OUT OF THE FUTURE
One of the best films about class conflict is a 10 minute sharp and biting shot, taken on June 10th 1968 outside the gates of the Wonder factory - a battery-maker - on the outskirts of Paris. Most of the workers were unskilled, low paid, looked down on women, often handling dirty chemicals. They'd been on strike since May 13th and were just about to go back in. What concessions they'd snatched from the boss were a lot in terms of better work conditions, and little compared to the energy put into the struggle. In the middle of the arguing group is a woman in her twenties, half shouting half crying, who won't be talked into returning:
"No, I'm not going back. I'll never set foot there again! Go and see for yourself what a shithole it is... what filth we work in. . ."
In 1996, a documentary interviewed people involved in that strike: men and women workers, foremen, a trotskyist typist, shop stewards, union activists, the local Communist Party leader who tried to convince the young woman to resume work. She, however, is untraceable. Few remember her well. She left the factory soon after the events and nobody knows what became of her, or even her full name, only the first one: Jocelyne.
We're left with one decisive question unanswered, the question posed by Jocelyne's reaction: in "normal" peaceful life, habits and guidelines weigh upon us, and it is practically inevitable to submit. But when millions of strikers build up collective strength, render the State helpless and media words worthless, bring a whole country to the verge of overall change, and realize they're given pay rises which will soon be eaten up by inflation, why is it that they step back into what they know amounts to dire or soft misery for the next thirty years?
Some will reply that Jocelyne and her workmates had not been enlightened, or had not met the true light, some will assert workers suffered from an absence of organisation, others that they lacked spontaneity, while wise guys will explain May 68 was bound to fail because capitalist evolution had not yet created the prerequisites of ...
The following essays do not solve the problem - this is no maths exercise or riddle where you have to find the right clue - they merely ask this first and foremost question.
In fact, one of the texts, The Class Struggle and Its Most Characteristic Aspects in Recent Years, was first conceived not long after the Wonder plant, like many others, returned to work. Leninism and the Ultra-Left goes back to 1969. Capitalism and Communism came out in 1972 at the request of a number of workers who circulated it, at Renault for example.
All three essays aimed at reasserting communism against an ideology named "marxism" - official, academic, or leftist.
Why call ourselves communist?
The more a lexical item means, the more likely it is to be put into hard labour by the ruling order. Like "freedom", "autonomy", "human" and a host of others, the word communism has been twisted, turned upside down, and is now currently a synonym of life under a benevolent/dictatorial totalitarian State. Only a free, autonomous, human, communist awakening will make these words meaningful again.
Although common wisdom proclaims that radical thought is obsolete, the last 25 years offer ample proof of its relevance.
What obsolescence?!
Class struggle? No need to read 2000 pages by Marx to realize that those dispossessed of the means of production have fought (and usually been defeated by) those who control them.
Value defined by the average social time necessary to manufacture goods? It's plain our civilization has an obsession with shortening time! Computerization, electronic highways and cell phones on every street corner speed up circulation. Work, shopping and leisure alike treat every act of life as though it has to be turned into an ever faster flow. Paul Virilio describes how economy does not produce just objects but speed, and indeed objects only as far as they produce speed. Though Virilio does not claim to be a marxist, he points at a world that prides itself on reducing the time needed to achieve everything, i.e. a world run by minimal time - by value.
Profit making as the driving force of this world? Anyone who has lost his job in a firm he gave 20 years of his life to, can see that a company is accumulated value looking to constantly increase itself, and crushing whatever hinders it.
The decreasing numbers of Western factory workers, the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and the withering away of extreme-left groups mean the final downfall of communism to those who portrayed blue collars as the salt of the earth, equated socialism with planned economy, and enjoyed marching in the street under a North Vietnam flag.
The collapse of so-called socialist countries showed how economy rules. East and West have both gone through accumulation crises. Trying to regain profitability required a new system of production in Cleveland, a new political regime in the Kremlin. State capitalism did not fail because people got fed up with totalitarianism, but when it was no longer able to support itself and give substance to its oppression.
Centralized economic planning was just about all right for developing capital goods industries; and bureaucratic power rested on a compromise with the peasants on the one hand, and the workers on the other (job for life plus minimal social security, in exchange for political submission: even periodic purges contributed to social promotion and thus to workers' support for the bureaucrats ). This may have been OK for Russia in 1930, but not in 1980, let alone for East Germany or Czechoslovakia in 1980. Capitalism needs some forms of competition between conflicting poles of accumulated value confronting each other, and therefore a certain amount of political and economic competition.
