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Title: Communisation Author: Gilles Dauvé Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: communism, communisation, anti-politics, revolution Source: Retrieved on December 3, 2014 from http://troploin.fr/node/24
If we speak of communisation and not just communism, it is not to invent
a new concept which would provide us with the ultimate solution to the
revolutionary riddle. Communisation denotes no less than the content and
process of a future revolution. For example, only communisation gives
meaning to our critique of democracy.
In recent years, communisation has become one of the radical in-words,
even outside what is known as the “communisers” (communisateurs in
French).
As far as we are concerned, we do not regard ourselves any more members
of this communising current than we feel close to – or far from – a
number of other communist groups.
The communisation issue is further complicated by the emergence of the
commons theory, according to which deep social change could come from
collective usage and extension of what is already treated as common
resources and activities (for instance, the open field system in still
existing traditional societies, and free software access in the most
modern ones). In other words, these “creative commons” would allow us a
gradual and peaceful passage toward a human community.
The successive refutation of theories we regard as incomplete or wrong
would have obscured our central points. As we wish to keep away from any
war of the words, the following essay will try and address the
communisation issue as directly as possible.
In English, the word has been used for a long while, to convey something
very different from what we are dealing with here. To communise was
often a synonym for to sovietize, i.e. to implement the full program of
the communist party in the Leninist (and later Stalinist) sense: “The
fundamental task of Comintern was to seek opportunities to communise
Europe and North America.” (R. Service, Trotsky. A Biography, Macmillan,
2009, p. 282) This was the Webster’s dictionary definition in 1961 and
1993, and roughly the one given by Wikipedia in 2010. This is of course
not what we are talking about.
More rarely, communisation has been used as a synonym for radical
collectivisation, with special reference to Spain in 1936-39, when
factories, farms, rural and urban areas were run by worker or peasant
collectives. Although this is related to what we mean by communising,
most of these experiences invented local currencies or took labour-time
as a means of barter. These collectives functioned as worker-managed
enterprises, for the benefit of the people, yet enterprises all the
same.
We are dealing with something else.
It is not sure who first used the word with the meaning this essay is
interested in. To the best of our knowledge, it was Dominique Blanc:
orally in the years 1972-74, and in writing in Un Monde sans argent (A
World Without Money), published in 3 booklets in 1975-76 by the OJTR
(the same group also published D. Blanc’s Militancy, the Highest Stage
of Alienation). Whoever coined the word, the idea was being circulated
at the time in the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe
(“The Old Mole”, 1965-72). Since the May 68 events, the bookseller,
Pierre Guillaume, ex-Socialisme ou Barbarie and ex-Pouvoir Ouvrier
member, but also for a while close to G. Debord (who himself was a
member of S. ou B. in 1960-61), had been consistently putting forward
the idea of revolution as a communising process, maybe without using the
phrase. Yet D. Blanc was the first to publicly emphasize its importance.
Un Monde sans argent said the difference between communist revolution
and all variants of reformism was not that revolution implied
insurrection, but that this insurrection would have to start communising
society… or it would have no communist content. In that respect,Un Monde
sans argent remains a pivotal essay.
The idea is fairly simple, but simplicity is often one of the most
difficult goals to achieve. It means that a revolution is only communist
if it changes all social relationships into communist relationships, and
this can only be done if the process starts in the very early days of
the revolutionary upheaval. Money, wage-labour, the enterprise as a
separate unit and a value-accumulating pole, work-time as cut off from
the rest of our life, production for value, private property, State
agencies as mediators of social life and conflicts, the separation
between learning and doing, the quest for maximum and fastest
circulation of everything, all of these have to be done away with, and
not just be run by collectives or turned over to public ownership: they
have to be replaced by communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms
of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start
at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the
preconditions of communism: it will create communism.
We are not talking about a plan to be fulfilled one day, a project
adequate to the needs of the proletarians (and ultimately of humankind),
but one that would be exterior to them, like blueprints on the
architect’s drawing-board before the house is built. Communisation
depends on what the proletarian is and does.
The major difference between Marx and utopian socialists is to be found
in Marx’s main concern: the labour-capital exploitation relation.
Because the proletarian is the heart and body of capital, he or she
carries communist potentials within himself or herself. When capital
stops buying labour power, labour is nothing. So every deep social
crisis opens the possibility for the proletarians to try and invent
“something else”. Most of the time, nearly all the time in fact, their
reaction is far from communism, but the possibility of a breakthrough
does exist, as has been proved by a succession of endeavours throughout
modern times, from the English Luddites in 1811 to the Greek insurgents
in 2008.
This is why it would be pointless to imagine an utterly different
society if we fail to understand the present society and how we could
move from one to the other. We must consider what communism is, how it
could come about, and who would be in the best position to implement the
historical change.
capitalism.”
The SI once suggested we ought to “go back to a disillusioned study of
the classical worker movement” (# 7, 1962). Indeed. To face up to our
past, we must break with the legend of a proletariat invariably ready
for revolution… and unfortunately sidetracked or betrayed. However,
blowing myths does not mean bending the stick the other way, as if the
workers had up to now persistently fought only for reforms, had
glorified work, believed in industrial progress even more than the
bourgeois, and dreamt of some impossible worker-run capitalism. This
historical reconstruction replaces one myth by its equally misleading
symmetrical opposite. The past two hundred years of proletarian
experience cannot be divided into two totally opposed periods, i.e. a
first one, closed by the end of the 20th century, during which the
proletariat would only have been able to fight for a social programme
which could be qualified as “capitalist”, and a second phase (now), when
the evolution of capitalism itself would render null and void the
“labour capitalist” option, and the only alternative facing the
proletariat would become a simple one: communist revolution or descent
into barbarism.
The historical evidence offered for this watershed theory is
unsubstantial.
Moreover, and more decisively, the mistake lies in the question.
No communist revolution has taken place yet. That obvious fact neither
proves… nor disproves that such a revolution has been up to now
impossible.
In his analysis of The Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx first lays
down what he believes to be a general historical principle :
“As soon as it has risen up, a class in which the revolutionary
interests of society are concentrated finds the content and the material
for its revolutionary activity directly in its own situation: foes to be
laid low, measures dictated by the needs of the struggle to be taken;
the consequences of its own deeds drive it on. It makes no theoretical
inquiries into its own task.”
Then Marx wonders why, in the democratic revolution of February 1848,
“The French working class had not attained this level; it was still
incapable of accomplishing its own revolution.
The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general,
conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. (..) [But
in 1848] the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. (..) The
struggle against capital in its developed, modern form – in its decisive
aspect, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the
industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon (..) Nothing is
more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to
secure the advancement of its own interests side by side with those of
the bourgeoisie (..) ”
Quotation is no proof, and maybe Marx was wrong, but at least let us get
his view right. While he regarded full-grown industrial capitalism as a
necessary condition for a proletarian revolution, he did not think that
the proletarians could and would only fight for reforms for a certain
period, until some complete maturity or completeness of capitalism left
open one and only option: revolution.
Slicing up history into phases is very useful, except when it becomes a
quest for the “last” phase.
