Théorie Communiste

¿Quiénes somos?

TC — 2025-05-04T17:44:00Z

El primer número de la revista Théorie Communiste (TC) apareció en 1977. El
grupo original se constituyó en 1975. Anteriormente, algunos miembros de este
grupo habían publicado la revista Intervention Communiste (dos números
publicados en 1972 y 1973) y habían participado en la revista Cahiers du
Communisme de Conseils (editada en Marsella entre 1968 y 1973, y muy vinculada a
ICO —Informations et Correspondance Ouvrière—, que luego se convirtió en
Échanges et Mouvement), de la que se separaron en cuanto ésta comenzó a
fusionarse con Révolution Internationale (la Corriente Comunista Internacional). El
breve relato que sigue permite, en parte, captar la problemática y los interrogantes
que estuvieron en el origen de TC.
Al principio de los años setenta, todo un medio ya crítico de la ultraizquierda
histórica comenzó a encontrar muy insuficiente la puesta en entredicho por ésta de
todas las mediaciones políticas y sindicales que conformaban la pertenencia del
proletariado, como clase, al modo de producción capitalista. En el balance que
entonces se pudo elaborar de la oleada de luchas de clases de finales de los años
sesenta, el llamamiento a la acción de la clase para sí misma enmascaraba la cuestión
esencial: no se trataba de redescubrir una pureza de la afirmación del proletariado.
La revolución, la abolición del capital, será la negación inmediata de todas las clases,
el proletariado incluido. Sin embargo, no podíamos aceptar el enfoque de Invariance
que, a partir de esta constatación, acabó por rechazar toda perspectiva clasista de las
contradicciones de la sociedad existente y de la revolución, ni el de Mouvement
Communiste, animado por Jean Barrot, que intentaba radicalizar la problemática de
ultraizquierda mediante una inyección de bordiguismo.
En un principio, el trabajo teórico de TC (en cooperación con el grupo que
publicaba Négation) consistió en elaborar el concepto de programatismo. La crisis de
finales de los años sesenta/principios de los setenta fue la primera crisis del capital
bajo la subsunción real del trabajo por el capital. Marcó el final de todos los ciclos
anteriores que, desde principios del siglo XIX, habían tenido por contenido inmediato
y objetivo el ascenso de la clase dentro del modo de producción capitalista y su
afirmación como clase del trabajo productivo, a través de la toma del poder y el
establecimiento de un período de transición. Práctica y teóricamente, el
programatismo designa todo ese período de la lucha de clase del proletariado. Con
una problemática necesariamente renovada, Échanges (publicado en inglés y en
francés) se mantiene sobre esa base general, a saber, que en cada lucha el
proletariado debe descubrirse de nuevo a sí mismo; la revolución se convierte en el
proceso de las luchas, en el proceso de esta conquista de sí.
La cuestión teórica central se convierte, por tanto, en: ¿cómo puede el
proletariado, actuando estrictamente como una clase de este modo de producción, en
su contradicción con el capital en el seno del modo de producción capitalista, abolir
las clases, y por tanto abolirse a sí mismo? O sea: ¿cómo puede el proletariado
producir el comunismo? Una respuesta a esta pregunta que se refiera a una especie
de humanidad cualquiera subyacente al proletario o a la actividad humana
subyacente al trabajo, no sólo termina en un cenagal filosófico, sino que siempre
acaba por considerar que la lucha de clase del proletariado sólo puede superarse a sí
misma en la medida en que ya exprese algo que la exceda y que se afirme (podemos
encontrar esto incluso en las formalizaciones teóricas actuales del «movimiento de

acción directa»). El obrero sudoroso ha sido sustituido por el Hombre, pero la
problemática no ha cambiado, sigue siendo la de la «Aufhebung»1
.

A partir de ahí emprendimos el trabajo de una redefinición teórica de la
contradicción entre proletariado y capital. En primer lugar, era necesario redefinir la
contradicción de manera que fuese simultáneamente una contradicción portadora
del comunismo como su resolución, y una contradicción reproductora y dinámica del
capital. Era necesario producir la identidad del proletariado como clase del modo de
producción capitalista y como clase revolucionaria, lo que implicaba que ya no
concibiésemos esa «condición revolucionaria» como una naturaleza de la clase que
se modulara, desapareciera, y resurgiera de acuerdo con las circunstancias y las
condiciones. Esa contradicción es la explotación. Con la explotación como
contradicción entre las clases obtuvimos su particularización como particularización
de la comunidad y, por tanto, simultáneamente como implicación recíproca. Esto
significó que obtuvimos: la imposibilidad de la afirmación del proletariado; la
contradicción entre proletariado y capital como historia; la crítica de cualquier
naturaleza revolucionaria del proletariado como una esencia definitoria ocultada o
enmascarada por la reproducción de conjunto (la autopresuposición del capital).
Habíamos historizado la contradicción y, por tanto, la revolución y el comunismo, y
no sólo sus circunstancias. Lo que son la revolución y el comunismo es producido
históricamente a través de los ciclos de luchas que jalonan el desarrollo de la
contradicción. La contradicción entre el proletariado y el capital fue realmente
desobjetivada sin considerar la economía como una ilusión. La tendencia
descendente de la tasa de ganancia se convirtió inmediatamente en una
contradicción entre las clases y no en la causa que la provoca, como seguía siendo el
caso con Mattick, aun cuando su teoría de la crisis abra el camino a la superación del
objetivismo.
Además de profundizar en estas presuposiciones teóricas, el trabajo de TC
consiste en definir cuáles son la estructura y el contenido de la contradicción entre
las clases desde finales de los años setenta, y consolidada en los años ochenta. Hubo
una reestructuración de la relación de explotación, es decir, de la contradicción entre
las clases; se trataba de la segunda fase de la subsunción real.
La extracción de plusvalor relativo se ha convertido en un proceso de
reproducción del cara a cara entre el capital y el trabajo que es adecuado, en el
sentido de que éste último no comporta ningún elemento, ningún punto de
cristalización, ningún punto de fijación que pueda constituir un obstáculo a la
necesaria fluidez y el revolucionamiento constante que necesita. Contra el anterior
ciclo de luchas, la reestructuración ha abolido toda especificación, garantías,
«bienestar», «compromiso fordista», y división del ciclo mundial en áreas nacionales
de acumulación, en relaciones fijas entre el centro y la periferia, en zonas internas de
acumulación (Este/Oeste). La extracción de plusvalor en su modo relativo exige el
constante revolucionamiento y la abolición de todas las restricciones al proceso de
producción inmediato, a la reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo y a las relaciones de
los capitales entre sí.
No hay reestructuración del modo de producción capitalista sin derrota obrera.
Dicha derrota fue la de la identidad obrera, la de los partidos comunistas, la del
sindicalismo, la de la autogestión y la de la autoorganización. Es todo un ciclo de
luchas, en su diversidad y sus contradicciones, el que fue derrotado en los años
setenta y a principios de los años ochenta. La reestructuración es esencialmente
1 Palabra alemana que significa, simultáneamente, aceptación, crítica y superación. Podría traducirse
como superación crítica.

contrarrevolución. Su resultado esencial, desde el principio de los años ochenta, es la
desaparición de toda identidad obrera producida, reproducida y confirmada en el
seno del modo de producción capitalista.
Cuando la relación contradictoria entre el proletariado y el capital deja de estar
definida por la fluidez de la reproducción capitalista, el proletariado no puede
oponerse al capital más que poniendo en entredicho el movimiento dentro del cual es
reproducido como clase. El proletariado ya no es portador de un proyecto de
reorganización social como afirmación de lo que es. En contradicción con el capital,
está, dentro de la dinámica de la lucha de clases, en contradicción con su propia
existencia como clase. Éste es ahora el contenido de la lucha de clases y lo que está en
juego en ella. Constituye la base de nuestro trabajo actual a través del análisis no sólo
del curso del capital sino también, indisociablemente, de las luchas como la de
diciembre de 1995 en Francia, el movimiento de los parados o la de los sin-papeles,
así como de luchas cotidianas menos espectaculares, pero igualmente significativas
de este nuevo ciclo.
Lo que constituye la radicalidad fundamental de este ciclo de luchas es
simultáneamente su límite: la existencia de la clase dentro de la reproducción del
capital. Este límite específico del nuevo ciclo de luchas es el fundamento y el
contenido históricamente específico de lo que a partir de 1995 hemos denominado
«democratismo radical». Es la expresión y la formalización de los límites de este
ciclo de luchas. Eleva a la práctica política o a una perspectiva alternativista la
desaparición de toda identidad obrera para ratificar la existencia de la clase dentro
del capital como conjunto de ciudadanos y/o productores, existencia a la que exige al
capital que se conforme. En oposición a esto, pero sobre la misma base, el
«movimiento de acción directa» pretende ser ya la existencia de nuevas relaciones
sociales «desalienadas» frente al capital.
La revolución es, a partir de este ciclo de luchas, una superación producida por
éste. No puede haber desbordamiento hacia la revolución de las luchas actuales por
la simple razón de que la revolución es la abolición de las clases. Esta superación es el
momento en el cual, dentro de la lucha de clases, la propia pertenencia de clase se
convierte en una constricción exterior impuesta por el capital. Se trata de un proceso
contradictorio interno al modo de producción capitalista. Mientras tanto,
renunciando tanto al papel de huérfanos del movimiento obrero como al de profetas
del comunismo por venir, participamos en la lucha de clases tal cual es
cotidianamente y tal cual produce teoría.

De la ultraizquierda a la teoría de la comunización. Más allá del programatismo

TC — 2025-05-04T17:34:00Z

• Prólogo: El «rechazo del trabajo» como realidad histórica y como representación
• Reestructuración e identidad obrera
• El programatismo y su caducidad
Los fracasos revolucionarios como legado
El final de un ciclo de luchas
• La ultraizquierda y su contradicción
La autonegación del proletariado: una salida ilusoria de la contradicción
La persistencia del programatismo y su crítica en actos
• La «época del ‘68»
El mayo francés: cuando una huelga esconde otra
El mayo francés: de la revuelta obrera a la comunidad humana pasando por la alienación
El mayo rampante italiano: la ambigüedad del «vogliamo tutti»
Italia, españa, portugal y otros lugares: la autoorganización y sus impasses
• La obsolescencia de la ultraizquierda y el curso caótico de las rupturas teóricas
Comunismo por imposibilidad y humanismo (clase obrera y proletariado)
Autonegación y humanismo
La autonegación y el rechazo de trabajo antes de su desarrollo humanista. Una forma simple: el operaismo
Autonegación y rechazo del trabajo: conceptos de transición
El rechazo del trabajo: hacia una superación del programatismo
• Dinámica del ciclo de luchas actual: brechas y retorno de la humanidad
• De la crítica del programatismo a la desaparición de la explotación: «crítica del valor» y «dialéctica sistemática»
Una explotación bien abstracta
¿Más allá del programatismo o más allá de la lucha de clases?
Retorno a la explotación
• Teoría de la comunización
La reestructuración: una actividad de la clase capitalista
La reestructuración: modificación estructural de la contradicción entre las clases y de su dinámica
La comunización: superación producida del ciclo de luchas
La comunización: una teoría en construcción
• Conclusión: la revolución será ideología

The conjuncture

TC — 2025-04-30T15:56:00Z

There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous. (Lenin, ‘The First Stage of the First Revolution')
1

… That the revolution succeeded so quickly and—seemingly, at the first superficial glance—so radically, is only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situation, absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social strivings have merged, and in a strikingly ‘harmonious' manner. (Ibid.)

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas—also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. (Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch)
2

A few citations and a little provocation in their signatures. But the chief provocation is theoretical in nature and defines the object of this text, which is to rework the concept of contradiction.

Genesis of a Concept

Everything was simple: capital was the moving contradiction and this contradiction was the essence of everything. It had a simple and homogenous form. It included everything, explained everything, but… like an avalanche, it sweeps up everything in its path.
3 The rest were appearances [phénomènes] and accidents, contingencies. Besides the economy, all other instances of the capitalist mode of production played minor roles, doing walk-on parts. The segmentation of the proletariat, the multiplicity of contradictions in which these segments were engaged—the contradiction between women and men, or again the other classes^? pulled into the struggle, all with their own objectives—were nothing but shadows cast on the wall of the cave by the substantial reality of class unity and of the becoming of capital, a reality and a unity always already real, always already unified. To posit this contradiction was, ipso facto, to grasp the process of its abolition and the production of its overcoming.

Until the crisis of the end of the 1960s and the restructuring which ensued from it, capital as the moving contradiction was indeed the content of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. The production and confirmation, within this moving contradiction, of a working-class identity organised the cycle of struggles as a competition between two hegemonies, two managements, two modes of control of reproduction. It was also the content of the gender contradiction through women's struggle caught in the paradoxical situation of affirming feminine identity and simultaneously demanding independence and equality with men (on the basis of recognition of this identity).
4

The present cycle of struggles had a double originality. Firstly, with respect to class struggle, the contradiction between the proletariat and capital was renewed, and this renewal itself—that is, the identity between the constitution and existence of the proletariat as class and its contradiction with capital—conferred upon it as its essential content. In its contradiction with capital, which defines it as a class, the proletariat is in contradiction to its own existence as a class. Secondly, with respect to the contradiction between women and men, their essential content and basic problem became the natural existence of the feminine body, of sex, and of sexuality. Demands for women's rights, independence, and equality, inextricable from the question of the body, produced and encountered their own limits in the fact of being woman. Not only are labour and population as productive force a problem for capital, but, in this phase of the capitalist mode of production characterised by the failure of programmatism, both have lost anything that could have been made into the content of a political demand or of an anti-capitalist self-affirmation. When work and the population become a problem in themselves, ‘nature' is brought into question and will not remain natural for long. ‘Being woman' becomes perplexing. Gender puts itself before sex.

Programmatism, as a historically specific theory and practice of the struggle of classes, was the overcoming of capital as the moving contradiction through the liberation of work, the affirmation of the proletariat and the emancipation of women as mothers by nature and free workers. The resolution of the contradiction between women and men was evacuated towards an indefinite post-revolutionary future, through the configuration of the contradiction between classes, but equally through the configuration of the contradiction between women and men, since work remained, more than ever, the primary productive force.

Thus, the theory of communist revolution could for a long time be satisfied with the one and only contradiction between the proletariat and capital. Because this contradiction could be resolved by the victory of one term over the other, it was enough just to grasp it and state it in its simple and homogenous form, leaving aside the multiple, diverse, and immediate forms of its existence, by which it distributes itself in the multiple existences of the relation of exploitation (though it only exists in this distribution), and the multiple levels of forms of appearance in diverse instances of the mode of production, as accidental circumstances and mere appearances. The simple enunciation of this contradiction was adequate to account for the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production and the movement of its abolition. We did not need anything else.

The programmatist theorists of the conjuncture situated their reflections in the frame of this reality.

‘Such, and only such, is the view that can be taken by a politician who does not fear the truth, who soberly weighs the balance of social forces in the revolution, who appraises every “current situation” not only from the standpoint of all its present, current peculiarities, but also from the standpoint of the more fundamental motivations …', Lenin wrote in the Letters from Afar. We now have to write this sentence backwards: ‘not only from the standpoint of the more fundamental motivations, but also and above all taking all its present, current peculiarities into account.' The question of the conjuncture existed before but it was just the husk and bursting envelope of the essential contradiction, revealing itself. The situation was separated into an invariant, substantial character, and particular historical circumstances, into the essential and the phenomenal, into potentiality and actuality.
5 But nothing exists otherwise than in actuality and that which exists in actuality is the whole of the concrete or the real.

So there was the course of capital as the moving contradiction. We know Marx's definition, from the Grundrisse… it is insufficient.

As the moving contradiction, capital is the dynamic unity that the contradictions of classes and genders construct. The contradiction between women and men is itself other than the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. No surplus labour without labour, no labour without population as primary productive force.
6 Wherever there is exploitation, there is the construction of the categories woman and man and the naturalisation that is inherent to what is constructed; there, also, the appropriation of all women by all men. The simultaneous and interdependent construction of the contradictions of genders and classes introduces the fissures of each category into the other. Inextricable, experience is always impure. But it is not enough to say that no experience and no subject is pure, as a mere observation; this ‘impurity' must be felt out and constructed in its intimacy.

Men and women are born of surplus labour. Of the same surplus labour they are born in their distinction and their contradiction. The existence of surplus labour is the existence of two contradictions. Each contradiction has its condition in the other, but more still, that which makes it a contradiction, that is, a process that puts into question its own terms in their relation. Four elements, two contradictions, one dynamic: that of capital as the moving contradiction.

This correlated existence of two contradictions is no mere encounter or sum, but exists for each contradiction in its proper terms, in its ‘language'.

The conflict between the proletariat and capital becomes a contradiction in the existence of labour as productive force (the contradiction between men and women which, in the terms of the relation, is the transformation of this conflictual relation into a contradiction): labour as the only measure and source of wealth transforms class struggle into a dynamic of the abolition of classes, which is capital as the moving contradiction.

The conflict between men and women becomes a contradiction in the existence of surplus labour and in its relation to necessary labour (the contradiction between classes which, in the terms of the relation, is the transformation of this conflictual relation into a contradiction): surplus labour and its relation to necessary labour transform the conflict between men and women into the dynamic of the abolition of being a woman and of being a man as conditions inherent to individuality. This also is capital as the moving contradiction. In other words, the population as primary productive force (the gender distinction) is abolished as a necessity by the contradiction between surplus labour and necessary labour. The revolution is not ‘contingent on the abolition of gender', because it is not by chance if these contradictions arrive together, entangled, in all revolutionary moments, if they confirm one another, or, more often, confront one another.

This redefinition of capital as the moving contradiction indicated the response to a question whose sole fault was to never have been posed. As soon as one considers capital, the moving contradiction, as the construction of two contradictions that, though correlated, remain distinct, it is possible to designate a revolutionary situation or crisis as a conjuncture. In a kind of misunderstanding, by responding to the question of capital as the moving contradiction, we indicated the presence of another question in our answer: that of the nature of its overcoming and not only the nature of its course.

Thus, the question is to be reformulated adequately:

(1) In part, we know that capital as the moving contradiction is a ‘tension towards the abolition of the rule' but this tension alone does not explain the possibility or the necessity of the overcoming, nor what this overcoming is.
7

(2) In part, we know that the step that class struggle and the women's struggle must take (with respect to class belonging and the distinction of the genders as an external constraint) is precisely the content of what makes up the overcoming, but this content does not tell us how the ‘tension' becomes an effective, efficient reality within this content.

(3) Finally, we know that if we are able to speak of revolution as communisation in the present tense, it is because the present class struggle contains, within itself, the production of class belonging as an external constraint: it contains rifts:
8 ‘Currently, the revolution is predicated on the supersession of a constitutive contradiction of the class struggle: for the proletariat, being a class is the obstacle that its struggle as a class must get beyond / abolish' (‘The Present Moment', Sic no. 1). The present cycle of struggles had a double originality. Firstly, with respect to class struggle, the renewal of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital—that is, the identity between the constitution and existence of the proletariat as class and its contradiction with capital—was conferred upon it as its essential content. In its contradiction with capital, which defines it as a class, the proletariat is in contradiction to its own existence as a class. Secondly, with respect to the contradiction between women and men, their essential content and basic problem became the natural existence of the feminine body, of sex, and of sexuality. Demands for women's rights, independence, and equality, inextricable from the question of the body, produced and encountered their own limits in the fact of being woman. Not only are labour and population as productive force a problem for capital, but, in this phase of the capitalist mode of production characterised by the failure of programmatism, both have lost anything that could have been made into the content of a political demand or of a self-affirmation against capital. When work and the population as primary productive force become a problem in themselves, nature is brought into question and will not remain natural for long. Being woman becomes perplexing. Gender puts itself before sex.

After the first two propositions, the concept of conjuncture follows immediately from this third.

Not only is revolution not the result of an overgrowth of the power of the class, the victory and affirmation of its place in the capitalist mode of production, but, moreover, the content of this qualitative leap is to turn against that which produces it. This turn against is the overthrow of the hierarchy of the instances of the mode of production that is the mechanic of its self-presupposition. The causalities and normal order of these instances (economy, gender relations, justice, politics, ideology…), which concur in its reproduction under normal conditions, is undermined.

The theory of revolution as communisation is not a prediction, but it is the present class belonging as the limit of struggling as a class, and the present contradiction between men and women, which puts their very definition into question. Therefore, it renders a certain theoretical paradigm obsolete: that of the simple and homogenous contradiction which resolves itself in the victory of one of its terms.

Under the shock of the redefinition of capital as the moving contradiction, these three responses produce a new question. How can the contradictory structure of the capitalist mode of production, this ‘tension towards the abolition of the rule', transform itself into a revolutionary situation? Obviously the question is not to know when and where such a thing will occur: it is to know the nature of this transformation; not what will produce it—this has already been defined as ‘the tension towards the abolition of its own rule', that is, capital's game as the moving contradiction—but the nature of what will be produced.

Conjuncture and the Unity of the Dynamic of Capital as Contradiction in Process

The nature of what is produced is a conjuncture, a present moment. That is, this situation that characterises periods of crisis, in which the movement of capital as the moving contradiction is no longer a single contradiction (between classes), nor even the simple, homogenous unity of two contradictions (between classes, between genders), but the moment where capital as the moving contradiction no longer imposes itself as the meaning, always already present, of every one of its forms of appearance.
9

The Contradiction of capital as the moving contradiction, a dynamic unity of the contradictions of classes and of genders is one and essential, but already in its definition, its construction indicates that, in its historical efficacy, it can only exist in its forms of manifestation. None of its forms, political, juridical, diplomatic relations, ideological, etc., none of the forms of relations between the functional instances of capital (industrial, financial, commercial), none of the particular forms of its effect on each part of the proletariat and on the assignation of gender, by which this contradiction refracts itself on every level of the mode of production—refractions that are the very condition of its existence—none of these forms are pure phenomena without which The Contradiction could exist just as well. The immediately existent conditions are its conditions of existence. It does not produce its own overcoming, its negation, the ‘negation of the negation' of excessive renown, as ‘ineluctable as the laws of nature' (and of dialectics), as if it ought to be simply because the The Contradiction is posed. The dynamic of the contradictions of classes and of genders becomes a revolutionary situation in all of the forms in which it actually exists and in their combination at a given moment, in a conjuncture. Otherwise, it is only a concept.

All of the forms of existence of this moving contradiction should be grasped as its own conditions of existence, in which alone it exists. It is nothing other than the totality of its attributes. Its essence is its own existence.

At stake now is our understanding not only of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, but also of capital in its historical efficacy as a contradiction in process. Not only do ‘classical' formalisations of capital as the moving contradiction limit themselves to the theory of class struggle, but they propose to dissolve all the forms of appearance in an essential inner unity. In fact, these formalisations are unable to comprehend these forms as forms of appearance of this inner essence (as if one could speak of capital without competition, of value without market price). ‘The advantage of my dialectic is that I say everything little by little—and when [my critics, author's note] think I'm at the end, and hasten to refute me, they do nothing more than display their foolishness' (Marx to Engels, June 27th , 1867).
10

The fundamental contradictory process is active in all contradictions within the forms of appearance, and it would be absurd and idealist to claim that these contradictions and their fusion in a conjuncture which is a unity of rupture are just its pure phenomenon. All these contradictions merge into a unity. In this fusion—in the revolutionary rupture—they constitute this unity on the basis of what is specific to each of them, on the basis of their own efficacy. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and accomplish the fundamental unity that animates them, but in this process they also indicate the nature of this contradiction, which is inseparable from society as a whole, inseparable from the formal conditions of its existence. This unity is internally affected by these conditions which are its conditions of existence, that is, more immediately, the existent conditions. That this unity is internally affected always implies that it is a hierarchised structure (and not just a collection across which a single principle would diffuse itself, homogenously and always the same—nature in Egypt, politics in Greece, law in Rome, religion in the Middle Ages, economy in modern and contemporary times, etc.) with a determinant, sometimes also dominant instance,
11 dominant instances which are designated by the latter, in hierarchical permutations, etc. The unity of the contradiction exists only in this hierarchy, in the dominant and/or determinant character of one or another level of the mode of production, in the designation of the other dominant instances.

It is impossible to reduce this complexity and multiplicity to the simple and unitary, as if to an origin, or as if from appearance to truth (here we are at the antipode of the Hegelian model of development: there is no original, simple unity). The conjuncture always has a dominant instance by which it finds unity in its very complexity and multiplicity. In the course of class struggle, according to the momentary results which need to be overcome, according to the shifting aspects of power relations, and according to the ‘gains' through which communisation ossifies, this dominant instance changes. The contradictions reposition themselves within the totality. Thus, to break up the existing order, what might momentarily be the nodal point must be attacked. But though the dominant instances are in constant permutation (political, economic, ideological, polarisation of the contradictions on some specific struggle or some specific part of the proletariat), the conjuncture is by no means a mere pluralism of determinations, indifferent to one another, stacked together.

This mutual conditioning of the existence of contradictions is not purely circular; it does not efface the totality as a structure with a determinant, crumpling into a facile, additive eclecticism or an undifferentiated inter-construction. This conditioning is, within the very reality of the conditions of existence of each contradiction, the manifestation of this structure with a determinant (that is the main difference between our theory and that of the Hegelian totality) which makes up the unity of the whole. Thus it is theoretically possible to speak of ‘conditions' without falling into the empiricism or irrationality of the ‘it's so' and of ‘chance'. Conditions are the real (concrete, actual) existence of the contradictions that constitute the whole because their role is assigned by the contradiction in its essential sense. In this role, these conditions are not mere appearances beside the contradiction in its essential sense, as if the contradiction could just as well exist without them, because they are the very conditions of its existence. When we speak of the conditions of existence, we speak of the existent conditions.

If the forms of appearance and essence do not coincide, it is because it belongs to the nature of the structure of the whole to be its effects (the laws of capital must be competition between capitals, value must be price, surplus-value must be profit, the gender distinction must be nature, etc.). The relation between the appearances and the concept is not limited to a difference between diversity and generality or abstraction, but is also one between mystification and comprehension. The concept, says Marx in his 1857 Introduction (Grundrisse), is elaborated ‘starting from the immediate point of view and from the representation', but ‘the concrete totality as a thought totality, as a mental representation of the concrete, is in fact a product of thought, of conception'. Essence does not correspond immediately to its appearance, a disordered opposition of terms between which the relations appear contingent. Nonetheless, essence is in this disorder, and nowhere else.

There is a surface of capitalist society, but it is a surface without depth. The essence is in this surface alone, even though it does not correspond to it, because the effects of the structure of the whole (the mode of production) can only be the existence of the structure if they invert it through their effects. Here we encounter the reality of ideology; it does not occult the structure: it is a necessary development of it.

Essence is neither a real thing (really existing and particularised), nor a simple word. It is a constitutive relation. Surplus value is not an idea or an abstraction under which specific differences can be arranged, and thus the reality, which resides in these specific objects (rent, profit, interest). Nor is it a universal abstracted from the primary reality of the specific forms. Essence is not what exists ideally in each specific form or what allows the external classification of these specific forms—in that case, ideology would be nothing more than a deformed reflection of this essence. The relations are essential (including the objective and effective illusion); active relations that the specific forms establish between themselves, which define what they have in common: the essence. Essence does not replace the various and finite beings by absorbing them into some kind of exterior unity, or by negating them in favour of their ‘inner truth'.

Conjuncture: A Mechanics of the Crisis of the Self-Presupposition of Capital

Conjuncture, then, is not an encounter between the two contradictions we have presented. There is no encounter; they are always already joint. Conjuncture is, instead, the multiplicity of the forms of appearance of this unity on every level of the mode of production, and, more precisely, the crystallisation of multiple contradictions in a single instance of the mode of production, which the multiple contradictions designate (momentarily) as dominant.
12 In this crystallisation, the conjuncture is also a unity of rupture.

Conjuncture is simultaneously encounter and undoing. It is the undoing of the social totality that, until then, united all the instances of a social formation (political, economic, social, cultural, ideological); it is the undoing of the reproduction of the contradictions that form the unity of this totality. Hence the aleatory aspect, the presence of encounters, the quality of an event, in a conjuncture: a disentangling which produces and recognises itself in the accidental aspect of specific practices. To such a moment belongs the power to make of ‘what is' more than what it contains, of creating outside of the mechanistic sequences of the causality or the teleology of finalism.

