L E T TH E D E A D

BU RY T H E IR D E AD
an unauthorized ENDNOTES anthology

L A T H E S E S 2015 2

B R I N G OUT YOUR DEAD 2 0 0 8 5

AF T E RWORD 2 0 08 18

WH AT AR E WE TO D O? 2 011 24

CRISIS IN T H E CL ASS RE L AT ION 2 010 37

M IS E RY AN D D E B T 2 010 50

N OT E S ON T H E N E W H OU S I N G QU E S T I ON 2 010 76

T H E H IS TORY OF S UB S UM P T ION 2 010 87

T H E H OL D IN G PAT T E R N 2 013 10 5

T H E LOG IC OF G E N D E R 2 013 139

T H E L IM IT P OIN T OF C AP ITAL IS T E QUAL IT Y 2 013 16 6

SPONTANEIT Y, MEDIATION , RUPTURE 2 013 183

select io ns fr om A H IS TORY OF SE PAR AT ION 2 015

PREFAC E 203

AF T E RWORD 215

AN IDE N T IC AL AB J E CT -SUB J E CT ? 2 015 237

SLEEP -WORKERS ENQUI RY 2 010 256

emancipation 2016
 L A T H E S E S
endnotes.org.uk 2015
in this society unity appears as accidental, separation as normal.
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value
1) We live in an era of long-unfolding social crisis, which is fundamentally the
crisis of societies organized in a capitalist mode. Indeed, the employment
relations that govern production and consumption in capitalist societies are
breaking down. The result has been the reappearance of a structural
condition that Marx called surplus capital alongside surplus population.1
Technological transformations continue to take place in spite of economic
stagnation, giving rise to a situation in which there are too few jobs for too
many people. Meanwhile, huge pools of money scour the earth for profits,
leading to periodic expansions of bubbles that burst in massive blowouts.
Rising job insecurity and inequality are symptoms of the increasing
impossibility of this world as such.
2) In the present moment, these contradictions, formerly contained within
capitalist societies, are set to explode. The 2008 crisis was one manifestation
of this. It gave rise to a global wave of struggles that is still unfolding today. In
order to gain some control over a simmering crisis, states organized
coordinated bailouts of financial and other firms. State debt rose to levels not
seen since World War II. Bailouts of capitalists thus had to be accompanied
by punishing austerity for workers, as states sought to manage their balance
sheets while also recreating the conditions for accumulation. Yet these state
actions have been only partially successful. Rich economies continue to grow
ever more slowly even as they take on huge quantities of debt at every level.
Poor economies are also faltering. We call this global situation the holding
pattern2 and assert that further economic turbulence is likely to issue in a
capitalist crash landing.
3) Workers fought defensive battles in the twentieth century as they still do
today. But then, their defensive battles were part of an offensive struggle:

1 See Misery and Debt, p. 50.

2 See The Holding Pattern, p. 105.

2
 workers sought to organize themselves into a labor movement3, which was
growing ever more powerful. This movement would sooner or later
expropriate the expropriators in order to begin to build a society organized
according to the needs and wants of workers themselves.
4) However, the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, which for many should have
spelled its end, led to a deep crisis of the labor movement itself. Its project is
no longer adequate to the conditions workers face. Most fundamentally, this
is because of the decline of the centrality of industrial work in the economy.
With the onset of deindustrialization4 and the decline in the manufacturing
share of employment (which was itself one of the fundamental causes of the
expansion of surplus populations), the industrial worker could no longer be
seen as the leading edge of the class. In addition, due to rising levels of
greenhouse gases, it is apparent that the vast industrial apparatus is not only
creating the conditions of a better future it is also destroying them. Most
fundamentally of all, work itself is no longer experienced as central to most
peoples identities. For most people (although not everyone), it no longer
seems as if work could be fulfilling if only it was managed collectively by
workers rather than by bosses.
5) At the same time, the decline of the workers identity revealed a multiplicity of
other identities 5, organizing themselves in relation to struggles that had, until
then, been more or less repressed. The resulting new social movements
made it clear, in retrospect, to what extent the homogeneous working class
was actually diverse in character. They have also established that revolution
must involve more than the reorganization of the economy: it requires the
abolition of gender, racial and national distinctions, and so on. But in the
welter of emergent identities, each with their own sectional interests, it is
unclear what exactly this revolution must be. For us, the surplus population is
not a new revolutionary subject. Rather, it denotes a structural situation in
which no fraction of the class can present itself as the revolutionary subject.
6) Under these conditions, the unification of the proletariat is no longer possible.
This might seem to be a pessimistic conclusion, but it has a converse
implication that is more optimistic: today the problem of unification is a
revolutionary problem. At the high points of contemporary movements, in

