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Title: Endnotes 1
Author: Various Authors
Date: 2008
Language: en
Topics: Endnotes, communization, anti-work, class struggle, Left Communism, insurrection, self-abolition of the proletariat, communism, anti-capitalism, journal, criticism and critique
Source: Retrieved on August 27, 2022 from https://libcom.org/article/endnotes-journal

Various Authors

Endnotes 1

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 20th 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.

When Insurrections Die

Gilles Dauvé, Quand Meurent les insurrections . ADEL, Paris, 1998.

This version, translated by Loren Goldner and revised by the author,

first published by Antagonism Press, 1999.

“If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian

revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present

Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a

communist development.”[21]

This perspective was not realised. The European proletariat missed its

rendezvous with a revitalised Russian peasant commune.[22]

Brest-Litovsk: 1917 and 1939

Brest-Litovsk, Poland, December 1917: the Bolsheviks proposed peace

without annexations to a Germany intent on taking over a large swath of

the old Tsarist empire, stretching from Finland to the Caucasus. But in

February 1918, the German soldiers, “proletarians in uniform” though

they were, obeyed their officers and resumed the offensive against a

soviet Russia as if they were still facing the Tsarist army. No

fraternisation occurred, and the revolutionary war advocated by the

Bolshevik Left proved impossible. In March, Trotsky had to sign a peace

treaty dictated by the Kaiser’s generals. “We’re trading space for

time”, as Lenin put it, and in fact, in November, the German defeat

turned the treaty into a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, practical proof

of the international link-up of the exploited had failed to materialise.

A few months later, returning to civilian life with the war’s end, these

same proletarians confronted the alliance of the official workers’

movement and the Freikorps. Defeat followed defeat: in Berlin, Bavaria

and Hungary in 1919; then the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920; the March

Action in 1921…

September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At the

border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD,

refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as “counter-revolutionaries”,

are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo. Years

later, one of them would explain the scars on her back — “GPU did it” —

and her torn fingernails — “and that’s the Gestapo”. A fair account of

the first half of this century.

1917-37: twenty years that shook the world. The succession of horrors

represented by fascism, then World War II and the subsequent upheavals,

are the effect of a gigantic social crisis opening with the mutinies of

1917 and closed by the Spanish Civil War.

Not “Fascism Or Democracy” — Fascism And Democracy

According to current left-wing wisdom, fascism is raw state power and

brutal capital unmasked, so the only way to do away with fascism is to

get rid of capitalism altogether.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the analysis usually turns round on

itself: since fascism is capitalism at its worst, we ought to prevent it

from actually producing its worst, i.e. we ought to fight for a

“normal”, non-fascist capitalism, and even rally non-fascist

capitalists.

Moreover, as fascism is capital in its most reactionary forms, such a

vision means trying to promote capital in its most modern, non-feudal,

non-militarist, non-racist, non-repressive, non-reactionary forms, i.e.

a more liberal capitalism, in other words a more capitalist capitalism.

While it goes on at length to explain how fascism serves the interests

of “big business”[23], anti-fascism maintains that fascism could have

been averted in 1922 or 1933 anyway, that is without destroying big

business, if the workers’ movement and/or the democrats had mounted

enough pressure to bar Mussolini and Hitler from power. Anti-fascism is

an endless comedy of sorrows: if only, in 1921, the Italian Socialist

Party and the newly-founded Italian Communist Party had allied with

Republican forces to stop Mussolini… if only, at the beginning of the

1930’s, the KPD had not launched a fratricidal struggle against the SPD,

Europe would have been spared one of the most ferocious dictatorships in

history, a second world war, a Nazi empire of almost continental

dimensions, the concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews.

Above and beyond its very true observations about classes, the state,

and the ties between fascism and big industry, this vision fails to see

that fascism arose out of a two-fold failure: the failure of

revolutionaries after World War I, crushed as they were by

social-democracy and parliamentary democracy, and then, in the course of

the 1920’s, the failure of the democrats and social-democrats in

managing capital. Without a grasp of the preceding period as well as of

the earlier phase of class struggle and its limits, the coming to power,

and still more the nature of fascism, remain incomprehensible.

What is the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political

unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914?

Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries —

Italy and Germany — where, even though the revolution had been snuffed

out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks

of the bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base in power,

ordering regular forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect

of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose

order, its mobilisation of the old middle classes crazed by their own

decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal

with the crisis of capitalism. Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie

to forcibly tame its own contradictions, to turn working class methods

of mobilisation to its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of

the modern state, first against an internal enemy, then against an

external one.

This was indeed a crisis of the state, during the transition to the

total domination of capital over society. First, workers’ organisations

had been necessary to deal with the proletarian upsurge; then, fascism

was required to put an end to the ensuing disorder. This disorder was,

of course, not revolutionary, but it was paralysing, and stood in the

way of solutions which, as a result, could only be violent. This crisis

was only erratically overcome at the time: the fascist state was

efficient only in appearance, because it forcibly integrated the

wage-labour work force, and artificially buried conflicts by projecting

them into militarist adventure. But the crisis was overcome, relatively,

by the multi-tentacled democratic state established in 1945, which

potentially appropriated all of fascism’s methods, and added some of its

own, since it neutralises wage-worker organisations without destroying

them. Parliaments have lost control over the executive. With welfare or

with workfare, by modern techniques of surveillance or by state

assistance extended to millions of individuals, in short by a system

which makes everyone more and more dependent, social unification goes

beyond anything achieved by fascist terror, but fascism as a specific

movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced-march discipline

of the bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the state, in the particular

context of newly created states hard-pressed to constitute themselves as

nations.

The bourgeoisie even took the word “fascism” from working class

organisations in Italy, which were often called fasci. It is significant

that fascism first defined itself as a form of organisation and not as a

programme. The word referred both to a symbol of state power (fasces, or

bundles, borne before high officials in Ancient Rome), and to a will to

get people together in bundles (groups). Fascism’s only programme is to

organise, to forcibly make the components of society converge.

Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it

with other, less brutal weapons): dictatorship is one of its tendencies,

a tendency realised whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to

parliamentary democracy, as it occurred in Germany after 1945, indicates

that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state

(at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not that

democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship: anyone

would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by

the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the choice? Even the gentle

democracy of Scandinavia would be turned into a dictatorship if

circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which

it fulfils democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is

less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to

dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the

preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the

bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Léon Blum’s

Popular Front did not “avoid fascism”, because in 1936 France required

neither an authoritarian unification of capital nor a shrinking of its

middle classes.

There is no political “choice” to which proletarians could be enticed or

which could be forcibly imposed. Democracy is not dictatorship, but

democracy does prepare dictatorship, and prepares itself for

dictatorship.

The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending

democracy: one no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to

pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option. Since

socialism is identified with total democracy, and capitalism with an

accelerating tendency to fascism, the antagonisms between proletariat

and capital, communism and wage-labour, proletariat and state, are

rejected for a counter-position of democracy and fascism presented as

the quintessential revolutionary perspective. The official left and far

left tell us that a real change would be the realisation, at last, of

the ideals of 1789, endlessly betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The new

world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be

preserved, in little buds to be tended: already existing democratic

rights must be pushed further and further within an infinitely

perfectible society, with ever-greater daily doses of democracy, until

the achievement of complete democracy, or socialism.

Thus reduced to anti-fascist resistance, social critique is enlisted in

dithyrambs to everything it once denounced, and gives up nothing less

than that shop-worn affair, revolution, for gradualism, a variant on the

“peaceful transition to socialism” once advocated by the CPs, and

derided, thirty years ago, by anyone serious about changing the world.

The retrogression is palpable.

We won’t invite ridicule by accusing the left and far left of having

discarded a communist perspective which they knew in reality only when

opposing it. It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces

revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its realism claims to

be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.

Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of power, and its

extension in the 20th century completes capital’s domination by

intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the

separation between man and community, between human activity and

society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the

problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever

incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the

problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to

strengthen the “social bond”, democracy contributes to its dissolution.

Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so

by tightening the hold of the net which the state has placed over social

relations.

Even in their own desperately resigned terms, the anti-fascists, to be

credible, have to explain to us how local democracy is compatible with

the colonisation of the commodity which empties out public space, and

fills up the shopping malls. They have to explain how an omnipresent

state to which people turn for protection and help, this veritable

machine for producing social “good”, will not commit “evil” when

explosive contradictions require it to restore order. Fascism is the

adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subtle

apology. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to

consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a

fight increases totalitarianism’s stranglehold on society.

Rome: 1919–1922

Fascism triumphed in countries in which the revolutionary assault after

World War I matured into a series of armed insurrections. In Italy, an

important part of the proletariat, using its own methods and goals,

directly confronted fascism. There was nothing specifically anti-fascist

about its struggle: fighting capital compelled workers and the young CP

(created at Livorno, January 1921, and led by the “Bordigist” faction)

to fight both the Black Shirts and the cops of parliamentary

democracy.[24]

Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution a mass base and in

mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to “transform the

imperialist war into civil war” against the workers’ movement, and it

appears as a reaction of demobilised veterans returning to civilian

life, where they are nothing, only held together by collective violence,

and bent on destroying everything they imagine to be a cause of their

dispossession: subversives, enemies of the nation, etc. In July 1918,

Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, added to its title “Veterans’ and

Producers’ Daily”.

Thus from the outset fascism became an auxiliary of the police in rural

areas, putting down the agricultural proletariat with bullets, but at

the same time developing a frenzied anti-capitalist demagogy. In 1919,

it represented nothing: in Milan, in the November general election, it

got less than 5000 votes, while the socialists got 170,000. Yet it

demanded the abolition of the monarchy, of the senate and all titles of

nobility, the vote for women, the confiscation of the property of the

clergy, and the expropriation of the big landowners and industrialists.

Fighting against the worker in the name of the “producer”, Mussolini

exalted the memory of the Red Week of 1914 (which had seen a wave a

riots, particularly in Ancona and Naples), and hailed the positive role

of unions in linking the worker to the nation. Fascism’s goal was the

authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state

structure capable (in contrast to democracy, Mussolini said) of limiting

big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding

values, social ties and work.

For decades, the bourgeoisie had denied the reality of social

contradictions. Fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence,

denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the

struggle between nations, denouncing Italy’s fate as a “proletarian

nation”. Mussolini was archaic in so far as he upheld traditional values

ruined by capital, and modern in so far as he claimed to defend the

social rights of the people.

Fascist repression was unleashed after a proletarian failure engineered

mainly by democracy and its main fallback options: the parties and

unions, which alone can defeat the workers by employing direct and

indirect methods in tandem. Fascism’s arrival in power was not the

culmination of street battles. Italian and German proles had been

crushed before, by both ballots and bullets.

In 1919, federating pre-existing elements with others close to him,

Mussolini founded his fasci. To counter clubs and revolvers, while Italy

was exploding along with the rest of Europe, democracy called for… a

vote, from which a moderate and socialist majority emerged. Forty years

after these events Bordiga commented:

“Enthusiastic involvement in the 1919 electoral celebration was

tantamount to removing all obstacles on the path of fascism, which was

shooting ahead while the masses were put to sleep as they waited for the

big parliamentary showdown… Victory, the election of 150 socialist MPs,

was won at the cost of the ebb of the insurrectionary movement and of

the general political strike, and the rollback of the gains that had

already been won.”

At the time of the factory occupations of 1920, the state, holding back

from a head-on-assault, allowed the proletariat to exhaust itself, with

the support of the CGL (a majority-socialist union), which wore down the

strikes when it did not break them openly. The institutionalisation of

“workers’ control” over the factories, under state supervision, was

approved by bosses and unions alike.

As soon as the fasciappeared, sacking the Case di Popolo, the police

either turned a blind eye or confiscated the workers’ guns. The courts

showed the fasci the greatest indulgence, and the army tolerated their

exactions when it did not actually assist them. This open but unofficial

support became quasi-official with the “Bonomi circular”. After being

expelled from the socialist party in 1912, with Mussolini’s agreement,

for supporting Italy’s war against Libya, Ivanoe Bonomi held several

ministerial posts, and was head of government in 1921-22. His October

20, 1921 circular provided 60,000 demobilised officers to take command

of Mussolini’s assault groups.

Meanwhile, what were the parties doing? Those liberals allied with the

right did not hesitate to form a “national bloc”, including the

fascists, for the elections of May 1921. In June-July of the same year,

confronting an adversary without the slightest scruple, the PSI

concluded a meaningless “pacification pact” whose only concrete effect

was to further disorient the workers.

Faced with an obvious political reaction, the CGL declared itself

a-political. Sensing that Mussolini had power within his grasp, the

union leaders dreamed of a tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with the

fascists, and called on the proletariat to stay out of the face-off

between the CP and the National Fascist Party.

Until August 1922, fascism rarely existed outside the agrarian regions,

mainly in the north, where it eradicated all traces of autonomous

agrarian worker unionism. In 1919, fascists did burn the headquarters of

the socialist daily paper, but they held back from any role as

strike-breakers in 1920, and even gave verbal support to worker demands:

Mussolini took great pains to stand behind the strikers and dissociate

himself from troublemakers, i.e. communists. In the urban areas, the

fasci were rarely dominant. Their “March on Ravenna” (September 1921)

was easily routed. In Rome in November 1921 a general strike prevented a

fascist congress from taking place. In May 1922 the fascists tried

again, and were stopped again.

The scenario varied little. A localised fascist onslaught would be met

by a working-class counter-attack, which would then relent (following

calls for moderation from the reformist workers’ movement) as soon as

reactionary pressure tapered off: the proletarians trusted the democrats

to dismantle the armed bands. The fascist threat would pull back,

regroup and go elsewhere, over time making itself credible to the same

state from which the masses were expecting a solution. The proletarians

were quicker to recognise the enemy in the black shirt of the street

thug than in the “normal” uniform of a cop or soldier, draped in a

legality sanctioned by habit, law and universal suffrage. The workers

were militant, used guns, and turned many a Labour Exchange or Casa di

Popolo into a fortress, but stayed nearly always on the defensive,

waging a trench war against an ever mobile opponent.

At the beginning of July 1922, the CGL, by a two-thirds majority

(against the communist minority’s one-third), declared its support for

“any government guaranteeing the restoration of basic freedoms”. In the

same month, the fascists seriously stepped up their attempts to

penetrate the northern cities…

On August 1st, the Alliance of Labour, which included the railway

workers’ union, the CGL and the anarchist USI, called a general strike.

Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on

the 3rd. In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary

form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the

police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course,

reinforced by the fascists.

Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by

the state and the fasci, but it was also smothered by democracy, and its

failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis.

What followed was less a coup d’état than a transfer of power with the

support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the Duce (who

actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the

fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state

went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power.

His ultimatum of October 24 (“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a

threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National

Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state

authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army

could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which

were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and

the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was

not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio

in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-21) legitimate authority

caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the

30th he asked the Duce to form a new government.

The liberals — the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism —

joined the government. With the exception of the socialists and the

communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted

for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist MPs, supported

Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal

icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had been head of state

many times before the war, and then again in 1920-21, whom fashionable

thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of

opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. Democracy not only

surrendered its powers to the dictator, but ratified them.

We might add that in the following months, several unions, including

those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves

“national”, patriotic, and therefore not hostile to the regime:

repression did not spare them.

Turin: 1943

If Italian democracy yielded to fascism without a fight, the latter

spawned democracy anew when it found itself no longer corresponding to

the balance of social and political forces.

The central question after 1943, as in 1919, was how to control the

working-class. In Italy more than in other countries, the end of World

War II shows the class dimension of international conflict, which can

never be explained by military logic alone. A general strike erupted at

FIAT in October 1942. In March 1943, a strike wave rocked Turin and

Milan, including attempts at forming workers’ councils. In 1943-45,

worker groups emerged, sometimes independent of the CP, sometimes

calling themselves “Bordigists”, often simultaneously antifascist,

rossi, and armed. The regime could no longer maintain social

equilibrium, just as the German alliance was becoming untenable against

the rise of the Anglo-Americans, who were seen in every quarter as the

future masters of Western Europe. Changing sides meant allying with the

winners-to-be, but also meant rerouting worker revolts and partisan

groups into a patriotic objective with a social content. On July 10,

1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. On the 24th, finding himself in a

19-17 minority on the Grand Fascist Council, Mussolini resigned. Rarely

has a dictator had to step aside for a majority vote.

Marshal Badoglio, who had been a dignitary of the regime ever since his

support for the March on Rome, and who wanted to prevent, in his own

words, “the collapse of the regime from swinging too far to the left”,

formed a government which was still fascist but which no longer included

the Duce, and turned to the democratic opposition. The democrats refused

to participate, making the departure of the king a condition. After a

second transitional government, Badoglio formed a third in April 1944,

which included the leader of the CP, Togliatti. Under the pressure of

the Allies and of the CP, the democrats agreed to accept the king (the

Republic would be proclaimed by referendum in 1946). But Badoglio

stirred up too many bad memories. In June, Bonomi, who 23 years earlier

had ordered the officers to join the fasci, formed the first ministry to

actually exclude the fascists. This is how Bonomi, ex-socialist,

ex-warmonger, ex-minister, ex-“national bloc” (fascists included) MP,

ex-government leader from July 1921 to February 1922, ex-everything,

took office for six months as an anti-fascist. Later the situation was

reoriented around the tripartite formula (Stalinists + Socialists +

Christian Democrats) which would dominate both Italy and France in the

first years after the war.

This game of musical chairs, often played by the self-same political

class, was the theatre prop behind which democracy metamorphosed into

dictatorship, and vice-versa. The phases of equilibrium and

disequilibrium in class conflicts brought about a succession of

political forms aimed at maintaining the same state, underwriting the

same content. No one was more qualified to say it than the Spanish CP,

when it declared, out of cynicism or naivety, during the transition from

Francoism to democratic monarchy in the mid-70’s:

“Spanish society wants everything to be transformed so that the normal

functioning of the state can be assured, without detours or social

convulsions. The continuity of the state requires the non-continuity of

the regime.”

Volksgemeinschaft Vs. Gemeinwesen

Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the terrain of revolution.

Through its “people’s community” National Socialism would claim to have

eliminated the parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy against which the

proletariat revolted after 1917. But the conservative revolution also

took over old anti-capitalist tendencies (the return to nature, the

flight from cities…) that the workers’ parties, even the extremist ones,

had misestimated by their refusal to integrate the a-classist and

communitarian dimension of the proletariat, and their inability to think

of the future as anything but an extension of heavy industry. In the

first half of the 19th century, these themes were at the centre of the

socialist movement’s preoccupations, before Marxism abandoned them in

the name of progress and science, and they survived only in anarchism

and in sects.

Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen, people’s community or the human

community… 1933 was not the defeat, only the consummation of the defeat.

Nazism arose and triumphed to defuse, resolve and to close a social

crisis so deep that we still don’t appreciate its magnitude. Germany,

cradle of the largest Social Democracy in the world, also gave rise to

the strongest radical, anti-parliamentary, anti-union movement, one

aspiring to a “workers’” world but also capable of attracting to itself

many other anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolts. The presence of

avant-garde artists in the ranks of the “German Left” is no accident. It

was symptomatic of an attack on capital as “civilisation” in the way

Fourier criticised it. The loss of community, individualism and

gregariousness, sexual poverty, the family both undermined but affirmed

as a refuge, the estrangement from nature, industrialised food,

increasing artificiality, the prostheticisation of man, regimentation of

time, social relations increasingly mediated by money and technique: all

these alienations passed through the fire of a diffuse and multi-formed

critique. Only a superficial backward glance sees this ferment purely

through the prism of its inevitable recuperation.

The counter-revolution triumphed in the 1920’s only by laying the

foundations, in Germany and in the US, of a consumer society and of

Fordism, and by pulling millions of Germans, including workers, into

industrial, commodified modernity. Ten years of fragile rule, as the mad

hyperinflation of 1923 shows. This was followed in 1929 by an earthquake

in which not the proletariat but capitalist practice itself repudiated

the ideology of progress and an ever-increasing consumption of objects

and signs.

Capitalist modernity was questioned twice in ten years, first by

proletarians, then by capital. Nazi extremism and its violence were

adequate to the depth of the revolutionary movement National-Socialism

took over and negated. Like the radicals of 1919-21, Nazism proposed a

community of wage-workers, but one which was authoritarian, closed,

national, and racial, and for twelve years it succeeded in transforming

proletarians into wage-workers and into soldiers.

Fascism grew out of capital, but out of a capital which destroyed old

relationships without producing new stable ones brought about by

consumerism. Commodities failed to give birth to modern capitalist

community.

Berlin: 1919–33

Dictatorship always comes after the defeat of social movements, once

they have been chloroformed and massacred by democracy, the leftist

parties and the unions. In Italy, several months separated the final

proletarian failures from the appointment of Mussolini as head of state.

In Germany, a gap of a dozen years broke the continuity and made January

30, 1933 appear as an essentially political or ideological phenomenon,

not as the effect of an earlier social earthquake. The popular basis of

National Socialism and the murderous energy it unleashed remain

mysteries if one ignores the question of the submission, revolt, and

control of labour.

The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion a

proletarian assault strong enough to shake the foundations of society,

but impotent when it came to revolutionising it, thus bringing Social

Democracy and the unions to centre stage as the key to political

equilibrium. Their leaders emerged as men of order, and had no scruples

about calling in the Freikorps, fully fascist groupings with many future

Nazis in their ranks, to repress a radical worker minority in the name

of the interests of the reformist majority. First defeated by the rules

of bourgeois democracy, the communists were also defeated by

working-class democracy: the “works councils” placed their trust in the

traditional organisations, not in the revolutionaries easily denounced

as anti-democrats.

In this juncture, democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable to

German capitalism for killing off the spirit of revolt in the polling

booth, winning a series of reforms from the bosses, and dispersing the

revolutionaries.[25]

After 1929, on the other hand, capitalism needed to eliminate part of

the middle classes, and to discipline the proletarians, and even the

bourgeoisie. The workers’ movement, defending as it did political

pluralism and immediate worker interests, had become an obstacle. As

mediators between capital and labour, working-class organisations derive

their function from both, but also try to remain autonomous from both,

and from the state. Social Democracy has meaning only as a force

contending with the employers and the state, not as an organ absorbed by

them. Its vocation is the management of an enormous political,

municipal, social, mutualist and cultural network. The KPD, moreover,

had quickly constituted its own empire, smaller but vast nonetheless.

But as capital becomes more and more organised, it tends to pull

together all its different strands, bringing a statist element to the

enterprise, a bourgeois element to the trade-union bureaucracy, and a

social element to public administration. The weight of working-class

reformism, which ultimately pervaded the state, and its existence as a

“counter-society” made it a factor of social conservation which capital

in crisis had to eliminate. By their defence of wage-labour as a

component of capital, the SPD and the unions played an indispensable

anti-communist part in 1918-21, but this same function later led them to

put the interest of wage-labour ahead of everything else, to the

detriment of the reorganisation of capital as a whole.

A stable bourgeois state would have tried to solve this problem by

anti-union legislation, by recapturing the “worker fortress”, and by

pitting the middle classes, in the name of modernity, against the

archaism of the proles, as Thatcher’s England did much later. Such an

offensive assumes that capital is relatively united under the control of

a few dominant factions. But the German bourgeoisie of 1930 was

profoundly divided, the middle classes had collapsed, and the

nation-state was in shambles.

By negotiation or by force, modern democracy represents and reconciles

antagonistic interests, to the extent that this is possible. Endless

parliamentary crises and real or imagined plots (for which Germany was

the stage after the fall of the last socialist chancellor in 1930) in a

democracy are the invariable sign of long-term disarray in ruling

circles. At the beginning of the 1930’s, the crisis whipsawed the

bourgeoisie between irreconcilable social and geopolitical strategies:

either the increased integration or the elimination of the workers’

movement; international trade and pacifism, or autarchy laying the

foundations of a military expansion. The solution did not necessarily

imply a Hitler, but it did presuppose a concentration of force and

violence in the hands of central government. Once the centrist-reformist

compromise had exhausted itself, the only option left was statist,

protectionist and repressive.

A programme of this kind required the violent dismantling of Social

Democracy, which in its domestication of the workers had come to

exercise excessive influence, while still being incapable of unifying

all of Germany behind it. This unification was the task of Nazism, which

was able to appeal to all classes, from the unemployed to the industrial

tycoons, with a demagogy that even surpassed that of the bourgeois

politicians, and an anti-semitism intended to build cohesion through

exclusion.

How could the working-class parties have made themselves into an

obstacle to such xenophobic and racist madness, after having so often

been the fellow travellers of nationalism? For the SPD, this had been

clear since the turn of the century, obvious in 1914, and signed in

blood in the 1919 pact with the Freikorps, who were cast very much in

the same warrior mould as their contemporaries, the fasci.

Besides, socialists had not been immune to anti-semitism. Abraham

Berlau’s The German Social-Democratic Party 1914-1921 (Columbia 1949)

describes how many SPD or union leaders, and even the prestigious Neue

Zeit, openly raved against “foreign” (i.e. Polish and Russian) Jews. In

March 1920 the Berlin police (under socialist supervision) raided the

Jewish district and sent about 1000 people to a concentration camp. All

were freed later, but the labour movement did contribute to the spread

of anti-semitism.

The KPD, for its part, had not hesitated to ally with the nationalists

against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. No Comintern

theoretician opposed Radek when he stated that “only the working-class

can save the nation”. The KPD leader Thalheimer made it clear that the

party should fight alongside the German bourgeoisie, which played “an

objectively revolutionary role through its foreign policy”. Later,

around 1930, the KPD demanded a “national and social liberation” and

denounced fascism as a “traitor to the nation”. Talk of “national

revolution” was so common among German Stalinists that it inspired

Trotsky’s 1931 pamphlet Against National-Communism.

In January 1933, the die was cast. No one can deny that the Weimar

Republic willingly gave itself to Hitler. Both the right and the centre

had come round to seeing him as a viable solution to get the country out

of its impasse, or as a temporary lesser evil. “Big capital”, reticent

about any uncontrollable upheaval, had not, up to that time, been any

more generous with the NSDAP than with the other nationalist and

right-wing formations. Only in November 1932 did Schacht, an intimate

adviser of the bourgeoisie, convince business circles to support Hitler

(who had, moreover, just seen his electoral support slightly decline)

because he saw in Hitler a force capable of unifying the state and

society. The fact that industrial magnates did not foresee what then

ensued, leading to war and defeat, is another question, and in any event

they were not notable by their presence in the clandestine resistance to

the regime.

On January 30, 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor in complete legality

by Hindenburg, who himself had been constitutionally elected president a

year earlier with the support of the socialists, who saw in him a

rampart against… Hitler. The Nazis were a minority in the first

government formed by the leader of the NSDAP.

In the following weeks, the masks were taken off: working-class

militants were hunted down, their offices were sacked, and a reign of

terror was launched. In the elections of March 1933, held against the

backdrop of violence by both the storm-troopers and the police, 288

NSDAP MPs were sent to the Reichstag (while the KPD still retained 80

and the SPD 120).

Naive people might express surprise at the docility with which the

repressive apparatus goes over to dictators, but the state machine obeys

the authority commanding it. Did the new leaders not enjoy full

legitimacy? Did eminent jurists not write their decrees in conformity

with the higher laws of the land? In the democratic state — and Weimar

was one — if there is conflict between the two components of the

binomial, it is not democracy which will win out. In a “state founded on

law” — and Weimar was also one — if there is a contradiction, it is law

which must bend to serve the state, and never the opposite.

During these few months, what did the democrats do? Those on the right

accepted the new dispensation. The Zentrum, the Catholic party of the

centre, which had even seen its support increase in the March 1933

elections, voted to give four years of full emergency powers to Hitler,

powers which became the legal basis of Nazi dictatorship.

The socialists, for their part, attempted to avoid the fate of the KPD,

which had been outlawed on February 28 in the wake of the Reichstag

fire. On March 30, 1933, they left the Second International to prove

their national German character. On May 17 their parliamentary group

voted in support of Hitler’s foreign policy.

On June 22, the SPD was dissolved as “an enemy of the people and the

state”. A few weeks later, the Zentrum was forced to dissolve itself.

The unions followed in the footsteps of the Italian CGL, and hoped to

salvage what they could by insisting that they were a-political. In

1932, the union leaders had proclaimed their independence from all

parties and their indifference to the form of the state. This did not

stop them from seeking an accord with Schleicher, who was chancellor

from November 1932 to January 1933, and who was looking for a base and

some credible pro-worker demagogy. Once the Nazis had formed a

government, the union leaders convinced themselves that if they

recognised National Socialism, the regime would leave them some small

space. This strategy culminated in the farce of union members marching

under the swastika on May Day 1933, which had been renamed “Festival of

German Labour”. It was wasted effort. In the following days, the Nazis

liquidated the unions and arrested the militants.

Having been schooled to contain the masses and to negotiate in their

name or, that failing, to repress them, the working-class bureaucracy

was still fighting the previous war. The labour bureaucrats were not

being attacked for their lack of patriotism. What bothered the

bourgeoisie was not the bureaucrats’ lingering lip service to the old

pre-1914 internationalism, but rather the existence of trade-unions,

however servile, retaining a certain independence in an era in which

even an institution of class collaboration became superfluous if the

state did not completely control it.

Barcelona: 1936

In Italy and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means.

Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted

dictatorship with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the

exceptional case of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly,

defeated, Spain was the extreme case of armed confrontation between

democracy and fascism in which the nature of the struggle still remained

the same clash of two forms of capitalist development, two political

forms of the capitalist state, two state structures fighting for

legitimacy in the same country.

Objection!! — “So, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia

are the same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants

collectivising land are in the same camp?!”

First of all, the confrontation happened only because the workers rose

up against fascism. All the contradictions of the movement were manifest

in its first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into a

capitalist civil war (though of course there was no assignment of roles

in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated every act: history is

not a play).[26]

The dynamic of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the need

to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion

combines with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes

a crisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with

weak, recently unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents.

In Spain, from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the

colonial armed might of a commercial society it ultimately ruined,

choking off one of the pre-conditions of industrial expansion: an

agrarian reform. In fact, Spanish industrialisation had to make its way

through monopolies, the misappropriation of public funds, and

parasitism.

Space is lacking here for a summary of the 19th century crazy quilt of

countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic squabbles, the Carlist

wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after World War

I, and the cycle of insurrections and repressions that followed the

establishment of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these rumblings was

the weakness of the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was between its

rivalry with the landed oligarchy and the absolute necessity of

containing peasant and worker revolts. In 1936, the land question had

not been resolved: unlike France after 1789, the mid-19th century

sell-off of the Spanish clergy’s lands wound up strengthening a

latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the Institute for

Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at its disposal to buy

up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936-39 would never have reached

such political extremes, including the explosion of the state into two

factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which had

been rising from the social depths for a century.

Spain had no large centre-left bourgeois party like the “Parti Radical”

which was the centre of gravity of French politics for over sixty years.

Before July 1936, Spanish Social Democracy kept a much more militant

outlook in a country where land was often occupied by wage-labourers,

where strikes were rampant, where Madrid tram workers tried to manage

the workplace, and where crowds stormed jails to free some of the 30,000

political prisoners. As a socialist leader put it: “The possibilities of

stabilising a democratic republic in our country are decreasing every

day. Elections are but a variant of civil war.” (One might add: a

variant of how to keep it at bay.)

In the summer of 1936, it was an open secret that a military coup was

coming. After giving the rebels every chance to prepare themselves, the

Popular Front elected in February was willing to negotiate and perhaps

even to surrender. The politicians would have made their peace with the

rebels, as they had done during the dictatorship of Primo de Riveira

(1932-31), which was supported by eminent socialists (Caballero had

served it as a technical counsellor, before becoming Minister of Labour

in 1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936

to May 1937). Furthermore, the general who had obeyed Republican orders

two years earlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection — Franco —

couldn’t be all that bad.

But the proletariat rose up, blocked the putsch in half of the country,

and hung on to its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously

fighting fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists, because

their actions were directed against Franco and against a democratic

state more unsettled by the masses’ initiative than by the military

revolt. Three prime ministers came and went in 24 hours before the fait

accompli of the arming of the people was accepted.

Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the problem of

violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not go to the

side with the advantage in weaponry (the military) or in numbers (the

people), but rather to who dares to take the initiative. Where workers

trusted the state, the state remained passive or promised the moon, as

happened in Zaragoza. When their struggle was focused and sharp (as in

Malaga) the workers won; if it was lacking in vigour, it was drowned in

blood (20,000 killed in Seville).

Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection, but

such a characterisation is incomplete. It holds true only for the

opening moment: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the

forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the workers had the

power. But what were they going to do with it? Should they give it back

to the republican state, or should they use it to go further in a

communist direction?

Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of

Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT

(socialist union), the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of

the CP and the socialists in Catalonia), and four representatives of the

Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge

between the workers’ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not

integrated into the Generalitat’s Department of Defence by the presence

in its midst of the latter’s council of defence, the commissar of public

order, etc., the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to

unravel.

Of course in giving up their autonomy most proletarians believed that

they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power and giving

the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and

which they could control and orient in a favourable direction. Were they

not armed?

