| Both sides previous revision
Previous revision
Next revision
|
Previous revision
|
en:per_henriksson:on_marcel [Y-m-dH:i]
henriksson |
— (current) |
| ====== Marcel Crusoe’s ex-communists in Intermundia. Notes on the discussion about communisation ====== | |
| |
| ::**Per Henriksson** | |
| |
| >We already know what meaning "going beyond the framework of what exists" has. It is the old fancy that the state collapses of itself as soon as all its members leave it and that money loses its validity if all the workers refuse to accept it. Even in a hypothetical form, this proposition reveals all the fantasy and impotence of pious desire. It is the old illusion that changing existing relations depends only on the good will of people, and that existing relations are ideas. – //Karl Marx// | |
| |
| At first sight it seems obvious that the two journals, //Dissident// and //riff-raff//, have quite a few points in common. The two projects share the same theoretically curious approach. More specifically both pay close attention to the term "communisation" in trying to conceptualise how the capital relation may be overcome and communism established. It has brought about the need to define a new problematic for the present moment.((In what follows I’ll try to address certain issues around the term communisation as it is articulated by the "dissidents", mainly from these sources: //Dissident// no 3, 2008; Marcel, "Attack/Withdrawal", //riff-raff// no 8, 2006 <http://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/attack_withdrawal.php>; Marcel, "Communism of withdrawal, and communism of attack", //riff-raff// no 7, 2005 <http://www.riff-raff.se/en/7/attack_rough.pdf>; Marcel, "Hamburgers vs Value", //riff-raff// no 3--4, 2003 <http://www.riff-raff.se/en/3-4/burgers_vs_value.php>; Kim Müller, "Vi ville spela fotboll" ('We wanted to play football’), from his blog (also in //Dissident// no 3, and in the compilation of texts by Kämpa tillsammans! ('Struggle together!’), //Tillsammans. Gemenskap och klasskamp på samhällsfabrikens golv//, Pluribus, 2009; and various interventions in the discussion about communisation at the Swedish Internet community //Socialism.nu// between Dec 2007 and Jan 2008, by Hank (from Kämpa tillsammans!), Gracchus (his intervention seems to be a rough draft of what later appeared in //Dissident// no 3 as "Kommunismens diakroni: utvägar och flyktförsök ('The diachrony of Communism: Exits and efforts to escape’), the main theoretical text in that issue, and also an alter version in the Norwegian philosophy journal //Agora//) and Takeyama; and finally "Om kommunismens Messias" ('On the Messiah of Communism’) on the //Haecceitas// blog, Feb 2007. The quotes from the texts indicated by their Swedish title is translated into English by me.)) | |
| |
| In collaboration with Federativs, the publishing house of SAC (the anarcho-syndicalist union), //Dissident//, the journal of the "Batko group", which considers itself being a "loosely held community", published its third issue at the end of 2008. With this third issue, labelled "Where are we heading?", the journal is overtly inspired by the conceptual system we recognise in the texts by Marcel that have been published in //riff-raff// over several issues, in particular his cleavage of the concept of communisation into one external and one internal dimension.((The present issue is "radically different" from the previous ones, but shares the same "insurrectionary theme". From the "Organised anarchy" of the first issue (2004), with its "platformist" perspective and content, through the "Insurrectionary anarchism" of the second issue (2005), with its aim on the one hand to introduce the concept of insurrectionalism in Sweden, and on the other to be a critical break with the programme of the first issue, and the "Postscript to //Dissident// no 2" (2007), where the emphasis of the second issue of insurrectionalism as a "specific theoretical current in Sweden" slips over into merely "valuable angles of approach and lessons to make use of". With its third issue the journal wants to develop one aspect of this insurrectionalism: its "element of uncontrollability". This slip of perspective is to be understood as the people behind the journal "are and have been uncomfortable with the expectations and desires to mantle the role as representatives of a tendency".)) We have learned that Marcel is now part of this "community" after leaving the loosely held editorial group of //riff-raff//. | |
| |
| The overall issue I want to address is the understanding and use of the term communisation by the dissidents, an approach I would argue differs from more or less all other understanding, mine included, that appears in the broader (!) discussion around the concept; for example the discussions between and how it is articulated by Gilles Dauvé, Théorie communiste, Endnotes, riff-raff and the debates within //Meeting//. I will do this by trying to shed some light on some specific issues such as: whether communisation is to be considered a violent social revolutionary process or a faceless undermining and exit, a "latent transition"; whether the communist measures are something the proletariat is forced to take when the everyday class struggle reaches a critical point, when it reaches its limit, or if rather it about an individual proletarian’s withdrawal and refusal of his role or function as surplus-value producer, implicating that communisation is a permanent tension within the capital relation; whether communisation can spread punctually by gradually breaking away "time and geography" from the totality of capital and by this the totality is made obsolete, or if it must spread like a wildfire through the capital relation on a social level; whether communisation can be a "period of transition" or if it is about, in one and the same process, to abolish the classes, and with that to abolish capital, and to establish communist inter-individual relations. In the end this seems to be about different ways to understand society and the individual in the capitalist mode of production; whether the Individual is more or less free to choose his actions or if it is society, i.e. the class/capital relation, that determines the margin of action for the individual and the class he is subsumed under -- in short, two different approaches: a "methodological individualism" in the sociological Weberian sense, and a "Marxian" one according to which man is defined by the "ensemble of social relations" -- relations that act upon and determine and as //abstractions// dominate the apparent individual. | |
| |
| ===== Defining the present problematic ===== | |
| |
