Politics of the Rift_ On Théorie Communiste
Argentina, 2001
This essay examines the antinomy of sophistication wrestle, as formulated by Paul Mattick and elaborated by Théorie Communiste. The antinomy will be formulated as follows: whereas capital accumulates by exploiting wage labor, the replica of wage labor reproduces the circumstances of exploitation that propel the buildup of capital. Thus, in reproducing itself, wage labor reproduces the circumstances of its personal exploitation, which is to say, capital. Which means that labor’s positive factors in opposition to capital—higher wages and dealing circumstances—are gained at labor’s personal expense: growing wages indicate an growing fee of exploitation. Solely the abolition of the capitalist class relation can abolish this vicious cycle. The query is whether or not this abolition requires labor’s seizure of the technique of manufacturing, or whether or not these means have turn out to be so certain up with capital accumulation that abolishing capital entails relinquishing these means and abolishing manufacturing as we all know it. Théorie Communiste insists on the latter. Since social manufacturing has turn out to be inextricable from capital accumulation and the affirmation of labor inseparable from the affirmation of capital, communism because the abolition of capital requires the self-abolition of the proletariat. Class wrestle unfolds within the rift between two impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat with out affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital with out negating the proletariat. Is the potential of communism inextricable from this rift between unimaginable affirmation and unimaginable negation? Or does it require a politics of the rift able to pinpointing the faultline between these impossibilities?
The Antinomy of Class Battle
In one among his late texts, “Reform or Revolution,” Paul Mattick succinctly encapsulates the antinomy of sophistication wrestle:
Larger wages and higher working circumstances presuppose elevated exploitation, or the discount of the worth of labor energy, thus assuring the continual replica of the category wrestle inside the accumulation course of. It’s the goal risk of the latter which nullifies the employees’ financial wrestle as a medium for the event of revolutionary class consciousness.
Capital will solely improve the share of social wealth it yields to labor by growing the quantity of surplus worth it extracts from labor. Capital will increase by labor’s wrestle to extend its share in capital: the extra wealth labor obtains from capital, the extra labor is exploited by capital. Labor’s victories consolidate capital’s monopolization of social wealth: the strengthening of its affect upon capital can be the weakening of its problem to capital. Since labor’s final curiosity is the abolition of capital, profitable higher wages and dealing circumstances is a short-term acquire that diminishes the prospect of long-term victory.
However labor can no extra abstain from the wrestle for wages than it might probably relinquish the wrestle for overcoming capital. It’s caught in a double bind: if it offers up its wrestle for wages, will probably be immiserated; if it doesn’t, it perpetuates its personal exploitation. In orthodox Marxist principle, the intensification of labor struggles generated class consciousness and therefore consciousness of the necessity to abolish the category relation separating producers from the technique of manufacturing. Class wrestle culminates within the abolition of sophistication. Reformist consciousness turns into revolutionary when it perceives the necessity to abolish its personal social being (social being generates the consciousness able to remodeling it). However in historic observe, the consciousness ensuing from the elevated energy of organized labor seeks solely to consolidate the social being that generated it. Organized labor turns into the adjutant of the bourgeoisie. As a substitute of negating its social being, working class consciousness reinforces it. What explains this blockage? The subjectivity of labor is trapped between aspiring to the dominant standing of the bourgeoisie and affirming its goal standing within the social order. It aspires as a result of it’s subordinated and it’s subordinated as a result of it aspires. This impasse converts the consciousness of social being into its affirmation, stopping consciousness of sophistication from issuing into the crucial negation of sophistication.
However this neutralization was solely doable as long as capital was assured of an growing fee of exploitation. With the top of capital’s postwar increase (lasting roughly from 1950 to 1973), class struggle enters into a brand new part. Capitalist class consciousness is reenergized by the self-conscious energy of organized labor; it launches a brand new offensive in opposition to it. Privatization and marketization intensify. Because the bourgeoisie rolls again the social positive factors of the working class, labor’s diminishing energy and affect corrodes the fabric buffers that prevented class consciousness from recognizing the necessity to destroy class. Now maximizing exploitation entails rising immiseration,whose penalties are compounded by murderous imperial wars and catastrophic local weather change. In waging struggle in opposition to the working class, bourgeois consciousness dismembers social being, its personal in addition to that of its opponent. Capital’s struggle on the worldwide proletariat ramifies into the destruction of humanity’s inorganic physique, the earth. That is the place we discover ourselves. The query then is whether or not the category consciousness rekindled by labor’s nascent reorganization can be happy to regain what it has misplaced since 1973, or whether or not recognizing the destruction of its social being will spur it to pursue the definitive abolition of each capital and sophistication.