In the past, “final” or “mortal crisis” theoreticians set out to
demonstrate (usually with the help of the reproduction schema
ofCapital’s volume II) that a phase was bound to come when capitalism
would be structurally unable to reproduce itself. All they actually
showed was real fundamental contradictions but, as Marx wrote,
contradiction does not mean impossibility. Now the demonstration moves
away from schema and figures, and sees the impossible reproduction in
the capital-labour relation itself. In short, up to now, communist
revolution (or a real attempt to make it) has been out of the question,
because the domination of capital over society was not complete enough:
there was some scope for the worker movement to develop socialist and
Stalinist parties, unions, reformist policies; so the working class had
to be reformist, and the most it could do was to go for a worker-managed
capitalism. Now this would be over: capital’s completely real domination
destroys the possibility of anything but a communist endeavour.
We ought to be a bit wary of the lure of catastrophe theory. When 1914
broke out, and even more so after 1917, communists said that mankind was
entering the epoch of wars and revolutions. Since then, we have seen a
lot more wars than revolutions, and no communist revolution. And we are
well aware of the traps of the “decadence” theory. Only a successful
communist revolution one day will allow its participants to say: “We’ve
seen capitalism’s last days”. Until then, the only historical obstacle
to the reproduction of the present social system will come from the
proletarians themselves. There is no era when revolution is structurally
impossible, nor another when revolution becomes structurally
possible/necessary. All variations of the “ultimate crisis” disregard
history: they look for a one-way street that could block the avenues
branching off to non-communist roads. Yet history is made of crossroads,
revolution being one possibility among non-revolutionary options. The
schematisation of history loses its relevance when it heralds the
endpoint of evolution – in this case, capitalist evolution – and claims
to be the theory to end all theories.
In 1934, as a conclusion to his essay on The theory of the collapse of
capitalism, and after an in-depth study of the inevitability of major
crises, Anton Pannekoek wrote:
“The workers’ movement has not to expect a final catastrophe, but many
catastrophes, political — like wars, and economic — like the crises
which repeatedly break out, sometimes regularly, sometimes irregularly,
but which on the whole, with the growing size of capitalism, become more
and more devastating. (..) And should the present crisis abate, new
crises and new struggles will arise. In these struggles the working
class will develop its strength to struggle, will discover its aims,
will train itself, will make itself independent and learn to take into
its hands its own destiny, viz., social production itself. In this
process the destruction of capitalism is achieved. The self-emancipation
of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism.”
The concept of communisation is important enough as it is, without using
it to fuel another variant of the “last phase of capitalism” theory. Our
problem is not to prove that we have entered an entirely new epoch when
the proletariat can only fight for communism. It is to try and define
the concrete process of a communist revolution.
The communist movement predates the modern proletariat that appeared in
England at the end of the 18th century. It was active in the days of
Spartacus, Thomas MĂĽnzer and Gerrard Winstanley. Fifty years before
Marx, Gracchus Babeuf’s plans had little connection with the growth of
industry.
Because of his separation from the means of production (which was not
the case of the serf or the tenant-farmer, however poor they were), the
proletarian is separated from the means of existence. Such radical
dispossession is the condition of his being put to profitable work by
capital. But it also entails that, from the early days, the proletariat
is capable of a revolution that would do away with property, classes and
work as an activity separate from the rest of life.
The theme of communisation is as old as the proletarians’ struggles when
they tried to free themselves. Whenever they were on the social
offensive, they implicitly and sometimes explicitly aimed at a human
community which involved a lot more than better work conditions, or
merely replacing the exploitation of man by the exploitation of nature.
The logic or intention of the 1871 Paris communards, the 1936 Spanish
insurgents or the 1969 Turin rebel workers was not to “develop the
productive forces”, nor to manage the same factories without the boss.
It is their failure that pushed aside community and solidarity goals,
discarded any plan of man-nature reunion, and brought back to the fore
what was compatible with the needs and possibilities of capitalism.
True, so far, past struggles have tried to launch few communist changes
in the real sense of the word, i.e. changes that broke with the core
capitalist structure. But this limitation was as imposed from outside as
self-imposed: the proletarians rarely went beyond the insurrectionary
phase, as most uprisings were quickly crushed or stifled. When the
insurgents carried the day, they did attempt to live and create
something very different from a worker-led capitalism. The limits of
those attempts (in Spain, 1936-39, particularly) were not just the
result of a lack of social programme, but at least as much due to the
fact of leaving political power in the hands of the State and
anti-revolutionary forces.
What Rosa Luxemburg called in 1903 the “progress and stagnation of
Marxism” can help us understand why a deeply entrenched “communising”
prospect has waited so long before becoming explicit. At the dawn of
capitalism, the 1830s and 1840s were a time of farseeing communist
insights. Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts probably expressed the sharpest edge
of social critique, so sharp that the author himself did not think it
necessary to circulate it (the text was only published in 1932). Then,
as the worker movement developed against a triumphant bourgeoisie, the
communist intuition turned into demonstration and lost much of its
visionary force: the 1848 Communist Manifesto’s concrete measures were
compatible with radical bourgeois democracy, communism is only hinted at
in Capital’s volume I (1967), and it hardly appears in the Critique of
the Gotha programme (1875). Marx’s concern with the “real movement” led
him into a search for the “laws of history”, and his critique of
political economy came close to a critical political economy. (He never
lost sight of communism, though, as is clear from his interest in the
Russian mir: “If revolution comes at the opportune moment, if it
concentrates all its forces so as to allow the rural commune full scope,
the latter will soon develop as an element of regeneration in Russian
society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the
capitalist system.” (1881) )
However, as soon as the proletariat resumed its assault on bourgeois
society, revolutionary theory retrieved its radical momentum: the 1871
Commune showed that State power is not an adequate revolutionary
instrument.
Then again, the Paris Commune “lesson” was forgotten until, several
decades later, the birth of soviets and councils revived what Marx had
written in 1871.
In 1975-76, A World Without Money did not evade the issue of how Marx
stood regarding communisation (a word and concept he never used):
“That Marx and Engels did not talk more about communist society was due,
without doubt paradoxically, to the fact that this society, being less
near than it is today, was more difficult to envisage, but also to the
fact that it was more present in the minds of the revolutionaries of
their day. When they spoke of the abolition of the wages system in the
Communist Manifesto they were understood by those they were echoing.
Today it is more difficult to envisage a world freed from the state and
commodities because these have become omnipresent. But having become
omnipresent, they have lost their historical necessity.
Marx and Engels perhaps grasped less well than a Fourier the nature of
communism as the liberation and harmonisation of the emotions. Fourier,
however, does not get away from the wages system, since among other
things he still wants doctors to be paid, even if according to the
health of the community rather than the illnesses of their patients.
Marx and Engels, however, were sufficiently precise to avoid
responsibility for the bureaucracy and financial system of the
'communist' countries being attributed to them. According to Marx, with
the coming of communism money straightaway disappears and the producers
cease to exchange their products. Engels speaks of the disappearance of
commodity production when socialism comes.”
The communist movement owes much to its time. In this early 21st
century, we would be naĂŻve to believe that we are wiser than our
predecessors because we realize how destructive productive forces can
be. Just as the nature of capitalism is invariant, so are the nature and
programme of the proletariat. This programme, however, cannot escape the
concrete needs and mind-set of each period.