| Both the dissidents and me experience a need to define a new problematic based on the present situation. For me this situation is the class relation/contradiction as it is historically determined. The dissidents, on their part, seem to reduce this situation to a pure "concept-logical" dimension that necessarily //is not// historically determined; for them communisation is "untimely", "transhistorical", something invariant etc. I understand the present moment as a specific expression of the class contradiction such as it has arisen from the capitalist restructuring, which took place between the 1970s and the 1990s, and the end of the previous cycle of struggle and with that the death of programmatism. To take an example, the blog //Hacceitas//, with its post "On the Messiah of communism" (February 2007), touches upon this new problematic as it considers "the symptom of all the deaths": "the death of the workers’ movement, the death of the great narratives, the death of subjectivity" (my translation). But instead of trying to ground one’s theoretical approach to and perspective of the new forms of class struggle and the possibilities of overcoming that are produced and the limits it reaches in the actual, //social// struggle one is to turn to a "!!worldiness beyond!!" [bortomvärldslighet] that, by its claims of "other-ness" is "impossible to narrow down with the theoretical tools of the present day". Even though I wouldn’t articulate this problem in the same way -- for me this description seems more post-modern than post-mortem -- I sense the same vertigo [svindel, hisnande känsla] in the face of the unknown. However, at the end of the day I’m pretty sure that it is all about //the struggles of this world//, that the proletariat //as a class// is a negation as an //internal moment// of what is negated, and that this super-session, revolution as communisation, is a development of the contradiction. The dissidents on their part see nothing in the contradictory class relation that indicates a supersession of the relation. According to them capitalism //in itself//, as an antagonistic mode of production, as a class society, is not a historically transitory, relative mode of production. Its contingent collapse therefore must be caused by //something else//, i.e. //something else than class struggle//. The door is opened when "actual proletarians" withdraw from their functions as "labour-for-itself" and "!!pose themselves as a party!!" [framställer sig] (Marcel, "Attack/Withdrawal"). It seems to me that the dissidents, in face of the counter-revolution of the restructuring and the defeat of the proletariat’s struggles after 1968, adopts a perspective for action like [similar to???] the one Marx described in his "18th Brumaire": to seek "to achieve [one’s] salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck." According to the dissidents the individual breaks away from the iron fist of the capitalist society and establishes "another way to live and exist" (//Dissident// no 3). | |
| |
| But who is this individual, and what is society? Why does he the one time "smirk self-importantly and is intent on business" and the other time is "timid and holds back" (//Capital// vol. I)? Why does he one time appear as capitalist and the other time as proletarian? | |
| |
| ===== The individual, society, and the social individual ===== | |
| |
| In capitalist society the relations are inverted -- the social relations between individuals are made into social relations between things. "The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket" (//Grundrisse//), i.e. in his possession of money. As Marx said, what at first seems to be a paradox is that the epoch which produces the standpoint of the "isolated individual" (//Grundrisse//) -- such as it appears in political economy and in our spontaneous everyday way of thinking -- is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social relations. Here, the individuals are subjected to social production, which exists "outside of them as their fate" (//Grundrisse//). This historically determined individual freedom is at the same time "the most complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which assume the form of objective powers, even of overpowering objects -- of things independent of the relations among individuals themselves" (//Grundrisse//). However, these "overpowering objects" are produced by the individuals, but are out of their control and so establish "a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from" them (//The German ideology//). Capital //is// a "sensuous--super-sensuous thing" (//Capital I//) and the individuals are "ruled by //abstractions//" (//Grundrisse//). The individual is dependent upon the entire world for the satisfaction of his needs, today far more so than in 1846. Precisely that [the fact that???] capitalism as //class society// determines its individual members as specific members, as "average individuals", the class assumes an "independent existence as against the individuals"; their individual development is determined by their class-belonging and they are "subsumed" under this belonging (//The German ideology//). It is, as Marx wrote in his //Grundrisse//, "impossible for the individuals of a class etc. to overcome them [these external relations] //en masse// without destroying them". Under very specific circumstances, the individual may arrive on top of these external relations, "but the mass of those under their rule cannot, since their mere existence expresses subordination, the necessary subordination of the mass of individuals". | |
| |
| ===== Free labour, and the freedom of labourers ===== | |
| |
| What distinguishes the labouring individuals in the capitalist mode of production from other, earlier modes of production? How can the class relation be reproduced despite the workers being exploited and only reluctantly exchange their commodity, their labour-power, for the capitalist’s money? | |
| |
| In the capitalist mode of production the working class is "a class dependent on wages" (//Capital I//). The producers of the surplus-product in this mode of production are free labourers compared to for instance the labouring masses in feudalism, the slaves in ancient Greece and so on. They are also free of the means to produce their means of subsistence. In capitalism "the 'free' worker ... makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage" (//Capital I//). Even though the value of total labour-power equals the price of this total, the price //and// value of labour-power in every country, region, city and so on, even on the level of the individual workers, something it necessarily has to. But "be his payment high or low", the worker is //exploited// qua worker. Certain groups of workers, workers at certain firms and in certain countries, regions //may// occasionally, and/or over time, receive a wage above the average price of labour-power. The wage is not only the price for a minimum of the physical reproduction of labour-power, but contains "historical" and "moral" parts to that. The means of subsistence that enter into the value of labour-power is calculated by the value of and not the number of means of subsistence, and oscillates therefore with the productive-force of labour. The capitalist process of reproduction "takes good care to prevent the workers, those instruments of production who are possessed of consciousness, from running away, by constantly removing their product from one pole to the other, to the opposite pole of capital" (//Capital I//). Thus, the wage-worker, with all his socially compelling freedom, is tied to the capitalist with "invisible threads". "A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself allow it to be loosened somewhat" (//Capital I//). | |
| |