This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? But

rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000

proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in

anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next

day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they

recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.

“In fact, the fight in Spain between “legal” government and “rebel

forces” is in no way a fight for ideals, but a struggle between

determined capitalist groups entrenched in the bourgeois Republic and

other capitalist groups … The Spanish cabinet is no different in its

principles from the bloody Leroux regime which massacred thousands of

Spanish proletarians in 1934 … Spanish workers are now being oppressed

with guns in their hands!”[27]

The insurgents did not take on the legal government, in other words the

state as it then existed, and all their subsequent actions took place

under its auspices. “A revolution had begun but never consolidated”, as

Orwell wrote. This is the main point which determined the course of an

increasingly losing armed struggle against Franco, as well as the

exhaustion and destruction by both camps of the collectivisations and

socialisations. After the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was

exercised by the state and not by organisations, unions, collectivities,

committees, etc. Even though Nin, the head of the POUM, was an adviser

to the Ministry of Justice, “The POUM nowhere succeeded in having any

influence over the police”, as one defender of that party admitted.[28]

While the workers’ militias were indeed the flower of the Republican

army and paid a heavy price in combat, they carried no weight in the

decisions of the high command, which steadily integrated them into

regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring

to wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the

powerful CNT, it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before

July 1936 (having 14 MPs in the Popular Front chamber in February, as

opposed to 85 socialists), but which was able to insinuate itself into

part of the state apparatus and turn the state increasingly to its own

advantage against the radicals, and particularly against the militants

of the CNT. The question was: who mastered the situation? And the answer

was: the state makes subtle and brutal use of its power when it has to.

If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time

dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and

hunting down Trotskyist “saboteurs” and other “Hitler agents” at the

very moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything in

the struggle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse.

For the state and the CP (which was becoming the backbone of the state

through the military and police) these operations were not a waste of

time. The head of the PSUC supposedly said: “Before taking Zaragoza, we

have to take Barcelona.” Their main objective was never crushing Franco,

but retaining control of the masses, for this is what states are for,

and this is how Stalinism got its power. Barcelona was taken away from

the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in fascist hands.

Barcelona: May 1937

On May 3, the police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which

was under the control of anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the

Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority

stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and

anti-bourgeois. The local police, moreover, was in the hands of the

PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the workers finally

understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the

gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and that their

insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab

by the state, a general strike paralysed Barcelona. It was too late. The

workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time

in its democratic form), but they could no longer push their struggle to

the point of an open break.

As always, the “social” question predominated over the military one.

Legal authority could not impose itself by street battles. Within a few

hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a face-off

of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a

defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was

attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk

its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly

speaking, the CP and the state held the centre of the city, while the

CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts.

The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed

their trust in the two organisations under attack, while the latter,

afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though

not without difficulty) and thereby undermined the only force capable of

saving them politically and… “physically”. As soon as the strike was

over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the

government brought in 6,000 Assault Guards — the elite of the police.

Because they accepted the mediation of “representative organisations”

and counsels of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same

masses who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrendered

without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.

At that point repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to

outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or

otherwise, and to dispose of Nin. A parallel police was established,

organised by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and

answering only to Moscow. Anyone showing the slightest opposition to the

Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, could be denounced and

hunted down as a “fascist”, and all around the world an army of

well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from

ignorance, others from self-interest, but every one of them convinced

that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march.

The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the

Moscow Trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism

locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for the control

of the masses. At the time, not just CP fellow-travellers, but many

political parties, lawyers, reporters and even the French League for the

Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty

years later, mainstream ideology sees these trials as a sign of the

Kremlin’s mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do

with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the

most moderate forces and always turn against the most radical ones.

On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few months

before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the

right than Caballero: Negrin, heading a government which came down hard

on the side of law and order, including open repression against the

workers. Orwell — who almost lost his life in the events — realised that

the war “for democracy” was obviously over: “that meant that the general

movement would be in the direction of some kind of fascism.” What

remained was a competition between two fascisms, Orwell wrote, with the

difference that one was less inhuman than its rival: he therefore clung

to the necessity of avoiding the “more naked and developed fascism of

Hitler and Franco”.[29] From then on, the only issue was fighting for a

fascism less bad than the opposing one…

War Devours The Revolution

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from

a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is

never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to

break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are:

commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as

commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and

machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social

life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will

be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any

nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers

included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to

conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political

revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their

territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the

insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for

specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve

problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the

common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution

dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of

states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class “militia man” evolved

into a “soldier”.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in

other cities, starting from Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas

under Republican control, however, would have meant completing the

revolution in the Republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not

seem to realise that the state was everywhere still intact. As his

column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the

collectivisations: the militias helped the peasants and spread

revolutionary ideas. Yet however much Durruti declared that “these

militias will never defend the bourgeoisie” they did not attack it

either. Two weeks before his death he delivered a speech broadcast on

November 4, 1936:

“At the front and in the trenches there is only one idea and one aim —

the destruction of fascism.

“We call on the Catalan people to stop all internal conflicts and

intrigues, to forget all jealousy and politics and to think of the war

only. The politicians are only playing tricks to secure for themselves

an agreeable life. This dubious art must be replaced by the art to work.

The people of Catalonia must be worthy of their brothers fighting at the

front. If the workers of Catalonia have taken the supreme task to fight

at the different fronts, those living in towns and cities will also have

to be mobilised to do their share. Our heroic militia, ready to lie down

their lives on the battlefield want to be assured whom they have behind

them. They feel that no one should be deterred from their duty because

of lack of wage increase or shorter hours of work. Today all toilers and

especially those of the CNT must be ready for the utmost sacrifices. For

in that way alone can we hope to triumph over fascism.

“I address myself to all organisations, asking them to bury their

conflicts and grudges…

“The militarisation of the militias has been decreed. If this has been

done to frighten us, to impose on us an iron discipline, this is a

mistaken policy. We challenge those who have issued this decree to come

to the front and see for themselves our moral and our discipline and

compare it with the moral and discipline in the rear. We will not accept

dictated discipline. We are doing our duty. Come to the front to see our

organisation! Later we shall come to Barcelona to examine your

discipline, your organisation and your control!

“There is no chaos at the front, no lack of discipline. We all have a

strong sense of responsibility. We know what you have entrusted us with.

You can sleep quietly. But remember we have left Barcelona in your

hands. We demand responsibility and discipline from you too. Let us

prove our capacity to prevent the creation of new differences after our

war against fascism. Those who want their movement to be the strongest

are working in the wrong direction. Against tyranny there is only one

front possible, one organisation and only one sort of discipline.”[30]

Listeners would think that a revolution had actually taken place,

politically and socially, and just needed its military completion:

smashing the fascists. Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which

had not waited for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the

combative will in the world is not enough when workers aim all their

blows against one particular form of the state, and not against the

state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war of fronts meant leaving

social and political weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie behind the

lines, and moreover meant depriving military action itself of the

initial vigour it drew from another terrain, the only one where the

proletariat has the upper hand. As the “Dutch Left” wrote:

“If the workers really want to build up a defence front against the

Whites, they can only do so by taking over political power themselves,

instead of leaving it in the hands of a Popular Front government. In

other words, defending the revolution is only possible through the

dictatorship of the proletariat, and not through the collaboration of

all anti-fascist parties … Proletarian revolution revolves around the

destruction of the old state machine, and the exercise of the central

functions of power by the workers themselves.”[31]

In the summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority,

the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the

Foreign Legion and in the Moroccan “Moors”. In 1912, Morocco had been

split by France and Spain into two protectorates, but had long since

rebelled against the colonial dreams of both countries. The Spanish

royal army had been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the

defection of Moroccan troops. Despite Franco-Spanish collaboration, the

Rif war (in which a general named Franco had distinguished himself)

ended only when Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years later, the

announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for Spanish

Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the shock

troops of reaction. The Republic obviously gave short shrift to this

solution, under a combined pressure from conservative milieus and from

the democracies of England and France, which had little enthusiasm for

the possible break-up of their own empires. At the very time, moreover,

the French Popular Front not only refused to grant any reform worthy of

any name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the Etoile

Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria.

Everyone knows that the policy of “non-intervention” in Spain was a

farce. One week after the putsch London announced its opposition to any

arms shipment to what was then the legal Spanish government, and its

neutrality in the event that France would become drawn into a conflict.

Democratic England thus put the Republic and fascism on the same level.

As a result, the France of Blum and Thorez sent a few planes, while

Italy and Germany sent whole divisions with their supplies. As for the

International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet Union and the CPs,

their military value came at a heavy price, namely the elimination of

any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks. It was at the

beginning of 1937, after the first arms shipments, that Catalonia

removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.

Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of battles,

cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a

directly “social” war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of

anti-fascism. Revolutionary élan initially broke the élan of the

nationalists. Then the workers accepted legality: the conflict was

stalemated and then institutionalised. From late 1936 onward, the

militia columns were bogged down in the siege of Zaragoza. The state

armed only the military units it trusted, i.e. the ones which would not

confiscate property. By early 1937, in the poorly equipped POUM militias

fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury. In the

cities, militia men rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular

soldiers. The fronts got stuck, like the Barcelona proletarians against

the cops. The last burst of energy was the Republican victory at Madrid.

Soon hereafter, the government ordered private individuals to hand in

their weapons. The decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an

unabashed will to disarm the people. Disappointment and suspicions

undermined morale. The war was increasingly in the hands of specialists.

Finally, the Republic increasingly lost ground as all social content and

revolutionary appearances faded away in the anti-fascist camp.

Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social

question into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being “the

strongest”. The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers,

superior logistics, competent officers and the support of allies whose

own political nature gets as little scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all

this means taking the conflict further from daily life. It is a peculiar

quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts, no one wants to lose

but everyone wants it to end. In contrast to revolution, except in the

case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed into a

military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased to be a personal

commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilisation from

above, like in any other war situation. After January 1937, voluntary

enlistments tapered off, and the civil war, in both camps, came to

depend mainly on compulsory military service. As a result a militia man

of July 1936 leaving his column a year later, disgusted with Republican

politics, could be arrested and shot as a “deserter”!

In different historical conditions, the military evolution from

insurrection to militias and then to a regular army is reminiscent of

the anti-Napoleonic “guerrilla” warfare (the term was borrowed from

Spanish at the time) described by Marx:

“By comparing the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the political

history of Spain, it is found that they represent the respective degrees

into which the counter-revolutionary spirit of the Government had

succeeded in cooling the spirit of the people. Beginning with the rise

of whole populations, the partisan war was next carried on by guerrilla

bands, of which whole districts formed the reserve, and terminated in

corps francs continually on the point of dwindling into banditti, or

sinking down to the level of standing regiments.”[32]

For 1936, as for 1808, the evolution of the military situation cannot be

explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from

the balance of political and social forces and its modification in an

anti-revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durruti, the

necessity of unity at any cost, could only hand victory first to the

Republican state (over the proletariat) and then to the Francoist state

(over the Republic).

There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it turned into its

opposite as the proletarians, convinced that they had effective power,

placed their trust in the state to fight against Franco. On that basis,

the multiplicity of subversive initiatives and measures taken in

production and in daily life were doomed by the simple and terrible fact

that they took place in the shadow of an intact state structure, which

had initially been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the

necessities of the war against Franco, a paradox which remained opaque

to most revolutionary groups at the time. In order to be consolidated

and extended, the transformations without which revolution becomes an

empty word had to pose themselves as antagonistic to a state clearly

designed as the adversary.

The trouble was, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only.

Not only did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the

insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socialisations,

tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the

anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through

the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of “realism”, the recourse

to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (including the

POUM and the CNT) in the name of effectiveness almost invariably proved

ineffective. Sixty years later, people still deplore the fact. But the

democratic state is as little suited for armed struggle against fascism

as it is for stopping its peaceful accession to power. States are

normally loath to deal with social war, and normally fear rather than

encourage fraternisation. When, in Guadalajara, the anti-fascists

addressed themselves as workers to the Italian soldiers sent by

Mussolini, a group of Italians defected. Such an episode remained the

exception.

From the battle for Madrid (March ’37) to the final fall of Catalonia

(February ’39), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the

battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war

wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist

problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded

in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in

check. In February 1939, the Surrealist and (then) Trotskyist Benjamin

Péret analysed the consummation of the defeat as follows:

“The working class… having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees

any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan

against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defence of

Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war

increasingly became an imperialist war.”[33]

That same year, Bruno Rizzi made a similar comment in his essay on

“collective bureaucratism” in the USSR:

“The old democracies play the game of anti-fascist politics in order to

let the sleeping dog lie. One must keep the proletarians quiet… at any

time, the old democracies feed the working class with anti-fascism…

Spain had turned into a slaughter of proletarians of all nationalities,

in order to calm down unruly revolutionary workers, and to sell off the

products of heavy industry.”

The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions.

If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of

workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic

and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up

behind Franco. This class polarisation gave a progressive aura to the

Republican state, but it did not disclose the historical meaning of the

conflict, any more than the large working-class membership of socialist

or Stalinist parties told us all about their nature. Such facts were

real, but secondary to the social function of these parties: in fact,

because they were grass-roots bodies, they were able to control or

oppose any proletarian upsurge. Likewise the Republican army had a large

number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were

they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one it

considers possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the

bourgeoisie.

“Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle”, Trotsky

wrote in Their Morals and Ours (1938). Quite… as long as one adds that,

from the “Wars of Religion” to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our

own time, civil war is also, and indeed most often, the form of an

impossible or failed social struggle: when class contradictions cannot

assert themselves as such, they erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs,

still further delaying any human emancipation.

Anarchists In The Government

Social Democracy did not “capitulate” in August 1914, like a fighter

throwing in the towel: it followed the normal trajectory of a powerful

movement which was internationalist in rhetoric and which, in reality,

had become profoundly national long before. The SPD may well have been

the leading electoral force in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only

for the purpose of reform, within the framework of capitalism and

according to its laws, which included for example accepting colonialism,

and also war when the latter became the sole solution to social and

political contradictions.

In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism in the state in

1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a union,

an original union undoubtedly but a union all the same, and there is no

such thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ.

Whatever its original ideals, every permanent organism for defending

wage labourers as such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Even

when it is in the hands of radicals, even when it is repressed, the

institution is bound to escape control of the base and to turn into a

moderating instrument. Anarchist union though it may have been, the CNT

was a union before it was anarchist. A world separated the rank-and-file

from the leader seated at the bosses’ table, but the CNT as a whole was

little different from the UGT. Both of them worked to modernise and

rationally manage the economy: in a word, to socialise capitalism. A

single thread connects the socialist vote for war credits in August 1914

to the participation in the government of the anarchist leaders, first

in Catalonia (September ’36) and then in the Spanish Republic (November

’36). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of his comrades

(including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defence “government

anarchists”.

The CNT had long been both institutionalised and subversive. The

contradiction ended in the 1931 general election, when the CNT gave up

its anti-parliamentary stand, asking the masses to vote for Republican

candidates. The anarchist organisation was turning into “a union

aspiring to the conquest of power”, that would “inevitably lead to a

dictatorship over the proletariat”.[34]

From one compromise to the next, the CNT wound up renouncing the

anti-statism which was its raison d’être, even after the Republic and

its Russian ally or master had shown their real faces in May ’37, not to

mention everything that followed, in the jails and secrets cellars. Like

the POUM, the CNT was effective in disarming proletarians, calling on

them to give up their struggle against the official and Stalinist police

bent on finishing them off. As the GIC put it,

“…the CNT was among those chiefly responsible for the crushing of the

insurrection. It demoralised the proletariat at a time when the latter

was moving against democratic reactionaries.”[35]

Some radicals even had the bitter surprise of being locked up in a

prison administered by an old anarchist comrade, stripped of any real

power over what went on in his jail. Adding insult to injury, a CNT

delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting material aid

did not even raise the issue of the Moscow Trials.

Everything for the anti-fascist struggle!

Everything for cannons and guns!

But even so, some people might object, anarchists by their very nature

are vaccinated against the statist virus. Isn’t anarchism the arch-enemy

of the state? Yes, but…

Some Marxists can recite whole pages of The Civil War in France on the

destruction of the state machine, and quote the passage from State and

Revolution where Lenin says that one day cooks will administer society

instead of politicians. But these same Marxists can practice the most

servile state idolatry, once they come to see the state as the agent of

progress or historical necessity. Because they imagine the future as a

capitalist socialisation without capitalists, as a world still based on

wage labour but egalitarian, democratised and planned, everything

prepares them to accept a state (transitional, to be sure) and to go off

to war for a capitalist state they see as bad, against another they see

as worse.

Anarchism overestimates state power by regarding authority as the main

enemy, and at the same time underestimates the state’s force of inertia.

The state is the guarantor, but not the creator, of social

relationships. It represents and unifies capital, it is neither

capital’s motor nor its centrepiece. From the undeniable fact that the

Spanish masses were armed after July 1936, anarchism deduced that the

state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides

not in institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state

ensures the tie which human beings cannot and dare not create among

themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and

real.

In the summer of 1936, the state apparatus may have seemed derelict in

Republican Spain, because it only subsisted as a potential framework

capable of picking up the pieces of capitalist society and re-arranging

them one day. In the meantime, it continued to live, in social

hibernation. Then it gained new strength when the relations opened up by

subversion were loosened or torn apart. It revived its organs, and, the

occasion permitting, assumed control over those bodies which subversion

had caused to emerge. What had been seen as an empty shell showed itself

capable not only of revival, but of actually emptying out the parallel

forms of power in which the revolution thought it had best embodied

itself.

The CNT’s ultimate justification of its role comes down to the idea that

the government no longer really had power, because the workers’ movement

had taken power de facto.

“…the government has ceased to be a force oppressing the working-class,

in the same way that the state is no longer the organism dividing

society into classes. And if CNT members work within the state and

government, the people will be less and less oppressed.”[36]

No less than Marxism, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as

being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little armed

flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never

claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a

minority that would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared

the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of

the “social organisations” (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of

the state, its raison d’être, is to paper over the shortcomings of

“civil” society by a system of relations, of links, of a concentration

of forces, an administrative, police, judicial, and military network

which goes “on hold” as a backup in times of crisis, awaiting the moment

when a police investigator can go sniffing into the files of the social

worker. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor’s

mansion to “take”: its task is to render harmless or destroy everything

from which such places draw their substance.

The Rise And Decline Of The Collectivisations

The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socialisations

after July 1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish

tradition of popular autonomy, and the gap between the people and the

state which made itself manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in

the revolutions of the 19th century, which renewed age-old communal

resistance to the power of the dynasty. The absolute monarchy, he

observed, did not shake up various strata to forge a modern state, but

rather left the living forces of the country intact. Napoleon could see

Spain as a “cadaver,

… but if the Spanish state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of

life” and “what we call the state in the modern sense of the word is

materialised, in reality, only in the army, in keeping with the

exclusive “provincial” life of the people.”[37]

In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it was

vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789.

But if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated

economically, they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal

market and a modern state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a

whole, and the domination of local life and its particularism. For Marx

in 1854 a “despotic” government coexisted with a lack of unity that

extended to the point of different currencies and different systems of

taxation: his observation still had some validity eighty years later.

The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out agrarian

reform; it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary

for capital accumulation, nor unify the provinces, nor less keep down

the proletarians of the cities and the countryside.

It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July ’36 gave rise, on

the margins of political power, to a social movement whose real

expressions, while containing communist potential, were later reabsorbed

by the state they allowed to remain intact. The first months of a

revolution already ebbing, but whose extent still concealed its failure,

looked like a splintering process: each region, commune, enterprise,

collective and municipality escaped the central authority without

actually attacking it, and set out to live differently. Anarchism, and

even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish originality,

which is wrongly grasped if one sees only the negative side of this

“late” capitalist development. Even the ebb of 1937 did not eradicate

the élan of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who took over

land, factories, neighbourhoods, villages, seizing property and

socialising production with an autonomy and a solidarity in daily life

that struck both observers and participants.[38] Communism is also the

re-appropriation of the conditions of existence.

Sad to say, if these countless acts and deeds, sometimes extending over

several years, bear witness (as do, in their own way, the Russian and

German experience) to a communist movement remaking all of society, and

to its formidable subversive capacities when it emerges on a large

scale, it is equally true that its fate was sealed from the summer of

1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigour

of communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital

but which are not yet daily reproduced by capital, and also their

impotence, taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution. The

absence of an assault against the state condemned the establishment of

different relationships to a fragmentary self-management preserving the

content and often the forms of capitalism, notably money and the

division of activities by individual enterprises. Any persistence of

wage-labour perpetuates the hierarchy of functions and incomes.

Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two

states (Republican and Nationalist), if only by solving the agrarian

question: in the 1930’s, more than half of the population went hungry. A

subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed

strata, those farthest from “political life” (e.g. women), but it could

not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.

At the time, the workers’ movement in the major industrial countries

corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialised by

a total domination of capital over society, where communism was both

closer at hand as a result of this socialisation, and at the same time

farther away because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity

form. The new world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as

a worker’s world, even as an industrial one.

The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by a

capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative than

qualitative. From this reality it drew both its strength and its

weakness, as attested by the tradition and demands for autonomy

represented by anarchism.

“In the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in

Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the

sharing out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of

independence … the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They

too demand, first of all, the possibility of managing their industrial

community or their union themselves, and then the reduction of working

hours and of the effort required from everyone …”[39]

One of the main weaknesses was the attitude towards money. The

“disappearance of money” is meaningful only if it entails more than the

replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one (such

as labour coupons). Like most radical groups, whether they called

themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see money

as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a tool

of measurement, an accounting device, and they reduced socialism to a

different management of the same categories and fundamental components

of capitalism.

The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations was not

due to the power of the UGT (which was opposed to the collectivisations)

over the banks. The closing of private banks and of the central bank

puts an end to mercantile relations only if production and life are

organised in a way no longer mediated by the commodity, and if such a

communal production and life gradually come to dominate the totality of

social relationships. Money is not the “evil” to be removed from an

otherwise “good” production, but the manifestation (today becoming

increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspects of

life. It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when

exchange withers away as a social relationship.

In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and they

often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being

used as “internal money”. Sometimes money was handed over to the

collective. Sometimes workers were given vouchers according to the size

of their families, not to the amount of work done (“to each according to

their need”). Sometimes money played no part: goods were shared. An

egalitarian spirit prevailed, as well as a rejection of “luxury”.[40]

However, unable to extend non-commodity production beyond different

autonomous zones with no scope for global action, the soviets,

collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious

communities, and sooner or later were either destroyed from within or

violently suppressed by the fascists… or the Republicans. In Aragon, the

column of the Stalinist Lister made this a speciality. Entering the

village of Calanda, his first act was to write on a wall:

“Collectivisations are theft.”

Collectivise Or Communise?

Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the

collective appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic

statism. Both visions, nonetheless, have the same starting point: the

need for collective management. The problem is: management of what? Of

course, what Social Democracy carried out from above, bureaucratically,

the Spanish proletarians practised at the base, armed, with each

individual responsible to everyone, thereby taking the land and the

factories away from a minority specialised in the organising and

exploitation of others. The opposite, in short, of the co-management of

the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist union officials. Nevertheless,

the fact that a collectivity, rather than the state or a bureaucracy,

takes the production of its material life into its own hands does not,

by itself, do away with the capitalist character of that life.

Wage labour means the passage of an activity, whatever it might be,

ploughing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money.

This money, while it makes the activity possible, is expanded by it.

Equalising wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing

currency by coupons has never been enough to do away with wage labour.

What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money

becomes its master.

Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a

guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because if the collective did abolish

private property within itself, it also set itself up as a distinct

entity and as a particular element among others in the global economy,

and therefore as a private collective, compelled to buy and sell, to

trade with the outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise

which like it or not, had to play its part in regional, national and

world competition or else disappear.

One can only rejoice in the fact that half of Spain imploded: what

mainstream opinion calls “anarchy” is a necessary condition for

revolution, as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made

their subversive impact on the basis of a centrifugal force. Rejuvenated

communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and their

barrio, as if the point were to discover a lost world and a degraded

humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighbourhood to the

metropolis, the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the

countryside of the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the

poor to the rich, the small to the large and the local to the

international, all the while forgetting that a co-operative is often the

longest road to capitalism.

There is no revolution without the destruction of the state. But how?

Beating off armed bands, getting rid of state structures and habits,

setting up new modes of debate and decision — all these tasks are

impossible if they do no go hand in hand with communisation. We don’t

want “power”, we want the power to change all of life. As an historical

process extending over generations, can one imagine over such a time

frame continuing to pay wages for food and lodging? If the revolution is

supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an

apparatus whose sole function would be the struggle against the

supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a

system of control resting on no other content than its “programme” and

its will to realise communism the day that conditions finally allow for

it. This is how a revolution ideologises itself and legitimises the

birth of a specialised stratum assigned to oversee the maturation and

the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff

of politics is not being able, and not wanting, to change anything: it

brings together what is separated without going any further. Power is

there, it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it represses:

it is.

Political domination (in which a whole school of thought sees problem

number one) flows from the incapacity of human beings to take charge of

themselves, and to organise their lives and their activity. This

domination persists only through the radical dispossession which

characterises the proletarian. When everyone participates in the

production of their existence, the capacity for pressure and oppression

now in the hands of the state will cease to be operative. It is because

wage-labour society deprives us of our means of living, producing and

communicating, not stopping short of the invasion of once-private space

and of our emotional lives, that the state is all-powerful. The best

guarantee against the reappearance of a new structure of power over us

is the deepest possible appropriation of the conditions of existence, at

every level. For example, even if we don’t want everyone generating

their own electricity in their basements, the domination of the

Leviathan also comes from the fact that energy (a significant term,

another word for which is power) makes us dependent on industrial

complexes which, nuclear or not, inevitably remain external to us and

escape any control.

To conceive the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against

the police and the armed forces is to mistake the part for the whole.

Communism is first of all activity. A mode of life in which men and

women produce their social existence paralyses or reabsorbs the

emergence of separate powers.

The alternative upheld by Bordiga: “Shall we take over the factory, or

take over power?” (Il Soviet, February 20, 1920) can and must be

superseded. We don’t say: it does not matter who manages production,

whether an executive or a council, because what counts is to have

production without value. We say: as long as production for value

continues, as long as it is separated from the rest of life, as long as

humankind does not collectively produce its ways and means of existence,

as long as there is an “economy”, any council is bound to lose its power

to an executive. This is where we differ both from “councilists” and

“Bordigists”, and why we are likely to be called Bordigists by the

former, and councilists by the latter.

Leaving The 20th Century?

The Spanish failure of 1936-37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of

1917-21. The Russian workers were able to seize power, not to use it for

a communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and

international isolation by themselves do not explain the involution. The

perspective set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way

after 1917, of a renaissance in a new form of communal agrarian

structures, was at the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Lenin’s

eulogy for Taylorism, and Trotsky’s justification of military labour,

for almost all the Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of the Third

International, including the Communist Left, socialism meant a

capitalist socialisation plus soviets, and the agriculture of the future

was conceived as democratically managed large landholdings. (The

difference — and it is a major one! — between the German-Dutch left and

the Comintern was that the Left took soviets and worker democracy

seriously, whereas the Russian communists, as their practice proved, saw

in them nothing but tactical formulas.)

The Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens to a power

which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing real

conditions very much.

What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is

violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation. The Russian

civil war was won in 1919, but sealed the fate of the revolution, as the

victory over the Whites was achieved without communising society, and

ended in a new state power. In his 1939 Brown Fascism, Red Fascism, Otto

Rühle pointed out how the French Revolution had given birth to a

military structure and strategy adequate to its social content. It

unified the bourgeoisie with the people, while the Russian revolution

failed to create an army based on proletarian principles. The Red Army

that Poland defeated in 1920 hardly kept any revolutionary significance.

As early as mid-1918, Trotsky summed it up in three words: “work,

discipline, order”.

Very logically and, at least in the beginning, in perfectly good faith,

the soviet state perpetuated itself at any cost, first in the

perspective of world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute

priority being to preserve the unity of a society coming apart at the

seams. This explains, on one hand, the concessions to small peasant

property, followed by requisitions, both of which resulted in a further

unravelling of any communal life or production. On the other hand, it

also explains the repression against workers and against any opposition

within the party.

In January 1921, the wheel had come full circle. The 1917 revolutionary

wave set in motion by mutinies and basic democratic demands ended in the

same way — except this time proles were being repressed by a

“proletarian” state. A power which gets to the point of massacring the

Kronstadt mutineers in the name of a socialism it could not realise, and

which goes on to justify its action with lies and calumny, is only

demonstrating that it no longer has any communist character. Lenin died

his physical death in 1924, but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head

of state in 1921, if not earlier. Bolshevism was left with no option but

to become the manager of capitalism.

As the hypertrophy of a political perspective hell bent on eliminating

the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution

dissolved in a self-cannibalising civil war. Its pathos was that of a

power which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a

counter-revolutionary force.

In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their

own terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie

and its state were present behind the front lines on both sides. In

1936-37, the proletarians of Spain were not fighting against Franco

alone, but also against the fascist countries, against the democracies

and the farce of “non-intervention”, against their own state, against

the Soviet Union, against...

The “Italian” and “German-Dutch” communist Left (including Mattick in

the US) were among the very few who defined the post-1933 period as

utterly anti-revolutionary, whereas many groups (Trotskyists, for

example) were prompt to foresee subversive potentials in France, in

Spain, in America, etc.

1937 closed the historical moment opened by 1917. From then on, capital

would not accept any other community but its own, which meant there

could no longer be permanent radical proletarian groups of any

significant size. The demise of the POUM was tantamount to the end of

the former workers’ movement.

In a future revolutionary period, the most subtle and most dangerous

defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalist

and pro-statist slogans, but those who have understood the possible

point of a total rupture. Far from eulogising TV commercials and social

submission, they will propose to change life… but, to that end, call for

building a true democratic power first. If they succeed in dominating

the situation, the creation of this new political form will use up

people’s energy, fritter away radical aspirations and, with the means

becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an ideology.

Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the

proletarians’ only path to success will be the multiplication of

concrete communist initiatives, which will naturally often be denounced

as anti-democratic or even as… “fascist”. The struggle to establish

places and moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the

autonomy of the movement, will prove inseparable from practical measures

aimed at changing life.

“…in all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always remained

intact and the only issue has been a different distribution of this

activity and a redistribution of work among different persons; whereas

the communist revolution is directed against the mode of activity as it

has existed up till now and abolishes work and the domination of all

classes by abolishing classes themselves, because it is carried out by

the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not

recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the

dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present

society…”[41]

Normative History and the Communist Essence of the Proletariat

Théorie Communiste, 'Histoire normative et essence communiste du

prolétariat. Théorie Communiste , no. 16, 2000 A critique of Gilles

Dauvé's When Insurrections Die Translated by Endnotes .

In When Insurrections Die we find the normative conception of the

history of class struggle in its purity. On the first page Dauvé puts in

place the vocabulary of this problematic: a vocabulary of “missed”

chances and “failed” materialisations. Throughout the text fascism and

Nazism are described as the result of the limits of the class struggles

of the preceding period, but these limits are defined in relation to

Communism (with a big ‘C’) rather than in relation to the struggles of

that period. Meanwhile the history of capital is referred to a

contradiction which overreaches it, a general contradiction of history:

the separation between man and community, between human activity and

society:

“Democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated

society in history.”[42]

But this was never its intention. Only the society in which the

relations between people are the strongest and most developed produces

the fiction of the isolated individual. The question is never to know

how individuals, determined by a mode of production, are linked together

by a political form, but why these social bonds take the form of

politics. A certain type of individual corresponds to a certain type of

community; individuals form communities as limited as themselves.

Democracy (the state in general) is the form of this community at the

political level; it does not respond to a general separation — such a

separation does not exist. To say that democracy responds “badly” to

separation is to say that this general separation is the general dynamic

of history (an idea broadly developed in La Banquise).

We are told that the workers were defeated by democracy (with the aid of

the parties and unions); but the objectives — the content — of these

workers’ struggles (in Italy, Spain, Germany) always remains unspoken.

We are thus plunged into the problematic of “betrayal” by the parties

and unions.[43] That the workers obeyed reformist movements — it is

precisely this that ought to have been explained — and on the basis of

the nature of those struggles themselves, rather than letting the

nebulous shadows of manipulation and trickery pass for explanation.

“Proletarians trusted the democrats”[44], the very same proletariat

which fought capital “using its own methods and goals”[45]; methods and

goals which are never defined. Dauvé goes so far as to ask the question,

“Who defeated this proletarian energy?”[46] but nothing is ever said of

the content, the forms and the limits proper to this energy. It is

proletarian energy and that is all. For Dauvé the central question was

“how to control the working class?”[47] but before asking this question

we need to ask another one: “What does the working class do?” This

always seems self-evident in the text, just a matter of “proletarian

energy”. Why then did the “control” succeed in ’21 and in ’43 (in

Italy)? These are the questions to which the text only responds

anecdotally; or else in the profound manner we’ll see later on: the

workers failed and were beaten because they didn’t make the revolution —

a collapse into tautology.