3See selections from A History of Separation, p. 204, and A History of Separation: The
Construction of the Workers Movement, Endnotes 4.
4 See Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture, p. 183.
5 See The Logic of Gender, p. 139, and The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality, p. 166.

3
 occupied squares and factories, in strikes, riots and popular assemblies,
proletarians discover not their power as the real producers of this society, but
rather their separation along a multiplicity of identity-lines (employment
status, gender, race, etc.). These are marked out and knitted together by the
disintegrating integration of states and labor markets. We describe this
problem as the composition problem6: diverse proletarian fractions must
unify but do not find a unity ready-made within the terms of this unraveling
society.
7) This is why we think it is so important to study the unfolding of struggles in
detail. It is only in those struggles that the revolutionary horizon of the present
is delineated. In the course of their struggles, proletarians periodically
improvise solutions to the composition problem. They name a fictive unity,
beyond the terms of capitalist society (most recently: the black bloc, real
democracy, 99%, the movement for black lives, etc.), as a means of fighting
against that society. While each of these improvised unities inevitably breaks
down, their cumulative failures map out the separations that would have to be
overcome by a communist movement7 in the chaotic uproar of a revolution
against capital.
8) This is what we mean when we say that class consciousness, today, can only
be consciousness of capital 8. In the fight for their lives, proletarians must
destroy that which separates them. In capitalism, that which separates them
is also what unites them: the market is both their atomization and their
interdependence. It is the consciousness of capital as our unity-in-separation
that allows us to posit from within existing conditions even if only as a
photographic negativehumanitys capacity for communism.
Endnotes, Los Angeles, December 2015

6 See p. 12936 in The Holding Pattern and Editorial #4, Endnotes 4.

7 Amadeo Bordiga, The Immediate Program of the Revolution, 1953 (libcom.org).
8 A History of Separation: The Defeat of the Workers Movement, Endnotes 4.

4
 B R I N G O U T YO U R D E A D
Endnotes 1 2008
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the
living...The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from
the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped
away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections
of the past in order to smother their own content. In order to arrive at its own
content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their
dead.1
If this was true when Marx wrote this passage, when one could only speak of
communism in the future tense, it is all the more so of today, now that anarchists
and communists can speak of their own histories, indeed seem to speak of little
else. Marxism itself is now a tradition of dead generations, and even latter-day
situationists seem to have difficulty in leaving the twentieth century. 2
We write this not from any special infatuation with the present, or any resultant
desire to bring communist theory up-to-date. The twenty-first century just as
much as the previous one is formed by the contradiction between labour and
capital, the separation between work and life, and the domination of everything
by the abstract forms of value. It is therefore just as worth leaving as its
predecessor. Yet the twentieth century familiar to the situationists, its contours
of class relations, its temporality of progress, and its post-capitalist horizons, is
obviously behind us. We've become bored with theories of novelty with post-
modernism, post-Fordism, and each new product of the academy not so much
because they fail to capture an essential continuity, but because the capitalist
restructuring of the 1970s and 80s is no longer novel.
In [the] preliminary issue of Endnotes we have assembled a series of texts
(basically an exchange between two communist groups in France) all concerned
with the history of revolutions in the twentieth century. As the texts make clear,
the history of these revolutions is a history of failure, either because they were
crushed by capitalist counter-revolution or because their victories took the form
of counter-revolutions themselves setting up social systems which, in their

1 Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852 (MECW 11), pp. 103106. All
references to the works of Marx and Engels are to the Lawrence & Wishhart Marx-
Engels Collected Works (MECW).
2 Now, The SI (IS no. 9, 1964). Christopher Gray, Leaving the Twentieth Century: the
Incomplete Works of the Situationist International (Rebel Press 1998).

