The communization of society won’t be gradual or peaceful but abrupt and insurrectionary. It won’t be some peaceful process that some sufficient number of forces will gradually rally around.
Insurrection and communization are intimately linked. There won’t be an insurrection first and then a transformation of social reality, enabled by this insurrection, later. The insurrectionary process draws its strength from communization itself.
There is no intermediary, mixed category of the mode of production between capitalism and communism. The period of transition, or rather the period of rupture, is characterized the contradiction between absolutely communist methods on the one hand and a reality still entirely permeated by mercantilism on the other. It’s in this phase that a society of abundance and liberty needs to confront the problems of scarcity and power. It has to eliminate the human and material fallout of an era of slavery, and to neutralize the forces that would remain attached to it.
The use of violence to achieve their aims—that’s what distinguishes revolutionaries from reformists.
The opposition between revolutionaries and reformists isn’t so much about strategy and method as it is about the nature of the transformation to be accomplished. Here, obviously, arises a difference in method.
History has distinguished two kinds of reformists: the soft and the tough.
Soft reformists, social democrats and parliamentarists,1 think that their alterations can be made with a soft touch. They’re often right, so long as their illusions center on the depth of the reforms that they’re capable of actually implementing. They prove every day, and in every corner of the world, that the forces in power are fine with not repressing those who don’t threaten them. Sometimes these soft reformists grow tough, but that toughness is wielded chiefly against the proletariat.
Besides these, there are the real toughs, which is to say Stalinists and the like. These take themselves for revolutionaries. Their goal is to seize the state and control the economy by replacing the leaders in power. It isn’t worth their while to underestimate their adversaries’ ability to retaliate. Their success, and their very skins, depend on it.
And the revolutionaries?
The communist revolution is a tremendous social convulsion. It entails confrontation and violence. But if the revolution is an act of force, its essential question isn’t a question of violence, and the terms for its success aren’t intrinsically a matter of military force.
This is because the revolution isn’t a matter of power. We aren’t contesting the state or the economy with all the powerful still in place. Thanks to the positions that it occupies in the economy, communism will be more than capable of disarming the counterrevolution and undermining its foundations, especially in the military. It’ll avoid direct confrontation as far as possible.
The reason communist revolution doesn’t make violence the central problem is that its aim is to bring about the dawning of what already exists, not to shoehorn some project into reality.
Just as we’re opposed to fanatics and fetishists, we’re also opposed to pacifists. As much as nonviolent methods can and must be adopted, even with regard to soldiers, nonviolent ideologies can’t be tolerated.
This ideology relies on and conveys pedagogical illusions. It assumes that all people can be coached into nonviolence and mobilized with cool heads. It seeks mass action but doesn’t see that the problems of information and coordination imposed by this type of action—and retaliation—can’t be resolved without the possibility of violence.
Systematic non-violence presumes a consensus between adversaries to respect certain rules and, above all, some freedom of information. Nonviolence is primarily effective as a defensive strategy. Its limitations reveal themselves when it comes to taking the initiative and neutralizing enemies.
The more that the revolution makes itself felt with force and lucidity, the more that it enforces its choices and presents them as irreversible, the more capable it’ll be of rallying the hesitant and neutralizing the opposition. An understanding of violence’s limited but essential role can avert mistakes with bloody consequences.
The proletariat can’t renounce the acquisition, production, and use of weapons. If weapons aren’t always readily available in society, the materials that enable their manufacture often are, and in large quantities. It’s essential to inventory them and to prepare for their possible use—to arm ourselves and prepare traps that’ll force our enemies to pay dearly for their intrusions. What’s actually ridiculous and shameful is to push people to form self-defense groups, to equip themselves with revolvers or knives, for defending their factories and neighborhoods against tanks and aircraft.
We can’t predict the way that future insurrections will unfold, but we can champion a strategy in advance, over the course of the movement. This strategy is founded on the very nature of the communist revolution and on each person’s strengths.
The bourgeois and the bureaucrats are counting on the army. The strength of the proletariat is in its economic position.
The armed forces are vulnerable, but not so much from a military perspective as from its dependency on the economy, More and more, it depends on the economy for its weapons, its munitions, its food, its transportation. It integrates workers and technicians into its core. To wage war—and modern war is costly—logistics has to keep up and the country has to work.
The military counterrevolution must be attacked behind its economic lines. Social peace cannot be allowed to persist at home; it’s crucial to denying national armies the ability to mete out repression overseas.