We find this same indeterminate “revolutionary energy” in the analysis

of the working class defeat and subsequent victory of Nazism in Germany:

“The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion a

proletarian assault [we must be dealing with a manifestation of

‘proletarian energy’] strong enough to shake the foundations of society,

but impotent to revolutionize it, thus bringing Social Democracy and the

unions to centre stage as the key to political equilibrium”.[48]

We are not told anything else about this “proletarian assault”. Why is

it not powerful enough to revolutionise society? That’s the question,

however, and the only one we need answer. Things seem so obvious to the

author, it’s enough to say “proletariat” and “revolution”. At one moment

he fleetingly gives us an indication: the German radical movement is

described as “aspiring to a workers’ world”.[48] But this comment of

fundamental import isn’t developed; here it serves only as a sort of

detail which does not resolve the question of defeat, and it is

immediately downplayed by the generality of the “proletarian assault”.

The key to the problematic is given to us in an incidental remark:

“But the conservative revolution also took over old anti-capitalist

tendencies (the return to nature, the flight to cities…) that the

workers’ parties, even the extremist ones, had misestimated by their

refusal to integrate the a-classist and communitarian dimension of the

proletariat, and their inability to think of the future as anything but

an extension of heavy industry.”[49]

We’ll leave aside the struggles of the Nazi regime against heavy

industry; it’s the “proletarian energy” which interests us. This energy

resides in this “a-classist and communitarian dimension”. If this is so,

once this dimension is proclaimed, everything else — that is the real

history of class struggles — can be nothing more than a succession of

forms more or less adequate to it. The general pattern of the argument

is then as follows: man and society are separate and this is the

foundation of all history; all the historic forms of human society are

built on this separation and try to resolve them but only through

alienated forms. Capital is the society in which the contradiction is

pushed to its limits, but simultaneously (Hegel to the rescue!) it is

the society which gives birth to a class with this communal dimension,

an a-classist class. As for capital, it is forced to respond to the same

question of separation (which, let’s not forget, is just a form of

social bond), with the state, democracy, politics. We have arrived at

the simple opposition of two answers to the same question. It is no

longer proletariat and capital which are the terms of the contradiction

within the capitalist mode of production, but the human community

carried by the proletariat and politics (the state) which confront each

other, the only connection between them being that they are opposing

solutions to the trans-historical problem of the separation of man and

society, individual and community. We can find this problematic in

developed form in La Banquise’s ‘The Story of Our Origins’ (LB no. 2).

This whole problematic ignores the basic axiom of materialism: that a

certain type of individual corresponds to a certain type of community.

The proletariat does not have an a-classist or communitarian dimension:

it has, in its contradiction with capital, the ability to abolish

capital and class society and to produce community (the social immediacy

of the individual). This is not a dimension that it carries within

itself — neither as a nature that comes to it from its situation in the

capitalist mode of production, nor as the finally discovered subject of

the general tendency of history towards community.

Unable, in such a problematic, to consider class struggle as the real

history of its immediate forms and to understand that its particular

historical content exhausts the totality of what transpires in the

struggle (and not as a historical form of something else), Dauvé never

tells us why the revolution failed, or why it is that every time the

state, the parties, the unions want to destroy the revolutionary

movement, it works. “Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the

terrain of revolution”[50] — exactly, but we never find out why the

counter-revolution wins out in relation to the historical

characteristics of the revolution. The author describes how it happens,

but leaves it at that. Given the general problematic, the only

explanation has to be tautological: the revolution failed because it

didn’t go further. In saying this we’ve said nothing on the actually

existing failure of the actually existing revolution. “In this juncture,

democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable to German capitalism

for killing off the spirit of revolt in the polling booth, winning a

series of reforms from the bosses, and dispersing the

revolutionaries.”[51] But the relation of this activity of the

capitalist class and social democracy to the historical content of the

revolution itself, which alone would tell us why “it works”, has not

been explained; herein lies the necessary blind spot of this

problematic.

The chapter on Spain takes the impasses of this problematic to an

extreme. Dauvé describes precisely the counter-revolution (we have no

disagreement on this), but he only talks about the revolution on the

basis of what it didn’t do, in relation to what it should have done and

as a succession of “fatal errors”:

“After defeating the forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the

workers had the power. But what were they going to do with it? Should

they give it back to the republican state, or should they use it to go

further in a communist direction?”[52]

We know the answer, and Dauvé explains to us in great detail the “fatal

error” of the Spanish revolutionaries who failed to take on the legal

government, the State. But why did they make this error, was this error

not bound up with the very nature of the “proletarian assault”? (It was

certainly fatal, but whether we can talk of an error is less sure).

These are the real questions which this problematic cannot address. “In

May ´37, workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state

(this time in its democratic form), but they could no longer push their

struggle to the point of an open break”[53]— so this capacity did exist

in July 1936. For Dauvé the masses are “deceived” by the CNT and the

POUM who are afraid of alienating the State:

“Because they accepted the mediation of ‘representative organisations’

and counsels of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same

masses who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrendered

without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.”[54]

If we follow this interpretation, Spanish proletarians are idiots. It is

extraordinary to write such expressions as: “the masses placed their

trust”, “fatal error”, “the proletarians, convinced that they had

effective power”, “because they accepted the mediation…,” without a

single moment of doubt, or a question such as: but why does it work? Why

did they give their trust? Why did this error happen? Why this

conviction? If these questions don’t even momentarily occur, we should

nonetheless ask ourselves why not.

The point is that in the text the proletariat is by nature

revolutionary, and, even better, communist. It is a given that history

is the history of the separation of man and society; as for

proletarians, they are “commodified beings who no longer can and no

longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes

capitalist logic”. Proletarians are, in themselves, contradictory

beings, and as such they carry the community — communism — within

themselves. It follows that when they fail to make the revolution, it’s

that they are wrong, or have been deceived. Thus it is that which failed

to happen which becomes the explanation for what actually happened.

The formula “commodified beings, etc.” leaves shrouded in darkness

theoretical questions which could not be more arduous or decisive. The

proletarians are here the crux of an internal contradiction, one of

whose terms is left unsaid and is taken as given: on the one hand they

are commodities, but in the name of what, on the other, do they no

longer want to be this? Elementary: they are men. The social definition

of the proletariat in a specific mode of production gives way to a

hybrid definition: commodity and man. But who then is this man who is

not the ensemble of his social relations through which he is merely a

commodity?

From the moment that the revolutionary nature of the proletariat is

constructed as this contradictory hybridisation of man and commodity,

the history of the class struggle — and more precisely of revolution and

communism — disappears. Communism is inscribed once and for all in the

nature of the proletariat. That the proletariat can’t and doesn’t want

to remain what it is, is not a contradiction internal to its nature,

intrinsic to its being, but rather the actuality of its contradictory

relation to capital in a historically specific mode of production. It is

the relation to capital of that particular commodity which is labour

power, as a relation of exploitation, which is the revolutionary

relation. Posed in this way, it is necessarily a history: that of this

contradiction. The class struggle in Barcelona in May ’37 was not the

movement of communism in general (even in these particular conditions)

which fell short for reasons which can never be given; it was rather the

revolution as it really existed, that is to say, as affirmation of the

proletariat drawing its force and the content of its autonomy from its

very condition inside the capitalist mode of production. “Errors” now

appear as what they are, inherent limits, to the extent that the

revolution implies its own counter-revolution. The affirmation of the

autonomy of the proletariat implies the affirmation of what it is in

capital; that is where it finds its power and the raison d´être for its

action, at the same time as the essential link between this action and

the counter-revolution is produced.

The affirmation of an “a-classist”, “communitarian” dimension of the

proletariat merely derives from a poor understanding of an era of the

class struggle (up to the 1840s) and not from the revolutionary nature

of the proletariat. However, this allows the proletariat to be

constructed as figure of humanity, as representation of a pre-existing

contradiction. Communism is presupposed as tension, as tendency, which

opposes itself to capital from the outset of the capitalist mode of

production and aims to explode it. This is different from affirming that

communism is the movement which abolishes existing conditions, that is

to say the movement of the internal contradiction of these conditions.

Moreover, if the proletariat is invested with this dimension, the

historical process of the class struggle is no longer really necessary

in relation to the revolution: it is merely a process of realisation.

This causes the slippage in the analysis whereby the contradiction

between communism and capital comes to replace the contradiction between

the proletariat and capital.

If we come back to the course of the Spanish civil war as described in

the text, what is striking is the use of the subjunctive and the

conditional: “Taking the revolution beyond areas under republican

control, however, would have meant completing the revolution in the

republican areas as well”.[55] What failed to happen is always the

explanation for what actually happened: “but even Durruti did not seem

to realize that the state was everywhere still intact.” Everything

happens as if there were a huge thermometer with a scale up to Communist

Revolution (human community): you stick it into a sensitive point of

events and see how far the mercury rises, then you explain that the

mercury only rose that far because it failed to rise any further.

However “Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which had not

waited for 1936 to storm the existing world”.[56] “Proletarian energy”

plays a starring role in this vision of history: it is what makes the

mercury rise in the thermometer. It is, like in the old physics, one of

those ineffable forces destined to wrap up all tautologies. We note in

passing that “energy” is embodied, just like “momentum”.[57] Ultimately,

without explaining why the Spanish revolution fails to go further and

what its essential relation to the counter-revolution is, Dauvé

accumulates all the perfectly pertinent “hows”, but without ever

providing us with the beginnings of an explanation; unless it is in the

conditional, with the condition being what should have been done:

“the announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for

Spanish Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the

shock troops of reaction.”[58]

“In order to be consolidated and extended, the transformations without

which revolution becomes an empty word had to pose themselves as

antagonistic to a state clearly designed as the adversary. The trouble

was, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only. Not only

did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the

insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socialisations,

tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the

anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through

the state in order to defeat Franco.”[59]

“Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two

states (republican and nationalist), if only by solving the agrarian

question: in the 1930’s, more than half of the population went hungry. A

subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed

strata, those farthest from ‘political life’ (e.g. women), but it could

not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.”[60]

Why? To answer that question the revolution must be defined other than

as “revolutionary élan”, “communist potential” or “aborted

revolution”.[61] The contradiction between the proletariat and capital

must be considered as a relation of reciprocal implication, and

revolution and communism as historical products — not as the result of

the nature of the revolutionary class defined as such once and for all.

For Dauvé the German revolution, like the Russian and Spanish ones,

testifies to “a communist movement remaking all of society”.[62] But it

is precisely the nature of this communist movement, at this particular

juncture in the history of the contradiction between the proletariat and

capital, that must be defined if we want to understand its limits and

its relation to the counter-revolution without reducing it to what it

should have done and what it wasn’t. Nevertheless the author furnishes

us with an explanation of the limits of the revolution, albeit without

seeming to attribute much importance to it:

“The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigour of

communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital but

which are not yet daily reproduced by capital, and also their impotence,

taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution. The absence of an

assault against the state condemned the establishment of different

relationships to a fragmentary self-management preserving the content

and often the forms of capitalism, notably money and the division of

activities by individual enterprises.”[63]

And what if it was precisely these bonds and these forms which prevented

the “assault”? And what if this were just a particular form of the

affirmation of the proletariat? Dauvé does not ask himself this type of

question, because for him the particular conditions are always merely

the conditions in relation to what the revolution must do, and not the

very form of the revolution at a given moment. In this brief but very

interesting passage he does not escape a problematic of objective

conditions / revolutionary nature. These particular conditions which he

calls to our attention should have been those which nonetheless should

have produced an assault against the state. In consequence this

explanation of the limits is given but doesn’t intervene in the general

reasoning. If it had intervened, Dauvé would have been forced to

historically specify the “revolutionary vigour”, the “revolutionary

élan”, and could no longer have spoken of “aborted revolution” or

“communist potentialities”. He would no longer have been able to explain

what had happened by what hadn’t, and all the “would-have-beens” would

have had no sense. As it is he is content to juxtapose an ahistorical

vision of the revolution and of communism with the conditions which will

give it form, which will model it. The history of class struggle is here

always double: on the one hand the communist principle, the élan or

revolutionary energy which animates the proletariat, a transcendent

history, and on the other, the limited manifestation of this energy, an

anecdotal history. Between these two aspects there exists a hierarchy.

Transcendent history is “real” history, and real history with all its

limits is only the accidental form of the former, so much so that the

former is constantly the judgment of the latter.

One can hardly question Dauvé’s remark on the condition of social

relations in 1930’s Spain, but either it was possible to do what he says

it would have been necessary to do, and thus the conditions could have

been overcome, or it was not possible and in that case the conditionals

of Dauvé lose all rational signification. Such a situation would have

been overcome if the revolutionary élan was that which he presupposes in

his analysis. But if it was a matter of a programmatic struggle, such a

situation (communal bonds) is a material that it reworks according to

its own nature.

One could consider that the whole of this historical text is a work of

reflection on what the revolution must and can be today. But the problem

with Dauvé is that he presents this in an eternal, atemporal, fashion;

so much so that if we finish more knowledgeable we have nonetheless made

no advance on the essential question: question: why could the revolution

be today what it wasn’t in the past?

We should make it clear: we are absolutely in agreement with the

sequence of facts that Dauvé presents, as much for Germany as for Spain

(with some reservations in regard to Russia). His conception of the

communist revolution is entirely our own as far as its content and

communist measures are concerned, its comprehension as communisation and

not as prior to this communisation. Where we differ profoundly is on the

comprehension of the course of class struggle as the juxtaposition of a

given, known, communist principle within the being of the proletariat,

and a history which contents itself with expressing this principle in a

partial, confused or aborted fashion. Its not a question of the method

of historical analysis; this isn’t a quarrel between philosophers of

history. As always, what is at stake is the comprehension of the current

period. Dauvé’s method renders impossible the comprehension of the

overcoming of programmatism, of the revolution as affirmation of the

proletariat.[64] The communist revolution as we can currently conceive

it, as it presents itself in this cycle of struggle, is for him already

there (limited, aborted, with errors and illusions, etc.) in the

Russian, German and Spanish revolutions. Thus even when we say that we

are in agreement with the conception of the revolution that he presents

at the end of his brochure, this is because he does not see that this

revolution is not — is no longer — that of Russia etc. They were

revolutions of the cycle of struggle in which the proletariat was

affirmed; this is no longer the case today. The confusion is not without

consequences for any theory based on the current situation of the

relation between the proletariat and capital, on the comprehension of

current struggles and on the revolution as produced overcoming of this

cycle of struggle. That is to say, on the way one takes these struggles

as really productive of their overcoming (practically and theoretically)

and not as to be judged in relation to this overcoming already posed as

a norm. The history of class struggle is production and not realisation.

[48]p. 38

Human, All Too Human?

A reply to ‘Normative History and the Communist Essence of the

Proletariat’ by Théorie Communiste. Originally published as ‘Humain,

Trop Humain?’, appendix to Quand Meurent Les Insurrections (When

Insurrections Die ), (La Sociale, Montreal 2000), pp. 69–77. Translated

by Endnotes .

It is for the reader to judge whether, as Théorie Communiste think, When

Insurrections Die explains what happened by what didn’t happen. We

believe that in that article we set out first what proletarians actually

did, and then what they weren’t able or didn’t want to do. “Yet no

lessons but negative ones can be drawn from all these undertakings [the

struggles of the German proletariat from 1919 to 1923]… The lesson

learned was how not to proceed.”[65] To jump back and forth between

yesterday and tomorrow has its dangers, but is more illuminating than

the explanation according to which every social movement ineluctably

ends up where it is driven by its epoch.

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to

solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself

arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already

present or at least in the course of formation.”[66]

So be it. It remains for us to determine these conditions, and which

goal they correspond to. Otherwise we limit ourselves to demonstrating

how what had to happen happened. To reconstruct two hundred years of

class struggles from the knowledge which we now have of them is not

without interest. But what privilege permits the observer in the year

2000 to know that his standpoint is ultimately the right one? Nothing

can guarantee that in 2050, after 50 more years of capitalism, an even

more broad-ranging overview won’t establish for x + y reasons the ways

in which the proletarians of the year 2000 (and with them TC along with

G. Dauvé) remained historically constrained by the limits of their

times, and thus that communism wasn’t actually in the offing in the year

2000 any more than it was in 1970 or 1919, but that now a new period is

ushering itself in, allowing us to genuinely grasp the past from the

new, proper viewpoint. Nothing guarantees it, except the certainty of

the opening of a totally different historical epoch towards the end of

the 20th century. To be sure, the conviction of TC is well buttressed

and argued. Despite everything, however, it is not a caricature to read

a new version of the “final crisis” in this vision of a phase in which

proletariat and capital are supposedly from now on face to face,

enabling proletarians to call into question their own existence as

class, thus posing the question of communism in all its nakedness.

More than a mere theoretical position, it is this way of situating

oneself in relation to the world, this ultimatism, which is

questionable.[67]

Capitalism will only be non-reproducible the day when proletarians cease

producing it. There is no objective limit to a social system.

Proletarians only give themselves tasks that they are able to and want

to resolve.

Théorie Communiste steers clear of the conditional and subjunctive

modes. However, just as one of the traits of language is projection into

the future, man is also characterised by his capacity to think what

could be, to reinterpret the past on the basis of the collective choices

made by social groups, and thus to consider what could have been.

History is a conjunction of possibilities and wills. Freedom consists

not in being able to do anything one wants, but in wanting what one can

do. Which is another way of saying “Men make their own history … but

under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the

past”[68], circumstances which they don’t invent, but which it is within

their power to modify.

“Will”, “freedom”, “Man”: these are all words which disturb the

theoretical rigour of TC. Unfortunately, to refuse all concepts which

are exterior to capitalism is to condemn oneself to thinking nothing but

capitalism. The fate of capitalism is not intelligible on the basis of

capitalism alone. To reject all concepts which refer to an outside of

the capital/wage-labour structure amounts to building a model that is

irrefutable because it refers only to itself. What would be the use in a

proletarian structuralism?

We don’t postulate an irreducible, ahistorical human nature which ends

up bursting the capitalist fetter.

“Underneath labour lies activity”, stated an article in La Banquise.[69]

Idealism? Everything depends on the underneath. It is false to conceive

of capitalism as a prison from which, one glorious dawn, will emerge a

virtuality which today is enclosed. That would presuppose an always

already existing positivity, constrained by capital and waiting to

escape.

What exists, on the contrary, neither anterior nor exterior to capital,

but consubstantial with it, and as indispensable condition of its

functioning, is the universal scope of living labour, from which it

feeds every day.

Not in the sense in which labour is presumed as the essential

characteristic of Man defined as homo faber.

More simply, proletarians are not bovines. A man is not put to work like

an animal is. The most manual occupation demands more than mere

expenditure of muscle: a grasp, an anticipation of the gesture, a

savoir-faire not eliminated by Taylorism, an acquired skill which the

worker can then transmit. This faculty includes the representation of

what other workers do and are, including if they live 10,000km away. The

horse can refuse the work demanded of it, kill its master, escape and

finish its days free, but it cannot initiate another form of life which

reorganises the life of the former master as well. Capital is only

capital because it exploits not only the product of labour but that

which is human: a power to work, an energy which is always collective,

which capital manages but can never completely dominate, which it

depends on and which can put it into crisis — or even a revolution.

Proletarianisation is not the loss of some prior existing thing, but the

exploitation of a human capacity. Alienation is only transhistorical to

the extent that capitalism recapitulates a multi-millenarian past.

Something becomes other: this is certainly one of the characteristics of

wage-labour. The latter effects a dispossession, not of an undefinable

humanity, but of time constrained, energy used, acts forced by capital

which is thereby valorised. What the proletarian loses every day is not

a strip of some eternal nature, but a force of life, a social capacity

which the beast of burden does not have at its disposal, and which is

thus a reality internal to the wage relation. It’s not a question of

introducing a human dimension into the analysis, but of seeing that it

is to be found there.

A fundamental contribution of the German-Dutch Left, and its

descendents, is to have emphasised this.

“If the worker is, even from the economic point of view, more than a

machine, it is because he produces for the capitalist more than he costs

him, and above all because in the course of his labour he manifests the

creativity, the capacity to produce ever more and ever better, than any

productive class of previous periods ever possessed. When the capitalist

treats the proletariat as livestock, he learns quickly to his expense

that livestock cannot fulfil the function of the worker, because the

productivity of over-exploited workers decreases rapidly. This is the

deep root of the contradictions of the modern system of exploitation and

the historical reason of its failure, of its incapacity to stabilise

itself.”[70]

Socialisme ou Barbarie, like councilism, reduced the generic character

which is the foundation of wage-labour to the dimension of its

management. This fact, however, cannot blind us to that which these

currents, which reflect the struggles for self-activity and autonomy

against the bosses, bureaucracy and the State, brought to light: it is

the proletariat which capitalism places in a situation of universality.

The important thing is not that proletarians produce riches (which for

the most part impoverish us), but that they themselves are the ever more

totalising but never total commodification of activity and life. Since

the proletarian is the commodity which produces all the others, he

contains them all, holds the key to his own exploitation, and in

negating himself as commodified-being, can revolutionise the world of

the commodity. No previous exploited class lived a similar potentiality.

In fact, even if they died from overwork, the slave, the serf, the

peasant under the yoke of the corvée and tax, the artisan and the worker

before the industrial revolution, were only ferociously exploited in one

part of their existence, a large portion of which remained outside the

control of the dominant class. The serf’s vegetable garden wasn’t of

interest to the lord. Modern proletarians produce the totality of

material life, they lose it, then they receive it back in the form of

the commodity and the spectacle, and this takes the form of the global

circulation of goods and labour. It’s for this reason that capitalism

was theorised a hundred and fifty years ago as the realisation, if not

the completion, of a double tendency of the universalisation of humanity

and its alienation.

Between 1830 and 1848, a minority perceived society at a limit-point:

proletarians can only reappropriate the totality of the conditions of

life, “not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard

their very existence.”[71] The announced revolution will use productive

forces, but won’t be a revolution of the producers. Technology is only

valid as a flowering of individuals, with the supersession of

professional capacities: “now the isolation of individuals and each

person’s particular way of gaining his livelihood have themselves become

accidental.”[72]

“Thus, while the fugitive serfs only wished to have full scope to

develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already

there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the

proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, have to

abolish hitherto prevailing condition of their existence (which has,

moreover, been that of all society up to then), namely, labour. Thus

they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto,

the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves

collective expression, that is, the state; in order, therefore, to

assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.”[73]

Beyond the glaring contradiction between an increasing production of

wealth which impoverishes its producers, the more radical perceived a

historic opening, through the contradiction of labour, “which is now the

only possible but, as we see, negative form of self-activity.”[74]

From the clash between artisans a new figure could emerge beyond the

creator-artist and the proletarian-servant of the machine. Thanks to

commodified labour, which was unattached and indifferent to its content,

but collective, it became possible to envisage association, and the

supersession of the wage form (still too recent to appear “natural”).

The “Proletariat” is thus conceived as that which will compose another

society. It already configures a kind of society, since classes dissolve

themselves in it. It sucks in artisans and peasants, attracts a

proportion of “intellectuals”, and doesn’t form a bloc or entity, but

expresses a social decomposition (or a recomposition as revolutionaries

hope). Proletarians experience unemployment, poverty, uprooting, the

breakdown of the family, of customs, of identities, of values, and at

the same time act collectively (as seen in insurrections, chartism,

trade-unions, Tristan’s Union Ouvrière, Luddism too, of which the later

trade unions gave the falsified image of a brute force, spontaneous but

limited). The proletariat of before 1848 is an ensemble disaggregated

enough to criticise itself, but still communitarian enough to want to

struggle, and by the breaking-down of barriers between

worker/non-worker, artisan/labourer, manual/intellectual… accede to a

free association. The organised workers’ movement subsequently both took

on and denied this heritage, and the communist horizon has been fixed on

sociology for more than a century.

Under the weight of the epoch, Marx himself, although aiming for “a

description of the characteristics of communist society”[75] considered

it increasingly on the basis of capitalism, and by dint of criticising

political economy became enclosed within it. What is the interest in

scientifically “proving” exploitation, instead of exposing how

exploitation exploits that which can produce communism?

It’s not a case of opting for the “young” Marx against the “old” Marx,

but of understanding that the “young” Marx contains the “old” Marx a lot

more than the “old” Marx contains the “young” Marx. Thus the

intellectual involution echoes a historical stabilisation. The

perspective is impoverished in the International Workingmen’s

Association or the Commune when compared to that of the middle of the

century, which the author of the 1844 Manuscripts synthesised the best,

but which others had also expressed.[76]

The revolution didn’t occur around 1848, and it would be vain to expect

that computerisation will finally render “historically necessary” in the

year 2000 that which large-scale mechanised industry was supposed to

achieve before 1914 or nascent automation after 1960.

What is true is that every profound reorganisation of the productive

system materially impoverishes the workers, but also dispossesses them

of a relative mastery over their work, and unleashes resistance and

revolts, often conservative, but revolutionary perhaps. The calling into

question by capitalism of the forms of wage-labour opens up a path of

rupture with the wage condition. Each time, nothing guarantees that a

communist movement will be able or want to take advantage of it, but the

possibility is there, which makes of the proletariat the “overthrowing

class”.[77]

A hypothesis: we are living in a new charnel-epoch in which capitalism

is able to create poles of profit for itself, technically innovate and

multiply consumer goods, create employment and/or income, calm riots,

but not unify the global society of generalised labour at the very

moment in which the latter becomes inessential. From the fetid cellars

of Lille or Manchester in 1840 to the living-rooms of council

tower-blocks where the VCR has pride of place, the problem remains: how

to put wage-earners to work if they are profitable, and what to do with

them when they are not? At one extreme, in China, 100 million uprooted

ex-rurals which the capitalist city won’t be able to integrate. At the

other end of the chain, in Seine-Saint-Denis (TN: Parisian suburb ):

school until 22 years old; training schemes; insignificant, precarious

jobs; benefits. Between the two, the United States. For Emmanuel Todd

(L’illusion économique), “the biggest success of the American system of

production is anti-economic”. The question isn’t whether there is no way

out of the situation for capital, but whether it reopens a way out for

the proletariat as a class not of workers, but of the critique of work.

The limit of capital is that it is unable to do without labour, which it

indeed generalises, making millions of beings enter into wage labour, at

the same time as it reduces labour to a negligible role. To remedy this,

thinkers such as Andre Gorz propose the delinking of money from labour,

in order to accord to everybody a share in consumption, whether they

have participated in production or not. Such a society is impossible:

even if it were ten times more automated, our world would still rest

upon labour. Proletarians will remain the necessary evil of capitalism.

A question: is it possible to pass from the moment where capital refuses

many proletarians (in particular young ones) to the refusal of this

world and its labour by proletarians (particularly lots of young ones)?

What will be done by these “masses resulting from the drastic

dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the

proletariat…”

“… By proclaiming the dissolution of the hereto existing world order,

the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it

is in fact the dissolution of that world order. By demanding the

negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank

of a principle of society what society has made the principle of the

proletariat, what without its own co-operation, is already incorporated

in it as the negative result of society.”[78]

On the basis of what he had in front of his eyes — i.e. nascent

industrialisation, Marx theorised a period (to come) of dislocation of

classes, which was simultaneously the effect of a profound social crisis

and the conscious action of proletarians. For him, the proletariat of

1844, but also one hundred or two hundred years later, is the ensemble

of categories having in common that they live only from the sale of

their labour-power, whether they are in work or without it, partially

employed, precarious or protected by a statute but susceptible (if not,

a brother, or a daughter…) to falling into a fragile category. The

proletariat exists as dissolution of classes in the sense that it is and

effects this dissolution. It is both the product and the process of this

dissolution, by a revolution “in which, further, the proletariat rids

itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position

in society.”[79] It is not a question of it forming a bloc like an army

against another, but that it puts into practice the negation which it is

already, going beyond individualism as well as massification.

“…standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of

the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who,

robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals,

but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter

into relation with one another as individuals.”[80]

“…the communal relationship into which the individuals of a class

entered, and which was determined by their common interests over against

a third party, was always a community to which these individuals

belonged only as average individuals, only insofar as they lived within

the conditions of existence of their class — a relationship in which

they participated not as individuals but as members of a class. With the

community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take

their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under

their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the

individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of

individuals (assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces, of

course) which puts the conditions of the free development and movement

of individuals under their control — conditions which were previously

abandoned to chance and had won an independent existence over against

the separate individuals just because of their separation as

individuals, and because of the necessity of their combination.”[81]

According to Théorie Communiste, “the proletarian of the young Marx is

the personal individual for whom the previous social determinations have

become a matter of contingency, and it is this situation in itself which

is posed as revolutionary.”[82] However this proletarian evoked by Marx

is more than an individual, as he shares (in his head and his actions)

his fate with millions of others. Is he so individual, this individual

who is weighed down by a historical constraint, this being who is

endlessly “excluded” from production then coercively re-included, and by

the same token who, because his condition doesn’t enclose him in a

factory, an occupation or a particular place, is able to do what the CGT

metalworker proved himself to be incapable of: to pass from one category

to another, not to think of himself one-sidedly as “worker” or “out of

work”, to manifest a certain fluidity, a freedom…

Proletarians can fight exploitation, either to merely impose some limits

upon it, or to bring an end to it by producing communist social

relations. How does the link between the two operate? Even the most

resolved and most autonomous movement will only challenge society if it

manifests the practical demand for another life, in a word if its acts

contain or acquire a universal dimension. The communist revolution is

precisely the moment of fusion between the struggle against exploitation

and the struggle against alienation. No historical dialectic can deliver

the key to this in advance.

Love of Labour? Love of Labour Lost…

Originally published as ‘Prolétaire et travail: une histoire

d’amour?’, Lettre de Troploin no. 2, 2002. This version, translated by

the authors, first published as ‘To Work or not to Work? Is that the

Question?’, (Troploin Newsletter no. 3, 2002). Some passages from the

original which were removed have been reinserted for the sake of

continuity with the text that follows. Published in Endnotes #1.

A historical failure: 154 years after Marx’s and Engels’ Manifesto, that

could be a blunt but not too unfair summary of the communist movement.

One interpretation of such a miscarriage centres on the importance or

prevalence given to work. From the 1960s onwards, a more and more

visible resistance to work, sometimes to the point of open rebellion,

has led quite a few revolutionaries to revisit the past from the point

of view of the acceptance or rejection of work. Former social movements

are said to have failed because the labourers tried to have labour rule

society, i.e. tried to liberate themselves by using the very medium of

their enslavement: work. In contrast, true emancipation would be based

on the refusal of work, seen as the only effective subversion of

bourgeois and bureaucratic domination alike. Only work refusal would

have a universal dimension able to transcend quantitative claims, and to

put forward a qualitative demand for an altogether different life.

The Situationists were among the most articulate proponents of this

view: “Never work!”[83] Later, in Italy particularly, a number of formal

and informal groups, often called autonomous, attempted to develop and

systematise spontaneous anti-work activities.[84]

The refusal of work has become the underlying theme of many a theory on

past and present struggles. Defeats are explained by the acceptance of

work, partial successes by active shop-floor insubordination, and a

revolution to come is equated with a complete rejection of work.

According to this analysis, in the past, workers shared the cult of

production. Now they can free themselves of the delusion of work,

because capitalism is depriving it of interest or human content, while

making hundreds of millions of people jobless.

In Germany, Krisis recently gave an excellent illustration of the

transformation of the anti-work stand into the philosopher’s stone of

revolution.[85]

But since the 70s, mainly in France, the role of work has also been

reinterpreted in a different light: up to now the labouring classes have

only tried to assert themselves as the class of labour and to socialise

work, not to do away with it, because up to now capitalist development

prevented communist prospects from emerging. Whatever the proletarians

(or radical minorities) may have thought, they were fighting for a

capitalism without capitalists, for a worker led capitalism. A real

critique of work was impossible in the 60s-70s, and the ’68 period is

analysed as the last possible effort of labour to pose itself as the

dominant pole within the capital/wage labour couple. Now things are

completely different, because a restructured capital no longer leaves

any scope for a workers’ capitalism. Théorie Communiste has been the

main exponent of this perspective.[86]

We’re not lumping together people as different from each other as the SI

and Théorie Communiste. We’re only dealing with one important point they

have in common: the belief that asserting the importance of labour was a

major obstacle to revolution, and that this obstacle has been removed

more by capitalist development than by the proletarians themselves. It

seems to us that these views are false in regard to the facts, and even

more so in regard to the method, the attitude in relation to the world

to be transformed. However, their defenders clearly uphold revolution as

communisation, destruction of the State and abolition of classes. So

this essay will be less of a refutation than an attempt to think twice

about work.

Before 1914

A profusion of data shows that for centuries the workers used their

professional ability and dignity as justifications for what they

regarded as their due. They acted as if their right to a fair wage (and

to fair prices, in the “moral economy” described by E.P. Thompson)

derived from their toil and competence.

But, if they claimed and rebelled in the name of work, were they

fighting for a world where they would take their masters’ place?

Answering the question implies distinguishing between workers’ practice

and workers’ ideology.

