8.

The proletariat
and communism

Communism is the negation of the proletarian condition by the proletarians themselves. The proletariat and communism are realities that are intimately and contradictorily linked. If you separate them, you can understand neither the communist movement, nor the communist revolution, nor even the proletariat.

Lenin

In the wake of Kautsky, Lenin said that proletarians are only capable, by their own might, of rising to a trade-unionist consciousness.1 They can only dream of selling themselves at greater cost, not of revolutionizing society. Lenin was wrong. Proletarians are incapable of reaching a clear consciousness of their economic interests. Proletarians are merchandise, but they’re also paltry merchants. In struggle and negotiation, proletarians consistently demonstrate that they don’t know what they want and that they muddle and confuse economic and human realities.

This is a weakness, because when it concerns the defense of their economic interests, the proletariat is much less effective than the bourgeoisie. But you can’t judge them by a bourgeois standard.

Lenin was right to underscore the discontinuity between trade-unionist consciousness and revolutionary consciousness. The second isn’t an intensification of the first. The two are at odds. But revolutionary consciousness—and for us, this is communist consciousness—doesn’t have to be imported from outside, isn’t the product of intellectuals as a social stratum. Lenin’s perspective isn’t stupid, as some defenders of the people believe, but it accounts only for an obvious movement. A movement immediately contradicted by a period of revolution.

The proletariat demonstrates daily that it’s already beyond the economy. Its ineffectiveness, its naive illusions, are the negative and fleeting inverse of its humanity. In the struggle, independent of the necessarily limited nature of its demands, it manifests its humanity and its aspirations toward communism in many ways and through many slips of the tongue.

What matters isn’t what the proletariat is or appears to be when it works, when it parades on May Day, when it responds to opinion polls. Its fundamental situation will compel it, and already does compel it, to act in a communist way.

In order to survive under normal conditions, the proletarian must seek to compensate for this fundamental privation through the thousand means available to him. In the spectacle, he finds himself interests, homelands, drugs. He tries to find a new lease on life through the power of his company or his union. Capital can’t abolish widespread prostitution, but it can distract those who prostitute themselves. It lavishes solace on the proletariat by allowing it to “find fulfillment” and become ensnared in commodities and images.

The proletariat isn’t the optimistic incarnation of communism within capitalism; neither is it permanently and eternally integrated in a system that sucks it dry of all its sweat and life. Its reality is fundamentally contradictory. All of a sudden, a breach forms. In rushes the proletariat to widen it. The consequences of its actions push it forward. It discovers its strength and does things it never would have dared to dream of.

The bourgeois and the proletarians

What is the proletariat? Where does it start and where does it stop? What’s its numerical significance?

On the numerical extent of the working class, strictly speaking, there have been evaluations based on official statistics. It represents only a slight portion of the global population, as its size can be gauged somewhere between 200 and 250 million individuals. This figure excludes the families of these workers and fails to count a good number of proletarianized wage laborers, even in industry, and therefore can’t represent all proletarians. In any case, the numerical extent of the working class, which is already enormous when compared to that of the bourgeoisie, is insufficient to account for its true significance.

To add—this significance, contrary to the thesis that avant-garde sociologists are trying to substantiate, is growing.

But just as much as the bourgeoisie, the proletariat isn’t something that can be touched, defined, and numbered with precision. This detracts nothing from its reality, even if our sociologists can’t manage to snare it in their academic nets.

The proletariat can’t be reduced to some standardized image: the indigent in rags, the blue-collar worker, the standard-bearer of the red flag. It’s only in specific situations that its limits appear with clarity.

Just as the bourgeois is defined as a caste (by its privileges and its quirks, by the difficulty of entering it) instead of as a class (by its function in the relations of production), so too is the proletariat reduced to a socio-professional category, or to some collection of socio-professional categories.

From there, it’s easy to demonstrate that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to seize upon just what the proletariat is. Does it really exist? Haven’t technological progress and social security gotten rid of it? The class struggle, if you consent to grant it any significance, is reduced to one form of conflict among others. Women and men, the young and the old, the cosmopolitan and the countrified all bicker from time to time. Why shouldn’t it be the same between workers and bosses?

