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Title: Bring out your dead
Author: Endnotes
Date: October 2008
Language: en
Topics: communization, criticism and critique, anti-work, critique of leftism, Endnotes, class struggle
Source: Retrieve don 27th August 2022 from https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/8
Notes: Published in Endnotes #1.

Endnotes

Bring out your dead

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the

brain of the living… The social revolution of the nineteenth century

cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot

begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the

past. The former revolutions required recollections of the past in order

to smother their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the

revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their

dead.”[1]

If this was true when Marx wrote this passage, when one could only speak

of communism in the future tense, it is all the more so of today, now

that anarchists and communists can speak of their own “histories”,

indeed seem to speak of little else. Marxism itself is now a tradition

of dead generations, and even latter-day situationists seem to have

difficulty in “leaving the twentieth century.”[2]

We write this not from any special infatuation with the present, or any

resultant desire to bring communist theory “up-to-date”. The

twenty-first century — just as much as the previous one — is formed by

the contradiction between labour and capital, the separation between

work and “life”, and the domination of everything by the abstract forms

of value. It is therefore just as worth leaving as its predecessor. Yet

the “twentieth century” familiar to the situationists, its contours of

class relations, its temporality of progress, and its post-capitalist

horizons, is obviously behind us. We’ve become bored with theories of

novelty — with post-modernism, post-Fordism, and each new product of the

academy — not so much because they fail to capture an essential

continuity, but because the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s and

80s is no longer novel.

In this preliminary issue of Endnotes we have assembled a series of

texts (basically an exchange between two communist groups in France) all

concerned with the history of revolutions in the twentieth century. As

the texts make clear, the history of these revolutions is a history of

failure, either because they were crushed by capitalist

counter-revolution or because their “victories” took the form of

counter-revolutions themselves — setting up social systems which, in

their reliance on monetary exchange and wage-labour, failed to transcend

capitalism. Yet the latter was not simply a “betrayal”; any more than

the former was the result of “strategic errors” or missing “historical

conditions.” When we address the question of these failures we cannot

resort to “what if” counterfactuals — blaming the defeat of

revolutionary movements on everything (leaders, forms of organisations,

wrong ideas, unripe conditions) other than the movements themselves in

their determinate content. It is the nature of this content which is at

issue in the exchange which follows.

In publishing such “historical” texts we have no wish to encourage an

interest in history per se, nor to revive an interest in the history of

revolutions or of the workers’ movement. We hope that in considering the

content of the struggles of the last century we will help to undermine

the illusion that this is somehow “our” past, something to be protected

or preserved. Marx’s dictum reminds us of the need to shed the dead

weight of tradition. We would go so far as to say that with the

exception of the recognition of the historical break that separates us

from them, that we have nothing to learn from the failures of past

revolutions — no need to replay them to discover their “errors” or

distil their “truths” — for it would in any case be impossible to repeat

them. In drawing the balance of this history, in taking it to be over,

we are drawing a line that foregrounds the struggles of our own time.

The two parties to the exchange we are publishing, Troploin and Théorie

Communiste, both emerged from a tendency in the early 1970s that, on the

basis of new characteristics of the class struggle, critically

appropriated the historical ultra-left in both its German / Dutch

(council communist) and Italian (Bordigist) varieties as well the more

recent work of the Situationist International and Socialisme ou

Barbarie. Before we can introduce the texts themselves we must therefore

introduce this common background.

From the Refusal of Work to “Communisation”

When Guy Debord wrote “never work” on the wall of a left-bank alleyway

in 1954, the slogan, appropriated from Rimbaud,[3] was still heavily

indebted to surrealism and its avant-garde progeny. That is to say, it

evoked at least in part a romanticised vision of late nineteenth century

bohemia — a world of déclassé artists and intellectuals who had become

caught between the traditional relations of patronage and the new

cultural marketplace in which they were obliged to vend their wares. The

bohemians’ negative attitude towards work had been both a revolt

against, and an expression of, this polarized condition: caught between

an aristocratic disdain for the “professional”, and a petit-bourgeois

resentment of all other social classes, they came to see all work, their

own included, as debased. This posture of refusal was rendered political

by the surrealists, who transformed the nihilistic gestures of Rimbaud,

Lautréamont, and the dadaists, into the revolutionary call for a “war on

work”.[4] Yet for the surrealists, along with other unorthodox

revolutionaries (e.g. Lafargue, elements of the IWW, as well as the

young Marx), the abolition of work was postponed to a utopian horizon on

the other side of a revolution defined in its immediacy by the socialist

programme of the liberation of work — the triumph of the workers’