Old time social movements are depicted as endeavours to achieve a utopia

where labour would be king. This certainly was one of their dimensions,

but not the only one, nor the one that gave coherence to all the others.

Otherwise, how do we account for the frequent demand to work less? In

1539, in Lyons, printing workers went on a four months strike for

shorter hours and longer public holidays. In the 18th century, French

paper-makers used to take “illegal” holidays. Marx mentions how English

bourgeois were shocked by workers who, chose to work (and earn) less, by

only coming to the factory four days a week instead of six.

“To live as a worker, or die as a fighter.” The famous Lyons

silk-workers’ motto of the 1830s of course signifies a claim for work,

but less for work as a positive reality than as a means of resisting

deteriorating pay. The 1834 silk-workers’ insurrection was not prompted

by machines that would have deprived them of their jobs — the machines

were already there. The workers actually fought the power of the

merchants who allocated work at their own discretion and paid very

little. When the silk-worker spoke highly of the quality of his silk, he

was not talking like a medieval master craftsman — his life was the

subject-matter.

In June 1848, it is true that the closure of the National Workshops by

the government led to the Paris insurrection. But these workshops were

no social model, only a means to keep the jobless busy. The actual work

done was socially unprofitable, and of no interest to the recipients.

The insurgents rose to survive, not to defend a guaranteed nationalised

or socialised form of work that they would have regarded as an embryo of

socialism.

At the time, many strikes and riots took place against mechanization.

They expressed the resistance of craftsmen anxious to save the (real and

imagined) rich human content of their skills, but equally they tried to

curb further exploitation. When Rouen textile workers managed to prevent

more efficient machinery being installed, they were not fighting for a

trade, they were putting a (temporary) stop to worsening living

conditions. Meanwhile, other Normandy textile hands were asking for a

10-hour day, and construction workers for the end of overtime, which

they regarded as a cause of accidents and unemployment.

As for the Paris Commune, when it took over a few firms, imposed a wage

rate or forced owners to re-open the plants, its main purpose was to

provide these wage-earners with an income. Taking charge of production

was no priority for the Communards.

This short survey of the 19th century points to a juxtaposition of

struggles. Some could be labelled modern. In that they aimed at higher

wages and sometimes rejected work (in a nutshell, less working hours and

more pay). Others aimed through producer and consumer cooperatives at a

working class take over of industrialisation by which the working

classes would put an end to capital and become a sort of total capital.

Association was then a keyword that summed up the ambiguity of the time:

it conveyed the ideas both of mercantile links and of fraternal unity.

Many workers hoped that co-ops would be more competitive than private

business, would eliminate capitalists from the market and from their

social function, and maybe force them to join the associated workers.

United labour would have beaten the bourgeois at their own game.

1848 tolled the death knell of the utopia of a wage-labour capital, of a

working class that would become the ruling class and then the unique or

universal class through the absorption of capital in associated labour.

From then on, via a growing union movement, the workers will only be

concerned with their share of the wage system, they won’t try to compete

with the monopoly of capital owned by the bourgeoisie, but to constitute

themselves as a monopoly of labour power. The programme of a popular

capitalism was on the wane. At the same time, the ruling classes gave up

any attempt at the “different” capitalism imagined and sometimes

practised by innovative and generous industrialists like Owen. At both

ends of the wage system, capital and labour knew their place.

This explains the paradox of a social movement that was so keen on

separating labour from capital, but which finally created so few

producers’ cooperatives. The ones that existed were born out of the will

of enlightened bourgeois, or, if they had a worker origin, soon turned

into business as usual.

The Albi Workers’ Glassworks in the south of France illustrates this

tendency. The highly skilled glass workers, still organised on a

pre-1789 guild model, had kept their control over apprenticeship. It

took 15 years to be a fully-fledged glass-blower. Those labour

aristocrats were paid twice as much as miners. In 1891, a strike of

several months against the introduction of new technology only resulted

in the creation of a union, which the management then tried to smash,

thereby provoking another strike. The bosses locked-out and refused to

reintegrate the most militant strikers. Out of this deadlock rose the

idea of a co-op. This came into existence in 1892, after a national

subscription with some bourgeois help, and the labour force contributing

by investing 50% of their wages (and 5% more in 1912). To be profitable,

a cooperative had to combine high skills and income, popular support and

outside financing. Self-management soon lost any reality. The plant went

through a series of industrial disputes directly against the CGT, which

stood in the dual position of the single union and the boss (it was the

biggest shareholder): a several months’ strike in 1912, 4 months in

1921, stoppages for 7 months in 1924, and so on. The co-op still existed

in 1968.

Since the mid-19th century, cooperatives have lost their social impetus

and all ambition for historical change. When today the Welsh miners of

Towers Colliery buy out a workplace that the owners wanted to get rid

of, and then manage it collectively, even those who support and praise

them do not consider their market and human success as a solution that

could be generalised.

Russia: 1917–21

Between February and October 1917, “workers’ control” did little to

restart production.[87] Later, though they were stimulated by a

political power that owed to them its existence and strength, the

proletarians hardly manifested any productive enthusiasm. They often

lacked respect for what was supposed to be theirs: Victor Serge recalls

how Petrograd workers would take machines apart and cut the belts to

make slippers or soles that they sold on the market.

Lenin’s party did not get to (and stay in) power through bureaucratic

intrigues. It was built on proletarian struggles. But, for lack of

social change, the Bolsheviks who’d become the new State remained at its

head like any power does, promising a lot, promoting some and repressing

others. The mass of the workers, who initially had not been able or

willing to run the factories in their own interests, were faced with new

bosses who told them they now worked for themselves and for world

socialism. They reacted as they usually do, by individual and collective

resistance, active and passive. Even before 1921 and Kronstadt, some

strikes, at the famous workers’ bastion of the huge Putilov plant for

instance, were suppressed in a bloodbath (as documented in the now

available Cheka archives).

The inversion we are describing did not take place in a month or a year.

A contradictory process, it allowed for the coexistence (often in the

same person) of a revolutionary dynamic and a crystalisation of power

looking to maintain itself at any price. The historical tragedy was that

one part of the working class, organised in a party and in State power,

forced the other part to work for a revolution… that by this very

situation ceased to exist. That contradiction was perceived at once by

the anarchists, soon by the German-Dutch Communist Left, and much later

— if ever — by the Italian Left. In any case, it surely closed the door

on any workers’ capitalism.

The recurrent opposition to the Bolshevik majority – the Left

Communists, the Makhnovshchina (which included industrial collectives),

the Workers’ Opposition, the Workers’ Group – was an expression of that

impossibility. It’s no accident the debate on who should run the

factories reached its climax in 1920, at the backward surge of the

revolutionary wave. Then everything had been said and done, and the

split between the masses and the party was complete: but it was only a

negative split, as the proletarians didn’t come up with an alternative

to Bolshevik policy. If Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group was a small but

genuine emanation of the rank and file, Kollontai’s Workers’ Opposition

was the unions’ voice — one bureaucracy against another.

But the party had the merit of coherence. As early as 1917, Lozovsky

stated: “The workers must not figure the factories belong to them.”

Still, at that time, the decree on workers’ control expressed a balance

of power — shop-floor militancy maintained some collective rank and file

management, directly or through union channels. But the leaders had made

no secret of their objectives. Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism defined

man as a “lazy animal” that must be forced to work. For the Bolsheviks,

workers’ control only served to curb bourgeois power, help wage-earners

to discipline themselves, and teach management to a handful of future

executives.

The oppositions’ platforms (even the radical one by the Miasnikov group)

might appear as an attempt to assert the value of work and socialise it,

but after 1920 with a world balance of power that was unfavourable to

wage labour such an attempt was even less feasible. Those proletarian

expropriations and re-organisations of production that took place were

emergency measures. It would have been impossible to turn these partial

spontaneous efforts into something systematic, and the proletarians did

not bother to. Labour kept away from the programmes that wished to make

it (and not the Bolshevik party) the real ruler.

In 1921, the toiling masses stood outside such a debate. The Workers’

Opposition’s proposals, like those of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s, dealt with

the best way to put people to work in a society the workers had lost

control of. The Russian proletarians weren’t keen to discuss the ways

and means of their own exploitation. The debate that ensued did not

oppose socialisation of labour unbound, to labour under constraint, it

was about a rearrangement of power at the top.

The Russian revolutionary crisis shows that as long as capital reigns,

labour can’t be liberated and must be imposed upon the wage-earners, and

that its persistence in one form or another is an unmistakable sign of a

failed revolution. In 1917–21, the alternative was between abolishing

wage labour or perpetuating exploitation, with no possible third option.

Russia was to experience the charms of material incentives, elite

workers, hard and forced labour camps, and “communist Sundays”. But

let’s not turn history upside down. The Russian proles did not fail

because of a misguided belief in the myth of liberation through work:

it’s their failure that gave a free rein to an unprecedented

glorification of work. Who truly believed in a “communist Sunday”,

except those who could expect some symbolic or material reward out of

it? Stakhanovism was to be the ultimate argument in that debate, and

caused quite a few reactions, including the murder of some elite workers

by their mates. As for Alexei Stakhanov, he died more addicted to vodka

than to coal.

Italy: 1920

Reading Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo on the Italian workers that took

over the factories in 1920 is like going through the impressive yet

contradictory saga of a movement that was both formidable and tame.

Violent means (including the use of guns to guard the plants) mixed with

a definite moderation in the actual demands. The Fiat proletarian is

described thus: “intelligent, human, proud of his professional dignity”;

“he doesn’t bow before the boss”; “He is the socialist worker, the

protagonist of a new mankind…”; “The Italian workers… have never opposed

the innovations that bring about lower costs, work rationalisation and

the introduction of a more sophisticated automatism”. (Gramsci, Notes on

Machiavelli)

At the metalworkers’ union conference (November, 1919), Tasca, one of

the editors of Ordine Nuovo, called for the shop stewards to study, the

bourgeois system of production and work processes to achieve the maximum

technical capacities necessary to manage the factory in a communist

society. One last quote from Ordine Nuovo in September 1920: “The

workers wish … to prove that they can do without the boss. Today the

working class is moving forward with discipline and obeying its

organisation. Tomorrow, in a system that it will have created itself, it

will achieve everything.”

Reality proved different. The workers showed no desire to increase the

quantity or quality of work. The absence of significant production

during the occupation movement reveals the weakness of the ideology of a

producer proud of his labour, and the impossibility of liberated and

socialised work. Buozzi, general secretary of the Metalworkers’ union,

admitted it: “Everyone knew that the workers interrupted work on the

most futile pretext.” In a week, between August 21st and 28th, 1920, the

15,000 workers of Fiat-Centre decreased production by 60%.

At Fiat-Rome, a banner proclaimed: “The man who will not work shall not

eat” (a statement borrowed from Saint-Paul). Other banners at

Fiat-Centre repeated: “Work elevates man”. Yet the succession of

stoppages at Fiat-Brevetti led the workers’ council to force the

personnel back to work, and to create a “workers’ prison” to deal with

theft and laziness. Because of “the extravagant number of people taking

days off”, Fiat’s central council threatened to fire all those who’d

been away for more than two days.

Caught up between the desire of union and party activists to reorganise

work in a socialist manner, and their own reluctance to work, the

workers had not hesitated long.

No Right to be Lazy

Let’s rewind the course of history a little. We’d be mistaken to think

no-one cared about a theoretical critique of work before the 1960s. In

the 1840s, Marx and others (Stirner for example) defined communism as

the abolition of classes, of the State and of work.[88]

Later, in his Right to be Lazy (1880), Lafargue was thinking ahead of

his time when he attacked the 1848 “Right to Work”: work degrades, he

says, and industrial civilisation is inferior to so-called primitive

societies. A “strange folly “ pushed the modern masses into a life of

work. But Marx’s son-in-law also belonged to his time because he partook

of the myth of technical liberation: “the machine is the redeemer of

mankind”. He did not advocate the suppression of work, but its reduction

to 3 hours daily. Though pressing a few buttons is usually less

destructive than sweating from morning till night, it does not put an

end to the separation between the productive act and the rest of life.

(It’s this separation which defines work. It was unknown in primitive

communities, uncommon or incomplete in the pre-industrial world, and it

took centuries to turn it into a habit and norm in Western Europe.)

Lafargue’s provocative insight was a critique of work within work.

Interestingly, this pamphlet (with the Manifesto) long remained among

the most popular classics of the SFIO, the old French socialist party.

The Right to be Lazy helped present work as a boon and an evil, as a

blessing and a curse, but in any case as an inescapable reality, as

unavoidable as the economy.

The labour movement wished (in opposing ways, of course, according to

its organisations being reformist or revolutionary) the workers to prove

their ability to manage the economy and the whole society. But there’s a

discrepancy between these sets of ideas and the behaviour of

wage-earners who did their best to get away from the “implacable

imposition of work” (point 8 of the KAPD programme). That phrase isn’t

trivial. It’s significant it should come from the KAPD, a party whose

programme included the generalisation of grassroots workers’ democracy,

but came up against the reality of work and its role in a socialist

society. The KAPD did not deny the alienation inherent to work, yet

wanted it imposed on everyone for a transition period to develop the

bases of communism to come. That contradiction calls for an explanation.

Workers’ Management as a Utopia of Skilled Labour

The aspiration to set up the workers as the ruling class and to build a

workers’ world was at its highest in the heyday of the labour movement,

when the Second and Third Internationals were more than big parties and

unions: they were a way of life, a counter-society. That aspiration was

carried by Marxism as well as by anarchism (particularly in its

revolutionary syndicalist form). It coincided with the growth of large

scale industry (as opposed to manufacture earlier, and Scientific

Management later).[89]

“Let the miners run the mine, the workers run the factory…” — this only

makes sense when the people involved can identify with what they do, and

when they collectively produce what they are. Although railwaymen do not

manufacture train engines, they are entitled to say: We run the railway

lines, we are the railway system. This was not the case of the craftsmen

pushed together in the manufacture: they could dream of an

industrialisation that would turn its back on the big factory and return

to the small workshop, and to a private independent property freed of

money fetters (for example, thanks to free credit à la Proudhon, or to

Louis Blanc’s People’s Bank).

In contrast, for the skilled electricity or metal worker, for the miner,

railwayman or docker, there was no going back. His Golden Age was not to

be found in the past, but in a future based on giant factories… without

bosses. His experience in a relatively autonomous work team made it

logical for him to think he could collectively manage the factory, and

on the same model the whole society, which was conceived of as an

inter-connection of firms that had to be democratically re — unified to

do away with bourgeois anarchy. The workers perform tasks that the boss

merely organises — so the boss could be dispensed with. Workers’ or

“industrial” democracy was an extension of a community (both myth and

reality) that existed in the union meeting, in the strike, in the

workers’ district, in the pub or the café, in a specific language, and

in a powerful network of institutions that shaped working class life

from the aftermath of the Paris Commune to the 1950s or 60s.

This was no longer the case for the industrial or service sector

unskilled worker. One cannot envisage managing a labour process that has

been as fragmented inside the plant as between geographically separate

production units. When a car or a toothbrush comprises components from

two or three continents, no collective worker is able to regard it as

his own. Totality is split. Work loses its unity. Workers are no longer

unified by the content of tasks, nor by the globality of production. One

can only wish to (self-)manage what one masters.

Taylorised workers (like those in the US in the 1930s) did not form

councils. The collective organ of struggle was not at the same time a

potential collective management organ. The strike and occupation

committee was only an aggregate instrument of solidarity, and provided

the leadership of that specific movement: it was not a body that would

represent or incarnate labour for other tasks (particularly the running

of the firm). The Taylorised workplace leaves little room for managerial

aspirations.

It’s interesting to observe that after 1945, workers’ councils

re-emerged in State capitalist countries that remained mainly in the

large scale mechanised industry stage, and were hardly penetrated by

Scientific Management: East Germany, 1953; Poland, 1955 and 1971;

Hungary, 1956; Czechoslovakia, 1968.

“The future world must be a workers’ world”, as a Chinese communist put

it around 1920. This was the dreamland of skilled labour. However, after

1914–18, even where in Europe the movement was at its most radical, in

Germany, where a sizeable minority attacked unions and parliamentary

democracy, and where groups like the KAPD would implement a workers’

programme, there were hardly any attempts to take over production in

order to manage it. Whatever plans they may have nurtured, in practice

neither the Essen and Berlin workers nor those in Turin put work at the

centre of society, even of a socialist one. Factories were used as

strongholds in which the proletarians would entrench themselves, not as

levers of social reorganisation. Even in Italy, the plant was not a

bastion to be defended at all costs. Many Turin workers would occupy

their workplace in the daytime, leave at night and come back in the

morning. (Such behaviour will re-occur in Italy’s Hot Autumn, 1969.)

This is no sign of extreme radicality. Those proletarians abstained from

changing the world as much as from promoting work, and “only” snatched

from capital what they could get. That unformulated refusal of work

contrasted with thousands of pro-work posters and speeches. It just

showed that these proletarians weren’t totally caught in the framework

where they’d been trapped, and where they’d trapped themselves.

France: June 1936On France and Spain, see Micheal Seidman’s

well-researched Workers Against Work during the Popular Front (UCLA,

1991).

Much has been written about the transformation of factories into

closed-in workers’ fortresses. But the June ‘36 sit-downs never aimed to

re-start production. Their objective was less to protect the machinery

(which no saboteur threatened) than to use it to put pressure on the

boss and to have a good time. The conscious festive dimension was far

more important than an alleged will to prove productive abilities

superior to those of the bourgeois. Very few even contemplated worker

management of the occupied plants. A harsh and alienating place was

turned into liberated space, if only for a few weeks. It certainly was

no revolution, nor its dawning, but a transgression, a place and time to

enjoy a somewhat illegal yet fully legitimate holiday, while winning

substantial reforms. The striker was proud to show his family round the

premises, but his long collective meals, his dancing and singing

signalled his joy not to be at work. As in the US a little later, the

sit-down was a re-appropriation of the present, a (short) capture of

time for oneself.

The vast majority of the strikers understood the situation better than

Trotsky (“The French revolution has begun”) or Marceau Pivert

(“Everything’s possible now”).[90] They realised that 1936 did not

herald social upheaval, and they were neither ready nor willing to make

it happen. They grabbed what they could, especially in terms of labour

time: the 40-hour week and paid holiday stand as symbols of that period.

They also preserved the possibility of selling their labour power to

capital as it existed, not to a collective capitalism that would have

been run by the labour movement. The CGT kept a low profile on a

possible new society based on socialised work. June ‘36 had a more

humble and more realistic purpose — to enable the worker to sell himself

without being treated as an animated thing. This was also the period

when recreational and educational activities organised for and sometimes

by the masses became popular: culture brought to the factories,

“quality” theatre for the common people, youth hostels, etc.

Resistance to work went on for a long while after the sit-downs, in a

more and more hostile environment. Bosses and Popular Front spokesmen

kept insisting on a “pause” in demands, and on the necessity to rearm

France. But the proletarians took advantage of the slackening of the

military style factory discipline that had been enforced since the 1929

crash. In the Spring of 1936, they’d got into the habit of coming in

late, leaving early, not coming at all, slowing down work and disobeying

orders. Some would walk in drunk. Many refused piece rates. At Renault,

stoppages and go-slows resulted in a productivity that was lower in 1938

than two years before. In the aircraft industry, piece rates were

virtually abandoned. That trend did not prevail only in big factories,

but also in construction work and plumbing. It’s after the failure of

the November ‘38 general strike (which aimed to defend the 40 hour

week), and after the government had called in the police and army to

intimidate and beat up strikers (Paris lived in an undeclared state of

siege for 24 hours) that discipline was restored and working hours

greatly extended, with a resulting increase in production and

productivity. The centre-right leader Daladier (formerly one of the

leaders of the Popular Front) rightly boasted he was “putting France

back to work”.

Spain: 1936See note 8 above.

Apart from farming estates, many companies were collectivised and

production re-started by the personnel. This was often because the boss

had fled, but sometimes to “punish” one who’d stayed but sabotaged

production to harm the Popular Front. That period gave birth to a

multitude of meaningful experiences, like waiters refusing tips on the

basis that they weren’t servants. Other endeavours tried to suppress

money circulation and develop non-mercantile relationships between

production and between people.

Another future was in search of itself, and it carried with it the

superseding of work as a separate activity. The main objective was to

organise social life without the ruling classes, or “outside” them. The

Spanish proletarians, in the factories as well as in the fields, did not

aim at developing production, but at living free. They weren’t

liberating production from bourgeois fetters, they were more plainly

doing their best to liberate themselves from bourgeois domination.[91]

In practice, the democratic management of the company usually meant its

union management by CNT and UGT (the socialist union) activists or

officials. It’s they who described self-governance of production as the

road to socialism, but it does not seem that the rank and file

identified itself with such a prospect.

Loathing work had long been a permanent feature of Spanish working class

life. It continued under the Popular Front. This resistance was in

contradiction with the programme (particularly upheld by the

anarcho-syndicalists) calling the proles to get fully involved in the

running of the workplace. The workers showed little interest in factory

meetings which discussed the organising of production. Some

collectivised companies had to change the meeting day from Sunday (when

nobody cared to turn up) to Thursday. Workers also rejected piece rates,

neglected working schedules, or deserted the place. When piecework was

legally abolished, productivity fell. In February 1937, the CNT

metalworkers’ union regretted that too many workers took advantage of

industrial injuries. In November, some railwaymen refused to come on

Saturday afternoon.

Union officials, trying to bridge the gap between government and

shop-floor, retaliated by reintroducing piece rates and keeping a

careful eye on working hours, in order to fight absenteeism and theft.

Some went as far as forbidding singing at work. Unauthorized leaving of

one’s work station could lead to a 3-day dismissal, with a 3 to 5 day

wage cut. To get rid of the immorality adverse to maximum efficiency,

the CNT suggested closing bars, concert and dance halls at 10 p.m. There

was talk of putting prostitutes back on the straight and narrow path

thanks to the therapy of work. Laziness was stigmatised as

individualistic, bourgeois and (needless to say) fascist. In January

1938, the CNT daily, Solidaridad Obrera, published an article — ‘We

Impose Strict Discipline in the Workplace’ — that was to be reproduced

several times in the CNT and UGT press, pressing the workers not to

behave as they used to, i.e. not to sabotage production, and not to work

as little as possible. “Now everything (was) completely different”

because industry was laying “the foundations of a communist society”.

With the exception of the anarchist rank and file (and dissidents like

the Friends of Durruti) and the POUM, the parties and unions who stood

for a reign of labour were the same who did everything to prevent that

ideology from becoming a reality, and to make work remain nothing but

work. In 1937, the debate was over, and the contradiction soon brought

to a close — by force.

France: 1945

As early as 1944, a number of French companies went under union control,

sometimes under union management, as in the Berliet heavy vehicle plant.

Throughout the country, several hundred factories were supervised by

workers’ committees. With assistance from the administrative staff, they

took care of production, pay, canteens and some social benefits, and

asked for a say over hiring and firing. As a CGT official declared in

1944: “The workers are human beings, they want to know who they’re

working for… The worker must feel at home in the factory … and through

the union get involved in the management of the economy”.

But the haze of self-management assertions could not cloud a capitalist

functioning that soon reappeared in its down-to-earth banality. Let’s

just take the example of the miner. Much has been made of his pride and

his eagerness to mine coal. We’ve seen newsreels of Thorez (the CP

leader) exhorting thousands of miners in their work clothes to do what

he called their class and national duty — to produce… and produce more

and more.

There’s no point in denying the miner’s pride, but we have to assess its

scope and limits. Every social group develops an image of itself and

feels proud of what it does and of what it thinks it is. The colliers’

self-esteem was socially conditioned. The official Miner’s Status (which

dates back to that period) granted quite a few advantages, like free

medical care and heating, but also put the mining areas under a

paternalistic supervision. The CGT controlled labour and daily life.

Being regarded as a loafer was close to being treated as a saboteur, or

even as a pro-Nazi. It was up to the foreman to decide how much coal was

to be mined. Piecework ruled. To put it mildly, what productive

eagerness there was lacked spontaneity.

Real miners’ pride had more to do with the community of labour

(festivals, rituals, solidarity…) than with the content of work, and

even less with its alleged purpose (to produce for the renaissance of

France). In the 30s and 40s, the diary of a radical miner like Constant

Malva never mentions the beauty or the greatness of his craft. To him,

work was work and nothing else.[92]

Productivist practices and speeches also filled a gap. Everyone,

including the common man, claimed to be a patriot and accused the

bourgeoisie as a whole of collaboration with the Germans. Coal was also

the prime energy source, and a precious one in a devastated economy.

Let’s add a direct political cause to this near fusion between

patriotism and productivism: it helped people forget the support given

to the Hitler-Stalin pact by the French CP, its denunciation of the war

in 1939–41 as “imperialist”, and its late involvement in the anti-German

Resistance.

Putting the proletarians back to work meant reintegrating them into the

national community, and punishing those bosses who’d been overtly

collaborationist. This is why Renault was nationalised in 1945.

Branding the bourgeoisie as anti-labour and un-French was one and the

same thing, and it went along with self-managerial appearances. But this

was all the more possible because in France the CP did not really aspire

to power. Wherever it did (in Eastern Europe for instance), it did not

bother with such slogans. In fact, the average French (or Italian, or

American…) Stalinist was convinced that socialist countries did their

best for the welfare of the masses, but certainly not that the Russian

or Polish workers ran the factories – everything for the people’s good,

nothing by the people themselves…

The whole post-war story looks like a shadow theatre. No more than the

bosses, did unions and workers’ parties ever try to promote labour as a

class, or develop a wage-earners’ democracy (even a superficial one)

inside the firms. After the troubled 1920s, after the persistent

rejection of work of the 1930s, the prime objective was now to force the

proletarians into reconstructing the economy. The workers were too

preoccupied with bread and butter demands to put their minds and energy

into a “reign of labour” nobody really cared for, nor sought to

establish. The 1947–48 strikes offer an excellent illustration of this:

they proved the ability of the French CP (and of its Italian neighbour)

to recuperate and streamline the class struggle potentials it had been

repressing since the end of the war.

Italy: 1945

As early as 1942, Italy was shaken by a strike wave that culminated in

the April 25, 1943 insurrection that drove the Germans out of Turin

after five days of street fighting. A national union of all parties was

set up, dominated by the Stalinists (at Fiat-Mirafiori, 7,000 workers

out of 17,000 belonged to the CP). Economic recovery was given top

priority. In September 1945, the Metalworkers’ union stated that “the

toiling masses are willing to accept more sacrifices [lower wages,

transfers, firing of those who have other incomes, partial redundancy]

so that Italy can be born again … We must increase production and

develop labour: there lies the unique road to salvation.”

In December, the National Liberation Committees turned into Company

Management Committees, or rather they took over those bodies created

under Mussolini’s corporatism. The main role of every CMC was to help

put people back to work and enhance hierarchy. Its method was a mixture

of Taylorism and Stakhanovism: youth brigades, volunteers’ groups,

material incentives, bonuses for cleaning and maintaining machines… The

idea was to arouse “the enthusiasm of the working classes for the

productive effort”.

Reality stood in stark contrast to propaganda. The struggle for better

work conditions remained strong, and enthusiasm for production quite

low. A CMC official admitted that the party had to resort to much

persuasion because people took a nap in the afternoon. According to a

Mirafiori shop steward, the union activists were labelled “fascists”

when they tried to convince the workers that it was their duty as

comrades to work: “they interpreted freedom as the right to do nothing”.

The workers would come in at 8.30 in the morning and have breakfast. An

ex-partisan then employed at Mirafiori sadly told how the workers

misused their own freedom, how they loitered in the toilets. They

weren’t suitable material for building socialism, he regretted, they

went on strike to play games — “we were more serious”. The personnel

kept resisting anything that came close to a control over time, to the

reintroduction of material incentives. On factory walls, writings like

“Down with timing” were a rejection of the pro-Taylor quotes by Lenin

which the Stalinists were most fond of.

If the CMCs eventually proved relatively efficient in restoring

discipline and hierarchy, they failed to raise productivity: in 1946, it

only increased by 10%, which wasn’t much, owing to its low level at the

end of the war. Above all, they failed to create a “new” proletarian —

the one that would manage his own exploitation. The CMCs composed only

of workers never got off the ground. The proles had more trust in their

direct delegates, the shop-floor commissars, who were more inclined to

go on strike than to produce.

This multiform unrest went on until 1948, which was the last outburst

against a worsening repression and deteriorating living conditions. A

partial wage freeze was imposed in April 1947, and maintained until

1954. For about 15 years, the Fiat workers underwent unrestrained

exploitation and were nearly deprived of union protection. In other

words, in 1944–47, the Italian proletarians were not defeated because

they had tried to establish a domination of labour over capital while

remaining within capital. They got crushed by the bourgeoisie in a more

conventional way — with the help of union and party bureaucracies.

France and Elsewhere: 1968

This time, the festive element that characterised the June 36 sit-downs

was fairly absent in France, but quite widespread in Italy. In many

French factories dominated by the CGT, the place was practically locked

up, for fear restless workers and “outsiders” would upset the orderly

running of the strike by the union. ’68 was in many respects harsher

than ’36, as a small but determined proletarian minority challenged the

hegemony of the Stalinists over the industrial workers.

The festive dimension moved from the factory to the street, which

indicated that demands were breaking the workplace barrier and that the

heart of the matter was encompassing the whole of daily life. In France,

the most radical wage-earners would often leave the factory. There was

no Chinese Wall between “workers” and “students” (a lot of whom were not

students at all). Many workers, often young ones, would share their time

between their work mates inside the factory, and discussion (and

sometimes action) groups outside, where they met with minority workers

from other factories.[93] Moreover, during the Italian Hot Autumn of 69,

it was quite common for workers to occupy the premises in the daytime,

leave at night and be back the following morning, even after they’d been

violently fighting the police and company guards to occupy the plant.

They felt that the essential was not happening just within the confines

of the workplace. As passive reaction (absenteeism) turned active

(collective sabotage, permanent meeting and wild partying on the

assembly line, etc.), it burst outside the factory walls.

The aftermath of ‘68 brought forth an experience that set itself up (and

that many people accepted) as exemplary, but which remained on the

fringe of the movement: in 1973, LIP, a watchmaker company that went

bankrupt, was taken over by the personnel and became a symbol of

self-managed capitalism. But its principles (“We produce, we sell, we

pay ourselves”) were little more than an ingenious yet desperate attempt

to avoid unemployment and to continue to get an income. LIP’s

wage-earners self-managed distribution more than production (they sold a

lot of watches and manufactured few), until they had to close down. In

the mid-1970s, radicals were perfectly justified to analyse the LIP

adventure as an experiment in self-exploitation, but quite wrong to

interpret it as a feasible form of counter-revolution. Clearly, this was

neither a viable option for the capitalists, nor a popular one among

workers.

Similar attempts with a partial restarting of manufacturing and some

selling of stock were to follow, particularly in the engineering

industry, However, these were more a way to react to a programmed

closure, than a blueprint for the future. Whatever theories may have

been elaborated by leftists, these self-management embryos were grounded

on nothing solid, nothing able to mobilise the workers. Such practices

appeared at the crossroads of an endemic critique of work that led to

nothing else, and the beginning of a capitalist restructuring about to

dispose of excess labour.

Portugal: 1974Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution

(Solidarity, 1977). A lively account and thorough analysis.

The “Revolution of the Carnations” set in motion factory sit-ins and

self-management practices. These occurred generally in small or medium

size firms, mostly in poor industries, employing simple technology and

unskilled labour such as textiles, furniture-making and agro-industry.

These occupations were usually in response to (real or fraudulent)

bankruptcy, or to a closure of the plant by the owner. Sometimes, they

got rid of a boss who had been too visibly supporting the Salazar

regime. One of the objectives was to counter economic sabotage by the

opponents of the Revolution of the Carnations. It was also a means to

impose specific demands such as the reintegration of fired militant

workers, to apply government decisions regarding wages and work

conditions, or to prevent planned redundancies.

This social surge (élan) never questioned the circulation of money, nor

the existence and function of the State. Self-managers would turn to the

State for capital, and more often than not Stalinist — influenced

agencies would logically reserve investment funds for their political

friends or allies. They also asked the State to impose exchanges between

self-managed firms and those that weren’t. Wages were still being paid,

often with a narrowed wage differential, or none. Hierarchy was

frequently dismantled, and the rank and file had a democratic say in

most decisions. Still, the movement did not go beyond workers’ control

over production, wage scales, and hiring and firing. It was a kind of

LIP extended to an entire relatively poor capitalist country. The

Portuguese experience was a replay of all the dead-ends revived by the

60s-70s era: populism, syndicalism, Leninism, Stalinism,

self-management…

Critique of Work / Critique of Capital

Short as it is, our historical scan casts the shadow of doubt on the

thesis that the (undeniable) self-identification of the proletarian as

producer has been the decisive cause of our defeats. When did the

workers really try to shoulder economic growth? When did they compete

with old time bourgeois owners or modern directors for the management of

the companies? In that matter at least, there’s no coincidence between

political platforms and proletarian practices. Workers’ movements don’t

boil down to an affirmation of labour. The attempts to resume production

were often enough a makeshift solution, an effort to fill a gap caused

by the absence or incompetence of the boss. In that case, occupying the

premises and restarting the work process did not mean an affirmation of

the workers as workers — as in other circumstances when a bankrupt

company is bought out of by its personnel, it was a means of survival.

