This booklet should be seen as a fifth chapter. The
preceding chapters are the following: Crisis of the State-as-Planner:
Communism and Working Class Organization (Feltrinelli, Milan, 1974); The
Working Class Party Against Work (in Crisis and Working Class
Organisation, Feltrinelli, Milan. 1976); and Self-valorisation of the
Working Class and the Role of the Party ( in my book The State-Form,
Feltrinelli, Milan ,1977).
As I say, a fifth chapter. And thus one which
requires a reading of the preceding chapters.
While proof-reading this manuscript, I am thinking
about how many things stand between each of these chapters. However, if
nostalgia is possible within the revolution, then mine is not all melancholic.
A. Negri
Carona. 3rd Sept.1977
"Crime,
through its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into
being new methods of defence, and thus is as productive as strikes are in
relation to the invention of machinery."
Karl Marx:
Theories of Surplus Value.
"What strikes
me in your reasoning is that it remains within a schema of 'up until today'.
Now, a revolutionary undertaking is directed not only against the 'today', but
also against the law of 'up until today'."
Michel
Foucault: A Microphysics of Power
Lenin is supposed to have said (a claim made by
Keynes) that inflation is the weapon best guaranteed to bring about a crisis of
the capitalist economies. The attribution of this statement to Lenin a
statement so much beloved by bourgeois economics and not just by Keynes, as
evidenced by their continual repetition of it is demonstrably apocryphal.
This was recently shown by F.W.Fetter in Economica 44, Feb.1977, No.173,
pp 77-80. The offending phrase is nowhere to be found in Lenin's works. In
fact, insofar as Lenin explicitly deals with the problems of inflation, his
emphasis is along the lines of a moralistic denunciation of its effects on the
poor classes a denunciation well within the Socialist tradition.
This does not mean, however, that other Bolsheviks
did not at various points stress the destabilising effect of inflation in
relation to capitalist power. Preobrarzensky speaks for then all with his
description of "paper money as a machine gun for the Finance Commissariat
to fire at the bourgeoisie, enabling the monetary laws of that regime to be
used in order to destroy it". Also I am not implying that such a sentiment
would have been uncharacteristic of Lenin: he was, after all, intent on
grasping the interconnections between the revolutionary insurgence of the
proletariat and the crisis of imperialism.
However, I am convinced that the sense of any such
statement by Lenin would have been a complex thing. In fact, in Lenin's
teaching, any action that destabilises the capitalist regime is
immediately accompanied by action that destructures capitalist's system.
Insurrectional action against the State is
articulated in relation to the task of destroying the State. I am not giving an
anarchist interpretation of Lenin's thought. I am simply highlighting the
"destabilization-destructuration" nexus which is present in a precise
and continuing manner in Lenin's thinking, as in all revolutionary Marxist
thinking (with the exception, realistically speaking, of anarchist
immediatism). Thus, in this sense, F.W.Fetter is right when he says that the
statement regarding the positive effect of inflation for the revolutionary
process cannot be unreservedly attributed to Lenin: one cannot allow the
destabilisation effect alone to predominate. The crisis of capitalism has to
have a direction, which is imposed and controlled by the power of the
proletariat. Destabilisation of the regime cannot be seen as distinct from the
project of destructuring the system. The insurrection cannot be separated from
the project of abolishing the State.
With this we arrive at the heart of today's political
debate. Two different positions are present within working class and
proletarian autonomy. Destabilisation of the regime and destructuration of the
system sometimes appear as divergent objectives, and as such they are built
into differing tactical and strategic projects. Is it right that this
divergence should exist?
Let us start by looking at the problem from capital's
viewpoint. For capital there is no problem: restructuration of the svstem is
a precondition -the stabilisation of the regime, and vice-versa. The
tactical problems arise within the relative rigidity of this
relationship, and not outside it at least, ever since capitalist development
has rendered undesirable the option of operating force and duress (in the sense
of mere physical force against the working class and the proletariat.
For capital the solution of the crisis consists in a
restructuring of the system that will defeat and reintegrate the antagonistic
components of the proletariat within the project of political stabilisation. In
this sense capital is well aware of the importance of having the proletariat as
antagonist and is also often, in fact aware of the quality of that
antagonism. Capital has often accepted that the working class struggle is the
motor of development and has even accepted that proletarian self-valorisation
should dicta the pace and nature of development: what it needs to eliminate is
not the existence, but the antagonistic element of the working class movement.
Taken this to (paradoxical) extremes, we could say that for capital there is no
possibility of effective political stabilisation (ie no possibility of command
and exploitation within a dimension of an enlarged reproduction of profit)
except to the extent that it proves possible to take the proletarian movement
as the base, the starting point for restructuration. The interests of the
proletariat, however, are quite the opposite. The proletariat aims at a
critical grasp of the nexus between stabilisation ard restructuration, in order
then to attack it. To overthrow this relationship and to transform it into a
project of destabilisation and also destructuration this is the interest of
the working class. In general.
Now, to be particular: today we have two opposed
fronts that of capital and that of the proletariat. The divergent antagonism
in the direction of the movement of the two fronts is absolutely clear. This is
due to the singularity of the balance of power between the two classes in
struggle. Both the classes have the ability to take action both on the system
and on the regime; the actions of both are capable of directly affecting the
nexus of the overall relationship. Thus, 'if we do not focus our discussion on
this nexus, on the way in which it is affected in an antagonistic manner by the
two classes in struggle, we risk dangerously oversimplifying the debate.
For capital, as we have pointed out, the problem
exists only in relative form. We could cite one or two examples. During the
past 10 years we have seen such a continuous and active interpenetration of
these two moments as to eliminate all "catastrophist" interpretations
and theories of the crisis. The "crisis-State" has not for one moment
ceased to be also a "planned-State". All the elements of
destabilisation that working class and proletarian struggle has brought into
action against the State have one by one been taken on board by capital and
transformed into instruments of restructuration. Inflation in particular, far
from being a moment of destabilisation has been transformed into its opposite
into a decisive instrument of restructuration. At a very high cost,
admittedly: albeit within a deepening tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
capital has been forced to take planned action which permitted the maintenance
of (high) levels of working class valorisation and thus the non-devaluation of
(overall) labour power. This notwithstanding, the "catastrophe"
appears not to have materialised! Obviously this process has not been free of
situations of subjective crisis for the capitalist class. But the constant,
continuing operation of reinforcing the State-form -ie of the imposition
of the law of value (albeit in continuously modifying form) as a measure
and a synthesis of stabilisation and restructuration has never faltered. When
we speak of a crisis of the law of value, we must beware the fact that this
law is in a crisis does not at all mean that it does not operate; rather it
modifies its form, transforming it from a law of political economy into
a form of State-command. But for capital there is no such thing as command
without a content, and a quite specific content at that a content of
exploitation. Thus the rhythms of exploitation within which the social
mechanism of the reproduction of exploitation is to be stabilised, must be
dictated by the law of value. 'Then the proletariat respectfully declines this
invitation to dinner, when all the economic parameters of the relationship
explode, then it is factory command (commando d'impresa), it is the
political transformation of factory-command into the State-form which takes the
upper hand in order to redetermine the functional relationship of value, the
law of exploitation.
Recent studies '(Lapo Berti in Primo Maggio,
or Christian Marazzi and John Merrington's presentation to the British
Conference of Socialist economists in 1977) have broadly confirmed and
documented this process, with particular regard to monetary questions questions
which today are undeniably fundamental to any consideration of the
transformation of the law of value. This has led 'to a correct insistence upon
the theorisation of the capitalist State (and of it's development) as the
authoritative form of the capital relation (eg John Holloway, Sol Picciotto, in
Capital and Class No.2, Summer 1977, pp 76-101). Thus, within the critique
of political economy an understanding of the structural relation of capitalist
development (and of the capitalist crisis) has been developing, in Opposition
to existing purely objectivist notions.