The breaking up of the USSR is not the definitive refutation of Marx, but the verification of Das Kapital. The Politburo could fiddle its own internal market but not evade world trade pressures. The same market forces that were laying off thousands in Liverpool were busy smashing the bureaucratic dykes that blocked the streams of money and commodities in Moscow. The spectre still haunts us, the Wall Street Journal wrote in 1991, in reference to the 1848 Manifesto: "Marx's analysis can be applied to the amazing disintegration of communist regimes built on the foundations of his thought but unfaithful to his prescriptions."
There had been workers' uprisings before, openly confronting both the State and the institutionalized labour movement, and many far more violent, after WW I for example. But around 1970, the upheaval had something more global and deeper about it. Contrary to 1871, 1917-21 or 1936-37, in industrialized countries capital had penetrated the whole of life, turned more and more everyday acts and relationships into commodities, and unified society under its dominion. Politics as opposed political programs was on the way out. In '68, French unions and labor parties were able to stifle a 4 or 5-million 3-week strike, but could no longer put forward a platform alternative to that of the "bourgeois" parties. Those who were to take part in the general strike did not expect much more from a possible Left government than a bit more welfare. Mixed economy was the order of the day, with an emphasis on State intervention when the Left was in power, on market forces when votes swung to the Right.
Commodity relationships mediated the simplest human needs. The American dream is yours if you're rich enough to buy it. But even so, the only attractive car is never the one you've just bought, but the next one on the TV commercial. Goods are always at their best on posters. Just when a Russian style workers' paradise was no longer valid, the consumer heaven appeared out of reach - by nature. So no future could be found through the factory, neither the nightmare the other side of the Iron Curtain, nor the soft dreamland this side of the screen. As a result, the workplace declined as a place where to start building a better world. Although the Situationist International's book, Society of the Spectacle, had few readers at the time, its publication in 1967 was a forerunner of critiques to come. True, that period also meant unionization for many downtrodden poorly paid workers who finally got into the XXth century, and only a minority of the working class voiced a refusal of society, rebels with a cause on the fringe of the labour force, the young especially. But the worldwide strike and riot wave remains incomprehensible without its underlying characteristic: mass disaffection for factory and office life. "Who wants to work ?", Newsweek asked in the mid-70s.
Still, nearly all sit-downs occupied the workplace and went no further. Of all transgressing gestures (take over of gas and transport services by Polish strikers in 1971, Italian self-reduction, squatting, "social" strikes by bus drivers, hospital staff and supermarket cashiers providing transport, health care and food free of charge, electricity workers cutting off supplies to bureaucrats or firms, and a thousand other instances) hardly any turned into a beginning of communization. The disruption of work and the trespassing of commodity did not merge into an attack on work-as-commodity, i.e. wage labour as such. From prison to child education, everything came under fire, yet the assault remained mainly negative.
The lack of creative attempts to transform society gave the impetus back to capitalism.
Historical upheavals have no date of birth or death, but surely Fiat was more than a symbol - a landmark. For years the Turin firm had been plagued by permanent stoppages of assembly lines, mass absenteeism and meetings on the premises. However, organized disorder did not transcend negation into something positive. Thus the management was able to break a (fairly large) minority, with the passive help of a weary majority fearing for their jobs. Radicals had disrupted a social logic, not shifted into a new one. Violent (even armed) actions gradually disconnected from the shop floor. In 1980, the company laid off 23,000 out of 140,000: the factory went on strike for 35 days, at the end of which 40,000 Fiat workers took to the streets against the strike. Then the unions signed a compromise whereby the 23,000 got State compensation money, and later many more thousands were sacked through rationalization. On such turning points was the social surge of the 60s-70s reversed.
Since then, the defeats of the working class have been due to its defensive position against a constantly mobile opponent. However deeply entrenched in mines or workshops, workers' militancy could not resist restructuring. Labour is strong as long as it's necessary to capital. Otherwise, it can delay redundancy, sometimes for years with support from the rest of the working community, but it can't stay on for ever as an unprofitable labour force. In the 70s and 80s workers had number and organization, but they lost because the economy deprived them of their function, which is their social weapon. Nothing will force capital to hire labour that is not useful to it.
At the same time, those autonomous "action committees", "base groups", etc., which had been the organs of rank-and-file activity within the workplace and outside, faded away. When fresh coordinating bodies emerged, as in the railway (1986) and nurses' (1988) strikes in France, they did not survive their function, and dissolved, (very few transfused their energy into newly formed, "rank-and-filist" breakaway unions and were thus integrated into capital).
For years, assembly line workers had rejected being treated like robots, while a minority turned away from work and the consumer society. Capital replied by installing real robots, suppressing millions of jobs and revamping, intensifying, densifying what was left of unskilled labor. At the same time, a widespread desire for freedom was converted into freedom to buy. In 1960, who imagined that one day a 12 year old could get cash out of a dispenser with her own plastic card? Her money - her freedom... The famous slogans of 68: Never work! and Ask for the impossible! were mocked when people were forced out of secure jobs and offered ever more plentiful and frustrating goods to buy.