Our sociologists reproach Marx, he who invented class struggle, of not knowing what a social class is. He contradicts himself, sometimes speaking of the peasantry as a class and sometimes dividing it into opposing classes.

That peasants can at times be considered as a single class because they share common interests and illusions, because they act in the same direction—and then that these same peasants can be divided into poor and rich, into farmers and landowners—that’s beyond the comprehension of a sociologist. He can’t understand that a class isn’t defined, from an intellectual point of view as well as from a practical point of view, independently of the activity by which it constitutes a class. There are no classes independent of the class struggle.

Reducing a class to a socio-professional category is to put on the airs of science and rigor. In reality, everything depends on the more-or-less arbitrary criteria with which someone chooses to dissect the social body. More than anything, this objectifies reality.

All is reduced to the place that capital assigns to men. Specific dissections are captured in time: intellectuals, workers, denizens of slums, minimum wage workers. You can see neither what engenders these circumstances nor the possibility of leaving them behind.

At best, “classes” stay classes; one can be imagined to prevail over the other. Thus the bourgeoisie dominates in the West, while the proletariat has installed its dictatorship in Eastern Europe.

For us, the proletariat can’t be defined independent of its struggle against capitalism—that is to say, also, independent of communism.

This doesn’t mean that a class is a set of people fighting for the same cause. If that were the case, the bourgeois sympathetic to the revolution would transform into proletarians, and the reactionary street sweeper would end up a banker. Anti-capitalism—that is, communism—can become a cause for some, but by nature, it isn’t a cause. It’s an activity linked to a specific social situation.

The proletariat is that fraction of the population that produces capital while being cut off from its ownership and management. The nightmare of self-management is to make proletarians perform the role of the bourgeoisie. If this pipe dream were to be realized, there still wouldn’t be an abolition of classes. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat would coexist, in contradiction, within a single body. One person, operating machinery on the factory floor, would be his own enemy while on the board of directors.

From time to time, it transpires that children of the bourgeoisie go and ruin their health in a factory, or that workers line their pockets at the expense of an unlucky few. There’s nothing in this that signifies the abolition of classes.

The line of demarcation between capital’s managers and slaves is rigid. It simply happens that some people straddle the border, a foot to either side. They’ll very much have to settle on one side or the other.

Should the line of demarcation be made concrete? You can capture it in attitudes toward money. Of course, the bourgeois can be distinguished from the proletarians by the amount of money that passes through their hands—but that’s not enough. More fundamentally, the proletarian sees money as money. For him, it represents a certain number of goods. For the bourgeois, money is money capital. Money is for making more money. You invest it and, how wonderful, it’s spawned more. This is what links the medieval bourgeois, across the ages, with the modern manager. The hypocrisy continues to this day.

To discern the bourgeois class, it’s necessary to also include the familial ties and the sociological burdens that make the children and the wives of the bourgeois members of the bourgeoisie.

In economic life and within businesses, there’s a border between those who have access to financial knowledge and decisions—not necessarily the technicians or employees of finance—and the others. There are those who know that a business is money that’s been temporarily tied up, meant to make more money, then there’s the vast majority: those who see it primarily as the manufacture and trade of use values.

It’s sometimes difficult to pin an individual to any particular class. Some senior executive, some engineer, or, why not, some worker, can be caught up by the ruling class by means of his family background, his likelihood of promotion, his friendships, his leadership roles, his possessions, his properties. On the contrary, petty investors are pinned to the dominated class by a thousand ties.

From the perspective of the revolution, it’s important to not immediately throw these luxury proletarians into the bourgeois camp. The engineer attached to the bourgeoisie—and all the more so his colleagues who share neither his salary, nor his managerial role, nor his connections—can feel the contradictions between his professional and human interests and the limits imposed by finance. This can push him toward communism, toward a world where technical projects are free of the dictatorship of exchange value.

The knowledge and skills of this group are essential. But beware of those who may be tempted toward the revolution because they see their condition proletarianizing and naively hope to regain authority.