Revolutionary Risk
This sketch omits all the main points one would anticipate from a reputable evaluation or clarification. Nevertheless it serves to focus on an underappreciated side of historic materialism (one which can be burdened by Mattick ). Social being determines consciousness and is redetermined by it in return. However the temporal hiatus separating willpower from redetermination marks the noncoincidence of topic and object, or the hole between social being in-itself and social being for-itself. This hole is essential for the interaction between the subjective and goal dimension of historic materialism. The latter just isn’t concerning the one-way willpower of consciousness by social being, however concerning the two-way willpower between the unconscious objectivation of subjective observe (what we do on a regular basis with out figuring out we’re doing it) and the acutely aware subjectivation of goal construction (what we’re compelled to do, having consciously interpreted our social being). It’s the transition from one second to the opposite, and particularly the redetermination of social being by class consciousness, that decides whether or not the bourgeoisie will preserve its social being in addition to that of the working class, or whether or not the proletariat will virtually negate its personal social being along with that of the bourgeoisie. The sensible shift from affirmation to negation marks the transition from reformist to revolutionary class politics. Effecting this transition requires greedy this hiatus because the interval inside which historical past is made. This entails consciously apprehending and intervening into the hole separating the subjective and goal dimensions of social being and thus figuring out when to behave on the limits of figuring out.
Revolutionary risk emerges within the interval between the target penalties of subjective exercise and their subjective redetermination. It’s a truism to say that “revolution takes time.” However this truism has each a reformist and a revolutionary sense. In line with the previous, the revolutionary transition from one mode of manufacturing to a different stays a social course of: the transformation of social replica requires its upkeep. The revolutionary sense insists that revolution just isn’t a transition however a hiatus interrupting common social processes and even the crucial of social replica itself. The revolutionary crucial consists in actively suspending the crucial of social replica with a purpose to safe its future, as a result of to proceed to affirm it’s to jeopardize this future. We would add that within the present conjuncture, it’s exactly the blind affirmation of the necessity to proceed that negates the potential of persevering with. Refusal gathers the previous, current, and way forward for social replica into the interval that suspends them and makes an attempt to recreate their future risk. The transition from capitalism to communism is cast by risking the continuity of transition.
However the query is whether or not suspending current circumstances of continuity (i.e., current circumstances of social replica) forges a brand new, radically completely different continuity, or whether or not the discontinuity generated by negating these circumstances deserves the title “communism.” That is the distinction between communism as sublation and communism as abolition. The difficulty considerations greater than the logic of negation. Asking whether or not labor would possibly resume its ascendancy vis-à-vis capital assumes that the dynamic of sophistication wrestle is akin to the motion of a pendulum in a impartial medium, every pole ascending in alternation. However historical past just isn’t a impartial medium. Its irreversibility inflects this dynamism and irrevocably alters its composition of forces.
Théorie Communiste on the Disconnection of Valorization and Social Replica
The restructuring of the labor-capital relation initiated within the Nineteen Seventies and prolonged by the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties (generally described as “neoliberalism,” a time period I’ll keep away from due to its imprecision) adjustments the circumstances of sophistication wrestle. For some, it alters them in a manner that renders a sure conception of revolution, i.e., the proletariat’s seizure and management of manufacturing, traditionally out of date. That is the fundamental proposition of Théorie Communiste (TC), a gaggle of theorists and activists born of the cycle of struggles that flared from 1968 to 1977, whose work is devoted to pondering by the implications of this restructuring. It has three primary elements: deindustrialization and off-shoring; privatization and austerity; financialization and credit score. Their mixed consequence is the “twin disconnection” of the replica of labor energy from valorization and of wage revenue from consumption. The primary disconnection entails the geographical “zoning” of valorization, which entails
capitalist hypercenters grouping collectively the upper capabilities within the hierarchy of enterprise group (finance, excessive know-how, analysis facilities, and so forth.); secondary zones with actions requiring intermediate applied sciences, encompassing logistics and industrial distribution, ill-defined zones with peripheral areas dedicated to meeting actions, typically outsourced; final, disaster zones and “social dustbins” wherein an entire casual financial system involving authorized or unlawful merchandise prospers.”
