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Title: What is communisation?
Author: Leon de Mattis
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: communication, introduction, communisation
Source: http://sicjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Sic-1-what-is-communisation-lo.pdf

Leon de Mattis

What is communisation?

One thing is now certain: in the capitalist world, our situation can

only get worse. All that was previously taken for granted in the form of

‘social benefits’ has been, once again, put into question. However, this

transformation is not the result of poor economic management, of the

excessive greed of bosses, or a lack of regulation of international

finance. It is simply the inevitable outcome of the global evolution of

capitalism.

Wages, job opportunities, pensions, public services and welfare benefits

have all been affected by this evolution, each of them in their own way.

What was conceded yesterday is taken away today, and tomorrow there will

be even less. The process is the same everywhere: new reforms take up

the offensive at the exact point where the previous reforms had stopped.

This dynamic is never reversed, even when we move from ‘economic crisis’

back to prosperity. Beginning in the aftermath of the great crisis of

the 1970 s, the same dynamic continued even after the return to growth

in the 1990 s and 2000 s. It thus becomes difficult to imagine things

getting better, even in the quite improbable hypothesis of an ‘end of

the crisis’ after the financial shock of 2008 .

Nevertheless, faced with this rapid transformation of worldwide

capitalism, the response, on the left of the Left, has been appallingly

weak. Most are content with denouncing the extreme neoliberalism of

bosses and politicians. They seem to think that it’s possible to defend

the social benefits of the previous period, and even to extend them a

bit more, if only we could go back to the capitalism of yesteryear, that

of the period just after the Second World War. Their proposals for the

future recall the main points of the program of the Resistance, adopted

in 1944 . [1] It is as if it were still necessary to fight Nazism, as if

governments were willing to make concessions in order to assure victory

as if there has ever been a backwards motion in history. In this way

they forget everything that constitutes the capitalist social relation

in its present dynamic. Why does crisis and the restructuring of

capitalism that is to say, the way it has changed in the last 40 years

render impossible any return to the prior conditions of struggle? And

what can be deduced from this fact for today’s struggles?

To answer these questions, we must take a brief theoretical detour.

Profit is not just one element of capitalist society among many. It is

the major engine, the reason for anything to exist at all in the social

world. Profit is not something that can be grafted on top of human

activities, taking away the product of labour for some parasitical

capitalist. It is the source of all activities, none of which could

exist without it. Or, if we prefer, these human activities would exist

in such a different manner that they would bear no resemblance to those

we presently observe.

The point is not to form a moral judgement on this state of affairs but

rather to understand all its consequences. It is not a matter of profit

being systematically favoured at the expense of what is useful, good, or

beneficial to society (such as health, culture, etc.). It is ‘utility’

itself that cannot exist without profit. Nothing that isn’t profitable

can be useful in capitalism. Or, in other words, everything that is

useful can only be useful as long as it offers opportunities for making

profit. To say, for example, that ‘health is not a commodity,’ is simply

an absurdity, without any basis in the reality of a capitalist world. It

is only because health is profitable (on the one hand, because generally

speaking it maintains a functional working population, and on the other

hand, more specifically, because it is source of profit for some) that

it is an economic sector. And it is only because it really is an

economic sector, and thus a ‘commodity’, that there is enough to pay the

doctors, to make machines for analysing the human body, and to build

hospitals. Without that there would obviously be nothing at all.

To make a profit, it is necessary that the value contained in the

commodity increases: that the value of what is produced be more than the

value spent (in raw materials, machines, buildings, transport, etc.) in

order to produce it. Now, what is used to produce has the same value as

what is produced if we don’t add something to it. That thing which is

added is human activity, intelligence, strength, physiological energy

spent to assemble and transform distinct objects into an object

qualitatively different from what we had at the beginning. This activity

must show itself in a particular form in order that it can be bought,

and hence be incorporated into the final value. This is human activity

under a particular form the form of labour a form that can be purchased

by capital

But this shows that capitalism is not sharing but exploitation, that the

value at which labour is bought is lower than the value which labour

produces. It is not possible to redistribute all the value produced and

return it to labour, because value only exists in this dissociation

between labour and its product, and so permits the unequal allocation of

this product. It is really the existence of this dissociation between

human activity and social wealth that makes possible the ‘appropriation’

of such wealth.

