Communisation vs socialisation
The seizure of the elements of capital. Appropriation or communisation
What is at stake in communisation is the overcoming of a defensive position, in which proletarians fight to maintain their conditions and therefore their reciprocal implication with capital, through a seizure of capital, not in the sense of a socialisation, i.e. a mode of managing the economy, but rather by constituting a community of individuals that are directly its constituents. It is true that societies, i.e. communities dominated and represented by a class, also always constitute the unity of individuals that belong to them, but individuals are only members of societies as average class individuals; singular individuals have no social existence. Communisation is accomplished through seizing the means of subsistence, of communication, of transport and of production in the restricted sense. The communisation of relations, the constitution of a human community / communism, is realized for, in and through the struggle against capital. In this struggle, the seizure of the material means of production cannot be separated from the transformation of proletarians into immediately social individuals: it is one and the same activity, and this identity is brought about by the present form of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. The radical difference from socialisation is that it is not a matter of changing the property status of the material means of production. In communisation there is no appropriation of goods by any entity whatsoever; no state, commune, or council to represent and dominate proletarians in expropriating capital and thus carry out an appropriation. Changing the property regime entail the constitution of a new form of economy, namely socialism, even if it is called an economy of solidarity. When socialism was really possible, communism was postponed to the end of time, whereas it was the impossibility for socialism to be what it pretends to be: the transition to communism, which made it finally the counterrevolution adequate to the only real revolution of the period. Communisation doesn’t constitute an economy. It makes use of everything, but has no other aim but itself. Communisation is not the struggle for communism; it is communism that constitutes itself against capital.
The entanglement of communisation and socialization
If the action of communisation is the outlet of class struggle in the revolutionary crisis, the same act of seizure could be, as we have seen, either communisation or socialisation. Any action of this type can take one or the other form; it all depends on the dynamic and on the context, constantly in transformation. In other words: everything depends on the struggle against capital, which either deepens and extends itself or loses pace and perishes very quickly. Everything also depends on the struggle within the struggle against capital. The constitution of communism is bound up with the constitution of the last socio-economic form alternative to the capitalist one. Until communisation is completed there will be a permanent tendency for some entity to be constituted which strives to make the seizure of material means into a political and economic socialisation. This permanent brake, able to be used by a capitalist counter-revolution at the heart of the revolutionary movement, is the dimension of affirmation and liberation of labour, which remains present in the revolutionary movement, as it is and remains the movement of the class of labour even in the overcoming of activities like labour. The affirmation remains as long as capital is not yet abolished; this is to say, as long as capital still exists as opposed to the proletariat, even the proletariat on the point of abolishing it, i.e. of abolishing itself. In this context the proletariat retains a positivity, even if this positivity of labour is not confirmed by capital anymore, for the positivity is reactivated in the revolutionary process, as the social reproduction becomes a process dependent on the action of the proletarians.
The past revolutions show us only too well: “the red flag can be waved against the red flag” until the freikorps arrive
Capital “will not hesitate” to proclaim again that labour is the “only productive activity” in order to stop the movement of its abolition and, even better, to take up the boot as soon as it can. This dimension can only be overcome by the victory of communisation, which is the abolition of the capitalist class and the proletariat. The overcoming of the counter-revolution will not always be peaceful, it will not always take place “within the movement” and it will not be a true and quicker version of the “withering of the state” which was foreseen in socialism. Any form, whether it be a state form or a para-state form, will always do anything to maintain itself even in the name of its ultimate withering! This sclerosis and perpetuation are no “counter-revolutionary tendencies within the revolution”, but rather The counter-revolution. The capitalist counter-revolution in opposition to the revolution.
Communism doesn’t fight against democracy, but the counter-revolution claims to be democratic
It is in the very name of the abolition of classes that radical democracy strives to maintain or restore elective structures, which it claims are necessary to prevent the formation of a new ruling class, one self-appointed and uncontrolled. The constitution of communism is bound up with the constitution of a final form of socialism even if the movement that bore it, the labour movement, has definitively disappeared.
