9.

A human
becoming

Communism is no prisoner of the future. It arises from within capitalism itself. The activity that proletarians deploy when they spontaneously, and most often unconsciously, reject their condition is communist.

Communism presents itself, first of all, as theory as much as practice; as an anticipation. From the start, it presents itself as a more-or-less feasible—though immediate—solution to the ills of the old world. Utopia isn’t some dross to be eliminated. On the contrary, it’s the characteristic sign of communism. We have more confidence in the science of the future than in that of the present. But the future does eat away at the present.

Of course communism is a stage of human history, a new world. But more than anything, it’s not some given social form; it’s a privileged movement in the humanization of the species.

History

On the theoretical plane, communism appeared with the renewal of Renaissance ideas. In Leuven, 1516, Englishman Thomas More published his Utopia. In 1602, the Dominican Campanella wrote The City of the Sun. He was therefore imprisoned for provoking an anti-Spanish conspiracy in Calabria. This was for having described a world where money, property, and class division disappeared, and for having posed this as an alternative to the world he lived in. More, Campanella, and the others who tended toward communism weren’t proletarians, nor even rebels. Rather, they were brilliant, trailblazing minds who either courted the established powers or were hunted down for their independence and nonconformity.

Yet in the same period, with the German Peasants’ War and Thomas Müntzer, communism began to materialize. It terrified princes, the bourgeois, and religious reformers like Luther, who cried out, “Lost wretches that you are! It’s the voice of flesh and blood that rises in your ears.”1

They were confusing faith with hope; is it not natural to believe, when one possesses nothing? Now, the grave thing was this: the blessed hope that animated them, they meant to manifest not in another world after death, but on this very earth, and as soon as possible (The Revolution of the Saints, 1520-1536, G. d’Aubarède 1946).2

But with the Anabaptists of those times, it hadn’t only been a question of religion. Their doctrine was undermining the foundations of the entire social order: property, laws, magistrature … As for private homes, each man made do as he pleased. One such, who had formerly lived beneath a thatched roof, conveyed himself to a hotel. Domestics of the nobility and the clergy helped themselves, without scruple, to what had belonged to their masters. They sacked the episcopal palace, the archives, the titles, the royal grants, all the papers. Of what use could these trifles be, in the new Zion, of which the foundations were doctrinal liberty and fraternal equality? (Jean Bockelson, M. Baston 1824).3

Too many people are ignorant of the fact that communism has already entered the realm of history as practical fact, that it proved itself, that it prevailed for a few years and was fiercely established in a few provinces, no more than three hundred years ago … There existed the same pretexts as at present, more or less the same tendencies, the implementation of the same methods for action, but with a mighty means besides, a lever of immense force: the religious and mystical form in which the forceful revolutionaries of the era swathed themselves (Historical Studies on Communism and Insurrections in the 16th Century, Arnoul, 1850).4

Traces of the tendency toward communism can be found further back in time, before even the development of capitalism. It’s the ancient aspiration to recover lost abundance and community.

The first practical attempts at modern communism would themselves be based on remnants of the primitive communism that had survived the development of class societies.

Modern communism draws its inspiration from the works of the ancient advocates for the community of goods: Plato, who endorsed it in the aristocratic style for members of the elite, and the early Christians, who communalized their goods in accordance with the spirit of the Gospels.

However, even while drawing inspiration from and connections to the past, modern communism innovates.

Communism sees itself as an adversary of established society and seeks to replace it. Thomas More devotes the first part of his work to denouncing contemporary ills and to uncovering their causes. He takes note of the ravages visited by the development of capital.

Communism is no longer a state of mind, or a way of life through the communalization of resources. It’s a global and social solution, a method for the organization of production.

Thomas More introduces a navigator, Hythloday, who’s visited the imaginary isles of Utopia. Hythloday considers our society:

My dear More, spoke he, to freely own to you what is in my heart, where money is the standard of all things, in those nations, I cannot think either justice or prosperity could prevail in public affairs … Plato, wise a man as he was, could not but foresee that there was only one way to public salvation, to wit equality, which does not seem to me possible to obtain so long as property belongs to individuals … I am persuaded, from whence, that there can be no equitable nor just distribution of things, nor can the affairs of men be happily managed, unless property is totally abolished.5

More denounces the damages incurred by the development of landed property and plantation capitalism, which drives out peasants to replace them with sheep: “… your sheep, so mild, so easily kept in feed, now may be said to be so rapacious and so wild that they devour men.”6 He denounces the impotence of politics and the distance that necessarily separates good precepts from their practical application.

