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Title: Capitalism and Communism Author: Gilles Dauvé Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: communisation, anti-work, left communism, communism, capitalism, history, Karl Marx Source: Retrieved on 9/25/20 from https://libcom.org/library/capitalism-communism-gilles-dauve Notes: The first 1972 version of this essay underwent various changes in 1997. It has been considerably modified again for this new (2015) edition.
Communism is not a programme one puts into practice or makes others put
into practice, but a social movement. Apart from perhaps a clearer
understanding, those who develop and defend theoretical communism are
moved by the same practical personal need for communism as those who are
not especially concerned by theory. They have no privilege whatsoever:
they do not carry the knowledge that will set the revolution in motion.
On the other hand, they have no fear of taking initiatives. Like every
other revolution, the communist revolution is the product of real living
conditions and desires. The points made in this text are born out of
social contradictions and practical struggles which help us discern the
possibilities of a new society amidst and against the monstrosity and
fascination of the old.
Communism is not an ideal to be realised: it already exists, not as
alternative lifestyles, autonomous zones or counter-communities that
would grow within this society and ultimately change it into another
one, but as an effort, a task to prepare for. It is the movement which
tries to abolish the conditions of life determined by wage-labour, and
it will abolish them only by revolution.
We will not refute the CPs, the various brands of socialists, the far
left, etc., whose programmes call for a modernisation and
democratisation of all existing features of the present world. The point
is not that these programmes do not go far enough, but that they stay
within the boundaries of the present society: they are capitalist
programmes.
If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the
great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the
physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their
personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can
only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is
usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others.
The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet
the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and
bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production,
now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by
force.
In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century
on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants,
repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor.
Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included
capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of
peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly
normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that
he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything
is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange…
such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.
By means of its school system and its ideological and political life,
contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this
situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which
enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which
the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the
shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an
obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor
disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities.
Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are
left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main
thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or
class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is
quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the
wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also
is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that
insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away
with this relationship and make another world possible.
What characterises human society is the fact that it produces and
reproduces the material conditions of its existence. Other forms of
life—bees, for example—make their own material conditions, but, at least
as far as we can understand them, their evolution remains at a timeless
standstill. Human activity is a continually changing appropriation and
assimilation of man’s environment. In other words, humankind has a
history. The relation of humans to “nature” is also a relation among
humans and depends on their relations of production, just as the ideas
they produce, the way they conceive the world, depend on their
production relations.
Production relations into which people enter are independent of their
will: each generation confronts technical and social conditions left by
previous generations. But it can alter them. What we call “history” is
made by people. This is not to say that the windmill created the feudal
lord, the steam engine the bourgeois industrialist and that, in due
time, with the same implacable logic, automation and electronics will
free the toiling masses. If this were true, there would be no
revolutions. The new society bred by the old can only emerge through a
violent decisive break through the entire social, political, and
ideological structure.
What must be exposed, behind the material objects, the machines, the
factories, the labourers who work there every day, the things they
produce, is the social relation that regulates them, as well as its
necessary and possible evolution.
What is known as “the primitive community” matters to us because it
shows that the rule of money is a historical—not natural—reality, far
less widespread and fairly more recent than we are usually taught. But
there is no point in eulogising it. Superficial critics of contemporary
capitalism would like to get rid of its bad side (cars, banks, cops…)
while developing the good side (cycling lanes, schools, hospitals…).
Similarly, though many primitivists would certainly appreciate the
harmony with nature enjoyed by the Native Americans portrayed in Dances
with Wolves, few would tolerate living under the domination of
patriarchy and myth. While the North American potlatch happened in a
non-market environment, it went along with hierarchy and power.
Anyway, there is no going back: we will not re-enact the past.
As far as anthropology is to be trusted, it seems that human beings
first lived in relatively autonomous and scattered groups, in families
(in the broadest sense: the family grouping all those of the same
blood), in clans or tribes. Production consisted essentially of hunting,
fishing, and gathering. There was no individual production, as the
individual did not exist, nor freedom as we are used to it. Activities
were decided (actually imposed on the group by the group) and achieved
in common, and their results shared in common. Not everyone got a “fair”
share, but “production” and “consumption” took place without the
mediation of comparing separately produced goods.
Many a “primitive” community had the “technical” means to accumulate
surpluses and simply did not bother. As M. Sahlins pointed out, the age
of scarcity often meant abundance, with lots of idle time—though our
“time” would have had little relevance to these people.[1] As the West
explored and conquered the world, travellers and anthropologists
observed that searching for and storing food took a rather small portion
of a “primitive’s” day. After calculating that in just one hour, in the
eighteenth century, an English farmer produced 2,600 calories and some
Indonesians 4,500, Gregory Clark draws a parallel with hunter-gatherers
who only “worked” a few hours a day: “Thus the average person in the
world of 1800 was no better off than the person of 100,000 BC.”[2] Quite
a striking comparison, but is it relevant to use the same notion, work,
for a Papuan hunter-gatherer and a Yorkshire rural day-labourer? Clark
has the mindset of an economist. The main point is that primitive
“productive” activity was part of a global relationship with the group
and its environment.
Eventually, not all but most of humankind moved from hunting-gathering
into agriculture and ended up developing surpluses, which communities
started swapping.
This circulation was achieved by taking into account what is common to
all goods. The products of human activity have this one thing in common:
every one of them results from a certain amount of exertion of physical
and mental effort. Labour has an abstract character: it does not only
produce a useful thing, it also consumes energy, both individual and
social. The value of a product, independently of its use, is the
quantity of abstract labour it contains, i.e. the quantity of social
energy necessary to reproduce it. Since this quantity can only be
measured in terms of the time spent, the value of a product is the time
socially necessary to produce it, namely the average for a given society
at a given moment in its history.
With the growth of its activities and needs, the community came to
produce not only goods, but also commodities, goods produced to be
exchanged, and for their exchange value. Commerce first appeared between
communities, then penetrated inside communities, giving rise to
specialised activities, trades, socially divided labour. The very nature
of labour changed. Productive activity was no longer integrated into the
totality of social activity: it became a specialised field, separated
from the rest of the individual’s life. What somebody makes for himself
is set apart from what he makes for the purpose of exchange. The second
part of his activity means sacrifice, time-counting, working hours as
opposed to free time, and constraint: society becomes not just
diversified into different trades, it is divided between workers and
non-workers. Work is class.
Exchange relations help the community to develop and to satisfy its
growing needs, but they ultimately destroy what made the community
immediately communal. People now treat each other, and themselves,
mainly as suppliers of goods. The utility of the product I make for
exchange no longer interests me: I am only interested in the utility of
the product I will get in exchange. But for the person who sells it to
me, this second utility does not matter: his sole concern lies in the
usefulness of what I produced. What is use value for the one is only
exchange value for the other, and vice versa.
Community started to erode when its members became interested in each
other only to the extent that they benefited from each other. Not that
altruism was the driving force of the primitive community, or should be
the driving force of communism. But in one case the movement of
interests drives persons together and makes them act in common, whereas
in the other it individualises them and compels them to be indifferent
or antagonistic to one another. Even when we do not treat each other as
enemies, most daily encounters are ruled by the urge to save time and
“get things done.” With the birth of value exchange in the community,
labour is no longer the realisation of needs by a collective, but the
means to obtain from others the satisfaction of one’s needs.