5
reliance on monetary exchange and wage-labour, failed to transcend capitalism.
Yet the latter was not simply a betrayal; any more than the former was the result
of strategic errors or missing historical conditions. When we address the
question of these failures we cannot resort to what if counterfactuals blaming
the defeat of revolutionary movements on everything (leaders, forms of
organisations, wrong ideas, unripe conditions) other than the movements
themselves in their determinate content. It is the nature of this content which is at
issue in the exchange which follows.
In publishing such historical texts we have no wish to encourage an interest
in history per se, nor to revive an interest in the history of revolutions or of the
workers movement. We hope that in considering the content of the struggles of
the last century we will help to undermine the illusion that this is somehow our
past, something to be protected or preserved. Marx's dictum reminds us of the
need to shed the dead weight of tradition. We would go so far as to say that with
the exception of the recognition of the historical break that separates us from
them, that we have nothing to learn from the failures of past revolutions no
need to replay them to discover their errors or distil their truths for it would
in any case be impossible to repeat them. In drawing the balance of this history,
in taking it to be over, we are drawing a line that foregrounds the struggles of our
own time.
The two parties to the exchange we are publishing, Troploin and Thorie
Communiste, both emerged from a tendency in the early 1970s that, on the basis
of new characteristics of the class struggle, critically appropriated the historical
ultra-left in both its German / Dutch (council communist) and Italian (Bordigist)
varieties as well the more recent work of the Situationist International and
Socialisme ou Barbarie. Before we can introduce the texts themselves we must
therefore introduce this common background.

FROM THE REFUSAL OF WORK TO COMMUNISATION

When Guy Debord wrote never work on the wall of a left-bank alleyway in 1954,
the slogan, appropriated from Rimbaud3, was still heavily indebted to surrealism
and its avant-garde progeny. That is to say, it evoked at least in part a
romanticised vision of late nineteenth century bohemia a world of dclass
artists and intellectuals who had become caught between the traditional relations
of patronage and the new cultural marketplace in which they were obliged to
vend their wares. The bohemians negative attitude towards work had been both

3We shall never work, oh waves of fire! Arthur Rimbaud, Qu'est-ce pour nous, mon
cur (1872) in: uvres compltes (Renville & Mouquet, 1954), p. 124.

6
a revolt against, and an expression of, this polarized condition: caught between
an aristocratic disdain for the professional, and a petit- bourgeois resentment of
all other social classes, they came to see all work, their own included, as
debased. This posture of refusal was rendered political by the surrealists, who
transformed the nihilistic gestures of Rimbaud, Lautramont, and the dadaists,
into the revolutionary call for a war on work.4 Yet for the surrealists, along with
other unorthodox revolutionaries (e.g. Lafargue, elements of the IWW, as well as
the young Marx), the abolition of work was postponed to a utopian horizon on the
other side of a revolution defined in its immediacy by the socialist programme of
the liberation of work the triumph of the workers movement and the elevation
of the working class to the position of a new ruling class. The goal of the abolition
of work would thus paradoxically be achieved through first removing all of work's
limits (e.g. the capitalist as a parasite upon labour, the relations of production as
a fetter to production) thereby extending the condition of work to everyone
(those who don't work shall not eat) and rewarding labour with its rightful share
of the value it produces (through various schemes of labour-accounting).
This apparent contradiction between means and ends, evinced in the
surrealists troubled relationship with the French Communist Party, was typical of
revolutionary theories throughout the ascendant period of the workers
movement. From anarcho-syndicalists to Stalinists, the broad swathe of this
movement put their hopes for the overcoming of capitalism and class society in
general in the rising power of the working class within capitalism. At a certain
point this workers power was expected to seize the means of production,
ushering in a period of transition to communism or anarchism, a period which
would witness not the abolition of the situation of the working class, but its
generalisation. Thus the final end of the elimination of class society coexisted
with a whole gamut of revolutionary means which were premised on its
perpetuation.

