In this book a number of contemporary thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Zizek) were asked to respond to the questions, ”Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?” Reprinted here from Columbia University Press blog. A longer extract from Badiou’s essay can be accessed here.

Our concern is le monde, the world that evidently exists, not tout le monde, where the democrats (Western folk, folk of the emblem) hold sway and everyone else is from another world — which being other, is not a world properly speaking, just a remnant of life, a zone of war, hunger, walls, and delusions. In that “world” or zone, they spend their time packing their bags to get away from the horror or to leave altogether and be with—whom? With the democrats of course, who claim to run the world have jobs that need doing….

In sum, if the world of the democrats is not the world of everyone, if tout le monde isn’t really the whole world after all, then democracy the emblem and custodian of the walls behind which the democrats seek their petty pleasures, is just a word for a conservative oligarchy whose main (and often bellicose) business is to guard its own territory, as animals do, under the usurped name world.

Badiou concludes by writing:

What I have aimed to do here is to set brackets around the authority the word democracy is likely to enjoy, or have enjoyed, in the mind of the reader and make the Platonic critique of democracy comprehensible. But as a coda, we can go right back to the literal meaning of democracy if we like: the power of peoples over their own existence. Politics immanent in the people and the withering away, in open process, of the State. From that perspective, we will only ever be true democrats, integral to the historic life of peoples, when we become communists again. Roads to that future are gradually becoming visible even now.

No related posts.

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

The following is republished here from the symptom.

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams. The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality.

……

Our situation is the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do, but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations….

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem….

Why the Idea and Why Communism?

Slavoj Zizek

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

From democracy to —

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Engendering monsters

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “perse- cution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.).

The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

NOTES

[1] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479.

[2] Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview with Alain Badiou, Los Angeles, 7/2/2007. All unmarked quotes that follow are from the manuscript of this interview.

[3] Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” in From Linnaeus to the Future(s), Göteborg: Linnaeus University Press 2010, p. 190.

[4]I rely here on the analysis of Ervin Hkladniuk-Milharcic, Ljubljana.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?

Communization (to give it anon-British spelling) is the name for a theory or approach developed by Gilles Dauvé and others.

Perhaps its central thesis is that a communist revolution begins its work of “communization” from the very first day. But, although the approach stems from this basic anti-stagist thesis, it does not represent a revolutionary program (“We are not talking about a plan to be fulfilled one day,” as the authors say below. “Communisation depends on what the proletarian is and does.”)

The present article is reprinted from Troploin.

In English, the word has been used for a long while, to convey something very different from what we are dealing with here. To communise was often a synonym for to sovietize, i.e. to implement the full program of the communist party in the Leninist (and later Stalinist) sense. This is of course not what we are talking about.

More rarely, communisation has been used as a synonym for radical collectivisation, with special reference to Spain in 1936-39, when factories, farms, rural and urban areas were run by worker or peasant collectives. These collectives functioned as worker-managed enterprises, for the benefit of the people, yet enterprises all the same.

We are dealing with something else.

 

Communisation

What is meant and what do we mean by “communisation” ? Actually, we have often dealt with this theme, for instance in our answers to the German group Revolution Times’ questionnaire, published in English as What’s It All About ? (2007), and in other texts, including A Contribution to the Critique of Political Autonomy (2008).

If we speak of communisation and not just communism, it is not to invent a new concept which would provide us with the ultimate solution to the revolutionary riddle. Communisation denotes no less than the content and process of a future revolution. For example, only communisation gives meaning to our critique of democracy.

In recent years, communisation has become one of the radical in-words, even outside what is known as the “communisers” (communisateurs in French).

As far as we are concerned, we do not regard ourselves any more members of this communising current than we feel close to – or far from – a number of other communist groups.

The communisation issue is further complicated by the emergence of the commons theory, according to which deep social change could come from collective usage and extension of what is already treated as common resources and activities (for instance, the open field system in still existing traditional societies, and free software access in the most modern ones). In other words, these “creative commons” would allow us a gradual and peaceful passage toward a human community.

The successive refutation of theories we regard as incomplete or wrong would have obscured our central points. As we wish to keep away from any war of the words, the following essay will try and address the communisation issue as directly as possible.

A few words about the word

In English, the word has been used for a long while, to convey something very different from what we are dealing with here. To communise was often a synonym for to sovietize, i.e. to implement the full program of the communist party in the Leninist (and later Stalinist) sense: “The fundamental task of Comintern was to seek opportunities to communise Europe and North America.” (R. Service, Trotsky. A Biography, Macmillan, 2009, p. 282) This was the Webster’s dictionary definition in 1961 and 1993, and roughly the one given by Wikipedia in 2010. This is of course not what we are talking about.

More rarely, communisation has been used as a synonym for radical collectivisation, with special reference to Spain in 1936-39, when factories, farms, rural and urban areas were run by worker or peasant collectives. Although this is related to what we mean by communising, most of these experiences invented local currencies or took labour-time as a means of barter. These collectives functioned as worker-managed enterprises, for the benefit of the people, yet enterprises all the same.

We are dealing with something else.

It is not sure who first used the word with the meaning this essay is interested in. To the best of our knowledge, it was Dominique Blanc : orally in the years 1972-74, and in writing in Un Monde sans argent (A World Without Money), published in 3 booklets in 1975-76 by the OJTR (the same group also published D. Blanc’s Militancy, the Highest Stage of Alienation). Whoever coined the word, the idea was being circulated at the time in the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe (“The Old Mole”, 1965-72). Since the May 68 events, the bookseller, Pierre Guillaume, ex-Socialisme ou Barbarie and ex-Pouvoir Ouvrier member, but also for a while close to G. Debord (who himself was a member of  S. ou B. in 1960-61), had been consistently putting forward the idea of revolution as a communising process, maybe without using the phrase. Yet D. Blanc was the first to publicly emphasize its importance. Un Monde sans argent said the difference between communist revolution and all variants of reformism was not that revolution implied insurrection, but that this insurrection would have to start communising society… or it would have no communist content. In that respect, Un Monde sans argent remains a pivotal essay.

In a nutshell

The idea is fairly simple, but simplicity is often one of the most difficult goals to achieve. It means that a revolution is only communist if it changes all social relationships into communist relationships, and this can only be done if the process starts in the very early days of the revolutionary upheaval. Money, wage-labour, the enterprise as a separate unit and a value-accumulating pole, work-time as cut off from the rest of our  life, production for value, private property, State agencies as mediators of social life and conflicts, the separation between learning and doing, the quest for maximum and fastest circulation of everything, all of these have to be done away with, and not just be run by collectives or turned over to public ownership: they have to be replaced by communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the preconditions of communism: it will create communism.

“Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy – by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them – all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the State and – most fundamentally – wage labour and the working class itself.” (Endnotes, # 2, 2010)

Is it a programme ?

We are not talking about a plan to be fulfilled one day, a project adequate to the needs of the proletarians (and ultimately of humankind), but one that would be exterior to them, like blueprints on the architect’s drawing-board before the house is built. Communisation depends on what the proletarian is and does.

The major difference between Marx and utopian socialists is to be found in Marx’s main concern : the labour-capital exploitation relation. Because the proletarian is the heart and body of capital, he or she carries communist potentials within himself or herself. When capital stops buying labour power, labour is nothing. So every deep social crisis opens the possibility for the proletarians to try and invent “something else”. Most of the time, nearly all the time in fact, their reaction is far from communism, but the possibility of a breakthrough does exist, as has been proved by a succession of endeavours throughout modern times, from the English Luddites in 1811 to the Greek insurgents in 2008.

This is why it would be pointless to imagine an utterly different society if we fail to understand the present society and how we could move from one to the other. We must consider what communism is, how it could come about, and who would be in the best position to implement the historical change.

“The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism.”

The SI once suggested we ought to “go back to a disillusioned study of the classical worker movement” (# 7, 1962). Indeed. To face up to our past, we must break with the legend of a proletariat invariably ready for revolution… and unfortunately sidetracked or betrayed. However, blowing myths does not mean bending the stick the other way, as if the workers had up to now persistently fought only for reforms, had glorified work, believed in industrial progress even more than the bourgeois, and dreamt of some impossible worker-run capitalism. This historical reconstruction replaces one myth by its equally misleading symmetrical opposite. The past two hundred years of proletarian experience cannot be divided into two totally opposed periods, i.e. a first one, closed by the end of the 20^th century, during which the proletariat would only have been able to fight for a social programme which could be qualified as “capitalist”, and a second phase (now), when the evolution of capitalism itself would render null and void the “labour capitalist” option, and the only alternative facing the proletariat would become a simple one: communist revolution or descent into barbarism.

The historical evidence offered for this watershed theory is unsubstantial.

Moreover, and more decisively, the mistake lies in the question.

No communist revolution has taken place yet. That obvious fact neither proves… nor disproves that such a revolution has been up to now impossible.

In his analysis of The Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx first lays down what he believes to be a general historical principle :

As soon as it has risen up, a class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated finds the content and the material for its revolutionary activity directly in its own situation: foes to be laid low, measures dictated by the needs of the struggle to be taken; the consequences of its own deeds drive it on. It makes no theoretical inquiries into its own task.

Then Marx wonders why, in the democratic revolution of February 1848,

The French working class had not attained this level; it was still incapable of accomplishing its own revolution.

The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. (..) [But in 1848] the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. (..) The struggle against capital in its developed, modern form – in its decisive aspect, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon (..) Nothing is more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to secure the advancement of its own interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie (..)

Quotation is no proof, and maybe Marx was wrong, but at least let us get his view right. While he regarded full-grown industrial capitalism as a necessary condition for a proletarian revolution, he did not think that the proletarians could and would only fight for reforms for a certain period, until some complete maturity or completeness of capitalism left open one and only option: revolution.

Slicing up history into phases is very useful, except when it becomes a quest for the “last” phase.

In the past, “final” or “mortal crisis” theoreticians set out to demonstrate (usually with the help of the reproduction schema of Capital‘s volume II) that a phase was bound to come when capitalism would be structurally unable to reproduce itself. All they actually showed was real fundamental contradictions but, as Marx wrote, contradiction does not mean impossibility. Now the demonstration moves away from schema and figures, and sees the impossible reproduction in the capital-labour relation itself. In short, up to now, communist revolution (or a real attempt to make it) has been out of the question, because the domination of capital over society was not complete enough: there was some scope for the worker movement to develop socialist and Stalinist parties, unions, reformist policies; so the working class had to be reformist, and the most it could do was to go for a worker-managed capitalism. Now this would be over: capital’s completely real domination destroys the possibility of anything but a communist endeavour.

We ought to be a bit wary of the lure of catastrophe theory. When 1914 broke out, and even more so after 1917, communists said that mankind was entering the epoch of wars and revolutions. Since then, we have seen a lot more wars than revolutions, and no communist revolution. And we are well aware of the traps of the “decadence” theory. Only a successful communist revolution one day will allow its participants to say: “We’ve seen capitalism’s last days”. Until then, the only historical obstacle to the reproduction of the present social system will come from the proletarians themselves. There is no era when revolution is structurally impossible, nor another when revolution becomes structurally possible/necessary.  All variations of the “ultimate crisis” disregard history: they look for a one-way street that could block the avenues branching off to non-communist roads. Yet history is made of crossroads,  revolution being one possibility among non-revolutionary options. The schematisation of history loses its relevance when it heralds the endpoint of evolution – in this case, capitalist evolution – and claims to be the theory to end all theories.

In 1934, as a conclusion to his essay on The theory of the collapse of capitalism, and after an in-depth study of the inevitability of major crises, Anton Pannekoek wrote :

“The workers’ movement has not to expect a final catastrophe, but many catastrophes, political – like wars, and economic – like the crises which repeatedly break out, sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly, but which on the whole, with the growing size of capitalism, become more and more devastating. (..) And should the present crisis abate, new crises and new struggles will arise. In these struggles the working class will develop its strength to struggle, will discover its aims, will train itself, will make itself independent and learn to take into its hands its own destiny, viz., social production itself. In this process the destruction of capitalism is achieved. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism.”

The concept of communisation is important enough as it is, without using it to fuel another variant of the “last phase of capitalism” theory. Our problem is not to prove that we have entered an entirely new epoch when the proletariat can only fight for communism. It is to try and define the concrete process of a communist revolution.

A novelty ?

The communist movement predates the modern proletariat that appeared in England at the end of the 18^th century. It was active in the days of Spartacus, Thomas Münzer and Gerrard Winstanley. Fifty years before Marx, Gracchus Babeuf’s plans had little connection with the growth of industry.

Because of his separation from the means of production (which was not the case of the serf or the tenant-farmer, however poor they were), the proletarian is separated from the means of existence. Such radical dispossession is the condition of his being put to profitable work by capital. But it also entails that, from the early days, the proletariat is capable of a revolution that would do away with property, classes and work as an activity separate from the rest of life.

The theme of communisation is as old as the proletarians’ struggles when they tried to free themselves. Whenever they were on the social offensive, they implicitly and sometimes explicitly aimed at a human community which involved a lot more than better work conditions, or merely replacing the exploitation of man by the exploitation of nature. The logic or intention of the 1871 Paris communards, the 1936 Spanish insurgents or the 1969 Turin rebel workers was not to “develop the productive forces”, nor to manage the same factories without the boss. It is their failure that pushed aside community and solidarity goals, discarded any plan of man-nature reunion, and brought back to the fore what was compatible with the needs and possibilities of capitalism. True, so far, past struggles have tried to launch few communist changes in the real sense of the word, i.e. changes that broke with the core capitalist structure. But this limitation was as imposed from outside as self-imposed : the proletarians rarely went beyond the insurrectionary phase, as most uprisings were quickly crushed or stifled. When the insurgents carried the day, they did attempt to live and create something very different from a worker-led capitalism. The limits of those attempts (in Spain, 1936-39, particularly) were not just the result of a lack of social programme, but at least as much due to the fact of leaving political power in the hands of the State and anti-revolutionary forces.

What Rosa Luxemburg called in 1903 the “progress and stagnation of Marxism” can help us understand why a deeply entrenched “communising” prospect has waited so long before becoming explicit.  At the dawn of capitalism, the 1830s and 1840s were a time of farseeing communist insights. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts probably expressed the sharpest edge of social critique, so sharp that the author himself did not think it necessary to circulate it (the text was only published in 1932). Then, as the worker movement developed against a triumphant bourgeoisie, the communist intuition turned into demonstration and lost much of its visionary force: the 1848 Communist Manifesto‘s concrete measures were compatible with radical bourgeois democracy, communism is only hinted at in Capital‘s volume I (1967), and it hardly appears in the Critique of the Gotha programme (1875). Marx’s concern with the “real movement” led him into a search for the “laws of history”, and his critique of political economy came close to a critical political economy. (He never lost sight of communism, though, as is clear from his interest in the Russian mir: “If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.” (1881) )

However, as soon as the proletariat resumed its assault on bourgeois society, revolutionary theory retrieved its radical momentum: the 1871 Commune showed that State power is not an adequate revolutionary instrument.

Then again, the Paris Commune “lesson” was forgotten until, several decades later, the birth of soviets and councils revived what Marx had written in 1871.

In 1975-76, A World Without Money did not evade the issue of how Marx stood regarding communisation (a word and concept he never used):

That Marx and Engels did not talk more about communist society was due, without doubt paradoxically, to the fact that this society, being less near than it is today, was more difficult to envisage, but also to the fact that it was more present in the minds of the revolutionaries of their day. When they spoke of the abolition of the wages system in the Communist Manifesto they were understood by those they were echoing. Today it is more difficult to envisage a world freed from the state and commodities because these have become omnipresent. But having become omnipresent, they have lost their historical necessity.

Marx and Engels perhaps grasped less well than a Fourier the nature of communism as the liberation and harmonisation of the emotions. Fourier, however, does not get away from the wages system, since among other things he still wants doctors to be paid, even if according to the health of the community rather than the illnesses of their patients.

Marx and Engels, however, were sufficiently precise to avoid responsibility for the bureaucracy and financial system of the ‘communist’ countries being attributed to them. According to Marx, with the coming of communism money straightaway disappears and the producers cease to exchange their products. Engels speaks of the disappearance of commodity production when socialism comes.

The communist movement owes much to its time. In this early 21^st century, we would be naïve to believe that we are wiser than our predecessors because we realize how destructive productive forces can be. Just as the nature of capitalism is invariant, so are the nature and programme of the proletariat. This programme, however, cannot escape the concrete needs and mind-set of each period.

At the end of the 18^th century, in a country plagued with misery, starvation and extreme inequality, and with still very few factory workers, Babeuf advocated an egalitarian mainly agrarian communism. His prime concern was to have everyone fed. It was inevitable, and indeed natural for down-trodden men and women to think of themselves as new Prometheus and to equate the end of exploitation with a conquest over nature.

About a hundred years later, as industrial growth was creating a new type of poverty, joblessness and non-property, revolutionaries saw the solution in a worker-run “development of the productive forces” that would benefit the masses by manufacturing the essentials of life and free humankind from the constraints of necessity. The prime concern was not only to have everyone fed, housed, nursed, but also in a position to enjoy leisure as well as creative activities. As capitalism had developed “the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour-time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum”, revolution would be able “to free everyone’s time for their own development.” (Marx, Grundrisse, 1857-58)

Another century later, ecology is the buzz word. Nobody seriously believes in a factory-induced or a worker-managed paradise, new public orthodoxy declares the industrial dream to be a nightmare, so there is little merit in debunking the techno-cult or advocating renewable energy or green building.

The idea of communisation as a revolution that creates communism - and not the preconditions of communism – appears more clearly when capitalism rules over everything, extensively in terms of space (the much talked-about globalisation), and intensively in terms of its penetration into everyday life and behaviour. This helps us grasp revolution as a process that from its very beginning would start to undo what it wants to get rid of, and at the same time from its early days start to create new ways of life (the completion of which would of course last a while).  That is the best possible answer to the inevitable question: “Why talk of communisation now ?”

One might wonder why the notion hardly surfaced in Italy 1969-77, when that country came closer than any other to revolutionary breaking point. Part of the answer is likely to be found in the reality of Italian worker autonomy at the time, in theory as in practice. Operaism emphasized more the revolutionary “subject” or agent than the content of the revolution, so the content finally got reduced to autonomy itself. That was linked to the limits of operaismo, whose goal was to create or stimulate organisation (top-down, party-led, or bottom-up, council-based). This may be the reason why a wealth of practical communist critiques and endeavours resulted in so little synthetic theorization of communisation. Apart from such hypotheses, it would be risky to embark on sweeping generalizations purporting to explain the (mis)adventures of theory in a particular country by the ups and downs of class struggle in that country. Unless one enjoys being word-drunk, there is little fun in playing the prophet of the past.

Transition ?

We would have nothing to object to the concept of transition if it simply stated the obvious: communism will not be achieved in a flash. Yet the concept implies a lot more, and something totally different: not simply a transitory moment, but a full-fledged transitory society.

However debatable Marx’s labour vouchers are, at least his Critique of the Gotha programme (1875) was trying to describe a society without money, therefore without wage-labour. His scheme of a time-based currency was supposed to be a provisional way of rewarding everyone according to his or her contribution to the creation of common wealth. Afterwards, when social-democrats and Leninists came to embrace the notion of transition, they forgot that objective, and their sole concern was the running of a planned economy. (Although anarchists usually reject a transitory period, they lay the emphasis on management, via worker unions or via a confederation of communes: in the best of cases, when the suppression of wage-labour remains on the agenda, it is only as an effect of the socialisation of production, not as one of its causes.)

It is obvious that such a deep and all-encompassing transformation as communism will span decades, perhaps several generations before it takes over the world. Until then, it will be straddling two eras, and remain vulnerable to internal decay and/or destruction from outside, all the more so as various countries and continents will not be developing new relationships at the same pace. Some areas may lag behind for a long time. Others may go through temporary chaos. But the main point is that the communising process has to start as soon as possible. The closer to Day One the transformation begins and the deeper it goes from the beginning, the greater the likelihood of its success.

So there will a “transition” in the sense that communism will not be achieved overnight. But there will not be a “transition period” in what has become the traditional Marxist sense: a period that is no longer capitalist but not yet communist, a period in which the working class would still work, but not for profit or for the boss any more, only for themselves: they would go on developing the “productive forces” (factories, consumer goods, etc.) before being able to enjoy the then fully-matured fruit of industrialization. This is not the programme of a communist revolution. It was not in the past and it is not now. There is no need to go on developing industry, especially industry as it is now. And we are not stating this because of the ecology movement and the anti-industry trend in the radical milieu. As someone said forty years ago, half of the factories will have to be closed.

Some areas will lag behind and others may plunge into temporary chaos. The abolition of money will result in fraternal, non-profit, cooperative relations, but sometimes barter or the black market are likely to surface. Nobody knows how we will evolve from false capitalist abundance to new ways of life, but let us not expect the move to be smooth and peaceful everywhere and all the time.

We will only modify our food habits, for example, as we modify our tastes: changing circumstances go along with changing minds, as was written in the third Thesis on Feuerbach in 1845. Our intention is not to create a new man, virtuous, reasonable, always able and willing to master his desires, always respectful of sound dietary rules. About a century ago, chestnuts were the staple food of some rural areas of the French Central Massif. Such a “poor” diet does not compare favourably with the variety we have been accustomed to in “rich” countries. But the future is written nowhere. We might well enjoy a more limited range of dishes than the abundance currently sold in the supermarket.

Violence and the destruction of the State

As a quick reminder, let us go back in time.

For reasons we cannot analyse here, the 1871 communards did not change much the social fabric: that, plus the insurrection being isolated in one city, prevented the communards from  really appealing to the rest of the world, in spite of genuine popular support in Paris. Versailles army’s superiority was not due to more troops or better guns: its law and order, pro-property and anti-worker programme was more consistently understood, put forward and fought for by the bourgeois politicians than communalism and social republicanism  were by the Commune leaders.

In Russia, 1917, contrary to the communards, the Bolsheviks clearly knew what they wanted – the seizure of power – and the power vacuum enabled them to seize it. The insurgents did away with a State machinery which was already dissolving, did not attempt or manage to change the social structure, won a civil war, and eventually created a new State power.

In Spain, the July 1936 worker insurrection neutralised the State machinery, but within a few weeks gave political power back to reformist-conservative forces. Thereafter all social transformations were limited by the pressure of a reconsolidated State apparatus, which less than a year later openly turned its police against the workers.

In the 1960s, the radical wave opposed the instruments of coercion but never dispensed with them. The French general strike made the central political organs powerless, until the passive attitude of most strikers enabled the State to recover its role. The power vacuum could not last more than a few weeks, and had to be filled again.

This brief survey reminds us that if, in the abstract, it is necessary to separate social and political spheres, in real life, the separation does not exist. Our past failures were not social or political: they were both. Bolshevik rule would not have turned into power over the proletarians if they had changed social relationships, and in Spain after 1936 socialisations would not have ended in disaster if the workers had kept the power they had conquered in the streets in July 36.

Communisation means that revolution will not be a succession of phases: first the dismantling and destruction of State power, then social change afterwards.

While they are ready to admit this in principle, quite a few comrades, “anarchists” or “Marxists”, are reluctant to consider the idea of a communisation which they fear would try and change the social fabric while not bothering to smash State power. These comrades miss the point. Communisation is not purely or mainly social and therefore non-political or only marginally political. It implies fighting public – as well as private – organs of repression. Revolution is violent. (By the way, which democratic revolution ever won merely by peaceful means ?)

Fundamentally, communisation saps counter-revolutionary forces by removing their support. Communisers’ propulsive force will not come from shooting capitalists, but by  depriving them of their function and power. Communisers will not target enemies, but  undermine and change social relations. The development of moneyless and profitless relations will ripple through the whole of society, and act as power enhancers that widen the fault lines between the State and growing sections of the population. Our success will ultimately depend on the ability of our human community to be socially expansive. Such is the bottom line.

Social relations, however, are incarnated in buildings, in objects, and in beings of flesh and blood, and historical change is neither instantaneous nor automatic. Some obstacles will have to be swept away: not just exposed, but done away with. We will need more than civil disobedience: passive resistance is not enough. People have to take a stand, some will take sides against communisation, and a revolutionary trial of strength does not just battle with words. States (dictatorial or democratic) are enormous concentrations of armed power. When this armed power is unleashed against us, the greater the insurgents’ fighting spirit, the more the balance of forces will shift away from State power, and the less bloodshed there will be.

An insurrectionary process does not just consist in occupying buildings, erecting barricades and firing guns one day, only to forget all about them the next. It implies more than mere spontaneity and ad hoc ephemeral getting together. Unless there is some continuity, our movement will skyrocket today and fizzle out tomorrow. A number of insurgents will have to remain organized and available as armed groupings. (Besides, nobody has talents or desires for everything.) But if these groupings functioned as bodies specialized in armed struggle, they would develop a monopoly of socially legitimate violence, soon we would have a “proletarian” police force, together with a “proletarian government”, a “people’s army”, etc. Revolution would be short-lived.

