It is something of a commonplace that revolutionaries have little to learn from past revolutions. Our opportunities, if they exist at all, lie in the terrible present and not the horrible past. Retracing the paths of past revolutions in the present, we can only find our path blocked, surely, for capitalism has learned well from its victories and our defeats, forging new manacles from the old alloys of class struggle. Capitalism has falsified the revolutionary practices of the past by adapting to them, restructuring the labor-process and reorganizing the circuits of accumulation in order to vastly weaken class struggle at the point of production and call into question any revolutionary strategy based upon the gradual empowerment of the working class. Our prospects in the twenty-first century are therefore different than they were in the nineteenth and twentieth.

And yet many aspects of capitalism and therefore our struggle against it remain the same. There is an invariant character to capitalist structure, from which we can derive certain invariants of revolutionary struggle. It remains as true today as it was in Marx’s time, for example, that in order to expropriate the wealth of capitalist society and distribute it freely one must first suspend if not annul the armed power of the state. Every revolution in history attests to this fact. In the work that follows I attempt to disclose what is eternal about the project of communist revolution against capitalism and class society—what will have needed to happen. In doing so, I hope to make it easier to identify those features of future revolutions which are contingent, variable, to be discovered by future revolutionary struggle against capitalism itself.

In this manner my book represents a contribution to the discourse on the invariance of the communist movement initiated by Amadeo Bordiga, and developed by many of his readers. In writing to me about this translation, my editors at La Tempête noted the lack of any engagement with Bordiga’s most influential exponent, Jacques Camatte. This is indeed a significant gap, and I had originally planned to write a short chapter on Italy in the 1970s, the movement of 1977, Camatte, and his Italian collaborators, such as Giorgio Cesarano, but could not fit it into the minimal word count allotted by my editors. I set these topics to the side in part because, although Camatte and his writings in Invariance are an important background to the confrontation between a theory of communization and a theory of the workers’ council after 1968, particularly through the attention they give to the German Revolution and the KAPD, Camatte quickly abandons the concept of revolution altogether and elaborates a theory of runaway capitalism that has broken free of the law of value and the proletariat altogether.

Camatte therefore draws very different conclusions from ‘68 than the writers I do discuss, such as Gilles Dauvé, whose later account of the German Revolution with Denis Authier I use because it is superior to Camatte’s and more sensitive to the actual historical conditions. By 1974, when Dauvé and François Martin’s Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement was published in English, based on articles they had written for Mouvement Communiste, Camatte was already operating on quite different principles than Dauvé and his associates and, in fact, had rejected any meaningful notion of invariance insofar as he rejected revolution. What was necessary after ‘68 was an anthropological “inversion,” a turning away not only from capitalism but an errancy inherent in the human species since its emergence, an errancy which capitalism has perfected but did not originate. We must leave the world, Camatte tells us, through a collective act of will and a non-conflictual affirmation of our common being with all of nature. These are the words of a saint. Unfortunately, we are all sinners long ago condemned to hell.

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Originally published in Heatwave 2. From May 29, 2025 release for The Future of Revolution at Red May (Town Hall Seattle)

1. The first condition of revolution is the destruction of the repressive state—army and police, judiciary and prison. All other conditions depend on the first: socialization of wealth by the revolution can only occur to the extent that the repressive apparatus has been suspended. From the looters in a riot to common production for common use, communism advances as property and its violently enforced right recedes.

   1. As the state is disarmed, the revolution is armed. But the powerful few are not the same as the weak many. Insurrection and state are asymmetrical. The revolution succeeds by dispersing rather than concentrating state violence. Frontal confrontation between the party of chaos and the party of order always leads to the reimposition of order. The eclipse of the state proceeds through desertion, mutiny, and fraternization between the forces of order and chaos. Fight against the drawing of lines, it reminds us, by fighting behind the lines.

2. The breakdown of the state is only the gateway to revolution. Revolutions are social and not merely political insofar as they are revolutions of the vast majority of humanity, the proletariat. The vast majority cannot become a new power over society, for then it would simply exploit and dominate itself, a contradiction in terms. It must abolish exploitation, domination, and all classes. This is therefore the second condition: the revolution must be massive, its organizations must be organizations of the vast majority, the proletariat. They must be universal except for this condition. They disallow elites and their enforcers but are otherwise unrestricted by any other social category or identity.

   1. The structures of revolution therefore must comprise, at least potentially, everyone. They must be both intensive, rooted within the fundamental structures of daily life of the common people, and extensive, linking people with others at a distance. Since the human species cannot be concentrated in a single location, such structures must also coordinate common action at a distance. They must delegate. However, since inclusivity is a first requirement, these delegates must be given explicit mandates and their decisions made revocable at will. Authority is both given and retained and therefore held in suspension. This is the third condition.

   2. There must be no difference between delegates and their delegators, which means that delegates serve for a limited period, and their work is simplified and rendered transparent to all. Where expertise is required, it is advisory. These must be working bodies, not governmental ones, both political and economic at once and neither, abolishing the division of labor between execution and conception, manual and mental labor, that structures capitalism.

   3. These structures presume the abolition of police power. The arming of the proletariat, of the vast majority, means that violence can only ever be directed outward, against the enemies of the revolution, and not inward as a backstop to the revolution. Directed inward, such violence violates the first and second conditions, reconstituting the police power of the state and excluding the majority from participation.

3. We can name this collection of three conditions the commune, inasmuch as the postulates outlined above correspond to what Marx, writing about the Paris Commune of 1871, calls the commune-form. This is a “thoroughly expansive form,” as Marx wrote, plastic and scalable. The commune is fractal, self-similar, exponentiating across any social distance, assigning delegates to delegates as needed. This expansivity means that it projects a future—it is both actuality and idea, actuality calling by way of idea to further actuality. In this way, the commune is not confined to a place or time but is universal. As a fragment of a future communism, it rallies communists around the world to its side. Its borders do not coincide with any nation, for its black flag spells death to the nation-state.

   1. The commune is, however, ambiguous, amphibian—as an expansive form its content remains unspecified. If simply a structure of direct democracy, it can easily become vehicle for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Who composes the commune? What does it do? How? And why? These are questions to which history poses an answer with the soviets and workers’ councils that appear first in Russia in 1905 and then again in 1917, and in 1918 and 1919 across central Europe.

   2. The historical workers’ councils have a content restriction—a restriction to proletarians—because they are transitional products of the mass strike, a class-wide proletarian action that exceeded the control of the institutions of the workers’ movement (parties and unions) and therefore required an extra-party instrument. During the German Revolution, participants were sometimes asked to show an employment card as evidence of proletarian identity in order to join. After the councils were defeated from within, voting to abolish themselves, many concluded that it was because non-workers were allowed to participate and become delegates, bringing many of the councils under the control of the unions and parties. It was necessary, they concluded, to ensure the proletarian character of the councils.

   3. But because the mass strike moves inexorably toward insurrection, these organizations for the conduct of the strike make plans to depose the police, to occupy the government buildings and the newspapers. As soon as they silence the machinery of capitalism, they also quietly maintain services vital to the revolution and to the reproduction of the vast majority. They keep the power station running and print newspapers with headlines announcing the revolution. To the proletarian content restriction, we must add a communist one. The councils must expand to include everyone and everything in a common plan to provision for common use. They must abolish production for profit and with it the commodity, money, and the law of value through common production for common use.

4. Thus, the workers’ council: the only new invention of the communist movement in the 20^th century. All else since can be seen as a refinement of the council-form as it supersedes the commune-form. But here again we need to distinguish between the council as actuality and the council as idea. In actuality, as I indicate above, the councils were not entirely proletarian instruments. But more importantly, the councils lacked a functional content restriction—instead of becoming avatars for the extension of the revolution and the socialization of wealth, delegates were reduced to electors for a national assembly, re-constituting the German state as a parliamentary democracy. In order to be revolutionary, the councils needed to be both proletarian and communist. They needed to be oriented toward the reproduction of the revolution, and the absorption of the vast majority, thereby abolishing all classes and with it the proletariat as a dominated class. This can only happen to the extent that such organizations are engaged in the destruction of generalized commodity production and its replacement by common production for common use.

   1. With these restrictions, the councils make clear what is meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Certain people are excluded as a matter of first principles—unless they relinquish the powers conferred upon them by capital and the state. Nor are these democratic, constituent bodies. They are communist by definition and presume a communist unanimity.

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At the center of the talk I have prepared today is a single image, a dialectical image if you will, which represents labor in capitalism at the same time as it negates it and prefigures its emancipation. This is Gerd Arntz’s 1931 woodcut print Fabrikbesetzung, Factory Occupation, which is based on Arntz’s experience of the German Revolution and its revolutionary workers’ councils, inaugurated and extended through the occupation of workplaces in November 1918 and beyond. Arntz had participated in the March uprising of 1920 in Dusseldorf—the first antifascist uprising—which reacted to the right-wing Kapp Putsch through a nationwide general strike in which workplaces were reoccupied and the workers councils of 1918 strengthened or reformed. Dusseldorf was then part of the zone controlled by the Red Army of the Ruhr, a constellation of anarchist, Spartacist, communist, and Independent factory groups and councils which for a brief time had annulled the armed power of the state and laid claim to the heartland of German and indeed European heavy industry.

Arntz’s print therefore represents events described directly in my book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the George Floyd Uprising, which analyzes among other important revolutions the German Revolution and particularly the revolutionary struggles in the Ruhr, where the movement for workers’ councils was strongest in part because social democracy had poorly organized the deskilled workers there, many of them Catholic, or migrants from Slavic areas of the German Empire, and who were as a result more sympathetic to the anarchists, Spartacists, and communists who broke with social democracy. The rising in the Ruhr was for partisans of the council then and after an image of the future, of victorious communism, and still remains a highwater mark of the global communist movement and the world revolution of 1917-23, murdered in Germany before it died slowly in Russia and elsewhere. Arntz’s print therefore must be set alongside other reflections on the fate of the German Revolution which emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s and which I discuss in my book.

Arntz’s print is also an image of what I call the “revolutionary example”, and which I define as “an idea embedded in practice, an idea with a future, an idea that promises, through its own generalization, to usher in communism.” The revolutionary example is “process that through its replication produces communism and through its self-reflexivity preserves and extends it.” This self-reflexivity is seen most easily in the graphic character of Arntz’s print—its simplifying use of positive and negative space, rendering it an easily reproducible image, a symbol even, not unlike the hammer and sickle which the little girl inscribes on the first floor of the factory. The whole image itself could be chalked or spraypainted on a factory wall, or a police station, not to mention reproduced as poster, handbill, or as illustration for the proletarian press, as it was and as it has been. It reminds us that the unfolding of councilar revolution is mimetic, as uprisings and occupations inspire other occupations and uprisings.

An Engelsian socialist, Arntz was the son of a tool manufacturer who apprenticed at his father’s factory in order to develop his artistic skills, taking some indications from artisanal labor at the same as he was engaged by the abstract constructivism of machine age. Like other members of the so-called Cologne Progressives—Franz Siewert and Hans Hoerle—Arntz was a partisan of the workers’ council and councilar revolution. The Cologne Progressive groups had evolved out of Cologne Dada and a transitional group of Stupid artists, and had connections, as is obvious by their style, to Russian constructivism and Dutch De Stijl painting. Arntz and the other Cologne Progressives were connected to the broader council communist milieu, particularly the AAUD-E, a council communist factory group particularly strong in Cologne and Bavaria, whose membership at this time was more pacifist, anarchist, and middle-class than the milieu around the AAUD, the factory group associated with KAPD. The factory groups were organizations which advocated for the formation and strengthening of workers’ councils and at one point comprised hundreds of thousands of persons. Presumably many of the workers in Arntz’s print would belong to such groups.

Key to the Cologne Progressive group was an idea of the artwork as embodiment of Gesetzmässigkeit, of a lawfulness or orderliness, a consistency in form, that could extend from one artwork to the other. Arntz developed this “systematic interest in consistency across works” in modular series of woodcut prints designed to be shown together, such as Twelve Houses of our Time. Indeed, Factory Occupation shares a visual language with the 1931 print Crisis, which represents the preconditions for occupation in the breakdown of capitalist reproduction. Arntz’s work in graphic design therefore develops a trans-individual technique as much as it develops a personal style. Arntz’s work is modular but also adaptable.

Factory Occupation is also the basis for the cover of The Future of Revolution, brilliantly adapted by Jonathan Pelham.I had written Verso’s design team a long letter about what I called, loosely, the aesthetics of the ultraleft and of council communism, focusing on Artnz and the Cologne Progressives and particularly this image. What was most important about this image was how it translated several key concepts in my book and in particular underscored the “secret” reading of Marx’s Capital that I develop there. As I argue, Marx’s Capital can be read as a description of communism via negativa. His analysis of the fetishism of commodities is meant to indicate two aspects of capitalism that must be overcome, aspects that can only really be seen and understood in the light of communism, and by comparison with a classless, stateless, moneyless society. In capitalism, relationships between people are mediated and replaced by relationships between things, rendering economic decision opaque and intractable not only to the workers themselves but even to the capitalists, who must produce without knowledge of full economic conditions and adjust prices after the fact. Communism abolishes this opacity and intractability, rendering capitalism first transparent and then tractable:

Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self­awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson’s products were exclusively the result of his own personal labour and they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally. The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour­time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour­time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution. (italics mine)

Factory Occupation is therefore an image of this rendering tractable and transparent, which is the first result of the communist measure, of the act of communist expropriation. The cut-away style taken from engineering and architectural imagery allows us to penetrate into what Marx calls the “hidden abode of production,” which the legal structure of the commodity form renders private and marks with a legal threat: No admittance except on business. Pelham’s adaptation captures this negativity beautifully through its use of lighter and darker colors, reminding us that the Arntz’s print is a negative, an image in reverse of factory labor, emancipated through the cuts in the pictorial plane that are likewise gouges in wood. The bar through the word “future” also emphasizes this negativity, the revolutionary example which is both “rallying cry and the thing itself,” to borrow from Kristin Ross’s description of the commune.

Arntz however produces this work long after the events to which it refers, in a period of left-wing defeat. Arntz’s print is therefore contemporary to one of The Future of Revolution’s central texts, The Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution, conceived and principally authored by one of the main figures in my book, Jan Appel. A working-class militant who had organized with the shop stewards movement in the northern shipyards during the WWI, participating in the November revolution and the January Spartacist insurrection, joining first the KPD and then the KAPD, and working in the Ruhr region, where as I noted earlier the struggle for workers councils was most intense, Appel had little time for study until he found himself serving a jail sentence in Dusseldorf for actions taken in 1920. It was then, he says, that he began a serious study of Marx, in order to figure out what the councils might have done in order to socialize the means of production directly. Reading Marx’s Capital in light of the struggle for communism in which he had participated, Appel is one of the first to see that it offers a vision of communism via negativa. From key passages like the one above and from his own experience, Appel develops a model for communist production and distribution.

Central to Marx’s claims in these passages, in my reconstruction, is that they define communist free association as common planning that is both tractable and transparent to participants. What Appel locates specifically in Marx is the notion that communism requires, among other things, a form of common accounting, in which participants account for each other by accounting for things directly in terms of socially necessary labor. Appel literalizes Marx’s “parallel with capitalist production” and takes labor time as the measure for this accounting. In the words of council communist Anton Pannekoek, who was eventually convinced by Appel of the importance of collective accounting, the single measure of socially necessary labor time simplifies the process of production, rendering it tractable:

As a plain and intelligible numerical image the process of production is laid open to everybody’s views. Here mankind views and controls its own life. What the workers and their councils devise and plan in organized collaboration is shown in character and results in the figures of bookkeeping. Only because they are perpetually before the eyes of every worker the direction of social production by the producers themselves is rendered possible.

The cut-away style of Arntz’s print is an aesthetic corollary to this work of rendering transparent. It represents the x-ray vision of revolutionary expropriation which lays bare the operations of capital and the labor-process. A key point of my book, developed in its final chapter, is that expropriation of the means of production will require expropriation of the knowledge and technique to which they correspond, and moreover the development of new knowledge and new technique consistent with the fundamental principles of communist production and distribution. The exchange of commodities in the marketplace, in public, renders private their use or consumption, including the use of labor. In Arntz’s print these insides and outsides—public and private worlds—are laid open to the viewer through the positive and negative space of the print. This is a work of abstraction against abstraction—in order to be laid open the viewer, the factory must be disconnected from the circuits of capital, the power line cut, the wheels of the machines stopped and the control dials stilled. Insofar as it depicts political violence, Arntz’s cuts represent the counter-violence of expropriation—the raised fist to the foreman on the second floor, the guns to the boss on the third. But already we can see the peace and freedom which this expropriation promises to the generations who might emerge after it, the child who can wander freely in this world of armed adults and step into the factory to mark it with a hammer and sickle, cradled by the masses outside who bear but do not use their arms, suspending the violent power of the state. This communist mark, or sigil, this transformation of act into symbol, into revolutionary example, seems obversely related to the strange equations extruded to the upper left corner of the building’s surface, rendering both transparent and opaque the calculations of capital which turn out be so many zeros, so many empty ratios.

By the time Arntz made this print he was already living in Vienna and collaborating with the socialist philosopher and economist Otto Neurath. Neurath also had direct experience of the German Revolution, and had been imprisoned for his participation in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic, to which he had contributed an economic plan for the socialization of production in both Saxony and Bavaria. Neurath thus represented the maximal position in the so-called socialization debate, which attended the German Revolution and in which economists from the SPD and the Independents proposed plans for the socialization—in most cases, nationalization— of production. These debates excluded the ultraleft council communists, and even though Neurath argued for “total socialization” against the partial socialization plans of other left-wing economists, he nonetheless excluded what he called “Anarchistic Neo-Communism,” eschewing violent expropriation.

Neurath, however, shared with Appel and with council communism a commitment to rendering production both tractable and transparent. Neurath had seen Arntz’s work Mitropa in 1926 in Dusseldorf, when his Museum of Society and Economy was participating in an exhibit in the same city. Neurath was working on a method for the visual presentation of economic data, in order to facilitate democratic economic decision-making. Neurath saw in Arntz’s commitment to socialization and his emphasis on artistic Gesetzmässigkeit someone who could help him develop a complete visual language, and invited the artist to join him in Vienna and work for the museum. Together they develop a visual statistical language composed of pictograms (singaturen) and abstract images (leitbilder), an International System of Typographic Picture Education (ISOTYPE), establishing offices in Moscow and convening international conventions.

Like Appel, Neurath came away from his experience with a commitment to transparency and tractability, but one somewhat at odds with the one Appel discovered in Marx. For Neurath, socialist coordination of production and distribution as production for need and production of use-values need take account of various in-kind measures, quantities of incommensurable goods. Behind these incommensurable goods and the choice to combine them in specific quantities lay incommensurable desires and needs, which emerged from incommensurable social values. Socialist accounting would therefore need to be “multi-criterial,” as Aaron Benanav has written in his development of Neurath’s ideas. For Neurath: “Planning could no longer be understood as a technical process for selecting the best solution. It had to be re-conceived as a democratic procedure for navigating among divergent priorities.” Measuring use-values according to socially necessary labor time, as The Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution does, will not help answer the question of how to choose among these priorities—since optimizing for labor-time might create suboptimal outcomes according to these other values: ecological mitigation, remediation of sectoral imbalances (between health, care, education, housing, on the one hand, and industrial growth, for example, on the other). The labor-time measure therefore continues to occlude or render opaque these fundamental technical qualities, the resources and capacities of society, obscured by the equations extruded to the picture plane in Arntz’s print.

In Vienna, Neurath had been introduced to Rudolf Carnap and other positivists, and had been a principal author of the so-called Vienna School philosophical manifesto. Positivist socialism meant the development of universal methods of communication—Marx’s call to render transparent the means of production required a rehabilitation of language, thought, and even metaphysics, a Modernist universalism similar to projects like Esperanto, which Neurath promoted, and CK Ogden’s Basic English, which he translated into his pictorial language. In this strange encounter between constructivism, positivism, and socialism, Neurath, Arntz, and Marie Reidemeister developed what they would call ISOTYPES, a grammar for pictorial statistics in which to represent in-kind quantities and facilitate democratic production decisions.

The visual statistics Arntz and Neurath produced are part of Neurath’s larger economic project to adduce “relief maps of the quality of life” from a “topography of the situations of life”—that is to say, of fixed quantities of socially useful elements: housing, food, transportation, etc. Neurath’s thinking is topographical rather than algebraic because a reasoning in terms of in-kind quantities will produce incommensurable situations and incomparable possibilities for economic planning, in which it can not be said for certain whether one plan is better than other. In such cases, it comes down to choosing between the two based on value distinctions that are multi-criterial. These relief maps of situations of life Neurath describes, then, as a three-dimensional collection of blocks stacked atop a grid whose columns are people and whose rows are various comparable magnitudes of separate qualities of life translated into the height of blocks. The grid therefore approximates a curved plane that maps the totality of these features. Choosing a new production plan would therefore raise and lower the blocks in particular areas—health, care, education, housing, transport, ecological remediation. These production plans would be incomparable because different people will value different maximizations—some people want to work less, some people want better housing, etc. A topography of the situations of life is therefore an indicative tool, describing various optima as maximal points of curves on the approximative topographic plane, a helpmeet to planning that fundamentally comes down to choosing between incommensurable plans.

Today the influence of Neurath and Arntz’s work together is visible everywhere—in the visual design of books and magazines, in the symbols found on roadsides, in the emojis and symbols of social media, and in the standardized visual language which accompanies consumer products with international markets. Indeed, perhaps the best example of the fate of their idea is the IKEA instruction manual, which transforms the techniques of participatory planning by incorporating production into the space of consumption.. At the same time, in our pre-post-literate and app-addled age, Neurath’s claim that “images unite; words divide” seems quaint if not downright wrong-minded. Arntz’s typifying graphic style can surely prove divisive, especially when it comes to the representation of people, where typification is inseparable from social norms around social identity, gender performance, etc. By representing people in terms of the social function these images might end up reifying that social function. With Neurath’s economic statistics it should be noted that insofar as they present to their viewer a topography of incommensurable goods, they also rely on an underlying commensuration in which different types of goods are aggregated together. For mass-produced consumer goods this is not so much of a problem—and here standardization will be an important part of communist production and distribution, eliminating the meaningless distinctions between different brands induced by the commodity form, and ensuring interoperability for different component parts, in contrast to capitalism proprietary waste. But in order to measure housing, health care, or education as magnitudes of a single quality one would need to abstract away from all kinds of important differences that are not easily inventoried, and can only be ascertained by comparing money prices or engaging in an extensive and probably testimonial survey.

This means that images alone are unlikely to suffice. Nonethless, a revolutionary reorganization of society will require the kinds of utopian encyclopedism—a utopedia—that Neurath and Arntz innovated, even if language, narrative, and testimony will need to be a part of it. As for visual style, one possible direction is indicated by the illustrations of Prole.Info—arguably influenced by Arntz. In texts like “Abolish Restaurants” and “The Housing Monster,” Prole.Info lays bare the nature of contemporary labor. What is striking about Prole.Info’s visual style however is the facelessness of the characters or types of contemporary labor, reminding us that capitalism forces “character masks” upon everyone. But the indifference and facelessness of these characters then also indicates the possibility of a disidentification with labor and social role, a reminder that people are not only what they do, and that in socialism, social identity need not be determined by social role but by the free, varied, multi-criterial development of each and all. It reminds us that Arntz provides in Factory Occupation not only an image of emancipated labor but also the degradation of people as labor under capitalism, in which the personification of things corresponds to the reification of people, and particularly but not only workers. These are best seen as roles not people, but roles in revolt against a world arranged against them.

In my previous post, I wanted to indicate why I think the Nunes book is important, useful, and underrated. Now I want to spell out some of my criticisms of the book. My first criticism is that I think the account which we get in the book of the emergence of the “network paradigm” lays the emphasis too much on technological change, and the internet in particular. Of the four causes that Nunes gives for this emergence—information technology; cheaper organizing via information technology, the crisis of centrism, and the waning of workers’ parties and unions—the fourth is, in my view, the most important, whereas Nunes’s book lays emphasis on the first two. (I should add that I think 1 and 2 are the same, and 3 not a real thing). But we can easily deduce that the fourth is the determinative cause since the examples he gives of “organizational ecology” date from the 1970s and not the 1990s. If the ecological view emerges with the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements or the “area of Autonomy” in Italy in 1977 and not the networked, alter-globalizing Zapatista Liberation Army, then we cannot attribute it to digital technology primarily. The crisis of the parties and unions—or what Endnotes and others have described as “end of workers’ identity” of the “end of the workers’ movement” or “programmatism”—emerges much earlier than digital technology, and is therefore determinative.

Furthermore, some of what Nunes attributes to the network paradigm has been a consistent feature of class struggle for as long as we have examples. Informal organization—aggregate action—has always been part of the mix, and we can find recognition of this “self-activity” in Marx, Luxemburg, and others. Nearly every revolution has begun as a consequence of informal organization with formal organizations playing catch up. Since the 1990s, digital technology has acted as a multiplier for this kind of informal organization, but the decline of formal working-class organization is, in my view, far more consequential. Adopting an evolutionary framework, Nunes argues that informal organizing now out-competes formal organization as a result of the low levels of initial investment digital technology affords—anybody can, potentially, reach millions with a single tweet or TikTok. In a fascinating moment in the text, Nunes suggest that, rather than an era without vanguards, digital technology has allowed nearly anyone to become a vanguard, such that the leadership function, rather than having disappeared, has been distributed more widely. Anyone who has participated in contemporary social movements will recognize the truth of this assertion, even if when, we trace things back to their origins, we often find the actions of vouched groups rather than scattered individuals. Aggregate action (informal organization) and collective action (formal organization) are always co-present. It’s not that intentional, deliberate action has disappeared—in fact there is more of it than ever, it’s just that now it’s in the hands of more people.

In assigning relative weight to these various causes, we should place emphasis, however, on the inability of formal organizations to “get the goods” and downgrade the lower investment allowed by digital technology. The affordances of the digital are not, in this regard, all that different than print—or graffiti, for that matter—which is why we see the “ecological” paradigm emerging in the 1960s and 1970s and not the 1990s. In the era of the classical workers’ movement—let’s date it from 1871-1968, for convenience—the unions and parties which were able to assert partial leadership over social movements did so because they were able to deliver tangible benefits to participants through bilateral negotiations with the state and capitalists. But today we live in an era in which, to put it bluntly, due to weakening growth, elites are much less willing to negotiate. There is no longer a compromise position and class struggle has become much more zero-sum. As such, the fruits of formal organization are diminished as a function of investment in such organization, and it is this which explains their decline, and the preference for informal organization, not some deleterious ideology emerging from the Port Huron Statement and sent around the world. It’s not so much that informal organization has become cheaper but that everything else has become more expensive.

The other problems with Nunes’s approach might be described as formalism and monism. Nunes offers us a theory of “political organisation” and not a theory of revolution or communism. As such, its strengths (its lucidity about organisation) rest on weaknesses. In its Spinozism, it defines organization as the “capacity to act” and “produce political effects” but are all capacities and effects equal? While Nunes states that his aim is a theory of political organization rather than organization as such, it’s hard to see how his definition is specific enough to emancipatory, revolutionary, or communist organization—ie, the forms of organization we care about. Doesn’t this definition work for fascist organization as well? Doesn’t it describe the organizing forms of the state and capital? Are those not “political”? A related problem is that (revolutionary, emancipatory) political organizations are usually described and analyzed in the book without any reference to antagonist organizations. But the goal of communist organization is not just to multiply the power of such organizations but to negate the already-existing organizations by which proletarians are always already organized: the organizations of capitalism and the state. In other words, the theory of political organization we get in Nunes’s book lacks negativity and does not sufficiently distinguish emancipatory from counter-emancipatory organizations. This is because its definition of organization is formalist or perhaps functionalist but is missing “content,” missing a sense of what such organization is for, ultimately—ie, the production of classless, moneyless, stateless society. It is possible that such a society can be defined as a kind of organization but the book does not do so. Marx’s definition of communism as a state of affairs in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” shares something with Nunes’s definition of organization as “capacity to act” but contains some additional predicates. Development is not only capacity to act but capacity to cultivate new capacities and experiences. In other words, we can’t define organization formally but must think about content, about what people want and what people are. This is something which Nunes resists, given the post-Althusserian and antihumanist theory he relies on, but I don’t think it can be avoided if we want to develop a theory of emancipatory organization.

When I was writing my review of Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, I thought that I would end by comparing the Bevins and Nunes. Like Bevins, Nunes’s theoretical tract is a “response to the cycle of struggles that began in 2011” but unlike Bevins, Nunes does not think that the failures of this cycle of struggles can be attributed to ideology alone. While he does offer a critique of “horizontalism,” like Bevins, he recognizes that this ideology is, in part, a response to certain underlying material conditions that remain, for better or worse, unavoidable. The nature of capitalist society has changed and so, therefore, has the nature of class struggle. Leaving aside whether this would be desirable or not, attempting to turn back the clock to an era in which unions and parties and other formal organizations mediated class struggle is itself ideological, an expression of left melancholy that needs to be overcome.