A conjuncture is also an encounter between contradictions that each had their own course and their own temporality, between which the only relations were interactions: workers' struggles, student movements, women's movements, political conflicts within the state, conflicts within the capitalist class, the global trajectory of capital, reproduction of this trajectory in a single nation, ideologies in which individuals carry out their struggles. The conjuncture is the moment of the multiple crash of these contradictions, but this multiple crash sets and acquires its form according to a dominant determination designated by the crisis which unfolds in the relations of production, in the modalities of exploitation. The conjuncture is a crisis of the self-reproductive determination of the relations of production that defines itself by an established and fixed hierarchisation of the instances of the mode of production.

A theory of conjuncture is a theory of revolution, which takes seriously the fact that ‘the solitary hour of “determination in the final instance”—the economy—never sounds' (Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination', For Marx).
13 All the instances that compose a mode of production do not follow the same rhythm; these instances occupy an area of the global structure of the mode of production, which ensures their status and efficacy through the specific place assigned to one of these instances (neither monadic, nor a significant totality). It happens to be the case that in the capitalist mode of production, the economy is both the determinant and dominant instance, which was not the case in other modes.
14 A conjuncture is a crisis in this assignation, and can therefore be a variation of the dominant instance (political, ideological, diplomatic relations) within the global structure of the mode of production, on the basis of the determination by the relations of production.
15

In the crisis of reproduction, this displacement of the dominants and determinants across instances is the how, the mechanism, of the tension towards the abolition of the rule, through which the actual questioning of class belonging and gender assignation take place. Thus, capital as the moving contradiction is no longer the simple and homogenous automatism which always resolves itself into itself. When unity is undone (from the relations of production which are its determination), the assignation of all the instances of the mode of production enters into a crisis. The dominant instance shifts, from then on, according to a kind of game in which nothing is fixed: the bomb is passed from hand to hand. A conjuncture is the effectivity of the game which abolishes its own rule.

The conjuncture is a moment of crisis that upsets the hierarchy of instances—the hierarchy which fixed for each instance its essence and role, and defined the unequivocal meaning of their relations. Now roles are exchanged ‘according to circumstances'. The ‘determinant contradiction in the last instance' can not be identified with the role of the dominant contradiction. One or another ‘aspect' (forces of production, economy, practice…) cannot eternally be assimilated to the main role, and another ‘aspect' (relations of production, politics, ideology, theory) to the secondary role. The determination in the last instance by the economy exercises itself, in real history, in the permutations of the primary role along with economics, politics, ideology (it would be necessary to demonstrate that this is already contained in the definition of the economy itself within the capitalist mode of production).
16

This rigidity of the hierarchy among the instances of the capitalist mode of production constructs a linear time, a causal connection which progressively creates a link between the events in a purely quantitative temporality: it is the given, what simply is. But the time of the self-presupposition of capital also carries a crisis in itself, a moment of rupture in homogeneous time, the collapse of the hierarchy of instances and of economic determination, discontinuity of the historical process—a crisis which this temporality of the self-presuppositon of capital holds in itself, a disruption in the hierarchised instances of the economic determinations, a discontinuity in the historical process: a conjuncture. The conjuncture is an exit from the repetitive—the narrow door, quickly closed, by which another world can arrive. The conjuncture is the conscious practice that it is now that this is played out, as much the heritage of the past as the construction of the future; it is a present, the moment of the at present.

Conjuncture: A Necessary Concept

The concept of conjuncture is necessary to a theory of revolution as communisation. In fact, the revolution is not only a rupture, but also a rupture against that which produces it, which can also be expressed in the terms of the self-transformation of the subject, or again in the form Marx gives it in the German Ideology: ‘the class overthrowing it [the ruling class] can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages.'
17 The conjuncture is inherent to the revolution as communisation: self-transformation of proletarians. All the manifestations of social existence, that is, for each individual, the ‘conditions inherent to individuality' (ibid.), leave their hierarchised relation within the mode of production and recombine—moving, as they create new situations—in their relation of determination and dominance. These manifestations thus become the object of contradictions and struggles in their specificity, and not as the effect and manifestation of a fundamental contradiction through which these manifestations would only be eliminated ‘in consequence'.
18

When the struggle as a class is the limit of class struggle, the revolution becomes a struggle against that which produced it, the whole architecture of the mode of production, the distribution of its instances and of its levels are pulled into the overthrow of the normality/fatality of its reproduction defined by the determinative hierarchy of the instances of the mode of production. Only if the revolution is and accomplishes this overthrow can it be the moment when proletarians disburden themselves of the muck of ages which sticks to their skin, men and women of that which constitutes their individuality.
19 This is not the consequence, but the concrete movement of the revolution, in which all the instances of the mode of production (ideology, law, politics, nationality, economy, gender, etc.) can become, in turn, the dominant focalisation of the ensemble of the contradictions. If, as we say, the solitary hour of determination in the last instance—the economy—never sounds, this is because it is not in the nature of revolution to strike it. Changing circumstances and changing oneself coincide: this is revolution.
20

We rediscover what makes the concept of conjuncture fundamentally necessary to the theory of revolution: the overthrow of the determinative hierarchy of the instances of the mode of production. A conjuncture designates the mechanism of crisis as a crisis of the self-presupposition of capital, and the revolution as a produced overcoming of the preceding course of the class and gender contradictions, as a rupture against that which produced it.

The question of the unity of the proletariat, a question which is inherent to the revolution as communisation, is equally at stake in the concept of conjuncture.

The contradictions which oppose the middle classes, the unemployed and the precarious, the surplus masses of the periphery or the ghettos, the ‘core' of the working class, the employed but constantly threatened workers, etc., to capital, to its reproduction, to exploitation, to austerity, to misery, etc., are not identical each to the next, and even less to the contradiction between women and men. The unity qua class of those who have nothing to live on but the sale of their labour power is something that the proletariat finds and confronts as objectified, against them, in capital; for themselves, this definition is only their separation. Equally, the capitalist class is not a unique and homogenous block, nor are the nations or regional groupings that structure the global trajectory of the valorisation of capital. It would be extremely simplifying to pretend that these two groups of contradictions (those internal to ‘the haves' and those internal to ‘the have-nots') do not interpenetrate each other, that the Brazilian proletarian is a stranger to the conflict between emergent capitalism in her country and the United States and the ‘old centres of capital', that men against women could not equally be proletarians against capitalist exploitation.

The unity of the proletariat and its contradiction with capital was inherent to the revolution as affirmation of the proletariat, to its effort to erect itself as dominant class, generalising its condition (before abolishing it…), just as it was inherent to the liberation of women as women. The diffuse, segmented, shattered, corporate character of conflicts is the necessary lot of a contradiction between classes and of a contradiction between genders that situate themselves on the level of the reproduction of capital. A particular conflict, according to its characteristics, the conditions in which it unfolds, the period in which it appears, whatever its position in the instances of the mode of production may be, can find itself in a position to polarise the whole of this conflictuality that up until then appeared irreducibly diverse and diffuse. This is the conjuncture as unity of rupture. What takes place at this point is that, in order to unite, the workers must break out of the wage relation by which capital ‘groups' them, and if in order to become a revolutionary class, the proletariat must unite, it cannot do so otherwise than in destroying the conditions of its own existence as a class.

The dictatorship of the social movement of communisation is the process in which humanity as a whole is integrated into the vanishing proletariat. The strict delimitation of the proletariat with respect to the other layers, its struggle against all commodity production is at the same time a process that constrains the layers of the salaried petite bourgeoisie, of the ‘class of social management' to join the communising class; thus, it is a definition, an exclusion, and, at the same time, a dividing line and an opening, the erasure of borders and the withering away of classes. This is no paradox, but the reality of the movement in which the proletariat defines itself in practice as the movement of the constitution of the human community, and in this movement the fixed and hierarchised relations that defined the reproduction of the mode of production, its self-presupposition, are undone. How can production be used as a weapon, if it is always what defines all the other forms and levels of relations between individuals, and if it itself exists as a particular sector of social life?

All contradictions are reconstructed, they unite in a unity of rupture. Revolutionary practice, communist measures, overthrow the hierarchy of the instances of the mode of production whose reproduction was the immanent meaning of each instance. Beyond this immanence—this self-presupposition that contains and necessitates the established hierarchy of instances—there is something aleatory, something of the event.

Conjuncture and Event

The activity of class struggle is not simply a reflection of the conditions which constitute it.
21 It creates discrepancy: '… proletarian revolutions [unlike bourgeois revolutions which ‘storm more swiftly from success to success … soon they have reached their zenith', A/N], like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!' (Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, part I).
22

This could be the description of a conjuncture as matrix of the event, that is, of a situation that exceeds its causes, that turns against them. The event is the most immediate element, the atom of the conjuncture, it is when the conjuncture produces discontinuity and novelty. It cannot therefore be reduced to a simple moment in a serial, continuous process as the prolongation of its own causes: in revolutionary crises, revolutionaries are busy transforming themselves, themselves and things, creating something totally new, as Marx writes at the beginning of the 18th Brumaire: ‘The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.' The event goes against its causes: hic Rhodus, hic salta.

At the very beginning of Wage Labor and Capital (1849), Marx writes: ‘The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission—these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up [our emphasis] … But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848 develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded the existence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers [our emphasis].'
23

However ambiguously, Marx poses here a difference between conjuncture and general abstract analysis—and, simultaneously, he poses the unity of the two. The conjuncture is the process of this ‘summary' (‘the chief events in which … the class struggle … was summed up'), of this concentration in one place, or in one instance—here, politics—in one moment, in events.

The conjuncture is the mechanics, the intimate gears of the qualitative leap that breaks the repetition of the mode of production. The concept of conjuncture has therefore become necessary to the theory of the contradictions of classes and genders as a theory of revolution and communism.

Revolution: Conjuncture and Ideology

Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. (Marx, 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, our emphasis)
24

After exposing the broad articulations of what would become books II and III of Capital, Marx concludes a letter to Engels, dated April 30 1868, thus: ‘At last we have arrived at the forms of manifestation [underlined in the text] which serve as the starting point in the vulgar conception: rent, coming from the land; profit (interest), from capital; wages, from labour [the well-known ‘Trinity formula'—the fetishism specific to capital—presented at the end of Book III, A/N] … Finally, since those 3 items (wages, rent, profit (interest)) constitute the sources of income of the 3 classes of landowners, capitalists and wage labourers, we have the class struggle, as the conclusion in which the movement and disintegration of the whole shit resolves itself.'
25 It is remarkable that Marx, in the architecture of Capital, should introduce the classes and the struggle of classes on the basis of forms of manifestation, after having consecrated thousands of pages to showing that these forms were not the essence, the concrete in thought, of the capitalist mode of production. Actually, these forms of manifestation are not simply phenomena which could be shoved aside to find, in the essence, the truth about what exists and about the right practice. We begin to understand Marx's strange turn of phrase: 'ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.'

Ideology is the way men (and women…) experience their relation to the conditions of their existence as something objective that confronts them as subjects. Reality appears as presupposed and as presupposing, that is to say, as world, as object, confronting the activity that, faced with the world, defines the subject. The main fault of all the materialisms criticised by Marx in his first thesis on Feuerbach is not simply a theoretical error; this fault is the expression of everyday life.
26 As we have said before, essence is nowhere else than on this surface, but it does not correspond to it, because the effects of the structure of the whole (the mode of production) cannot be the existence of the structure except on the condition that they invert it through their effects. This is the reality of ideology. ‘The categories of bourgeois economy are forms of thought that have an objective truth insofar as they reflect real social relations.' (Capital Vol 1)
27 In short, ideology is everyday life.

This definition of ideology integrates ideologies which are usually grasped as intellectual problems. Even in this case, ideology is not a lure, a mask, a collection of falsehoods. It is well known that this kind of ideology is dependent on the social being, but this dependency implies its autonomisation; this is the paradoxical power of ideas. The theory of ideology is not a theory of ‘class consciousness' but a class theory of consciousness. The division between material and intellectual labour traverses all class societies and all individuals; if ideology always exists in forms of abstraction and the universal, then it is by way of this division which, placing intellectual labour on the side of the dominant class, gives the product of this labour the form of the universal that is the garb of all class domination. The paradoxical power of ideas and their universality, this inversion of representations and their foundations, is parallel to the real inversion that presides over the organisation of production. The exploitation of the class of producers really turns the production of material life upside-down, within itself, in the production itself of material life. If it is true that ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life',
28 it is no less true that life is what ‘makes believe' that it is consciousness. Bourgeois representations are ideologies, quite functional ones too, and they become perfectly real institutions. Justice, right, freedom, equality are ideologies, but heavily material when one finds oneself before a tribunal, in prison, or in a voting booth. The bourgeoisie, says the Manifesto, fashioned the world in its image, but then the image is the thing: the production of ideology participates in the production and the conditions of material life. Representations are not a more or less well-fitting double for reality but are active instances of this reality which assure its reproduction and permit its transformation.

Ideology circulates everywhere in society. It is not just the appendage of a few specialised ‘cutting-edge' activities. The relation of the exploited class to the process of production is also of an ideological nature; since this relation cannot be completely identical to that of the dominant class, it seems at first that these two ideologies would confront one another. And this is true to a certain extent. This ‘second' ideology is critical, even subversive, but only insofar as it is the language of demand, of critique and of the affirmation of this class in the mirror afforded by the dominant class. Ideology is always the ideology of the dominant class because the particular interest of this class is the only particular interest that can objectively produce itself as universal.

In this sense ideology is not so much a deformed reflection of reality in consciousness as it is the ensemble of practical solutions, which resolve this separation of reality into object and subject, thus justifying and reinforcing it (see Marx, first thesis on Feuerbach). Ideological representations are effective because they reflect to individuals a realistic image and a credible explanation of what they are and what they are experiencing; they are constitutive of the reality of their struggles.

So, then, what about the revolutionary practice as communisation? It is the production of the new, not as the development or victory of a term which pre-exists the contradiction, nor as the reestablishment of a prior unity (negation of the negation), but as the determinate abolition of the old and, in this abolition, the abolition of the abolishing subject. If, at this last instant, the relationship of contradictory implication between proletariat and capital remains determinant, in these very particular circumstances (those of the conjuncture), the instances designated in turn as the locus of the dominant contradiction will always be constituted by ideology.

In its movement, in the forms it takes and leaves, the revolutionary struggle criticises itself. This struggle is, until the end, split between, on the one hand, that which remains an objective movement which is not an illusion—the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production—and, on the other hand, within this objectivity, the practice of its abolition that disobjectifies this movement. For that reason, the struggle remains structurally ideological. It lives off the separation between object and subject. Because the dissolution of objectivity constitutes a subject in itself, a subject which considers itself as such, ideology (invention, freedom, project and projection) is inherent to its definition and its action.
29

The revolutionary conjuncture is the internal transgression of the rules of the mode of production's reproduction, because these rules which direct the development of the capitalist mode of production have no finality beyond that which they have for the agent interior to these rules.
30 The rules which direct capitalism to its ruin do not produce some ideal that one should await fatalistically. They are a practical organisation of struggles according to the targets and stakes of the moving crystallisation of the dominants, of their relation and autonomy vis-à-vis the determination by the relations of production—this is a revolutionary conjuncture: a finality which produces itself and recognises itself in the accidental of such or such a practice, in the ideological practice of the proletariat as subject, as a term of the contradiction.

Without any previously developed objective basis, communism is a production caught in the contradiction of an objective relation whose overcoming should produce itself as the conscious and voluntary formalisation of a project, because the process of revolution always rejects its present state as being its result. This project is an ideological one because it rejects its objective foundation in its present state as its raison d'être, and places the future, what ought to be, as the comprehension of the present and as practice, in the present moment. In the objectivity of the revolutionary process, communism is a project, the ideological form of combat in which it is carried through to the end.

In Conclusion

When our Greek comrades present the events of the November 19th, 2011 protest in Athens in their text ‘Without You, Not a Single Cog Turns', this helps us come closer in a situation to what we call a conjuncture.

They present a situation which makes it possible to speak of programmatism, workers' identity, class unity, asystematicity of the wage demand, communist measures, the cycle of struggles, and they do this all in an 'evental' way.

This presentation grasps the movement of the burst of a situation into multiple contradictions, the conjunction in a ‘present moment' of opposed and heterogeneous interests which are produced, specified and overcome in their confrontations—in a word, it is the very essence of what a conjuncture could be which is condensed in these three pages and grasped as such. Under the effect of the crisis and of the ‘step to be taken' by class struggle, the contradiction between proletariat and capital as it is grasped in its immediacy is no longer the simple and homogenous contradiction that was our theoretical object; this contradiction has become the ensemble of its own determinations, of all its forms of appearance, including its political, ideological, juridical forms, which are not mere phenomena, but precisely that within which only it exists. All the classes and especially all the dynamics and functions that had been, up until then, kept as absorbed into a simple contradiction between the proletariat and capital are now revealed to themselves and to others. This heterogeneity of ‘agents' and of projects, these conflicts, all are the conditions of existence of this contradiction. It becomes clear that even the economic definition of the crisis and of the situation is determinant only in the measure in which it designates itself as political confrontations, as heterogeneity and conflicts in the struggle between proletariat and capital and within the proletariat itself. This economic determination imposes itself as effective in the course of history as politics and as ideology.

On the basis of a particular situation, of an event, these few pages sketch up what a conjuncture can be. Humorously, but without irony, one could say that they are as beautiful as Lenin's in the months preceeding October.

1.
Lenin, V. I., ‘Letters from Afar, First Letter, “The First Stage of the First Revolution”', in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 297–308 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/first.htm#v23pp64h-297.

2.
‘Engels to J. Bloch In Königsberg, London, September 21, 1890', in Historical Materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin) (Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 294–296 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm.

3.
‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.' Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 706.

4.
To demand equality and the end of differences in the name of, and through the action of, a group which is defined as a particular one. Joan W. Scott, Only paradoxes to offer (Harvard University Press, 1996).

5.
Within Being, Aristotle distinguished between the ‘potentiality' that is its essential principle and the ‘actuality' that is the present manifestation of this principle (between the two, ‘form' intervenes.) Most contemporary theories of the capitalist mode of production and of class struggle are Aristotelian, that is, idealist. For such theories, the concept, that is, a concrete in thought, is for them a concrete part of the real, the existent, which can be separated into this nuclear conceptual matter (an oxymoron) and the mineral crust of circumstance. As in all idealisms, the process of thought and the concrete are assimilated and even confused.

6.
To start from (biological) reproduction and the specific place of women within this reproduction is to presuppose as a given what is the result of the social process. The point of departure is what makes this specific place a construction and a social differentiation, that is to say, the modes of production until today. Up until and including capital, where this becomes contradictory, the principal source of surplus labour is of course labour, which means the increase of population. The increase of population as a principal productive force is no more of a natural relation than any other relation of production. But to possess a uterus does not mean to ‘make children'; to move from one to the other requires a social apparatus of appropriation, of the mise-en-scène / of ‘making children', an apparatus through which women exist. To possess a uterus is an anatomical characteristic and not already a distinction, but ‘to make children' is a social distinction which transforms the anatomical characteristic into a natural distinction. It is typical of this social construction, of this apparatus of constraint, to constantly send back what is socially constructed, i.e. women, to biology. The necessary appropriation of surplus labour, a purely social phenomenon (surplus labour does not originate in a supposed over-productivity of labour) creates genders and the social relevance of their distinction in a way which is sexual and naturalised.

7.
By way of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, exploitation is a process constantly in contradiction with its own reproduction: the movement of exploitation is a contradiction for the social relations of production of which it is the content and the movement. Valorisation, the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, is the mode in which labour exists socially. Defined by exploitation, the proletariat is in contradiction with the necessary social existence of labour as capital, that is, value autonomised which can only remain by valorising itself: the fall of the rate of profit is the contradiction between classes. The proletariat is constantly in contradiction with its own definition as a class: the necessity of its reproduction confronts it as constantly necessary and always in excess: that is what the tendency of the rate of profit to fall means, the contradiction between surplus labour and necessary labour (which becomes the contradiction of necessary labour itself). Exploitation is this peculiar game, always won by the same player (because it is subsumption), but at the same time, and for the same reason, it is a game in contradiction with its own rules, and a tension towards the abolition of these rules. The object as totality, the capitalist mode of production, is in contradiction with itself in the contradiction of its elements because for these elements each contradiction with the other is a contradiction with itself, insofar as the other is its other. In the contradiction that exploitation is, its asymmetry alone gives the overcoming. When we say that exploitation is a contradiction for itself we define the situation and the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

8.
To act as a class means, today, to lack any horizon beyond capital and the categories of its reproduction, and, for the same reason, to be in contradiction with the reproduction of one's own class, to question this reproduction. We call the situations and practices that experience this duality ‘rifts'.

9.
It is important to note that capital as a contradiction in process is the basis of any capacity of capital to be a counter-revolution. Indeed, it is on this ground that the capitalist mode of production, as a contradiction to value in its own perpetuation, is the adequate answer to a revolutionary practice.

10.
Translator's footnote: This quotation is taken from Althusser's citation of this letter in his Reading Capital. But, in fact, the actual quote is a bit different, and goes like this: ‘Now if I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition. On the contrary, the good thing about this method is that it is constantly setting traps for those fellows which will provoke them into an untimely display of their idiocy.' ‘Marx To Engels In Manchester, London, 27 June 1867', in Collected Works of Marx and Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1988), p. 389.

11.
It all depends on the modalities of extraction of surplus labour in each mode of production: see Marx, Manuscripts 1861–1863.

12.
‘This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part [our emphasis].' Capital Vol I (Penguin, 1976), p. 176 (Chapter 1, footnote 35).

13.
Translator's footnote: The actual quote from Althusser is slightly different, and reads like this: ‘From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance' never comes.' Trans. Ben Brewster (Vintage, 2005), p. 113.

14.
See the Marx quote in footnote no 9.

15.
For example the Paris Commune of 1871 or the seizure of the Tuileries [August 10th, 1792, TN].

16.
Criticising capitalist social relations as economy takes their autonomisation as economy at face value. A certain social relation, capital, presents itself as an object, and this object presents itself as the presupposition of the reproduction of the social relation. The critique of the concept of economy, which in this concept includes its conditions of existence, does not manage to pose the overcoming of the economy as an opposition to the economy, because the reality of economy (its raison d'être) is exterior to it. The economy is an attribute of the relation of exploitation.

17.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ch01d.htm.

18.
This could be the family, as being of the city or the countryside.

19.
‘The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other, so long as the above-mentioned contradiction is absent, are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these definite individuals, living under definite relationships, can alone produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. The definite condition under which they produce, thus corresponds, as long as the contradiction has not yet appeared, to the reality of their conditioned nature, their one-sided existence, the one-sidedness of which only becomes evident when the contradiction enters on the scene and thus exists for the later individuals. Then this condition appears as an accidental fetter, and the consciousness that it is a fetter is imputed to the earlier age as well.' The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ch01d.htm#d4.

20.
‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.' Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis III, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

21.
Further down we will come to the role of subjectivity and of the action of the subject.

22.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.

23.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch01.htm.

24.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-poleconomy/preface.htm.

25.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_04_30.htm.

26.
‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

27.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#212.

28.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.

29.
However, one must be very careful with the status conferred to this distinction between subject and object, none of which exists by itself or even through their reciprocity. In fact, the struggle of the proletariat and even the revolution are not the sudden emergence of a more or less free, more or less determined, subjectivity, but a moment of the capitalist mode of production's relation to itself—to see objectivism in this would be to forget that the proletariat is a class of the capitalist mode of production and that the latter is the struggle of classes. The question of the relation between the objective situation and subjectivity is raised in the self-contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. The subject and the object we speak of here are moments of this self-contradiction, which in its unity goes through these two opposed phases (a unity of moments destined for autonomy).

30.
It is as practice of the proletariat that the game abolishes its rule: 'When we say that exploitation is a contradiction for itself, we define the situation and the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.' (‘The Present Moment', Sic no. 1). See also footnote 5 above.

The concept of cycle of struggles is part of the definition of exploitation

TC — 2025-04-30T14:40:00Z

What we call cycle of struggles is the whole of the struggles, organisations and theories that constitute a historically defined practice of the proletariat in the reciprocal implication between the two terms of the exploitation which is the dynamic contradiction of the mode of capitalist production. This whole of practices and struggles by which this contradiction, in each specific phase of its historical development, carries revolution and communism as well as its overcoming.

In the first place, even if the chronological landmarks may be identical, the concept of cycle of struggles does not coincide with the one of a historical period of the capitalist mode of production. In the concept of cycle of struggles, the practice of the proletariat is defined as one of the prominent aspect of a totality by which this totality produces its overcoming. As a consequence, a cycle of struggles is a period of the mode of capitalist production that is considered in as much as it produces its overcoming.

The definition of the concept of cycle of struggles articulates around three great principles:

Exploitation – as a contradiction between proletariat and capital – is simultaneously defined as the reciprocal implication of these terms and the production of each one's specificity as far as its situation and practice are concerned. It is not the exploitation in itself, or the development of the capitalist mode of production that carries its overcoming , they carry it only by the specific situation and activity of the proletariat as a revolutionary class and as a class of the mode of capitalist production.
The historical production of the revolution and of communism: both are the overcoming that each cycle of struggles specifically produces.
The contradiction between proletariat and capital is simultaneously the dynamics of the development of the modern mode of capitalist production and of its overcoming, the outcome of which is that a cycle of struggles defines itself in its whole as the relationship between, on one side, the daily course of the class struggle, and, on the other side, revolution and communism in their historical content.

1) Specific practice and reciprocal implication

Exploitation is the first great principle that defines what a cycle of struggles is. The definition of a cycle of struggles comes from an understanding of the exploitation in which the reciprocal implication between the terms of the contradiction, proletariat and capital, as well as their specification and their autonomy are simultaneously laid. Without this, there is no cycle of struggle, that is to say no specific practices of the proletariat against the capital, as a particuliarisation of a whole of which the capital is precisely the other necessary term. A cycle of struggles is a phase of the capital in as much as it is producing its overcoming by the specific activity of the proletariat as a pole of the contradiction which, because it is a reciprocal implication, particuliarises itself.

In their contradictory relationship, proletariat and capital each have a specific position and activity. It is this process of particuliarisation of those terms, which is intrinsic to the contradiction, that we are up to define, while considering them precisely as terms of a contradiction, that is to say as a mutual implication. Exploitation is not the content of a contradictory relationship between two symmetric terms, it is a difference in the relationship to the whole, which, regarding its content, determines one term to be questioned and to overcome this whole. The capitalist mode of production and exploitation only carry their overcoming in the situation and specific activity of the proletariat as a pole (particularisation) of the whole capitalist mode of production.

Exploitation as a relationship between the proletariat and the capital is a contradiction as it is a process in contradiction with its own reproduction (fall of the profit rate), a whole in which each element only exists in relation to the other, and defines itself in this relation as a contradiction with the other and because of this with itself, as the relationship defines it: productive work and accumulation of capital; surplus labour and necessary work; valorisation and immediate work. The capital is a contradiction in process, which means that the movement exploitation is is a contradiction of the production social relationships of which exploitation is the content and the movement. In this light, it is a game that can lead to the abolition of its rule. The capital as a contradiction in process is the class struggle, when we say that exploitation is a contradiction for itself, we define the situation and the revolutionary activity of the proletariat.

Exploitation is the valorisation of the capital, it has three constitutive moments:

the confrontation of the work force and of the capital as potential capital. This confrontation makes sense only in its resolution, the purchase-sale of the work force.
The subsumption of work under the capital (surplus value production)
The transformation of the surplus value in additional capital : the reproduction of the confrontation, the separation, are the starting point and the main result of the production process.
It is this same transformation of the surplus value into additional capital that is never ascertained, because of competition of course on the most superficial level, but above all because of the fact that this transformation implies on one side the meeting of the commodity capital and of the money as capital or means of circulation ( it is the general possibility of the crises), and on the other side because it implies the underlying transformation of the surplus value into profit, therefore the relation between the surplus value and the total engaged capital. The fall of the profit rate is constantly the anguish at the heart of self-presupposition, or without circumlocution, the “never ascertained” nature of this transformation in additional capital and so of the renewing of the process whose terms are produced as subjects. This production of subjects within the reciprocal implication does not occur at the end of each cycle, it is permanent in the course of the valorisation process and funds the autonomy and the practice of the proletariat and of the capital during the whole process. The problematic character of the transformation of the surplus value into additional capital is also the transformations of the capital, the bankruptcies, the redundancies as well as the augmentations of the production paces and the transformation of the process of work. The transformation of the surplus value into additional capital is first and foremost the extraction of a sufficient surplus value to allow for this transformation.

