Communism is the negation of capitalism—a movement produced by the very growth and success of the capitalist mode of production—a movement that’ll eventually topple capitalism and bring forth a new kind of society. Where there exists a world built on the wage labor force and the commodity, there has to come a world where human activity is never again subject to wage labor, and where the products of that activity are no longer objects of commerce. Our time is the time of this metamorphosis. It brings together the elements of the capitalist crisis with all the materials necessary for a communist resolution of this crisis.
To describe the principles of communism; to consider how they make it possible to safeguard the future existence of humanity; and to show that they’re already at work, right under our noses—these are our objectives.
We’d like to depict that which will be tomorrow’s world, the communist society we envision. This is absolutely not about challenging science fiction, or journalism, by writing a report on the lives of the men and beasts of the future. We have no time machine to climb that hill.
Despite the appeal of the question, we can’t predict who’s going to prevail in the war that pits the slacks against the skirts, vegetable broth against bird’s nest soup. If worst comes to worst, we can’t even say whether humanity has a future. Can anyone promise that we won’t be blown away in a nuclear war or a cosmic cataclysm?
That said, prediction remains desirable and possible. We intend to describe communist society on the basis of its general laws of operation while paying particular attention to what distinguishes it from present-day society. We have to show that it’s possible for tomorrow to be something other than an improved or repackaged today.
To avoid being too tedious, we’ll occasionally go into detail; we’ll provide examples. These shouldn’t be taken too seriously. You’re free to think up different ones. You’re free to reject ours.
Tomorrow isn’t neutral ground. Capital aims to occupy and subjugate all social space—but unlike the imaginings of science fiction writers, it can’t shuttle the commerce of its commodities and its wage workers between past and future. It takes its revenge in the realm of advertising and ideology. We’re invited to live today on tomorrow’s time, to buy here and now the clock or the car of the future. Successive, competing, and sometimes “anti-capitalist” notions of a capitalist future muddle our present.
To discuss the communist organization of society, despite the risks of error, is to begin lifting the lead weight that hangs over our lives.
The old question of the reactionaries—But what do you propose as an alternative?—needs to be rejected out of hand. We aren’t idea peddlers. We don’t have to market-launch a replacement society the way you would a new pocket watch. Communism is an object neither of commerce nor of politics. It’s the radical critique of both. It is not a plan put forward, even democratically, for the choice of voters or consumers. It’s the hope, for the proletarianized masses, to no longer be reduced to the status of voters or consumers. Anyone who assumes the position of spectator, who’d like to be able to judge without having to commit to anything, is barred from the discussion.
If it’s possible to speak of revolutionary society, it’s because revolutionary society is already gestating within present-day society.
Some will find our theories entirely insane or entirely naïve. We don’t hope to convince everyone. It’d be disturbing if that were possible! In any case, there are those who’d rather gouge out their own eyes than recognize the truth of our positions.
The proletarian revolution will be the victory of naivety over a servile and dessicated science. Those who demand proofs should beware. They run the risk of being shown these proofs, not in the calm of the laboratory, but violently, and on their backs.
Before saying what communism is, we first have to clear the ground. We have to denounce the lies surrounding it—to say what it isn’t. For while communism is an extremely simple reality, so linked to everyday life that it can feel almost palpable, the most enormous untruths haven’t failed to proliferate around it. This is only a paradox for people who are unaware that, within the “society of the spectacle,” it’s precisely the sense of the everyday and the familiar that must be repressed.