In Utopia, things are different:

Every father of a family goes and takes whatsoever he or his family need, without paying for it, without compensation of any sort. Why deny any thing to any person, when there is such plenty, and no man fears that his neighbor might ask more than he needs? For what should make any act such, if they are all sure that they will be always supplied? What engenders greed or rapaciousness is the fear of want …

In all other places, whereas people talk of a greater good, every man only seeks his own good; but there where no man has any property, all men do pursue the good of the public; and indeed, as the individual good is truly intertwined with the greater good … In Utopia, where every man has a right to every thing, they do all know that no private man can want any thing, if care is taken to keep the public stores full. For among them there is no unequal distribution; there’s no poor nor beggar to be seen, and though no man has any thing, yet they are all rich …

Is not a society both unjust and ungrateful, when it is so prodigal of its favors to those that are called gentlemen, or goldsmiths, or such others that are idle or live by flattery, or by contriving the arts of vain pleasure? When, on the other hand, it has neither thought nor feeling toward those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, and smiths, without whom no society could exist? In its selfish cruelty, it exploits the vigor of their youth to extract from them the greatest travail and profit; but after the public has been served by them, and that they come to be oppressed with age, sickness, and want, all their labors and the good that they have done is forgotten, and all the recompense given them is that they are left to die of hunger.7

More concludes his book as follows: “there are many things in the commonwealth of Utopia that I wish to see followed in our cities. I wish, not hope.”8 And in everyday language, the word utopia does designate an unfeasible dream. And yet…

And yet, a little over a century later, there would transpire an experiment remarkably close to More’s dream. It’s rare indeed for a social project to be so faithfully realized.

Guarani communism

The year that Utopia was published, the Spaniards invaded and began conquering Paraguay, the land of the Guarani Indians. In the 16th century, the name “Paraguay” designated the Guarani homelands, a territory larger than present-day Paraguay, which is why the experiment we’re about to speak of happened beyond the borders of modern Paraguay.

Under the aegis of the Jesuits, hundreds of thousands of Indians would live—cultivate the land, extract and forge metals, set up dockyards, dedicate themselves to the arts—without the establishment of money, wage labor, or private property. The republic of the Guaranis would endure for around a century and a half, then break down with the expulsion of the Jesuits and attacks from the Spaniards and the Portuguese. In its era, this entity constituted the most industrially advanced country in Latin America. Contemporaries would ponder and debate the nature and scope of the experiment that would come to fortify European socialism. Some would see it as a trailblazing attempt; others would play it down or reduce it to a seedy Jesuit enterprise. Over time, this affair would be considered either too Jesuitical or too communist to merit attention.

The documents cited by Clovis Lugon, papist and Stalinophile, make it possible to form a more accurate opinion (The Republic of the Guaranis, Éditions Ouvrières, 1970):

Nothing seemed more beautiful to me than the order and the manner in which is administered the needs of the tribe’s inhabitants. Those who take in the harvest are obliged to transport all the grain into public stores; there are people appointed to the watch of these stores, who maintain a register of all they receive. At the commencement of each month, the officers who have the management of the grain deliver to the local chiefs the amount necessary for all the families of their districts, and these distribute it forthwith to those families, giving each one more or less grain in accordance with the greater or lesser number therein (Rev’d Fr. Florentin, “Voyage to the West Indies…”).9

Most of the work was done communally, and the Indians didn’t seem tempted by private property. For themselves, they’d keep only chickens or a horse. Individual parcels were distributed so as to encourage them to progress toward private property, but on the day that the Indians had to see to these plots, they stayed “stretched out on their hammocks all day”10:

Fr. Cardiel who, as has been said, deplores the persistence of the communist system, did everything possible on his part to lead the Guaranis to private property, and first of all to a sense of profit and individual interest, by encouraging them to cultivate valuable products on their parcels, with a view toward sales of the surplus. He confesses his failure frankly, and professes to having met no more than three examples, all in all, where individuals had taken from their plots a little of sugar or cotton for sale. More, one of these three individuals was a converted mulatto …

Fr. Cardiel adds: “In the twenty-eight years that I found myself among them, as priest or as compañero, I did not encounter another such example among so many thousands of Indians.”11

All the Indians were obliged to participate in manual work, and the time they spent on it was limited—a third or a half of the day.

“Everywhere, there are workshops of gilders, of painters, of sculptors, of goldsmiths, of watchmakers, of locksmiths, of carpenters, of joiners, of weavers, of smelters; in a word, of all the arts and all the trades that can be useful to them” (Charlevoix). “One can find so many master artisans and artists only in a great European city” (Garsch). “They make watches, they draw plans, they etch geographical maps” (Sepp).12

According to Charlevoix, the Guaranis

succeed, as if by instinct, in all the arts to which they are applied … They have been seen to make the most elaborate organs upon a single inspection, as well as astronomical spheres, carpets in the Turkish style, and all that is most difficult in the making … As soon as children are of an age to be able to start working, they are led to these workshops and installed in those for which they seem to have the most inclination, because they are convinced that art must be guided by nature.13