While it developed exchange, the community tried to restrain it. It
attempted to control or destroy surpluses or to establish strict rules
to control the circulation of goods. Some Ancient Greeks opposed
economics, i.e. exchanging goods between producers at a “fair price”
(what could now be called “the real economy”), to chrematistics,
accumulating wealth for its own sake. For a long while, only a fraction
of exchange was based on value, viz. on a reasonably sound calculation
of equivalent average labour time. Nevertheless, value triumphed in the
end. Wherever it did not, society withdrew into itself until it was
eventually crushed by the invasion of merchant conquerors.
As long as goods are not produced separately, as long as there is no
division of labour, one does not and cannot compare the respective
values of two items, since they are produced and distributed in common.
The moment of exchange, during which the labour times of two products
are measured and the products exchanged accordingly, does not exist yet.
The abstract character of labour appears only when within human groups,
some members trade their products with each other and also with other
groups. With these two prerequisites, value, i.e. average labour time,
becomes the instrument of measure.
Value is a linkage, because the average socially necessary labour time
is the one element all different tasks have in common: they all have the
property of consuming a certain quantity of human labour power,
regardless of the particular way in which this power is used.
Corresponding to the abstract character of labour, value represents its
abstraction, its general and social character, apart from all
differences in nature between the objects labour produces.
Value was not born because it is a convenient instrument of measure. It
appeared as an indispensable mediation of human activities because these
activities were separated and had to be linked by some means of
comparison. Labour became work, viz. a physical or mental effort meant
to be as productive as possible, not in the interest of the worker, but
for the benefit of the one who was putting him to work and profiting
from it. It is not technique we are talking about, but social division:
class. Work is inseparable from the fact that a group has no other way
of subsistence than working for a group who controls the means of
production.
A new sort of community was born: with the autonomisation of value, via
wage-labour, “money appears in fact as the thing-like existing
community” (Marx).[3]
Up to our time included (so far), with the advance of the efficiency of
human organisation and its capacity to associate the components of the
labour process, first of all labour power, history has coincided with
the difference (and the opposition) between those who work and those who
organise work and profit from it. The first towns and great irrigation
projects were born out of an increased productive efficiency. Commerce
appeared as a special activity: some people do not make a living by
producing, but by mediating between the various activities of the
separate units of production. An increasing proportion of items,
artefacts, places, ideas, emotions, souvenirs become commodities. To be
used, to put into practice their ability to fulfil a need, they must be
bought, they must fulfil their exchange value. Otherwise, although they
exist materially, they do not exist socially, and no-one has a right to
use them, because commodity is not just a thing, but first and foremost
a social relation ruled by the logic of exchange. Use value is the
support of value. Production becomes a sphere distinct from consumption,
and work a sphere distinct from non-work. Private property is the legal
framework of the separation between activities, between men, between
units of production. The slave is a commodity for his owner, who buys a
man to work for him, whereas the wage-labourer is his own private
proprietor, legally free to choose who to work for, at least in
principle and in democratic capitalism.
Money made value “visible” and transferable (though coinage was unknown
until the seventh century BC). The abstraction, value, is materialised
in money, becomes a commodity, and tends to become independent, to
detach itself from what it comes from and represents: use values, real
goods. Compared to simple exchange (x quantity of product A against y
quantity of product B), money permits a universalisation, where anything
can be obtained for a quantity of abstract labour time crystallised in
money. Money is labour time abstracted from labour and solidified in a
durable, measurable, transportable form. Money is the visible, tangible
manifestation of the common element in all commodities—not two or
several commodities, but all possible commodities. Money allows its
owner to command the work of others, any time any place in the world.
With money it is possible to escape from the constraints of time and
space.
A tendency towards a universal economy occurred around some great
centres from Ancient times to the Middle Ages, but it failed to reach
its aim. The propensity of empires to overstretch, and their subsequent
break-up or destruction, illustrate this succession of failures.[4] Rome
was not the only huge geopolitical entity to rise and fall. Exchange
relations periodically came to an end between the various parts of the
civilised (i.e. statist and mercantile) world, after the demise of one
or several empires. Such interruptions might last for centuries, during
which the economy seemed to go backwards, towards a subsistence economy,
until gold and sword combined to generate another aspiring
all-encompassing power. Commerce alone, simple commodity production
could not provide the stability, the durability required by the
socialisation and unification of the world. Only capitalism created,
from the sixteenth century on, but mainly in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the necessary basis for a durable world-unified
economy, when the Industrial Revolution turned labour itself into the
Number One commodity.
Capital is a production relation which establishes a completely new and
dramatically efficient bond between living labour and past labour
(accumulated by previous generations). In several Western European
countries after the Middle Ages, merchants had accumulated large sums of
money, perfected systems of banking and credit, and found possible to
use these sums by hiring labour to work on machines. Masses of former
peasants or craftsmen dispossessed (by debt or brute force) of their
instruments of production were forced to work as wage-labourers on
accumulated, stored-up labour in the form of machines, particularly in
the textile industry. Past labour was set in motion by the living labour
of those who had not been able to realise such an accumulation of raw
materials and means of production.
There is no valorisation without work. Labour power is quite a special
commodity: its consumption furnishes work, hence new value, whereas
means of production yield no more than their own value. Therefore the
use of labour power furnishes a supplementary value. The origin of
bourgeois wealth is to be found in this surplus value, in the difference
between the value created by the wage-labourer in his work, and the
value necessary for the reproduction of his labour-power. Wages only
cover the expenses of that reproduction (the means of subsistence of the
worker and his family).
Past labour is valorised by living labour. To invest, to
accumulate—these are the mottos of capital, and the priority given to
heavy industry in “socialist” countries is a sure sign of capitalism.
But the system only multiplies steel mills, mines, airports, docks,
etc., if and when they help accumulate value. Capital is first of all a
sum of value, of abstract labour crystallised in the form of money,
finance capital, shares, bonds, etc., in search for its own expansion,
preferably in liquid form which makes capital as universally
transferable as can be. An x sum of value must give x+profit at the end
of the cycle.
The appropriation of surplus-value by the bourgeois is an integral part
of the system, which is logically run by the class who benefits from it.
But this inevitable fact is not the heart of the matter. Supposing the
capitalist and the wagelabourer were fused into one, if labour truly
managed capital, re-oriented production in the interest of everyone, if
wages were equal and fair, etc., and value logic continued to operate,
it would not go beyond capitalism: it would be a (short-lived)
worker-led capitalism.
The point is not that a handful of people take a disproportionately
large share of surplus-value. If these parasitic profiteers were pushed
aside, while the rest of the system remained, part of the surplus-value
would be given to the workers and the rest invested in collective and
social equipment, welfare, etc.: this is the age-old programme of the
left, including the official CPs. Unfortunately, the logic of the value
system involves developing production for maximal valorisation. In a
society based on value, value dominates society, not the other way
round. The change brought about by capital is to have conquered
production, and thus to have socialised the world since the nineteenth
century, spreading industrial plants, warehouses, ports,
telecommunication networks, etc., all over the world, which results in
goods being available in shops. But in the capitalist cycle, the
fulfilment of needs is only a by-product, never the driving force of the
mechanism. Valorisation is the aim: fulfilment of needs is at best a
means, since what has been produced must be sold. Even if it was
feasible, labour-managed value would still operate according to
valorisation. The bourgeois hardly control value: “people’s power” would
not fare any better.
The company is the locus of capitalism: each industrial, trading, or
agricultural company operates as a rallying point for a quantum of value
looking for expansion. The enterprise must make profits. Profitability
has nothing to do with the evil doing of a few “big” capitalists, and
communism does not mean getting rid of fat cigar smokers wearing top
hats at horse shows.[5] Old and new reformism always targets the rich,
yet what matters is not individual profits, however outrageous they may
be, but the constraint, the orientation imposed upon production and
society by a system which dictates what and how to produce and to
consume.