But all this is not enough. The working class consciousness
within the critique of political economy must transform itself into awareness
of the revolutionary project. The proletarian opposition has no choice but to
consolidate itself into practical overthrow, into subversion. But it is the whole
relationship which, both in its political aspects and in its structural
foundations, is to be subverted. It is not possible to simply eliminate the
complexity of the relation imposed by the State form of the organisation of
exploitation; we cannot escape either via subjective voluntarism or via
collective spontaneism the difficulties, the problems, the determinations
which arise from this form. We have come perilously close to this during the
last phase of the struggle. The divergence has, as I stated earlier, involved a
tendency for strategic and tactical projects to diverge. Is it right that this
divergence should exist?
In my opinion it risks proving fatal for the entire
movement. And in this situation I am really not sure which is preferable a
rapid decease brought about by the plague of subjectivity, or the long, slow
agony and delirium of the syphilis of spontaneism. However, counter-indications
do exist; a constructive project is possible. It is to be found and is being
developed through the articulations of the mass line, in the dialectic
that the proletariat continually puts in motion, the dialectic between its
ability to consolidate itself structurally (the strengthening of that mass
counter-power, which, in itself, tends to disorientate and throw out of balance
capital's plans for restructuration) and its capacity for political attack, (a
destabilising capacity which shatters the nodes of the enemy's power, which
emphasises and shows the emptiness of the spectacular nature of that power, and
destroys its force). This dialectic is internal to the mass movement, and we
need to deepen it further. As I have stated, the project of destructuring the
capitalist system cannot be separated from the project of destabilising
capital's regime. The necessity of this inter-relationship is revealed at the
level of the power-relationship between the two classes, today, inasmuch as the
mass line has been completely developed into a project of proletarian
self-valorisation.
I should explain: the concept of proletarian self-valorisation
is the opposite of the concept State-form it is the form that power
assumes within a further-developed workerist standpoint. Proletarian
self-valorisation is immediately the destructuration of the enemy power; it is
the process through which working class struggle today attacks directly the
system of exploitation and its political regime. The socialisation of
capitalist development has permitted the working class to transform the diverse
moments of communist strategy (the insurrection and the abolition of the State)
into a process and to unify them into a project. Proletarian self-valorisation
is the global, mass, productive figuration of this project. Its dialectic is
powerful inasmuch as it is global, and global inasmuch as it is powerful.
Elsewhere (in La Forma-Stato "The State Form" Feltrinelli,
Milan 1977, pp 297-342) I have tried to demonstrate the formal conditions
whereby the Marxist critique of political economy reveals the independence of
the working class as a project of self-valorisation. Now we are forced by the
constructive polemic that is going on in the Movement to think out the real and
immediate political condition's for this independence of the proletariat. And
within the Movement we shall have a battle on two fronts: against the diseases
of insurrectionism and subjectivism on the one hand; and on the other most
importantly against the opportunism, streaked with pacifist Utopianism, which
mythologises the gentle growth of an impotent "movement" of desires
and nothing else.
It is clear that the polemic within the Movement can
only develop if it takes as its practical and theoretical starting point the
deepening of both the concept and the experiences of proletarian
self-valorisation. This is something I shall attempt in the course of this
book. But it may be useful to anticipate one particular polemical point of
departure, in relation to two recent propositions: that of Lea Melandri (L'Infamia
Originale, Milan 1977) and that of Furio di Paola (Quaderni di Ombre
Rosse No.1, Rome 1977). In both these cases the discussion is built around
a radical initial mystification, from which we must free ourselves right from
the start. It is a mystification that arises from a radicalisation of the
polemic against "power", in which the specific and determined nature
of power is denied. In fact, for these comrades power can be in the words of
the old philosophers predicated only univocally ie defined and qualified
solely as an attribute of capital or as its reflection. This position is false,
even if it does correctly pose the problem of the non-homologability of the
concept of power as between its capitalist usage and its proletarian usage (ie
the untranslatability of the term). But, precisely, this is a problem of method
'which cannot be answered with a reply that is radically negative in its
content. From this point of view you end up playing into the enemy's hands ie
you maintain that the only meaningful linguistic horizon is that pertaining to
the structure of capitalist power (a position which, apart from anything else,
is contradictory with the spirit and the method of approach to the analysis of
self-valorisation within women's autonomy and youth autonomy which forms the
substance of both these essays).
And it is this which is false. Power, party: Panzieri
used to say "that in such conditions the party will become something
wholly new, and it even becomes difficult to use that term". Very true.
But elsewhere, and in the same sense, he adds: "no revolution without a
party". And we might further add: "without power, no proletarian
self-valorisation". And then we could even change the terminology, if you
like! But first let us reconquer the dialectical unity of the process of
proletarian self-valorisation, its tendency towards the destructuration of the
enemy power as a project for its own liberation, as a powerful and effective
struggle for its own proletarian independence.
One final note, as a prelude. It is not hard to
understand how important it is at the level of militancy to stress the
necessary relationship between action that is materially destructuring and
action that politically restabilises the enemy power. Here in fact, that
slender but strong thread that feeds subjectivity with a mass-content,
which transforms proletarian love into struggle against the enemy, which gives
a joint basis and a bonding of class hatred and the passion for freedom, finds
again its unifying wellspring. The personal is political, through this
collective mediation. It is the collective praxis of proletarian
self-valorisation that determines the unity of the subjective awareness. It is
this dynamic and productive being that constitutes our dignity as
revolutionaries. Thus, both objectively and subjectively, we have no choice but
to fight to re-establish the complexity of the revolutionary proposition, in
relation to the independence of proletarian self-valorisation.
When I theorise an independence of the process of
proletarian self-valorisation, and when I examine the possibility of its having
an internal dialectic of continuous recomposition between structural functions
and attacking functions, I am bound to draw certain methodological conclusions.
First, it seems to me fundamental to consider the totality of the process of
proletarian self-valorisation as alternative to, and radically different
from, the totality of the process of capitalist production and reproduction. I
realise that I am exaggerating the position, and oversimplifying its
complexity. But I also know that this "intensive road", this radical
break with the totality of capitalist development, is a fundamental experience
of the movement as it stands today.
Today the process of constituting class independence
is first and foremost a process of separation.
I am emphasising this forced separation in order to
clarify the overall meaninglessness of a capitalist world within which I find
myself constituted in non-independent form, in the form of exploitation. I thus
refuse to accept the recompositional dialectic of capital; I affirm in
sectarian manner my own separateness, my own independence, the differentness of
my consitution. As H.J.Krahl understood (in his book Constitution and Class
Consciousness -a book which, with the passing of the years, becomes
increasingly important), the totality of class consciousness is first and
foremost an intensive condition, a process of intensification of class
self-identity as a productive being, which destroys the relationship with the
totality of the capitalist system.
Working class self-valorisation is first and foremost
destructuration of the enemy totality, taken to a point of exclusivity in the
self-recognition of the class's collective independence. For my own part I do
not see the history of class consciousness in a Lukacsiam sense, as some future
all-embracing recomposition; on the contrary, I see it as a moment of intensive
rooting within my own separateness. I am other as also is the movement
of that collective praxis within which I move. I belong to the other
movement of the working class. Of course, I am aware of all the criticisms
that could be levelled at this position from a traditional Marxist viewpoint.
For my own part, I have the sense of having placed myself at the extreme limits
of meaning in a political class debate. But anyone who comes with accusations,
pressing me with criticism and telling me that I am wrong, must, in turn,
accept the responsibility of being a participant in the monstrosities we have
seen in the development of "socialism" with its illicit dealings
with the most disgusting results of the capitalist mode of production. It is
only by recognising myself as other, only by insisting on the fact of my
differentness as a radical totality that I have the possibility and the hope of
a renewal.
Furthermore, in my insistence on this radical
methodological rupture I am in good company. The continuity of the history
of the working class revolutionary movement is the history of the
discontinuity of that movement, the history of the radical ruptures that
have characterised it. The revolutionary working class movement is continually
being reborn from a virgin mother. The hacks of continuity are still alive and
well in the History Institutes of the labour movement. But luckily militant
historiography is undergoing a renaissance too, spurred by the experience of
the ruptures in our present movement and in our history-writing we are now
confident enough to present the notion of the "other workers'
movement". Thus the methodological precondition of an initial radical
rupture (which we consider fundamental for any renewal of the social practice
of the proletariat) is empirically corroborated by an extensive documentation
(limited, perhaps, in scale, but remarkable in its intensity). When Karl-Heinz
Roth (Die Andere Arbeiterbewegung "The Other Workers'
Movement", shortly to be published by CSE Books), or Gisela Bock La
Formazione dell 'Operaio Massa ne li USA "The Formation of the Mass
Worker in the USA" Feltrinelli, Milano, 1976 tell the formidable story
of how the working class in struggle has continually destroyed its own
traditional organizations they are certainly not animated by a spirit or
iconoclasm: rather, they are highlighting the radical, irreducible
differentness of the revolutionary movement. This is a perspective which could
also provide us with a feel for other historical revolutionary experiences of
the proletariat experiences that have proved victorious and have (therefore)
been betrayed and destroyed.