When, in Argentina at the end of 2001, the workers took over the

Bruckman textile factory which was threatened with closure, and kept it

going, they did so with no prospect of transforming capitalism into

socialism, even within the limits of a single firm. This then became the

case with dozens of Argentinian companies. Such behaviour occurs when

proletarians think they have no chance of changing the world.

An essential point here is how far we are determined by history. If the

“being” of the proletariat theorised by Marx is not just a metaphysics,

its content is independent of the forms taken by capitalist domination.

The tension between the submission to work and the critique of work has

been active since the dawn of capitalism. Of course the realisation of

communism depends on the historical moment, but its deep content remains

invariant in 1796 and in 2002. Otherwise, we would not understand how,

as early as the 1840’s, some people were able to define communism as the

abolition of wage-labour, classes, the State and work. If everything is

determined by a historical necessity that was logically immature in

1845, how could we explain the genesis of communist theory at that time?

In the 20th century it was the failure of the rich post-1917

revolutionary process that gave full scope to the social-democratic and

Stalinist cult of the productive forces.[94] To afterwards interpret

that process as the cause of the cult, is tantamount to analysing

something from its contrary. Marx and Stalin both talked of the

dictatorship of the proletariat, but Stalin does not explain Marx. To

say that the KPD programme in 1930 (or the SPD programme in 1945) would

reveal the true nature of the KAPD programme in 1920, is to turn history

upside down.

Once the counter-revolution was there to stay, work (in the US as in the

USSR) could only exist under constraint: the workers weren’t put to work

as a pseudo ruling class, but as a really ruled one, and according to

proven capitalist methods. The ideology of workers’ management was

flatly denied by unions and labour parties of all kinds. Now they had a

share in power (in corporate boardrooms as in ministries) they could

only promote the economy by resorting to the good old devices that had

been beneficial to the bourgeois for centuries.

In the most acute social crises, whatever they may have thought or said,

the proletarians did not try to assert themselves through asserting the

value of work. Since the origins of the class struggle, they have kept

fighting for less working hours and more pay. Let’s also bear in mind

the stuff daily workshop or office life is made of: absenteeism, petty

thefts, go-slows, non-genuine illness or faked injuries, even sabotage

or assault on supervisors, all of which only decrease in times of severe

unemployment. If freebie strikes (for instance, when transportation

workers permit free rides, or postal employees allow free postage and

phone calls) are so rare, it’s a sign that strikes offer a pleasant

opportunity to dodge work.

We’re not suggesting that proletarian reality is a permanent underground

rebellion. The contradictory role of the wage-earner in the productive

process entails a contradictory attitude to work. The proletarian puts a

lot into work, among other reasons because no-one can stand a job for

hours and years without a minimum of interest, and because work both

stultifies our ability and know-how and allows us to at least partially

express them – the anthropological dimension of work has been

sufficiently exposed elsewhere that we don’t have to go into it

here.[95]

In periods of social turmoil, either the workers show a deep

indifference to work (sometimes running away from it); or work is

re-imposed on them. During such periods, proletarians initiate a

critique of their condition, because refusing work is a first move

toward negating oneself as a proletarian.

It’s true, however, that so far they have not gone past that critique,

or its early steps. There lies the problem.

It’s not the critique of work that’s been lacking, like an essential

dimension up to now neglected. How many men and women are happy to wear

themselves out for the sake of churning out alarm clocks or pencils, or

of processing files for the NHS? The worker is well aware that work

stands as his enemy and, as far as he can, he does his best to get away

from it. What is more difficult for him to imagine (and even more to put

into deeds) is that he could do away with both work and capital. Isn’t

it the critique of capital that’s been lacking, and still is? People are

prone to lay the blame on the reign of money, and they also denounce the

alienation of work: what is much less common is the understanding of the

unity that binds the two, the critique of selling one’s activity in

exchange for an income, i.e. the critique of wage-labour, of capital.

The failure of the proletarian movement up to now is to be related to

its own activity, not to its specific formatting by capital at specific

historical moments. Formatting provides the conditions: it does not give

nor ever will give the means to use them. And we’ll only have a true

answer once the transformation of the world is achieved.

In any case, a revolutionary period weakens (rather than strengthens)

the ideology of emancipating labour through labour. Then the ebb of the

radical wave brings about self-managerial practices that leave bourgeois

power intact, and which this power sooner or later will sweep away.

The ideal of a wage-labour capitalism, and the attempt to realise it,

are not remains from the past that a real domination of capital (or some

form of it more real than previously) would at last be able to

undermine.[96] The adhesion to work is neither (as Situationists tend to

think) a delusion which the proles should or now can grow out of, nor

(as Théorie Communiste tends to think) a historical phase formerly

inevitable but now gone. It is neither an ideology nor a stage in

history (though both aspects play their part). Wage-labour is not a

phenomenon imposed from outside, but the social relationship that

structures our society: practical and collective adherence to work is

built into the framework of that relationship.

What’s New About Capitalism

Some have interpreted contemporary capitalism as a production of value

without work, of a value so diffused that its productive agents and

moments would be scattered throughout the whole social fabric.

Neither theory (Marx’s Grundrisse, in particular[97]) nor hard facts

validate this thesis. It’s true that today valorisation depends much

less on the direct intervention of every single producer than on a

collective effort. It is a lot more difficult to isolate each productive

wage-earner’s contribution to value than in 1867. Nevertheless, it is

not an undifferentiated social whole that valorises capital. The

assembler, the lorry-driver, the computer expert, the firm researcher…

do not add value to the company to the same extent. The “social factory”

theory is relevant as far as it takes into account unpaid productive

labour (e.g., that of housewives). It gets irrelevant when it regards

value as the result of a uniform totality. Managers know their Marx

better than Toni Negri — they keep tracing and measuring productive

places and moments to try and rationalise them more and more. They even

locate and develop “profit centres” within the company. Work is not

diffuse, it is separated from the rest. If manual labour is evidently

not the unique or main source of value, if immaterial labour is on the

increase, work remains vital to our societies. It is strange to speak of

an “end of work” when temp agencies are among the largest employers in

the US.

In a country like France, though sociologists and statisticians tell us

that there are more office than factory workers (now reduced to 1⁄4 of

the working population), the latter — 80% of whom are male — are often

married to the former. As a consequence, 40% of kids are living in a

household where one of their parents is a “blue collar” worker, often

employed in the service sector. Instead of walking through factory gates

every morning, he is in charge of maintenance, drives a heavy vehicle,

moves goods in a warehouse, etc. Half of French workers aren’t

“industrial” any more. Still, thus defined, workers are the most

numerous groups. Whether they’re old style factory operatives, service

sector manual wage-earners, Taylorised clerks, cashiers, etc., underling

wage-earners compose over half of the French working population. (It

would be interesting to have the exact figures for a would-be city of

the future like Los Angeles.) These facts do not change anything in the

validity or vanity of a communist perspective, their only merit is

precisely to show that nothing fundamental has changed since the 19th

century. According to Marx’s own figures in Capital volume I, there were

more servants than industrial workers in mid-Victorian England. Should

the theory of the proletariat be wrong, it was already so in 1867, and

it isn’t wrong in 2002 because there aren’t enough workers left.

Capitalism is the first universal exploitation system. Surplus-labour is

no longer extorted from someone who organises and therefore controls his

production to a large extent, as was the case of the peasant under

Asiatic despotism, the serf pressurized by his lord and by the taxman,

or the craftsman dominated by the merchant. These weren’t exploited

within their work: part of the fruit of their labour was taken away from

them from outside and after it had been produced. Buying and selling

labour power introduces exploitation, not on the edge of human activity,

but in its heart.

But, because of that very process — because the wage-earner sells his

labour power — he makes capital as much as he is made by it, he lives

inside capital to a far higher degree than the peasant depended on his

master and the craftsman on the merchant. Because he lives (and resists,

and fights) inside capital, he produces and shares its essentials,

including consumption and democracy. Because selling his life force is

necessary to him, he can only despise and reject his work, in reality

and in his mind, by rejecting what makes him exist as a wage-earner,

i.e. by rejecting capital. In other words, if it’s got to be more than

everyday resistance, refusal of work is only possible through an acute

social crisis.

In pre-industrial times, the Peasants’ wars in the 15th and 16th

centuries, the Tai-Ping in 19th century China, and many others, managed

to build up self-sufficient liberated areas that sometimes survived for

over ten years. In the West Indies, Black slaves could take to the hills

and live on their own outside “civilisation”. The industrial world

leaves no such space for an alternative. If the 1919 Petrograd worker

fled to the countryside, capitalism caught up with him within a few

years. The Spanish collectivities of 1936–38 never “liberated” large

areas. More recently, Bolivian miners self-managed their villages, with

armed militia, radio stations, co-ops, etc. But it stopped when the

mines were closed down. Their social dynamism depended on the function

that international capital gave them. Only peasant communities, in so

much as they stood outside the world economy, could go on living on

their own for a long while. Modern workers have been unable to set up

any reorganised social life that would rival normal or purely capitalist

capitalism for a durable length of time. No room for a Third Way any

more.

The Contradiction May Not Be Where We Think

Every reader of Marx knows that he never completed what he regarded as

his master work, and that he rewrote the beginning several times. Why

does Marx linger on the commodity, why does he start with the way

capitalism presents itself, instead of giving its definition right away?

If he insists first on representation and not on capital’s nature, it

may well be that he thinks its nature is related to its representation,

which is no psychological process, but has to do with social

representation at its deepest.

The author of Das Kapital keeps talking about a mystery, a secret to

penetrate. Which one? It is hard to believe Marx is only concerned with

proving to the worker that he is exploited… It’s more logical Marx would

be circling the various facets of capital to focus on a contradiction

more crucial to the communist movement than the mechanics of

surplus-value.[98] He is targeting the amazing dynamics of a social

system that is based more than any other on those it enslaves and

provides them with weapons to dismantle it, but — because of that —

manages to integrate them into its triumphant and destructive march, and

(at least until now) uses social crises to regenerate itself. The

contradiction of the proletarian is to be the bearer of a commodity that

contains the possibility of all others, and can transform everything,

while having to sell this commodity, and therefore to act and picture

himself as a valorizer. The potential gravedigger of the system is the

same one who feeds it.

Only with commodity exchange do relationships between humans appear as

relations between things. The 19th century worker tended to see in

capital only the capitalist. The 21st century wage-earner often

perceives capital as just… capital, and not his own activity that

(re)produces it. Fetishism still rules, albeit depersonalised, but it

still veils the social relations producing capital. The denunciation of

exploitation usually misses what economy is — the domination of

everything and everyone by production for value. Actually, what’s at

stake from a communist point of view is not what capital hides and what

most proletarians have the intuition of: the extraction of

surplus-value. What’s at stake is what capitalism imposes daily in real

life and impresses on our minds: the economy as something obvious and

inevitable, the necessity of exchanging commodities, of buying and

selling labour, if we wish to avoid want, misery and dictatorship.

True, contemporary work does not socialise well because it tends to

become a pure means of earning a living. Still, that socialisation does

not vanish. (The emergence of radical reformism has to do with its

persistence.) As a Moulinex laid-off worker said in 2001: “The hardest

thing now is to be alone.” The ideology of labour power is the necessary

ideology of the proletarian within capital. That commodity is the prime

reality of billions of men and women. The proletarian is never reduced

to what capital turns him into, yet he feels a need to be recognised and

socially enhanced, and that need is based on his only asset: work. He

has to have this positive image of himself, if only to be able to sell

himself on good terms. In an interview, the job seeker will not devalue

himself. If he did, he would submit to the common prejudice that debases

the competence of a simple order-taker.

On the other hand, non-adherence to work is not enough to guarantee the

possibility of revolution, let alone its success. A proletarian who

regards himself as nothing will never question anything. The unskilled

worker of 1970 was convinced he was doing a stupid job, not that he was

stupid himself: his critique addressed precisely the emptiness of an

activity unworthy of what he claimed to be. A purely negative vision of

the world and of oneself is synonymous with resignation or acceptance of

anything. The proletarian only starts acting as a revolutionary when he

goes beyond the negative of his condition and begins to create something

positive out of it, i.e. something that subverts the existing order.

It’s not for lack of a critique of work that the proletarians have not

made the revolution, but because they stayed within a negative critique

of work.

The affirmation of labour has not been the principal factor of

counter-revolution, only (and this is important!) one of its main

expressions. But unions conveyed this ideology through what remains

their essential function: the bargaining of labour power. Organisations

like the Knights of Labour at the end of the 19th century played a minor

part, and withered with the generalisation of large scale industry.

If the promotion of labour was as central as we’re sometimes told,

Fordism would have taken it up. But Scientific Management did not defeat

the skilled workers by bestowing more professional dignity on the

shop-floor, but by deskilling and breaking down trades. Generous schemes

for job enrichment and re-empowerment are only implemented to disrupt

the autonomy of the work team — then these reforms gradually fade away

because the rank and file does not really care.

The ideas that rule are those of the ruling class. The ideology of work,

whatever form it takes, is the capitalist ideology of work. There can’t

be any other. When the social consensus is shattered, that

representation goes down with the others. It would be paradoxical that a

severe crisis, instead of shaking it, should develop it even further.

Revolution is No Exact Science

The first part of this essay was mainly historical. What follows could

be called methodological. Our critique of determinism focuses on a

general tendency among revolutionaries to treat capitalist civilisation

as if it were a one-way street to revolution.

From the omnipresence of capital, one can conclude with the possibility

— or even necessity — of revolution. One could also deduct from it the

impossibility of a revolution. That type of reasoning may be repeated

indefinitely, and still be used in a hundred years if capitalism is

still here. A theoretical model explains nothing but itself. Yesterday

and tomorrow, as many reasons point to the continuity of capitalism as

to its abolition. (As we wrote earlier, only when accomplished will the

destruction of the old world throw a full light on past failures.)

Some comrades postulate the coming of an ultimate stage when the inner

working of the system won’t just upset it, but destroy it. They believe

that whatever has happened before that final stage has been necessary,

because up to now the workers have only been able to reform capitalism.

Now there comes a threshold when reform becomes utterly pointless, a

threshold that leaves no other option except revolution. Past radical

proletarian activity has only contributed to bring about the historical

moment that makes revolution possible — or necessary, rather. Until

then, the class struggle has provided the required sequence of phases

preparing the final phase.

By the way, this would justify what has been called Marx’s and Engels’

revolutionary reformism — urging the bourgeoisie to develop capitalism

and create the conditions of communism. Among other things, Marx

supported the German national bourgeoisie, praised Lincoln, sided with

quite a few reformist parties and unions while relentlessly targeting

anarchists…[99] Shall we also have to agree with Lenin (because he acted

like a new revolutionary bourgeois) against Gorter and Bordiga? And was

Roosevelt a better (though unconscious) contributor to human

emancipation than Rosa Luxemburg?

Anyway, from now on, all ambiguity is said to have been cleared up. We

should be entering the final stage in the history of wage-labour: work

is said to be now less and less available, more and more deskilled,

devoid of any other meaning but to provide an income, thereby preventing

the wage-earner from adhering to capital, and to the plan of a

capitalism without capitalists. Reaching this threshold has made it

impossible once and for all for labour to assert itself as labour within

capital.

The underlying logic to this approach is to search for an un-mediated

class relationship that would leave no other solution for the

proletariat but a direct (class against class) confrontation with

capital.

Determinism revisits history to locate the obstacle to revolution, and

discovers it in the form of the social space that the workers supposedly

wished to occupy inside capitalism. Then that option is said to be now

closed — such a social space does not exist any more because in fully

real domination capitalism is everywhere. The reasons for past failures

give the reasons for tomorrow’s success, and provide the inevitability

of communist revolution, as the obstacle is cleared away by the

completion of what is described as capital’s quasi natural life cycle.

In other words, the revolutionary crisis is no longer perceived as a

breaking up and superseding of the social conditions that create it. It

is only conceived of as the conclusion of a pre-ordained evolution.

The methodological flaw is to believe in a privileged vantage point that

enables the observer to grasp the totality (and the whole meaning) of

past, present and near future human history.

In short, the causes of our previous shortcomings are not sought in the

practical deeds of the proletarians. Instead of a labour-power

overcoming its condition and rising to its historic task of freeing

itself from its chains, and thus freeing humanity, the dynamic element

is no longer proletarian action, but the movement of capital. The mutual

involvement of capital and labour is reduced to a one-way relation of

cause and effect. History gets frozen.

We would prefer to say that there is no other limit to the life-span of

capital than the conscious activity of the proletarians. Otherwise, no

crisis, however deep it might be, will be enough to produce such a

result. And any deep crisis (a crisis of the system, not just in it)

could be the last if the proletarians took advantage of it. But there’ll

never be a day of reckoning, a final un-mediated showdown, as if at long

last the proletarians were directly facing capital and therefore

attacking it.

“The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the breakdown of

capitalism”, as Pannekoek wrote in the last sentence of his essay on The

Theory of the Breakdown of Capitalism (1934). It is significant this

should come as the conclusion of a discussion on capital’s cycles and

reproduction models (Marx’s, Luxemburg’s and Henrik Grossmann’s). The

communist movement cannot be understood through models similar to those

of the reproduction of capital — unless we regard communism as the last

logical ( = as inevitable as any previous crisis) step in the course of

capital. If this were the case, the communist revolution would be as

“natural” as the growing up and ageing of living beings, the succession

of seasons and the gravitation of planets, and just like them

scientifically predictable.

1789 might have happened forty years later or sooner, without a

Robespierre and a Bonaparte, but a bourgeois revolution was bound to

happen in France in the 18th or 19th century.

Who could argue that communism is bound to happen? The communist

revolution is not the ultimate stage of capitalism.

“With the psychology of a trade unionist who will not stay off his work

on May Day unless he is assured in advance of a definite amount of

support in the event of his being victimised, neither revolution nor

mass strike can be made. But in the storm of the revolutionary period

even the proletarian is transformed from a provident pater familas

demanding support, into a ‘revolutionary romanticist’, for whom even the

highest good, life itself, to say nothing of material well-being,

possesses but little in comparison with the ideals of the

struggle.”[100]

Finally, whoever believes that 1848, 1917, 1968… were compelled to end

up as they ended up, should be requested to prophesy the future — for

once. No-one had foreseen May ‘68. Those who explain that its failure

was inevitable only knew this afterwards. Determinism would gain

credibility if it gave us useful forecasts.[101]

Never Ask Theory for What It Can’t Give

Revolution is not a problem, and no theory is the solution of that

problem. (Two centuries of modern revolutionary movement demonstrate

that communist theory does not anticipate the doings of the

proletarians.)

History does not prove any direct causal link between a degree of

capitalist development, and specific proletarian behaviour. It is

improvable that at a given historical moment the essential contradiction

of a whole system would bear upon the reproduction of its fundamental

classes and therefore of the system itself. The error does not lie in

the answer but in the question. Looking for what would force the

proletarian, in his confrontation with capital, to attack his own

existence as a wage-earner, is tantamount to trying to solve in advance

and through theory a problem which can only be solved — if it ever is —

in practice. We cannot exclude the possibility of a new project of

social reorganisation similar to that which had workers’ identity as its

core. The rail-worker of 2002 can’t live like his predecessor of 1950.

This is not enough for us to conclude that he would only be left with

the alternative of resignation or revolution.

When the proletariat seems absent from the scene, it is quite logical to

wonder about its reality and its ability to change the world. Each

counter-revolutionary period has the dual singularity of dragging along

while never looking like the previous ones. That causes either a

renunciation of critical activity, or the rejection of a revolutionary

“subject”, or its replacement by other solutions, or a theoretical

elaboration supposed to account for past defeats in order to guarantee

future success. This is asking for unobtainable certainties, which only

serve to reassure. On the basis of historical experience, it seems more

to the point to state that the proletariat remains the only subject of a

revolution (otherwise there won’t be any), that communist revolution is

a possibility but not a certainty, and that nothing ensures its coming

and success but proletarian activity.

The fundamental contradiction of our society (proletariat-capital) is

only potentially deadly to capitalism if the worker confronts his work,

and therefore takes on not just the capitalist, but what capital makes

of him, i.e. if he takes on what he does and is. It’s no use hoping for

a time when capital, like a worn out mechanism, would find it impossible

to function, because of declining profits, market saturation, exclusion

of too many proletarians from work, or the inability of the class

structure to reproduce itself.

A current subtext runs through much of revolutionary thinking: the more

capitalism we have, the nearer we get to communism. To which people like

Jacques Camatte retort: no, the more capitalism we have, the more

capitalist we become. At the risk of shocking some readers, we’d say

that the evolution of capital does not take us closer to or farther from

communism. From a communist point of view, nothing is positive in itself

in the march of capital, as is shown by the fate of classism.

The Rise and Fall of Classism

In practice, “classism” was the forward drive of the working class as a

class within capitalist society, where its organisations came to occupy

as much social space as possible. Labour set up collective bodies that

rivalled with those of the bourgeoisie, and conquered positions inside

the State. That took — and still takes — many forms (social-democracy,

CPs, the AFL-CIO…), and also existed in South America, in Asia and parts

of Africa.

In theory, classism is the vindication of class difference (and

opposition) as an end in itself, as if class war was the same as the

emancipation of the workers and of mankind. So it’s based exactly on

what has to be criticised, as classes are basic constituents of

capitalist society. Whether it’s peaceful or violent, the mere

opposition of one class to the other leaves both facing each other.

Naturally any ruling class denies the existence of class antagonisms.

Still, in the early 19th century, the first to emphasise class

confrontation weren’t socialists, but bourgeois historians of the French

revolution. What is revolutionary is not to uphold class struggle, but

to affirm that such a struggle can end through a communist revolution.

Nowadays, the decay of classism and of the labour movement is visible

and documented enough for us not to dwell upon it. Some revolutionaries

have rejoiced over the demise of worker’s identity and of the

glorification of the working class as the class of labour, and they’ve

interpreted that demise as the elimination of a major obstacle to

revolution — which the labour institutions and that ideology no doubt

were. But what has the critique of the world really gained by their

withering away? We’d be tempted to say — not much, because of the rise

of even softer practices and ideas. Just being freed of their workers’

role and hopes didn’t turn wage-earners into radical proletarians. So

far, the crisis of the working class and of classism has not favoured

subversion. The past twenty years have brought about neo-liberal,

neo-social-democratic, neo-reactionary, neo-everything ideologies, the

emergence of which has coincided with the symbolic annihilation of the

working class. This wiping out is a product of capital class

recomposition (unemployment, de-industrialisation, proletarianisation of

office work, casualisation, etc.). It also results from the rejection by

the wage-earners themselves of the most rigid forms of worker identity.

But this rejection remains mainly negative. The proletarians have

shattered the control of parties and unions over labour. (In 1960,

anyone handing out an anti-union leaflet at a French factory gate risked

being beaten up by the Stalinists.) But they haven’t gone much further.

The decline of workerism was accompanied by the loss of a point of view

allowing a perspective on the whole of this society, gauging and judging

it from the outside in order to conceive and propose another.

Proletarian autonomy has not taken advantage of bureaucratic decline.

We are experiencing a dislocation of class struggle. In the 60s-70s, the

unskilled workers stood at the centre of the reproduction of the whole

system, and other categories recognised themselves in the “mass worker”.

No social symbolical figure plays such a pivotal role — yet.

Work as a Fallen Idol

19th century and early 20th century communists often shared the

progressivism of their time, and believed that a new industry and a new

labour would emancipate humankind.[102] A hundred years later, we’d be

naive to espouse the exact opposite views just because they happen to be

fashionable. In fifty years, the praise of toil and sacrifice has become

as outdated as the belief in the liberating Horn of Plenty of the

economy.[103] This evolution is as much the result of the radical

critique of the 1960s-70s, as of a deepening of capital — making labour

productive today is achieved more through the work process itself than

by outright discipline. The computer screen is now the immediate

supervisor of millions of industrial and service sector wage-earners. In

its most advanced sectors, capital has already gone beyond authoritarian

hierarchy and work as a curse. “Autonomy” and “bottom-up” are the in

words. The macho, muscle-bound, national (= white) worker image is

giving way to a more open, multi-ethnic, male and female figure.

In 1900, you had to produce before consuming, and labour parties told

the worker he had to develop the productive forces first, in order to

enjoy the fruits of socialism later. Instead of a single Redeemer dying

on a cross, millions of sufferers (“the salt of the earth”) would create

the conditions of a better world. The consumer and credit society has

done away with that: painful self-exertion is no longer said to come

before pleasure. True, this goes together with the multiplication of

sweatshops, of forced, unpaid or ill-paid labour, and of a renaissance

of slavery. Such forms complement but do not contradict the general

trend toward a de-consecration of work. (In 1965, unskilled mass workers

weren’t the majority of wage-earners either.)

Work is an idol, albeit a fallen one. Its imposition is no longer of a

moral or religious kind (“You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your

brow”), but profane and down-to-earth. In some Asian countries, labour

is now being disciplined better by the pressure of consumerism than by

an appeal to Confucianism. In Tai-Peh as in Berlin, public concern is

about creating and getting jobs, not suffering to enter some earthly or

heavenly paradise. So work now calls for a critique different from the

time when an aura of self-inflicted pain surrounded it. Mobility and

self-empowerment are the present slogans of capital. We cannot be

content with anti-work statements such as the ones that the surrealists

were rightly making eighty years ago.[104]

In 2002, work rules, but the work ethic is no longer sacrificial: it

calls upon us to realise our potentials as human beings. Nowadays, we

don’t work for a transcendent goal (our salvation, a sacred duty,

progress, a better future, etc.). The consecration of work was

two-sided: any object of worship is a taboo to be broken. But our age is

one of universal de-consecration. Transcendence is out. The pragmatic

pursuit of happiness is today’s motive: we are Americans.

This, however, does not lead to a growing subterranean rejection of

work. A de-Christianized society substitutes the desire to feel good for

the fear of sin. Religion gives way to a body and health cult: the “me

generation” is more concerned with keeping fit than saving souls. So

work is no longer worshipped because it does not need to be: it’s enough

for it to simply be there. It’s more an overwhelming reality than an

ideology. Its pressure is more direct and open, close to what Marx

described as the American attitude: “total indifference to the specific

content of work and easily moving from one job to another”.[105] In a

modern and “purer” capitalism, de-consecrated work still structures our

lives and minds. And the current moral backlash in the US is proof of

how reactionary attitudes complement permissiveness.

Not much revolutionary clarification has grown out of these changes,

because not everything has the same value in capitalist evolution. The

critical potential completely differs if it’s the workers that attack

worker identity and the worship of work, or if capital is sweeping them

aside. For the last thirty years, as work identification was being

disrupted, the possibility of an utterly different world has also

vanished from individual and collective thinking. In the past, Stalinist

and bureaucratic shackles did not prevent such a utopia, and minorities

debated the content of communism. If a working class entangled in its

identification with work did not make a revolution, nothing yet proves

that the proletarians now liberated from it will act in a revolutionary

way.

“We Are Not of This World” (Babeuf, 1795)

We find it hard to share the optimism of those who see the present

period as entirely dissimilar from the 60s-70s or from any previous

period, with a capitalism that would systematically downgrade the living

conditions of wage-earners, thereby creating a situation that would soon

enough be intolerable and lead to a revolutionary crisis. The limits of

proletarian upsurges from Algeria to Argentina, and the rise of radical

reformism in Europe and the US, rather suggest that it’s reform — not

revolution — that is becoming topical again.[106]

The eagerness to celebrate the twilight of worker identity has led some

comrades to forget that this identity also expressed an understanding of

the irreconcilable antagonism between labour and capital. The

proletarians had at least grasped that they lived in a world that was

not theirs and could never be. We’re not calling for a return to a

Golden Age. We’re saying that the disappearance of this identification

owes as much to counter-revolution as to radical critique. Revolution

will only be possible when the proletarians act as if they were

strangers to this world, its outsiders, and will relate to a universal

dimension, that of a classless society, of a human community.

This implies the social subjectivity indispensable to any real critique.

We are well aware of the interrogations raised by the word subjectivity,

and we surely do not wish to invent a new magical recipe. For the

moment, let us just say that we’re not bestowing any privilege on

subjectivity against objective conditions which would then be secondary

or negligible.

We’ve often emphasised that there’s no point in trying to arouse a

consciousness prior to action: but any real breakthrough implies some

minimal belief in the ability of the people involved to change the

world. This is a big difference with the 60s-70s. Thirty years ago, many

proletarians were not just dissatisfied with this society: they thought

of themselves as agents of historical change, and acted accordingly, or

at least tried to.

The subject/object couple is one of those philosophical expressions that

a human community would supersede. The declared definitive opposition

between individual and society, soul and body, spirit and matter, theory

and praxis, art and economy, ideals and reality, morals and politics…

all relate to the dissolution of communities into classes through the

combined action of property, money and State power. Though not

synonymous with perfect harmony, communism would try and live beyond

such tragic splits in human life.[107] “Subject” and “object” don’t

exist separate from each other. A crisis is not something exterior to

us, that happens and forces us to react. Historical situations (and

opportunities) are also made of beliefs and initiatives, of our actions

— or inaction.

Vaneigem’s “radical subjectivity”[108] had its qualities (and its

purpose at the time) and one major weakness: it appealed to the free

will, to the self-awareness of an individual rising against his social

role and conditioning. This is clearly not what we suggest. Capitalism

is not based on necessity, and communism (or a communist revolution) on

liberty. The abolition of their condition by the proletarians cannot be

separated from concrete struggles against capital. And capital exists

through social groups and institutions. Objective realities, notably the

succession of “systems of production” rooted in and dependent on the

class struggle, are the inevitable framework of the communist movement.

What we do and will do with it remains to be seen.

Much Ado About Nothing

The subject which Dauvé and Nesic seek to reflect upon in this text is

nothing less than the “historical failure” of the communist movement

over the 154 years following the publication of Marx and Engels’

Manifesto.[109] They approach this subject by way of a critique of the

concept of programmatism developed primarily by the journal Théorie

Communiste. However, programmatism could only serve as an explanation of

the “failure of the communist movement” if we imagine, as Dauvé and

Nesic do, that communism is a norm, a substance, something invariable in

“its deep content”.[110] For without this assumption programmatism is

only the explanation of its own failure. We will thus begin by

explicating the theory of programmatism which Dauvé and Nesic have so

misunderstood. But it should be noted that what is actually at stake

here is the definition of the present period and, even more, the fact

that a “present period” may even exist. That is ultimately to say,

something called history.

1 The theory of programmatism

i The emancipation of labour and its failure

Generally speaking we could say that programmatism is defined as a

theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in

its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social

organisation which become the programme to be realised. This revolution

is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of

the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of

transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or

a “society of associated producers”. Programmatism is not simply a

theory — it is above all the practice of the proletariat, in which the

rising strength of the class (in unions and parliaments,

organisationally, in terms of the relations of social forces or of a

certain level of consciousness regarding “the lessons of history”) is

positively conceived of as a stepping-stone toward revolution and

communism. Programmatism is intrinsically linked to the contradiction

between the proletariat and capital as it is constituted by the formal

subsumption of labour under capital.

At this point capital, in its relation to labour, poses itself as an

external force. For the proletariat, to liberate itself from capitalist

domination is to turn labour into the basis of social relations between

all individuals, to liberate productive labour, take up the means of

production, and abolish the anarchy of capitalism and private property.

The proletariat’s liberation is to be founded in a mode of production

based upon abstract labour, i.e. upon value.

The revolutionary process of the affirmation of the class is two-fold.

It is on the one hand conceived of as the rising strength of the

proletariat in the capitalist mode of production and, on the other hand,

its affirmation as a particular class and thus the preservation of its

autonomy. In the necessity of its own mediations (parties, unions,

cooperatives, societies, parliaments), the revolution as autonomous

affirmation of the class (as a particular existence for itself in

relation to capital) loses its way, not so much in relation to

revolution per se, but in relation to this very affirmation. The

proletariat’s rising strength is confused with the development of

capital, and comes to contradict that which was nevertheless its own

specific purpose: its autonomous affirmation.

In the revolutionary period after World War I, of which the Communist

Lefts in their practice and theory are the substantial expression, the

proletariat finds itself ambushed by a novel situation: in its

autonomous affirmation it confronts what it is in capital, what it has

become, its own strength as a class in so far as it is a class of the

capitalist mode of production. The revolution as affirmation of the

class confronts its own failure, because the counter-revolution is

intrinsically linked to this affirmation in its very motivations (and

not because there was any “error”, or because it was impossible in terms

of some ahistorical definition of the revolution). From this point on,

the workers’ parties become the content of the counter-revolution

closest to the revolution.

With the transition of capital to a period of real subsumption of labour

(at the end of the 19th, and beginning of the 20th century), the rising

strength of the class, in which labour presents itself as the essence of

capital, is confused with the development of capital itself. All the

organisations which formalise this rising strength, are able from the

First World War onwards, to present themselves as the managers of

capital — they become as such the most acute form of the

counter-revolution.