At the end of the 18th century, in a country plagued with misery,
starvation and extreme inequality, and with still very few factory
workers, Babeuf advocated an egalitarian mainly agrarian communism. His
prime concern was to have everyone fed. It was inevitable, and indeed
natural for down-trodden men and women to think of themselves as new
Prometheus and to equate the end of exploitation with a conquest over
nature.
About a hundred years later, as industrial growth was creating a new
type of poverty, joblessness and non-property, revolutionaries saw the
solution in a worker-run “development of the productive forces” that
would benefit the masses by manufacturing the essentials of life and
free humankind from the constraints of necessity. The prime concern was
not only to have everyone fed, housed, nursed, but also in a position to
enjoy leisure as well as creative activities. As capitalism had
developed “the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce
labour-time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum”, revolution
would be able “to free everyone's time for their own development.”
(Marx, Grundrisse, 1857-58)
Another century later, ecology is the buzz word. Nobody seriously
believes in a factory-induced or a worker-managed paradise, new public
orthodoxy declares the industrial dream to be a nightmare, so there is
little merit in debunking the techno-cult or advocating renewable energy
or green building.
The idea of communisation as a revolution that creates communism - and
not the preconditions of communism - appears more clearly when
capitalism rules over everything, extensively in terms of space (the
much talked-about globalisation), and intensively in terms of its
penetration into everyday life and behaviour. This helps us grasp
revolution as a process that from its very beginning would start to undo
what it wants to get rid of, and at the same time from its early days
start to create new ways of life (the completion of which would of
course last a while). That is the best possible answer to the inevitable
question: “Why talk of communisation now?”
One might wonder why the notion hardly surfaced in Italy 1969-77, when
that country came closer than any other to revolutionary breaking point.
Part of the answer is likely to be found in the reality of Italian
worker autonomy at the time, in theory as in practice. Operaism
emphasized more the revolutionary “subject” or agent than the content of
the revolution, so the content finally got reduced to autonomy itself.
That was linked to the limits of operaismo, whose goal was to create or
stimulate organisation (top-down, party-led, or bottom-up,
council-based). This may be the reason why a wealth of practical
communist critiques and endeavours resulted in so little synthetic
theorization of communisation. Apart from such hypotheses, it would be
risky to embark on sweeping generalizations purporting to explain the
(mis)adventures of theory in a particular country by the ups and downs
of class struggle in that country. Unless one enjoys being word-drunk,
there is little fun in playing the prophet of the past.
We would have nothing to object to the concept of transition if it
simply stated the obvious: communism will not be achieved in a flash.
Yet the concept implies a lot more, and something totally different: not
simply a transitory moment, but a full-fledged transitory society.
However debatable Marx’s labour vouchers are, at least his Critique of
the Gotha programme (1875) was trying to describe a society without
money, therefore without wage-labour. His scheme of a time-based
currency was supposed to be a provisional way of rewarding everyone
according to his or her contribution to the creation of common wealth.
Afterwards, when social-democrats and Leninists came to embrace the
notion of transition, they forgot that objective, and their sole concern
was the running of a planned economy. (Although anarchists usually
reject a transitory period, they lay the emphasis onmanagement, via
worker unions or via a confederation of communes: in the best of cases,
when the suppression of wage-labour remains on the agenda, it is only as
an effect of the socialisation of production, not as one of its causes.)
It is obvious that such a deep and all-encompassing transformation as
communism will span decades, perhaps several generations before it takes
over the world. Until then, it will be straddling two eras, and remain
vulnerable to internal decay and/or destruction from outside, all the
more so as various countries and continents will not be developing new
relationships at the same pace. Some areas may lag behind for a long
time. Others may go through temporary chaos. But the main point is that
the communising process has to start as soon as possible. The closer to
Day One the transformation begins and the deeper it goes from the
beginning, the greater the likelihood of its success.
So there will a “transition” in the sense that communism will not be
achieved overnight. But there will not be a “transition period” in what
has become the traditional Marxist sense: a period that is no longer
capitalist but not yet communist, a period in which the working class
would still work, but not for profit or for the boss any more, only for
themselves: they would go on developing the “productive forces”
(factories, consumer goods, etc.) before being able to enjoy the then
fully-matured fruit of industrialization. This is not the programme of a
communist revolution. It was not in the past and it is not now. There is
no need to go on developing industry, especially industry as it is now.
And we are not stating this because of the ecology movement and the
anti-industry trend in the radical milieu. As someone said forty years
ago, half of the factories will have to be closed.
Some areas will lag behind and others may plunge into temporary chaos.
The abolition of money will result in fraternal, non-profit, cooperative
relations, but sometimes barter or the black market are likely to
surface. Nobody knows how we will evolve from false capitalist abundance
to new ways of life, but let us not expect the move to be smooth and
peaceful everywhere and all the time.
We will only modify our food habits, for example, as we modify our
tastes: changing circumstances go along with changing minds, as was
written in the third Thesis on Feuerbach in 1845. Our intention is not
to create a new man, virtuous, reasonable, always able and willing to
master his desires, always respectful of sound dietary rules. About a
century ago, chestnuts were the staple food of some rural areas of the
French Central Massif. Such a “poor” diet does not compare favourably
with the variety we have been accustomed to in “rich” countries. But the
future is written nowhere. We might well enjoy a more limited range of
dishes than the abundance currently sold in the supermarket.
As a quick reminder, let us go back in time.
For reasons we cannot analyse here, the 1871 communards did not change
much the social fabric: that, plus the insurrection being isolated in
one city, prevented thecommunards from really appealing to the rest of
the world, in spite of genuine popular support in Paris. Versailles
army’s superiority was not due to more troops or better guns: its law
and order, pro-property and anti-worker programme was more consistently
understood, put forward and fought for by the bourgeois politicians than
communalism and social republicanism were by the Commune leaders.
In Russia, 1917, contrary to the communards, the Bolsheviks clearly knew
what they wanted - the seizure of power - and the power vacuum enabled
them to seize it. The insurgents did away with a State machinery which
was already dissolving, did not attempt or manage to change the social
structure, won a civil war, and eventually created a new State power.
In Spain, the July 1936 worker insurrection neutralised the State
machinery, but within a few weeks gave political power back to
reformist-conservative forces. Thereafter all social transformations
were limited by the pressure of a reconsolidated State apparatus, which
less than a year later openly turned its police against the workers.
In the 1960s, the radical wave opposed the instruments of coercion but
never dispensed with them. The French general strike made the central
political organs powerless, until the passive attitude of most strikers
enabled the State to recover its role. The power vacuum could not last
more than a few weeks, and had to be filled again.
This brief survey reminds us that if, in the abstract, it is necessary
to separate social and political spheres, in real life, the separation
does not exist. Our past failures were not social or political: they
were both. Bolshevik rule would not have turned into power over the
proletarians if they had changed social relationships, and in Spain
after 1936 socialisations would not have ended in disaster if the
workers had kept the power they had conquered in the streets in July 36.
Communisation means that revolution will not be a succession of phases:
first the dismantling and destruction of State power, then social change
afterwards.
While they are ready to admit this in principle, quite a few comrades,
“anarchists” or “Marxists”, are reluctant to consider the idea of a
communisation which they fear would try and change the social fabric
while not bothering to smash State power. These comrades miss the point.
Communisation is not purely or mainly social and therefore non-political
or only marginally political. It implies fighting public – as well as
private – organs of repression. Revolution is violent. (By the way,
which democratic revolution ever won merely by peaceful means ?)