So what is it that has changed? The place to look for answers is in the heart of the book, “Elements for a Theory of Organisation 1.” As Nunes writes, “the idea of horizontality” emerges for three reasons: “an increased awareness of the interconnectedness brought about by capitalist globalization; the discovery of the organizing and mobilizing affordance provided by the internet; and the inspiration coming from autonomous movements in the Global South, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico and those that emerged in Argentina in the wake of the 2001 crisis.” In other words, while the “idea of horizontality” may be ideology, what it responds to are very real changes in the nature of society: globalization, information technology, and new form of class struggle emerging in response to these. Note how different this account is from Bevins, who attributes horizontalism—or the idea of horizontality—to ideology alone. As he writes later in the chapter:

Today’s revolts emerge from a conjuncture marked by the convergence of four historical trends that, at least for now, appear irreversible. The first is the increasing mediatisation of everyday life, and specifically the use of digital platforms that generate an enormous potential for what Manuel Castells dubbed “mass self-communication.” The second is the vertiginous drop in organising costs resulting from that, which enables complex collective coordination on a scale that in the past could only have been achieved through mass organisations. The third is the crisis of the “post-political” centrist consensus dominant in most countries since the end of the Cold War, which has intensified a long-running loss of confidence in liberal democratic institutions across the world. The fourth is the decline, in membership as well as political relevance, of most mass organisations that played a central role in convoking and organising popular struggles in the twentieth century.

Only reason 3 is a matter of ideology—the others are material changes in the nature of contemporary life that are irreversible except through other material changes. Fighting against the ideology of horizontalism without addressing these underlying material conditions is quixotic because these new forms offer both potentials and drawbacks. The easiness of networked organizing outcompetes formal organizations time and again, and therefore one must accept that, for the time being, this will be a big part of the mix, even if one imagines, as Nunes does, an important role for formal organizations. The result of this recognition is that Nunes suggests we stop thinking about organization as formal organization alone but look at “organisational ecology” which includes both formal and informal organization. In fact, Nunes argues that since the 1960s and 1970s this ecological perspective has been implicitly adopted by movements where a leading formal organization was lacking, such as “Autonomia” or “the movement of ‘77” in Italy and the Gay and Women’s Liberation Movements.

This brings us to some of the most important points of the book, with regard to contemporary debates about organization. Today there is a tendency to treat organization as a quantity which can be measured—organization is something which class struggle today lacks, either in whole or in part, and therefore the problems confronting us are problems of “disorganization.” But for Nunes organization is just what there is, and what some people describe as disorganization is simply a different form of organization. This is a point that has been made many times before, including by me. What people describe as spontaneous, reflexive, and disorganized is often, in fact, quite organized. Riots don’t lack organization, though they do typically lack formal organization. Contemporary movements are, in fact, a kind of fractal—when you zoom in on the disorganization of the riot what you find are, in fact, planned, conscious actions that merely appear disorganized in aggregate. This insight applies the other way, too. When one examines the behavior of a formal organization, what often appears highly organized in aggregate is often quite spontaneous, unplanned, or chaotic when one zooms in, since all kinds of decisions taken within organizations are done so informally. “Spontaneity” is therefore a particularly problematic concept.

Nunes also offers a criticism of another concept, “self-organization,” that is often used by the ultraleft to describe the power of informal organization. But what is the self of self-organization? What we call self-organization is often not really very self-organized but rather in response to some kind of other-organization. In class society, and in struggles against it, there is no real self-organization, since that would imply full autonomy for the self-organized group when, in fact, what we describe as self-organization is a reaction to heteronomy—to the fact of being organized by bosses, cops, unions, and parties.

The critique of self-organization that Nunes offers is gotten at by way of the discourse of cybernetics, and particularly second-order cybernetics. Cybernetics is, in some senses, a study of self-organization. It defines animals, people, machines, and even organizations by their capacity to act on and regulate themselves through circular causality. But any organism deemed self-organizing is always in relation to whatever is outside the self, from which it derives energy, resources, etc. Even though the human body self-regulates it isn’t really self-organized since it is partly produced by forces outside itself, hence second-order cybernetics. This is a useful framework and one of the best aspects of the book is the way it takes ideas from cybernetics and shows their utility. As much as this discourse has been used by capitalism to naturalize economy and society, there are some important truths contained within it, and for better or worse, we can’t get away from the language of “emergence” when it comes to describing society and its class struggle. Without the notion of emergence, it becomes hard to understand how things happen without anyone intending them. Though the Hegelian dialectic is another way to get at this, “emergence” is here to stay and helps explain how movements always surprise us and how they unfold in ways that are beyond the control of individuals

In a subsequent post, I will offer some criticisms of Nunes, and indicate some of the problems with his approach.

Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley, is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them.

Historical typicality of characters; encounter with historical subjects who are not the narrative protagonists; a dialectics of protagonicity in which the contradictions of class society are internalized as character and externalized as action; a treatment of history as the unfolding of a two-sided necessity, where historical suffering is the concomitant of progress; and a treatment of history that looks forward to the moment of its writing, not attempting to capture the past as it really was but the past as prehistory of the author’s present. In his essay for the LRB, Anderson, who is notorious for the wideness of his reading, tells us that few novels in the 20^th century lived up to this model. He can find only a few, mostly from the peripheries of the world system: from the 1950s “Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairene Trilogy . . .and in Indonesia and Arabia two remarkable cycles of nationalist fiction that can be regarded as, in their way, cousins of Mahfouz: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, composed between 1975 and 1985, and Abdelrahman Munif’s quintet, Cities of Salt, written in the 1980s and already much freer in its handling of time and probability.” The problem, it turns out, is the necessity for a progressive historical consciousness—if one relaxes the criterion, then there are more candidates, for example, Giovanni Di Lampedusa’s exquisite The Leopard which fulfills Lukacs model completely except that it is pointedly anti-progressive, treating history as the slow unfolding of a bourgeois world which erases all traces of the aristocratic past. I would add, also, James Welch’s brilliant Fools Crow, which confronts squarely the genocide of Native Americans and Welch’s own ancestor with a consciousness of the future that is not progressive but seeks to preserve his ancestry and the historical past of the Americas.

What is lost for the most part after 1945 and this is certainly true of American literature is not just the sense of history as progressive but also the notion of historical necessity itself. This is a key element in what Jameson diagnosed as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” and to which he gives the name “waning of historicity.” Communism is our antiquity, as I’ve said. Whereas Marx, Lukacs, most socialists and many liberals alike once thought communism the certain future of humanity, it now seems uncertain that humanity even has one, and certainly few today feel that communism is the only future for humanity – indeed too few believe it is a future all for reasons that ultimately originate in the stagnation of capitalism and its senescence. For me this doesn’t mean that Lukacs is wrong about the historical novel as machine for historical consciousness—in fact, I believe the historical novel is perhaps the only form of the realist novel that has life left in it. What it does mean is that the kind of historical consciousness compatible with the communist prospect today is entirely different than Lukacs imagines.

This is a very long preamble to my main topic, which is Terry Bisson’s alternate history novel Fire on the Mountain. This is quite simply an excellent, beautiful, and deeply revolutionary book. I am tempted to say that it is a shame it is not better known—and it is—but there is a sense in which the book is simply too revolutionary. If you are a communist and you know something about American history this book will blow you away, but unfortunately that is a very small reading demographic and perhaps readers who lack these predicates find it bewildering. For me it's like discovering an old friend, if something is even possible. What’s interesting is that Bisson manages to produce, in my mind, a deeply hopeful and furthermore believable vision of historical progress whose ultimate bequest is to the optimism of revolutionaries in the  bleak 1980s. Bisson apparently began writing this novel, in which John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry succeeds, while imprisoned for refusing to testify to a grand jury. He was part of the John Brown Anti-Klan Action Committee and May 19^th Committee, groups connected to the Weather Underground. The grand jury was likely connected to a series of bombing in the early 80s, for which Marilyn Buck and others were later convicted. The JBAKC put antiracism and antifascist work front and center, counterprotesting white supremacist rallies and are a point of contact between the Weather Underground networks and 80/90s antifascism. Bisson dedicates his novel to Kuwasi Balagoon and the Black Liberation Army, and the PM press re-issue of the book contains a glowing preface from Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Jameson has said that science fiction and the historical novel are mirror images of each other, and the alternate history novel is perhaps the clearest testament to this connection. Bisson embeds a historical novel within his alternate history—the characters in 1950s Nova Africa, in a universe where world socialism is triumphant, encounter a manuscript retelling the events of Brown’s victory at Harper’s Ferry, and the subsequent guerrilla war, from the perspective of a slave who eventually joined Brown and Tubman’s army and went on to participate in the socialist revolutions of the 19^th century. Here is a perfect middle character—a slave who has more freedom than many freedmen, living at the very edge of slave society in West Virginia who encounters Brown himself obliquely and does not participate in many of the central battles and events, which remain murky. Bisson also writes, I must say, one of the most unselfconscious black characters by a white writer I can think. It is as if this alternate timeline allowed Bisson to liberate himself of the writerly burden of white guilt.

But what I wanted to say is that this novel recovers the progressive historical consciousness that Lukacs idealizes in perhaps the only way possible, not by narrativizing necessity but by exploring contingency. Here is the world which Marx and Engels expected, a world where there is no Lukács because the revolution begins in the late 19^th century, as expected. Bisson’s book is marvelously engaged with the history of socialism and abolition and 19^th century revolutionaries. He knows his history, and the novel might be read as an extended meditation in novel form on the potencies within W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction. This is a universe where Brown and Tubman rout Lee from the Blue Ridge, threatening to sweep through the cotton belt in a socialist version of Sherman’s march, where  “there is talk of an international detachment of Garibaldini gathering in Mexico to aid the rebels and, some say, recapture Texas and even California” and “German socialists, veterans of ’48 are openly drilling with arms in Union Square,” where “in St. Louis street fighting has erupted between the Socialists and the Know-Nothings and local Copperheads.”

I am trying to reserve some details for the reader, since this post is a recommendation and the novel is full of surprises. The treatment of Lincoln is a delight as is the handling of 1950s socialist world, its pro-ecological technology and projects of reconstruction. What is remarkable is how little Europe seems to figure in this world—Africa has become a center of world development, and people travel by airship from Nova Africa to Africa. This is of course a vision of American and world revolution, for readers who know, that derives directly from the 1920s and 1930s CPUSA, where the US would be ripped apart by various national liberation movements, establishing a Black nation in the black belt of the South. This model was influential upon the 60s and 70s Marxist-Leninist groups that came out of the Weather Underground such as the May 19^th Organizing Committee, which was fully oriented toward national liberation movements and people’s war as the revolutionary horizon in the US and elsewhere. The novel maps 60s and 70s guerrilla insurgencies back into the past. I am of course critical of these programmatic politics, and ambivalence about nationalism and the state within Leninism. But this is a world in which, just as there is no Lukacs there is also no Lenin or Stalin—the dialectic of socialism and communism unfolded differently, so who knows what there is or isn’t to criticize. In a way, the novel asks me to consider the contingency of many of these positions, the fact that their meaning derives from the whole of a history that is here wholly different. I’m not a flag guy but this moment in the novel, where the protagonist sees Brown’s army and their red black and green flag, gives me chills:

There were sixteen of them, mounted on fair-to-good horses, with one mount doubled. They all held identical Sharps carbines at the ready, blackened with soot so that they wouldn’t gleam; and they were all masked. They all had black faces but several had white hands showing through the laid on soot…I had never seen so many black men on horseback, carrying such weapons. But the most astonishing thing all was, they carried a flag—a new flag, an unknown flag. It was big as a sail, and green and black and red in broad stripes, like Ahmad’s of the Sudan or Garibaldi’s flag of Italy (though I had seen neither at the time); all I knew was that it was not the American flag and the man carrying it was black like me.

If this were a moment in a realist novel, it would likely make Lukács shout for joy—inasmuch as The Historical Novel is also an engagement with Stalinist popular front politics --but what would he say about Bisson’s novel? I think it’s clear he would hate it from the outset, linking the entire genre of the alternative history novel to a reactionary probabilistic and ultimately Nietschzean (or perhaps Benjaminian) ontology of history. There is a beautiful moment in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s preface—reading from confinement a book begun in confinement and against, among other things, confinement—where he mentions many-worlds theory:

According to classic multi-dimensional theory, there are thousands (millions?) of alternative universes where every probability has its potential fruition. If that is so, there is one where Fire on the Mountain is not sci-fi but a history book on what was.

No doubt L. would link this view to Nietschze on the eternal return, if not Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars, also written from confinement and which advances a similar philosophy, perhaps, as response to the despair of a failed revolutionary. I’m not so sure, however, and don’t think the novel encourages a passive acceptance of one’s place among an infinity of possible timelines. I think it focuses the reader on the real tasks of revolution and that we do not really know what will or will not work. In fact, I think it’s one of the finest novelistic treatments of revolution I’ve read.

The German Revolution traces the steps that Luxemburg lays out in “The Mass Strike.” From 1916, a strike wave sweeps through the German war industry, spreading to the soldiers and sailors and the rest of the economy. The political expression of this mass strike is Luxemburg’s Spartacist League, comprising the left wing of the Independent Social Democrats, who had broken with the SPD. Parallel to this, is the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revoutionaere Obleute) movement, a clandestine organization of factory delegates that grew to several thousand by 1918, capable of mobilizing vast sections of the working class. The Obleute anticipate the factory groups (unionen) that would emerge in 1919 and 1920 but also resemble the soviets of 1905, likewise built to conduct the mass strike. The militarization of the economy and conscription had decimated the trade unions, and the Obleute provided organizational structures for the young, poor, hungry  workers who manned the late German war economy. Militarization also collapsed the political into the economic and directed all struggle toward the state, now the main employer.

In 1918, this mass strike surpasses the 1905 Russian Revolution and joins the 1917 one, toppling the German Empire. A chief difference between 1905 and 1917 or 1918 is that soviets form in the military ranks as well. When the mass strike spreads to the barracks or the ships it by necessity turns to the formation of councils for the simple reason that sailors can’t go anywhere and, by refusing command, effectively dissolve the state for themselves where they are. Every insubordinate ship or barracks is already a soviet. As the mass strike develops, ending the war and bringing down the state in the process, councils form in the ranks of the military and also wherever the Obleute are strongest, in Berlin especially and in the shipyards and munition plants in Hamburg and Bremen. The German Empire collapses and control over the economy rests in the hands of an armed working class, in some places now organized independently of the SPD and the trade unions. In much of the country, however, especially where the trade unions still retain control, the situation is uncertain. In the days after the revolution, revolutionary marines spread through the country, declaring the republic and instructing workers to elect councils, the composition of which varies wildly, and may include professionals, municipal staff, or trade union representatives.

Fate came at the councils fast, with the Berlin councils forced to act as representative of the councils at large in holding off the reconstitution of the state and military under the leadership of the SPD, who were from the first day busy coordinating with Entente powers and liberals to form new ministries. By December, delegates had been elected from all the councils and, through the substitutionist and arithmetic manipulation of trade union and SPD officials and to the great dismay of the newmade partisans of the council, voted to cede power to the Ministries of the German liberal state in waiting and to call for a constituent assembly. But the situation was by no means under control for the simple reason that the workers were in possession of vast numbers of arms and the soldiers and sailors were organized into revolutionary units. 

The Spartacist uprising of January, in consequence of which Luxemburg was murdered, was an attempt to forestall the SPD consolidation of power and particularly the reconstitution of the German army and the police. The battle was for the Berlin military barracks and for control over the press and the police; defeat of the Berlin proletariat would essentially end the revolution there. Elsewhere, however, the proletariat remained armed, especially in the Ruhr mining region where in 1919 workers struck repeatedly to demand socialization of the industry and workers’ control. The Ruhr uprising of 1920 developed from the organizational structures of 1919, and particularly the new “factory-groups” like the anarchist FAUD. These factory groups responded to the manipulation of the councils at 1918 Congress by the trade unions by organizing parallel workplace organizations—organizations that were both political and economic at once, unitary organizations, oriented toward revival of the councils and the creation of a councilar society.

The Ruhr uprising is probably the farthest the German Revolution went in producing communism. It is an example, a rare historical example, of a process of communization in its earliest days. The rapidity of its progress is astounding, inspiring, and is for me a continual reminder of the uncountable, unpredictable powers of self-organization. In less than 24 hours, a hundred thousand proletarians armed themselves, disarmed the police and military, and lay claim to the central means of production of German industry, its coal, iron, and steelworks. They did so without pre-planning or coordination, forming “armies” that were not really armies in the sense that they lacked anything like a central command or discipline. This allowed, however, for pseudo-representatives to sign agreements with the state and army on their behalf. This was an “army” with divided objectives; in some places workers wanted to establish councilar control, and in others simply to prevent their massacre by the freikorps, and to restore the status quo ante. Dauve locates the beginning of antifacism here, with the pro-democracy counter counter-revolution beating back the putsch but cedings its autonomy—a kind of Spanish civil war in miniature. One thing that is notable is the dislocating character of the armed units, which by necessity ranged widely across the terrain of the Ruhr valley, and were often disconnected from workplace organizations. They were thus put in the role of catalysts---calling for the election of new councils, whose condition they would determine. The theory of the KAPD and Jan Appel begins here.

Organized communists appear to have played little role in the Ruhr rising, except in crushing it. The KAPD had not been formed—that would happen the next month, in April, and the AAUD, the communist factory groups, would be formed in February. Appel says he was in the Ruhr then, and we know that the KAPD sent him, after it was formed, to represent them in Moscow at the second congress of the Comintern, to which he arrived, in true communist fashion, by stealing a boat and maneuvering around the British blockade. The text we are reading today is the speech he gave a year later, when he returned to Moscow, by legal means, to represent the KAPD at the Third Meeting of The Communist International, slowly before that group was expelled. At issue in that speech and at the meeting is the comportment of the KAPD during the 1921 March Action, which followed upon the Ruhr rising by about a year. Both the KPD and KAPD expected a repeat of the Ruhr rising, a spontaneous rising of the class in response to the threat of disarmament, which loomed throughout the year. They both organized in order to push this offensive to the point where it would topple the state, but from there they had very different ideas about how to organize. The March Action was therefore the first action in which organized communists explicitly dedicated to councilar revolution participated.

Both Karl Radek, who speaks for the Comintern, and Appel/Hempel, who speaks for the KAPD is assess the March Action similarly. It failed because it was not broad or sustained enough, and there was little to no coordination among rebellious workplaces and the armed units. But Radek and Hempel have radically different ideas about the role that organized communists might have played and should have played. The speech which Appel gives is a reflection of the theory which informed that participation, a theory of the party, of organization, and of self- organization, that is radically different than that of the Bolsheviks. Appel agrees with Radek that the Ruhr rising and the March failed for lack of organization but draws a red line between the organizations of the old workers’ movement—trade unions, parliamentary party—and the organizational forms of the revolution itself, chiefly the councils.

In Russia, in Germany, in Italy, “the form of organization adopted by the fighting proletariat has been that of the Soviets.” The old organizations of the working class—trade unions, parliamentary parties—only sufficed for a period in which the working class struggled to improve its position within capitalism but not to overcome it. When millions of workers declare for revolution, however,  such mechanisms and the persons attached to them are by their very nature an impediment, and revolutionary workers will naturally seek other means.  It is “for that reason,” Appel tells the Comintern, “we declare that the workers must organise themselves in accordance with the selfsame example which the revolution itself, in the course of its development has shown us, and in which, when struggle is placed on the agenda, we Communists should play the leading role.”

The work of the communist party is exemplification. Communists learn from and lead by example. A council is not just a council, but in a revolutionary conjuncture it is also a commune, the future form of communism made present in a fragment of now. It spreads through imitation and exemplification, through a spontaneous adoption whose contagiousness solves, on its own, some of the dilemmas posed by Ruhr rising. Winning the masses to the side of revolution was not enough, nor would the formation of a dedicated cadre of professional leaders be. Rather the workers must be directly given the means by which to exert power. The party for Appel is neither a quantitative form, swelling with an influx of the masses, or a qualitative one, deepening with discipline, but a catalyst, a transitional and vanishing mediator that gives way to direct workers’ power. The goal of the KAPD, then, as it distinguished itself from the Spartacists in the KPD, was strictly the revitalization of councilar power and the destruction of all those who stood in its way, specifically the SPD-affiliated trade unions, who by the end of 1919 had locked themselves into the delegate structure of the councils.

To this end, militants in the KAPD focused on the formation of unionen, or factory-groups, structures parallel to the councils but oriented toward them, that might agitate for councilar power both within and beyond the councils. Rather than seek to organize above the councils, communist should organize alongside them: “Communists must now form themselves into a hard core, must now form a framework which the proletariat can adopt as its own, when the very development itself impels it into struggle.” This is also the reflection of an example which the KAPD learned from the FAUD, and the struggle in the Ruhr. This notion of the party of communists as framework is markedly different from that of Luxemburg or the Bolsheviks, for whom the party is an educator or leader. Here it is simply a framework, like the factory groups, a model of a structure, like the councils, which the proletariat not only can take up but, in fact, must take up “because the trades unions will no longer provide a structure adequate to promote those struggles.”

At the time, Appel and his comrades thought a party of organized communists was necessary in addition to the factory groups—this is because he recognized the centrality of struggles among the unemployed, who would not find a revolutionary role within the factory at the worksite, but who could be encouraged to organize themselves into unemployed councils directly and thereby join with workers’ councils.[1] The factory groups were open to any revolutionary workers, even unemployed ones, regardless of affiliation, as long as they agreed on the goal of communism. The party, on the other hand, required that adherents agree with its principles. This division between factory groups and party split the difference between mass party and professional party—the factory were mass communist organizations, whereas the party took up particular positions and postures. For example, within the factory groups there might be very different ideas about how to organize the councils during and after the revolution. And of course there was disagreement about whether or not a party was needed in addition to the factory groups, with some group of partisans of the councils outside of the KAPD from the beginning, and another leaving over a disagreement on this point precisely, and forming the AAUD-E, the Allgemeine Arbeiter Unionen Deutschland Einheitsorganisation—unitary organization, indicating that it was party and factory group all in one.

Appel and his comrades learned from the example of the Ruhr rising and organized themselves in a form adequate to the energies they had encountered—a selfsame example, capable of acting as a catalyst for armed, self-organized councilar power. This party was of a very particular type, however, not the democratic centralist party that Radek wanted. In Appel’s party “each individual should be a fully developed Communist, and he should be able to fulfil a leading role in whatever position he finds himself in,” guided not by particular directives but by the organization’s program. At the same time, each communist could only negotiate with the unanimity of his comrades. Dauvé on the KAPD here is useful:

each member knew what had to be done, and he did not join the KAPD to follow orders and to be told what to do. Congresses and various kinds of general assemblies were quite frequent. There was no central committee invested with full powers for an indeterminate period of time: there was, on the one hand, a current affairs committee (Geschäftsführung) and also a “Central Committee” (Hauptausschuss) which met whenever important decisions had to be made, and, unlike the same structure in other organizations, was on each occasion subject for the most part to re-election by the party districts, and consisted of the standing administrative committee and the district delegates. One could say that the party line was constantly decided by the whole party, which manifested an enormous force in the KAPD; it was only in order to recuperate this force that the Communist International tolerated the presence of this party, which never ceased to openly and violently attack the Communist International’s opportunism. In the KAPD, throughout its best period, that which Bordiga denominated as “organic centralism” was actually realized.

This possibility of acting independently and yet with the assent of the group, except in explicit negotiation, is connected to Appel’s insistence that the party can only play an affirmative role with regard to spontaneous worker’s actions. In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army cut a swathe through Poland, the KAPD resolved to sabotage the arms shipment which France and other Entente powers were sending through Germany to the Polish Army. Had the Red Army not chosen to head toward Warsaw it might have been mere miles from Germany. The KAPD organized for insurrection in the areas where trains were passing and then, as the time for our action neared, reversed course, attempting to call off what they had organized with a hasty publication. Certain groups went forward with it, declaring the Council republic in small towns, and were then wiped out. Appel insists that it was wrong to call off the action—the role of the party can only be affirmative or neutral not negative. Whereof it has fucked up, thereof it must remain silent. This is because, given its insistence of self-organization, on catalysis, it can only promote, not hinder free action.

The March Action is the best place to see this theory at work, for there we see the effect of the KAPD’s affirmative, adventurist but not vanguardist politics. The March Action was part spontaneous, part planned, an Action not a rising. Throughout 1920 and 1921, as the economic situation deteriorated, communists in the KPD and the KAPD were looking for the next insurrectionary moment, not wanting to miss their chance, as they had the year previously, during the 1920 rising in the Ruhr. The flash point this time emerged to the east, in Halle and Mansfeld, where the unionen were quite active and the workers armed, especially in the ultramodern Leuna works, where according to one estimate at least two thousand of the twenty-five thousand workers were organized in the AAUD union. When the government tried to disarm the workers, a general strike spread through the region, and in a moment of synchrony, both the KAPD and the KPD decided that the time for insurrection had come. This was the moment of heroic ultraleft adventurism. Responding to the general call, the armed units began burning down police stations and courthouses, robbing banks, and distributing goods. Max Holz, the so-called Robin Hood of the revolution, ambushed the police units sent from Berlin to put down the rebellious workers in Mansfeld. Here is a description of his proto-communizing force in action:

A motorized squad had between 60 and 200 men. A reconnaissance unit proceeded in advance, armed with machine guns or small arms; and then came the trucks with heavy weaponry. Then came the commander in his own car “with the strongbox,” along with his “secretary of the treasury.” As a rearguard, another truck loaded with heavy guns followed behind. All of these vehicles were covered with red flags. Upon arriving in a town, supplies were requisitioned and post offices and banks looted. The general strike was proclaimed and largely paid for by the business owners. Butchers and bakers were compelled to sell their goods for 30% or 60% less than the normal prices. Any resistance was immediately and violently crushed. Such units were very active throughout Saxony after the Kapp Putsch

The KPD and KAPD central committees issued a general call to insurrection, but beyond that had little control over fast-moving events. Messages got lost in the relay between the center and the provinces. Armed groups operating autonomously had little sense of what was happening elsewhere. In a signal example of the general lack of coordination that ruled, the semi-skilled workers at the occupied Leuna plant resisted the call to take up the arms they had and pass over into the offensive because they concluded they would be massacred. They were unaware, however, that Holz’s force was nearby and might have come to their aid. Eventually the factory was bombed, the workers disarmed, Holz captured and arrested. The moment had been lost.

All counterfactuals are facile. If things had been different, then they would have been different. Yes. But it is not facile to ask what a councilar revolution might have looked like, and what forces might be involved in it. Between the unionen, the parties, the councils, and the armed groups, some process of catalysis would need to take place leaving in its place a pure communist precipitate: the councils, autonomy armed. The difference between Appels’ theory and Radek’s, which would result in the mechanistic, doomed Hamburg insurrection of 1923, is that for Appel the chief site of reflection is the class itself, whereas for Radek it is the party. For Radek, the party is the servomechanism of the class, directing class action through feedback mechanisms. But Appel’s affirmative party can only feedforward, only accelerate. It is a passive reflector, inert, and this is true of the factory groups too. Any control, self-modulation, or direction must come from the class itself, the class as event, taking control of the councils. There is the site of reflection, self-direction, and leadership.

Massive questions remain, how would the councils organize themselves? By industry, as the syndicalists proposed, or by region, as the communists did. If by region, what precisely is the connection between workplace councils and regional councils and how to prevent the infiltration of petit bourgeois mediation, as had happened. Arming the workers is one thing but in conditions of mass dislocation, who is working and where and who is fighting and where does control over the working and the fighting lay? For Appel these are questions the councils themselves would have to sort and it is the very flexibility of this form and the rigidity of its proletarian content which lends itself to such challenges.

                                                                        Friday November 18

Yesterday as I was searching for information on the strike I came across a photo tweet on Twitter, the social media site which may soon implode due to the erratic and narcissistic behavior of the world’s biggest billionaire. It was a flyer, posted on some UC campus with a headline that read “Be Reasonable, Demand the Impossible” and above it the question “What could a strike mean?” The headline is a translation into English of a famous Situationist slogan which appeared in Paris during the events of May ‘68: Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible! French is nice because it makes clear, with its structures of agreement, that this is a plural you, a plural group of realists told to demand the impossible.

What I’m interested in here is the bottom of the flyer, which quotes, without citation, from Diane Di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter # 19”: you are selling yourself short / you can have what you ask for, ask for everything! If you are in my English 90 class, then you have already read this poem. If you are in my English 26 class, we would have discussed Revolutionary Letters this week, if it were not for the strike. Between the May ’68 slogan and the lines from Di Prima, the flyer is interrogative, making clear who its plural you is: “Why accept a raise when the university is still on stolen land? Why accept a raise when we’ll be right back to working for the UC? Why accept a raise when you will still be a worker?”