movement and the elevation of the working class to the position of a new

ruling class. The goal of the abolition of work would thus paradoxically

be achieved through first removing all of work’s limits (e.g. the

capitalist as a parasite upon labour, the relations of production as a

fetter to production) — thereby extending the condition of work to

everyone (“those who don’t work shall not eat”) and rewarding labour

with its rightful share of the value it produces (through various

schemes of labour-accounting).

This apparent contradiction between means and ends, evinced in the

surrealists’ troubled relationship with the French Communist Party, was

typical of revolutionary theories throughout the ascendant period of the

workers’ movement. From anarcho-syndicalists to Stalinists, the broad

swathe of this movement put their hopes for the overcoming of capitalism

and class society in general in the rising power of the working class

within capitalism. At a certain point this workers’ power was expected

to seize the means of production, ushering in a “period of transition”

to communism or anarchism, a period which would witness not the

abolition of the situation of the working class, but its generalisation.

Thus the final end of the elimination of class society coexisted with a

whole gamut of revolutionary means which were premised on its

perpetuation.

The Situationist International (SI) inherited the surrealists’

opposition between the concrete political means of the liberation of

work and the utopian end of its abolition. Their principle achievement

was to transpose it from an external opposition mediated by the

transition of the socialist programme into an internal one that

propelled their conception of revolutionary activity. This latter

consisted of a radical rethinking of the liberation of work, along lines

which emphasised the refusal of any separation between revolutionary

action and the total transformation of life — an idea expressed

implicitly in their original project of “creating situations”. The

importance of this development should not be underestimated, for the

“critique of separation” here implied a negation of any temporal hiatus

between means and ends (thus of any period of transition), as well as a

refusal of any synchronic mediations — insisting on universal (direct

democratic) participation in revolutionary action. Yet in spite of this

ability to rethink the space and time of revolution, the SI’s

transcendence of the opposition between the liberation and abolition of

work would ultimately consist in collapsing its two poles into one

another, into an immediate contradictory unity, transposing the

opposition between means and ends into one between form and content.

After their encounter with the neo-councilist group Socialisme ou

Barbarie at the beginning of the sixties, the SI wholeheartedly adopted

the revolutionary programme of council communism, lauding the council —

the apparatus through which workers would self-manage their own

production and, together with other councils, grasp the entirety of

social power — as the “finally achieved form” of the proletarian

revolution. From then on all the potential and all the limits of the SI

were contained in the tension between their call to “abolish work” and

their central slogan, “all power to the workers’ councils.” On the one

hand the content of the revolution was to involve a radical questioning

of work itself (and not merely its organisation), with the goal of

overcoming the separation between work and leisure; yet on the other

hand the form of this revolution was to be workers taking over their

workplaces and running them democratically.[5]

What prevented the SI from overcoming this contradiction was that the

polarities of content and form were both rooted in an affirmation of the

workers’ movement and the liberation of work. For although the SI

appropriated from the young Marx (and the sociological inquiries of

Socialisme ou Barbarie) a preoccupation with the alienation of labour,

they nonetheless saw the critique of this alienation as made possible by

the technological prosperity of modern capitalism (the “leisure society”

potentials of automation) and the battalions of the workers’ movement

who were capable of both compelling (in their day to day struggles) and

appropriating (in their revolutionary councils) these technical

advances. It was thus on the basis of an existing workers’ power at the

points of production that they saw the abolition of work as becoming

possible, both from a technical and organisational standpoint. In

transposing the techniques of the cyberneticians and the gestures of the

bohemian anti-artist into the trusted, calloused hands of the organised

working class, the situationists were able to imagine the abolition of

work as the direct result of its liberation; that is, to imagine the

overcoming of alienation as a result of an immediate technical-creative

restructuring of the workplace by the workers themselves.