Whereas zoning unifies the valorization of worth, it divides the replica of labor energy:
Replica happens in numerous methods in every of those zones. Within the first world: high-wage strata the place social dangers are privatized intermeshed with fractions of the labor power the place sure points of Fordism have been preserved and others, more and more quite a few, subjected to a brand new “compromise.” Within the second world: regulation by low wages, imposed by sturdy inner migratory stress and precarious employment, islands of roughly secure worldwide subcontracting, little or no assure for social dangers and labor migrations. Within the third world: humanitarian help, every kind of illicit commerce, agricultural survival, regulation by numerous mafias and wars on a roughly restricted scale, but in addition by the revival of native and ethnic solidarities.
The result’s a “whole disjunction” between the worldwide valorization of capital and the replica of labor energy satisfactory for that valorization. The reciprocity between mass manufacturing and the replica of labor energy, attribute of Fordism, disappears. There’s a separation between the replica and circulation of capital and that of labor energy. Furthermore, the zoning of social replica enforces the segmentation of the proletariat, its division by processes of racialization and gendering compounded by the subdivisions of ethnicity and tradition. Proletarianization is not the socially homogenizing power that promised to unify the proletariat in opposition to capital: “The unity of segmentation is all that exists for it [the proletariat].” The second disconnection {couples} growing consumption with lowering wages. Mounting debt permits family expenditure to outstrip revenue. Macroeconomic threat is displaced onto households, whose debt turns into the prime supply of demand. Thus the place to begin for the subprime disaster of 2008 just isn’t capital investments however family money owed. The financial savings instrumentalized by monetary markets, financial savings whose reimbursement is limitless, are these of wage laborers: “The wage is not a component of regulation of the entire of capitalism.”
Given how a lot will prove depend on it, it’s value pausing to contemplate essential rejoinders to the disconnection thesis. On a charitable studying, the zoning of valorization will be understood to acquire at completely different geographic scales and even inside single nation-states: Brazil would possibly plausibly embody all three. However the “twin disconnection” thesis has been subjected to notably trenchant criticism by Bruno Astarian. Astarian’s critique will be boiled down to 3 details:
1) The unification of worth exists solely as an assemblage of a number of capitals differentiated by their natural composition (ratio of fixed to variable capital and of labor energy to technique of manufacturing). This differentiation is hierarchical and guidelines out any international equalization of the speed of revenue. The totality of accessible surplus worth just isn’t equally distributed as a single fee of revenue throughout all capitals.
2) If the unification of worldwide capital is relative, then the replica of labor energy is each domestically and internationally differentiated, and as such roughly satisfactory to the differentiated unity of worth.
3) With regard to family debt, there’s a distinction between shopper credit score and actual property credit score. Whereas the primary permits a rise in family expenditure, it represents solely a minor half—roughly 30 %—of whole family debt. Shopper credit score is principally practiced in 5 international locations: the USA, Canada, the UK, Japan, and Germany. Sixty-five % of the mass of shopper debt is concentrated in these international locations. As one would possibly anticipate, the vast majority of the worldwide proletariat doesn’t have recourse to shopper credit score. Even within the US, the resort to credit score amongst proletarians is comparatively rare and the sums involved comparatively modest. In line with Federal Reserve figures, between 1998 and 2007, whereas debt was current in any respect ranges of revenue and was onthe rise even on the decrease finish of the revenue bracket, it was the middle-classes who sustained the vast majority of shopper credit score, they usually did so each in larger numbers and for bigger sums. This doesn’t rule out the prevalence of overindebtedness among the many poorest, but it surely does indicate that wages have fallen relative to what’s thought of a standard lifestyle within the US and that the “restructuring” invoked by TC is a minimum of not in full impact. As for actual property credit score, it solely will increase family demand for brand spanking new housing. Thus, transactions regarding previous housing ought to be deducted from this whole credit score mass. In 2007, the variety of actual property transactions for previous housing was $5.7 million, versus $0.7 million for brand spanking new housing. Consequently, whereas family debt does play a task in stimulating general demand within the US and Europe, the preponderant mass of debt driving this demand come from the middle-classes moderately than the proletariat. Center-class revenue contains a bigger portion of surplus worth, whether or not within the type of greater salaries, bonuses, or extra straight by capital revenues (curiosity, dividends) and small or private enterprise income. Typically talking, the propensity for family debt is straight proportional to revenue, which determines the capability for reimbursement. Thus, the wealthy invariably incur larger debt than the poor. The marked lower in rates of interest incited households to incur money owed on the higher limits of their capability and, within the case of subprime mortgages, typically past it. However the subprime mortgage disaster is extra indicative of the way in which wherein the capability for reimbursement imposes limits upon family debt than of a drift in the direction of debt in proletarian consumption. Consequently, whereas it’s true to say that the proletariat within the US and Europe is indebted and that the 2008 monetary disaster was initiated by cost defaults among the many poorest, it’s false to assert that proletarian consumption has turn out to be disconnected from the wage, whether or not singly or doubly.