This is why it is so difficult to draw a line between speculative and
productive investment. In capitalist logic, productive means value
production, whether value comes out of a Wolfsburg assembly line or a
Wall Street trader’s office. The aim of production is not to satisfy
human wants, nor provide labour with jobs, nor to please the engineer’s
inventive mind, but to accumulate value. Of course this enables the
bourgeois to amass fortunes, but only in so far as he fulfils his
function. There is no point in contrasting the “real” economy that
manufactures clothes with “parasitic” finance that plays with
derivatives. The bottom line reality is to be read at the end of the
financial statement that shows net income or loss.
“It is important to emphasize the point that what determines value is
not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could
possibly be produced in, and the minimum is ascertained by
competition.”[6]
Competition is the cornerstone of capitalism, the dynamic that makes it
not only produce a lot more than other systems, but makes it the
world-system where labour productivity is a priority. Each corporation
meets its rivals on the market, each fights to corner the market.
Competition disjoints productive systems into autonomous centres which
are rival poles, each seeking to increase its respective sum of value,
which exists against the others. Soft and “fair” competition is not
uncommon, but any firm will resort to cut-throat methods if it has to.
Neither “corporate governance,” nor “ethical guidelines,” nor
“democratic planning” can pacify economic warfare. The motive force of
competition is not the freedom of individuals, nor even of the
capitalists, but the freedom of capital: it lives by devouring itself.
The form destroys its content to survive as a form. It destroys its
material components (living labour and past labour) to survive as a sum
of value valorising itself.
Each competing capital has a specific profit rate. But capitals move
from one branch to another, looking for the best possible profit
opportunity, for the most rewarding sector or niche. When this sector is
saturated with capital, its profitability decreases and capitals are
eventually transferred to another one. When CDs won the day, very few
record companies kept mass-manufacturing vinyl. This unceasing dynamic
process is modified, but not abolished, by the establishment of
monopolies and oligopolies, which play a permanent war and peace game
between themselves.
“Social Darwinism” expresses a world where one has to battle to sell and
to sell oneself. Economic violence is complemented by armed State
violence. Capitalist built-in tendencies combine with “push” political
factors to make the world safe for war, and the social system that
prides itself on its pacifying features makes us live between one
impending conflict and the next.
Nothing changes so long as there exist production units each trying to
increase its respective amount of value. If the State (“democratic,”
“workers’,” “proletarian,” etc.) takes all companies under its control,
while keeping them as companies, either State enterprises obey the law
of profit and value, and nothing changes; or they try to bend the rule,
with some success… which cannot last for ever.
This is what happened to bureaucratic capitalism. In spite of
“established” prices set by a State body, by the industrial sector, by
the firm, or by some bargaining between the three, “socialist” firms
could not go on unless they accumulated value at a socially acceptable
rate. This rate was certainly not the same in Zamosc as in London. As in
England, Polish firms were managed as separate units, with the
difference that in Zamosc (unlike London) there was no private
proprietor free to sell or buy a factory at will. Still, a Polish
company manufacturing furniture did not just produce tables and sofas
supposed to fulfil a function: it had to make the best profitable use of
all the money that had been invested to produce these tables and sofas.
“Value formation” mattered differently in Zamosc and London, but it did
matter. No sofa was given free to the inhabitant of Zamosc for him to
take home: just like the Londoner, he paid for his new sofa or went back
home without.
Of course, the Polish State could subsidise sofas and sell them at too
low a price, i.e. below production cost: that game could last a while…
until value finally staked its claim. Russian and Polish planners kept
bending the rules of profitability, but these rules asserted themselves
in the end, through poor quality, shortages, waste, black market,
purging of managers, etc. In England, a non-competitive furniture
manufacturer would have gone bankrupt. In Poland, the State protected
companies against bankruptcy. Yet no-one can fiddle the logic of
valorisation for too long. One firm, ten firms, a thousand could be
saved from closure, until one day it was the whole society that went
bankrupt. If her Majesty’s government had kept bailing out every
unprofitable company from the early days of industrialisation,
capitalism would now be defunct in Britain. The “law of value,” viz.
regulation by the social average time, functioned in very different ways
in “bureaucratic” and in “market” capitalism, but it did apply to
both.[7]
Value (de)formation was the inner weakness of the USSR, and this
Achilles heel, as much as the war of economic attrition with the United
States (the Russian State spent between one third and one half of its
income on the military) caused the demise of bureaucratic capitalism.
7. Crisis
On the one hand, capital has socialised the world: all products tend to
be the result of the activity of all humankind. On the other hand, our
planet remains divided into competing corporations (backed by national
States[8]), which try to produce what is profitable, and produce to sell
as much as possible. Value accumulation leads to over-accumulation, and
value production to over-production. Growth is over-growth. Each
enterprise tries to valorise its capital in the best possible
conditions. Each tends to produce more than the market can absorb and
hopes that its competitors will be the only ones who suffer from
overproduction. As business grows more concentrated and centralised,
monopolies postpone overproduction problems while further aggravating
them until crisis re-adjusts supply to demand… only solvent demand,
since capitalism only knows one way of circulating products: buying and
selling.
We do not live simply in a world of commodities, but in a capitalist
world which “presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities,”
as written in Das Kapital’s first sentence. Capitalist crises are more
than commodity crises: they link production to value in such a way that
production is governed by value, as shown by comparing them with
precapitalist crises.
Until the nineteenth century, a bad grain harvest would cause a decrease
of agricultural production. The peasants bought fewer manufactured goods
such as clothing or equipment, and industry found itself in trouble.
Merchants speculated on corn and kept it in storage to drive prices up.
Eventually there were famines here and there. The very existence of
commodities and money is the condition for crises: there is a separation
(materialised in time) between the two operations of buying and selling.
From the standpoint of the merchant trying to increase his wealth,
buying and selling corn are two distinct matters in time, the interval
being determined by the amount and rate of his expected profit. In the
interval between production and consumption, people starved: during the
Irish famine of the 1840s, one million died while Ireland was a food net
exporter. The mercantile system only acted as an aggravating
circumstance in a crisis caused by climatic factors. The social context
was pre-capitalist, or that of a weak capitalism, as in present-day
China and Russia where bad harvests still have devastating effects on
the economy and the people.[9]
Capitalist crisis, on the other hand, is the product of the forced union
of value and production. Take a car maker. Competition forces him to
raise productivity and get a maximum value output through a minimal
input (cheapest possible raw materials, machinery, and labour). A crisis
arises when accumulation does not go with a sufficient decrease in the
costs of production. Thousands of cars may come off the assembly line
every day, and even find buyers, but manufacturing and selling them does
not valorise this capital enough compared to other car makers. So the
company streamlines production, invests more, makes up profit loss with
the number of cars sold, resorts to credit, mergers, government
subsidies or tariffs, etc., eventually produces as if demand was to
expand for ever, and loses more and more. Crises lie neither in the
exhaustion of markets, nor in overgenerous pay rises, but in falling
profits (to which workers’ militancy contribute): as a sum of value,
capital finds it increasingly hard to valorise itself at a socially
acceptable rate.
Pre-capitalist crises originated from an unavoidable reality (wet winter
and freezing, for instance) which mercantile relations only made worse.
