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Title: Crisis activity and communisation Author: Bruno Astarian Date: June 2010 Language: en Topics: communist, crisis, communisation, work, capitalism Source: Retrieved December 15, 2014 from [[http://libcom.org/library/crisis-activity-communisation-bruno-astarian]] Notes: Original publication at [[http://www.hicsalta-communisation.com/english/crisis-activity-and-communisation]]
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 (ârevendicativeâ) 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.
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
1917â1918 (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 transition period 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 communising
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.
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 proletariatâs 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 proletariatâs 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 todayâs
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.
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 presupposition 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 proletariatâs 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 â
assuming it ever was â 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
proletariatâs 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 proletariatâs 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 â we will come back to it â is the moment of the greatest
subjective intensity of the proletariatâs 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.
What we just said about the automatisms of the proletariatâs
reproduction during the prosperity of capital posits the class as coming
before the individual: class belonging determines the individualâs
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 sailorsâ 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 Thiersâ 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
subjectâs individualization is one of the necessary conditions of
communism.
All the proletariatâs 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 todayâs 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.
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 doesnât happen, the proletariatâs
activity remains at the level of meetings, demonstrations, and demands.
When the proletariatâs 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 proletariatâs 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 workersâ 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 donât think that history offers a single example of a return
to work by insurgent proletarians that doesnât 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, âsome 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 surgeâ. 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
ârevive a creativity and spirit of initiative in complete rupture with
wage slaveryâ, in other cases they adopt as their own âwork that in the
final analysis differs little from what they formerly were forced to
doâ[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 donât aim at reappropriating the
means of production and at relaunching production by the workers
involved. We will come back to this.
The proletarian insurrection creates the subjective conditions for
communist revolution through the proletariatâs crisis activity. The
classâs 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
proletariatâs 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.
What was written above, at a general level, should be modulated
according to the periodization of capitalismâs 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.
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?
Letâs 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, without supersession 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.
In the 60s-70s, the workersâ 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 workersâ
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 proletariatâs revolt against
capital were what forged the basis for subsequent theoretical
developments, from the end of affirmation of labor against capital as an
âovercomingâ 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 workersâ 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 â what was new â office work even more
destructive. The 80s and 90s were marked by the bossesâ victory.
This immediately raises the question: what will happen when revolt
explodes in todayâs factories, where conditions have become so much
worse? I pose the question in the future tense because, though we
havenât 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 âdowntimeâ. âDowntime 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 âpaying themselves on the beastâs backââ[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 â or because of â the substantial gains in productivity,
it seems that fighting waste is still one of capitalâs objectives.
Another aspect of the current class struggle in developed countries
seems to me equally significant: when workers protest against layoffs â
more and more often violently â 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 theyâll 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 âglobal workshop,â concentrated tens of
millions of overexploited proletarians in factories which are not at the
cusp of global progress. The workersâ revolt took the âanti-workâ 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
businessmenâs magazine representing the major multinationals operating
in Asia worried:
âAlthough 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 âStrike!â for all the workers on the
line to rise up as if in ovation and stop working.â[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.
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 hadnât 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 didnât take
long for the movement to spread, for cars to be torched and highways
blocked. On January 5, 2008, the Paina Textile Millâs 1500 workers
turned up to apply for a job. They had actually been locked out in that
the industryâs 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 â but to destroy them. We saw that
these destructions were not âcollateral damageâ 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.
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 isnât scheduled to stop at a particular station, commuters call
each other to find out whatâs 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 doesnât 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 proletariatâs struggles demonstrate that anti-work is
back in a big way. In each of the latterâs 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
capitalâs 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
workersâ 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 workersâ 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.
As weâve seen, inherent in crisis activity is a tendency to
individualize proletarians by temporarily calling into question laborâs
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 proletariatâs
movement which, as it becomes increasingly radical, depends more on
local initiatives 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.
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 âtraditionalâ 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
âthe massesâ were following. I am not advocating exemplary action to
make the latter conscious of their historical responsibility. Nor did
the young Greek insurgents. They werenât 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
âlaw schoolâ, 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
âbigâ 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 200â300 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 proletariatâs 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.
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 proletariatâs
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, capitalâs 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 capitalâs
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 capitaland 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 âsharing the benefits of productivityâ. 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 proletariatâs life, not just in the âworkâ
component of the proletariatâs 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 proletariatâs
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.
One of the major theses of communisation theory is the rejection of the
notion of the transition society. But letâs 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 60âs-70âs 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 âbeforesâ and âaftersâ
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 how this gross
fiction could delude people for such a long time. Is it because it
guaranteed 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 doesnât create anything else than
communism. Communisation doesnât mean the creation of a new form of
property preceding the abolition of property, a new form of government
preceding the abolition of 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.