The Indians also manufactured bells, their own firearms, cannon and munitions. Printing presses made it possible to release books in several languages, and especially in Guarani. The Indians were militarily organized: “We could immediately mobilize more than thirty thousand Indians, all on horseback,” and capable “as much of holding a musket as of brandishing a saber … of fighting in offense or in defense, just like any European” (Sepp). Fr. d’Aguilar, Jesuit general superior of the Republic, wrote: “What could one set against twenty thousand Indians who have measured themselves against the best of Spanish and Portuguese troops, before whom the Mamelukes no longer dare show themselves, who have twice driven out the Portuguese of the Santisimo Sacramento colony, and who for so many years have kept at bay the infidel nations by which they are surrounded?”14

According to Charlevoix, there was “neither gold nor silver but for decorating the altars.” “The population procured foodstuffs with neither money nor any pieces of coin,” says Muratori; “these idols of avarice were absolutely unknown to them.”15

The value of goods was expressed in “pesos” and “reals” in a purely fictitious way. It was a way of fixing the relative value of everyday foodstuffs … Apart from barter and the fictional currency of the peso, there existed a ‘real’ currency consisting of certain goods of general use, which all accepted as payment, even without having immediate need or purpose of it. [Tea, tobacco, honey, corn …] Prices normally corresponded to the real value of the goods, that being to the sum of labor exacted by their production, without augmentation for the profit of nonexistent intermediaries. The relative price of a particular merchandise was naturally influenced by its rarity or its abundance (Lugon).16

The dealings between the “reductions”17 were the purview of the community. “As statistics regularly indicated the extent of the reserves and the needs of each reduction, it was easy to predict the exchanges. The vicar held counsel with the corregidor and the majordomo in order to determine the kind and the amount of goods to import and export” (Lugon).18

Does this scream genuine communism?

Guarani communism wasn’t a pure communism. There was the churchy spirit of the Jesuits, the tributes paid to the Spanish crown and the Guarani military forces placed at its service, the persistence of the barter, etc. But we aren’t in search of purity.

It wasn’t the Jesuits who brought communism to the Guaranis. They found it there already and had to adapt to it. Some were delighted, finding it consistent with the spirit of the Gospels; others, by inclination or under outside pressure, sought to curtail it. The Jesuits permitted the grafting of Western technologies and knowledge onto an ineradicable primitive communism. They permitted the Guarani groups to unite into a consequential whole.

This was a communism sufficient to arouse mistrust and provoke attack. Subject as they were to an authority external to the Guarani community, the Jesuits played a rather detrimental role, in sowing confusion and disunity among the Indians, when the Spanish and the Portuguese attacked the eastern “reductions” from 1754 to 1756. “The Fathers of the reductions had received from the General of the Company, Ignace Visconti, ‘the strict order to submit to the inevitable and bring the Indians to obedience’” (Lugon).19 Menaced directly, Indians fought but were ultimately crushed. The Jesuits were expelled in 1768. Anti-Guarani incursions continued, destroying the experiment. The weakness of Guarani communism was that it wasn’t a revolutionary communism to begin with, that it wasn’t formed from confrontation.

In 1852, Martin de Moussy wrote:

… this strange regime … this communism so criticized, perhaps with a semblance of reason; the best proof that it suited the Indians is that the successors of the Jesuits saw themselves forced to continue it nearly to the present day, and that its destruction, not readied by intelligent and fatherly measures, had no other result but that of throwing the Indians into destitution. At this present hour, their last heirs sorely mourn this regime, no doubt imperfect, but so well suited to their instincts and their mores.20

Lugon, who absolutely wanted to make the Jesuits out as the importers of communism, further wrote:

In the aftermath of the destruction of Entre Rios, the survivors were reorganized under the leadership of three caciques assisted by a council, completely in accordance with the customs bestowed by the Jesuits. The population of that colony was estimated at 10,000 people between 1820 and 1827. The community of goods was entirely restored. In the reductions falling within modern Paraguay, the communist regime was officially abolished in 1848 by the dictator Lopez. The Guaranis who still remained in the region were at that point stripped of their properties and their goods. They were left to vegetate on reservations established in the North American manner.21

The republic of the Guaranis isn’t the only example of encounters between Indian communism and the West. There were some others of lesser importance: the Chiquitano republic in southeastern Bolivia, the republic of the Mojeño in northern Bolivia, the group of the Pampas…22

The communists of Müntzer and of Paraguay went further than did the Communards, or other modern-day proletarians, by creating an intermediate social form between primitive communism and advanced communism. Would there have been regression with time? It’s the power of capital and the resulting degradation, on the level of the social orientation of individuals, that’s risen up against communism. There’s no regression, only a cycle that’s coming to pass—and which will see communism reemerge, this time at the center of the capitalist world.

Maybe this is incomprehensible to those who see history as a linear and continuous process. There’s neither regression nor anticipation, but rather a perpetual progress from inferior to superior. But why, then, did modern industry develop from the backwardness of European feudalism, and from neither the great Inca textile mills nor the arts and technologies of China? Why was it only possible to introduce this industry after a period of decline?