The exploitation relation is, on the one hand, the content of the reciprocal implication of the proletariat and the capital, the fact that they are the terms of a same whole, and, on the other hand, their production as genuinely active subjects of this whole, that has no other movement that the one that results from the actions of its subjects. It is in this relation, at the general level of analysis, in the unity of its moments, that the “never ascertained” character of its reproduction constantly exists.

The “never ascertained” character of the renewing of the three constitutive moments of the exploitation blends in with the particularisation movement of the contradictory terms of the whole. It is there that the general possibility of the exploitation crisis as contradictory practices between classes^? lies, it is there that the particularisation process of the terms of the contradiction in their activity as subjects lies, there that their own action and reciprocal implication lie.

However, the position of the capital in relation to the whole is different from the proletariat's. This difference is a consequence of the very content of exploitation. The capital is the agent of the general reproduction. A cycle of struggles is not a collection of struggles brought about by causality by a certain stage of the development of the capital. What appears as a causality relation that goes from the state of the capital to the struggles of the proletariat and that explains their content and historical evolution, is only an effect of the subsumption of work under the capital. It is true that the definition of a cycle of struggles always has, as a starting point, the valorisation process in its historical content and aspect. But we cannot deduce from there a causality relation, it would be not to understand what a totality is and its necessary particularisation in a non symmetrical position of its terms in relation to the renewing of the relation of the whole. A causality relation makes of the specific situation of the proletariat in the relation of the whole, something changing and liable to be influenced and from this, in spite of appearances, does not conceive it as essentially historical, that is to say essentially as the other term of a relation, but as a historically determined revolutionary nature.

To conceive essentially the situation and the practice of the proletariat as the other term of a relation, of a contradictory relation that constitutes a particularised totality, is to conceive them in a dynamic and historical process, for it is simultaneously to conceive the two contradictory terms and thus a process. To establish a causality relation between the capital (brought back to objective conditions) and the practice of the proletariat can only produce an object on which this causality will act, that is to say a revolutionary nature that this causality will modulate. At this level, the theoretical production of the concept of cycle of struggles plays a part as an element of the overcoming of programmatism in as much as it is the criticism of a simple relation of causality between the practice of the proletariat and the objective conditions and as a corollary of a separation of the terms that leaves the possibility of a victory of the proletariat which would be its liberation, its affirmation.

Thus the first elements of definition that emerge from this first point make clear that a cycle of struggles is the specific practice of the proletariat in a relation of reciprocal implication with the capital as particularisation of a same totality, a specific practice that such a production immediately and essentially defines as historical and not as “historically brought about”. The overcoming of the capitalist mode of production is not the result of the contradiction process as undifferentiated unit, but of the activity of one of its terms: the proletariat. This term is able to produce this overcoming only because it is a particularisation of the whole and not because it could carry within itself a revolutionary essence.

2) The concept of cycle of struggles lies on the identity between what makes the proletariat a revolutionary class and a class of the capitalist mode of production.

Still starting from the first great defining principle of a cycle of struggles, exploitation. The non separation of what makes the proletariat a revolutionary class and its definition as a class of the capitalist mode of production derives from it as a determination of this principle.

As particularisation of the whole, the two terms of the contradiction do not entertain the same relation with this whole. The constitutive contradiction of this whole, exploitation, defines itself as the subsumption of work under the capital. In front of salaried work, the capital subsumes the living work, as such, it is the agent of the reciprocal reproduction of the two poles, as a consequence, there is no equality, no simple complementarity between the terms but a contradiction.

The subsumption of work under the capital implies that all the conditions of the renewing of the relation can be found , at the end of each cycle, reunited as capital in front of work (it's the economy). If work implies capital, it is because the first is always put by the latter in a position to involve it. Thus one cannot be content to say that the proletariat implies the capital and vice versa the capital implies the proletariat, because of the very content of this implication, exploitation, it does not have in the two ways the same “form”. The proletariat implies the capital because it exists only as continually put by the capital in the position of having to involve it. The capital is the agent of general reproduction, the two terms are not on an equal footing, exploitation and subsumption are there and this makes the reciprocal implication a non symmetrical relation.

With the inequality of the terms of the contradiction in relation to the whole, it is as a form the very content of the contradiction that is found again. The proletariat is in contradiction with the necessary social existence of its work, as capital, autonomised value in front of it, and staying so only as increasing value : the fall of the profit rate is a contradiction between the classes. The very movement of accumulation constantly brings the surplus value back to the produced and transmitted value. Through the fall of the profit rate, the exploitation of the proletariat and the production of surplus value reach as their own limit the very social existence of work as producer of value and the accumulation of this value. The specification of the terms of this contradiction and the very shape of this contradiction with the inequality of its terms define a class that is constantly contradictory to the development and to the reproduction of the totality that defines and involves it. What we have here is the daily struggle as well as, following the rules of the game, the possibility of its abolition. In the fall of the profit rate, the proletariat is constantly in contradiction with the totality of the conditions accumulated in front of it as value, this contradiction exists as the very form of contradiction, we can then define what the proletariat is, as a situation in a relation and not as a nature any longer. The concept of cycle of struggles is in itself a criticism of programmatism, it overtakes the rigid opposition between what makes the proletariat a revolutionary class and what defines it as a class of the capitalist mode of production.

Proletariat produces communism against capital which means that it is the subject of this overcoming, not as an executioner or as a midwife, but as a pole of the contradiction itself. If, beginning with the exploitation, we anchor what makes the proletariat a revolutionary class in what defines it as a class of the capitalist mode of production, that is to say in its implication with the capital, a necessary link between the daily course of the class struggle and revolution, this link considered as a historical phase is a cycle of struggles. In the concept of class struggles the ambivalence between a proletariat that would be a « revolutionary force that runs » and a proletariat that should overtake what it is in the capitalist mode of production to be revolutionary is overtaken. However, to give a correct rendition of the nature of this link and process, it is necessary to go through the second great principle around which the concept of cycle of struggles revolves : revolution and communism are historical productions as far as their content is concerned. This means that defining the concept of cycle of struggles is defining a succession of cycle of struggles. This second great defining principle is eventually only an extension of the first ; if exploitation is the contradiction between the proletariat and the capital, this contradiction is thus simultaneously the dynamic of the capitalist mode of production, it is history.

II Revolution and communism are historical productions through the cycles of struggles

It is necessary to simultaneously historicise and specify each cycle of struggles and to understand the way they follow on from each other, to understand for example, the specificity of the current cycle of struggles and to refer, even if it is in a necessarily critical way, to the whole history of the proletariat and to the production of communism. It is, at each time, in each cycle of struggles, the whole course of the capitalist mode of production that has communism as its resolution. Revolution and communism as we define them now (communisation and social immediacy of the individual) are not an invariant, a norm that would run through the history of the capitalist mode of production under multiple avatars. The current cycle of struggles, along with the definition and the production of communism it contains, is, in itself, the necessary overcoming produced by the previous cycles. History cannot be rewritten backwards. In the current cycle of struggles, the production of communism becomes a historical axis running through the whole mode of capitalist production, this production is a succession and a totalisation of the cycles of struggles.

The analysis in terms of cycles of struggles helps to understand how the proletariat produces communism against the capital, this production can be found, for example, in the various stages of the programme (1790-1848 ;1848-1871 ;1871-1914), there are the internal contradictions of these stages, it is the affirmation of the class that is always carrying its impossibility in its own terms, through what programmatism historically is (its necessary explosion in trends, its relation to counter-revolution, etc.), it is eventually, the fact that class affirmation is never seen as an end in itself, and this turns out against it.

The impossibility of the programmatic revolution lies in its necessity to be simultaneously an increase in importance of the class in the capital, and an autonomous affirmation of the proletariat. The two terms contradict each other but can remain linked until the years 1870-1880. But as soon as the process of shifting to real subsomption^? genuinely begins, their coexistence becomes impossible. One can keep promoting revolution only through abstracting the reinforcement of the class from the capital; and on the other side, one will only be able to keep promoting the development of the class within the capitalist mode of production through making socialism an organized capitalism. One could develop the same reasoning about the old cycle of struggles that ended in the middle of the 70's by understanding its impossibility through the theoretical and practical implication between self-organisation and self-negation, autonomy and refusal of work.

The point here is neither to make each last cycle of struggles the norm of the previous cycles nor to consider the cycle in which we are as having, in an isolated way, communism as its resolution.

Each cycle of struggles constitutes a specific totality from its determinations, and from the way revolution and communism are defined from the historical stage of the contradiction between proletariat and capital it expresses. However, the succession of the cycles of struggles does not appear as a juxtaposition of exclusive totalities : there is a progression, an overcoming of the limits of a previous cycle in the specificity of a new cycle. At the same time a new cycle is the overcoming of a previous one, it constitutes the characteristics, the shape, the determinations of it in terms of limits, contradictions, and through this manifests that in itself this previous cycle can be analysed as producing, carrying, and calling for its overcoming in a relation, necessary but mediated by the next cycle with communism as this last cycle defines it. The characteristics of the previous cycles carry then, in the understanding ( that became objective and not a viewpoint) the following cycle provides, communism as it is defined by this cycle. The error would be to forget the analysis's starting point, to forget the reality of the current cycle and to consider that the previous cycle carries communism outside the existence of the current cycle. The mere present existence of this new cycle makes of this ‘starting point' not a subjective viewpoint but an objective relation.

From cycle to cycle, the proletariat does not store up experiences that it could take advantage of to overcome the limits of a previous cycle. If a new cycle overcomes the limits of a previous cycle, it is because counter revolution, the capital restructuration, constituted the characteristics of this former cycle as limits. The fact that communism is contained by all the former cycles through what funds their own impossibility, through their internal contradictions, this fact is solved in counter revolution, capital restructuration and its development. Capital is not a mere obstacle. It is up to – through its own development, because it is a contradiction in process – solve a contradiction carrying communism as its overcoming. Thus, the historical significance of the capital links in one single historical movement the various and specific cycles of struggles and makes of each stage of the contradiction between proletariat and capital the overcoming of the previous cycle's limits. The impossibility in its own terms of each cycle of struggles up until now is the corollary of the ability of the capital to solve in its development a contradiction that carries communism. If counter revolution is a relevant answer to revolution, it is because the development of the capital is the obsolescence of the value in act. For the next cycle, this restructuration becomes a necessary mediation for revolution and communism.

The 1917 Russian proletarians acted as such as did the 1919 German, the 1936 Spanish, and the 1968 French or Italian. They led the revolutionary movements or the rebellions that were not theirs with full awareness, and in all their contradictions. None of their actions were contingent for them, the limit of their movement were imposed on them by the counter revolution they had to fight, it was not, for them, an external limit that they could not overcome, but the very nature of their struggle. What we can say now of these movements, we say it now, and if we say why these movements were beaten we owe it to the struggles as they were led and to the counter revolution that crushed them (counter revolutions are also and above all our relation to the past revolutions). Our analysis is a result, the result did not pre exist in the object. For us now, the whole importance of these revolutions lies in what appears to us as their inner contradictions, in their impossibility as it occurred in the very terms these struggles existed and were lived in. It is through all that is, pragmatically and theoretically, for us now the impossibility of the programatic revolution that we relate to the history of past struggles and to the continuity of theoretical production. It is the reason why we are led to give prominance to peripheral currents or to “heretical” opinions, for, within them, it was the criticism on its own bases, included in itself, of the revolution as affirmation of the proletariat and liberation of work that existed and not the potential or embryonic existence of the revolution as it appears now. It is what relates us to these movements, what makes them our living heritage. The whole history of the capitalist mode of production did not have in mind to produce the current situation, but the current situation allows to consider as its own condition for existence the whole past history, to understand the current cycle of struggles as an overcoming and resolution of the previous cycles. We are looking neither for lessons nor ancestors.

The problem of the role and activity of the capital in relation to communism as the overcoming of its contradiction with the proletariat is important because it is the one of the relation between revolution and counter revolution. It establishes this relation in the development of the capital as a historical process and cycles of struggles. If capital is a contradiction in process as is developped by Marx in Grundrissen, and if its development is the production of the material conditions able to make the cramped basis work value is burst, it is not its obituary that is then described, it is simultaneously its strength and its historical meaning. It is because it is this contradictory process that undermines itself that capital has a historical significance but then to have a historical significance is, in the very content of its development (“the stealing of someone else's work on which current wealth is based appears as a paltry basis confronted to the new basis, created and developed by the big industry itself”, Grundrisse, vol.2, p.222), to be able to impose, in front of the revolutionary class, its own reproduction and accumulation as an answer having a historical meaning in front of revolution, and taking place on its limits. The value's obsolescence is the very dynamic of the capitalist mode of production.

The principle of all restructuration consists in – for the capital – being able to lay its own contradiction with the proletariat as a contradiction with its previous development as a limited one. It is a movement of transformation between proletariat and capital into multiple inner contradictions of the capital as pole of the relation.

Communism is not the historical product of each cycle of struggles, but of their succession (the concept of cycle of struggles is necessarily a succession of cycles of struggles), a succession that, through counter revolutions, restructurations and through the historical significance of the capital, is an overcoming and a “totalisation” – conservation and overcoming.

Each new cycle cannot conceive that previous cycles gave to revolution and communism the same content it does under different forms, it only understands itself as the result of a necessary history in relation to communism. Being itself the proof of the historical significance of the capital, each new cycle understands the defeat of the previous cycle as necessary and thus understands, taking itself as starting point, that the previous cycles had their impossibility in their own terms. Each new cycle is the objective existence of what it, itself, defines as revolution and communism as being the outcome of the previous cycles.

The previous cycles did not define communism as a social immediacy of the individual. The point here is not to rewrite history backwards. However the current cycle of struggles is a historical result. Revolution as communisation (communist measures) and communism as social immediacy of the individual are the result of the overcoming of the previous cycles of struggles and allows to understand their limits and their contradictions in the very terms of these previous cycles. The succession of the cycles of struggles is not a juxtaposition but a totalising overcoming.

From the current cycle of struggles, one understands the production of communism as a historical trend running through the whole history of the capitalist mode of production. One does not give goals and contents they never had to previous stages, but the content of this cycle is the historical result and true understanding and appropriation of previous cycles, their revolutionary resurrection, their overcoming-integration.

III A cycle of struggles is the link between the daily course of class struggle and revolution

The daily course of class struggle is not an incompleteness or a waiting, as accumulation of capital is not an obstacle. The relation of the daily course to revolution is a production one. To separate the two means that one considers all the course before the revolution as an accumulation of necessary conditions, mystifications, errors, insufficiency, mere integration of the proletariat or as unlucky attacks of a constantly revolutionary proletariat just as constantly beaten. Between the previous course of class struggle and revolution, there never was a “transgrowth” relation, mainly with the real subsumption of work under capital when the reproduction and the defense of the proletarian condition, although contradictory and antagonistic, are integrated within the own cycle of the capital.

One can only correctly place the relation between the daily course of class struggle and revolution, by defining proletariat both and identically as a class of the mode of capitalist production and as a revolutionary class, as well as revolution and communism as historical production. To define the course of class struggle as cycles of struggles is to understand this relation for it is historical and not normative. Each cycle of struggles is this relation's dynamic process.

To link the previous course of class struggle to revolution is to understand revolution as a rupture, an overcoming of a previous situation, but a produced rupture and made necessary by this previous situation through a specific historical development in which each term has its activity, its situation and its own responsibility as regards this overcoming. The point is, in each cycle of struggles, to show how class struggle comes up against its own limits and gives revolution a historically determined content.

The theoretical link between the daily course of class struggle and revolution can be found in the constantly contradictory situation proletariat is in relation to the necessary social form of its work as a value accumulated in front of it, and remaining thus only through developing itself, as capital. This contradiction is, for capital, its own dynamic. Subsuming work through this contradiction : exploitation, it constantly is the agent of the general reproduction of the relation and all the reproduction conditions can thus constantly be found as capital in front of work. Thus the daily course of class struggle is limited essentially and not externally by a resistance of the capital. This daily course comes up against its own limits in its contradiction with capital, but by so doing, it also produces them as such and calls for their overcoming and its own. The daily course of class struggle is a movement which, against the capital, calls for its overcoming, because if it comes up against its own limits it is because capital subsumes contradiction in its own cycle, it is its own dynamic. This process thus becomes the one of the inner contradictions of the capitalist accumulation process. This the reason why we must go through economy, for the daily course of class struggle does not call for its overcoming because of an inner process but through the crisis of the capital. The development of the capital resulting from each of these cycles replaces the proletariat in its specific situation in front of the accumulation of all the conditions of reproduction. This is what links the daily course of class struggle to the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. What we have here is a class that is constantly, and in its own definition, contradictory with the development that includes it, a development that finds in its very contradiction its dynamic – the whole problem is there.

The concept of cycle of struggles synthetises the daily course of class struggle and the contradiction between proletariat and capital as a dynamic of the capitalist mode of production and the historical production of revolution.

When Marx talks about the proletariat as being the midwife of the new society, one is still in the problematic in which proletariat comes to reveal something that is produced as an objective course. It is the whole development towards communism that needs to be understood as coming from the specific position of the proletariat in the contradiction, and not from this specific position, as executioner or midwife that is to say as a result of the process. The contradictions of this process would be limited therefore to the ones of capitalist accumulation, an accumulation understood in an objective way, an accumulation of the conditions that would be a purgatory that one had to go through. If the crisis of the social relation of exploitation – which is in itself an economic crisis – is the only social relation in which, for each cycle, its overcoming can occur. There is here, in the current cycle, a new relation between the struggles and their limits compared to the previous cycles. These limits can no longer be found in the counter revolutionary movement of the dynamics of the new cycle of struggles in the capital restructuration, but they become intrinsic to the whole course of the cycle, constantly present as such. The reproduction of capital has become the specific limit of this cycle in relation to its immediate characteristics and not in itself through the tautological relation alone according to which there is no revolution if capital reproduces itself. Of course, the limits of the previous cycles only went with the reproduction of capital, but this reproduction was not in itself the historically specified limit of the cycle of struggles, which is now the case. To act as a class now is: on the one hand, to have capital and the categories of its reproduction as only perpective, on the other hand, it is for the same reason to be in contradiction with its own class reproduction.

The concept of cycle of struggles bears the relation between immediate struggles and revolution within each cycle of struggles. It makes each term of the contradiction a subject by giving them their autonomy within their reciprocal implication (and through the latter as well). In this daily course, it is important to define what makes it a dynamic process calling for its own overcoming, to find in the daily struggles the reason why they come up against their own content which is then constituted as limits in the opposition to the capital. To confer activity, vitality, and autonomy to each term of the contradiction, to establish a link between daily struggles and revolution, to define the production of revolution and of communism as historical compel one to understand the movement as a succession of cycles of struggles and to make the difference – in these cycles of struggles and even if all the elements make a whole – between what calls for overcoming, what is a reversal in the capital, and what establishes the content of these struggles as limits through making it stable.

LA AUTOORGANIZACIÓN ES EL PRIMER ACTO DE LA REVOLUCIÓN, LOS SIGUIENTES VAN CONTRA ELLA

TC — 2025-04-27T17:45:00Z

LA AUTOORGANIZACIÓN ES EL PRIMER ACTO DE LA REVOLUCIÓN, LOS SIGUIENTES VAN CONTRA ELLA

La autonomía, en tanto perspectiva revolucionaria que se realiza a través de la autoorganización, es paradójicamente inseparable de una clase obrera estable, fácilmente discernible en la superficie misma de la reproducción del capital, consolidada en sus límites y en su definición por esa reproducción, y reconocida en su seno como interlocutora legítima. La autonomía es la práctica, la teoría y el proyecto revolucionario de la época «fordista». Tiene como sujeto al obrero y presupone la revolución comunista como emancipación de éste, es decir, como emancipación del trabajo productivo. Presupone que las luchas reivindicativas son el punto de apoyo de la revolución y que el capital reproduce y confirma una identidad obrera en el seno de la relación de explotación. Todo esto ha perdido cualquier fundamento.

Muy al contrario, en cada una de sus luchas, el proletariado ve cómo su existencia de clase se objetiva en la reproducción del capital como algo ajeno a él y que puede verse llevado a poner en tela de juicio en el curso de su lucha. Dentro de la actividad del proletariado, ser una clase se convierte en una restricción exterior objetivada en el capital. Ser una clase se transforma en el obstáculo que su lucha como clase debe franquear, y este obstáculo posee una realidad clara y fácilmente identificable: la autoorganización y la autonomía.

AMARGA VICTORIA DE LA AUTONOMÍA

Autoorganización en todas partes, revolución en ninguna

No cabe hablar de autonomía sino cuando la clase obrera es capaz de relacionarse consigo misma en contra del capital y de encontrar en esta relación tanto las bases como la capacidad para afirmarse como clase dominante. La autonomía presupone que lo que define a la clase obrera no es una relación, sino algo inherente a ella. Se trataba de formalizar lo que somos en la sociedad actual como base de la nueva sociedad a construir en tanto emancipación de lo que somos.

Desde el final de la Primera Guerra Mundial hasta comienzos de la década de 1970, la autonomía y la autoorganización no sólo fueron la huelga salvaje y una relación más o menos conflictiva con los sindicatos. La autonomía era el proyecto de un proceso revolucionario que conducía de la autoorganización a la afirmación del proletariado como clase dominante mediante la emancipación del trabajo y su afirmación como organización de la sociedad. Al liberar la «verdadera situación» de la clase obrera de su integración en el modo de producción capitalista, representada por todas las instituciones políticas y sindicales, la autonomía era la revolución en marcha, la revolución en potencia. Si bien este era el propósito explícito de la ultraizquierda, no era una mera ideología. La autoorganización, el poder sindical y el movimiento obrero pertenecían al mismo universo de la revolución como afirmación de la clase. La afirmación del ser realmente revolucionario que se manifestaba en la autonomía no habría tenido el menor viso de realidad de no haberse tratado del lado bueno y desalienado de la misma realidad que residía en un movimiento obrero poderoso que «encuadraba» a la clase. El movimiento obrero también era la garantía de la independencia de esa clase dispuesta a reorganizar el mundo a su imagen y semejanza; bastaba con revelarle a esta potencia su verdadera naturaleza, desburocrantizándola y desalienándola. No era raro que los obreros pasaran de la constitución, necesariamente efímera, de organismos de lucha autónomos, al universo paralelo del estalinismo triunfante o, en el Norte de Europa, al regazo de poderosos sindicatos. La autonomía y el movimiento obrero se nutrían y se confirmaban mutuamente. El dirigente estalinista podía ser «la réplica obrera del patrón por derecho divino», pero también era la réplica institucional de la autonomía. Como teoría revolucionaria, la autoorganización tenía sentido bajo las mismas condiciones que dotaron de estructura al «viejo movimiento obrero». La autoorganización es la lucha autoorganizada más su prolongación necesaria, la autoorganización de los productores; en una palabra, el trabajo emancipado; en otra, el valor.

Volvamos brevemente la vista atrás. Ya en la Italia de 1969, los sectores obreros en lucha fueron incapaces de crear una «asamblea» de enlace entre las diversas formas de autoorganización, y el movimiento fue «recuperado» por la CGIL y sus comités de taller. También en Italia, durante el «movimiento de las autoconvocatorias por la escala móvil» (febrero-marzo de 1984) se constata cómo la autoorganización se vuelve defensiva, en el sentido de expresar la defensa de una composición y de una relación antiguas de la clase con el capital, y que la reestructuración está en curso de abolir. Por las mismas razones, en España el «movimiento asambleario» (1976, 1977, 1978) crea o revitaliza estructuras sindicales, al igual que «el otoño caliente» holandés (1983). Es también la época en que se constituyen todo tipo de «sindicatos autónomos». Lo que la reestructuración pone en tela de juicio, fundamentalmente, es un tipo histórico de clase obrera. En la fábrica Le Mans de Renault, durante las huelgas de 1975, donde la fuerza de trabajo es más estable y el nivel de sindicalización (un 40%) dobla la media nacional de Renault, es donde más dura es la huelga, que adquiere a menudo visos de «lucha autónoma». A comienzos de la década de 1980, cuando se remata este proceso de racionalización golpeando sobre todo a los efectivos de los OS inmigrados (ouvrier spécialisé = obrero especializado), provocando una enorme oleada de huelgas en el sector del automóvil, la violencia de las luchas no se formalizó jamás en tentativas de formar órganos autónomos. «Quieren matarnos, pero ya estamos muertos»; ése era el espíritu de las luchas. Si, en 1983-1984, era igualmente difícil calificar la huelga de los mineros británicos de «lucha autónoma y autoorganizada» es porque en realidad fue una huelga sin reivindicaciones, sin programa y sin perspectivas. El hecho de ser una clase ya era algo que sólo era definido por el adversario y a través de él, en la acción contra éste. La decadencia y la pérdida de sentido de la autonomía no son el simple producto de un retroceso de la lucha de clases. La «lucha» no es una invariante histórica que expresa constantemente la misma relación de clase. La decadencia de la autonomía no supone la decadencia de la «lucha», sino la de una fase histórica de luchas de clase.

Cuando, a partir de las coordinadoras de los ferroviarios de 1986, la autoorganización se convierte en Francia en la forma dominante de todas las luchas, ya no representa la ruptura con todas las mediaciones que convierten a la clase en una clase del modo de producción capitalista (ruptura que supuestamente liberaría su naturaleza revolucionaria). La autoorganización pierde su «sentido revolucionario», a saber, el desbordamiento entre autoorganización de la lucha y control obrero sobre la producción y la sociedad. La autoorganización ya no es más que una forma radical de sindicalismo. Hoy en día, toda lucha reivindicativa con cierto grado de amplitud o intensidad es autoorganizada y autónoma; la autoorganización y la autonomía se han convertido en un simple momento del sindicalismo (de un sindicalismo que se distingue de la existencia formal de los sindicatos). Si los organismos de lucha de los que se dotaron los portuarios españoles en los años ochenta intentan garantizar su supervivencia cambiando de forma, es porque no eran sino organismos de defensa de la condición obrera. Es ahí donde reside la continuidad que explica la transición entre una cosa y otra. Los teóricos de la autonomía querrían que, como tales, los «órganos autónomos» inventasen el comunismo sin dejar de ser lo que son: órganos de lucha reivindicativa. En tanto tales, su tendencia natural es hacerse permanentes y, por consiguiente, «transformarse».

En todos los discursos actuales sobre la autonomía, lo notable es constatar que lo que ha desaparecido es la revolución. Lo que, hasta comienzos de los años setenta, constituía la razón de ser misma del discurso sobre la autonomía, a saber, su perspectiva revolucionaria, se ha vuelto poco menos que inexpresable. La defensa y la valoración de la autonomía se han convertido en fines en sí mismos y se tiene buen cuidado de no articularlas con una perspectiva revolucionaria (los últimos en hacerlo fueron los operaistas italianos). En la actualidad basta con repetir que la autonomía existente no es la buena. Ahora bien, lo que ha desaparecido es la capacidad del proletariado para encontrar en su relación con el capital las bases de su constitución en clase autónoma y en un movimiento obrero poderoso La autonomía y la autoorganización fueron un momento histórico de la lucha de clases, no modalidades de acción formal. En todos los planteamientos actuales, la autonomía designa cualquier actividad en la que los proletarios se conciertan directamente entre sí con vistas a hacer algo, una suerte de forma de acción ahistórica y general que tiene por condición su independencia de las instituciones. Lo que desaparece así son la historización y la periodización de la lucha de clases. No se puede hablar de autonomía más que si la clase obrera es capaz de relacionarse consigo misma en contra del capital y de encontrar en esta relación consigo misma la capacidad de afirmarse como clase dominante (lo que de todos modos sólo podía producir la contrarrevolución que hacía imposible esa afirmación).