Members of the military know the risk there would be for them to have to compensate for the “failings” of workers in the realm of production. The military can’t organize the economy against workers. It prefers to have well-defined adversaries of the same nature as itself over having to accomplish tasks that are alien to it—tasks that bog them down and ultimately dispel them.
It’s typical to picture the revolution as a clash between two armies: one under the orders of the privileged and the exploiters, the other at the service of the proletarians. The revolution is reduced to a war. The stakes become the taking of power and the controlling of territories. This vision is dangerously incorrect. It relies on memories of the battles of the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars, as well as of wars for national liberation.
Even if, at some given moment, in some given circumstance, revolutionary action takes a military turn—commando operations, air raids—that’ll change nothing about the profound nature and the global character of the conflict.
Not only is it not communist to see the revolution as a confrontation between Red and White armies, it’s also moronic, given the disproportion of the military forces involved. To offer capital a war would be to play right into its hands.
The army and the police constitute the last bastion of capital. Their actions can be expressed directly through the destruction of men and of things, but also in creating and maintaining a situation of scarcity suitable for fostering selfishness, fear, and other old instincts. This would pit needy populations against revolutionary troublemakers and tend to reanimate market mechanisms.
The military can be utilized to operate and control certain strategic sectors of the economy.
Because of its hierarchized nature that eliminates discussion and dissent in favor of obedience and discipline—because of its function and its patriotic ideology—the military tends to be a conservative body.
But the military counterrevolution has its weaknesses.
The feeling of security and the sense of great entitlement, which members of the military derive from their enclaves and their trinkets, are in constant danger of being quickly upset if the military can’t justify and fortify itself through confrontations with hostile armies on well-defined battlefields. The military must be prevented from functioning as a military, opposed with the dissolving fluidity of communism. It’s all about paralyzing, contaminating, dividing, and dispersing military forces.
Our armed interventions need to closely accompany our actions toward social deconstruction and reconstruction. The use of violence can’t become an autonomous activity that justifies itself. It serves to block and unblock those situations that depend directly on communization, which provides not only its justification but also its strength.
Before and during an insurrectionary period, you can never be too careful about isolated violence, about terrorism. Revolutionaries can find themselves caught in a cycle of conflict and retaliation that ends up being void of communism. When violence becomes a violence for communism and no longer accompanying communism—when it’s emptied of its immediate content—all provocations become fair game. It becomes easy to perpetrate killings and bombings and pin them on revolutionaries.
Soldiers have to have the rug pulled out from beneath them, deprived of anything to defend, via the immediate and radical transformation of social organization. The military is a tool; it can’t do everything by itself, in its capacity as an organ of violence. You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.
Among the left, there’s a prejudice favoring intellectuals and disfavoring soldiers. When it comes to the revolution, people naturally think that the former will side with it and the latter against it. Intelligence on one side, brute force on the other.
History’s shown the extent of the error that these prejudices encompass. Ever since the Paris Commune, when Colonel Rossel sided with the insurgents and was shot for it, and when the progressivist writers G. Sand and E. Zola turned their noses up at those same insurgents,2 some portion of the armed forces has regularly joined the insurrection and some no-less-notable portion of the intelligentsia has stood against it.
The revolution is such that, when it comes, it will at times frighten those who hoped for it and delight those who dreaded it.
The army forms a fairly autonomous body whose values are alien, in part, to values that are strictly bourgeois and commercial. The bourgeois class, unlike the feudal class, is unable to take direct charge of its own defense. It delegates that to the military or the police. Even if some portion of the military leadership completely identifies its interests with those of the dominant class, there nevertheless exists a latent contradiction between the interests and behavior of soldiers and those of the bourgeoisie.
It shouldn’t be hoped that the military, or some part of the military, will spontaneously and readily align itself with the revolution. That can only happen as a very function of the revolution’s development and infiltration into the military. The military will become revolutionary to the extent that, under pressure from soldiers and officers, the hierarchy’s omnipotence is called into question and blind obedience condemned.
Revolutionaries must not make any concession to militarism. Soldiers need to be shown that they’re not fighting on their own behalf, and even less on behalf of the Nation. They need to be shown that the movement of capital undermines their ideals. They also need to be shown that, as men, and as men with their distinct abilities and qualities, soldiers do have their place in the communist movement.
Our goal is the destruction of the military. It has to be hoped that this can be realized with the fewest possible confrontations with soldiers. Armed groups, newly constituted or reconstituted, will gradually lose their specific character by participating in productive tasks and workers’ councils.