Modern crises have no such natural origin: their cause is social. All
the elements of industrial activity are present—raw materials, machines,
workers—and left to lie fallow. They are not just things, material
objects: they only exist socially if value brings them to life. This
phenomenon is not “industrial”; it does not come from technical
requirements. It is a social relation: productive apparatus and social
structure are ruled by mercantile logic.[10]
It is commonplace to bemoan the sad facts that office blocks are built
more readily than lodgings for the homeless, that while hundreds of
millions go hungry, food production is mainly promoted where it suits
agro-business, or that the automotive industry remains a hyper-developed
sector in spite of the damage it causes. This is crying out against the
evils of a system as if we could only benefit from its virtues. The
global network of enterprises—as centres of value which must yield a
required profit rate—has become a power towering above us, and people’s
needs of all kinds (lodging, food, “culture”) are subjected to
valorisation and ultimately shaped by it.
In capitalism, productive designates what expands value, i.e. what
produces either means of production, or means of livelihood for the
proletarian, both accruing the sum of value. As a result, capital takes
possession of science and technique: in the productive field, it orients
research towards what will minimise labour cost; in the unproductive
field, it stimulates management and marketing.
Thus mankind tends to be divided into three groups:
having their “life-time transformed into working-time,” in the words of
American worker Paul Romano in 1947;[11]
waste;
areas, but most of them in less capitalist-developed “poor” countries.
Since it has no means of livelihood because it is deprived of any means
of production, a large part of the world’s population has to sell its
labour power in order to live… but it can’t: capital only buys labour
that brings in profit, so this labour power remains forcibly idle.[12]
The economic “take-off” of some formerly less-developed countries, like
Brazil, is quite real, but can only be achieved through the partial or
total destruction of former ways of life. The introduction of the
commodity economy deprives poor peasants of their means of subsistence,
leaves them landless or drives them to the misery of overcrowded towns.
Only a minority is “lucky” enough to find a factory, shop, or office
job, or to work as a servant; the rest is under-employed or
unemployed.[13]
Any revolution originates in material living conditions which have
become unbearable. This also applies to the proletariat.
If one identifies proletarian with factory worker (or with manual
labourer), or with the poor, one misses what is subversive in the
proletarian condition. The proletariat is the negation of this society.
It is not the collection of the poor, but of those who are dispossessed,
“without reserves,”[14] who are nothing, have nothing to lose but their
chains, and cannot liberate themselves without destroying the whole
social order. The proletariat is the dissolution of present society,
because this society deprives the proletarians of nearly all its
positive aspects: the proles only get their share of capitalist
material, mental, and cultural wealth in its poorest aspects. All
theories (bourgeois, fascist, Stalinist, Labourite, left-wing, or
far-leftist) which somehow glorify and praise the proletariat as it is
and claim for it the positive role of defending values and regenerating
society, are anti-revolutionary. Enlightened bourgeois even admit the
existence of class struggle, providing it never ends, in a
self-perpetuating bargaining game between labour and capital, where the
proletariat is reduced to the status of an element of capital, an
indispensable wheel within an inevitable mechanism. The bourgeois does
not mind the worker as long as he remains a partner.
Defining the proletariat has something but little to do with sociology.
Indeed, most proles are low paid, and a lot work in production, yet
their existence as proletarians derives not from being low-paid
producers, but from being “cut off,” alienated, with no control either
over their lives or the outcome and meaning of what they have to do to
earn a living. The proletariat therefore includes the unemployed and
many housewives, since capitalism hires and fires the former, and
utilises the labour of the latter to increase the total mass of
extracted value. The proletariat is what reproduces value and can do
away with a world based on value. Without the possibility of communism,
theories of “the proletariat” would be tantamount to metaphysics. Our
only vindication is that whenever it autonomously interrupted the
running of society, the proletariat has repeatedly acted as negation of
the existing order of things, has offered it no positive values or role,
and has groped for something else.
The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are ruling class not because they’re
rich and the rest of the population aren’t. Being bourgeois brings them
riches, not the other way round. They are ruling class because they
control the economy—employees as well as machines. Individual ownership
strictly speaking is only a form of class domination in particular
variants of capitalism. Private property did not exist in State
capitalism: the bureaucratic ruling class collectively owned the means
of production.
Although a lot of proles work, the proletariat is not the working class,
rather the class of the critique of work. It is the ever-present
destruction of the old world… potentially: the potential only becomes
real in moments of tension and upheaval. It only acts as the subversion
of established society when it unifies and organises itself, not in
order to become the dominant class like the bourgeoisie did, but in
order to destroy the society of classes: when that prospect is achieved,
there will be only one social agent: humankind. Till then, our
historical terrain will remain one of clashing class interests.
Communist theory is not worker-centred or workplace-centred: it does not
eulogise the working class, nor regards manual work as infinite bliss.
It gives productive workers a decisive (but not exclusive) part because
their place in production puts them in a better situation to
revolutionise it. Only in this sense do “blue collar” (man and woman)
workers keep a central role as initiators and precipitants, in so far as
their social function enables them to carry out different tasks from
others in an insurrection. Yet with the spread of unemployment, casual
labour, longer schooling, training periods at any time of life, temp and
part-time jobs, forced early retirement, and the odd mixture of welfare
and workfare whereby people move out of misery into work and then again
into poverty and moonlighting, when dole money sometimes equals low pay,
it is getting harder to tell work from non-work.
We may well soon be entering a phase similar to the dissolution Marx’s
early writings referred to. In every period of intense historical
disturbances (the 1840s as after 1917), the proletariat reflects the
loosening of social boundaries (sections of both working and middle
classes slip down the social ladder or fear they might) and the
weakening of traditional values (culture is no longer a unifier). The
conditions of life of the old society are already negated in those of
the proles. Not hippies or punks, but modern capitalism makes a sham of
the work ethic. Property, family, nation, morals, politics in the sense
of periodic re-sharing and re-shuffling of power between quasi-similar
bourgeois factions, all social props and pillars tend to decay as they
are negated, delegitimised, “swamped” as Marx wrote, in the proletarian
condition. In other words, the proletariat is not the working class, but
a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a
class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all
estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal
suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong,
but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no
historical, but only human, title; … a sphere, finally, which cannot
emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of
society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in
a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only
through the complete re-winning of man.[15]
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,
the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the
proletariat is its special and essential product.[16]
If these two quotes do not contradict each other, the emphasis is
undoubtedly different. The 1843 “radical humanist” or “universal class”
approach morphed four or five years later into the “class analysis” of
the Communist Manifesto. These quotes are but two among many, and not
just in Marx’s time: such theoretical ambiguity reflects the practical
contradiction that the proletariat actually is:
If it was above all working class, how could it abolish work? How could
a class primarily fighting another class (the bourgeois) defeat its
enemy and at the same time get rid of all classes?
On the other hand, if the proletarians were just a couple of billion
dispossessed people defined by what they are not, have not and do not,
how could such an infinite but entirely negative mass achieve anything
positive? Communisation is rejection and creation. Both.
Therefore proletarians are the wage-labour class, though this is often
brought down to a wage-less condition. The definition has to be positive
and negative: they are both in and out of this world. Only communist
revolution will prove communist theory right, and solve the
contradiction for good.
For the dispossessed masses, the capitalist socialisation of the world
creates an entirely new reality. Unlike the slaves, serfs, or craftsmen
of the past, the wage-labour (often wage-less, as we said) “immense
majority” is potentially unified for collective action capable of
overthrowing capitalism and creating a cooperative social life. Such is
the crux of communist theory.