The ‘value’ of things is not a natural creation, but a social one. Also,

contrary to what some would want us to believe, it is not a neutral

creation that exists only for convenience. There are a lot of other

possible means, just as convenient, to produce what could be considered

in a given society as indispensable to the lives of human beings. Value

makes it self necessary only because it becomes an instrument of

domination. It permits, in the present mode of production, the capturing

of the lower classes’ activity for the benefit of the upper classes. The

very existence of value and of what appears in history as its permanent

representative, i.e. money is only a necessity as long as it measures

what must be taken from the former and given to the latter. Prior to

capitalism, value and money were not at the centre of production itself,

but they were already the signs of the power of some and the weakness of

others. Treasures, palace ornaments and the rich decorations of churches

were the signs of the social power of the nobles, the caliphs, or the

ecclesiastical authorities. From the beginning of class society, money

and value have been the symbols of domination. They became the supreme

instruments for it in capitalism. Hence, no equality can come from the

use of a means whose very existence is based on inequality. As long as

there will be money, there will be rich and poor, powerful and

dominated, masters and slaves.

Given that the search for profit requires that the cost of production be

as low as possible, and that what has already been produced or is used

in order to produce (machines, building, infrastructure) can only

transfer their own value, the only variable that can be adjusted is the

value of labour power. This value must be lowered to its minimum. But,

at the same time, only labour can generate value. Capitalism resolves

this insoluble problem by lowering the value of labour power only

relatively to the total value produced, while increasing the value of

labour power and the quantity of labour absolutely. This is made

possible by rising productivity, the rationalisation of labour, and

technical and scientific innovations. But it is then necessary to make

production grow in enormous proportions, to the detriment of much else

(natural spaces, for example). Nevertheless, such growth never exists in

a continuous manner and the reversal of this tendency is the cause of

the present situation.

The period from the Second World War to the beginning of the 70 s was

actually a very specific period for worldwide capitalism. It is

necessary to understand clearly the characteristics of this period, to

understand why it has disappeared, and why contrary to the hopes of

unions and liberals it will never return.

After the Second World War, destruction caused by war, and losses of

value during the long depression that had preceded it, created a

situation favourable to what economists call ‘growth’. This growth is

nothing less than a contradictory race to decrease the relative value of

labour power while its absolute value increases. The political

connections imposed by the antinazi alliance during the war allowed for

a form of power sharing both at a worldwide level (Eastern and Western

blocs) and at the social level within Western countries (recognition of

a certain legitimacy of struggles, allowing unions and left parties to

represent the interests of labour). The ‘Fordist compromise’ [2]

prevailed at the time. It consisted in establishing, through increasing

wages, a rising ‘standard of living’ in exchange for an enormous growth

in productivity and evermore arduous work. The value of the labour power

employed, spread out over a greater number of workers, was increasing in

absolute terms, but the total value of everything produced increased a

lot more due to the growth of productivity. The sale of all these

commodities the basis of what was called at that time ‘consumer society’

permitted the surplus value which appeared in production, the source of

capitalist profit, to be transformed into additional capital that was

reinvested in order to continually expand production. Yet this expansion

contains an internal limit: at a certain point there is too much capital

to valorise in relation to what it is necessary to produce and sell in

order to maintain a profit. In actuality a dynamic equilibrium was

maintained for more than two decades, up to the middle of the 1960 s

when a progressive decline set in, leading to the socalled ‘oil crisis’

of the 1970 s.

Some quick remarks about that period. Firstly, ‘prosperity’ was reserved

for Western Europe, North America and Japan, and even within these

privileged areas some parts of the proletariat were excluded from its

benefits, including intensively exploited and underpaid immigrants.

Secondly, Western prosperity could not mask the fact that what was given

to the proletariat was due to its character as the dominated pole in the

capitalist social relation. Increases in purchasing power were

accompanied by the massive selling of poorquality standardised

commodities. The expression that appeared at that time, ‘consumer

society’, is unfortunate since it was just as much a ‘producer society’.