Fundamentally, communisation saps counter-revolutionary forces by
removing their support. Communisers’ propulsive force will not come from
shooting capitalists, but by depriving them of their function and power.
Communisers will not target enemies, but undermine and change social
relations. The development of moneyless and profitless relations will
ripple through the whole of society, and act as power enhancers that
widen the fault lines between the State and growing sections of the
population. Our success will ultimately depend on the ability of our
human community to be socially expansive. Such is the bottom line.
Social relations, however, are incarnated in buildings, in objects, and
in beings of flesh and blood, and historical change is neither
instantaneous nor automatic. Some obstacles will have to be swept away:
not just exposed, but done away with. We will need more than civil
disobedience: passive resistance is not enough. People have to take a
stand, some will take sides against communisation, and a revolutionary
trial of strength does not just battle with words. States (dictatorial
or democratic) are enormous concentrations of armed power. When this
armed power is unleashed against us, the greater the insurgents’
fighting spirit, the more the balance of forces will shift away from
State power, and the less bloodshed there will be.
An insurrectionary process does not just consist in occupying buildings,
erecting barricades and firing guns one day, only to forget all about
them the next. It implies more than mere spontaneity and ad hoc
ephemeral getting together. Unless there is some continuity, our
movement will skyrocket today and fizzle out tomorrow. A number of
insurgents will have to remain organized and available as armed
groupings. (Besides, nobody has talents or desires for everything.) But
if these groupings functioned as bodies specialized in armed struggle,
they would develop a monopoly of socially legitimate violence, soon we
would have a “proletarian” police force, together with a “proletarian
government”, a “people’s army”, etc. Revolution would be short-lived.
No doubt this will have to be dealt with in very concrete issues, such
as what to do with police files we happen to find. Though revolution may
exceptionally use existing police archives and security agency data,
basically it will do away with them, as with all kinds of criminal
records.
Revolution is not a-political. It is anti-political.
Communisation includes the destruction of the State, and the creation of
new administrative procedures, whatever forms they may take. Each
dimension contributes to the other. None can succeed without the other.
Either the two of them combine, or both fail. If the proletarians do not
get rid of political parties, parliament, police bodies, the army, etc.,
all the socialisations they will achieve, however far-reaching, will
sooner or later be crushed, or will lose their impetus, as happened in
Spain after 1936. On the other hand, if the necessary armed struggle
against the police and army is only a military struggle, one front
against another, and if the insurgents do not also take on the social
bases of the State, they will only build up a counter-army, before being
defeated on the battlefield, as happened in Spain after 1936. Only a
would-be State can out-gun the State.
Communist revolution does not separate its means from its ends.
Consequently, it will not firstly take over (or dispense with) political
power, and then only secondly change society. Both will proceed at the
same time and reinforce each other, or both will be doomed.
Communisation can only happen in a society torn by mass work stoppages,
huge street demos, widespread occupation of public buildings and
workplaces, riots, insurgency attempts, a loss of control by the State
over more and more groups of people and areas, in other words an
upheaval powerful enough for social transformation to go deeper than an
addition of piecemeal adjustments. Resisting anti-revolutionary armed
bodies involves our ability to demoralise and neutralise them, and to
fight back when they attack. As the momentum of communisation grows, it
pushes its advantages, raises the stakes and resorts less and less to
violence, but only a rose-tinted view can believe in bloodless major
historical change.
At the Caracas World Social Forum in 2006, John Holloway declared: “the
problem is not to abolish capitalism, but to stop creating it”. This is
indeed an aspect of communisation, equally well summed up by one of the
characters in Ursula Le Guin’s fiction The Dispossessed (1974): our
purpose is not so much to make as to be the revolution. Quite. But J.
Holloway’s theory of “changing the world without taking power” empties
that process of any reality by denying its antagonism to the State. Like
Holloway, we don’t want to take power. But unlike him and his many
followers, we know that State power will not wither away under the mere
pressure of a million local collectives: it will never die a natural
death. On the contrary, it is in its nature to mobilize all available
resources to defend the existing order. Communisation will not leave
State power aside: it will have todestroy it.
The Chartists’ motto “Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must” is
right only in so far as we understand that we will be forced to act
“forcibly”.
In revolutionary times, social violence and social inventiveness are
inseparable: the capacity of the proletarians to control their own
violence will depend on the ability of this violence to be as creative
as destructive. For the destruction of the State (we want to destroy
power, not to take it) to be more than an empty phrase, negative acts
must also be positive. But not creative of a new police, army,
Parliament, etc. Creative of new deliberative and administrative bodies,
directly dependent on social relationships.
“The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense
majority, in the interests of that vast majority (..)” (Communist
Manifesto). Both phrases are crucial : independent movement and immense
majority. That being said, it does not follow that nearly everyone is a
proletarian, nor that every proletarian can play the same part in the
communising process. Some are more apt than others to initiate the
change, which does not mean that they would be the “leaders” of the
revolution. On the contrary, they would succeed only in so far as they
would gradually lose their specificity. Here we bump into the inevitable
contradiction the whole argument hinges around, but it is not an
insurmountable contradiction. .
We do not live in a society where just about everybody is exploited and
has the same basic interest in an overall change, therefore the same
desire and ability to implement what would be a rather peaceful process,
as nearly everyone would join in: only 3 to 5% would object, Castoriadis
assured us, but no doubt they would soon see the light.
We live neither in a post-industrial society, nor in a post class
society, nor therefore in a post working class society. If work had
become inessential, one might wonder why companies would have bothered
in the last twenty years to turn hundreds of millions of earthlings into
assembly line workers, crane operators or computer clerks. Work is still
central to our societies, and those in the world of work – currently
employed or not – will have better social leverage power, at least in
the early days or weeks of communisation.
The contradiction can be solved because, unlike the bourgeoisie striving
for political power in 1688 (the Glorious Revolution that gave birth to
what was to become English parliamentary democracy) or in 1789, labour
is no ruling class and has no possibility of becoming one, now or then.
General strike, mass disorder and rioting break the normal flow of
social reproduction. This suspension of automatisms and beliefs forces
proletarians to invent something new that implies subjectivity and
freedom: options have to be decided on. Everyone has to find his or her
place, not as an isolated individual any more, but in interactions that
are productive of a collective reality. When only railway workers go on
strike, they are unlikely to look beyond their own condition: they
simply do not have to. In a communisation situation, the extension of
work stoppages opens the possibility for railway personnel to move on to
a different range of activities decided upon and organized by themselves
and by others: for instance, instead of staying idle, running trains –
free of course - to transport strikers or demonstrators from one town to
another. It also means starting to think and act differently about the
railway system, no longer believing in feats of engineering for
progress’s sake, and no longer sticking to the view that “high-speed
trains are super because they’re fast”.
What to do with high-speed trains and with buses cannot be the sole
decision of train engineers and bus drivers, yet for a while the
individual who used to be at the wheel will be more expert at handling
and repairing them. His or her role will be specific and provisional.