No doubt this will have to be dealt with in very concrete issues, such as what to do with police files we happen to find. Though revolution may exceptionally use existing police archives and security agency data, basically it will do away with them, as with all kinds of criminal records.

Revolution is not a-political. It is anti-political.

Communisation includes the destruction of the State, and the creation of new administrative procedures, whatever forms they may take. Each dimension contributes to the other. None can succeed without the other. Either the two of them combine, or both fail. If the proletarians do not get rid of political parties, parliament, police bodies, the army, etc., all the socialisations they will achieve, however far-reaching, will sooner or later be crushed, or will lose their impetus, as happened in Spain after 1936. On the other hand, if the necessary armed struggle against the police and army is only a military struggle, one front against another, and if the insurgents do not also take on the social bases of the State, they will only build up a counter-army, before being defeated on the battlefield, as happened in Spain after 1936. Only a would-be State can out-gun the State.

Communist revolution does not separate its means from its ends. Consequently, it will not  firstly take over (or dispense with) political power, and then only secondly change society. Both will proceed at the same time and reinforce each other, or both will be doomed.

Communisation can only happen in a society torn by mass work stoppages, huge street demos, widespread occupation of public buildings and workplaces, riots, insurgency attempts, a loss of control by the State over more and more groups of people and areas, in other words an upheaval powerful enough for social transformation to go deeper than an addition of piecemeal adjustments. Resisting anti-revolutionary armed bodies involves our ability to demoralise and neutralise them, and to fight back when they attack. As the momentum of communisation grows, it pushes its advantages, raises the stakes and resorts less and less to violence, but only a rose-tinted view can believe in bloodless major historical change.

At the Caracas World Social Forum in 2006, John Holloway declared: “the problem is not to abolish capitalism, but to stop creating it”. This is indeed an aspect of communisation, equally well summed up by one of the characters in Ursula Le Guin’s fiction The Dispossessed (1974): our purpose is not so much to make as to be the revolution. Quite. But J. Holloway’s theory of “changing the world without taking power” empties that process of any reality by denying its antagonism to the State. Like Holloway, we don’t want to take power. But unlike him and his many followers, we know that State power will not wither away under the mere pressure of a million local collectives: it will never die a natural death. On the contrary, it is in its nature to mobilize all available resources to defend the existing order. Communisation will not leave State power aside : it will have to destroy it.

The Chartists’ motto “Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must” is right only in so far as we understand that we will be forced to act “forcibly”.

In revolutionary times, social violence and social inventiveness are inseparable: the capacity of the proletarians to control their own violence will depend on the ability of this violence to be as creative as destructive. For the destruction of the State (we want to destroy power, not to take it) to be more than an empty phrase, negative acts must also be positive. But not creative of a new police, army, Parliament, etc. Creative of new deliberative and administrative bodies, directly dependent on social relationships.

Who ?

“The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of that vast majority (..)” (Communist Manifesto). Both phrases are crucial : independent movement and immense majority. That being said, it does not follow that nearly everyone is a proletarian, nor that every proletarian can play the same part in the communising process. Some are more apt than others to initiate the change, which does not mean that they would be the “leaders” of the revolution. On the contrary, they would succeed only in so far as they would gradually lose their specificity. Here we bump into the inevitable contradiction the whole argument hinges around, but it is not an insurmountable contradiction. .

We do not live in a society where just about everybody is exploited and has the same basic interest in an overall change, therefore the same desire and ability to implement what would be a rather peaceful process, as nearly everyone would join in : only 3 to 5% would object,  Castoriadis assured us, but no doubt they would soon see the light.

We live neither in a post-industrial society, nor in a post class society, nor therefore in a post working class society. If work had become inessential, one might wonder why companies would have bothered in the last twenty years to turn hundreds of millions of earthlings into assembly line workers, crane operators or computer clerks. Work is still central to our societies, and those in the world of work – currently employed or not – will have better social leverage power, at least in the early days or weeks of communisation.

The contradiction can be solved because, unlike the bourgeoisie striving for  political power in 1688 (the Glorious Revolution that gave birth to what was to become English parliamentary democracy) or in 1789, labour is no ruling class and has no possibility of becoming one, now or then.

General strike, mass disorder and rioting break the normal flow of social reproduction. This suspension of automatisms and beliefs forces proletarians to invent something new that implies subjectivity and freedom: options have to be decided on. Everyone has to find his or her place, not as an isolated individual any more, but in interactions that are productive of a collective reality. When only railway workers go on strike, they are unlikely to look beyond their own condition: they simply do not have to. In a communisation situation, the extension of work stoppages opens the possibility for railway personnel to move on to a different range of activities decided upon and organized by themselves and by others: for instance, instead of staying idle, running trains – free of course – to transport strikers or demonstrators from one town to another. It also means starting to think and act differently about the railway system, no longer believing in feats of engineering for progress’s sake, and no longer sticking to the view that “high-speed trains are super because they’re fast”.

What to do with high-speed trains and with buses cannot be the sole decision of train engineers and bus drivers, yet for a while the individual who used to be at the wheel will be more expert at handling and repairing them. His or her role will be specific and provisional. The success of communisation depends on the fading away of former sociological distinctions and hierarchies: breaching professional distances will go together with dismantling mental blocks regarding personal competence and aspiration. The process will be more complex than we expect, and more unpredictable: the experience of any large social movement (Germany 1918, Spain 1936, France 1968, Argentina 2001, to name a few) shows how volatile the unprecedented can be, when the situation slips out of control and creates both deadlocks and breakthroughs. One thing leads to another point of departure for further development. That particular example prompts the question of the fading of the difference between “public” and “private” transport, which in turn brings back the vital issue of where and how we live, since today’s means of locomotion are conditioned by the urban segmentation of specific areas reserved for administration, habitation, work, recreation, etc.

Revolution of daily life

The trouble with philosophers, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz once suggested, is that they do not care about trousers and telephones. That remark hardly applied to Nietzsche, who was no revolutionary but refused “to treat as frivolous all the things about life that deserve to be taken very seriously – nutrition, residence, spiritual diet, treatment of the sick, cleanliness, weather !” (Ecce Homo, 1888). It is everyday life indeed we will change: cooking, eating, travelling, meeting people, staying on our own, reading, doing nothing, having and bringing up children, debating over our present and future… providing we give daily life its fullest meaning. Sadly, since the phrase became fashionable in 1968, “everyday life” has been usually limited to the out-of-work time-space, as if people gave up hope of altering the economy and wage-labour, and were contented with altering acts and doings of a lesser kind: feelings, body, family, sex, couple, food, leisure, culture, friendship, etc.

On the contrary, communisation will treat the minor facts of existence for what they are: a reflection and a manifestation of “big” facts. Money, wage-labour, companies as separate units and value accumulation centres, work-time cut off from the rest of our time, profit-oriented production, obsolescence-induced consumption, agencies acting as mediators in social life and conflicts, speeded-up maximum circulation of everything and everyone… each of these moments, acts and places has to be transformed into cooperative, moneyless, profitless and non-statist relationships, and not just managed by a collective or converted into public ownership.

The capital-labour relation structures and reproduces society, and the abolition of this relation is the prime condition of the rest. But we would be foolish to wait for the complete disappearance of the company system, of money and the profit motive, before starting to change schooling and housing. Acting locally will contribute to the whole change.

For instance, communising also implies transforming our personal relation to technique, and our addiction to mediation and mediators. A future society where people would feel a constant need for psychologists, therapists and healers would merely prove its failure at building a human community: we would still be incapable of addressing tensions and conflicts by the flow and interplay of social relations, since we would want these conflicts solved by professionals.

Communisation is the destruction of repressive (and self-repressive) institutions and habits, as well as the creation of non-mercantile links which tend to be more and more  irreversible: “Beyond a certain point, one cannot come back. That tipping-point we must reach.” (Kafka)

Making, circulating and using goods without money includes breaking down the wall of a private park for the children to play, or planting a vegetable garden in the town centre. It also implies doing away with the split between the asphalt jungle cityscape and a natural world which is now turned into show and leisure places, where the (mild) hardships of a ten-day desert trek makes up for the aggravating compulsory Saturday drive to a crowded supermarket.  It means practising in a social relation what has now to be private and paid for.

Communism is an anthropological revolution in the sense that it deals with what Marcel Mauss analysed in The Gift (1923): a renewed ability to give, receive and reciprocate. It means no longer treating our next-door neighbour as a stranger, but also no longer regarding the tree down the road as a piece of scenery taken care of by council workers. Communisation is the production of a different relation to others and with oneself, where solidarity is not born out of a moral duty exterior to us, rather out of practical acts and interrelations.

Among other things, communisation will be the withering away of systematic distinction between learning and doing. We are not saying that ignorance is bliss, or that a few weeks of thorough (self-)teaching are enough for anyone to be able to translate Arabic into English or to play the harpsichord. Though learning can be fun, it often involves long hard work. What communism will do away with is the locking up of youth in classrooms for years (now 15 to 20 years in so-called advanced societies). Actually, modern school is fully aware of the shortcomings of such an absurdity, and tries to bridge the gap by multiplying out-of-school activities and work experience schemes. These remedies have little effect: the rift between school and the rest of society depends on another separation, which goes deeper and is structural to capitalism: the separation between work (i.e. paid and productive labour), and what happens outside the work-place and is treated as non-work (housework, bringing up children, leisure, etc., which are unpaid). Only superseding work as a separate time-space will transform the whole learning process.

Here again, and in contrast to most utopias as well as to modern totalitarian regimes, communisation does not pretend to promote a “brave new world” full of new (wo)men, each equal in talents and in achievements to his or her fellow beings, able to master all fields of knowledge from Renaissance paintings to astrophysics, and whose own desires would always finally merge in harmonious concord with the desires of other equally amiable fellow beings.

Distant futures & “here and now”

Few people today would agree with what Victor Serge (then a Bolshevik living in Moscow) wrote in 1921: “Every revolution sacrifices the present to the future.” While it is essential to understand how communisation will do the opposite of what Serge believed, this understanding does not give us the whole picture.

One of the strong points of the 1960s-70s, or at least one of the best remembered, was the rejection of a revolution that would postpone its completion to an always receding future.

In the following years, as the radical wave gradually ebbed, the emphasis on the here and now remained, albeit deprived of subversive content and purpose, and was reduced to an array of piecemeal changes in our daily life. When they are as all-powerful as they have become, money and wage-labour are compatible with – and sometimes feed on – inoffensive doses of relative freedom. Anyone can now claim that a certain degree of self-management of his neighbourhood, his body, his parenthood, his sexuality, his food, his habitat or his leisure time contributes to a genuine transformation of society, more genuine in fact than the old- fashioned social revolution of yesteryear. Indeed, daily life reformers claim to work for overall change by a multiplication of local changes: they argue that step by step, people’s empowerment is taking over more and more social areas, until finally bourgeois rule is made redundant and the State rendered powerless. The ex-situationist Raoul Vaneigem perfectly encapsulated this vision in a few words (also the title of a book of his in 2010): “The State is nothing any more, let’s be everything.”

In the aftermath of “68″, against Stalinism and Maoist or Trotskyst party-building, radical thought had to combat the reduction of revolution to a seizure of political power, and the postponement of effective change to later days that never came.

Thirty years later, Stalinism is gone, party-building is passé, and it is increasingly difficult to differentiate ex-Trots from current far leftists. While it pushes dozens of millions in or out of work, today’s all-encompassing capitalism wears more often a hedonistic than a puritanical mask. It turns Victor Serge’s formula upside down: “Do not sacrifice the present… ! Live and communicate here and now !”

Communising will indeed experiment new ways of life, but it will be much more and something other than an extension of the socially innocuous temporary or permanent “autonomous zones” where we are  now allowed to play, providing we do not trespass their limits, i.e. if we respect the existence of wage-labour and recognize the benevolence of the State.

Commons ?

The Marxist-progressivist approach has consistently thrown scorn on pre-capitalist forms, as if they were incapable of contributing to communism: only industrialization was supposed to pave the way for proletarian revolution.

In the past and still in many aspects of the present, quite a few things and activities were owned by no-one and enjoyed by many. Community-defined rules imposed bounds on private property. Plough-sharing, unfenced fields and common pasture land used to be frequent in rural life. Village public meetings and collective decisions were not unusual, mostly on minor topics, sometimes on important matters.

While they provide us with valuable insights into what a possible future world would look like, and indeed often contribute to its coming, these habits and practices are unable to achieve this coming by themselves. A century ago, the Russian mir had neither the strength nor the intention of revolutionising society : rural cooperation depended on a social system and a political order that was beyond the grasp of the village autonomy. Nowadays, millions of co-ops meet their match when they attempt to play multinationals – unless they turn into big business themselves.

Our critique of progressivism does not mean supporting tradition against modernity. Societal customs have many oppressive features (particularly but not only regarding women) that are just as anti-communist as the domination of money and wage-labour. Communisation will succeed by being critical of both modernity and tradition. To mention just two recent examples, the protracted rebellion in Kabylia and the insurgency in Oaxaca have proved how collective links and assemblies can be reborn and strengthen popular resistance. Communisation will include the revitalization of old community forms, when by resurrecting them people get more than what they used to get from these forms in the past. Reviving former collective customs will help the communisation process by transforming these customs.

Community

Countless and varied visions of a future communist world have been suggested in modern times, by Sylvain Maréchal and G. Babeuf, Marx, even Arthur Rimbaud in 1871, Kropotkin and many anarchists, the Dutch council communists in the 1930s, etc. Their most common features may be summed up in the following equation:

communism =

direct democracy =

fulfilment of needs =

community + abundance =

equality

Since the historical subject of the future is envisioned as a self-organised human community, the big question is to know how it will organise itself. Who will lead : everybody, a few, or nobody ? Who will decide : the collectivity, or a wise minority ? Will the human species delegate responsibilities to a few persons, and if  so, how ?

We will not go back here to the critique of democracy, which we have dealt with in other essays, and we will focus on one point: because the vast majority of revolutionaries (Marxists and anarchists) regard communism above all as a new way of organising society, they are first of all concerned by how to find the best possible organisational forms, institutions in other words, be they fixed or adaptable, complex or extremely simple. (Individual anarchism is but another type of organisation : a coexistence of egos who are free and equal because each is independent of the others.)

We start from another standpoint: communism concerns as much the activity of human beings as their inter-relations. The way they relate to each other depends on what they do together. Communism organises production and has no fear of institutions, yet it is first of all neither institution nor production : it is activity.

The following sections only give a few elements on how work could be transformed into activity.

No money

Communising is not just making everything available to everyone without anyone paying, as if we merely freed instruments of production and modes of consumption from their commodity form: shopping made easy… without a purse or a Visa card.

The existence of money is often explained by the (sad, alas inevitable) need of having a means of distributing items that are too scarce to be handed out free: a bottle of Champagne  has to have a price tag because there is little Champagne produced. Well, although millions of junk food items are manufactured every day, unless I give $ 1 in exchange for a bag of crisps, I am likely to get into trouble with the security guard.

Money is more than an unpleasant yet indispensable instrument : it materializes the way activities relate to one another, and human beings to one another. We keep measuring objects, comparing and exchanging them according to the average labour time (really or supposedly) necessary to make them, which logically leads to assessing acts and people in the same way.

The duality of use value and exchange value was born out of a situation where each activity (and the object resulting from it) ceased to be experienced and appreciated for what it specifically is, be it bread or a jar. From then on, that loaf of bread and that jar existed above all through their ability to be exchanged for each other, and were treated on the basis of what they had in common: in spite of their different concrete natures and uses, both they were comparable results of the same practice, labour in general, or abstract labour, liable to be reduced to a universal and quantifiable element, the average human effort necessary to produce that bread and that jar. Activity was turned into work. Money is crystallised labour: it gives a material form to that common substance.

Up to our time included, nearly all societies have found only work as a means to organise their life in common, and money connects what is separated by the division of labour.

A few millennia after “abstract labour” was born, capitalism has extended worldwide the condition of the proletarian, i.e. of the utterly dispossessed who can only live by selling his or her labour power on a free market. As the proletarian is the commodity upon which the whole commodity system depends, he or she has in himself or herself the possibility of subverting this system. A proletarian revolution can create a new type of social interaction where beings and things will not need to be compared and quantified in order to be produced and circulated. Money and commodity will no longer be the highway to universality.

Therefore, communisation will not abolish exchange value while keeping use value, because one  complements the other.

In quite a few past uprisings, in the Paris Commune or in October 1917, permanent armed fighters were paid as soldiers of the revolution, which is what they were.

From the early hours and days of a future communist revolution, the participants will neither need, use nor receive money to fight or to feed themselves, because goods will not be reduced to a quantum of something comparable to another quantum. Circulation will be based on the fact that each action and person is specific and does not need to be measured to another in order to exist.

Superficial critics of capitalism denounce finance and praise what is known as the “real” economy, but today a car or a bag of flour only have some use because they are treated (and acted upon) according to their cost in money terms, i.e. ultimately to the labour time incorporated in them. Nothing now seriously exists apart from its cost. It is unthinkable for parents who have a son and daughter to buy a car as birthday present for her and a T-shirt for him. If they do, everyone will measure their love for their two children according to the respective amount of money spent on each of them. In today’s world, for objects, acts, talents and persons to exist socially, they have to be compared, reduced to a substance that is both common and quantifiable.

When building a house, there is a difference between making sure the builders will not be short of bricks and mortar (which we can safely assume communist builders will care about) and budgeting a house plan (which in this present society is a prior condition). Communisation will be our getting used to counting physical realities without resorting to accountancy. The pen and pencil (or possibly the computer) of the bricklayer are not the same as the double-entry book of the accounts department.

In the communist revolution, the productive act will never be only productive. One sign of this among others will be the fact that the product considered will be particular: it will correspond to needs expressed personally (by the direct producers at the time or by others) and that the satisfaction of the need won’t be separated from the productive act itself. Let’s think, for example, about how the construction of housing will change as soon as standardization disappears. Production without productivity will mean that any individual engaged in the project will be in a position to give his opinion concerning the product and the methods. Things will go much slower than in today’s industrialized building industry. The participants in the project may even wish to live there after the building is finished. Will it be a total mess? Let’s just say that time will not count and that cases in which the project isn’t completed, in which everything is abandoned in midstream – maybe because production of the inputs is without productivity too – won’t be a problem. Again, this is because the activity will have found its justification in itself, independently of its productive result.

In a general way, one can say that communisation replaces the circulation of goods between “associated producers” with the circulation of people from one activity to another. (Bruno Astarian)

Critic after dinner

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Marx, German Ideology, 1845)

This statement has been ridiculed by bourgeois for its naivety, and attacked by radicals for its acceptance of objectionable activities, hunting of course, more generally its endorsement of man’s domination over animals. An even more critical view might ask why Marx reserves philosophy or art for the evening, as an afterthought, as if there was no time for it while producing food, which seems to take up most of the day in Marx’s vision…

In 1845, Marx was providing no blueprint for the future, and he inserted his prejudices and preconceptions of his time. But so do we today, and we would be pretentious to think ourselves devoid of prejudices.

The most valid aspect of that statement remains the idea that people living in a communist world would not be tied to a trade or function for life, which still remains the fate of most of us. When this is not the case, mobility is often forced upon us: the least skilled usually get the worst jobs, the poorest pay and lowest social image, and they are the first to be laid off and pressured into a re-training scheme. Besides, “multi-tasking” is a way of making workers more productive.

As long as work exists as such, that is as a time-space reserved for production (and earning money), a hierarchy of skills will remain. Only the opening-up of productive acts to the rest of life will change the situation. Among other things, this implies the end of the present work-place as a specific distinct place, where only those involved in it are allowed in.

Scarcity vs. abundance : Prometheus unbound ?

For many a communist (once again, most Marxists and quite a few anarchists), the original cause of the exploitation of man by man was the emergence of a surplus of production in societies still plagued by scarcity. The tenets of the argument could be summarized as follows. For thousands of years, a minority was able to make the majority work for the benefit of a privileged few who kept most of the surplus for themselves. Fortunately, despite its past and present horrors, capitalism is now bringing about an unheard-of and ever-growing wealth: thereby the age-old need (and desire) to exploit and dominate loses its former objective cause. The poverty of the masses is no longer the condition for education, leisure and art to be enjoyed only by economic, political and cultural elites.

It is therefore logical that the goal (shared by most variants of the worker movement) should be to create a society of abundance. Against capitalism which forces us to work without fulfilling our needs, and distributes its products in most unequal fashion, revolution must organise the mass production of useful goods beneficial to all.  And it can, thanks to the celebrated “development of the productive forces”.

Besides, industrialization organises and unifies the working class in such numbers that they will have the means to topple the ruling class and make a revolution which Roman slaves or late medieval peasants attempted but were incapable of achieving.

Moreover, and this is no minor point, if money is the root of all evil, and if scarcity is the ultimate cause of money, such a vision believes that reaching a stage of abundance will transform humankind. When men and women are properly fed, housed, schooled, educated, cared for, “struggle for life” antagonisms and attitudes will gradually disappear, individualism will give way to altruism, people will behave well to each other and have no motive, therefore no desire, for greed, domination or violence. So the only real question that remains is how to adequately manage this society of abundance : in a democratic way, or via leaders ? with Kropotkin’s moneyless system of helping oneself to goods that are plentiful, and democratic rationed sharing-out of goods that are not plentiful ? or with some labour-time accounting as suggested by the Dutch councilists in the 1930s ? The answer usually given by anarchists and non-Leninist communists is a society of “associated producers” run by worker collectives. Whatever the details, all these schemes describe a different economy, but an economy all the same: they start from the assumption that social life is based on the necessity to allocate resources in the best possible way to produce goods (in the genuine and democratically-decided interests of all, there lies the difference with bourgeois economy).

This is precisely where we beg to differ.

Women and men must eat (among other necessities)… or die, there is no denying it. Basic needs do exist. So, of course we are aiming at society which fairly, soundly and ecologically matches resources with needs. What we dispute is that human life consists primarily in fulfilling needs, and that, logically, revolution should primarily consist in creating a society where physical needs are fulfilled. Human beings only satisfy – or fail to satisfy – all their needs within social interrelations. Only in extreme circumstances do we eat just in order not to starve. In most cases, we eat in the company of others (or we decide or are led or forced to eat on our own, which also is a social situation). We follow a diet. We may overeat or voluntarily skip a meal. This is true of nearly all other social acts. Contrary to widespread popular misbelief, the “materialistic conception of history” (as exposed in The German Ideology for example) does not say that the economy rules the world. It states something quite different: social relations depend on the way we produce our material conditions of life, and not, say, on our ideas or ideals. And we produce these material conditions in relation to other beings (in most societies, these are class relations). A plough, a lathe or a computer does not determine history by itself. In fact, the “materialistic conception” explains the present rule of the economy as a historical phenomenon, which did not exist in Athens 500 B.C., and will no longer exist after a communist revolution.

The human Number One question, or the revolution question, is not to find how to bridge the gap between resources and needs (as economists would have it), nor to turn artificial and extravagant needs into natural and reasonable ones (as ecologists would like us to). It is to understand basic needs for what they are. Communism obviously takes basic needs into account, especially in a world where about one billion people are underfed. But how will this vital food issue be addressed ? As Hic Salta explained in 1998, the natural urge to grow food, potatoes for instance, will be met through the birth of social links which will also result in vegetable gardening. Communisers will not say: “Let’s grow potatoes because we need to feed ourselves.” Rather, they will imagine and invent a way to meet, to get and be together, that will include vegetable gardening and be productive of potatoes. Maybe potato growing will require more time than under capitalism, but that possibility will not be evaluated in terms of labour-time cost and saving.

“When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end.” (1844 Manuscripts)

A typical feature of what we have been used to calling “the economy” is to produce goods separately from needs (which may be “natural” or “artificial”, authentic or manipulated, that matters but is not essential at this point), before offering them on a market where they will be bought to be consumed.

“Socialism” or “communism” has usually been thought of as the symmetrical opposite of that economy: it would start from people’s needs (real ones, this time, and collectively decided upon) to produce accordingly and distribute fairly.

Communism is not a new “economy”, even a regulated, bottom-up, decentralized and self-managed one.

To use K. Polanyi’s word in The Great Transformation (1944), capitalism has disembedded the production of the means of existence from both social life and nature. No Marxist and certainly not a communist, Polanyi was not opposed to the existence of a market, but he analysed the institution of the economic process as a distinct system with its own laws of motion. The Great Transformation, written in the aftermath of the Great Depression, coincided with a capitalist effort to regulate market forces. In the last decades, there has been a renewed interest in Polanyi’s emphasis on “embeddedness”: many reformers would like the economy to be brought under social control, in order to create a sustainable relationship with nature. Unfortunately, as the liberals are right to point out, we cannot have the advantages of capitalism without its defects: its regulation is a momentary step before going into overdrive. To do away with capitalist illimitation, we must go beyond the market itself and the economy as such, i.e. beyond capital and wage-labour.