4 La Rvolution Surraliste no. 4 (1925). In practice the surrealists refusal of work was
often restricted to artists, with denunciations of the influence of wage-labour on
creativity and demands for public subsidies to pay for their living costs. Even the text co-
written by Breton and Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, seems to distinguish
between two revolutionary regimes, one for artists/ intellectuals and one for workers: if,
for a better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a
socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist
regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. Thus one reason the
surrealists neglected the contradiction between the liberation and abolition of labour
may have been that they saw the former as a matter for others.

7
 The Situationist International (SI) inherited the surrealists opposition between
the concrete political means of the liberation of work and the utopian end of its
abolition. Their principle achievement was to transpose it from an external
opposition mediated by the transition of the socialist programme into an internal
one that propelled their conception of revolutionary activity. This latter consisted
of a radical rethinking of the liberation of work, along lines which emphasised the
refusal of any separation between revolutionary action and the total
transformation of life an idea expressed implicitly in their original project of
creating situations. The importance of this development should not be
underestimated, for the critique of separation here implied a negation of any
temporal hiatus between means and ends (thus of any period of transition), as
well as a refusal of any synchronic mediations insisting on universal (direct
democratic) participation in revolutionary action. Yet in spite of this ability to
rethink the space and time of revolution, the SI's transcendence of the opposition
between the liberation and abolition of work would ultimately consist in collapsing
its two poles into one another, into an immediate contradictory unity, transposing
the opposition between means and ends into one between form and content.
After their encounter with the neo-councilist group Socialisme ou Barbarie at
the beginning of the sixties, the SI wholeheartedly adopted the revolutionary
programme of council communism, lauding the council the apparatus through
which workers would self-manage their own production and, together with other
councils, grasp the entirety of social power as the finally achieved form of the
proletarian revolution. From then on all the potential and all the limits of the SI
were contained in the tension between their call to abolish work and their
central slogan, all power to the workers councils. On the one hand the content
of the revolution was to involve a radical questioning of work itself (and not
merely its organisation), with the goal of overcoming the separation between
work and leisure; yet on the other hand the form of this revolution was to be
workers taking over their workplaces and running them democratically.5

5 The situationists were aware of this potential critique and tried to deflect it. In
Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organisation (IS no. 12, 1969) Riesel writes it
is known that we have no inclination towards workerism of any form whatsoever, but
goes on to describe how workers remain the central force within the councils and the
revolution. Where they get closest to questioning the affirmation of the proletariat, in the
theory of generalized self-management, they are at their most incoherent e.g.: only
the proletariat, by negating itself, gives clear shape to the project of generalized self-
management, because it bears the project within itself subjectively and
objectively (Vaneigem, Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalised Self-
Management ibid.). If the proletariat bears the project of self-management within itself
then it follows that it must negate this project in negating itself.