The success of communisation depends on the fading away of former
sociological distinctions and hierarchies: breaching professional
distances will go together with dismantling mental blocks regarding
personal competence and aspiration. The process will be more complex
than we expect, and more unpredictable: the experience of any large
social movement (Germany 1918, Spain 1936, France 1968, Argentina 2001,
to name a few) shows how volatile the unprecedented can be, when the
situation slips out of control and creates both deadlocks and
breakthroughs. One thing leads to another point of departure for further
development. That particular example prompts the question of the fading
of the difference between “public” and “private” transport, which in
turn brings back the vital issue of where and how we live, since today’s
means of locomotion are conditioned by the urban segmentation of
specific areas reserved for administration, habitation, work,
recreation, etc.
The trouble with philosophers, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz once
suggested, is that they do not care about trousers and telephones. That
remark hardly applied to Nietzsche, who was no revolutionary but refused
“to treat as frivolous all the things about life that deserve to be
taken very seriously – nutrition, residence, spiritual diet, treatment
of the sick, cleanliness, weather!” (Ecce Homo, 1888). It is everyday
life indeed we will change: cooking, eating, travelling, meeting people,
staying on our own, reading, doing nothing, having and bringing up
children, debating over our present and future… providing we give daily
life its fullest meaning. Sadly, since the phrase became fashionable in
1968, “everyday life” has been usually limited to the out-of-work
time-space, as if people gave up hope of altering the economy and
wage-labour, and were contented with altering acts and doings of a
lesser kind: feelings, body, family, sex, couple, food, leisure,
culture, friendship, etc.
On the contrary, communisation will treat the minor facts of existence
for what they are: a reflection and a manifestation of “big” facts.
Money, wage-labour, companies as separate units and value accumulation
centres, work-time cut off from the rest of our time, profit-oriented
production, obsolescence-induced consumption, agencies acting as
mediators in social life and conflicts, speeded-up maximum circulation
of everything and everyone… each of these moments, acts and places has
to be transformed into cooperative, moneyless, profitless and
non-statist relationships, and not just managed by a collective or
converted into public ownership.
The capital-labour relation structures and reproduces society, and the
abolition of this relation is the prime condition of the rest. But we
would be foolish to wait for the complete disappearance of the company
system, of money and the profit motive, before starting to change
schooling and housing. Acting locally will contribute to the whole
change.
For instance, communising also implies transforming our personal
relation to technique, and our addiction to mediation and mediators. A
future society where people would feel a constant need for
psychologists, therapists and healers would merely prove its failure at
building a human community: we would still be incapable of addressing
tensions and conflicts by the flow and interplay of social relations,
since we would want these conflicts solved by professionals.
Communisation is the destruction of repressive (and self-repressive)
institutions and habits, as well as the creation of non-mercantile links
which tend to be more and more irreversible: “Beyond a certain point,
one cannot come back. That tipping-point we must reach.” (Kafka)
Making, circulating and using goods without money includes breaking down
the wall of a private park for the children to play, or planting a
vegetable garden in the town centre. It also implies doing away with the
split between the asphalt jungle cityscape and a natural world which is
now turned into show and leisure places, where the (mild) hardships of a
ten-day desert trek makes up for the aggravating compulsory Saturday
drive to a crowded supermarket. It means practising in a social relation
what has now to be private and paid for.
Communism is an anthropological revolution in the sense that it deals
with what Marcel Mauss analysed in The Gift (1923): a renewed ability to
give, receive and reciprocate. It means no longer treating our next-door
neighbour as a stranger, but also no longer regarding the tree down the
road as a piece of scenery taken care of by council workers.
Communisation is the production of a different relation to others and
with oneself, where solidarity is not born out of a moral duty exterior
to us, rather out of practical acts and interrelations.
Among other things, communisation will be the withering away of
systematic distinction between learning and doing. We are not saying
that ignorance is bliss, or that a few weeks of thorough (self-)teaching
are enough for anyone to be able to translate Arabic into English or to
play the harpsichord. Though learning can be fun, it often involves long
hard work. What communism will do away with is the locking up of youth
in classrooms for years (now 15 to 20 years in so-called advanced
societies). Actually, modern school is fully aware of the shortcomings
of such an absurdity, and tries to bridge the gap by multiplying
out-of-school activities and work experience schemes. These remedies
have little effect: the rift between school and the rest of society
depends on another separation, which goes deeper and is structural to
capitalism: the separation between work (i.e. paid and productive
labour), and what happens outside the work-place and is treated as
non-work (housework, bringing up children, leisure, etc., which are
unpaid). Only superseding work as a separate time-space will transform
the whole learning process.
Here again, and in contrast to most utopias as well as to modern
totalitarian regimes, communisation does not pretend to promote a “brave
new world” full of new (wo)men, each equal in talents and in
achievements to his or her fellow beings, able to master all fields of
knowledge from Renaissance paintings to astrophysics, and whose own
desires would always finally merge in harmonious concord with the
desires of other equally amiable fellow beings.
Few people today would agree with what Victor Serge (then a Bolshevik
living in Moscow) wrote in 1921: “Every revolution sacrifices the
present to the future.” While it is essential to understand how
communisation will do the opposite of what Serge believed, this
understanding does not give us the whole picture.
One of the strong points of the 1960s-70s, or at least one of the best
remembered, was the rejection of a revolution that would postpone its
completion to an always receding future.
In the following years, as the radical wave gradually ebbed, the
emphasis on the here and now remained, albeit deprived of subversive
content and purpose, and was reduced to an array of piecemeal changes in
our daily life. When they are as all-powerful as they have become, money
and wage-labour are compatible with – and sometimes feed on –
inoffensive doses of relative freedom. Anyone can now claim that a
certain degree of self-management of his neighbourhood, his body, his
parenthood, his sexuality, his food, his habitat or his leisure time
contributes to a genuine transformation of society, more genuine in fact
than the old- fashioned social revolution of yesteryear. Indeed, daily
life reformers claim to work for overall change by a multiplication of
local changes: they argue that step by step, people’s empowerment is
taking over more and more social areas, until finally bourgeois rule is
made redundant and the State rendered powerless. The ex-situationist
Raoul Vaneigem perfectly encapsulated this vision in a few words (also
the title of a book of his in 2010): “The State is nothing any more,
let’s be everything.”
In the aftermath of “68”, against Stalinism and Maoist or Trotskyst
party-building, radical thought had to combat the reduction of
revolution to a seizure of political power, and the postponement of
effective change to later days that never came.
Thirty years later, Stalinism is gone, party-building is passé, and it
is increasingly difficult to differentiate ex-Trots from current far
leftists. While it pushes dozens of millions in or out of work, today’s
all-encompassing capitalism wears more often a hedonistic than a
puritanical mask. It turns Victor Serge’s formula upside down: “Do not
sacrifice the present… ! Live and communicate here and now !”
Communising will indeed experiment new ways of life, but it will be much
more and something other than an extension of the socially innocuous
temporary or permanent “autonomous zones” where we are now allowed to
play, providing we do not trespass their limits, i.e. if we respect the
existence of wage-labour and recognize the benevolence of the State.
The Marxist-progressivist approach has consistently thrown scorn on
pre-capitalist forms, as if they were incapable of contributing to
communism: only industrialization was supposed to pave the way for
proletarian revolution.
In the past and still in many aspects of the present, quite a few things
and activities were owned by no-one and enjoyed by many.
Community-defined rules imposed bounds on private property.