As we wrote in the section on “the revolution of daily life”, communisation will be tantamount to an anthropological change, with a re-embedding of organic links that were severed when the economy came to dominate both society and nature.

Equality

There would be no communist movement without our spontaneous indignation when we witness a Rolls-Royce driving by slums. Sylvain Maréchal, Babeuf’s comrade, wrote in the Manifesto of the Equals (1796):

“No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.

We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.

Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their like, their equals.”

S. Maréchal’s statement was asserting the existence of a human species whose members are similar and should have a fair share of available resources.

Communisation demands a fraternity that involves, among other things, mutual aid as theorized by Kropotkin, and equality as expressed in The Internationale lines: “There are no supreme saviours/Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune”.

But equality is not to be achieved by book-keeping. As long as we measure in order to share out and “equalize”, inequality is sure to be present. Communism is not a “fair” distribution of riches. Even if, particularly at the beginning and under the pressure of circumstances, our priority may sometimes be to share goods and resources in the most equitable way (which, whether we like it or not, amounts to some form of rationing), our prime motive and mover will not be the best and fairest way to circulate goods, but our human links and the activities that result from them.

Universality

Where do capitalism’s powerful drive and resilience come from ? Undoubtedly from its amazing and always renewed capacity to invent advanced ways of exploiting labour, to raise productivity, to accumulate and circulate wealth. But also from its fluidity, its ability to supersede rigid forms, to remodel hierarchy and discard vested interests when it needs to, not forgetting its adaptability to the most varied doctrines and regimes. This plasticity has no precedent in history. It derives from the fact that capitalism has no other motive than to create abstract value, to maximize its flow, and eventually to set in motion and accumulate more figures than goods.

That aspect is documented enough for us not to go into details. What matters here is that capitalist civilization develops extreme individualism, while creating a universality of sorts, which is also a form of freedom (of which democracy is the political realization): it breeds and favours a new type of human being potentially disconnected from the ties of tradition, land, birth, family, religion and established creeds. In the 21^st century, the modern Londoner eats a banana grown in the West Indies (where she was holidaying last week), watches an Argentinean film, chats up an Australian woman on the Internet, rents a Korean car, and from her living-room accesses any classical or outrageously avant-garde work of art as well as all schools of thought. Capitalism is selling her no less than an infinity of possibilities. Fool’s gold, we might object, because it is made of passivity and spectacle in the situationist sense, instead of truly lived-in experience. Indeed… Yet, however specious this feeling of empowerment, it socially “functions” as it is able to arouse emotion and even passion.

We would be wrong to assume that a period when communisation is possible and attempted would automatically and quickly eliminate the appeal of false riches – material or spiritual. Two centuries of modern capitalist evolution have taught us how resourceful that system can prove. In troubled times, social creativity will not only be on our side: in order to ride out the storm, capitalism also will put forward authenticity and collectiveness. It will provide the individual with opportunities to go beyond his atomized self. It will suggest critiques of “formal” democracy, defend planet Earth as a shared heritage, oppose cooperation to competition and use to appropriation. In short, it will pretend to change everything… except capital and wage-labour.

The communist perspective has always put forward an unlimited development of human potentials. Materially speaking: everyone should be able to enjoy all the fruits of the world. But also in the “behavioural” field, in order to promote, harmonize and fulfil talents and desires. The surrealists (“absolute freedom”) and the situationists (“to live without restraints”) went even further and extolled the subversive merits of transgression.

Today, the most advanced forms of capitalism turn this critique back on us. Current Political Correctness and its Empire of Good leave ample room for provocation, for verbal and often factual transgression. Let us take a look at the many screens that surround us: compared to 1950, the boundary is increasingly blurred between what is sacred and profane, forbidden and allowed, private and public. English readers had to wait until 1960 to buy the  unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover : fifty years later, on-line pornography, whatever that word covers, is widespread (according to some figures, 12% of all sites and 25% of Internet searches deal with pornography). Contemporary counter-revolution will appeal much less to moral order than it did in the 1920s and 30s, and often have a “liberal-libertarian” and permissive-transgressive flavour. Communisation, on the other hand, will prevail by giving birth to ways of life that will tend to be universal, but not dominated by addiction, virtuality and public imagery.

The inescapable contradiction

Communisation will be possible because those who make the world can also unmake it, because the class of labour (whether its members are currently employed or out of a job) is also the class of the critique of work. Unlike the exploited in pre-capitalist times, wage-earners can put an end to exploitation, because commodified (wo)men have the means to abolish the realm of commodity. It is the working class / proletariat duality we are talking about: a class, as Marx put it in 1844, which is not a class while it has the capacity to terminate class societies.

Marxists often turn this definition into formulaic dialectics. Non-Marxists make fun of it: the French liberal Raymond Aron used to say that the “working class” is worthy of the fine name “proletariat” when it acts in a (revolutionary) way that suits Marxists. Anyone who takes this definition seriously cannot evade the obvious: this duality is contradictory. Those who handle the modern means of production and have thereby the ability to subvert the world, are also those with a vested interest in the “development of the productive forces”, including utterly destructive ones, and are often caught up, willy-nilly, not just in the defence of their own wages, shop-floor conditions and jobs, but also of industry, of the ideology of work and the myth of progress.

We have no other terrain apart from this contradiction. It dramatically exploded in January 1919, when a few thousand Spartakist insurgents went to battle amidst the quasi indifference of several hundred thousand Berlin workers. Communisation will be the  positive resolution of the contradiction, when the proletarians are able and willing to solve the social crisis by superseding capitalism. Therefore communisation will also be a settling of scores of the proletarian with him/herself.

Until then, and as a contribution to this resolution, communist theory will have to acknowledge the contradiction, and proletarians to address it.

For further reading

(We have also published an essay in French on Communisation, available on our site. This English version is much shorter, but also different : a few passages have been expanded.)

Essential reading :

To the best of our knowledge, Un monde sans argent has not been translated in English, except for short extracts published in the SPGB magazine Socialist Standard (July 1979) : John Gray “For communism” site : reocities.com

Bruno Astarian, Crisis Activity & Communisation, 2010: hicsalta-communisation.net (with other texts by B. Astarian on communism)

Background information on how the “communisation” idea became explicit in the 1970s :

The Story of Our Origins (part of an article from La Banquise, # 2, 1983): John Gray “For communism” site: reocities.com

For the complete article:  Re-collecting Our Past : libcom.org

(Also: Are the Revolutionaries One Counter-revolution Behind ?, from La Banquise, # 3, 1984: libcom.org)

And :

Endnotes, # 1 and 2: 56a Infoshop, 56 Crampton St., London SE 17 3 AE, UK; and: endnotes.org

Théorie Communiste (R. Simon, 84300 Les Vignères, France). Among other texts, Communisation vs. socialization : meeting.communisation.net

TPTG (Ta Paidia Tis Galarias, or : “The Children in the Gallery”, a group in Greece), The Ivory Tower of Theory : a Critique of Théorie Communiste & « The Glass Floor » : libcom.org

A. Pannekoek, The Theory of the collapse of capitalism (1934): marxists.org

On the Russian and Spanish revolutions : When Insurrections Die (1999),on the troploin site

V. Serge’s The Anarchists & the Experience of the Russian Revolution (1921), is included in the V. Serge compendium Revolution in Danger, Redwords, London, 1997.

On the mir and Russian populism: F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist & Socialist Movement in 19^th Century Russia, first published in 1952.

On democracy: The Implosion of Democratist Ideology, 1989: “For Communism” website; and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Autonomy, 2008, available on our site.

Marx, letter to Vera Zasulich, March 1881; and : “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” (preface to the 1882 edition of the Communist Manifesto);  also another letter to V. Zasulich, by Engels, April 23, 1985.

Group of International Communists of Holland (GIK), Fundamental Principles of Communist Production & Distribution (1930): reocities.com

S. Maréchal, Manifesto of the Equals (1796) : marxists.org

No related posts.

Creating Space for Communist Re-Emergence: Approaching Badiou

By J. Ramsey

I would like to begin by thanking the Platypus Affiliated Society, the organizers of the conference, as well as Chris Cutrone for organizing this panel, and inviting me—inviting us—to speak with you today. I do not at all take it for granted that there are groups of people who come together to share views and engage in thoughtful discussion about capitalism, marxism, communism, and the path to human emancipation…. Ours is an age—and in particular, the US, is a society—where the very existence of what Badiou calls the Communist Hypothesis is in no way guaranteed. In this context, the very idea of Communism –indeed the very idea of Big Ideas!—needs to be defended, nurtured, and deliberately developed. And so it is important that we not take forums like this conference, or each other, our fellow-travellers on this revolutionary road, for granted.

The Platypus panel description we were given asks several questions. They are certainly not exhaustive of the topic of Badiou, (post) Maoism, or Communism. But they do seem to me to be a reasonable, if not the only, place to start. I want to use my time, in part, to deepen and unpack, just the first of the really quite loaded questions that were put to us.

First, we are asked by the blurb, “How does the prominence of Alain Badiou’s approach to communism speak to the present historical moment and its emancipatory possibilities?”

This question like many questions has embedded within it a number of aspects. 1. The prominence of Badiou’s thought. 2. Badiou’s approach to communism. And how each of those relates to: 3. The present historical moment. 4. And its emancipatory possibilities. 1.2.3.4. + aspects. Each of these aspects brings forth another question, complex in and of itself—questions that deserve full treatment in themselves—among them: 1. What is the prominence of Badiou’s thought today? 2. What is the nature of Badiou’s approach to communism? 3. What is the best way to understand the present historical moment? 4. And what are the emancipatory possibilities within in this moment? Finally, 5. How does Badiou’s thought relate to #3 and #4 , to the contemporary moment and its emancipatory possibilities?

In this paper I would like to take a stab at just the first couple of these, beginning with:

1. How prominent is Alain Badiou’s thought today, and what is the nature of this prominence?

At a minimum, Badiou’s rise to prominence would seem to signal a growing open-ness—at least in academic circles—to the issue of communism, or at least to the radical opposition to capitalism, which is to say, a waning of certain cold war era prohibitions, a fading of the “end of history” Fukuyama-ist haze that has blanketed academia for so long. Badiou’s prominence, at least within humanities, English, and philosophy departments would likewise appear to signal a certain moving beyond the limits of what is often called “postmodernist” discourse, with its fetishization of plurality, irony and uncertainty, its privileging of difference, and its ethics of respecting the Other at a distance, even at the expense of meaningful intervention…His “prominence” suggests a re-emerging interest in questions of unity, universality, truth (with a capital T), and politics (with a capital P), as well as thinking in terms of transforming inherited situations in fundamental ways, rather than ‘subversively’ playing on their hybrid margins. It’s also worth considering the radical difference between Badiou and say the empirical approach of Noam Chomsky, an invaluable thinker whose critical work of exposing the system’s crimes is still haunted, nonetheless, by a prohibition on thinking “Big Ideas.” As already noted, Badiou identifies this prohibition as one of the symptoms of our time, as well as one of the major obstacles to breaking out of the present capitalist system. In my view, these developments are largely positive!

Of course Badiou’s prominence is not the only sign of this moment’s open-ness to Big Ideas, or to communism in particular. A recent Rasmussen poll for instance found that 11% of “likely voters” in the US found Communism “more moral” than the current US political and economic system. Breaking down these numbers (for their “Platinum members only”) the pollsters found that 26-7% of 18-29 year olds interviewed reported that communism was both moral and that it worked better than the current US system. (And keep in mind here of course that “likely voters” tend to be wealthier and, by definition, more committed to the political existing system than, say, non-voters, let alone say, non-citizens, or the un-documented.) To me these are exciting and encouraging numbers. To what extent are Badiou and the discourse around him and other emerging philosophers of communism have contributed to this support vs. merely benefited from it in increased attention and readership?… It is difficult to say.

But what does seem likely to me is that aside from matters of direct influence, many of these people who are now reporting themselves as in favor of communism, are likely coming at communism, like Badiou, in new and what may appear to us as “strange” ways, not primarily through a reading of Marx’s Capital, but through other vectors of discourse, experience, reflection, and influence. (Though undoubtedly in many cases Marx or Marxism continue to play an important role, as well they should.)….

This brings us to the second question within the given question:

2. What is Alain Badiou’s approach to communism?

I would start by noting an assumption that is built into this question. Namely, that there is only one singular Badiou-ist approach to communism. While I haven’t yet read let alone made a close study of Badiou’s complete oeuvre, I have read enough to learn that there is, in fact, more than one Badiou—as there is more than one Marx for that matter! There are tensions, competing trajectories, and changes that move through Badiou’s work, regarding many elements of his philosophy, including several that are quite directly linked to communism and to politics.

I do not mean to throw open the door to a kind of textual indeterminacy, as if we can “never generalize about Badiou because he is not even identical with himself.” Rather I aim to suggest that in dealing with Badiou—or other complex thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Adorno, or Mao—we would do better to imagine Badiou’s work as a kind of layered terrain, a textual topology with which we best familiarize ourselves before pronouncing a totalizing judgment, that is, if we want to stand a chance of entering that terrain, to grapple with Badiou seriously, and/or to engage students of Badiou in a meaningful way.

For example, in reading Bruno Bosteels recent essay (“The Leftist Hypothesis” from the Idea of Communism book, based on talks from the Birkbeck conference), it becomes clear that there are differences between Badiou of the early 1980s and the Badiou of today, as regards, for starters, such “fundamental concepts of Marxism” as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolution. Similarly in his 1969 essay “Outline of a Beginning,” curiously reprinted in the middle of Badiou’s most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, (in a section entitled “We Are Still Contemporaries of May 1968,”) Badiou appears very much open to the notion of something like a maoist party of “a new type,” one that puts into practice the mass line, (“from the masses to the masses”) with cadre dialectically engaging mass movements, in a process of movement party mutual transformation. A Party that continually struggles against bureaucratization, ossification, as well as fragmentation and anarchic isolation—a party that would incorporate the very mass friction it encounters as the means of its radical renewal and transformation, as well as the masses’ (self)transformation. For this Badiou of 1969 or even of 1982, “the party-state” is not simply “exhausted,” as it appears in much later work (though even here there are variations and competing tendencies).

For instance consider Badiou’s rather sympathetic description of the notion of the Party as it was grasped by Marx and for that matter, Lenin (from his book Metapolitics): “It is crucial to emphasize,” Badiou states, “that for Marx of Lenin, who are both in agreement on this point, the real characteristic of the party is not its firmness, but rather its porosity to the event, its dispersive flexibility in the face of unforeseeable circumstances.” To quote a long passage that Bosteels finds in Badiou on this point:

Rather than referring to a dense, bound faction of the working class…the party refers to an unfixable omnipresence, whose proper function is less to represent class than to de-limit it by ensuring it is equal to everything that history presents as improbably and excessive in respect to the rigidity of interests, whether material or national. Thus, the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness, its anticipatory aspect, and therefore the precariousness of the bond, rather than its firmness.” (Metapolitics, 71).

Tracing the development of Badiou’s thought into his later writings, in relationship and in contrast to these writings of the 1980s and 1990s, Bosteels (in “The Leftist Hypothesis” essay) asks, skeptically, but not dismissively: “What happens when of these four fundamental concepts [class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, and communism] only communism is retained?…Moreover…what are we to make of Badiou’s recent calls for the complete separation of the communist hypothesis both from the party form of politics and from the figure of the State”? (Bosteels, 50). We too should raise and pursue such critical questions. Note: they are not simply rhetorical questions aimed as disqualifying Badiou’s project as anathema to Marxism or “true communism,” but, rather, real questions that demand investigation and clarification. That is: If we cannot rely solely on the concept of class struggle producing a revolutionary communist subject, (the party being the official, and even historically destined leader of that struggle) then where might—where will, where must—such communist subjectivity come from? Similarly if the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—as embodied in a socialist state—has proven historically to not in itself adequate to guaranteeing the progress of the revolutionary transformation of capitalism, through socialism to communism, then what new concepts and new forms are necessary and available to us to prepare the way for this radical transition? Considering a history of socialist states that have had difficulty “withering away,” how ought communists to relate to the notion of “socialism” today?

Moreover, we might ask (in ways that challenge Badiou): Does reckoning with the limitation of these “fundamental” concepts of Marxism to date necessitate their retirement (as “exhausted”), or merely their revision, reconception, or perhaps their being supplemented by other additional concepts and organizational forms? And if so, what are these concepts and forms? What in these concepts is still worth fighting for and reclaiming, albeit “against the current” of the times? Moreover we should ask to what extent has Badiou carried out the investigation of past communist events and sequences necessary to justify these rather bold theoretical generalizations? To what extent does our understanding of these previous sequences support, confirm, complicate, or contradict Badiou’s conclusions?

Personally, I should note, that while my thinking has been provoked on Badiou this point, I have yet to be convinced by Badiou’s more recent conclusion (which derives from Sylvian Lazarus, as I understand it) that the “Party-State” form of emancipatory politics is totally “exhausted.” In my estimation the quite informative and thought-provoking historical examination that Badiou gives the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China—Badiou’s prime example for the exhaustion of the party-state organization as a communist form of politics—does not provide a conclusive evidentiary basis that could justify the rather universalizing conclusions he then draws about politics in general.

At the same time, I unite with Badiou when he writes (in the Communist Hypothesis) that Mao remains the name of a problem we still face; that is the contradiction between maintaining power for a revolutionary order on the one hand, and unleashing further emancipatory currents that threaten to destabilize even the main institutions of that new order, on the other. I can at least unite with Badiou in that it is clear to me that the problem of the communist party must be thought again, whether or not we retain this name “party” in the end at all.

These days Badiou continues to reconsider and reframe his position with respect to the state. For instance, as Bosteels has pointed out, Badiou’s essay “The Idea of Communism,” in its published book form, differs subtly but importantly from the talk version of the essay he delivered at the Birkbeck conference some months prior. At the conference Badiou put forth his frequently quoted point about the “party-state” being “exhausted.” Yet, in the published version Badiou argues that it may still be possible for the Idea of Communism to include a projected figure of ‘another state’ so long as this post-capitalist state to come is on the one hand, subtracted from the present State and secondly is figured so that it’s essence is to “wither away” (CH 248).

I don’t mean to wade too deeply into this particular—and important– thicket of the Party-State. The main point here is that both historically, and even in our present moment, Badiou’s thinking is an active and developing project, one that—as Bosteels has sugggseted, is still subject to the pressure and effect of ideological struggle. Indeed, as Badiou himself argues, we are in a time of political experimentation, the experience and summation of which then ought—indeed must—be figured back into theoretical constructions. To do otherwise would be to fall into dogmatism.

But to get back to the issue of what communism means for Badiou.

Badiou offers several different Communist concepts, each of which have a distinct meaning and position within his thought, the main being:

What he calls “generic communism”

What he calls The Communist Hypothesis

And also what he calls The Idea of Communism

To get at the meaning of the first two concepts, we might do well to quote the following passage, from The Meaning of Sarkozy, one of Badiou’s most recent books.

In its generic sense, ‘communist’ means first of all, in a negative sense—as we can read in its canonical text The Communist Manifesto—that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome. This arrangement, which has been that of history ever since antiquity, is not inevitable. Consequently, the oligarchic powers of those who possess wealth and organize its circulation, crystallized in the might of states, is not inescapable (98).

As Badiou continues, moving to the second concept:

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor; every individual will be a ‘multi-purpose worker,’ and in particular people will circulate between manual and intellectual work, as well as between town and country. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state separate from civil society, with its military and police, will no longer seem a self-evident necessity. There will be, Marx tells us—and he saw this point as his major contribution—after a brief sequence of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ charged with destroying the remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of a ‘free association’ of producers and creators, which will make possible a ‘withering away’ of the state. (98-99).

Generic communism here appears as an actuality of resistance. The actuality of this resistance and rebellion then makes possible the self-consciousness of that historical movement: the communist hypothesis. From this point on, for Badiou it becomes possible—at least in partial and fragmentary ways—to raise the issue of communism as a question and a problem to be solved, in its own right.

To offer a few further reflections on this passage: It is statement about possibility; and about the non-necessity of the current order of things. It is not to be confused with the hopefully hopelessly vague World Social Forum slogan that “Another World is Possible” in some clear and positive sense, as if the “alternative” is simply there for the taking (without a major revolutionary reckoning that involves the negation and overcoming of many aspects of the present situation). It is a statement aiming to deprive the ruling capitalist order of classes and states of its aura as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable.’ That aims to clear the ideological fog that obscures the path(s) forward: Things do not have to be this way. We can make the world on new foundations.

There is more that we might say about even this short passage, namely its emphasis on the transformation of society not simply in terms of overcoming wealth inequality but also the division of labor, and in particular the division between mental and manual labor, and between town and country. (The debt to Marx and to Mao here are unmistakable.) Badiou, contrary to his critics is not simply calling for some radical egalitarian democracy of a “pre-marxian” sort.

The communist hypothesis for Badiou is a projected negation of the present conditions, and a posited horizon, not only to be strived towards but to be used as a critical—what he calls a “heuristic”—a Kantian “regulatory idea”; a means of “produce lines of demarcation between different forms of politics” that contend in the actuality of the present. It is not itself a path to be followed but a kind of lens, a perspective through which to evaluate and to decide between paths that present themselves. As he writes, “By and large, a particular political sequence is either compatible with these principles or opposed to them, in which case it is reactionary. Communism in this sense is a heuristic hypothesis that is very frequently used in political argument, even if the word itself does not appear.”

As Badiou elaborates on this point, with rhetorical flair:

If it is still true, as Sartre said, that ‘every anti-communist is a swine’, it is because any political sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity, and thus to the properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words they use, as such words matter little—reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality. As we know, the contemporary—that is, the capitalist name of this animality—is ‘competition’. The war dictated by self-interest, and nothing more. (Meaning of Sarkozy, 99-100).

Indeed, for Badiou, capitalism strives to make ‘animals’ of us all.

Badiou’s framing of the communism in terms of the Communist Hypothesis, of course, draws an analogy between the historical struggle to achieve communism and the proof of a mathematical theorem. I see at least three implications of this framing: 1) It suggests an approach of testing and experimenting, of persistent inquiry rather than doctrinal certitude; 2) In contrast with, say the language of Manifestation, to frame communism as a hypothesis emphasizes the importance of thought and learning in communism’s emergence; communism is not something whose emergence is simply immanent to the dynamics of capitalism and the class struggle, though its possibility is suggested—and its hypothesis established—for Badiou even by pre-modern slave uprisings like Spartacus, etc. The working out of communism is something that requires abstraction and reflection, as well as conscious testing in theory and practice. 3) By speaking of Communism as a hypothesis, Badiou reframes previous (unsuccessful) attempts at achieving communism as merely the “prehistory of the proof of the hypothesis.” Failure, and the summing up and learning from failure, through close and situated analysis of those sequences, is absolutely crucial, to any scientific endeavor. Certainly for an experiment to fail, or rather to produce negative results, does not impugn the project as a whole. Past failures are nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you learn from them and persist in the proof! Indeed, they are often necessary to bring about the rare and precious positive breakthroughs. Likewise with the history of the communist movement.

I will at this point bring in a fourth aspect which seems to me more of a danger implicit in this hypothesis framing. Namely 4) that the mathematical rhetoric here may lead some to read Badiou as suggesting that the problems and questions of communism can be resolved solely within the context of controlled laboratory experiments, or through theoretical abstractions shared at conferences like these (or via websites even). Certainly, in academic contexts many a thinker—Marx himself for one—has been domesticated in this way, divorced from practice that engages the world beyond the seminar table. But is this tendency one that Badiou seeks to encourage? I would say no. For alongside the imperative to learn from the failures of the communist movements and socialist states of the past, and to draw abstract and universal lessons from these studies, Badiou also calls us to examine the partial successes and failures of contemporary political movements whose actual politics and ideology are far from communist.

As he writes, for instance, “Today we need to investigate the real nature of the link to the people from the standpoint of the universal lessons to be drawn, of organizations limited by their religious allegiance: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. We should also pay attention to the countless worker uprisings in China, and the actions of the ‘Maoists’ in India and Nepal. The list is by no means closed” (Sarkozy, 111). The point here I want to underscore is that alongside Badiou’s mobilization of the communist hypothesis (and the communist Idea, to be discussed further below) and his emphasis on abstractions and subjective dynamics, is a perhaps less pronounced, but equally important imperative to investigate political situations past and present, with an eye to how the new communist sequence can be helped forth.

