Capital creates a network of enterprises which exist only for and through profit and are protected by States which are no more than anti-communist organizations, and simultaneously creates the mass of individuals who are forced to rise against capital itself. This mass is not homogeneous, but it will forge its unity in the communist revolution, although its components will not play the same role.
A revolution is the result of real needs; it originates in material living conditions which have become unbearable. This also applies to the proletariat, which is brought into existence by capital. A large part of the world's population must sell its labour power in order to live, since it has no means of production. Some sell their labour and are productive. Others sell it and are unproductive. Still others cannot sell it: capital only buys living labour if it can hope to valorize itself at a reasonable rate (the average rate of profit); they are excluded from production.
If one identifies proletarian with factory worker (or even worse: with manual labourer), or with the poor, then one cannot see what is subversive in the proletarian condition. The proletariat is the negation of this society. It is not the collection of the poor, but of those who are desperate, those who have no reserves (les sans-réserves in French, or senza riserve in Italian), 5 who have nothing to lose but their chains; those who are nothing, have nothing, and cannot liberate themselves without destroying the whole social order. The proletariat is the dissolution of present society, because this society deprives it of nearly all its positive aspects. Thus the proletariat is also its own destruction. All theories (either bourgeois, fascist, stalinist, left-wing or "gauchistes") which in any way glorify and praise the proletariat as it is and claim for it the positive role of defending values and regenerating society, are counter-revolutionary. Worship of the proletariat has become one of the most efficient and dangerous weapons of capital. Most proles are low paid, and a lot work in production, yet their emergence as the proletariat derives not from being low paid producers, but from being "cut off", alienated, with no control either over their lives or the meaning of what they have to do to earn a living.
Defining the proletariat has little to do with sociology. Without the possibility of communism, theories of "the proletariat" would be tantamount to metaphysics. Our only vindication is that whenever it autonomously interfered with the running of society, the proletariat has repeatedly acted as negation of the existing order of things, has offered it no positive values or role, and has groped for something else.
Being what produces value and can do away with a world based on value, the proletariat includes for instance the unemployed and many housewives, since capitalism hires and fires the former, and utilizes the labour of the latter to increase the total mass of extracted value.
The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are ruling class not because they're rich and the rest of the population aren't. Being bourgeois brings them riches, not the other way round. They are ruling class because they control the economy - employees as well as machines. Ownership strictly speaking is only a form of class power that appears in particular variants of capitalism.
The proletariat is not the working class, rather the class of the critique of work. It is the ever-present destruction of the old world, but only potentially; it becomes real only in a moment of social tension and upheaval, when it is compelled by capital to be the agent of communism. It only becomes the subversion of established society when it unifies itself, and organizes itself, not in order to make itself the dominant class, like the bourgeoisie in its time, but in order to destroy the society of classes; at that point there is only one social agent: mankind. But apart from such a period of conflict and the period which precedes it, the proletariat is reduced to the status of an element of capital, a wheel within a mechanism (and of course this is precisely the aspect glorified by capital, which worships the worker only as a part of the existing social system).
Although not devoid of "ouvriérisme" and labourism (the other side of intellectualism), radical thinking did not eulogize the working class nor regard manual work as infinite bliss. It gave productive workers a decisive (but not exclusive) part because their place in production puts them in a better situation to revolutionize it. Only in this sense does the blue collar (often wearing white overalls, and possibly a tie) keep a central role, in so far as his/her social function enables him/her to carry out different tasks from others. Yet with the spread of unemployment, casual labour, longer schooling, training periods at any time of life, temp and part-time jobs, forced early retirement, and the odd mixture of welfare and workfare whereby people move out of misery into work and then again into poverty and moonlighting, when dole money sometimes equals low pay, it is getting harder to tell work from non-work.
We may well soon be entering a phase similar to the dissolution Marx's early writings refer to. In every period of strong historical disturbances (the 1840s as after 1917), the proletariat reflects the loosening of social boundaries (sections of both working and middle classes slip down the social ladder or fear they might) and the weakening of traditional values (culture is no longer a unifier). The conditions of life of the old society are already negated in those of the proles. Not hippies or punks, but modern capitalism makes a sham of the work ethic. Property, family, nation, morals, politics in the bourgeois sense, tend to decay within the proletarian condition.