What Marx called capitalism’s “historical role” was to create conditions
which enable human beings (providing they make a revolution to that
effect) to do without mediations that up to now have organised and
imprisoned them. Value is one of those mediations: it materialises the
social character of human activity. Value, concretised in money in all
its forms, from the simplest (small change in your pocket) to the most
sophisticated (credit lines on a trader’s computer screen), results from
the general character of labour, from the individual and social energy
produced and consumed by labour. We can now dispense with an element
external to social activities yet (up to now) necessary to connect and
stimulate them. Communism does not reduce the components of social life
to a common denominator (the average labour time contained in them): it
compares utility to decide what to do and what to produce. Its material
life is based on the confrontation and interplay of needs—which does not
exclude conflicts and possibly some form of violence. Human beings will
never be selfless angels, and why should they?
We can only approach social reality with words inherited from a few
millennia of exploitation and deprivation. When we speak of needs, the
term immediately conveys the idea of a lack, an absence, a deficiency.
“Need” is what one wants but does not have, whether it is something
obviously vital (food for the hungry) or deemed superfluous (a designer
suit). It refers to an object or service as separate from me as
production is cut off from consumption. Need is rarely understood as
social, as something positive that connects me with others, me with the
rest of the world, and me with the fulfilment of the need. Except if I
am starving, my satisfaction in eating includes the fact that I have
been longing for food. Providing one does not wait in vain, pleasure
lies also in the waiting.
The natural urge to grow food, potatoes for instance, will be met
through the birth of social links which will also result in vegetable
gardening. The question is not how to grow potatoes because we have to
eat. Rather, it is to imagine and invent a way to meet, to get and be
together, that will include vegetable gardening and be productive of
potatoes. Maybe potato growing will require more time than under
capitalism, but that possibility will not be evaluated in terms of
labour-time cost and saving.[17]
Communism is not an entirely different economy: it is the end of the
economy as a separate and privileged domain on which everything else
depends, and where work is—like money—the source of a universal
love-hate relationship. Humankind produces and reproduces its conditions
of existence. Ever since the disintegration of primitive communities,
but in an extreme form under capitalism, the activity through which man
appropriates his environment has taken the form of work—both an
obligation and a compulsion. On the one hand, it is a curse, a
constraint opposed to leisure and “true” enjoyable life. On the other,
it is so pervasive that it often pre-empts the worker’s capability for
other activity outside working hours, and many proletarians feel at a
loss in their “free time,” or when they retire. Work is a blessing and a
curse. With capital, production, i.e. production for valorisation, has
become our master. It is a dictatorship of production relations over
society. When one produces, one sacrifices one’s life-time in order to
enjoy life afterwards; this enjoyment is disconnected from the actual
content of the work, which is a means of supporting one’s life
(workaholics are more numerous among taxation experts than street
cleaners).
Communism dissolves production relations as separate and re-integrates
them within the whole of social relations. The obligation of doing the
same work for a lifetime, of being a manual or an intellectual worker,
or of forced multi-tasking, disappears. Communism supports neither play
against work, nor non-work against work. These limited and partial
notions are capitalist mutilated realities. Activity as the
production-reproduction of the conditions of life (material, affective,
cultural, etc.) is the very nature of humanity, bearing in mind that
“production” is a lot more than object-making: for instance, travelling
produces ideas and experiences which transform people and contribute to
inventions and new activities.
Some tasks will be taken in charge by everyone, and we can trust human
inventiveness to come up with a wealth of new occupations. Automation
probably will help. But believing in automation as the solution to the
age-old malediction of work would be trying to address a social issue by
technical means (actually, this is what capitalism pretends to be
doing).
First, fully automated production (including huge computer networks)
requires so much raw material and energy that overextending it would be
wasting even more resources than contemporary industry does.
Secondly and more importantly, the human species collectively creates
and transforms the means of its existence. If we received them from
machines, we would be reduced to the status of a young child who is
given toys without knowing where they come from: their manufactured
origin does not even exist for him.
Neither does communism turn production into something perpetually
pleasant and playful. Human life is effort and pleasure. Poetry-writing
involves stress and pain. Learning another language implies a degree of
exertion. Lots of things can be boring at times, vegetable gardening no
exception, and communism will never fully abolish the difference between
effort and enjoyment, creation and recreation. The all-leisure society
and the push-button factory are capitalist utopias.
In Marx’s time and until much later, communist revolution was conceived
as if its material preconditions were still to be created all over the
world, and not just in “backward” countries like Russia or China: in the
industrialised West as well. Nearly all Marxists—and a few
anarchists—believed that when it took power, the working class would
have to further develop the economy, in a different way from the
bourgeois of course: it would reorient production in the interests of
the masses, put the petit-bourgeois to work and generalise factory-type
labour. In the best of schemes, this went along with worker management,
equal pay and substantial reduction of working hours. But revolution did
not come, and its German stronghold was crushed. Since then, such a
programme has been fulfilled—over-fulfilled—by capitalist economic
growth. The material basis of communism now exists. There is no longer
any need to pack off clerks and shop-assistants to the shop floor, to
turn white into blue collar: our problem will be to create a totally
different “industry”… and to close quite a few factories. Compulsory
labour is out of the question: what we want is the abolition of work as
such, as an activity separate from the rest of life. For example,
putting an end to garbage collection as a job some have to do for years,
will be a lot more than job rotation: it will imply changes in the
process and logic of garbage creation and disposal.
Underdeveloped countries—to use a capitalist phrase—will not have to go
through industrialisation. In many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, capital oppresses labour but has not subjugated it to what Marx
called “real” submission: it dominates societies which it has not yet
fully turned into money and wage-labour relationships. Old forms of
social communal life still exist. Communism would regenerate a lot of
them—as Marx expected the Russian peasant commune might do—with the help
of some “Western” technology applied in a different way:
If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it concentrates all its
forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope, the latter will soon
develop as an element of regeneration in Russian society and an element
of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist system.[18]
In many respects, “backward” areas may prove easier to communise than
huge motorcar-adapted and screen-addicted “civilised” conurbations.
To pre-empt glib critique, let us add that communisation is of course
not instantaneous: its effects will take time, at least a generation.
But it will be immediate: it will proceed without the mediation of a
“transition period” which would be neither capitalist nor
non-capitalist. The process of living without value, work, and
wage-labour will start in the early insurrectionary days, and then
extend in depth and scope.
Communism is mankind’s appropriation of its wealth, and implies an
inevitable and complete transformation of this wealth. It is not a
continuation of capitalism in a more rational, more efficient, and less
unequal, less uncontrolled form. It does not take over the old material
bases as it finds them: it overthrows them. We will not get rid of the
“bad” side of capital (valorisation) while keeping the “good” side
(production). Capital accumulates value and fixes it in the form of
stored labour, past labour: nearly all present workplaces are geared to
labour productivity and labour submission. (Most buildings too, schools
particularly.) Communist revolution is a dis-accumulation. Communism is
opposed to productivism, and equally to the illusion of sustainable
development within the existing economic framework. The official
spokespersons of ecology never voice a critique of the economy as
value-measuring, they just want to keep money under control. Economy and
ecology are incompatible.
Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the
seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode
of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist
society), but as a tendency to community and solidarity never realised
in this society: when it is implemented today, however innovative it can
be, this tendency causes little else than marginal social experiments
incapable of structural change. What they usually breed is more
alternative lifestyles than new ways of life.[19]
Some past proletarian movements were able to bring society to a
standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal
stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without
money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close
down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be
technically improved, put an end to battery farming, do away with school
as a specialised place which cuts off learning from doing for
fifteen-odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison
themselves in three-room family units—in short, it will tend to break
partitions. Eventually, communism will not even know what value was.