In the years after 1917 revolution is still an affirmation of the class,

and the proletariat seeks to liberate against capital its social

strength which exists in capital — a social strength on which it bases

its organisation and founds its revolutionary practice. The very

situation which gave it the capacity to engage in the broad affirmation

underlying the “revolutionary élan” of the post-war period became its

limit. The specificity of this period in relation to classical

programmatism, represented by pre-1914 social democracy, resides in the

fact that the autonomous affirmation of the class against capital

entered into contradiction with its rising strength within capital. At

the same time, this affirmation found its raison d’être and its

foundation in this integration. What the class is in the capitalist mode

of production is the negation of its own autonomy, whilst at the same

time being the reason and power behind its drive for autonomous

affirmation. The counter-revolutions are administered by the workers’

organisations. The impetuous history between the wars, from the Russian

revolution to the Spanish civil war, is that of the liquidation of this

question.

The concept of programmatism historicises the terms of class struggle,

revolution and communism. This enables us to understand class struggle

and revolution in their real historical characteristics and not in

relation to a norm; to overcome the opposition which is made between

revolution, communism, and its conditions (those famous conditions which

are never ripe); to abandon the dichotomy between a proletariat always

revolutionary in its substance (revolutionary, in fact, as the

subsequent period understands the term) and a revolution which it never

produces; to construct the diverse elements of an epoch as a totality

producing its own internal connections at the same time as its

diversities and conflicts (between Marx and Bakunin, Luxembourg and

Bernstein, etc.); and finally, to avoid ending up with a “revolutionary

being” of the proletariat, whose every “manifestation” results in a

restructuring of capital.

One can always search out evidence to the contrary in isolated actions

and events which appear at first sight to oppose themselves to the

general movement, and seek to detach such moments from the movement and

consider them in isolation. In this way Dauvé and Nesic only show how

the incomparably larger part of the movement contradicts their

affirmations. By failing to integrate these moments into a totality they

limit themselves to opposing isolated activities to each other without

grasping their unity.

With the real subsumption of labour under capital, the defining

characteristic of which is the extraction of relative surplus value,

that which disappears is everything which allowed the proletarian

condition to be turned against capital — this is the decomposition of

programmatism. From the 20s to the end of the 70s, this decomposition is

not an exhaustion of the previous period, but a new structure and a new

cycle of struggle. The basis of the decomposition of programmatism as an

historical period is the existence of a workers’ identity stabilised in

the aftermath of the second world war: a workers’ identity confirmed in

the reproduction of capital — labour legitimised as the rival of capital

within the capitalist mode of production. This workers’ identity is

founded on all the characteristics of the immediate process of

production (i.e. assembly-line work, cooperation, the collective worker,

the continuity of the process of production, sub-contracting, the

segmentation of labour power) and all those of reproduction (work,

unemployment, training and welfare). As such it is an identity founded

on all the elements which make of the class a determination of the

reproduction of capital itself (i.e. public services, the national

delimitation of accumulation, creeping inflation and “the sharing of

productivity gains”); all these elements which positioned the

proletariat, socially and politically, as a national interlocutor formed

a workers’ identity which challenged the hegemonic control and

management of the whole of society. This workers’ identity which

constituted the workers’ movement and structured class struggle, even

integrating “really existing socialism” within the global division of

accumulation, rested on the contradiction between, on the one hand, the

creation and development of labour power put to work by capital in an

increasingly collective and social manner, and on the other, the

(increasingly) limited forms of appropriation by capital of this labour

power in the immediate process of production and reproduction.

This is the conflictual situation which developed as workers’ identity —

an identity which found its distinction and its immediate modalities of

recognition (its confirmation) in the “large factory”, in the dichotomy

between employment and unemployment, work and training, in the

submission of the labour process to the collectivity of workers, in the

link between wages, growth and productivity on a national level, in the

institutional representations that all this implied, as much in the

factory as at the level of the state, and, last but not least, in the

social and cultural legitimacy and pride in being a worker. There was a

self-presupposition of capital, in accordance with the concept of

capital, but the contradiction between the proletariat and capital

couldn’t situate itself at this level, in so far as within this

self-presupposition there was a production and confirmation of a

workers’ identity through which the class struggle structured itself as

the workers’ movement.

The decomposition of programmatism contains the increasingly obvious

impossibility of conceiving the revolution as a “growing-over”[111] of

that which the proletariat is in capitalist society, of its rising power

as a workers’ movement. The process of revolution is practically and

theoretically posed in terms of class autonomy, as so many ruptures with

its integration, and of the defence of its reproduction.

Self-organisation and autonomy become the revolution, to such an extent

that the form suffices for the content.

Self-organisation, strong unions and the workers’ movement, all appeared

in the same world of the revolution as affirmation of the class. The

affirmation of the truly revolutionary being of the class which

manifests itself in autonomy could not have the slightest basis in

reality if it weren’t for the good de-alienated side of this world which

was experienced as a strong workers’ movement “framing” the class.

Self-organisation entails the self-organisation of struggle, thus the

self-organisation of producers. In a word — liberated labour; in another

word — value. This cycle of struggle culminated between the end of the

60s and the first half of the 70s. Practically and theoretically,

autonomy was unleashed in every possible manner, from self-organised

unions to insurrectionary autonomy. This world is now obsolete.

There is no restructuring of the capitalist mode of production without a

workers’ defeat. This defeat was that of workers’ identity, of communist

parties, of unionism; of self-management, self-organisation and

autonomy. The restructuring is essentially counter-revolution. Through

the defeat of a particular cycle of struggle — the one which opened in

the aftermath of World War I — it is the whole programmatic cycle which

reached its conclusion.

ii The overcoming of programmatism is not a critique of work

We have just briefly outlined the “thesis of programmatism.” For Dauvé

and Nesic this thesis is “false in regard to the facts, and even more so

in regard to the method, the attitude in relation to the world to be

transformed.”[112] Nevertheless, Dauvé and Nesic have understood it

neither in regard to the facts nor the “method.” And as for the

“attitude”…

The starting point for their refutation of the “thesis of programmatism”

is a misunderstanding:

“From the 1960s onwards, a more and more visible resistance to work,

sometimes to the point of open rebellion, has led quite a few

revolutionaries to revisit the past from the point of view of the

acceptance or rejection of work.”[113]

“A real critique of work was impossible in the 60s … Now things are

completely different.”[114]

This observation is historically correct, but the misunderstanding

resides in the fact that to understand the breakdown of programmatism as

a crisis of work and its overcoming formulated as a “critique of work”

is to remain within programmatism.

Given that the proletariat presented itself as a revolutionary class in

the critique of all that which “articulates” it as a class of the

capitalist mode of production, in the councilist and

self-organisationalist vision the worm was already in the fruit. It

popped its head out at the beginning of the 70s, with the ideology of

self-negation of the proletariat and the critique of work. It was only

by opposing itself to that which could define it as a class of the

capitalist mode of production that the proletariat could be

revolutionary. The “refusal of work”, the riots, lootings and strikes

without demands, naturally became the supreme activity on the basis of

which self-negation could take place. All that was needed was to

self-organise, set up The Councils whilst no longer remaining

“labourers” and “workers”: i.e. to square the circle.

Theoretical humanism allowed that which appeared as negation and refusal

to be seen as overcoming. Dauvé and Nesic are examples of theoreticians

blocked at this stage of theoretical production, not only because they

understand neither the restructuring nor the new cycle of struggle, but

most importantly because they are waiting for such things to resurface —

the resurrection of a schema which was already in its own day an

ideology of the failure of a cycle of struggle coming to an end. Just as

the relation between the rising strength of the class and its autonomous

affirmation expresses, in its own terms, the failure of programmatism,

this same relation, in the form of the relation between

self-organisation and self-negation, expresses the impossibility of the

revolution, in its own terms, in the cycle of the decomposition of

programmatism. Communism is not principally the abolition of work, it is

only such within a theoretical system founded on the analysis of labour,

that is to say on the relation between man and nature as the starting

point of communist theory. What matters in reality are the social

relations which determine human activity as labour — the point is thus

the abolition of these relations and not the abolition of work. The

“critique of work” is not able to positively address the restructuring

as a transformation of the contradictory relation between classes. It

can only address it negatively in terms of the “liquidation” or

de-essentialisation of work.

iii Beyond programmatism

For Dauvé and Nesic we are free of the “old workers’ movement” based on

the “consecration of work” and “workers’ identity” etc., but this has

resulted in no “revolutionary clarification” — in short we are no

further down the road. It is obvious that “proletarian autonomy has not

taken advantage of bureaucratic decline,” for they both belong to the

same world of workers’ identity. Dauvé and Nesic attribute this

liquidation exclusively to capital, as if the “struggles of ’68” had no

role to play. Trapped in their normative problematic of the revolution

(in fact an ideological result of the failure of the previous cycle)

they see only the disappearance of the old and not the appearance of the

new.

Today, the overcoming of revindicative struggles[115] as revolutionary

struggle — i.e. as communisation — is presaged whenever, in these

struggles, it is its own existence as a class that the proletariat

confronts. This confrontation takes place within revindicative struggles

and is first and foremost only a means of waging these struggles

further, but this means of waging them further implicitly contains a

conflict with that which defines the proletariat. This is the whole

originality of this new cycle of struggle. Revindicative struggles have

today a characteristic that would have been inconceivable thirty years

ago.

The proletariat is confronted by its own determination as a class which

becomes autonomous in relation to it, becomes alien to it. The

objectifications in capital of the unity of the class have become

palpable in the multiplication of collectives and the recurrence of

discontinuous strikes (the strikes of spring 2003 in France, the strike

of the English postmen). When it appears that autonomy and

self-organisation are no longer the perspective of anything, as with the

transport strike in Italy or that of the workers at FIAT Melfi, it is

precisely there that the dynamic of this cycle is constituted and the

overcoming of revindicative struggles is presaged through a tension

within revindicative struggles themselves.

To put unemployment and precarity at the heart of the wage relation

today; to define clandestinity (TN: undocumented, black-market work) as

the general situation of labour power; to pose — as in the direct-action

movement — the social immediacy of individuals as the already existing

foundation of the opposition to capital, even if this opposition

describes the whole limit of this movement; to lead suicidal struggles

like those of Cellatex and others of Spring and Summer of 2000;[116] to

refer class unity back to an objectivity constituted by capital, as in

all the collectives and discontinuous strikes; to target all that

defines us, all that we are, as in the riots in the French suburbs of

2005; to find in the extension of revindicative struggles the

questioning of revindication itself, as in the struggles against the

CPE; are contents, for all of these particular struggles, which

determine the dynamic of this cycle within and through these struggles.

The revolutionary dynamic of this cycle of struggle, which consists in

the class producing and confronting in capital its own existence, that

is to say putting itself in question as a class, appears in the majority

of struggles today. This dynamic has its intrinsic limit in that which

defines it as a dynamic: action as a class.

In Argentina, in the productive activities which were developed,

principally within the Piquetero movement, something occurred which was

at first glance disconcerting: autonomy appeared clearly for what it is

— the management and reproduction by the working class of its situation

in capital. The defenders of “revolutionary” autonomy would say that

this is due to the fact that it didn’t triumph, although its triumph is

precisely there. But at the moment within productive activity when

autonomy appeared as it is, everything on which autonomy and

self-organisation are founded was upset: the proletariat cannot find in

itself the capacity to create other inter-individual relations (we

deliberately do not speak of social relations) without overturning and

negating what it is in this society, that is to say without entering

into contradiction with autonomy and its dynamic. In the way that these

productive activities were put into place — in the effective modalities

of their realisation, in the conflicts between self-organised sectors —

the determinations of the proletariat as a class of this society

(property, exchange, division of labour) were effectively upset.

Self-organisation was not superseded in Argentina, but the social

struggles pointed beyond themselves to such a supersession; it is in

this way that the revolution becomes credible as communisation. The

generalisation of the movement was suspended, its continuation

conditioned upon the ability of every fraction of the proletariat to

overcome its own situation, that is to say the self-organisation of its

situation.

To act as a class today means, on the one hand, to no longer have as a

horizon anything other than capital and the categories of its

reproduction, and on the other, for the same reason, to be in

contradiction with one’s own reproduction as a class, to put it into

question. These are two faces of the same action as a class. This

conflict, this divergence[117] in the action of the class (to reproduce

itself as a class of this mode of production / to put itself into

question) exists in the course of the majority of conflicts. To act as a

class is the limit of the action of the proletariat as a class. This

contradiction will be a practical question in need of resolution, a

question much more difficult, risky and conflict laden than the limits

of programmatism.

Revolutionary activity is the rupture and overcoming that Dauvé and

Nesic are looking for, but a produced rupture and overcoming — it has

nothing to do with the immediate and above all presuppositionless

transformation of the “pater familias” into a “revolutionary

romanticist.”[118]

The alliance between the autonomy of the proletariat and the negation of

classes, the worker and man, which is an emergent ideology from a

particular historical situation (that of May ’68 and its failure) has

been presented by Dauvé and Nesic as the invariant substance of a

“tension” within the proletariat “between the submission to work and the

critique of work.”[119] Their essentialist and invariant problematic of

the proletariat and communism prevents them from having a historical

conception of revolution and communism. The concept of programmatism is

the basis of such a conception — a conception that they declare “false

in regard to the facts, and even more so in regard to the method”.

2 “false in regard to the facts”

Dauvé and Nesic make seven objections to the concept of programmatism:

i The workers did not support “a utopia where labour would be king”

for “otherwise, how do we account for the frequent demand to work less?”

The workers couldn’t have had the liberation of labour as their

perspective because they didn’t want to work more for the boss. The

argument is simply dumbfounding. Dauvé and Nesic don’t understand the

“affirmation of labour” as the “liberation of labour”, that is to say

the abolition of its situation of subordination. The “liberation of

labour” is precisely the reverse of wanting to work more (for less

money) for the boss. It is precisely not to consider wage labour as a

positive reality, but as that which is to be abolished. This objection

wouldn’t be worth citing if we didn’t find it repeated in inverted form

in the ideology of the “social bond” or “adhesion” which is supposed to

be one of the terms of the “tension” within the being of the

proletariat.

ii The “liberation of labour” is the product of the organisations of

the workers’ movement and not of the workers themselves

This is passing a little rapidly over the fact that the workers

themselves had founded these organisations and adhered to them in

sometimes massive numbers. Besides, it was indeed the workers who, even

if to defend their existence as workers (but how else could it be when

one sets up workers’ councils?), created councils, soviets, occasionally

experimented with self-management, took control of factories,

participated in factory committees, set up cooperatives and founded

organisations, parties and unions which had the dictatorship of the

proletariat and the liberation of labour as their programme. If we say

that the liberation of labour is the theory of the organisations and not

the working class, first it is false, but even if it were true it would

be necessary to explain the relation between the two.

The history of the Commune is supposed to show that all of the

aforementioned rigmarole didn’t actually interest the workers. In his

preface to Bilan, Dauvé says that during the Commune the communists,

“being few in number,” were “cautious”.[120] But it is the content of

their programme that explains these “cautions”: the presentation of the

affirmation of labour as “the final end of the movement” which must

integrate “a long historical process”;[121] the fact that in their own

programme the communists recognised the historical necessity of those

(the bourgeois republicans) who were about to eliminate them. There was

a lot to be “cautious” about.

The re-appropriation of production by the workers was in reality such a

small priority for the Commune that its central committee announced as

early as 21st of March 1871 (between the 18th and the 26th, thus before

the re-appropriation by the republicans) in its Journal official: “The

workmen, who produce everything and enjoy nothing, who suffer from

misery in the midst of their accumulated products, the fruit of their

work and their sweat… shall they never be allowed to work for their

emancipation?”[122] Commenting on this citation Marx writes: “it is

proclaimed as a war of labour upon the monopolists of the means of

labour, upon capital;”[123] and a little bit further, “what the Commune

wants is the social property which makes property the attribute of

labour.”[124]

Leaving aside these overt calls for re-appropriation, the number of

enterprises and workshops taken over by the workers is far from being

insignificant, nor was the system the Commune employed of handing out

contracts to the most “socially progressive” bid. In the end it is the

nature of the struggle for the liberation of work that explains the

small number of measures of the kind Dauvé and Nesic are looking for.

This struggle of the working class is moulded by all the historical

mediations of capitalist development. Marx attacks the “patronizing

friends of the working class” who congratulate themselves that “after

all, workmen are rational men and whenever in power always resolutely

turn their back upon socialist enterprises! They do in fact neither try

to establish in Paris a phalanstère nor an Icarie”.[125] In a word,

those who seek the immediate realisation of the liberation of labour

which is, for Marx, merely “a tendency” in the measures taken by the

Commune, remain at the stage of utopian socialism and have not

understood that these objectives have now become real through their

submission to the “historical conditions of the movement.”[126]

Although “the working class did not expect miracles from the

Commune,”[127] this working class knew that to “work out their own

emancipation” they would have to “pass through long struggles,” a

“series of historic processes,” in order for them to be recognised as

“the only class capable of social initiative”[128]— and recognised as

such by the middle class, which was supposed to line up, with the

Commune, on the side of the workers.

The “hesitant” and timid character of these measures has also another

root. Toward the end of March, within the Commune, the workers were

beaten in their own camp. If Marx doesn’t speak of the social

significance of the transformation of the Commune’s organs of

management, and if he pretends that the Commune is exclusively a

workers’ government (“the finally achieved form of the dictatorship of

the proletariat”) it is because, for him, the revolution is not where

we, today, look for it — that is to say in the independence of

proletarian action and in its capacity to abolish itself in abolishing

the capitalist mode of production — but in the capacity of the

proletariat to represent the whole of society and its future. Looked at

closely, this other reason for “hesitancy” is not that different than

the first. The historical development of working class practice implies

its defeat as an autonomous class.

As with the Commune, the Russian Revolution of 1917 is supposed to

confirm that “the proletarians hardly manifested any productive

enthusiasm.” And nevertheless in an earlier text by Dauvé we find:

“…the movement of factory and workshop Committees saw a remarkable surge

between February and October. These committees were most often created

with the aim of obtaining the eight-hour day and wage increases. In

April the provisional government recognized their right to represent the

workers in their negotiations with bosses and the government, but little

by little the committees tried to influence the direction of the

factories which they took over in several cases.”[129]

“During this time [after October 1917, the Bolshevik leadership having

inaugurated and structured workers’ control in Russia ‘in the interests

of a planned direction for the national economy’] the Russian workers

continued to animate the Committees which often tried to seize

factories. As the January 1918 number of the Voice of the Metal Workers

states: ‘the working class, from its nature, must occupy the central

place in production and especially its organisation…’ But these efforts

often lead to failure.”[130]

Of course one can change one’s opinion, but that’s not on the issue here

— rather than the opinion about them, it is the historical facts

themselves that have changed: that which existed exists no more.

One can equally refer to more “classical” historians:

“The natural consequence of the [February 1917] revolution was to

exacerbate the economic struggles. In this context the factory

committees became the veritable protagonists of the confrontation

between Capital and Labour. They regulated the unions from behind. …

Moreover, their leaders [the unions], mostly Mensheviks, took care to

avoid intervening directly in the domain of production. It was thus the

factory committees which immediately took this up, without a thought to

the limits to which they were assigned by law. The workers of many

factories had started to interrogate the questions of administration and

technical direction, even to the point of chasing bosses and engineers

out of the factory. When the employer decided to leave the key under the

door it was common to the find the factory committee taking over the

management of the establishment. … By launching the slogan of ‘workers’

control’, which constituted an essential aspect of their programme, the

Bolsheviks fanned the flames of the spontaneous movement which grew from

the radicalisation of the working masses. They thus encouraged — for

tactical reasons which we will return to later — the libertarian and

anarcho-syndicalist tendencies which appeared in the factory committees

and which sought to establish a workers’ power in each separate

enterprise, without making use of a centralised direction or taking into

account the whole economic reality, thus a singularly confused

programme. While the Mensheviks and the union leaders foresaw a state

control of production, conforming to the generally accepted socialist

principles, the factory committees generally stood up for the direct

seizure of the enterprise and the self-management of the

factories.”[131]

“Workers’ committees rapidly formed in the factories and a decree for

the provisional government of the 22nd April 1917 gave them a legal

existence in recognising their right to represent the workers in

relation to the employers and the government. Their first demands were

for the 8 hour day and a wage rise. But these demands didn’t delay in

arriving at more or less organised attempts on the part of workers, at

first sporadic, but soon more and more frequent, to intervene in the

management and to take possession themselves of the factories …

Nonetheless, that which no one foresaw, was that the seizure of the

factories by the workers would be in the long term even less compatible

with the establishment of a socialist order than the seizure of land by

the peasants.”[132]

The last phrase by Carr contains the solution to the next question.

iii During the rare occasions where a seizure of production took

place under workers’ control, the leaders of “workers’” organisations

had a very hard time imposing discipline on workers who showed little

productive enthusiasm.

The first thing would be to explain why such “occasions” existed. But

let’s let this pass and come to the objection itself. The emancipation

of labour is here conceived as the measurement of value by labour time,

the preservation of the notion of the product, and the framework of the

enterprise and exchange. At those rare moments when an autonomous

affirmation of the proletariat as liberation of labour arrives at its

realisation (necessarily under the control of organisations of the

workers’ movement), as in Russia, Italy and Spain, it immediately

inverts itself into the only thing it can become: a new form of the

mobilisation of labour under the constraint of value and thus of

“maximum output” (as the CNT demanded of the workers of Barcelona in

1936) provoking ipso facto, though marginally, all the reactions of

disengagement or workers’ resistance (cf. Seidman, M., Workers Against

Work in Barcelona and Paris).

According to Dauvé the Russian Revolution of 1917 showed two

fundamentally related things: firstly the workers “did little to restart

production”[133] and lacked productive enthusiasm, and secondly these

workers found themselves “faced with new bosses,” and responded “as they

usually do, by individual and collective resistance, active and

passive.”[134] We have dealt with the first point, let’s pass to the

second. Why were the workers confronted with new bosses? Why was the

revolution a failure? What is this “revolutionary dynamic” which,

coexisting with the “crystallization of power” would define the Russian

Revolution as a “contradictory process” which went through an

involution?[135] In all the texts of Dauvé and Nesic there is never a

response to these questions. To respond to them they would have to

qualify their “revolutionary dynamic”, specify it historically, along

with its counter-revolution. Yet it is here that we discover the

forbidden dimension of their theory. For it presupposes that though the

development of capital can be historically specified, the revolution,

just like the counter-revolution, must be as it is in itself for all

eternity. This hiatus prevents them from arriving at any synthesis.

Dauvé and Nesic don’t want to see the self-management and the seizure of

the factories in the ascendant phase of the Russian Revolution (February

to October 1917). They don’t completely deny the facts, but class them

in the range of activities subject to necessity (i.e. poverty). In their

conception, given that the revolution must — by definition — be free,

that which arises from necessity cannot be revolutionary. Thus there was

never any revolutionary emancipation of labour because everything that

could be seen as close to it in fact depends on the sordid activity of

necessity. “What would be the worth of a revolution into which we were

pushed against our wills?” ask Dauvé and Nesic in an earlier text.[136]

There is a “revolutionary élan”[137], a “revolutionary dynamic”, but

these must remain undefined: everything else is “necessity”. To define

them would be to see the essential relation between the revolution and

the Bolshevik counter-revolution, it would be to define the failure of

revolution in terms of its very nature as liberation of labour, in terms

of the seizing of production by the “associated producers”. In effect it

would mean having to deal with that which is described by Anweiler, Carr

or Voline; and even Dauvé and Nesic themselves…

These latter two report all the trouble that the Bolsheviks had in

returning the factories to a state of order. In this way they contradict

their previous assertion about the infrequency of workers seizing

factories and taking over the management of production. The Bolshevik

counter-revolution finds its source and flows naturally (which doesn’t

mean without confrontation) from the course of the workers’ revolution.

It is as Trotsky said “the seizure of power by the whole of the

proletariat”, and simultaneously “workers’ control initiated in the

interests of a planned regulation of the national economy” (Decree on

Workers’ Control of 14-27 November 1917). If revolution is the control

and management of the factories, the organisation of their relations,

the circulation and exchange of the products of labour, it has nothing

to oppose to the state, to value, to the plan and a renewed capitalist

management, other than its rank and file soviet democracy — that is to

say nothing, a pure form — or else resistance to the re-imposition of

work.

Yet this is not without importance. The proletariat does not simply find

itself once more in an ordinary capitalist enterprise. Its refusal of

work is situated at the heart of programmatism. In its manifestation of

what, on its own terms, is an internal contradiction and impossibility

of the programmatic revolution, the refusal of re-imposed work

anticipates that which will spell the death of programmatism at the end

of the 1960s.

In the most general sense, in its internal contradiction and the

practical process of its own impossibility, programmatism produces the

terms of its overcoming. It is through all that which, practically and

theoretically, exists for us today as this impossibility that we can

relate ourselves to the history of past struggles and to the continuity

of theoretical production. We don’t attribute to these struggles and

theoretical productions the consciousness or the possibility to see

another perspective, because we can only relate to them through the

mediation of a restructuring of the capitalist mode of production which

was their defeat. We don’t relate to these elements genealogically, but

reproduce them in a problematic constituting a new paradigm of the

contradiction between proletariat and capital.

It is true, there was never any “scope for a workers’ capitalism”, but

that simply means that there was scope for a capitalist

counter-revolution articulated within a workers’ revolution based upon

the seizing of factories, liberating labour, and erecting the

proletariat as ruling class; a counter-revolution that was able to turn

the latter’s content back against it. If “the proletarians didn’t come

up with an alternative to Bolshevik policy,”[138] it is because

Bolshevik policy was the accomplishment against them of their

revolution.

Just as in Spain against the CNT, the UGT or the POUM, the workers have

nothing to oppose to the management of enterprises by their

organisations, because the programme that they apply is their own. The

revolution as affirmation of the class implacably transforms into the

management of capital, smoothly reverts into the counter-revolution to

which it provides its own content. Faced with this ineluctable reversal

of their own movement, overseen by their own organisations, the workers

are thrown back to resisting work. The revolution as affirmation of the

class finds itself confronted by a counter-revolution which has for its

content that which justified the revolution itself: the rising power of

the class in the capitalist mode of production, its recognition and

integration in the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. We

could even call it the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

We can only agree with Dauvé and Nesic when they write that “the Russian

revolutionary crisis shows that as long as capital reigns, labour can’t

be liberated and must be imposed upon the wage-earners.”[139] And yet

the social and historical mechanism of this dynamic must be made clear:

the liberation of labour is impossible because it calls forth its own

counter-revolution as capitalist organisation of work. Dauvé and Nesic

dispel the problem saying: no revolution ever presented itself as such

(except in the programme of the organisations). We have very briefly

seen that this is false. Being unable to explain by what mechanism this

impossibility imposes itself, they prefer to say that things didn’t

happen. Anyone can proclaim that “in 1917-21, the alternative was

between abolishing wage labour or perpetuating exploitation, with no

possible third option”[140] — it’s a nice phrase, but it expresses

absolutely nothing; says nothing about the period of “revolutionary

crisis”. In the sense that nobody — not a single social movement — posed

such an opposition other than as the liberation of labour and the

opening of a period of transition; the radical alternative, as Dauvé and

Nesic present it, simply didn’t exist.

In Italy, as in Russia, being unable to explain what happened, Dauvé and

Nesic decide that nothing happened. For the whole period one must start

from two principal facts: (1) there was a powerful organised workers’

movement, which (2) had as a programme the affirmation/emancipation of

labour (the workers’ creating factory councils, etc.). These two major

elements define the period’s content. Faced with the reversal that they

suffer, the workers are disarmed in the sense that that which is taken

over by the organisations is in fact the perspective, now turned against

them, that they themselves advance from their own ranks.

It is difficult to regard the articles and reports of Malatesta on the

situation in Italy as merely a series of militant lies. On the 28th of

June 1922, in l’Umanità Nova, Malatesta writes: “The metal workers

started the movement over the question of wages. It turned out to be a

strike of a new kind. Instead of abandoning the factories, they stayed

in them without working, guarding them night and day against any

lockout. But we were in 1920. All of proletarian Italy was trembling

with revolutionary fever, and the movement rapidly changed character.

The workers thought it was the moment to definitively take over the

means of production. They armed themselves for defence, transformed

numerous factories into veritable fortresses, and began to organise

production for themselves.”[141]

In Italy once more it is the revolutionary perspective of emancipation,

of “seizing the factories”, which allowed the state and the bourgeoisie

to retake control of the situation (with the violent intervention of the

fascists). The number of occupations decline after the 25th of September

1920 with the signing of the accord between Aragonna, chief of the CGL,

and the government of Giolitti:

“the famous decree on the control of the factories is a joke, because it

gives birth to a new band of bureaucrats who, although they come from

your ranks, will not defend your interests, but only their position,

because they seek to combine your interests with those of the

bourgeoisie, which is to try to set a wolf to tend a goat.”[142]

In l’Umanità Nova of the 10th September 1920, under the title To the

Metal Workers, Malatesta writes:

“Enter into relations between factories and with the railway workers for

the provision of raw materials; come to agreements with cooperatives and

with the people. Sell and exchange your products without dealing with

ex-bosses.”[143]

“Sell and exchange your products”: in the very injunction of Malatesta

to pursue and deepen revolutionary combat resides its failure and

reversal into counter-revolution. The same worker who would applaud

Malatesta will the very next day press for slowing down the work rate in

“the enterprise in the hands of the workers”. To take over the

factories, emancipate productive labour, to make labour-time the measure

of exchange, is value, is capital. As long as the revolution will have

no other object than to liberate that which necessarily makes the

proletariat a class of the capitalist mode of production, workers’

organisations which are the expression of this necessity will employ

themselves to make it respected. Being unable to hold onto the

articulation of these elements, Dauvé and Nesic have decided, against

all the evidence, that the workers’ never had the perspective or

practice of the emancipation of labour. What is more, although for Dauvé

and Nesic it was indeed the case that all of that was true of the

organisations — to deny this would be very difficult — it is still

necessary to explain who could have put such ideas into the heads of the

organisations. The facts which were still visible in When Insurrections

Die, and even more in the Preface to Bilan, have here disappeared.

Nothing happened, move on, there is nothing to see.

Dauvé and Nesic see the problem without being able to connect the terms.

In their argumentation they ceaselessly confuse the effective

impossibility of the liberation of labour with its non-existence, just

as they confuse the “liberation of labour” with “the liberating power of

labour.”

iv The workers didn’t struggle to “make labour king” but to “curb

further exploitation”

It is contentious to try to separate revindicative struggles in a given

period from revolution and communism as they are defined in that same

period. It is hardly credible to say that in 1848 the workers only

struggled against the worsening of their conditions, that the insurgents

only “rose to survive”[144], and that the struggles betrayed no

perspective of the reorganisation of society around the “organisation of

labour” and its generalisation, that is to say liberation, by the

working class. Such incredibility is amply demonstrated by a glance at

the political expressions of the Parisian working class in that year:

“Marche, a worker, dictated the decree [decree on the right to work, 25

February 1848] by which the newly formed Provisional Government pledged

itself to guarantee the workers a livelihood by means of labour, to

provide work for all citizens, etc. And when a few days later it forgot

its promises and seemed to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of

20,000 workers marched on the Hôtel de Ville with the cry: Organise

labour! Form a special Ministry of Labour.”[145]

To “rise up in order to survive” is an expression as lacking in meaning

in 1848 as it is in 2007. Every insurrection and even every strike,

however “modest”, always exists in a certain period of the contradiction

between the proletariat and capital. To this degree, the defence of

physical survival has no more existence in itself, is no more an

ahistorical invariant, than is communism “in its deep content”.

In the form of the National Workshops the “defence of survival” becomes

a question of social regime: “The right to work is, in the bourgeois

sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to

work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the

appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the

associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labour, of

capital, and of their mutual relations. Behind the “right to work” stood

the June insurrection.”[146]The Parisian workers “rose up to survive”

and this insurrection for survival contained: “the organisation of

labour,” and the “submission of the means of production to the

associated working class”. A precise study of the insurrection of June

shows that it was substantially supported by the unemployed workers of

the National Workshops. Yet one finds in far greater number those who

were not directly touched by the closure of the National Workshops: the

local workers and the professions who had also been the most virulent

during the quasi general strike which hit Paris in 1840.

On this connection between immediate struggles, political reform and

social revolution, the most important movement of the period is without

doubt Chartism. About this Dauvé and Nesic say not a word. For doing so

would make it difficult to suggest that the aspiration to re-appropriate

the means of production by the associated workers was only an ideology

which had no correspondence in the practice or mobilisation of the

workers, and that the resistance to the worsening of exploitation is a

neutral and purely quantitative activity.

v The turn of 1848

For Dauvé and Nesic 1848 marks a turning point in the history of

workers’ struggles:

“1848 tolled the knell of the utopia of a wage-labour capital, of a

working class that would become the ruling class and then the unique or

universal class through the absorption of capital in associated labour.