Plough-sharing, unfenced fields and common pasture land used to be
frequent in rural life. Village public meetings and collective decisions
were not unusual, mostly on minor topics, sometimes on important
matters.
While they provide us with valuable insights into what a possible future
world would look like, and indeed often contribute to its coming, these
habits and practices are unable to achieve this coming by themselves. A
century ago, the Russian mir had neither the strength nor the intention
of revolutionising society: rural cooperation depended on a social
system and a political order that was beyond the grasp of the village
autonomy. Nowadays, millions of co-ops meet their match when they
attempt to play multinationals – unless they turn into big business
themselves.
Our critique of progressivism does not mean supporting tradition against
modernity. Societal customs have many oppressive features (particularly
but not only regarding women) that are just as anti-communist as the
domination of money and wage-labour. Communisation will succeed by being
critical of both modernity and tradition. To mention just two recent
examples, the protracted rebellion in Kabylia and the insurgency in
Oaxaca have proved how collective links and assemblies can be reborn and
strengthen popular resistance. Communisation will include the
revitalization of old community forms, when by resurrecting them people
get more than what they used to get from these forms in the past.
Reviving former collective customs will help the communisation process
by transforming these customs.
Countless and varied visions of a future communist world have been
suggested in modern times, by Sylvain Maréchal and G. Babeuf, Marx, even
Arthur Rimbaud in 1871, Kropotkin and many anarchists, the Dutch council
communists in the 1930s, etc. Their most common features may be summed
up in the following equation:
communism =
direct democracy =
fulfilment of needs =
community + abundance =
equality
Since the historical subject of the future is envisioned as a
self-organised human community, the big question is to know how it will
organise itself. Who will lead: everybody, a few, or nobody? Who will
decide: the collectivity, or a wise minority? Will the human species
delegate responsibilities to a few persons, and if so, how?
We will not go back here to the critique of democracy, which we have
dealt with in other essays, and we will focus on one point: because the
vast majority of revolutionaries (Marxists and anarchists) regard
communism above all as a new way of organising society, they are first
of all concerned by how to find the best possible organisational forms,
institutions in other words, be they fixed or adaptable, complex or
extremely simple. (Individual anarchism is but another type of
organisation: a coexistence of egos who are free and equal because each
is independent of the others.)
We start from another standpoint: communism concerns as much the
activity of human beings as their inter-relations. The way they relate
to each other depends on what they do together. Communism organises
production and has no fear of institutions, yet it is first of all
neither institution nor production: it is activity.
The following sections only give a few elements on how work could be
transformed into activity.
Communising is not just making everything available to everyone without
anyone paying, as if we merely freed instruments of production and modes
of consumption from their commodity form: shopping made easy… without a
purse or a Visa card.
The existence of money is often explained by the (sad, alas inevitable)
need of having a means of distributing items that are too scarce to be
handed out free: a bottle of Champagne has to have a price tag because
there is little Champagne produced. Well, although millions of junk food
items are manufactured every day, unless I give $ 1 in exchange for a
bag of crisps, I am likely to get into trouble with the security guard.
Money is more than an unpleasant yet indispensable instrument: it
materializes the way activities relate to one another, and human beings
to one another. We keep measuring objects, comparing and exchanging them
according to the average labour time (really or supposedly) necessary to
make them, which logically leads to assessing acts and people in the
same way.
The duality of use value and exchange value was born out of a situation
where each activity (and the object resulting from it) ceased to be
experienced and appreciated for what it specifically is, be it bread or
a jar. From then on, that loaf of bread and that jar existed above all
through their ability to be exchanged for each other, and were treated
on the basis of what they had in common: in spite of their different
concrete natures and uses, both they were comparable results of the same
practice, labour in general, or abstract labour, liable to be reduced to
a universal and quantifiable element, the average human effort necessary
to produce that bread and that jar. Activity was turned into work. Money
is crystallised labour: it gives a material form to that common
substance.
Up to our time included, nearly all societies have found only work as a
means to organise their life in common, and money connects what is
separated by the division of labour.
A few millennia after “abstract labour” was born, capitalism has
extended worldwide the condition of the proletarian, i.e. of the utterly
dispossessed who can only live by selling his or her labour power on a
free market. As the proletarian is the commodity upon which the whole
commodity system depends, he or she has in himself or herself the
possibility of subverting this system. A proletarian revolution can
create a new type of social interaction where beings and things will not
need to be compared and quantified in order to be produced and
circulated. Money and commodity will no longer be the highway to
universality.
Therefore, communisation will not abolish exchange value while keeping
use value, because one complements the other.
In quite a few past uprisings, in the Paris Commune or in October 1917,
permanent armed fighters were paid as soldiers of the revolution, which
is what they were.
From the early hours and days of a future communist revolution, the
participants will neither need, use nor receive money to fight or to
feed themselves, because goods will not be reduced to a quantum of
something comparable to another quantum. Circulation will be based on
the fact that each action and person is specific and does not need to be
measured to another in order to exist.
Superficial critics of capitalism denounce finance and praise what is
known as the “real” economy, but today a car or a bag of flour only have
some use because they are treated (and acted upon) according to their
cost in money terms, i.e. ultimately to the labour time incorporated in
them. Nothing now seriously exists apart from its cost. It is
unthinkable for parents who have a son and daughter to buy a car as
birthday present for her and a T-shirt for him. If they do, everyone
will measure their love for their two children according to the
respective amount of money spent on each of them. In today’s world, for
objects, acts, talents and persons to exist socially, they have to be
compared, reduced to a substance that is both common and quantifiable.
When building a house, there is a difference between making sure the
builders will not be short of bricks and mortar (which we can safely
assume communist builders will care about) and budgeting a house plan
(which in this present society is a prior condition). Communisation will
be our getting used to counting physical realities without resorting to
accountancy. The pen and pencil (or possibly the computer) of the
bricklayer are not the same as the double-entry book of the accounts
department.
“In the communist revolution, the productive act will never be
onlyproductive. One sign of this among others will be the fact that the
product considered will be particular: it will correspond to needs
expressed personally (by the direct producers at the time or by others)
and that the satisfaction of the need won't be separated from the
productive act itself. Let's think, for example, about how the
construction of housing will change as soon as standardization
disappears. Production without productivity will mean that any
individual engaged in the project will be in a position to give his
opinion concerning the product and the methods. Things will go much
slower than in today's industrialized building industry. The
participants in the project may even wish to live there after the
building is finished. Will it be a total mess? Let's just say that time
will not count and that cases in which the project isn't completed, in
which everything is abandoned in midstream - maybe because production of
the inputs is without productivity too - won't be a problem. Again, this
is because the activity will have found its justification in itself,
independently of its productive result.
In a general way, one can say that communisation replaces the
circulation of goods between "associated producers" with the circulation
of people from one activity to another.” (Bruno Astarian)
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity
but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do
one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just
as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or
critic.” (Marx, German Ideology, 1845)
This statement has been ridiculed by bourgeois for its naivety, and
attacked by radicals for its acceptance of objectionable activities,
hunting of course, more generally its endorsement of man’s domination
over animals. An even more critical view might ask why Marx reserves
philosophy or art for the evening, as an afterthought, as if there was
no time for it while producing food, which seems to take up most of the
day in Marx’s vision...