Under normal circumstances, and especially outside of the production process, the situation can seem unclear. Society seems to consist of lone atoms that meander in one direction or another. The worker and the bourgeois seem to disappear, no longer anything more than voters with equal say or consumers with more or less money. But as soon as a conflict erupts, as soon as the revolution appears, these atoms gather around antagonistic poles.

The proletariat isn’t an undifferentiated mass. Certain social strata, certain individuals, are a driving force in accordance with their specific attributes and their place in production. To a greater or lesser extent, they help the class to build itself as a class.

Some social strata are more restless, or protest their discontent more loudly, than others. Be wary of appearances. A group that’s more disruptive than another might not ultimately prove itself to be very revolutionary. It might be active for reasons that are very specific to it. It might be acting out because its status is waning. But it can’t manage to take aim at the foundations of society. With the revolution in sight, it might end up feeling more threatened than capital will.

Those who seem the most integrated and the most quiet, because they’re being coddled by the system, might wake up and get straight to the point. The power and the assurance that their situation grants them may empower them to attack capital without compromise.

The evolution of individuals and social strata can’t be considered independently of the depth of the conflict and the situation as a whole. Left to their own devices, social strata like students, intellectuals, and executives can only rise to a corporatist consciousness, or worse, a pseudo-revolutionary one. Let communism develop and these strata, by the very virtue of the lack of autonomy that characterizes them, will be radicalized. Not having any real power or interests to defend, they can only find these things by joining and supporting workers.

Can the immense mass of Third World peasants participate in the communist revolution? Is it part of the proletariat? Yes, but not as a function of the degree of its poverty. The more direct capital’s hold on its existence, the more it forms a part of the proletariat.

Even if it doesn’t labor for wages, it tends to join up with the class of wage laborers, given the commodity economy’s growing hold on all men and resources. The offensive of the wage-laboring proletarians will help it to discover its enemy and its solutions.

Wage labor, in a way, is capital’s ideal relation of exploitation. Nevertheless, you can’t lump together proletarians and wage laborers. It’s already been shown that the relations of slavery were integrated into the capitalist world by thus changing their contents. Many small proprietors are directly subject to capitalist exploitation, and often more oppressed by it, than are wage laborers. The leaders of large companies receive wages. In reality, however, everything about them is bourgeois. They set their wages themselves, and this wage is only one part of their real income.

Some professions develop more of a revolutionary attitude than others. The question depends particularly on the degree of identification existing between the worker and his role.

Some get caught up in the game. They can’t put things into perspective, regarding the work that they do. Either their work makes them into their own tools and all challenges to their professional roles constitutes a challenge to their own selves, as in the case of educators, or the products of their labors aren’t products at all but direct contributions to the functioning of their companies.

In either case, there’s a danger of developing a ideology that justifies their professional roles and their contradictions. The most alienated might end up believing that, thanks to their own abilities or to the general usefulness of their toils, they are revolutionizing society.

The most clear-sighted workers are often those who feel no connection to their companies or to the jobs that they occupy. This is the case for most workers.

Given their place in production—the solidarity it engenders, their human qualities—workers will be at the heart of the communist revolution. Even if the American or the Soviet worker has an easier time surviving than the Indian beggar, even if he’s more corrupt, he’s also better placed to recognize the nature of the oppression that hangs over him and to put an end to it.

It’s customary to deny the working class its central role in the revolution.

People highlight its absence from struggles for national liberation, which all the same led to Marxist states.

People pay particular attention to the lack of revolutionary consciousness among the vast majority of workers from rich countries, and to the benefits that they draw from the system.

People entrust other social categories with the role that these workers seem incapable of fulfilling. The revolutions of the 19th century are said to have been the handiwork of artisans. In the 20th century, Leninist intellectuals are said to have taken the reins. In countries of the Third World, it’s all about the peasants.

If these people were to look at things soberly, they would see that workers have consistently been at the center of attempts to radically transform reality. Workers are reproached for not having taken part in revolutions that were, in reality, bourgeois. When workers do intervene, people relegate their actions to the backdrop in order to foreground people belonging to social groups that prove themselves to be hardly communist, either up front or after the fact. When proletarians do rise up, people exaggerate and foreground one or another characteristic in order to demonstrate that they’re workers only marginally, doubtfully—that they’re peasants, petit bourgeois, soldiers, gangsters disguised as workers.