So, I must assume this radical "otherness"
as a methodological precondition of the subversive case we are arguing namely
the project of proletarian self-valorisation. But what about the relationship
with the totality of history, the relationship with the totality of the system?
Here I must now face up to the second methodological Consequence of my
assumption: my relationship with the totality of capitalist development,
with the totality of historical development, is guaranteed solely by the
force of destructuration that the movement determines, by the global sabotage
of the history of capital that the movement enacts. There is only one way that
I can read the history of capital as the history of a continuity of
operations of self-re-establishment that capital and its State have to set in
motion in order to counter the continuous breakdown process, the permanent
provocation-towards-separation that the real movement brings about. The
present state of things is built upon a continuity of destruction, of abolition
of transcendence that the real movement brings about. I define myself by
separating myself from the totality; I define the totality as other than me -as
a net which is cast over the continuity of the historical sabotage that the
class operates.
And thus (here is the third methodological
implication) there is no homology, no possible immediate
translatability of languages, of logics, signs, between the reality of the
movement as I experience it and the overall framework of capitalist development,
with its contents and its objectives.
Let us now pause and consider the question from
another angle. The fundamental point, however you look at the question, is
obviously still the nexus between the process of self-valorisation and its
effects in destructuration. I have taken this nexus to extremes, and I have
defined it as separation. Basing myself on the experience of the movement, I
have stressed first and foremost the subjective element. If I now approach the
question from the objective point of view the viewpoint of the Crisis-State (Stato-crisi),
the position is no different. When the State, faced with the crisis in the
functioning of the law of value, attempts to reimpose that law by force,
mediating its own relation to capital in relation to the commodity form, it
registers upon itself, in effect, the crisis of all homologous functions. Force
does not substitute for value, but provides a surrogate for its form.
The law of value may be forcibly reintroduced, in
spite of the crisis of That law, and its operations may be imposed in modified
form but this does not remove the void of significations that Power is forced
to register. The Crisis-State is a power which lives in a vacuum of
significations, a void, a logic of force/logic which is itself destructured.
This logic, this critical form, is a "dark night in which all cows are
white": in other words, the meaning of the whole is not in any way
provided by the perfect connection of the parts. The State's investment in the
totality is purely negative, in terms of meaning. The rule of total alienation
is the only possible content of this project. The totality is a void, is
structured as destructuration, as a radical lack of value. Thus it becomes
clear what we mean in this case by a lack of homology. All the elements of the
whole are unified in a technical sense; they only hang together in their
mutual untranslatability; only in the form of a forced relationship. So, from
an objective viewpoint too, the system can be seen must be seen
as destructured.
However, while our consideration of the objective
aspect of the situation confirms our analysis of the subjective aspect, the
objective aspect has neither the same logical extension nor the capacity to
substitute for the subjective. One cannot move from the understanding of
destructuration as an effect, to the identification of the process of
self-valorisation as the cause. This is particularly clear in the analytic
principles of Michel Foucault (and in particular his methodological treatment
in La Volonte de Savoir), which have caught my attention because of the
way they strain after a notion of a productivity, a creativity of an unknown
quantity located beyond the cognitive horizon.
This is also clear and, furthermore, scandalous in
the various surreptitious attempts that are being made to reimpose a sense of
conclusiveness on this destructured horizon. (These attempts, be they
humanistic in inspiration, or conceived in terms of Wille zur Macht, do
nonetheless start from a correct perception of the blind objectivity of the
development of capital's system. Regarding Cacciari's Krisis Feltrinelli,
Milan 1977 see my review in Nos.155-156 of Aut-Aut). But this
surreptitiously-restated homology this "revolution from above" in the
absence of radical significance can be seen clearly, in the light of what we
have said, for what it is a fraud.
The above considerations lead me now to confirm my
original hypothesis of the prevalence of the subjective in the
explanation of the present-day dialectic of capital. Taking the subjective
viewpoint to extremes does not negate its methodological validity. Rather, it
confirms and extends it. It permits me, in the articulation between
self-valorisation and destructuration, to avoid both premature reductivist
foreclosures of the problem (because in fact it is the productivity of the
proletarian subject that structures the destructuration, ie negatively
determines its own opposite); and, on the other hand, totalising dialectical
extensions of the discourse, because, in this case, there are no longer any
homologous functions.
We are not suggesting that methodology in any sense
resolves the problems that face us (although a correct framing of the solution
is greatly facilitated). We know that the methodological hypothesis requires
confirmation from class analysis. It is only the theoretical-political
determination of the composition of the working class that can offer a sound
basis for a methodological hypothesis such as ours. And in fact the following
methodological approximations, without pretending to be exhaustive, confirm our
initial methodological assumption that, today, the establishment of working
class independence takes place first and foremost in its separation. But separation
in this instance means breaking the capital relation. Separation also
means that, having reached the highest point of socialisation, the working
class breaks the laws of the social mediation of capital. Marx in Capital
Vol.11, 1, calls for "another mode of inquiry" in the analysis of the
metamorphoses of overall social capital. Is this to be a logic of separation?
Is it to be a Darstellung built on carrying to extremity this independent
proletarian subjectivity, built on the movements of proletarian
self-valorisation as such?
I think that these questions are important for the
further development of this essay. However, before going further, they can be
further articulated at a formal and methodological level, in order to constitute
a framework for the ensuing debate. Let us look more closely. As I have said,
the separateness of the proletarian subject is organised in the dialectic
between self-valorising productivity and functions of destructuration. I know,
however, that this dialectic does not produce effects of homology and of
totalisation, because it is a dialectic of separation. But, equally necessarily
it is inherent in The complexity of The events that are being determined. How?
In particular, how does this articulation of a separate subject relate to the
constitution of capitalist domination? Secondly and conversely, how precisely
does the constitutive process of the collective subjectivity proceed, in all
its radicality and intensity?
In short, what are the laws that govern
(albeit in a situation of separateness, of lack of any homology) the
parallel and opposed processes of the State-form and of proletarian
self-valorisation?
The further development of this book will be
dedicated to answering these questions. But in defining the problems we can now
add a couple of further notes first in relation to the
self-valorisation/destructuration nexus. In the history of socialist
thought and practice.The sense of proletarian self-valorisation has often been
expressed with original intensity. (If Gramsci's teachings can be retained in
any useful sense today, it is certainly in this regard). But it is never
expressed in terms of separateness rather it is always expressed in a
dialectical sense in relation to the totality. Reciprocation takes the place of
opposition. In the social-anarchist tradition this reciprocity, this
correspondence, has been played out in terms of the dialectic between
centralisation and decentralisation. Thus it is not difficult, in a critique
that starts with Marx and stretches through to Foucault's edition of the Panopticon,
to demonstrate the perfect compatibility of Proudhon and Bentham. But this
compatibility also exists in the tradition of "scientific socialism"
this time not extensive (between centralization and decentralisation), but
intensive between the general working class interest and the general interests
of society, between socialism and democracy). This compatibility, of the
process of self-valorisation with the productive structuration of society, is a
myth. It is not Proudhon and Bentham, but Rousseau and Stalin who are the
fathers of this much-loved synthesis. personally, I have no time for the
so-called "nouveaux philosophes", but I must say I am rather
disconcerted when I see representatives of the historical parties of the
working class, who have always been enamoured of the link between rationalism
and productive Stalinism, insulting these young philosophers for having drawn
attention to this mystifying connection".