In the wake of the bourgeois revolutions, alongside and subsequent to this communism that was swathed in religion—albeit iconoclastic beside the German insurgents, or Campanella, who sought the end of the family—would develop a naturalistic and anti-religious communism.

The Levellers

In England, after the revolution of 1648, a current favorable to communism developed within the party of the “Levellers.” Several communist works appeared during this period. These advocated for the universal obligation to work and the free distribution of goods.

Contact with non-Western societies nourished philosophical reflections. In 1704, Guedeville published Dialogues or Discussions Between a Savage and the Baron de Lahontan.23 The Indian was supposed to be superior to the European because he was ignorant of the distinction between mine and thine.

In 1755, Morelly published his Code of Nature. In it, he asserts that man is neither vicious nor wicked. It’s necessary to break with property and the “desire to have”:

Now, if you were to take away property, the blind and pitiless self-interest that accompanies it, you would cause all the prejudices in errors that they sustain to collapse. There would be no more resistance, either offensive or defensive, among men; there would be no more furious passions, ferocious actions, notions or ideas of moral evil.24

Despite his faith in human nature, Morelly contradictorily proceeds to define laws to govern peoples’ lives, down to the smallest detail. Clothing, marriage, divorce, child-rearing, thought, and even daydreams are strictly regulated.

Morelly’s communism would especially influence the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf, who was executed in 1797 after the failure of the Conspiracy of the Equals.

He was fundamentally correct to judge that communism corresponds to human nature, that it’s the natural state of the species. This isn’t because man is automatically good or moral, nor because societies succeed one another without modifying some unalterable human nature. Simply put, classes, property, exchange, and the State impose themselves as necessities that are social and therefore also human, but they’re only momentary necessities, corresponding to the passage from one communist social form to another. Communism doesn’t impose itself. It springs forth unceasingly, even if it can only flourish at certain moments. We’ve seen that spontaneous and characteristically human manifestations, like speech, have remained communist, at least on the level of form. With understanding itself, communism remains much more simple and transparent than capitalism—the dominant social form. This is because even today, it’s a more immediate reality. When we make mockery of bourgeois wealth that’s built on hoarding and expressed in money, when we pretend at naivety, it’s because we can directly draw on a communist conception of wealth that’s extant in a latent state.

People will reproach us for being simplistic or naive. To some extent, these are virtues that we’re cultivating. Blessed are the simple of spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; and not only that. People reproach communism, not for being incomprehensible or unacceptable, but for being naive, for taking no account of the reality it claims to be able to overthrow. But people fight against communism because they know that it’s not so naive—that the means for its success exist.

Theory is a necessity. It’s necessary in a world where human reality eludes men. But if theory only serves to complicate things, to reinforce the screen that separates men from their humanity, then it’s best to abstain. Revolutionary theory isn’t like the theory of relativity. It speaks to a reality whose waters we’re swimming in. The complexity and the distance that it seeks to reduce, in a move that’s consequently communist in itself, aren’t linked only to physical reasons but to ones that are human and humanly changeable.

It’s tempting to either drug yourself with theory and thereby reject life, or to reject theory and drug yourself with practice. The lack of living—the distance from the mechanisms that organize men’s lives—don’t lead to a will to learn but to a frantic search for images, for possibilities of identification. What matters isn’t to understand and thus arrive at the possibility of transforming reality, but to find those responsible­­—the guilty, the warmongers, the thieves of labor. It’s only because of this search for images and the concrete that the system and its managers have been able to focus popular hostility against one or another social group. This perverted need for practice needs to be opposed with analysis, but above all with life itself. You can’t cure an addict with words.

Morelly notes: “It is unfortunately all too true that to form a republic of this sort would be just about impossible at the present time.”25 The utopians never grasped the movement that could lead to communism. In those days, the proletariat didn’t yet seem like much of an autonomous force. But utopian descriptions had already manifested the historical need for communism and turned it into an immediate demand, as befits its profound nature.

The future isn’t a point external to the reality that we’re living in. It is this reality; it is its transcendence. Communism is here and everywhere, today and tomorrow, subjectivity and the objective development of productive forces. You cannot, without losing your way, pit communism as utopia against communism as historical movement. One of the great merits of the utopians is that they entertained no illusions about the historical possibility of their project.

It was later that communist reformers like Cabet and Owen would come along, trying to bring their ideas to life by creating small communities or institutions that were “communist” or communist-oriented.26

The strength of the utopian is that he doesn’t get hung up on elaborating a representation of development, on deducing what’s to come from what already is. He makes direct predictions. He tackles radically—that is, on the human level—the problems that capitalism engenders and unveils. Problems that humanity will one day be forced to deal with.

Communism asserts itself as utopia, in its discontinuity with the present. It’s conceived as a new global equilibrium.