En la actualidad, dondequiera que triunfan la autonomía y la autoorganización, también se expresa inmediatamente la insatisfacción con ellas. Ya en 1986, las coordinadoras de los ferroviarios franceses suscitaron una amplia desconfianza, al igual que lo hizo en 2003 el intento de constituir coordinadoras amplias más allá de los colectivos locales. En el seno mismo de la autoorganización triunfante actual, lo que prefigura la abolición de las clases es lo que se opone a ella. No se trata de la insatisfacción con una autonomía presuntamente «recuperada», sino con la propia autonomía en el sentido de que ya sólo puede ser «recuperada» por naturaleza. Esa naturaleza, que consiste en la emancipación de la clase a partir de su afirmación autónoma (una vez que haya «roto» con sus lazos sociales capitalistas), y que definía la revolución en el ciclo anterior, es ahora aquello que hace que la autoorganización y la autonomía sean vividas conscientemente como el límite de todas las luchas actuales. En todas partes, apenas se pone en práctica la autoorganización (y en la actualidad es algo casi imposible de evitar), la gente está harta de ella, se convierte en una traba para el movimiento. Apenas esbozada, nos «empacha», porque nos recuerda enojosamente lo que somos y ya no queremos ser. Es ahí, en el seno mismo de la autoorganización y contra ella, donde la lucha del proletariado como clase produce su propia existencia de clase como un límite a superar. La autonomía no significa más que la emancipación del obrero en tanto obrero.

En el curso concreto de las luchas, la autonomía y la autoorganización, es decir, aquello que somos como clase, se han convertido en objeto de crítica regular. Hay que percibir la importancia teórica y práctica de este desajuste en el seno de la autoorganización, entre lo que ésta representa en la actualidad como forma necesaria de la lucha de clases, y la crítica práctica y teórica que suscita en su propio seno cuando es puesta en práctica. Ahora bien, es preciso tener en cuenta, como característica del ciclo de lucha actual, que el combate contra la «mala» autoorganización se libra en nombre de la «buena». En la actualidad, el combate contra la autoorganización sólo se manifiesta a través de ese combate a favor de la «buena» autoorganización, es decir, la perspectiva de la revolución sólo aparece como algo que no pertenece ya al ámbito de la afirmación de la clase y que, por ello mismo, ya no puede pertenecer radicalmente al ámbito de la autoorganización ni de la autonomía.

Mientras ningún enfrentamiento de clases inicie de forma positiva, en tanto acción de clase contra el capital, la comunización de las relaciones entre los individuos, la autoorganización seguirá siendo la única forma posible de acción como clase. La búsqueda de la autoorganización «verdadera» no es un «error», pues el «error» mismo indica constantemente, mediante la crítica de la autoorganización realmente existente en nombre de una autoorganización ideal, que la autoorganización es algo a superar. En tanto proceso sin fin, esta crítica de la autoorganización realmente existente en nombre de una autoorganización ideal supone una tensión en el seno de la autoorganización e indica el contenido de aquello que ha de ser superado: el impasse de la autoorganización, es decir, de su contenido, la afirmación del proletariado, la revelación de éste a sí mismo.

La superación de la autoorganización realmente existente no se logrará mediante la producción de la autoorganización «buena», «bella» y «verdadera»; se efectuará contra ella pero en su seno, a partir de ella. En las luchas actuales, el proletariado reconoce al capital como su razón de ser, como su existencia frente a sí mismo, como la única necesidad de su propia existencia. En sus luchas, el proletariado se dota de todas las formas organizativas necesarias para su acción. Pero cuando el proletariado se dota de las formas organizativas necesarias para sus objetivos inmediatos (su abolición también será un objetivo inmediato), no existe para sí mismo como clase autónoma. La autoorganización y la autonomía sólo eran posibles sobre la base de la constitución de una identidad obrera que la reestructuración ha desbaratado. ¿Qué van a autoorganizar ahora esos proletarios?

Si la autonomía desaparece como perspectiva, es porque la revolución ya no puede tener por contenido más que la comunización de la sociedad, es decir, la autoabolición del proletariado. Ante tal contenido, resulta impropio hablar de autonomía, y es improbable que un programa semejante fuese aceptado por lo que se suele entender por «organización autónoma». El proletariado no puede ser revolucionario más que reconociéndose como clase, y se reconoce como tal en cada conflicto; y lo hará con mayor motivo aún en una situación en la que su existencia como clase en el seno de la reproducción del capital sea la situación que tenga que afrontar. No nos equivoquemos sobre el contenido de este «reconocimiento». Su reconocimiento como clase no será un «retorno sobre sí misma», sino una extroversión total, su autorreconocimiento como categoría del modo de producción capitalista. Aquello que somos como clase no es, inmediatamente, otra cosa que nuestra relación con el capital. En realidad, este «reconocimiento» será un conocimiento práctico, en el curso del conflicto, no de la clase para sí, sino del capital.

Sobre la autoorganización en las luchas actuales

«El sistema inglés de los shop-stewards , que nació durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, impulsó una organización de fábrica específica conocida como mutuality , en la que el contenido de las tareas y el ritmo de trabajo los fijaba la dirección tras llegar a acuerdos con los trabajadores afectados a través de delegados electos. Dicho sistema, incluso antes de la era Thatcher, fue barrido por todas las reestructuraciones. Durante los años setenta surgieron numerosos conflictos en torno de este poder de los delegados de base; el canto del cisne de este sistema se debió, por una parte, a las propuestas de transformación de la producción por los comités de shop-stewards, sobre todo en las fábricas de armamento, y por otra, a la continuación de la producción por los trabajadores tras los cierres de fábricas. Todo aquello contribuyó a crear un movimiento en torno a las nociones de worker's control y self-management, modalidad británica de autogestión que, tanto en los hechos como en las ideas, llegó mucho más lejos que las pretensiones francesas sobre el tema. Hoy, tras la laminación de la industria británica, esta corriente ya no representa nada.» (Échanges, n° 99, p. 23)

«Durante más de treinta años se desarrolló un complejo movimiento autónomo, una suerte de híbrido que combinaba el sistema de los delegados de base elegidos y responsables (los shop-stewards) con la utilización de las estructuras sindicales de base (a menudo reforzadas por la amplia difusión del «closed-shop» —es decir, empresas en las que la afiliación sindical era obligatoria— o sea, la gestión de la contratación por los sindicatos). Se asistió entonces a una oleada de huelgas salvajes que en repetidas ocasiones hizo tambalearse gobiernos empeñados en «imponerse por la fuerza», (…). La crisis que ocultaba este conjunto culminó en el invierno 1978-1979 —The winter of discontent —, en el curso del cual el país se vio sumido en un caos total, sin otra perspectiva que el inmovilismo de ese bloque de resistencia».

El gobierno Thatcher barrió todo eso mediante la destrucción del aparato industrial, la privatización, la mundialización y financiarización de la economía, la generalización de la flexibilidad, la precariedad laboral y el desempleo masivo.

«La relación de fuerzas subyacente al movimiento autónomo se quebró; pero sólo pudo ser derrotado (provisionalmente) mediante luchas muy duras en los sectores claves de la autonomía obrera: los puertos, la siderurgia, el automóvil, la prensa y, sobre todo, las minas.» (Échanges, n° 107, oct.-nov. 2003)

Tras volver a la época actual para extraer las lecciones de la huelga de los empleados de Correos británicos, el texto concluye: «Los fundamentos de la lucha, aunque marquen una ruptura de la base con las direcciones sindicales, muestran también la persistencia de ciertas nociones en las relaciones laborales y la utilización de las estructuras sindicales de base, esas mismas nociones que a principios de los años ochenta “la puesta en vereda” de la autonomía de las luchas había intentado erradicar pero que vuelven a surgir […]. En cualquier caso, hay que tener en cuenta que, por diversas razones, entre ellas la intervención de la lucha de clases, el servicio de correos británico es prácticamente la única industria nacional que no ha sido desmantelada (es uno de los principales empleadores británicos, con 160.000 trabajadores, lo que les proporciona un poder evidente). Además, las prácticas de base en el seno de las relaciones laborales, corrientes en la industria en otros tiempos pero eliminadas durante los años ochenta, aquí siguen muy vivas (subrayado nuestro)». No se puede ser más claro.

Actualmente, en muchos conflictos, como el de los estibadores de la Costa Oeste de los Estados Unidos, los empresarios intentan destruir a los sindicatos por las mismas razones por las que destruyen la autonomía obrera cuando ésta se manifiesta, ya que ambas pertenecen a la misma época y la misma lógica de reproducción capitalista. He aquí una cuestión que debería plantear «interrogantes» a los adeptos de la ya secular ideología de la autoorganización obrera. Hoy por hoy, sea en el servicio de correos británico o en los puertos de la Costa Oeste de Estados Unidos, el contenido de la lucha autónoma de los obreros desemboca en la defensa de las grandes centrales sindicales, no por razones de utilización momentánea de los sindicatos por parte de los trabajadores, sino por lo que son: grandes centrales que gestionan la autonomía de la fuerza de trabajo.

El viernes 18 de julio de 2003 por la tarde, en el aeropuerto de Heathrow estalló una huelga salvaje contra la flexibilidad y la anualización del tiempo de trabajo. Tras tres días de huelga por parte de los empleados de inspección de billetes y facturación de pasajeros y equipajes, el trabajo se reanudó con el anuncio de negociaciones entre los sindicatos y la dirección.

Igualmente, en España, durante la huelga de los astilleros de enero-febrero de 2004, lo que estaba en juego era la renovación del convenio colectivo y el aumento de la flexibilidad. El 30 de enero, la manifestación sindical degenera y acaba con barricadas, coches incendiados, y la policía disparando pelotas de goma. El 5 de febrero, en Puerto Real, «una organización de base intenta coordinar la lucha en caso necesario» (Echanges, n° 109, p. 23); el día 12, tras nuevos enfrentamientos, una asamblea general decide realizar una nueva manifestación en la ciudad que provoca nuevos enfrentamientos; el día 13 se reanudan las negociaciones entre los sindicatos y la dirección. Como de costumbre, la huelga salvaje, incluso cuando va acompañada de la formación de órganos autónomos, ya no es más que un sustituto o un acompañamiento de la acción sindical. Se ha vuelto imposible esperar de ella otra cosa, o esperar de ella una dinámica interna que constituya su superación a partir de sí misma en lugar de contra ella.

El 2 de junio de 2003, el sindicato IG Metall lanzó una convocatoria de huelga en el sector metalúrgico de cinco Länder de la antigua RDA. El fracaso de esta huelga se explica en parte por la oposición que surgió entre obreros del «Oeste» y obreros del «Este». El número cada vez mayor de conflictos en diferentes unidades de trabajo, la multiplicación de las subcontratas y de otras recetas para reducir los costes de producción, están fragmentando los lugares de explotación, y tienen como corolario la práctica desaparición de las luchas globales por ramo profesional. Lo que se planteó fue la cuestión de la unidad del proletariado a partir de las luchas reivindicativas.

Por lo demás, se ha vuelto evidente que el proletariado no puede unirse para sí como clase revolucionaria a través del salariado, en el marco de su situación de vendedor de su fuerza de trabajo; todo contribuye cada vez más a demostrarlo y eso es algo que salta a la vista.

En Italia, en diciembre de 2003, el movimiento de huelga de los autoferrotramvieri no logró engendrar ninguna organización formal intercocheras. Aunque la «enfermedad de la huelga salvaje golpeó con mucha fuerza», «el dispositivo sindical antihuelga funcionó a la perfección» (Carta de Mouvement Communiste). El responsable de la coordinadora de conductores de Brescia, afiliada a la coordinadora nacional, se conformó con decir que la huelga ilegal era «la única arma de la que disponían los trabajadores» y que «si los sindicatos han tenido en cuenta la reivindicación de los 106 euros, es que porque están escuchando a las bases», a lo que añadió que «la huelga no va contra los sindicatos». Finalmente, los tranviarios de Milán reanudaron la huelgan bajo el lema: «el sindicato somos nosotros». Los «sindicatos de base» desempeñaron plenamente su papel de exutorio de la cólera de los empleados, es decir, hablando claro, que los empleados aceptaron plenamente que desempeñaran dicho papel.

«Por desgracia, nadie captó ni hizo suyo el significado político ofensivo de la lucha de los autoferrotramvieri, ni tampoco el de la tarea permanente de su organización en los lugares de trabajo, incluida ahí hasta la última cochera ocupada por el movimiento. Los sindicatos de base aprovecharon —sin mucho éxito— la situación para fortalecerse a costa de las grandes centrales sindicales oficiales, pero se negaron a favorecer la organización independiente de la lucha.» (Ibíd.). Nadie captó esto, ni siquiera los mismos trabajadores.

En un destello de lucidez, esta Carta concluye: «Es como si las luchas defensivas ya no funcionaran como escuela de comunismo, como si no generaran su propia superación política.»

«Después de las huelgas de los empleados de limpieza de los ferrocarriles y las huelgas de los transportes públicos, ahora les llega el turno a los metalúrgicos. En todos los casos, se trata de luchas durísimas que se producen al margen y en contra de los sindicatos, de luchas autónomas propiamente dichas (el subrayado es nuestro)» (Échanges, n° 109, p. 19). Esta afirmación es pura y simplemente falsa. En mayo de 2004, la lucha de los obreros de la FIAT en Melfi empezó con huelgas convocadas por los sindicatos por el pago de las horas de paro técnico; los trabajadores desbordaron rápidamente ese marco y añadieron a estas reivindicaciones la reorganización de las horas de trabajo y aumentos de sueldo (ambas reivindicaciones fueron aceptadas por los sindicatos). La huelga estuvo controlada de cabo a rabo por la FIOM (sindicato de la CGIL), comprendido ahí el bloqueo de la fábrica; los obreros delegaron en los sindicatos los intentos de extensión de la lucha a otras fábricas FIAT y la gestión de las negociaciones. Tras alcanzarse un acuerdo («no muy malo», según la estimación de Échanges en su n° 109), la tentativa de los Cobas de impugnarlo fracasó. Los obreros no constituyeron ninguna organización autónoma, cosa que no impidió, tanto en esta lucha como en la de los autoferrotramvieri, que los ideólogos de la autoorganización concluyeran: «con la lucha de los obreros de Melfi, la autonomía obrera ha franqueado una nueva etapa en Italia». La autonomía ni se ha desplegado ni ha franqueado ninguna nueva etapa salvo en la cabeza de los militantes que han permanecido anclados en su sueño de Mirafiori: una fábrica «caída en manos obreras». ¿Qué hubieran hecho con ella?

Con la conclusión del texto de Échanges sobre la huelga de Melfi llegamos al colmo del patetismo. Ésta nos transmite la declaración de Roberto Maroni, ministro italiano de Asuntos sociales, en el curso de una entrevista con el Corriere della Sera. El ministro afirma: «Cuando los sindicatos se comprometen con el gobierno a poner fin a los bloqueos (se refiere a Melfi, pero también a las huelgas de Alitalia y de los transportes públicos, según señala Échanges) y no lo consiguen, es que hay un problema de representatividad. El sistema actual corre el riesgo de ser incapaz de gestionar los conflictos.» Échanges comenta: «El ministro añadió que había llegado el momento de implicar también a las organizaciones autónomas en los acuerdos, ya que éstas tienen mayor presencia entre los trabajadores y son más activas. Las palabras de Maroni son interesantes, no por lo que propone, sino porque demuestran que surgen continuamente formas de lucha autónomas y radicales, y que éstas comienzan a plantear problemas a ciertos ámbitos del gobierno y del Estado.» No cabe duda de que las luchas de los trabajadores plantean problemas, pero el discurso de Maroni es claramente interesante ante todo por lo que propone, que no sólo es interesante, sino también cierto. Maroni reconoce algo que tendría que alegrarle el corazón a todo militante de la autonomía: las formas autónomas de luchas que se dan los obreros son representativas. Se trata de «recuperación», de «manipulación», dirán los ideólogos, pero no. Maroni es mucho más lúcido: puesto que el sindicalismo de las luchas reivindicativas está mediado por organizaciones autónomas, el ministro dice: «reconozcamos a estas organizaciones como interlocutoras».

La capacidad de lucha de la que están dando prueba los trabajadores italianos abre amplias perspectivas para el porvenir, cuando, forzados por la situación y por el curso de las luchas, los trabajadores italianos y los de otros países afronten su propia situación de trabajadores, que la autonomía formaliza actualmente como la forma avanzada del sindicalismo. La autonomía, tal como se manifestó realmente en Melfi, ya se ha mostrado incapaz, por su propia naturaleza, de expresar el rechazo al trabajo tan presente en la lucha de estos trabajadores. La dinámica de este ciclo de luchas se constituye ahora, en el seno de la autoorganización y de la autonomía y contra ellas, como un viraje en el seno de la lucha de clases en general y de la autoorganización en particular, es decir, como un viraje en el interior mismo de la acción como clase.

La autoorganización de las luchas es un momento crucial de la superación revolucionaria de las luchas reivindicativas. La conducción de la lucha de forma intransigente y hasta el fin no puede ser algo que incumba a los sindicatos, sino a la autoorganización y la autonomía obreras. Emprender, a través de la autonomía obrera, la lucha reivindicativa sobre la base de intereses irreconciliables, es efectuar un cambio de nivel en la realidad social del modo de producción capitalista. La lucha reivindicativa no se sitúa ya a nivel de los beneficios y de todos los elementos del proceso de producción que también concurren a su formación, sino a nivel del trabajo como productor de valor y, por tanto, de plusvalor.

La autoorganización formaliza en la lucha reivindicativa el carácter irreconciliable de los intereses de la clase obrera y la clase capitalista, y constituye por ello el momento necesario de la aparición de la pertenencia de clase como restricción exterior y la forma a través de la cual comenzará, contra ella, la comunización de las relaciones entre individuos.

LUCHAS REIVINDICATIVAS/REVOLUCIÓN

Una ruptura

Si la autoorganización se ha vuelto obsoleta como dinámica revolucionaria, es porque la relación entre luchas reivindicativas y revolución se ha vuelto problemática. La autoorganización fue la forma más radical de una relación entre ambas entendida como desbordamiento. Pannekoek nos dijo que tras un largo periodo histórico de conflictos, la clase trabajadora organizada en Consejos se convertiría en el poder dominante de la sociedad, Negri que la historia del capital era la historia de la actividad obrera, y Georges Marchais redactó el Programa Común de la Izquierda. Los tres ya están muertos.

Una lucha revolucionaria parte de conflictos de intereses inmediatos entre proletarios y capitalistas, y del carácter irreconciliable de estos intereses; está, por así decirlo, anclada en estos conflictos, pero si en un momento dado de la lucha reivindicativa, los proletarios, constreñidos y forzados por su conflicto con la clase capitalista, no levan el ancla, su lucha seguirá siendo una lucha reivindicativa, y como tal, irá hacia la victoria o —como por desgracia sucede la mayor parte de las veces— hacia la derrota. Por el contrario, si atacan las relaciones mercantiles, se apoderan de los bienes y medios de producción, integran en la producción comunitaria a aquellos a los que el trabajo asalariado es incapaz de absorber, extienden la gratuidad, quebrantan el marco de la fábrica como origen de los productos, superan la división del trabajo, suprimen toda esfera autónoma (empezando por la economía), disuelven su autonomía para integrar en la relaciones no mercantiles a todos los sin reservas e incluso a una gran parte de las clases medias que su propio movimiento habrá reducido a la miseria, en ese caso lo que superan es su propia existencia pasada y su asociación como clase, así como (sólo es un detalle) sus reivindicaciones económicas. No se puede luchar contra las relaciones mercantiles y la «dictadura del valor» si no es emprendiendo la comunización.

Defender la sacrosanta autonomía del proletariado significa encerrarse en las categorías del modo de producción capitalista y, por tanto, abstenerse de pensar que el contenido de la revolución comunista significa la abolición del proletariado, no en virtud de una simple equivalencia lógica (que sostendría que la abolición de las relaciones capitalistas supone, por definición, la del proletariado), sino en virtud de prácticas revolucionarias precisas. El proletariado suprime el valor, el intercambio y todas las relaciones mercantiles en el transcurso de la guerra que lo enfrenta al capital, y ahí reside su arma decisiva. A través de medidas comunizadoras integra a la mayoría de los sin reservas, a los excluidos, a las clases medias y a las masas campesinas del Tercer Mundo (también en este caso cabría reflexionar sobre el ejemplo de las luchas en Argentina, no para defender el interclasismo, sino al contrario, la abolición de las clases).

En tanto facultad de pasar de la lucha reivindicativa a la lucha revolucionaria, la inoxidable «autonomía de las luchas» es una construcción que no se interesa por el contenido de dicho paso, por lo que sigue siendo una manera formal de abordar la lucha de clases. Si se deja de lado el contenido del paso, es porque la autonomía impide entender ese paso como una ruptura, como un salto cualitativo. El «paso» no es más que la afirmación y la revelación de la verdadera naturaleza de lo que existe: con la revolución, el proletariado tal cual es bajo el capital triunfa y se transforma en polo absoluto de la sociedad. El «salto» no es más que una formalidad. Obviamente, al autoorganizarse el proletariado rompe con su situación anterior, pero si esa ruptura no es más que su «liberación», la reorganización de lo que es, de su actividad, sin el capital, y no la destrucción de su situación anterior, o sea, si permanece autoorganizado, si no supera esta fase, su derrota está asegurada.

Suponer que toda lucha por el salario contiene una revuelta contra el salariado, equivale a suponer que esos dos elementos existen uno dentro del otro, en lugar de suponer que el segundo es la superación contradictoria del primero. Hoy en día, este punto de vista sólo puede desembocar en el democratismo radical. Hace cincuenta años se podían concebir las cosas de esta guisa y desembocar en el poder de los Consejos o en el Socialismo Real. El ciudadanismo, el altermundialismo o, mejor dicho, el democratismo radical, son, sin lugar a dudas, el proyecto de remate de las luchas reivindicativas, y como tales, hoy en día no pueden tener otro. La evolución del tiempo de trabajo tendría que ser portadora de emancipación en el tiempo libre; la renta universal tendría que convertirse en el paso progresivo a una actividad beneficiosa para el individuo y la sociedad, es decir, la abolición de la explotación en el seno del salariado; la reivindicación salarial tendría que convertirse en reparto de la riqueza; la crítica de la mundialización y de la financiarización se antepondrían a la crítica de aquello cuya mundialización representan (el capital), y el liberalismo y la mundialización serían la causa de la explotación. Quienes hayan participado en las luchas recientes o las hayan «seguido», saben muy bien que su lenguaje es éste, y no sólo en los «servicios públicos».

Nadie negará que la lucha revolucionaria surge de la lucha reivindicativa o siquiera que sea producida por ella. La cuestión está en la naturaleza de este paso. El único contenido «profundamente anticapitalista» opuesto a la lógica capitalista que podría tener una lucha consiste en atacar las relaciones capitalistas de producción (lo que significa, para el proletariado, atacar su propia existencia), la reproducción de la explotación y la de las clases. Una lucha reivindicativa que ataque todo esto ya no es una lucha reivindicativa, a no ser que por lucha revolucionaria entendamos la toma del poder por el proletariado, la transformación del proletariado en clase dominante.

La cuestión de la unidad de clase

El proletariado no ha desaparecido ni se ha transformado en pura negatividad, pero la explotación ya no pone en movimiento una figura social homogénea, central y dominante de la clase obrera, capaz de ser consciente de sí misma como sujeto social en el sentido habitual de la expresión, o sea, capaz de ser consciente de sí misma como relación consigo misma, frente al capital.

Integrada en otra totalidad, despojada de su centralidad como principio organizador del proceso laboral de conjunto, la gran fábrica que congregaba a las grandes muchedumbres obreras no ha desaparecido, pero ya no representa el principio organizador de los procesos de producción y de valorización, ahora mucho más difusos; se ha convertido en un elemento más de un principio organizador que se le escapa. En el seno de la contradicción entre proletariado y capital, ya no existe algo sociológicamente dado a priori, como podía serlo el «obrero masa» de la gran fábrica. El carácter difuso, segmentado, fragmentado, corporativo, de los conflictos, es el destino necesario de una contradicción entre las clases que se sitúa a nivel de la reproducción del capital. Ahora bien, precisamente porque no se trata de una suma de elementos yuxtapuestos, sino de una difusión producida a partir de una modalidad histórica de la contradicción entre proletariado y capital, un conflicto particular, por sus características, las condiciones en las que se desarrolla y el período en el que aparece, puede encontrarse en situación de polarizar una conflictividad de conjunto que hasta ese momento se presentaba como irreductiblemente diversa y difusa.

Para unirse, los trabajadores tienen que romper la relación en la cual el capital los «reúne», y uno de los signos más habituales de que sus luchas están superando el marco reivindicativo y de que empiezan a unirse para sí mismos (es decir, que empiezan a atacar su propia condición), es que subvierten y desvían los marcos productivos, urbanos, geográficos y sociales de su «unidad» para el capital, como sucedió en 1982 y 1984 en La Pointe de Givet, en las Ardenas francesas, o más recientemente en Argentina. No se puede desear simultáneamente la unidad del proletariado y la revolución comunista, es decir, esa unidad como requisito previo o condición de la revolución. Ya no habrá unidad sino en la comunización, y sólo ésta, al atacar el intercambio y el salariado, unificará al proletariado, es decir, que no se producirá una unidad del proletariado sino en el curso del movimiento de su abolición misma. Los hagiógrafos de las luchas reivindicativas hablan de «unidad» en el vacío, sin poder precisar en absoluto la forma concreta que reviste, salvo cuando se trata de la unidad formal de la política o de formas organizativas que pretenden encubrir lo que está divido y lo que seguirá estando mientras la clase se mantenga dentro de la lucha reivindicativa. Esa unidad siempre es algo que hay que añadir a las luchas.

Los obreros se forjan como clase revolucionaria revolucionando las relaciones sociales, o sea, todo lo que son en el seno de las categorías del intercambio y del salariado. En las luchas salariales no ven aparecer ni una «fuerza» ni un «proyecto», sino la imposibilidad de unificarse sin atacar su propia existencia como clase en el marco de la división del trabajo y de todas las divisiones del salariado y del intercambio, es decir, sin poner en tela de juicio su existencia como clase, sin emprender una práctica revolucionaria. La única unificación del proletariado es la que realiza aboliéndose a sí mismo, es decir, mediante la unificación de la humanidad. Las medidas comunizadoras que partan de un punto «cualquiera» (seguramente de forma casi simultánea de una multitud de puntos) del planeta capitalista tendrán este efecto de unificación rápida o serán aplastadas.

So capa de autoorganización y de autonomía se puede decir cualquier cosa: que las huelgas «son revolucionarias», que lo son «en potencia», que tienen «algo» de revolucionarias, que son portadoras de la revolución «en germen», etc. Todo esto tiene una sola función: no reconocer el salto, la negación, la ruptura, y evitar criticar las luchas salariales. Eso lleva a defender una concepción gradualista y mecanicista del paso de las luchas reivindicativas a las luchas revolucionarias y a abandonar a la clase como sujeto de su actividad comunista al entrar en conflicto con su situación anterior. Marx, como todos los revolucionarios, veía un salto, una negación, pero a diferencia de hoy, la asociación permanente permitía contemplar la posibilidad de una continuidad organizada entre una fase y otra. En la época actual, los militantes de la autonomía buscan en la defensa del precio de la fuerza de trabajo o en determinadas formas de lucha «algo» revolucionario, «gérmenes» o «potencialidades». En esta espera en torno a la dinámica de las luchas reivindicativas, la lucha tendría que generar por sí misma otra lucha. Ahora bien, las luchas no son más que momentos de la actividad de los proletarios que éstos superan y niegan, no fenómenos que se van encadenando gradualmente y en los que una lucha es portadora de los gérmenes de otra. En pocas palabras, el vínculo entre las «luchas», es el sujeto que se transforma sí mismo y que efectúa ese vínculo de manera negativa. No se trata de un vínculo evolutivo.