| It goes without saying, then, that the room to move for the individual worker differs from man to man, from firm to firm, from country to country. In as much as one manages to establish for oneself an existence where the wage covers more than the absolute minimum of physical survival one may, as an exception, be able to chose to deny oneself some of the specific level of standard of living determining one’s specific value of labour-power: One could live in confined quarters [att bo trångt, compact living?], choose a vegetarian diet, to travel by bus, indeed, the list of banal examples can be extended into boredom. But once we speak of the //working-class// this room to move is absent, apart from the occasional fluctuations in the value of total labour-power. Even though your daily dollar in a Chinese sweatshop may fill a bowl of rise or two, the possibility there to withdraw and secure your mere //physical existence// is utterly limited. If you, however, as a computer engineer, an oil rig worker or so in a Western country, despite this by denying some of your material standard and living and due to being credit worthy, buy a piece of land, and the climate is favourable and so on, you may, once again as an exception, be able to establish at least by appearance a not-capitalist existence. It would certainly //not// be communism, even though you would seize to be dependent on a wage. | |
| |
| The capitalist process of production does not merely produce commodities, surplus-value, trash and repetitive strain injury. Considered as a process of reproduction it produces and reproduces "in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour" (//Capital I//). If one considers the bourgeois society at large, society, "i.e. the human being itself in its social relations" (//Grundrisse//). Capital presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. It is not by chance that they get in contact with each other -- they carry all of their economical relations with them together with the commodity they aim to exchange, and as a relation of production, subsumption, and so on, the worker belongs to the capitalist even before he sells his labour-power. In the course of its own process this "economic relation" reproduces the separation of the conditions of labour from the workers and thus "reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited" (//Capital I//). By posing the relation of production in this formal way it seems like it is about [som om det handlar om] a "tautology", what Marcel was talking about in his "Communism of Attack, and Communism of Withdrawal", in //riff-raff// no 7 (2005). | |
| |
| The conclusion, however and once again, of Marx’s critique of political economy is that capitalism, being a contradictory mode of production, is historically determined and transitory; its extinction is implicit in its concept, even though to become an "empirical reality" a social revolution is a precondition, but one that can’t be mathematically predicted or entered up in an agenda. On the one hand it reproduces itself through its contradictions, but on the other hand relations of production and forms of intercourse develop "so many mines to explode it" (//Grundrisse//) -- by a communist revolution which abolishes the "external conditions", what will hardly be some "quiet metamorphosis". If it would not be like that, capitalism wouldn’t be a historically determined and transitory mode of production, and our attempts to explode it would be "quixotic". In his Preface of 1859 Marx is even more prophetic: "The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation". And as he stressed in his "Postface" to the second issue of //Capital I//, dialectics in its "rational form ... includes in its positive understanding <del>of</del> what exists as a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction..." | |
| |
| At the same time as the capital relation reproduces itself and its preconditions it is a "contradiction-in-process" in that it strives to reduce its only source of surplus-value to a minimum, and thus its laws of motion at the //level of the system// tends to undermine its own foundation. "The //real barrier// to capitalist production is //capital itself//." (//Capital III//) The capital relation as process of accumulation is its own obituary. The tendency of the profit rate to fall is exploitation, thus class struggle. Even though it won’t tell us when capitalism is going to be abolished, on its specific level of abstraction, it is an indication of the capital relation as a "contradiction-in-process". The extinction of the capitalist mode of production is implicit in its concept, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.((Just because the historically transitory nature of the class relation gives a logical and conceptual barrier to it, that doesn’t mean that communism is given beforehand or that Marx’s //oeuvre// is to be understood as a "theory of decadence". How the finity of the system is put forward is marked by the level of abstraction one expresses oneself. Communism is not some "automatic collapse". What is of interest to us is to define how the immanent tendencies of the capital relation determines the revolutionary action of the proletariat. Cf. further Marx’s letter to Engels of April 30, 1868.)) | |
| |
| ===== Logical communisation ===== | |
| |
| >If you consider communisation a logical concept, the thought is rather classic: you think that you may find a form of "anti-economic logic" in the refusal of work and similar tendencies, and that this logic postulates a community that is //alien// to capital… Hence, you stake your money on what seems to be able to alienate itself from capital and its determinations. -- //Gracchus// | |
| |
| The dissidents’ problematic is founded on that, when capital has subjugated the whole of society, it becomes an infinite and tautological circular movement, one which is dynamic merely within its static organism. That which forms a part of and is determined by the capital relation can then only belong to and move, more or less tensiously and rebelliously within this relation. The capital relation defines its poles, i.e. its classes; their opposition between themselves is only valid within the relation and they are mutually conditioning each-other. The dialectic of the capitalist mode of production as a totality becomes with them more of a causal interaction between the parts of the relation, what they call a "dichotomous logic". By presenting the relation as a "tautology" accumulation disappears as a historical development. For them, the relation is not a contradictory whole, even less any "mutual implication", but a "binary relation" (Marcel, "Attack/withdrawal"), which always closes its circle and starts again once more. Therefore, they argue, there is no "immanent result" of the contradiction which "tends to undermine it", which has as its only result "the perpetuation of its dialectic conditions". Instead, the possibility to overcome this formal logic is said to lie in "actual proletarians’ attempts to detach themselves from their function as labour-for-itself…"((Ibidem. The formal-logical argument of the dissidents is in many instances a contradiction-in-terms, something that has been argued by Peter Åström, elsewhere in this issue of //riff-raff// (no 9, 2010), and by Per Henriksson in //riff-raff// no 8 (2006). In the contribution by Marcel in //riff-raff// no 8 (2006), "Attack/Withdrawal" one can follow this line of argument: capital = class-struggle; capital = its own barrier; class-struggle ≠ "its own barrier".)) In //Dissident// no 3 we can read things such as the following: | |
| |