In this sense the SI’s theory represents the last sincere gesture of

faith in a revolutionary conception of self-management integral to the

programme of the liberation of work. But its critique of work would be

taken up and transformed by those who sought to theorise the new

struggles that emerged when this programme had entered into irreversible

crisis in the 1970s. The latter would understand this critique as rooted

not in an affirmation of the workers’ movement, but in new forms of

struggles which coincided with its decomposition. However, in the

writings of Invariance, La Vielle Taupe, Mouvement Communiste and

others, the attempt to overcome the central contradiction of the SI

would first be expressed in a critique of “formalism”, the privileging

of form over content, within the ideology of council communism.

The Critique of Councilism

Contrary to the instructions of the SI, the workers who took part in the

mass strike of May ’68 in France did not seize the means of production,

form councils, or try to run the factories under workers’ control.[6] In

the vast majority of occupied workplaces workers were content to leave

all the organisation in the hands of their union delegates, and the

latter often had trouble in convincing workers to show up to the

occupation assemblies to vote for the continuation of the strike.[7] In

the most important class struggles of the ensuing years, most notably

those in Italy, the council form, consistently the epitome of

proletarian radicalism in the foregoing cycle (Germany ‘19, Italy ‘21,

Spain ‘36, Hungary ‘56), was absent. Yet these years paradoxically saw a

rise in the ideology of councilism, as the perception of an increasingly

unruly working class and the decreasing viability of the old

organisations seemed to suggest that the only thing missing was the form

most adequate to spontaneous and non-hierarchical struggles. In this

context groups like Informations Correspondance Ouvrieres (ICO) in

France, Solidarity in England, Root and Branch in the US, and to some

extent the operaisti current in Italy, managed to revive an interest in

the German/Dutch Left through blaming the old enemies of councilism —

all the left parties and unions, all the “bureaucrats” in the language

of the SI — for the failure of each new insurgency.

It would not take long for this perspective to be challenged, and this

challenge would initially take the form of a revival of the other

left-communist tradition. Under the intellectual leadership of Amadeo

Bordiga, the Italian Left had long criticised council communism (which

in “Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder” Lenin lumped together

with the Italian Left) for its championing of form over content, and its

uncritical conception of democracy.[8] It is this position, filtered

through the influence of the dissident Bordigist journal Invariance,

which underlies Gilles Dauvé’s critique of council communism in

“Leninism and the Ultraleft”, one of the foundational texts of the

tendency we are describing.[9] Dauvé accuses council communism of

formalism on two counts: their approach to the question of organisation

sees the form of organisation as the decisive factor (an “inverted

Leninism”), and their conception of post-revolutionary society

transforms the form (the councils) into the content of socialism,

through depicting the latter as fundamentally a question of management.

For Dauvé, as for Bordiga, this was a false question, for capitalism is

not a mode of management but a mode of production, in which “managers”

of any sort (capitalists, bureaucrats, or even workers) are merely the

functionaries through which the law of value is articulated. As Pierre

Nashua (La Vielle Taupe) and Carsten Juhl (Invariance) would also later

argue, such a preoccupation with form over content effectively replaces

the communist goal of the destruction of the economy with a mere

opposition to its management by the bourgeoisie.[10]

Critique of Work Redux

In itself this critique of council communism could only lead to

reworking the canonical theses of the Italian Left, either through an

immanent critique (a la Invariance) or by developing a sort of

Italo-Germanic hybrid (a la Mouvement Communiste). What provided the

impetus for a new conception of revolution and communism (as

communisation) was not simply an understanding of the content of

communism derived from a close reading of Marx and Bordiga, but also the

influence of a whole wave of class struggles of the late sixties and

early seventies which would give a new meaning to “the refusal of work”

as a specific content of the revolution.