It is obvious that looting, requisitions in supermarkets, etc. will be
part of the crisis activity of the communising 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 oneâs 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 âwhat is there to eat?â, âwhereâs a place to
sleep?â, âwhat can be done with the children?â do not even arise.
TCâs text on Communisation vs Socialization states that âgratuity, the
radical non-accounting of whatever, is the axis of the revolutionary
community that is building upâ. Non-accounting is indeed a basic fact of
communisation. It is the absolute anti-planning. But it is necessary to
specify whether we are talking about commodities available from
capitalâs 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-communisors 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 â be it a use value one, a power relationship, delegations
(who counts what, who stores what, etc.), all of which goes against
communisation. 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 â 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 doesnât 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 communising proletarians start to produce on,
the question is not so much that of gratuity, but rather that of the
radical transformation of activity, of all activities. We will thus try
to explain how the ârevolutionary communityâ builds itself on
communising activities that are more substantial than gratuity only.
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 âproductionâ nor âconsumptionâ, 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].
Communisation starts in the crisis activity to go beyond it.
Communisation doesnât 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 proletariatâs
attempts at demands have proven ineffective in saving the proletariat
economically, communisation makes the jump into non-economy. There is a
paradox here: the economic crisis is at its deepest, the proletariatâs
needs are immense, and the solution is to reject productivism. Indeed,
âproductionâ 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 capitalâs 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 everything, to regroup the goods, to coordinate
their distribution, to impose criteria for rights and obligations, etc.,
and a communising 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 communisation, 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 donât 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 âproductionâ without productivity is that
peopleâs 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 communisation,
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
communisation 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
communisation 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 beonly
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 wonât be separated from the
productive act itself. Letâs 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 todayâs 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? Letâs just say that time
will not count and that cases in which the project isnât completed, in
which everything is abandoned in midstream â maybe because production of
the inputs is without productivity too â wonât 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 âassociated producersâ with the circulation
of people from one activity to another. This implies especially:
they will produce or not depending on the number and objectives of those
present, because the âsites of productionâ will above all be places of
life.
not as autarchic communities, but as initiatives controlled entirely by
the participants. Communisation will take place as nebula of local
initiatives. In my opinion, the local level is the only level at which
communisation can prove its ability to immediately improve the life of
proletarians by transforming it radically â by abolishing the class. And
this is fundamental: proletarians make a revolution for a better life,
not for ideals.
âproductionâ 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 âresultâ 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.
We have written above that, in the face of communisation, a tendency
toward âeconomic realismâ 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:
that of the current proletarians, in the crisis without revolution for
the moment. But needs are not absolute. They are related to oneâs 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. Letâs 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.
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. Donât 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 didnât 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 wonât need a communist âdevelopment aidâ.
This does not exclude solidarity, but not as a prerequisite to
communisation in developing countries, by the proletarians who live
there â and who all have a proletarian relative in the rich countriesâ
slums. Of course, the needs covered there by communisation wonât be the
same as those in capitalâs global cities. But why should they be the
same? And why should the extreme poverty of the inhabitants of the
developing countries prevent communisation? The latter doesnât result
from a hypothetical abundance. The issue in communisation 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 wonât 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 1999â2000. 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 âchange of mentalitiesâ
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 communisation is not
something very complicated, and certainly not more utopian than the
transition society and the withering away of the State â as long as you
donât 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.
One of the topics which complicates the discussion of communisation 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 âI am not a puppet, I also exist as an
individualâ, 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 didnât 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 isnât
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 âbeforeâ, 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
proletariatâs history, those who commit themselves to the struggle
didnât 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 individualâs participation (at the barricade, in the
workersâ council, in the riot) is optional, uncertain, left for him to
decide. And it works all the same because the insurrection isnât a sum
of arbitrary, atomized revolts but the unfolding (fleeting on historyâs
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 âmistakesâ 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.
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 doesnât mean simply âprice = zeroâ.
Rather, gratuity is gratuity of the activity (in the sense that its
productive result is secondary). It is freedom of access to oneâs living
conditions (including the means of âproductionâ and âconsumptionâ).
Consumption without necessity and production without productivity are
identical when taken as totalizing activities. The âproducerâ doesnât
leave his needs in the cloakroom. He includes in his âproductiveâ
activity his choices, his personality and the satisfaction of his needs.
And vice versa, the âconsumerâ is not sent back to a life deprived of
sociality to assume the functions of his immediate reproduction.
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 communising
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.
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 âweâll see when
the time comes what the proletarians doâ. I have always challenged that
view, for two main reasons
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.
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 proletariansâ 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.
[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 workersâ 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. Iâve 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 donât consider (as does TC for instance) that âsocial individualâ
is an oxymoron. All depends on the individual and the society.