From then on, via a growing union movement, the workers will only be

concerned with their share of the wage system, they won’t try to compete

with the monopoly of capital owned by the bourgeoisie, but to constitute

themselves as a monopoly of labour power. The programme of a popular

capitalism was on the wane.”[147]

Thus that which never existed nonetheless had an existence prior to

1848. The peculiarity of eclecticism is to fail to perceive that the

elements which one juxtaposes may contradict each other. This

consideration of the pre-1848 period is all the more surprising given

that this period of “wage-labour capital” is for them, in another

respect, essentially that of the expression of communism in “its deep

content”: the proletariat of the human community, not yet bogged down in

the defence of the wage (see below).

Thus the proletariat no longer attempted, after 1848, to become a ruling

class. With a wave of the theoretical wand, Dauvé and Nesic manage to

make the Commune vanish; they imply that all the post-1848 texts of Marx

are apocryphal; they convince us that revolutionary syndicalism never

existed. Even German Social Democracy, with its rising power of the

class and the theory of the spontaneous socialization of capital leading

to socialism, fails to fit with the need of Dauvé and Nesic to flatten

class struggle in the extreme for fear of recognizing the infamous

programmatism; even Bernstein and Hilferding disappear. The project of

“a working class take over of industrialization” is over in 1848, just

as that of “a working class that would become the ruling class.”[148] Of

course! If it didn’t come from such good authors one would suspect

simply ignorance, here one must also suspect the theoretical impasse of

a discourse which after being tempted by an indeterminate “revolutionary

élan” has to silence itself from fear of allowing it to be determined.

Once again: move on, there is nothing to see!

If we can consider that 1848 is a break, it is only in the measure that

that which was an alternative project, that is to say, able to coexist

with bourgeois society (cooperatives etc.), became after ’48 a political

project presupposing the reversal of bourgeois society. Far from

“tolling the knell” of workers’ emancipation and the liberation of

labour (articulated, of course, with the revindicative struggles of the

working class), 1848 marked the generalisation of this project in a

struggle of class against class.

vi Even at its apogee, the aspiration to make labour king was only

half-hearted

And once again we find an epoch where that which never existed attained

its apogee. Dauvé and Nesic concede that there might have been a period

of the workers’ composition of a world of free labour:

“the aspiration to set up the workers as the ruling class and to build a

workers’ world was at its highest in the heyday of the labour movement,

when the Second and Third Internationals were more than big parties and

unions: they were a way of life, a counter-society… Workers’ or

‘industrial’ democracy was an extension of a community (both myth and

reality) … that shaped working class life from the aftermath of the

Paris Commune to the 1950s or 60s.”[149]

Here is a remarkable concession, but one which doesn’t recognize that

this organised workers’ movement was also a counter-revolutionary force.

Dauvé and Nesic want to insist that this “workers’ world” which shaped

the life of the working class was just a “utopia of skilled

labour”.[150] Yet even in Germany between 1919 and 1921, where for Dauvé

and Nesic this movement of skilled workers had gone the furthest, “there

were hardly any attempts to take over production in order to manage it.

Whatever plans they may have nurtured, in practice neither the Essen and

Berlin workers nor those in Turin put work at the centre of society,

even of a socialist one.”[151]

We’ve already seen in the case of Italy and Russia that if we shouldn’t

confuse the activity of workers with the activity of organisations and

their programmes, it is completely insufficient to satisfy oneself with

the distinction. When the principle factory organisations are grouped

into two unions (AAUD and AAUDE) that together counted several hundred

thousand members (not counting those adhering to the revolutionary

unions) the programme of the KAPD is not an invention of the

theoreticians of the KAPD. It is the only perspective that the struggle

itself allows. In the period about which Dauvé and Nesic speak (in fact

since 1848), the struggle for the emancipation of labour passes by a

political struggle; that is, the abolition of existing society (whatever

form this takes, seizure of power or abolition of the state) and

establishment of the proletariat as a ruling class (which cannot fail to

turn back on itself in the very course of its success as

counter-revolution). The workers of Essen, Berlin and Turin “put work at

the centre of society” by their very uprising. What else is the power of

the councils where it momentarily establishes itself other than the

power of workers as workers? Are we supposed to believe that the workers

sought power for its own sake?

The seizure of state power, the political victory, is the necessary

preamble, even the first act, of the emancipation of labour, the

proletariat becoming a ruling class. In Germany between 1918 and 1923,

in Italy in 1920, the political struggles for the power of the working

class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, had for their content the

affirmation of the proletariat as a ruling class and through this the

generalization of its condition. Under the pretext that they see no (or

very few) self-managed factories, Dauvé and Nesic deny that the

political struggle had the affirmation of the proletariat as a ruling

class for its object, that is to say, the emancipation of labour.

We can’t help but note that in these pages on the “utopia of skilled

labour”, Dauvé and Nesic, for the second time, and contrary to their

official religion, link a certain practice of the proletariat to a

certain level of development of capital, that which they condemn in the

theoretical conclusion of their text. This link is made several times in

their text, with the artisan, the manufacturing worker, the skilled

worker, the mass worker. That which Dauvé and Nesic refuse to attribute

to the contradiction between the proletariat and capital and its

overcoming — to be a history — they accord to the action of historically

existing workers. In a kind of impoverished Operaismo, they confer to

“class composition” that which they can’t allow for revolution and

communism.

vii Desertion of the enterprise, “refusal of work”

The seventh objection is not exactly of the same nature as the others.

It applies to the struggles at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of

the 1970s. That is to say, to the period when programmatism is at the

end of its course, the period in which we are ready to recognise that

the affirmation of the proletariat and the liberation of labour are no

longer the content and perspective of the class struggle. As a

consequence, we could, to an extent, agree with the comments on these

struggles, and at a push this objection would not be one at all. Yet

only to an extent… and for two reasons. Firstly, Dauvé and Nesic

recognise no historical break, for history is the looming absence in

their whole normative horizon; the examples only succeed one another in

a chronological order by the simple habit of thought and presentation —

they could be presented in any other order without having the slightest

influence on the “demonstration”. Secondly, in accordance with their

permanent denial of the reality of anything which could be seen as

affirmation of labour, they fail to see that the overcoming of

programmatism, very real in the struggles of this period, still takes

place within programmatism.

The turn at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies

was simply the breakdown of programmatism. “May ’68” was the liquidation

of all the old forms of the workers’ movement. The revolution was no

longer a question of the establishment of the proletariat as a ruling

class which generalises its situation, universalises labour as a social

relation, and the economy as the objectivity of a society founded on

value. But the “May ’68” period doesn’t simply remain in this

impossibility of being a programmatic revolution.

On the one hand we had a strong workers’ movement with solid roots, the

confirmation by capital of a workers’ identity, a recognised strength of

the class but a radical impossibility to transform this strength into an

autonomous force and into a revolutionary affirmation of the class of

labour. On the other, this impossibility was positively the extension of

a revolt against all social reproduction, a revolt through which “the

proletariat negated itself”.

The revolution could only be the negation of the worker’s condition, but

it was necessary to seek it, not in the relation between proletariat and

capital, but in the universality of alienation. Universal, and to this

extent human, alienation. Through real subsumption capital had subjected

all social reproduction, all aspects of life. In encompassing the whole

of everyday life, the revolution was the negation of the proletarian

condition. Through the universality of its negation the revolt became

autonomised from its real conditions, it appeared to no longer flow

directly from the situation of the working class, but from the universal

alienation of which this situation was the consummation, the

condensation.

The revolt against the condition of the working class, revolt against

every aspect of life, was caught in a divergence. It could only express

itself, only become effective, in turning against its own foundations,

the workers’ conditions, but not in order to suppress them, for it

didn’t find in itself the relation to capital which could have been that

suppression, but in order to separate itself from them. “May ’68” thus

remained on the level of a revolt.

The workers fled the factories occupied by the unions, the youngest

among them joined the student struggle, May ’68 was the critique in acts

and often “with the feet” of the revolution as the rising strength and

affirmation of the class. The workers only entered the factories at the

moment of the return to work, often to oppose themselves violently to

it. Here we are in agreement with the few remarks of Dauvé and Nesic on

May ’68. Where we diverge is in the fact that for them such a thing is

not a historical product, but merely fits into the long list of examples

that they evoke. It is supposed to have always been this way, from the

simple fact of what the proletariat is and what the revolution must be.

For Dauvé and Nesic the end of the sixties is prosperity and the

critique of prosperity (consumer society, everyday life, alienation), it

is the workers’ movement and the “critique of work” — the enigma is

solved. The revolution must be both a workers’ revolution and a human

revolution, but only “workers’” because in the worker it is the human

that is negated. As a worker the proletarian has the possibility to

smash this society, as a human, to construct the new one. To remain at

this position is to remain within an ideology born of the failure of

’68. During that whole period, in Italy, France and elsewhere, class

struggles expressed but failed to overcome the limits and impasses of

the previous cycle, that of workers’ identity, of autonomy, of

self-organisation, that which formed the very definition of the

revolutionary dynamic, whilst today they form its limit.

This contradiction internal to class struggle appeared in Italy, from

the mid-sixties, in a very concrete manner, in the extension of

struggles beyond the factories. On the one hand the central figure of

the Italian working class, that through which all class struggle was

structured, is that of the industrial triangle Milan–Turin–Genoa, and,

in this triangle, principally the productive workers of the big

manufacturers. On the other hand, such a concentration implies, and only

exists through, the socialisation and massification of the working class

beyond the immediate process of production. The workers’ struggle is

also the town, transport, housing, all of social life. By encompassing

all of everyday life, class struggle becomes a refusal of the worker’s

condition, but it only encompasses all social life from the basis of the

factory, the very extension only exists under the leadership, the

tutorship, of the worker of the large factory: Turin is FIAT. This

movement contains a contradiction between, on the one hand, the central

figure of workers’ identity, still dominating and structuring class

struggle, on the basis of which this movement exists, and, on the other

hand, the struggle over the entirety of reproduction which can thus not

give everything that it contains, cannot put into question the condition

of the worker itself. The struggle over the wage is the place of this

contradiction, the place it becomes concrete. That which the workerists,

in a programmatic perspective, theorised as “political wage” or

“self-valorisation of the working class” was, as a practice, as a

particular struggle, the contradiction in which, on the basis of the

very situation of the worker and within this, the reproduction of the

worker as such was put into question. The slogan of workers’ power in

the factories coexisted with the refusal to live outside as a worker and

to be employed as a worker in that very factory. The class struggle

developed within that highly contradictory and unstable configuration in

which it is labour which refuses to function, in capitalism, as labour

power.

Autonomy can only be programmatic, because it is by its very nature

workers’ autonomy. The movement of ’69 is still a movement of the

affirmation of the proletariat and the emancipation of labour, it is its

dominant characteristic. It is only on the basis of this dominant

characteristic that one can understand that it contains within it that

which subsequently puts it into question, renders it impossible. It was

the same workers who committed sabotage and organised the marches in the

factories who regrouped in the CUB as in Pirelli, or who found

themselves in the student-worker assemblies in Turin. It is in this

situation that all the originality and importance, as much historical as

theoretical, of this period lay.

Today every revindicative struggle of whatever size or intensity is

self-organised and autonomous; self-organisation and autonomy can be

opposed to the unions, but always remain merely a moment of unionism. We

have passed from one cycle of struggle to another.

But for Dauvé and Nesic it is not enough to say that nothing happened,

it is necessary to add that those for whom what happened was the

revolution, as defined historically in its strength and its failure in

its own terms, commit a methodological error: determinism. Any

historical critique which fails to acknowledge the invariant substance

and says that revolution and communism are historical is branded with

the infamous epithet.

3 “false in regard to the method”

The “methodological error” of Théorie Communiste (not named) is supposed

to consist in believing that there is a “situation” or a “period” in the

history of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore of class

struggle (but this “therefore” is, as we shall see, for Dauvé and Nesic

another methodological error), which will assure the victory of the

communist revolution. We finally confront the famous determinist devil.

Dauvé and Nesic do not see that the “error” they denounce is only an

“error” if we accept all their presuppositions. Only if we suppose that

the communist revolution is a given and known substance since the

beginning of the class struggle within capitalism.[152] If we accept

that the proletariat would have been able to do in 1968 what it did in

1848, in the Paris of 1830 what it did in Bologna in 1977, that the

insurgents of the Commune failed because they didn’t do what the SI had

said nonetheless had to be done, it is obvious that TC is wrong.

The principle “error” is necessarily accompanied by an accessory error.

We are supposed to have looked to capital and its development to resolve

our problems in our place. This is to assume that it is capital alone

which suppressed workers’ identity, the “old workers’ movement”, and, as

a consequence, that which we call programmatism. As if the struggles at

the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies had nothing to

do with it; as if the re-appropriation of the themes of workers’

identity in the radical democratic movement and the practical critique

of this radical democratism by the direct action movement are all for

nothing. Even if we accepted that capital suppressed workers’ identity,

it could only be as a counter-revolution, that is to say against the

preceding revolution and not as an objective tendency which would “give”

us ready-made new “conditions”, without us participating in their

emergence.

We will develop all these questions around the three synthetic themes

that Dauvé and Nesic expose: there is no direct link between proletarian

action and the degree of the development of capital; the “being” of the

proletariat; and the “reasons for past failures”.

i There is no direct link between proletarian action and the degree

of the development of capital

“If the ‘being’ of the proletariat theorized by Marx is not just a

metaphysics, its content is independent of the forms taken by capitalist

domination. The tension between the submission to work and the critique

of work has been active since the dawn of capitalism. Of course the

realization of communism depends on the historical moment, but its deep

content remains invariant in 1796 and in 2002.”[153]

If there is a “being” of the proletariat, and moreover a being on which

the “realization of communism” depends, the revolution is inevitable. No

amount of theoretical tinkering around the “historical moment” as the

conjunctural condition of the becoming actual of this “being” will

change anything. The “being” will always find its way through

contingency and circumstance. Communism “in its deep content” will

remain invariant in 1796 and 2002. All that remains is to name that

“deep content”, and, in passing, indicate a little contingent dross due

to the “historical moment” of 1796 or 2002. But how do we separate the

dross from the “invariant”?

Contrary to what Dauvé and Nesic say, if this “being” is “not just a

metaphysics” then it is not “independent of the forms taken by

capitalist domination”. How could its “being” be independent when the

proletariat is only a class of the capitalist mode of production? The

“being” is held to be independent of the forms taken by capitalist

evolution, but apparently the “realization of communism” is “of course”

dependent on the “historical moment”. Here we are knee-deep in the

metaphysical relation par excellence: that of the essence and its

conditions, of the tendency and its realisation. Dauvé and Nesic are

careful to avoid explaining the relation between this “being” and the

“historical moment”. It goes without saying, just like the spontaneous

idealism with which we think unawares. It is a case of the ideology of

the launch window. They believe themselves to have overcome determinism

because, as Dauvé writes in Human, all too Human: “nothing guarantees

that a communist movement will be able or want to take advantage of it,

but the possibility is there.”[154] A “possibility” which may or may not

be actualised… in other words: objective conditions.

“History does not prove any direct causal link between a degree of

capitalist development, and specific proletarian behaviour.”[155] The

“Metropolitan Indians” of Bologna could have taken the Winter Palace,

and the unemployed of the National Workshops could have set up workers’

councils. Dauvé and Nesic have conserved the entire theoretical

structure of determinism, but the key element has become impossible to

maintain: the identification of the “development of capital” with

“revolutionary activity”, that is, the rising strength of the class in

the capitalist mode of production. As a result, they find themselves

with a class activity which floats in the void, condemned to

self-determination, that is to say indetermination. Such a conclusion

cannot be expressed as such; one thus needs determination, but not too

much, “invariance” and the “historical moment”. And above all lots of

“freedom”, because the development of capitalism has been paradoxically

maintained in its objective density.

The development of capitalism is nothing more than the contradiction

between the proletariat and capital; there is no “link”, neither rigid,

nor fluid, nor direct. In the end Dauvé and Nesic tinker between

determinism and liberty, necessity and possibility, invariance and

contingency, freedom with a little determinacy and determinism with a

little freedom. One must allow the proletariat the “freedom” to rise to

its “historic task”.[156] What a strange freedom, and a strange critique

of determinism, which can speak of an “historic task”. In the end it is

their own determinism that Dauvé and Nesic are seeking to exorcize.

To look for the cause of revolutions and their failures in the relation

between the proletariat and capital as they existed, is that to do

anything other than to look for them in the practice of proletarians?

What would this practice be if not the relation to capital? What would

this development of capital be if not this relation? To demand that we

search for the causes of “our failures” only in the “activity of

proletarians” is to see the development of capital as a frame to which

we attribute more or less effectivity, but always as a sum of

conditions. Dauvé and Nesic have conserved all the fundamental

separations of objectivism and determinism, their only “originality” is

to have refused the causal link which unites the elements. This renders

their production incoherent and eclectic, and their writing full of

hesitation and oscillation (yes/but, it is such and such/but of course

we know that nonetheless…). And yet it is we, for whom the “solution” is

neither a presupposition nor ineffable, but a real historical

production, and of the only history that exists, that of the capitalist

mode of production, who are supposed to be “determinists”.

When we define exploitation as the contradiction between the proletariat

and capital, we define that contradiction as a history. The stage of the

cycle of accumulation is not an external condition of victories or

defeats, a conjuncture. Accumulation is part of the definition of the

proletariat and its contradiction with capital. The proletariat is

defined in the totality of the moments of exploitation, in the sense

that it implies its reproduction and produces the conditions of the

latter. To define the proletariat in the three moments of exploitation

(the coming together of labour power and capital and the buying and

selling of labour power, the absorption of living labour by objectified

labour in the immediate process of production where surplus value is

formed, the transformation of surplus value into additional capital) is

to understand that the development of capital is not the realisation or

the condition of the class contradiction which opposes the proletariat

to capital, it is the real history of this contradiction. The

contradiction does not dress itself in different forms, because it is

nothing other than these forms. Those who would take umbrage at that,

assuming it means capital would be doing the work in our (the

revolutionary proletarians’) place, have understood nothing of what a

social relation means. All this also implies the historicity of the

content of communism. Communism is historical in that it is in relation

with the immediate course of each cycle of struggle. When we say that

the revolution and communism can only be immediate communisation, that

doesn’t mean that communism has finally presented itself today as it

always really was or as it always should have been.

To all those who say that 1848, 1917, 1968 etc. ended up in a way that

could have been averted, we have a right to demand that just for once

they tell us what made them end up where they did other than by saying

that they ended up where they did because they didn’t end up where they

could have. Could anything else have happened? We don’t know and we

don’t care. The question is meaningless. That which didn’t happen leaves

the domain of thought to enter the domain of faith and madness. The

ideology of the possible looks to the past and says “this could have

been or not been”, it consists in considering as contingent, on the

basis of the subsequent period, that which was essential to the previous

period. From this substitution is born the belief in the invariant as

the substantial core which results from the movement.

If the restructuring of the contradiction between the proletariat and

capital resolves to a large extent the contradictions and limits of

programmatism (not without the participation of workers’ struggles), it

neither gets us closer to a purity of this contradiction, nor a purity

of capital. What creates this illusion is the fact that the capitalist

mode of production always restructures itself according to what it is,

and overcomes the limits which had been its own (its own conditions of

valorisation and reproduction in a given moment). The restructuring is a

supersession which, though unforeseeable (constituted along the

tempestuous flow of struggles), cannot infringe upon the nature of

capital. Once the restructuring is accomplished, the previous

characteristics of capital appear for the next period as contingent,

non-indispensable in relation to the nature of capital, but they were

certainly not contingent for the previous period. It is in this way that

the becoming appears predetermined as a march towards purity. This is

the trap into which fall all the ideologues who, not being able to

conceive of history beyond teleology, choose to suppress it.

What is more, the question as to the “ultimate” character of this cycle

of struggle has no solution, for strictly speaking it cannot be posed

theoretically (and it never has been, for any cycle of struggle). Does

that mean that the revolution and communisation are now the only future?

Again this is a question without meaning, without reality. The only

inevitability is the class struggle though which we can only conceive of

the revolution of this cycle of struggle, and not as a collapse of

capital leaving a space open, but as an historically specific practice

of the proletariat in the crisis of this period of capital. It is thus

this practice which renders the capitalist mode of production

irreproducible. The outcome of the struggle is never given beforehand.

It is self-evident that revolution cannot be reduced to a sum of its

conditions, because it is an overcoming and not a fulfilment. It is

communisation which renders the contradiction between the proletariat

and capital irreproducible.

In the last resort, the independence of communism “in its deep content”

in relation to the development of the contradiction between the

proletariat and capital has its ontological argument: that of the

philosophical communism of 1843-46.

Philosophical communism, which invokes Man and Species, characterises

the quasi totality of theoretical production in the first half of the

1840s. For the “Germans” its point of departure is the critique of

religion. This critique, as Marx himself applied it, is the matrix of

the critique of all alienations (as Marx affirms in the first sentence

of the Introduction of 1843). It follows that man’s rediscovery of his

essence in the critique and abolition/overcoming of religion is,

according to him, the matrix of all abolitions (money, work etc.): the

return of the subject to itself as Community, Species Being, Man.

Stirner was right to say that Man had replaced God and that it is the

worst of all religions.

Man externalises his own powers, he objectifies them. It was thus

necessary to rediscover the anthropological nature of religion in order

to abolish it. Of course what was found there was the mechanism of every

alienation, abolition, and overcoming for philosophical communism,

including the abolition of labour which, in becoming

“self-manifestation”, was intended to reconcile the essence of the

proletariat as a person with his immediate being. The abolition of

money, of the state, followed the same logical mechanism. The

Feuerbachian critical apparatus was generalised. The result of the

abolition/overcoming is merely the true form of the essence of man.

There is only a historical development and contradiction as an inverted

form of the true community, which is already the truth of this inverted

form. Alienation is merely its own becoming for itself.

“Labour is man’s coming to be for himself within alienation or as an

alienated man.”[157] Alienated labour or alienation of the essence of

man are thus only moments of the identity in-itself of labour and its

objects, of man and his externalised forces, in the process of becoming

an identity for-itself. The loss is only a form of the identity, its

necessary becoming in order to rediscover itself (here lies all the

limits of the concept of alienation). Against all the analysis of

Capital or the Grundrisse in which we rediscover these expressions of

the alienation of labour or its product, here the point of departure is

not a social relation, but a subject (man) which divides itself in its

identity with itself. It’s in this sense that labour is destined to be

abolished, because labour exists here only to produce its abolition.

In The German Ideology the abolition of labour is deduced from two

themes: the virtual universality of the proletariat in relation to the

history of the division of labour as universalisation of productive

life; the contradiction in the life of the individual between its

existence as a person and its existence as a member of a class. This

second theme can be seen as derived from the first. Potentially

universal, labour can no longer be a “means”.

Those who think that Marx and Engels, between 1843 and 1846, with the

abolition of labour and the other abolitions, grasped what we are now

able to conceive of communist revolution don’t realise that it is the

very fact of conceiving the revolution as abolition of labour which

distinguished their vision from ours. The abolition of labour, for Marx

and many others, was the emancipation of the proletariat not, of course,

as an affirmation of labour, but as a movement of the affirmation of a

class which, because in the old world it is “rid of the old world”[158],

represents the movement which abolishes existing conditions: communism.

But since simultaneously, as action, communism exists as the definition

of a class of this society, it follows that it is its independent

organisation, its reinforcement and its pursuit of its own ends, the

defence of its interests in this society which becomes identified with

communism itself. Less than a year after The German Ideology, the

abolition of labour explicitly becomes the “liberation of labour”[159],

because the “abolition of labour” was the emancipation of the

proletariat and the emancipation of the proletariat was its actual

existence as action in the present society. At the moment when the old

theory became coherent and concrete it flies into pieces.

The years 46-47 do not mark the passage between two theories of

communism or revolution: a “radical” theory which, from the moment of

its entry on the historical stage, is supposed to have announced, thanks

to a particular situation of the proletariat, the quintessence of

Communism, and a theory of the proletariat as class of the capitalist

mode of production destined to defend its interests within it, a theory

of the defence of the wage. It marks a passage from a philosophy of the

proletariat, the revolution and communism, to a theory of the

proletariat, the revolution and communism. This latter is not our own,

but the former still less so. In this philosophical communism, under the

same words, the concepts are absolutely different from our own, are

inscribed in a completely different problematic. It is illusory to try

to use some formulas as if they could be applied to class struggle as it

exists today.

The revolutionary humanism of the “young” Marx, which he shares with all

the theoreticians of the epoch, amounts, in the period which comes to a

close in 1848, to the belief that capitalism and the domination of the

bourgeoisie is only an ephemeral state (Marx broke from this position

before ’48). The proletariat is only a class of transition, an unstable

social form resulting from the decomposition of society.

From the moment the contradiction was posed, its overcoming was supposed

to be imminent. What escaped Marx and Engels at that early point was

that capital could be the development of the contradictions which give

rise to it, that they could be its raison d’être, that which nourishes

it, that they could be the principle of its accumulation. They didn’t

see development as part of the contradiction, it was only anecdotal in

relation to it, and could well not be from the moment that The

Contradiction is. But it is thus the contradiction itself which is

purely formal because its development is unnecessary.

We could treat the history of capital as unimportant because in 1845 (or

1867) and in 2007 it is identical in itself, and conclude that what was

said of communism at its beginning is fixed in stone. But those who

believe that the history of capital is without importance in the sense

that, from the beginning, it is as it is in itself, have not yet managed

to become Hegelian. Parmenides suffices. They leave the development

alongside being as something which doesn’t form part of it, something

accidental. Contrary to the Marx of 1843-46, if we can and must speak of

revolution today as the abolition of work (and all the rest) we do it on

the basis of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of

production, of exploitation, of the situation of the proletariat,

without any reference to the “person” of the proletariat, to a “human

essence”, to “man as community”. We are in contradiction with capital on

the basis of what we are, that is to say of what capital is, and not

from what we could be, a potential which would somehow already exist as

suffering. It is the breakdown of programmatism which, at the end of the

sixties and beginning of the seventies, momentarily resurrected the very

conditions of its emergence as if they could also be those of its

overcoming. We momentarily all became Feuerbachians again, …some of us

remained so. They have thus made of an ideology born of the failure of

’68, the eternal formula of the communist revolution.

ii The “being” of the proletariat

The question of the “being” of the proletariat was raised and criticised

at the beginning of the previous section. Here we consider more closely

the central role given to labour in the “tension” within this “being”.

“The tension between the submission to work and the critique of work has

been active since the dawn of capitalism”. There we have it: the “being”

of the proletariat. On the one side: the “adherence” and “investment”

which come with the wage relation, yet also the famous “anthropological

dimension” of work;[160] but the first wouldn’t be able to function

without the second, the other side: the desire for “evasion” and

“critique” of work. But can one oppose an “anthropological dimension”?

No. In the “tension” defined by Dauvé and Nesic the “anthropological

dimension” effectively possesses the status of a mediation. It is that

which permits the “adherence” of the worker to his work, but

simultaneously, combined this time with the “rejection” of this work,

that which opens other social horizons.

As always, if we have a “revolutionary being” this means that something

in this being is the seed of its overcoming. In the revolution, the

evasion and critique of work must be combined with adherence in so far

as the former is also anthropological.

Dauvé and Nesic have uncovered the “secret” and the “mystery” over which

Marx slaved away all his life: the “integration” of the proletariat with

the “triumphant and destructive march of capital”.[161] Such

“enslavement” and “integration” is supposed to be founded on the

anthropological nature of work which is prevented from rejecting its

enslavement by the fetishism of commodities which “veils the social

relations producing capital”.[162] For Dauvé and Nesic capital is not a

relation or production which defines us, but something which makes us

adhere. The social relation explains why we enter it, but then the whole

problem is there: we no more enter a social relation than we adhere to

it. Fetishism and its veil are necessary to a problematic for which the

social definition of classes, or more trivially individuals, is a matter

of adherence. However, it isn’t as exchangers that proletarians and

capitalists confront each other, but as poles of a social relation, as

classes.

It is the relation of exploitation and its reproduction, the capital

relation, which includes exchange, and not the other way around. It is

because it is a relation of exploitation that, if we want to put it like

that, “capitalism imposes daily in real life and impresses on our minds:

the economy as something obvious and inevitable, the necessity of

exchanging commodities, of buying and selling labour.”[163] But then

it’s not a kind of blackmail, an imposition we must obey “…if we wish to

avoid want, misery and dictatorship,” that intergrates us into the

“destructive march of capital.” We are not intergrated by the fetishism

of commodities (which is different to that of capital, i.e. the

autonomisation of the elements of production in their relation to

profit) but by the very structure of the social relation which is our

own, exploitation — a relation which has turned exchange into an

immanent moment of the domination of living labour by objectified

labour. The possibility of tearing away the “mystifying appearance of

the transaction” is situated within the contradictions of exploitation,

the abolition of exploitation is not dependent on the tearing of the

veil. If we read Dauvé and Nesic closely it seems that the “social bond”

is for them what authorises the reproduction of capital.[164] Everything

is inverted and appears as if the actors of capitalist society imagine

their belonging to society as an environment. The “social system” is

based on those it enslaves because the fetishism of commodity exchange

veils the social relation productive of capital. The point is to

overcome “the economy as something obvious and inevitable.”

The “social bond” is always the reproduction of the capitalist social

relation, always the self-presupposition as result of the contradiction

between the classes in the sense that capital is always the dominant

pole, assuring and constraining reproduction. In reality capitalism is

only “based on those it enslaves” to the extent that “those it enslaves”

exist only in the “enslavement” which defines them. They won’t get out

of this slavery by tearing away a “veil”, but only by abolishing this

slavery, by abolishing themselves. This is only possible due to the

contradictory process of this enslavement for capital itself. The

contradiction between the proletariat and capital is a contradiction for

the very thing for which it is the dynamic: the capitalist mode of

production. It’s in this sense that it is a contradiction which can lead

to its own abolition. Capitalism is not only “based on those it

enslaves”, but it is also in the very nature of this enslavement that

the capacity for the latter to become revolutionary resides. It is the

object as totality — the capitalist mode of production — that is in

contradiction with itself in the contradiction of its elements, because

this contradiction with the other is for every element, to the extent

that is its other, a contradiction with itself. The overcoming of the

contradiction of exploitation is provided by its non-symmetrical aspect

(subsumption of labour under capital). The situation of the proletariat

is the self-contradiction of the reproduction of capital. When we say

that exploitation is a contradiction for itself we define the situation

and revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

Dauvé and Nesic expressly say:

“The proletarian only starts acting as a revolutionary when he goes

beyond the negative of his condition and begins to create something

positive out of it, i.e. something that subverts the existing order.

It’s not for lack of a critique of work that the proletarians have not

‘made the revolution’, but because they stayed within a negative

critique of work.”[165]

We are still waiting for them to define “a positive critique of work.”

They avoid doing this because it would require them also to define this

anthropological work which capital imperfectly subsumes to itself and

which, in relation to the refusal of this subsumption, gives us the

revolution. Dauvé and Nesic want the liberation of true labour. Such

“living labour with universal grasp” only exists as such, that is, as

abstraction, to the extent that capital nourishes it; it is nothing more

that its relation to capital.

“Labour power overcoming its condition and rising to its historic task

of freeing itself from its chains, and thus freeing humanity.”[166] What

an unfortunate and truly determinist formula. Doubly unfortunate, for

not only does it take up that dominical determinism of the “old days”

soapbox discourse, it indicates all the hidden discourse of Dauvé and

Nesic — that of the liberation of labour. Labour power “freeing itself

from its chains” is a contradiction in terms. It’s true that it has

already “overcome its condition”, but this just renders everything more

confused. If it “overcomes its condition” it is no longer labour-power,

there is nothing left which can be called by that name.

The conclusion of Dauvé and Nesic’s text is given the authoritative

stamp of a quote from Babeuf: “we are not of this world.” Sylvain

Maréchal took the hospice as the model of communist organisation, Babeuf

took the army. To call proletarians at the turn of the 19th century “men

from nowhere” is to cast around phrases without consideration. We would

recommend, on this subject, the reading of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of

the English Working Class, of which Gilles Dauvé was one of the

translators, to understand all the historical, cultural and geographical

rootedness which formed this class and on the basis of which it formed

itself. Dauvé and Nesic do not conceive of the overcoming of the

capitalist mode of production on the basis of the contemporary situation

and practice of the working class in this mode of production, within it,

as its contradictory process; they write: “the decline of workerism was

accompanied by the loss of a point of view allowing a perspective on the

whole of this society, gauging and judging it from the outside in order

to conceive and propose another”.[167]

After regretting not being able to “judge” and “gauge” society “from the

outside” in order to propose another, they wait for the proletarians to

act as if they were outside: “Revolution will only be possible when the

proletarians act as if they were strangers to this world, its outsiders,

and will relate to a universal dimension, that of a classless society,

of a human community.”[168] What does it mean to act as if one was

outside? Note the circumlocutions of the formula. Already how to act

“outside” is hardly obvious, but to act “as if” one was outside… The

outside connects to the universal dimension: we are in total conceptual

phantasmagoria. One of the most difficult things to understand is the

nature of contradiction: that the capitalist social relation can be on

the one hand totally ours and we can only be it, and, on the other, that

we could in that very respect abolish it.