8
 What prevented the SI from overcoming this contradiction was that the
polarities of content and form were both rooted in an affirmation of the workers
movement and the liberation of work. For although the SI appropriated from the
young Marx (and the sociological inquiries of Socialisme ou Barbarie) a
preoccupation with the alienation of labour, they nonetheless saw the critique of
this alienation as made possible by the technological prosperity of modern
capitalism (the leisure society potentials of automation) and the battalions of the
workers movement who were capable of both compelling (in their day to day
struggles) and appropriating (in their revolutionary councils) these technical
advances. It was thus on the basis of an existing workers power at the points of
production that they saw the abolition of work as becoming possible, both from a
technical and organisational standpoint. In transposing the techniques of the
cyberneticians and the gestures of the bohemian anti-artist into the trusted,
calloused hands of the organised working class, the situationists were able to
imagine the abolition of work as the direct result of its liberation; that is, to
imagine the overcoming of alienation as a result of an immediate technical-
creative restructuring of the workplace by the workers themselves.
In this sense the SI's theory represents the last sincere gesture of faith in a
revolutionary conception of self-management integral to the programme of the
liberation of work. But its critique of work would be taken up and transformed by
those who sought to theorise the new struggles that emerged when this
programme had entered into irreversible crisis in the 1970s. The latter would
understand this critique as rooted not in an affirmation of the workers movement,
but in new forms of struggles which coincided with its decomposition. However, in
the writings of Invariance, La Vielle Taupe, Mouvement Communiste and others,
the attempt to overcome the central contradiction of the SI would first be
expressed in a critique of formalism, the privileging of form over content, within
the ideology of council communism.

THE CRITIQUE OF COUNCILISM

Contrary to the instructions of the SI, the workers who took part in the mass
strike of May '68 in France did not seize the means of production, form councils,
or try to run the factories under workers control.6 In the vast majority of occupied
workplaces workers were content to leave all the organisation in the hands of
their union delegates, and the latter often had trouble in convincing workers to

6 The SI would later reveal the extent of their self-delusion by retrospectively claiming
that workers had been objectively at several moments only an hour away from setting
up councils during the May events. The Beginning of an Era (IS no. 12, 1969).

9
show up to the occupation assemblies to vote for the continuation of the strike.7
In the most important class struggles of the ensuing years, most notably those in
Italy, the council form, consistently the epitome of proletarian radicalism in the
foregoing cycle (Germany 19, Italy 21, Spain 36, Hungary 56), was absent. Yet
these years paradoxically saw a rise in the ideology of councilism, as the
perception of an increasingly unruly working class and the decreasing viability of
the old organisations seemed to suggest that the only thing missing was the form
most adequate to spontaneous and non-hierarchical struggles. In this context
groups like Informations Correspondance Ouvrieres (ICO) in France, Solidarity in
England, Root and Branch in the US, and to some extent the operaisti current in
Italy, managed to revive an interest in the German/Dutch Left through blaming
the old enemies of councilism all the left parties and unions, all the
bureaucrats in the language of the SI for the failure of each new insurgency.
It would not take long for this perspective to be challenged, and this challenge
would initially take the form of a revival of the other left-communist tradition.
Under the intellectual leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the Italian Left had long
criticised council communism (which in Left-wing Communism, an Infantile
Disorder Lenin lumped together with the Italian Left) for its championing of form
over content, and its uncritical conception of democracy.8 It is this position,
filtered through the influence of the dissident Bordigist journal Invariance, which
underlies Gilles Dauv's critique of council communism in Leninism and the
Ultraleft, one of the foundational texts of the tendency we are describing.9 Dauv
accuses council communism of formalism on two counts: their approach to the
question of organisation sees the form of organisation as the decisive factor (an
inverted Leninism), and their conception of post-revolutionary society
transforms the form (the councils) into the content of socialism, through depicting
the latter as fundamentally a question of management. For Dauv, as for
Bordiga, this was a false question, for capitalism is not a mode of management

7Bruno Astarian, Les grves en France en mai-juin 1968, (Echanges et Mouvement

2003).
8 e.g.: [T]he formulae workers control and workers management are lacking in any
content. ... The content [of socialism] won't be proletarian autonomy, control, and
management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage
system; of exchange even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for
labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be
nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand autonomy from. Amadeo
Bordiga, The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism (1957) (ICP, 1972).
9 First published in English in Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement
(Black and Red, 1974).