Astarian’s critique plunges us into questions of political financial system that I’m not certified to adjudicate. Apparently nonetheless, it undermines the disconnection thesis whereas reasserting the correlation between wages and surplus worth. The consequence that TC derives from the disconnection thesis—that the wage relation is not a regulative component vis-à-vis capitalism as an entire—should be relinquished to the extent that the wage stays figuring out for almost all of the proletariat. However the disconnection thesis has a major corollary that deserves consideration even when one rejects the thesis itself. That is the declare that the up to date wage relation is the component which renders seen the contradictoriness in proletarian being as such. It indexes the overlap between proletarian belonging—the inner relation between wage labor and proletarianization—and belonging to capital—the exterior relation between dwelling labor and valorization. Whereas the primary is a relation of inner necessity, the second is a relation of exterior contingency. Being proletarian belongs to capital. There’s nothing left to affirm within the possession of labor energy however the exterior compulsion of capital: it manufacturers labor with the destitution of belonging to capital.
The wage demand turns into structurally illegitimate vis-à-vis capital, and never simply antagonistic vis-à-vis the maximization of surplus worth. The wage relation is now the location of labor’s wrestle for existence, and not of the demand for its administration. The disjunction between valorization and the replica of labor energy recenters the contradiction between capital and proletariat. However now the proletariat is riven by this contradiction in its very existence. Its id as a category is imposed externally upon it by capital: “The need of its replica is one thing it finds going through it, one thing represented by capital, for which it’s consistently needed but all the time superfluous.” Capital is not compelled to barter the ratio of surplus to needed labor; it might probably impose it by power. The illegitimacy of the demand for greater wages renders the disciplining of labor energy integral to the capitalist agenda. Coercive managerialism enhances police violence. This disaster within the wage relation concentrates the present part of the contradiction between labor and capital. The proletariat is nothing outdoors of the contradiction of the wage relation. It can’t reproduce itself independently of this relation, however by reproducing itself it reproduces the relation that nullifies its independence. That is the rationale for TC’s infamous insistence that there’s nothing left to affirm in proletarian being, no optimistic attribute to defend, no impartial capability to protect: “The proletariat is nothing in itself, however a nothing filled with social relations, such that, in opposition to capital, disappearance is its solely choice.” To be a proletarian is not to be the nothing able to being every part; it’s to be the nothingness by which every part (the totality of social relations) just isn’t solely preserved however expanded in its homogeneous fullness.
Critique of Programmatism and Principle of the Rift
In the course of the interval of the ascendancy of labor energy, its rising energy inside the capitalist mode of manufacturing was accompanied by its identification with a selected predicate: being a employee. It’s exactly this identification that’s disqualified by the rising rift between the buildup of worth and the replica of labor. The disconnection between valorization and the replica of labor, and between wages and consumption, renders out of date the definition of communism because the dis-alienation of labor, the expropriation of expropriators by seizure of the technique of manufacturing. That is the programmatist schema, whereby communism is known because the proletariat’s transition from being a category in-itself to a category for-itself, the self-organization and self-affirmation of labor, which, apparently, TC views as widespread to each Leninists and council communists, Stalinists and anarcho-syndicalists:
Typically talking, programmatism could also be outlined as a principle and observe of sophistication wrestle wherein the proletariat finds, in its drive towards liberation, the basic components of a future social organisation which turn out to be a programme to be realised. Within the class wrestle between the proletariat and capital, the proletariat is the optimistic component that takes the contradiction to the purpose of explosion. The revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether or not as a dictatorship of the proletariat, staff’ councils, the liberation of labor, a interval of transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or a “society of related producers.” One of many phrases of the contradiction is taken into account its resolution.