By the early 1970s journalists and sociologists began to speak of a

“revolt against work” afflicting an entire new generation of workers in

traditional industries, with rapidly rising rates of absenteeism and

sabotage, as well as a widespread disregard for the authority of the

union. Commentators variously blamed: the feeling of expendability and

insecurity brought about by automation; the increasing assertiveness of

traditionally oppressed minorities; the influence of an

anti-authoritarian counter-culture; the power and sense of entitlement

afforded by the prolonged post-war boom and its hard-won “social wage”.

Whatever the reason for these developments, what seemed to characterize

the new struggles was a breakdown in the traditional forms through which

workers sought to gain control over the labour process, leaving only the

expression of an apparent desire to work less. For many of those who had

been influenced by the SI, this new proletarian “assault” was

characterized by a “refusal of work” shorn of the techno-utopian and

bohemian-artistic elements which the SI had never been able to abandon.

Groups like Négation and Intervention Communiste argued that it was not

only the power of the union which was being undermined in these

struggles, but the entire Marxist and Anarchist programme of the

liberation of work and the triumph of “workers’ power”. Far from

liberating their work, bringing it under their own control, and using it

to seize control of society through self-managing their workplaces, in

the French May and the subsequent “creeping May” in Italy, the “critique

of work” took the form of hundreds of thousands of workers deserting

their workplaces. Rather than an indication that struggles hadn’t gone

far enough, the absence of workers’ councils during this period was thus

understood as an expression of a rupture with what would come to be

known as “the old workers’ movement.”

The Concept of Communisation

Just as it had been influential in spreading the above-mentioned

critique of councilism, the dissident Bordigist journal Invariance was

an important forerunner of critical reflection on the history and

function of the workers’ movement. For Invariance the old workers’

movement was integral to a development of capitalism from a stage of

merely “formal” to one of “real domination.” The workers’ failures were

necessary since it was capital that constituted their organizing

principle:

“The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions,

shows that the proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social

order which presented an obstacle to the development of the productive

forces, and thus to the development of capital, but that at the moment

that it became a matter of establishing a different community, it

remained a prisoner of the logic of the rationality of the development

of those productive forces, and confined itself within the problem of

managing them.”[11]

Thus a question that for Bordiga had been one of theoretical and

organisational error came for Camatte to define the historic function of

the workers’ movement within capitalism. The self-liberation of the

working class meant only the development of the productive forces, since

the principle productive force was the working class itself. One did not

need to follow Camatte into the wilderness[12] in order to agree with

this estimation. After all, by the 1970s it was clear that in the East

the workers’ movement had been integral, at least at the beginning, to

an unprecedented rise in the productive capacity of the socialist

states; whilst in the West workers’ struggles for better conditions had

played a key role in bringing about the post-war boom and the resulting

global expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Yet for many the

crisis of the institutions of the workers’ movement in the 1970s showed

that this purely capitalist function was itself coming into crisis, and

workers would be able to shed the burden of this history. For Mouvement

Communiste, Négation, Intervention Communiste, and others the breakdown

of the old workers’ movement was something to be celebrated, not because

the corrupt leadership of the workers’ organisations would no longer be

able to restrain the autonomy of the masses, but because such a shift

represented a transcendence of the historical function of the workers’

movement, a transcendence that would mark the reemergence of the

communist movement, the “real movement which abolishes the present state

of things”.[13] And it did so in an immediate sense, for the riots and

wildcat strikes of that decade were read by these writers as a total

refusal of all the mediations of the workers’ movement, not in favour of

some other more “democratic” mediation like that of workers’ councils,

but in a way that posed the immediate production of communist relations

as the only possible revolutionary horizon. Thus whereas communism had

previously been seen as something that needed to be created after the

revolution, the revolution was now seen as nothing other than the

production of communism (abolishing wage labour and the state). The

notion of a period of transition was jettisoned.[14]

In a recent text Dauvé sums up this estimation of the old workers’

movement:

“The workers’ movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was

neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or

fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at

preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. … The purpose

of the old labour movement was to take over the same world and manage it

in a new way: putting the idle to work, developing production,

introducing workers’ democracy (in principle, at least). Only a tiny

minority, ‘anarchist’ as well as ‘marxist’, held that a different

society meant the destruction of State, commodity and wage labour,

although it rarely defined this as a process, rather as a programme to

put into practice after the seizure of power…”[15]