The revolution cannot disregard its strength and lose the opportunity, in transforming the old society’s organs of repression, to integrate them into its forces. The cop might be entirely willing to serve what he sees no longer as subversion but as the new authority. It can even be hoped that some won’t want to be henchmen any more.
In any case, revolutionaries and proletarians can’t allow others to hold a monopoly on armament. This question, of the armament of the proletariat, will be a test to assess the value of rallying soldiers to the revolution.
Revolutionaries have neither a taste for blood nor a spirit of vengeance. The insurrections of the past show that only a small part of the blood spilled, generally, is attributable to insurgents. Hope purges resentment.
It’s the counterrevolution that has massacred, imprisoned, deported. Blood flows during battles but often afterward as well, when military victory is already assured—murderous fury, born of the terror of the propertied. The reaction must crush the opposing forces. To the reaction, the revolution seems to reside within the revolutionaries. It must therefore destroy them.
The spirit of vengeance may have played a role in workers’ uprisings. But what’s that, when you compare their actions to the repression of the Versaillais, of the Kuomingtang in 1927, of the Francoists?
Workers’ uprisings have been far less vengeful than the anti-feudal peasants’ revolts were. This is because revolution isn’t an act of desperation. Destruction of goods, reprisals against individuals—these are often the work of people who see no way out of poverty, contenting themselves with annihilating that which embodies oppression.
Taking revenge wouldn’t only be petty, it’d be stupid. To condemn in advance, on the basis of the past, is to fortify our adversaries with fear and determination. It can only create enemies in our midst who, right or wrong, think that they have something to hide. It encourages personal score-settling.
We have to offer our adversaries the opportunity to switch camps. Communist principles don’t dictate, in themselves, a uniform mode of conduct. To the contrary, they imply that it’s possible to express all the diversity of the characters, situations, and backgrounds of those who participate in the revolution. Better, they imply that if our adversaries can blind themselves so as to no longer see us as anything but “red rats,” we must, for our own part, continue to recognize human beings in even the worst of our enemies—without deluding ourselves, incidentally, about human nature.
It’d be stupid to alienate doctors, engineers, and peasants, when many of them will be ready to join us without our having to make any concessions to the myth of the specialist, to the hierarchy of labor, to property. This means that councils will sometimes have to protect certain established positions. This will go against equality, but it’ll make it possible to win certain people over by allowing them to hold onto the things that they value. Doctors can be guaranteed the use of their homes and their professional equipment, on the condition that they don’t emigrate and that they treat those who need it. Secondary residences located in the countryside can revert to their legitimate owners—or to relations or friends—without anyone being allowed to have two homes while others live in shacks.
Those who seek to preserve their privileges, on the other hand, or to line their pockets by taking advantage of the situation, will have to understand that they won’t enjoy any mercy from their victims.
The more assertive the revolutionary councils are, the more they’ll be able to prescribe clear rules, the more they’ll be able to promptly transform reality, the less that violence will be necessary.
Communizing doesn’t mean expelling bosses from businesses and factories in order to cling to these institutions; it means starting out by closing a good number of them.
The border between the counterrevolution and the revolution will be drawn between those who push worker-consumers to cling to their yokes and their drugs—in the name of the fatherland, of democracy, of self-management, of workers’ councils, of Christ the King, of chocolate pudding, of whatever—and those who push to massively reduce and radically redevelop all production. This will be a matter of reducing pollution, and of breaking with the stupefaction of work and the pseudo-abundance of the market, as quickly as possible,
To remain in your factory, even for the purpose of self-managing it, is to freeze the situation to the benefit of the counterrevolution. Whether professed by workaholics, naive trade unionists, or capitalist scoundrels hoping to buy time, the result of this attitude is all the same.
Revolutionaries will probably find themselves accused, by all these good apostles, of wanting to disrupt production and lower the living standards of the people.
This reduction in production shouldn’t at all be seen as some fascination with austerity. The sacrifices demanded will be far fewer than those that would be imposed by any other solution—false solutions that would only serve to prevent a decisive rupture from the past, and to immobilize the forces necessary to the struggle. False solutions that would unite all those who fear seeing the foundations of their power evaporate: die-hard trade unionists, top management and middle managers, politicians, administrators, bosses…
Only by breaking down the division between enterprises and stopping the production of a myriad of products that are barely useful, useless, or even harmful, will it be possible to concentrate forces in order to produce an abundance of things that are needful and necessary. Research has to be undertaken and implementation initiated toward a new system of production. In this way, communization not only signifies demonetization but also the rapid transformation of production. The two things are intimately linked.