The primitive community is too poor and weak to take advantage of the potentialities of labour. It only knows work in its immediate form. Labour is not crystallized, accumulated in instruments; little past labour is stored. When this becomes more common, exchange is necessary: production can be measured only by abstract labour, by average labour time, in order to circulate. Living labour is the essential element of activity, and labour time is the necessary measure. Labour time is materialized in money. Hence the exploitation of classes by other classes, the aggravation of natural catastrophes (see above, on pre-capitalist crises). Hence the rise and fall of States and sometimes empires which can grow only by fighting against one another. Sometimes exchange relations come to an end between the various parts of the civilized (i.e., mercantile) world, after the death of one or several empires. Such an interruption in the development may last for centuries, during which the economy seems to go backwards, towards a subsistence economy.
In this period mankind does not have a productive apparatus capable of making the exploitation of human labour useless and even ruinous. The role of capitalism is precisely to accumulate past labour. The existence of the entire industrial complex, of all fixed capital, proves that the social character of human activity has finally been materialized in an instrument capable of creating, not a new paradise on earth, but a development making the best possible use of available resources to fulfil needs, and producing new resources in response to needs. If this industrial complex has turned into the essential element of production, then the role of value as a regulator, a role which corresponded to the stage when living labour was the main productive factor, is deprived of all meaning; value becomes unnecessary to production. Its survival is now catastrophic. Value, concretized in money in all its forms, from the simplest to the most elaborate, results from the general character of labour, from the energy (both individual and social) which is produced and consumed by labour. Value remains the necessary mediator as long as that energy has not created a unified productive system throughout the world: it then becomes a hindrance. 6
Communism means the end of a series of mediations which were previously necessary (in spite of the misery they entailed) to accumulate enough past labour to enable men to do without these mediations. Value is such a mediation: it is now useless to have an element external to social activities to connect and stimulate them. The accumulated productive infrastructure only needs to be transformed and developed. Communism compares use values to decide to develop a given production rather than another one. It does not reduce the components of social life to a common denominator (the average labour time contained in them). Communism organizes its material life on the basis of the confrontation and interplay of needs - which does not exclude conflicts and even some form of violence. Men will not turn into angels: why should they?
Communism is also the end of any element necessary for the unification of society: it is the end of politics. It is neither democratic nor dictatorial. Of course it is "democratic" if this word means that everyone will be in charge of all social activities. This will not be so because of people's will to manage society, or because of a democratic principle, but because the organization of activities can only be carried out by those taking part in them. However, as opposed to what the democrats say, this will be possible only through communism, where all the elements of life are part of the community, when all separate activity and all isolated production are abolished. This can only be achieved through the destruction of value. Exchange among enterprises excludes all possibilities for the collectivity to be in charge of its life (and first of all its material life). The aim of exchange and value is radically opposed to that of people - General Motors, Woolworth's or nuclear power stations will never be democratically run. The enterprise tries to valorize itself and accepts no leadership but that which allows it to reach its aim (this is why capitalists are only the officials of capital). The enterprise manages its managers. The elimination of the limits of the enterprise, the destruction of the commodity relation which compels every individual to regard and treat all others as means to earn his living, are the only conditions for self-organization. Management problems are secondary, and it is absurd to want everyone to have a turn managing society. Bookkeeping and administrative work will become activities similar to all others, without privilege; anyone can take part in them or not take part in them.
"Democracy is a contradiction in terms, a lie and indeed sheer hypocrisy. . . In my opinion, this applies to all forms of government. Political freedom is a farce and the worst possible slavery; such a fictitious freedom is the worst enslavement. So is political equality: this is why democracy must be torn to pieces as well as any other form of government. Such a hypocritical form cannot go on. Its inherent contradiction must be exposed in broad daylight: either it means true slavery, which implies open despotism; or it means real freedom and real equality, which implies communism." 7
In communism, an external force which unifies individuals is useless. Utopian socialists never understood this. Nearly all their imaginary societies, whatever their merits or their visionary power, need very strict planning and quasi totalitarian organization. These socialists sought to create a link which is created in practice whenever people associate in groups. In order to avoid exploitation and anarchy at the same time, Utopian socialists organized social life in advance. Others, from the anarchist standpoint, refuse such authoritarianism and want society to be a permanent creation. But the problem lies elsewhere: only determined social relations based on a given level of development of material production make harmony among individuals both possible and necessary (which includes conflicts). Then individuals can fulfil their needs, but only through automatic participation in the functioning of the group, without being mere tools of the group. Communism has no need to unify what used to be separate but no longer is.