The above mentioned general growth of total value necessitated putting

into circulation an always greater number of commodities. While the

lowering of every commodity’s value, made possible by mass production,

permitted a lowering of the relative value of labourpower (less work was

necessary in order to provide indispensable products for the worker’s

survival). Everyday ‘alienation’, a topic many times analysed and

criticised during that period, was nothing more than a consequence of

the imperatives of the circulation of value.

The oncefashionable concept of alienation has faded from present day

vocabulary. Literally speaking, alienation is the way in which our own

world seems extraneous to us (alien, a word derived from Latin, denotes

radical otherness; an alienated person is someone who is not themselves

anymore). ‘Producing for production’ is the byword under which

capitalist alienation appears to us. Material production seems to have

no other goal but itself. But what capitalism produces before everything

else is social relations of exploitation and domination. If it appears

as material production without a goal, it is because capitalism

transposes relations between individuals into relations between things.

The absurdity of producing for production, and of this apparent power of

things over people, is nothing more than an inverted image of the

rationality of the domination of a class over another that is to say, of

the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist class. The

ultimate goal of capitalism is not profit or ‘producing for production’,

it is to preserve the domination of a group of human beings over another

group of human beings. And it is in order to secure this domination that

profit and ‘producing for production’ are imposed as imperatives on

everyone. [3]

With the changes that have taken place since the 1980 s, alienation

stayed but ‘prosperity’ flew away. The crisis of 1973 made the decline

of the previous dynamic obvious. Capitalism was no longer able to

concede the same level of wage increases without impinging on the rate

of profit. Meanwhile the proletariat no longer settled for what

capitalists had given it so far. The 60 s and 70 s were a period of a

developing farreaching protest, which criticised labour and working

conditions as well as various other aspects of capitalist society.

Compromise was rejected in its most essential element: the tradeoff

between a rising standard of living and the total submission of the

proletariat in production and consumption. Contesting established

mediations of the workers’ movement, such as unions or official

communist parties, had the same meaning: the role assigned to the

working class by the ‘Fordist compromise’ was called into question.

Capitalism had therefore to liquidate the essential of what made it what

it was in the previous period. There were two, basically identical,

reasons for this: the fall in the rate of profit and the growth of

social struggle. Crisis and restructuring served this very purpose,

against a social and political background of a conservative and

repressive ‘neoliberal’ wave portrayed by politicians like Thatcher or

Reagan. But ‘neoliberalism’ was not the cause of the restructuring: on

the contrary, it was the restructuring, essential for the continuation

of capitalist exploitation, that was accompanied by this ideological

decorum. In some offbeat countries like France, it was ‘socialists’ who

had to obey the capitalist injunction. [4]

Now that restructuring is advanced, all its components appear clearly.

The objective was to lower the total cost of labour, and, for this

purpose, to find outside of the Western countries a cheap workforce not

burdened by the long history of the workers’ movement. A few ‘workshop

countries’, like Hong Kong or Taiwan, became the precursors. The

development of finance and the transformation of money which, since 1971

, is no more based on goldprovided the necessary mechanism [5] for the

development of a globally integrated capitalism: some areas dedicated to

manufacturing, some other areas more orientated to consumption and/ or

advanced manufacturing, still others abandoned because after all they

became superfluous as far as the imperatives of the circulation of value

were concerned. This global zoning was quickly developed, up to the

point of being nowadays fractally reproduced in all parts of the world.

Impoverished suburbs (or innercities) in the core are the image of

countries peripheral to worldwide flows: a human overflow that profit

does not know what to do with, and that must be penned in and kept under

surveillance. Worldwide competition has imposed on the western

proletariat a relative fall of those benefits that had resulted from the

previous historic compromise. And since there is no perspective of

improvement, it is police and repressive discourse which constitute the

State’s response to lost hopes.

The very existence of this global zoning shows that it is impossible to

force on newly industrialised countries, like India or China, the

pattern valid for the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe.

A rather mechanistic reasoning perceives the transformations that

affected the working class of Western countries one or two centuries ago

as repeating themselves, in an accelerated manner, in these countries.