Some modernists replace a gentrified proletariat with new categories. The revolution is said to be the work of young people because they aren’t yet domesticated, of women because they’re more in touch with the realities of life, of hippies or other nonconformists because they’re outside the system, of black people because they love music and have rhythm in their blood… Others no longer see the necessity to give the advantage to any particular category. Capital is an inhuman force to which all are victims; it’s therefore humanity, as a species, that needs to rise up. There’s no longer a bourgeoisie or a proletariat—or little enough of them, anyway.

When one or another social group, or age group, or sexual category, is foregrounded, it’s done by virtue of the values that these groups are said to hold. There isn’t so much a change in the choice of revolutionary subject as there is an implicit recognition of reality, such as it is. Young people would be revolutionaries qua young people, women qua women, while the proletariat, which includes both young people and women, is revolutionary only so long as it’s no longer the proletariat. The proletariat isn’t a social group. It’s a movement. It is what it becomes. It exists as a function of its potential for self-destruction.

We aren’t saying that young people—or women, or disabled veterans—don’t have specific concerns, or that they can’t transform reality. Simply put, unless they act as proletarians, they can only defend their concerns as young people—or as women, or as disabled veterans—within some given reality. The proletarian revolution can give them the means, without abandoning their convictions, to go beyond their factional demands, to transcend them. These are young people—women, disabled veterans—who take action, but they no longer do so for youth, for femininity, or for its converse, state benefits and the regard of the citizens.

And the intellectuals?

In a way, the revolution requires that proletarians become intellectuals. They must be capable of going beyond their immediate circumstances. It’s well known that during insurrections you see people on the streets, discussing problems that were previously the preserve of philosophers.

The revolution also signifies the end of the intellectual as a separate social category. If intellectuals participate in the revolution, they can only do so by denying their own status—by recognizing that they’re crippled. Eventually, measures will need to be taken to prevent anyone from being able to continue on as an intellectual and nothing else.

Intellectuals are often attributed a privileged role as the bearers of consciousness. On its own, consciousness is nothing and can do nothing. Our intellectuals, who’ve often believed themselves capable of rising to a broad and objective understanding of things, in fact have regularly been in the thrall of the established powers. They’ve been subject to the worst delusions and have supported, with the spirit of criticality, of course, the worst drivel. Ready to excuse all in the name of Reason, of History, of Progress.

The demands of intellectuals are better suited to stir the hearts of the bourgeois than those of workers. How much nobler it is to demand freedom of expression than to cry out for bread! The intellectual seems to be the champion of the public interest. The worker seems self-centered and earthbound.

Yet proletarian demands are more profound than those of intellectuals. Intellectuals make a specialization of crying out for empty forms. When workers cry out for, or rather impose, freedom of expression, it’s because they have something to say. Otherwise, this is of relatively little interest to them. Their ability to avoid dissociating form and content, to avoid fighting over hot air, is a sign of communism. The problem with intellectuals is that hot air is often what they draw their income from.

The youth are often the most active in revolutions. Maybe there are biological causes for this, but their social situation is sufficient explanation. Even those who come from the privileged classes are less tied to the established powers. They have to wait to inherit! Capitalist society fetishizes youth and renewal, but it distances the youth from positions of responsibility and property. They find themselves more available.

In addition to the youth, people sometimes foreground nonconformists. They don’t live like everyone else; maybe they’re the future? Here, again, there’s an inability to comprehend that the revolution can and must emerge from within the system itself. There’s an inability to understand, dialectically, just what the proletariat is. There’s a delusion about the degree of independence that nonconformists enjoy, in relation to the system.

Has capital itself abolished social classes by outpacing the revolution? It’s long been claimed that the bourgeois revolution enabled all men to be equal at last.

Society’s division into classes is alive and well. Never before has it been so pronounced, perhaps, even if never before have such means been deployed to scrub the fact from memory.