This critique is historic, not metaphysical. The declare just isn’t that programmatism is an phantasm which we are able to now see by however that whereas it was as soon as traditionally reputable, it’s not. The social circumstances that made it viable not receive. On the premise of this analysis of the historic obsolescence of programmatism, TC proposes “communization” not because the hitherto occluded reality or essence of communism however as its solely present, traditionally viable type. It’s the abolition of state, class, and of the division of labor, but in addition of commodification and alternate—an abolition not consequent upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose result’s not envisageable by way of “the free affiliation of producers.” It’s an abolition in course of, however an abolition not subordinated to the reconstitution of relations of manufacturing. At their most provocative, TC means that communism just isn’t the reconfiguration of forces and relations of manufacturing however the abolition of the social objectivation that generates and is regenerated by these forces and relations. We are going to look at this side of their pondering extra critically under. For now, what must be burdened is that what TC calls “communization” follows from greedy the contradictoriness of proletarian being in its dependence upon the power that expands by nullifying it.
Though it renders communism unrealizable as an affirmative program (the liberation of dwelling labor), this contradiction yields a rift (écart) in social being that makes communism doable as revolutionary negation. That is the rift between two historic impossibilities: the impossibility of affirming the proletariat with out affirming capital and the impossibility of negating capital with out negating the proletariat. The second negation was additionally endorsed by programmatism, however solely as a consequence of the revolutionary self-affirmation by which the proletariat seized the technique of manufacturing. Self-negation adopted self-affirmation, however they had been rigidly segregated. Communization decouples negation from affirmation (wherein regard it’s profoundly anti-Nietzschean). It overthrows negation’s subordination to the optimistic. The rift is without delay what compels proletarian motion in opposition to capital, and what limits it. It’s the rift between the proletariat as constitutive of capital and the proletariat as negation of capital—the rift between the restrict that blocks wrestle (the truth that the proletariat can act solely as a category) and the dynamic that propels wrestle (the truth that the proletariat seeks to abolish what constitutes it as a category, i.e. capital). Class wrestle is without delay the product and the presupposition of this rift. The separation of the producers from the technique of manufacturing, with out which capital can’t operate, just isn’t a punctual origin relating two distinct substances, labor and capital, however a rift wherein ceaseless self-expansion, capital, feeds off ceaseless self-depletion, labor. The rift conjoins capital as self-relation, reflexively positing its personal presuppositions, and the alienage (extranéisation) of labor, break up between labor energy, posited by the valorization of capital, and dwelling labor, whose obligatory replica by the wage relation is the true presupposition, without delay solicited and repressed, for the motion of valorization. The break up between dwelling and useless labor, or labor and labor energy, by which worth valorizes itself, can be what can’t be wholly built-in inside self-relating worth, the efficient (wirklich), not posited, presupposition that forestalls it from reaching closure. However this isn’t as a result of dwelling labor is an autonomous energy. Quite the opposite, it can’t be substantialized and separated from the useless labor upon which its life relies upon. The alienage of labor doesn’t observe from the estrangement of an antecedent propriety (or authenticity). It designates a situation of voidedness, or lack of substance, that doesn’t presuppose an originary plenitude. The separation of producers from manufacturing just isn’t an originary alienation that communism would undo by reuniting what has been separated however the perpetual alienage of the rift, the contradiction inherent within the commodity labor energy, which renders communism traditionally immanent within the day by day course of sophistication wrestle.