What could a strike mean? What can a poem mean? It is notable that what we are asked about here is meaning. The flyer is an act of literary interpretation as much as political intervention. It asks the reader to interpret the strike, to seek out its meanings, much as we might seek out the meanings of “Revolutionary Letter #19”

The poem was written as a critical response to the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Martin Luther King shortly before he was assassinated in April 1968 and then carried out in May and June of 1968. Participants set up a protest camp on the Washington mall, and stayed there for six weeks, hearkening back to the Bonus Army of 1932, in which tens of thousands of WWI veterans camped on the mall, demanding bonus payment for services rendered, and looking forward to the Occupy movement of 2011. Di Prima is critical of this campaign, however, because its demands remain limited narrow sense of the possible and impossible. This was June 1968, after the assassination of MLK and riots in dozens of cities, after May 68 in France, and the turn toward the armed underground by students and black radicals. To turn back from insurrection and to make demands on the state at this moment was, for DiPrima, an act of treason:

            if what you want is jobs

            for everyone, you are still the enemy

            you have not thought thru, clearly

            what that means

Notice how the adjective “clearly” is perfectly placed to mean both “clearly you have not throught thru what that means” and “you have not through clearly what that means.” One comma preserves the double meaning.

The poem is about making distinctions, making things clear. The line that divides friends from enemies. But as we see above, the drawing of these lines is designed to make things clear, to encourage enemies to come over to the other side. We might forget that the poem is conditional: if what you want is x, then you are the enemy. But the poem gets so carried away in listing x, the predicates of the enemy, that you might forget it still holds out hope for the you, By the time we get to the last stanza it comes as something as something of a surprise. If what you want is:

            degrees from universities which are nothing

            more than slum landlords, festering sinks

            of lies, so you too can go forth

            and lie to others on some greeny campus

            THEN YOU ARE STILL

            THE ENEMY, you are selling

            yourself short, remember

            you can have what you ask for, ask for

            everything

The boldface accusation, which completes the conditional formulation, gives way immediately to a generosity toward the you, enemy but also victim of its own desires.

It is remarkable that these last two stanzas are more or less addressed to the same subject as the flyer. The tens of thousands of graduate students now on strike do for the most part hope to keep working in the profession, on other greeny campuses, just as I do, and just as I hoped when was a graduate student.

What can a strike mean? What are the stakes? The response of the UC Office of the President to the strike has been to render the demands of the union illegitimate, illegible. We are told that the union’s demands are too political, that they are addressed toward economic conditions outside of the power of the university, such as inflation, and the housing and rental crisis. This is another kind of drawing of lines, one that seeks to isolate graduate students from undergraduates, from faculty, and from staff. The cost of living may be an issue that affects graduate students, they say, but it is an issue that affects everyone else too, therefore it is outside of the realm of bargaining.

The current strike campaign and its demands are a direct outgrowth of the wildcat graduate student strike of 2019, and its demands for #COLAFORALL, which forced the union to make “rent burden” and cost of living part of its campaign. The very structure of labor negotiations in the US and everywhere is designed to limit the scope of workers’ action, and make it so that only certain issues and questions can be arbitrated by the union.

Many readers of the flyer involved in the strike may find its questions facile. “Why accept a raise when you’ll still be a worker” is answered easily, when the alternative is not being a worker in a society which forces you to work in order to eat. But the questions of interpretation and meaning it opens up are pertinent, and we can see how these sorts of questions, pushing at the boundaries of what can be prosecuted through the union, has led to the vitality of the present historically unprecedented strike.

•   First online session Oct. 16, 12pm PST. Sign up here

The twentieth century can count only one truly new communist idea: the workers’ council, which emerged in Russia in 1905 as part of a revolutionary mass strike movement. But what is a workers’ council, or soviet, and how does it follow from the nineteenth-century theory of the commune?  Is there an underlying concept of proletarian self-organization which both these theories of class struggle share? And what role do these theories leave for the party? What is the relationship between the workers’ council, which vanished from the world at the moment of its greatest extent, in the 1970s, and the turn, in struggle since then, to an autonomy without councils.

In tracing the story of the workers’ council from the Paris Commune to the present era, we will define, as a matter of preliminaries, the basic contours of revolution in our time. Not the council or the commune, perhaps, but what the council hoped to achieve. The focus here is as much on the practical history of the communist movement, as it is on the intellectual history of the movement of communists. Works by Rosa Luxemburg, Jan Appel, CLR James, Paul Mattick, will be read in the context of the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, May ’68, and the Carnation Revolution.

The series comprises eight month-long modules, with local, offline reading groups followed two weeks later by an online plenary session, hosted by Red May. Participants are encouraged to organize their own reading groups. The series is designed for people to participate at different levels, either offline or online or both.

More information here.

On Self-Organization and the Commune

The emancipation of the working classes must be, as we know from history and from Marx and Engels, conquered by the working class itself.[1] The class of proletarians must organize itself, must self-organize, for who else could be trusted to abolish class society and class rule but the class which cannot rule? In this sense, self-organization is presupposed by all meaningful class struggle, the prelude of insurrection if not revolution. But whose is the self of self-organization? What is the working class itself? It cannot be the sum of each worker themself, as organized by capitalism, for that is by definition not self-organization but other-organization. Nor can it be the product of all workers, organized for each other, for that is simply communism, leaving no room for another class and thus no room for classes or class as such. It must be the difference that some section of the class makes when it removes itself from its organization by capitalism and for the ruling class. Self-organization is always a matter of some section of the class that would be all but isn’t. Self-organization is never, then, the class itself, but rather some fraction of the class subtracted from given relations. To organize for themselves and by themselves, the members of some projective collectivity must do so with each other, but most importantly, against their already existing organization by and for capital. The proletariat steps forward by stepping back out of the existing organization of the world but it never does so wholly. The proletariat is always only some proletarians.

Self-organization does not unite the working class but splits it—in doing so, however, it betokens the abolition of class, not the unity of proletarians but real human community. Split upon split, self-organization inscribes the division between classes within the proletarian class in order that all divisions might be trespassed. Against a self-organizing fraction, the unity of the class presents itself as the subordination of each member of the class to their identity as exploited worker or dispossessed proletarian. The workers occupy their factories but it is never all the workers nor all the factories nor, when a show of hands is taken, are the occupiers even the workers. Liberation means breaking with both the owners and the arbiters of labor power, breaking with the class of rulers as well as the class of the ruled, the owners and their delegates and representatives within the class, who enable the buying and selling of labor in bulk. But by the same measure, this exceptionality is also always a form of representation if not substitution. In organizing by themselves such self-organizing fractions are rarely entirely selfish in their motives, are rarely only strictly for themselves. This is why it is usually some moment of individual mournability that sets things off—the police kill a worker, or some section of workers are fired, and then everyone reacts, for themselves and others all at once.

The workers occupy the factories in May ’68, for example, but their demands are both selfish and not: they stand with the students, against De Gaulle, and for themselves. They inspire and are inspired by other proletarians near and far, with and without jobs, inside and out any sociological bound we might draw. The rebels of the Paris Commune, of the Shanghai Commune, of Berlin in 1918 and Bologna in 1977 and Argentina in 2001 act for themselves and others—not just Paris or Shanghai or Bologna or Buenos Aires or Cairo but Paris and Shanghai and Bologna and Buenos Aires and Cairo. Inasmuch as they act in such a way as to make possible a later overcoming of class itself then they act on behalf of all proletarians, even and especially those not yet born into dispossession. In this manner, to the extent that they introduce something new into the class struggle, something imitable they inspire sympathy, solidarity and imitation far and wide. This is the secret meaning of the term commune, which is always a fragment of some communism not yet established, a part without a whole that nonetheless treats itself as whole, a communist Paris without a communist France, a city center turned into an armed encampment, an occupied factory made emblem of proletarian autonomy as such.

As without, so within. The self- of self-organization is spectral, dissolving at any moment into the frayed ends of individual selves. This is why all attempts to represent, to count, to fix the revolutionary camp in place, however defined, must fail. In collective action, people together believe what individually they doubt, making the boundaries of such actions indiscernible. Self-organization is a kind of fanatic reason—something is rational because, in collective action, people make it so. From the revolutionary Red Interval of 1917-23 through to the 1960s and 1970s, this is the conclusion we are led to draw from the shocking reversals and betrayals of the greatest revolutionary proletarian successes. In Germany in 1918, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, this dynamic was perhaps posed most clearly, if only because there the most massively inertial institution of the workers’ movement, the SPD, confronted one of the largest fields of proletarian revolutionary self-organization yet seen. Communists like Rosa Luxemburg, aligned with the Spartacist League and its successors, hoped to out-maneuver the left wing of capital by drawing upon the substantial support demonstrated by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of November, spontaneous formations that had ended a world war and toppled the German empire, but in balloting workers are counted modulo capital, as individual chunks of variable capital, heads of house, citizens, and consumers. A kind of Heisenbergian uncertainty attends self-organization, then. Some subject, some specter, makes itself felt, makes its presence known, but cannot be represented or observed directly—in fact, dissipates when one attempts to formalize or gather it, to body the ghost in constitution.

This is simply another way of saying that the object of self-organization is not, or cannot be, the securing of rights, for that is organization by and of another. Thus is the moment of contract, of settlement, always a scandal for struggles that insist on self-organization, whether piqueteros or Zapatistas, whether in the Zone a defendre or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Self-organization cannot become self-rule, autonomy, without becoming the domination of each individual by some abstract notion of the collective, some mediation, substitution or representation. As atomized, penniless, and market-bound individuals, proletarians are weak, but collectivization is no guarantee against heteronomy, since capital treats labor as variable capital, bought in bundles that might be individuals or groups, a real-valued function that might as well be one worker or one thousand or 12.57 workers, whatever that means. The collective action of a movement can be absorbed as a movement of variable capital, as a flow of labor-power reproduced at a given capacity.

This explains the sudden reversals experienced when it comes time to settle up. In June of 68, in Paris, the mass of the workers greet the negotiations between the leaders of the respective classes with an indifference equal to the ferocity with which they downed their tools in the great strike of May. In Italy’s Creeping May, the rank-and-file organizations which brought the apparatus of Italian industry to halt with ease dissipate just as quickly in the face of negotiations between the classes. The informality of self-organization cannot be banished, cannot be formalized, no matter the tyrannies imposed by such lack of structure. That lack of structure, or rather that refusal of structure, derives from the antinomies of the class struggle.

For this reason, even though self-organization is the very presupposition of revolutionary action, as and if the revolution unfolds it becomes an obstacle which the revolution must overcome.[2] Perhaps limit is the better term, for it is not what self-organization does that hinders the revolution but what it doesn’t do. The self-organizing fraction cannot simply subtract itself, for it remains materially dependent—that way lies suicide. Nor can it simply transact, or contract, for that would be organization by and through the enemy class. It must extract from capital and retract from the state what is necessary for each self to organize itself with others according to its own desire, which is to say nearly everything. The self of self-organization is projective, prospective, aspirational, not the real individuals themselves but a kind of spirit that hovers near, but only near. It doesn’t exist here and now, and therefore can only look on itself strictly as itself—as worker in autoplant, parent in a neighborhood, citizen in a city—as in fact the self of another, as something to be abolished. Self-organization always fights its way into a corner where the options are suicide, compromise, or total victory, which is to say the overcoming of opposition between self and other in the sense used here, the abolition of classes. Absent the production of communism, of classless society, such a self presents itself as vengeful spirit, appears most clearly when destroying the things of this world.

[1] Marx, “General Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Working Men’s Association,” 3.

[2] Simon, “L’auto-organisation est la premier acte de la revolution, la suite s’effectue contre elle.”

chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

In section six of this series, I discussed Theorie Communiste’s notion of the écart, the swerve (or rift) within class action, and attempted my own formulation of it. The theory of the écart, we will remember, attempts to grapple with the insufficiency of self-organization as such. “Self-organization is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.” A truly dialectical concept, the écart is both the shape of that overcoming and the rift, or gap, that must be sealed by it. This rift-swerve, this diagonal or lateral rift, I have suggested, might be thought of as the other-organization of self-organization, or what amounts to the same thing, the self-organization of self-organization. In a nutshell, the theory of the swerve reveals that the self of self-organization is problematic, bound up with notions of right, property, and belonging which subtend the communist movement but which the movement of communism will have to unmake.

I intend to make this less abstract, but first a provisional word on translation. Écart is a word that takes on many meanings—most primarily gap, or distance, as between a train and a platform, or between the intentions and results of an action. It might also mean discrepancy, as between a real and a nominal value, or statistical variance, but finally swerve or deviation, as made by an automobile or perhaps a revolutionary proletariat confronting the limits of its action as a class. Theorie Communiste often use the word  to mean something close to “rift” or “gap” (or perhaps “fault”), for they often speak of an écart between [entre] two predicates, typically between, on the one hand, actions that put the proletariat’s reproduction within capital into question and, on the other hand, actions that simply confirm it as part of the self-reproduction of capital. This type of syntactical construction (écart entre) is used consistently with the term in in their initial writing on the topic, “Theorie de l’écart,” but in later texts, such as “The Present Moment,” they pluralize the term, speaking of a multiplication of écarts within the field of class struggle, such that the translator of this text rendered the term as “swerve” rather than “rift.” Though TC still employ the term in a sense closer to rift than swerve—“slippage” might be a nice compromise—I prefer the traduction of swerve to the implications of rift in some cases because I like the sense that the swerve is both forced and not. A coyote wanders onto the highway; one car swerves in order to avoid it and then another car swerves in order to avoid the car now swerving into it. So, too, the moments where some fraction of the proletariat finds itself forced to break from the circuits of capitalist reproduction and drive into the oncoming traffic of history.

 Theorie Communiste speak consistently of a “rift that opens in the center of class activity” where “to act as a class is to refuse its existence as a class, existence which self-organization formalizes and confirms.” The rift opens between the intention of an act and its effect. We see this sense of the rift most prominently in the way that, today, all reformist struggles burn with an insurrectionary intensity, and yet when pushed to define their contents, fall well within the limits of capital. But this kind of gap between means and ends might from another perspective, a perspective internal to class struggle, seem a swerve, a breaking-out or breaking-away of some fraction within the field of struggle.

In some sense, the theory of the swerve I want to develop assumes the primacy of one rift in particular, from which all other rifts flower: that between the working class as such and the proletariat as such, between the class of the exploited and the class of the dispossessed, which both is and is not the same class. We have encountered this rift time and again in this series, as I hope to show now, for it is a fundamental outgrowth of capital’s law of motion, its requirement that value self-valorize. From this law contradictory tendencies emerge which only crisis and class struggle can resolve—on the one hand, capital seeks to multiply labor, to employ as many workers as possible and to extend their time of labor for as long as possible. On the other hand, capital strives to wring as many products from those workers as possible, using any and all methods to increase productivity. Whereas the first tendency increases the mass of value, the second merely redistributes the value from capital to labor, by reducing necessary labor. The first tendency increases the working class by increasing proletarianization, dispossessing laborers so that they have nothing to sell but their labor, or imprisoning them and enslaving them, as was often the case in early capitalism. The second tendency decreases the size of the working class, and increases the size of the proletariat surplus to production.

The first tends to result in massified, deskilled labor. The second tends to result either in a reskilling or a Taylorization of labor. In an early twentieth-century mine, labor was both deskilled and relatively massified. In a Fordist factory, labor was often deskilled, or semiskilled, and atomized. The most powerful struggles tend to cut laterally across these divisions. We have so far examined the German Revolution, May ’68, the Italian 70s, and the Argentine crisis of 2001. In each case, we can see that the explosivity of the sequence results from lateral connections that cut, swervingly, across these divisions. In an essay on the KAPD and the movement of the German Councils, “Class Composition and the Theory of the  Party at the Origins of the Workers-Councils,” Sergio Bologna writes fascinatingly about these divisions, though he tends to overstate his case. Bologna was one of the most astute theorists to emerge from operaismo, and an important internal critic of Potere Operaio. His essay is as much about Italy in the 70s as it is about the German Revolution, an attempt to highlight certain themes within the council movement that are relevant to the situation, developing the important concept of “class composition.” Marxists had typically used the term composition, following Marx, as a category to describe capital, and particularly the relationship between variable and constant capital, but Romano Alquati had, in his study of shopfloor culture, used composition to think about the structure of the class—both technically composed by the division of labor and the structure of machinery, and politically composed through its struggle. Bologna reads the factory-council movement as an attempt to produce worker’s power without worker’s control. It was a reformist rather than insurrectionary movement, in his view, dominated by the skilled workers and technicians in the German machine-industry who did not want so much to take over the economy as retain their autonomy. But as Bologna notes, the most combative fractions of the German working-class typically emerged where semi-skilled or deskilled gang-labor still operated—mines, heavy industry, and shipyards.

Bologna’s essay is wide-ranging, moving rather quickly from Germany to a discussion of the IWW, the 1905 strike wave, and the first Russian revolution. The rift Bologna observes, between a mass, deskilled workforce and a skilled, professionalized one is precisely the rift that he and other writers associated with operaismo see flowering across the interval of the extended May. By contrast, the council movement in Italy in the red biennium after WWI had been composed largely of skilled workers, whose visions of autonomy most resembled syndicalism. That skilled working-class still existed by Bologna’s time but was being augmented by a new mass worker, composed of migrants from the south, women, and youth, whose values were entirely different. It was this group that brought the theme of “refusal of labor” to the fore. The hesitation of the council movement is then explained, for Bologna, not as the expression of the will to expropriate but instead class power as rupture, arrest, refusal, something that Bologna says would have been unacceptable for German capital and provoked revolution.

Much of the essay is clearly retrojection, designed to legitimate a tendentious position on the the then-developing struggles of the Italian working class, but there is something to Bologna’s assessment, something that conforms with the facts. The most explosive episodes did, in fact, occur where labor was collective, massified, and relatively deskilled. It is unsurprising but nonetheless worth remarking that the program of the KAPD and the later council communist formations found its strongest appeal among the unemployed, the marginally employed, the deskilled—that is, those who lacked autonomy in their working lives. The workers who did have some autonomy fought to retain it but not necessarily to expand it, given how much they had to lose. The March Action of 1920, the last hope of the communist left, broke out among the industrial workers of central Germany after an attempt to disarm them. At the Leuna works, the 12,000 armed workers chose not to go on the offensive though they did take up arms and were bombarded, disarmed, and killed, in part due to the hesitance of the KAPD organizers among them. Had they known of the armored communist units operating in their area and been able to coordinate with them, perhaps things would have gone differently. To do this, however, would have required an extension of self-organization that broke with the self of the factory-works. This would have been a veritable swerve, a deviation in the course of the revolution, breaking down the opposition between Red Army and workers’ council, workers and the unemployed.

The process of partisanization, the informal Red Army that emerges in the course of a revolution, has a tendency to separate partisans from social location. Conflict is mobile, and so must organization be. In the rising in the Ruhr, the armies that formed had a loose connection to the factory groups of the anarchists and the communist left, by necessity. Any proof of working class identity was taken as sufficient.

One can see an image of the swerve in Dauve’s commentary on this rising in the Ruhr:

The proletarians were victorious as long as they relied upon their social functions, utilizing the productive apparatus for supplies, arms and transport, without, however, remaining within the boundaries of production. The rebel cities united and sent help to   the workers in other cities. But even in this respect the movement displayed its weak points, which characterized the whole epoch. After having emerged victorious from its clash with the Army, using the Army’s own methods and fighting on its own terrain, the proletarians, in their immense majority, thought that their job was done and handed over their power to the parties and the democracy. The red army expelled the military and then transformed itself into the classical workers movement.

One interpretation of the implications of this passage is that if the armies had pushed further, continued the fight, and began no to reproduce not only the means of combat but to direct themselves to proletarian needs, coordinating with workplace structures, they would have broken those “boundaries of production” and effected a real break with the “classical workers’ movement.” Communism cannot be made at gunpoint but it will not emerge through democratic deliberation either; it must emerge through a series of rifts, swerves, that allow people to make communism together.

Italy in the 70s, the real object of the Bologna essay, seems to provide an image of the rifts such a choreography of swerves would need to overcome. Never has the theme of class recomposition found such a fertile tactical and strategic ground. But as we learn from Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni’s The Golden Horde, the project of class recomposition was always projectual. After the Hot Autumn of 69 and the student movement of that period, the newly energized Italian left, heads stuffed full of Quaderni Rossi and the Situationist International, Mao and Che, Marcuse and the Black Panthers, joined together as Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, Il Manifesto, Avanguardia Operaia, and many other groups. By 1975, however, most of these groups had collapsed. The themes of autonomy, of refusal, had a tendency to break apart existing identities, to decompose as much as they recomposed. A prime example, frequently described in the literature of the movement is the women’s march in Rome called by Lotta Feminista. Male comrades had insisted that groups like Lotta Communista be represented in the march with banners, in order to express solidarity with their women comrades. But the women had heard something different in the watchword of autonomy. When the men were told they could not enter the march with their banners, a brawl broke out, one of the central events leading to the dissolution of Lotta Communista.

Autonomy, yes, but from whom? And for what? Whose refusal? These questions came to the fore in 1975. Potere Operaio had dissolved but its militants were still active. The moment the movement had been waiting for seemed to occur with the armed occupation of the Turin Mirafiori plant in 1973, which provided an image of a way forward for the movement after the death of the groups:

 The year 1973 without doubt represented a key moment in the process of divergence between the workers’ vanguard and the Communist Party, for two reasons. The  workers’ and proletarian vanguard received a decisive message from the Mirafiori occupation: it was possibly to organize autonomously even up to the point of occupying one of the biggest factories in Italy, without the participation of the union or the Party—indeed, even while being explicitly against these forces.

In other words, the occupation became a model of the party, of the organic unity of the class, bringing together workers with the unemployed, students, and others. Potere Operaio disbanded in response to this development, the emergence of what Toni Negri would call the “Mirafiori Party.” But while the tactic of occupation would dominate, the energy would pass from the worksite to beyond—the plazas, the streets. One could not unify around the figure of the worker without provoking violent conflict, as was made clear in the open brawls between proletarian youth and Communist Party steward during the speech by Lucio Lama, General Secretary of the CGIL, forced on the occupation of the university of Bologna by Communist Party-aligned students. On the run, chased from place to place, without a grasp on the levers of power, the armed occupation passed quickly into armed struggle and sclerotic voluntarism, disconnected from the mass, festival-like energies of the movement. A gap had emerged at the heart of the project of autonomy, between refusal of work and workers’ power. The ability of refusal to form an organization of production was limited, all it could do was set rates. The organizations that formed could only tear apart production, not run it, which would mean something closer to proletarian power than workers’ power.

Nowhere a swerve and everywhere a rift. Do I even need to say how these dynamics play out in Argentina in 2001? Between the occupied bankrupt factories taken over by their workers and unemployed piqueteros demanding grants so that they can autonomously organize their own reproduction between the populist cacerolazo that brought down the government and rioters of proletarian suburbs and cities, we can outline the passage from insurrection to revolution as a swerve that did not take place. The singularization of the term is a bit of a problem, and throughout this piece I am forced to rely on the fiction of what would have needed to happen, rotating history away from the axis of the real and into the complex plane, where imaginary histories keep pace with what must have happened. The point of this exercise, it should be made clear, is only to illuminate the communist prospect today, not engage in alternate history. I do not mean to imply that everything rested on these moments—the Ruhr, Mirafiori, etc. For if things were different so too would the central moments be, and in any case the passage to communist revolution is not a single swerve but many, a dynamic that pulls self-organization from its social location through reciprocal action. The point is to illuminate the rifts that compose our movements.

Those rifts are everywhere, as an examination of the uprising last study here in the United States will show. For what is the story of the various forms of autonomy carved from the center of antipolice riots but a story about the difficulty of determining the self- of self-organization, which is to say also the other of self-organization? Autonomy, yes, but from what and for what?

*Readers may wonder, given the influence of Althusser on Theorie Communiste, whether Althusser translates Lucretius’s clinamen as écart in his late writing on aleatory materialism. The term he uses is déviation.

I would also like to invite readers to two panels at Red May this Sunday (events at Pacific Standard Time):

We (Still) Want EverythingSun, May 23rd, 2021, at 11 AM PDT

Speakers:Maria Teresa Carbone, Rachel Kushner, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Jasper Bernes

1969. A young worker from the South arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin. The work sucks. The bosses withhold his wages. His complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays. Result: a wave of continuous strikes shut down the factory. Barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets. Nanni Balestrini’s novel of Italy’s ‘Hot Autumn’ and its decade of revolt has lost none of its edge.

Value, Capitalism, And Communism Sun, May 23rd, 2021, at 5 PM PDT

Speakers:Jasper Bernes, Cordelia Belton. Kailash Srinivasan

What is the relationship between Marx's theory of value and communism? Drawing upon thinkers such as Amadeo Bordiga and Gilles Dauvé, for whom "the whole of Marx's work was a description of communism," Jasper Bernes has proposed a new way of understanding the tasks of communism in practice and in theory. In Marx, and in the few thinkers who have attempted to apply his thought directly to the practical task of communism, we can find a "test of communism," a logical model of the necessary conditions for communism, which implies an adequate concept of capitalism. The panel will bring together new research on the theory of value, the theory of the state, and the history of the communist movement, in order to begin a wider discussion about the prospects for communism in the twenty-first century.

Jacques Camatte and the missing link of contemporary social criticism

The work of Jacques Camatte, which appeared in successive series of the review Invariance[1] from 1968 to 2002, is truly staggering, due not only to the scope, the richness and the variety of its subject matter, but also to the scant circulation it seems to have enjoyed. In itself, the first series of the review, dedicated for the most part to the colossal task of publishing and analyzing unreleased or unavailable writings of the young Marx and the «communist left» groupings that broke with the Third International (the German KAPD, Gorter, Pannekoek, Bordiga), should have more than sufficed to award Invariance and its main figurehead an outstanding place in the contemporary landscape of social critique. If we add to this the extensive and innovative study that Camatte published on the famous Unpublished 6th Chapter of Capital, (Invariance nº 2, 1968) under the title Capital et Gemeinwesen (translated in English as Capital and Community), not to mention his detailed and thorough analyses on the history of the communist movement, the evolution of contemporary capitalism and the most important social movements of the 1968-77 period, our perplexity and amazement at the lack of awareness regarding Camatte can only increase. Putting to one side the possible role played by the pure and simple incomprehension of his writings, everything points to the origin of this clamorous silence lying in his ruthless analysis of the logic pervading activist “rackets”[2] and his comprehensive critique of politics, contained in such enlightening texts as « Mai-Juin 1968: théorie et action (1968) », « Perspectives » (1969), “On organization” (1969) or “Transition” (1970). As if this were not enough —and as a supplementary reason for animadversion and censure— these writings, already highly controversial in themselves, were the first steps of a journey that, far from leading Camatte to a “reaffirmation of the proletarian program”, led him to announce that the latter had expired and to subsequently explore not only the forgotten “dead ends” of the revolutionary processes of the 20th century, but the communitarian dimension of the human species’ entire past as well.

Nonetheless, and despite the rejection which some of his most unorthodox conclusions have encountered, the fact remains that Camatte’s influence has been both wide and varied. The entire French “ultraleft” which emerged following May ‘68 was marked by it to a greater or lesser extent, and the same applies to the Green and Primitivist anarchist currents that appeared a few years later, now in a context of clear revolutionary ebb (In 1975, Fredy Perlman, for example, translated and published —under the title The Wandering of Humanity— two essays in which Camatte delves into the subject of the “presuppositions of capital”, that is, the millenarian pre-capitalist legacy of the domestication of nature and humanity which paved the way for the despotism of capital.) In more recent times, exponents of the so-called “communization current” (and particularly groups such as Théorie Communiste and Endnotes), while flatly denying any possibility of “seceding” from the capital relation and therefore rejecting Camatte’s exhortation to “leave this world,” have openly acknowledged their debt to him.

From the second series onward, Invariance —after theorizing the overcoming of the law of value and the subsequent “renouncement of the theory of the proletariat”— embarked upon a course summed up in texts such as “Community and communism in Russia”[3] (1972), “On revolution” (1972) “The Wandering of Humanity” (1973) or “La révolution russe et la théorie du proletariat” (1974), and moved even further away from any and all attempts to bring the “proletarian program” back to life. According to Camatte, the “autonomized” forms of capital (such as fictitious capital) have resulted in the constitution of a “material community” based on competition between rival gangs which has reabsorbed the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Consequently, from now on there is no possible opposition to capital but “in its human dimension” (a thesis that concurs to some extent with the analyses of Moishe Postone and the Krisis group[4]).

The end of an era

May 1968 signaled the closure of the historical cycle that had begun in the 1920s with the triumph of counterrevolution in Russia and Germany, and inaugurated the “second proletarian assault against class society” (a rather inconvenient denomination, as it tends to reduce the new cycle to a “corrected and expanded” repetition of the previous one). However, this return of the proletariat to the stage of history, manifested in the riots in American ghettos, the proliferation of wildcat strikes in Europe and a general revolt against work and the commodification of everyday life, paradoxically coincided with the beginning of the end of the autonomous affirmation of the proletariat as a class. In encompassing the totality of daily life, the new revolutionary movement represented, first and foremost, a massive rejection of the proletarian condition. In “Vers la communauté humaine” (1976), Camatte sums up the discontinuity between the two periods as follows:

[…] The most important thing immediately was that we had to deal with a revolutionary movement that did not pose a class dimension, which therefore expressed with utmost clarity the requirement indicated in Origin and Function of the Party Form: a revolution grounded in the human dimension.