Against this is opposed a sham determinism that reduces development to a continuous process, where each phase is the extension or the plaster-cast reproduction of the preceding phase. The utopian is reduced to a dreamer or a mystical rationalist. His approach and its point of departure aren’t understood as part of the movement in question.

Communism is a manifestation of the extension, historically possible and methodical, of the human species’ capacities. It’s the natural condition of the species—but this nature is historically produced. History itself only orders and rehashes the same materials without, however, treading water or going in circles.

The intermediate phase of class societies, which tends to negate man by making him into an instrument, was itself only rendered possible and necessary by the specific and genetically inscribed characteristics of the species. It’s the human capacity to adapt but also to endure, to use tools but also to be used as a tool, that’s turned against humanity. This phase, in engendering capitalism and machinery, has signed its own death warrant.

Scientific socialism

In the 19th century, the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat comes to the forefront. Communism makes fewer claims toward reason or philosophy in general. It seeks to integrate itself into and transform reality in practice. The first tendency to arise is one that seeks to start creating communist islands and to proliferate by example, with the eventual consent of the powers that be. The second tendency is one of revolutionary and insurrectionary communism. In France, this comes to be particularly associated with the name of Blanqui:

Communism, which is the revolution itself, must be wary of the allures of utopia and never separate itself from politics. Previously it was outside of politics; today it finds itself right at its heart. Politics is nothing more than communism’s servant … The day the gag is removed from the mouth of Labour, it will have to be put into that of Capital.27

Blanqui sees communism already at work in the capitalist world—albeit too generously, if you ask us:

Taxes and government itself derive from communism—in its worst form, to be sure, and yet of an absolute necessity … In the service of capital, association becomes a scourge, so much so that it will not be endured for long. This glorious principle has the privilege of being able only to do good (“Communism, the Future of Society,” 1869).28

By linking itself openly to the fight of the proletariat, communism takes a decisive step—but it is also perverted. It progressively ceases to be an immediate demand. It becomes a project, a mission, an historical stage cut off from the present. Emptied of its content for the “Levellers” and the “communalists,” it’s able to become a guise for capital in the 20th century.

“Scientific socialism” was a way to rationalize the historical alienation of communism. In the 19th century, the working class might have acted autonomously, but communism wasn’t possible. By proposing political angles and transitional phases, Bray, Marx, and Blanqui enabled all kinds of misrepresentation.

What’s missing from the celebrated Communist Manifesto, precisely, is communism. In the Manifesto, you can find a vindication of the bourgeoisie, an analysis of class struggle, of transitional measures… But it says little on communism itself, and pretty badly at that.

The Manifesto was drawn up for the “League of the Just,” later to become the “Communist League.” Before the arrival of Marx and Engels, this association of German immigrant artisans and workers had been fairly nebulous in doctrine. Weitling, its founder and theoretician, was of a mystical ilk. Marx and Engels would make incontestable progress but also cause a regression, in relation to the League’s prior assertion of communism, which was naive but more constructive and, even, more just.

In June 1847, the League’s congress defines its intentions in Article I of its Statutes: “The League aims at the emancipation of humanity by spreading the theory of the community of property and its speediest possible practical introduction.”29

In November 1846 and February 1847, the steering Committee writes to the sections, “You know that communism is a system according to which the Earth must be the common property of all men, according to which each person must work, ‘produce,’ according to his abilities, and enjoy, ‘consume,’ according to his strengths.”30

Article I of the new Statutes, drawn up by Marx and Engels, places emphasis on the questions of power and domination and defines communism in the negative: “The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property.”31

In The Cry for Help of the German Youth (1841), Weitling defines his Christian communism as follows:

The problem that He [Christ] set himself was the founding of an empire over the whole earth, the freedom of all nations, the community of goods and of labor for all who profess the empire of God. And this is precisely what the communists of today have adopted anew…

There are communists who are such without knowing it: the hard-working farmer who shares his morsel of brown bread with the starving worker is a communist; the hard-working artisan who doesn’t swindle his workers, who pays them in proportion to the product of their shared labor, is a communist; the rich man who employs his surplus for the good of long-suffering humanity is a communist…32

Communism and charity are practically conflated. Marx would react, vigorously and rightfully, against this slop. But the Communist Manifesto no more defines communists by their communism. They’re just the most resolute among proletarians, those who have the advantage of a clear understanding of the proletarian movement’s workings: the possessors of theory.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th—and despite Marx’s ragings against social democracy, most notably before the Gotha Congress of 1875—communism would be emptied of its true content. It would retain its underlying meaning only for a handful of anarchists.