The Idea of Communism

Badiou’s Idea of Communism, which he describes as more of an operation—I might suggest projection or even project—than a fixed “utopian ideal,” has a distinct meaning, related but different from The Communist Hypothesis. Basically, it is the operation through which an individual becomes Subject to a communist Truth-process, symbolically bridging the gap between the singularity of particular political practices and the great historic collective project of human emancipation. If the Communist Hypothesis aims to open our eyes and help us see the possibilities and lessons of the past and present more clearly, than the Communist Idea, is an essentially subjective operation, one that makes the individual communist subject a part of something bigger than him/herself. To quote Badiou, at several key points:

An Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process…is also , in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, realizes his or her belonging as an element of a new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History (Communist Hypothesis, 235).

In other words, the communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political real into the symbolic narrative of History. (CH, 239).

The Idea is a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth. But it can only be so if it admits as its own real this aleatory, elusive, slippery, evanescent, dimension (CH, 247).

The role of this Idea is to support that individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure, to authorize the individual, in his or her own eyes, to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or subjectivizable body (CH, 252).

In short, Badiou asks us to anchor communist subjectivity in the imagination, not in the necessities of history. The state of being a communist subject is not, for Badiou, something that can be reduced to, or read off of objective determinants, whether of class position, or party affiliation—certainly not just by adding the adjective “communist” to some pre-existing or half-thought practice or organization. It is not something organic or stable or something guaranteed but something that is sustained only so long as the communist Idea is operative. It is not guaranteed by History, which remains an imagined projected narrative, albeit a necessary one, if we are collectively to think, and through our thoughts, and actions supported by those thoughts, to actualize global human emancipation.

We may hear in Badiou’s language here a certain secularized communist recasting of Christian communion. Through the operation of the Idea we become aware of our potential to join our individual self as part of a larger greater body of truth, and a movement of History. Contrary to a certain vulgar secularism, within our age of cynicism, I find, this notion of the Communist Idea of interest as a way to simultaneously (on the one hand) en-courage and sustain the fidelity of lonely and depression-visited radical anti-capitalists in a moment of Sarkozys and Obamas. At the same time it is a notion that encourages rather than squelches local experiments in political practice. For no practice can be deemed in itself in advance to be “communist” or “non-communist” based on simply its location or its immediate import; it is the way that practice is bound up with and mediated by, and becomes a site of the idea operation of communism that they will have become communist. The Idea remains an Idea not a certainty. Just as a hypothesis demands proof in practice.

Which then brings us to the final two questions in the assigned blurb:

3+4) What is the nature of the “present historical moment”? And what are its “emancipatory possibilities?”

I might reverse this question and instead ask : What are some of the things that stand in the way of the emergence of a movement capable of cultivating, organizing, and mobilizing these emancipatory possibilities?

A quick list comes to mind:

Fragmentation, pessimism, isolation

The TINA notion that “there is no alternative” to the capitalist system

Cynicism and nihilism (both on and beyond the left)

Dogmatism and Sectarianism (including a fetishization of or premature dismissals of tactics and forms)

Facile anti-communist dismissals of actually existing communists movements, past and present

I would argue that Badiou offers us perspectives and approaches, and a spirit of enthusiastic engagement , that can play a role in helping us in addressing all of the above weaknesses. No magic bullet. But an element of the mix!

**

In closing, a few notes on an additional question put to us by Platypus and by Chris Cutrone:

“How does Badiou’s conception of communism relate to the history of Marxism in the 20th century, with its roots in the 19th century?

As is well known, Badiou places particular emphasis and pays close attention to the moments of the Paris Commune, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as May 1968.

He places great emphasis on learning from failure. Failure not as it was “doomed from the start” but as it was worked through in actual historical experience, theory and practice.

He places a particular focus on Mao as a name that still embodies a the practical-theoretical knot of the communist movement, even today, namely: How to build an organization that is massive and powerful enough to overthrow the present order, to sustain state power (in a capitalist-imperialist world), and yet is able to stave off ossification, bureaucratization, capitalist roaders—to remain a revolutionary agent encouraging, not suppressing the initiative of ‘spontaneous’ mass organization and social transformation.

Obviously, we are not in the position of picking up where Mao left off….The practical question for us is not “what could or should have Mao or the revolutionary cadre in China have done to transform their possibilities in the 60s or 70s?” But how to organize NOW in light of the limits and the tangles that communist revolutionaries come up against in the past.

To briefly and provocatively conclude: what I take from Badiou in this vein is the necessity for us today to conceive of communist revolution as from the start—not simply after supplanting the present state power—a cultural revolution. We need not just a revolutionary party, but a revolutionary people. For which we need revolutionary intellectuals and activists who sink deep roots in the people not simply to build a core of cadre oriented towards exposing and eventually overthrowing of the current state power as well as the construction of a new and different one, but whose aim is to stir up and support emancipatory ideas and practices so as to cultivate new cultural and social spaces that can now prepare the field, so that we have a shot of avoiding those pitfalls that have constrained and even toppled those who have come before us.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek on our situation — and communism

This paper was originally presented at a 2002 conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. It is reprinted here from a copy made available on the author’s website.

Freedom and the ‘realm of necessity’

Sean Sayers

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite. (Marx 1971, 820)

1

Many commentators argue that there are two conflicting strands in Marx’s thought on work and freedom.1 In his early writings, Marx maintains that, although work in contemporary society is an alienated activity, it need not be so (Marx 1975a; Marx 1975b). Alienation can and will be overcome in a future society; potentially, work can be a fulfilling and liberating activity.

In his later work, however, Marx appears to change his outlook. This is evident, it is argued, in the well known passage from Capital quoted above. Here, Marx seems to adopt a more `sombre’ and `realistic’ (Berki 1979, 53), a `gloomy’ and `pessimistic’ (Cohen 1988, 207), perspective on the place of work in human life. He appears to say that economically necessary labour is inescapably alienating and unfree. Cohen, for example, glosses this passage as follows. `Being a means of life, [labour] cannot be wanted, and will be replaced by desired activity as the working day contracts’ (Cohen 1988, 207). `True freedom’ is attainable only outside work. The aim of a future society, therefore, is not to humanize work but rather to reduce it to the unavoidable minimum and to expand the `realm of freedom’.

My aim in this paper is to question this account of what Marx is saying in this passage and to clarify his views on work and freedom. It is a mistake, I shall argue, to interpret Marx as opposing the realms of necessity and freedom. Properly understood this passage provides no grounds for thinking that Marx’s views on work and freedom changed significantly in his later writings.

2

By the `realm of necessity’, Marx means the sphere of economically necessary labour, labour to meet material needs.2 He contrasts it with the `realm of freedom’, the sphere of activities not so determined.3 However, it is a mistake — though a common one — to infer that the realm of necessity is therefore a realm of unfreedom. This inference is predicated on the assumption that economic labour is necessarily unfree. There is no evidence that Marx makes this assumption, either here or elsewhere. Quite the contrary. In this very passage, Marx explicitly talks of freedom in the realm of necessity (`freedom in this field…’) and spells out the conditions for it.4

The idea that economically necessary work can be free and fulfilling is fundamental to Marx’s outlook, both here and throughout his work (Sayers 1998, chapter 4). However, it is unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. Indeed, it is denied, implicitly at least, by most traditional philosophies. Plato and Aristotle regard a fully human life as the life of reason, requiring exemption from labour, which they regard as a lower activity catering only to lower needs. For Kant, too, we are rational beings and our material nature is a lower and merely animal aspect of our being. Such attitudes are also evident in an important strand of Christian thought which treats work as a curse, a punishment for our `fallen’ nature. Work is seen as painful toil by the hedonism which underlies utilitarianism and classical economics (cf Marx 1973, 611 on Adam Smith). On this view we are essentially consumers rather than producers, who work only as a means to satisfy our needs (Anthony, 1978).

Views such as these are familiar, and Marx is often interpreted in the light of them. According to Marx, however, work has a quite different place in human life. We are essentially active and creative beings who can develop and fulfill ourselves only through productive activity. In his early writings Marx describes work as the `vital activity’ of human beings, their `species activity’, the `essential activity’ by which human beings are distinguished from other animals (Marx 1975a, 328-9; Marx and Engels 1970, 42). He maintains these views throughout his life. In the Grundrisse he describes labour as `free’ activity, in the `Critique of the Gotha Programme’ he envisages it becoming `life’s prime want’ (Marx 1958, 24). However, he never spells out the philosophical basis for these views.

This derives from Hegel. For Hegel, as for Marx, work plays an essential role in human life. It is the basis on which human beings are distinct from other animals. Non-human animals, on Hegel’s view, have a purely immediate relation to nature, both to their own nature and to the surrounding environment. They are driven by their desires and instincts, and they consume the objects they desire immediately and directly. Human beings, by contrast, are self-conscious, they have `being-for-self’. They can stand back from what is immediately present, both through conscious reflection and in a practical way. Work is a form of such practical being-for-self. In work, gratification is deferred, the object is not consumed immediately, it is not simply annihilated but formed and altered. Thus a distinctively human relation to nature is established.

Through work we separate ourselves from nature and establish a self apart. At the same time we begin the process of overcoming this division from nature. By objectifying ourselves, we come to recognise our powers and capacities as real and objective, and thus develop a consciousness of self. Moreover, by humanising the world we come to feel increasingly at home in it. The human being lays the basis for overcoming his alienation from the purely natural world and, as Marx puts it, come to `contemplate himself in a world he himself has created’.5

Both for Hegel and for Marx, in this way, work is not only a means to satisfy material needs, but also an activity of self-development and self-realisation. This process of objectification and self-realisation is present not only in work but in other forms of practical activity as well. Its fullest development is in the creative activity of art. This is the ideal of creative activity, the highest form of work, for both of these philosophers.

A distinctive account of freedom is associated with these views. According to this, freedom is not an all-or-nothing affair, it is present by degrees. Different kinds of practical activity involve different degrees of freedom for the agent and, correlatively, allow different degrees of freedom to the object. Animal consumption as an immediate result of desire is not free. It is immediately determined by the appetites which drive it and by the object. By deferring gratification and working on the object, human beings detach themselves from their appetites and desires and acquire a degree of freedom with respect to them. At the same time, work allows a measure of freedom to the object. The object is not simply consumed; it is transformed and hence preserved. Nevertheless, the purpose of work is the satisfaction of needs, it is still in the `realm of necessity’; and the object is destined ultimately for consumption and destruction. Artistic creation is truly free activity, in that it is not in the service of material needs, and its product is not for consumption: determination by desire is entirely transcended. This is what Marx is referring to when he talks, in Capital, of activity in the `realm of freedom’. This is entirely consonant with what he says in the 1844 Manuscripts, `animals … produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need … man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty.’ (Marx 1975a, 329)

3

In short, contrary to the view of the commentators cited above, there can be freedom in the sphere of necessary work. Marx specifies two conditions for this in the passage from Capital that I am discussing (cf Marx 1973, 611). First, alienation from the process of production must be overcome: `the associated producers’ must `rationally [regulate] their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature’. Note here that freedom involves not simply an absence of constraint, but the positive aspect of rational self-determination.

Second, necessary economic labour must be carried out `with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature’. What Marx means is that through the use of human intelligence, especially with the introduction of machinery, the brute physical exertion involved in work can be minimized and the intelligent and `scientific’ aspects of work enhanced (Marx 1973, 611).

Marx also insists that the time devoted to necessary labour is to be reduced so that `disposable time’ for free activity, the `realm of freedom’, can be increased. Is there a contradiction here? Does this not imply that work in the realm of necessity is a regrettable necessity after all, as writers like Cohen assert? If activity in the realm of necessity can be free why should it be reduced?

Marx does not explicitly address this issue, but what he does say suggests the following response. To maintain that economic work can be a liberating and fulfilling activity is not to say that it is the only such activity or that it should be our sole activity. Yet in industrial society, particularly when Marx was writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, working hours had been extended to extreme lengths (Marx 1967, chapter 10). Since then they have gradually decreased, but they still dominate the lives of most working people leaving little time for anything else (Zeisel 1958). Marx wants work time to be reduced to what he calls `a normal length’ (Marx 1972, 257, see below), not because he thinks that in ideal conditions necessary work should be eliminated, but so that labour can become a free activity, and so that people can have time and energy for other kinds of fulfilment as well.

It is self-evident that if labour-time is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character. (Marx 1972, 257)

Historically, up to now, the surplus labour of the mass of working people has been the basis on which a few have been exempt from labour and able to enjoy free time.

The free time of the non-working parts of society is based on the surplus labour or overwork, the surplus labour time, of the working part. The free development of the former is based on the fact that the worker have to employ the whole of their time, hence the room for their own development, purely in the production of particular used values; the development of the human capacities on one side is based on the restriction of development on the other side. The whole of civilization and social development so far has been founded on this antagonism. (Marx 1988, 191; cf Marx 1973, 705-6, 708)

Work time and free time have stood in antagonistic opposition to each other. To be free has meant not working, and to work has meant to be unfree. Neither condition has been satisfactory. Alienated and oppressive work has existed alongside an alienated and disconnected sort of freedom. Philosophical theories, as may be expected (Sayers 1985, 184-7), have reflected this situation. Activities which cater to material needs have been looked down upon and disparaged as `lower’, `animal’ forms of activity, in contrast to `higher’ and more worthy intellectual and rational pursuits. Plato is the extreme here. At times he suggests that our bodily and natural appetites are a burden and that we would be better off without them. Other philosophers, such as Aristotle, Kant, and even Hegel, sometimes appear to accept this line of thought as well. At other times, however, all these writers (including Plato) recognise that we are physical as well as rational beings and that our bodily needs are essential to us (Sayers 1999, 142-4). Our happiness lies not in opposing the rational to the bodily aspects of our being, but in finding a means of overcoming this antagonism and harmonizing these aspects.

Marx, I am suggesting, follows this latter line of thought. In a society of the future, Marx envisages that the antagonism which has hitherto prevailed between these aspects can be transcended.6 The purpose of limiting the working day is not to minimise or eliminate work in the `realm of necessity’ as such, but rather to overcome the antagonistic relation which has existed historically between work and freedom. The aim is to create the conditions in which alienation can be overcome — conditions in which necessary work becomes a free activity, and in which free creative activity becomes a universal human need (Marx 1973, 708). This is Marx’s idea, not only in his early writings but also in Capital and throughout.

4

A number of questions are thrown up by the account I have been presenting. Will the aim of society continue to be to minimise necessary labour in order to maximise free time? Will the distinction between the realms of necessity and freedom persist even when the antagonism between them is overcome?7

It is not easy to interpret what Marx says on these issues, there are different and possibly divergent strands to his thought. On the one hand, in the passage that I have been discussing, Marx insists that the realm of necessity will continue to exist `in all social formations and under all possible modes of production’ (Marx 1971, 820). This follows simply from the fact that we are creatures of material need, a fact which no social changes can alter.8

Marx also maintains that the aim of society will continue to be to minimise the time devoted to satisfying material needs (necessary labour time). In the Grundrisse Marx spells this out as follows. In a future society,

The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. (Marx 1973, 705-6)

All this may seem to imply that the distinction between the realms of necessity and freedom will continue to exist. However, other themes in Marx’s thought point in a different direction: towards the reduction and ultimate overcoming of the very distinction between these realms.

Fundamental to Marx’s outlook is the view that human needs change historically. As Marx puts it in this passage, the realm of necessity `expands’ (Marx 1971, 820), needs become more developed and differentiated. This is a Hegelian thought, and Hegel gives a graphic example of the process.

Hercules was attired in a lion skin, and this is a simple way of satisfying [the need for clothing]. Reflection fragments this simple need and divides it into many parts: according to its particular nature, each individual part of the body — head, neck, feet — is given particular clothing, and one concrete need is divided into many needs and these in turn into many others. (Hegel 1997, 167-8)

Moreover, clothing also comes to have social and aesthetic functions. The same occurs with food, housing and other basic necessities. Work to meet these needs, which is in the realm of necessity, thus acquires an aesthetic aspect, a creative and free dimension.

Conversely, as needs develop, free creative activity itself becomes a need. The expansion of needs increasingly takes in the requirement for self-expression and self-realization. Marx foresees the emergence of the person `rich in needs’ who is `simultaneously the man in need of a totality of vital human expression … the man in whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as need’ (Marx 1975a, 356).ix

With human development, that is to say, basic necessities are aestheticised and free expression becomes a necessity. Work to satisfy basic needs becomes free activity and free activity becomes a need. In this way, Marx seems to envisage that not only the antagonism but ultimately even the distinction between the realms of necessity and freedom will eventually be overcome.

Bibliography

P.D. Anthony 1978, The Ideology of Work, London: Tavistock.

H. Arendt 1958, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

R.N. Berki 1979, “On the Nature and Origins of Marx’s Concept of Labour,” Political Theory, 7:1, 35-56.

G.A. Cohen 1988, “The Dialectic of Labour in Marx,” in History, Labour, and Freedom, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 183-208.

G.W.F. Hegel 1975, Aesthetics, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

G.W.F. Hegel 1997, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right, Heidelberg 1817-1818, with Additions from the Lectures of 1818-1819, trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson, Berkeley: University of California Press.

J.C. Klagge 1986, “Marx’s Realms of `Freedom’ and `Necessity’,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16:4, 769-78.

H. Marcuse 1969, “The Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom,” Praxis, 5, 20-5.

K. Marx 1958, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Marx-Engels Selected Works (2 volumes), II, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 13-37.

K. Marx 1967, Capital, I, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling, New York: International Publishers.

K. Marx 1971, Capital, III, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

K. Marx 1972, Theories of Surplus Value, III, trans. J. Cohen, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

K. Marx 1973, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

K. Marx 1975a, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 279-400.

K. Marx 1975b, “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” in Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 259-78.

K. Marx 1988, `”Eonomic Manuscripts of 1861-3,” in K. Marx and F. Engels Collected Works, 30, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

K. Marx and F. Engels 1970, The German Ideology Part I, New York: International Publishers.

J. McMurtry 1978, The Structure of Marx’s World-View, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

J. Plamenatz 1975, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

S. Sayers 1985, Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge, Oxford: Blackwell.

S. Sayers 1998, Marxism and Human Nature, London: Routledge.

S. Sayers 1999, Plato’s Republic, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

J.S. Zeisel 1958, “The Workweek in American Industry 1850-1956,” in Mass Leisure, Glencoe Ill.: Free Press, 145-53.

Notes

1.    Arendt 1958, 105-15; Berki 1979, 53-4; Cohen 1988, 207-8; Marcuse 1969; McMurtry 1978, 51-2; Plamenatz 1975, 143ff. See also Klagge 1986 for an account nearer to that presented here.

2.   Marx makes related distinctions, between `necessary’ and `surplus’ labour and labour time. These apply only in capitalist society (Marx 1988, 190-3; Marx 1973, 708-9).

3.  The `realm of freedom’ encompasses time for `idleness or for the performance of activities which are not directly productive (as e.g. war, affairs of state) or for the development of human abilities and social potentialities (art, etc., science) which have no directly practical purpose’ (Marx 1988, 190).

4.   Cf his view that labour can be `self-realization, objectification of the subject … real freedom’, (Marx 1973, 611).

5.    `It is … in his fashioning of the objective [world] that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appear as his work and his reality. The object of labour is the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself [sich verdoppelt] not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.’ (Marx 1975a, 329)

Cf Hegel 1975, 256: `[Through work, man] humanizes his environment, by showing how it is capable of satisfying him and how it cannot preserve any power of independence against him. Only by means of this effectual activity is he … aware of himself and at home in his environment.’

6.   This antagonism is ultimately a product of the division between mental and manual labour (Sayers 1998, chapter 2).

7.  I am grateful to Daniel Brudney and Andrew Chitty for their helpful discussion of these points at the VIII ISSEI international conference, Aberystwyth July 2002, where an earlier version of this paper was first presented.

8. Cf Marx 1967, 42-3: `So far therefore as labour is a creator of use-value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.’

9.   The growth of such needs is apparent in the field of education, which now standardly involves a significant component of art, music, dance, etc., at least at lower levels of school, in a way that even a century ago it did not; and also in the growth of leisure activities (Sayers 1998, chapter 4).

No related posts.

The following very interesting — and challenging — piece originally appeared on troploin. Thanks to Nick for drawing attention to this.

The following quotations from this essay are not consecutive; they are a few excerpted with an eye to showing a main line of thought in the piece.

In the capitalist mode of production as in the other modes, the classes of labour and property presuppose each other. The interdependance of the two classes is today tighter than it has ever been. This is another way of saying that the proletariat cannot save the jobs imperiled by capital without saving capital itself, i.e. working harder for less pay. The reciprocal presupposition of the classes tightly links them together around an enormous mass of fixed capital. This preempts any notion of a revolutionary outcome of the crisis that would affirm the working class and work against the capitalists, who would be eliminated. If the proletariat is to abolish capital, this will only be possible by abolishing wage labour, the fixed capital that dictate its content to work and work itself.

The current period offers better conditions for overcoming capital than ever before. But our period also poses radically new problems, because the high degree of capital domination on all of social reproduction indicates that it is difficult to imagine overcoming the capitalist mode of production without both classes being abolished at the same time, without supersession of the economy, invention of a totally new life for which the current categories of social analysis are basically useless.

Generally speaking, the changing class relationship within the last thirty years must be understood against the background of capital’s furious struggle against the falling rate of profit. The headlong flight into credit is one aspect of this. Outsourcing is another. This movement is not prompted by whim or cupidity on the part of the capitalists. It is the condition for reproduction of the social relationship, i.e. between capital and the proletariat. The content of at least some of the struggles against the capitalist offensive show that the way out of the crisis is not through a better balance in the exploitation of labor, that there is no possibility for “sharing the benefits of productivity”. Underneath, those struggles imply the necessity of doing away with both classes simultaneously. Unless one conceives of a return to previously existing conditions of the capitalist social relationship, the current struggles as well as an analysis of the modes of labor exploitation point to the possibility and necessity of communisation.

One of the major theses of communization theory is the rejection of the notion of the transition society. But let’s not confuse immediacy and instantaneity. When we talk of the immediacy of communism, we posit that the communist revolution no longer has the objective of creating a society half way between capitalism and communism, but communism directly. As a result, the problem of taking political power disappears with its questions of alliances with other social layers, of effectuation of the transition (withering away of the state, etc.). The communist revolution nonetheless has a duration, a history, phases of advance and retreat, etc.

The immediacy of communism is not a notion coming out of the blue. It appeared with the crisis of the 60′s-70′s on the basis of the inability of the left and the leftists to take into account the most advanced forms of the class struggle, especially those that I regroup under the term of anti-work. But neither the communist revolution nor communism abolish history. And this precisely why the word communisation was coined: to indicate that the abolition of classes and the transcending of the economy is a process.

I think that communization is not something very complicated, and certainly not more utopian than the transition society and the withering away of the State – as long as you don’t try to fit the capitalist society, with its workshops and offices, its airports and supermarkets… into a communist mould.

Crisis activity & communisation

by Bruno Astarian

More than a text on communisation, what follows actually describes the relationship between capitalism and communism, from the perspective of the crisis, in the present period.

In the first section, I tried to define the crisis activity of the proletariat in the insurrectional phases of its history. It seemed important to bring to the fore the specific features of those moments of struggle, which differ qualitatively from the day-to-day process of class struggle. The latter, which is the focus of so much attention by many comrades, gives only an indication (which certainly should not be underestimated) of what happens when the proletariat rises up against exploitation in a violent and generalized way. At that moment, the proletariat confronts capital in a way that brings out in the open the issue of overcoming the social contradiction, something it does not do in demands-oriented (“revendicative”) struggles.

In the second section, I wanted to highlight the specific conditions today of what was said above, even though the present crisis has seen only relatively marginal phases of proletarian uprising. Greece and Bangladesh do, however, furnish useful indications of what could happen in a probable phase of deepening crisis.

The third section raises the issue of communisation. It concerns the onset of an effectively revolutionary process based on the crisis activity specific to the present period. This could be called the revolutionary exit from the crisis, in the sense that the proletariat raises its struggle against capital to the level of building actual practical situations that abolish class relations and overcome value and the economy. That level was not in fact reached by the uprising of the proletariat in Greece or Bangladesh.

Introduction

The current crisis raises the issue of what could be a revolutionary exit from the crisis. Crisis is generally the crucible in which communist theory is forged, in its specificity as neither a science nor political, neither economic nor philosophy, but a category of its own. What makes this theory unique is that the class that upholds it is also unique: the proletariat is the first (and last) exploited class in history, whose exploitation periodically results in the impossibility of working and calls into question its most immediate reproduction. When the capitalist crisis breaks out, the proletariat is forced to rise up in order to find another social form capable of restoring its socialization and immediate reproduction. Throughout the history of capitalism, this alternative form was called communism, even though the content attributed to the word varied greatly depending on the period. However, communist theory has in any case always been characterized as the iterative movement between analysis and critique of capitalist society and the projection of the exit from the capitalist crisis brought about by the proletariat. The communist society projected at each period had its own specific features derived from the historical conformation of the relationship between capital and proletariat. In other words, the notion of communism has a history, just as the class relationship itself does. The invariance of the fundamental content of the capitalist social relationship (extraction of surplus value) does not exclude its historical embodiments.