In short, they are addressing themselves to a problem
which no longer has any real basis. Class self-valorisation has nothing to do
with the structuration of capital. But it has a lot to do with its
de-structuration. The whole of capitalist development, ever since the working class
reached its present high level of composition, has been nothing other than the
obverse, a reaction to, a following-in-the-footsteps-of proletarian
self-yalorisation -a repeated operation of self-protection, of recuperation, of
adjustment in relation to the effects of self-valorisation, which are effects
of sabotage of the capitalist machine. Tronti is correct in his latest
utterance that the modern State is the political form of the autonomy of the
working class. But correct in what sense? In the sense for him too, with his
revamped socialism of compatibility and convergence? Not at all, comrade:
here the methodology of the critique of political economy has to be
modified, taking as its starting point proletarian self-valorisation, its
separateness, and the effects of sabotage that it determines. In particular it
is within this perspective that we must frame our analysis of the
State-form.
If our analysis of the nexus between
self-valorisation and State structure leads us along a path of causality that
is negative and destructuring, the situation is different when we come to
consider our methodological approach to the nexus of self-valorisation with
itself in its separateness. Here we shall have to stress and adequately
analyse the synchronous dimensions of the process. But here, too, there can be
no recourse to models of "continuity", to functional determinations!
What can be said straightaway -because it constitutes the heart and substance
of the methodological proposition itself is that the separateness of
proletarian self-valorisation itself appears as a discontinuity,
as aconjoining of leaps and innovations. The method of social transformation
that derives from the self-valorising separateness of the proletariat has
nothing in common with the homologies of rationalist or historicist
progressivism. Proletarian self-valorisation is the power to withdraw from
exchange value and the ability to reappropriate the world of use values. The
homologies of progressivism relate to exchange value. The rupture and
recognition of the class's own independent productive force, removes any
possibility of a resolutive dialectic. The dialectical positivity of method in
the separateness of proletarian self-valorisation is wholly and solely
innovative.
Having outlined our polemical methodological
premises, we can now start on the substance of the matter. Facing us stands the
State; among us -and sometimes within us stands the form of the domination.
To struggle means that we must recognise the monstrous nature of the power that
stands facing us, recognise it with the same immediate clarity and on the same
level as we have seen the relationship between self-valorisation and
destructuration. Now, this monstrous nature of power is the effect of our
sabotage; it is the negative result of our actions:
"Crime," says Marx, "through
its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being
new methods of defence, and thus is as productive as strikes are in relation to
the invention of machinery". (K.Marx, Theories of Surplus Value)
This is no paradox Marx does not like the
paradox label, not even in the case of Mandevilles Fable of the Bees;
this pleasure he leaves to the "philistine apologists of the bourgeois
school". It is, rather, a key to understanding. In point of fact, the more
we sabotage the State and the more we give expression to the
self-valorisation/destructuration nexus, the more the rules governing the
development of capital's State-system become ferocious, monstrous and
irrational'. So now let us l9ok at how the State and the system of social
domination respond to the social sabotage which results from self-valorisation,
and let us look at the logic that they express a logic which is internally
coherent, but which is nonetheless negative; a logic of destructuration which
can never be sublimated, but only precipitated further.
Capital's continual restructuration is its response
to working class sabotage. Restructuration is the empty but efficacious
content of the State-form. Empty, because it lacks any rationality save
that accredited by working class sabotage; efficacious, because the form of the
restructuration is command. But bourgeois economy's critical consciousness is
obliged to fill the vacuum of its own process by spreading a wafer-thin
(recuperated and mystified) formal rationality, over the timings set by working
class and proletarian struggles. Let us look at how it proceeds.
Within the critical consciousness of bourgeois
political economy, the evolution of the logic of co=and has taken place in at
least three distinct phases, following on the great Crisis of the 1930s. Each
one of these phases is matched by a particular quality and intensity of working
class and proletarian struggles. Elsewhere (in the articles published in Operai
e Stato ("Workers and the State"), Feltrinelli, Milan 1972) I
have indicated the fundamental characteristics of the Keynesian epoch.
In that epoch, control of working class struggle was to be achieved in global
terms. Keynes replied to the formation and the struggles of the mass worker
with an overall balancing in progressive terms of supply and demand. But
Keynes based himself on a political proposition that was pure and general he
had stressed the overall trend. But when the trend comes into
contra-diction with the actual progress of the cycle (because working class
conflictuality does not respect finalized equilibria), the Keynesian sate goes
into crisis. Who commands in the crisis? The Keynesian-bred politicians try to
invent a "political trade cycle", try to form "intermediate
regimes" etc: in practice, control is little by little slipping out of
their hands -the control-dimension no longer matches the dimensions of
proletarian and working class conflictuality. A second phase opens.
Alongside the theoretical progresses" that lead Sraffa and his ilk to a
dissolution of the aggregate categories of Capital, more concretely we can
observe that the working class struggle has a continuity that is discontinuous,
and that the apparent continuity of the struggle is the outcome of an infinite
series of individual crisis-points. The economic and political sciences of
restructuration must take account of this. It is no longer possible to invent
indeterminate macro-economic equilibria which are independent of short-run
variations and independent of the micro-economic components which are variable
within the unforeseeable timing determined by the struggles of the collective
worker. Based on this necessity, we now see the formation of the
State-as-Crisis, the Crisis-State (Stato-crisi), on the following lines:
to divide up the overall thrust of the working class; to control it from within
the mechanisms of its own accumulation; and to forestall it, by attacking it in
its class composition. Keynes' broad equilibria are replaced by an internal
operation of decomposition, within the class, in an attack that is precisely
orientated towards dealing with single and particular class crisis points a
microphysics of political economy. "The long-term trend is nothing other
than a component which alters slowly of a chain of short-term
situations"
"it is not an independent entity". (Michael
Kalecki, in Trend and Business Cvcles Reconsidered, in Economic
Journal, July 1968, pp 263 seq.). Thus it becomes impossible to produce a
model of development unless it takes explicit account of the interruptions that
occur in the process of production and reproduction, and thus a fresh
foundation is laid for a theory of development based on the theory of cyclical
fluctuations, incorporating the dynamics that occur at the microeconomic level.
A long phase of bourgeois economic theory now
develops around these premises. Michael Kalecki is the leading light in this
movement (see Joan Robinson in New York Review of Books, 4th March 1976
and in particular George R. Feiweel, The Intellectual Capital of
M.Kalecki, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1975). But this theory also falls short.
Crisis-State theory is, after all, a reformist theory. It faces up to
the emerging productivity of the mass worker, and tries to construct an
"economy of oligopolies" on two fronts: on the one hand the
capitalist entrepreneurial oligopoly, and on the other hand the working
class-trade union oligopoly in the factory (M. Kalecki, "Class Struggle
and the Distribution of National Income", in Kyklos XXIV, 1971, pp
1 seq.) But in the meantime, the struggle has advanced; the action of the mass
,worker has gradually laid siege to the whole of society. We now see the worker
developing as a "social" worker even (and particularly) if still
remaining a "workplace worker". The worker responds to the
Crisis-State even more violently than previously to the State-as-Planner (Stato-piano).
If this latter went into crisis because of its inability to control the
quantities of working class demand, the Crisis-State is forced into an internal
self-criticism of what is now a socially inescapable (and immediately
efficacious) extension of working class action. The Crisis-State is not
only a State-form that is reformist to its roots it is also, and above all, a
State-form that is still linked in to the dimensions of direct production, to
factory command over living labour. But when working class sabotage extends to
invest the whole of society, the entire mechanism of circulation, forcing
aggregate social capital into a confrontation over the rifles governing the
reproduction of the system, at that same moment the consciousness of bourgeois
political economy which had actually been consolidating itself up to that
point goes into a further stage or crisis and disintegration.
It is interesting to note the formation of a third
phase of theoretical development in the political economy of the Keynesian
epoch. It is in the process of formation today, and draws on the elements of
crisis in the previous schemas. In particular it tries to operate in a more
generalised way on the social movements of the working class. Its central arena
of interest is the question of circulation. The simple transition from
global control of production (Keynes), to dynamic control of production
(Kalecki) is insufficient. The problem is that of the functional control of
circulation, of the dynamic nexus linking production and reproduction. And here
the problem of time becomes fundamental. Keynes never concerned himself
with the temporal determination of equilibria and secondary equilibria.