In 1891, in order to justify “individual reclamation,” which is to say theft, Paul Reclus offers this short and sweet definition of communism in La Révolte:

Activity, in the world that we imagine, shall be equally distant from our present ideas of both work and theft: one will take without asking, and this shall not be theft; one will use one’s own abilities and faculties, and this will not be work.33

With the revolutionary wave that follows the First World War, and in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Marxist and communist tendencies reappear. There are remnants of communism, among the Bolsheviks. Remnants that will quickly be perverted, disappearing with the retreat of the global revolution and their own entanglement in Russia’s problems.

It’s with good reason that the very premature counterrevolutionary role of the Bolsheviks has been denounced; it’s with good reason that the bourgeois character of Lenin’s theoretical and practical oeuvre has been brought to light. But it’s idiotic to try and hold the Bolsheviks responsible for the failure of the worker’s revolution in Russia. Rather, the Bolsheviks are a specific case where a handful of men managed to influence the course of history, to the extreme of the revolutionary possibilities. Their adversaries, even to their left, generally only had humanist and democratic perspectives to oppose.

The contrast between the magnitude of the revolutionary wave and the feebleness of its affirmation of communism is striking.

In Germany and Holland especially, “left-communists” denounce the Russian regime as a capitalism of the State. They counter this with a communism based on workers’ management. They’re to thank for the emphasis placed on workers’ councils and the autonomous action of the masses. This current, notably expressed by the KAPD,34 will be fragmented with the ebb of the revolution into insignificant sects, where once it was capable of rallying hundreds of thousands of workers.

This worker-managementism will also be put to use by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Communism is reduced to the self-organization of producers.

It’s in Italy that the left of Bordiga, which dominates the PCI35 at its founding, will best restore communist doctrine. It stands against participation in elections, rejects common fronts with social democracy, criticizes the democratic illusion. It foregrounds the abolition of wage labor and the mercantile economy. Particularly after the Second World War, Bordiga elaborates his analysis of the capitalist counterrevolution in Russia as well as his own notion of communism. You don’t build communism—you destroy mercantilism.

Despite its great depth, Bordigism never manages to free itself of its Leninist miasma. Its radicalism and insight go to waste in the worst impasses.

After the Second World War, it’s only very gradually that theoretical communism is reborn. The prosperity and good health of capital don’t help. After considering and reconsidering its past, and rather poorly anyway, it attempts to move on. It develops gradually, as the social then economic crises of capital start to become visible once more.

After having taken up the critique of the Eastern Bloc and bureaucracy, the Situationists elaborate a theory of modern society based on the commodity and the “spectacle.” They denounce modern poverty. But however pertinent their analysis may often be, it stays on the surface of things. Captive in style and content to the spectacular effect that it both denounces and reflects.

The Situationists produce a brilliant and corrosive social critique, but not a theory of capital, nor of the machinery that sustains the spectacle, nor of the revolution. They don’t broach the question of communization, other than by applauding the immediate negation of the commodity­ (looting or burning) or by sinking into councilism (for the absolute power of the workers’ councils upon which everything depends). Feral enemies of Bolshevism, they, like the Bolsheviks, turn the revolution into a question of organization.

Communist doctrine needs to be centered on the description of the future and, above all, the process of communization. It’s on this that we have to debate, unite, or, on the contrary, divide. It’s not a question of fleeing the present but of living it, and judging it by the light of the future. Communism is here, and its prospects can be immediately set against the capitalist mire.

If protest fails to open onto constructive prospects and therefore demonstrates its lack of depth, it becomes a means for wallowing in misery under the pretext of denouncing it. Following the lead of clowns and fools, ideologues end up feeding off the very decomposition of the system. While we might forgive anything of those who make us laugh, we can forgive these people of nothing. It’s the ultimate way to mask the gigantic and unexplored possibilities that are opening up before humanity—the ultimate way to extinguish hope in the hearts of the oppressed!

In the course of history, the communist idea and the communist struggle resurface unendingly. They gradually transform, however, as their co-optation by capital forces them to go ever further. Today, as capitalism has normalized public property and penal labor, communism is beyond the opposition of individual and collective appropriation. It’s no longer all about the question of property. Communism no longer has to oscillate between an asocial naturalism and an exasperated moralism or regulationism.

The Marxist stage can’t be spared, either. Communism was thought of as a mode of production to succeed capitalism. But it’s something that’s at once more than and different from a social form. It’s the movement, present within the very capitalism that represses it, through which human activity smashes its shackles and flourishes at last!

Communist activity

Communism is, first of all, activity. First of all because it arises from within capitalism before it’s able to overthrow it. First of all because in the communist world, human activity and the upkeep of vital functions are no longer prisoner to the engendered social forms. The organization of tasks no longer has to be ossified into institutions.

Communism positively springs forth from within capitalism. But it asserts itself as the reverse of negation. Communism as action is at once negation and anticipation. There aren’t two successive moments. The more that activity rises up against capital the more it tends to represent communism, and vice versa.

It’s therefore not a question of building islands of communism within capitalism. From the communist point of view, when activity tends toward building, it’s destroying itself.