[…] It could also be considered that the non-affirmation of a classist dimension developed within the dynamics of revolution, since K. Marx had often insisted that the aim of the latter was the suppression of the proletariat, and therefore, the maturity of the movement initiated in May ‘68 should be affirmed to the extent that the negation of the proletariat was to impose itself increasingly. Thus, what I considered that ought to be foregrounded was not the autonomy of the proletariat, which Potere Operaio, for example, spoke so much about, but rather its negation.

Thus, the first stirrings of the new cycle were simultaneously a crisis of the theoretical premises of the previous cycle and of its entire problematic, starting with the classical conception that advocated various forms of conquest of power —regardless of it whether it was political or economic— by the proletariat[5]. At the same time, however, ‘68 prompted a vigorous return of the repressed in the guise of a resurrection of the previous cycle’s “finest moments” (i.e., the most repressed ones): the movement of the workers’ councils, the KAPD, the writings of the young Lukács and Karl Korsch, or the interest in the work of Hegel and Wilhelm Reich. According to Camatte, although this was an inevitable and healthy phenomenon, it was also “an indicator of the fact that people had not grasped the reality of the situation directly, and that the situation itself was unable to give birth to new forms of struggle and other theoretical approaches”. (“Against domestication”, 1973). In any case, in order for critique to follow through right to its end and reject the inadequacies of the past en bloc, it was necessary for the “undefeated” part of the defeated revolutionary project to return to the present as if to its own home.

What the new era had brought to the fore was not only the critique in acts of the “politicist” or Jacobin conception of revolution, but also of any notion of revolution rooted in the issues involving the management, organization or emancipation of labor:

The May ‘68 wildcat general strike did not produce any specific organ of worker’s management. During Italy’s long “rampant May”, factory and zone councils, although they testified to the class’s capacity for self-organization in regard to its aims […], did not tend in any way to take over the productive apparatus. Not even the Polish insurrectional strike of December 1970 showed a clear tendency toward self-management, as opposed to what had happened in Hungary in 1956[6].

The immediate consequence was the gradual rejection of the theoretical baggage of a generation that, as a reaction against Stalinism, had made the struggle against bureaucracy —whether state, party or union— its fundamental priority. Such was the case of the now-defunct review Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), which from its first issue had placed the antagonism between proletariat and bureaucracy at the forefront, and which had considered that the formation of councils in East Berlin (1953), the Hungarian insurrection of 1956 and anti-union strikes on both sides of the Atlantic confirmed its theses.

Contrary to what it may seem at first sight, S. ou B.’s point of view remained bogged down in the Trotskyist problematic, which located the center of gravity of the counterrevolution in Russia (and in the labor bureaucracy in general). A comparison, for example, of the analyses developed as early as 1947 by the Johnson-Forest tendency —an American group that, like S. ou B., had emerged from a split within Trotskyism— with Chalieu-Castoriadis’s diagnosis, would suffice to realize to what extent the latter had barely scratched the surface of the “bureaucratic phenomenon”[7]:

[…] Now, today, the proletariat, on a higher plane, has drawn the ultimate conclusion. Its revolt is not against politics and the distribution of the surplus value. The revolt is against value production itself. It has made its own comprehension of the pivot on which the comprehension of political economy turns. (The Invading Socialist Society, p. 13)

If, back in the day, proving the capitalist character of Russian society, as was done in S. ou B.’s article “The Relations of Production in Russia” (May-June 1949), had been a most valuable instrument of theoretical clarification, in the new stage inaugurated by May 1968 it was no longer enough to demonstrate that the USSR was capitalist: now it was also necessary to explain why that was the case without turning the consequences —“bureaucracy” or “the Bolshevik ideology”— into causes. The crux of the matter had shifted elsewhere: what mattered was not so much the nature of Russia as that of capital itself (and, consequently, the nature of the proletariat). In 1972, in the epilogue of La Vielle Taupe’s reprint of “The Relations of Production in Russia”, Pierre Guillame, former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, listed the consequences of analyzing the Soviet regime in terms of “bureaucratic capitalism”:

[…] the anti-capitalist program was replaced by an anti-bureaucratic program in which self-management, autonomy and democracy played a decisive role. The whole communist conception was thrown into disarray. […] Bureaucracy is a threat, a permanent human tendency opposed by another human tendency: autonomy[8].

Unlike S. ou B., which nonetheless exerted a great influence on it, the Situationist International was widely recognized by the May revolt and could boast that its slogans had proven it right. However, the S. I. never understood that this “triumph” owed just as much to its virtues as it did to its limitations (its own and those of May ‘68). Despite having introduced within the classical forms of the “proletarian program” contents that broke with it —such as the abolition of wage labor and exchange, of classes and the State with no transition whatsoever— and having duly taken stock of the most relevant novelties of the day[9], the Situationists were unable to discard two conceptions of the previous cycle now reduced to mere incantations: the defense of the absolute power of the workers’ councils, and consequently, the access of the proletariat (redefined as an almost universal class of all individuals dispossessed of the use of their lives) to a theory and a consciousness which supposedly were its own but which it had paradoxically become “separated” from. Hence, the S. I., condemned to repeating itself ad infinitum and unable to refine its analyses any further, was doomed in the short term to crisis and dissolution.

Indeed, the ill-fated “question of the subject” had rapidly become, and this was no coincidence, the most glaring Achilles heel which the “new movement” that emerged from ‘68 was to stumble relentlessly against. Years later, Eduardo Subirats would point this out in “A critical approach to ‘History and Class Consciousness[10]’”:

[…] when, in a specific social context in which there is no empirical bearer of resistance to reification […] the category of the proletariat is programmatically invoked, it becomes an abstract deus ex machina. Such was the case of the use of the concept of the proletariat by the Situationists[11].

Thus, both for Lukács in History and Class Consciousness and for the Situationists —who had also turned the proletariat into an abstract universal subject— the latter was not defined by its status as “variable capital” within the framework of capitalist production relations, but by its opposition to reification. In any case, it should be noted that when —almost three decades later— Moishe Postone described the historical subject of Lukács as a collective version of the bourgeois subject constituting itself and the world through labor, he was merely completing the already very advanced portrait drawn by Subirats: “Lukács cannot endow his representation of the proletariat with any other empirical attributes than those of the classic-modern subject of domination.” (Contra la razón destructiva, p. 137).

Thus, although it may be argued that the indeterminacy of the use of the concept of “proletariat” by the S. I. prefigured the “revolt of the new social subjects” and the spread of social conflicts to the field of reproduction, it would soon prove completely unable to account in any way for the absence of the “constitution of an integral social subject harboring critical power against the reified totality of the capitalist system.” (Contra la razón destructiva, p. 127)

This does not mean, however, that during those very same years, important theoretical efforts were not being carried out (and not just by Camatte, who had already made more than a few contributions to the question of the proletariat “as subject and as representation”) to get to the bottom of that “absence”:

The proletariat cannot be a class, because class is still a mode of social existence […] Class consciousness is the consciousness of people who compete against each other, who struggle, but who close ranks against all who remain outside, in the face of all that is not their class […] Class is the union of competitors whose general interests are identical and whose particular interests oppose them to one another. It is the war of every bourgeois against everyone else. What is particular about class, as opposed to any other form of social existence, is that it is constituted against an exteriority by people who, in turn, are external to each other.

[…] What is particular about the modern proletariat is that it does not constitute a class and cannot constitute one. Proletarians cannot struggle against each other, and they cannot struggle against something external. They are absolutely separated, and that separation leaves nothing outside of itself […] When proletarians struggle, they do not struggle against something external, against another class; they struggle against that separation, they struggle against the proletariat[12].

As early as 1948, C.L.R. James, in “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States”, had been inspired by Lenin’s position on the right of national self-determination to emphasize (in the American context and in defense of the independent and autonomous character of the civil rights movement) the importance of internal divisions within the working class (in this case ethnic ones, to which, from the 1970s onward, sexual and generational ones were to be added):

What Lenin is saying is that although the fundamental force is the proletariat, although these groups are powerless, although the proletariat has got to lead them, it does not by any means follow that they cannot do anything until the proletariat actually comes forward to lead them. He says exactly the opposite is the case.

They, by their agitation, resistance and the political developments that they can initiate, can be the means whereby the proletariat is brought on to the scene.

Not always, and every time, not the sole means, but one of the means. That is what we have to get clear.

Therefore, the “unity” of the proletariat was by no means the prerequisite of revolutionary activity; on the contrary, this unity, as Camatte would say in “The KAPD and the Proletarian Movement” (1971):

[…] can only be achieved after a tenacious and resolute struggle, with no concessions, against capital and, to an extent, by a struggle within the universal class itself.

From there to implicitly admitting the potential relevance of movements and struggles that do not explicitly question the capitalist system (as in the case of the “Arab Spring” and other contemporary movements, for example) there is but one step, which implies a further overthrowing of the “proletariat as representation”, although in a diametrically opposed sense to that posited by Postone and “value critique”, for whom such movements constitute, at best, no more than “belated modernization attempts”. For Camatte, on the contrary:

To say that any revolutionary social movement can only foster counterrevolution from the moment that the Western proletariat does nothing, is to wish to make everything revolve around the West; it is Eurocentrism or the justification of colonialism, etc…. and moreover, it is to pay scant attention to the tragic impasse in which a multitude of men and women in the various so-called backward areas find themselves and will find themselves in the future. Finally, it expresses, in the most acute way possible, the inversion of the proposition “the proletariat does not have to await any Messiah” to “the proletariat is the new Messiah to be awaited”. (“Vers la communauté humaine”, 1976)

But let’s backtrack to the mid-1970s. When they saw that the new “proletarian assault” was coming to a standstill, but that at the same time insubordination was spreading to the totality of the institutions of social reproduction (schools, families, prisons, psychiatric asylums) most of the radical currents of that time focused their attention on these new forms of struggle, which led them to a continual search for “new subjects” that were somehow “outside of” the capitalist system (it is no coincidence that the great revaluation and reassessment of pre-industrial movements of revolt took place at this time), as well as to opposing the proletariat —considered to be the incarnation of a future communist humanity— to the working class, mere variable fraction of capital. In both cases, according to Camatte, the result was the same:

To remain faithful to a concept of proletariat including negativity, we must search for those elements of society that are really revolting against the established order or that, due to their way of life, represent the dissolution of existing society. Hence the theory of Marcuse regarding students and minorities such as the blacks in the United States, but also the theory of different revolutionaries about the marginalized and the excluded, which, in any case, is tantamount to the abandonment of the theory of the proletariat in its classical form[13].

Thus, instead of taking stock of the actual limits which the movement that began in 1968 had run up against and seeking an explanation in the evolution of the capital relation itself and in the hierarchical segmentation inherent to the proletariat, they blindly forged ahead and interpreted the “new relationships” established in daily life by way of sexual liberation, communes, the critique of the family or various forms of delinquency, as harbingers of the “new society” that was struggling to break forth from the womb of the old, as well as of the increasing presence and rootedness of the veritable “spirit of the age”: autonomy.

The elements of a new world tend to reveal themselves continually from the very functioning of the capitalist system […] The most visible demonstration of this tendency occurs in the new forms of class struggle, and the widening of class conflicts to clashes between the dominators and dominated in all structures of society. […] The attempts at rejecting trade unions, the underground organization of conflicts, the attempts to make horizontal links between those in struggle, the new attitudes of students, women, homosexuals and so on, the attitude of workers towards work, all these reflect the desire of those concerned to manage their struggle for themselves and by themselves.[14]

However, the heterogeneous components of this “autonomous” explosion —which probably reached its climax in Italy in 1977— failed to converge, and following the breakdown of the movement (in the form of the critique of everyday life, the ideologies of desire, feminism and a variety of alternative social projects) all that it left behind was an abstract insistence on autonomy, reduced in turn to a mere form devoid of any content. Thus, the choice with which the movement that had begun in 1968 was faced with was the following: to either mask in one way or another the real issues posed by the hierarchical segmentation of the proletariat, while simultaneously extolling the “pluralism” of the new forms of resistance and proclaiming that, henceforth, abstract labor encompassed all social practices (the routes taken, respectively, by postmodernism and post-operaista triumphalism), or to drain the bitter chalice of defeat and adopt perspectives bordering on the “renouncement of the theory of the proletariat” proposed by Camatte (such was to be the case of the future founders of the Encyclopédie des Nuisances or the Primitivists). Thus, in « Prolétariat et Révolution » (1975), Camatte volunteered the following historical assessment:

We have already indicated the point of departure: locating the limits of the theory of the proletariat on the historical plane, that is, verifying, on the one hand, how, in the course of this century’s revolutionary struggles, the proletariat did not ultimately propose a different way of life or society, but merely called for a different form of management of capital, and that, therefore, its intervention was limited to favoring the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital over society in the most advanced areas of the West and to reinforcing its worldwide domination, allowing it to penetrate areas in which it had not yet been able to enter due to resistances of a geographical, historical or social order.

[…] For that very reason, historical study acquired a different dimension: to verify to what extent the majority of revolutionaries had lived and fought under the influence of a certain representation of the proletariat as a revolutionary class and were themselves imbued with a representation of “communist society” that was not incompatible with the being of capital.

The misfortunes of fetishism

In any case, several years before undertaking such a sobering diagnosis, Camatte had understood that it was imperative to resume the critique of political economy by adopting a periodization that reflected the way in which all spheres of social life had been subordinated to the overall reproduction process of the capitalist system:

The starting point of the critique of current capitalist society must be the reassertion of the concepts of formal and real domination as the historical phases of capitalist development. Any other periodization of the process of the autonomization of value, such as competitive, monopoly, state, bureaucratic, etc., capitalism, abandons the domain of the theory of the proletariat —that is, the critique of political economy— and belongs to the vocabulary of the praxis of social democracy, or Leninist ideology codified by Stalinism. (“Transition”, 1970)

During the transition to real domination, the workers’ movement had theorized the epiphenomena of the state’s subordination to the valorization process by resorting to categories such as state capitalism, organized capitalism or bureaucratic capitalism, which inevitably led, in consequence, to conceive of the overcoming of capitalism as a fundamentally political process in which organization was the essential issue[15]. This, in turn, allowed completely dispensing with the unpleasant reality owing to which, as a result of capital being nothing other than “the moving contradiction”, any form of organization which presumably intends to transcend that contradiction must, of necessity, also reproduce it. This was something that, albeit in a limited fashion, the Johnson-Forest Tendency had already understood many years before:

And at each successive stage the degeneration of the proletarian party not only imitates capitalism but must take on to a greater degree the contradictions which are rending capitalism. (The Invading Socialist Society, p. 8)

According to Camatte, another peculiarity of the theoretical cycle that, coinciding with the transition to the initial stage of real domination, was inaugurated by Lukács and closed by the Situationists, was the great importance ascribed to the critique of the commodity and its fetishism at the expense of the analysis of capital as a whole. While it is undeniable that the commodity does indeed summarize the capitalist mode of production, when it comes to phenomena such as crises, restructurings and turning points in the system’s trajectory, it becomes essential to deal with the mediations it goes through. Given that capitalist production is a simultaneous process of production of surplus value and reproduction of the social relations that allow the former to be produced, it is essential to bear in mind the process —always conflictual and in fact not very “automatic” at all— of accumulation and valorization as a whole[16].

Now then, the “protagonists” of a crisis theory that would culminate in a “real movement that transforms existing conditions” can only be social beings endowed with determinations that render them antagonistic to capital (that is, it presupposes a theory of the proletariat) because, should it be referred merely to the individual or to humanity in general, that would make it meaningless and would inevitably result in updated repetitions of the old social democratic catastrophism liable to serve similar purposes[17].

What is certain, moreover, is that the history of the Marxian theory of crises represents more than a mere succession of erroneous interpretations or frustrated expectations: it also reveals a process of increasing concretion in the perception of the capital relation itself. Contrary to how things might seem at first sight, there is a notable difference between the Second International’s classical catastrophist theories —which saw in crises the motor of revolution and of a growing awareness that would pave the way to the “final struggle”— and the theory of the “decadence of capitalism” developed by the revolutionary elements of the first proletarian assault against class society (Lenin, Luxemburg, the Italian Left Communists, the KAPD). Although the latter also betrays the fact that Marxist theorists were still dominated by the perspective of capital[18], the mere act of linking crisis theory to the debate on organization as a process that was inseparable from the “real movement”, in the context of the debate on the mass strike inaugurated by the Russian revolution of 1905 (in contrast to the organizational fetishism of the German social democratic party and its trade union apparatus, which identified its own survival with the “advance toward socialism”) opened up the first great breach in the mechanistic and positivist outlook of “orthodox Marxism”.

Otherwise, the objectivist notion of economics argued for in the debates of the historical “ultra-left” of the 1930s left the old dispute between the supporters of the “autonomous development of proletarian subjectivity” and those who believed that “revolutionary consciousness” could only be brought about by the cyclical crises inherent to the capitalist system (embodied respectively in the figures of Pannekoek and Grossman) intact. Hence, after the Second World War, when capitalism entered one of its most sustained phases of expansion, and objectivism became an ever greater obstacle to understanding the new situation, minorities emerged that focused their attention naturally on the novelties of the concrete evolution of the class struggle instead of insisting on following the course of the ups and downs of an economy separated from it.

Already in 1950, in State Capitalism and World Revolution, C. L. R. James, R. Dunayevskaya and G. Lee had indicated, in the course of their analysis of what would later become known as “Fordism”, that:

Ford’s regime before unionization is the prototype of production relations in fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia.

But —and without this, all Marxism is lost— inextricably intertwined with the totalitarian tendency is the response of the working class. A whole new layer of workers, the result of economic development, burst into revolt in the CIO. (p. 40)

The very context in which the class struggle was now taking place tended, therefore, to deobjectivize the conception of the economy. However, since this deobjectification did not come to completion, it led to a subjectivist rejection of objectivism that put the proletariat in the forefront, turning it into the only active factor in the development of capitalism and its crises, which was “what Chalieu-Castoriadis was thinking when he said that Marx forgot to mention the class struggle in his book, Capital.” (J. Camatte, “The KAPD and the Proletarian Movement”, 1971).

Having said that, to maintain that the crises of capital are caused by the autonomous activity of the proletariat instead of insisting that it is the crises of capital that force the proletariat to react does not amount to abandoning the objectivist perspective, but to merely inverting it by adding a subjective determination to objectivity. And since “autonomist” theorists continued to consider the relationship between capital and the working class as a relation of exteriority rather than as a contradictory relationship of reciprocal implication, they tended to develop the notion of two independent subjects —capital and labor— and consequently, the idea of a confrontation between two strategies, which meant forgetting that

[…] It is no longer a matter of supporting either of the two poles or aspects of capital; what we have to do is to destroy both of them. In this sense, the autonomy of the working class is an empty demand if it is not posed in the context of the process of suppression of that class. (J. Camatte, “The KAPD and the Proletarian Movement”, 1971).

However, and although they occasionally made a rather lax and sociological use of concepts such as “class composition” and “recomposition” to dereify categories such as the organic composition of capital, “autonomist” theorists used them to better understand the forms of struggle and subjectivity that accompany a given composition, as well as the specific roots of the rejection or decline of certain forms of organization. In any case, and to sum up, “we might say that just as ‘68 showed both the limitations as well as the validity of Situationist ideas, the period of crisis and revolutionary activity in Italy during the decade of 1969-1979 showed the validity and limitation of the workerists’ and autonomists’ theory.” (“Decadence: The Theory of decline or the decline of theory?”, part 2, Aufheben, 1994)

Camatte and Invariance’s evolution, however, took a very different course. In stating that the theory of value had in some way been overcome by the development of fictitious capital, both the crisis theory based on it and the theory of the proletariat became groundless. From the moment in which one concludes that capital has been abstractly “unified” and has reabsorbed social classes, the only possible conflict remaining is a struggle between an abstract humanity and the “material community”, the continued existence of which now demands an anthropological explanation. Unlike classical revolutionary theory, which attributed the survival of capitalism to causes that remained somehow external to the “revolutionary subject” (imperialism, social democracy, Stalinism, etc.), Invariance attempted to explain it in terms of the assimilation of humanity’s “communal being” (the Gemeinwesen) by capital and advocated “secession” as a necessary premise of the break with capital, which translates to replacing the real movements of an international proletariat immersed in very specific historical problems (growing levels of social exclusion, for example) with an indeterminate revolt of “humanity”.

Now, as Ray Brassier says in “The Wandering Abstraction”[19]:

There is a straightforward rejoinder to Camatte’s account: his appeal to a human community whose basic expressive modalities remain constant across millennia of social and historical transformation is an abstraction in the most problematic sense. Camatte hypostatises a set of human expressive capacities that persist not only independently of capitalism but of every form of social organisation: “creating”, “producing”, and “using” are postulated as invariants of human life as such. […] Moreover, the affirmation of community over society unwittingly echoes a familiar reactionary trope: while community ensures that social roles, values, and beliefs remain firmly rooted in interpersonal relations, society jeopardises these by instituting impersonal roles, formal values, and objective beliefs on the basis of indirect interactions. Here Camatte’s denunciation of the despotism of capital shades into a repudiation of modernity, which becomes a cipher for humanity’s wandering away from its authentic communality.

This contrasts sharply with the analysis of contemporary social reality offered, for example, by the British “communizer” group Endnotes. By remaining within the framework of a crisis theory based on the value-form, its general diagnosis of the situation coincides with that of the representatives of the “critique of value”, but with a fundamental difference: for Endnotes the effects of the current crisis on class relations do not constitute a separate element of their description of that reality.

Thus capital’s accumulation of an ever-growing surplus value is accompanied by an ever-growing “surplus population” excluded from the process of production. The proletariat becomes “that which is produced by capital without producing capital.” The result is the disintegration of the proletariat’s self-identification as producers of capital. It becomes impossible for the working class to affirm itself assuch in its antagonism with capital. This is why communization can no longer be conceived as the end result of the workers’ revolutionary seizure of the means of production. It must be reconceived as an intransitive process, an immanent movement which consists in destroying the relation through which capital reproduces labor while labor reproduces capital[20].

On the other hand, there is a second and more substantial objection to be made both to Invariance’s thesis and the “critique of value”:

[…] the process of fetishization of capital, of its autonomization, cannot be actualised. Thus, Marx’s discovery of the double character of labor is indeed decisive, but it is a matter of seeing what it means; the meaning of this discovery, which implies the need for the capitalist phenomenon to split into an apparent dimension and a real one, may, in my opinion, be summed up in the affirmation that fetishism is already contradictory per se[21].

The tacit presupposition of Camatte’s entire analysis of “anthropomorphosis” and the constitution of the “material community” is the identification of the apparent movement of the autonomization of capital —its reification or fetishism— with its real movement, and in that respect, it should be noted that Invariance turned a contradictory trend into a fait accompli, and consequently failed to sufficiently recognize the open character of the constant struggle characteristic of this process.

The missing link of contemporary social criticism, then, is the inseparable character of the theory of value and the theory of the proletariat (conceived of more as a contradictory bearer of all separations than as the abstract bearer of their overcoming), and the union of both in a theory of crisis linked to the concrete configuration of the capitalist social relationship. Little does it matter that, for historical reasons that are easy enough to explain, and without intending to detract from the interest of his subsequent evolution, Jacques Camatte renounced both: what remains fundamental is that he highlighted their indissoluble unity, and that he did so within the framework of a radical critique of the fetishism of organization, of representation as the essence of politics and of racketeering as ways of life of present-day capitalist society.

F. Corriente

May 2014

[1] (http://revueinvariance.pagesperso-orange.fr/). The name of the review was a reference to the “invariance of the theory of the proletariat”, one of the mainstays of the Italian Communist Left, a.k.a “Bordigism”. When Camatte and Co.’s detractors pointed out that “nothing varies as much as Invariance”, he and his comrades replied that “what is invariant is the aspiration to rediscover the lost human community”, thus emphasizing the other guiding thread of his investigations, humanity’s Gemeinwesen (community). [2] The English term racket refers, in principle, to any grouping involved in organized crime, but by extension it may be considered to embody the real and necessary modus operandi or prototype of any “organization” within the framework of existing society. Bordiga linked the notion of the gang to the critique of the idea of ​​the bureaucracy as a new ruling class propounded by Chalieu-Castoriadis. Theodor W. Adorno first took an interest in this matter regarding the Marxist theory of classes in “Reflections on the theory of classes” (1942), and returned to it in “Individual and Organization” (1953), as well as in “Marginal Notes on Theory and Practice” (1969). It also figures prominently in two articles published in Internationale situationniste #4 and #7, « Gangland et Philosophie » (1960) and « Geopolitique de la hibernation » (1962). There is also an excellent and documented article on the subject, “Rackets”, by F. Palinorc in http://www.left-dis.nl/ . [3] It is quite significant that the only Invariance text translated into Spanish for many years was Comunidad y comunismo en Rusia (Madrid, Zero-zyx 1975), an in-depth study of the “Russian question” (with which Camatte insisted that it was urgent to “cut the umbilical cord”). [4] In arguing that class struggle is unable to do anything other than to reproduce capitalism and “modernize” it (which turns class struggle into a subordinate factor devoid of any further historical interest), Postone and the Krisis group’s theory of the “automatic subject” also implicitly states that the subject of any potential opposition can only be the individual or an abstract humanity. Camatte, on the other hand, sees the “anthropomorphosis” of capital as the terminal stage of the evolution of the capital relation, and thus pays the utmost attention (at least until he came to consider that its historical outcome had come to completion) to all the transformations and ups and downs of that struggle.   [5] There is a clear parallelism between the “crisis of programmatism” (that is, of any notion of the overcoming of capitalism based on the transformation of the proletariat into the ruling class) inaugurated by May ‘68, and the opposition —theorized by the exponents of “Wertkritik” and the Postone school— between an “exoteric Marx” (who criticized capitalism “from the standpoint of labor”) and an “esoteric Marx” (who criticized labor under capitalism, that is, as one of its constituent elements). However, it is one thing to explain this turning point as a result of the historical evolution of the capitalist system itself and quite another to explain it as some type of deplorable straying issuing from an “erroneous” reading which has now —finally— been corrected. Having said that, when, at the beginning of Adventures of the Commodity, Anselm Jappe poses the need to “historicize Marx’s theory, as well as traditional Marxism” by relating them to “two different historical stages: modernization and its overcoming” (p. 12), he not only takes the validity of both these notions for granted, but a few pages later, he also passes over the opportunity to historicize “Wertkritik” itself supporting his thesis with the dates he himself provides: “The background of the critique of value lies in the 1920’s, in G. Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and I. Rubin’s Essays on the Theory of Value. It proceeded implicitly in the writings of T. Adorno, and its real birth can be located around 1968, when in different countries (Germany, Italy, United States), authors such as H.-J. Krahl, H.-G. Backhaus, L. Coletti and F. Perlman worked around the same subject.” (p. 20). The question that needs to be posed is precisely whether these two fundamental categories of the “critique of value” —“traditional Marxism” and “modernization”— would survive such a historicization. [6] (Rupture dans la théorie de la révolution, texts introduced by François Danel, Ed. Senonevero, Paris 2003). This did not prevent the Councilist tendencies of the day from stubbornly defending the self-management program and insisting that the autonomy of workers’ struggles, their self-organization outside and against unions, was the necessary and sufficient criterion to determine whether or not they were on the right track. “Hence the uproar and the shock caused by Jean Barrot’s (Gilles Dauvé’s) text Leninism and the ultra-left in 1972, and the rejection of its author by the Councilists, who could not tolerate this critique, let alone Dauvé’s attempt to adopt elements of Bordiga’s theory, whom the Councilist current had reduced rather hastily to an ultra-Leninist theoretician.” (François Bochet, « A propos de quelques textes récents: Anselm Jappe, Jaime Semprun, Robert Kurz, Jean-Marc Mandosio », http://raumgegenzement.blogsport.de/2010/07/19/francois-bochet-a-propos-de-quelques-textes-recents-anselm-jappe-jaime-semprun-robert-kurz-jean-marc-mandosio-2004/) [7] Although the concepts espoused by the Johnson-Forest Tendency (C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) and those of S. ou B. were very similar, there was also a fundamental difference: according to the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the Stalinist bureaucracy was “the organic product of the development attained by capitalism and the political form adequate to the final stage of the capitalist system, State Capitalism” (The Invading Socialist Society, p. ii), from which it followed —for them— that the problem “is not to be solved through of the analysis of ‘bureaucracies’, but by the analysis of capital”. (Ibid., p.16) [8] We might consider this the true “birth certificate” of the “veritable split” between proto-communizing tendencies and the myriad “autonomies” that were to take over preaching the emancipatory virtues of radical politics and super-duper direct democracy from soon to be obsolete leftist groupings. Over the years, the false problem of the bureaucracy became increasingly relegated due to the convergence of two intimately linked phenomena: the entry of capitalism in its “neoliberal” stage (along with the subsequent collapse of “really existing socialism”) and the gradual conversion of the old leftists to the assemblyist gospel of “horizontality” (regarding this “debureaucratization of the world”, see Loren Goldner’s texts “A Short History of the World Working-Class Movement from Lassalle to Neo-Liberalism: The Distorting Hegemony of the Unproductive Middle Classes” (http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/734/), “Multi-Culturalism or World Culture?: On a ‘Left’-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown” (http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/multi-culturalism-or-world-culture-on-a-left-wing-response-to-contemporary-social-breakdown/ ), “Post-Modernism Meets the IMF: The Case of Poland” (http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/post-modernism-meets-the-imf-the-case-of-poland/ ), and “Facing Reality 45 Years Later: Critical Dialogue with James/Lee/Chaulieu” (http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/facing-reality-45-years-later-critical-dialogue-with-jamesleechaulieu/ ) [9] «Youth, workers, people of color, homosexuals, women and children want everything that has been forbidden them [...] Every area of a social space that has been increasingly fashioned by alienated production and its planners today becomes a new field of struggle, from primary school to public transportation, psychiatric asylums, and prisons. “(“Theses on the Situationist International and its Time”, in The Veritable Split in the International, Chronos Publications, translated by Christopher Winks and Lucy Forsyth) [10] «Una aproximación crítica a Historia y conciencia de clase», [in Contra la razón destructiva, Tusquets, Barcelona 1979]. [11] Around the same time, former MIL (Iberian Liberation Movement) theoretician Santi Soler wrote: “[...] all that stuff the Situationists wrote about proletarians being ‘those who lack any power to decide over their own life and know it’, as Debord said, does not refer to specific social categories [...] but rather boils down to drowning in the Lukacsian Maelstrom of ‘class consciousness’.” (Marxismo: señas de identidad, Ediciones Libertarias, Madrid 1980, p.71). [12] Jean-Pierre Voyer, Une Enquête sur la nature et les causes of the misère des gens, Champ Libre 1976, pp. 111-113. Or also, put in less convoluted terms: [...] To become a revolutionary class, the proletariat must unite, but now it cannot unite but by destroying the conditions of its own existence as a class. Unification is not a means to make the struggle for demands more effective; on the contrary, it can only exist by overcoming the struggle for demands; the content of unification is that proletarians devote all their efforts to ceasing to be proletarians; it is the calling into question of its own existence as a class by the proletariat, the communization of relations among individuals. As proletarians, they cannot find in capital, that is, in themselves, anything other than all of the divisions of wage labor and exchange, and no organizational or political form can overcome this division. (Roland Simon, « Unification du prolétariat et communisation », http://meeting.communisation.net/archives/meeting-no-2/les-textes-publies-6/article/unification-du-proletariat-et )   [13] « À propos de la dictature du prolétariat » (1978) (http://revueinvariance.pagesperso-orange.fr/dictature.html) [14] «The New Movement», H. Simon, Échanges et mouvement (https://libcom.org/files/solidarity-pamphlet-n51.pdf). Text included in Apuntes sobre la autonomía obrera, Ediciones Etcétera, Barcelona 1979, pp. 3-6. [15] In a footnote of Adventures of the Commodity in which he criticizes the “sometimes obsessive emphasis placed by the radical left on organizational issues” and the vicissitudes of the definition of the bureaucracy as an exploitative and parasitic class, Anselm Jappe points out, quite rightly, that “although accurate as a description, this explanation could have found much better support in Robert Michels, Wilfredo Pareto or Max Weber than in Marx” (p. 181). Moreover, Jappe evaluates the “critical Marxism” of the 1950s and 1960s (the direct forerunner of contemporary post-workerism) in almost “Bordigist” terms when he underlines the “distinct tendency” of this current “to reinterpret Marx’s theory in light of the bourgeois notion of democracy”, and adds that “what all these theories have in common is the fact that they never refer to the Marxian critique of value and the commodity, let alone assign them a central role.” (p. 25) [16] “[...] if antagonism has any meaning, at the heart of the category [of value] there must be an element of uncertainty, of openness. To say that social relations are antagonistic is to say that they are developed through struggle, and that therefore they can never be considered as predetermined. To understand value, therefore, we must open the category completely, understand value as struggle, as a struggle of which we are inevitably part.” (J. Holloway, “Crisis, Fetishism, Class Composition”, in Open Marxism, p. 158). One of the distinctive features of Postone and the Krisis group is precisely their refusal to recognize the antagonistic character of this process, or at least that the fundamental mainspring of its dissolution lies in this antagonistic character, which leads them, if not to deny the class struggle any emancipatory character at all, at least to accuse it of a fatal propensity to breed the scapegoats that the system needs to ensure its perpetuation. According to Camatte, on the other hand, this tendency does not arise from the class struggle per se, but from the racket-gang logic tending to pervade every “organization” constituted in society as it stands, which, in the political sphere, for example, results in continuous processes of “accountability/purges” (sometimes “civilized”, sometimes bloody) as a fictitious form of solving insoluble contradictions. [17] On the various functions performed by the theory of crisis in the labor movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, see G. Marramao’s article “The Theories of Collapse and Organized Capitalism in the Debates of Historical Extremism”, (https://libcom.org/library/theories-collapse-organized-capitalism-debates-%E2%80%9Chistorical-extremism%E2%80%9D-giacomo-marramao). [18] “‘The ruling ideas of each epoch are the ideas of its ruling class’ does not simply mean that those ideas are physically the most widespread or the most widely accepted. It also means they tend to be assented to, partially and unconsciously, by the very people who oppose them the most violently.” (Cardan-Castoriadis, S. ou B. No. 27, “Proletariat and Organisation” https://generation-online.org/h/fpcastoriadis.htm) [19]http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction) [20] Ibid. [21] Pier Aldo Rovati, «La crítica del fetichismo en el “Fragmento sobre las máquinas” de los Grundrisse», en Progreso técnico y desarrollo capitalista, Ed. Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente nº 93, México 1982, pp. 209-210.