Contradiction is polarization, pitting the replica of ever-dwindling labor energy in opposition to the buildup of ever-expanding capital. As an exercise of the proletariat manifesting this contradiction, class wrestle is essentially restricted, but this restrict begins to founder when, in the midst of a wrestle initiated by a requirement (revendication) (for greater wages or a shorter working day), the willpower of sophistication (being a bearer of labor energy) begins to be acknowledged as an exterior constraint to be abolished, moderately than as an inner impulse (a productive capability) requiring liberation. It’s this encounter with their very own restrict that pushes struggles initiated by calls for, and therefore conditioned by the capital relation, past these calls for and thus past this relation:
The circumstances for overcoming struggles for calls for are put in place on the premise of struggles for calls for themselves … Placing unemployment and precarity on the coronary heart of the wage relation; defining clandestinity as the overall scenario of labor energy; posing the social immediacy of the person as the inspiration to provide the premise of opposition to capital, as within the Motion Directe motion; partaking in suicidal struggles akin to that at Cellatex and others within the spring and summer season of 2000 (Metaleurop—with some caveats—Adelshoffen, Société Française Industrielle de Contrôle et d’Equipement, Bertrand Faure, Mossley, Bata, Moulinex, Daewoo-Orion, ACT-ex Bull [these examples are important because they point to the interweaving of the concrete and the abstract in TC’s work]); decreasing class unity to an objectivity constituted in capital and within the multiplicity of collectives and waves of momentary staff’ strikes (France 2003, British postal staff)—all the above outline the content material of every of those particular struggles as constitutive of the dynamic of the cycle inside and through these struggles.
The wage demand of the employed is proscribed by the revolt of the unemployed, however the two are not pitted in opposition to each other in competitors for a share of surplus worth accrued by the growing exploitation of the one and the intensifying domination of the opposite. The restrict of the demand for needed labor binds it to the revolt in opposition to immiseration expressed by these consigned to the scrapheap of surplus labor: “The employee can not break the chain within the liberation of labor, the chain which hyperlinks collectively the phrases of contradictory reciprocal implication between surplus and needed labor.” The illegitimacy of the wage demand conjoins employed and unemployed. As a result of it indexes the restrict between priceless and worthless labor energy, value-producing labor retains a central revolutionary position regardless of the decentralization of worth manufacturing (its spatiotemporal dispersion). Social replica fuels worth manufacturing; they can’t be decoupled with out abolishing manufacturing as a social relation. Whereas the latter could also be communization’s final aim, it can’t be reached with out being routed by labor struggles. Thus it’s an error to accuse communizers of diminishing the revolutionary significance of labor struggles, and, concomitantly, of inflating the revolutionary import of insurrections by the unwaged (an error I’ve made prior to now). The purpose is to acknowledge the interdependence between wage calls for and unwaged revolts, in opposition to programmatism’s tendency to decouple them. If the latter constitutes the restrict of the previous, then by the identical token, unwaged revolt encounters its restrict within the wage demand. Riot can’t be decoupled from wrestle on the websites of manufacturing:
If class wrestle stays a motion on the stage of replica, it is not going to combine its personal raison-d’être, which is manufacturing. The at present recurring restrict of all riots and “insurrections” is what defines them as minority struggles. Revolution must go into the area of manufacturing to abolish it as a selected second of the relation between folks and to abolish, in the identical second, labor within the abolition of wage labor. That’s the key position of productive labor and of those that at a selected second are the direct bearers of the contradiction as a result of they expertise it as needed and superfluous on the similar time of their existence for capital.
It’s this stress on the way in which wherein the restrict of wage struggles essentially {couples} them with the struggles of the unwaged, and vice versa, such that surplus labor is merely the obverse of needed labor, that distinguishes the politics of value-abolition conceived as communization, from the politics of value-critique (Wertkritik). The place value-critique decouples the logic of valorization from the category relation, thereby relegating class wrestle to the standing of a fetish (e.g., Robert Kurz), communization stresses their interdependence whereas distinguishing class wrestle from the affirmation of labor. The place value-critique reduces labor to an avatar of worth and identifies capital with its summary domination, downplaying the exploitation of labor, communization stresses the indissociability of summary and concrete domination, and the entwinement of exploitation and oppression, wage struggles and unwaged revolt. Most importantly, the critique of programmatism upholds the ineluctability of sophistication wrestle whereas ridding it of its subordination to the teleology of manufacturing.