Initially overexploited and immiserated, this class, through its

struggle for higher wages, attained a level of prosperity triggering the

virtuous growth cycle which is sustained by the expansion of a domestic

market. Such an evolution would however be hardly desirable for existing

capital in developing countries (given the limits already reached, it

would undoubtedly entail nothing more than irreparable ecological

disaster). Moreover, it seems to be, at least in presentday conditions,

squarely impossible. The development of the West which, let’s not

forget, was helped by the plundering of colonies cannot be repeated in

an identical form in an economy which is from the very start globally

integrated. The Chinese or Indian domestic market, even in spectacular

expansion, cannot possibly absorb all the growth of these countries,

which are in desperate need of Western outlets and even of Western

wealth, as their assets are denominated in us or European debt. To put

it on a more theoretical level, it is the entire mass of globally

accumulated value (not just that of these countries) which must find a

corresponding profit in world production. The limit of what has been

attained in the 1970 s is always there. The capital to be valorised is

too massive for the dynamic equilibrium of the three post-War decades to

be reinstated, and this is equally true for newly industrialised

countries and for Western countries . The restructuring of capitalism

following the crisis of the 1970 s has principally meant that capital

found another way to valorise itself, through lowering the cost of

labour, and we are still at this point.

Such an evolution had unavoidably an extremely important impact on class

struggles in Western countries. During the period preceding the crisis

of the 1970 s and the restructuring, the proletariat’s struggle had a

double meaning, no doubt contradictory but ultimately based nonetheless

on the same premise. On the one hand, the struggle could pursue

immediate objectives, such as an improvement of working conditions, an

increase in wages, and social justice. On the other hand, the struggle

also had as a result, and sometimes as an objective, the reinforcement

of the class of labour relatively to the class of capital, and even,

tendentially, the overturning of the bourgeoisie. These two aspects were

conflictual, and the antagonisms between the proponents of ‘reform’ and

the proponents of ‘revolution’ were permanent. Ultimately, however, the

struggle as such could mean either of them. The struggle for immediate

advantages and the struggle for future communism were articulated

together around the idea that victory could only come through a

reinforcement of the working class and its combativity. Needless to say,

the debates cutting across the working class were as many divisions

between proponents of revolution or reform, of parties, unions or

workers’ councils, etc that is to say, between leninists, leftists,

anarchists, etc. But they shared an experience of struggle where the

proletarian class, without being unanimous or even united (which it

never has been), was nonetheless a visible social reality in which all

workers could easily recognise themselves and with which they could

identify themselves.

What about now? If the debate between ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ has

simply disappeared since thirty years, it is because the social basis

that gave it meaning has been pulverised. The form which gave a

subjective existence to the working class for a century and a half i.e.

the workers’ movement has collapsed. Parties, unions and leftwing

associations are now ‘citizen’ or ‘democratic’ parties, etc., with an

ideology borrowed from the French Revolution, that is from the period

preceding the workers’ movement. It is however obvious that neither the

proletariat nor capitalism have disappeared. So what is missing?

At first sight we could of course say that it is the possible sense of

victory which has been modified. Without at all idealising previous

periods, nor underestimating retreats, we could say that since the

beginning of capitalism, the working class has staged struggles that

have translated into real transformations in its relation to capital: on

the one hand, through what was concretely achieved regulation of the

working day, wages, etc and, on the other hand, through the very

organisation of the workers’ movement into parties and unions. Any

struggle and any partial victory could take the form of the

reinforcement of the proletariat, whereas every defeat could appear as a

temporary retreat before the next offensive. It is true that this

reinforcement was at the same time a weakening . Partial victories and

the institutionalisation of the unions’ role were factors tending to

make the communist perspective increasingly more distant. As years went

by, this perspective became evermore remote and hypothetical. [6] Yet

the general framework of struggles notwithstanding all their limits was

the reinforcement of workers against employers.

Today however, and almost for thirty years now, struggles are

exclusively defensive. Every victory is just putting off the

announcement of defeat. For the first time in two centuries, the

existing dynamic points only towards a weakening of the class of labour.