Kalecki, on the other hand, stressed the necessity of determining Keynesiamism
via the redefinition of phenomena within individual "time units". And
now, today, the temporal dimension is being extended to the whole of the
process. In analytic terms, the new approach is a sort of Einsteinian theory of
relativity: it involves the insertion of another dimension of analysis, in
order to relativise the contents of that analysis. But this is indeed a strange
kind of relativity: it is above all a relativity of time, the reduction of time
to an indifference of command. In practical political terms we have an
analytic mechanism which assumes circulation-time as a terrain of both theory
and control. The totality of circulation-time is drawn into the economic
analysis; the totality of circulation-time is to be controlled by economic
policy: the hypothesis of the simultaneity of functions and operations within
the cycle is not assumed in advance and abstract (a la neo-classics), but
operational and political (a la Milton Friedman and his monetarist bedfellows).
The Kaleckian interruptions of the short cycle are still mediations between the
trend and the overall cycle: here science does not become separated in its
application, does not waste its efforts in forecasting, but intensifies its
analysis on every moment, every transition. It is a physics of elementary
particles and science stands watchful, like a policeman, over everything.
It is not the Marxists' job to observe that the
temporal dimension is decisive in the relation between circulation and
reproduction, and in general within the relation as it impinges on the class
struggle in the sphere of reproduction (although Geoff Kay draws attention to
the problem in his very useful Development and Underdevelopment,
Macmillan,London, 1975). It is not surprising that the problem is arising
again. Rather, what is surprising is the fact that the proposition arouses so
much passion. The philosophers are well aware of the problems associated with
the dimension of time: infinitely sub-divisible and infinitely extendable. So
how should we grasp the analytic proposition in operational terms; how are we
to concretise the political project? It is not our job to answer this: suffice
it to draw attention to the indeterminateness of the project. Rather, our task
is to note how the process of destructuration within the logic of political
economy is taking a further step forward. (See, apropos, the fine essay by
A.Graziani, introducing R.Convenevole"s book La Dinamica del Salarid
Relativo ("The Dynamic of the Relative Wage"), republished in Quaderni
Piacentini, No.64, pp 113 seq.). In its anxiety to keep up with the process
of working class attack against the general dimensions of exploitation,
bourgeois political economy strips even the appearance of coherence from its
logic, and forces itself into the role of a technical instrument against the
emergence of the destructuring power of the working class; it extends itself
over the indefinite discontinuity of the movement of self-valorisation state
restructuration becomes increasingly an indiscriminate succession of actions of
control, a technical apparatus that is effective, but which has lost all
measure, all internal reference-points, all internal coherent logic.
Good working class theory rejoices at this. But,
being responsible people, we must recognise the enormous weight of suffering,
of inhumanity, of barbarities that all this brings with it. This revelation of
the internal void of capitalist restructuration, this successive
self-destruction of the moments of capitalist control, and this dissolution
of theory into a technique of power, bring closer the final outcome of the
revolutionary struggle. But at the same time it makes it hard to endure the
harshness of the daily struggle and the cruelty of capital's continued
existence. (Note that certain theoretical positions that exist within the
official labour movement, and which have nothing to do with Marxism such as
the famous theory of the "autonomy of the political" ape these
bourgeois affirmations). And yet it is still the action of the working class
that brings about these effects -to The extent that the destructuring tendency
of these struggles has a direct effect on the very rationality of
capitalist restructuring, and removes this rationality, even in its formal
aspect, and leaves us with a whole that is destructured, technical and
repressive. The varied and combined modality of working class action is
respected in every moment of the restructuration of capital: from the actions
of the mass worker, and from those of the social" worker, arise effects
that are then matched, in the sense of a subsequent radical destructuring of
the enemy power.
Thus it is no accident that today the big forces of
capitalist reformism have adopted at a world-wide level a terroristic
strategy of savage deflation (or "dis-inflation", if you prefer).
On the basis of the experience of the fiscal crisis of the American cities this
political line has been correctly described as a "regressive distribution
of income, of wealth, and of power" (see the articles by Robert Zevin, and
Roger A. Alcaly and Elen Bodian in The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities,
New York, 1977).
The destructured logic of the economic
compatibilities must in fact be extended downwards, to reach single individual
social groups, in such a way as to destroy any consolidation of proletarian
seif-valorisation. At every level. Generalised control must be deepened and
intensified, to act on every point of linkage in the process of reproduction;
it must allow the destruction of every rigidity; it must fluidify, in a new
manner, the cycle of capitalist reproduction. But you say this has always
happened! This is one of the laws of capital! Certainly. But what makes the
present situation specific is the depth, the intensity, the extensiveness of
the control. Capital has been subjected to a class pressure at the social
level, which has definitively destructured its terms of reference. Right down
to the level of factory-command (commando-impresa), command is in
crisis. Restructuration, at this point, is pure form-of-domination. It aims to
be effective even at the level of the individual unit of production, the single
social group, the single individual. Thus it is no accident that, acting at
such a depth and within such micro-economic dimensions, State power is once
again, for the first time in several decades, resurrecting the ideology of Freedom!
At this stage, the capitalist determination (whose
articulations attempt to follow the social emergence of The processes of
proletarian self-valorisation, and which has to face up to the destructuration
effects that these engender), reaches a high point of its logical vacuity: here
the reimposition of the law of value within restructuration is violence and is
logically founded on criteria of indifference. However, this in no sense
diminishes the efficacity of the project of restructuration. The specification
of the indifference starts from command. If the social struggle of the working
class has driven the capitalist brain into a position of formal indifference,
then capitalist command tries to specify itself materially on this possibility.
It is important to emphasise this transition. It is important because with it
comes a fundamental shift in the development of the contemporary form of the
State. That very social-democratic project, which since the time of
Keynes has been at the centre of capital's interests within the restructuring
process, is now subsumed to the indifference of the possibilities of
capital. This is perhaps a splendid example of how working class and
proletarian self-valorisation has destroyed an instance of the enemy. The
social-democratic project is beginning to disintegrate, and from this point of
view, the euphoria That is accompanying the present development of the various
Euro-communisms is slightly macabre.
So, concretely speaking, what is the centre of the
capitalist restruct-uration project today? How is the form of domination being
realised? The fact of command over living labour taking The upper hand over the
law of value is not something new: but what is specific to today's
restructuration is the conjuncture of command together with the indifference of
the contents of command and of its articulations. This capitalist
conclusion derives from the powerful socialisation of the revolutionary
movement of the proletarian class; it is the obverse of this. In this
situation, capital's initiative becomes regressive in other words, it has to
base itself on a logic that is as empty as it is separate. Once again a premise
which, to us, is fundamental ie the separateness of the cycles of capital and
its State-form from the cycle of working class self-valorisation is verified.
But at this point a whole series of problems re-emerge. In particular, if we
want to identify not so much the centre, as the specific content of capitalist
restructuration. This terrible void and indifference, this terribly weak and at
the same time ferocious freedom of capital how is it determined today?
For the moment I know only one thing. That from the
working class point of view having arrived at this level of awareness the
effects of the destructuring action that I have set in motion force me to
confront -in a destructive manner capital's powers of stabilisation. And this
means, above all, confronting that power which ;provides the breeding ground
for the multiple indifferent possibilities of domination. Destructuration of
the enemy system involves the immediate necessity of attacking and
destabilising its political regime.
I find myself in a complex theoretical position. I
must, at one and the same time, show how The form of capitalist domination is
subordinated to the process of working class and proletarian self-valorisation
and at the same time show The resulting determinations in the destructured
separateness of command. This, in fact, is the sense of the question that I
posed earlier: how does one specify and determine the indifference of
command?
As regards the first proposition, I think I have
already gone some way towards proving my point. In short, at the same time as
capital is living through The complete socialisation of the productive power of
the working class, you rind that the (Keynesian and/or Kaleckian) instruments
that it had at its disposal for controlling the relation between production and
reproduction (based on a balancing of supply and demand, on the twin basis of
an expanding employment base and an expanding production base) fail. Why do
they fail? Because the mechanisms of capital's reproduction and the
mechanisms of reproduction of the working class are no longer operating
synchronously. The social self-valorisation of the working class
accentuates, in an antagonistic sense, both the quality and the quantity of
working class needs. It radicalises the aspect of simple circulation,
over against the global reproduction of all the dimensions of capital.