| >When the oppositional politics shifts into such an uncontrollable, anti-political practice, then parts of the class -- because the proletariat is always stratified and differentiated -- act against their interest in working as a function within the totality of the production process. Such an un-interest in functioning as the subjectivity of capital establishes a dualism, an incapacity on the part of capital of integrating labour with its dialectic by posing it as not-capital. At such a moment labour has partly lost its function as use-value for capital, partly it avoids the production of subjectivity and of needs that arise from the double nature of labour and the commodity. The individual private labourers now function as outsides !!/ externalities!! to capital and labour. They no longer stand in a necessary or dialectic relation to the social nature of total labour. The worker has freed himself from the dialectic of capital by refusing to perform his function within the totality; he puts himself in a non-dialectic relation to capital. -- "The diachrony of Communism: Exits and efforts to escape" | |
| |
| Without doubt, the dissidents are fond of Robinson Crusoe stories. The apparent individualism of bourgeois society and the at the first appearance binary nature of the relation fit their logical argument like a glove. But this seemingly simple relation rests upon an equality that is "alrready disturbed" in that both poles stand in a determined economic relation to each-other: a relation of exploitation. The impression is that the argument of the dissidents is resting on a a naïve comprehension of the logic of capital -- and the logic of //Capital//. They comprehend this as a simple relation, one with formal-logic determinations, as opposed to the contradiction-in-process which determines the classes that form part of it, as mutual implication, whose single components, the "actual proletarians" in this case, are determined twice -- as a class under capital, as an individual under the class. (Of course, also the capitalist is determined by his class belonging.) | |
| |
| It becomes rather absurd when the dissidents are using terms such as "private labourers" to indicate that the refusal of work by individual workers, for "private labourers" is more of a formal criterion to designate capitalist free labour / wage labour as the necessary pre-condition of capital as such (see above), something which Marx contrasts with work under earlier modes of production.((For example!! "..."!!)) | |
| |
| In the same way it becomes problematic to understand how communism is empirically possible already at the abstract level of commodity exchange, which includes the exchange between the seller and the buyer of labour power, where, plain and simple, it appears as if the labourer = not-capital, and capital = not-labour, which is a formal determination within Marx’s systematic dialectic exposition. This "equals to" implies that they are each-others equivalents. As the exchangers of their respective commodities the worker and the capitalist, the "owner of money", are "equal in the eyes of the law", the former as the //seller// of his labour-power, the latter as the //buyer// of this labour-power. Both of them exchange their commodities, and in both instances no violation is made on the principles of the free market exchange. But, as Marx said, "[b]etween equal rights, force decides" (//Capital I//). As if the entire problem was some kind of direct formal logic, the dissidents maintain that if labour withdrew from its role, capital would loose the only use-value that is able to valorise it -- and //voilà//, the latter is then made "obsolete". A simple, symmetrical logic, a binary relation from which one factor is withdrawn and the relation as such seizes to exist, //if and only if//... In the pure categories from the analysis of the commodities are involved "[d]efinite historical conditions" -- an investigation of there conditions, however, "would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities" (//Capital I//), as Marx notified us. The dissidents seem to believe that this relation //as such// exists empirically. They too abstract from the determined historical preconditions, but not like Marx, due to the mode of presentation of the critique, or due to the systematically dialectical structure of //Capital//((See C. J. Arthur //The new dialectic and Marx's Capital//, 2002, and //Endnotes// no 2, 2010.)), but //absolutely//, once and for all. With starting-point in the purest abstractions they travel, by way of "ever more advanced approximations" (Gracchus), towards a concrete understanding, towards the empirical level, which by then may be expressed in class composition analyses and in workers' inquiries. | |
| |
| In company with Harry Cleaver the dissidents completely ignore the mediations and transitions between the Marxian categories and where in Marx's systematically dialectical presentation the cited terms and passages are picked, just like in general the //relation// between the logical and the empirical. However, communisation doesn't play itself out on paper, and class-struggle ain't no "Möbius strip" in which you are led forward only to return exactly to where you begun.((Märklig not på svenska!)) The refusal of individual actors or their withdrawal do not //in themselves// undermine the capitalist system as a historical //mode of production//, by always and all the time, in every single case, cancel !!/annul [ogiltiggöra]!! the logical concept of capital. | |
| |
| The dissidents seem to make use of the Cartesian "symmetrical product" when putting forward this so called binary relation. If A = B, then the relation is made obsolete if either of the factors are removed. And of course it never crosses their mind that the capitalist would ever abdicate. Thus, it is through the refusal of work, by refusing to play one's role as worker etc. that the "actual" workers abolish the concept of capital, and with that the relation as such, in each and every case. In the world of discourse perhaps, but capitalism can't be talked away. Social phenomenon are abolished by social processes. In my book it is //neither enough nor possible// to "withdraw", to turn one's back to, and one's head from, capital or labour and muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it. | |
| |
| But if we raise our heads and try to see the shit as it appears before our eyes -- for example in "an average day", at "an average workplace" (//Dissident// no 3) -- or, why not, read a little further in Marx's //magnum opus//((It gets even more exciting and interesting once we leave the circulation of commodities and enter the "hidden abode of production", but then we'll need to continue to read a little further, all the way to the third part of the first book. And without revealing how the story ends, I can tell you so much that not even after finishing the very last page we'll know so much more of this average day or average workplace.)), it will be brutally clear to us that the class relation rather is //asymmetrical// in that it is always labour that is subsumed under capital. All semblance of equivalence vanishes as soon as we understand how //logic// is //practically// determined.((It is one capitalist paradox that the exchange between worker and capitalist is acted out as equivalents, but the commodity that the worker sells, his ability to produce surplus-value, is actually the use-value the capitalist wants, the only use-value that can valorise capital. The enigmatic character of profit is based on this exchange of equivalents.)) | |