Workers, employees, and teachers will be invited to go where they’ll be truly useful. These changes will be based primarily on the masses’ spontaneous disgust for their work and the revelation they’ll have of their own abilities. These changes won’t take place under the aegis of a central authority, but will emerge from a multitude of diverse initiatives. This doesn’t mean disorder and sloppiness. All revolution entails a degree of fluctuation, of disorder and waste; it’s important to keep that to a minimum. This is the particular job of the most radical people. We’re neither against order nor against discipline, nor against organization, nor even against authority. Those who would confound revolution with chaos need to be denounced and combated as resolutely as we’ll go after the statists whose hands they play into.
Redevelopment must first make it possible to ensure the satisfaction of the most basic needs. Then it must promote not than the creation of certain products but the creation of tools and machinery necessary to their fabrication. These materials will be widely distributed amongst the population, allowing each person to manufacture what they would otherwise have to have manufactured by others.
The following are some signs of the conceivable changes, depending on major economic sectors. None of these transformations make sense in themselves. The danger of making concrete proposals is that they can be co-opted against communism. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that revolutionaries can’t content themselves with pronouncing general principles—that they must advance concrete solutions in accordance with given circumstances.
Energy: There will be a significant reduction in energy production. This reduction will flow naturally from shuttering the portion of industry that consumes the majority of this energy. It may be necessitated, in any case, by the difficulty of ensuring the supply of oil, gas, coal.
The distribution of energy will be transformed. Some portion that had previously been monopolized by industry will be possible to redirect toward domestic consumption: heating, lighting, the powering of small machines.
New sources of energy will gradually be put in play. It’ll be necessary to develop those that pollute the least, and to conserve limited resources like fossil fuels. It’ll be possible to promote a decentralized and intermittent form of production for local use. This doesn’t mean, in any case, that communism would be fundamentally opposed to nuclear energy. There will simply need to be serious guarantees on production conditions and usage requirements. In the short term, water, wind, and solar seem preferable.
Transportation: Transportation wastes energy, creates pollution, reifies social inequalities… Here, again, there are going to be significant reductions and rationalizations that will enable a reorganization of space. People will manage things in order to avoid making excessively long journeys. They’ll have fewer occasions to travel against their wishes. Schedules that are more flexible will allow them to avoid being crammed into the same vehicles at the same time.
The production of present-day automobiles can generally be stopped. The number of cars currently in circulation, used in a more rational way, will make it possible to await the development and manufacture of less miserable machines. Some vehicles can be used as taxis, with or without a driver, or for public purposes.
The vast majority of cars will probably continue to be used privately. This will make it possible to preserve traditional habits and keep users interested in the good working order of what has continued to belong to them. This ownership could be limited by certain conditions of use, aimed at restricting or eliminating traffic in certain places, and at allowing for the best usage and utilization possible.
Trains and other modes of guided transit will have to be promoted and developed. Here, again, is where you can find the greatest safety, the greatest energy efficiency, the most efficient use of land. These fast and comfortable machines can be supplemented by slower vehicles, more individual and more flexible, equipped with non-polluting engines.
In the meantime, production can continue on trucks, bicycles, scooters, and good shoes.
To reduce the need for travel, particularly as concerns rapid connections over long distances, it’ll be necessary to develop a good telephone or videophone network. This will allow for many more people to stay in contact, and at much lower cost, than today.
Airplanes are a noisy, polluting gimmick for businessmen and harried tourists. It’d be difficult to extend their use to everyone. They’ll therefore need to be eliminated or limited to certain specific cases.
For long-distance travel, why not modernize big sailboats and bring them back into fashion? Their manufacture would give rise to healthy competition. In any case, there are going to be other ways of getting from one continent to another. For that, there’s no need for supersonic aircraft.
Publishing: This is a sector whose revolutionary significance is easy to see. Who’s going to control the press?
In insurrectionary periods, workers have regularly controlled the contents of the newspapers they print. With all due respect to those champions of the freedom of the press—who are often no more than supporters of the freedom of the dough—this will begin again. But it isn’t enough. The press will have to be transformed. It has to cease being a contemplative reflection of reality.
The revolution will allow for a freedom of expression that’s impossible today. A great number of small printing presses, which today belong to businesses and administrations, will be made available to all.
Tomorrow, books and writings won’t be edited and distributed depending on the consent of some editor. They’ll be taken direct charge of and printed, to start with, by those concerned. Their success will therefore depend on their authors’ fortitude and the practical support they meet with.