This is also true on a world and even universal scale. States and nations, which were necessary instruments of development, are now purely reactionary organizations, and the divisions they maintain are an obstacle to development: the only possible dimension is that of mankind.
The opposition between manual and intellectual, between nature and culture, used to make sense. Separation between the one who worked and the one who organized work increased the efficiency of labour. The current level of development no longer needs this, and this division is nothing but a hindrance which exhibits its absurdity in all aspects of professional, "cultural," and school life. Communism destroys the division between workers crippled by manual labour and workers made useless in offices.
This also applies to the opposition between man and his environment. In former times man could only socialize the world by fighting against the domination of "nature." Nowadays he is a threat to nature. Communism is the reconciliation of man and nature.
Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it. Man produces and reproduces his conditions of existence: ever since the disintegration of the primitive community, but in the purest form under capitalism, work, i.e., the activity through which man appropriates his environment, has become a compulsion, opposed to relaxation, to leisure, to "real" life. This stage was historically necessary to create the past labour which makes possible the elimination of this enslavement. With capital, production (= production for valorization) becomes the ruler of the world. It is a dictatorship of production relations over society. When one produces, one sacrifices one's life-time in order to enjoy life afterwards; this enjoyment is usually disconnected from the nature of the work, which is just a means of supporting one's life. Communism dissolves production relations and combines them with social relations. It does not know any separate activity, any work opposed to play. The obligation of doing the same work for a lifetime, of being a manual or an intellectual worker, disappears. The fact that accumulated labour includes and integrates all science and technique makes it possible for research and work, reflection and action, teaching and working, to become a single activity. Some tasks can be taken in charge by everyone, and the generalisation of automation profoundly transforms productive activity. Communism supports neither play against work, nor non-work against work. These limited and partial notions are still capitalist realities. Activity as the production-reproduction of the conditions of life (material, affective, cultural, etc.) is the very nature of humanity.
Man collectively creates the means of his existence, and transforms them. He cannot receive them from machines: in that case mankind would be reduced to the situation of a child, who receives toys without knowing where they originate. Their origin does not even exist for him: the toys are simply there. Likewise communism does not turn work into something perpetually pleasant and joyous. Human life is effort and pleasure. Even the activity of the poet includes painful moments. Communism can only abolish the separation between effort and enjoyment, creation and recreation, work and play.
Communism is mankind's appropriation of its wealth, and implies an inevitable and complete transformation of this wealth. This requires the destruction of enterprises as separate units and therefore of the law of value: not in order to socialize profit, but to circulate goods between industrial centres without the mediation of value. This does not mean that communism will make use of the productive system as it is left by capitalism. The problem is not to get rid of the "bad" side of capital (valorization) while keeping the "good" side (production). As we have seen, value and the logic of profit impose a certain type of production, develop some branches and neglect others, and praise of productivity and growth is singing hymns to the glory of capital.
On the other hand, to revolutionize production, to destroy enterprises as such, the communist revolution is bound to make use of production. This is its essential "lever," at least during one phase. The aim is not to take over the factories only to remain there to manage them, but to get out of them, to connect them to each other without exchange, which destroys them as enterprises. Such a movement almost automatically begins by reducing and then suppressing the opposition between town and country and the dissociation between industry and other activities. Today industry is stifled within its own limits while it stifles other sectors.
Capital lives to accumulate value: it fixes this value in the form of stored labour, past labour. Accumulation and production become ends in themselves. Everything is subordinated to them: capital feeds its investments with human labour. At the same time it develops unproductive labour, as has been shown. The communist revolution is a rebellion against this absurdity. It is also a dis-accumulation, not so as to return to forms of life which are now gone forever, but to put things right: up to now man has been sacrificed to investment; nowadays the reverse is possible. Communism is opposed to productivism, and equally to the illusion of ecological development within the existing economic framework. "Zero growth" is still growth. The official spokespersons of ecology never voice a critique of economy as value-measuring, they just want to wisely keep money-led quantities under control.
Communism is not a continuation of capitalism in a more rational, more efficient, more modern, and less unequal, less anarchic form. It does not take the old material bases as it finds them: it overthrows them.
Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power. It is a movement which already exists, not as a mode of production (there can be no communist island within capitalist society), but as a tendency which originates in real needs. Communism does not even know what value is. The point is not that one fine day a large number of people start to destroy value and profit. All past revolutionary movements were able to bring society to a standstill, and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communization, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money, open the gate isolating a factory from its neighbourhood, close down another factory where the work process is too alienating to be technically improved, do away with school as a specialized place which cuts off learning from doing for 15 odd years, pull down walls that force people to imprison themselves in 3-room family units - in short, it will tend to break all separations.