Of course capital’s an impersonal force. Of course everyone’s more or less subject to its effects. Poor bourgeois, working themselves into the ground, arguing with their children, breathing unwholesome air!

The effects of capital, some have more opportunity to remedy than others. The disparity in today’s living conditions is considerably entrenched. The possibilities of diversifying products and the development of trade have made it so that certain strata of the population have a standard and quality of life very alien and superior to that of their contemporaries. It may very well be that the bourgeois aren’t the happiest. They can at least quit being bourgeois. The reverse isn’t possible for road workers. If even the bourgeois are discontented with their way of life, that’s just one more reason for abolishing this class and its society.

The bourgeoisie doesn’t posture. It leaves that to new money. It’s not in its interest to flaunt the lifestyle it leads in the shelter of its dachas and its private beaches. Proletarians generally overestimate the incomes of the social classes closest to them and underestimate those of the actual bourgeois.

Were the bourgeois to lead an austere and frugal lifestyle, it still wouldn’t make them disappear in their capacity as a class. What counts more than anything is their economic and social function. Their income is obviously directly tied to it. A portion of their consumption, including in Western countries, is blended into their business expenses. They travel, they dine, they fuck for and on the company dime.

Now more than ever, capital has the tendency to eat away at the identities of social groups—as much with the bourgeoisie as with the working class. The voter, the consumer, are beyond class. The pleasure kindled by the purchase is no longer tied to status but to impersonal cash. This capitalist negation of the classes makes ready for classless society. But it’s negated, in its turn, by the economic necessity that aims to hierarchize incomes and divide roles.

The battle for communism isn’t a battle for any particular class, but a struggle for humanity. But this battle is tied to those to whom all humanity is denied. The revolution won’t win unanimous support, and it’s dangerous to lead people to believe it will. Maybe a few bourgeois will rally to the movement; that won’t change anything about the fact that the interests of the bourgeoisie are at odds with those of communism. The proletarian will immediately gain from the revolution, while the bourgeois will be dispossessed by it. Though communism applies to the entire human species, there are men who can identify their immediate interests with those of the species, in a period of rupture, and others—not.

Waiting for Godot

What do revolutionaries propose to do, while waiting for the night of the Big Night?2

We have no magic bullet for making the time pass, no ideal type of conduct to champion. Communists, like anyone else, are mired in the muck of capitalism and unable to implement some pure and universal strategy that sees past all specific interests, abilities, and conditions. In any case, we aren’t proposing anything for the “masses” that we’d refuse for ourselves, nor vice versa. We can only make note of differences in behavior.

We aren’t purists; we accept improvements, however limited, as long as they’re real. This is already being thorough at a time when people herald great victories as soon as they’ve been paid off with hot air.

We aren’t purists; we’re willing to take action with people who don’t share our opinions, in the beginning, from the moment that the prospects for action become clear.

It’s worthwhile to be flexible on a practical level in order to take advantage of changing circumstances, of the unexpected. It’s important to know how to compromise and, above all, how to recognize compromises made. We have no formulas on offer, and we feel sorry for those who need them. No remote guidance here.

Those who act with an obsession for co-opting the revolution are themselves co-opted from the outset, and radically so. Sectarianism is foremost a way to protect yourself from your own doubts. When you have deep convictions—not ideological ones­—you can innovate, improvise, and invent without feeling your purity threatened. Mistakes? Well, it’s not by smothering the truth against your own breast that you preserve it.

This pragmatic flexibility needs to be accompanied by a serious rigidity and even, let’s say, in order to frighten off the “free spirits,” doctrinal dogmatism. Theoretical clarity and surety are essential. You have to know where you’re going and you have to make it known, too.

Our time is one of rigid behavior and flabby thinking. It’s a matter of breaking with that. Ideas are only of interest if they provide sufficiently solid points of reference.

The classic question: Should you participate in trade unions? It all depends on the situation, the fellows concerned. But trade unions have been assimilated?! That could be a reason to participate in them. Either you take advantage of the benefits this brings the trade unions or you demonstrate the limits of these benefits. Eventually you’re run out, and the contradiction between revolutionary content and the trade-unionist form is brought to light.