Insurrection implies carrying out a historical mutation in the way we
live, which includes how and what we produce. In the shifting sands of
troubled times, the outcome is unpredictable, but the insurgents’
ability to confront police and army guns and armoured cars will depend
on the social content of their endeavour. To neutralise and overcome
their enemies, the proletarians’ main propelling force will be their
communising ability.
Modern strategy means the emancipation of the bourgeoisie and the
peasantry: it is the military expression of that emancipation. The
emancipation of the proletariat will also have a particular military
expression and a new specific warfare. That is clear. We can even
analyse such a strategy from the material conditions of the
proletariat.[20]
Insurrection cleaves the normal course of events and opens up
make-or-break times. Up to now, insurgents have hardly ever reached the
tipping point where creating an altogether new society could coincide
with a corresponding armed action. In its culminating moments, for
instance in Germany between 1919 and 1921, the proletariat never reached
a communisation stage. Whereas the bourgeoisie resorted to its “natural”
weapon—the economy—by dividing the working class through unemployment,
the proletariat was unable to reply on the same scale by means of its
blocking power over society. Though it went as far as to create a Red
Army in the Ruhr in 1920, its military “offensive” remained socially
defensive: the insurgents did not transform what they had taken control
of. They did not raise the stakes by using the destructive-constructive
“weapon” which their social function gives them.[21]
In a very different context, when some riots in the United States
re-appropriated goods, they remained on the level of consumption and
distribution. Rioters were attacking commodity, not capital.[22]
Communisation will deal with the heart of the matter: value production.
But the insurgents will only use this instrument if they transform it at
the same time. Such a process can only take place on a worldwide scale,
and first of all in several countries where social contradictions are
more acute, which means communisation is more likely to be initiated in
Western Europe, North America, and Japan.[23]
The question is not the seizure of power by the workers. It is absurd to
advocate the rule of the working class as it is now: a partner in the
valorisation mechanism, and a subjected partner.[24] Under the dominion
of wage-labour and company, worker management is just capable of
moderating the dictates of capital. The dictatorship of the existing
working class cannot be anything but the dictatorship of its
representatives, i.e. the leaders of the unions and workers’ parties.
This is the programme of the democratic left.
Theories of “workers’ government” or “workers’ power” only propose
alternative solutions to the crisis of capital. Revolution transforms
society, i.e. relations among people, and between people and their means
of life. Organisational problems and “leaders” are secondary: they
depend on what the revolution achieves. This applies as much to the
start of the communist revolution as to the functioning of the society
which arises out of it. Revolution will not happen on the day when 51
percent of the workers become revolutionary; and it will not begin by
setting up a decision-making apparatus. Management and leadership
dilemma are typical capitalist obsessions. The organisational form of
the communist revolution, as of any social movement, hinges on its
substance and development. The way revolution gets organised,
constitutes itself and acts, results from the tasks it performs.
Marx’s early works suggested a critique of politics, and opposed
“political” to “social” revolution: the former rearranges links between
individuals and groups without much change in what they actually do; the
latter acts upon how people reproduce their means of existence, their
way of life, their real condition, at the same time transforming how
they relate to each other.[25]
One of our first spontaneous rebellious gestures is to revolt against
control over our lives from above, by a teacher, a boss, a policeman, a
social worker, a union leader, a statesman… Then politics walks in and
reduces aspirations and desires to a problem of power—be it handed to a
party, or shared by everyone. But what we really lack is the power to
produce our life. A world where all electricity comes to us from mammoth
(coal, fuel-oil, or nuclear) power stations, will always remain out of
our reach. Only the political mind thinks revolution is primarily a
question of power seizure or redistribution.
Understanding this critique of politics is essential to grasp the issue
of the State.
We described value as an element external to social activities and up to
now necessary to connect and stimulate them.
In a similar way, the State was born out of human beings’ inability to
manage their lives. It is the unity—symbolic and material—of the
disunited: some social contract has to be agreed upon. As soon as
proletarians start appropriating their means of existence, this
mediation begins to lose its function, but destroying it is not an
automatic process. It will not disappear little by little as the
non-mercantile sphere gets bigger and bigger. Actually, such a sphere
would be vulnerable if it let the central governmental machinery go on,
as in Spain 1936–37. No State structure will wither away on its own.
Communising is therefore more than adding piecemeal actions. Capital
will be sapped by general subversion through which people take their
relationships with the world into their own hands. But nothing decisive
will be achieved as long as the State retains its hold on the essential.
Society is not simply a capillary network: relationships are centralised
in a force which concentrates the power to preserve this society.
Capitalism would be too happy to see us change our lives locally while
it carries on globally. Because it is a central force, the State has to
be demolished by central action. Because its power base is ubiquitous,
it must be extinguished everywhere. Communisation will combine both
dimensions… or fail. The communist movement is anti-political, not
a-political.
Writing and reading about violence and even more so armed violence is
easy, and carries the risk of mistaking the pen for a sword. All the
same, no reflection on revolution can evade the issue. Our purpose is
neither to prepare for a revamped Red Army, nor for worker militia
modelled on the 1936 Spanish experience, where the participants received
pay: traditional military they were not, yet like soldiers they were
given money to live on. This alone showed the absence of communisation.
In any deep historical change, the nature, extent, degree, and control
of violence depends on what is changed, by whom and how.
Since the communisation of society would begin at once and gradually
involve more and more people, its inevitable violence would be different
from what Marx or Rosa Luxemburg could imagine. The proletarians will be
able to make the bourgeoisie and the State, i.e. the political props of
capitalist economy, utterly useless and ultimately defenceless, by
undermining the sources of their power. The bourgeoisie is aware of it:
modern States are steeling themselves for “low-intensity operations,”
which imply a lot more than police work, and include population and
resource control. Of course counter-revolution has never been only
military and political, but its social dimension is now a condition of
the rest. In 1972, though it dealt mostly with wars in the Third World,
Michael Klare’s War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams
provided useful insights into the strategy of the big capitalist States
preparing for civil war on their own soil. If we considered the problem
from a purely material point of view, the State’s superiority would be
outstanding: guns against tanks. Our hope resides in a subversion so
general and yet so coherent that the State will be confronted by us
everywhere, and its energy source depleted.
Communist revolution “destroys” less than it deprives counter-forces by
draining them of their function. The Bolsheviks did the opposite: they
got rid of the bourgeois, left the basics of capitalism survive, and
ended up fulfilling the capitalist function in the place of the
bourgeois. Lenin and his party started 1917 as political activists,
became efficient soldiers, and after winning the war turned into
managers.
On the contrary, as communisation is immediate (in the sense defined in
the previous section), it does not separate ends from means: it does not
aim at political power, for instance by creating a stronger military
force than the State’s army: it aims at the power of transforming social
relations, which include the self-transformation of the insurgents
themselves.
Communism may be called “democratic” if democracy means that everyone
has a say in the running of society, but this will not be so because of
people’s ability and desire to manage society, or because we would all
be educated enough to master the art of sound administration.
Our problem is not to find how to take truly common decisions about what
we do, but to do what can be decided upon in common. A Taylorised
factory will never come under the management of its personnel. Neither
will a farm based on value productivity. A General Motors plant, a
nuclear power station, Harvard University or the BBC will never operate
democratically. A company or an institution run like a business accepts
no leadership but that which allows it to valorise itself. The
enterprise manages its managers, and capitalists are the officials of
capital. The elimination of the limits of the company, the destruction
of the commodity relation which compels every individual to treat others
as a means to earn his living, here are the main conditions for
self-organisation. Instead of making management a priority, communism
will regard administration as an activity among others.