Today, a considerable portion of a book’s cost hangs on its distribution and advertising. Communism’s advantage is evident there. It might even become admissible, so as to save the trees, that newspapers and texts be posted up or passed from hand to hand.
Communism, while promoting written, oral, and audiovisual expression for all, must make it possible to reduce society’s consumption of paper and ink.
What’s to become of literature? No doubt that it’ll be transformed, and that the novelistic activity will gradually lose its necessity. Even if people continue to busy themselves with fiction, there will no longer be a world of books in opposition to the real world. Maybe, over time, written communication will even lose its importance and begin to disappear.
Construction: The construction industry will undergo a transformation. This doesn’t mean that masons will be put out of work. Construction is one of the rare activities that won’t wane.
It’ll nevertheless be necessary to take measures to limit or, more radically, ban construction in overcrowded cities and suburbs. But the people who move out of these urban centers are going to need housing. It’ll be necessary to begin construction on houses and buildings of every kind. It’ll also be necessary to do demolitions and organize the recycling of materials.
Here as elsewhere, and maybe even more quickly, professionalization will be eroded. Those who want a new home are going to have to get their hands dirty. They can seek help from those who know better than them, by training or by experience.
The inadequately housed will be immediately rehoused in apartments and residences that have become vacant for one reason or another. Naturally, one of the first manifestations of the revolution will be a moratorium on the payment of rent and bills.
Clothing: It won’t be possible to transform everything all in one go. It’ll be necessary to continue producing in accordance with existing materials and machinery—but transformations can certainly be brought about fairly quickly, in terms of quality and durability.
Some number of styles in clothing and shoes will be possible to produce in large quantities. In complement, the production of fabrics and small machines will be cultivated so that people can fashion what they need for themselves. This will allow for products that are adapted to people’s tastes. This will allow the distribution of clothing to depend directly on efforts furnished.
Food: The industrialization of food products has generally resulted in a deterioration in quality of said products. Communism must, as quickly as possible, increase the quantity of food produced; alter its distribution, particularly in aid of the Third World’s underfed populations; and work toward improvements in quality.
Modifications will be introduced in the composition of products. Anything that’s harmful or merely useless, anything that only serves to deceive the consumer, will have to be gotten rid of. Packaging will be simplified.
As far as agriculture’s concerned, the use of chemical products has to be limited and gradually reduced. This isn’t about some principled position against anything that might be chemical or artificial, but rather an opposition to the real deterioration and adulteration of agricultural products.
Monoculture will have to give way to polyculture and the union of agriculture and livestock farming, which allows for the recycling and utilization of manure and waste. This makes it possible to reduce the scale of outside supplies—which is of vital importance, particularly for non-industrialized countries.
It’s more worthwhile for society’s forces to be directly invested in working the land, rather than in factories for chemical products and fertilizers. Even if it means diverting hands from agriculture, it’d still be for the best to manufacture agricultural tools and machinery. This equipment needs to be introduced, in particular, to the agricultures of the Third World.
Research on food quality and agricultural methods, which currently is relatively little-developed, needs to be expanded. It’ll be necessary to determine the best plant varietals, the methods least taxing on the soil, the crop distribution best adapted to alimentary needs. In agriculture, as elsewhere, there are choices to be made: should we promote animal or vegetable proteins? Should we favor yield or hardiness?
Health: Health problems are, in large part, caused by living and working conditions. In revolutionizing these conditions, communism is going to do much for the health of the population.
Emphasis needs to be placed on measures of sanitation and prevention. The production of drugs will thereby be reduced. Some products that are useless, or that currently only appear useful, will be pulled. Just as with brands of detergent, there exist numerous commodities for the same pharmaceutical product. The costs of packaging, of advertising, outstrip the costs of the actual active ingredients. All of this will obviously disappear.
It’s all about deprofessionalizing medicine as rapidly as possible. This means reintroducing medical and sanitary knowledge that’s been lost to the population, making it possible to employ medicinal plants. This means training a segment of the population to be able to make medical interventions, and within a relatively short amount of time.
Education: The period of insurrection and redevelopment will increase the need for education and training. Since a large portion of the population will have to change occupations, and since everyone will have to diversify their skills, learning will become a necessity.
This learning will be done, in large part, on the job. Everyone will have to share their knowledge to the benefit of their peers.
Television and radio will make it possible to transmit what people need at minimal cost. It’ll be easy to broadcast courses in mechanics, in agriculture, in masonry, which will supplement practical training.