At this point, as we have seen (and as Christian Marazzi describes so well in
his Intervention on Public Expenditure, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris,
April 1977, mimeo, "the needs of social expenditure have to be met,
inasmuch as they have to guarantee a continuity of production and
reproduction of aggregate labour power. This Therefore sets in motion a State
monetary phenomenon which, unlike Keynesian deficit spending, must make
possible a simultaneity of both capitalist and working class
reproduction".
Thus all the channels of administration and not
merely the monetary aspect must work to provide possibilities of reducing to
zero the relation between supply and demand. Given the actual strength of the
working class, the problem is thus to reduce the autonomous reproduction-time
of the working class. Thus the separateness of capitalist command could
not be clearer. Its destructuration springs from capital's realisation
that every attempt to match up to the given articulation of the working class
and the proletariat fails, for this very reason of the split timings of
capitalist and proletarian reproduction. Only command, conceived as
indifference, conceived as a capacity for separate self-reproduction of itself
-only this command can hope to succeed. Capital is driven to daydreams of
self-sufficiency. It is no accident that, at this extreme, we see the
re-emergence of economic theories that we Thought long dead and buried
-theories of the self-sufficiency of cappital and its money memories of
neo-classicism, and quantitative monetarist practices.
But dreams are only dreams for all that: that noisy
alarm clock of the class struggle is still there to wake you up. So the capitalist
State now has to rearticulate in positive terms the separate essence of its
command. From a practical and theoretical point of view, there has certainly
been a profound and significant advance: here the destruction of the
value-terms of the capitalist social relation is no longer a result, but a
starting point; it is no longer a "result suffered", but a proud
and arrogant "act of will". Indeed, never before has the capitalist
State been so politically autonomous! It still remains necessary for capitalist
command to be articulated, but henceforth its parameters will be based on this
separateness. The source and the legitimation of power are no longer the law of
value and its dialectic, but the law of command and its hierarchy. Having been
forced into the most radical material destructuration, capital's State
must now restructure itself ideally. The free productive State
characteristic of the capitalist revolution is now reduced to a corporative,
hierarchical form to the organisation of appearances. This is the only
logic of the so-called "autonomy of the political". Henceforth
neither political economy and the critique of political economy, nor the
analysis of class and class composition, can adequately explain this
destructured reality: only descriptive sociology is fitted for following this
phenomenon!
This is the State-based-on-Income-as-Revenue,
the State-of-Revenue (Stato-rendita). A State of political income. The
one absolute value against which all other hierarchical values must measure
themselves is political power. And this one absolute value is the foundation
for the construction of a rising ladder of differential incomes, whose
value is calculated on the basis of one's greater or lesser distance from the
centre, from the point of production of power. (In addition to The work of
Romano AIquati, see the article by G.Bossi in Aut-Aut No.159-160, pp 73
seq.). Power is the simultaneity, the point of perfect compatibility of the
mechanisms of production and reproduction, and it is from this that circulation
must proceed, accepting its authority. One's location in the hierarchy, the
nature of the corporative structure, and the respective positions of the
various "separate bodies" (corpi separati) all these are
articulated according to this logic. These differential incomes are distributed
according to the variability of one's insertion within the hierarchy, within
the articulation of command. This, then, is the only form within which the
"indifference" can be determined. The party-State (Stato-de-Partiti)
and the system of public administration tend to guarantee this specification of
differential income as the form and the content of political power (see Sergio
Bologna "The Tribe of
Moles", in Primo Maggio No.8, Spring 1977) (page 67 in this
book).
Now, all of this is of direct relevance to productive
labour. What, in short, is the nature of productive labour within the
State-of-Income-as-Revenue? From capital's point of view we can define it as
that cart of social labour which has been trade-unionised, corporatised, placed
and located within the "separateness" of the State hierarchy. From
this point of view, the extent of your faithfulness to the system is watched
more closely than the actual value you produce. The labour market ie
aggregate labour power in its relative independence is sectionalised
according to the hierarchical values advanced by the system (see Glen a Cain
"The Challenge of Segmented Labour Market Theories to Orthodox Theory: A
Survey", in Journal of Economic Literature, December 1976). Of
course, every time the State mechanism intervenes in the reality of The class
struggle in a direct manner, the game becomes harder. In particular, when the
intensity of the approach cannot be mystified, when the intervention takes
place at the point of greatest contradiction. To take an initiative against the
labour market in order to divide it, to sectionalise it, to hierarchise it (when
it is precisely at this level that productive labour has made itself general, and
where "small circulation" has made itself independent, and where
reproduction seeks to be self-valorisation. See, apropos, the useful notes by
M.Aglietta: "Panorama et nouveaux developpements sur les theories de
l'emploi". mimeo, INSEE 14/1/1977 MA/SP 320/ 3564) to take such an
initiative, as I said, against this concrete reality guarantees a maximum of
violence and mystification. Because here the two extremes of the process that
we are describing, meet: on the one hand the unified material base of the
processes of proletarian self-valorisation, and on the other The active,
repressive figure of the State-power that has been destructured by the
struggles.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider this
central moment, and to emphasise some of the consequences of what we have been
saying, as regards the theorisation of proletarian self-valorisation. Now, two
elements are immediately clear. The first is that the wage is no longer at
this point, in its economic identity, an independent variable. It is
completely subordinated to the entire dynamic of power, to the entire framework
of the political autonomy of the State. The wage is reduced to the hierarchy of
command, in a process which is the counter-part, the obverse of, the repression
of the unity of the proletariat at the social level. This leads us to the
second consequence: the centre of the working class and proletarian struggle
consists in the recognition of the general aspects of the wage as a cost of
reproduction of the unitv of the proletariat, of its self-valorisation. The
problem is political, on both fronts even if, as in this case, it is obvious
that the meanings of the term "political" are not homologous because
we are dealing with meanings that are mutually opposed, completely and
precisely antagonistic. For capital, politics is division and hierarchy, for
the proletariat it is unity and equality; for capital it means the
subordination of labour, for the proletariat it means the process of
self-valorisation; for the State it means the simultaneity of the processes of
production and reproduction, for the proletariat it means developing the
~independence of its own processes of reproduction, its dissymmetry, its
discontinuity.
At this point, therefore, the problem of the wage (as
the pivot-point of the antagonistic capital relation) has to be seen in a
different light. The logic of separation which flow;s from the process of
self-valorisation, and which capital undergoes in a destructured and idealised
form leaves no margins of compromise in this respect. So it becomes obvious
by the capitalist reaction to the development of the class struggle has
expressed itself particular'y around the problem of public expenditure
understood as the terrain on which the thrust of the working class struggle
was reshaping the thematic of the wage, in effective terms of an offensive,
bringing it up to the level of the project of self-valorisation. In the
struggle over public spending, capitalist hierarchisation, the differential
incomes accorded by State rower, the corporative mystifications of the trade
unions, were coming under heavy attack, while the unity of social productive
labour as the basis of the process of self-valorisation was increasing. This
was indeed a "battle for production"! It gave the working class the
possibility of regaining its own productive dignity, its unity, outside and
against the mechanisms of State income, of State parasitism, which the trade
unions and the forces of State power sought to impose on it. It gave the
working class the possibility of finding a material base for its own productive
unity a possibility of opposing exploitation by self-valorisation.
Public spending and the wage are themes to which the
analysis, the theory and the practice of revolutionaries will continually have
to return, because in a situation of discontinuity in the cyclicity of
the class struggle, the problem of public spending will, in the coming
years, assume the same importance as the wage, narrowly defined, has had
in years past. But we must be clear here: in the discontinuity of the movement,
once again, no homology, no equation of terms is permissible. In other words,
the theme of fighting public spending cuts is not simply an extension, a
completion of the theme of the wage-struggle. The problem of public spending
is not that of the social wage. It is rather the recognition, the
imposition of the recognition that the unity of social labour, of the whole
of social labour, today constitutes the only possible' definition of the
productivity of labour: this is the base for which capital must pay. It
must pay for it, giving regard to its quality, its articulations, its
determinante nature. It must recognise the independence of working class
self-valorisation.