Auto- and Alloproduction
The contradiction between the proletariat’s necessity and its contingency for capital (which is the contradiction between needed and surplus labor) is the situation of its personal decision. The alienage of sophistication belonging isn’t just a conceptual type deployed in principle however the content material of revolutionary observe. Communism can solely emerge by suspending the present circumstances of social replica. The proletariat just isn’t the category endowed with the ability to dissolve current circumstances; it’s this dissolution embodied as a category. If communism begins with the proletariat placing its personal existence into query, it culminates with the proletariat destroying the social kinds that perpetuate it: “corporations, factories, manufacturing, alternate.” Thus it isn’t solely commodification, class, state, and the division of labor which can be indices of transcendence, however social relations of manufacturing as such, insofar as they’re indissociable from the logic of alternate (the summary equivalence of worth). In abolishing the latter, communization additionally places an finish to the previous. Communization is “the autoproduction of humanity not positing any social relation as a presupposition to be reproduced”; it’s “autoproduction as lack, ardour, fixed destruction and creation, ceaselessly positing turning into as its premise.”
But on the similar time, endorsing Marx’s critique of Hegelian idealism within the Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts, TC insists that “humanity is an goal being, finishing itself with exterior objects that it causes to turn out to be for it.” Can humanity produce itself with out reproducing preexisting social relations? There’s a stress between the declare that humanity is an goal being, certain to finish itself by “inflicting exterior objects to turn out to be for it” (notice the avoidance of the time period “manufacturing”), and the insistence that it might probably accomplish that with out this causation turning right into a mode of manufacturing, objectifying a set of social relations. The important thing distinction lies between the target immanence of autoproduction and the transcendence of objectivation, or alloproduction. Capital is the extremity of humanity’s alloproduction; its transcendence is merely essentially the most acute variant of the objectivation of manufacturing. Consequently, the overcoming of capital terminates the social objectivation of manufacturing that has conditioned all earlier human historical past:
The overcoming of current circumstances is the overcoming of the objectivation of manufacturing. On this regard communism is the overcoming of all earlier historical past. It’s not a brand new mode of manufacturing and there will be no problem about its administration. It constitutes a complete break with the ideas of financial system, of productive forces, of objectivated measures of manufacturing. Humanity is an goal being, finishing itself with exterior objects that it causes to turn out to be for it. All through its historical past, the noncoincidence between particular person exercise and social exercise, which is constitutive of its historical past and which doesn’t must be confirmed or abstractly produced, took the shape, for this goal being, of its separation (objectivation) from the productive act and from manufacturing, turning into the social character of its particular person manufacturing. Separation, alienation, objectivation, in the midst of the historical past of the separation of exercise from its circumstances, turned the latter into an financial system, into relations of manufacturing, right into a mode of manufacturing. Because the dissolution of the capitalist mode of manufacturing’s current circumstances, the proletariat as a category, in its contradiction with capital, is the presupposition for the overcoming of this whole historical past, with out assuming that attaining this example is the aim of all earlier historical past.
For TC, the historical past of manufacturing is a consequence of this noncoincidence. They dismiss as “idealism” the suggestion that historical past itself outcomes from the externalization and estrangement of manufacturing and the event of productive forces. But when the historical past of this improvement is just the historical past of the contradiction between labor and capital, then the duty is “to not clarify why alienation has existed however why it can’t go on current.” The top of alienation is the top of the disjunction between particular person and social exercise. If the origin of alienation requires no clarification from a materialist standpoint, neither does the disjunction between particular person and social exercise.
But at this level, one other stress emerges between TC’s dedication to the historic immanence of actual subsumption and its conception of historical past as noncoincidence of particular person and social exercise. For a historic materialist, “particular person” and “social” are historic classes, as are “common” and “explicit.” Can the “noncoincidence” of particular person and social exercise be abstracted from our personal traditionally particular society and retrojected because the origin of human historical past? That is exactly the transfer TC objects to when it’s made with regard to “labor on the whole” as a supposed invariant of human historical past. Labor on the whole is merely the historic retrojection of traditionally particular summary labor. It’s exhausting to see how positing the noncoincidence of particular person and social exercise because the matrix of historical past is any much less mystifying than the account of historical past because the alienation of manufacturing.