What’s to become of teachers? It’s not a question of banning them from teaching—but they will have to be discouraged, by all means, from being teachers and nothing else. In any case, a great part of culture will no longer be made the object of instruction, in the strict sense. As far as children are concerned, it won’t be a matter of forcibly removing them from the care of teachers who love their profession. But from the moment that the activities offered to children diversify and expand, from the moment that they’re no longer a burden on adults who are themselves no longer chained to professional and domestic labor, it’ll become impossible for the school to keep up.
To ensure their own well-being, the teaching profession will have every interest in dedicating themselves to practical tasks, just like everyone else. If they don’t, it’s them who’ll pay the direct costs. No doubt that the majority of teachers, who are more and more becoming teaching machines, will appreciate a new way of life—one that wouldn’t prevent them, in any case, from benefiting others with their knowledge.
Religion: Some believers of little faith cry that the communist revolution will get rid of religion. This is doubting the Lord’s power to see to his own affairs. As for us, we leave the task to him.
Between capitalism and communism, there exists a phase not of transition but of rupture, wherein revolutionaries must seek to implement irreversible measures.
Some people lament the commodification and industrialization of all social life. They’d very much like for this to change, but they’d prefer to stay reasonable. They appeal to the authorities in power, or to their official opposition, to promote change. Above all, they’d like for things to change in an orderly way. For them, the irruption of the masses onto the stage of history can only lead to the most inextricable disorder.
They’d like to progressively decommodify the economy by cultivating public services and free goods. Wage labor would be reduced, and alongside it would be developed new activities that are less inhumane.
The most audacious foresee the eventual disappearance of wage labor and the commodity.
It’s always the same hope of being able to muzzle and harness capital. The same illusion is propagated by people who want to preserve wage labor while eliminating differences in wage, or while transforming wages into a fair compensation for the onerousness of the work.
Capital is fundamentally expansionist and imperialist. That’s why it tends to take over all social life. Non-market sectors, operating alongside a market system, are quickly recommodified. Either they remain pastimes or games completely dependent on capital, like present-day home improvement, or they assume greater significance and their production spreads, and so they reinvent capitalism for themselves. There’s disintegration from within and an onslaught from without. “Free” producers, those weekend artisans who continue being prisoners of a bourgeois way of life, very naturally seek to draw income from their unofficial production so as to earn a little extra cash.
Should we count on political power to support such a “revolution”? This would be forgetting its dependence on the economy. It would be opposing market totalitarianism with state totalitarianism.
Can we count on a transformation of the mind? This would be believing that commodification is primarily a perversion of the intellect. Minds will be what circumstances allow them to be.
You can’t reach for the new world with one hand while guarding your wallet with the other.
These reformist notions understand nothing of the necessity of a global rupture, nor the nature of revolutionary proletarian action. They don’t see that it’s in the circumstances and actions of the dispossessed class that the true adversary of the commodity system will be found. They believe it’s possible to take measures against capital because they consider it as a thing whose power must be limited, not as a social relation.
Capital can play around at liberating human activity and decommodifying it in appearance. It sells a new life in its all-inclusive resorts; people pay so as to not have to pay. New systems of payment are tending to avoid direct and oppressive contact with money. All of this demonstrates the need for and the possibilities of communism, but also the co-opting, vampiric, deceitful nature of capital.
The commodity system is a whole. It will be cast down in whole. You can’t communize sectors one at a time, sectors that are intimately linked by exchange. In any case, does anyone believe that it’s possible to limit the field of the intervention in an insurrection?
Fittingly, “anti-market” measures, which aim to temporarily restrict or obscure the actions of capital, can only intend to deter or halt an insurrection. Whatever the goodwill or even the half-understanding of those who propose them, they can only serve the counterrevolution.
In an insurrectionary period, revolutionaries will have to do their best to denounce falsely radical measures and accelerate the course of things. Very often, their actions will be underhandedly denounced, not as revolutionary but as excessive, by those who disguise themselves as revolutionaries in order to better combat the revolution.
The solution to the significant problems posed by the abrupt rupture with the commodity economy will rest, before all else, on the councilist organization of the production and distribution of goods. In this intermediary phase, distinctions due to product scarcity will no longer be made on the basis of money, but by councils and committees of “consumers,” who will see to the distribution of products in accordance with their best possible use. The danger is in believing that it’s possible to establish a mixed system in order to avoid difficulties.
Councils will have to settle difficult questions, but they’re the only force capable of settling them.
To enable and support councilist organization, the working wing of the revolution will need to concentrate its forces on certain strategic points. It’ll have to destroy everything that would allow for the survival or resurgence of the old system.
