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| ===== Communist theory beyond the ultra-left ===== | ===== Communist theory beyond the ultra-left ===== | ||
| - | The perspective we have wrestled during the last 60--70 weeks is the problematic posed by the Marseilles based group/ | + | The perspective we have wrestled during the last 60--70 weeks is the problematic posed by the Marseilles based group/ |
| The novelty in this perspective is first and foremost its profound historisation of class struggle. Class struggle is not something which goes on within a perennial framework only differing in whether we for a time have a working class offensive, defensive, once more an offensive and so on. Contrary to this invariance of class struggle we, and TC, stress that class struggle has to be historised both with the thin and wide brush. The aims and content given to the proletariat by every //cycle of struggle are produced by// the relations in which the proletariat face capital. Thus it is the very relation between proletariat and capital that determine the possible actions. TC gives us an exciting concept -- the //mutual implication of the proletariat and capital// -- that means that neither the proletariat nor capital can be regarded as the active party driving the contradiction between classes. | The novelty in this perspective is first and foremost its profound historisation of class struggle. Class struggle is not something which goes on within a perennial framework only differing in whether we for a time have a working class offensive, defensive, once more an offensive and so on. Contrary to this invariance of class struggle we, and TC, stress that class struggle has to be historised both with the thin and wide brush. The aims and content given to the proletariat by every //cycle of struggle are produced by// the relations in which the proletariat face capital. Thus it is the very relation between proletariat and capital that determine the possible actions. TC gives us an exciting concept -- the //mutual implication of the proletariat and capital// -- that means that neither the proletariat nor capital can be regarded as the active party driving the contradiction between classes. | ||
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| In Russia the Bolshevik party came to power with the support of the masses of peasants in the country side and of the workers in cities such as Petrograd and Moscow. The establishment of the councils (‘spontaneously’ in 1905, with strong intervention from the Bolsheviks in 1917) provided the basis for the dual power that extinguished the tsar regime as well as the provisional government. Step by step soviet power was transferred to the Bolsheviks after October 1917 and they organised a new state apparatus. This state was, however, not more than the guardian of order -- not the least the economical order --, which found its perhaps purest appearance in how it suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, but it also went hand in hand with the ideal of the Bolshevik leaders of iron discipline in the factories. Under Stalin, so, the basis had been laid for a capitalist programme of modernisiation in the form of mass industrialisation and an extraordinarily bloody restructuring of production and of society as a whole.((We would like to recommend an interesting text: Loren Goldner, ‘Communism is the material human community: Amadeo Bordiga today’. Published (in Swedish) in // | In Russia the Bolshevik party came to power with the support of the masses of peasants in the country side and of the workers in cities such as Petrograd and Moscow. The establishment of the councils (‘spontaneously’ in 1905, with strong intervention from the Bolsheviks in 1917) provided the basis for the dual power that extinguished the tsar regime as well as the provisional government. Step by step soviet power was transferred to the Bolsheviks after October 1917 and they organised a new state apparatus. This state was, however, not more than the guardian of order -- not the least the economical order --, which found its perhaps purest appearance in how it suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, but it also went hand in hand with the ideal of the Bolshevik leaders of iron discipline in the factories. Under Stalin, so, the basis had been laid for a capitalist programme of modernisiation in the form of mass industrialisation and an extraordinarily bloody restructuring of production and of society as a whole.((We would like to recommend an interesting text: Loren Goldner, ‘Communism is the material human community: Amadeo Bordiga today’. Published (in Swedish) in // | ||
| - | Parallel to the defeat of the international revolutionary wave the Communist International soon degenerated. Initially its aim was being an organ for spreading the world revolution, but it was transformed into an instrument for the national interests of the Russian state. The Communist parties of other countries linked to the ‘International’ ended up in being nothing more than the tentacles of Stalinist Russian dominance. The so-called | + | Parallel to the defeat of the international revolutionary wave the Communist International soon degenerated. Initially its aim was being an organ for spreading the world revolution, but it was transformed into an instrument for the national interests of the Russian state. The Communist parties of other countries linked to the ‘International’ ended up in being nothing more than the tentacles of Stalinist Russian dominance. The so-called Dutch--German |
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| > The Left only saw the integration taking place in the passage to real subsumption in the mediations of the empowerment of the class, and //separated these mediations from the definition of the proletariat as class// of the capitalist mode of production.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., our emphaisis.)) | > The Left only saw the integration taking place in the passage to real subsumption in the mediations of the empowerment of the class, and //separated these mediations from the definition of the proletariat as class// of the capitalist mode of production.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., our emphaisis.)) | ||
| - | The analysis of the Dutch-German communist left, however, does not end with the defeat of the revolution in 1923. With the deepening of real subsumtion the communist left faced a situation, with its background in the ongoing class struggle, where the actions containing the affirmation of the class at the same time as they fights the mediations contains a contradiction. With this in mind TC conclude that the Dutch-German communist left does not get stuck in this dead-end. ‘[I]t had, almost despite itself …, produced the conditions and the theoretical arms for its overcoming.’ What the ultra-left did not manage to articulate, however, was that the class ‘in its definition as class of the capitalist mode of production [finds] the capacity and the necessity to negate itself as a class in its contradiction with capital.’((Théorie communiste, op. cit.)) | + | The analysis of the Dutch--German communist left, however, does not end with the defeat of the revolution in 1923. With the deepening of real subsumtion the communist left faced a situation, with its background in the ongoing class struggle, where the actions containing the affirmation of the class at the same time as they fights the mediations contains a contradiction. With this in mind TC conclude that the Dutch--German communist left does not get stuck in this dead-end. ‘[I]t had, almost despite itself …, produced the conditions and the theoretical arms for its overcoming.’ What the ultra-left did not manage to articulate, however, was that the class ‘in its definition as class of the capitalist mode of production [finds] the capacity and the necessity to negate itself as a class in its contradiction with capital.’((Théorie communiste, op. cit.)) |