The mechanism of the communist revolution is a product of struggles. Their development leads to a time when society forces all individuals whom it leaves with no other perspective to establish new social relations. If a number of social struggles now seem to come to nothing, it is because their only possible continuation would be communism, whatever those who take part in them may now think. Even when workers are just making demands they often come to a point when there is no other solution but a violent clash with the State and its assistants, the unions. In that case, armed struggle and insurrection imply the application of a social programme, and the use of the economy as a weapon (see above, on the proletariat). The military aspect, as important as it may be, depends on the social content of the struggle. To be able to defeat its enemies on a military level, the proletariat - whatever its consciousness - transforms society in a communist way.
"Modern strategy means the emancipation of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry: it is the military expression of that emancipation. The emancipation of the proletariat will also have a particular military expression and a new specific warfare. That is clear. We can even analyse such a strategy from the material conditions of the proletariat." 8
Up to now struggles have not reached the stage when their military development would have made necessary the appearance of the new society. In the most important social conflicts, in Germany between 1919 and 1921, the proletariat, in spite of the violence of the civil war, did not reach this stage. Yet the communist perspective was present underneath these encounters, which are meaningless if one does not take it into account. The bourgeoisie was able to use the weapon of the economy in its own interests by dividing the working class through unemployment, for instance. The proletariat was unable to use the economy in its own interests, and struggled mainly by military means; it went so far as to create a Red Army in the Ruhr in 1920, yet never used the weapon which its own social function gives it.
In a different context, some riots in the US began a social transformation, but only on the level of the commodity, and not of capital itself. These people were only one part of the proletariat, and often had no possibility of using the "lever" of production because they were excluded from it. They were outside the factories. However, the communist revolution implies an action from the enterprise, to destroy it as such. The rebellions in the US remained on the level of consumption and distribution. 9 Communism cannot develop without attacking the heart of the matter, the centre where surplus-value is produced: production. But it only uses this lever to destroy it.
Those who have no reserves make the revolution: they are forced to establish the social relations which jut out of the existing society. This break implies a crisis, which can be very different from that of 1929, when a large part of the economy came to a standstill. If the various elements rebelling against wage labour are to be unified, society will have to be in such trouble that it will not be able to isolate each struggle from the others. The communist revolution is neither the sum of the present day movements, nor their transformation through the intervention of a "vanguard." Of course such a mechanism can only take place on a world-wide scale, and first of all in several advanced countries.
The main question is not the seizure of power by the workers. It is absurd to advocate the dictatorship of the working class as it is now. The workers as they are now are incapable of managing anything: they are just a part of the valorization mechanism, and are subjected to the dictatorship of capital. The dictatorship of the existing working class cannot be anything but the dictatorship of its representatives, i.e., the leaders of the unions and workers' parties. This is the state of affairs in the "socialist" countries, and it is the programme of the democratic left in the rest of the world.
Revolution has, but is not a problem of organization. All theories of "workers' government" or "workers' power" only propose alternative solutions to the crisis of capital. Revolution is first of all a transformation of society, i.e., of what constitutes relations among people, and between people and their means of life. Organizational problems and "leaders" are secondary: they depend on what the revolution achieves. This applies as much to the start of the communist revolution as to the functioning of the society which arises out of it. Revolution will not happen on the day when 51% of the workers become revolutionary; and it will not begin by setting up a decision-making apparatus. It is precisely capitalism that perpetually deals with problems of management and leadership. The organizational form of the communist revolution, as of any social movement, depends on its content. The way the party, the organization of the revolution, constitutes itself and acts, depends on the tasks to be realized.
In the 19th century, and even at the time of the first world war, the material conditions of communism were still to be created, at least in some countries (France, Italy, Russia, etc.). A communist revolution would first have had to develop productive forces, to put the petite bourgeoisie to work, to generalize industrial labour, with the rule: no work, no food (of course this only applied to those able to work). But the revolution did not come, and its German stronghold was crushed. Its tasks have since been fulfilled by capitalist economic growth. The material basis of communism now exists. There is no longer any need to send unproductive workers to the factory; the problem is to create the basis of another "industry," totally different from the present one. Many factories will have to be closed and compulsory labour is now out of the question: what we want is the abolition of work as an activity separate from the rest of' life. It would be pointless to put an end to garbage collection as a job some have to do for years, if the whole process and logic of garbage creation and disposal did not change at the same time.