Today’s emblematic case of a victorious workers’ struggle is Cellatex

the radical struggle for redundancy payments when employment is

eliminated. Victory means in such a case the end of everything that made

the struggle possible being workers of the same firm, now closed and no

longer the beginning of something new.

And this is not all. The transformations of work during these last

thirty years, under the pressure of massive unemployment, have modified

the worker’s relation to work, hence the relation of the proletariat to

itself. Employment is less and less the point of reference it had been

in the postwar period (something that also gave to the critique of work

the con tent of a radical critique of capitalist society as such).

People no more occupy a post for life. No career development can be

taken for granted. The worker is supposed to ‘evolve’, to get training,

to change the place of work and job. Precarity is becoming the rule.

Unemployment is no more a negation of work but just one of its moments:

a passage that all workers will have to cross repeatedly in their

lifetime. For many work has become a partial and temporary complement of

unemploy ment. Within firms, there is a proliferation of workers’

statuses and con ditions. External isation of tasks, subcontracting and

the use of temping agen cies are fragmenting and dividing workers into

multiple categories. The result is that it becomes difficult to wage a

struggle, as the very unity of those supposed to struggle together is

problematic from the start contrary to what held for the period

preceding the 1970 s, when this unity was more or less given

(independently of the divisions which would inevitably appear later).

The unity of those in struggle is now constructed by the struggle itself

as an indispensable means for achieving its goals. This unity is never

given beforehand, and, even if temporarily attained, it is always

subjected to the probability of division that already existed in the pre

vious period.

The struggle becomes therefore more difficult, but there is also

another, even more important difference: it will not produce the same

results. Precisely because unity is not given before the struggle

itself, it is not included in its official goals. A certain idea of

improvement of the workers’ condition, or more generally of the

proletarian condition, no longer forms a part of the struggle’s horizon.

Or else it only enters the horizon of defensive struggles, whose failure

is known beforehand (as in the case of struggles over pensions). As for

victorious struggles, they are victorious only insofar as they pursue an

immediate and partial goal, an individual goal one might say. In

capitalism we can no longer achieve any collective improvement of our

situation, but only an individual one, which cannot take the form of a

defence of the living condition of workers as such, and therefore can

only be transitory. Moreover, the end of the struggle, whether by

victory or defeat, marks the end of the unity constructed in the course

of the struggle, and thus the impossibility to continue or resume it. By

contrast, the previous period gave rise to a sense of progress which

seemed to make the ‘capitalisation’ of struggles possible, that is a

gradual piling up of the victorious results of past struggles. This was

probably an illusion, but it counted nonetheless in what people could

think of their own struggles and its possible consequences. [7]

In a certain sense, we could say that now any class struggle meets its

limit in the fact that it is the action of a class that no longer finds,

in its relation to capital, what seemed to have constituted in the past

its rationale and its force the fact of collectively embodying labour.

This relation of to one’s own proletarian being, a relation ultimately

external to one’s work, affects the way in which one can struggle and

obtain victory through struggle. Whatever we win is a loss relative to

the very conditions of the struggle . And whatever we lose is a loss

too. This de facto situation seems unshakeable. It would be wrong to

believe that the proletariat’s unity should be established as a

prerequisite, before the struggle, in order to have an effective

proletarian action. Unity exists only provisionally and only in the

course of the struggle and among those struggling, without the need for

any reference to the common belonging to a social class. ‘Class

consciousness’ is not something definite that could be recreated through

political propaganda, since it has never existed other than relatively

to a specific configuration of the capitalist social relation. This

relation has changed, and so has consciousness. We must admit it.

We must all the more admit it since this new configuration obliges us to

review our conceptions of communism and revolution and critically grasp

what they had been during the previous period. Indeed, when the

proletarian identity was confirmed by the relation of the proletariat to

capital the massively imposed conception of radical change largely

shared by reformists as well as revolutionaries, by anarchists as well

as marxists was that of a victory of the proletariat over the

bourgeoisie, after a mobilisation of the forces of the class of labour

using various methods (tradunion action and organisation, electoral

conquest of power, action of the vanguard party, self organisation of

the proletariat, etc.). Let it be said once more that this vision

offered a perspective for both reform and revolution and permitted them,

notwithstanding their confrontation, to place their quarrel on a common

background. This is why the revolutionary and the traditional reformist

perspective disappeared together from the terrain of official politics.