10
but a mode of production, in which managers of any sort (capitalists,
bureaucrats, or even workers) are merely the functionaries through which the law
of value is articulated. As Pierre Nashua (La Vielle Taupe) and Carsten Juhl
(Invariance) would also later argue, such a preoccupation with form over content
effectively replaces the communist goal of the destruction of the economy with a
mere opposition to its management by the bourgeoisie. 10

CRITIQUE OF WORK REDUX

In itself this critique of council communism could only lead to reworking the
canonical theses of the Italian Left, either through an immanent critique (a la
Invariance) or by developing a sort of Italo-Germanic hybrid (a la Mouvement
Communiste). What provided the impetus for a new conception of revolution and
communism (as communisation) was not simply an understanding of the content
of communism derived from a close reading of Marx and Bordiga, but also the
influence of a whole wave of class struggles of the late sixties and early
seventies which would give a new meaning to the refusal of work as a specific
content of the revolution.
By the early 1970s journalists and sociologists began to speak of a revolt
against work afflicting an entire new generation of workers in traditional
industries, with rapidly rising rates of absenteeism and sabotage, as well as a
widespread disregard for the authority of the union. Commentators variously
blamed: the feeling of expendability and insecurity brought about by automation;
the increasing assertiveness of traditionally oppressed minorities; the influence of
an anti-authoritarian counter-culture; the power and sense of entitlement afforded
by the prolonged post-war boom and its hard-won social wage. Whatever the
reason for these developments, what seemed to characterize the new struggles
was a breakdown in the traditional forms through which workers sought to gain
control over the labour process, leaving only the expression of an apparent
desire to work less. For many of those who had been influenced by the SI, this
new proletarian assault was characterized by a refusal of work shorn of the
techno-utopian and bohemian-artistic elements which the SI had never been able
to abandon. Groups like Ngation and Intervention Communiste argued that it
was not only the power of the union which was being undermined in these
struggles, but the entire Marxist and Anarchist programme of the liberation of
work and the triumph of workers power. Far from liberating their work, bringing
it under their own control, and using it to seize control of society through self-

10 Pierre Nashua (Pierre Guillaume), Perspectives on Councils, Workers Management

and the German Left (La Vielle Taupe 1974). Carsten Juhl, The German Revolution and
the Spectre of the proletariat (Invariance Series II no. 5, 1974).

11
managing their workplaces, in the French May and the subsequent creeping
May in Italy, the critique of work took the form of hundreds of thousands of
workers deserting their workplaces. Rather than an indication that struggles
hadn't gone far enough, the absence of workers councils during this period was
thus understood as an expression of a rupture with what would come to be
known as the old workers movement.

THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNISATION

Just as it had been influential in spreading the above-mentioned critique of
councilism, the dissident Bordigist journal Invariance was an important forerunner
of critical reflection on the history and function of the workers movement. For
Invariance the old workers movement was integral to a development of
capitalism from a stage of merely formal to one of real domination. The
workers failures were necessary since it was capital that constituted their
organizing principle:
The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions, shows that the
proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social order which presented an obstacle to
the development of the productive forces, and thus to the development of capital, but
that at the moment that it became a matter of establishing a different community, it
remained a prisoner of the logic of the rationality of the development of those productive
forces, and confined itself within the problem of managing them.11

Thus a question that for Bordiga had been one of theoretical and organisational
error came for Camatte to define the historic function of the workers movement
within capitalism. The self-liberation of the working class meant only the
development of the productive forces, since the principle productive force was
the working class itself. One did not need to follow Camatte into the wilderness12
in order to agree with this estimation. After all, by the 1970s it was clear that in
the East the workers movement had been integral, at least at the beginning, to
an unprecedented rise in the productive capacity of the socialist states; whilst in
the West workers struggles for better conditions had played a key role in bringing
about the post-war boom and the resulting global expansion of the capitalist
mode of production. Yet for many the crisis of the institutions of the workers
movement in the 1970s showed that this purely capitalist function was itself
coming into crisis, and workers would be able to shed the burden of this history.
For Mouvement Communiste, Ngation, Intervention Communiste, and others

11 Jacques Camatte, Proletariat and Revolution (Invariance Series II no. 6, 1975).

12Camatte, particularly through his influence on Fredy Perlman, would go on to become
a principle inspiration for primitivist thought see This World We Must Leave: and
Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1995).