on the theory of communization and its histories

chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

—

I am going to try a slightly more analytical and less narrative approach in this piece, in order to better embody the content of the theory of communization. It is difficult to step away from the dark of history and into the light of abstraction, in outlining this theory, since it is a theory that suggests all theory is historically produced. The problem, however, is that this history is already split—a real history, producing a theory, inside of which one can also read history: 1918-21 seen by way of 1968-72. As the theory of communization evolves, so too does its sense of its past.  From my vantage, as I hope has become clear, new continuities and new ruptures emerge. A narrative of narratives, then, in which the theoretical production of a future continually produces new presents, and new pasts.

We have seen that communization emerges as a response to a revolutionary problematic, a conundrum, which motivates a reassessment of the theory of the historical ultraleft, then at a highwater mark of reconsolidation. Sometimes communization theory is described, rather awkwardly, as the post-ultraleft, where the prefix implies both continuity and rupture. But which rupture and which continuity? Communization inherits from the ultraleft its critique of the undead “old workers’ movement,” which as Jan Appel and Paul Mattick and others describe so well, developed a strategic and tactical organization useful for improving the position of workers within capitalism, but entirely incapable of organizing a revolution against capitalism. Communization theory, in its most robust presentation, extends this critique to the ultraleft itself, suggesting that even its most maximal visions would likewise subordinate labor to the logic of capitalism. For Theorie Communiste, for example, both Leninism and the ultraleft are expressions of what they call programmatism, which forms the bedrock of the workers’ movement, spanning from left to right. The new workers’ movement is the old one in the shell of the new. Programmatism “is a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become the programme to be realised.” 

At stake also in this claim is the future as much as the past. TC suggest that there can be no continuity between the base elements of capitalism and communism but that texts like the GIK’s Grundprinzipien presume it. Which continuities in particular are at issue? In the GIK’s vision of revolution, there is no continuity of organization, neither of party nor union, nor continuity of state function, nor of value as such, nor profit, competition, law-directed economic activity. But some continuities do remain, what the KAPD described honestly in its 1920 program as “ruthless enforcement of the obligation to work” which is either presumed by the labor certificate and distribution through the workplace or, in its absence, renders them meaningless and ineffective as regulators. The wage-form, we might say, persists in some way, dragging with it a shadow of the law of value, still latent in the calculation of socially necessary labor time and abstract labor as a magnitude, a measure, if not a form run wild. The cell-form of impersonal bourgeois right, subject, and law is retained, as Marx notes. But it’s not clear to what extant the labor certificate is a contingent or essential feature of council communism—reading late Mattick suggests it is not essential.

Other continuities lay deeper still, and this is where communization offers something genuinely new, the rather slender claim that the enterprise-form and the given division of labor must be quickly abolished by the revolution, and that self-organization by the enterprise must give way to self-organization against the enterprise or fail. There can be no “councils,” then, if by council one means a given relationship between self-organization and division of labor. This is where we can speak of meaningful rupture, in historiography, theory, and history itself. The relationship between self-organization and the division of labor, its arrangement by enterprise and industry, has changed over the last several decades, such that a process of revolutionary expropriation of the means of production can no longer follow the grooves laid down by the division of labor, can no longer emerge simply as the linking up of self-organized factory groups that then transform into councils, because the very division of labor will become an obstacle to self-organization. The question we must ask is why. Why is this the case?

One answer, which we have already encountered, we might call subjectivist, confirmed in the antiwork and anticonformist attitudes of the day. As a consequence of growth, of affluence, and of the postwar boom, working-class desire matured beyond wage demands, beyond struggles that could be satisfied at the worksite and beyond identification with work. The refusal of work emerges primarily as a consequence of the false utopianism of midcentury capitalism. Its promise of betterment that turns out to be, as Debord writes, merely an “augmented survival.” This explanation works well for May ’68 and the Hot Autumn/Creeping May of Italy, the rank and file struggle wave in the early 70s in the US, but less well for the cycle of struggles that picks up after 2008, which emerge in many cases in economic conditions of crisis, stagnation, and mass unemployment. Across the span of the long downturn, this subjectivity undergoes a weird modulation, as Theorie Communiste explain—the disidentification with work rests on a darker recognition, which is that with the reorganization of the labor process, struggle in the workplace becomes a struggle for capital, for the survival of a particular firm, occupation, or bailiwick. Workers self-organize in order to continue being exploited, fighting against layoffs and restructuring, under conditions in which most wage demands are illegitimate, foreclosed by the international economy’s anemic growth rates. This is clearest in the “suicidal” struggles that emerge in France after ’95, when workers threatened with liquidation took over their bankrupt, outmoded plants, not in order to self-mange them, but to get the best possible severance packages. In Cellatex, a chemical plant, they expropriated 50,000 liters of explosive chemicals, often leached into the surrounding environment, and threatened to explode the plant or dump the chemicals in the river. What they wanted, however, was money pure and simple, not to run the poison factory themselves. As

From these subjective indications, one must construct an objective theory of the developing composition of the working class, entangled at every level with the development of capital. The approach of Theorie Communiste and also Bruno Astarian, of Négation, took inspiration from the theoretical inquiry of Jacques Camatte into newly published texts by Marx, particularly the Grundrisse, The Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, and the “Immediate Results of the Process of Production,” sometimes referred to as the “missing sixth chapter of Capital.” In the last text, Marx makes a distinction between formal and real subsumption (or subordination, domination) by capital, two forms but also stages of the development of capitalism. In the first, capital subsumes an already existing labor process, through a change in property rights, which is to say, a formal change (formwechsel). In formal subsumption the labor process remains untransformed, but once ownership over the means of production has been effected, capital is free to introduce labor-saving techniques and equipment, the extra revenue from which will accrue to the owner. Part IV of Capital, arguably the center of the book, details these forms of real subsumption, of material subsumption which produce surplus value not only by lowering the costs of the reproduction of labor, rather than by increasing worker effort, but also by intensifying and multiplying labor, drawing from deep labor reserves.

Self-management, according to this account, is the political horizon corresponding to formal subsumption, in which the direction of the labor process still remains within reach and sight of the worker. Inasmuch as the underlying form of labor remains unsubsumed by capital, it is possible for labor to imagine throwing off the valorization process and producing directly for need. In real subsumption, when the productive forces have been reorganized in a manner adequate to capital, but not necessarily for humans, the very organization of the production becomes an obstacle. One can no longer throw off the valorization process, for the valorization process has subsumed the production process. One can only blow up the poison factory or suck it up.

There are problems with this history, however, chiefly the fact that the periodization offered, in which real subsumption only begins during the postwar boom, doesn’t actually accord with the history of capital. Real subsumption begins even before the emergence of large-scale industry in England in the 1820s—Adam Smith’s famous pin factory, with which he begins The Wealth of Nations, is an example of real subsumption, as is the four field/mixed husbandry crop system which made English agrarian capitalism possible centuries earlier. In fact, it’s hard to imagine formal subsumption as a historical stage rather than a logical presupposition of capitalist accumulation—it certainly does happen that precapitalist labor processes are subsumed without being materially altered—but this seems the exception rather than the rule, and in most cases of transition to capitalism, where capitalists take formal control they immediate translate that formal control into real control, real reorganization, material change. In any case, this means only that the first part of the claim, linking the project of workers’ self-management to a period of formal subsumption, needs to be complicated; it might nonetheless be true that the ongoing reorganization of the labor-process by production for profit reaches a point, eventually, where workers’ self-management is no longer intelligible as a horizon.

Narratives of real subsumption are often, as a result, forced to admits stages of real subsumption, a real subsumption followed by a realer subsumption, in which the mass worker of Fordism is replaced by the flexible worker of Toyotism, vertically organized conglomerates replaced by JIT and contract production. Often, what’s at stake in these expanded forms of subsumption is not reorganization of the labor-process qua labor but the subsumption of society, of infrastructure beyond the workplace, in order to meet the demands of valorization—schools, police, cultural institutions, etc. But this leads either to an expansion of the term “subsumption” or the concept of production and labor beyond meaning since most of these social forms had long oriented themselves to capitalist reproduction. What turns out to be more important for the writers within the communization stream who adapt this narrative is registration of a qualitative shift in the relation between labor-process and valorization process circa 1968.

For Theorie Communiste, this turns out be something like the “subsumption of struggle” not just the subsumption of the class in-itself, but also the class for-itself. TC’s schematic histories owe much to the post-Althusserian Regulation School, who break capitalism into a successive labor regimes characterized by relatively stable structures. Thus, the class compromise of the “Fordist” period, itself a reaction to the threat of revolution after WWI and its collapse in the 1930s, falls apart in the long May and gives way to a new labor regime in the restructuring of the 1980s. If the first is characterized by national agreements linking working-class wages to (high) productivity growth, in which the massifying working class was seen as a partner in accumulation, the second is characterized by a new delinking of wages from (slower) growth, and a new requirement, dictated by the demands of production for profit, that all returns from growth accrue to capital, and all wage-demands be treated as an impediment. In this new era it’s not just labor that has been subsumed, you might say, but class struggle itself, at least class struggle on the shop floor. The ruling class no longer needs to compromise—it can grab all the chips on the table every day. The class struggle that does emerge is a survival struggle, competing for the right to be exploited, or fighting against the squandering of working-class pensions or other social wages paid in decades ago and dissipated. The new situation is one of a “reciprocal implication” between capital and labor in which the proletariat’s own positioning as labor has become an obstacle to struggle, up to and including revolutionary struggles, rather than a lever to be used by them. But which comes first? Is the illegitimacy of wage demands the cause of the reciprocal implication of capital and labor or is it the other way around? This seems like a question worth asking because our original test cases—Italy and Argentina—both feature situations in which, because of crisis, working-class demands are legitimated. One therefore needs a narrative capable of subsuming all these instances.

A version of that narrative can be found in the history provided by Endnotes, which instead of seeing history as a series of successive regimes, highlights a single predicate which cuts across all the regimes: industry, that is to say real subsumption of the labor process by the factory, and particularly the continuous flow factory, and the demographic and economic transitions it indexes. Endnotes takes from Theorie Communiste the notion that something has changed in the nature of class struggle but manages to extend the frame of reference beyond the narrow purview of the shopfloor. Though Marx and his followers like to imagine that the workers’ movement is generated by the technical composition of the workplace, its divisions and aggregations, this was always something of a wishful thought. The shopfloor united workers but only by dividing them against other workers. Broad durable unity where it existed either emerged as the consequence of the necessities of struggle or had to rely on other mechanisms: political program, moral indoctrination, or cultural institutions. The places of greatest conflict were not only where semi-skilled workers were aggregated in large workplaces, though this was important. Explosive conflict, rather, was mostly likely to occur when these workers already had shared some common identity—in the Hot Autumn, as many have noted, the most rebellious workers were migrants from the south, identified with each other by the racism of the north, and bringing a repertoire of violent tactics from the moral economies of the south. Many such cases, but perhaps now fewer than ever before.

The workers’ movement was tasked, therefore, with solving the composition problem, producing class unity, strategic and tactical, in situations where the class was actively divided by class struggle itself. This required a project of working-class autonomy, not just in the shopfloor, but most particularly in proletarian community. This was the role of the party, the union: to produce a world, and from that world to launch a revolution. Michael Heinrich’s attempt to distinguish between worldview Marxism and critical Marxism doesn’t recognize that the project of the second and third international-era Marxism wasn’t just to produce a worldview but much more importantly a world. The problem, however, was that when it came time to make revolution, those who were willing to do so had to destroy the proletarian world, break with it, whereas most hoped to retain that space within capitalism, precisely because it seemed an easier path to a better life. Those institutions that did not conform after the failure of the global revolution were destroyed, and the ones that remained retained their autonomy in name only. Autonomy was no longer quiet from this moment on; it could be found only in molotovs and occupations, fought for, constructed in the middle of riots and in radical ghettoes. Proletarian culture was subsumed by the market and the nation-state.

We inherit the composition problem but not its solutions. We no longer have even a putative, practical class unity from which to begin. Class unity is projectual at best (when it isn’t simply repressive) and also always, it seems, when voiced with any strength, tainted by interclassism: Occupy’s we are the 99%, or the gilets jaunes focus on cost-of-living, both based on sociological conceptions of class that have little do with the proletariat as such. Or it’s articulated by quantifiers existential and universal: black lives matter, water is life, all cops are bastards, forms in which the proletariat speaks its name through the modalities of capitalist dispossession, through the violence of the state which always appears at once necessary and excessive.  

What Endnotes added to this conversation, in particular, was an ability to put the workers’ movement in relation to easily observed economic particulars, across the span of decades and centuries, and to do so both rigorously and without needless academic chatter. At the core of their story is an identification of real subsumption with a transitory social process, industrialization, which revolutionizes and rearranges labor and people, country after country, but in an increasingly rapid time frame. The compressed demographic and industrial transition observed in Italy after WWII is repeated on a larger and even more impressive scale in Japan, then the Asian Tigers, and finally China and India. But each time this process inherits the full set of technological capacities, meaning output rises more and swiftly. Now that even China and India are deindustrializing in aggregate terms, as Chinese capital moves to Africa and South Asia and beyond, this process may be over. Seen from space like this, the history of capitalism does seem to have a beginning, a middle, and what looks now to be a shorter or longer end. Inasmuch as the proletariat and its projects are products of capitalism, then so too is the workers’ movement expression of this structure of accumulation and growth, its possibilities realized on the upswing whose downstroke now explains the terrible position of the world proletariat, and the changed balance of forces since 1965.

To this story, I bring some new details, perhaps, and some further speculation. Most of my interest is in the implications of this theory for our revolutionary prospects today. It is only on the basis of an analysis of the tendencies and structures of capitalism that we can project any pathway out of capitalism. The story that Theorie Communiste tells emphasizes the dialectical entanglement of capital and labor in and through proletarian struggle; Endnotes, for their part, emphasizes the tandem development of capital and the workers’ movement. Between the two one observes that capital across the long downturn has not borne the crisis passively. The shrinking horizon of real subsumption, the diminishing returns of the millions of laborers sacrificed to the idol of productivity has sent capital into a frenzy, structuring the global factory around access to the cheapest labor possible, instituting a division of labor specifically designed to inhibit workplace organization and with effects that explain, at a phenomenological level, the waning of class belonging. This by no means indicates the end of class existence, class identity, nor of workers and the working-class. But increasingly workers find it difficult to struggle as workers rather than as proletarians, as dispossessed people, as such. The explanations for this are technological and organizational, not mention subjective, as I note, in effect unifying the different levels of analysis presented above. The result is that today, as Joshua Clover has outlined in Riot. Strike. Riot. class struggle tends to unfold in the space of circulation, outside the fortress of the worksite.

The last decade has provided powerful confirmation of all these theses, more or less. There is no major uprising of the last decade which was not in some sense a circulation struggle—from the plaza occupations of the Arab Spring, the movement of the squares, and Occupy, to the freeway blockades and riots of the Ferguson and George Floyd uprisings, to the occupied roundabouts of the gilets jaunes and the swarm tactics of Hong Kong. At the same time, these struggles very much seem to reinscribe themselves within the limits established by the communization analysis rather than overcome them. Politics is back, even as the tenor of the time remains markedly antipolitical. The austerians of tomorrow present themselves as the reformers of today. The emancipatory struggles of the early 2010s have spurred a grim reaction, as populism, nationalism, and revanchism, if not outright neofascism, show the ability to mobilize if not the capacity to redirect state power. None of these things were well-anticipated by the original analyses and as such deserve real thought.

Nonetheless, the tendencies of capitalism enumerated by the theory of communisation still hold. The theory of limits and obstacles to revolution has been confirmed. But the theory of communization is also a theory of how, based on these observed, characteristics a future revolution must unfold. In other words:

The fundamental problem to which all theoretical production must return, that must be confronted and to which it must find a resolution, is the following: how can the proletariat – acting strictly as a class of the capitalist mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within this mode of production – abolish capital, therefore all classes and therefore itself; that is to say, produce communism?

An analysis of tendencies is just the first step in answering this question. Between the tendencies of capitalism on the one hand, and the test of communism on the other, lay the tasks of the revolution, the theory of rupture, swerve, breakthrough, communist measure.

parts 1, 2, 3, 4

One step forward and two steps back. All my attempts to advance the story of communization seems to have led me back to its antecedents in left communism and council communism, if not Marx and the Second International. This is because the theory of communization is always narrative in presentation, as I have learned. Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin’s essays are translated and titled in English as The Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement, a narrative of the worker’s movement and its counterrevolutionary eclipse, told from the standpoint of a new cycle of struggles, moving forward on a new basis. Here, the critique of the historical ultraleft is the theoretical counterpart of a real shift in class struggle, first visible in ’68 but confirmed in the years since. The point of the theory of communization is to take stock of what has changed, and that requires at the very least a then and a now.

The sections dealing with May ’68 and its afterlives were written not by Dauvé but by Francois Martin (the penname of Francois Cerruti), who tells us that May ’68 was significant mostly for what did not happen, for “the great silence of the proletariat,” who rose up to interrupt and to paralyze capital, to shut down the industrial machinery, but nowhere formed workers’ organizations adequate to the task of a revolutionary seizure of that apparatus. Only in Censier, in the occupied university, did an explicitly communist workers’ committee of any size form, bringing thousands of radical workers together with students and ultraleft intellectuals, proposing “general self-management” and immediate revolutionary measures.

While these appeals fell on deaf ears, elites in the university, in the boardroom and in the halls of state were listening. In a great irony, workers’ control was understood as the explicit demand of the uprising at the precise moment that the working class refused to take control in practice, refused to form organizations of workers’ self-management:

The P.C.F itself includes ‘real participation’ in its governmental programme. The other large union, the CFDT advocates self-management, which is also supported by ultraleft groups who are in favor of workers’ councils. The Trotskyists propose worker’s control as a minimum programme for a workers’ government.”

Employers, too, quickly recognized in the language of self-management not their own imminent euthanasia but a means to intensify labor, subjectively, to compel investment in the labor process, seducing workers to participate in their own exploitation and think it liberation.

1968 was a riddle, and still is, for it did not emerge in response to manifest political or economic crisis. It emerged from an antagonism produced by growth itself, not its interruption, by the epochal reorganization of French society across the trentes glorieuses. Getting to the root of the antagonism was not easy, since it seemed to emerge from a mélange of qualitative and existential complaints, most visible in the student and youth movements of the era. Fulfilment, meaning, dignity, participation, creative expression. Between these demands and the capitalist workplace, however, there was a contradiction, and so Martin argues that the absence of concrete institutions of workers’ control in ’68 derives not from the timidity of the working class, but its intransigence—workers were no longer interested in assuming responsibility for their reproduction as workers, now clearly incompatible with their needs as human beings. In the heat of struggle, something else is revealed, something that is foreclosed by the moment of negotiation and even by the identity of worker. After 68, in France and in Italy, where this subjectivity will be even clearer, self-organized groups of workers strike it seems, in order to strike, and against the end of the strike, finding in means an end itself, and displaying an indifference to the conduct of final negotiations, which always lead back to disempowerment.

The ultraleftists at Censier were prosecuting what they believed was the maximal communist program, based on self-organized seizure of the means of production by workers’ committees. It took those who participated months and years to come to terms with the proletariat’s silence, its curiously aggressive passivity; the theory of communization is one form of that coming to term, emerging directly from the discussions of those who continued meeting, in order to figure out what happened. But the explanation Martin gives in his book is less explanation than observation, a flag marking the problem. We can understand the theory of communization as a series of attempts to come to terms with this silence, which would reappear, in one form or the other, in every significant struggle since. Here is how Dauvé and others describe it in a subsequent document, that offers a much fuller and richer account of 1968:

In the factories in 1968 one hardly found the festive atmosphere of 1936. People felt that something had happened which could go further but they avoided doing so. The atmosphere of gravity which reigned was coupled with a resentment against the unions, a convenient scapegoat, whereas they were only able to keep control through the behaviour of the rank and file. The gaiety was elsewhere, in the streets. This is why May 68 could neither reproduce, or lead to, a revolutionary return during the years which followed. The movement generated a reformism which fed on the neutralisation of its most virulent aspects. History doesn't pass the dish around a second time.

What 1968 exposed was a profound de-subjectivation, a disidentification with work that was often a disidentification with the workers’ movement as such, a negativity manifesting in refusal of labor, in strikes and sabotage, but just as capable as turning to nihilism, cynicism, and passivity:

Abandoning control of the factories to the trade unions was a sign of weakness, but also of the fact that they were conscious that the problem lay elsewhere. Five years later, in 1973, in a big strike at Laval, workers purely and simply left the factory for three weeks. Like the « de-politicization » of which so much has been said, this loss of interest in the company, in work and in its reorganisation, is ambivalent, and cannot be interpreted except in relation to everything else. Communism was certainly present in 1968, but only in relief, in negative. At Nantes in 1968, and later at SEAT at Barcelona (1971) or Quebec (1972), strikers would take over districts or cities, go as far as seizing radio stations, but would make nothing of it : the self-organisation of proletarians « is possible, but at the same time, they have nothing to organise » (Théorie communiste, n° 4, 1981, p. 21)

But if the problem wasn’t in the factory, where was it? And what was the problem anyway? Presumed here is that proletarians had already recognized the critique of workers’ self-management which communist theory was just then digesting—proletarians did not set up workers’ committees because they recognized, in some way, such structures would block the way toward communism. They did not swell the parties of the extra-parliamentary left because they recognized that these parties, too, had adapted themselves to capitalism, become its loyal opposition.

The 1970s did provide confirmation for this thesis about subjectivity, especially in southern Europe. In Italy, refusal of work and autonomy from rotten workers’ organizations became the slogan of an insurrectionary movement which brought the country to the brink of civil war; in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, where the liquidation of the left by fascism and authoritarianism favored the spontaneous and the insurrectionary, new tactical and strategic immediacies confirmed what had been seen in the gas of May. In Poland and Iran, workers’ councils did emerge too, though largely without a vision of workers’ self-management, indicating that something of the old dream did yet live.

As a negative claim, the theory of communization has stood the test of time. That the workers’ movement began dying, and with it all sorts of subjective investments in work and workplace, does seem indubitable, but an argument from subjectivity is not enough, even if it were provable. From whence comes such a subjective shift? This is what needs to be explained in some manner neither circular nor self-verifying. The best explanations have proceeded not only from an assessment of some shift in subjectivity but from an examination of the restructuring of capitalism. New tactics and new attitudes index changes in the nature of work and capitalism. In other words, it is less that workers have intuited both problem and solution than that there is something about capitalist enterprise as it has developed, about the entanglement of property and technique, that precludes a vision of workers’ self-management.

At Censier, after May had ended, general assemblies of the ultraleft continued to meet, and discuss these questions. The first answer they came up with was that capitalism had become so productive that a passage directly to communism was now possible, and that workers recognized as much. 1968 occurred during a moment of relative abundance, in which wage-demands were overwhelmed by a whole host of qualitative demands. In rejecting the “augmented survival” that linked productivity to wages, and the working class to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, the proletariat seemed to break with all developmental logics. In the Censier commities, then,

the point of convergence was the conviction that the proletariat does not have to install itself as a social force before changing the world. There is thus no workers organisation to create, to arouse or to hope for. There is no transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism. There is no autonomous proletarian organisation outside of what the proletariat does in order to communise the world and itself with it.

As the crisis of the 1970s unfolded, this assessment would need to be revised. Reformism was not off the table so much as altered entirely. In Italy, in the Hot Autumn of 1969 and the revitalized proletarian movement that followed, refusal of politics and work, enabled by the watchwords of autonomy and workers’ power, instead floated on a sea of achievable demands whose power lay in their diversity rather than maximality. In Italy, the immediacies of May became local, molecular, insurrectionary mostly in their extent and duration, which seemed to lead to revolution only by way of civil war.