Those who speak of reform today, anywhere from the right to the extreme

left of the political spectrum, refer only to a reform in the management

of capitalism, and not to a reform leading to a break with capitalism.

This latter reference remained in the program of the socialist parties

up until the 1970 s, under an undoubtedly ideological form it is true,

but one whose existence was nonetheless revealing. Since then, this

perspective has simply been forgotten.

At present we can understand that the reformist as well as the

revolutionary perspective were at an impasse, because they comprehended

communist revolution as the victory of a class over another class, not

as the simultaneous disappearance of classes. From this stemmed the

traditional idea of a transition period during which the proletariat,

once victorious, assumes the management of society for an intermediate

period. Historically this has practically translated into the

establishment of a Sovietstyle State capitalism where the bourgeoisie

had been replaced by a class of bureaucrats linked to the communist

party, and the working class remained in fact exploited and forced to

provide the required excess of value. It is however to be noted that

this idea of a transition period was more widespread than the one,

strictly marxist, of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In various

forms, reformists (who counted on the conquest of power through the

ballot box) and even anarchosyndicalists (who envisioned a conquest of

power through union structures) were not strangers to this line of

thought. For them too, it was the triumph of the proletariat either

democratically, through State bodies, for reformists, or through

struggle, with their own (union) organisations, for anarchosyndicalists

which would give it the time to transform society by means of its

domination. And it was dissidents from both the anarchist and the

marxist camp who gradually elaborated a theory of the immediacy of

revolution and communism. On the basis of their theoretical explorations

in that time, and with the hindsight of the recent transformation of

capitalism, we are now in a position to understand that communism can

only be the simultaneous disappearance of social classes, not a triumph,

even transitional, of one over another.

The present period gives us a new conception of revolution and communism

that originates in these dissident critical currents of the earlier

workers’ movement, and that capitalism’s evolution shows to be adequate

to today’s proletarian struggles. Everyday proletarian experience poses

class belonging as an external constraint, therefore the struggle to

defend one’s condition tends to be confounded with the struggle against

one’s condition. More and more often in the struggles, we can discern

practices and contents which can be comprehended in this way. These are

not necessarily radical or spectacular declarations. They are just as

much practices of escape; struggles where unions are criticised and

booed without any attempt to replace them with something else, because

one knows that there is nothing to put in their place; wage demands

transforming into the destruction of the means of production (Algeria,

Bangladesh); struggles where one does not demand the preservation of

employment but rather redun-dancy payments (Cellatex and all its

sequels); struggles where one does not demand anything, but simply

revolts against everything that constitutes one’s conditions of

existence (the ‘riots’ in French banlieues in 2005 ), etc.

Little by little, what emerges in these struggles is a calling into

question, through the struggle , of the role assigned to us by capital.

The unemployed of some grouping, the workers of some factory, the

inhabitants of some district, may organise themselves as unemployed,

workers or inhabitants, but very quickly this identity must be overcome

for the struggle to continue. What is common, what can be described as

unity, stems from the struggle itself, not from our identity within

capitalism. In Argentina, in Greece, in Guadeloupe, everywhere, the

defence of a particular condition was perceived as utterly insufficient,

because no particular condition can any more identify itself with a

general condition. Even the fact of being ‘precarious’ cannot constitute

a central element of the struggle, one in which everybody would be able

to recognise themselves. There is no ‘status’ of precarious workers to

be recognised or defended, because being a precarious worker whether

involuntarily, or by choice, or by a combination of both is not a social

category, but rather one of the realities which contributes to the

production of class belonging as an external constraint.

If a communist revolution is today possible, it can only be born in this

particular context in which on the one hand being a proletarian is

experienced as external to oneself, while on the other hand the

existence of capitalism requires that one is forced to sell one’s labour

power and thus, whatever the form of this sale, one cannot be anything

else but a proletarian. Such a situation easily leads to the false idea

that it is somewhere else, in a more or less alternative way of life,

that we can create communism. It is not by chance that a minority, which

is starting to become significant in Western countries, falls eagerly in

this trap and imagines opposing and fighting capitalism by this method.