| |
| The "particular workers", or the "private labours", of the individualist discourse of the dissidents let themselves loose from total labour, but in //reality// they are "spontaneous developed branches of the social division of labour, and are in a situation of all-round dependence on each other" (//Capital I//). The understanding of the productive workers that is expressed in this discourse is, as Marx told us (twice at that), "from the standpoint of the simple labour process, ... by no means sufficient to cover the capitalist process of production" (//Capital I//) Once the capitalist process of production adopts its character of co-operation the concepts of productive labour and productive worker are necessarily extended and transformed. With the introduction of the automatic machinery it becomes "sufficient for him to be an orgn of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions" (//Capital I//), to be sentenced to this "!!olycka!!". In the developed capitalist production process the worker stands beside this process instead of being its main character. In this way capital posits "the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary" (//Grundrisse//). It is this that makes capital a contradiction-in-process (a moving contradiction), by trying to reduce necessary labour to a minimum at the same time as labour time is its only source and measure. This is the "necessary tendency of capital" //and at the same time// what conceptually makes it a historical transitory mode of production. "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production" (//Grundrisse//). | |
| |
| Every specific historical mode of production has its own specific "laws of population", so also the capitalist one, needless to say. Rudely simplified it works in a way that the working class at the same time as it by its own labour produces a growing capital it also produces "the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an exten which is always increasing" (//Capital I//). This is both a fundamental moment and the result of the general law of capitalist accumulation. With the continuous process of accumulation the relation between constant and relative capital is altered in a way that the increase in constant capital equals the proportional decrease in variable capital. "It [the demand for labour] falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases" (//Capital I//). An ever growing accumulation is not only necessary for employing more workers, but already to employ the old workers. Capital puts to work only that labour which will produce surplus-value, and this is what the entire logic and organism capital is based on. This relative surplus-population, !!the labour reserve!!, is the property of capital in such a way that their lack of employment is a lack //relative to// the valorisation imperative of capital accumulation. And the free worker's freedom from the possession of the means to exist, except from selling his labour-power, is a freedom //relative to// the capitalist means of production. | |
| |
| The tendency to reduce variable vis-à-vis constant capital, manifested in the pushing aside of the immediate worker from, and his subsumption under, constant capital in the form of machinery makes the immediate labour more and more inessential for the capitalist process of production, and that it is the total productive-force of the labour-force, with the subsumption of science and the "general intellect", that is valorising. To this tendency "the extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied asit is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the anciend domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of aservant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc." (//Capital I//), who are even more exposed to the temperamentious demand for labour-power by capital. | |
| |
| I have tried to show with the above that the dissidents, as it seems to me, chooses to build parts or their argument from the terms we know from Marx's (conceptual) analysis of the simple reproduction and also the simple labour process, mainly from the first chapter of //Capital I// and //Contribution to critique of political economy//, and from the more savage manuscripts of his //Grundrisse//; it is obvious that they are quite text-bound in following the Swedish selection of the latter.((Partly, this can be explained by that the text I refer to from //Dissident// no 3 is a parallel and "critical" reading of Negri's //Marx beyond Marx//.)) At this, the most abstract level of analysis labour and capital as a relation of class is not yet apparent; rather, in these "pure abstractions" the commodity producers get in relation to each other to exchange their commodities, exchange-value for use-value and vice verse. According to this Marxian formal determination of the act of exchange the individuals, as subjects of exchange, their relation is "that of //equality//" (//Grundrisse//). But even if "already the simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital" (//Grundrisse//), it is impossible to understand the capital relation as a class contradiction from this "simple determination". I get inveigled to believed that the dissidents read (!!läsa in!!) the //logical, possible// end of the capital relation qua class contradiction in certain Marxian passages, such as, for example, this one from the //Grundrisse//: | |
| |
| >In order to become capital, it itself persupposes labour as not-capital as against caital; hence it presupposes the establishment at another point of the contradiction it is supposed to overcome. If, then, in the original relation itself, the object and the //product// of the worker's exchange -- as product of mere exchange, it can be no other - were not use value, subsistence, satisfaction of direct needs, withdrawal from circulation of the equivalent put into it in order to be destroed by consumption -- then labour would confront capital not as labour, not as not-capital, but as capital. But capital, too, cannot confront capital if capital does not confront labour, since capital is only capital as not-labour; in this contradictory relation. Thus the concept and the relation of capital itself would be destroyed.((Cf. also: "Only as an exception does the worker succeed through will power, physical strength and endurance, greed etc., in transforming his coiin into money, as an exception from his class and from the general conditions of his existence" (Ibid); "Thus, also the individual worker can cease to be the being-for-itself of labour; he may inherit or steal money etc. But then he ceases to be a //worker//" (ibid).)) | |
| |
| In this passage Marx polemicises against the idea of "bourgeois 'philanthropy'" that the workers can liberate themselves from their situation by saving their "money in a properly ascetic manner". Marx replies that if money no longer functions as capital, as "not-labour", "the concept and the relation of capital itself would be destroyed". It may seem obvious that Marx gives these hypocrite apologists a sarcastic slap in their faces, but after the dissidents' new reading his words are transformed into a weapon, to a veritable revolutionary strategy, to a "theory for practice" (as the dissidents love to agitate), in which the worker, or "not-capital", as producer and consumer, lifts himself from "!!the general circulation!!" and thus "annihilates" his opposite, capital, or "not-labour". Thus it seems as easy to make a revolution as it is to regret your last buy in the supermarket. | |