There aren’t any communist needs that would have to be satisfied outside of the system. Even if there’s an element of communism underlying the needs, once they appear they can’t be separated from their potential for realization, even if imaginary, from inside the system. Capitalism’s inability to satisfy desires leads to the world overcoming it and overcoming the desires that it enables.

We don’t see anything communist about either moral sensibility, as Weitling does, or the glorious principle of association, as Blanqui does. If that’s communism, it’s negative communism (though not to be confused with bad communism). It’s the rise of the movement of capitalist dispossession.

Dispossessed of the instruments of production, denied power over their labor, separated from one another, yet confronted, animating an enormous productive force, united in a great mass—proletarians see communism as negatively inscribed in their circumstances. Even if they do own their own toolboxes, they have no particular interests to champion. Their privation faces up to the might and the social wealth that they fuel. This is what makes the proletariat the class of communism. Proletarians can’t reappropriate the means of production piece by piece; they have to communalize them.

But what’s fundamental, even if things are inextricably linked, isn’t so much the movement of reappropriating and communalizing goods as it is the new activity that develops: the reappropriation of life, the birth of new relationships, the reversal of the relation of domination between men and objects.

Of course communism, the human community, is one stage of historical development, one given mode of production. The antagonisms that set human groups and interests against each other will disappear.

But you can’t understand communism if you turn it into a finalized goal or movement, detached from the activity that produces it. In subjugating the activity to the goal, the means to the ends, you’re only projecting onto history the way that commodity-capital dominates human activity, which it imprisons in the labor-form. The communist goal, result, and social form needs to be considered as a necessity of activity, seeking to safeguard and reproduce its conditions of existence.

Community exists in the society to come—the unification of the planet, the end of the division of the economy into enterprises—in a solution that’s global and social. But those who don’t see it at work in the spontaneous action of the proletarians, in the immediate and specific negations of racism and lies, can’t understand anything about it.

The relation between immediate action and the world to come is central. The universality of communism is contained within the specifics of real circumstances.

If universality can spring up from the specific, it’s because this specificity is itself the product of the universal, unifying, and privative logic of capital.

Those who don’t grasp the connection are obliged to resort to a false universal: the (proletarian!) party, the (proletarian!) State, or even the proletariat itself, but only in its capacity as an abstraction or representation. This false universal is itself considered to harbor the active ingredient, before an inert social ointment. The instrument and its object. The spirit transforming or straddling matter.

Communist consciousness only becomes widespread when society is shaken to its foundations. But all is already present in the life that springs up, including consciousness, which ceases to be the passive reflection of frozen representations and circumstances. Ideological consciousness is transformed into practical consciousness. In this, it’s already communist.

The more the struggle intensifies, the more those who take part in it find themselves cleansed of the prejudices and pettinesses that used to occupy them. Their consciousness comes unsnarled, and the gaze that they cast on reality and the existence that they lead is one that’s new and astonished.

This presence of communism doesn’t imply a monopoly on struggle, in the narrow sense of the term—a clear and overt clash between labor and capital. It manifests itself through all social life and often deserts those ritualized, rigid, boring struggles that are no longer struggles at all.

True human community always entails a contradiction to capital. It moves toward becoming open struggle or it sees itself destroyed, co-opted in order to be made into an image for papering over reality. Capital’s tightening hold on life is increasingly repressive, rendering impossible all humanity, all love, all true creation and inquiry. Men are becoming empty carcasses, trudging lifelessly to the rhythm of capital. Revolt and reaction therefore need to take on an increasingly human character. This humanity—contradictory to capital, the precise phase in the becoming of our species—is what we call communist. This label will remain necessary so long as this human becoming can’t yet claim to represent and encompass all human embodiment because it remains antagonistic to capital.

Communism is possible because capital can’t transform men into robots. Even if it automates their existence, it can’t do without their humanity. The most assimilationist and servile of activities feed off participation, creation, and initiative, even if these qualities can’t truly flourish. The need for and expectation of a wage aren’t enough to keep the worker going. He needs other motivations; he has to make his own contributions. The labor form can’t vacate the generic, human character of the worker’s activity.

We’ve seen (Ch. 4) that beneath these divisions, life goes on and maintains its wholeness; it’s impossible to completely dissociate production, education, and experimentation. In production, even the most stupid job requires a certain adaptivity from its worker, the ability to cope with unplanned circumstances. Likewise, the most abstract education must be made tangible through certain “products,” even if they’re only exam papers. The necessities of outside testing fall back on production…

The system of production would cave in if workers were no longer able to experiment, to help each other out, to consult each other. The hierarchical organization of labor can only survive if its own rules are flouted all the time. It imposes an insurmountable framework on these illegalities, and on the spontaneous activity of workers, in order to prevent them from developing and becoming truly dangerous and subversive. When a breach opens up or a conflict breaks out, this activity moves to become autonomous and develop its own logic.