However, the capitalist social relation is the totalising dynamic of our

world and there is nothing that can escape it as easily as they imagine.

The overcoming of all existing conditions can only come from a phase of

intense and insurrectionist struggle during which the forms of struggle

and the forms of future life will take flesh in one and the same

process, the latter being nothing else than the former. This phase, and

its specific activity, is what we propose to call by the name of

communisation.

Communisation does not yet exist, but the whole present phase of

struggles, as mentioned above, permits us to talk about communisation in

the present. In Argentina, during the struggle that followed the riots

of 2001 , the determining factors of the proletariat as class of this

society were shaken: property, exchange, division of labour, relations

between men and women... The crisis was then limited to that country, so

the struggle never passed the frontiers. Yet communisation can only

exist in a dynamic of endless enlargement. If it stops it will fade out,

at least momentarily. However, the perspectives of capitalism since the

financial crisis of 2008 perspectives which are very gloomy for it at a

global level permit us to think that next time the collapse of money

will not restrict itself to Argentina. The point is not to say that the

starting point will necessarily be a crisis of money, but rather to

consider that in the present state of affairs various starting points

are possible and that an imminent severe monetary crisis is undoubtedly

one of them.

In our opinion, communisation will be the moment when struggle will make

possible, as a means for its continuation, the immediate production of

communism. By communism we mean a collective organisation that has got

rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve society by linking

individuals among them: money, the state, value, classes, etc. The only

function of these mediations is to make exploitation possible. While

they are imposed on everybody, they benefit only a few. Communism will

thus be the moment when individuals will link together directly, without

their inter-individual relations being superimposed by categories to

which everyone owes obedience.

It goes without saying that this individual will not be the one we know

now, that of capital’s society, but a different individual produced by a

life taking different forms. To be clear, we should recall that the

human individual is not an untouchable reality deriving from ‘human

nature’, but a social product, and that every period in history has

produced its own type of individual. The individual of capital is that

which is de-termined by the share of social wealth it receives. This

determination is subservient to the relation between the two large

classes of the capitalist mode of production: the proletariat and the

capitalist class. The relation between these classes comes first, the

individual is produced by way of consequence contrary to the all too

frequent belief that classes are groupings of pre-existing individuals.

The abolition of classes will thus be the abolition of the

determinations that make the individual of capital what it is, i.e. one

that enjoys individually and egoistically a share of the social wealth

produced in common. Naturally, this is not the only difference between

capitalism and communism wealth created under communism will be

qualitatively different from whatever capitalism is capable of creating.

Communism is not a mode of production, in that social relations are not

determined in it by the form of the process of producing the neces

sities of life, but it is rather communist social relations that

determine the way in which these necessities are produced.

We don’t know, we cannot know, and therefore we do not seek to

concretely describe, what communism will be like. We only know how it

will be in the negative, through the abolition of capitalist social

forms. Communism is a world without money, without value, without the

state, without social classes, without domination and without hierarchy

which requires the overcoming of the old forms of domination integrated

in the very functioning of capitalism, such as patriarchy, and also the

joint overcoming of both the male and the female condition. It is

obvious too that any form of communitarian, ethnic, racial or other

division is equally impossible in communism, which is global from the

very start.

If we cannot foresee and decide how the concrete forms of communism will

be, the reason is that social relations do not arise fully fledged from

a unique brain, however brilliant, but can only be the result of a

massive and generalised social practice. It is this practice that we

call communisation. Communisation is not an aim, it is not a project. It

is nothing else than a path. But in communism the goal is the path, the

means is the end. Revolution is precisely the moment when one gets out

of the categories of the capitalist mode of production. This exit is

already prefigured in present struggles but doesn’t really exist in

them, insofar as only a massive exit that destroys everything in its

passage is an exit.