| |
| |
| ===== Faceless resistance and rhizome. The “general strike” of the termites ===== | |
| |
| At the most banal level workers struggle //as workers//, individually and together. Sometimes to make one's existence a little better, but most often to stop it from getting worse, sometimes just because of sheer boredom and one wants a good laugh on behalf of the boss, a union official, or a work-mate.((Cf. Marx's note in //Capital I//!!...!!)) Kämpa tillsammans! [Struggle together!] in Sweden has ever since it was formed made a good work in concretely and in a personal way tried to portray this everyday resistance. Its concrete application of the "militant inquiry" has many times been valuable and great inspiration. Indeed, I would say that this everyday struggle by the "!!motsträviga men elastiska naturliga skrankan!!" (//Capital I//) may be understood as the banal //precondition// for all struggle, since it expresses what it is //to be a proletarian// in this society. I see and engage in the same things, what makes us different is how we understand what we see and do. | |
| |
| For the dissidents of today this permanent tension and dynamic in capitalism //is communisation// -- "a simple matter", something that occurs "all the time"; in each and every case a sphere is opened up that no longer !!obey!! the logic of the capitalist totality: "It can be riots, occupations and refusal of work, just as it can be linguistic, intellectual and poetical flight-ways" (//Dissident// no 3). They place their hope in that the "faceless resistance" just like termites shall undermine capitalism and make it obsolete.((The concept of "faceless resistance" was coined, at least in Sweden, at the beginning of the 21st Century by the group Kämpa tillsammans! and stands for the mass of "small and hidden resistance against wage labour" and capital that occurs everyday. In the same manner as Indian Kammunist kranti the analogy is "termites" that "slowly gnaw through the foundations that capitalism relies on" (as the term is defined by Marcel in hist "Burgers vs Value", in //riff-raff// no 3--4). These thoughts re-appear in //Dissident// and for example on the blog "Kim Müller", even though the concept today seems to be weighed down philosophically.)) Such a "going beyond the framework of what exists" make me think of the "general strike" of revolutionary syndicalism, that's supposed to make the capitalist system collapse by the workers' refusal of work //en masse//. Such banal and pragmatical communisation is said to appear when individual workers', or "private labour's", undermining and refusal "tend to block labour's determination as productive labour" (Gracchus). They say that the individual worker is "capable to resist his productive determination" (ibid), and that it is when such "attempts to !!break loose!!" spread and achieve "simultaneity" that the capital relation is drained of blood and can be left behind, like a carcass on the steppes of history. According to this understanding the limits of communisation are mere //quantitative// -- temporally, spatially, and the number of participants. They cover their stand with saying: "... at least on //their// workplace"; "However all happened within the framework of the actual workplace, we came no longer..."; "... unfortunately within the reproduction of a specific institution" (a temp work agency); etc. For them the limits are not to be super-seeded by a //qualitative break// at a certain moment of a struggle. | |
| |
| According to the dissidents' understanding, these !!attempts to break loose!! by individual proletarians dig "underground tunnels" which, once connected to other "!!holed rooms!!" //rhizomes//, a term borrowed from Deleuze/Guattari, stand for "uncontrollable !!compositions [sammansättningar]!!". What is important is that they "negate the existing relations' way to function, and //how// they manage to exist in community with other communist events" (//Dissident// no 3). Another image they borrow is the "gardens" of Ernest Jünger, which stand for "sanctuaries where the logic of the present is unable to establish itself"; these can "move outside of the totality, at the same time as they at the moment only are visible through it -- they can only be understood by their relations to the reality they, by their mere existence, negate" (Ibid). | |
| |
| The dissidents set up the following criterion for when an act //is// communising: | |
| |
| >The revolutionary in an act can only be measured from the relation of the action to the capitalist abstractions, its potential to become... -- Marcel, "Communism of attack, and communism of withdrawal" | |
| |
| But the criterion here set up is //impossible//, since no phenomenon and no action is anything //in itself//. All acting appear in a context, and it is this context in its totality that determines the acting: To steal at work, or in a supermarket, //is// not communisation //in itself//, whether it logically omits the logic of capital or not. To play or sleep at work may be both fun and needed, but it isn't communisation in itself, not even if it turns out to be negative for the output or other business rations of the work process. | |
| |
| If the measures taken by the proletarians start communisation, out of necessity rather from the careful choice of form or method of struggle, is fully determined by the //dynamic and context of the struggle//. Its character will shift during the process until the communising measures have driven the dynamic to a point of no return, where a fall back within the limits of class existence is impossible. | |
| |
| However, even if it //is// not communisation in each and every case of refusal by the individual worker, the fact remains that revolution as communisation will have to start //somewhere by someone//. This "someone" can't exist in singular, though. //As a social process// it is impossible to, as in mechanics or gene research, to isolate //the// act that triggers off, or //the// initiating individual. Communisation knows no Rosa Parks (and the civil rights' movement didn't either). Every workplace struggle, group of workers or the vast majority of the workforce at a workplace or a region comes up against the limits of the struggle, sooner, and not later, The possibility to overcome this limit is not up to the workers in struggle //themselves//, but that the context in which the struggle is waged is pulled into the actions of the workers in struggle and that these actions spread and is deepened. Communisation will then be the practical answer to the (social) crisis of the class relation. The surrounding society will be pulled into the struggle, which will be transformed qualitatively, when for example the factory gates will be opened for the workers to get out and the proletarians in the region to enter both the plant and the struggle. In this way the struggle spreads and the abyss opened up by the struggle will be both wider and deeper the more it is filled by proletarians in struggle. However, it is not obvious, by this moment, that it is communisation. If the process, started by a specific struggle, become //communisation// depends on how the context is transforming, how the struggle against capital is evolving, as well as the struggle //within// the struggle against capital. A fast spreading in space and time is necessary, as well as a qualitative transformation. It may be ridiculous to stress that no act is communisation //in itself//, but not even a single struggle is communisation. !![...]