En el transcurso de las luchas, el sujeto que en otro tiempo fue el de la autonomía se transforma y abandona sus viejos hábitos, de tal modo que ya no puede reconocer su existencia sino en el seno de la existencia del capital. Representa todo lo contrario de la autonomía y de la autoorganización que, por naturaleza, no tienen otro sentido que la liberación del proletariado, su afirmación, y ¿por qué no? (para los nostálgicos), su dictadura. Se puede hablar de «dinámica» de las luchas, pero eso supone pasar por alto la autotransformación del sujeto, cerrar los ojos ante el hecho de que en esta «dinámica» lo que resulta abolido es el sujeto que se autoorganizaba, y que esta «dinámica» no existe sino en la medida en que el sujeto que se autoorganizaba es abolido. Cuando el proletariado se autoorganiza, no puede hacerlo sino partiendo de lo que es dentro de las categorías del capital. No se trata de condenar normativamente la autoorganización, sino de decir lo que es, y de decir también que la revolución no es una dinámica que aquélla contiene y que no pide otra cosa que eclosionar.

Se produce un cambio cualitativo cuando los obreros se unen contra su condición de asalariados, cuando integran a los sin reservas y desbaratan los mecanismos mercantiles, no cuando una huelga se «transforma» en «oposición» al poder. Este cambio es una ruptura. No se trata de definir la autoorganización o la autonomía, sino de comprender un proceso social, un proceso de ruptura en el seno de la lucha de clases, la autotransformación de un sujeto que suprime aquello que lo define. Quienes hablan sin cesar de «dinámica» de las luchas pasan completamente por alto este momento esencial: el proletariado como sujeto de la revolución que se suprime a sí mismo como sujeto de la autonomía.

Los defensores de la «dinámica de las luchas» pretenden que los obreros, que en sus luchas reivindicativas topan cada vez más con el capital y el Estado en conjunto, se den cuenta de que para satisfacer sus reivindicaciones tienen que elevarse a formas de lucha cualitativamente superiores, tienen que darse medios políticos u organizativos acordes con sus reivindicaciones. Una vez más, volvemos a recaer en la misma distorsión: el fin es el mismo, sólo los medios difieren. Toda práctica apunta a un fin determinado y emplea medios acordes con éste. Si cambia la práctica entonces también cambia el fin. El fin no es exterior a los medios, es su resultante. No nos interesan la violencia, los «medios», o los «consejos» en sí mismos. Lo que preguntamos es: ¿por qué se enfrentan los obreros al Estado? ¿Por «intereses» categoriales o nacionales? ¿Para echar a los inmigrantes? ¿Contra los Estados Unidos? ¿O es porque el Estado se erige en defensor de las relaciones mercantiles, y por tanto, de todas las divisiones categoriales, nacionales y «reivindicativas» frente a su movimiento comunista?

EL ANUNCIO

Entre las luchas reivindicativas y la revolución sólo puede existir una ruptura, un salto cualitativo; pero esta ruptura no es un milagro, ni es tampoco la simple constatación por parte del proletariado de que ante el fracaso de todo lo demás no queda otra solución que la revolución. «La única solución, la revolución» es una inepcia simétrica a la de la dinámica revolucionaria de la lucha reivindicativa. Esta ruptura ha sido producida positivamente por el desarrollo del ciclo de luchas anterior y podría decirse que aún pertenece a él. Esta ruptura es anunciada por la multiplicación de virajes en la lucha de clases entre, por una parte, la puesta en tela de juicio por parte del proletariado de su propia existencia como clase en su contradicción con el capital, y por otra, la reproducción del capital implícita en el hecho mismo de ser una clase. Como puede comprobarse empíricamente, este viraje es la dinámica del ciclo de lucha actual.

Nos referimos a ciertos aspectos del movimiento social argentino que, partiendo de la defensa de la condición proletaria y en el marco de esa defensa, llegaron a ponerla en tela de juicio; a las luchas «suicidas»; a la exterioridad en relación con las luchas y su autoorganización en los aarchs en la Cabilia (Argelia); a las prácticas de la «juventud salvaje» en las fábricas; a los colectivos; a la quiebra de la autonomía; a los parados que reivindican la inesencialización del trabajo; a todas las prácticas que en el seno de las luchas producen la unidad de clase como una unidad exterior y una restricción objetiva; al Movimiento de Acción Directa; a la insatisfacción contra sí misma contenida en la autoorganización realmente existente en la medida en que no se opone al capital sino ratificando la existencia del proletariado como clase del modo de producción capitalista.

Dos aspectos resumen lo esencial del ciclo de luchas actuales:

La desaparición de una identidad obrera confirmada en la reproducción del capital supone el final del movimiento obrero y la quiebra concomitante de la autoorganización y de la autonomía como perspectivas revolucionarias.
Con la reestructuración del modo de producción capitalista, la contradicción entre las clases se traslada al nivel de su reproducción respectiva. En su contradicción con el capital, el proletariado pone en tela de juicio su propia existencia.
Las luchas reivindicativas han adquirido unas características impensables hace treinta años.

En las huelgas de diciembre del 95 en Francia, en la lucha de los sin papeles, de los parados, de los estibadores de Liverpool, de Cellatex, de Alstom, de Lu, de Marks and Spencer, en la revuelta social argentina, en la insurrección argelina, etc., tal o cual característica de la lucha —en el curso de la propia lucha— se presenta como límite, en la medida en que esa característica concreta (trátese del sector público, de la demanda de empleo, de la defensa de las herramientas de trabajo, del rechazo de la deslocalización, de la gestión exclusivamente financiera, de la recuperación de las fábricas, de la autoorganización etc.), contra la que el movimiento topa a menudo en las tensiones y enfrentamientos internos de su retroceso, se remite siempre al hecho de ser una clase y de seguir siéndolo.

No se trata, las más de las veces, de declaraciones estrepitosas o de acciones «radicales», sino de todas las prácticas de «fuga» o de rechazo de su propia condición por parte de los proletarios. En las luchas suicidas a lo Cellatex, en la huelga de Vilvoorde y en tantas otras, lo que sale a la luz es que, separado del capital, el proletariado no es nada, y que ya no puede seguir siendo esa nada (pues el hecho de que exija su unión con el capital no colma el abismo abierto por la lucha, su reconocimiento y rechazo tanto de sí mismo como del abismo). Lo que se convierte en la actividad misma del proletariado es la inesencialización del trabajo, tanto de manera trágica, en forma de luchas desprovistas de perspectivas inmediatas (suicidas) y actividades autodestructivas, como en la reivindicación de esa inesencialización en el caso de las luchas de los parados y precarios del invierno de 1998. Cuando se hace evidente, como en el caso de la huelga de la Fiat en Melfi, o la de los obreros del transporte italianos, que la autonomía y la autoorganización ya no son sino la perspectiva de la nada, es ahí donde se constituye la dinámica del ciclo actual y se prepara la superación de la lucha reivindicativa a partir de la lucha reivindicativa. El proletariado se encuentra frente a su propia definición como clase, que se autonomiza y se vuelve ajena a él. Las prácticas autoorganizativas y su evolución son un claro indicio de ello.

La multiplicación de los colectivos y la recurrencia de las huelgas intermitentes (primavera de 2003 en Francia, la huelga de Correos en Inglaterra), hacen palpable, a través de los intentos de demarcarse de ella, que la unidad de la clase es una objetivación en el seno del capital. No se trata de analizar estos fenómenos a la luz de una perspectiva normativa que no ve ahí sino el carácter inconcluso e incumplido de su propio proyecto de unificación de la clase como requisito previo a su afirmación. En estas luchas, lo que se revela como característica actual, presente, de la lucha de clases, es la exteriorización de la pertenencia de clase. En todos estos movimientos, entender la segmentación como una debilidad que habría de superarse en la unidad equivale a plantearse una cuestión formal y a darle una respuesta igualmente formal. La difusión de estos movimientos, su diversidad, su discontinuidad, constituyen su interés y su dinámica mismos. «Ir más allá» no es superar la segmentación dentro de la unidad, o sea, aportar una respuesta formal tal vez ya caduca, pues no se trata de perder la segmentación ni las diferencias. «Ir más allá» significa, en otras circunstancias, la contradicción entre la diversidad de esas luchas de clases y la unidad de la clase objetivada en el capital. No se trata de decir que cuanto más dividida esté la clase mejor, sino que la generalización de un movimiento de huelga no es sinónimo de su unidad, es decir, de la superación de unas diferencias que se consideran puramente accidentales y formales. Se trata de empezar a comprender lo que está en juego en estos movimientos difusos, segmentados y discontinuos: la creación de una distancia ante la unidad «sustancial» objetivada en el capital. Esta extrema diversidad, conservada e incluso ahondada en el seno de un movimiento más amplio y general en contradicción con el capital y la unidad objetiva que representa, quizá sean una condición de la articulación entre las luchas inmediatas y la comunización. Estos hechos constituyen en la actualidad una determinación ineludible de la lucha de clases. La unidad de la clase ya no puede constituirse sobre las bases del salariado y de la lucha reivindicativa como requisitos previos a su actividad revolucionaria. La unidad del proletariado ya no puede ser más la actividad mediante la cual éste se suprime a sí mismo aboliendo todo aquello que lo divide. Una fracción del proletariado, al superar el carácter reivindicativo de su lucha, tomará medidas comunizadoras y emprenderá la unificación del proletariado, que no se distinguirá de la de la humanidad, es decir, de su creación como conjunto de relaciones que los individuos, en su singularidad, establecerán entre sí.

Situar el paro y la precariedad en el corazón de la relación salarial; definir la situación del clandestino como la situación general de la fuerza de trabajo; plantear —como sucede en el Movimiento de Acción Directa (MAD)— la inmediatez social del individuo como fundamento, ya existente, de la oposición al capital; llevar a cabo luchas suicidas como la de Cellatex y otras de la primavera y el verano del 2000 (Metaleurop —con ciertas reservas—, Adelshoffen, la Société Française Industrielle de Contrôle et d'Equipements, Bertrand Faure, Mossley, Bata, Moulinex, Daewoo-Orion, ACT-ex Bull+); remitir la unidad de la clase a una objetividad constituida dentro del capital, son para cada una de estas luchas contenidos que producen la dinámica de este ciclo dentro de y en el curso de esas luchas. En la mayoría de las luchas actuales aparece la dinámica revolucionaria de este ciclo de luchas, que consiste en producir su propia existencia como clase dentro del capital y, por tanto, en poner esa existencia en tela de juicio (no más relación consigo misma); el límite intrínseco de esta dinámica se encuentra en lo que la define como dinámica: actuar como clase. Teóricamente, nosotros somos los vigías y promotores de este viraje, que dentro de la lucha del proletariado supone su propia puesta en tela de juicio, y en la práctica también somos sus actores cuando estamos directamente implicados. Existimos dentro de esta ruptura.

Desarrollemos algunos de estos aspectos en relación con algunas luchas recientes.

Los colectivos

La marejada de fondo que constituye, en toda lucha de cierta importancia y duración, la creación de «colectivos» —que ya no implican autoorganización o autonomía— es un indicio de la desaparición de la identidad obrera. Estos organismos no suponen, como en el caso de la autonomía, una mejor organización/existencia de clase que las formas representativas institucionalizadas, a las que abandonan aquello que les pertenece (dejar a los sindicatos lo que es de los sindicatos), sino la creación de una distancia con respecto a esas formas que tiene como contenido una distancia de la clase con respecto a sí misma. Una distancia establecida frente a una unidad de clase que existe como algo objetivo dentro de la reproducción del capital. Los nostálgicos del Gran Partido y de la unidad de los grandes batallones de la clase obrera se engañan al considerar que esta segmentación sea algo pasivamente sufrido, pues lo más frecuente es que se trate de una segmentación deseada, construida y reivindicada. La naturaleza de la segmentación y de los colectivos constituye, en el interior de la lucha de clases, una actividad de enajenación del proletariado con respecto de su propia definición como clase. ¿Cómo podrá construirse, en el seno de un movimiento general de lucha de clases, una «unidad» que no lo sea, sino una interactividad? No sabemos nada al respecto… pero la lucha de clases nos ha dado con frecuencia prueba de una inventiva infinita. Hemos de reconocer como algo extremadamente positivo que las características del nuevo ciclo de luchas sólo nos sean reveladas a medida que se desarrolla la lucha cotidiana y ordinaria.

Actividades que producen la objetivación de la existencia y la unidad de clase

La unidad de clase, incluso bajo la forma de la huelga general, en la visión «clásica» que se tiene del asunto, ha ingresado en la era de la sospecha. Cuando los huelguistas de la primavera de 2003 llamaron a la huelga general en Francia, no exigieron a los sindicatos lo que ellos mismos no estaban haciendo pero habrían querido hacer, sino que exigieron a los sindicatos algo distinto de que lo que ellos estaban haciendo. He aquí un movimiento «de base», «espontáneo», «autoorganizado» que no veía otra salida que exigirle una huelga general a unos sindicatos de los que se desmarca cotidianamente. No se trata necesariamente de una contradicción (al fin y al cabo, así transcurrieron las cosas), pero cuesta presentar el llamamiento a los sindicatos para que declararan una huelga general como la simple prolongación del movimiento huelguístico. Curiosamente, el movimiento no llama a la huelga general cuando va viento en popa, sino cuando está en declive, lo que arroja una extraña luz sobre la naturaleza de la huelga general. Lo que domina en ese momento a los huelguistas es su propia acción, lo que no era el caso quince días antes, cuando esta acción era el continuo fluir del tiempo de la actividad y de la oposición a través de la cual la clase existe en sí misma como distinción respecto de su unidad y su existencia objetivadas en la reproducción del capital. La unidad de clase sigue existiendo, desde luego, pues es una unidad objetiva en el seno de la reproducción del capital; hacer un llamamiento a los sindicatos era simplemente reconocer esta unidad en el nivel donde existe, como una hipóstasis.

«Juventud salvaje»

En este caso se trata del rechazo por parte de fracciones importantes de jóvenes obreros de todo el orden del sistema productivo capitalista. Este rechazo no da pie más pie a las seducciones o sanciones de la integración de lo que da pie a construcciones ideológicas del tipo de la autogestión. Semejante situación no tiene nada que ver con lo que pudo describirse a lo largo de los años setenta en Estados Unidos o en Europa.

Las «víctimas colaterales» de la «juventud salvaje» son las fábulas sobre esa cooperación que vincula a los trabajadores entre sí (para sí mismos) como peldaño que conduce a la autorganización y a la autonomía revolucionarias.

Argentina: una lucha de clase contra la autonomía

Cabe interrogarse sobre la «autogestión de la miseria» pero entonces pasamos por alto la cuestión principal, que es la naturaleza misma de la autogestión, la autoorganización y la autonomía. Igual de fácil es decir que no hay autogestión posible dentro del sistema capitalista, pero una autogestión generalizada que hubiera abolido el Estado y la dominación capitalista no sería más que la gestión de las empresas (de todas las empresas) y de sus nexos, sus intercambios. Haría renacer indefectiblemente el valor y el Estado. La gran época de las luchas autónomas en Argentina —al final de los años sesenta y comienzo de los setenta— se acabó no sólo porque en la práctica ya no se dan luchas semejantes, sino en virtud de las transformaciones del propio modo de explotación, de la composición de la clase obrera y de las modalidades de su reproducción. El «Rodrigazo» de 1975 y sus asambleas sectoriales fue el canto del cisne de ese período y de esa época de la lucha de clases. Ya durante aquel período, la autonomía no desembocaba más que en la formulación de programas de nacionalización y planificación o en la renovación sindical.

En la actualidad, para todos los militantes de la autonomía, lo que importa es negar la autonomía realmente existente porque están encerrados en una contradicción insuperable: por un lado, la autonomía y la autoorganización son la ruta de la revolución en marcha o en potencia; por otro, las expresiones actuales de la autonomía y la autoorganización suponen, de forma masiva y recurrente, la confirmación de la clase como clase del modo de producción capitalista. «Hemos hecho el trabajo de los partidos políticos, de las ONG, del gobierno», declaran los movimientos autónomos argentinos. La única perspectiva, la única dinámica que emerge es la de todo lo que va en contra de esa autonomía. Se puede ser un purista de la autonomía o de la autoorganización, pero eso no impedirá que la autoorganización sea la autogestión de las empresas por los propios trabajadores y la gestión de los planes trabajar (en el seno de estos movimientos pueden regularse ahora hasta las horas de trabajo) por los propios movimientos piqueteros. Desde que las organizaciones piqueteras obtuvieron el derecho de gestionar ellas mismas las prestaciones (planes trabajar), la asignación de éstos se ha convertido en un verdadero desafío, no sólo en relación con los gobernantes, sino también en el seno del propio movimiento.

No se puede recurrir al argumento de la distribución de los Planes trabajar para afirmar que los movimientos piqueteros ya no son autónomos ni autoorganizados. Es importante subrayar el carácter autónomo y autoorganizado de esos movimientos, no para mostrar que aquello en lo que se han convertido es una degeneración o una institucionalización producida por una esclerosis de la autoorganización y de la autonomía, sino más bien porque son la expresión más clara, la verdad —ni buena, ni mala— de lo que son en la actualidad: un rechazo de lo que somos en la sociedad actual que no significa otra cosa que nuestra «liberación».

Los pocos casos de ocupación de empresas con reanudación de la producción que han apelado a la intervención del Estado representan el verdadero contenido actual de la autonomía (la autonomía de la clase obrera es el trabajo y el valor). Cabe muy bien imaginar que se recuperaran todas las fábricas, pero eso no cambiaría nada. Mientras los trabajadores se autoorganicen como trabajadores (y la autoorganización, por definición, no puede ser otra cosa) las «fábricas recuperadas» serán fábricas capitalistas, las dirija quien las dirija. La esencia de lo sucedido en Argentina es que todas las formas de autoorganización, de autonomía, de recuperación, de asambleas, toparon enseguida con sus límites bajo la forma de una oposición y de una contradicción interna que las trataba como una perpetuación de la sociedad capitalista. Abolir el capital significa, por eso mismo, negarse como trabajador, no autoorganizarse como tal; supone un movimiento de abolición de las empresas, de las fábricas, del producto, del intercambio (bajo la forma que sea). Como clase y como sujeto de la revolución, el proletariado se niega a sí mismo aboliendo el capital. El proceso revolucionario es el proceso de abolición de todo lo autoorganizable. La autoorganización es el primer acto de la revolución, los siguientes van contra ella.

El contenido de esta puesta en tela de juicio de la autoorganización en el seno de sí misma se articuló de forma consciente en las luchas de Argentina en torno a dos temáticas: la subjetividad y el trabajo.

En el núcleo mismo de los proyectos productivos autoorganizados, la puesta en primer plano de la subjetividad y la interindividualidad se opone a la particularización de una actividad como el trabajo, que supone la coincidencia del carácter social e individual de la actividad humana al margen de sí misma, y se opone a la autonomización de las condiciones de la producción como economía. El modo de producción capitalista es un modo de producción no porque necesite pasar por la producción material como tal, sino porque estas relaciones sociales no se pueden reproducir más que sometiéndose a una norma, a un principio que sólo puede objetivamente: el valor. El comunismo no es un modo de producción porque las actividades no se remiten a una norma común exterior que sólo puede existir objetivándose como producción. En el comunismo las relaciones entre individuos son relaciones cuya singularidad constituye la realidad de esas relaciones. Tan absurdo sería ver en el comunismo una modalidad de organización de la producción —lo que indefectiblemente nos conduciría a una igualación contable de las actividades forzosamente abstracta— como concebirlo como una pura relación intersubjetiva en la que la producción no sería sino algo accesorio. En el comunismo cada actividad es un fin en sí mismo porque no existe norma, ni principio de igualación ni situación que haya que reproducir.

Lo que más nos importa en las luchas sociales de Argentina es lo que los apologistas de la autoorganización han despreciado, no, como pretenden ellos, porque la autonomía se ha perdido en la institucionalización y en la esclerosis de las actividades productivas, «facilitando la reproducción de una economía en crisis» (Échanges), sino porque es ahí donde realmente reside la autonomía y es puesta en tela de juicio. La revolución como comunización se vuelve creíble en el seno de las modalidades de actividad productiva efectiva porque entra en contradicción con la autoorganización por la forma en que se ponen en marcha esas actividades productivas y en los conflictos en los que la propia autoorganización se convierte en blanco de las críticas.

En las actividades productivas que se desarrollaron durante las luchas sociales de Argentina sucedió algo a primera vista desconcertante: la autonomía apareció como lo que es: la gestión y reproducción por parte de la clase obrera de su situación dentro del capital. Los defensores de la autonomía «revolucionaria» dirán que eso se debe a que la autonomía no triunfó, cuando este fue su verdadero triunfo. Pero en el mismo momento en que, dentro de las actividades productivas, la autonomía se presenta como lo que es, todo lo que constituye las bases de la autonomía y de la autoorganización queda desbaratado: el proletariado ya no puede encontrar en sí mismo la capacidad de crear otras relaciones intersubjetivas (no hablamos, deliberadamente, de relaciones sociales) sin derrocar y negar todo lo que es en esta sociedad, es decir, sin entrar en contradicción con el contenido de su autonomía. Por el modo en que se han puesto en práctica esas actividades productivas, en las modalidades efectivas de su realización, lo que se tambalea efectivamente son las determinaciones del proletariado como clase de esta sociedad: propiedad, intercambio, división del trabajo, y sobre todo, el trabajo mismo.

«Si creamos cantinas sólo para que los compañeros coman, entonces somos unos boludos. Si uno cree que producir verduras en una finca quiere decir simplemente cosechar para que los compañeros coman, entonces somos más boludos todavía… Si no sabemos, a partir de la finca y de todo lo que nos arroja el Estado, ser los constructores de nuevas relaciones sociales, de nuevos valores, de una nueva subjetividad, entonces no apostemos por otro 19/20 .» (un militante del MTD Allen —Sur de Argentina—, Macache, p. 27). Queremos «generar una nueva subjetividad, nuevos valores» (ibíd.). Por lo demás, en una entrevista con un activista del MTD Solano, emerge que la meta de todas estas actividades no es sólo sobrevivir, sino que se da como razón de ser «desarrollar nuevas formas de vida en común»: división del trabajo; rotación de tareas; jerarquía; relaciones hombres-mujeres; formas de aprendizaje; relaciones privado/público; trabajo simple-trabajo cualificado; superar las relaciones de intercambio, etc.… Punto capital es, por ejemplo, en MTD Solano, el rechazo (en toda la medida de lo posible) a tomar decisiones mediante el voto: «… la idea es encontrar una respuesta en la que cada cual se reconozca». Lo que aquí se trata de una manera nueva es la cuestión del «nosotros» y del «yo». Sin llegar al extremo de hablar de inmediatez social del individuo, lo que pone de relieve este planteamiento es, más allá de toda relación mística entre lo uno y lo general, la ausencia de separación entre los dos, que conservan así su diversidad. «Cuando se vota, da la impresión de que unos ganan y otros pierden, como si hubiera dos grupos.» También es aquí donde hay que insistir una vez más en la importancia de la organización territorial que pone en tela de juicio la autoorganización como encierro en una situación particular (la unidad territorial no es socialmente homogénea). La fábrica recuperada ya no está sola, sino incluida dentro de un conjunto. Producción y distribución plantean una serie de problemas que no pueden solucionarse en el marco de las categorías que definen estrictamente la condición proletaria y su reproducción. Un activista de MTD Allen (Macache) comenta cómo en una fábrica recuperada se plantea el problema del excedente, de la producción sobrante, de su distribución, de cómo para las obreras de Bruckman recuperar la fábrica y ponerla en marcha de nuevo se inscribe en unas relaciones de fuerza que incluye su vinculación con los movimientos de parados piqueteros. En ese punto alguien podría decir que lo que falta es la «generalización de la autoorganización» o de la autonomía. Pero en tal caso no se entendería que lo que se denomina «generalización» no es tal, es una destrucción de la clase en tanto sujeto que se autoorganiza. Esta generalización es una autosuperación del sujeto que encontraba en su situación la capacidad de autoorganizarse. No entender esta «dinámica» como ruptura es limitarse a una visión puramente formal del movimiento, porque lo que se nos escapa es su contenido; es confundir el hecho de hacerse cargo de sus condiciones de supervivencia con la abolición de la situación que ha obligado a hacerse cargo de ellas. Si el proletariado se suprime a sí mismo, no se autoorganiza. Llamar al conjunto del movimiento autoorganización es permanecer ciego ante su contenido.

Se autoorganizan como parados de Mosconi, obreras de Bruckman, vecinos de los suburbios…, pero haciendo eso al autoorganizarse, se enfrentan inmediatamente a lo que son y que, en el curso de la lucha, se convierte en aquello que hay que superar. En los conflictos entre sectores autoorganizados, la autoorganización aparece como límite general a superar. Lo que apunta en esos conflictos es que, al defender su condición actual, los trabajadores permanecen dentro de las categorías del modo de producción capitalista que los definen. La unificación es imposible sin que sea precisamente la abolición de la autoorganización, sin que el parado, el obrero de Zanon o el okupa no puedan ya ser parado, obrero de Zanon u okupa. O bien hay unificación, y entonces se suprime aquello que era autoorganizable, o bien hay autoorganización, y entonces la unificación es un sueño que se pierde en los conflictos implícitos en la diversidad de situaciones (cfr., las oposiciones entre los «comités de vecinos» de El Alto y las asociaciones de Santa Cruz en Bolivia en torno a la nacionalización del gas y de los hidrocarburos).

En Argentina la autoorganización no se superó porque ésta no se puede superar más que en la fase terminal de una insurrección comunizadora. Las luchas sociales en Argentina anunciaron esa superación. Cuando se hace evidente que la autoorganización ya no puede tener la autonomía como contenido y proyecto realizable o ya en curso de realización, ésta se transforma en un encierro en la propia situación, que es precisamente lo que la lucha contra el capital constriñe a superar. La lucha de clase permanece encerrada en la simple expresión de la situación de clase. En el curso de la defensa encarnizada de sus intereses más inmediatos, la existencia de clase se convierte en una restricción exteriorizada en el capital. En la defensa de sus intereses inmediatos, el proletariado se ve llevado a abolirse porque su actividad en la «fábrica recuperada» ya no puede ser encerrada en la «fábrica recuperada», ni en la yuxtaposición, coordinación o unidad de las «fábrica recuperadas» o de todo lo autoorganizable (véase en Macache el testimonio de una obrera de Bruckman).

Esto significa simplemente que el proletariado no puede luchar contra el capital sin poner en tela de juicio todas las determinaciones que definen su implicación con él. Es lo que se vio apuntar en la contradicción interna de los proyectos productivos (autoorganización de la clase cuyas modalidades efectivas descomponen todas las determinaciones que la definen) y en los conflictos entre estructuras autoorganizadas.

Argelia: «Cuando me hablan de los Aarouchs, tengo la impresión de que me hablan de algo ajeno.»

La explosión social insurreccional que comenzó en la Cabilia en la primavera de 2001 también ilustra la insatisfacción que suscita la autoorganización apenas ha sido esbozada, no por insuficiencias coyunturales de la misma sino por su propia naturaleza, que consiste en confirmar la existencia del proletariado, definido como una clase dentro de las categorías del modo de producción capitalista. Esta insatisfacción que el movimiento insurreccional manifiesta ante las formas autoorganizativas de las que se dota él mismo en un momento dado se concentra en dos aspectos: la extensión del movimiento y la cuestión de las reivindicaciones. En esta insatisfacción y los dos aspectos en los que se concentra, lo que existe es el viraje en la lucha de clases entre la existencia de la clase tal como se formaliza en la autoorganización, y la puesta en tela de juicio de esa existencia acarreada por la continuidad y el ahondamiento de su contradicción con el capital. En esta continuación y ahondamiento, y en ausencia de medidas comunizadoras, la insurrección cabila se vio condenada a una huída hacia delante desprovista de objetivos formalizables y/o a volver a su existencia autorreconocida, es decir, reconocida por y para el capital, o sea, finalmente, a la negociación a través de sus formas autoorganizadas. Al carecer los disturbios de ninguna perspectiva reivindicativa, o de una generalidad tal (el fin de la hogra ) que no pudieran tenerla, a veces las revueltas se convertían en enfrentamientos (más o menos manipulados por la policía durante las grandes manifestaciones de junio de 2001 en Argel) entre bandos rivales de manifestantes saqueadores, lo que da fe de la imposibilidad de unificar a la clase al margen de su actividad revolucionaria de abolición de sí misma.