Democracy is a contradiction in terms, a lie and indeed sheer hypocrisy…
This applies to all forms of government. Political freedom is a farce
and the worst possible slavery; such a fictitious freedom is the worst
enslavement. So is political equality: this is why democracy must be
torn to pieces as well as any other form of government. Such a
hypocritical form cannot go on. Its inherent contradiction must be
exposed in broad daylight: either it means true slavery, which implies
open despotism; or it means real freedom and real equality, which
implies communism.[26]
Most utopian socialists looked for some pre-ordained external factor
which would compel individuals to live in harmonious unity. Despite
their visionary foresight, imaginary communities often resort to strict
planning and “soft” despotism. To avoid chaos and exploitation, utopians
devised schemes to organise social life in advance. Others, from an
anarchist standpoint, refuse any institution and want society to be a
permanent re-creation. But the problem lies elsewhere: only
non-mercantile non-productivity relations can make harmony among
individuals both possible and necessary. “Fair” and “efficient” links
depend on the way we associate to do something together, be it planting
fruit trees or having a party. Then individuals can fulfil their needs,
through participation in the functioning of the group, without being
mere tools of the group. That being said, harmony does not exclude the
likelihood of conflicts.
To avoid discussing in the abstract, let us wander if the democratic
principle applies in social life. The 1986 French railway strike was to
a large extent (at any rate, a lot more than is commonly the case)
self-organised by the rank and file. At Paris-Nord, a train engine
drivers’ meeting had just voted against blocking the tracks to prevent
trains from running. Suddenly the strikers saw a train come out of the
station, driven by middle managers under police protection: they rushed
to the tracks to stop it, undoing by spontaneous action hours of
democratic deliberation.
What does this (and hundreds of similar instances) prove? Certainly not
that any rash initiative going against collective decision is positive.
It simply reminds us that collective is not synonymous with what is
usually often referred to as democracy: a deliberation process organised
according to a set of pre-planned rules.
Communism is of course the movement of a vast majority at long last able
to take actions into their own hands. To that extent, communism is
“democratic,” but it does not uphold democracy as a principle.
Politicians, bosses, and bureaucrats take advantage either of a minority
or a majority when it suits them: so does the proletariat. Workers’
militancy often stems from a handful. Communism is neither the rule of
the most numerous, nor of the wise few. To debate or start acting,
people obviously have to gather somewhere, and such common ground has
been called a soviet, committee, council, shura, etc. The means turns
into an end, however, when the moment and machinery of decision-making
prevail over action. This separation is the essence of
parliamentarianism.
True, people must decide for themselves and, at some point or other,
this requires a “discursive” time and space. But any decision,
revolutionary or not, depends on what has happened before and what is
still going on outside the formal deciding structure. Whoever organises
the meeting sets the agenda; whoever asks the question determines the
answer; whoever calls the vote often carries the decision. Revolution
does not put forward a different form of organisation, but a different
solution from that of capital and reformism. As principles, democracy
and dictatorship are equally wrong: they isolate a special and seemingly
privileged moment. Communism is neither democratic nor dictatorial.
The essence—and limit—of political thought is to wonder how to organise
people’s lives, instead of considering first what those to-be-organised
people do.
Communism is not a question of inventing the government or
self-government best suited to the social reorganisation we want. It is
not a matter of institutions, but of activity.
What members of society have in common or not depends on what they are
doing together. When they lose mastery over the material basis of their
conditions of existence, they lose their mastery over the running of
their personal and group life.
In sum, communisation will deprioritise the power question, by stressing
the nature of the change: revolution will be born out of a common
refusal to submit, out of the hope of getting to a point of no return
where people transform themselves and gain a sense of their own power as
they transform reality.[27]
The world of commodities and value is activated by us, yet it lives a
life of its own, it has constituted itself into an autonomous force, and
the world at large has to submit to its laws. Communism challenges this
submission and has opposed it since the early days of capitalism, so far
with no chance of success.
The communist revolution is the continuation as well as the surpassing
of present social movements. Communism will grow out of struggles, out
of real interest and desires which are now already trying to assert
themselves, and cannot be satisfied because the present situation
forbids it. Today numerous communist gestures and attitudes express more
than a refusal of the present world: they express an attempt to get to a
new one. Whenever they succeed, they are confined to a social fringe,
and tolerated as long as they do not antagonise wage-labour and State:
otherwise, they are “recuperated,” stifled or suppressed. Public opinion
only sees their limits, only the tendency and not its possible
development, and “extremism” or “alternativism” always present these
limits as the true aims of the movement. In the refusal of assembly-line
work, in the struggles of squatters, the communist perspective is
present as the social energy spent to create “something else,” not to
escape the modern world, but to transform it. In such conflicts people
spontaneously try to appropriate goods, or even make goods and invent
new types of goods, against the logic of value exchange, and this
process helps the participants to change themselves in the event.
However, that “something else” is present only potentially in these
actions, whatever the people involved think and want, and whatever
activists and theorists may do and say. Communisation is not embryonic
in any strike, riot, or looting, and trying to radicalise them is
tantamount to trying to change something into what it cannot be now. The
only possible “autonomous” spaces in this society are those allowed by
capital and State, therefore politically harmless. When the social
experimenter sneaks into the cracks of conformity, the crack closes in
on him. Revolution is fun (besides being other things): not all fun is
revolutionary. The course of history is neither piecemeal nor gradual:
revolution is a cut, a break-through. “The gate is straight, deep and
wide,” but we still have to cross the gate to get to the other side.
[1] Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” in Stone Age
Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972).
[2] Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the
World (Princeton University Press, 2008)
[3] Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life (Detroit: Black & Red,
1969).
[4] (New York: Random House, 1987); Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983); Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver,
Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999).
[5] Sorry for the old-fashioned cliché. Today’s bourgeoisie has been
updated and even increasingly genderised: a woman became head of the IMF
in 2011, another is currently Facebook’s COO, etc.
[6] Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, chap. 1, section 2.
[7] On value formation and de-formation in the USSR, see Aufheben no.9,
2000.
[8] Though there are exceptions, most of those companies called
multinational are first and foremost U.S., Japanese, Chinese, etc. The
theory of a world company, an international ruling financial oligarchy,
or a post-nation-State empire (as in Negri and Hardt’s 2000 bestseller),
is not documented by facts. As demonstrated by the pre-1914 economic
internationalisation, closer interconnections on the world market go
together with competing monopolies and antagonistic political entities
or blocs. In the twenty-first century, national States are still warring
with one another economically… for the moment. The bourgeoisie may be
cosmopolitan, and capital indeed flows worldwide online every second,
but the planet remains divided between contending political entities,
large or small, with the oddity of an economic giant that remains
politically feeble: Europe.
[9] In the 1946–47 famine in Russia, estimates vary from one to two
million deaths. At the end of the 1950s, millions starved in China. In
both cases, climatic factors and government policy coalesced to create
chaos and catastrophe.
[10] Since we wrote the first version of “Capitalism and Communism” in
1972, “anti-industrialism” has come to the fore. The anti-industrial
critique points to an essential feature of capitalism, but mistakes the
part for the whole. Industry is certainly at the centre of the present
world and it is hard to imagine a non-industrial capitalism. The
“post-industrial society” is a myth now as it was in 1970. Yet industry
is not the centre of capitalism. We are not faced with a self-propelled
freewheeling mega-machine, but with a value-driven productive system.