Against such a programmatic approach, groups like Mouvement Communiste,

Négation, and La Guerre Sociale advocated a conception of revolution as

the immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production, or

“communisation”. As we shall see, the understanding of communisation

differed between different groups, but it essentially meant the

application of communist measures within the revolution — as the

condition of its survival and its principle weapon against capital. Any

“period of transition” was seen as inherently counter-revolutionary, not

just in so far as it entailed an alternative power structure which would

resist “withering away” (c.f. anarchist critiques of “the dictatorship

of the proletariat”), nor simply because it always seemed to leave

unchallenged fundamental aspects of the relations of production, but

because the very basis of workers’ power on which such a transition was

to be erected was now seen to be fundamentally alien to the struggles

themselves. Workers’ power was just the other side of the power of

capital, the power of reproducing workers as workers; henceforth the

only available revolutionary perspective would be the abolition of this

reciprocal relation.[16]

Communisation and Cycles of Struggle: Troploin and Théorie

Communiste

The milieu in which the idea of communisation emerged was never very

unified, and the divisions only grew as time went on. Some ended up

abandoning whatever was left of the councilist rejection of the party

and returned to what remained of the legacy of the Italian Left,

congregating around atavistic sects such as the International Communist

Current (ICC). Many others took the questioning of the old workers’

movement and the ideal of workers’ councils to require a questioning of

the revolutionary potential of the working class. In its most extreme

form with the journal Invariance this led to an abandoning of “the

theory of the proletariat”, replacing it by a purely normative demand to

“leave this world”, a world in which the community of capital has,

through real domination, supplanted the human community. Yet even among

those who didn’t go as far, there was an abiding sense that as long as

struggles remained attached to the workplace they could only express

themselves as a defence of the condition of the working class. In spite

of their different approaches, Mouvement Communiste, La Guerre Sociale,

Négation, and their descendants ended up affirming the workplace revolts

of the 1970s, and the growth of struggles around reproduction with which

they coincided, to the extent that they seemed to escape the constraints

of class identity, freeing the “class for-itself” from the “class

in-itself”, and thus revealing the potential for communisation as the

realisation of the true human community. A few people associated with

this tendency (notably Pierre Guillaume and Dominique Blanc) would take

the critique of anti-fascism (shared to some extent by all of those who

defended the communisation thesis) to an extreme and become entangled in

the “Faurisson Affair” of the late-1970s.[17] Another tendency,

represented by Théorie Communiste (hereafter TC), attempted to

historicise the communisation thesis itself, understanding it in terms

of changes in class relations which were in the process of undermining

the institutions of the workers’ movement and working class identity in

general. They would go on to conceptualise this change as a fundamental

restructuring of the capitalist mode of production in accordance with

the termination of one cycle of struggle and the emergence, via a

successful counter-revolution, of a new cycle. The distinguishing

feature of this new cycle for TC is that it carries within it the

potential for communisation as the limit of a class contradiction newly

situated at the level of reproduction (see the afterword for a

clarification of TC’s theory in this respect).[18]

Whilst TC developed their theory of the restructuring at the end of the

1970s, others would follow suit in the 1980s and 90s, and the group

Troploin (consisting principally of Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic) has

recently attempted something of that order in “Wither the World” and “In

for a Storm”. The difference between these conceptions is marked, not

least because the latter seems to have been at least partly developed in

opposition to the former. The exchange between Théorie Communiste and

Troploin we are publishing here took place in the last ten years, and

underlying the assessment of the revolutionary history of the twentieth

century to be found in these texts, are different conceptions of

capitalist restructuring and opposed interpretations of the current

period.