In 1845, Marx was providing no blueprint for the future, and he inserted
his prejudices and preconceptions of his time. But so do we today, and
we would be pretentious to think ourselves devoid of prejudices.
The most valid aspect of that statement remains the idea that people
living in a communist world would not be tied to a trade or function for
life, which still remains the fate of most of us. When this is not the
case, mobility is often forced upon us: the least skilled usually get
the worst jobs, the poorest pay and lowest social image, and they are
the first to be laid off and pressured into a re-training scheme.
Besides, “multi-tasking” is a way of making workers more productive.
As long as work exists as such, that is as a time-space reserved for
production (and earning money), a hierarchy of skills will remain. Only
the opening-up of productive acts to the rest of life will change the
situation. Among other things, this implies the end of the present
work-place as a specific distinct place, where only those involved in it
are allowed in.
For many a communist (once again, most Marxists and quite a few
anarchists), the original cause of the exploitation of man by man was
the emergence of asurplus of production in societies still plagued by
scarcity. The tenets of the argument could be summarized as follows. For
thousands of years, a minority was able to make the majority work for
the benefit of a privileged few who kept most of the surplus for
themselves. Fortunately, despite its past and present horrors,
capitalism is now bringing about an unheard-of and ever-growing wealth:
thereby the age-old need (and desire) to exploit and dominate loses its
former objective cause. The poverty of the masses is no longer the
condition for education, leisure and art to be enjoyed only by economic,
political and cultural elites.
It is therefore logical that the goal (shared by most variants of the
worker movement) should be to create a society of abundance. Against
capitalism which forces us to work without fulfilling our needs, and
distributes its products in most unequal fashion, revolution must
organise the mass production of useful goods beneficial to all. And it
can, thanks to the celebrated “development of the productive forces”.
Besides, industrialization organises and unifies the working class in
such numbers that they will have the means to topple the ruling class
and make a revolution which Roman slaves or late medieval peasants
attempted but were incapable of achieving.
Moreover, and this is no minor point, if money is the root of all evil,
and if scarcity is the ultimate cause of money, such a vision believes
that reaching a stage of abundance will transform humankind. When men
and women are properly fed, housed, schooled, educated, cared for,
“struggle for life” antagonisms and attitudes will gradually disappear,
individualism will give way to altruism, people will behave well to each
other and have no motive, therefore no desire, for greed, domination or
violence. So the only real question that remains is how to adequately
manage this society of abundance: in a democratic way, or via leaders?
with Kropotkin’s moneyless system of helping oneself to goods that are
plentiful, and democratic rationed sharing-out of goods that are not
plentiful? or with some labour-time accounting as suggested by the Dutch
councilists in the 1930s? The answer usually given by anarchists and
non-Leninist communists is a society of “associated producers” run by
worker collectives. Whatever the details, all these schemes describe a
different economy, but an economy all the same: they start from the
assumption that social life is based on the necessity to allocate
resources in the best possible way to produce goods (in the genuine and
democratically-decided interests of all, there lies the difference with
bourgeois economy).
This is precisely where we beg to differ.
Women and men must eat (among other necessities)… or die, there is no
denying it. Basic needs do exist. So, of course we are aiming at society
which fairly, soundly and ecologically matches resources with needs.
What we dispute is that human life consists primarily in fulfilling
needs, and that, logically, revolution should primarily consist in
creating a society where physical needs are fulfilled. Human beings only
satisfy – or fail to satisfy – all their needs within social
interrelations. Only in extreme circumstances do we eat just in order
not to starve. In most cases, we eat in the company of others (or we
decide or are led or forced to eat on our own, which also is a social
situation). We follow a diet. We may overeat or voluntarily skip a meal.
This is true of nearly all other social acts. Contrary to widespread
popular misbelief, the “materialistic conception of history” (as exposed
in The German Ideology for example) does not say that the economy rules
the world. It states something quite different: social relations depend
on the way we produce our material conditions of life, and not, say, on
our ideas or ideals. And we produce these material conditions in
relation to other beings (in most societies, these are class relations).
A plough, a lathe or a computer does not determine history by itself. In
fact, the “materialistic conception” explains the present rule of the
economy as a historical phenomenon, which did not exist in Athens 500
B.C., and will no longer exist after a communist revolution.
The human Number One question, or the revolution question, is not to
find how to bridge the gap between resources and needs (as economists
would have it), nor to turn artificial and extravagant needs into
natural and reasonable ones (as ecologists would like us to). It is to
understand basic needs for what they are. Communism obviously takes
basic needs into account, especially in a world where about one billion
people are underfed. But how will this vital food issue be addressed? As
Hic Salta explained in 1998, the natural urge to grow food, potatoes for
instance, will be met through the birth of social links which will also
result in vegetable gardening. Communisers will not say: “Let’s grow
potatoes because we need to feed ourselves.” Rather, they will imagine
and invent a way to meet, to get and be together, that will include
vegetable gardening and be productive of potatoes. Maybe potato growing
will require more time than under capitalism, but that possibility will
not be evaluated in terms of labour-time cost and saving.
“When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda,
etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this
association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what
appears as a means becomes an end.” (1844 Manuscripts)
A typical feature of what we have been used to calling “the economy” is
to produce goods separately from needs (which may be “natural” or
“artificial”, authentic or manipulated, that matters but is not
essential at this point), before offering them on a market where they
will be bought to be consumed.
“Socialism” or “communism” has usually been thought of as the
symmetrical opposite of that economy: it would start from people’s needs
(real ones, this time, and collectively decided upon) to produce
accordingly and distribute fairly.
Communism is not a new “economy”, even a regulated, bottom-up,
decentralized and self-managed one.
To use K. Polanyi’s word in The Great Transformation (1944), capitalism
has disembedded the production of the means of existence from both
social life and nature. No Marxist and certainly not a communist,
Polanyi was not opposed to the existence of a market, but he analysed
the institution of the economic process as a distinct system with its
own laws of motion. The Great Transformation, written in the aftermath
of the Great Depression, coincided with a capitalist effort to regulate
market forces. In the last decades, there has been a renewed interest in
Polanyi’s emphasis on “embeddedness”: many reformers would like the
economy to be brought under social control, in order to create a
sustainable relationship with nature. Unfortunately, as the liberals are
right to point out, we cannot have the advantages of capitalism without
its defects: its regulation is a momentary step before going into
overdrive. To do away with capitalist illimitation, we must go beyond
the market itself and the economy as such, i.e. beyond capital and
wage-labour.
As we wrote in the section on “the revolution of daily life”,
communisation will be tantamount to an anthropological change, with a
re-embedding of organic links that were severed when the economy came to
dominate both society and nature.
There would be no communist movement without our spontaneous indignation
when we witness a Rolls-Royce driving by slums. Sylvain Maréchal,
Babeuf’s comrade, wrote in the Manifesto of the Equals (1796):
“No more individual property in land:the land belongs to no one. We
demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the
fruits belong to all.
We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great
majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.
Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have
disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their like, their
equals.”
S. Maréchal’s statement was asserting the existence of a human species
whose members are similar and should have a fair share of available
resources.
Communisation demands a fraternity that involves, among other things,
mutual aid as theorized by Kropotkin, and equality as expressed in The
Internationale lines: “There are no supreme saviours/Neither God, nor
Caesar, nor tribune”.