Underdeveloped countries - to use a dated but not inadequate phrase - will not have to go through industrialization. In many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, capital oppresses labour but has not subjugated it to "real" domination. Old forms of social communal life still exist. Communism would regenerate a lot of them - as Marx thought of the Russian peasant commune - with the help of some "western" technology applied in a different way. In many respects, such areas may prove easier to communize than the huge motorcar-adapted and screen-addicted "civilized" conurbations. In other words, a worldwide process of dis-accumulation.
The State was born out of human beings' inability to manage their lives. It is the unity - symbolic and material - of the disunited. As soon as proletarians appropriate their means of existence, this mediation begins to lose its function, but destroying it is not an automatic process. It will not disappear little by little as the non-mercantile sphere gets bigger and bigger. Actually, such a sphere would be fragile if it let the central governmental machinery go on, as in Spain 1936-37. No State structure will wither away on its own.
Communizing is therefore more than an addition of direct piecemeal actions. Capital will be sapped by general subversion through which people take their relationships with the world into their own hands. But nothing decisive will be achieved as long as the State retains some power. Society is not just a capillary network: relationships are centralized in a force which concentrates the power to preserve this society. Capitalism would be too happy to see us change our lives locally while it carries on on a global scale. As a central force, the State has to be destroyed by central action, as well as its power dissolved everywhere. The communist movement is anti-political, not a-political. 10
K) Communism as a Present Social Movement
Communism is not only a social system, a mode of production, which will exist in the future, after "the revolution." This revolution is in fact an encounter between two worlds:
1) on the one hand, all those who are rejected, excluded from all real enjoyment, whose very existence is sometimes threatened, who are nevertheless united by the necessity of coming into contact with one another, to act, to live, to survive;
2) on the other hand, a socialized economy on a world-wide scale, unified on a technical level, but divided into units forced to oppose each other to obey the logic of value which unifies them and which will destroy anything to survive as such.
The world of commodities and value, which is the present framework of productive forces, is activated by a life of its own; it has constituted itself into an autonomous force, and the world of real needs submits to its laws. The communist revolution is the destruction of this submission. Communism is the struggle against this submission and has opposed it since the early days of capitalism, and even before, with no chance of success.
Mankind first attributed to its ideas, its conceptions of the world, an origin external to itself, and thought the nature of man was to be found, not in his social relations, but in his link with an element outside of the real world (god), of which man was only the product. Likewise mankind, in its effort to appropriate and adapt to the surrounding world, first had to create a material world, a network of productive forces, an economy, a world of objects which crushes and dominates it, before it could appropriate this world, adapting and transforming it according to its needs.
The communist revolution is the continuation as well as the surpassing of present social movements. Discussions of communism usually start from an erroneous standpoint: they deal with the question of what people will do after the revolution. They never connect communism with what is going on at the moment when the discussion is going on. There is a complete rupture: first one makes the revolution, then communism. In fact communism is the continuation of real needs which are now already at work, but which cannot lead anywhere, which cannot be satisfied, because the present situation forbids it. Today there are numerous communist gestures and attitudes which express not only a refusal of the present world, but most of all an effort to build a new one. In so far as these do not succeed, one sees only their limits, only the tendency and not its possible continuation (the function of "extremist" groups is precisely to present these limits as the aims of the movement, and to strengthen them). In the refusal of assembly-line work, in the struggles of squatters, the communist perspective is present as an effort to create "something else," not on the basis of a mere rejection of the modern world (hippy), but through the use and transformation of what is produced and wasted. In such conflicts people spontaneously try to appropriate goods without obeying the logic of exchange; therefore they treat these goods as use values. Their relations to these things, and the relations they establish among themselves to perform such acts, are subversive. People even change themselves in such events The "something else" that these actions reach for is present in the actions only potentially, whatever those who organize them may think and want, and whatever the extremists who take part in them and theorize about them may do and say. Such movements will be forced to become conscious of their acts, to understand what they are doing, in order to do it better.
Those who already feel the need for communism, and discuss it, cannot interfere in these struggles to bring the communist gospel, to propose to these limited actions that they direct themselves towards "real" communist activity. What is needed is not slogans, but an explanation of the background and mechanism of these struggles. One must only show what they will be forced to do.