The banking and financial system will have to be destroyed in its material foundations. It’ll be necessary to attack establishments, to burn account books, papers, archives. Everything that might resemble a means of payment will have to be eradicated.
The machine of state will have to be paralyzed. This doesn’t mean delivering a frontal assault to the center of the system, so much as destroying its manifold tentacles. The state has branches everywhere. This is its strength and its weakness.
Everything that makes it possible to surveil people will have to be tackled, starting with identity papers of every kind. Records, state and private, will have to be hunted down. Apart from a few items of revolutionary or historical interest, administrative archives and papers of all kinds will have to be destroyed.
The seizure of the prisons and the liberation of the prisoners, including political prisoners, will be the order of the day. There’s something that won’t reassure any upstanding citizens: the entire underworld out on the streets, overnight. Aren’t prisons filled with awful gangsters and horrible killers?
In reality, most prisoners are proletarians who sought, in attacking property and the commodity, to escape their circumstances. They aren’t little saints or benevolent revolutionaries, for the most part. But the reasons for their offenses would vanish with the disappearance of the current system. The overwhelming majority of them will know to put their talents to use at the service to the revolution.
And the underworld? Crooks aren’t generally behind bars. Sometimes, they even strike with the collusion of the police. Killers? They often have the law on their side. Some can even be found at the heads of states.
The liberation of prisoners will exclude notorious reprobates and counterrevolutionaries. The end of the commodity, the organization of armed militias, will make it possible to reduce the number of bad actors.
These varying measures can’t be carried out within just any context or any balance of power. But they’re a pressing necessity for revolutionaries and anti-statists.
Committees entailing the distribution of goods might seek to rally small business owners and managers and use their premises. If these social categories demonstrate an ability to be retrained, all the better. If they resist and seek to retain ownership of their stock and their stores, society will have to do without them. In the case that the commodities that they hold are significant or necessary, they’ll have to be seized. In any case, their power is limited, as it’ll suffice to cut off their supplies at the source.
Advertising can be redeveloped as anti-advertising. This will be a matter of providing information on the characteristics and the manufacture of products, on the status of reserves, and encouraging moderation.
The revolution will be global.
This isn’t a moral imperative—all men are equal, and brothers, and have a right to it.
The revolution will be global because capital itself is a global reality. It’s destroyed human communities, separated individuals, made every person into the competitor of every other. But by the same stroke, it’s collected and unified the human race under its heel. Today, and for the first time in history since Adam and Eve, there’s a correspondence between the genetic unity and the social unity of the species.
The birth of the national idea and the nation-state are the direct fruit of capitalist development, of the destruction of traditional groups, of standardization through trade, of inequality in growth. But if capital takes shelter behind borders, it doesn’t let them imprison it. Its development, imperialistic and commonplace, has always had the tendency to conquer and unify markets. There has been a succession of different countries and regions that were the preferred site of capital accumulation, before declining so as to make way for the next.
The contemporary era has seen this movement accelerate. There’s been a globalization of commodity relations and an escalation in inequality. Colonization, world wars, the development of new poles of accumulation, the formation of new nation-states, more or less puppets—these have been the stages of the movement. The proliferation of nations and states hasn’t prevented the consolidation, even on the political level. Small states are enfeoffed to stronger states; they come together into military blocs and economic zones; they create global institutions and peace-keeping forces.
Even more remarkable is the internationalization of trade and the formation of multinational businesses, which have outpaced political consolidation and deprived states of the greater part of their economic power. These giant firms are richer than many nations. They have a planetary view of things. They seek to produce and to sell wherever it’s most profitable, with no regard for borders.
Trade is standardizing life across the world; the same kinds of grains, buildings, and teachings can be found throughout. Local color, preserved or superimposed, is an advertising pitch aimed at tourists and traditionalists. Nothing better illustrates this gimmickification of the national idea than the archetypal scenery transported around the world on interchangeable airplanes. Here you eat à la française, there you run into some Japanese geishas… and just about everywhere, Palestinian hijackers.
Faced with all of this, revolutionaries obviously aren’t calling for the defense or the restoration of the homeland, as are a heap of demagogues. Nor do we support regionalist or neo-nationalist movements that advocate the formation of newer, more legitimate homelands. In invoking the right to difference and autonomy, what’s being opposed is nationalism with nationalism, state with state. At first, there’s often a healthy reaction against statism, standardization, and the inequality of development in the contemporary world. The only solution possible is the end of capital and all of its states.