The extended, “creeping” May of Italy resembled the French case, however, inasmuch as workers began against the unions and employers a fight they would let the unions resolve for them in the end. As in France, the student radicals of the late 60s linked up with workers in the factory, but in Italy the connection was more productive, forging a durable and reciprocal link between Marxist intellectuals and wildcatting strikers. At the Pirelli rubber plant, in Milan, one of many sites in the north where the collective bargaining structure linking productivity to wages broke down in the face of accelerating growth and a changing division of labor, “unitary base-committees” (CUBs) emerged, forming networks of contacts independent of the foremen within and across worksites. Influenced by the ideas of operaist journal Quaderni Rossi, and later by Potere Operaio, the base committees, in which students could participate on an equal footing with workers, made their power felt through the practice of autoriduzione (autoreduction), essentially a slowdown strike, taking output rates as their object and using any and all means, including sabotage, to set factory-wide rates. From this moment, linking theory and practice, autoreduction would become a veritable metonym for a vast repertoire of refusals.

The events at Pirelli and the spread of the CUBs through the industrial triangle of Milan-Turin-Genoa confirmed, powerfully, the one-sided “science of class hatred” that Mario Tronti had proposed in Workers and Capital (1967). There he had argued, apropos of the struggles of the early and mid-1960s, that the “working class had discovered, or rediscovered…its political capacity to impose reformism on capital and then make rough-and-ready use of that reformism for the purposes of working class revolution.” In the Keynesian planner-state, which brought parties, unions, and employers’ associations to the bargaining table in order to agree on output targets and wages, one in fact saw the power of the working class to set the primary economic determinant, productivity. It is workers who set the pace of the economy, and capital which scrambles to respond, Tronti argued. The fact that the workers of Pirelli set the rate at which the economy’s wheels would spin was explicit confirmation of the inverted relationship between capital and labor.

For Tronti, however the auto of auto-reduction lacks a steering wheel that could turn self-organization (here entirely negative) into self-management. On this, he and Bordiga agree: only the coordinating party can turn the proletarian strategy of refusal into socialism, through tactical centralization. Reformism might overflow into revolution, but only through the structure of the party. But this overgrowth grew over the bounds of the parties and the unions, and no new container could be found for it: auto-reduction referred to a whole panoply of tactics for setting not just rates but prices, for transport, for rent, for utilities, for housing.. The base-committees required networks of militants throughout the factory, as well as connection to other organization, but they were not organized in order to take power over the production process, as some thought, but to rattle the employers into concessions. Autoreduction implied the self-organization of the proletariat as a force independent from the means of production, and in antagonism with them. The struggle against speedup was one and the same with a wage struggle, which meant it could only be one-sidedly concluded through direct action. Negotiation was inevitable, and there the organizations of the ultraleft were easily routed. While the parties remained moribund, the unions showed themselves resilient and flexible and, as in France, quickly took on board the language of workplace democracy and the new qualitative demands of the movement.

The self-organization of refusal led away from rather than toward workers’ self-management, which became the part of the language of the official left. In the workplace its metier was organized passivity. Its positive acts and expropriations, when it came to that, were generally undertaken outside of the workplace. Proletarian shopping sprees, occupations of housing blocks. Counterplanning from the shopfloor could become planning only indirectly, because it took the division of labor itself for its object—divisions between skilled and semiskilled workers, between men and women, between managers and managed. Any vision of proletarian revolution and planning would, by necessity, be constructed against not across these divisions. But perhaps for this reason, thinking on communist transition by the partisans of operaismo and autonomia tends to refuse the distinction between means and ends, between proletarian empowerment, organization, and struggle, on the one hand, and communism as object on the other.

In Italy, then, we can see visible most clearly the limits that workplace self-organization as such faces. The self- of self-organization has become newly problematic, fractured by the midcentury refashioning of industry. Workers struggle against their own positionality in the division of labor, as women, as migrants, as piece-rate workers, technicians, etc. The self- of self-organization must lie elsewhere, either in the proletariat as such, independent of the means of production, or in some future communist transformation of those means of production. What is required for revolution is not self-organization as such, but the self-organization of self-organization, which would mean an other-organization, a recoding of the system of places inherited from capitalism. As Theorie Communiste write, encapsulating this insight, “self-organization is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.”

There is something powerful but also imprecise about this formulation—what distinguishes self-organization as object and as subject, as obstacle and activity? That is not to be found in self-organization itself but, as noted above, the changing division of labor. For the self- of self-organization has at its root some notion of place, of belonging, even when it is the self-organization of those who have no place. One cannot but fight where one is, but if one remains there, then it can be possible that struggle cements the system of places, rather than overcomes them. Self-organization will therefore come into conflict with the self-, with the laws of right and property and belonging which subtend the left and the workers’ movement, or it will simply become nothing, the reproduction of capitalism.

Since the Italian 70s, “autonomy” has as often as not taken up the space self-organization did—an insistence on direct action, direct participation, and independence from the institutions of the moribund left. There is a difference, however. Autonomy is self-organization stripped of any project of self-management of the means of production—its fantasies tend to be fantasies of secession, fugitivity, and perpetual anabasis, since the goal of communism has been suppressed. Autonomy from what? And from whom? And for what purpose? Autonomy has no meaning except in relation to heteronomy—as the name for a positive project, it chooses immanence over transcendence, and gives up the ghost of communism. The shift in the vernacular of the ultraleft—perhaps most visible in the 90s and 00s, before the return of a new crisis communism that has revitalized older thematics—attests to the new prospects of communism in the twenty-first century. One can imagine capital only as an Egypt one must flee.

If it were just Italy, just France, in which one witnessed these dynamics, communization would not be much of a theory at all. There is something unique about the size and strength of the workers’ movements in these two countries, as well as the rapidity of their postwar transition, especially in Italy. One might therefore expect them to be unique. In the 2000s, however, in Argentina, in Greece, in Mexico, in countries quite different from France and Italy, self-organization and autonomy played out similarly. In the 2010s, this dynamic becomes general, global, from Egypt to the United States, from Sudan to Rojava.

The events in Argentina give the clearest demonstration, straddling the beginning of the millennium whose logic they seem to imprint. During the 90s, when the structural adjustment programs inflicted upon Argentina by its debt crisis swelled the ranks of the unemployed, one of the most powerful movements of the unemployed in recent decades converged around a particular tactic, the piquete, or corte de ruta, road blockades undertaken by unemployed workers along with a specific demand for aid from the state. First employed by rural workers laid off by the national oil company due to structural adjustments, the piquete could be used to set prices, to demand relief, and eventually, after the crisis of ’98, to demand bulk grants that could be used for self-administered planes trabajar, work plans, that in some areas took over a significant part of proletarian reproduction, with bakeries, canteens, clothing exchanges, brick-making factories, and childcares. This was a robust vision of self-management indeed, but one which could posit autonomy only by first presupposing the state as guarantor of production, in other words, by presupposing heteronomy. In the deepening crisis, after ’98, when firms began to fail, and with them governments, toppled by riots, Argentina witnessed the most extensive wave of workplace takeovers seen yet. But these occurred only in those firms that had failed, that had been bankrupted, and whose ownership not to mention financial prospects were as a result uncertain. Workers therefore inherited deeply indebted and unproductive businesses, the runts of the economy, which could only be operated through state subsidy, on the one hand, and/or solidarity economy on the other. Not a model that could be generalized, since workers did not occupy and hardly even struck the most productive, highly-concentrated sectors of the economy, the conglomerates. As Roland Simon of Theorie Communiste writes:

 In the productive activities which developed during the social struggles in Argentina, something happened which was at first sight rather disconcerting: autonomy appeared clearly as what it is, the taking over and reproduction of its situation within capital by the working class. The defenders of “revolutionary” autonomy can say that this came about because it didn’t triumph, but this was its real triumph. But, at the very moment when, in productive activities, autonomy appeared for what it was, it was the whole basis of autonomy and self-organisation which was    overturned: the proletariat could not find in itself the capacity to create other inter-individual relations (I’m deliberately not talking about social relations), without overturning and negating   what it is in this society, that is to say without entering into contradiction with the content of its    autonomy. In the way that the productive activities have been carried out, in the effective details    of their realisation, it is the determinations of the proletariat as a class of this society which have been effectively shaken: property, exchange, division of labour and, above all, work itself.

It is easy to understand TC’s pessimism here. The piqueteros, the occupied factories, could not become the basis for an overcoming of capitalism, as they presume a division between employed and unemployed workers, presume the state as guarantor, etc. But note also their optimism. There is something untenable about this situation which the partisans of self-organization note immediately, there is something about self-organization that resists the sclerosis of self-organization and that wants to organize it on a basis that would bring it into contradiction with self-organization. TC sees this, in particular, in the radical subjectivity of the movement and its emphasis on free giving and participation, its hostility to all divisions. They quote from one piquetero:

If we create canteens only so the compañeros can eat, then we are dickheads. If we believe  that producing on a farm is just about digging up beans so that so that the compañeros can eat,   then we are really complete dickheads… If we don’t know how to leave the farm and everything which the state throws at us, how to be the builders of a new social relation, of new values, of a new subjectivity, let’s not bet on a new 19/20.” (a militant from MTD Allen4 – south of Argentina, Macache, p. 27). 

It is this attempt to build the whole world anew on a ground that won’t let you which characterizes the dynamic tension of the moment, its possibilities. From this contradiction, one can anticipate an overcoming which is not the generalization of autonomy or self-management but, because it cuts laterally to all notions of self- and other, the immediate production of communism:

An activist of the MTD Allen (Macache) told how the question of surplus, of overproduction, of its distribution, was posed in an occupied factory, how for the Brukman workers taking over the     factory and making it work again was part of a relation of force which included the liaison with the unemployed piqueteros movement. At that moment, we can say that what is lacking is “generalisation of self-organisation” or autonomy. But if so we do not understand that what is called a “generalisation” is not one, it is a destruction of the class as self-organising subject. This generalisation is a supersession by itself of the subject which previously found in its situation the capacity to self-organise. If we do not understand this “dynamic” as a rupture, we are stuck on the vision of a purely formal movement because its content eludes us, we are confusing the taking in hand of the conditions of survival and the abolition of the situation that one has been led to take in hand. If the proletariat abolishes itself, it does not self-organise. Calling for the self-organisation of the whole movement, is to be blind to its content.

Between piquetero and occupier, there can be only some third term which overcomes both and which, as a result, can proceed from neither. They will call this l’écart, a somewhat untranslatable term that might appear in one place as “gap” and elsewhere as “swerve.” The self-organization of self-organization, which overcomes its system of places. This is what must be articulated, as the communist prospect, as communizing activity, its anticipations located in the most intense class struggles of the current era. This is what I will attempt to do in subsequent essays.

Communism is an old idea in the world. Let’s call it ancient, for it may as well be our antiquity. We need not track down its origins in the alleyways of insurrection, only know that millions have struggled and died in its name. In this sense, it is not just an idea but a real force in history, product of and factor in a proletarian movement that has for at least two centuries now posed the overcoming of capitalism by classless, stateless, moneyless society. In fact, what’s remarkable about the history of the workers’ movement of the last two centuries is that this real ideal has until recently not only seemed inevitable but obvious. Even where they disagreed, violently, about how to achieve such a state of affairs, anarchists, communists, socialists, Marxists, syndicalists, and even some liberals, all stood joined by a common vision of a future classless society.

Today this common horizon has collapsed. Communism is a way out perhaps, a last hope, but only a fool could think it inevitable now. The theory and practice of class struggle we inherit from the last millennium is not comprehensible, however, except in the light of this ideal, if not the guarantee then at least the possibility of communism. This is especially true in the case of Karl Marx, tribune of the workers’ movement, who can otherwise appear most grandiose where he is in fact most modest. In 1868, he writes of the just-published Capital, his critique of political economy, that it is “without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie.”[1] Marx however had from the time of his first collaborations with Friedrich Engels twenty years earlier insisted that communism was not a matter of ideas and that it had already been announced by the real action of the proletarian movement, most explicitly in the revolutions of 1848. Marx could devote himself to critique, in other words, to sinking the supply ships of bourgeois economics, precisely because he did not think such work determinative in matters class struggle. He would hurl books at the heads of the bourgeoisie while the proletarian movement took out their legs.

Take his letter to his long-time friend and supporter Louis Kugelmann, for example, who wrote to Marx immediately after the original publication of Capital in German to report that readers familiar with economic theory were struggling with Marx’s theory of value. “The vulgar economist,” Marx responds, “has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations need not be identical with the magnitudes of value.”[2] Yet it is more than that: “The point of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The reasonable and the necessary in nature asserts itself only as a blindly working average.” The bourgeoisie and its intellectual representatives are therefore forced to treat as “great discovery” the fact that “in appearance things look different.” They have no need for Marx’s “science” and in fact their standpoint in society will make it difficult to comprehend very simple matters: “The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and the method of science. Every child knows that a country which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but for a few weeks, would die.” The problem in other words is not so much that Marx is very smart but that bourgeois economists are particularly stupid—their reaction “shows what these priests of the bourgeoisie have come to, when workers and even manufacturers and merchants understand my book and find their way about in it.” Notice the emphasis: even manufacturers and merchants can understand it, but workers do so more naturally. If his critique of political economy is a missile lobbed at the heads of the bourgeoisie, it is not undertaken in order to explain capitalism to them through the percussion of intellectual missiles—it is a critique on behalf of the working class, who pushes the attack on other fronts.

It is not because workers are better educated about the principles of economics that they intuitively understand Marx’s work. Rather it is because daily experience, of exploitation and oppression, daily reminds them of the coherence and correctness of Marx’s critique, the necessity of revolution. What he says of “every child” is likely not true of bourgeois children, for whom the products of labor appear as if by magic: but proletarian children, who begin work young and watch their family work, do understand such basic matters. At stake is more than experience, however, but also attitude, standpoint—Marx’s Capital is always illuminated by a future communism. Once the “inner connection” between value magnitudes and exchange relations, “is grasped,” he tells Kugelmann, “all belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions breaks down before their practical collapse.” This first collapse, the critical collapse, is neither cause nor precondition of the practical collapse, revolution. Marx does not believe that by proving capitalism impermanent he will induce the bourgeoisie to simply quit the field. Indeed, he has noted they will find it constitutively difficult to descry their doom in the fog of the business cycle. Marx in 1865 is tribune of a workers’ movement that has already announced its historical mission: to abolish capitalism. It is not that Marx can kill capitalism with his ideas, but that he has expressed in ideas a movement already underway which seemed certain to usher in a practical collapse. Here is modesty where, in the absence of that great backdrop of the workers’ movement, one might find only grandiosity. The point of the critique of political economy is not so much ideology critique as it is an illumination of existing conditions in light of their practical collapse, on behalf and for the movement that will precipitate it.

Marx wrote a book entitled Capital, not one entitled Communism or The Proletariat, because the workers’ movement did not need its ends articulated, did not need an explicit description of classless society, that common horizon. It needed better weapons, a clarification of means. At stake here is less a claim about Marx’s method than one about the methods which communists should use to read Marx. We can no doubt treat Capital as a grand analysis without presupposition, an immanent critique, a science, a research project, but certain key aspects will remain inscrutable, written in invisible ink that only the heat of communism can bring to the surface. I think this is the case for important parts of Marx’s theory of value. As Marx notes in the letter, the bourgeoisie need hardly bother with the concept of value. They can make do with appearances. If proletarians understand the concept of value more readily it is because value names for Marx the inner coherence of that monster which proletarians recognize as their enemy. Value names the differentia specifica of the capitalist mode of production, the one element that presupposes all the others, the ring that binds together the other rings of money and wages, profit and price, property and the police, the state and the banking system, world markets and international conflict. The concept of value is as much a descriptive concept as a revolutionary hieroglyphic, a critical heuristic designed to focus those who would overthrow capitalism on the essential.

These objectives are clearer in Marx’s first attempts at critique of political economy, where Marx generally had very particular political interlocutors in mind. Early anticapitalists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his disciple Alfred Darimon, on the one hand, and the “Ricardian Socialists” like John Francis Bray, John Gray, and Thomas Hodgskin, on the other, frequently proposed to right the wrongs of capitalism through reform of the money system and banking.[3] Marx recognized the incoherence and impracticability of these reforms—which mostly consisted of proposals to replace national and bank money with “labor money”— and it was in developing the concepts adequate to these critiques, first in the Grundrisse and then in Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, that Marx struck on certain key aspects of his theory of value.[4]

Labor money was in many respects a derivation from the labor theory of value developed by Adam Smith and then David Ricardo. In the 1820s and 1830s in Britain, as resistance to early capitalism took shape in the form of trade unions and cooperatives, social reformers associated with Robert Owen and then Chartism developed the labor theory of value into a theory of exploitation depending on natural rights and natural prices, cast in absolutist moral terms.[5] Once it had been demonstrated that labor is the source and measure of all wealth, it required only a simple step further to propose to right the injustices of capitalism by denominating goods in terms of their “real” value. With the prices of goods labeled in terms of labor hours and labor minutes, rather than dollars and pennies, it would be nearly impossible to swindle workers and not give them the full value of their product, according to the proponents of the theory. The LTV thus offered both a critique of capitalism and a way to improve it, subordinating money and capital to the benefit of laborers and, in turn, the nation. Every monetary exchange could be made equal and transparent, with its real value for a producer written right there on its face.

Marx eventually refuted this by demonstrating such a notion of fair exchange was self-contradictory: the very idea of equal exchange presupposes inequality, as he shows, because the value of labor (the output of a worker) is never the same as the value of labor-power (the reproduction requirement of that worker, and therefore the price of its use by a capitalist). From this distinction, Marx develops one even more fundamental, between concrete labor and abstract labor, the core of his mature theory of value. His main achievement in this arena was not, then, as is sometimes supposed, a theory of surplus value or a proof of exploitation—versions of such a theory were already available, as he would summarize in the manuscript entitled “Theories of Surplus Value.” As Diane Elson formulates it elegantly in her seminal essay “Value: The Representation of Labor in Capitalism,” summarizing debates on the topic in the Conference of Socialist Economics in the 1970s, Marx’s theory of value had been radically misunderstood by those who saw in it a method to calculate the magnitudes of exploitation: “It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labor. But rather of seeking an understanding of why labor takes the forms it does, and what the political consequences are.”[6]

Elson worries overtly in her introduction that her corrective reading, distinguishing between Marx’s theory of value and the Ricardian LTV, might be depoliticizing. For the Ricardian proof of exploitation, with or without labor money, at least had the virtue of being politically salient, and leading to very clear practical objectives. This is because, despite the virtue of her corrective reading, she does not see how the concept of value is directly connected to the objectives of communism, naming not only a historical process – “why labor takes the form it does”—but a great misfortune, understanding of which will aid in its overcoming. Elson stands at the headwaters of a new way of reading Marx, begun in the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Marx’s complete works, and sometimes called “value-form theory,” or with respect to German exponents, the new reading of Marx. These Marxological interventions have been enormously clarifying for readers of Marx, making sense of the inner analytic coherence of Marx’s work. This clearheaded way of reading Marx has, however, come at the expense of a certain political power, I would argue. It is a way of reading Marx for an era that lacks Marx’s certainty.

In the text that follows we will encounter another, complementary way of reading Capital, in which Marx’s masterwork is not only the adequate representation of the capitalist mode of production but an outline in negative of its overcoming by communism. I have come to this way of reading Marx by a long and winding route, over terrain that will be mapped thoroughly, though its origins lie in the programmatic method of Amadeo Bordiga, for whom, to use Gilles Dauvé’s helpful paraphrase, “the whole of Marx’s work was a description of communism.”[7] Bordiga is supremely attentive to those moments in Marx’s mature writing, surprisingly abundant if you know what to look for, where in order to illuminate some feature of capitalism, Marx finds that he must, in fact, compare it with a fictitious communism. “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common and expending their many different forms of labor-power as one single social labor force.”[8] This is offered as ultimate contrast with capitalism, where the fetishism of commodities induces a complicated situation in which humans become mannequins puppeted and ventriloquized by sarcastic commodities, both unfree and deluded about the sources of their unfreedom. The purpose of such contrast is to bring out key features of the capitalist mode of production, and class society more generally, otherwise untheorizable. It is only in the light of communism that we come to see the misprisions of the commodity form for what they are: “The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e., the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.”  Marx therefore offers more than a description of capitalism, but one in which key predicates of communism become visible.

At stake here is less a claim about Marx’s method than the method that communists should apply to the reading of Marx. For communists, the science of capitalism is the theory of the rules of a game they hope to consign to the dustbin. The goal for us is not just to enumerate those rules, nor much less to learn to play the game better, but to develop from them an understanding of how the game itself might be overcome. If it is anything for communists in the twenty-first century, it is an applied science, the science of destroying capitalism, whose descriptions of capitalism and predictions about class struggle and its unfolding have their meaning in action, in class struggle itself. And here our concern should be less about what Marx intended—science of capitalism? weapon against it? —than what we, as communists, need. We need to know what capitalism is, but not in order to wonder at it and enumerate its sublimities. The concept of value is nothing, for communists, if not a cross-hairs that flashes red when we need to smash something.

There is also in Marx a tendential theory alongside the heuristic theory. The light of communism revealed for Marx a directionality to capitalist production, one that pointed toward its ruin but also its overcoming by communism. The tendencies identified are numerous and complexly entangled: immiseration and mass proletarianization, concentration and centralization of capital, globalization of trade, rising organic composition of capital, falling rate of profit, depletion of the soil, colonization and imperialism. Chief among all these tendencies, however, was the tendency for capitalism to produce its own gravediggers in the rising, militant proletariat. The tendencies are also, it should now seem needless to say, illuminated by a future communism. This is because, first, the rising proletariat is already practically oriented toward communism, and second, tendencies within capitalism lead inexorably toward communism. Tendencies are directional, and directions are not neutral, but stained with the dye of class struggle, progressive and reactive.

Much of the tendential theory has not held up, at least if read strictly, and in some instances, it must be admitted, Marx was badly wrong. But the fact that any of it has held up, despite the fact that the communist revolution has not occurred, and capitalism soldiers on long after Marx could have thought such a thing imaginable, counts as no small feat. None of his contemporaries fare better. The tendential theory must, in any case, always return to the facts of the world, of class struggle, for confirmation. But it also must know what it’s looking for, where it hopes history will lead. Here again Marx can appear most grandiose when he is in fact being most modest. He need not proselytize and inveigh, draw up battle plans and programs, for the tendencies of capitalism are already doing the work of forming a resistance adequate to it. The tendential analysis is not prescriptive, but diagnostic, highlighting limits and opportunities. But these are opportunities that, for Marx, the working class must come to understand one way or another. It is class struggle itself which brings these opportunities to mind for Marx—his work is to clarify and refine political tendencies, the communist movement principally, already in the process of formation.

Seen in this new historical light Marx concludes not only that the proponents of labor money were wrong but also that their proposals would by necessity be rejected, and were indeed already being rejected, by the new proletarian movements sweeping across Europe and the world. Labor money assumes, in its theory of exploitation, an underclass consisting not so much of wage laborers as artisans who own (or borrow) their means of production and sell their output on the market. Such petty producers were exploited by merchants and bankers offering them increasingly miserable terms, threatening them with bankruptcy and, in turn, loss of the means of production, ultimately reducing them to mere proletarians. A reform of the market, offering “fair terms” or a restoration of antecapitalist conventions of natural right, appeals to artisans because the market is the locus of their exploitation. Proletarians, on the other hand, are more likely to see their oppression as originating from production itself. As such, Marx wasn’t only rejecting labor money on the plane of ideas, as practically unworkable, but also as resting on a pragmatic class basis which made its moral theories of natural right and price inapposite. The labor monetarists thought the way they did, then, according to the theory Marx develops, because of a social division of labor and a historical process (the formation of a strictly propertyless proletariat) which duped them into thinking their own ideas causes when in fact they were simply effects.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels caricatured their post-romantic contemporaries, “the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany,” as being like the proverbial fellow who thought that “men were drowned in water only because they were possessed of the idea of gravity.”[9] John Gray and Alfred Darimon were thus cut from the same mold as the reactionary, bourgeois, and utopian socialists Marx and Engels took to task in The Communist Manifesto, and the various post-Hegelians they savaged in their other writings. Against this, uniquely in the history of radical thought up until then, Marx and Engels developed an account of history which placed class struggle and proletarian self-activity at the center of any meaningful project to overcome capitalism. It was no longer simply a matter of ideas, though ideas were very much at stake, since the matter had to be debated out in the pages of books. What mattered was class struggle, collective action, social practice.

Once the moral underpinnings of labor money are made apparent, then, the political implications of Marx’s turn to economics and the critique of political economy in the 1850s makes perfect sense, coming as they do after the thoroughgoing critique of the moral, religious, and idealist presuppositions of his fellow socialists and communists that he had developed in the 1840s. Diane Elson need not be so worried, then, about losing political salience by casting off the Ricardian fetters of Marxist pseudo-orthodoxy. It’s not so much that value analysis renews critical thought, or denaturalizes the economy, though it does all this. Rather, Marx’s value theory offers a method by which certain socialist proposals can be put to the test. This is prediction, but only of a certain sort. It does not tell you what will happen but what must, or what can’t. The test of value is a logical test—it works from the definition of capitalism, its basic logical structure, in order to clarify what it would mean to overcome it. Here, however, it must be said from the start that the dialectic has betrayed many a traveler to this region, leading some to believe that the abolition of value, the sine qua non of capitalism, is itself the sufficient condition for communism when it is in fact merely a necessary one. Communism cannot be derived logically from the presuppositions of capitalism. There is a missing moment, an absent positive, to the inversion of value. Indeed, that missing moment is what is fundamentally missing from life not just in capitalism but in all class society.

Full essay here: https://jasperbernesdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/the-test-of-communism.pdf

[1] “Letter to Johan Philip Becker,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), 358–59. [2] “Marx to Kugelmann in Hanover” (July 11, 1868), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), 68. [3] Alfred Darimon and Emile de Girardin, De La Réforme Des Banques, (Paris: Guillaumim et Cie, 1856); John Gray, Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money: Delivered Before the Members of the “Edinburgh Philosophical Institution” during the Months of February and March, 1848 (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black; [etc., etc.], 1848). [4] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin, 1993); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), 257–518. [5] E. K. Hunt, “The Relation of the Ricardian Socialists to Ricardo and Marx,” Science & Society 44, no. 2 (1980): 177–98. [6] Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London : Atlantic Highlands, N. J: CSE Books ; Humanities Press, Inc, 1979), 123. [7] Jean Barrot and Francois Martin, Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement, 1st Edition (Black & Red, 1974), 125. [8] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 171. [9] Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to The Critique of Political Economy (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1976), 30.

part five in a series

parts 1, 2, 3, 4

I can’t leave Jan Appel just yet, it turns out. There is still more to say about his relationship to communization, if not “council communism” or “councilism.” This is because Appel in 1920 on his hijacked herring schooner, navigating toward Murmansk and onward to St. Petersburg to be told off by the man after whom the city would be renamed, was not yet a councilist or even a council communist, if we are to go the definitions Phillipe Bourrinet leaves us.* Rather, he was part of a broad, as-yet-undefined left communism in the process of defining itself while the world revolution decayed. He was on his way to Soviet Russia after all, on behalf of the newly-formed KAPD, whose positions were antiparliamentary, anti-trade-union, and pro-council, but by no means council communist. The very fact that he had hijacked the Senator Schröder on behalf of his party, to communicate with the Comintern, indicates that he still saw an expansive role for the party. He was on a boat named after a parliamentary official, on his way to communicate with the leaders of a rebel state, after all.

Jan Appel remains fascinating not just because he is the very model of the proletarian intellectual, his theories formed directly at the beating heart of class struggle, but because he passes through each of the signal moments of the German Revolution (there are five, though only four are relevant to Appel’s story) and we can read those moments in the evolution of his thinking, an evolution that seems, in fact, to escape all the labels we might apply to it. The first of these periods comes with the great revolutionary strikes leading up to the November 1918 revolution and the formation of the councils. Appel had been sent to the shipyards of Hamburg during the war, still under military command, where he became a leading organizer. This first period ends in early January 1919 with the passage into a second period of open civil war, the so-called “Spartacist” rising of January, crushed quickly in Berlin by the freikorps units which the new SPD Defence Minister Gustav Noske unleashed on the radical workers. Elsewhere the rising lasted longer. Appel was in Hamburg when he heard that the freikorps had recaptured all the buildings occupied by the Spartacists—principally, the police station and the headquarters of Vorwärts, the SPD newspaper—and tracked down and killed both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the nascent communist left.  

There was no KPD or KAPD then, in 1919, only the USPD, the independent Social Democrats and within it the half-organized communist left known as the Spartacist League, which after January would form into the KPD and then the KAPD. In Hamburg, after the defeated Berlin rising, Appel worked with Ernest Thalmann, then member of the USPD and later leader of the KPD, to organize a night march of workers on the nearby barracks, in Barenfeld, whose soldiers they disarmed and whose four thousand weapons they seized. But the attempt to cohere those four-thousand armed workers into a disciplined insurrectionary force failed, Appel tells us, as “after a good week of effort to build up a well-armed fighting force, those with arms began to disperse one after the other and disappeared along with their weapons. It was at this point that we arrived at the conclusion that the unions were quite useless for the purposes of the revolutionary struggle.”