| ==== From the victory of labour to the abolition of the proletariat ==== | ==== From the victory of labour to the abolition of the proletariat ==== | ||
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| > The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided. | > The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided. | ||
| > | > | ||
| - | > It therefore requires a specifically | + | > It therefore requires a specifically |
| Well, what TC and we, rather boldly, are admitting is that we go beyond Marx’s formulation in //Capital// and the concepts of ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumtion’ for us implies a wider definition than the narrow tie to the (assumed) immediate process of production. The concepts are // | Well, what TC and we, rather boldly, are admitting is that we go beyond Marx’s formulation in //Capital// and the concepts of ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumtion’ for us implies a wider definition than the narrow tie to the (assumed) immediate process of production. The concepts are // | ||
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| //Figure I. Double mill in motion. The reproduction of capital and labour?// | //Figure I. Double mill in motion. The reproduction of capital and labour?// | ||
| - | The original French translator of //Das Kapital//, Joseph Roy, decided to play on the sense of mill and came up with //double moulinet//, explicitly evoking the image of two cogs or cycles, with the added benefit that a moulinet was also a grinder. It seems as though Roy got a good aproximation, at least Marx seemed to think so as he supervised the translation and even claimed it was better than the original. Which is more than can be said for his English counterparts; | + | The original French translator of //Das Kapital//, Joseph Roy, decided to play on the sense of mill and came up with //double moulinet//, explicitly evoking the image of two cogs or cycles, with the added benefit that a moulinet was also a grinder. It seems as though Roy got a good approximation, at least Marx seemed to think so as he supervised the translation and even claimed it was better than the original. Which is more than can be said for his English counterparts; |
| This disquisition of the Mill game is of value in context because TC makes such a big deal about it and they think that it sheds light on an important problematic. The analogy is used to illustrate a picture of //the whole of the capitalist mode of production and the reproduction of its classes//, its // | This disquisition of the Mill game is of value in context because TC makes such a big deal about it and they think that it sheds light on an important problematic. The analogy is used to illustrate a picture of //the whole of the capitalist mode of production and the reproduction of its classes//, its // | ||
| - | //The whole// | + | //The whole// |
| > Exploitation, | > Exploitation, | ||
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| > As a matter of fact, the worker is caugt in a trap but the strength of the image of the ‘double moulinet’ lies in the fact that it shows that he owes not his position and definition to a manoeuver but to a structural definition of reproduction. The proletariat cannot abolish capital without abolishing itself at the same time. (You get this idea in the phrase ‘double moulinet’.) If understanding the contradictory reproduction through the ‘double moulinet’ dismisses the liberation of the class, it nevertheless induces a terrible question: how can the abolition of its own rules be part and parcel of the game, as a relation between its terms and also as a movement of the whole? In the contradiction between its poles is the object itself (the mode of production) which is in contradiction with itself. Because capital is a contradiction in process proletariat against capital includes the negation of its own existence. | > As a matter of fact, the worker is caugt in a trap but the strength of the image of the ‘double moulinet’ lies in the fact that it shows that he owes not his position and definition to a manoeuver but to a structural definition of reproduction. The proletariat cannot abolish capital without abolishing itself at the same time. (You get this idea in the phrase ‘double moulinet’.) If understanding the contradictory reproduction through the ‘double moulinet’ dismisses the liberation of the class, it nevertheless induces a terrible question: how can the abolition of its own rules be part and parcel of the game, as a relation between its terms and also as a movement of the whole? In the contradiction between its poles is the object itself (the mode of production) which is in contradiction with itself. Because capital is a contradiction in process proletariat against capital includes the negation of its own existence. | ||
| - | |||
| - | > To answer this question would amount to reconsider the whole analysis of the contradictory course of the capitalist mode of production, not only as contradictory and reflexive game between two classes which constitute the two poles of the same whole, but as an internal movement within a whole which has two poles. It is only in apprehending contradiction (exploitation) as the internal movement of a whole that we will only be able to grasp the way in which the game comes to the abolition of its own rule and in no way the transient and random victory of one of the players (who actually is always the same one). | ||
| - | |||
| - | > Exploitation makes it possible to build class struggle as contradiction, | ||
| > | > | ||
| - | > All this only functions if we achieve understanding the fall of the rate of profit as a contradiction between the classes and as a questionning | + | > To answer this question would amount to reconsider the whole analysis of the contradictory course of the capitalist mode of production, not only as contradictory and reflexive game between two classes which constitute the two poles of the same whole, but as an internal movement within a whole which has two poles. It is only in apprehending contradiction (exploitation) as the internal movement of a whole that we will be able to grasp the way in which the game comes to the abolition of its own rule and in no way the transient and random victory of one of the players (who actually is always the same one). |
| + | > | ||
| + | > Exploitation makes it possible to build class struggle as contradiction, | ||
| + | > | ||
| + | > All this only functions if we achieve understanding the fall of the rate of profit as a contradiction between the classes and as a questioning | ||
| ==== From self-organisation to communisation ==== | ==== From self-organisation to communisation ==== | ||