The techno-bureaucratic-industrial monster has to abide by the
constraints of labour productivity and capital profitability. Big
business only wants larger factories and more machines if they bring in
more value: otherwise, it leaves them to rot, moves elsewhere,
speculates, or stays idle. Capitalist history is as much industrial
wasteland (the U.S. rust belt, or the empty European factories zoned for
reclamation) as formidable mega-machinery.
[11] The American Worker, 1947, chap. 2,
http://www.prole.info/pdfs/americanworker.pdf
.
[12] This passage has been left nearly as it was written in 1973. It
might make strange reading after a few decades of growth and crisis, but
is the world picture immensely different in 2013 from the one we painted
forty years ago? As before, capitalism’s Promethean progress is
paralleled with an equally innovative catastrophic power. Life
expectancy has gone up, yet nearly one billion people go hungry every
day, and it’s easier for the Indian poor to use a cell phone than have
access to clean water.
However, we will not look for vindication in the “worst” aspects of this
world (dire misery, over-exploitation of Asian or Latin American labour,
etc.). Capitalism’s supporters have their twofold answer ready: “These
people’s lot used to be worse, and soon it’ll get better.” (Curiously,
this is what the defenders of Stalinist Russia used to say.) Therefore
we will not focus on the most visible forms of poverty in “rich”
countries, like what Michael Harrington wrote on The Other America in
1962. Our indictment will not deal with environmental issues either,
however serious they are: there’s enough ecological talk going round for
everyone to see capitalism’s waste propensity. We’d rather take a look
at the supposedly “best” or “good” aspects of contemporary society.
Let’s not consider what capitalism denies or destroys, but what it
offers. It prides itself on giving us rewarding jobs: for once, let us
judge a system in accordance with its own values. Here are the top ten
jobs that most people do in the United States, according to the official
Bureau of Labor Statistics (2010): 1) retail salespeople, 2) cashiers,
3) office clerks, 4) combined food preparation and serving workers (fast
food workers), 5) registered nurses, 6) waiters and waitresses, 7)
customer service representatives (mostly telemarketing), 8) manual
freight and stock movers (as opposed to people who move things with
forklifts), 9) janitors and cleaners (not including maids), 10) stock
clerks and order fillers. Apart from nurses, this list does not only
mean low pay, job insecurity, and lack of recognition, but monotony,
techno-slaving, physical discomfort, and low “human” content of the
labour performed. Besides, reformers deplore the “evil” world of
marketing and advertising, but fail to realise the parasitic nature of
the ever-growing armies of psychosocial specialists (alleviators of
social ills, mediators, trainers, coaches, facilitators, etc.), of
communicators, of researchers, of media workers… and of security
personnel (one million in the United States). A society where a
“correction industry” employs more people than Ford, GM, and Walmart
combined does not merely “waste” natural resources: human ones as well.
Moreover, “Nobody in the 1950s or 1960s could have guessed that the
average Americans in 2000 would be working longer hours or that their
incomes, in real, inflation-adjusted terms, would not have risen in a
generation.” (Michael Lind, Land of Promise, New York: Harper, 2012),
chap. 16.
We’ll let the naïve delude themselves with the belief that sensible,
eco-friendly Denmark does far better than outrageous, cruel America. It
may well be, but a century of Scandinavian social-democracy has proved
unable to uproot poverty: local reformers only pride themselves on
getting rid of extreme poverty. Capitalism remains a grinding system:
“The organisation of the workers and their constantly growing resistance
will possibly stem the growth of misery to a certain extent. But the
insecurity of existence will surely grow.” (Engels, Critique of the
Erfurt Programme, 1891).
[13] Brazil’s last decades of growth seem to contradict this bleak
picture, especially since ex-metal worker Lula was elected president in
2003, and promised to put an end to “social apartheid”: thanks to
agro-business and local manufacturing for multinationals, wealth would
“trickle down” to the poor. More modestly, his successor at the head of
the “world’s seventh economy” has merely claimed to have done away with
dire misery. So much for ending social apartheid. In 1844, the future
Napoleon III published The Extinction of Pauperism. No emperor, no union
leader turned statesman can get rid of the dispossession which lies at
the root of—and is reproduced by—capitalism.
[14] The concept of “those who have no reserves” was formulated by
Amadeo Bordiga in the years following World War II. Bordiga’s purpose
was not to create a new definition of the proletariat, but to go back to
the general definition. Marx’s Capital can only be understood when read
with earlier analyses of the proletariat, for instance The Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, 1843, and the 1857–58
manuscripts, often referred to by their German title: The Grundrisse.
[15] A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
Introduction, 1843.
[16] Communist Manifesto, chap. I
[17] Le Communisme—tentative de définition, part IV (1998):
https://www.hicsalta-communisation.com/
. Also by Bruno Astarian, Crisis Activity and Communisation, 2011,
http://libcom.org/library/crisis-activity-communisation-bruno-astarian
.
[18] Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich, first draft, April 1881. The whole
draft deserves to be read.
[19] Since the 1970s, modern democratic advanced societies have become a
lot more flexible in accepting alternativist social experiments. There
are more and more examples of passive housing and ecobuilding. On the
Vauban “sustainable model district” in Freiburg (Germany), see Green
Gone Wrong: The Broken Promise of the Eco-Friendly Economy (London:
Verso, 2010), chap. 3, by Heather Rogers (by no means an
anti-ecologist). A thorough investigation.
[20] Engels, Conditions and Prospects of a War of the Holy Alliance
against a Revolutionary France in 1852, 1851.
[21] Dauvé and Denis Authier, The Communist Left in Germany, 1918–21,
available at
https://libcom.org/library/communist-left-germany-1918-1921
; on Spain 1936–39, Dauvé, When Insurrections Die, available at
https://www.troploin.fr/node/47
.
[22] Situationist International, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle
Commodity Economy,” Situationist International no. 10, 1966.
[23] Since 1973, the ex-Third World and the ex-”socialist bloc” have
given birth to several “emerging countries.” We do not equate
industrialisation with communist potentials. However, a social system
first reaches its breaking point where its fundamental contradictions
(capital/labour, in the case of capitalism) are the sharpest and can
have the most explosive impact. Though class struggle erupts everywhere,
communist revolution is more likely to be initiated in the United States
than in the Congo, and in China more in Shanghai than in Karakorum.
After this, Congolese and Mongolian proletarians will contribute as much
as those from the United States and from Chinese metropolises.
[24] Of course workers “as they are now” have managing capabilities, as
proved by the continual creation of cooperatives. Myriads of co-ops have
appeared in the last decades (Portugal after 1974, Towers Colliery in
Wales, Argentina in 2001…) and many more spring up every year. We do not
deny that they often help people get jobs, self-help, community
services, and sometimes function on the principles of equal pay and
decision-sharing. Still, they make up for the deficiencies of capital
and State, and a million co-ops will never will be a threat to Big
Business… except for a few successful co-ops lucky or unlucky enough to
become Big Business themselves. Likewise, micro-credit is finance
adapted to the poor (not the very poor).
[25] Especially in The King of Prussia and Social Reform, also in The
Jewish Question, and in his analysis of Jacobinism as the paroxysm of
the political over the social spirit. In the 1840s, Marx immersed
himself extensively in the French Revolution, and many of his notes and
comments can be now read as an implicit but direct critique of Bolshevik
policy after 1917.
[26] Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” The New Moral
World, April 4, 1843. Decades later, he suggested “that Gemeinwesen
[“commonalty” or collective being] be universally substituted for state;
it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the
French Commune” (letter to A. Bebel, March 18–28, 1875).
[27] For more on democracy, see our “A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Autonomy,” 2008,
http://www.troploin.fr/node/17
.