We can be sure that communisation will be chaotic. Class society will

not die without defending itself in multiple ways. History has shown

that the savagery of a state that tries to defend its power is limitless

the most atrocious and inhuman acts since the dawn of humanity have been

committed by states. It is only within this match to the death and its

imperatives that the limitless ingenuity set free by the participation

of all in the process of their liberation will find the resources to

fight capitalism and create communism in a single movement. The

revolutionary practices of abolishing value, money, exchange and all

commodity relations in the war against capital, are decisive weapons for

the integration through measures of communisation of the major part of

the excluded, the middle classes and the peasant masses, in short for

creating, within the struggle, the unity which does not exist anymore in

the proletariat.

It is obvious too that the forward thrust represented by the creation of

communism will fade away if it is interrupted. Any form of

capitalisation of the ‘achievements of revolution’, any form of

socialism, any form of ‘transition’, perceived as an intermediate phase

before communism, as a ‘pause’, will be counterrevolution, produced not

by the enemies of revolution but by revolution itself. Dying capitalism

will try to lean on this counterrevolution. As for the overcoming of

patriarchy, it will be a major disruption dividing the camp of the

revolutionaries themselves, because the aim pursued will certainly not

be an ‘equality’ between men and women, but rather the radical abolition

of social distinctions based on sex. For all these reasons,

communisation will appear as a ‘revolution within revolution’.

An adequate form of organisation of this revolution will only be

provided by the multiplicity of communising measures, taken anywhere by

any kind of people, which, if they constitute an adequate response to a

given situation, will generalise of their own accord, without anybody

knowing who conceived them and who transmitted them. Communisation will

not be democratic, because democracy, including of the ‘direct’ type, is

a form corresponding to just one type of relation between what is

individual and what is collective precisely the type pushed by capital

to an extreme and rejected by communism. Communising measures will not

be taken by any organ, any form of representation of anyone, or any

mediating structure. They will be taken by all those who, at a precise

moment, take the initiative to search for a solution, adequate in their

eyes, to a problem of the struggle. And the problems of the struggle are

also problems of life: how to eat, where to stay, how to share with

everybody else, how to fight against capital, etc. Debates do exist,

divergences do exist, internal strife does exist communisation is also

revolution within the revolution. There is no organ to decide on

disputed matters. It is the situation that will decide; and it is

history that will know, post festum , who was right.

This conclusion might appear quite abrupt; but there is no other way to

create a world.

[1] The 1944 program of the French resistance was an accord between

Gaullist and Communist members of the resistance that put in place the

principle features of French postwar welfare capitalism. Translator’s

note.

[2] Henry Ford, the great American industrialist, defended between WWI

and WWII the idea that it is necessary to increase wages and

productivity in order to simultaneously develop production and the

market that could absorb products.

[3] Even on capitalists themselves, who do not control the rules that

put them in control.

[4] In France in 1981 François Mitterand, a liberal and ‘socialist’

politician, was elected as President. He had to give up most of his

social campaign promises in 1983 to follow a strictly ‘neoliberal’

economic policy. Translator’s note.

[5] Financial capitalism is not at all a parasitical growth on

productive capitalism, contrary to what leftist common sense would have

us believe. It is rather indispensable to the existence of productive

capitalism itself. The formidable development of finance since the

1970s, has, along with other factors, made the global and instantaneous

circulation of capital possible. It is a necessary instrument of the

global integration of cycles of production and consumption.

[6] Some libertarians or council communists were for that matter more

than happy to denounce the betrayal of union representatives. But such a

‘betrayal’ was in line with the institutionalisation of the workers’

movement, implied in the pro le tariat’s affirmation of its power. Union

representatives were traitors to the ex tent that they accepted to take

on a specific role in order to reinforce their own power; but they did

not create this role themselves. To content oneself with denouncing this

‘betrayal’ is not enough, to the extent that it could imply that

other—more honest—representatives could have done otherwise.

[7] Class struggles in newly industrialised countries such as China,

India, Bangla desh or Cambodia can be different, because the struggles

that take place there, wage struggles for instance, can bring about

victories with farreaching impacts. However, in a capitalism that is

globally integrated, this impact is never big enough to really transform

the characteristics of the capitalist social relation. These struggles

are not a replay of the struggles that took place in Europe at the

beginning of capitalism, if only because they can no longer be in line

with the revolutionary perspective of the years between 1840 and 1970.