Los aarchs desempeñaron dos papeles contradictorios: por un lado, el de expresión del movimiento en tanto forma de organización de éste, espacio de debate y de toma de la palabra, y por otro, el de una nueva representación política emergente: fueron los suplentes de los partidos, una nueva representación política que encuadró la revuelta. Finalmente, los aarchs revelaron muy rápidamente que no eran un espacio de expresión amplia para la población, sino una palestra para políticos viejos y nuevos.

A partir del momento en que el movimiento insurreccional argelino de la Cabilia, a pesar de o gracias a su gran violencia, se limitó a atacar todas las instituciones del Estado, pero dejando intactas, —porque ese no era su objetivo y porque carecía de medios suficientes para atacarlas— todas las relaciones de producción, intercambio y distribución (pese a algunas modificaciones marginales fruto de la solidaridad o de la ayuda mutua, como sucede en todos los períodos de perturbación del marco social establecido), esta insurrección tuvo que autoorganizarse. Así pues, su autoorganización no era sino el signo de que no estaba alterando las relaciones sociales imperantes, que apuntaba sólo a un objetivo limitado: liberar a la sociedad de un Estado «corrupto» y «corruptor» (de un Estado no-libre) según los términos que aparecieron en el comienzo mismo de la insurrección. Las formas de organización que se dio, es decir, las formas de autoorganización, surgieron de su limitación misma.

La continuación, después de junio de 2001, de los ataques contra las instituciones del Estado y la necesidad de la violencia en estos enfrentamientos fueron, en idéntica medida, ataques contra el Estado argelino y un rechazo al movimiento autoorganizado de los aarchs. Es la propia existencia como clase lo que la autoorganización formaliza como una existencia dentro de y para el capital, y que el proletariado en lucha ya no reconoce como algo propio. Su existencia como clase se autonomiza de él. Parodiando a Marx en Las luchas de clases en Francia, podríamos decir: fue sólo haciendo surgir de su propio movimiento una autoorganización compacta, poderosa, creándose un adversario y combatiéndolo, que el partido de la subversión pudo, en fin, llegar a convertirse en un partido verdaderamente revolucionario.

Esto no sucede sin organización, igual que cuando los proletarios asumen diversas necesidades impuestas por el desarrollo de la lucha: cortar carreteras, sitiar cuarteles de «gendarmería», obligar a los tenderos a no abastecer a las fuerzas de seguridad, reapropiarse directamente de las mercancías necesarias mediante el pillaje o el control de determinados stocks … Esta organización nunca es la formalización de lo que se es en la sociedad actual como base o punto de anclaje de la nueva sociedad a construir como emancipación de lo que se es, es decir, no es autorganización. No formaliza la existencia de ningún sujeto preexistente; la condición proletaria ya no es algo a organizar, a defender y a emancipar, sino algo a abolir.

No deja de ser interesante poner de relieve las relaciones simultáneamente conflictivas e integradoras que se crearon entre parados, proletarios empleados, pequeños comerciantes y empleados de las administraciones —que en Argelia están más o menos inmersos en relaciones de clientelismo político—, algo que ninguna unidad reivindicativa podría realizar jamás. La lucha de los proletarios argelinos de la Cabilia se impone mediante la acción directa, se afirma al margen de todo territorio particular (lugar de trabajo, barrio,…), niega las divisiones fomentadas por la clase capitalista, tiende a generalizarse, es portadora de un proyecto global de rechazo del Estado, y se despliega frente a todas las iniciativas legalistas, pacifistas y electorales.

Estos proletarios sólo reivindican de forma muy excepcional «las determinaciones clasistas» de sus actividades. Es cierto que eso representan un cambio con respecto al ciclo de lucha anterior, cuando cualquier acción, por reformista que fuera, era reivindicada alto y claro como la movilización de la clase obrera mundial, orgullosa de sí misma y de su boina. Que la acción de los proletarios no sea reivindicada ya como acción de clase no impide que lo sea. Acción de clase lo es en grado paroxístico, porque es la puesta en tela de juicio por parte del mismo proletariado de su existencia como clase objetivada frente a él como determinación de la reproducción del capital, eso que toda autoorganización confirma. Nada tiene de extraño que los proletarios ya no afirmen que actúan como clase, ya que son sus adversarios quienes erigen la existencia del proletariado como clase en contenido dominante de la contrarrevolución que se contrapone a ellos.

El Movimiento de Acción Directa (Mad)

Puesto que erige la negación de las clases en forma de vida y, por ello, en requisito previo a la lucha de clase, el Mad desemboca en una serie de callejones sin salida: el capital como dominación y símbolo, el problema insoluble de su propia extensión, su referencia a las necesidades, al placer, a los deseos, a un yo humano «auténtico». Este callejón sin salida se manifiesta en el curso de los disturbios, en su autolimitación (en el carácter autorreferencial de éstos) y en su «recuperación» por objetivos que no son los suyos, como ocurrió en Quebec y en Praga, y también en Génova. Sin embargo, la exclusión recíproca entre ser proletario y producir otras relaciones sociales que constituye al Mad, se ha convertido ahora, en este ciclo de lucha, en la forma necesaria de plantear la dinámica del ciclo de lucha actual. Incluso si las relaciones inmediatas entre individuos en su singularidad acaban existiendo sólo como alternativa, el Mad anuncia el contenido de la revolución comunista: la puesta en tela de juicio por parte del proletariado, contra el capital, de su existencia como clase.

Las luchas «suicidas»: caducidad de la autonomía

Ya hemos evocado la lucha de Cellatex y las que siguieron. Entre enero de 2002 y diciembre de 2003, la huelga de ACT en Angers, Francia (sistemas informáticos, filial de Bull) fue dirigida de manera yuxtapuesta por una intersindical y un comité de lucha «muy abierto, más bien emanación de las bases» (Échanges n° 104). Se volvieron a poner momentáneamente en marcha tres líneas de fabricación, lo que no impidió luego que los productos acabados fueran quemados. Es interesante repasar la cronología de los acontecimientos. La fábrica fue ocupada tras el anuncio, el 20 de diciembre, de la liquidación definitiva de ACT (tras numerosas maniobras y debates dilatorios). La fábrica fue ocupada, pero nadie sabía con qué fin. El 10 de enero el comité de huelga aceptó iniciar la fabricación de tarjetas electrónicas destinadas a un fabricante italiano. El 22 de enero se entregaron doscientas tarjetas electrónicas, el 23 los ocupantes quemaron tarjetas sacadas del almacén, y el 24 los ocupantes fueron desalojados sin miramientos.

Si Cellatex pudo crear escuela no sólo en la forma (la violencia tiene una larga historia en la lucha de clases) sino también en el fondo, es porque la dinámica que subyace a este tipo de luchas reside en que el proletariado no es nada en sí mismo, pero es una nada repleta de relaciones sociales, lo que hace que, frente al capital, no tenga otra perspectiva que su propia desaparición.

En el mismo período, cuando prendieron fuego a una nave de la fábrica, los asalariados despedidos de Moulinex se inscribieron también en la dinámica de este nuevo ciclo de luchas que convierte la propia existencia del proletariado como clase en el límite de su acción de clase

COMUNIZACIÓN

El límite extremo de la lucha reivindicativa puede ser definido como aquel en que la contradicción entre proletariado y capital se tensa hasta tal punto que la definición de clase se convierte en una restricción exterior, en una exterioridad que está ahí simplemente porque el capital está ahí. La pertenencia de clase es exteriorizada como restricción. Ese es el momento del salto cualitativo en la lucha de clases. Es aquí donde se produce una superación y no un desbordamiento. Es aquí donde se puede pasar de un cambio en el sistema a un cambio de sistema.

El punto final de la implicación recíproca entre las clases es aquel en el que el proletariado se apodera de los medios de producción. Se apodera de ellos pero no puede apropiárselos. La apropiación por parte del proletariado no puede ser tal, porque no puede llevarse a cabo sino mediante su propia abolición como clase, a través de una unión universal de la producción en la que el proletariado se despoje de todo lo que aún le quede de su situación social anterior. En el comunismo ya no hay lugar para la apropiación, puesto que la noción misma de «producto» es abolida. Por supuesto, sigue habiendo objetos (también han de revisarse las nociones de objetividad y de subjetividad) que sirven para producir, otros que son directamente consumidos, y otros que se destinan a ambas usos. Pero hablar de productos y plantearse la cuestión de su circulación, su reparto o su «cesión» —es decir, concebir un momento de la apropiación— presupone lugares de ruptura, de «coagulación» de la actividad humana: el mercado en las sociedades mercantiles, el «tomar del montón » en algunas visiones del comunismo. El producto no es una cosa sencilla. Hablar de producto es suponer que un resultado de la actividad humana se presenta como acabado frente a otro resultado o entre otros resultados. No hay que partir del producto sino de la actividad.

En el comunismo, la actividad humana es infinita porque es indivisible. Tiene resultados concretos o abstractos, pero esos resultados nunca son «productos» en torno a los que se plantearía algún problema de apropiación o de cesión bajo modalidad alguna. Esta actividad humana infinita sintetiza lo que cabe decir del comunismo. Si podemos hablar de actividad humana infinita bajo el comunismo, es porque el modo de producción capitalista nos muestra ya —aunque sea de manera contradictoria, y no como «lado bueno»— la actividad humana como flujo social global continuo y al general intellect o «trabajador colectivo» como fuerza dominante de la producción. El carácter social de la producción no prefigura nada: lo único que hace es volver contradictoria la base del valor.

La necesidad ante la que se encuentra la revolución comunista no consiste en modificar la distribución entre salarios y beneficios, sino en abolir la condición de capital de los medios de producción acumulados. Una lucha reivindicativa puede pasar del nivel del conflicto al de la contradicción. El nivel del conflicto es el de la distribución entre salarios y beneficios; aquí, incluso cuando los intereses son irreconciliables, seguimos dentro de un juego de suma cero indefinidamente reproductible en la medida en que, mientras se permanezca a este nivel, el péndulo continuará yendo de un lado a otro, ya que el propio mecanismo no ha sido atacado. El nivel de la contradicción es el del plusvalor y del trabajo productivo, pero no se puede reivindicar ser un poco menos trabajador productivo de plusvalor de otra for,a que reivindicando algo más de salario o unas horas de trabajo menos, lo que nos remite de nuevo a la distribución y al conflicto. La insuficiencia del plusvalor en relación con el capital acumulado es el meollo de la crisis de la explotación; si la cuestión del trabajo productivo de plusvalor no fuera el meollo de la contradicción entre proletariado y capital, si no existiera más que un problema de distribución y si todos los conflictos en torno al salario no constituyeran la existencia de esta contradicción, entonces la revolución seguiría siendo un mero deseo piadoso. La lucha reivindicativa no se supera atacando el trabajo productivo de plusvalor (pues siempre regresaríamos a un problema de distribución), sino atacando los medios de producción en tanto capital. Una lucha autoorganizada puede llevarnos al borde de la ruptura, pero ésta última presupone la superación de la primera.

El ataque contra la naturaleza capitalista de los medios de producción supone su abolición como valor que absorbe trabajo para valorizarse a sí mismo, la extensión de la gratuidad, la destrucción —que puede ser física— de ciertos medios de producción, su abolición en tanto fábrica en la que el producto se define como producto, es decir, los marcos del intercambio y del comercio, la transformación de las relaciones entre sectores de la producción que materializan la explotación y su tasa, así como su definición y su inserción en relaciones intersubjetivas individuales, la abolición de la división del trabajo tal como está inscrita en el paisaje urbano, en la configuración material de los edificios, en la separación entre campo y ciudad, en la existencia de algo llamado fábrica o lugar de producción. «Las relaciones entre individuos se han coagulado en las cosas, porque el valor de cambio es de naturaleza material» (Marx, Grundrisse…, Anthropos, t. 1, p. 97). La abolición del valor es una transformación concreta del paisaje en el que vivimos, es una nueva geografía. Abolir las relaciones sociales es una cuestión muy material.

La producción de nuevas relaciones entre los individuos consiste, pues, en las medidas comunistas tomadas como necesidad de la lucha. La abolición del intercambio y del valor, de la división del trabajo y de la propiedad, no son otra cosa que el arte de la guerra de clases, ni más ni menos que cuando Napoléon libró su guerra en Alemania introduciendo su código civil. Las relaciones sociales anteriores se desmoronan a través de esta actividad social en la que no se puede distinguir entre las actividades de huelguistas e insurrectos y la creación de otras relaciones entre los individuos, de relaciones nuevas en las que las que los individuos no consideran lo que es sino como momento de un flujo ininterrumpido de producción de la vida humana.

La destrucción del intercambio son trabajadores atacando los bancos donde están sus cuentas y las de otros trabajadores, obligándose así a arreglárselas sin ellas, trabajadores comunicándose y comunicando a la comunidad sus «productos» directamente y sin mercado, los sin techo ocupando viviendas, «obligando» así a los obreros de la construcción a producir gratis, los obreros de la construcción tomando libremente de los almacenes, obligando a toda la clase a organizarse para buscar alimentos en los sectores a colectivizar, etc. Seamos claros. No hay ninguna medida que, considerada aisladamente y en sí misma, sea el «comunismo». Distribuir bienes, hacer circular directamente medios de producción y materias primas, emplear la violencia contra el Estado establecido, son acciones que en determinadas circunstancias pueden ser emprendidas por fracciones del capital. Lo que es comunista no es la «violencia» en sí misma, ni la «distribución» de la mierda que nos lega la sociedad de clases, ni tampoco la «colectivización» de la maquinaria extractora de plusvalor: es la naturaleza del movimiento que vincula entre sí esas acciones, que les subyace y que las convierte en momentos de un proceso que no puede sino comunizar cada vez más o ser aplastado.

Las actividades militares y sociales son inseparables, simultáneas y se compenetran. No se puede llevar a cabo una revolución sin tomar medidas comunistas, sin disolver el trabajo asalariado, comunizar la alimentación, la vestimenta y la vivienda, sin procurarse todas las armas (destructivas, pero también telecomunicaciones, los víveres, etc.…) e integrar a los sin reservas (incluyendo a aquellos a los que nosotros mismos habremos reducido a tal estado), a los parados, a los desocupados, a los campesinos arruinados, a los estudiantes marginados y desarraigados. Hablar de una revolución hecha por una «categoría» que representa al 20% de la población y que estuviera haciendo «huelgas» para exigir al Estado que satisfaga sus «intereses» sería una broma.

A partir del momento en que se empieza a consumir gratis, hay que reproducir lo que se consume; para ello hacen falta materias primas, piezas de recambio, víveres (evitamos el término poco satisfactorio de «valor de uso», que es una noción intrínseca a la existencia de la mercancía). Hay que apoderarse, pues, de los medios de transporte, de las telecomunicaciones y entrar en contacto con otros sectores, y para hacer esto hay que enfrentarse a bandas armadas enemigas. El enfrentamiento con el Estado plantea inmediatamente la cuestión del armamento, que no puede resolverse sino poniendo en pie una red de distribución para sostener combates en una multiplicidad de puntos casi infinita (la constitución de un frente o de zonas de combate delimitadas supone la muerte de la revolución). A partir del momento en que los proletarios deshacen las leyes mercantiles, ya no pueden detenerse (y menos cuando al capital se le priva así de bienes esenciales y contraataca). Cada ahondamiento social, cada extensión, dotan a las nuevas relaciones de carne y sangre, y permite integrar a cada vez más no proletarios en la clase comunizadora en vías de constituirse y disolverse a la vez, reorganizar las fuerzas productivas, abolir cada vez más toda competencia y división entre proletarios, adquirir una posición militar, y hacer de ello el contenido y el desarrollo de su enfrentamiento armado contra aquellos a los que la clase capitalista todavía puede movilizar, integrar y reproducir dentro de sus relaciones sociales.

La clase capitalista y sus innumerables capas o estratos periféricos reposan sobre una enrevesada maraña de papeleo y de burocracia sumamente vulnerable, de vínculos financieros, créditos y obligaciones. Sin esos vínculos, su cohesión interna se desmorona. Esta clase no es una comunidad basada en una asociación material, sino un conglomerado de competidores unidos por el intercambio. El intercambio es la comunidad abstracta (el dinero). De ahí que todas la medidas comunizadoras tendrán que ser iniciativas enérgicas destinadas a desmantelar los vínculos que unen a nuestros enemigos y a sus soportes materiales, destruyéndolos con rapidez y sin vuelta atrás posible. La comunización no significa organizar apaciblemente la gratuidad y un modo de vida agradable entre proletarios. La dictadura del movimiento social de comunización es un proceso de integración de la humanidad en el proletariado en vías de desaparición. La delimitación estricta del proletariado respecto a los demás estratos y su lucha contra toda producción mercantil, es al mismo tiempo un proceso que obliga a las capas de la pequeña burguesía asalariada, «la clase del encuadramiento social», a incorporarse a la clase comunicadora, que es, por tanto, definición y exclusión, y al mismo tiempo demarcación y apertura, eliminación de las fronteras y extinción de las clases. No se trata de ninguna paradoja sino de la realidad del movimiento a través del cual el proletariado se define en la práctica como movimiento de constitución de la comunidad humana. El movimiento social argentino, porque tuvo que afrontarlo, se planteó el problema de las relaciones entre proletarios en activo (asalariados), parados, excluidos y clases medias. Sólo aportó respuestas muy parcelarias, la más interesante de las cuales fue sin duda su organización territorial. Frente a esta situación, los detractores radicales del interclasismo o los propagandistas de la unanimidad nacional democrática son los militantes de dos tipos de derrota diferentes. La revolución que en este ciclo de luchas ya no puede ser sino la comunización supera el dilema entre las alianzas de clases leninistas o democráticas y «el proletariado solo» de Gorter.

La única forma de superar los conflictos entre parados y «empleados», entre cualificados y no cualificados, es poner en práctica, de forma inmediata y en el curso de la lucha armada, medidas comunizadoras que supriman las bases mismas de estas divisiones (cosa que las empresas recuperadas de Argentina no intentaron hacer más que de manera muy marginal, contentándose lo más a menudo —cfr. Zanon— con unas cuantas redistribuciones caritativas a algunos grupos de piqueteros). A falta de tales medidas, el capital apostará a lo largo de todo el movimiento sobre esta fragmentación, y encontrará entre los autoorganizados a sus Noske y sus Scheidemann . Las crisis del modo de producción capitalista no constituyen ninguna garantía del proceso revolucionario: la clase capitalista sabe utilizarlas perfectamente para descomponer a la clase obrera. De lo que se trata en realidad —y la revolución alemana ya lo mostró— es de disolver a las clases medias tomando medidas comunistas concretas que las constriñan a ingresar en el proletariado, es decir, de consumar su «proletarización». Hoy, en los países desarrollados, la cuestión es a la vez más simple y más peligrosa, pues por un lado la inmensa mayoría de esas capas medias es asalariada y su posición social está desprovista de toda base material; su papel de control y dirección de la cooperación capitalista es fundamental pero se encuentra sometido a una precariedad permanente, y su posición social depende de un mecanismo muy frágil de extracción de fracciones de plusvalor. Ahora bien, por otro lado, y por esas mismas razones, la proximidad formal de estas capas con el proletariado las lleva a presentar en el seno de las luchas de este último «soluciones» alternativas de gestión nacional o democrática que conserven sus propias posiciones. Podrían encontrarse a sus anchas en el democratismo radical expresando los límites de las luchas. No habrá soluciones milagrosas porque no existe ninguna reivindicación unificadora. La clase no se unifica sino rompiendo la relación en cuyo seno tienen sentido las reivindicaciones: la relación capitalista. La cuestión esencial que tendremos que resolver es la de saber cómo difundir el comunismo antes de que sea asfixiado por las tenazas de la mercancía, cómo integrar la agricultura para no tener que intercambiar con los campesinos, cómo deshacer los lazos de intercambio del adversario para imponerle la lógica de la comunización de las relaciones y de la apropiación de los bienes, y cómo, enfrentado a la revolución, disolver al bloque del miedo mediante la revolución.

Los proletarios no «son» revolucionarios de igual modo que el cielo «es» azul, porque «son» asalariados y explotados, y ni siquiera porque «son» la disolución de las condiciones existentes. Se constituyen a sí mismos en clase revolucionaria transformándose a sí mismos a partir de lo que son.

(trad. F. Corriente)

Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution

TC — 2006-05-31T22:00:00Z

Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution;

it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome

Autonomy, as a revolutionary perspective realising itself through self-organisation, is paradoxically inseparable from a stable working class, easily discernable at the very surface of the reproduction of capital, comfortable within its limits and its definition by this reproduction and recognised within it as a legitimate interlocutor. Autonomy is the practice, the theory and the revolutionary project of the epoch of “fordism”. Its subject is the worker and it supposes that the communist revolution is his liberation, i.e. the liberation of productive labour. It supposes that struggles over immediate demands1 are stepping stones to the revolution, and that capital reproduces and confirms a workers' identity within the relation of exploitation. All this has lost any foundation.

In fact it is just the opposite: in each of its struggles, the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as something foreign to it and which in its struggle it can be led to put into question. In the activity of the proletariat, being a class becomes an exterior constraint objectified in capital. Being a class becomes the obstacle which its struggle as a class has to overcome; this obstacle possesses a reality which is clear and easily identifiable, it is self-organisation and autonomy.

The bitter victory of autonomy

Self-organisation everywhere, revolution nowhere

We can only speak of autonomy if the working class is capable of relating to itself against capital and finding in this relationship to itself the basis of and the capacity for its affirmation as dominant class. Autonomy supposes that the definition of the working class is not a relation but is inherent to it. It was a question of the formalisation of what we are in present society as basis for the new society, which is to be constructed as the liberation of what we are.

From the end of the first world war up to the beginning of the 1970s, autonomy and self-organisation weren't simply the wildcat strike and a more or less conflicting relationship with the unions. Autonomy was the project of a revolutionary process extending from self-organisation to the affirmation of the proletariat as the dominant class of society, through the liberation and affirmation of labour as the organisation of society. In freeing up the “true situation” of the working class from its integration in the capitalist mode of production, an integration represented by all the political and union institutions, autonomy was the revolution under way, the potential revolution. If this was explicitly the agenda of the Ultra-Left, it wasn't only an ideology. Self-organisation, union power and the workers' movement belonged to the same world of revolution as affirmation of the class. The affirmation of the truly revolutionary being which manifested itself in autonomy couldn't have had the slightest hint of reality if it hadn't been the good, unalienated side of the same reality which resided in a powerful workers' movement “constraining” the class. The workers' movement was itself also the guarantee of the independence of the class which was ready to reorganise the world in its own image; it was sufficient to reveal the true nature of this power to itself, by de-bureaucratising it, disalienating it. It was not a rare occurrence that workers passed from the necessarily ephemeral constitution of autonomous organisations of struggle to the parallel universe of triumphant Stalinism or, in northern Europe, to the bosom of powerful unions. Autonomy and workers' movement nourished and comforted eachother mutually. The Stalinist leader was perhaps the “workers' equivalent of the boss by divine right”, but he was also the institutional counterpart of autonomy. Self-organisation as a revolutionary theory made sense in exactly the same conditions as those which gave structure to the “old workers' movement”. Self-organisation is the self-organised struggle with its necessary extension the self-organisation of the producers; in a word, liberated labour; in another word, value.

A little step backwards. Already in the Italy of 1969, the sectors of workers in struggle are incapable of creating an “assembly” connecting up the diverse forms of self-organisation and the movement is “recuperated” by the CGIL and its workshop committees. Still in Italy, in the self-convened movements of February-March 1984 on the production line, self-organisation is seen to be defensive, in the sense that it expresses the defence of an old composition and an old relation of the working class to capital, a relation which restructuring is in the process of abolishing. For the same reasons, in Spain the assemblies movement (1976, '77, '78) creates or revitalises union structures; likewise the Dutch “hot autumn” of 1983. This is equally the epoch in which all sorts of “autonomous unions” are formed. It is fundamentally a historical type of working class whose existence is put into question by the restructuring. At Renault, during the strikes of 1975, it is the factory of Le Mans, where labour power is the most stable and the rate of unionisation, at 40% is double the national average for Renault, that the strike is the hardest and sometimes has the air of an “autonomous struggle”. At the beginning of the 1980s, when this process of streamlining “is completed” essentially by hitting the unskilled immigrant workforce, provoking an enormous wave of strikes in the car industry, the violence of the struggles is never formalised in attempts to set up autonomous organs. “They want to kill us, but we're already dead”, such is the spirit of the struggles. If in 1983-84, it is equally difficult to qualify the miners' strike in Britain as an “autonomous, self-organised struggle”, it is because it was in fact a strike without demands, without a programme, without perspectives. What it meant to be a class was now only defined in and through the adversary of that class, in the action against it. The decline and lost meaning of autonomy are not a simple product of the retreat of class struggles. The “struggle” is not a historical invariant constantly expressing the same class relation. The decline of autonomy is not the decline of the “struggle”, it is the decline of a historical stage of class struggles.

In France, when self-organisation becomes the dominant form of all struggles, starting with co-ordination between the railway-workers in 1986, it no longer represents a rupture with all the mediations by which the class is a class of the mode of production (a rupture liberating the class' revolutionary nature); self-organisation loses its “revolutionary meaning”: the overgrowth2 between the self-organisation of the struggle and workers' control of production and society. Self-organisation is nothing other than a radical form of syndicalism. Any struggle over immediate demands of any amplitude or intensity is now self-organised and autonomous; self-organisation and autonomy have become a simple moment of syndicalism (here we mean syndicalism as opposed to the formal existence of trade unions). If the organisms of struggle which the Spanish dockers adopted in the 1980s attempt to guarantee their survival and change form, it is because they were nothing other than organisms for the defence of the proletarian condition. Therein lies the continuity which explains the transition of the one into the other. The theoreticians of autonomy would have it that as such the “autonomous organs” invent communism by remaining what they are: organs of the struggle over immediate demands. As such their natural inclination is permanence and thus their “transformation”.

In all the current discourses on autonomy, it is remarkable to observe that it is the revolution which has disappeared. What was until the beginning of the 1970s the very raison d'être of the discourse on autonomy, namely its revolutionary perspective, has become almost unspeakable. The defence and valorisation of autonomy becomes an end in itself and care is taken not to articulate a revolutionary perspective there – the Italian workerists were the last to do that. Now people are content to repeat that the existing autonomy isn't the right one. But now it is the very capacity of the proletariat to find in its relation to capital the basis for constituting itself as an autonomous class and in a powerful workers' movement which has disappeared. Autonomy and self-organisation represented a historical moment of the history of the class struggle and not formal modalities of action. In all the current approaches, autonomy designates any activity where proletarians coordinate directly to do something together, a sort of ahistorical and general form of action on the condition that it is independent of institutions. The historicisation and periodisation of the class struggle vanish. We can only speak of autonomy if the class is capable of relating to itself against capital and finding in this relation to itself the basis and the capacity for its affirmation as dominant class (which in any case could only produce the counter-revolution which rendered this affirmation impossible).

Currently, anywhere that self-organisation and autonomy triumph, dissatisfaction with them is immediately manifested. Already in France in 1986, the co-ordination between railway workers provoked movements of great defiance, as did the attempt to constitute broader forms of co-ordination beyond the local collectives in 2003. Within the current triumphant self-organisation, it is what opposes it which prefigures the abolition of classes^?. It is not a question of a dissatisfaction with a “recuperated” autonomy, but with autonomy itself in the sense that it is no longer anything other than “recuperated” by its very nature. This nature, consisting of the liberation of the class following from its autonomous affirmation (having “broken” its capitalist social moorings), was the definition of the revolution in the previous cycle; it is now that through which self-organisation and autonomy exist and are consciously experienced as the limit of all current struggles. Everywhere, as soon as self-organisation is established (and currently you can hardly escape it), people are fed up with it; it weighs heavily on the movement. As soon as it is initiated, it “winds us up”, because it reminds us bluntly what we are and what we no longer want to be. It is here, within self-organisation, against it, that the struggle of the proletariat as a class produces its own existence as a class as a limit to be surpassed. Autonomy is only ever the liberation of the worker as worker.