Until now, what characterized communist theory was its construction around a program of measures to be applied once the proletarian insurrection has taken power. This general formulation differed depending on the period. The Manifesto program (nationalizations) is not the same as that of the Paris Commune (direct collective democracy), which in turn differs from that of the Russian and German revolutions in 1917-1918 (workers councils). Despite these differences, however, the principles are the same: in one way or another, the outcome of the insurrection to which the proletariat is compelled by the capitalist crisis is the seizure of political power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which dictatorship always, whether democratic (the councils) or autocratic (the party), amounts to dispossessing the capitalists of their property and imposing work on everyone. At that point begins the transitionperiod during which society must move from the reign of necessity to that of liberty. Such is the so-called programmatic schema of the communist revolution. It is obsolete.

The aim of this working document is to present the so-called communizing alternative to the programmatic schema. On the scale of history, this is a new alternative, since its birth can be dated to the crisis in the 60s-70s.

I – CRISIS AND CRISIS ACTIVITY

The crisis has to be considered as a social, not an economic, phenomenon, as a crisis of the social relationship between capital and the proletariat. When the crisis of the capitalist social relationship deepens and turns insurrectional, the proletariat’s activity changes qualitatively from what it was in the ordinary course of the class struggle, which never stops even in times of prosperity. I call this peculiar form of the proletariat’s struggle in an insurrection crisis activity. It is in this very specific moment that the whole issue of communism has its roots, because it is here and only here that the question of the link between a capitalist society (in crisis) and communism (as the overcoming of the labour/capital contradiction) arises socially. And it is from here that the communisation of the society will eventually start. In the history of the proletariat, crisis activity appears in the 19^th century Parisian barricades as well as in today’s riots. In these moments, one can understand the specificity of this notion. If the current crisis unfolds in insurrectionary phases, the crisis activity will of course have specific traits marking the historical level reached by the contradiction of the classes. And the limits of the current riots will have to be transcended, quantitatively and qualitatively, for a real possibility of communisation to take form.

I.1 With the crisis of the reciprocal presupposition of the classes, automatic social reproduction disappears

In the capitalist mode of production as in the other modes, the classes of labour and property presuppose each other. With the capitalist mode of production, this reciprocal présupposition is immediately stronger due to the fact that the proletariat, as soon as it stops working, is totally separated from the means of production.In the precapitalist modes of production, this is not the case, or only partially. The reciprocal presupposition of the classes is even more tightly knit when capital has established its real domination over labour, for then it is the entirety of the proletariat’s life that is directly controlled by capital. For example, capital has striped labour of its skills, and handicraft is no solution for all those proletarians that the crisis has left out of work. In farming the situation is the same. In the industrialized countries, agriculture is purely capitalistic, and only the most marginal proletarians will attempt going back to the country, ending up close to a situation of slum life. Likewise in the developing countries, the transformation of the countryside prevents those who left it to find a job in towns from returning when unemployed. This is what happened with the Asian crisis in 1998, and in China today.

The interdependance of the two classes is today tighter than it has ever been. This is another way of saying that the proletariat cannot save the jobs imperiled by capital without saving capital itself, i.e. working harder for less pay. As skilled work left its hands to become incorporated into fixed capital, the proletariat can no longer claim, as under the formal domination, that it could simply take over the means of production and produce without the capitalists. This claim was illusory at the time of skilled trades. Today, even skilled workers know that most of the technical-material conditions of their activity are incorporated into machines, computers, the vehicles that are their means of labour. In other words, the function of property today is no longer – assuming it ever was – to enjoy the resulting income, but to manage a system of production and reproduction that it developed precisely to escape the control of the working class, completely and definitively. Even after eliminating all the dividend-cashing capitalists, a working class revolution that envisions only the reappropriation of the means of production could not avoid entrusting the management of those means to a particular category of workers who would become the collective capitalist. Today, self-management is a pipe dream for middle managers.

The reciprocal presupposition of the classes tightly links them together around an enormous mass of fixed capital. This preempts any notion of a revolutionary outcome of the crisis that would affirm the working class and work against the capitalists, who would be eliminated. If the proletariat is to abolish capital, this will only be possible by abolishing wage labour, the fixed capital that dictate its content to work and work itself.

As long as the capitalist society reproduces itself normally, the proletariat’s activity derives automatically and directly from the succession of different phases of the cycle[1]: once the labour force is sold, the content of work itself, followed by rest and reconstituion of the labour force -are directly dictated by capital. Far from a voluntary and chosen act, the sale of the labor force itself is imposed on the worker as soon as his wage has been consumed, ie immediately after the end of the cycle.

All these automatisms in the social reproduction disappear when the crisis explodes. Then, the proletariat’s activity is forced to turn to invention. In the insurrecttional crisis, the relationship of reciprocal presupposition becomes confrontation. Work and exploitation stop massively, and there is no more negotiation for the exchange between labour and capital. In this confrontation, the capitalist class tries by all means to force the proletarians to work for a reduced wage, whereas the proletarians seek to impose a higher standard of living than the one they rejected when they rose up against capital. This insurrectional moment – we will come back to it – is the moment of the greatest subjective intensity of the proletariat’s activity. History shows us how the crisis activity of the proletariat has been able, in each period, to invent previously unthought of social forms in order to confront the danger it has to face in the crisis.

I.2 – Proletarian individualization in crisis activity

What we just said about the automatisms of the proletariat’s reproduction during the prosperity of capital posits the class as coming before the individual: class belonging determines the individual’s behaviour. The modalities of labour subordination to capital leave the proletariat little liberty. It is free to sell its labour force or die, to take the bus or be late for work, to obey orders or get sacked, etc. At work, only general labour produces commodities, not the personal labour of a particular proletarian. This general labour (cooperation) belongs to capital. In general, class reproduction is only one moment in the reproduction of capital, and all its activity presents itself as a vast massified routine.

This is precisely what breaks up when crisis turns to insurrection. Nothing that the capitalists propose is acceptable to the proletariat any longer. Even within a short time-space, there is no objective standard of living that would constitute an intangible floor below which the proletariat would automatically rise up. History shows that the proletariat can accept abyssal poverty, but also that it sometimes refuses a lowering of its standard of living, even when the latter is seemingly no worse than other attacks by capital. The parameters of this sudden shift from submission to insurrection cannot be determined in advance.

In opposition to what goes on during the prosperity, there are no more automatisms in an insurrection. Then, proletarians themselves have to invent the way to resocialise among themselves to confront capital. An interactive process develops among proletarians, and the more their individualisation is advanced, the more intense it is. Whether the subject is building barricades around working class areas in Paris (in 1848 for example), the Kiel sailors’ mutiny in 1918, or the destruction in downtown Athens by young Greeks after one of them was murdered by the police, the insurrection starts each time at an individual level. By word or deed, there have to be a few proletarians to start. Some women had to give the alarm and try to prevent Thiers’ army from seizing the Garde Nationale cannons for the Commune to start. Nobody gave orders, because nobody would have found reasons to obey. The ways in which an insurrection starts and develops are always somewhat mysterious, and seldom reported in history books. And in any case, there would be no lessons for would-be leaders to draw because the circumstances are, in their details, unique each time. The only thing that counts is that, on each occasion, some proletarians had, as individuals, to take the initiative of crossing the line of legality, of overcoming fear so that the crisis activity could form itself in an interactive way. Without that crisis activity, no communist revolution is possible. For the subject’s individualization is one of the necessary conditions of communism.

All the proletariat’s insurrections in history show a strong development of proletarian individualization in the crisis activity (the role of women is a striking example). This individualisation derives directly from the crisis of capital, which calls into question class contingency. In today’s conditions, the individualization in the crisis activity will be reinforced by the fact that, even before its crisis, capital achieved a de-massification of the proletariat (precariousness, subcontracting…). Individualization of the subject in no way implies atomization. On the contrary, because it is on the basis of inter-individual interaction that the assembled class ceases to be a crowd (as in demos behind union banners), to become an active and conscious collective, able to act and react, to take initiatives and to correct them, to debate internally and to confront capitalists in the most suitable way. By this interactivity of proletarian individuals, the proletariat forms an internal social relationship, which is the foundation stone for the possibility of communism. However, this social relationship has to exist concretely.

I.3 – Taking possession of capital elements, but not to work

The true construction of crisis activity as a social relationship peculiar to the proletariat occurs when it confronts capital and takes possession of certain components (factories, inventories, vehicles, buildings, etc.). As long as this doesn’t happen, the proletariat’s activity remains at the level of meetings, demonstrations, and demands. When the proletariat’s activity goes beyond that level, it crosses a qualitative threshold which, then and only then, makes it appear as the possible subject of a communist revolution. This distinction lessens the importance of the proletariat’s struggles in the daily movement of the class struggle.

The insurrectional uprising of the proletariat cannot escape taking possession of some elements of capital. This process has been considered as the beginning of the expropriation of the expropriators, with a strong implication of a return to work under the workers’ control and for their own benefit. This implication probably arises mainly from the ideology developed in proletarian politics, based on skilled labour and the notion that capital steals its production from the worker, who could easily produce without the capitalists. What was already at the time an ideology no longer has any basis today. Workers do sometimes seize the means of production and start working for their own account, but these occur outside of insurrectional phases and in fact exist because there is no more powerful movement of the proletariat. Of course, these self-management attempts imply conflicts with capital. But they nonetheless amount to ways of surviving in the present society.

It is a general rule that, in its first surge, an uprising never re-takes elements of capitalist property to relaunch production for its own account. This is important, for it announces the possibility of a social relationship among individuals that does not have work as its content. I don’t think that history offers a single example of a return to work by insurgent proletarians that doesn’t take place within the counter-revolutionary reversal of the uprising. Otto Geyrtonnex[2] thinks that the Spanish uprising of July 1936 is an exception: during the first days of the uprising, “some sections of the working class saw the need to take over the factories in order to arm themselves. Numerous metal workers uses the tools that previously enslaved them to armour lorries. Bakers suddenly appeared…, transportation and utilities were restarted… These activities were never motivated by the need to sell, by the production of value. What counted was the revolutionary struggle, and production meeting its needs was part of the same surge”. It is not a contradiction per se that the insurrectional surge includes some resumption of production. Production is not necessarily counter-revolutionary. In the present case, however, it seems that the revolutionary surge is mainly directed at separate military operations. Production is aimed at supporting the front. Moreover, as OG himself admits, if some proletarian initiatives allow them on occasion to “revive a creativity and spirit of initiative in complete rupture with wage slavery”, in other cases they adopt as their own “work that in the final analysis differs little from what they formerly were forced to do”[3]. In light of these elements, it seems to me possible to consider that, even at the beginning of the Spanish insurrection, the return to production as it unfolded indicates a stabilization and the beginning of a counter-revolutionary reversal through self-management. This did not happen without resistance, but it remained fragmentary.

The current conditions of capitalist production in fact confirm the general rule: taking possession of elements of capital in the insurrections of our times obviously don’t aim at reappropriating the means of production and at relaunching production by the workers involved. We will come back to this.

Conclusion

The proletarian insurrection creates the subjective conditions for communist revolution through the proletariat’s crisis activity. The class’s subjective expression is profoundly modified by the interactive relationship created by individuals to take possession of elements of capital and confront capital: while exploitation lasted, the production of a surplus product and its handover to property constituted the proletariat’s participation in the construction of the social relationship. With the crisis, the proletariat is no longer a partial subject determined by its subordinate relationship to the other class, but rather attains the status of subject in its own right. The key components of this subjectivity-in-crisis are that it involves inter-individual relationships, that it finds in itself the means to access nature, and that work is neither its content nor its objective.

II – THE CURRENT CRISIS

II.1 – Periodization

What was written above, at a general level, should be modulated according to the periodization of capitalism’s history, but we will not do so here. My analysis in Hic Salta 1998[4] is only an outline but sufficient to show that the crisis of capital, like capital itself, has a history. As a result, communist theory and the very notion of communism have a history too. Despite certain invariant elements, communism in 1848 or 1918 is not identical to that of today.

II.2 – The conditions for communism at the outset of the 21^st century.

Compared to the general conditions of a communist revolution such as we have analysed it above, what is the specificity of the current period? Let’s say first that the current period offers better conditions for overcoming capital than ever before: the same is true of every new phase of crisis, since the contradiction between classes never diminishes as history unfolds. But our period also poses radically new problems, because the high degree of capital domination on all of social reproduction indicates that it is difficult to imagine overcoming the capitalist mode of production without both classes being abolished at the same time, withoutsupersession of the economy, invention of a totally new life for which the current categories of social analysis are basically useless. We will come back to this.

It seems to me that two main elements should be underlined if we want to analyse the subjective conditions of a communist revolution in our times: the return of anti-work after a period of eclipse, and the demassification of the proletariat in post-fordism.

II.2.1: Anti-work is back

In the 60s-70s, the workers’ reaction to the Fordist conditions at the time went beyond the wage demands that had until then aimed at offsetting extreme working conditions. Wages were of course often good (especially in the car industry). That was part of the Fordist compromise. And it was precisely that compromise that the line workers’ revolt challenged. Beyond the wage demands controlled by the unions, and in opposition to the latter, line workers in the 60s and 70s began sabotaging, missing work, drinking and taking drugs, stopping work on the slightest excuse or without any excuse at all, causing havoc on the shop floor. All these kinds of actions were grouped under the term anti-work to underscore the lack of proletarian identification with their activity in the factory, respect for machines, and pride in being workers. These manifestations of the proletariat’s revolt against capital were what forged the basis for subsequent theoretical developments, from the end of affirmation of labor against capital as an “overcoming” of the capitalist mode of production to the current notion of communisation (immediateness of communism, simultaneous negation of the two classes, overcoming of the economy and of work).

In the 1960s and 1970s, the line workers’ revolt against Fordized work caused a serious crisis of valorization. While the bosses reacted by automating, firing and offshoring, the commentators at their bidding launched into incantations about the recomposition of labor. In reality, from the standpoint of the labor process, the outcome of the crisis during that period, post-Fordism, differed little from Fordism, though it was more ferocious, more delocalized, and above all, the end of the compromise originally needed for global expansion of that mode of labor exploitation. In developed countries, labor was not recomposed, but the system of self-managed groups, automation of certain operations, and out-and-out repression under the threat of layoffs and restructuring made factory work and – what was new – office work even more destructive. The 80s and 90s were marked by the bosses’ victory.

This immediately raises the question: what will happen when revolt explodes in today’s factories, where conditions have become so much worse? I pose the question in the future tense because, though we haven’t seen any major insurrections in the key global industrial centers yet, there are already indications. After a period of silence, anti-work has returned.

A sign of radicalization of the class war is that time wasting (a Taylor favorite) has reappeared as a pet theme among certain management experts. Only the term used now is “downtime”. “Downtime affects (…) all categories of employees. Destructions of working hours (sic) can stem (…) from the voluntary behavior of certain employees. The point for them is to make up for poor working conditions or inadequate wages by ‘paying themselves on the beast’s back’”[5]. These words of wisdom followed a long phase of employer offensives to take back all the dead time in the working day, including the act on the 35-hour workweek in France. Despite – or because of – the substantial gains in productivity, it seems that fighting waste is still one of capital’s objectives.

Another aspect of the current class struggle in developed countries seems to me equally significant: when workers protest against layoffs – more and more often violently – they begin, not by defending their jobs, but straight away by bargaining over the terms of the restructuring plan. This in no way indicates that they are content to lose their jobs and think they’ll be able to live comfortably off of their unemployment benefits. Rather, it shows that they are realistic about the employment issue. The necessity of overcoming the wage system (if not work itself) is thus a material aspect of an increasingly widespread practice within the Western working class. They no longer demand that the boss save the company, but that the severance pay be as big as possible so they can keep going even without a wage-earning alternative.

Post-Fordism is perhaps not the right term to use for developing countries, at least as far as the labor process itself is concerned. In just 30 years, China, the “global workshop,” concentrated tens of millions of overexploited proletarians in factories which are not at the cusp of global progress. The workers’ revolt took the “anti-work” forms seen in the West in the 60s-70s. Referring to a wave of strikes in Japanese factories in the Dalian special economic zone (Summer, 2005), a businessmen’s magazine representing the major multinationals operating in Asia worried:

“Although the workers apparently do not have leaders, they develop an organizing strategy without a head. Because the workers have widely shared interests and a sense of shared suffering, they react to subtle signs. Workers explained that, when they are dissatisfied, it just takes a handful standing up and shouting ‘Strike!’ for all the workers on the line to rise up as if in ovation and stop working.”[6].

This is almost reminiscent of the wild atmosphere in the Italian factories in 1969. Except that now, the atmosphere is without doubt more serious. Killings of bosses are frequent, and destructions, without reaching the same extremities, occur almost daily. There are numerous examples recalling certain features of the anti-work of the 60s-70, only to a higher degree: lack of discipline, destructive fury, few or no demands, indifference to the consequences to plant and equipment or to jobs. These characteristics are strongly present in the recent struggles in Bangladesh.

Textile workers in Bangladesh

This under-industrialized country has experienced accelerated growth in the textile industry since 1970. It counts some 4000 companies today, from only 8 in 1977, which employ two million workers, primarily young women. The expansion of the textile industry is part of the global trend among western and Japanese industries to move offshore to countries where labor costs are lower. Bangladesh exports 80 percent of its textile output.

In May 2006, the violent repression of workers protesting wage cuts triggered a series of movements of fury that rapidly escalated beyond the company originally concerned. At the peak of the wave of violence, on May 22, a protest broke out at a plant where the boss hadn’t paid wages for some time. The same day, the strike movement fanned out to a number of other factories, two of which were torched and a hundred ransacked. The entire population, not just the women textile workers, took part. In the most violent battles, the women workers apparently let the men take over. The following day, the revolt widened, reaching the capital, Dhaka. Looting and destruction spread to the center of city. That, according to the account in Echanges[7], is when the demands appeared.

An agreement was finally signed between the bosses and the Textile Workers Federation. It was revised several times but rarely implemented. So the movement began again in the fall. It is remarkable that a movement defeated in a shaky collective bargaining agreement found the strength to resume a few months later, with the same fury and the same violence. As in the spring, the movement spread very quickly around a local conflict and gained ground with looting and destruction of factories. That is the striking aspect: workers in a struggle to defend their wages and working conditions destroy the factories they work in, even though the jobs those factories propose are rare and considered attractive. Most of the employees in those companies come from neighboring slums.

The movement resumed in late 2007-early 2008. As in 2006, it didn’t take long for the movement to spread, for cars to be torched and highways blocked. On January 5, 2008, the Paina Textile Mill’s 1500 workers turned up to apply for a job. They had actually been locked out in that the industry’s bosses had thought wiser to close the plants when the protests resumed. They came not so much to work as to get paid what the boss owed them. The latter only wanted to pay half, so the workers swept into the mill and broke everything in sight.

The movement continued over the following months. To cite only the most noteworthy of the numerous examples: 400 women workers who were laid off without notice or pay attacked a police camp close to the mill. The police fired on the workers, and the crowd that had assembled, no doubt in solidarity, turned around and went back into the mill, ransacking and torching it for four hours.

Recently (June, 2009), the movement erupted again in the suburbs of Dhaka. Strikers from many textile plants learned that the factories owned by the Ha Meem Group were still running. (The strikers were apparently from subcontracting plants in difficulty, whereas the Ha Meem Group is higher up on the scale ranging from subcontractors at the bottom, under the greatest pressure, to the Western principals at the top. Whatever the case, the workers at Ha Meem were not on strike since their situation was not as critical as at the small subcontracting plants). About 50,000 workers (and others) marched towards the factories. The police were forced to retreat. On their way, the demonstrators ransacked and torched some fifty factories. At the same time, small groups split off and methodically torched buildings belonging to the Ha Meem Group: a sweater factory, three apparel factories, two washing plants, two fabric warehouses, 8000 machines, and some bus and trucks. Other groups meanwhile blockaded the neighboring highway, thereby keeping the firefighters out for five hours. This episode seems to involve two closely intertwined aspects: the attack on factories in general and the attack on the Ha Meem factories, where the workers refused to go on strike. In other words, there was simultaneously an attack on capital and competition among workers. The simultaneity of the struggle against capital and clashes between groups of workers reflects the earlier mentioned fragmentation of the proletariat, here in the form of subcontracting. There is no point in regretting it. That is one way in which capital accumulation was realized over recent decades.

We stress the highly paradoxical nature of these movements, which defend the wage-earning condition while destroying the means of production. The proletariat develops radical crisis activity, seizes the means of production, and storms factories – but to destroy them. We saw that these destructions were not “collateral damage” caused by traditional demonstrations but a little more violent than usual. From what I know about China and Bangladesh, destruction cannot arise as though due to a stroke of misfortune. It is part of the fundamental content specific to such struggles. The case of Bangladesh could represent in our times what the riots in the American ghettos represented in the 60s. With a fundamental difference between the two situations: now, that part of the productive proletariat situated at the core of global extraction of relative surplus value is directly involved in movements that leave politicians and people in power speechless.

Public transportation

If the factory destructions demonstrate that proletarians do not affirm themselves as workers in their crisis activity, I think the same is true of the destructions of public transportation. To my knowledge, this is a new phenomenon. The young Greek insurgents ransacked several subway stops in Athens. In Argentina, too, some stations in Buenos Aires were the theater of real riots over disruptions in train operation. Even in France, where trains have a good reputation, the tension is palpable in public transportation in the Paris area. The cattle wagons shuttling workers into Paris on the Troyes line have been known to run through station between two rows of CRS riot police without stopping. On that line, notorious for poor operation, when a train is cancelled and the next one isn’t scheduled to stop at a particular station, commuters call each other to find out what’s happening and do a favor by setting off the alarm so the train has to stop. And that creates real chaos![8]

The deteriorating quality of public transportation doesn’t date from the current crisis. Attacks and destruction of public transportation will in my opinion be part of crisis activity in the next insurrections. Quite simply because time spent in transportation is unpaid work time and because there is no reason why public transportation, the link between suburbs and factories or offices, should be spared when suburbs and workplaces are not. Finally, because being crammed into trains is a humiliation proletarians experience twice a day. One way in which class confrontation manifests itself in modern cities is through action rejecting public transportation. By challenging being shuttled between work and home, the proletarian attacks a fundamental division of activity. And indeed, overcoming the separation between work and leisure, between social life and private life, between production and consumption is a fundamental moment in the communist revolution.

As the standard of living declines and working and living conditions deteriorate, the proletariat’s struggles demonstrate that anti-work is back in a big way. In each of the latter’s manifestations, the proletariat is saying that when it clashes with capital, the aim is not to restore the conditions of the Fordist compromise, but something else. That something else is totally absent from the landscape, it has no existence in society. We cannot organize ourselves around an embryo of a future society to develop it. All we can do is observe that the most combative struggles are those that one or the other form (or several forms) of anti-work. It can be deduced that when the proletariat in capital’s major urban centers rises up massively, it does not follow the proletarian program model, whatever the variant. For its most advanced sectors in any case, it will not occupy factories, will not form workers’ councils to manage them or manage other aspects of its own reproduction (neighborhood councils, etc.), will not have as its principle to spread work throughout the entire society, will oppose any attempts at planning, at a return to workers’ association as the basis of society. And all of this because, right now, what proletarians are saying, to whomever is willing to see and understand, is that they are workers only under constraint, without pride and without a future, and even though their work is directly destructive of their being.

II.2.2: Demassification of the proletariat

As we’ve seen, inherent in crisis activity is a tendency to individualize proletarians by temporarily calling into question labor’s subordination to capital. Over the past 30 years, the segmentation of the working class has already led to an obvious demassification of the proletariat, and there is no point in calling for its formal reunification unless one has plans to get into politics.

The impact of demassification on struggles is recognizable in several ways. (We have just seen an instance in Bangladesh.) By noting, for example, that parties and unions have little to do with the outbreak and escalation of most major conflicts. In the West, proletarians are forced to raise the stakes and resort to violence in order to defend themselves against the most severe effects of the crisis. Union bureaucracies rarely take the initiative. And the more frequent presence of union locals does not invalidate the logical development of the proletariat’s movement which, as it becomes increasingly radical, depends more on localinitiatives than on national slogans. Such local initiatives (whether by a union or not) result from the fact that the large umbrella organizations are no longer in touch with the realities of the class relation. And they indicate that workers have to some extent overcome the passivity that characterized the phase of Fordist prosperity. Yet these are not as such insurrectionary situations.

Greece, December 2008

Throughout the history of the proletariat, insurrection has constituted an acute phase of individualization, and over time that characteristic has become more pronounced. (Other factors may come into play, such as the depth of the crisis.) The riots in Greece in December, 2008 were probably a breakthrough point in that process. Without giving a detailed account, and while fully aware of the problems posed by the lack of participation of the “traditional” working class, I would like to stress certain points.