The first text, When Insurrections Die, is based on an earlier

introduction by Gilles Dauvé to a collection of articles from the

Italian Left journal Bilan on the Spanish Civil War. In this text Dauvé

is concerned to show how the wave of proletarian revolts in the first

half of the twentieth century were crushed by the vicissitudes of war

and ideology. Thus in Russia the revolution is sacrificed to the civil

war, and destroyed by the consolidation of Bolshevik power; in Italy and

Germany the workers are betrayed by unions and parties, by the lie of

democracy; and in Spain it is again the march to war (to the tune of

anti-fascism) which seals the fate of the whole cycle, trapping the

proletarian revolution between two bourgeois fronts.

Dauvé doesn’t address the later struggles of the 60s and 70s, but it is

obvious that judgements from this period, as to e.g. the nature of the

workers’ movement as a whole, inform his assessment of what was

“missing” in this earlier defeated wave of struggles. In their critique

of When Insurrections Die, TC attack what they consider to be Dauvé’s

“normative” perspective, in which actual revolutions are counter-posed

to what they could and should have been — to a

never-completely-spelled-out formula of a genuine communist revolution.

TC broadly agree with Dauvé’s conception of revolution (i.e.

communisation) but criticise Dauvé for ahistorically imposing it on

previous revolutionary struggles as the measure of their success and

failure (and thus of failing to account for the historical emergence of

the communisation thesis itself). According to TC it follows that the

only explanation that Dauvé is capable of giving for the failure of past

revolutions is the ultimately tautological one that they didn’t go far

enough — “the proletarian revolutions failed because the proletarians

failed to make the revolution.”[19] In contrast they argue that their

own theory is able to give a robust account of the whole cycle of

revolution, counter-revolution and restructuring, in which revolutions

can be shown to have contained their own counter-revolutions within them

as the intrinsic limit of the cycles they emerge from and bring to

term.[20]

In the subsequent three texts in the exchange (two by Troploin and one

by TC) a number of controversies are explored, including the role of

“humanism” in Troploin‘s conception of communisation, and the role of

“determinism” in that of TC. Yet for us the most interesting aspect of

this exchange, the reason we are publishing it here, is that it

constitutes the most frank attempt we have come across to assess the

legacy of 20^(th) century revolutionary movements in terms of a

conception of communism as neither an ideal or a programme, but a

movement immanent to the world of capital, that which abolishes

capitalist social relations on the basis of premises currently in

existence. It is in order to interrogate these premises, to return to

the present — our starting point — that we seek to analyse their

conditions of emergence in the foregoing cycles of struggle and

revolution.

[1] Karl Marx, The 18^(th) Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852 (MECW 11),

pp. 103–106. All references to the works of Marx and Engels are to the

Lawrence & Wishhart Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW).

[2] ‘Now, The SI’ (IS no. 9, 1964). Christopher Gray, Leaving the

Twentieth Century: the Incomplete Works of the Situationist

International (Rebel Press 1998).

[3] ‘We shall never work, oh waves of fire!’ Arthur Rimbaud, Qu’est-ce

pour nous, mon cœur (1872) in: Œuvres complètes (Renéville & Mouquet,

1954), p. 124.

[4] La Révolution Surréaliste no. 4 (1925). In practice the surrealists’

refusal of work was often restricted to artists, with denunciations of

the influence of wage-labour on creativity and demands for public

subsidies to pay for their living costs. Even the text co-written by

Breton and Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, seems to

distinguish between two revolutionary regimes, one for artists/

intellectuals and one for workers: ‘if, for a better development of the

forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist

regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an

anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be

established.’ Thus one reason the surrealists neglected the

contradiction between the liberation and abolition of labour may have

been that they saw the former as a matter for others.

[5] The situationists were aware of this potential critique and tried to

deflect it. In ‘Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organisation’

(IS no. 12, 1969) Riesel writes ‘it is known that we have no inclination

towards workerism of any form whatsoever’, but goes on to describe how

workers remain the ‘central force’ within the councils and the

revolution. Where they get closest to questioning the affirmation of the

proletariat, in the theory of ‘generalized self-management’, they are at

their most incoherent – e.g.: ‘only the proletariat, by negating itself,

gives clear shape to the project of generalized self-management, because

it bears the project within itself subjectively and objectively’

(Vaneigem, ‘Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalised

Self-Management’ ibid.). If the proletariat bears the project of

self-management ‘within itself’ then it follows that it must negate this

project in ‘negating itself’.