But, as we have seen, this does not happen. Rather,
the contrary happen the whole of capital's attention is directed to the
operation of differential income (restructuration) and to the consolidation, in
absolute terms, of its political basis (stabilisation). Now, the mechanism
of income-as-revenue must be destroyed: the struggle against public
spending cuts is a struggle that directly attacks the mechanisms of command and
the determination of income, and destroys those mechanisms. It destroys them by
quantitatively raising public spending to the point of making it
incompatible with the maintenance of command over reproduction, and by
blocking qualitatively the relative choice of options. But this is not
enough. There is also the question of a need for direct action. As follows.
Some groups of workers, some strata of the working class, remain tied to the
dimension of the wage, to its mystified terms. In other words, they are living
oft income-as-revenue Inasmuch as they are living from income-as-revenue (even
some who work in the big factories), they are stealing and expropriating
proletarian surplus value they are participating in the social-labour racket
on the same terms as their management. These positions and particularly the
trade union practice that fosters them are to be fought with violence if
necessary. It will not be the first tine that a march of the unemployed has
entered a large factory so that they can destroy the arrogance of salaried
income! (See the accounts in Wal Hannington's Unemployed Struggles).This
was what the unemployed were doing in Britain in the 1920s and quite rightly
so.
Here, however, it is no longer simply a matter of the
unemployed. Here we are dealing with all the protagonists in the social
production of value who are rejecting and refusing the operation that capital
has set in motion in order to destroy their unity: the workers of the large
factories need to be brought back again into the battle-lines of this struggle.
This is fundamental. The social majority of the proletariat, of
socially-productive labour power, must impose the theme and practice of unity,
resubmitting it to the attention of the workers in the large factories. The mass
vanguards of the large factories must struggle, in conjunction with the
proletarian movement, in order to destroy the blue-eyed boy syndrome,
guaranteed by the trade unions in the big factories. This is fundamental. Here,
in fact, we are dealing with the project the living, effective project of
working class self-valorisation, which refuses, and must destroy, the vacuity
of the rentier logic of capital, and all of its apparatuses.
Now, at this point I should answer those jackal
voices that I already hear howling: I am not saying that the Mirafiori worker
is not an exploited worker (this is the extent to which you have to go, in
order to polemicise with jackals!). I am saying that the "Party of
Mirafiori" must today live the politics of the proletarian majority, and
that any position which is restricted purely to the necessary struggle in the
factory, and which is not linked to the wider majority of the proletariat, is a
position that is bound to lose. The factory struggle must live within the
wider majority of the proletariat.
The privileged place of the wage in the continuity of
proletarian struggle must, today, be extended to the struggle over public
spending cuts. Only this struggle can enable the full self-recognition of the
proletariat; can fix the bases of self-valorisation; can attack directly the
theory and practice of income-as-revenue. On the other hand, the capitalist
practice of political income defined according to the hierarchy of power is
utterly fragile fragile because it is completely ideal, in the sense of being
political. Here the problem is no longer that of income-as-revenue, but that of
its political foundation. Now, this "absolute" foundation is itself
ideal it is the point at which the threat to the whole machinery of
capitalist development becomes manifest, to the extent that it has registered
the crisis of the law of value. It has, therefore, an absolute limit. And thus
it is nothing more than an attempt at overall mystification of the system of
exploitation.
When Marx criticises Ricardo's theory of absolute
rent, he admits nonetheless that its tendency must be to disappear: the
'toverestimation" of Ricardo's differential rent would in this context
become plausible. But here we are already in the situation where the survival
of moments of absolute rent has already given way to the global domination of the
capitalist mode of production. Mere the re-appearance of income-as-revenue no
longer has any material foundation. It is a phantasma. The
State-of-income-as-revenue develops two mystifications. The first is the
one which joins differential income and its mechanisms to a generic emergence
of the law of value (which, as we have already said, has been transmuted into
the form of command over living labour); the second is that which seeks to
consider the absolute nature of income at the level of the source of power it
self, as its fundamental condition. But this too, as it happens, is pure and
simple mystification: here we are not seeing the expression of an historical
necessity tied to the period of development of the law of value we are seeing
simply the expression of the extreme limit of mystification, of forced
reimposition of a law onto a proletarian world which otherwise would be
impossible to dominate. At the same time, this proletarian movement represents
the extreme dissolution of the very concept of power. And now enough of
tirades on the nexus between Lenin and Wax Weber! Here, as in the thought of
Lenin, thought and practice go in two opposite directions working class
freedom and bureaucratic indifference are two polar opposites -with the first
being rational, the second irrational; the first being struggle, the second
mere formalisation of income-as-power.
The indifference of command, therefore, is specified
in a sort of political practice of income-as-revenue, whose absolute
foundations lie in political authority, and whose differential lies within the
system of hierarchy. This situation brings about a conception (and a reality)
of the wage system which differs radically from the experience of wage
struggles conducted by the "other" workerist movement in other
historical epochs. Today, in fact, the wage struggle cannot be other
Than immediately political, general and egalitarian. The principal
terrain on which it moves is that of public spending, of the
self-valorising overall reproduction of the proletariat. This terrain has to be
rebuilt, together with the workers in the factories; this straggle must
re-unify the terrain of the proletariat. And it can. And anyway, there is no
alternative: or rather there is an alternative it is to accept subordination,
to plunge into the whirlpool of destructuration, to abandon ourselves to
destruction.
Now, once again, the only point that we are
interested in pursuing is the relationship between self-valorisation and
destructuration. Reformism fundamentally denies this relationship rather it
asserts that selt-valorisation is compatible with structuration not
destructuration. Valorisation, for reformism, is univocal: there is only
capitalist valorisation. The problem is how to gain command over it. Everything
else is Utopian. Eurocommunism sets itself up as a candidate to represent the
developed working class, as a party that mediates' the process of proletarian
self-valorisation with the restructuration of capital. Euroconmunism is the
party of restructuration -it is the party of the synthesis between proletarian
self-valorisation and capitalist valorisation. Raving picked out of the mud the
banners of democracy that the bourgeoisie had let drop, Eurocommunism now sets
about gathering the banners of the economic development which capital had
destructured. Thus any discussion about power is based, is organised solely
within the virtuous circle of restructuration. And as for Eurocommunism's
objectives, they are more than clear: the conscious extension of the capitalist
mode of production to the whole of society, and its ("socialist")
State-management.
Our intention here is not to demonstrate that this
project is wicked, nasty etc. Rather, we believe we can show it to be impossible
undesirable, in fact, because it is not realistic but mystified. We believe
it can be shown that the working class is moving increasingly so, as it
becomes more socialised in terms that are antagonistic to this project. The
battle is on, and it is a battle between the true and the false. And to
conclude, we believe it can be shorn that Eurocommunism, inasmuch as it moves
on these lines, presents no alternative whatsoever to capitalist development,
but rather is the representation of a catastrophic subordination of the class
to capital, a fragile and transitory element of capital's State-form.
So, self-valorisation and restructuration. In
reality, the decision as to whether or not these two terms are compatible is
not merely a question of fact. Eurocommunism is innovatory in terms of Marxism,
not because it denies the empirical conditions of the process of self-valorisation,
but because it denies the working class and proletarian nature, the radically
antagonistic potential, and the political relevance of that
self-valorisation.
First, the working class and proletarian nature.
Eurocommunism does not use the term self-valorisation, but rather the term
"hegemony". This term allows the processes of socialisation of the
working class struggle from below to be interpreted along the lines of
the dissolution of the class into "civil society". It substitutes for
a Marxist, class terminology, a Hegelian and populist one. Operating through
this framework, Eurocommunism shifts the focus from the class struggle and the
antagonism within the reproduction process, the terrain of class recomposition
in the crisis, to "society" understood generally, and
"politics" as the sphere of institutional power. By this means the
terrain of self-valorisation is robbed of its class content. For Eurocommunism
it becomes a marginal "frontier zone", meaningful only in the terms
of the reconstruction of a social totality.