Commentators frequently underscored the role of cell phones and the Internet in spreading the rioting right from the first evening. Yet they know that those means of communication mainly flood the world with twitter, ignorance, and prejudice. It takes more than that for communication to foster interaction between individuals and trigger rioting. In short, for all the ease of communication, there is no less fury and individual daring in the fact that individuals who were at one instant a group of young people comparing cell phones become a commando of fire-bombers in the next. Because that is another characteristic of the Greek movement: it developed as a loose conglomeration of small groups acting locally and independently, with no concern for whether “the masses” were following. I am not advocating exemplary action to make the latter conscious of their historical responsibility. Nor did the young Greek insurgents. They weren’t politicians, and their actions sometimes scared even the anarchists.

The sources I used (mainly TPTG and Blaumachen) did not analyze the demonstrations in great detail. Nevertheless, there were clearly no big demonstrations. The highest figure was 20,000 demonstrators. That was in Athens on Monday, December 8. The demonstration had been called by the “law school”, i.e. the leftists. According to TPTG, the demonstration advanced slowly, with 1500 youths entering and leaving the demo to ransack and loot. At the same time, more looting and attacks of police stations occurred in other parts of the city, but this time with no “big” demonstration. That is a far cry from the huge stroll-marches intended to show Juppé that they were two million. In general, the accounts or chronologies published by Greek comrades repeatedly refer to demonstrations of 200-300 people in the suburbs or provinces whose objective, frequently, was to attack the local police station. The meaning of those systematic confrontations between young people and the police is debatable. (Was that the best objective?) But there is no denying the advanced demassification of an insurrectionary movement which, due in particular to that dispersion (as well as the remarkable absence of demands), struck fear in many a government.

I think that this tendency is going to grow in the coming phases of the global proletariat’s crisis activity and that there lies one of the key conditions for success of the communist revolution. The 2008 Greek riots surely give an idea of what a deeper insurrectional phase could be: by multiplying the seats of struggle, not controlled by any center, the proletariat will center the struggle on the most concrete, specific forms of exploitation and subordination. The initial specificity and even localism of the confrontations will be the best guarantee against any attempt at political recuperation. In addition, by confronting capital and the State at such levels, the more the struggle succeeds, the more it will be a ferment of dislocation of the State, more powerful than if the State were attacked at its summit.

Conclusion

From the above we can see that anti-work is back, but not in the same way. The destruction of the Fordist compromise in recent decades led to far-reaching changes in the conditions and content of the proletariat’s struggle against capital. For example, casualization of labor invaded Fordist factories through outsourcing and temporary work. This phenomenon is often deplored as a factor of class division. That is true, and it plays against the proletariat in its day-to-day demands-oriented (revendicative) struggles. But we need to go further. With the rise of a stronger movement, without demands, for example, we will see the sense of identification with the workplace disappear and the enemy appear more clearly as capital in general, even in a single shop. Moreover, capital’s division of the class over the last thirty years will backfire on capital when the demassification of the proletariat decentralizes crisis activity into a multitude of nuclei, over which politics will have no hold (e.g. Greece).

Generally speaking, the changing class relationship within the last thirty years must be understood against the background of capital’s furious struggle against the falling rate of profit. The headlong flight into credit is one aspect of this. Outsourcing is another. It is one of a whole series of offensives to lower the value of an already significantly inessential labor force. This movement is not prompted by whim or cupidity on the part of the capitalists. It is the condition for reproduction of the social relationship, i.e. between capital and the proletariat. The content of at least some of the struggles against the capitalist offensive show that the way out of the crisis is not through a better balance in the exploitation of labor, that there is no possibility for “sharing the benefits of productivity”. Underneath, those struggles imply the necessity of doing away with both classes simultaneously. In the 60s and 70s, this issue appeared on a limited scale in the struggles by assembly-line workers in Fordized industry. Today, a comparable process is experienced by the entire labor force (one illustration is in the changes affecting office work). And that is true for all aspects of the proletariat’s life, not just in the “work” component of the proletariat’s reproduction, but also, by the attack on the value of the labor force as well (limits on relative surplus value lead to reduction of the subsistence basket), in every aspect of life (housing, transportation, schools, unemployment, etc.). In a way, it could be said that what was considered anti-work in the proletariat’s struggle will become anti-proletariat. Unless one conceives of a return to previously existing conditions of the capitalist social relationship, the current struggles as well as an analysis of the modes of labor exploitation point to the possibility and necessity of communisation.

III – COMMUNISATION

III.1 – Communisation and transition society

One of the major theses of communization theory is the rejection of the notion of the transition society. But let’s not confuse immediacy and instantaneity. When we talk of the immediacy of communism, we posit that the communist revolution no longer has the objective of creating a society half way between capitalism and communism, but communism directly. As a result, the problem of taking political power disappears with its questions of alliances with other social layers, of effectuation of the transition (withering away of the state, etc.). The communist revolution nonetheless has a duration, a history, phases of advance and retreat, etc.

The immediacy of communism is not a notion coming out of the blue. It appeared with the crisis of the 60′s-70′s on the basis of the inability of the left and the leftists to take into account the most advanced forms of the class struggle, especially those that I regroup under the term of anti-work. But neither the communist revolution nor communism abolish history. And this precisely why the word communisation was coined: to indicate that the abolition of classes and the transcending of the economy is a process, with a succession of “befores” and “afters” and with the passage of time. But these successive phases do not consist in putting in place a transition society between capitalism and communism. The meaning of the socialist society that the proletarian program puts in place there is that the proletariat bases its power on the State and the latter takes charge of creating the conditions for communism (at its own expense moreover!). One wonders hao this gross fiction could delude people for such a long time. Is it because it garanteed a job after the insurrection to the politicians who sold it to the proletariat?

Thus, the immediacy of communism is not the cancellation of time, but the fact that the revolution doesn’t create anything else than communism. Communization doesn’t mean the creation of a new form of property preceding the abolition of property, a new form of government preceding the abolition af all forms of power, etc., but means the abolition of property, the suppression of any power, etc., by creating social forms that ensure that people live better than during their crisis activity.

III.2 – The issue of gratuity

It is obvious that looting, requisitions in supermarkets, etc. will be part of the crisis activity of the communizing proletarians. But in my opinion, this is at best only a first approach to the abolition of property. In the CMP, even more so than in the precapitalist modes of production, property refers less to the fact of having (a house, a car) than to the right of access to nature as it is monopolized by the capitalist class. Consequently, property is not so much the right to enjoy one’s belongings privately as it is the possibility of compelling others to work for oneself. In other words, if I am owner, you are precarious. In short, the abolition of property is not merely redistributing everything to everybody but above all creating a social form where questions like “what is there to eat?”, “where’s a place to sleep?”, “what can be done with the children?” do not even arise.

TC’s text on Communization vs Socialization states that “gratuity, the radical non-accounting of whatever, is the axis of the revolutionary community that is building up”. Non-accounting is indeed a basic fact of communization. It is the absolute anti-planning. But it is necessary to specify whether we are talking about commodities available from capital’s inventories or things produced in the process of communisation.

In the first case, it seems obvious that commodities looted or requisitionned are freely distributed. It is less obvious that they are not counted, for this inevitably suggests utopian images of limitless abundance,of plundering, which gives anti-communizors a good opportunity to protest and call for a bit of common sense. All the same, this point of view has to be defended, and one must insist: if the proletarians of the crisis activity start counting their loot, they immediately restore an economy – be it a use value one, a power relationship, delegations (who counts what, who stores what, etc.), all of which goes against communization. One can see that gratuity and non-accounting are two different things.

In the second case, there is no reason why products produced in a communist way should be declared free. Gratuity is after all nothing but the suspension of value and price during a lapse of time or in given space. Communism satisfies needs, whatever they are, in a way which is neither free nor paying. The simplest way to understand that is to consider that there is not a system of needs face to face with a system of production and separated from it. Today, if I want to eat, I have to work – which has nothing to de with my appetite and my tastes. At work, I do not eat, I am not given anything to eat, but money instead. After work, I will go and spend the money on food. It seems that the problem with the notion of gratuity is that it takes us back to the sphere of distribution. That it maintains the separation between the need and the means of its satisfaction. Except that one doesn’t pay. This is why the notion of non-accounting is more fundamental than gratuity alone, provided that the nature of this activity for which there is no accountancy is better defined.

From the moment when the communizating proletarians start to produce on, the question is not so much that of gratuity, but rather that of the radical transformation of activiy, of all activities. We will thus try to explain how the “revolutionary community” builts itself on communizating activities that are more sunstantial than gratuity only.

III.3 – Production without productivity

The words at our disposal to describe a society did not foresee that this society could be communist. To go beyond the theme of gratuity, we need a category that is neither “production” nor “consumption”, etc. The unification of life in communism, the overcoming of all separations, and direct production of socialization at the level of the individual all pose problems of vocabulary that I could only solve with the expression, production without productivity or, put otherwise, consumption without necessity[9].

III.3.1 – The struggle for a totalizing activity

Communization starts in the crisis activity to go beyond it. Communization doesn’t correspond to an ideal or a political slogan. It is the solution to the difficulties the proletariat encounters in its reproduction in the crisis activity. The crisis activity is a struggle against capital to ensure survival, nothing more. Once the proletariat’s attemps at demands have proven ineffective in saving the proletariat economically, communization makes the jump into non-economy. There is a paradox here: the economic crisis is at its deepest, the proletariat’s needs are immense, and the solution is to reject productivism. Indeed, ‘production’ without productivity is not a production function. It is a form of socialization of people which entails production, but without measuring time or anything else (inputs, number of people, output).

During the phase of the deepening of the crisis, the revolutionary proletariat reproduces itself mainly by plundering capital’s property. Even in a lean economy, there are inventories. The crisis activity will consist (among others) in seizing them. In this phase already, one can imagine a divergence between a counter-revolutionary tendency which tries to account for eveything, to regroup the goods, to coordonate their distribution, to impose criteria for rights and obligations, etc., and a communizing tendency which rejects this looting economy and opposes the establishment of higher distribution authorities, even democratically elected, etc. This second tendency will insist that a local deepening of the revolution, absolute gratuity, are better than an abstract solidarity and an egalitarianism that can only be measured and managed by a power.

In the revolutionary process of communization, the expression production without productivity is almost indecent given the destitution in which the crisis plunges the proletariat, imparting a sense of urgency to the situation. The would-be managers of solidarity and equality will certainly insist on that point of view. There is a real paradox here: urgency because millions of proletarians don’t have even the bare minimum, and the notion of productivity should be abandoned! To this, several answers:

The question is how production can resume without work, or productivity, or exchange. The principle of ‘production’ without productivity is that people’s activity and their relationship come first and output second. To develop production without productivity is to abolish value in both its forms:

Exchange value: if nothing is accounted for, if the justification of activity is nothing other than itself, the product resulting from the activity has no abstract content.

Use value: use value in the commodity is different from its simple usefulness in that it is abstract too. The usefulness of the commodity has to be at a general, or average, level in order to satisfy the need of an unknown user whose particularity is also unknown (it is the same kind of difference as between ready-made and tailor-made clothing). Production without productivity is a particular activity by particular individuals to satisfy personally expressed needs. The use of objects produced bears the mark of this particularity. It is anti-standardization. The necessarily local character of communization, at least at its beginning, contributes to this.

We have here an important element in understanding the difference between the programmatic version of communist theory and the communization version. In the first chapter of Capital, the distinction between use value and utility is at best blurred and considered without importance. But then, if use value is considered identical to utility, the abolition of value is limited to the abolition of exchange value. And it is true that communist theory in its programmatic forms offers various versions of the abolition of value that, in the end, are limited to the elimination of exchange through planning. The activity stays the same (work, separated from consumption and from the rest of life), and planning guarantees justice, equality and the satisfaction of needs, considered exogenous, almost natural givens. On the contrary, as soon as communization is understood as a radical transformation of activity, of all activities, as a personalization of life due to the abolition of classes, use value reveals its abstract dimension of utility for a (solvent) demand unknown in its peculiarities and thus average, abstract.

In the communist revolution, the productive act will never be only productive. One sign of this among others will be the fact that the product considered will be particular: it will correspond to needs expressed personally (by the direct producers at the time or by others) and that the satisfaction of the need won’t be separated from the productive act itself. Let’s think, for example, about how the construction of housing will change as soon as standardization disappears. Production without productivity will mean that any individual engaged in the project will be in a position to give his opinion concerning the product and the methods. Things will go much slower than in today’s industrialized building industry. The participants in the project may even wish to live there after the bulding is finished. Will it be a total mess? Let’s just say that time will not count and that cases in which the project isn’t completed, in which everything is abandoned in midstream – maybe because production of the inputs is without productivity too – won’t be a problem. Again, this is because the activity will have found its justification in itself, independently of its productive result.

In a general way, one can say that communization replaces the circulation of goods between “associated producers” with the circulation of people from one activity to another. This implies especially:

• That the “sites of production” won’t keep a permanent staff and that they will produce or not depending on the number and objectives of those present, because the “sites of production” will above all be places of life.

• That, at least in a first phase, communization will develop locally, not as autarchic communities, but as initiatives controlled entirely by the participants. Communization will take place as nebula of local initiatives. In my opinion, the local level is the only level at which communization can prove its ability to immediately improve the life of proletarians by transforming it radically – by abolishing the class. And this is fundamental: proletarians make a revolution for a better life, not for ideals.

• The “sites of production” will actually be places of life, because any “production” will build itself as a totalizing activity, not for the sake of the beauty of totality, but because this will correspond to the needs of the struggle against capital. This totalizing tendency is lacking in current rebellions, not only because they remain circumscribed by their original place or fraction, but also in the sense that they cannot broaden their scope (passing from looting of supermarkets to requisitioning apartments, for example, not to mention production).

Entering into too much detail entails the risk of drawing the outlines of a non-economy just as restrictive as the transition society. A the same time, how can we not give examples (and show the poverty of our imagination) to make clear that all the solutions brought by the communist revolution have as their principle and their end the absolute priority given to the relationship between individuals and to the activity rather than its results. This is another way of saying that the main “result” aimed at by the activity is itself. Individuals will circulate between activities according to their affinities, and every step of this circulation will be a moment of reproduction. Products will circulate along with these individuals, but without exchange.

III.3.2 – The end of separation of needs

We have written above that, in the face of communization, a tendency toward “economic realism” will most probably develop in the name of the urgency of the situation, of the deep poverty of the class and of the immensity of the needs. Of course, this realism entails sacrifices for a better tomorrow. To criticize this point of view, several remarks may be made:

a) one the one hand, the immensity of the needs we are talking about is that of the current proletarians, in the crisis without revolution for the moment. But needs are not absolute. They are related to one’s life. The wage earner who has to work feels much more comfortable if he has a car that works, a public transport pass, an au pair to fetch the kids at school and domestic help to keep the house in order, etc. There is no point in criticizing these needs, in saying that they are artificial, illusory, that the proletarians are victims of advertising. Let’s simply note that they correspond to a type of life. In the crisis activity, everything changes. Of course, there is always a need for 2500 cal per day, for shelter from the cold or rain, etc. For those who are below these basic thresholds, the first answer will be to simply take what they need. There is so much empty housing, plus all the buildings that have a purely capitalist function (banks, offices, storehouses…), all kinds of possibilities for proletarians who lack decent housing. The same is true for the other basic needs.

b) Another way of using the immensity of the needs to justify a phase of economic transition that would be more efficient is to cite the problem of gaps in development levels. Inhabitants of poor countries would somehow have to catch up with the level of development in the rich countries, where the proletarians would have to make even more effort to help the proletarians in poor countries. The point here is not to reject the notion of solidarity in general, but to wonder about the context in which this argument is used to justify economic realism. Don’t those who talk about economic realism envisage poverty in the same way as Mike Davis talks of slums? Total destitution, radical exclusion, an almost animal-like life, Mike Davis looks at the inhabitants of slums as complete outcasts, as absolutely poor, as if they didn’t belong to the global capitalist society. This simplistic point of view has been criticized in the name of all the struggles taking place in slums, which clearly show the class relationship between slum dwellers and capital. Moreover, as in Argentina, the extreme conditions of slum life have for years fostered the invention of new social forms or production processes. Since these take place at the margin of valorisation, they give some sense of the store of imagination that will be released when slum dwellers are able to reject the straightjacket that the surrounding city imposes on them. This imagination ranges from building processes (which the World Bank tried in vain to spread because they are so cheap) to urban micro-agriculture and includes attempts at self-management of slums. Nothing revolutionary, but enough imagination to show that slum dwellers know what to do and won’t need a communist “development aid”. This does not exclude solidarity, but not as a prerequisite to communization in developing countries, by the proletarians who live there – and who all have a proletarian relative in the rich countries’ slums. Of course, the needs covered there by communization won’t be the same as those in capital’s global cities. But why should they be the same? And why should the extreme poverty of the inhabitants of the developing countries prevent communization? The latter doesn’t result from a hypothetical abundance. The issue in communization is not to meet a list of pre-established needs, but to overcome the notion of need as want by abolishing ownership (all ownership) of the means to satisfy it. In the developing and central countries alike, although in different productive contexts, revolution won’t unfold as a series of measures predetermined according to a list of needs currently unsatisfied and urgent. Not only will the transformation of society abolish the separation between need and satisfaction, but it will make needs and activities appear and disappear, constantly and fluidly[10].

This whole issue is not just a figment of the imagination. It is based in the current movement of the capitalist mode of production. I particularly think of Argentina and the crisis of 1999-2000. The latter pushed a fraction of the piquetero movement towards very radical positions. The characteristic features of this fraction are the will (and the actual attempt) to produce without the product being the sole objective. The piqueteros consider that the productive act should also constitute a moment where the relationship between individuals changes. Hence the principle of horizontality, the rejection of leaders, General Assemblies without agenda, decision-making without voting but by consensus. These are limited experiments, encircled by a capitalist society that goes on as best it can. They bear the mark of these limits, especially in their voluntarism, their call to a “change of mentalities” as conditions for qualitative change in the productive act. What I wrote above about the slum dwellers points in the same direction.

On the basis of such experiments, I think that communization is not something very complicated, and certainly not more utopian than the transition society and the withering away of the State – as long as you don’t try to fit the capitalist society, with its workshops and offices, its airports and supermarkets… into a communist mould. Alternatively, I am ready to learn a lesson in realism, as long as there is no talk of economy.

III.3.3 – The issue of the individual

One of the topics which complicates the discussion of communization is the issue of the individual. There is justly emphasis on the fact that the abolition of classes is synonymous with the emergence of the free, directly social individual [11]. This is the end of class contingency, whereby the individual is and does what his class belonging dictates. This belonging may appear in various ways (belonging to a company, stigmatization of a neighbourhood, etc.). It generally means that this individual here who attends this machine, who takes care of this patient, etc., is actually nothing but the puppet of the institutions that define him. Confronted with this determinism, the individual who wants to prove his particularity (or who, due to the inevitable limits of this reification, has to do so for his work to be done) appears as a monad, a free electron whose revolt strongly resembles a whim when its purely individual. He says “I am not a puppet, I also exist as an individual”, but this is only partly true because capital has absorbed much of his personality, which he finds again as skills incorporated into the machine, as personal tastes picked up in magazines, etc. So that when he affirms his personality, he says commonplace things or become desocialized, sometimes even driven to madness.

Yet it is often this whimsical individual who is projected in thinking about communism, even when quoting the Marxian expression, social individual. I sometimes did so when I asserted loud and clear the pleasure principle against the reality principle in order to convey that, in communism, nothing would be produced if the individuals associated in this activity didn’t find in it their lot of personal satisfaction. Faced with this, accusations of utopia are easy for the realist and no-nonsense critiques. And they propose organisational schemes with rules and obligations that are so many safeguards to keep our whimsical individual under control. We have returned to the economy and the discussion goes round in a circle.

In order to get out of this vicious circle, we have to try to understand positively what the individual of communism is. Actually, this isn’t totally mysterious. To approach him, we have the insurgent proletarian, the proletarian whom we see in the crisis activity, in the insurrection, and not the rebellious individual envisioned above. The specificity of the crisis activity is that it emerges from an interactive relationship among proletarian individuals which signals concretely the crisis (not yet the abolition) of class contingency. It is what I called above the end of social automatisms. Now what do we see in the crisis activity? We see individuals, who only yesterday formed an undifferentiated mass of wage earners, invent social forms of struggle with unsuspected imagination, we see them take decisions (and often apply them), we see them adapt from one hour to the next to changing circumstances, we see them forget their personal interests of “before”, sometimes burning their bridges at the risk of their lives. And all of this without a leader, or at least a pre-existing leader, without a pre-existing organization, without a formal pledge and without responsibility towards a principal. In all the important insurrectionary moments of the proletariat’s history, those who commit themselves to the struggle didn’t wait for it to be decided by a vote. They leave one front to go elsewhere, or give up the struggle, without being accountable to anybody. The individual’s participation (at the barricade, in the workers’ council, in the riot) is optional, uncertain, left for him to decide. And it works all the same because the insurrection isn’t a sum of arbitrary, atomized revolts but the unfolding (fleeting on history’s scale) of social activity in its own right, where individuals socialize directly, and where, already, the activity comes before its result (were that not the case, how could we understand the “mistakes” that with hindsight we detect in so many insurrections?)

In spite of its extreme brevity, the crisis activity is the crucible where we can glimpse what might be a directly and personally free, social individual. It is from this viewpoint that, in my opinion, it is possible to claim that a general activity is possible without an imposed plan or coordination, without rights or duties.

III.4 – Consumption without necessity

The realm of necessity is not the sphere in which the productive forces are insufficient to ensure an abundance that would be hard to define exactly. The realm of necessity is the sphere in which the existence of property is a constant threat of want for those who are not owners. This is why, in the present society, gratuity or low prices provoke reactions of stockpiling or overconsumption. In communism, this fear of want disappears at the same time as property. Property positively abolished is also the guarantee that gratuity doesn’t mean simply “price = zero”. Rather, gratuity is gratuity of the activity (in the sense that its productive result is secondary). It is freedom of access to one’s living conditions (including the means of “production” and “consumption”).

Consumption without necessity and production without productivity are identical when taken as totalizing activities. The “producer” doesn’t leave his needs in the cloakroom. He includes in his “productive” activity his choices, his personality and the satisfaction of his needs. And vice versa, the “consumer” is not sent back to a life deprived of sociality to assume the functions of his immediate reproduction.

Conclusion

The notion of a transition society, if it was ever valid, is henceforth obsolete and reactionary. The communist revolution defines itself today as the simultaneous abolition of the two classes by the communizing proletariat. Hence it is, immediately, the radical transformation of activity, the overcoming of all separations. The communisation of society unfolds as a seizing of capitalist property and using it for the needs of the struggle, with no accounting, as production without productivity, like consumption without necessity. It is set in motion in crisis activity and overcomes that activity by affirming and spreading the space of liberty gained in the insurrection.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

For several years now, the theme of communisation has led to controversies that are very often ill-informed. I am ready to admit that it takes some naivety to assert that communisation is not all that insurmountable a problem. There are those who simply reject the whole issue of a revolutionary exit from the crisis, saying “we’ll see when the time comes what the proletarians do”. I have always challenged that view, for two main reasons

First, an analysis of the whole movement of class struggle cannot dispense with understanding what overcoming the contradiction between classes means. It is not enough to lay down the terms of a contradiction. The moment one does so, this contradiction begins moving, and one will not adequately follow that movement without understanding, as far as possible, what it must produce. Obviously, nothing is certain beforehand, and even less so in the case of communisation, in which, as we have seen, even the vocabulary tends to be lacking. Nevertheless, communist theory has always been traversed by this tension, which has to be accepted even while we recognize our limits.

Second, the proximity and intrication of revolution and counter-revolution necessitates distinguishing as clearly as possible between what advances the crisis activity of the proletariat towards communism and what makes it move backward towards the restoration of value (this aspect of the question was only mentioned here).

That was my reason for attempting in this text to say what communisation will be, based on the crisis activity of the proletariat. The examples I gave should not prevent more theoretical discussion to continually improve our understanding of what is meant, in the context of the insurgent proletarians’ action, by the abolition of value, the overcoming of labor and the liberation of activity, etc., but also by value abolished, labor overcome, liberty established, etc.

B.A., June 2010

Notes

[1] This does not imply that there is no struggle anymore between capital and the proletariat. This struggle is constant and is part of the continuous adjustment of the relationship of exploitation. The insurrectional phases of struggle differ from this continuum by the fact that the proletariat posits itself as a revolutionnary subject.

[2]Against the myth of self-management, project, July 2009.

[3] Michael Seidman gives interesting information on workers’ resistance to this return to self-managed work in Republic of Egos, a Social History of the Spanish Civil War, and Ouvriers contre le travail, Ed. Senonevero.