The struggle to “bring to reason” the fractions of the proletariat which are most active in the expropriation of capital will be all the more violent when it presents itself as the defence of the democratic revolution, refusing to let the minority compromise the gains of the majority.
The defence of gains is the possibility of a counter-revolutionary phase
Communisation will never have any gains. All the expropriations that constitute the immediate community will again be called into question as pure expropriations, savage takeovers. They will be proclaimed socialisations as soon as the movement decelerates, and a para-state instance is set up in order to defend what at that moment appears as gains and as elements of the formation of a possibly new economy. The class recognizes itself as divided and diverse in order to abolish itself. The abolition of the proletariat as the dissolution of other classes implies the internal need of the proletariat for these other classes, to absorb them in dissolving them and, at the same time, the contradiction with them. Communisation lives constantly in the conditions of its own sclerosis. Everything will happen on a geographical plane, a horizontal plane, and not on a sectoral plane differentiating types of activities. Limits will be everywhere, and the generalized intertwining of revolution and counter-revolution will manifest itself in multiple and chaotic conflicts. The proletariat abolishes itself in the human community that it produces. It is the inner and dynamic contradictions within such a process that give content and force to the counter-revolution, because in each one capital can regenerate itself. Since for the class to abolish itself is to overcome its autonomy, therein resides the content and force of the capitalist counter-revolution.
Extension is the movement of victory, deceleration the one of counter-revolution.
Without it being an explicit strategy, capital will struggle to recover social control in two ways: On the one hand, States will fight to re-establish their domination and restore exploitation. On the other hand, capitalist society will continue to maintain itself on the totally ambiguous bases of popular power and self-management. In formal subsumption, the entirety of the product of labour had for a long time been the object of a workers’ demand; it will now find a new lease of life and will constitute the ideal content for the reproduction of capitalist relations and a basis for a “solid” resistance against communisation. These factions may fight against each other or align themselves depending on the situation and hence on the development of the movement of communisation. The action of the capitalist class could be as much military as it could consist in social counter-measures and the construction of conflicts based on the capacities of the capitalist mode of production. The revolution itself pushes these capacities to develop in an unforeseeable manner, from the resurrection of slavery to self-management. But above all this reproduction of capitalist relations will be deployed as close as possible to the revolution, reproducing itself in all the moments where communisation starts to harden by its own nature into the simple organisation of the survival of proletarians, that is, into socialisation. The capitalist class is equally likely to centralise its counter-revolutionary action in the State as to decentralize the confrontation in its regionalization, dividing the classes into social categories, even ethnicising them, because a situation of crisis is also an inter-capitalist conflict. If in an inter-capitalist conflict one of the capitalist sites manages, across the general devalorisation of the crisis, to represent a global solution for all capitals, it will represent such a solution also for the vanquished.
The revolution will not be won in a straight line
Some fractions of the proletariat will be smashed, others will be “turned back”, rallying to conservative strategies of survival. Other insurrections will pick up where they leave off. Certain of those turned back or bogged down will resume direct expropriations, and the organisation of the struggle by those who struggle and uniquely for the struggle, without representation, without control by anyone in the name of anything, thereby taking up once again the constitution of communism, which is not a goal of the struggle but the content of struggle. Counter-revolutionary ideologies will be numerous, starting perhaps with that of the survival of the economy: preserving economic mechanisms, not destroying all economic logic, in order to then construct a new economy. The survival of the economy is the survival of exchange in all its forms, whether it employs money, any kind of voucher, or even simply barter, which can be adorned with the name of mutual aid! The complete absence of any form of accounting is the axis around which the revolutionary community will construct itself, only the absence of exchange value will enable the bringing together of all the not directly proletarian social strata which will disintegrate in the hyper crisis. Only the destruction of exchange value will integrate/abolish all the not directly proletarian individuals, all those “without reserves” (including those who revolutionary activity will have reduced to this condition), the unemployed, ruined peasants of the “third world”, the masses of the informal economy. These masses must be dissolved as middle strata, as peasants, in order to break the personal relations of dependence between “bosses” and “employees” as well as the situation of “small independent producers” within the informal economy, by taking concrete communist measures which force all these strata to join the proletariat, that is, to realise their “proletarianisation”…
Proletarians who communise society will have no need of “frontism”. They will not seek out a common program for the victims of capital. If they engage in frontism they are dead, if they remain alone they are also dead. They must confront all the other classes of society as the sole class not able to triumph by remaining what it is. The measures of communisation are the abolition of the proletariat because, in addition to its unification in its abolition, they dissolve the basis of existence of a multitude of intermediary strata (which are thereby absorbed into the process of communisation) and millions (if not billions) of individuals that are exploited through the product of their labour and not the sale of their labour-power. As much on the level of regions as at the global level, communisation will have an action that one could call “humanitarian”, even if this term is currently unpronounceable, because communisation will take charge of all the misery of the world. Human activity as a flux is the only presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit, because as a pre-supposition of itself it has no conception of a product and can thus give plentifully. The proletariat, acting as a class, dissolves itself as a class in its seizures, because in these seizures it overcomes its “autonomy”.