Many compare the situation today to the 20s and 30s - fascist threat included. But unlike the insurrections and armed counter-revolution that took place between 1917 and WW II, the present proletarian setback has been a protracted and gradual absorption of vast sections of the working class into joblessness and casualization. If there's hope, it's in the proles, Winston says in 1984. It's as though a lot of the proles of the real 1984 had risen a few years before that date, taken the world into their hands and refused either to accept or change it. Decades earlier, their grandfathers had locked themselves behind factory gates (Italy, 1920) often with guns; they had fought and died, but the premises always ended up again with the boss. This time only a handful got their guns (and even less with the advent of unemployment: one does not shoot at a closing plant). So, more a failure than a defeat, actually. Like a player stepping aside from a fixed game: he can't or won't smash the place, and lets the fixers win.
That game's lost, there's no use denying it. Capitalism triumphs, more fluid and immaterial than 25 years ago, universalizing everything but in an abstract, passive, screenwise, negative way. A 60s commercial pictured an auto worker looking at a photo of a new car and wondering: "Who makes this model?" Forcibly part-time or flexible, the year 2000 car worker will watch Crash on TV while his kid plays a video game that uses chips which could one day "downsize" his father or himself. Never before has humankind been so unified and divided. Billions watch the same pictures and live ever more separate lives. Goods are at the same time mass produced and unavailable. In 1930, millions were out of work because of a huge economic breakdown. Now they're on the dole at a time of growth, because even a recovering economy can't make profits out of them as it did 30 years ago. In many ways, we're out of the profitability crisis of the 70s, and most of the business community is better off than before. The paradox is, labour productivity has risen so much that capital often does not need to hire more labour to valorize itself.
The workers' movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. At best it got a better life for the toiling masses, at worst it pushed them into world wars. It all belongs to the past now, and the popularity of films about workers' culture is a sure sign of its passing from reality into memories and museums. Stalinists turn social-democrat and social-democracy goes centre-left. Everybody shifts to the right and soon trotskyists will name themselves radical democrats. What once was a revolutionary milieu is filled with helplessness and nostalgia. As for us, we won't feel sorry for a time when Brezhnev was called a communist and thousands of young people paraded the streets singing the International when they were in fact supporting groups trying to be the extreme-left of the left.
The purpose of the old labour movement was to take over the same world and manage it in a new way: putting the idle to work, developing production, introducing workers' democracy (in principle, at least). Only a tiny minority, "anarchist" as well as "marxist", held that a different society meant the destruction of State, commodity and wage labour, although it rarely defined this as a process, rather as a programme to put into practice after the seizure of power, often after a fairly long transition period. These revolutionaries failed to grasp communism as a social movement whose action would undermine the foundations of class and State power, and misunderstood the subversive potential of fraternal, open, communistic relationships that kept re-emerging in every deep insurrection (Russia 1917-19, Catalonia 1936-37...).
There is no need to create the capitalist preconditions of communism any more. Capitalism is everywhere, yet much less visible than 100 or 50 years ago when class distinctions ostensibly showed up. The manual worker identified the factory owner at one glance, knew or thought he knew his enemy, and felt he'd be better off the day he and his mates got rid of the boss. Today classes still exist, but manifested through infinite degrees in consumption, and no one expects a better world from public ownership of industry. The "enemy" is an impalpable social relationship, abstract yet real, all-pervading yet no monster beyond our reach: because the proletarians are the ones that produce and reproduce the world, they can disrupt and revolutionize it. The aim is immediate communization, not fully completed before a generation or more, but to be started from the beginning. Capital has invaded life, and determines how we feed our cat, how we visit or bury friends, to such an extent that our objective can only be the social fabric, invisible, all-encompassing, impersonal. (Although capital is quite good at hiring personnel to defend it, social inertia is a greater conservative force than media or police.) A human community is at hand: its basis is present, a lot more so than a century ago. Passivity prevents its emergence. Our most vital need: others, seems so close and so far at the same time. Mercantile ties are both strong and fragile.
The 1991 Los Angeles riots went further than those of Watts in 1965. The succession of riots on estates shows a significant fraction of youth cannot be integrated. Here and there, in spite of mass unemployment, workers won't be blackmailed into accepting lower wages as barter against job creation. Koreans have proved the "World Company" spreads factory restlessness at the same time as profits, and "backward" Albania gave birth to a modern rising. When a sizeable minority fed up with virtual reality starts making possibilities real, revolution will rise again, terrible and anonymous.
This is dedicated to Jocelyne, the unknown worker.
1997