[4]Eléments sur la périodisation du capital ; histoire du capital, histoire des crises, histoire du communisme, Hic Salta, 1998. This text is available online at http://patlotch.free.fr/text/1e9b5431-1140.html

[5] Laurent Cappelletti (academic), Les Echos, July 21, 2009.

[6]Corporate Social Responsibility Asia, vol. 2, #4, 2006.

[7]Echanges #118, Fall, 2006. For more recent information, see issues 119, 124, and 126.

[8] From a colleague at work who uses the line. I’ve never seen incidents like this mentioned in newspapers.

[9] B. Astarian, Le communisme, tentative de définition, 1996, in Hic Salta 1998

[10] Much could be said about the way in which the necessary productivity sets the pace of life and creates these routines which, because they save time, impose their repetition and freeze the terms of existence.

[11] I don’t consider (as does TC for instance) that “social individual” is an oxymoron. All depends on the individual and the society.

Related posts:

1. Some contributions to thinking in the present moment
2. Equaliberty, the common, and communism
3. How can communism be brought about?

David Harvey has recently published two notable books. One, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, is essentially a text version of his introductory course of lectures on Capital. (The book is not a transcription of the lectures, but a written work encompassing the same territory.) The other is an approach to the analysis of the current crisis: The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capital. While without having had the time to give either book more than a cursory read, I think they can both be highly recommended. The Enigma of Capital, in particular, will certainly be receiving some more extended attention on this site.

In the meantime, the following is Harvey’s Introduction to the 2008 Pluto Press edition of the Communist Manifesto. As in the above-mentioned works, his concern is to relate Marx’s analysis to present conditions in service of a broadly political task.

For our times, it becomes necessary to pay attention to those processes of class formation and re-formation occurring with such dramatic force in China, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, the ex-Soviet Bloc as well as throughout Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Nor should we presume these days, if we ever should have, that class formation is confined within nation states, since cross-border and  even transnational relations among workers moving within migration streams and forming diasporas are every bit as intricate as those to be found within a capitalist class that many now regard as being almost by definition transnational.

We have come to accept unthinkingly that a healthy economy grows and that growth is therefore normal and good, no matter what the social, political or environmental consequences. But it boggles the mind to imagine what the world will be like after another hundred years of compound growth at, say, 2–3 per cent per year. Plainly, some other way must be found to organise the social order if humanity is to survive.

Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. While institutionalised communism may be dead, there are by this measure millions of communists among us…. We communists are the persistent spectral presence….

Introduction to the Communist Manifesto

David Harvey

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is an extraordinary document, full of insights, rich in meanings and bursting with political possibilities. Millions of people all around the world – peasants, workers, soldiers, intellectuals as well as professionals of all sorts – have, over the years, been touched and inspired by it. Not only did it render the dynamic political-economic world of capitalism more readily understandable, it moved millions from all walks of life to participate actively in the long, difficult and seemingly endless political struggle to alter the path of history, to make the world a better place through their collective endeavours. But why re-publish the Manifesto now? Does its rhetoric still work the old magic it once did? In what ways can this voice from the past speak to us now? Does its siren call to engage in class struggle still make sense?

While we may not have the right, as Marx and Engels wrote in their Preface to the 1872 edition, to alter what had even by then become a key historical document, we do have both the right and the political obligation to refl ect upon and if necessary re-interpret its meanings, to interrogate its proposals, and, above all, to act upon the insights we derive from it. Of course, as Marx and Engels warn, ‘the practical application of the principles will depend as the Manifesto itself states everywhere and at all times, on the historical’ (and, I would add, geographical) ‘conditions for the time-being existing’. We are certainly now, as of 2008, in the midst of one of those periodic commercial crises ‘that put on trial’, as the Manifesto notes, ‘each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society’. And food riots are breaking out all over, particularly in many poorer nations, as food prices rise uncontrollably. So conditions seem propitious for a re-evaluation of the Manifesto’s relevance. Interestingly, one of its modest proposals for reform – the centralisation of credit in the hands of the state – seems to be well on the way to realisation, thanks to the collective actions of the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the central banks of the other leading capitalist powers in bailing out the world’s financial system (the British ended up nationalising their leading ailing bank, Northern Rock). So why not take up some of the other equally modest but wholly sensible proposals – such as free (and good) education for all children in public schools; equal liability of all to labour; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax to rid ourselves of the appalling social and economic inequalities that now surround us? And maybe if we followed the proposal to curb the inheritance of personal wealth, then we might pay far more attention to the collective inheritance we – such as free (and good) education for all children in public schools; equal liability of all to labour; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax to rid ourselves of the appalling social and economic inequalities that now surround us? And maybe if we followed the proposal to curb the inheritance of personal wealth, then we might pay far more attention to the collective inheritance we pass on to our kids of a decent living and working environment as well as a natural world that maintains both its fecundity and charm.

So let us take this text, fashioned in the gloomy days of January 1848 in Brussels and focus its laser gaze upon on our own actually existing situation in London and Leeds, Los Angeles and New Orleans, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Buenos Aires and Cordoba, Johannesburg and Durban…. Here I am in a brilliantly lit New York City on 31 January 2008 – 160 years almost to the day after Marx put the final touches to the Manifesto – sitting down to write a new introduction to this well-thumbed text. I do so knowing that there are plenty of other past and present splendidly learned introductions available. But too many of the recent ones, in my judgement, view the Manifesto as a mere historical document whose time has passed, whose vision was either faulty or at least so deeply questionable as to make it irrelevant to our more complicated if not sophisticated times. The best we can do, when not cavilling at the text’s obvious omissions and its equally obvious lapses with respect to what is now considered politically correct, is to admire the prose, annotate the references, trace the infl uences it encapsulated and projected, and bury the central political message either under a blanket of wistful leftist nostalgia or under a mass of academic footnotes. The collapse after 1989 of actually existing communisms and the conversion of those communist parties that do remain in power, as in China and West Bengal, into agents for a ruthlessly exploitative capitalism, have indeed cast a heavy pall over the political tradition that the Manifesto spawned. Who needs a communist manifesto after all of that burdened history?

But look around us and what do we see? Here in New York City the Wall Street bonuses have just been added up – a cool $33.2 billion (only a little less than the year before) for investment bankers who made a mess of the world’s financial system and piled up fi nancial losses now estimated to be at least $200 billion and daily mounting (some, like the International Monetary Fund, say it will be a trillion dollars lost before it is all over). When the bankers (with venerable names such as Merrill Lynch, Citicorp and the now defunct Bear Stearns) were first confronted with their diffi culties in the summer of 2007, the world’s central banks (led by the US Federal Reserve) rushed in with massive amounts of short-term credit and then cut interest rates to bail them out. Meanwhile at the source of the trouble lies a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US in which close to 2 million people have already lost their homes to foreclosure (with many more in waiting) without any help forthcoming from anywhere (apart from a few tardy and largely symbolic gestures of support in Congress and a few band aids from fi nancial institutions and understandably concerned local governments). The initial foreclosures were heavily concentrated among low-income African-Americans and women (particularly single-headed households) in the poorer sections of US cities where they leave a trail of boarded up and vandalised houses in totally devastated neighbourhoods. It begins to look as if a ‘fi nancial Katrina’ has battered multiple cities around the USA. The society of ‘the too much’, of ‘overproduction’ and excessive speculation, has plainly broken down and reverted, as it always does, to ‘a state of momentary barbarism’. Some of the corporate heads that innovated us into this mess have lost their jobs. But they had to pay nothing back of the many millions they earned in the halcyon years and some received incredibly generous golden handshakes when they stepped down – $161 million in the case of Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch and $40 million for Charles Prince of Citicorp (the head of the failed British bank Northern Rock departed with £750,000). Those foreclosed upon merely receive an extra tax bill, because
forgiveness of a debt is assessed as income. And just to add insult to class injury, those companies and lawyers employed in the ‘foreclosure mill’, as it is now called, are reaping the handsomest of profits. Who said class differences (neatly intertwined, as is all too often the case, with race and gender) are irrelevant to the sociality of our postmodern times?

This is what makes a contemporary reading of the Manifesto so astonishing, because the world the Manifesto describes has in no way disappeared. Do we not, after all, live in a world of turbocharged capitalism where greed, selfishness, competitive individualism and the lust for loot from any short-term gain at no matter whose or what else’s expense surrounds us at every turn? Capitalism, Marx and Engels observe, ‘cannot exist without perpetually revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’ (including those of consumption). The resultant perpetual ‘uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions’, accompanied by ‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ generates incredible volatility in personal and local economic fortunes (to say nothing of endemic financial crises and dizzying gyrations in stock values). With wages ‘ever more fl uctuating’ and livelihoods ‘more and more precarious’, personal insecurities (over jobs, social provision, pensions) and collective anxieties (over others who seem to threaten us) proliferate, militating against the civilised treatment of immigrants, dissidents and all those others who look or behave in a mode of difference. No wonder ‘all that is solid’ seems to be perpetually ‘melting into air’. And does not the pervasive power and influence of corporate capital continue to strip ‘of its halo every occupation’ hitherto trusted to tell us the truth – ‘the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science’ as well as the professors, pundits and media gurus to say nothing of all those bought politicians who do the bidding of moneyed interests? Is it not sad to note how much of what we call culture is ‘a mere training to act as’ (or attach oneself to) ‘a machine’ (or in our times an electronic device) and that the family, held up to us by sentimentalists as the solid rock of a civilised society, is ‘reduced to a mere money relation’, even when it is not mired in myriad hypocrisies? Do we not also feel more than a little alienated in a world where ‘no other nexus between man and man’ exists ‘than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment’, where people are viewed merely as objects and commodities in the market place, and where most of us work to create the wealth of others? What can we say about a world in which most labour has ‘lost its charm’ and relations of production have become merely ‘despotic’, and where all of us, from janitor to banker, are increasingly positioned as mere appendages to an ever-expanding and constantly accelerating capitalist accumulation machine that blindly continues on its path without the least concern for social or environmental consequences? Is it not perplexing that all of this is to be found in the midst of the greatest productive capacity, wondrous powers of transport and communications, and scientifi c-technical understandings that could surely be harnessed to permit a decent life and a safer future for all? And is it not, finally, deeply troubling to realise that the freedom and liberty promised again and again by the apologists and politicians mean nothing more than the freedom of the market and of market choice (dependent upon ability to pay) coupled with that ‘single, unconscionable freedom – free trade’?

Communism may be declared dead, but a violent, brutalising, and perpetually revolutionising capitalism still flourishes. Marx and Engels in the Manifesto found a brilliant way to reveal to us what that capitalism was and is fundamentally about and how it came to be. In so doing they found an inspirational language with which not only to resist capitalism’s class oppressions and penchant for creative destruction, but also to illuminate the way to transform capitalism, with all of its remarkable achievements (achievements that Marx and Engels freely acknowledged in their own time as we must surely do, even more so, in ours), into something radically different and far more humane. Given the class character of this monstrous system, they also took the clear, logical and obvious step of insisting that the only way to engage in this transformative project was to wage a politics of class struggle. To the degree that the circumstances of their dystopian account have been ameliorated over the years, and the conditions they describe do not fully pertain, then it is to the grand history of popular resistance and class struggle since 1848 that we must bend a knee.

Imagine, furthermore, the shock of recognition with which the laid-off steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Sheffi eld and Essen, or the once solidly employed textile workers in the mills of Manchester, Mumbai, Mulhouse and South Carolina, would read the following passage:

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfi ed by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.…

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Nowadays, of course, it is goods from China that are battering down our walls, as we go off to shop in the Wal-Mart store (where ‘Made in China’ predominates) to seek satisfaction for all those new wants for products drawn from distant lands and climes. The Manifesto’s prescient description of what we now call globalisation (with its cognates of off-shoring and deindustrialisation and global interdependence) suggests a certain continuity within the historical geography of capitalism from 1848 until today. Meanwhile nation states, facing an increasing centralisation of corporate capitalist power and expanding populations, become even more enmeshed in capitalist rules of the game through international agreements like the World Trade Organisation, NAFTA and the European Union, backed up by powerful international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund). These forces all connive at the breaking down of trade barriers while consolidating a rule of law in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other forms of human right you can think of. Competition between states and industrial regions (Bavaria, Silicon Valley, the Pearl River delta, Bangalore) re-enforces this capitalist logic of exploitation and imprints capitalist, and in these times distinctively neoliberal, values ever deeper in our psyches. Failing all this, the powers of the leading imperialist states are deployed to violently inflict the corporate agenda (check out the constitution imposed on Iraq in the first phases of US occupation) upon the world. And lest we think such violence is new or idiosyncratic to George W. Bush and his now notso-merry crew of disgraced neoconservative theorists, consider what that archetypal liberal President Wilson of the United States had to say in 1919:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.1

How far capitalism had advanced down the path of globalisation and construction of the world market by 1848 was, of course, miniscule compared to the enormous strides made since then. So how was it that Marx and Engels could produce such a prophetic document? All too aware of the storm clouds of capitalist crisis and social revolution then gathering across Europe, they were charged with writing a manifesto for a pan-European and mainly clandestine movement of those who called themselves communists. Since nobody at that time had any clear idea of what communism might mean, the door was open for a creative shot at defining the nascent movement’s mission. Marx’s critical studies of political economy (mainly British) and of the revelatory writings of the utopian socialists (mainly French though Robert Owen was also important) had alerted him to the nature of the fundamental driving forces behind capitalist development, and this, coupled with Engels’ first-hand knowledge of Manchester industrialism (set out in 1844 in The Condition of the Working Classes in England), allowed them both to glimpse a vision of what the world would be like if it all became like Manchester, as it surely would if there were no resistance.

Marx (for it was he who, by Engels’ account, did the final writing) produced a brilliant synthesis of insights, a succinct description, in immediately recognisable and the simplest of terms, of what capitalism was and still is fundamentally about, where it had come from, what its potentialities were, and where it was likely to go to in the absence of coherent opposition on the part of those who created the wealth, the working classes. Go now to the Pearl River delta (with factories employing as many as 40,000 workers), the maquila zones of Mexico, the clothing factories in Bangladesh, the sewing shops of the Philippines, the shoe producers in Vietnam, the mines of Brazil and Orissa, and dare to say they were wrong!! Two billion proletarians have been added to the global wage labour force over the last 20 years – the opening of China, the collapse of the erstwhile Communist Bloc and the incorporation of formerly independent peasant populations in India and Indonesia as well as throughout Latin America and Africa playing a crucial role. A no-holds-barred corporate capitalism has re-emerged over the last 30 years to take advantage of this situation. In China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Guatemala and Vietnam, contemporary descriptions of the catastrophic conditions of labouring could be inserted into Marx’s chapter on ‘the Working Day’ in Capital without anyone being able to tell the difference. And the most rabid forms of exploitation rest, as is so often the case, on the backs of women and people of colour. Meanwhile, in the advanced capitalist countries, those who once had proud positions as unionised workers in powerful industries find themselves living in the midst of the wreckage of processes of deindustrialisation
that have destroyed whole communities and left cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Sheffield and Essen, as well as a once thriving textile industry in Mumbai, a legacy of empty factories and warehouses awaiting hopeful conversion into condominiums, casinos or shopping malls with perhaps a museum of industrial history to house memories, both brutal and triumphant, of the class war once waged with that particular form of industrial capitalism.

So what do we make today of the obvious inference that the only way to resist these depredations is to wage class struggle and that to do so workers of the world must unite? ‘Class struggle’ is, admittedly, a blanket term that conceals myriad variations. To simply parrot the phrase without doing the requisite analysis as to exactly what it means in different places and times is to disrespect the analytic tradition of historical materialism that Marx and Engels bequeathed us. Classes are always in the process of formation and re-formation and while on the one hand Marx and Engels thought they detected a tendency towards a grand polarisation between bourgeoisie and proletariat emerging, they also recognised forces of fragmentation and slow dissolution of past class forms. Western Marxists these days, of course, are wont to complain that the working class has disappeared. But what has simply happened is that technological changes, the shift towards a service economy and widespread deindustrialisation have seriously weakened traditional working-class institutions in those countries where Western Marxists dwell, while massive processes of proletarianisation have gone on elsewhere. For our times, therefore, it becomes necessary to pay attention to those processes of class formation and re-formation occurring with such dramatic force in China, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, the ex-Soviet Bloc as well as throughout Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Nor should we presume these days, if we ever should have, that class formation is confined within nation states, since cross-border and  even transnational relations among workers moving within migration streams and forming diasporas are every bit as intricate as those to be found within a capitalist class that many now regard as being almost by definition transnational. These are the sorts of situations and processes we need to analyse with the greatest care if we are to accurately gauge the economic situation and calculate the political possibilities of our time.

Marx and Engels also liked to argue that the working classes could (or should?) claim no country since they had long been deprived of access to and control over the means of production. But even in their time, as they recognised towards the end of the Manifesto, national differences clearly mattered. They recognised that uneven geographical development of both bourgeois and working-class power were creating different conditions of political struggle in, for example, England, France, Poland, Switzerland and Germany. And so it is today. Nations are pitted against nations, regions against regions, cities against cities, if only in the competitive struggle to attract investment, and workers, desperate for jobs, are corralled into supporting local alliances to promote development packages and projects that offer sweet subsidies to highly mobile multinational capital to come to or stay in town. And to the degree that capitalists can distract attention from their own perfidious role in the ruthless exploitation of labour power in the workshops of production, by blaming immigrants, foreign competition and the ‘uncivilised’ habits of despised others for all the problems that local workers face, so the prospective unity of the working classes is rendered far more difficult. The divide and rule tactics of exploiting not only national but also ethnic, gender and religious differences within the working classes take an inevitable toll and all too often end up fomenting and even entrenching a politics of exclusions rather than of incorporation into a global dynamic of class struggle.

Furthermore, as the example of the Wall Street bonuses and the home foreclosures with which I began demonstrates, the field of class struggle stretches way beyond the factory and into the nether corners of everyone’s daily lives. The class violence (articulated through racism and sexism) entailed in the foreclosure wave could not be clearer. As the Manifesto concedes, workers, having hopefully earned a living wage, are then ‘set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker’ and, we should add, the masters of credit, for yet another round of exploitation. Predatory activities of this sort played, however, a primary role in the historical emergence of capitalism. It was the merchant capitalists who robbed much of the world not only of silver and precious metals but also of the products of labour produced under all manner of other social conditions in ‘distant lands and climes’. It was the usurers who helped undermine feudal power and thereby release a huge army of retainers into the wage labour force. This ‘primitive accumulation’ did not stop, however, with the rise of industrial capitalism. The depredations of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism continue to this day to rob much of the rest of the world of value, of cultural and natural resources in order to support the ever-escalating affluence of the capitalist classes, particularly in the core regions of global capitalism (though now countries like Mexico, China, Russia and India have their aliquot share of billionaires). Not content with robbery in the nether regions of the world, corporate capitalists and financiers, as the foreclosure example demonstrates, are all too willing to cannibalise wealth from within their own territories (just look at what has been happening as workers lose not only their houses but also their hard-won pension and healthcare rights in the US and Europe). These on-going predatory practices of what I call ‘accumulation by dispossession’ are everywhere apparent and spark an enormous variety of struggles against the loss of assets here, environmental and resource degradations there and outright thievery, fraud and violent robbery somewhere else.2

While the differences and varieties of struggle are palpable, we must perforce recognise, Marx and Engels insist, the commonalities underlying our diverse fates and fortunes. It is crucial that we become politically aware as to the fundamental nature of capitalism and the possibilities for transformation latent within it. This is the political task that the Manifesto so cogently addresses. And if Marx and Engels return to the proletariat again and again as the central agent of radical and transformative change it is for two very specific analytic reasons that hold as powerfully true today as they did in 1848. The first lies in the simple fact that the profit that capitalists perpetually seek ultimately rests on the production of a surplus product and of surplus value (profit) through the exploitation of living labour in the act of production. But by virtue of this pivotal position, workers also have the potential power to bring the capitalist system to a halt and thereby
radically transform it because it is their labour and their labour alone that powers the system onwards.

To be sure, there are all sorts of other struggles going on around us that distract attention from this central point of struggle. There is persistent tension within the capitalist class as to how the surplus might be distributed, for example, between fi nanciers, merchants, industrialists, landlords, service providers, the state, and the like. From time to time major reforms have to be instituted to curb the excesses of this or that faction (e.g. the financiers in the present conjuncture  clearly need to be reined in by regulation). And there are similar struggles between factions within the working classes, pitting industrial, agricultural, service and state employees against each other, to say nothing of the fomented nationalist and ethnic differences that pit, for example, US against Chinese workers in the desperate search to procure and protect jobs. Geo-economic and geopolitical conflicts between the different geographical regions of capital accumulation (everything from inter-urban competition to regional class alliances and transnational groupings such as the European Union, East Asia, NAFTA and Mercosur) also periodically erupt to obscure other dimensions of struggle. But at the end of the day, Marx and Engels logically conclude, the only form of class struggle that can radically change the system is one that is led by all those who produce the wealth of others in general and the capitalist class in particular, and that is defi ned as the proletariat.

This then poses a difficult organisational question: how can all these proletarians located all around the world and working under the most disparate of circumstances come together to change the world? On this point the Manifesto has some interesting ideas. Struggle, Marx and Engels suggest, begins with the alienated individual who understands precisely how, to cite the slogan made famous by contemporary feminists, the personal is political. Passivity in the face of thievery, domination and exploitation is no option. Assembled together in factories, fields, offices and institutions, individuals come together and develop a collective understanding of the common sources of their discontents and frustrations. From this they begin to sense the class identity implicit in their varied  experiences and on that common basis start to articulate collective arguments and demands. And as they build collective organisations to agitate for satisfaction of their wants, needs and creative desires, they construct territorial groupings – in neighbourhoods, cities, metropolitan regions – within and from which a  broader political and cultural commonality arises. This new sociality, when linked together with other distinctive regions by the ever-more sophisticated means of transport and communications that capitalism constructs to facilitate commodity exchange and the circulation of capital, opens up the prospect to conquer the nation state as a dominant container of power. But political agitation cannot stop at that geographical scale either, for only when workers of the world can unite around a common vision (albeit one that rests on enormous differences) can capitalism be tamed and the communist vision of an alternative come to fruition. The organisational form of the class struggle has to be prepared, in short, to ‘jump geographical scales’ and move smoothly from the local to the global and back again.

The history of communist movements demonstrates all too tragically what happens when the movement forgets that these different moments and geographical scales of political struggle are dialectically integrated and mutually constitutive of each other. If the way the personal is political fails to build towards an open dynamics of regional cultural consciousness formation, then the organisational schema proposed in the Manifesto fails. Even more importantly, if the actions taken in the name of the nation state, once captured by proletarian powers, do not resolve the alienations and frustrations of individuals, then the local and regional organisational forms painstakingly and lovingly built in a spirit of revolutionary hope become hollowed out, static and unresponsive bureaucratic shells. The necessity for both progressive and permanent revolutions (of the sort that capitalism so successfully and vigorously prosecutes through its own dynamism) cannot be neglected. Failing this, the revolutionary movement relapses into stasis (as it did in the ex-Soviet Union) and becomes an all-too easy target for capitalist counter-revolution. The dialectics of organisational form outlined in the Manifesto require careful elaboration and application if the revolutionary movement is to succeed.

But there is a further lesson to be learned from the Manifesto’s form of analysis. Consider, for example, how the bourgeoisie came to power. Merchant capital went outside of the constraints of feudal power in its explorations and exploitation of the world market. In effect this was a geographical strategy that gained power from outside of the bastions of feudalism and then, having surrounded the latter, forced them to surrender to bourgeois power. The state that protected feudal interests was captured and transformed and put to bourgeois uses (is the US state as currently constituted anything other than an executive committee for the protection of corporate interests?). The lesson for any revolutionary movement is that the territorialisation of political struggle, the occupation of this or that region or nation state as a staging ground for broader assaults upon the political power of capitalist elites, is important. While socialism in one country (let alone city) may be impossible, this does not mean that the territorialisation of political struggle, the occupation of this or that city, region or nation state as a staging ground for broader assaults upon the political power of capitalist elites, is irrelevant. But there were many other elements in the situation that permitted the bourgeois rise to power – the existence of a landless labour force, a rising market demand, an influx of money and gold – and it was into this situation that those armed with a certain money power could step and position themselves as full- fledged capitalists. As Marx notes elsewhere, radical social transformations such as the rise of capitalism or the transition to communism, do not occur in empty space but depend crucially on the prior construction of the conditions that make such transformations possible. While Marx and Engels do not go on to make the point specifically, the advantages Britain possessed in all these respects undoubtedly played a crucial role in explaining why a nascent capitalism everywhere could most easily take root in that particular part of the world from the sixteenth century onwards. Furthermore, capitalists when hit with crises of overproduction and over- accumulation, as they inevitably are, once again ‘go geographical’ in expanding their geographical range of market and investment possibilities. This tendency to look for what I call ‘a spatial fix’ to problems of overproduction has played an incredibly important role in the perpetuation of the globalisation processes that Marx and Engels so succinctly described in 1848.3

The implication is that communism has to emerge from within the nexus of possibilities that capitalism inevitably creates. It has to be alert to those moves that the bourgeoisie makes to deal with the crises it foments – such as the current moves to centralise credit in the hands of the state apparatuses in order to control the financial crisis – and treat these moves as political opportunities to seize hold of new powers and to define new trajectories of social change. Furthermore, communism has to take root in those regions where the conditions are most favourable for its development. It then has to pursue a territorial and geographical strategy to surround and undermine the central loci of capitalist power. Unfortunately, in the class struggles that have been waged across the world these last 200 years, capitalists have again and again used their superior command over space as a way to beat down revolutionary movements in particular places (Chile, Portugal and Mozambique in the 1970s come immediately to mind). Workers of the world must not only unite to pursue their revolutionary claims: they must also devise sophisticated political and geopolitical strategies to win the right to construct a different kind of world order.