Self-organisation, autonomy, in fact what we are as a class, have become objects of regular critique in the concrete course of struggles. It is a case of grasping the theoretical and practical discrepancy within self-organisation between what self-organisation is now as a necessary form of the class struggle, and the practical and theoretical critique that is engendered within itself, even as it is put into practice. However we have to take into account as a characteristic of this cycle of struggles the fact that the battle against “bad” self-organisation is waged in the name of “good” self-organisation. Currently, it is only within this battle in the name of “good” self-organisation that the battle against self-organisation itself manifests itself, i.e. only here does the perspective of the revolution appear as something which is no longer of the order of the affirmation of the class and which as a result can no longer be radically of the order of self-organisation or of autonomy.

As long as class confrontation fails to positively initiate the communisation of relations between individuals as class action against capital, self-organisation will remain the only available form of class action. The search for “true” self-organisation is not an “error”, the “error” itself constantly indicates that self-organisation is to be superseded, by constantly taking as its target really existing self-organisation. This critique of really existing self-organisation in the name of an ideal self-organisation, in which it constitutes a process without end, creates a tension within self-organisation; it indicates the content of that which is to be superseded: the impasse of self-organisation, i.e. of its content, the affirmation, the revelation to itself of the proletariat.

The supersession of really existing self-organisation will not be accomplished by the production of the “true”, the “right”, the “good” self-organisation, it will be achieved against really existing self-organisation, but within it, from it.

In the current struggles, the proletariat recognises capital as its raison d'être, its existence against itself, as the only necessity of its own existence. In its struggles, the proletariat adopts all the necessary forms of organisation for its action. But when the proletariat adopts the necessary forms of organisation for its immediate goals (its abolition will equally be an immediate goal), it does not exist for itself as autonomous class. Self-organisation and autonomy were only possible on the basis of the constitution of a workers' identity, a constitution which has been swept away by the restructuring. What is left now for these proletarians to self-organise?

If autonomy disappears as a perspective, it is because the revolution can no longer have any other content than the communisation of society, which means for the proletariat its own abolition. With such a content, it becomes inappropriate to talk of autonomy and it is unlikely that such a programme would entail what is commonly understood as “autonomous organisation”. The proletariat can only be revolutionary by recognising itself as a class, and it recognises itself as such in every conflict and even more so in a context where its existence as a class is the situation that it has to confront in the reproduction of capital. We should not mistake the content of this “recognition”. To recognise itself as a class won't be a “return to itself” but a total extroversion through its self-recognition as a category of the capitalist mode of production. What we are as a class is immediately nothing other than our relation to capital. This “recognition” will in fact be a practical knowledge, in the conflict, not of the class for itself, but of capital.

On self-organisation in the current struggles

“The English system of shop-stewards which was born in the course of the First World War engendered a specific organisation of the factory, which was given the name of
mutualism
, in which the content of work-tasks and the rhythm of work were fixed by managers in agreement with the workers concerned through the intermediary of these elected delegates. This system was swept away by all the restructuring, even before the era of Thatcherism. In the course of the 1970s, numerous conflicts arose around this power of the shop-floor delegates; the swan-song of this system was on the one hand the proposals to transform production by the shop-stewards' committees, notably in the weapons factories, and on the other it was the restarting of production by the workers when firms closed. All this combined to produce a movement around the notions of workers' control and self-management, a British flavoured self-managementism which surpassed in terms of practice and ideas any French developments along these lines. Today, after the decimation of British industry, this current no longer represents anything at all.”
(Echanges, n°99, p.23)

A complex autonomous movement developed over more than 30 years, a kind of hybrid which combined the system of elected shop-floor delegates (the shop-stewards) and the utilisation of base union structures (often reinforced by widespread use of the “closed shop”, i.e. enforced unionisation in a firm – in other words the management by the unions of the hiring of employees. A development of “wildcat strikes” was seen which on repeated occasions threatened governments which had decided to “impose themselves by force”. (…) The crisis which was brewing in this situation culminated in the Winter of 1978-79 – the Winter of discontent – in the course of which the country was plunged into a total chaos with no other perspective than the immobilism of this bloc of resistance

The Thatcher government swept all that away through the destruction of the industrial apparatus, privatisation, globalisation, increasing the orientation towards finance of the economy, the generalisation of flexibility, workers' precariousness and massive unemployment.

“The balance of forces underlying the autonomous movement was undermined; but it could only be (provisionally) overturned after fierce disputes in the key areas of workers' autonomy: the docks, the steelworks, the car factories, the printers and above all the mines.”
(Echanges, n° 107, oct-nov 2003)

Returning to the current period to draw out the lessons from the strike of the British postal workers, the text concludes: “The foundations of the struggle, if they mark a break by workers on the shop-floor from the union leadership, also demonstrate the persistence of certain notions in labour relations and in the utilisation of base union structures, the very notions which the “bringing to heel” of the autonomy of struggles at the beginning of the 1980s had attempted to eradicate, but which are resurgent. (…) All the same, we have to consider that the Royal Mail is practically one of the only national industries in the UK which has not been dismantled, for various reasons, including the intervention of class struggle (it is one of the principal British employers, with 160,000 workers, whose numbers give them an obvious power). Also the shop-floor practices in labour relations, which were common previously in industry but eliminated in the 1980s, are alive and well here” (my emphasis). We could not be any clearer than this.

Currently, in numerous disputes like that of the longshoremen of the West coast of the US, the bosses are attempting to break the unions for the same reasons that they break workers' autonomy when it manifests itself, because both of them belong to the same epoch, the same logic of capitalist reproduction. This is a point which should exercise the minds of the advocates of the now secular ideology of workers' self-organisation. In our times, in the post office in Britain or the ports of the West coast of the US, the autonomous struggle of workers becomes indistinguishable in its content to the defence of the large union institutions, not for reasons of the temporary utilisation of unions by workers, but for what they are: large institutions regulating the autonomy of labour-power.

On the evening of Friday July 18th, a wildcat strike breaks out at the Heathrow airport against flexibility and the annualisation of work-time. After three days' strike by ticket staff and baggage-handlers, they return to work with the announcement of the opening of talks between the unions and management.

Similarly, in Spain, during the shipbuilders' strike in Jan-Feb 2004, it is the renewal of the collective bargain and increased flexilbility which is at stake. On the 30th of January, the union demonstration ends up with barricades, cars set on fire, the police use rubber bullets. On the 5th February, in Puerto Real, “a base organisation attempts to co-ordinate the struggle if necessary” (Échanges, no.109, p23); on the 12th, after renewed battles, a general assembly of the workers decides to hold another demonstration in town which causes further trouble; on the 13th talks between unions and management resume. As usual, the wildcat strike, even when accompanied by the formation of autonomous organisations, is merely a substitute for or an accompaniment to union action. It has become impossible to expect anything else from it, or to hope for an internal dynamic which would constitute its supersession from its own basis and not against itself.

On the 2nd June 2003, the IG Metall union calls for a strike in the metal-workers' industry in 5 regions of the former GDR. The splits which have appeared between workers in the “West” and workers in the “East” partially explain the failure of the strike. The increasing number of conflicts in different workplaces, the multiplication of sub-contracting and other measures to reduce the costs of production are fragmenting sites of exploitation, with the corollary that global struggles by professional branches of an industry have almost completely disappeared. It is the question of the unity of the proletariat on the basis of struggles over immediate demands which is posed.

Futhermore it has become obvious that the proletariat cannot be united for itself as a revolutionary class by the wage, in the framework of its position as seller of labour-power, everything proves more and more the contrary and this is so obvious that it almost jumps out and hits us round the head.

In Italy, in December 2003, the strike movement of the autoferrotramvieri fails to lead to any formal organisation between depots. If the “disease of the wildcat strike hit very hard”, “the union anti-strike mechanism worked perfectly” (Lettre de Mouvement Communiste). The delegate from the drivers' co-ordination committee in Brescia, a member of the national co-ordinating committee, is content to say that the illegal strike was “the only weapon available to the workers” and that ”if the unions have taken up our demand for 106 euros, it's because they are listening to the rank-and-file”; he adds that the strike is not aimed against the unions”. Finally the tramdrivers of Milan resume the wildcat strike with the slogan: “we are the union”. The “base unions” played to the full their role as outlet for the anger of the employees, i.e. let's make no bones about it, the employees fully accepted that they should play this role.

Unfortunately no-one grasped for themselves the offensive political significance of the struggle of the autoferrotramvieri nor the permanent task of its organisation at the workplace, right up to the very last of the depots taken over by the movement. The base unions tried without great success to exploit the situation in order to reinforce themselves to the detriment of the large official union confederations, but they refused to facilitate the independent organisation of the struggle.” (ibid). No-one grasped this, not even the workers themselves.

In a flash of lucidity this Lettre concludes: “It is as if defensive struggles no longer functioned as the school of communism, as if they no longer engendered their own political supersession.”

“After the strikes of the railway cleaners, after the strikes in public transport, it is now the turn of the metal-workers. In each case we are dealing with extremely fierce struggles which develop outside and against the unions, properly autonomous struggles” (my emphasis) (Échanges, no.109, p19). This is simply wrong. At Melfi, the struggle of the FIAT workers in May 2004 started with strikes called by the unions over the payment of days of down-time due to technical problems; rapidly the workers go beyond this framework and add to these demands the organisation of working time and wages (these additions were accepted by the unions). The strike was controlled from top to bottom by the FIOM (union of the CGIL), including the blockading of the factory; the workers delegated the attempts to extend the struggle to the other FIAT sites and also the conduct of negotiations. When an agreement (“not a bad one” according to the estimation of Échanges no.109) is reached, the attempt to contest this agreement by Cobas3 fails. The workers didn't constitute a single autonomous organisation, a fact which doesn't prevent the ideologues of self-organisation to conclude, for this struggle as well as for that of the autoferrotramvieri: “with the struggle of the workers of Melfi, workers' autonomy has gone on to a new stage in Italy”. Autonomy is only deployed and only goes on to a new stage in the heads of militants who have remained fixated by their dream of Mirafiori: a factory “fallen into the hands of the workers”. What would they have done with it?

Pathetic depths are plumbed by the conclusion of the Échanges text on the Melfi strike. This conclusion reports the declaration of Roberto Maroni, Italian Minister of Social Affairs, in an interview published in Corriere della Sera. The minister states: “When the unions agree in talks with the government to get the blockades lifted (he is referring to Melfi, but also to the strikes at Alitalia and in public transport, as noted by Échanges) and don't manage to do this, a problem of representation is posed. The current system is in danger of not being capable of managing disputes.” Échanges comment: “he added that the moment had arrived to involve the autonomous organisations in the accords as well, because they are more present and active among the workers. Maroni's speech is interesting not because of what he proposes, but because he demonstrates that radical and autonomous forms of struggle are constantly being thrown up and are beginning to pose a problem in certain strata of the government and the state.” The struggles of the workers pose a problem for sure, but Maroni's speech is evidently interesting above all for what he proposes; not only is it interesting, but it is also true. Maroni recognises something that should gladden the heart of any militant of autonomy: the autonomous forms of struggle adopted by the workers are representative. This is “recuperation”, “manipulation” the ideologues will say, but no. Maroni is much more lucid: the syndicalism of struggles over immediate demands is mediated by autonomous organisations; “let's recognise these organisations as interlocutors” says the minister.

The capacity for struggle which Italian workers seem to be demonstrating these days opens up vast perspectives for the future when, constrained by the situation and the course of struggles, Italian workers and those elsewhere will confront their situation of being workers which autonomy formalises today as the advanced form of syndicalism. Already autonomy, as it has really manifested itself at Melfi, has revealed itself to be incapable by its very nature of expressing the revolt against work which is so present in the struggle of these workers. It is now within self-organisation and autonomy, against them, that the dynamic of this cycle of struggles is produced as a divergence within the class struggle in general and self-organisation in particular, i.e. as a divergence within action taken as a class.

The self-organisation of struggles is a crucial moment of the revolutionary supersession of struggles over immediate demands. To carry on the struggle over immediate demands intransigently and to the very end cannot be achieved by unions, but by self-organisation and workers' autonomy. To carry on the struggle over immediate demands through workers' autonomy on the basis of irreconcilable interests is to effect a change of level in the social reality of the capitalist mode of production. The struggle over immediate demands is no longer situated at the level of profit and all the elements of the process of production which combine to produce it, but at the level of labour as productive of value, of which surplus-value is a part.

In the struggle over immediate demands, self-organisation formalises the irreconcilability of interests between the working class and the capitalist class, and it constitutes in this way the necessary moment of the appearance of class belonging as an exterior constraint; self-organisation is also the form in which the communisation of relations between individuals will get under way, against it.

Struggles over immediate demands/revolution

A rupture{}

If self-organisation, as a revolutionary process, has become obsolete, it is because the relation between struggles over immediate demands and revolution has become problematic. Self-organisation was the most radical form of relation between them as long as this relation was understood as an overgrowth. Then, Pannekoek could tell us that after a long historical period of struggles, the working-class was becoming the dominant power in a society based on councils, Negri that capital's history was equivalent to the history of workers' activity and Georges Marchais was writing a common program for the Left. All of them are dead now.

A revolutionary struggle emerges from a conflict of immediate interests between proletarians and capitalists and from the fact that these interests are irreconcilable. It is, so to speak, anchored in these conflicts, but if at a moment of the struggle over immediate demands, the proletarians, compelled by their conflict with the capitalist class, don't lift the anchor, their struggle will stay a struggle over immediate demands and will, as such, lead to victory or unfortunately most of the time to defeat.

On the contrary, if they fight against market relations, seize goods and the means of production while integrating into communal production those that wage-labour can't integrate, make everything free, get rid of the factory framework as the origin of products, go beyond the division of labour, abolish all autonomous spheres (and in the first place the economy), dissolve their autonomy to integrate in non-market relations all the impoverished and even a large part of the middle class, reduced to poverty by their movement; in this case, it is precisely their own previous existence and association as a class that they go beyond as well as (this is then a detail) their economic demands. The only way to fight against exchange and the dictatorship of value is by undertaking communisation.

To defend the proletariat's sacrosanct autonomy is to retreat into the categories of the capitalist mode of production; it is to prevent oneself from thinking that the content of the communist revolution is the abolition of the proletariat, not thanks to a simple logical equivalence (which would say that the abolition of capitalist relations is, by definition, the abolition of the proletariat ) but thanks to precise revolutionary practices. The proletariat abolishes value, exchange and all market relations in the war that sets it against capital, and this is its decisive weapon.

It integrates by some measures of communization the largest part of the impoverished, of those previously excluded, of the middle-classes and of the peasantry of the Third World (on this issue too it would be important to reflect on the example of the struggles in Argentina, not to defend interclassism but rather the abolition of classes).

The ever untarnished “autonomy of struggles“ as a faculty for transition from a struggle over immediate demands to a revolutionary struggle is a construction that is not interested in the context of this transition. It remains a formal approach to class struggles. If the content of this transition is put aside, it is because autonomy prevents us from understanding this transition as a rupture, a qualitative leap. The “transition” is only an affirmation and a revelation of the true nature of what exists. The proletariat self-organizes, it breaks with its previous situation, but if this rupture is only its “liberation”, the reorganization of what it is, of its activity, without capital, rather than the destruction of its previous situation, that is to say if it remains self-organized, if it doesn't go beyond this stage, it will automatically be defeated.

To assume that any struggle about wages contains a revolt against wage-labour is to assume that these two elements exist one inside the other rather than that the second term is a contradictory supersession of the first. Such a view can now, in practice, only lead to radical democratism. Fifty years ago, it was possible to understand things that way and this conception led to the power of the Councils or to “Real Socialism”. The “citizens' movement”, alternative globalization, or, more accurately, radical democratism represent without doubt the project of completion of the struggles over immediate demands, and, as such, they can't have any other projects now.

In the radical democratic perspective the evolution of labour time ought to bring emancipation in leisure time; benefits for all ought to become a progressive transition to an activity beneficial to the individual and to society, that is to say the abolition of exploitation within wage-labour; wage demands would become the sharing of wealth; the critique of globalisation and finance would become more important than the critique of that which has been globalised (capital); liberalism and globalisation would be the cause of exploitation. Anybody involved in recent struggles or keeping a close eye on them knows very well that this language has become theirs, and not only in the “public services”.

Nobody would deny that the revolutionary struggle originates within a struggle over immediate demands or even that it is produced by it. The question is the nature of the transition. The only “deeply anticapitalist” content confronting the capitalist logic that a struggle could have consists in targeting the capitalist relations of production (that is to say, for the proletariat, targeting its own existence), the reproduction of exploitation and of classes. A struggle over immediate demands that targets this is not a struggle over immediate demands any more, or only if the takeover of the proletariat on society, the proletariat as the dominant class, is what we mean by revolutionary struggle.

The question of class unity.

The proletariat has not disappeared, nor has it become a pure negativity. However, exploitation doesn't produce a homogeneous social entity of the working class any more, a prevailing entity, with a key role, able to be conscious of itself as a social subject, in the sense habitually given to this, that is to say able to have a consciousness of itself as a relation to itself, facing capital.

Integrated in another totality, having lost its centrality as a principle organizing the totality of the labour process, the big factory which gathered a large number of workers together has not disappeared, but it is not the principle organizing the labour process and the valorisation process any more, as they are now a lot more diffuse. It has become a part in an organizing principle that it doesn't grasp. In the contradiction between proletariat and capital, there isn't anything sociologically given a priori (as was the “mass-worker” of the big factory) any more.

The diffuse, segmented, fragmented, corporate characteristic of conflicts is the necessary lot of a contradiction between classes situated at the level of the reproduction of capital. But it is because these conflicts are not a sum of juxtaposed elements but rather a diffusion produced from a historical modality of the contradiction between proletariat and capital, that a specific conflict, because of its characteristics, because of the period and the conditions in which it takes place, is able to polarize the totality of the antagonism that until then seemed irremediably diverse and diffuse.

To unite, workers must break the relation by which capital “brings them together”. One of the most common signs that their struggles are going beyond the framework of a struggle over immediate demands and that workers are beginning to unite for themselves (that is to say begin to target their own condition) is the fact that they subvert and détourne the productive, urban, geographical and social frameworks of their “unity” for capital, as in 1982 and 1984 in La Pointe du Givet (in the French Ardennes) or, more recently, in Argentina.

One can't simultaneously want the unity of the proletariat and the communist revolution, i.e. this unity as a condition or precondition for revolution. There won't be any unity other than in communisation and it is only communisation, by targeting exchange and wage-labour, that can unite the proletariat, i.e. there will only be a unity of the proletariat in the very movement of its abolition. The hagiographers of struggles over immediate demands can only speculate about “unity”, and they can't specify in any way the concrete form it takes, unless it is the formal unity of politics or of forms of organisation come to smooth over divisions which however remain within the struggle. This unity is always something to be added to the struggle.

Workers forge themselves into the revolutionary class in revolutionising social relations, that is everything that they are in the categories of exchange and wage labour. Within struggles over wages, they don't see the appearance of ‘power' or ‘project', but the impossibility of unifying without attacking their very existence as class within the division of labour and all the divisions of the wage relation and of exchange. That is, without putting class itself into question, without a revolutionary practice. The only unification of the proletariat is the one it realises in abolishing itself, which means that this has to be the unification of humanity. Measures of communisation starting from whatever point of the capitalist world (it will have to be from a multitude of points pretty much simultaneously) will have this effect of rapid communisation or will be crushed.

Under the cover of ideas of self-organisation and autonomy we can say whatever we like, that strikes ‘are revolutionary', that they are so ‘potentially', that they have ‘something revolutionary', that they carry the ‘seeds' of revolution, etc. All this has only one function, to fail to recognise the leap, the negation, the rupture and to avoid critiquing wage struggles. This leads to a gradualist and mechanistic conception of the passage of struggles over immediate demands to revolutionary struggles; and to abandoning the understanding that the class is the subject of its communist activity in coming into conflict with its previous situation. Marx, like all revolutionaries, saw a leap, a negation, but the difference with today is that before the permanent association of the class made it possible to envisage an organised continuity between one phase and to the other. Currently, the militants of autonomy seek in the defence of the price of labour power or in other struggles a ‘something', a ‘seed', a ‘potentiality' of revolution. In this attitude of waiting on the dynamic of struggles over immediate demands, the very struggle itself is supposed to engender another. But the ‘struggles' are only moments of activity of proletarians that they go beyond and negate, not a chain of phenomena that gradually link together – one struggle carrying the seed of another. In short, the link between ‘struggles', is the subject transforming himself negatively. The link is not ‘evolutionary'.

In the course of struggle, what was once the subject of autonomy transforms itself and casts off its old clothes, so that it can no longer recognise itself as existing other than within the existence of capitalism. It is the exact opposite of autonomy and of self-organisation which, by their very nature, have as their meaning only the liberation of the proletariat, its affirmation and, why not, (for the nostalgic among us), its dictatorship. We can talk of the ‘dynamic' of struggles only to reach an impasse over the self-transformation of the subject. It is to be blind to the fact that in this ‘dynamic', what is abolished is the self-organised subject; and that this ‘dynamic' exists only as abolition of the subject that self-organises. As long as the proletariat self-organises, it can only do it on the basis of what it is within the categories of capital. The point isn't to make a normative condemnation of self-organisation, but to state what it is and to say that the revolution is not a dynamic that it contains and which simply needs to blossom.

There is a qualitative leap when the workers unite against their existence as wage labourers, when they integrate the destitute and smash market mechanisms; not when one strike ‘transforms' itself into a ‘challenge' to power. The change is a rupture. The question is not the definition of self-organisation or autonomy, we should understand it as a social process; a process of rupture in the class struggle, the self-transformation of a subject that abolishes what defines it. Those who speak unceasingly of the ‘dynamic' of struggles miss completely what is the essential moment: the proletariat as revolutionary subject abolishes itself as subject of autonomy.

Those who hold to the discourse of the ‘dynamic' of struggles think that the workers, as they increasingly come into conflict with the state in their struggles over immediate demands, will realise that to win their demands they will have to rise to qualitatively superior forms of struggle. They will have to accede to the political or organisational means adequate to their demands. Once more, we fall into the same distortion: the end is the same, only the means are different. All forms of practice have a goal and use means adequate to reaching this goal. If they change, then the goals change. The end is not exterior to the means, it is its result. We are not concerned with violence, the ‘means', or the ‘councils' in themselves. What we ask is: why do the workers confront the state? For the sake of sectional or national ‘interests'? To chuck immigrants out? Against the Americans? Or because the state stands as the defender of market relations, and so of all of the divisions of sector, of nation, of specific demands – against their communist movement?

The rupture prefigured

From struggles over immediate demands to revolution, there can only be a rupture, a qualitative leap. But this rupture isn't a miracle. Neither is it the realisation by the proletariat that there is nothing left to do but the revolution, after the defeat of everything else. “Revolution is the only solution” is just as inept as talk of the revolutionary ‘dynamic' of struggles. This rupture is produced positively by the unfolding of the cycle of struggles which precedes it, and we can say that it still forms a part of it. This rupture is prefigured in the multiplication of gaps within the struggle between on the one hand the proletariat's questioning of its existence as a class in its contradiction with capital, and on the other hand, the reproduction of capital which implies this existence as class. As is empirically verifiable, this gap is the dynamic of this cycle of struggles.

We can point to aspects of the Argentinian social movement which, starting from the defence of a proletarian condition and within this defence, went all the way to putting it into question; or of ‘suicidal' struggles; or of the exteriority in relation to the Kabyl struggles of their self-organisation in the aarchs; or of the wild kids' activity in factories; of collectives; of the failure of autonomy; of the unemployed demanding the de-essentialisation of work; of the direct action movement; of the dissatisfaction that self-organisation contains within itself as it exists truly only as it opposes itself to capital in ratifying the existence of the proletariat as a class of the capitalist mode of production; finally, of all the forms of practice within struggles which produce the unity of the class as an exterior unity and an objective constraint.

Two essential points describe the essence of the current cycle of struggles:

The disappearance of a proletarian identity reaffirmed within the reproduction of capital. It is the end of the workers movement and the concomitant failure of self-organisation and of autonomy as a revolutionary perspective.

With the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production, the contradiction between the classes is found at the level of their respective reproduction. In its contradiction with capital, the proletariat puts itself into question.

Struggles display characteristics which were unthinkable thirty years ago. In the strikes of December 95 in France, in the struggles of the sans-papiers, of the unemployed, of the Liverpool dockers, of Cellatex, Alstom, Lu, of Marks and Spencers, in the Argentinian movement, in the Algerian rising; the specific characteristic of the struggle appears – in the course of the struggle itself – as a limit in that this very specific characteristic (whether it is the public sector, demands for jobs, defending the means of labour, fighting delocalisation, factory occupations, self-organisation etc.), against which the movement collides often in the tensions and the internal confrontations of its decline – always comes down to the fact of being a class and of remaining so.

Most of the time, the movements are not expressed by ringing declarations or radical action, but by all the practices of ‘flight', or of denial by proletarians of their own conditions. In the ‘suicidal' struggles of Cellatex, in the strike at Vilvoorde and many others it is evident that the proletariat is nothing if it is separated from capital and cannot remain this nothing (that the proletariat demands to be reunited with capital does not close the abyss that the struggle opens – the recognition and refusal of the proletariat of itself as that abyss). It is the de-essentialisation of labour which becomes the activity of the proletariat, both in a tragic manner in its struggles without immediate perspectives (suicidal struggles) and in its self-destructive activities, and also in the demands for this de-essentialisation as for example in the struggle of the French unemployed and precarious workers in the Winter of '98. When it becomes evident (as it did in the Italian transport strikes or of the Fiat plant at Melfi), that autonomy and self-organisation have no perspective, this is the point at which the dynamic of this cycle of struggles is constituted and the ground is prepared for the process of the supersession of the struggle over immediate demands on its own basis. The proletariat comes face to face with its own definition as a class which becomes autonomous in relation to it, which becomes foreign to it. The practices of self-organisation and their fate are clear examples of this.

The proliferations of collectives and the recurrence of intermittent strikes (like Spring ‘03 in France, or the English postworkers) make palpable in defining themselves against it, that class unity is an objectification within capital. We shouldn't judge these phenomena with a normative measure, which sees in them only an unaccomplished project of class unification which is the antecedent to its affirmation. In these struggles, it is the exteriorisation of class belonging which is revealed as the present nature of struggle as a class. In all these movements, seeing the segmentation of the class as a weakness to be overcome in a unity, is to ask a formal question and to answer it with a formal question. The spread of these movements, their diversity, their discontinuity is their very dynamic and what is interesting in them. ‘Going further' is not to overcome segmentation in unity – that is a formal answer to a problem which is probably obsolete. The point isn't to loose that segmentation, the differences. ‘Going further', is, in other circumstances, the contradiction between these struggles in their diversity and the unity of the class objectified within capital. The point isn't to say the more the class is divided the better, but that a generalization of a strike movement is not synonymous with its unity, i.e. with an overcoming of differences which are seen as purely accidental and formal. The point is to understand what is at play in these segmented, diffuse and discontinuous movements: the growth of a discrepancy within this ‘substantial' unity objectified within capital. This extreme diversity which is conserved and maybe even deepened in a more widespread movement (in contradiction with capital and this objective unity which it represents), is perhaps a condition of the articulation of these immediate struggles and communisation. These facts are now an unavoidable determination of the class struggle. The unity of the class can no longer base itself on the basis of the wage and the struggle over immediate demands as a prelude to its revolutionary activity. The unity of the proletariat can only be the activity in which it abolishes itself in abolishing everything that divides it. It is a fraction of the proletariat which in overcoming the demand based nature of its struggle will take communising measures and which will begin the process of the unification of the proletariat which will not be different from the unification of humanity, i.e. its creation as the totality of social relations that individuals establish between themselves in their singularity.

In recent times we have seen how unemployment and precariousness have been placed at the heart of the wage relation; we have seen how the situation of the clandestine worker has been defined as the generalised situation of labour-power; we have seen how the immediacy of the social individual has been posed as the already existing foundation of opposition to capital (as is done by the direct action movement); we have seen how suicidal strikes have broken out as at Cellatex and others in the Spring and Summer of 2000 (Metaleurop – with reservations – Adelshoffen, la Societe Francaise Industrielle de Controle et D'Equipements, Bertrand Faure, Mossley, Bata, Moulinex, Daewoo-Orion, ACT – ex Bull); and we have seen how class unity has been posited as an objectivity constituted within capital. It is the content of each of these particular struggles that produces the dynamic of this cycle within and in the course of these struggles. The revolutionary dynamic of this cycle of struggles appears in most of today's struggles as the tendency for the class to produce its existence as class within capital, and so to put class itself into question (the class no longer has a relation to itself). This dynamic has its intrinsic limit in what defines it as a dynamic – acting as a class. As theorists we are the spies and promoters of this gulf, which is the class putting its own existence as class into question within the class struggle, and in practice, we are also its actors when we are immediately involved. We exist in this rupture.