[6] The SI would later reveal the extent of their self-delusion by

retrospectively claiming that workers had been ‘objectively at several

moments only an hour away’ from setting up councils during the May

events. ‘The Beginning of an Era’ (IS no. 12, 1969).

[7] Bruno Astarian, Les grèves en France en mai-juin 1968, (Echanges et

Mouvement 2003).

[8] e.g.: ‘[T]he formulae ‘workers’ control’ and ‘workers’ management’

are lacking in any content. … The ‘content’ [of socialism] won’t be

proletarian autonomy, control, and management of production, but the

disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage system; of exchange

— even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for

labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as

well. There will be nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand

autonomy from.’ Amadeo Bordiga, The Fundamentals of Revolutionary

Communism (1957) (ICP, 1972).

[9] First published in English in Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the

Communist Movement (Black and Red, 1974).

[10] Pierre Nashua (Pierre Guillaume), Perspectives on Councils,

Workers’ Management and the German Left (La Vielle Taupe 1974). Carsten

Juhl, ‘The German Revolution and the Spectre of the proletariat’

(Invariance Series II no. 5, 1974).

[11] Jacques Camatte, ‘Proletariat and Revolution’ (Invariance Series II

no. 6, 1975).

[12] Camatte, particularly through his influence on Fredy Perlman, would

go on to become a principle inspiration for primitivist thought — see

This World We Must Leave: and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1995).

[13] Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 49.

[14] The idea of a ‘period of transition’, found notably in the

political writings of Marx and Engels, had been shared by almost every

tendency of the workers’ movement. During such a period workers were

supposed to seize control of the political (Leninist) or economic

(syndicalist) apparatuses and run them in their own interests. This

corresponded to a generally held assumption that workers could run their

workplaces better than their bosses, and thus that to take over

production would equally be to develop it (resolving inefficiencies,

irrationalities and injustices). In displacing the communist question

(the practical question of the abolition of wage-labour, exchange, and

the state) to after the transition, the immediate goal, the revolution,

became a matter of overcoming certain ‘bad’ aspects of capitalism

(inequality, the tyranny of a parasitical class, the ‘anarchy’ of the

market, the ‘irrationality’ of ‘unproductive’ pursuits…) whilst

preserving aspects of capitalist production in a more ‘rational’ and

less ‘unjust’ form (equality of the wage and of the obligation to work,

the entitlement to the full value of one’s product after deductions for

‘social costs’…).

[15] Gilles Dauvé, ‘Out of the Future’ in Eclipse and Reemergence of the

Communist Movement (1997) pp. 12–13.

[16] It should be noted that something like a communisation thesis was

arrived at independently by Alfredo Bonanno and other ‘insurrectionary

anarchists’ in the 1980s. Yet they tended to understand it as a lesson

to be applied to every particular struggle. As Debord says of anarchism

in general, such an idealist and normative methodology ‘abandons the

historical terrain’ in assuming that the adequate forms of practice have

all been found (Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, 1992), §

93 p.49). Like a broken clock, such anarchism is always capable of

telling the right time, but only at a single instant, so that when the

time finally comes it will make little difference that it is finally

right.

[17] Robert Faurisson is a bourgeois historian who attracted attention

to himself in the late 70s by denying the existence of gas chambers at

Auschwitz (though not the Nazi’s systematic mass murder of civilians).

For this Faurisson was put on trial. For reasons only really known to

himself, Pierre Guillaume became a prominent defender of Faurisson and

managed to attract several affiliates of La Vielle Taupe and La Guerre

Sociale (notably Dominique Blanc) to his cause. This created an

internecine polemic within the Parisian ultra-left which lasted more

than a decade.

[18] Other groups which trace their descent from this (loosely defined)

tendency in the 1970s: La Banquise, L’Insecurité Sociale, Le Brise

Glace, Le Voyou, Crise Communiste, Hic Salta, La Materielle, Temps

Critiques.

[19] see below p. 207.

[20] For a more detailed discussion of the differing assumptions at work

in this exchange see the Afterword at the end of this issue.