From then on Appel was a principal organizer of the unionen, the factory-groups which would become the social base for council communism from 1919 to 1921 (after which point the communist left in Germany essentially implodes and cedes the ground to the players of Bolshevist putsch chess in charge of the KPD). The unionen are and were, it must be said right away, not the same as the councils, the räte, which were determined geographically with proportional representation per workplace and sometimes mechanisms for the representation of the unemployed and others. The role of the unionen, after 1919, was to prepare the ground for a workers’ government by the councils, which so far had been thwarted by the SPD and the trade unions. The unionen did not represent the entirety of the working class but rather the perspective of the militant minority.

But what role then, if any, for the party? Positions within left communism, the KAPD, and the KAPD-associated unionen, the AAU, were varied. Some imagined a directive role for the party within the class struggle, able to act where the fragmented unionen could not; others imagined a role for the party as propagandizers, leading the way to a workers’ government by council, but not sticking around to ruin the show. This is more or less Appel’s view when he returns to Russia a year later, by legal means apparently, to present at the well-documented July 1921 Third Conference of the Comintern, which took as its task reflection on the “March Action” of 1921 (discussed below) and in particular the conduct of the KAPD. In its call to the conference, the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) wrote that the KAPD “must say conclusively whether or not it accepts international discipline.” Appel answered this call to say, no, they would not, and presenting under the name Max Hempel clarified his position on the role of the party. Responding to a withering attack on the KAPD by Karl Radek, Appel offered a crude but effective periodization of the workers’ movement, suggesting politely but definitively that Bolshevist war of position belonged to a bygone age of bourgeois revolution out of step with contemporary the character of the workers’ movement, in which now the whole of the class had at hand the organizational tools (the councils) and the means of production to move directly to workers’ government. Trade unions and parliamentary representatives could only produce more of the same. The parties and unions accustomed to the old state of affairs could only be a hindrance, and there was no question of continuing to work within the trade unions or parliament. The task at hand was to coordinate the arming of the proletariat and transition to a government by council.

Most at the 1921 conference thought that conditions in Germany remained pre-revolutionary, and geared their planning thus. Jan Appel was particularly keen to remind the ECCI that on his previous trip to Russia he was told that the Red Army would march into Silesia, within reach of Dresden and Berlin, and he and his comrades in the underground units of the KAPD alone had undertaken to sabotage the supply trains, filled with French weaponry and supplies, which the Entente powers had forward to Poland through Germany. The unexpected defeat of the Red Army in Warsaw, after it had blazed a path through Eastern Europe, was one of many missed encounters, in which an inability to coordinate armed proletarian power led to the missing of fatal chances. Here if anywhere was the role for the party, not in parliamentary and trade union maneuver.

The truth is that the councils were not an organized power within the revolution after 1918. Even before the January insurrection, they had, in the withering but nonetheless accurate description Dauvé gives, “committed suicide.” This is why Appel’s emphasis is on unionen and party, the forces necessary to revive that great flourishing of council sovereignty suicided in its birth. The democratic mechanisms of the councils meant that SPD officials were able to transparently win a majority outright in many areas, or through simple deviousness in others. Radical elements within the councils attempted to counter this process by convening a Congress of the Councils, for December 16, but the reformists had already embedded themselves in the delegate structure, controlling the Congress and the governing Executive Committee in Berlin. From Broué, we learn that out of 489 delegates, 405 were sent by workers and 85 by soldiers. But only 179 were factory or office workers. Out of the whole, 288 voted with the SPD, and only 90 with the Independents, of whom a scant 10 were Spartacists. The Congress, which met in the Prussian landtag, among the proletarian rabble, voted to hand over power to the Constituent Assembly and the Reichstag.

Every moment in the proceeding sequence, from the January rising on, is an attempt to reckon with the consequences of this decision, and the events in January unfold rather directly from this cross-party intrigue. The councils were by no means defeated, but they were not an alternate form of sovereignty except where they made themselves so, by violent force and declaration, as they would repeatedly throughout the next four years, only to be defeated by the state, the organized counter-revolution, and from lack of worker support from within. Everything Jan Appel does, everything council communism or left communism could mean in this moment, is an attempt to correct this problem, principally around two moments of opportunity: the Ruhr rising of 1920 and the March action of 1921. The chance would come again in 1923, in the throes of hyperinflation, but by that point the communist left was no longer a force.

These subsequent episodes occur largely outside of Berlin, pacified from 1919 on, in places where the councils were, from the start, the most militant. In the Ruhr mining and industrial region, an important part of the western European economy, and for that reason a sticking point in the postwar settlement between Germany and the Entente powers, where many immigrants worked, the council of Essen declared a workers’ government and demanded full socialization. In other places dominated by heavy industry,, similar radical demands were made, sometimes accompanied by the seizing of regional government power. Many of these complicated events unfolded, however, not around the question of control over production but over the reorganization of the armed power of the state. The later insurrections are by and large responses by the workers to attempts by the state to disarm them or, alternately, to fascist counter-revolution, during a period in which the army is in the process of reconstruction, limited by treaty, facing fascist subversion from within, and must rely on irregular and counterrevolutionary forces. These insurrections therefore do not even get to pose the question of revolution against capitalism, except implicitly through a revolt against armed power. The subsequent moments are a retreat from the possibility of council power, a necessary retreat into armed power, that must find its way back to the council.

Perhaps the most promising one was the first and most surprising, which took most unawares. In March 1920, after the SPD attempted to disarm some freikorps units returned from marauding int the Baltic, right-wing officers attempted to seize control of the government. Refused support by the local army commanders (“Reichswehr does not fire on Reichswehr”) the SPD ministers fled, leaving the capital to the putshcists. The leaders newly-formed of KPD, demonstrating their remarkable ability to lose their heads in their asses, would declare neutrality. The working class, however, responded with a ferocity nearly the equal of 1918, annihilating the Kapp government in a four-day general strike that brought the country to a stop from top to bottom. The leader of the putsch, Chancellor Kapp, faced a powerful demonstration of the proletarian science of value; he couldn’t find anyone to print money for the new government, as all the printers were on strike.

The coup attempt collapsed quickly except in Bavaria, where the putschists held power. The Berlin government returned and called on the workers to stand down. Such passions were not easily calmed, however. In the Ruhr, in particular, where the workers heard the local units of the freikorps, stationed nearby, supported the coup, they swept up the entire region in an insurrectionary frenzy, in town after town disarming police and then the military units, forming various commands, and defeating in battle, in several instances, many of the freikorps units sent to fight them. This Red Army of the Ruhr, forming overnight, numbered around 100,000. They were organized regionally as the councils, but had little connection to workplace organizations. There was no central command, to be clear, but various regional groupings. In most areas, the USPD and the right wing of KPD dominated but the anarchists were very active in the area and with the left of the KPD (which would become the KAPD), pushed rather far. In Duisberg, for example, they deposed the SPD executive and raided banks and storehouses, in a moment of proto-communization. Eventually, however, most of the units stood down and turned their power over to delegates who agreed to disarm, in exchange for concessions. A portion of the Red Army had no part in such negotiations, but so it went. Those who refused to disarm were massacred by the Freikorps.

Jan Appel was working in the Ruhr at the time, though I don’t have information about what he was doing. The KAPD was formed in April 1920, as a direct response to the perfidy of the KPD in response to the Kapp putsch, which effectively expelled its majority and continued on as before, in advance of a unification with the independents. In Hamburg, Appel and Fritz were sent by the KAPD to Russia, and it was then he stowed away on the Senator Schröder, arriving in Russia on May 1. This is partly projection, but I like to imagine Appel on the boat reflecting on the course of the revolution so far, and imagining what could have been done? What will need to be done differently next time? The passionate will, disarming freikorps units and stealing boats, was there. What was missing? How prevent the self-disarming of the worker through their own self-organization? The answer must have been, for Appel, the council. If the Red Armies had turned their power to the councils, and not to a negotiating party, if that example could have spread?

They would have their chance a year later, during the March Action of 1921, which erupted in Central Germany, particularly in the industrial areas of Halle and Mansfeld. This was an area where the workers had not been disarmed, particularly in the ultramodern Leuna chemical works. A general strike spread through the region, and in a moment of synchrony, both the KAPD and the KPD decided that the time for insurrection had come. They called on the workers to arm themselves and take power. This was the moment of heroic adventurism. Responding to the general call, armed units began burning down police stations and courthouses, robbing banks, and distributing good. Max Holz, the so-called Robin Hood of the revolution, wrecked the police units sent from Berlin to put down the rebellious workers in Mansfeld. Here is a description of his proto-communizing force in action:

The commando, motorised, counts 60 to 200 men. In front, a reconnaissance group with machine rifles or lighter arms: the heavily armed trucks followed. Then the "chief" in a motorcar, "with the cash" in company of his "minister of finances'. As cover, another heavily armoured truck. All decorated with red flags. From their arrival in a locality, provisions are requisitioned, the post offices and savings banks are ransacked. The general strike is proclaimed and paid for by the employers with a "tax' levied.  Butchers and bakers are ordered to sell their merchandise 30 to 60 per cent cheaper. All resistance is crushed immediately and violently…

The KPD and KAPD issued a general call to insurrection, but beyond that they had little control over fast-moving events. Messages got lost in the relay between the center and the provinces, and the inability for these units to form lateral connections proved fatal. In the Leuna works, the skilled workers resisted the call to take up the arms they had and pass over into the offensive, because they concluded they would be massacred. They were unaware, however, that Holz’s force was nearby. Eventually the factory was bombed, the workers disarmed, Holz captured and arrested. The moment had been lost again.

It’s not clear whether this was the last chance or not. In 1923 what appears to be a genuine pre-revolutionary situation returned. As a result of events in the Ruhr, from which the Reichswehr was prohibited by the treaty of Versailles, the French army occupied this vital industrial center (the source for much of its coal). The Germany economy went into a hyperinflationary tailspin; radical councils formed and the once again the passage toward insurrection began. But the KPD had lost touch with workers’ organizations, thinking the lesson from March the lack of organized, disciplined chains of command. The communist left didn’t exist anymore, and the KPD initiated a mechanical insurrection, out of touch with the mood of class struggle, which failed.

By that time Appel was in prison. He had been arrested by the French authorities, who were in the process of negotiating to send him back to Hamburg to stand trial for piracy. One detail we learn from the biography of Paul Mattick is that he, then 19 years old, was preparing to break Appel out of the jail, but the authorities agreed to charge Appel with a lesser crime, to which he was willing to plead guilty. Appel began his studies, and emerged in 1925 with a first draft of the GIK document, which he took to the Netherlands. This document is then a reflection on all these failed insurrections—if the radical unionen had existed, possessed with a workable program for socialization of production, perhaps the working class would not have balked at the prospect of seizing power through the councils and integrating the armed units. The moment of 1923 hyperinflation called for this, as the monetary system had wrecked capitalist reproduction—direct communist distribution and production in such conditions may have been immensely popular, as long as it didn’t look like a death-wish.

Appel is in prison in Dusseldorf writing his draft of the Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution around the same time Hitler is in prison in Munich writing Mein Kampf. But the conclusions they draw are diametrically opposed. Hitler gives up on an insurrectionary path to Nazi power and concludes that representative parliamentary mechanisms are a necessary adjunct. Appel gives up on parliamentary organization, deciding the party must be only a coordinator of insurrection. For their respective projects they were both right.

What of the council in all this? Where all the councils? We see immediately two problems that affected council power. One was the centralizing structure of revocable delegates, which created a bottleneck in the Executive Committee in Berlin, and allowed the council power to be easily defanged. It’s not clear to me that revocable delegates—rather than lateral relations—are the last word in self-organizing structure. But more fundamentally, at least for any twenty-first century analysis, there is the problem of the division of labor and the integration of the unemployed. When Appel presented to the Comintern, he suggested that only the regionally organized council form could integrate the great masses of unemployed proletarians with which the new workers’ movement would have to contend. Herein lies a paradox, however: support for council communism and the communist left was greatest among the unemployed or, alternately, in industries with a rather crude division of labor: mining, heavy industry. In these areas the workers tended to form into armed units, Red Armies, not councils, whereas the workers organized in manufacturing and other sectors, formed into councils, tended to be more cautious. The missed encounter between the 12,000 workers of the ultramodern Leuna chemical works and Max Holz’s battalion of 2000 ultraleft marauders is instructive. What is the form that could bring all this together? The council? The party? And which kind of council, which kind of party?

The GIK had an answer—just the council. The council itself, prepared for by groups of unionen, was sufficient. But it’s not clear if Jan Appel ever fully came around to this position. After the Nazi occupation, during which Appel and others councilists participated in Resistance work, his colleagues in the GIK would remark that Appel had too much the taste for intervention, and wanted to continue working with the resistance groups long after the other councilists decided it time to depart. In the 1960s and 1970s, when interest in the history of council communism is renewed, Appel joins with members of the International Communist Current, a left communist group, at their founding meeting in 1976. The ICC’s position is quite opposed to the GIK, and the history of the Dutch-German Communist Left that they produce, written by Philippe Bourrinet, reads councilism as a kind of crypto-anarchism that fails for its inability to think the crucial role for the party. But who knows what Appel really thought about all that? Not me. I’m using him as a set of coordinates, as a way to think history, but I realize the real Appel escapes all this, cutting across all the categories – party, council, unionen, red army—with which we might try to make sense of his time.

*Bourrinet, aligned closely with the perspective of Amadeo Bordiga, insists on the difference between rätekommunismum and linkskommunismus, pointing out the lively debate about the role of the party within the Dutch-German communist left. Councilism, by his definition, is council communism which sees no role for the party. A clarification of terms, then, is as follows: left communism consists of a rejection of trade unions and parliamentary parties, involving unionen, party, and council. Council communism includes all three, with a supressed role for the party. Councilism rejects the party, but not unionen and council. Bordiga rejects the council and the unionen for the party. Without adopting Bourrinet’s tendentious argument, I find this use of terms helpful.

So far I may have seemed to treat all the component elements of the communization cocktail as roughly equivalent—one part Bordiga, one part council communism, shaken with the ice of the Situationist International, strained, then served in a bottle, with a flaming rag. It’s not like that, not in my view. Bordiga, who fascinates me endlessly, remains a vexing figure, troubling in most of his core essays, and with a fundamental orientation that is dogmatic, even idealist, and moreover dependent upon an entirely unworkable anthropology (though I commend him for placing anthropology front and center). If I might continue my extended chemistry metaphor, Bordiga is some kind of caustic element whose most useful properties emerge only in combination with other materials. Council communism, by comparison, is a rich and surprisingly resilient metal—one can see the difference immediately in the fact that, unlike most other tendencies, council communism is not identifiable, either implicitly or explicitly, with an individual. The central contention of this tendency, and the broader Dutch-German communist left, was that the workers themselves could do it, would do it, in some places already had, only to be betrayed by the institutions and leaders of the workers’ movement. The “council,” the soviet, thrust to the front of history by the 1905 Russian Revolution, is an emblem of this capacity for creative self-organization, both a theory and a practice all in one. You didn’t need a Trotsky.

As practice, rather than ideology, council communism is communism as it really might have been in the twentieth century—the pure product of the workers’ movement, its theoretical summa. I do not believe, as sometimes seems implied by Dauvé, that this tendency was doomed to failure due to its theoretical errors, in part because the tendency can’t be so easily subsumed by its theory. Given the emphasis on self-organization, these groups had a capacity for internal self-critique that means some mistakes could perhaps have been overcome, given revolutionary conditions, through the lesson of practice. I do not think that Dauvé is correct (except perhaps in spirit) when he says, of the council communist theory of socialist distribution through labor-time accounting that it would simply amount “to the rule of value . . . without the intervention of money” or (even worse) that “it retains all the categories and characteristics of capitalism: wage-labor, law of value, exchange” such that it could be described as “capitalism, democratically managed by the workers.” This is a distortion both of the councilist theory as it was elaborated and Marx’s theory of value, and while I sympathize with the (misdirected) thrust of the critique, as I do believe these early proposals deserve critique, Dauvé makes a bit of a mess of it. [In another, more formal essay, I will approach all of this material from the standpoint of value, but I must repress all those tangents here!]

The sentences just quoted are from his revision of the 1969 text, “Sur l’ideologie ultra-gauche,” that I discussed in my first entry. This essay becomes, in Fredy Perlman’s Black and Red translation, “Lenin and the Ultra-left.” But the story does not end there, for Dauvé has continued reworking precisely these very passages and, in the updated version, published by PM in 2015, this chapter has split into two parts, with the newly birthed chapter focusing only on the question of value and communism, first in Marx, and then in council communism (the old version is not available online, the new is here, and see the author’s note for textual history). In the new text, Dauvé puts front and center what is the central council communist text on the matter, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (the Grundprinzipien), published by the Dutch Group of International Communists in 1930, and elaborated on by Paul Mattick. In this second piece, Dauvé is more circumspect, admitting that the GIK’s attempt to demonstrate how assorted workers’ councils might together administer the expropriated means of production after revolution “goes a long way” toward envisioning “moneyless utopia” but he nonetheless offers a version of the earlier statement, and concludes that “such a scheme goes as close as one can get to keeping the essentials of capitalism yet putting them under full worker control.”

In the second version, Dauvé also rightly links the GIK proposal to Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program,” which proposed the use of “certificates” to distribute social wealth among the freely associated producers. These certificates would not be money or money wages in a strict sense (they would not fulfill all the roles of money)—they would not circulate, and they would not be used to distribute raw materials or partly finished products. Each worker would receive a certificate saying they have performed a certain amount of work (in hours, or days) and that would then allow them to draw a given magnitude of commodities (also measured in hours or days) from the stores of social wealth. Every worker would consume the same “magnitude” of wealth—measured by the hour—though they would certainly not produce the same amount of wealth every hour. And some would not produce any, since wealth would need to be set aside for nonproducing members of society, as well as for reproduction and other structural costs. Marx is quite clear that this arrangement—which Dauvé now calls a “value without money”— is the best of bad worlds, in his view, a kind of unfair fairness, as there is simply no way to produce real justice through numerical equality: it always introduces another inequality. Unlike the social reformers whose monetary reforms were designed to fix structural problems, Marx’s scheme only works to the extent that revolutionaries have already entirely reorganized the economy, so that such certificates are a temporary stopgap, used only inasmuch as the “birth-defects” of communism remain.

The Grundrinzipien takes the cue from Marx and includes a clever mechanism whereby these defects might be overcome, one that Dauvé doesn’t comment on, and which is worth highlighting. The authors recognize that a certain portion of social wealth must be set aside, as we have said, for those who can’t or won’t work, for administrative purposes, and for any expansion desired, if desired. It is not possible to return to workers precisely the number of hours they contribute on average, as some portion of goods will always need to be a free gift. For example, in the GIK scheme, those who work in the unit which takes care of bookkeeping and other administrative matters would be paid in labor certificates but that service would not be, in turn, “paid for” with labor certificates. The costs of that service would instead be automatically deducted from every producers’ contribution. Where the Grundprinzipien is clever is that they imagine that more and more of the economy might be transformed into units like the bookkeeping office—General Service Units—whose products are unpriced and therefore distributed free of charge. The idea (see Mandel for a fuller exposition) is that once marginal demand reaches zero as a function of supply, one can essentially stop pricing goods. As productivity increases, then, more and more of the fruits of the economy would be distributable on demand, without metering. This makes the GIK proposal more plausible, in my view, and indicates that there may be or more likely may have been situations where, given the existing productive potentials, a proletarian revolution could quickly pass to full communism using labor certificates for some portion of people’s needs and wants. Imagine, for example, if food and housing were guaranteed but the rest of people’s needs and desires were certificated.

In such a state of affairs, what would matter is not the presence or absence of certificates, but the presence or absence of compulsion. There is a big difference between using certificates to portion consumption, and using them to force people to work. This need for compulsion is implicit within the GIK proposal, but unexamined, and even leads them to introduce consumption differentials for skill. It’s also where the whole thing falls apart, as even Paul Mattick admits in the introduction he writes when the book is finally published in English in the 1970s.

This is further evidence of the flexibility of council communism. Dauvé means to address his critique of the ultraleft to Mattick and focuses on the issue of labor-time accounting, but by 1970 Mattick found the argument for labor-time distribution badly made. This is a significant departure, as he had earlier been one of the main advocates, translating parts of the Grundprinzipien into English and offering an adapted version of its argument in his 1934 text, “What is Communism?” By 1970, however, it seemed to Mattick that in most industrialized countries the productive forces were so highly developed that labor-time distribution was no longer necessary: one could go to free access full communism right away. But even in the event that this wasn’t possible, if perhaps the productive forces had been partially destroyed during the revolution and scarcity remains a problem, Mattick points out, rather devastatingly, that freely associated producers could just choose to ration without calculating labor-time and without necessarily compelling each other to work, demonstrating that what’s at stake is power and political decision not arithmetic. The compulsion to work is, technically, and as a political matter, separate from the portioning of the proceeds of labor, and it is only in the ideology of the labor certificate that these two become confused.

Mattick writes the preface nonetheless, using the criticisms of the Grundprinzipien he offers to demonstrate the flexibility of the council concept and concluding that, in the GIK text, “we are not presented with a finished program, but with an initial attempt to approach the problem of communist production and distribution.” He reads it as “a historical document which sheds light upon a stage reached in past debate.” Here he concurs with the authors of document, who are insistent in their short 1930 preface that their intention is not to write a “program” but rather to “subject the possibilities projected here to the most thoroughgoing discussion,” after which point the organization intends to issue a final expression of its standpoint.

This emphasis on the development of self-organizing principle rather than the elucidation of programmatic demand is the most remarkable thing about the document, and deserves to be separated from the question of the certificate. Or rather, we might note that the labor-time distribution and calculation aims to serve two roles, only one of which is inimical to communism. On the one hand, the certificate is a form of power, of compulsion. But it is also a way of making a complicated labor process transparent. This emphasis on transparency and intelligibility is the most remarkable part of this text, and council communism in general, and deserves to be thought independent of the recommendation to certificate. As they write, “the simple language and the clear methods of analysis employed, which are understandable to every class-conscious worker, ensure that every revolutionary who diligently studies the following pages can also fully grasp their content. The clarity and disciplined objectivity of the writing likewise open up the possibility of a broad arena of discussion within the working class movement, one which can draw into its orbit all the varied schools of opinion represented within its ranks.” Anton Pannekoek writes beautifully on this theme, and the possibility for freedom and collective self-consciousness it allows:

As a plain and intelligible numerical image the process of production is laid open to everybody's views. Here mankind views and controls its own life. What the workers and their councils devise and plan in organized collaboration is shown in character and results in the figures of bookkeeping. Only because they are perpetually before the eyes of every worker the direction of social production by the producers themselves is rendered possible.

Pannekoek is picking up on a theme that is central to Marx’s critique of political economy. In the riddling passages on the commodity from Capital, Marx elucidates the mystifications of the commodity form by presenting us with its opposite: “Let us imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the mean of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” The self-awareness part is crucial—for Marx, the important part of communism is that “The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.” There is no commodity fetishism.   

It is not surprising that the Dutch-German communist left hit upon this theme—given that its central contention, developed against the Bolshevizing communist parties of Germany, was that proletarian self-organization was sufficient for revolution. The theory of transparency is a necessary corollary, one piece of evidence for which is that many council communists were highly involved in the Esperanto movement, imagining universal language a necessary concomitant of workers’ self-organization and self-management. Nonetheless, the singular focus on transparency in accounting measures appears to be due to a single person, Jan Appel, who embodied in his biography the council communist theory of proletarian self-organization and creativity. Another tradition would likely have put Appel’s name on the Grundprinzipien, for he was its primary author, in fact responsible for convincing Pannekoek that bookkeeping transparency was an important matter and not a trivial one.

Working in a Hamburg naval shipyard when the 1918 revolution broke out and ended World War I, Appel joined the revolutionary shop stewards movement and stormed an army barracks during the January 1919 Spartacist rising. He joined the anti-parliamentary and anti-union KAPD, which applied for membership to the Comintern along with its rival group, the KPD. Sent to Russia to represent the KAPD and to inform the Comintern of the KPD’s traitorous behavior during the Ruhr uprising, Appel stowed away on a friend’s boat, then helped to hijack it, navigating unaided through the Arctic to Murmamsk, and from there by train to Petrograd. He was received by Lenin himself who, after listening to the “comrade-pirates,” as he called them, produced a pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, that he had just written with such people in mind. Appel returned to Germany and underground work, but he was eventually apprehended and forced to serve prison time. It was during this sentence that he reflected on his experience, engaging in a deep study of Marx (and perhaps the passage above) and writing portions of the text which would become the Grundprinzipien, after a four-year period in which Appel discussed it with those involved in the Dutch Group of International Communists (GIK).

The book, he tells us, is direct product of these defeats—of his betrayal in the Ruhr, his reception in Russia by the Bolsheviks. What he thought was necessary was to show other workers that it could be done, that it wasn’t that complicated—this was a document designed to serve a particular purpose among the KAPD-affiliated Unionen (factory groups) that were on the verge of being swept away by history. When council communism is revived by S. ou B. and the ICO, the question of how to distribute proceeds was by no means settled, and as we see a perspective close to communization was easily arrived at by Mattick. It’s worth noting, too, that all of these groups had a variety of views with regard to the relationship between councils and political organizations—some, including Appel and Mattick, imagined a role for something like a party. The dividing line between communization and council communism then becomes harder to distinguish, especially if we imagine the council to apply not only to workplace organizations, but other kinds of self-organizing structures, as Mattick indicates in his introduction. The soviet, or council, is of course a historically specific tactical form —one that becomes both tactic and strategy—but part of a longer history of constituent assemblies and other organizational structures. The will to form an assembly, to take things over and to run them directly, is in some sense fundamental to emancipatory politics. It is not likely to go away, thankfully. Jan Appel’s lesson to us is less about the necessity labour time calculation than a reminder to the revolutionaries of today that they should steal the boat and write their own book.

As noted, the theory of communization that Gilles Dauvé and others developed offers a critique of the ultraleft (which here refers in the main to council communism) by way of the ideas of Amadeo Bordiga. I’ve described this as a synthesis, the production of a new theory of revolution. This synthesis could not have taken place without the presence of a crucial catalyst, the Situationist International.

But first, some background narrative. The confrontation between Bordiga and council communism described above was made possible by an international revival of ultraleft ideas initiated, in part, by defectors from Trotsky’s Fourth International right after the end of the war. In France, the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, in the United States, the circle around CLR James’s Johnson-Forrest Tendency, and in Italy, the writers later associated with operaismo, corresponded during the 1950s and 1960s, repudiating Trotsky’s account of the USSR—they largely converged around a “state capitalism” thesis—and placing special emphasis on spontaneity and workers’ self-activity.

The triumph of capital during this period, of Taft-Harley and the Marshall Plan, looks more total to us than it was experienced then. In Europe, communist partisans essential to the Allied victory exited the war in control of France, Greece, Italy, and Belgium, with massive strikes and other workers’ actions on the upswing.  Revolt in East Germany in 1951 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, alongside lesser developments in Poland, convinced ex-Trotskyists, council communists, and others that a wave of class struggle traversing the Cold War division of east from west might soon upset the American century. The publication of Kruschev’s secret speech, also in 1956, accelerated defections from various communist parties around the world, some of whom went looking for heterodox Marxism that could explain the defeat from within they had suffered.

Socialisme ou Barbarie (hereafter S. ou B.) gathered many of these dissidents together around the ex-Trotskyist Cornelius Castoriadis, who had come to Trotskyism during the Greek Civil War, and Claude Lefort, an associate of Merleau Ponty and writer for Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. In arguing that the USSR was state capitalist, Castoriadis placed special emphasis on the dimension of control, management, and execution, developing a theory of capital-as-power that could describe both French capitalism and nominal socialism in the USSR and elsewhere. S. ou B. was influenced by CLR James’ Johnson-Forest tendency, and particularly the analysis of the workplace this group was producing in texts like The American Worker, which combined auto worker Phil Singer’s reflections on the labor process with analysis from Grace Lee Boggs, and which inspired S. ou B.’s turn to the practice of worker writing and workers’ inquiry. Such a turn was already anticipated, though, by Claude Lefort’s emphasis on proletarian experience in the debates he had conducted with Sartre and others at Les Temps Modernes in the 1940s. To this rich conjuncture came a core of factory workers in a few plants, ex-Bordigists, council communists, and many young intellectuals including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gerard Genette, Edgar Morin, and Hubert Damisch.

Like twins suns acting upon a host of comets, Lefort and Castoriadis would force two exits from the organization that demonstrate the contradictions within the group, and likewise the impasses to which the theory of communization responds. As S. ou B. developed its critique, it engaged Anton Pannekoek and council communism in a way that would bring Lefort and some others within the organization to adopt a more or less council communist position, resisting the residual vanguardism of Castoriadis, who still imagined the organization might play an interventionist role. The Algerian war and coup d’état of 1958 brought these organizational differences to a head, and Lefort left with Henri Simon to form Informations et correspondance ouvrières, taking with them the complicated theory and practice of workers’ inquiry as well as most of their connection to factory organizations. ICO was rigorously anti-vanguardist, concluding that the only valid role for a theoretical organization was as an inter-syndical apparatus for workers to communicate about and theorize their experience.