I will now develop some of these points in relation to some recent struggles.

Collectives

The underlying dynamic behind the creation of collectives – which no longer imply self-organisation or autonomy – within each strike of any importance and length is testament to the end of working class identity. These formations are not, as autonomy, a better organisation/existence of the class than those institutionalised representative forms, leaving to them what belongs to them, (leave to the unions what belongs to them), but the creation of a distance towards these forms which has as its content the distance of the class to itself. A distance established against a class unity existing as something objective within the reproduction of capital. Those nostalgic for the Great Class Party and the unity of the battalions of the working class are kidding themselves if they think that the segmentation of the class is merely suffered – more often it is willed, constructed and demanded. The nature of the segmentation and the collectives is the proletariat making extraneous its own definition as a class within the class struggle. How then could a ‘unity' that isn't one, that is an inter-activity, be constructed within a wider class movement? I do not know… but the class struggle has often shown its infinite inventiveness. We see as an extremely positive sign that the characteristics of the new cycle of struggles are given to us in the course of ordinary everyday struggles.

Activities which produce the objectivisation of the existence and unity of the class

This class unity, even in the form of the general strike, (in the ‘classical' conception) has entered the era of doubt. When the strikers of the spring of 2003 in France called for a general strike, they didn't ask of the unions what they themselves were not doing but would have wanted to do, they demanded something else than they were doing. Here we have a ‘spontaneous', ‘basic', ‘self-organised' movement which sees as a way forward a call for a general strike from the very unions which they distance themselves from on a day to day basis. There is not necessarily a contradiction there (this is after all how things transpired), but it is difficult to present the demand that the unions call a general strike as a simple continuation of the movement. Strangely, this movement doesn't call for the general strike when it is on the rise, but rather when it is in decline, which gives a strange hue to the nature of the general strike. It is the strikers' own action which dominates the strikers, which was not the case fifteen days earlier when it was the continuous thread of activity and opposition through which the class exists in itself as distinction in relation to its unity and its objectified existence in the reproduction of capital. Class unity is still alive and well, it is an objective unity in the reproduction of capital, to appeal to the unions was simply to recognise the level at which this unity exists, as a hypostasised unity.

The “wild kids”

Here we are talking about the rejection of the entire order of the capitalist system of production by important sections of young workers. This rejection has no time for the seductions or sanctions of integration or for the ideologies of self-management. This situation has nothing in common with what we saw in the 1970s in Europe and America.

The ‘collateral victims' of the wild kids are the fables around cooperation tying the workers together, (for themselves), as a stepping stone to revolutionary self organisation and autonomy.

Argentina: a class struggle against autonomy.

We can talk about ‘self management of misery', but then we ignore the main thrust of the problem of the very nature of self-management, self-organisation and autonomy. It is just as easy to say that there is no possibility of self-management within the capitalist system – but generalised self-management having abolished the state and capitalist domination will in the end be nothing more than the management of businesses (of all businesses) and of their connections, their exchanges. It would inevitably lead to the re-establishment of value and of the state. The historic period of autonomous struggles in Argentina – the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s – is over not simply because empirically we don't encounter similar struggles, but as a result of the transformation of the mode of exploitation, of the composition of the working class, in the modalities of its reproduction. The ‘Rodrigazo' of 1975, with its area councils, is revealed as the swansong of this period and this era of class struggle. Even during this period, autonomy resulted only in formulating nationalist programmes, economic planning or renewed trade union strength.

At the moment, for the militants of autonomy, what's important is the denial of actually existing autonomy, because they are stuck in an insurmountable contradiction. On the one hand, autonomy and self-organisation are the route travelled by the revolution in progress, or they constitute the potential revolution. On the other hand, the present expressions of autonomy are in a massive and recurrent way the confirmation of the class as class of the capitalist mode of production. The autonomous Argentinian movements declare – ‘we have done the work of the political parties, the NGOs, the government'. The only perspective, the only dynamic which emerges is the one which is opened up by everything that runs counter to this autonomy. We can be purists of self-management and autonomy if we like, in the end self-organisation are the factories run by the workers themselves and the management of the planes trabajar by the piqueteros themselves, (even working time is now regulated within the movement). Since the piquetero organisations have won the right to manage these work plans, their allocation has itself become a huge question, that is, not just in relation to the government, but within the movement itself.

We cannot argue that because of the work plans the piqueteros are no longer autonomous and self-organised. If it is important to emphasise the autonomous and self-organised nature of the movements, it is not in order to show that they become degenerate or institutionalised, due to some sclerosis of self-organisation and autonomy; rather they are the clearest manifestation, the simple truth (neither good or bad), of what they are today: a rejection of what we are in society which is nothing but our ‘liberation'.

The few cases of occupation with the resumption of production, asking the state to take control of the factory, are the real content of autonomy at the moment (the autonomy of the working class is labour and value). We imagine if we like all the factories taken over, this would change nothing. As long as the workers self-organise as workers (self-organisation is this by definition), the ‘factories taken over' will be capitalist factories, never mind who runs them. The essence of what has happened in Argentina, is that all the forms of self-organisation, autonomy, workers' control and assembly immediately encountered their limit in the form of opposition and an internal contradiction treating them like a perpetuation of capitalist society. Abolishing capital is at the same time denying oneself as a worker and not self-organising as such, it's a movement of the abolition of businesses, of factories, of the ‘product', of exchange (whatever its form). The proletariat as class and revolutionary subject abolishes itself as such in the abolition of capital. The process of revolution is that of the abolition of what is self-organisable. Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution, what follows is carried out against it.

The content of this challenging of self-organisation within self-organisation is consciously articulated in Argentina around two themes: subjectivity and labour.

At the very heart of self-organised collective projects, the subjectivity and inter-individuality put forward is in opposition to the particularisation of an activity like labour which is the coincidence of the social and individual aspects of human activity outside itself; and is in opposition to the autonomisation of the conditions of production as economy. The capitalist mode of production is a mode of production not because it needs to pass through material production as such, but because its social relations need to pass through a form, a principle, which can only exist objectively – value. Communism is not a mode of production, because activity is not gathered as an exterior common norm that can only exist as production objectifying itself. In communism, relations between individuals are relations in which their singularity constitutes the reality of their relations. It is just as absurd to conceive communism as a form of organisation of production, which inevitably has in the end to be a form of account, a forcibly abstract equalisation of activities which can be quantified, as it would be to conceive it as a purely inter-subjective relation to which production is a mere accessory. In communism, each activity is an end in itself because there is no norm, there is no principle of equalisation or of a situation to reproduce.

The most important aspect of the Argentinian struggles is precisely the one scorned by the apologists of self-organisation. Not as they themselves would have it – the problem of autonomy within productive activity become sclerotic in institutionalisation ‘facilitating the reproduction of an economy in crisis' (Échanges) – but because it is therein that autonomy truly lies and that it is brought into question. Revolution as communisation becomes credible within the modalities of productive activity because it enters into contradiction with self-organisation in the way in which its productive activities are implemented and in conflicts in which self-organisation itself becomes the target.

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

“If we create canteens only so the compañeros can eat, then we are dickheads. If we believe that producing on a farm is just about digging up beans so that so that the compañeros can eat, then we are really complete dickheads… If we don't know how to leave the farm and everything which the state throws at us, how to be the builders of a new social relation, of new values, of a new subjectivity, let's not bet on a new 19/20.” (a militant from MTD Allen4 – south of Argentina, Macache, p. 27). We want “to engender a new subjectivity, new values” (ibid). Elsewhere in an interview with an activist from MTD Solano, it appears that the aim of all these activities is not just to survive, but the main raison d'être is given as “developing new forms of life in common”: division of labour; rotation of tasks; hierarchy; men-women relations; forms of apprenticeship; public/private relations; unskilled/skilled labour; going beyond relations of exchange etc. An important position is for example, in MTD Solano, the refusal (in so far as is possible) to take decisions by voting: “…the idea being to find the answer in which everyone recognises themselves”. It is the question of “we” and “I” which is treated in a new way here. Without going so far as to talk about the social immediacy of the individual, in such an approach what is put in place is, beyond any mystical relation between the one and the general, the non-separation between the two which maintains their diversity. “When there is a vote, it gives the sensation of losers and winners, as if there were two groups”. Here it is also necessary to insist again on the importance of territorial organisation which calls into question self-organisation as imprisonment in a particular situation (territorial unity is not socially homogenous). The occupied factory is no longer alone, it is part of a totality which includes it. Production, distribution thus pose problems which can no longer be solved in the categories which strictly define the proletarian condition and its reproduction. An activist of the MTD Allen (Macache) told how the question of surplus, of overproduction, of its distribution, was posed in an occupied factory, how for the Brukman workers taking over the factory and making it work again was part of a relation of force which included the liaison with the unemployed piqueteros movement. At that moment, we can say that what is lacking is “generalisation of self-organisation” or autonomy. But if so we do not understand that what is called a “generalisation” is not one, it is a destruction of the class as self-organising subject. This generalisation is a supersession by itself of the subject which previously found in its situation the capacity to self-organise. If we do not understand this “dynamic” as a rupture, we are stuck on the vision of a purely formal movement because its content eludes us, we are confusing the taking in hand of the conditions of survival and the abolition of the situation that one has been led to take in hand. If the proletariat abolishes itself, it does not self-organise. Calling for the self-organisation of the whole movement, is to be blind to its content.

We self-organise like the unemployed of Mosconi, the workers of Brukman, the inhabitants of the shanty towns…, but when we self-organise, we immediately come up against what it is that we are and which, in struggle, becomes what must be superseded. Self-organisation as a general limit to supersession appears in conflicts between the self-organised sectors. What appears in these conflicts is that workers defend their present situation, remaining in the categories of the capitalist mode of production which define them. Unification is impossible without being precisely the abolition of self-organisation, without the unemployed person, the Zanon worker, the squatter no longer being able to be unemployed, a Zanon worker or a squatter. Whether there is unification, but then there is the abolition of the same which is self-organisable, or whether there is self-organisation but then unification, is a dream which is lost in the conflicts that the diversity of situations implies (cf. oppositions between the “neighbourhood committees” of El Alto and the associations of Santa Cruz in Bolivia concerned with the nationalisation of gas and oil).

In Argentina, self-organisation has not been surpassed, and it can only be surpassed in the final phase of a communizing insurrection. The social struggles in Argentina have announced this supersession. When it becomes manifest that it can no longer have autonomy as its content as a realisable project or a project already in the course of realisation, self-organisation becomes an imprisonment within its own situation which is precisely what the struggle against capital must go beyond. The class struggle remains trapped in the simple expression of the class situation. In the course of the relentless defence of its most immediate interests, the existence of the class becomes an exteriorised constraint within capital. In the defence of its immediate interests, the proletariat is led to abolish itself because its activity in the “occupied factory” can no longer be imprisoned in the “occupied factory”, nor in the juxtaposition, the coordination, the unity of the “occupied factories ”, nor in everything which is self-organisable (cf. in Macache the testimony of a Brukman worker).

This means simply that the proletariat cannot struggle against capital without calling into question the causes which define itself in its involvement with capital. It is that which we can see peeping through the internal contradictions of the productive projects (self-organisation of the class all of whose effective practical details overturn all the terms defining the class) and in the conflicts between the self-organised structures.

Algeria: “When they talk to me about Aarouchs, I have the impression that they are talking about something foreign to me”.

The insurrectional social explosion beginning in the Kabylie region in spring 2001 also illustrates the dissatisfaction that self-organisation gives rise to as soon as it is put in place, not by its temporary shortcomings but by its very nature which confirms the existence of the proletariat defined as a class in the categories of the capitalist mode of production. This dissatisfaction that the insurrectional movement manifests vis-à-vis the forms of self-organisation which it gives itself at a certain point rests on two points: the extension of the movement and the question of demands. In this dissatisfaction and the two points on which it rests, what exists is the gap in the class struggle between the existence of the class as it formalises itself in self-organisation and the way that the continuation and deepening of its contradiction with capital leads to its being called into question. In this continuation and this deepening, in the absence of measures of communisation, the Kabylie insurrection was condemned to a headlong rush without formalisable objectives and/or to return to its existence recognised for itself, that is to say recognised by and for capital, that is to say finally to negotiation through its forms of self-organisation. The riots did not have a perspective of demands, or such a generality (the end of the hogra) that there could be one. They sometimes turned into confrontations (more or less manipulated by the police during the big Algerian demonstrations of June 2001) between rival gangs of looting demonstrators, which testifies to the impossibility of a class unification outside the revolutionary activity in which it abolishes itself.

The aarchs played two contradictory roles, in one way an expression of the movement, as its form of organisation, its place of debate, its voice; they were also a new emerging form of political representation: a substitute for the parties, a new political representation which confined the revolt. Finally, very rapidly, the aarchs revealed themselves not as a broad space of expression for the population, but as an arena for politicians old and new.

Right from the start the Algerian insurrection of Kabylie, despite or because of its great violence, limited itself to attacking all the institutions of the state, but left intact, because it was not its objective and it did not have the means to attack, all the relations of production, exchange and distribution (despite a few marginal modifications relevant to the solidarity or the mutual aid which marks any period where the habitual social framework is overturned). That insurrection had to self-organise. Its self-organisation was then only the sign that it did not overturn social relations, that it had only a limited aim: the liberation of society from a “corrupt ” and “corrupting ” state (from an unfree state) according to the terms which appeared from the beginning of the insurrection. It is its very limitation which gave birth to the forms of organisation that it gave itself, that is to say forms of self-organisation.

The continuation of attacks against the institutions of the state after June 2001 and the necessity of violence in these attacks are as much a rejection of the self-organised movement of the aarchs as they are attacks on the Algerian state. It is its own existence as a class that self-organisation formalises as an existence in and for capital and that, in struggle, the proletariat no longer recognises as its own. Its existence as a class is autonomised for it. To parody Marx in The Class Struggles in France: it is only by making appear from its own movement a compact, powerful self-organisation, making it into an adversary and fighting it that the party of subversion can finally become a truly revolutionary party.

That doesn't happen without organisation, as when proletarians take on various necessary tasks which impose themselves in the development of the struggle: the blocking of roads, laying siege to police stations, forcing shopkeepers to stop supplying the forces of order, the direct reappropriation of commodities which are necessary for them by looting or the control of stocks… This organisation is never the formalisation of what they are in existing society as the base or anchorage point of the new society to construct as the liberation of what they are, that is to say it is not self-organisation. It does not formalise the existence of any preceding subject. The situation of proletarians is no longer something to organise, to defend and liberate, but something to abolish.

It is interesting to recall the simultaneously conflictual and integrative relations which are created between unemployed, employed proletarians, small shopkeepers, employees of administrations which are still in Algeria more or less involved in a relationship of political clientelism. No unity on the basis of demands can ever be realised. The struggle of the Algerian proletarians of Kabylie imposes itself by direct action, it expresses itself outside of any particular terrain (workplace, neighbourhood…), it negates the divisions maintained by the capitalist class, it tends to its generalisation and it bears a global rejection of the state, it develops itself in opposition to all the legalist, pacifist and electoral slogans.

These proletarians only very rarely assert the “class determinations" of their activity. It is true that this differs in comparison with the preceding cycle of struggles, where any action no matter how reformist was loudly proclaimed to be the mobilization of the global working class, proud of itself and its flat-cap. That the action of proletarians is no longer proclaimed to be class action does not mean it isn't class action. The questioning by the proletariat of its own existence as a class which objectifies itself against itself as a determination of the reproduction of capital, is a convulsive type of class action, as any self-organization confirms. It is no surprise that proletarians no longer affirm themselves as acting as a class when it is their adversaries who uphold the existence of the proletariat as a class as the dominant content of the counter-revolution facing it.

The Direct Action Movement (DAM)

Because it proclaims the negation of classes as a lifestyle, and thereby, as a precondition for the class struggle, the DAM ends up in a series of dead ends: capital as domination and symbol, the unsolvable question of the DAM's own extension, its reference to needs, to pleasure, to desires, to an "authentic" human self. This dead end appears in the course of riots – their self-limitation (their self-referential character) – and in their "recuperation" in aims which are not their own, as in Quebec, in Prague and also in Genoa. However, this reciprocal exclusion which constitutes the DAM between being proletarian and producing other social relations has become now, in this cycle, the necessary form in which the dynamic of this cycle of struggles manifests itself. Even if the immediate relations of individuals in their singularity end up existing merely as an alternative, the DAM prefigures the content of the communist revolution: the proletariat's contestation, against capital, of its existence as class.

"Suicidal" struggles: the obsolescence of autonomy

We have already evoked the struggle of Cellatex and those which followed. In December 2002–January 2003, the ACT strike in Angers (IT systems, subsidiary of Bull) is carried out in a contradictory fashion by an inter-union coordination committee and a stike committee “broadly open, emerging from the rank-and-file” (Échanges no.104). Three production lines are momentarily restarted, which does not prevent the rest of the products ending up being burned. It is interesting to review the chronology of the events. The factory is occupied following the announcement, on 20th December, of the definitive liquidation of the ACT (after multiple manouvres and dilatory discussions). The factory is occupied, but no one knows why. On 10th January the strike committee agrees to start the production of electronic cards destined for an Italian equipment supplier. On 22nd January, 200 cards are delivered, on the 23rd the occupants burn cards taken out of storage, and on the 24th the occupants are evicted without difficulty.

If Cellatex can teach us anything in terms of form (violence has a long history in class struggle), but also in terms of content, it is that the dynamic at work in this type of struggle resides in the fact that the proletariat is in itself nothing, but a nothing full of social relations: against capital, the proletariat has no prospect but its disappearance.

In the same period, the workers laid off by Moulinex, in setting fire to a factory building, inscribed themselves equally in the dynamic of this new cycle of struggles in which the proletariat's own existence as a class is the limit of its class action.

Communisation

The ultimate limit of the struggle over wages and conditions can be defined as that in which the contradiction between the proletariat and capital comes to a head to such an extent that the definition of class becomes an external constraint, an exteriority simply there because capital is there. Class membership is exteriorised as a constraint. This is where we find the moment of a qualitative leap in class struggle. It is here that we find a supersession and not an overgrowing. It is here that we can pass from a change in the system to a change of system.

The ultimate point of the reciprocal implication between the classes is that in which the proletariat seizes the means of production. It seizes them, but it cannot appropriate them. An appropriation carried out by the proletariat is a contradiction in terms, because it could only be achieved through its own abolition as class, in a universal union of production in which it is stripped of all that remains of its previous social situation. In communism there is no longer a question of appropriation because it is the very notion of “product” which is abolished. Of course, there are objects (even the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are to be redefined) which are used to produce, others which are directly consumed, and others which are used for both. But to speak about products and to pose the question of their circulation, of their distribution, or of their “transfer”, i.e. to conceive of a moment of appropriation presupposes places of rupture, of “coagulation” of human activity: the market in market societies, the stockpiling and “stint or limit”5 in certain visions of communism. The product is not a simple thing. To speak of the product is to suppose that a result of human activity appears as finished in relation to another result, or amongst other results. We should not proceed from the product, but from activity.

In communism, human activity is infinite because it is indivisible. It has concrete or abstract results, but these results are never “products”, for that would raise the question of their appropriation or of their transfer* under some given mode. This infinite human activity synthesizes what one can say about communism. If we can speak of infinite human activity in communism, it is because the capitalist mode of production already allows us to see – albeit contradictorily and not as a “good side” – human activity as a continuous global social flux, and the “general intellect” or the “collective worker” as the dominant force of production. The social character of production does not prefigure anything: it merely renders the basis of value contradictory.

The necessity with which the communist revolution is faced consists not in modifying the share between wages and profit, but in abolishing the capitalist nature of the accumulated means of production. A struggle over wages and conditions can pass from the level of conflict to that of contradiction. The level of conflict is that of the share between wages and profit. It doesn't matter if interests remain irreconcilable on this level: we remain in a zero sum game that is indefinitely reproducible, and as long as we remain on this level the pendulum will swing one way and then another, because we have not attacked the pendulum itself. The level of contradiction is that of surplus value and of productive labour, but one cannot demand to be a little less of a surplus-value producing worker, other than through demanding a slightly higher wage or slightly less hours of work, which brings us back to the questions of distribution and the conflict. It is the insufficiency of surplus-value in relation to accumulated capital which is at the heart of the crisis of exploitation. If at the centre of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital there were not the question of surplus-value producing labour; if there were only a problem of distribution and if all the conflicts over wages were not the existence of this contradiction, the revolution would remain a pious wish. It is thus not by attacking the nature of labour as productive of surplus-value that the struggle over wages is superseded (this would always bring us back to a problem of distribution), but by an attack on the means of production as capital. A self-organised struggle can take us to the point of rupture, but the attack on the means of production is its supersession.

The attack against the capitalist nature of the means of production is tantamount to their abolition as value absorbing labour in order to valorize itself; it is the extension of gratuity, the potentially physical destruction of certain means of production; their abolition as factories in which the product is defined as product, i.e. the frameworks of exchange and of commerce; it is the upheaval of relations between the sections of productionwhich materialise exploitation and its rate; it is their definition, their setting in individual intersubjective relations; it is the abolition of the division of labour such as it is inscribed in the urban landscape, in the material configuration of buildings, in the separation between town and country, in the very existence of something which one calls a factory or a place of production. “Relations between individuals are fixed in things, because exchange value is by nature material” (Marx, Grundrisse…) The abolition of value is a concrete transformation of the landscape in which we live, it is a new geography. The abolition of social relations is a very material affair.

The production of new social relations between individuals are thus the communist measures, which are taken as a necessity of the struggle. The abolition of exchange and of value, of the division of labour, of property, is nothing but the art of class war: no more no less now than when Napoleon waged his war in Germany through the introduction of the Napoleonic Code. Previous social relations are dissolved in this social activity where one can't distinguish between the activity of strikers and insurgents, and the creation of other relations between individuals; the creation of new relations, in which individuals only consider what is as a moment of an uninterrupted flow of production of human life.

The destruction of exchange: this means the workers attacking the banks which hold their accounts and those of other workers, thus making it necessary to manage without; this means the workers communicating their “products” to themselves and the community directly and without market; this means the homeless occupying homes, thus “obliging” construction workers to produce freely, the construction workers taking from the shops at liberty, obliging the whole class to organise to seek food in the sectors to be collectivised, etc. Let's be clear about this. There is no measure which, in itself, taken separately, is “communism”. To distribute goods, to directly circulate means of production and raw materials, to use violence against the existing state: fractions of capital can achieve some of these things in certain circumstances. That which is communist is not “violence” in itself, nor “distribution” of the shit that we inherit from class society, nor “collectivisation” of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects these actions, underlies them, renders them the moments of a process which can only communise ever further, or be crushed.

Military and social activities are indissoluble, simultaneous, and interpenetrating. A revolution cannot be carried out without taking communist measures, without dissolving wage labour, communising supplies, clothing, housing, taking all the weapons (destructive, but also telecommunications, foods, etc.), integrating the destitute (including those which we ourselves will have reduced to this state), the unemployed, the ruined peasants, rootless drop-out students. To speak of a revolution carried out by a “category” which accounts for 20% of the population and which “strikes” to ask of the state that it satisfies its “interests”: that is a joke.

From the moment in which we begin to consume freely, it is necessary to reproduce that which is consumed; for this we lack the primary materials, spare parts, and food (I avoid the unsatisfying concept of “use value” which is an intrinsic concept to the existence of the commodity). It is thus necessary to seize the means of transport, of telecommunications, and enter into contact with other sectors; in doing this one runs up against opposing armed groups. The confrontation with the state immediately poses the problem of armament, which can only be solved by setting up a distribution network to support combat in an almost infinite multiplicity of places (the constitution of a front or of determinate zones of combat is the death of the revolution). From the moment in which proletarians dismantle the laws of commodity relations, there is no turning back (even more so because, in doing this, capital is deprived of essential goods, and it counter-attacks). Every social deepening, every extension gives flesh and blood to new relations, and enables the integration of more and more non-proletarians to the communising class, which is in the process of constituting and dissolving itself simultaneously. It enables the reorganisation of the productive forces, abolishing to an ever greater extent all competition and division between proletarians, acquiring a military position, and making of this the content and the progress of its armed confrontation against those which the capitalist class can still mobilise, to integrate and reproduce in its social relations.

The capitalist class and its innumerable peripheral strata rest on a complicated tangle of financial connections, credits, and obligations, that is ridden with red-tape, bureaucratic, and vulnerable to the highest point. Without these connections its internal cohesion breaks down. This class is not a community founded on a material association; it is a conglomeration of competitors unified by exchange. Exchange is the abstract community (money). This is why all the measures of communisation will have to be a vigorous action for the dismantling of the connections which link our enemies and their material support: rapid destruction, without the possibility of return. Communisation is not the peaceful organisation of free goods and of a pleasant way of life amongst proletarians. The dictatorship of the social movement of communisation is the process of the integration of humanity to the dissappearing proletariat. The strict definition of the proletariat in comparison with other strata – its fight against all commodity production – is at the same time a process which forces the strata of the salaried petit-bourgeoisie, of the “class of social containment”, to join the communising class. It is thus definition, exclusion and, at the same time demarcation and opening, erasure of the borders and withering away of classes. This is not a paradox, but the reality of the movement in which the proletariat is defined in practice as the movement for the constitution of the human community. The social movement in Argentina was confronted by, and posed, the question of the relations between active proletarians (wage-earning), the unemployed, and the excluded and middle strata. It has only brought extremely fragmentary responses, of which the most interesting is without doubt that of its territorial organisation. In this situation, the radical sworn opponents of interclassism or the propagandists of national democratic unanimity are the militants of two different types of defeat. The revolution which in this cycle of struggles can no longer be anything but communisation, supersedes the dilemma between the Leninist or democratic class alliances and Gorter's “proletariat alone”.

The only way of superseding the conflicts between the unemployed and those with jobs, between the qualified and the unqualified, is to carry out from the start, in the course of the armed struggle, the measures of communisation which remove the very basis of this division (this is something which the recouperated companies in Argentina, when confronted by this question, tried only very marginally, being generally satisfied (cf. Zanon) with some charitable redistribution to groups of piqueteros.) In the absence of this, capital will play on this fragmentation throughout the movement, and will find its Noske and Scheidemann amongst the self-organised6 . The crises of the capitalist mode of production are not a guarantee of revolutionary process: the capitalist class knows perfectly well how to use them to decompose the working class. In fact, what the German revolution had already shown, is that it is a question of dissolving the middle strata while taking concrete communist measures which force them to begin to join the proletariat, i.e. to achieve their “proletarianisation”. Nowadays in developed countries, the question is at the same time simpler and more dangerous. On the one hand a massive majority of the middle strata is salaried and thus no longer has a material base to its social position; its role of containment and of management of capitalist cooperation is essential but permanently being rendered precarious; and its social position depends upon the very fragile mechanism of the subtraction of fractions of surplus value. But on the other hand for these very same reasons, its formal proximity to the proletariat pushes it to present, in these struggles, national or democratic alternative managerial “solutions” which would preserve its own positions. It could be at ease in radical democratism expressing the limits of struggles. There will be no miracle solution because there is no unifying demand. The class only unifies itself through breaking the relation in which the demands have their meaning: the capitalist relation. The essential question which we will have to solve is to understand how we extend communism, before it is suffocated in the pincers of the commodity; how we integrate agriculture so as not to have to exchange with peasants; how we do away with the exchange-based relations of the opponent to impose on him the logic of the communisation of relations and of the seizure of goods; how, faced with the revolution, we dissolve the block of fear through the revolution.

The proletarians “are” not revolutionaries like the sky “is” blue, because they “are” salaried and exploited, nor “are” they the dissolution of existing conditions. In their self-transformation they constitute themselves from what they are, as a revolutionary class.