Democracy and solidarity economies will be the two big ideological constructions to defeat.
Democracy and solidarity economies will combine with other systems depending on the time and place. They will combine above all with the ideology of communities that could be very diverse: national, racial, religious. Probably more dangerous: the spontaneous and inevitable constitution of local communities. Such communities will be multiplied with infinite varieties and their ideologies can take all political colours: conservative, reactionary, democratic, and of course, above all revolutionary. The intertwining of revolution and counter-revolution is the rule. For there is no situation that, viewed unilaterally, would be without escape for capital. It is the action of the proletariat that will prevent capital from producing a superior mode of valorisation for which it can always find the conditions in every crisis and every confrontation with the proletariat, from these three points of view:
- Diversification and segmentation of the proletariat
- Dissolution and absorption of multiple exploited strata outside of a direct subsumption of their labour to capital
- Inter-capitalist conflicts recruiting the proletariat for whom these conflicts have a integrative and reproductive function
All of this provides the strength and content of the counter-revolution, strength and content in a direct relation with the immediate, empirical necessities of communisation (its dynamic contradictions, or the contradictions of its dynamic).
There is no ideological struggle, the practical struggle is theoretical.
One must not imagine the anti-ideological struggle as distinct from communisation itself. It is through communisation that ideologies are fought, because they are part of what the movement abolishes. The constitution of communism cannot avoid violent confrontations with the counter-revolution, but these “military” aspects do not turn around the constitution of a front. If such a front is set up the revolution will have lost, at least where the front is situated, and until it’s curbing. The revolution will be both geographic and without front, the starting points of communisation will always be local and in immediate and very rapid expansion, like the start of a fire. Even once extinguished these fires will smoulder under self-management and citizen communities. Communism will arise from an immense fisticuffs. The process of communisation will indeed be a period of transition, but not at all a calm period of socialist and/or democratic construction between a chaotic revolutionary period and communism. It will itself by the chaos between capital and communism. It is clear that such an anticipation, though well-reasoned, has nothing exciting about it! It is neither “barbarism”, a meaningless term, nor the royal road of the tomorrows that sing!1 It is a perspective that is anchored in the current situation of capital and struggles, in the current struggle between the proletariat and capital restructured in the crisis. It is a perspective which poses the overcoming of these struggles, not in a straight line, but in a deepening of the crisis of capital currently in place.