That is compounded by the repeated suggestion that human singularity preexists relations of manufacturing, as when TC declares that communization “abolishes society as autonomized substance of the relations amongst people, who then relate to one another of their singularity.” That is to imagine that human singularity subsists beneath capitalist social relations, simply ready to be launched. However what distinguishes human singularity from the pure singularity of sand grains and snowflakes is exactly the truth that it’s constituted in and thru social relations. It’s as if the precautions in opposition to the autonomization of dwelling labor served merely to protect the transcendence of human singularity. That is one other symptom of the strain between the dedication to historic immanence and the insistence that objectivation is transcendence. It was exactly the premium on historic immanence that motivated the rejection of the autonomy of dwelling labor and the declare that the proletariat solely exists in and thru the transcendence of capital. However whereas class willpower is totally beholden to capital, the determinations of subjectivity, singularity, and individuality are curiously absolved of this dependence. Thus, apparently disregarding their very own strictures in opposition to attributing autonomous company to labor as self-organization, TC appeals to the self-transformation of the category topic to launch human singularity from its transcendent objectivation in social relations. The self-abolition of the proletariat is meant to yield what they name “the social immediacy of the person”:
The social immediacy of the person is the top of the separation between particular person exercise and social exercise, which constituted, for humanity, the actual fact of its being an goal being on the premise of the relation between its individuality and its sociality, and outlined its exercise as labor. It’s not, for humanity, the actual fact of being an goal being in itself which is in query however the separation between particular person exercise and social exercise, which turns this objectivity into an financial system and financial system into what mediates the 2.
However how can this social immediacy of the person be postulated as the results of historic mediation if the separation of particular person and social exercise is the quick (non-produced) situation of historic mediation? Historic materialism stresses not solely humanity’s dependence upon nature, its inorganic physique, however every human’s dependence upon different people to provide its materials circumstances of existence. The sociality of human being is as a lot a part of its goal being as its natural points. However it’s exactly by rooting sociality in relations of manufacturing working “behind the again of” consciousness that Marx breaks with the Feuerbachian premium on the interpersonal relation because the “absolute relation” grounding sociality. Marx replaces sociality conceived as an absolute relation with the dynamic ensemble of social relations of fabric manufacturing. The target sociality of human being is grounded on this ensemble of social relations. It’s implausible to drive a wedge between human sociality, which is inseparable from the target, materials character of human being, and the objectivation of this sociality in relations of manufacturing, by the insistence that one is immanent and the opposite transcendent. The materialist premium on immanence is sound, however not the insistence that immanence be uncontaminated with transcendence—goal sociality with social objectivation. It’s exactly the separation of immanence and transcendence, their segregation as pure subjectivity and pure objectivity, which is idealist, whereas the popularity of the necessity to root transcendence in immanence, objectivation in subjectivation, is the hallmark of Marxian materialism. And it’s exactly the dynamic of externalization and estrangement—productive appropriation and consumptive expropriation—that articulates them. Right here TC (maybe following Althusser) merely assumes that externalization presupposes interiority whereas estrangement presupposes authenticity. However externalization needn’t presuppose antecedent interiority, simply as estrangement needn’t indicate prior authenticity. Interiority is retrospectively constituted as a consequence of the transcendent estrangement of externalization. Objectivation is the estrangement of a means of productive appropriation with out origin or finish. The separation of exercise from its circumstances just isn’t the premise of alienation and objectivation; it’s a consequence of the alienation of objectivation, as is the noncoincidence of particular person and social exercise. Making them coincide is the duty of appropriating manufacturing. Solely then can autoproduction—the manufacturing of manufacturing—be conceived as an externalization of estrangement that doesn’t retrospectively mythologize their quick coincidence.
Maybe it’s now simpler to see the basic issue that vitiates the plausibility of proletarian self-abolition understood because the abolition of objectivation. By decoupling class wrestle from the appropriation of manufacturing, the speculation and observe of the rift decouples class wrestle from politics conceived as strategic orientation round needs which can be greater than mere concatenations of wants. The issue turns into one among tactical discrimination in destroying current circumstances of manufacturing. However in destroying the means for the manufacturing of capital, class wrestle destroys the present means for the replica of the proletariat. The purpose at which the pursuit of communization threatens to compound capitalist immiseration is the purpose at which the politics of the rift replaces the administration of manufacturing with the palliative administration of wants. Tactical discrimination alone can’t resolve the strategic choice required to tell apart between these means which might and people which can’t be suspended with a purpose to decouple social replica from the replica of the capital relation.
This essay was impressed by conversations with Nathan Brown, who impressed upon me the philosophical significance of Théorie Communiste’s work. For Brown’s personal engagement with TC, see his Rationalist Empiricism: A Principle of Speculative Critique, chap. 9 and 10 (Fordham College Press, 2021).