This exit to council communism in 1958 was followed by the influx of new members into S. ou B., and a new journal Pouvoir Ouvrier, free to engage more freely with existing struggles. This group around PO was the version of S. ou B. that Guy Debord joined briefly in 1960, and left, with a parting critique that suggested the group remained traversed by divisions, between “stars” and “spectators,” that looked similar to the divisions between order-givers (dirigeants) and order-takers (exécutants) that Castoriadis had been theorizing. A new organization was needed, and Debord was already working on that elsewhere. Eventually Castoriadis’s egoism and his incapacity for true collective work led most of those around Pouvoir Ouvrier to found a new group, which brought with it the burden of all these critiques, and whose members would eventually, after 1968, join some of the small collectives developing the theory of communization.

To summarize, S. ou B. featured a departure to council communism and another to interventionism and between them a swerve, which was Debord’s critique of the militant. Debord, in other words, provided the missing element, the element necessary to overcome the contradictions internal to S. ou. B.  Debord therefore, in our story, is not the locus of the reconstituted critique but merely a catalyst for it. This is because the Situationist International itself never resolved its relationship to council communism or articulated the role it envisioned councils playing in revolution. The factory occupations of May ‘68 were, in this sense, both the realization and neutralization of the political project of the SI—the workers brought the economy to a standstill, but they did not behave as the theory of council communism expected; their motives and desires were elsewhere.

The missing element that Debord brings is of course the artistic critique, the heritage of Dada and Surrealism, Rimbaud and Lautreamont, and the entire project of the historical avant-garde, which Debord both submitted to merciless critique and, in a manner of sorts, brought to completion. When Debord and his peers began in the 1950s, their activities were well-circumscribed by the domain of culture—they were communists as the Surrealists and the Dadaists were, but their activity was not directly anticapitalist except by analogy. Like the earlier avant-gardes, their overcoming of the separation of art from life was not yet an overcoming of the separation of art from political effectivity, but rather a passage into ethics and psychology on the one hand, and architectural fantasy on the other. It was only once Debord decoupled the group from any type of cultural production that the SI was able to play its ultimate historical role. This critique of art gave Debord a unique window into the problems facing S. ou B. Viewing the tyranny of both the workplace and the political vanguard through the lens of the critique of the division of labor Debord had developed with respect to art, he could go much further than Castoriadis in a critique of bureaucracy, management, and control.

Neither is Debord, however, siding with Claude Lefort and his departed associates, as he emphasizes in his letter. If Debord locates in the self-organizing actions of workers a capacity for creative problem-solving independent of their representation by intellectuals and bureaucrats, he never imagines that this means intellectuals must quiet themselves. As Dauvé notes later on, this is one thing Debord got absolutely right. He simply assumed that, as a condition of revolution, the workers and the intellectuals would eventually join together, in advance of which anxiety by intellectuals served no purpose. Perhaps Debord’s creativity as a writer and filmmaker lead him to fear less that his ideas might bully the workers into submission.

Despite all this the SI never really overcomes the limits of the ultraleft as Dauve defines it. As Dauve notes, those who joined the group towards the end of the 1960s adopted a theory of the council as revolutionary instrument that is left more or less unconfronted with the group’s implicit worker’s anthropology. On the one hand, in many texts the SI establishes the revolutionary proletariat as a group whose many-sided needs and desire bring it into fundamental conflict with the capitalist mode of production and the workers’ movement. On the other hand, they imagine a more or less classically councilist passage to revolution, in which the need for a party is sidestepped by the direct seizure of the means of production by the workers’ themselves, who can then presumably figure out how to manage their affairs. But if the factory and office, the mine and the field, are places that the proletariat instinctively refuses how then imagine them as managers there of their own suffering. Where, then, is the aesthetic critique of the barren one-sidedness of everyday life in capitalism? Surely the requirements of revolution mean more than a workers’ council electing itself owner and hanging some cheerful bunting across the shop floor?

Debord and the SI therefore implicitly posed the question of content, but left it for the revolution to explicitly do so. Perhaps this is in keeping with Debord’s unique way of thinking about the avant-garde. He envisions the SI as an adventurist group but not a vanguard. Its goal is to provoke, unsettle, unmask, at which point whatever it has to contribute will have been generalized. As he writes, in the soundtrack to his elegiac reflection on the SI, In girum imus nocte et consumimumr igni, “Avant-gardes have only one time, their goal is to enliven their time without outliving it.” With this idea or the avant-garde, he sides neither with Lefort nor with Castoriadis—the SI is a catalyst, a form of avant-garde action that catalyzes proletarian self-organization, thus obviating the worries about party domination that obsessed S. ou B.

I mean the metaphor of catalyst here rather explicitly. A catalyst is an element required for a chemical reaction of which no trace can be found in the completed product. The product here is the theory of communization, the critique of the ultraleft that Dauvé effected by means of Bordiga. Note that in that original Dauvé text, “Sur l’ideologie ultra-gauche,” from 1969, the SI is not mentioned.  But it remains essential nonetheless, as Dauvé will acknowledges in his later articles. For it is the emphasis we find in the SI on everyday life as a site of suffering, and on creative expression as both proletarian weapon and general good, that shows up the failings of Bordiga’s “barracks-communism.”* Bordiga may point out that the council communists leave the content of communism undetermined in a way that implicates the Situationist International, but nonetheless the aesthetic critique of capitalism they develop offers a surer sense of the consistency of that content than Bordiga does.

*: kasernenkommunismus, “barracks communism,” is the term Marx coins to critique the militaristic, forced collectivism of Sergey Nechaev during the split in the First International.

References/Further Reading

1. On S. ou B. , see a) Marcel Van Der Linden, “Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949-1965),” Left History 5.1 (1977), b) Stephen Hastings-King, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialism ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing (Haymarket 2015). On the split in particular, Henri Simon is instructive: https://libcom.org/library/communism-france-sob-ico-echange

2. On workers’ inquiry, S. ou B. , JFT, and the Italian experience, see the invaluable third issue of Viewpoint: https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/30/issue-3-workers-inquiry/

3. On Debord’s connection to S. ou B., see Anthony Hayes, “The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Workers’ Movement”

4. Gilles Dauvé spells much of this out in Critique of the Situationist International; see also the passages on the SI, in Roland Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche, which is the best general history available.

5. I don’t have cause or space here to discuss the Situationist International and what they offer to aesthetic theory and aesthetic critique but suffice it to say I think the importance hard to overstate. For more on this, see my essay “Art and Revolution” from the Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

The other thing I wanted to say about communization I hinted at already in the last post, but it deserves its own exposition. Communization remains relevant for us not because it is the thought of the revolutionary wave of ’68, but because it is the thought which has most attempted to come to terms with the failure of ’68, and particularly those theories it pushed to the front. This is difficult for US readers, or at least it was for me, because we are used to thinking of May 68 and its global complement as a kind of triumph, neither a victory nor a culmination, but the opening of a door to the future, or at least sexy and fun if a little embarrassing, like a Maoist-period Godard film.

The communization tendency is interesting because it regarded 1968 from the start as a failure, and one that in fact put to the test, and found desperately lacking, the most advanced theory of its day, the late phase of the Situationist International. It was, as they learned through participating in it and thinking through the consequences of their participation, “the peak of a shockwave which died away in 72-74.” But such knowledge came with a price, apparently, and the history of the tendency in the 70s shows participants struggling with the weight of an isolating pessimism while the rest of the left staggered forward obliviously. It did not see itself, or so it appears in the documents we are left, at the head of a glorious new movement, but instead faced with a series of puzzling conundra which are only now being resolved in theory, as attempts to overcome them in practice are more or less our new tactical repertoire and strategic horizon. This is the reason why this thought is still alive for us today, whereas the other offspring of 1968 are largely sterile exercises in Althusserian blackboard diagrams. I quote here a long passage from a reflection on this period, composed in the late 1970s, which gives the unique flavor of this critique:

The explosion did not take place in either the most modern sectors of the industrialised world, or those most in difficulty, but where the boom over the previous twenty years was least well adapted to national conditions. Between 1954 and 1974 the proportion of wage workers in the French population rose from 62% to 81% (the increase above allaffecting those employees, technicians and middle managers who made up the new middle classes). We witnessed the fusion of violent workers demands and of anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive student aspirations which soon extended to a good part of the new middle classes. The movement was also anti-cultural in that culture formed a safety deposit box and was the opposite of creativity. It thus revived the refusal of art and culture which had appeared about 1914-18.

May 68 was more than a split between the trade unions and parties on one side, and a great many workers on the other. It was also a demand for existence, which in the   absence in practice of a social breakdown, appeared more as expression than action.      People wanted to communicate, to speak, to say that which could not be done. The rejection of the past didn't succeed in giving itself a content, and thus a present. The    slogans : « I believe in the reality of my desires », « Under the pavingstones, the beach    », referred to a different possibility, but one which, in order to become possible,       presupposed . . . a revolution. In its absence, this demand could only become adaptation or madness. The themes of May took the form of exhortations, replacing 19th century guilt with the imperative of pleasure.

Indeed, aside from a weak minority, the workers, the bourgeoisie, most of the «protestors » and the State, in short everybody, acted as if there was an “implicit pact” prohibiting everyone from going too far. Sign of its limit : people did not dare, did not even want to make a revolution, not even begin it. Sign of strength : people refused the political game of a pseudo-revolution, since a real one could only be something total. Even in the rue Gay-Lussac the violence remained well on this side of the working class violence before 1914, or that seen in the United States in the Thirties. The confrontations between workers and trade unions were less brutal than in the past, for example at Renault in 1947.

In the factories in 1968 one hardly found the festive atmosphere of 1936. People felt that something had happened which could go further but they avoided doing so. The atmosphere of gravity which reigned was coupled with a resentment against the unions, a convenient scapegoat, whereas they were only able to keep control through the behaviour of the rank and file. The gaiety was elsewhere, in the streets. This is why May 68 could neither reproduce, or lead to, a revolutionary return during the years which followed. The movement generated a reformism which fed on the neutralisation of its most virulent aspects. History doesn't pass the dish around a second time.

Knowledge of this “implicit pact,” knowledge of the fact that 1968 had not been betrayed by unions, or defeated by the state, or weakened by reactionaries, but hollowed out from within, was a difficult weight to bear, especially when everyone else insisted on seeing things as being on the upswing, imagining themselves swept up toward the horizon by the wind from the east. Here is what they are able to see which others can’t in the struggles of their time:

Bizarrely, at a time when people spoke so much of management, one saw that the workers disassociated themselves from all strike administration. Abandoning control of the factories to the trade unions was a sign of weakness, but also of the fact that they were conscious that the problem lay elsewhere. Five years later, in 1973, in a big strike at Laval, workers purely and simply left the factory for three weeks. Like the « de-politicization » of which so much has been said, this loss of interest in the company, in work and in its reorganisation, is ambivalent, and cannot be interpreted except in relation to everything else. Communism was certainly present in 1968, but only in relief, in negative. At Nantes in 1968, and later at SEAT at Barcelona (1971) or Quebec (1972), strikers would take over districts or cities, go as far as seizing radio stations, but would make nothing of it : the self-organisation of proletarians « is possible, but at the same time, they have nothing to organise » (Théorie communiste, n° 4, 1981, p. 21).

In the light of hindsight, they look sane while others appear mad, however, for the questions they posed were so simple and practical that it is a wonder no one else did. Why, if communism is simply the self-organization of the workers, did the workers not simply seize what was ready to hand? Why the indifference to the practical affairs of revolution:

The leaflet Que faire ?, about 100,000 copies of which were republished and distributed, recommended what the movement needed to do to go further, or even just continue : take a number of simple measures which broke with capitalist logic, in order that the strike could show its capacity to make society function differently; meet social needs (which would rally the hesitant and the middle class who were worried by the violence – the product of a deadlock, an impotent reaction in the face of an impasse) through free provision of transport, health care, food, through the collective management of distribution centres, through striking against payments (rent, taxes, bills); and show that the bourgeoisie and the state are useless.

Communism was only present in 1968 as a vision. Even the workers hostile to the trade unions didn't take the next step, the revolutionary elements among them being the exception rather than the rule. An additional proof of weakness was the confusion surrounding the rally at Charléty at the end of May. Charléty was a political attempt to go further, through an extension of the social movement at the level of state power. Charléty was where many of the leftists were to be found, but also the left of the trade unions (in particular the CFDT), and where we also saw a celebrity who people had recently wanted to make a national hero, the De Gaulle of the left : Mendès-France. Charléty was the peak of the consciousness and political realism which the « May movement » gave evidence of. On one side, the dream : councils. On the other, the reality : a real reforming government, where many saw themselves playing the role of Lenin to this Mendès-Kerensky. We can smile about it today, but if the Mendès solution had carried the day, many protestors would have supported it. One year later, two young workers who produced a leaflet with La Vieille Taupe recalling the revolutionary scope of May 68, stated : « We will not forget Charléty ». . . In 1981, the election of a Socialist President, Mitterand, would finally realise the hopes of Charléty."

Again, they are asking questions others simply would not. It is also the case that, in my view, the writers involved with the communization tendency had not fully developed their understanding of this “implicit pact.” They saw it, they recognized it, they noted some of its implications for theory, but they had by no means fully worked out those implications, much less worked them up into a convincing argument. In fact, it’s my view that it has only been in the 2000s and 2010s that such an argument has emerged, in the second period of the theory of communization. But the reason for this continuity indicates a continuity in the real world, in history as much as in theory. There is no solution in theory that isn’t also a solution, in practice, at least any solution that matters.  Communization returns as a thematic, does not simply go away with the 1970s, because the problematic this current identified in 1968 continues to reimpose itself with every subsequent struggle, thus inviting an attempt to formulate anew a better response.

In the document I just quoted, “Re-collecting our past,” by the collective La Banquise, which included Dauve but also offered a critique of the articles he had written for Mouvement Communiste (which we know as Eclipse and Reemergence) the problematic is phrased as a curious blend of acceptance and refusal:

In the will to go on mass strike there lay a refusal; in the manner of conducting that strike, and in particular of abandoning it to the trade unions, only in order to rebel   against them at the end when they had scuppered it, there lay an acceptance.

I recognize this blend of acceptance and refusal in most significant struggles of the 50 years since, upending our notions of reform, insurrection, social movement, and revolution. This post can’t possibly summarize the full answer to this problematic—that’s for another day, or a formal essay—and by all means there is still much that remains unanswered in the global 68, much that can only be answered with the practical overcoming of the impasses such a moment leaves.

It’s intriguing to me, though, and I need to know a little more about the entanglement of these groups to say much, that La Banquise quote Theorie Communiste from 1981, right before they attempt to explain the mystery that 68 presented. This is significant because it is TC, in developing an articulation distinct from Gilles Dauve, that in my view begins to work through a possible response to this conundrum, though most of essays that best do so are from the 2000s or later.

All the current problems of the apprehension of the revolution, which one finds to a greater or lesser extent in all the theorisations that are made, stem from the fact that the proletariat can no longer oppose Capital with what is within the capitalist mode of production, or rather, can no longer make the revolution the triumph of that which exists . . . » n(Théorie Communiste, n° 4, 1981, p. 37)

It it a gnomic formulation, and Theorie Communiste will hardly become clearer as they improve upon it. But if we want to pass into the open plain, we will have to cross those Alps. I leave that for another post.

Is Milkman (2018) a historical novel? I think by any definition the answer is yes, unless we refuse to recognize in it a particular time (the 1970s, “The Troubles”) and place (Belfast) that Irish readers instinctively do recognize. The jacket copy—speaking of an “unnamed city”—is rather misleading, since there is no other city which during the 1970s was in the midst of a civil war or insurgency involving defenders and renouncers, with one country across the water and another over a border. Though Belfast only appears on the back cover of the book in the author’s note, the city in the novel is unnamed but not unidentified. Its techniques of modernist defamiliarization then seem to find their justification not so much in psychic universals but in conditions of mass trauma and mass hallucination. Seen this way, as psychological history, as history told by its psychic conditions, and as naturalistic portrayal of a life under siege, the book is quite devastating and, I think, successful as history. But why is that so hard to recognize? Or is it that its success as history requires misrecognition?

That the novel is packaged in generic misrecognition is particularly significant since the novel is fundamentally propelled by misrecognition and its black comedies. We meet our first-person narrator while she is walking down the street, eyes trained and mind focused on the copy of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe that she is carrying, oblivious to the fact that she is being stalked by a leering and seemingly omnipresent character, Milkman, a paramilitary who (we realize before our narrator) grooms and torments young girls during hours off. In other words, this historical novel that doesn’t want us to think it is a historical novel has a first-person narrator we first meet when she has her head in a historical novel to the effect of causing her to be blind to the world around her, which is the world historical from our vantage. And it’s not just any historical novel, but one by Walter Scott, more or less accepted as the progenitor of the genre. And not just any historical novel by Walter Scott, but the historical novel with which Scott broke his own mold, projecting back not just sixty years as with Waverley, his first attempt, but all the way back to a twelfth-century Anglo-Saxon Britain. This is significant because Middle Sister admits that she wants to project herself as far away from Belfast in spacetime as she possibly can, and reading while walking, a considerably perilous activity in an active warzone, even without a nearby stalker, is one of the  “mental aberrations” that Middle Sister notices about herself and her familiars, like her habit of obsessively running, repressive automatisms that are the clear consequences of a world in which nearly half of everyone you know has been killed and, as a result, the other half are justifiably insane. No sane mind could bear it.

The novel then traces Middle Sister’s drift through this period of time, and her attempt to figure out what is happening to her. She is an exceedingly alert, curious, intelligent narrator, but also entirely passive, unable to act in any except automatic ways, inasmuch as she lives in a warzone controlled by men and violence, and, where men have not established some law, by the gossip and rumor of imagined community. So she drifts, sometimes losing feeling in her legs and the rest of her body, but she also attempts to make sense of her trauma by observing others likewise traumatized. This leads to some moving, horrifying, hilarious passages, such as the scenes in the center of the novel which concern her poisoning and the poisoning of some of her peers by a particularly disturbed member of their community, Tablets Girl. Middle Sister has difficulty distinguishing the effects of poisoning from the general scrim of anguish, paranoia, and recrimination, even as she is having her stomach evacuated by many women who are telling her she is poisoned. Eventually she works out what has happened in her head. Her cogitations are helped, usually, by an encounter with some fellow sufferer in whom she can use her skill as a narrator—that is, as a literate and careful observer—to note something about the other that is in fact something about herself:

The violence of the dogs brought a gasp from over the way and I looked and there was tablets girl’s sister, the one who, like me, and by the same person, had recently been poisoned unto death. Again like me, she was holding on to railings, looking startled, looking too, as they said she was, as if at the beginning of her poison ordeal instead of having already undergone the purge of her poison ordeal. She was squinting over, first at me, then at the dogs and I saw it was true too, that ever since her poisoning they said she hadn’t recovered her shininess – also that she could no longer properly see. They said she didn’t use a stick and here she was, not using one. Instead she was adapting what was left of her eyesight, plus walls, palings, lampposts, hedges and it was in that manner she negotiated her passage, bringing her face close to objects and feeling her way along. ‘She’s fine, out and about’ was the communal prognosis upon her, also the communal euphemism for ‘mended though broken’, itself another euphemism for “urgent need of medical care and attention’, all of which the person in need unfortunately was not going to attend hospital to get. As for her shininess, I now had my own confirmation that it was damaged, patchy, hardly to be discernible. Apart from a few dithering blinks and the odd, sullen twinkle, she could have been any one of us with our heavy, slumbering loads.

But in this is there anything particularly historical about this moment in history? Because if the answer is no, then it cannot be psychological history, for this would mean there is no historical content to the psychological in this case. I will argue there is history in Milkman, but to understand it we need to be specific about what our object of interpretation is when we talk about history in the novel. At stake are always at least two and perhaps three kinds of history, kinds of history and also moments in history, and good Marxist literary interpretation, not to mention the theory thereof, must bring all of these kinds and moments of history into alignment—it does this by reinscribing all the narratives involved within another interpretive metanarrative, and there is no better guide to this kind of interpretive history than George Lukács in his writing on the historical novel.

Lukács’s Tower

Take the two novels, Waverley (1814) and War and Peace (1869), around which Lukács threads his narrative. Walter Scott is writing about a historical event roughly sixty years prior, the Jacobite uprising of the 1740s. By insisting in his subtitle, first sentence, and introduction, on the span of sixty years, he means to indicate continuity of past and present. In fact, the accent of his effort is sharply anti-historical, since he associates historical change with superficial contingency. He has taken as his subject “a description of men rather than manners,” and thinks then to have snared as his subject “passions common to men of all stages of society.” So Scott’s historicism is only a romantic realism, one that doesn’t really admit history, but discovers it despite itself. In writing about what has been, the present perfect, he discovers the enduring origins of the present.

For Lukács, though, it’s more complicated, since from his vantage, writing in the 1920 and 1930s, he sees what Scott can’t, that he has invented historical consciousness by accident. Scott thinks he is discovering passions common to all humanity but really he has discovered passions common to his era of humanity, not the one he thinks he is writing about, an era that can be more or less named metonymically by Waterloo (1815). The interchangeability of Waterloo and Waverley  thus inscribes Scott within a narrative of the emergence of the bourgeois class and its chosen literary genre, bourgeois literary realism, through which it can gain some partial consciousness of itself and its own historical particularity, connected but of course not identical to the French Revolution and aftermath. There’s more, though, since Lukács then puts Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) on the other end of Waverley, linking it through the pivot point of the Battle of Waterloo, the defeat of Napoleon and with it the final historical payload of the French Revolution. Tolstoy situates his novel during the period when Sir Walter Scott first published Waverley. Tolstoy’s sixty years links up with Scott’s and—voila—by another sixty years connects, roughly to the time when Lukács is first beginning his study of the historical novel. There is a tower spanning from 1745 to 1930. I call it a tower and not something horizontal like a bridge because I want to emphasize its precarious constructedness. These are worlds upon worlds, nested stories, imaginary and real, with which Lukács tries to tell a story, a story ending in the future. Tolstoy, in Lukács reading, can see about the emergence of the bourgeois order in the early nineteenth century what Scott couldn’t, and Lukács can see about the revolutionary period in which Tolstoy is immersed what Tolstoy can’t. And the tower can be extended, as Lukács intends, since the whole point of his study is to anticipate the great historical novel of the world revolution of 1917, which would perhaps have to be written in the 1970s, when Ragtime (1975) and Song of Solomon (1977) were published.

Lukács’s interpretive tower therefore is designed to allow him, and us, to peer into the stars from a tower of text. In light of this conception, any novel brings together one imaginary time, let’s call it History Zero, with another real time, let’s call it History One. History Zero for Waverley is 1745 (really it should be a range) and History One is 1815 (also better thought of as range rather than moment). These can be thought of as the two axes of a conventional graph of two real number lines, or better as the intersection of a real timeline and an imaginary timeline. Thus the space of their intersection is the complex plane, in which each point is a complex historical number whose real part is its date of publication and whose imaginary part is its represented date, Waverley can be written as W=1815 + i1745 {Re(w)=1815}, {Im(w)=1745)}. This can be done not just with historical novels but with any work that is a representation of historical time. Costa-Gavras’s film Z for example, would be written as Z=1969+i1963. The novel 1984 would be written N1984=1949+i1984, a point that lies in the conjugate region of science fiction.

Lukács is able to span this distance using the standard measure of sixty years, which he gets from Scott. The measure of the standard aperture is sixty years because that’s the duration of “living memory” more or less, the point at which the collective present perfect slips into the simple past. Changes in life expectancy may have widened this aperture but it’s notable, to me at least, that the two novels we began with this semester conform loosely to the sixty-year gap. They were both written in the 1970s and revolve around incidents in the early part of the twentieth century, though Song of Solomon is sprawling, tracking events from the 1850s to the 1960s and Ragtime comparatively narrow, running from 1906 to the 1920s with most of the action happening between 1906 and 1910. The narrated events in Song of Solomon run from 1931 (when Morrison was born) to 1963, but as the narrated characters move forward in time they encounter elders who, in dialogue, allow the novel to revolve around events in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Each novel then presents these histories, kinds of histories, together, but allows them to be accessed differently. History Zero is history for the characters, history that can both written and read, interpreted and theorized. History One can be neither written nor read though it can be interpreted and written about; it is the history for the author and their world. History Two, real history as it unfolds, the continuous churn in which each of us immersed, can’t even be interpreted. It has no object, it can only be theorized, as Lukács attempts to sketch out the necessity for the proletarian realist novel after the crisis of bourgeois realism and its devolution into antinomy with the novel of democratic humanism. History Two can only be an object for some other critic who comes after (and for whom it is simply another History One), such as Jameson who, reading both Lukács and Ragtime, noted in his way that the historical novel of the world revolution never did get written. That fact has something to do with the fact that the world revolution was a failure, a failure no subsequent success has rectified.

From Zero to One

To ask if Milkman is historical then is to ask what we can say about History Zero (the 70s), History One (2018), or History Two (2020). Note that I am assuming History One and Two are distinct, but that’s something that must be demonstrated first. It’s possible for them to be the same, for the time of writing and reception to be the same, as it is from the framework of a reviewer writing in to the London Review of Books about a contemporary novel. As far as the 70s goes, it needs to be said now that one possible answer as to why the novel won’t appear as historical is that from someone’s vantage it is simply too soon for a historical novel of The Troubles, one that is specific about what happened and how and where the blame for it falls. The sixty year—or perhaps eighty—aperture is meaningful because it is likely that such anxieties will pass once the people involved are no longer alive, at least enough for some people to feel a reckoning other than psychological is in order. This isn’t that book. It tells you what it’s like after everything has gone to shit, not how it goes to shit. It also provides a story where the fundamental physics of this mode of insurgency, predicated on a command hierarchy division of labor forced by the requirements operational security, means that characters like Middle Sister are incapable of becoming actors, or doing much of anything, in this world. Doing things is for men, and the only moment where women have any agency (except for the exceptional group of feminists who float around the novel like a chorus) is where they beat down Middle Sister’s new, would-be stalker in the ladies’ bathroom, which is quite pointedly the space where they are allowed some agency.

The novel seems, then, to suggest that what’s historical about the trauma here is its proximity to the international women’s movement—already well underway around the world—the possibility (seemingly imminent) that women might become actors in this world, whose only possibilities are sketched out by the aforementioned beatdown, the poisoner Tablets Sister, and the group of mysterious feminists that occasionally gathers to offer challenges to the bands of armed men who run things. And not just sex and gender is at stake, but sexuality itself, since Middle Sister will have to learn about her own sexuality through discovering that her boyfriend is in fact in love with his male friend. Everyone’s desire is foreclosed in this novel. She experiences her disempowerment, her loss of feeling in her body, quite pointedly as an “anti-orgasm,” one directly connected to her memory of her father telling her, on his deathbed, that he has been raped. Sexuality, then, knowledge of the body and what it can do and know of itself, is at stake, and quite pointedly historical here, as the new social movements visible on the margins will soon blow up the map of possible locations. This is made palpable by Burns’ narration, which though often enough limited to the obscuring cloud of inquisitive anguish in which Middle Sister is trapped also often allows itself the knowledge, insight, and awareness of a future Middle Sister mature and able to recognize things the younger could not.

What happens, effectively, then is that History Zero and History One collapse. No liberation occurs but the fact of this future knowledge does seem freeing, and in the end of the novel there is a curious moment where, it seems, the future of 2018 does appear, if only briefly. There is a pause in the mesh of bombings and assassinations, when all the young girls of the area, inspired by a local celebrity dancer couple – the parents of Middle Sister’s boyfriend—decide to dress up in whatever finery they can find and start whirling through the streets in a kind of punk version of ballroom dance, banging themselves against each other and buildings. This is of course an image of a kind of dancing mania, like St. Vitus’ dance, sometimes associated with the end of a period of plague or disorder. These fits of manic, uncontrollable dancing were a consistent feature of the premodern world going back at least to the Dionysian cults of Greece and Rome, and there are dozens of examples, each with its own folkloric image. But one can also see in this scene also, perhaps, the women’s marches of 2018, and the emergence, in the face of a worldwide fascist imaginary, of a kind of broad, though not unproblematic, feminist consciousness not available to Middle Sister. So that, then, is History Zero and One, bound by the glue of the mythic.

From One to Two

We read Milkman in 2020, though, from quarantine, in the midst of the worst pandemic perhaps in history, in the midst of a massive economic depression, after a sequence of riots and mass mobilizations the largest in the 50 years. Here in History Two the conditions of mutual poisoning, blindness, repression automatism, distraction, chaos, and violence, are it seems to me at least easier to understand as realism. Here in History Two I have to think about Middle Sister’s trauma and the trauma of my own children, my son is only a year younger than Middle Sister, over this terrible year. I have to think about how maybe I too am a little traumatized and so also probably are many of you taking this class. Why wouldn’t you be? It has seemed ridiculous sometimes to do this class in this period of history. Unlike the French teacher in the novel who helps Middle Sister see the colors of the sunset that are right in front of her I worry I am providing a book you can bury your head in, that I can bury my head in, while the world burns. Why is it that this history cannot appear as history? And how, in this history of unknowing, can we see what we do not know about our own moment, which has rendered us all, to some degree, incapable of really understanding it? I must tell you that I do not really know, but I do believe that together we might cobble together from these partial views some approximation of a total one.