But to what, exactly, should the workers’ movement lay claim? Let us look more closely at what capitalists actually do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money, they go into the market place and buy labour power and means of production, they select (purchase) a technology, set these all to work to produce a new commodity and then sell that commodity for the original money plus a profit (a surplus value). The next day they wake up and have to decide what to do with the surplus money they gained the day before. They face a Faustian dilemma: reinvest to get even more money or consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest because if one does not reinvest then another surely will. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus. Successful capitalists usually make more than enough surplus to reinvest in expansion and satisfy their desire for pleasure. But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production at a compound rate – hence all the logistical growth curves (money, capital, output and population) that attach to the history of capital accumulation.

The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption. In this the capitalist faces a number of obstacles to continuous and trouble-free expansion. If there is a scarcity of labour and wages are too high then either existing labour has to be disciplined (technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organised working class power – such as that set in motion by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s – are two prime methods) or fresh labour forces must be found (by immigration, export of capital or proletarianisation of hitherto independent elements in the population). New means of production in general and new natural resources in particular must be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organisational forms to come on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods. The perpetual revolutions in technologies that the Manifesto describes are destabilising to the point where they can threaten profitability. Innovations also defi ne new wants and needs, reduce the turnover time of capital and the friction of distance. This last effect extends the geographical range over which the capitalist is free to search for expanded labour supplies and raw materials. If there is not enough purchasing power in the market then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments and debt-fi nanced state and personal expenditures. If, finally, the profit rate is too low, then state regulation of ‘ruinous competition’, monopolisation (mergers and acquisitions) and capital exports to fresh pastures provide ways out.

If any one of the above barriers to continuous capital circulation and expansion becomes impossible to circumvent, then capital accumulation is blocked and capitalists face a crisis: capital cannot be profi tably reinvested, accumulation stagnates or ceases and capital is devalued (lost) and in some instances even physically destroyed. Failure to negotiate the labour barrier produces a profit squeeze crisis because higher wages cut into profits; the failure to find ways to  negotiate natural resource and waste disposal barriers produces environmental crises (sometimes referred to as ‘the second contradiction of capitalism’); rapid technological changes produce a falling rate of profi t problem; lack of (usually credit-fuelled) effective demand generates a crisis of underconsumption. There is no singular theory of crisis formation within capitalism, just a series of barriers that throw up multiple possibilities for different kinds of crises. At one particular historical moment conditions may lead to one kind of crisis dominating, but on other occasions several forms can combine and on still others the crisis  tendencies get displaced spatially (into geopolitical and geo-economic crises) or temporally (as fi nancial crises). The effect, however, is always one of the devaluation of capital. Devaluation can take a number of forms. Surplus commodities can be devalued or destroyed, productive capacity and the assets can be written down in value and left unemployed, or money itself can be devalued through infl ation. And in a major crisis, of course, labour stands to be devalued through massive unemployment.

Once the barriers are circumvented or dissolve, accumulation typically revives at its compound rate. We have come to accept unthinkingly that a healthy economy grows and that growth is therefore normal and good, no matter what the social, political or environmental consequences. But it boggles the mind to imagine what the world will be like after another hundred years of compound growth at, say, 2–3 per cent per year. Plainly, some other way must be found to organise the social order if humanity is to survive.

So what, then, should a revolutionary movement demand? The answer is simple enough in principle: greater collective and democratic control over what is produced, how and by whom as well as strong command over the use of whatever surpluses are produced. To have a surplus product is not a bad thing: indeed, in many situations a surplus is crucial to adequate survival and it is only with an adequate surplus that many of the good things in life can be provided (cities, for example, could not exist without the mobilisation and concentration of a surplus product). Throughout capitalist history, some of the surplus value created has been taxed away by the state and in social democratic phases that proportion rose significantly putting much of the surplus under state control. At least some of it went to purposes (such as universal healthcare, social housing and education) that benefited hitherto oppressed, marginalised and excluded populations. The whole neoliberal project over the last 30 years has been oriented towards rolling back those benefits and establishing private control over the use of the surplus. The data for all OECD countries show, however, that the share of gross output taken by the state has been roughly constant since the 1970s. The main achievement of the neoliberal assault, then, has been to prevent the state share expanding in the way it did in the 1950s and 1960s in the leading capitalist countries (even including the United States). One further response on the part of the capitalist class has been to create new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests and, through the application of money power, assure that control over the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital (like Halliburton and the pharmaceutical companies) and the upper classes. Increasing the share of the surplus under state control will only work if the state apparatus itself is brought back under collective democratic control.

How the surplus is distributed and used is only one of the several pressing political issues for our times. We live on a planet of burgeoning slums, sites of teeming human possibilities and innovative activities in the midst of total degradation, violence, criminality and despair, alongside a rising tide of unconstrained and in some instances criminally profl igate consumerism that seemingly knows no bounds. The astonishing inequalities that now exist clearly need to be rectifi ed. But the fragmentations encountered make it more and more difficult to imagine a collective politics of hope let alone a well-organised class struggle. In the rapidly urbanising developing world in particular, the city

is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many “microstates”. Wealthy neighborhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fi ght for survival.4

But important though the politics of redistribution of wealth may be, it is, in Marx and Engels’ judgement, far too limiting as a political project. What distinguishes distributive socialism from communism is that the communists focus on the organisation and politics of production in general via a critique of the manner of capitalist production of surplus value and surplus product in particular. In Marx and Engels’ time, simple acquaintance with what life was like in the factories, fields and workshops of the world, as well as in the living spaces of an inadequately remunerated working class, was enough to provoke the outrage of the bourgeois factory and public health inspectors as well as the general public once these conditions were revealed for all to see. And this is the fundamental condition that communists seek to change. Those who controlled and used the means of production and used them for their own exclusive benefit were plainly at fault and it was therefore the mission of the communist movement to eradicate that class privilege and organise production through the association of workers  backed by democratic control of the state apparatus (this is as far as the Manifesto goes). We now know that such a general alternative plan was not and is not so easy to devise and implement. But the conditions of labouring and living in much of the world are now in such a parlous state as to suggest that the communist imperative to revolutionise the organisation of production and consumption on non-capitalist lines is more crucial now than it ever was in 1848. But to this there is now an added urgency. The compound rates of growth implied by the capitalist requirement to produce surplus value ad infi nitum via the production of a surplus product, are daily growing more threatening to planetary ecosystems and to the provision of basic requirements for energy, water and clean air. The compounding rates of capitalist growth cannot last for ever and something new – a steady state economy, for example, which would be totally incompatible with capitalism – has to be devised and that will require, whether we regard ourselves as communists or not, addressing the fundamental question of how to organise both production and consumption on more rational, equitable and sane lines. The warning signs of trouble in the bourgeois construction of paradise are all around us. Even a casual reading of them surely suggests that Marx and Engels were right to stress then as we should even more so now, that it is high time for capitalism to be gone, to make way for some superior mode of production.

It is imperative, therefore, that we re-ignite the political passions that suffuse The Communist Manifesto. Communists, Marx and Engels aver, have no political party. They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power. Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends. While institutionalised communism may be dead, there are by this measure millions of communists among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue to the political imperatives that the Manifesto defi nes, and, above all, ready to open their hearts and minds to this inspirational message that echoes down to us from the doleful days of 1848. We communists are the persistent spectral presence, conjured up by the bourgeoisie out of the nether world, the sorcerers who can weave our own distinctive magic, our own sense of class destiny, into the woof and weft of our historical geography. ‘Change the world’, said Marx: ‘Change Life’, said Rimbaud; ‘for us’, said André Breton, ‘these two projects are the same’. The struggle continues.

Acknowledgement

I thank Fernando Coronil for perceptive comments on an early draft.

Notes

1. Cited in N. Chomsky, On Power and Ideology, Boston, South End Press, 1990, p. 14.
2. D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.
3. D. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, London, Verso, 2006.
4. M. Balbo cited in National Research Council, Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World, Washington, DC, The National Academies Press, 2003, p. 379; M. Davis, Planet of Slums, London, Verso, 2006.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?

After decades of the welfare state, when cutbacks were relatively limited and came with the promise that things would soon return to normal, we are now entering a period in which a kind of economic state of emergency is becoming permanent: turning into a constant, a way of life.

The protesters’ story bears witness yet again to the misery of today’s left: there is no positive programmatic content to its demands, just a generalized refusal to compromise the existing welfare state. The utopia here is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system. Here, again, one should not miss the grain of truth in the countervailing argument: if we remain within the confines of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.

The standard liberal motto—that it is sometimes necessary to resort to violence, but it is never legitimate—is not sufficient. From the radical-emancipatory perspective, one should turn it around: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate—since their very status is the result of violence—but never necessary: it is always a matter of strategic consideration whether to use force against the enemy or not.

Lacan’s formula for overcoming an ideological impossibility is not ‘everything is possible’, but ‘the impossible happens’.

A Permanent 
Economic Emergency

Slovoj Zizek

During this year’s protests against the Eurozone’s austerity measures—in Greece and, on a smaller scale, Ireland, Italy and Spain—two stories have imposed themselves. [1] The predominant, establishment story proposes a de-politicized naturalization of the crisis: the regulatory measures are presented not as decisions grounded in political choices, but as the imperatives of a neutral financial logic—if we want our economies to stabilize, we simply have to swallow the bitter pill. The other story, that of the protesting workers, students and pensioners, would see the austerity measures as yet another attempt by international financial capital to dismantle the last remainders of the welfare state. The IMF thus appears from one perspective as a neutral agent of discipline and order, and from the other as the oppressive agent of global capital.

There is a moment of truth in both perspectives. One cannot miss the superego dimension in the way the IMF treats its client states—while scolding and punishing them for unpaid debts, it simultaneously offers them new loans, which everyone knows they will not be able to return, thus drawing them deeper into the vicious cycle of debt generating more debt. On the other hand, the reason this superego strategy works is that the borrowing state, fully aware that it will never really have to repay the full amount of the debt, hopes to profit from it in the last instance.

Yet while each story contains a grain of truth, both are fundamentally false.

The European establishment’s story obfuscates the fact that the huge deficits have been run up as a result of massive financial sector bail-outs, as well as by falling government revenues during the recession; the big loan to Athens will be used to repay Greek debt to the great French and German banks. The true aim of the EU guarantees is to help private banks since, if any of the Eurozone states goes bankrupt, they will be heavily hit. On the other hand, the protesters’ story bears witness yet again to the misery of today’s left: there is no positive programmatic content to its demands, just a generalized refusal to compromise the existing welfare state. The utopia here is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system. Here, again, one should not miss the grain of truth in the countervailing argument: if we remain within the confines of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.

One often hears that the true message of the Eurozone crisis is that not only the Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead—ok, but which Europe? The answer is: the post-political Europe of accommodation to the world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe that presents itself as standing for cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics. But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe: a re-politicized Europe, founded on a shared emancipatory project; the Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to the French and October Revolutions. This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital.

A new period

One thing is clear: after decades of the welfare state, when cutbacks were relatively limited and came with the promise that things would soon return to normal, we are now entering a period in which a kind of economic state of emergency is becoming permanent: turning into a constant, a way of life. It brings with it the threat of far more savage austerity measures, cuts in benefits, diminishing health and education services and more precarious employment. The left faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing ‘natural’ in such a crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously being fully aware that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, the violation of its rules effectively causes economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, rendered easier by the conditions of the global market (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse.

It would thus be futile merely to hope that the ongoing crisis will be limited and that European capitalism will continue to guarantee a relatively high standard of living for a growing number of people. It would indeed be a strange radical politics, whose main hope is that circumstances will continue to render it inoperative and marginal. It is against such reasoning that one has to read Badiou’s motto, mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre: better a disaster than a non-being; one has to take the risk of fidelity to an Event, even if the Event ends up in ‘obscure disaster’. The best indicator of the left’s lack of trust in itself today is its fear of crisis. A true left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions. Its basic insight is that, although crises are painful and dangerous, they are inevitable, and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. Which is why today, more than ever, Mao Zedong’s old motto is pertinent: ‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.’

There is no lack of anti-capitalists today. We are even witnessing an overload of critiques of capitalism’s horrors: newspaper investigations, tv reports and best-selling books abound on companies polluting our environment, corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their firms are saved by public money, sweatshops where children work overtime. There is, however, a catch to all this criticism, ruthless as it may appear: what is as a rule not questioned is the liberal-democratic framework within which these excesses should be fought. The goal, explicit or implied, is to regulate capitalism—through the pressure of the media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations—but never to question the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of the bourgeois state of law. This remains the sacred cow, which even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’—the Porto Allegre World Social Forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.

State and class

It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, perhaps today more than ever. For Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere proper, as with the criteria the global financial institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgement on a country—does it have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? The key to actual freedom resides rather in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed for effective improvement is not political reform, but a transformation in the social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, or about worker–management relations in a factory; all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain lie outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures can, of course, have a positive role to play. But they remain part of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose is to guarantee the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy. It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations.

Closely linked to the necessary de-fetishization of ‘democratic institutions’ is the de-fetishization of their negative counter-part: violence. For example, Badiou recently proposed exercising ‘defensive violence’ by means of building free domains at a distance from state power, subtracted from its reign (like the early Solidarnosc in Poland), and only resisting by force state attempts to crush and re-appropriate these ‘liberated zones’. The problem with this formula is that it relies on a deeply problematic distinction between the ‘normal’ functioning of the state apparatus and the ‘excessive’ exercise of state violence. But the ABC of Marxist notions of class struggle is the thesis that ‘peaceful’ social life is itself an expression of the (temporary) victory of one class—the ruling one. From the standpoint of the subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of the state, as an apparatus of class domination, is a fact of violence. Similarly, Robespierre argued that regicide is not justified by proving the King had committed any specific crime: the very existence of the King is a crime, an offence against the freedom of the people. In this strict sense, the use of force by the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is always ultimately ‘defensive’. If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens ‘normalize’ the state and accept its violence as merely a matter of contingent excesses. The standard liberal motto—that it is sometimes necessary to resort to violence, but it is never legitimate—is not sufficient. From the radical-emancipatory perspective, one should turn it around: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate—since their very status is the result of violence—but never necessary: it is always a matter of strategic consideration whether to use force against the enemy or not.

In short, the topic of violence should be demystified. What was wrong with 20th-century Communism was not its resort to violence per se—the seizure of state power, the Civil War to maintain it—but the larger mode of functioning, which made this kind of resort to violence inevitable and legitimized: the Party as the instrument of historical necessity, and so on. In a note to the CIA, advising them on how to undermine the Allende government, Henry Kissinger wrote succinctly: ‘Make the economy scream’. Former us officials are openly admitting today that the same strategy is applied in Venezuela: former us Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said of the Venezuelan economy on Fox News: ‘It’s the one weapon we have against [Chavez] to begin with, and which we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the economy even worse, so that his appeal in the country and the region goes down’. In the current economic emergency, too, we are clearly not dealing with blind market processes but with highly organized, strategic interventions by states and financial institutions, intent on resolving the crisis on their own terms—and in such conditions, are not defensive counter-measures in order?

These considerations cannot but shatter the comfortable subjective position of radical intellectuals, even as they continue their mental exercises so relished throughout the 20th century: the urge to ‘catastrophize’ political situations. Adorno and Horkheimer saw catastrophe in the culmination of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ in the ‘administered world’; Giorgio Agamben defined the 20th-century concentration camps as the ‘truth’ of the entire Western political project. But recall the figure of Horkheimer in West Germany of the 1950s. While denouncing the ‘eclipse of reason’ in the modern Western society of consumption, he simultaneously defended this same society as the sole island of freedom in a sea of totalitarianisms and corrupt dictatorships. What if, in truth, intellectuals lead basically safe and comfortable lives, and in order to justify their livelihoods, construct scenarios of radical catastrophe? For many, no doubt, if a revolution is taking place, it should occur at a safe distance—Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela—so that, while their hearts are warmed by thinking about faraway events, they can go on promoting their careers. But with the current collapse of properly functioning welfare states in the advanced-industrial economies, radical intellectuals may be now approaching a moment of truth when they must make such clarifications: they wanted real change—now they can have it.

Economy as ideology

The state of permanent economic emergency does not mean that the left should abandon patient intellectual work, with no immediate ‘practical use’. On the contrary: today, more than ever, one should bear in mind that communism begins with what Kant, in the famous passage of his essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, called the ‘public use of reason’: with the egalitarian universality of thought. Our struggle should thus highlight those aspects of the current ‘re-structuring’ that pose a threat to trans-national open space. One example would be the EU’s ongoing ‘Bologna Process’, which aims to ‘harmonize the architecture of the European higher education system’, and which is in fact a concerted attack on the public use of reason.

Underlying these reforms is the urge to subordinate higher education to the task of solving society’s concrete problems through the production of expert opinions. What disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by ‘society’—in reality, state and capital—but to reflect on the very form of these problems; to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem. The reduction of higher education to the task of producing socially useful expert knowledge is the paradigmatic form of Kant’s ‘private use of reason’—that is, constrained by contingent, dogmatic presuppositions—within today’s global capitalism. In Kantian terms, it involves our acting as ‘immature’ individuals, not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason.

It is crucial to link the push towards streamlining higher education—not only in the guise of direct privatization or links with business, but also in this more general sense of orienting education towards the production of expert knowledge—to the process of enclosing the commons of intellectual products, of privatizing general intellect. This process is itself part of a global transformation in the mode of ideological interpellation. It may be useful here to recall Althusser’s notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’. If, in the Middle Ages, the key isa was the Church, in the sense of religion as institution, the dawn of capitalist modernity imposed the twin hegemony of the school system and legal ideology. Individuals were formed into legal subjects through compulsory universal education, while subjects were interpellated as patriotic free citizens under the legal order. The gap was thus maintained between bourgeois and citizen, between the egotist-utilitarian individual concerned with his private interests and the citoyen dedicated to the universal domain of the state. Insofar as, in spontaneous ideological perception, ideology is limited to the universal sphere of citizenship, while the private sphere of egotistical interests is considered ‘pre-ideological’, the very gap between ideology and non-ideology is thus transposed into ideology.

What has happened in the latest stage of post-68 capitalism is that the economy itself—the logic of market and competition—has progressively imposed itself as the hegemonic ideology. In education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classical-bourgeois school isa: the school system is less and less the compulsory network, elevated above the market and organized directly by the state, bearer of enlightened values—liberty, equality, fraternity. On behalf of the sacred formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, it is progressively penetrated by different forms of ppp, or public–private partnership. In the organization and legitimization of power, too, the electoral system is increasingly conceived on the model of market competition: elections are like a commercial exchange where voters ‘buy’ the option that offers to do the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, and so on, most efficiently.

On behalf of the same formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, functions once exclusive to the domain of state power, like running prisons, can be privatized; the military is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries. Even the state bureaucracy is no longer perceived as the Hegelian universal class, as is becoming evident in the case of Berlusconi. In today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the base bourgeois who ruthlessly and openly exploits it as a means to protect his personal interests.

Even the process of engaging in emotional relations is increasingly organized along the lines of a market relationship. Such a procedure relies on self-commodification: for internet dating or marriage agencies, prospective partners present themselves as commodities, listing their qualities and posting their photos. What is missing here is what Freud called der einzige Zug, that singular pull which instantly makes me like or dislike the other. Love is a choice that is experienced as necessity. At a certain point, one is overwhelmed by the feeling that one already is in love, and that one cannot do otherwise. By definition, therefore, comparing qualities of respective candidates, deciding with whom to fall in love, cannot be love. This is the reason why dating agencies are an anti-love device par excellence.

What kind of shift in the functioning of ideology does this imply? When Althusser claims that ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, ‘individuals’ stand here for the living beings upon which ideological state apparatuses work, imposing upon them a network of micro-practices. By contrast, ‘subject’ is not a category of living being, of substance, but the outcome of these living beings being caught in the isadispositif, or mechanism; in a symbolic order. Quite logically, insofar as the economy is considered the sphere of non-ideology, this brave new world of global commodification considers itself post-ideological. The isas are, of course, still here; more than ever. Yet insofar as, in its self-perception, ideology is located in subjects, in contrast to pre-ideological individuals, this hegemony of the economic sphere cannot but appear as the absence of ideology. What this means is not that ideology simply ‘reflects’ the economy, as superstructure to its base. Rather, the economy functions here as an ideological model itself, so that we are fully justified in saying that it is operative as an isa—in contrast to ‘real’ economic life, which definitely does not follow the idealized liberal-market model.

Impossibles

Today, however, we are witnessing a radical change in the working of this ideological mechanism. Agamben defines our contemporary ‘post-political’ or biopolitical society as one in which the multiple dispositifs desubjectivize individuals, without producing a new subjectivity:

Hence the eclipse of politics, which supposed real subjects or identities (workers’ movement, bourgeoisie, etc.), and the triumph of economy, that is to say, of the pure activity of governing, which pursues only its own reproduction. The right and left which today follow each other in managing power have thus very little to do with the political context from which the terms that designate them originate. Today these terms simply name the two poles—the one that aims at desubjectivation, without any scruples, and the one that wants to cover it with the hypocritical mask of the good citizen of democracy—of the same machine of government. [2]

‘Bio-politics’ designates the constellation in which dispositifs no longer generate subjects (‘interpellate individuals into subjects’), but merely administer and regulate individuals’ bare life.

In such a constellation, the very idea of a radical social transformation may appear as an impossible dream—yet the term ‘impossible’ should make us stop and think. Today, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, we are told that ‘nothing is impossible’: we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films and tv series are available to download, space travel is available to everyone (at a price). There is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome; even the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded into one or another set of hardware.

On the other hand, in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the age of maturity in which humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality—read: capitalist socio-economic reality—with all its impossibilities. The commandment you cannot is its mot d’ordre: you cannot engage in large collective acts, which necessarily end in totalitarian terror; you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis; you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, without falling prey to the spectre of North Korean juche. In its ideological version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values—no more than two degrees of global warming—based on ‘expert opinions’.

It is crucial to distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossible-real of a social antagonism, and the ‘impossibility’ on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it serves as a mask of itself: that is, the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first. Today, the ruling ideology endeavours to make us accept the ‘impossibility’ of radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not reduced to a corrupt parliamentary game, in order to render invisible the impossible-real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies. This real is ‘impossible’ in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, its constitutive antagonism; which is not to imply that this impossible-real cannot be directly dealt with, or radically transformed.

This is why Lacan’s formula for overcoming an ideological impossibility is not ‘everything is possible’, but ‘the impossible happens’. The Lacanian impossible-real is not an a priori limitation, which needs to be realistically taken into account, but the domain of action. An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible—an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism.

Freedoms?

But the question persists: what does such a programmatic statement about doing the impossible amount to, when we are confronted with an empirical impossibility: the fiasco of communism as an idea able to mobilize large masses? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no all-European revolution, and knowing the idea of building socialism in one country to be nonsense, Lenin wrote:

What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries? [3]

Has this not been the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the Chavez government in Venezuela, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through ‘fair’ democratic elections, not through insurrection. But once in power, they exerted it in a way which is partially, at least, ‘non-statal’: directly mobilizing their supporters, by-passing the party–state representative network. Their situation is ‘objectively’ hopeless: the whole drift of history is basically against them, they cannot rely on any ‘objective tendencies’ pushing in their way, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. But, nonetheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? And are we—today’s left—not all in exactly the same situation?

Ours is thus the very opposite of the classical early 20th-century situation, in which the left knew what had to be done (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat), but had to wait patiently for the proper moment of execution. Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous. We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new, just to keep the machinery going and maintain what was good in the old—education, healthcare, basic social services. In short, our situation is like what Stalin said about the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves. Or as Gramsci said, characterizing the epoch that began with the First World War, ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif?, Paris 2007, pp. 46–7.

[3] V. I. Lenin, ‘Our Revolution’ [1923], in Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, p. 479.

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1. What will happen in China?