The abolition of the proletarian condition is the self-transformation of

proletarians into immediately social individuals, it is the struggle

against capital which will make us such, because this struggle is a

relation that implies us with it. The production of communism is

effectuated by a class which finds the content of communism in its own

class situation, without having to attach itself to any “universal

dimension”. Communisation is carried out in the struggle of the

proletariat against capital. Abolishing exchange, the division of

labour, the structure of the corporation, the state…, are measures which

are necessarily taken up in the course of struggle, with their retreats

and their sudden stops they are just as much tactical measures through

which communisation is constructed as the strategy of the revolution. It

is thus, through the struggle of a class against capital, that the

immediately social individual is produced. It is produced by the

proletariat in the abolition of capital (the final relation between

capital and the proletariat), and not by proletarians who will no longer

be completely proletarians acting “as if they were outside”. But then,

protest the delicate souls, “we would be forced…”

Proletarian activity does not determine itself because it has no “direct

link with capital,” it determines itself because it is its relation to

capital and nothing more and this relation is a contradiction. That can

only be seen as determinism if one wants to define a subject prior to

its relations in which alone it exists, which define it, and in which it

acts. If we separate the subject and its action from its “frame” we can

only conceive of their relation in the alternative of determinism and

freedom.

iii “The cause of our failures”

Why the failure? In a certain way Dauvé and Nesic give an answer: the

revolution failed because the proletariat failed to make the revolution.

They never get beyond that tautology and they cannot. It is inevitable

because to get beyond that tautology would be to determine the

historical action of proletarians, it would be to establish a link

between the development of capital and proletarian activity. The

tautology is structural to their thought. If you mess with the tautology

you mess with freedom.

Dauvé and Nesic can only accuse TC of “determinism” by supposing that TC

shares their own fixed, normative and invariant conception of the

revolution. It is obvious that in such a problematic the revolution

cannot “result from a particular stage”, for it is “invariant in its

deep content”.

For us, the revolution of which we speak today is, if you will, the

product of the current situation; it is not The Revolution rendered at

last possible by the current situation. In the problematic of Dauvé and

Nesic TC is determinist, what Dauvé and Nesic haven’t noticed is that TC

abandoned that problematic thirty years ago. They critique TC as if TC

was just giving another response to the same problematic.

After 18 pages intended to show that it never (and could never have)

existed, Dauvé and Nesic allow the supposition that the working class

was “entangled in its identification with work”.[169] We wouldn’t say

the class was ever “entangled”, we would rather say strengthened by its

identification with work. We don’t share Dauvé and Nesic’s normative

view of the revolution. Until a recent period there was no revolution

without this “identification with work” (or else there has never been a

revolutionary movement). If the proletariat is defined through

accumulation and acts accordingly, its failure is not interior to its

practice; it lies in its relation to the counter-revolution. This

practice is a determinant practice and not a communist practice

inherently propelled towards an internal impossibility. This practice is

directed at the community of labour, and it has really been rendered

impossible in the class struggle through its relation to the

counter-revolution.

If we say today that the revolutions were beaten on the basis of what

they were, that their intimate relationship to the counter revolution

was found within them (as certain left communist tendencies perceived),

if we do not replay history supposing that the revolutions could have

been anything else, we nonetheless don’t say that they lacked anything,

we don’t attribute to them the consciousness which results precisely

from their failures and counter-revolutions. The Russian proletarians of

1917, German of 1919, or Spanish of 1936, acted as such, they carried

out the revolutionary movement which was theirs in all consciousness and

all contradiction. The limits of their movement were imposed on them by

the counter-revolution that they had to fight. What we can say now of

these movements, we say now, and if we say why they failed we owe it to

the combats as they were waged. Our analysis is a result; the result

doesn’t pre-exist the thing. Anyone is free to explain what was on the

basis of what ought to have been, and to imagine the latter; that isn’t

our method.

“What privilege permits the observer in the year 2000 to know that his

standpoint is ultimately the right one? Nothing can guarantee that in

2050, after 50 more years of capitalism, a even more broad-ranging

overview won’t establish for x + y reasons the ways in which the

proletarians of the year 2000 … remained historically constrained by the

limits of their times, and thus that communism wasn’t actually in the

offing in the year 2000 any more than it was in 1970 or 1919, but that

now a new period is ushering itself in, allowing us to genuinely grasp

the past from the new, proper viewpoint.”[170]

The point of view is a good one because, today, it’s the only one we

have, because it is ours. We don’t aspire to an eternal grasp of

communism because such a thing doesn’t exist. Of course we may be

“constrained by our limits”, but for as long as the combat continues

these limits are what we are, our force which will perhaps become our

undoing. We know that if, in the current cycle, the limit of the class

activity of the proletariat is to act as a class, then nothing is

determined in advance, and overcoming this contradiction will be

arduous. But we also know that for us, now, communism is the abolition

of all classes and that it is the overcoming of all previous limits of

class struggle.

We don’t believe in the unchanging being of the proletariat or in the

invariant need of the human community since time immemorial. We think

the situation in which we find ourselves: our cycle of struggle carries

such a content and such a structure of the confrontation between capital

and the proletariat, and for us it is the communist revolution, because

for us it is rigorously impossible to envisage other forms and other

contents.

Afterword

The debate between Théorie Communiste (TC) and Troploin (Dauvé & Nesic)

that we have reproduced revolves around the fundamental question of how

to theorise the history and actuality of class struggle and revolution

in the capitalist epoch. As we have stressed in our introduction, both

sides of the debate were products of the same political milieu in France

in the aftermath of the events of 1968; both groups share, to this day,

an understanding of the movement which abolishes capitalist social

relations as a movement of communisation. According to this shared view,

the transition to communism is not something that happens after the

revolution. Rather, the revolution as communisation is itself the

dissolution of capitalist social relations through communist measures

taken by the proletariat, abolishing the enterprise form, the commodity

form, exchange, money, wage labour and value, and destroying the state.

Communisation, then, is the immediate production of communism: the

self-abolition of the proletariat through its abolition of capital and

state.

What sharply differentiates TC's position from that of Troploin,

however, is the way in which the two groups theorise the production, or

the historical production, of this movement of communisation. Neither

grounds the possibility of successful communist revolution on an

“objective” decadence of capitalism; however, Troploin's conception of

the history of class struggle, in common with much of the wider

ultra-left, is of a fluctuating antagonism between classes, an ebb and

flow of class struggle, according to the contingencies of each

historical conjuncture. In this wider conception, the revolutionary

struggle of the proletariat appears to be or is submerged at some points

in history, only to re-emerge at other “high points” (e.g. 1848, 1871,

1917-21, 1936, 1968-9). On this view, we are currently experiencing a

prolonged downturn in class struggle (at least in the advanced

capitalist countries), and it is a case of waiting for the next

re-emergence of the communist movement, or for the revolutionary

proletariat to carry out its subversive work: “Well burrowed, old

Mole!”[171]

Thus for Troploin, communism as communisation is an ever-present (if at

times submerged) possibility, one which, even if there is no guarantee

that it will be realised, is an invariant in the capitalist epoch. By

contrast, for TC communisation is the specific form which the communist

revolution must take in the current cycle of struggle. In distinction

from Troploin, then, TC are able to self-reflexively ground their

conception of communisation in an understanding of capitalist history as

cycles of struggle.

Cycles of struggle and phases of accumulation

TC historicise the contradictory relation between capital and

proletariat on the basis of a periodisation of the subsumption of labour

under capital; this periodisation distinguishes cycles of struggle

corresponding to the qualitative shifts in the relation of exploitation.

This history for TC comprises three broadly identifiable periods: (1)

formal subsumption — ending around 1900; (2) the first phase of real

subsumption — from 1900 to the 1970s; (3) the second phase of real

subsumption — from the 1970s to the present.

Importantly for TC, the subsumption of labour under capital is not

merely a question of the technical organisation of labour in the

immediate production process, in which formal subsumption would be

paired with the extraction of absolute surplus value (through the

lengthening of the working day) and real subsumption with the extraction

of relative surplus value (through increasing productivity by the

introduction of new production techniques, allowing workers to reproduce

the value of their wages in less time thus performing more surplus

labour in a working day of a given length). In TC's conception, the

character and extent or degree of subsumption of labour under capital is

also, and perhaps fundamentally, determined by the way in which the two

poles of the capital-labour relation, i.e. capital and proletariat,

relate to each other as classes of capitalist society. Thus for TC, the

key to the history of capital is the changing mode of reproduction of

capitalist social relations as a whole according to the dialectical

development of the relation between classes. Of course this development

is itself intrinsically bound up with the exigencies of surplus-value

extraction. In short, for TC the subsumption of labour under capital

mediates, and is mediated by the specific historical character of the

class relation at the level of society as a whole.

There is something problematic both in the way TC use the concept of

subsumption to periodise capitalism, and in the way this usage partially

obscures one of the most significant aspects of the development of the

class relation which their theory otherwise brings into focus. Strictly

speaking, formal and real subsumption of labour under capital only apply

to the immediate process of production. In what sense, for example, can

anything beyond the labour-process ever be said to be actually subsumed

by capital rather than merely dominated or transformed by it?[172] TC,

however, attempt to theorise under the rubric of these categories of

subsumption the character of the capitalist class relation per se rather

than simply the mode in which the labour-process actually becomes the

valorisation-process of capital. Yet it is through their questionable

theoretical deployment of the categories of subsumption that TC are able

to advance a new conception of the historical development of the class

relation. Within this periodisation the degree of integration of the

circuits of reproduction of capital and labour-power is of decisive

importance. The key to the historical periodisation of the class

relation is the extent to which the reproduction of labour-power, and

hence of the proletariat as class, is integrated with the circuit of

self-presupposition of capital.[173]

TC's “period of formal subsumption” is characterised by an un-mediated,

external relation between capital and proletariat: the reproduction of

the working-class is not fully integrated into the cycle of valorisation

of capital. In this period, the proletariat constitutes a positive pole

of the relation, and is able to assert its autonomy vis-à-vis capital at

the same time as it finds itself empowered by capitalist development.

However the rising power of the class within capitalist society and its

autonomous affirmation steadily come into contradiction with each other.

In the crushing of workers’ autonomy in the revolutions and

counter-revolutions at the end of the First World War this contradiction

is resolved in an empowerment of the class which reveals itself as

nothing more than capitalist development itself. This qualitative shift

in the class relation marks the end of the transition from the period of

formal subsumption to the first phase of real subsumption. From this

point on the reproduction of labour-power becomes fully integrated,

albeit in a heavily mediated fashion, into the capitalist economy, and

the process of production is transformed in accordance with the

requirements of the valorisation of capital. The relation between

capital and proletariat in this phase of subsumption is one which is

becoming internal, but mediated through the state, the division of the

world economy into national areas and Eastern or Western zones of

accumulation (each with their accompanying models of “third world”

development), collective bargaining within the framework of the national

labour-market and the Fordist deals linking productivity and wage

increases

The positivity of the proletarian pole within the class relation during

the phase of formal subsumption and the first phase of real subsumption

is expressed in what TC term the “programmatism” of the workers’

movement, whose organisations, parties and trade unions (whether social

democratic or communist, anarchist or syndicalist) represented the

rising power of the proletariat and upheld the programme of the

liberation of labour and the self-affirmation of the working class. The

character of the class relation in the period of the programmatic

workers’ movement thus determines the communist revolution in this cycle

of struggle as the self-affirmation of one pole within the

capital-labour relation. As such the communist revolution does not do

away with the relation itself, but merely alters its terms, and hence

carries within it the counter-revolution in the shape of workers’

management of the economy and the continued accumulation of capital.

Decentralised management of production through factory councils on the

one hand and central-planning by the workers’ state on the other are two

sides of the same coin, two forms of the same content: workers’ power as

both revolution and counter-revolution.

For TC this cycle of struggle is brought to a close by the movements of

1968–73, which mark the obsolescence of the programme of the liberation

of labour and the self-affirmation of the proletariat; the capitalist

restructuring in the aftermath of these struggles and the crisis in the

relation between capital and proletariat sweeps away or hollows out the

institutions of the old workers’ movement. The conflicts of 1968–73 thus

usher in a new cycle of accumulation and struggle, which TC term the

second phase of real subsumption, characterised by the capitalist

restructuring or counter-revolution from 1974–95 which fundamentally

alters the character of the relation between capital and proletariat.

Gone now are all the constraints to accumulation — all impediments to

the fluidity and international mobility of capital — represented by

rigidities of national labour-markets, welfare, the division of the

world economy into Cold War blocs and the protected national development

these allowed on the “periphery” of the world economy.

The crisis of the social compact based on the Fordist productive model

and the Keynesian Welfare State issues in financialisation, the

dismantling and relocation of industrial production, the breaking of

workers’ power, de-regulation, the ending of collective bargaining,

privatisation, the move to temporary, flexibilised labour and the

proliferation of new service industries. The global capitalist

restructuring — the formation of an increasingly unified global labour

market, the implementation of neo-liberal policies, the liberalisation

of markets, and international downward pressure on wages and conditions

— represents a counter-revolution whose result is that capital and the

proletariat now confront each other directly on a global scale. The

circuits of reproduction of capital and labour-power — circuits through

which the class relation itself is reproduced — are now fully

integrated: these circuits are now immediately internally related. The

contradiction between capital and proletariat is now displaced to the

level of their reproduction as classes; from this moment on, what is at

stake is the reproduction of the class relation itself.

With the restructuring of capital (which is the dissolution of all the

mediations in the class relation) arises the impossibility of the

proletariat to relate to itself positively against capital: the

impossibility of proletarian autonomy. From being a positive pole of the

relation as interlocutor with, or antagonist to, the capitalist class,

the proletariat is transformed into a negative pole. Its very being qua

proletariat, whose reproduction is fully integrated within the circuit

of capital, becomes external to itself. What defines the current cycle

of struggle in contradistinction to the previous one is the character of

the proletariat's self-relation which is now immediately its relation to

capital. As TC put it, in the current cycle the proletariat's own class

belonging is objectified against it as exterior constraint, as

capital.[174]

This fundamental transformation in the character of the class relation,

which produces this inversion in the proletariat's self-relation as pole

of the relation of exploitation, alters the character of class

struggles, and causes the proletariat to call into question its own

existence as class of the capitalist mode of production. Thus for TC the

revolution as communisation is an historically specific production: it

is the horizon of this cycle of struggle.[175]

A produced overcoming

For TC, the relation between capital and proletariat is not one between

two separate subjects, but one of reciprocal implication in which both

poles of the relation are constituted as moments of a

self-differentiating totality. It is this totality itself — this moving

contradiction — which produces its own supersession in the revolutionary

action of the proletariat against its own class-being, against capital.

This immanent, dialectical conception of the historical course of the

capitalist class relation supersedes the related dualisms of

objectivism/ subjectivism and spontaneism/ voluntarism which

characterised most Marxist theory in the 20th Century and indeed up to

the present. The dynamism and changing character of this relation is

thus grasped as a unified process and not simply in terms of waves of

proletarian offensive and capitalist counter-offensive.

According to TC, it is the qualitative transformations within the

capitalist class relation that determine the revolutionary horizon of

the current cycle of struggle as communisation. For us, it is also true

at a more general level of abstraction that the contradictory relation

between capital and proletariat has always pointed beyond itself, to the

extent that — from its very origins — it has produced its own overcoming

as the immanent horizon of actual struggles. This horizon, however, is

inextricable from the real, historical forms that the moving

contradiction takes. It is thus only in this qualified sense that we can

talk of communism transhistorically (i.e. throughout the history of the

capitalist mode of production). As we see it, the communist movement,

understood not as a particularisation of the totality — neither as a

movement of communists nor of the class — but rather as the totality

itself, is both transhistorical and variant according to the

historically specific configurations of the capitalist class relation.

What determines the communist movement — the communist revolution — to

take the specific form of communisation in the current cycle is the very

dialectic of integration of the circuits of reproduction of capital and

labour-power.[176] It is this which produces the radical negativity of

the proletariat's self-relation vis-à-vis capital. In this period, in

throwing off its “radical chains” the proletariat does not generalise

its condition to the whole of society, but dissolves its own being

immediately through the abolition of capitalist social relations.

[1] Karl Marx, The 18th 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.

[21] Marx & Engels, Preface to Russian Edition 1882, Communist Manifesto

(MECW 24), p. 426.

[22] Originally published as Quand Meurent les Insurrections, ADEL,

Paris, 1998. This version was translated by Loren Goldner, revised by

the author, and first published by Antagonism Press, 1999. An earlier

version was published in 1979 as a preface to the selection of articles

from Bilan on Spain 1936-39. Chapters of this preface have been

translated in English as Fascism and Anti-Fascism by several publishers,

for instance Unpopular Books.

[23] For example, Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business (New

International vol. 4 no. 10, 1938)

[24] Angelo Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism 1918-1922 (Gordon 1976).

Phillip Bourrinet, The Italian Communist Left 1927-45 (ICC 1992).

[25] See Serge Bricianer, Anton Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils

(Telos 1978) and Phillip Bourrinet, The German/Dutch Left (NZW 2003).

[26] Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939

(Freedom Press 1953). Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work during the

Popular Front (UCLA 1993).

[27] Proletariër, published by the councilist group in The Hague, July

27, 1936.

[28] Victor Alba, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: a History of

the POUM (Transaction Press, 1988).

[29] Homage to Catalonia, April 1938. In 1951, it had sold less than

1,500 copies. It was first published in the US in 1952.

[30] Boletín de Información, CNT-ait-FAI, Via Layetana, 32 y 34,

Barcelona, November 11, 1936.

[31] P.I.C., published by the GIC, Amsterdam, October 1936

[32] Marx, Revolutionary Spain, 1854 (MECW 13), p. 422.

[33] Clé, 2nd issue.

[34] P.I.C., German edition, December 1931.

[35] Räte-Korrespondenz, June 1937.

[36] Solidaridad Obrera, November 1936.

[37] Marx, cited by Marie Laffranque, ‘Marx et l’Espagne’ (Cahiers de

l’ISEA, série S. n°15).

[38] Among others: Orwell, and Low & Brea, Red Spanish Notebook, (City

Lights, 1979).

[39] Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, 1990).

[40] Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (Faber & Faber, 1937).

[41] Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 52.

[42] Gilles Dauvé, When Insurrections Die, p. 27 (all page references

are to the text in the published copy of Endnotes #1, unless otherwise

noted, a PDF of Endnotes #1 can be found here)

[43]

p. 29

[44]

p. 31

[45]

p. 28

[46]

p. 32

[47]

p. 34

[48]

p. 36. Our emphasis

[49]

p. 36

[50]

p. 36

[51]

p. 38. Translator’s note (TN): In the French version of the text to

which Théorie Communiste refer, democracy and Social Democracy

were also indispensable for containing/integrating (encadrer)

workers. This phrase is omitted from the English version.

[52]

p. 34

[53]

p. 50

[54]

p. 51

[55]

p. 53

[56]

p. 55

[57] TN: “élan” — a play on Dauvé’s “revolutionary élan” (pp. 57, 67)

which in other texts by Dauvé is translated as “revolutionary wave”

“…surge” or “…momentum”. Here it corresponds to one of the ineffable

forces of a defunct physics.

[58]

p. 56

[59]

p. 59

[60]

p. 68

[61] pp. 57, 66, 59 respectively

[62]

p. 67

[63]

p. 67

[64] For an explanation of TC’s concept of “programmatism” see below pp.

155-161 and Afterword p. 215.

[65] Paul Mattick, ‘Otto Rühle and the German Labour Movement’, 1935, in

Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Merlin Press, 1978).

[66] Marx, Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

1859 (MECW 29), p. 263.

[67] TN: Ultimatism — the confidence that one is in a position to grasp

the ultimate truth.

[68] Marx, 18th Brumaire (MECW 11), p. 103.

[69] ‘Sous Le Travail: l’Activité’, La Banquise no. 4, 1986.

[70] Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 1, 1949.

[71] Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 87.

[72] ibid. p. 88

[73] ibid. p. 80

[74] ibid. p. 87

[75] Amadeo Bordiga, ‘Trajectoire et catastrophe de la forme capitaliste

dans la classique et monolithique construction marxiste’, Réunion de

Piombino, September 1957. (French translation of the article which

appeared in Il Programma Communista in 1957).

[76] cf. Alain Maillard, La Communauté des égaux (éd. Kimé, 1999).

[77] Marx, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 53.

[78] Marx, Introduction, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right, 1843 (MECW 3), p. 187.

[79] Marx, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 88.

[80] ibid. p. 87.

[81] ibid. p. 80.

[82] Théorie Communiste no. 14, 1997 p. 19.

[83] “Ne travaillez jamais”: writing on a Paris wall, photographed in

the IS no. 8, 1963. That same issue defined “the centre of the

revolutionary project” as “nothing less than the suppression of work in

the usual sense (as well as the suppression of the proletariat) and of

all justifications of old style work”.

[84] “Autonomy” is a misleading term, because it mixes activities and

theories that vastly differed, though they were often present within the

same groups. A large part of the “autonomous” movement was involved in

grassroots anti-work action. On the other hand, Operaismo was using the

critique of work as a unifying theme on which some organisation

(sometimes genuinely democratic, sometimes similar to a party) could be

built. Operaismo found the common element to all categories of

proletarians in the fact that they were all at work, whether formal or

unofficial, waged or un-waged, permanent or casual. So, even when it did

promote shop-floor rebellion, Operaismo’s purpose was to have everyone’s

work acknowledged, through the supposedly unifying slogan of the

“political wage”. Instead of contributing to a dissolution of work into

the whole of human activity, it wanted everyone to be treated as a

worker (women, the jobless, immigrants, students, etc.). The critique of

work was used as a tool to claim the generalisation of paid productive

activity, i.e. of… wage-labour. Operaismo was fighting for the

recognition of the centrality of labour, that is for something which is

the opposite of the abolition of work. See for example Zerowork no. 1,

1975. This contradiction was expressed in Potere Operaio’s slogan: “From

the fight for the wage to the abolition of wage-labour”. Lack of space

prevents us from going into details. Cf. the two very informative

collections of articles and documents by Red Notes in the 70’s: Italy

1977–78. Living with an Earthquake, and Working Class Autonomy and the

Crisis. Just to show that the critique of work exceeds the borders of

so-called rich countries: A Ballad Against Work, A Publication for

Collectivities, 1997, Majdoor Library, Autopin Jhuggi, NIT, Faridabad

121001, India.

[85] Krisis, Manifesto Against Work (1999), now translated into French

and English.

[86] Théorie Communiste, BP 17, 84300. Les Vignères. Also the two books

by Roland Simon published by Senonevero.

[87] Stephen Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–18

(Cambridge UP, 1983)

[88] “‘Labour’ by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity,

determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the

abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is

conceived as the abolition of ‘labour’.” Marx, Notes on Frederich List,

1845 (MECW 4), p. 279.

[89] Though Marx does not speak of “systems of production”, the concept

is clearly in his writings. cf. Marx, Capital vol. 1 (MECW 35), pp.

341–509.

[90] Pivert was the leader of a left opposition in the socialist party

(which later formed the psop in 1938).

[91] Similar experiences took place in other countries and continents.

In 1945, in the north of Vietnam, 30,000 miners elected councils, ran

the mines for a while, controlled the public services, the railways, the

post office, imposed equal pay for all, and taught people to read, until

the Vietminh put its foot down. As a Vietnamese revolutionary recalled

later, they wished to live “without bosses, without cops”. Promoting

work was far from being their prime motive or concern.

[92] Constant Malva, Ma nuit au jour le jour (Labour, 2001). At the same

time, Belgium had to import thousands of Italians because the local

workers were reluctant to go down the mine.

[93] Richard Grégoire & Freddy Perlman, Worker-Student Action Committees

(Black & Red, 1969). Also Francois Martin, ‘The Class Struggle and Its

Most Characteristics Aspects in Recent Years…’ in Eclipse and

Re-Emergence… (Antagonism Press, 1998).

[94] On how both Stalinism and Nazism glorified work and social

egalitarianism, see Communism, ICG, no. 13, 2002, ‘On the Praise of

Work’.

[95] La Banquise ‘Sous le travail: l’activité’ (La Banquise no. 4, 1986)

[96] On formal and real domination see: Marx, Results of the Immediate

Process of Production (MECW 34), pp. 355, 471.

[97] Also the beginning of Capital vol. 1, chap.16 (MECW 35), p. 509ff.

[98] At the time, various people had the intuition of the origin of

surplus-value, and some came close to formulating it, for example Flora

Tristan in 1843.

[99] Any good biography of Marx describes his political activity, for

instance Franz Mehring’s and more recently Francis Wheen’s. In his

introduction to Capital volume I, Marx paid tribute to his time when he

compared himself to a scientist who discovers “natural” laws.

Fortunately, and in contradiction to Engels’s funeral speech on his

friend’s grave, Marx was not the Darwin of the proletariat. Nor did he

think history was foretold. To him, only a teleological mind would have

the course of human history move to a pre-ordained end. There was no

single line of evolution, as shown by the “late” Marx. See note 22

below.

[100] Rosa Luxemburg The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade

Unions (1906)

[101] The reader will understand that we’re not preaching indeterminism.

By and large, the 19th century was the epic of a conquering bourgeoisie

with a faith in the iron logic of progress that left no alternative but

final abundance and peace. 1914 opened an era of doubt and

anti-determinism, as is evident in the popular appeal of the

“uncertainty principle”. There is no need for us to swap the scientific

fashion of one age for another.

[102] Marx’s progressivism is both real and contradictory. He certainly

worked out a linear sequence: primitive community — slavery — feudalism

— capitalism — communism, with the side option of the “Asiatic mode of

production”. But his deep, longstanding interest in the Russian mir and

in so-called primitive societies (cf. his notebooks published in 1972)

prove that he thought it possible for some (vast) areas to avoid the

capitalist phase. If Marx had been the herald of industrialisation he is

often depicted as, he would have completed the six volumes he’d planned

for Das Kapital, instead of accumulating notes on Russia, the East, etc.

See ‘Karl Marx & the Iroquois’, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, no. 4

(Black Swan Press 1989) and our Re-Visiting the East and Popping in at

Marx’s Grave, available on the Troploin site.

[103] Similarly, in 1900, it was “obvious” to ask for more technology. A

hundred years later, it’s the opposite that goes without saying: we

“obviously” need less…

[104] The cover of the 4th issue of La Révolution Surréaliste (1925)

proclaimed: “and war on work”. See also Breton’s article “The Last

Strike” in no. 2 (1925), and Aragon’s Cahier Noir (1926).

[105] Results of the Immediate Process of Production (MECW 34), pp.

419–424.… See also the General Introduction to the Critique of Political

Economy, 1857 (MECW 28), p. 41.

[106] On the difficulty for capital to fully achieve a new

(post-Fordist) system of production, and the consequences of this

situation for the proletarians, see our 2nd Newsletter in English,

Whither the World?, 2002.

[107] Rigorous Marxists often dismiss notions like “subjectivity”,

“mankind”, “freedom”, “aspiration”… because of their association with

idealism and psychology. Strangely enough, the same rigor does not apply

to set of concepts borrowed from economics, philosophy or sociology.

(Primitivists would prefer anthropology.) All those vocabularies (and

the visions of the world they convey) belong to specialised fields of

knowledge, all of them inadequate for human emancipation, and therefore

to be superseded. Until then, we have to compose a “unitary” critique

from them and against them.

[108] The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).

[109] Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic, ‘Love of Labour? Love of Labour Lost…’

p. 107 (all page references are to Dauvé and Nesic’s texts in the

published version of Endnotes #1 unless otherwise noted, the PDF of

Endnotes #1 is available here).

[110]

p. 134

[111] TN: Transcroissance — Trotsky used this term to describe the

“growing over” from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution. TC

employ the term more generally, using it to signify the belief that

class struggle is not a part of capitalism but a stage in the

progressive liberation of the class; in particular the idea that

struggles over the wage may become revolutionary through being

generalised.

[112]

p. 108

[113]

p. 107

[114]

p. 108

[115] TN: Luttes revendicatives — from ‘revindicate’: to demand. Luttes

revendicatives is a common French term meaning struggles over wages and

conditions, or struggles over immediate demands (as opposed to

insurrectionary or political struggles). We use the archaic

‘revindicative’ because there is no simple equivalent in English.

[116] The struggle against capital, according to the advocates of

self-organisation, becomes “suicidal”, yet this never led them to

question the “preservation of the tools of labour” which the proletariat

was supposed to take over. They don’t see what this suicide contains for

the proletariat in its contradiction with capital: the evidence of its

own disappearance.

[117] écart — could also be translated as “swerve” or “gap”. See note 5

to the Afterword for an explanation of this concept.

[118]

p. 147

[119]

p. 134

[120] Jean Barrot (Gilles Dauvé) Fascism/Anti-fascism (Black Cat Press

1982). This text is a partial translation of Dauvé’s preface to Bilan:

Contre-révolution en Espagne 1936–1939 (10/18 1979), which was also the

basis for When Insurrections Die.

[121] Marx. The Civil War in France. (MECW 22), p. 504.

[122] Cited by Marx in Draft of The Civil War in France (MECW 22), p.

500.

[123] ibid. p. 501

[124] ibid. p. 505.

[125] ibid. p. 499.

[126] ibid.

[127] ibid. p. 335.

[128] ibid. p. 336.

[129] Jean Barrot / Gilles Dauvé, Notes pour une analyse de la

révolution russe — 1967 — in Communisme et question russe (Tête de

feuilles, 1972) pp.47-48. Emphasis added.

[130] ibid. p. 51

[131] Oskar Anweiler, The Russian Soviets. Translated from the French:

Les Soviets en Russie, (Gallimard 1972), pp.157-158. Emphasis added.

[132]

E. H. Carr, The Bolschevik Revolution. Translated from the French: La

Révolution bolchévique, vol.II (Ed. de Minuit 1969), p.66.

[133]

p. 113

[134] ibid.

[135] ibid.

[136] “que vaudrait une révolution où nous serions poussés quasi malgré

nous?” Gillles Dauvé & Karl Nesic, Il va falloir attendre (Troploin

Newsletter no. 2 2002), p.4. TN: this passage was removed from the

English version of this text — Whither the World?

[137] see note 18 to p. 87 above.

[138]

p. 114

[139]

p. 115

[140] ibid.

[141] Cited in Pier Carlo Masini, Anarchistes et Communistes dans le

mouvement des Conseils à Turin, (Nautilus 1983), p. 63.

[142] Errico Malatesta, Umanità Nova, 23 September 1920. Emphasis added.

[143] in Errico Malatesta, Articles politiques (10/18 1979), p.274.

[144]

p. 110

[145] Marx, The Class Struggles in France (MECW 10), p. 55.

[146] ibid. p. 78

[147]

p. 111

[148] ibid.

[149]

p. 120

[150]

p. 119

[151]

p. 121

[152] Dating this conception of the invariance of communism to the

emergence of capitalism is to give a charitable interpretation, because

for Nesic (in Call of the Void) it seemed to go back much further, and

for Dauvé in the Banquise it seemed inherent to the (unfortunately

misguided) communal nature of humanity.

[153]

p. 134

[154] Dauvé, ‘Human, All Too Human?’ p. 100 above.

[155]

p. 147

[156]

p. 145

[157] Marx, 1844 Manuscripts (MECW 3), p. 333.

[158] Marx, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 73.

[159] The text to which TC refer, Engels’ Principles of Communism, an

early draft of the Communist Manifesto, has in its English translation

the “liberation of the proletariat” rather than “labour” (MECW 6), p.

341.

[160]

p. 135

[161]

p. 141

[162] ibid.

[163] ibid.

[164] The term “social bond” or “social link” (lien social), is employed

by Dauvé alongside others such as “adhesion” “cohesion” and

“integration” to describe the means by which capital commands the

allegiance of those it exploits. See e.g. Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic.

Whither The World (Troploin Newsletter no. 2 2002) p. 13 and 28.

[165]

p. 142

[166]

p. 145

[167] pp. 150-151

[168]

p. 154

[169]

p. 153

[170] Dauvé, ‘Human, All Too Human?’ p. 93 above.

[171] Marx, 18th Brumaire, (MECW 11), p.105.

[172] We will explore these issues further in the next issue of

Endnotes.

[173] By "self-presupposition of capital" TC mean the sense in which

capital establishes itself both as condition and result of its own

process. This is expressed in TC's use (following the French edition of

Capital) of the term double

moulinet, signifying two intersecting cycles.

[174] This fundamental negativity in the proletariat's self-relation

vis-a-vis capital is expressed by TC's use of the term écart, which may

be translated as "divergence", "swerve" or "gap". For TC this concept

expresses the idea that the proletariat's action as a class is the limit

of this cycle of struggle; for its struggles have no other horizon apart

from its own reproduction as a class, yet it is incapable of affirming

this as such.

[175] For a discussion of this problematic in relation to concrete

struggles, see TC's 'Self-organization is the first act of the

revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to

overcome.' Available on libcom.org.

[176] We will explore these issues further in the next issue of

Endnotes.