By struggling, the proletarian immediately negates himself as wage laborer, as slave, as robot. However limited this reappearance of life and activity may be, capitalist oppression is already being found guilty at its very foundations.

The proletarian, who had been no more than a cog, begins once more to choose, to take part, to take risks. He retakes control of his conduct. His eyes open; his intellect thaws. The oppressive seriousness, the monotony that smothers men in the work camps of wage labor, the policed and commodified world—they cave in. Everything becomes possible once more.

Revolt, as search for pleasure and efficacy, can already be found beyond work. It wages can be found directly within the joy that it awakens and the results that it wins.

The wildcat activity of the proletariat sees itself suppressed as soon as it surpasses a certain threshold. More frequently, it’s co-opted and assimilated until it’s dead in the water. So not only is communism the product of capitalism, capitalism is the product of communism. If we make much of this latent communism, still in its first faltering steps, we don’t do so in order to fetishize it. It can only be itself by surpassing itself, by tearing itself away from the capitalist orbit. To recognize its significance is in no way to kneel down before a spontaneity that would refuse to organize itself, to be disciplined and go on the offensive.

Capital co-opts in accordance with its innermost nature. It’s a vampire by definition. It’s therefore not worth marveling over one or another of its more spectacular aspects.

Workers’ struggles, despite the opposition that they’ve aroused, have helped the system to transform itself and to realize its potentialities while always staying true to itself. Struggles for labor and politics, or struggles toward the ends of labor and politics, have shaken up the system and empowered it to modernize.

The struggle is coming to be sterilized at its roots. Strikes, demonstrations, and factory occupations tend toward hot air. People no longer try to harm capital but to inform it of discomfort, to express discontent. At the pinnacle of alienation, the strike no longer even seems like a means of exerting pressure but like a sacrifice on the part of those who walk out. They demonstrate, by the magnitude of their sacrifice, the seriousness of their protest. The social war is replaced by the parade.

The activity and the program

The prospect of action is the prospect of communism. It’s not about denying the need for action to be embodied, to be instantiated, to be drawn from what it generates and transforms; on the contrary, capital only considers action from the perspective of the thing produced. This is why, against all evidence, it equates labor with all specifically human action. Activity can be taken seriously only in view of its immediate and positive input. Positive according to capital.

This desire to consider only immediate impacts hides the anticipatory character of the workers’ struggle:

Instead of looking at what workers are doing, bourgeois ideologues try to imagine what workers would like to obtain. Proletarian activity is seen as, at most, an agent of disruption or the modernization of the system, never as the outline of its overthrow.36

This activity isn’t taken seriously because it doesn’t produce anything. It’d be purely destructive and negative. How is anyone dreaming that it could animate a new world? But in reality, the negative character of communist activity is determined by its immediate opportunities and the capitalist context. It’s only negative from the perspective of capital, not from the perspective of those who set it in motion.

We must not delude ourselves on the destructive nature of communist activity, such as it emerges from the flanks of capitalism. It’s already producing utility. Sabotage destroys market value by attacking the use that can be made of a commodity, but it produces a use value for the worker, in that it allows them to win free time, to put pressure on the boss (Lordstown ‘72).37

This destructive character vanishes, even, when the worker begins producing for his own benefit on the company dime.

By making revolutionary proletarian activity the crux of our doctrine, we can grasp the similarity and the discontinuity between the revolt against capital and the world to come. We see the contradictory unity of work and communist activity. We can confirm that communism is first a radical transformation of human activity before it’s an alteration of social forms. This allows us to reconsider the communist world’s traditional conceptions of the evaluation of costs.

In writings from his youth, Marx came to conceive of communism not only as movement but also as activity. Unfortunately, as he elaborated his conception of historical development, this perspective would dim in its capacity as an integrated perspective. Marx would become the communist theoretician of capitalism—in both senses of the expression. Heads, he analyzes capitalism from the perspective of its negation. Tails, he’s a prisoner of capitalism.

Obviously, Marx considered human activity as both revolutionary activity and productive activity—but separately. Regarding the Revolutions of 1848, he showed that proletarian activity feeds off of its class situation and develops its own logic. In his economic works, he made labor the basis and the measure of value. But by deducting productive activity from the product, he fell back on the false equivalence of labor and human productive activity. He didn’t see, in the activity of the revolutionary proletariat, a prospect beyond labor.

If everything lies in the immediate activity of the proletariat, why continue bothering with theory, with organizing? Why try to rework a program?

Not everything lies in the immediate activity of the proletariat, even if everything has to tie back to it, has to be put into perspective and made harmonious. Immediate activity is only communist through its capacity to outstrip itself.

The communist program is a necessity, even if it currently lies severed from the whole of the proletariat. It isn’t external to its movement; it’s an anticipation, a guide. Its truth lies in its capacity to be dissolved—that is to say, to be realized by that class. It’s nothing but the program of proletarian activity.