But equality is not to be achieved by book-keeping. As long as we
measure in order to share out and “equalize”, inequality is sure to be
present. Communism is not a “fair” distribution of riches. Even if,
particularly at the beginning and under the pressure of circumstances,
our priority may sometimes be to share goods and resources in the most
equitable way (which, whether we like it or not, amounts to some form of
rationing), our prime motive and mover will not be the best and fairest
way to circulate goods, but our human links and the activities that
result from them.
Where do capitalism’s powerful drive and resilience come from?
Undoubtedly from its amazing and always renewed capacity to invent
advanced ways of exploiting labour, to raise productivity, to accumulate
and circulate wealth. But also from its fluidity, its ability to
supersede rigid forms, to remodel hierarchy and discard vested interests
when it needs to, not forgetting its adaptability to the most varied
doctrines and regimes. This plasticity has no precedent in history. It
derives from the fact that capitalism has no other motive than to create
abstract value, to maximize its flow, and eventually to set in motion
and accumulate more figures than goods.
That aspect is documented enough for us not to go into details. What
matters here is that capitalist civilization develops extreme
individualism, while creating a universality of sorts, which is also a
form of freedom (of which democracy is the political realization): it
breeds and favours a new type of human being potentially disconnected
from the ties of tradition, land, birth, family, religion and
established creeds. In the 21st century, the modern Londoner eats a
banana grown in the West Indies (where she was holidaying last week),
watches an Argentinean film, chats up an Australian woman on the
Internet, rents a Korean car, and from her living-room accesses any
classical or outrageously avant-garde work of art as well as all schools
of thought. Capitalism is selling her no less than an infinity of
possibilities. Fool’s gold, we might object, because it is made of
passivity and spectacle in the situationist sense, instead of truly
lived-in experience. Indeed… Yet, however specious this feeling of
empowerment, it socially “functions” as it is able to arouse emotion and
even passion.
We would be wrong to assume that a period when communisation is possible
and attempted would automatically and quickly eliminate the appeal of
false riches – material or spiritual. Two centuries of modern capitalist
evolution have taught us how resourceful that system can prove. In
troubled times, social creativity will not only be on our side: in order
to ride out the storm, capitalism also will put forward authenticity and
collectiveness. It will provide the individual with opportunities to go
beyond his atomized self. It will suggest critiques of “formal”
democracy, defend planet Earth as a shared heritage, oppose cooperation
to competition and use to appropriation. In short, it will pretend to
change everything… except capital and wage-labour.
The communist perspective has always put forward an unlimited
development of human potentials. Materially speaking: everyone should be
able to enjoy all the fruits of the world. But also in the “behavioural”
field, in order to promote, harmonize and fulfil talents and desires.
The surrealists (“absolute freedom”) and the situationists (“to live
without restraints”) went even further and extolled the subversive
merits of transgression.
Today, the most advanced forms of capitalism turn this critique back on
us. Current Political Correctness and its Empire of Good leave ample
room for provocation, for verbal and often factual transgression. Let us
take a look at the many screens that surround us: compared to 1950, the
boundary is increasingly blurred between what is sacred and profane,
forbidden and allowed, private and public. English readers had to wait
until 1960 to buy the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
fifty years later, on-line pornography, whatever that word covers, is
widespread (according to some figures, 12% of all sites and 25% of
Internet searches deal with pornography). Contemporary
counter-revolution will appeal much less to moral order than it did in
the 1920s and 30s, and often have a “liberal-libertarian” and
permissive-transgressive flavour. Communisation, on the other hand, will
prevail by giving birth to ways of life that will tend to be universal,
but not dominated by addiction, virtuality and public imagery.
Communisation will be possible because those who make the world can also
unmake it, because the class of labour (whether its members are
currently employed or out of a job) is also the class of the critique of
work. Unlike the exploited in pre-capitalist times, wage-earners can put
an end to exploitation, because commodified (wo)men have the means to
abolish the realm of commodity. It is the working class /proletariat
duality we are talking about: a class, as Marx put it in 1844, which is
not a class while it has the capacity to terminate class societies.
Marxists often turn this definition into formulaic dialectics.
Non-Marxists make fun of it: the French liberal Raymond Aron used to say
that the “working class” is worthy of the fine name “proletariat” when
it acts in a (revolutionary) way that suits Marxists. Anyone who takes
this definition seriously cannot evade the obvious: this duality is
contradictory. Those who handle the modern means of production and have
thereby the ability to subvert the world, are also those with a vested
interest in the “development of the productive forces”, including
utterly destructive ones, and are often caught up, willy-nilly, not just
in the defence of their own wages, shop-floor conditions and jobs, but
also of industry, of the ideology of work and the myth of progress.
We have no other terrain apart from this contradiction. It dramatically
exploded in January 1919, when a few thousand Spartakist insurgents went
to battle amidst the quasi indifference of several hundred thousand
Berlin workers. Communisation will be the positive resolution of the
contradiction, when the proletarians are able and willing to solve the
social crisis by superseding capitalism. Therefore communisation will
also be a settling of scores of the proletarian with him/herself.
Until then, and as a contribution to this resolution, communist theory
will have to acknowledge the contradiction, and proletarians to address
it.
(We have also published an essay in French on Communisation, available
on our site (
). This English version is much shorter, but also different: a few
passages have been expanded.)
Essential reading:
To the best of our knowledge, Un monde sans argent has not been
translated in English, except for short extracts published in the SPGB
magazine Socialist Standard (July 1979): John Gray “For communism” site
:
Bruno Astarian, Crisis Activity & Communisation, 2010. Available on
. See
http://www.hicsalta-communisation.com/
for other texts by B. Astarian on communism.
Background information on how the “communisation” idea became explicit
in the 1970s:
The Story of Our Origins (part of an article from La Banquise, #2,
1983): John Gray “For communism” site:
For the complete article: Re-collecting Our Past:
(Also: Are the Revolutionaries One Counter-revolution Behind?, from La
Banquise, #3, 1984:
)
And:
Endnotes, #1 and 2 (
), and Théorie Communiste (among other texts, Communisation vs.
socialization). Visit also
http://meeting.communisation.net/
.
TPTG (Ta Paidia Tis Galarias, or: “The Children in the Gallery”, a group
in Greece), The Ivory Tower of Theory: a Critique of Théorie Communiste
& «The Glass Floor». Available on
A. Pannekoek, The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism (1934):
On the Russian and Spanish revolutions: When Insurrections Die (1999).
Available on
.
V. Serge’s The Anarchists & the Experience of the Russian Revolution
(1921), is included in the V. Serge compendium Revolution in Danger,
Redwords, London, 1997.
On the mir and Russian populism: F. Venturi, The Roots of Revolution: A
History of the Populist & Socialist Movement in 19th Century Russia,
first published in 1952.
On democracy:The Implosion of Democratist Ideology, 1989, available on
; and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Autonomy, 2008,
available on
.
Marx, letter to Vera Zasulich, March 1881; and: “If the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West,
so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership
of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.”
(preface to the 1882 edition of the Communist Manifesto); also another
letter to V. Zasulich, by Engels, April 23, 1985.
Group of International Communists of Holland (GIK), Fundamental
Principles of Communist Production & Distribution (1930):
S. Maréchal, Manifesto of the Equals (1796):