Communism isn’t the enemy of homelands, if by love of the homeland you mean the attachment of men to their regions, landscapes, customs, local ways of life. We don’t want to revive parochial attitudes, but we’re against the leveling of countries and their inhabitants.
Pretty often, defenders of the homeland are nothing more than defenders of the state. Their nostalgia seeks to ignore what it is that’s destroying the values that they defend.
Nationalism developed, paradoxically, in lockstep with the deterioration of man’s attachment to and knowledge of his environment. It valorizes not a real community but the image of a community that expresses the moronic fetishism of the flag or of national heroes. More and more, our era is rendering all of this bric-a-brac obsolete. The feelings that they crystallize around are more and more hypocritical and detached from reality.
Most leaders who glorify the national idea cancel each other out. Time and again, the ruling and privileged classes have shown how little they regard patriotism. The nation’s interests are only as worthwhile as their correspondence with the interests of capital. In the event that some proletarian menace were to appear, the ruling classes of various countries would rush to make peace.
The revolution will be global because the problems it will have to solve are global. The interpenetration of different economies prevents any solitary escape. In any case, if the revolution develops in a single country, it’ll have to face off against the outside counterrevolution. But this interdependence, the development of the means of communication, the simultaneity of economic and political upheavals, will make the revolution more infectious than ever. Each state, in playing policeman elsewhere, will have worry about accelerating things at home. The more quickly the insurrection spreads, the more difficult its repression will become.
Hunger and pollution have no local causes, even if their effects are very localized. The revolution will have to establish universal rules for the protection of nature. Agriculture will have to be organized so as to meet the needs of all populations.
This isn’t to say that rich, industrialized countries will have to bleed themselves dry, or that poor countries will remain dependent on privileged regions.
Each region, in accordance with its problems and its resources, with the stature of its proletariat, will have to come up with its specific forms of organization and development. As much as possible, they’ll have to manage with local resources to begin with.
It’ll nevertheless be necessary to organize transfers of equipment and technicians, especially at the start, in order to help the most marginalized escape abject poverty as quickly as possible. Food consumption in some regions will have to be reduced or transformed, if necessary, to help others. Communists will always be at the vanguard of the fight against local self-interest.
Underdeveloped countries can be communized, despite the deficiency of their development. The possibility of communism is established on a global scale. What matters isn’t the quantitative development so much as the qualitative development of productive forces. A certain degree of science and technology will generate a quantitative abundance in short time. The current predominance of industrialized countries will serve the dawn of communism by supporting local proletarian forces to liquidate capital everywhere.
How do you promote communist transformations in countries where agrarian populations predominate? There will be no need to have another go at primitive accumulation. Unlike capitalism, communism won’t establish itself by wreaking havoc on traditional social structures. On the contrary, by ridding them of their most negative aspects, communism will be able to build itself upon these structures to rediscover, beneath the parasitism and feudalism, their essential peasant communities.
This won’t prevent an attendant development of modern activities. Within these communities, technologies can be introduced: lightweight agricultural equipment, energy sensors, contraceptive procedures, medical treatments… There’s no absolute incompatibility between the equilibrium of the traditional community and the implementation of easy-to-use technologies. There are already examples of primitive populations who know how to use modern technologies. The actual handicap is rather the disintegration of these communities under the influence of capital.
It’s practically certain that the populations and social structures in question will evolve. But this evolution won’t primarily have been a destruction of men and a renunciation of community values.
Can you count on the working class to establish a global solidarity? Aren’t workers often racist?
Workers often show themselves to be racists—racist against foreigners, and foremost against workers who are immigrants or racial minorities. “Working-class” governments have shown themselves to be more racist, particularly on the issue of immigration, than have bourgeois governments. It’s often businessmen who are favorable to immigration and the abolition of discriminatory laws.
Working-class racism corresponds firstly to the attitude of the oppressed who, unable to escape their condition, are more than happy to be able to feel superior to their dogs, to cops, to immigrants. It’s the expression of a real class interest, of the working class qua commodity. The intellectual can wax poetic about the brotherhood of man; the worker, particularly the unskilled worker, understands very well that the foreigner is first and foremost a competitor in the labor market. Racism, overt or covert, is born of the inability to recognize that it’s capital that pits wage laborers against each other. This lack of understanding isn’t the manifestation of some straightforward intellectual deficiency. It corresponds to a powerlessness. Understanding goes hand in hand with the ability to transform reality. When the proletariat rises up and comes together, racism crumbles. No need to wait for the revolution to see it; in incomplete struggles, workers of various origins reject prejudices and mistrust.