!! Communisation is not the emancipation of labour, not to "let loose the barrier of capital, labour, from what makes labour labour", as we are told in //Dissident// no 3. Workers struggle //as workers//, and at a certain moment when a specific limit is overcome an abyss is opened in the face of which the next step must be to establish //other, immediate relations between the proletarians in struggle, in their process !!decomposition!!// by taking //communist measures//. But, if they are unable to take this step into the abyss, then the struggle will be violently thrown back within the former limits and die soon enough. Its death will be the more brutal the wider the abyss had been. The counter-revolution will grow from the soil of the character of the struggle and its limits, just like the communist measures taken. Many of the measures will be such fundamental matters as how to get hold of and prepare food, a scenario that is much more likely than the dough-war Kim Müller cites as signs of everyday communisation. | |
| |
| On the Swedish discussion forum on the Internet, //Socialism.nu//, in a thread about communisation, Hank, from Kämpa tillsammans! [Struggle together!] poses the question: "[Are] any struggles today at all ... communising or not?", and in an intervention a few days later he gives an answer that there are "tendencies to communisation today, and not just in bigger uprisings as those in Algeria [referred to by TC in their text on self-organisation and communisation, discussed by Hank and the Kim Müller blog], //but in the daily class-struggle//". Instead of developing this point in his intervention he refers to the Kim Müller blog and the post "We wanted to play football" which persists in that "many of the everyday struggles aren't about the wage or work time but about work itself". In this "seemingly meaningless micro-struggle" the matter is rather the will "to be oneself", a will expressed in "the daily inability to adjust to one's class situation". Because of that his workmates wanted "to play football", "to through dough at each other", "to play". They were not interested in "being protesting, disobedient or striking workers" affirming their role. They wanted get "beyond [their] class situation and a way to do that was to act as if [they] had already done so". | |
| |
| |
| ===== The Party of Exodus. Revolutionaries and Gemeinwesen ===== | |
| |
| >Two souls, alas, do dwell within his breast; The one is ever parting from the other. -- //Faust// | |
| |
| The guys in Swedish Kämpa tillsammans! [Struggle together!] asserted that because they "were both revolutionaries and workers", a difference they consciously "affirmed", a distance appeared to their being as on the one side labour-power, "the commodity that produces the tautology of capital", and on the other as "revolutionaries", a qualification that made it possible for them to "abandon the role as proletarian, as labour-power". But, as they admitted: "Our problem was that we always maintained within capital. What we wanted to do was to get 'outside' of capitalism" (Marcel, "Communism of withdrawal, and communism of attack"). | |
| |
| As we have seen the dissidents understand communisation as when "actual proletarians struggle against capital by resisting the efforts to incorporate them in their class, and avoid capital's efforts to incorporate the demands being raised as an objective result of the struggle..." At such a moment "this struggling part of the proletariat does not function as a proletariat ... but as an outside to capital's process of reproduction" (//Dissident// no 3) -- they "pose themselves as a party" (Marcel, "Attack/Withdrawal"), as "//Gemeinwesen//". In "Attack/Withdrawal", by Marcel, their party-theory is formulated as follows: | |
| |
| >The party is the production of the diachronic period of transition, i.e. the communisation that, in order to survive, has to expand at the expense of that which it is alien to: capital. The party, through its function as Gemeinwesen, therefore has to be the solution to the problem posed by class struggle. | |
| |
| This "fabrication of !!lösgörande!! relations" lead according to their logical concept to "passivity" (a new version of Lenin's "revolutionary defeatism"?), a "blockage" and so on, that is already "beyond the negation" in that it "annihilates the ground on which the poles stand". Theoretically one can "ascertain and practically produce" this in the "production of revolutionaries" ("Attack/Withdrawal").((The Haecceitas blog, in its contribution "On the Messiah of communism", admits that the concept of "passivity" leads one's thoughts towards "transcendentalism, idealism, Messianism", what may be "provoking when it is introduced in a still "'Marxist' dominated discourse". From advent to adventurism; from the advent of communism to the immediatism of communisation.)) | |
| |
| This it is by "excommunicating" oneself from the community of capital that the revolutionaries can establish not-capitalist (or not-anymore-capitalist) enclaves, as outsides to the capitalist totality. These Jüngerian "gardens" will become the resort for the communists, or rather the ex-communists.((Cf. the Haecceitas blog which says: "If the advent of communism can't be conceptualised, why call oneself a communist, and why even do theory?".)) These revolutionaries, in their gardens, seem to lead a life similar to the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, in their spaces in between the worlds, with no influence whatsoever on the universe or the life of men. Since, what influence does it have to excommunicate oneself, to turn one's back to the capitalist process of production, when capital itself through (or excommunicate) its workers by wholesale and retail? | |
| |
| At best, the perspective of our dissidents is //one-sided// -- since individuals act, feel, experience and so on, but not isolated from society --, but it neglects the social determination of the individual, and overestimate the "actual" proletarian's room to move and possibility to "leave this world". It also overestimates the instinct of self-preservation and self-valorisation of the capital relation at the same time as it underrates the ability of the proletarian class as a class to abolish itself and its opposite, capital and the capitalist society, and also the ability of the class relation to disarm the "small and hidden resistance" of the termites. | |
| |
| But don't get me wrong. It's neither the practical efforts or the will to live "differently" that is wrong, even though the approach and the self-image is very limited, indeed. However, we all do what we can to survive the day, to keep alienation at bay, so to speak. But the "politics is to will", by Olof Palme (the former Prime minister of Sweden, now residing six feet under the most remote Intermundia), is after all not enough, not the least. As a strategic perspective, and actual endeavour, it is in the end futile and impotent, since only a communist revolution can make it a reality. As //immediate endeavour// it can't exist today other than as an //alternative lifestyle// within the present state of things. As the expression of the disappearance of the workers' identity, however, it vegetates in the borderland between the proletarian condition and the establishment of new social relations. The revolutionaries, according to the dissidents and many in the ultra-left, seem to be the Minotaur of communism, half revolutionary, half labour-power; the one is ever parting from the other. What seems to me the most interesting with this perspective is //why// it seems to be an expression of the struggle //in our time// and what it can contribute with when it comes to //theoretical understanding// of our present moment. | |