Second: the denial of the radically antagonistic
potential of the processes of working class self-valorisation is the
dynamic consequence of the first negation. Once it is seen only as an ephemeral
emergent phenomenon, it can only be expressed dynamically by way of its
suppression within the social totality. This is the totality that is determined
by the society of capital. So we are not dealing with an antagonism,
according to Eurocommunism, but with an organic and functional dialectic
between the classes, the terms of whose solution are provided by the balance of
power and by relative compatibilities within the general interest. And the
general interest is the development of capitalism.
And finally, the political relevance of working
class self-valorisation will only be able to be restored by a general
function, external, such as to be able to discriminate the functions within the
project of the globality of development. Immediately, no political relevance
can be given to working class and proletarian self-valorisation, all the more
so since it is interpreted as on the extreme margins of the phenomenology of
the "productive aphere". Its movements do not contain a generality;
its separateness is to be politically mediated through society, with society,
in society; and the particularity of its interest is to be articulated with the
generality of capital's development.
Now, from negation to the affirmative. Only
restructuration say the Eurocommunists in addition and in conclusion will
provide the possibility Li of restoring the formal conditions for proletarian
self-valorisation, within the capitalist mechanism of development.
Restructuration reorganises the logic of capitalist development and structures
it in relation to the needs of the proletariat: it goes therefore from the
general to the particular, and only by proceeding in this direction can it give
meaning to the emerging movements of the proletariat at the margins of
"society". The only way that the particular interests of the
proletariat can be repaid in economic terms (of course, in a different manner,
a manner which is organic and compatible with development), is by destroying
those touchy, antagonistic points of particular interests that arise along the
road that leads to the centrality of the function of restructuration. The
social brain of the working class the reformists continue is the centre of
the process of restructuration: it negates the economism of its stimuli, and
transforms them into political direction; it negates the political direction
and moulds it into a force to manage capital. In the more refined versions
(Trans: Cacciari and others in the PCI) the insistence on the centrality of the
political functions of restructuration vis-a-vis the class mechanism of
self-valorisation reaches an extreme form of essentialism: functional formalism
of the bourgeois tradition (Weber, Nietzsche) is recuperated and inverted into
a pure autonomy of workers' political power.
I think I have done justice to Eurocommunism in
expounding its theory in these terms. In reality the operation is so clear-cut
that there is little point in descending to polemic. And in fact, as has quite
often been demonstrated, quite apart from the debasement of Marxism that this
conception entails, it is shown to be false simply by the reality of the
movement. When we say self-valorisation, we mean that the woricing class sets
in motion an alternative on the terrain of production and reproduction, by
appropriating to itself power and by re-appropriating wealth, in opposition to
the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and development.
We face a point where the process of proletarian
self-valorisation has begun to invest the entire terrain of the socialisation
of production, and of the circulation of commodities (every-increasingly
subsumed within the mechanism of capitalist reproduction). We face, in short,
an extension of the processes of valorisation (inclining essential
modifications that are inherent to the concept of productive labour). And at
this point every possibility of bestowing an antagonistic or
"generalising" political function (on the party as the working class "brain",
on an "independence of the political" however conceived) outside
the process of self-valorisation itself, becomes less and less viable.
Certainly, it is true that, in line with working class socialisation,
capitalist society has been permanently restructured: infrastructures,
services, education, housing policies, welfare policies etc multiply and
determine an ever-wider context for the processes of self-valorisation.. But precisely
this process reveals the characteristics of that self-valorisation: in fact
it reproduces within itself the more so the further it extends the
antagonistic characteristics of working class power. The working class struggle
imposes a reorganisation of society, a capitalist restructuration. This
restructuration must prove capable of matching a series of needs that are
imposed by the struggles themselves. It is the quantity and the quality of the
struggles that determine the reforms. But these still remain capitalist
reforms, and the effect of the working class struggle on them is immediately a
double effect: it reopens the struggle within this restructured fabric; and through
the subsequent extension and generalisation of the struggle it destructures
capitalist command at this level too, at this degree of extension. Working
class self-valorisation does not find a possibility of continuity within
restracturation: in restracturation it sees only an effect of its min strength,
an increase of its own attacking possibilities, an extension of its own power
capacity for overall destructuration of capital. So, there is no mediation
possible at this level, either in institutional terms or in terms of economic
re-structuration. Eurocommunism, seen from this angle, is living a lie: it
claims a continuity with the processes of self-valorisation, which is not given
and consequently it is forced to mystify and to fight the effective movement
of self-valorisation on the terms in which that movement actually expresses
itself as a potential of destructuration.
So it is no accident that the positions within
Eurocommunism which have laid claim to a correct institutional mediation of the
processes of self-valorisation, have also ended by being overturned by the
illusion of mediation. From the factory struggles to the struggles for reforms,
they said; then, from the struggle for reforms to a campaign to restructure
capitalist~ initiative, to restructure the State. Was this a necessary
continuity? Only as a step along the road of mystification! In fact, after a
short while, we then saw these bright sparks returning into the factory: of
necessity, the continuity which had led "from the struggles to the
State" had now been put into reverse. Now they were speaking from within
the logic of the State, and the antagonistic content of the worker's' factory
struggles and the struggles for reforms, were totally subordinated to The
State. The 'processes of self-valorisation were now to be seen as
"functions" of the capitalist State.
Let us now look at the working class viewpoint (il
punto di vista operaio). It extends and spreads from the factory to the
society; it forces capital into the organisation of social productive labour;
it re-opens on this terrain a struggle that is continuous and increasingly
efficacious. In valorising itself socially, the working class destructures
capital increasingly as capital is increasingly forced to extend its direct
command over society. Within this framework, the action of reformism and of Euro-communism
is an element of the State-form of capitalism but, we should note, in a subordinate
and threadbare form. It does not succeed in effect it cannot succeed in
ensuring that the rationale of self-valorisation prevails within capitalist
restructuration. It remains prisoner of a destabilised, destrctured rationality
which cannot be recomposed; it is hemmed in by the indifference of power, the
transcendent nature of its unity. The bargaining tempo which is proper to the
practice of reformism in the Keynesian State has become dissolved into the new
process of distribution of political income. In this context the only
credibility of reformism today takes the form of corporativism, as a
subordinate articulation of the State-form. The sole compensation for this
subordination is the mystified "bad faith" of belief in a political
will and vocation, which takes the path of repression of the struggle,
terroristic suppression of working class and proletarian self-valorisation But
at what a price! The historical lesson of Germany is once again demonstrated.
So this Netzschean presence in Parliament is
something to rejoice at. The situation is such that every failure of
mystification is a victory for the working class. Faced with the
impetuousness and the force of the process of working class self-valorisation,
the coalitions that have determined the State-form of late capitalism are
necessarily surrendering to the working class antagonism. Oligopolies,
trade unions, the "middle classes" have for half a century and
certainly since the Rooseveltian revolution -dominated the framework of the
State-form and have determined its constitutional foundations in the whole of
the Western world. The working class is now emancipating itself from the
institutions, imposing a continuous investment in public expenditure which is
now purely and simply appropriation, a fact of power, dastri destructuration of
the enemy. The capitalist response is disinvestment, is the flight from the
confrontation with the class. There is no alternative to the fall of the rate
of profit in this situation: whatever road is followed that of the defence
and maintenance of employment, or that of public spending come what nay, the
rate of profit is decreasing. (see W. Nordhaus, "The Falling Share of
Profits", in Brooking Papers on Economic Activity, No.1, 1974).
The relation of self-valorisation to
restructuration which is the only basis for any remaining dignity of
reformism and Eurocommunism thus has no standing whatsoever, from any point
of view. Neither as regards the working class, nor as regards capitalism. From
both standpoints, the relation appears antagonistic. And yet, because Power
recognises that mystification can be efficacious, it can still be part of the
State-form. Up to what point can this reformist participation in the State have
a stable existence? From the moment where its function has been totally
subordinated, the point will be determined by the struggle between the classes
over the question of power. For the moment, reformism and Euro-communism are
living an opaque, subordinate role within the framework of the State-form of
capital. Corporativism and parasitism are the qualities of their existence.