If participation in trade unions is acceptable, the conquest of their apparatuses in order to retrain them in a revolutionary direction is to be rejected.

In the struggle, as soon as opportunities arise for organization in a broader and less specialized way, trade unions must be rejected. The trade-unionist form can be made useful during a situation of retreat, but it can’t be allowed to impede the growth and intensification of the struggle. Actions by and for class must not be opposed with actions by and for an organization of specialists in demands and negotiation. In any case, it’s certain that as long as workers remain commodities whose price is up for negotiation, trade union apparatuses will still have a reason to exist.

It isn’t by giving up on narrow battles that you prepare yourself for the final fight. It’s not by scorning wage issues that you further the abolition of wage labor. Economic irreducibility is a manifestation of the capacity for resistance, and it can become dangerous for the system when threatened at its core—which is to say at its cash register. Woe betide anyone who seeks to distract proletarians from these issues with ideological fumes. Giving up the fight because “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” is often no more than the expression of a more general passivity.

Are we falling into the trap of efficacy for efficacy’s sake? Into economism? No, but we believe that class action tends to call forth its own content. It’s because of this that powers of all kinds seek to muzzle it.

As advocates for class pressure and class reaction as immediate and varied as possible, we’re extremely suspicious of protest goals that are dissociated from immediate possibilities and power relations. Even and especially when it comes to a transitional program of a Trotskyist savor. These representations, which are meant to unify and enlighten the proletariat, only block its view.

As just as it is to fight to reduce the time we spend at work, and in ways that are as generalizable as possible, it’s perverse to set targets for the length of the workweek or the age of retirement. All that does is take charge of and internalize capitalist limitations and divisions. The choice is between working time and free time, or, for the elderly, the condition of the convict or that of the dependent. The battle is curbed. Latent communism is sterilized.

Communism is the only defensible prospect. It’s not some distant abstraction but the human solution to all problems. It’s a matter of making manifest the meaning of the proletarian movement, of showing the power at its disposal.

Often, it’s the covert struggles—absenteeism, slowdowns, sabotage, time theft, skimming—that are the most effective. We aren’t fetishizing them. Capital can tolerate them and use them as a safety valve. They can’t replace a broader fight. But they bolster a fighting spirit, cultivate initiative, and win some healthy and immediate satisfactions.

It’s a question of popularizing those means of action that prefigure the communist world while putting immediate pressure on exploiters. It’s often possible, on the sly but also openly and in massive numbers, to distribute products and run services for free. Postal workers could neglect to stamp letters, railway workers to inspect tickets. If the most committed workers are fired, there are always opportunities for sabotage in order to get them reinstated.

Our strategy can be expressed as such: less hot air, less spectacle, but let the working class use the numerous means that it has at its disposal in order to command respect and set the future in motion. A little less solemn dissent and a few more smug and sneering smiles.

On the scale of history, the communist revolution is imminent. We aren’t writing for future generations.

While affirming this, we’re well aware that numerous revolutionaries have already declared the like and been mistaken. The system’s capacity for adaptation has regularly been underestimated. But it seems to us that these days, in reaction, people are doing the opposite. Isn’t this capital’s last gambit, to have anchored the image of its power and immortality in every head?

Having developed mechanization to the very threshold of automation, having unified the planet, capital is at the height of its power—but it’s also reached its historical limits. It can no longer hold up to the destruction of the social fabric or the environmental degradation that it engenders. It can no longer purge its fatty excesses. Its own power, its concentration, is what’s turning into a weakness.

The crisis of economic civilization has gradually taken shape as an economic crisis. Poetic justice! But the current phase can’t be reduced to a moment of economic difficulties.

To emerge from this crisis, it’s necessary to augment the rate of surplus value and straighten out the declining profitability of capital. There are many obstacles, technical, ecological, and human. It can only come about through massive conflicts and upheavals. The proletariat is already showing, in a thousand ways, that it won’t let things happen without it. It’s also showing that it isn’t prepared to adhere to some reformist solution—a solution that could only entail ensuring its complicity in its own defeat and burial, worse than Stalinism or fascism ever did.