| |
| It seems to me that the dissidents feel that the class belonging has become an external limitation rather than something to affirm and emancipate, and that individual exodus appears to be both attractive and possible. !![flyttat om stycke jfr med svenskan /PH]!!. Our dissidents seem to build their programme by extrapolating their own experienced situation, or at least how they have interpreted their situation.((As we have seen, the Batko group considers their "projectuality" as an "loosely held community", connoting already communist relations in between the guys.)) But this voluntarism of theirs, just like all voluntarism, is impossible in all imaginary [possible] ways. As I have tried to say with this text the room to move for the individual is utterly determined of the classes and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Inevitably this politics of will runs falls over in a poorly veiled moralism, and thus elitism, since it is impossible to realise on a capitalist basis. | |
| |
| I've tried to show that it is all up to the class-belonging and struggle, and the possibility to supersede this //class// struggle, in, by and on the basis of the same, buy taking communising measures in the chaos that will be brutal in the crisis of the exploitation relation, when the proletarian class abolish its opposite and master, capital and the capitalist class, and by that itself. | |
| |
| According to the dissidents we shall "try to see capitalism for what it is... [and] avoid to see communism where there is no communism" (//Dissident// no 3). According to J. Kellstadt, in his/her discussion about the paradox of anti-activism , we "shouldn't pretend that we're liberated when we're not, which could only turn us into a priggish aristocracy of the 'authentic' and 'un-alienated'".((http://libcom.org/library/anti-activism (published in Swedish in //riff-raff// no 7).)) To pretend is to play, but play //is not in itself// communisation. | |
| |
| |
| ==== Somersault ==== | |
| |
| Since, for the dissidents, communisation is something going on all the time, in the micro struggles everyday and in the individual withdrawals, they have consequently made a shift i problematic from //when and why// communisation is a practical problem for us today, from it being about measures the proletariat //has to take// when it reaches the limits of its class-struggle, to ask instead: "[W]hat stops communisation", in what ways is "this withdrawal [stopped] from being total?" (Gracchus). The //Haecceitas// blog maintains explicitly that the question about "the outside, as emptyness, as negation, as annulment [intande] [is] utopian in the best meaning of the word: a permanent possibility". | |
| |
| The preliminary answer they come up with, a permanent feature in the reasoning of the dissidents, is "consumption with money" -- "Money is used //against// (the tendencies to) communisation" (Gracchus) -- and when money doesn't work, "[i]f money and gadgets [prylar] can't incorporate the workers they have to defeat them with violence" (Gracchus). But communisation isn't stopped by "money and gadgets" -- the workers receive a //wage// in exchange for their labour-power, their ability to valorise capital. The "golden chains" ain't bling-bling. | |
| |
| ===== Communisation means abolishing, not abandoning, the capital relation ===== | |
| |
| I admit it might seem strange that the dissidents and me reach such different conclusions from the problematic I've tried to define above and from the use of the common term of communisation. For me, as I've argued in this text, the supersession of the class contradiction is produced by class-struggle, namely the class-struggle of the proletariat; for the dissidents communism, and its inter-individual relations, has to be established by //something else than// class-struggle and the proletariat. The "something else" appears according to them when individuals refuse to play their assigned roles as labour-power, each and every time, ever since the capitalist mode of production appeared in the pores of the feudal society. (At best; its hard to really tell the scope of their trans-historicity, and of their utopian permanent possibility.) | |
| |
| When the dissidents want to make the individual acts that annul [cancel] the logic of capital -- wildcat strikes, the refusal of being productive, theft, riots and so on -- into (a tendential) communisation, I'd prefer to say that these examples, which I see too (however differently, as it seems), that they are exaples of the everyday of class-struggle, of //being proletarian//. The faceless resistance of Kämpa tillsammans! [Struggle together!] may very well be a quality of struggle more up to date today, after the collapse of programmatism and the workers' identity, and the new cycle of struggle. But revolution //as communisation// is something else, something more, a social crisis and process as the result of the measures proletarians in struggle have to take at a specific moment to overcome the limits they face. Never the less, communisation //is not// a permanent tension that is held back, because if it would be that, then the very meaning of the concept would fall. Communisation is a practical problem to overcome when the class struggle by the proletariat poses the matter as an immediate //practical// problem. | |
| |
| In these few, and rough, lines I've tried to show that, despite their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system today, the dissidents find their way and support among the wrecked goods and body-bags of the collapse of programmatism and the former problematic. | |
| |
| To me it seems like the communist spectre of the earlier cycles of struggle that haunts their perspective: for Kämpa tillsammans! [Struggle together!] the faceless resistance was perservering attacks of termites gnawing holes in the capitalist system, and their revolutionary receipt was //autonomy//; for the dissidents of our time these termite attacks are //communisation//. Their model is the same, it has just changed clothes. | |
| |
| With their Cammattian echoes of the past the dissidents want to "leave this world"; they try to make us believe, and act as if they have already done that. At the end of the day, however, it is the //capitalist historical determination// of the social intercourse they (and me, and many, many more) feel the urge and need to supersede, abolish, destroy and so on. I am, though, pretty sure that this revolutionary process will be everything but a football game, a latent transition or tea-party (and no "immediatist Potlatch" in the anarchist Hakim Bey sense). As //proletariat// we'll set ourselves the task we'll then be albe to solve. But just because you have set the task for yourself, it doesn't mean that it is solved already. | |
| |
| ::July 2010 | |