The inter-twining of the revolution and counter-revolution implicates all organisation which the movement of class struggle gives rise to. An organisation, a collective, or any other form can be the organised struggle or tend towards a representation of this struggle, and to develop it, in a situation of the crumbling of the state, toward a para-state form. It is not a matter of the opposition between organisation and spontaneity (everything is always spontaneous and organised) but of the opposition between expropriation and appropriation, communisation and socialisation; the latter necessitating that society exists, that is to say that it would be something other than “people”, than the “people” of which we shall now speak. In the struggle in 2003 in France we could see the proletarians constructs between themselves what could be called an inter-subjectivity that was not beholden to the unions and the allowed them to organise a purely scenic representation of this unity. Nevertheless the struggle did not overcome the general limit of what it was at the time: radical democratism, the political consolidation of the limits of the struggle as a class through proposing solutions to the “problems of capital”, for example the “defence of public services”. It was truly an inter-subjectivity since it was a matter of (still proletarian) subjects linked together faced with their object – capital. In Greece in 2008 the riot was fundamentally inter-subjectivity. Confronting the question of democracy, the inter-subjectivity of the Greek rioters confronted, through the absence of demands, and beyond the foreclosure represented by radical democratism, class membership as an exterior constraint. In the movement of the abolition of capital this is de-objectified, the subject-object relation is abolished along with the capital-proletariat relation (remember that this abolition is the content of the revolutionary process, communisation, and as long as it is not yet finished there will still be a subject-object relation, even if the subject is in the process of abolishing itself as such, it is in this relation that the abolition is achieved, that is to say that proletarians abolish capital which makes them proletarian, pure subjects confronted with the object – capitalist society as a whole). The revolutionary process of de-objectification of capital is thus also a process of the destruction of the separated subjectivity of the proletariat. It is this process which we designate as self-transformation of the proletariat into immediately social individual. This transformation is never achieved before it is finished; in this sense it is proletarians that make the revolution till the end, because until the end they abolish capital that makes them proletarians.
Communisation and socialisation is not forming a contradiction
The contradiction remains that between capital and the proletariat. It does not become an internal contradiction within the proletariat. Even if there is a future total opposition between the two perspectives they are intertwined and both implicated in the contradiction capital–proletariat. The struggle of the proletariat against capital becomes the abolition of classes by the expropriation of capital. But this very action, in its opposition to capital, revives the affirmation of work when it is interrupted by the capitalist class (it is there that the gains exist that we have seen). This provisional and default affirmation of work advances a social state of which the future will be a social State, thus a counter-revolutionary form. The revolutionary movement must ceaselessly oppose itself to that which it has posed. The process of self-transformation into immediately social individuals can, in the struggle against capital and thus the capitalist class, also be a struggle against proletarians defending the proletarian condition. A struggle of communisation against socialisation.
The counter-revolution is constructed on the limits of the revolution
This is what this text has tried to show a little more “concretely”. In the period that saw the revolutionary tentatives of 1917 and ’37, the general structure of the proletariat–capital contradiction carried the affirmation of the class of labour and thus the construction of socialism. Now the contradiction carries the questioning of the class membership and thus the general structure poses communisation. This structure doesn’t mean that limits don’t still exist, even if the direction of the movement is towards their overcoming. The limit is consubstantial with every revolutionary measure, and this limit is only overcome in the following measure. It is the class character of the movement of communisation which is its limit. It is the overcoming of its own limited character, since it is the abolition of classes and thus of the proletariat. The proletarian is the private individual of objectivity, whose objectivity is opposed to him in capital. He is reduced to pure subjectivity, he is the free subject, carrier of a labour-power only able to become labour in action after being sold, and then put to work by its capitalist owner. The subject free of everything is bound to objectivity in itself, the fixed capital that subsumes his labour-power, submitting it and incorporating it in the labour process. The abolition of capital is the abolition of objectivity in itself through the seizure of material means, and the abolition of the proletarian subject through the production of the immediately social individual. It is what we call the simultaneous de-subjectification and de-obectification produced by the seizure of the social totality, an action that destroys individuals as distinct entities. The distinct totality is the independent society, in its division into classes and its representation by the dominant class. The abolition of classes is the abolition of society. The creation of socialist or even “communist” society is always the maintenance of the independence of the community in relation to its members, which are only social by the mediation of society. Communism is the end of all mediation between individuals and their constantly changing groupings of affinity. But in the revolution there is still mediation by capital since revolutionary activity is the abolition of capital! Communisation is mediated by its own object, thus it always carries the possibility that its mediation autonomizes itself in the constitution of the revolution as a different structure than revolutionary action. This tendency towards institutionalisation of the revolution, and the victory of capital, will continually exist, but revolution and counter-revolution will not cease to oppose one another face to face. The steps of communisation are those of a tightrope walker.