12
the breakdown of the old workers movement was something to be celebrated,
not because the corrupt leadership of the workers organisations would no longer
be able to restrain the autonomy of the masses, but because such a shift
represented a transcendence of the historical function of the workers movement,
a transcendence that would mark the reemergence of the communist movement,
the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. 13 And it did so in
an immediate sense, for the riots and wildcat strikes of that decade were read by
these writers as a total refusal of all the mediations of the workers movement,
not in favour of some other more democratic mediation like that of workers
councils, but in a way that posed the immediate production of communist
relations as the only possible revolutionary horizon. Thus whereas communism
had previously been seen as something that needed to be created after the
revolution, the revolution was now seen as nothing other than the production of
communism (abolishing wage labour and the state). The notion of a period of
transition was jettisoned.14
In a recent text Dauv sums up this estimation of the old workers movement:
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. ... 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,

13 Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 49.

14 The idea of a period of transition, found notably in the political writings of Marx and
Engels, had been shared by almost every tendency of the workers movement. During
such a period workers were supposed to seize control of the political (Leninist) or
economic (syndicalist) apparatuses and run them in their own interests. This
corresponded to a generally held assumption that workers could run their workplaces
better than their bosses, and thus that to take over production would equally be to
develop it (resolving inefficiencies, irrationalities and injustices). In displacing the
communist question (the practical question of the abolition of wage-labour, exchange,
and the state) to after the transition, the immediate goal, the revolution, became a
matter of overcoming certain bad aspects of capitalism (inequality, the tyranny of a
parasitical class, the anarchy of the market, the irrationality of unproductive
pursuits...) whilst preserving aspects of capitalist production in a more rational and less
unjust form (equality of the wage and of the obligation to work, the entitlement to the
full value of one's product after deductions for social costs...).

13
 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...15
Against such a programmatic approach, groups like Mouvement Communiste,
Ngation, and La Guerre Sociale advocated a conception of revolution as the
immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production, or communisation. As
we shall see, the understanding of communisation differed between different
groups, but it essentially meant the application of communist measures within the
revolution as the condition of its survival and its principle weapon against
capital. Any period of transition was seen as inherently counter-revolutionary,
not just in so far as it entailed an alternative power structure which would resist
withering away (c.f. anarchist critiques of the dictatorship of the proletariat),
nor simply because it always seemed to leave unchallenged fundamental
aspects of the relations of production, but because the very basis of workers
power on which such a transition was to be erected was now seen to be
fundamentally alien to the struggles themselves. Workers power was just the
other side of the power of capital, the power of reproducing workers as workers;
henceforth the only available revolutionary perspective would be the abolition of
this reciprocal relation.16

COMMUNISATION AND CYCLES OF STRUGGLE

troploin and thorie communiste
The milieu in which the idea of communisation emerged was never very unified,
and the divisions only grew as time went on. Some ended up abandoning
whatever was left of the councilist rejection of the party and returned to what
remained of the legacy of the Italian Left, congregating around atavistic sects
such as the International Communist Current (ICC). Many others took the
questioning of the old workers movement and the ideal of workers councils to
require a questioning of the revolutionary potential of the working class. In its

15Gilles Dauv, Out of the Future in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist
Movement (1997) pp. 1213.
16 It should be noted that something like a communisation thesis was arrived at
independently by Alfredo Bonanno and other insurrectionary anarchists in the 1980s.
Yet they tended to understand it as a lesson to be applied to every particular struggle.
As Debord says of anarchism in general, such an idealist and normative methodology
abandons the historical terrain in assuming that the adequate forms of practice have all
been found (Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, 1992), 93 p.49). Like a
broken clock, such anarchism is always capable of telling the right time, but only at a
single instant, so that when the time finally comes it will make little difference that it is
finally right.

14
most extreme form with the journal Invariance this led to an abandoning of the
theory of the proletariat, replacing it by a purely normative demand to leave this
world, a world in which the community of capital has, through real domination,
supplanted the human community. Yet even among those who didn't go as far,
there was an abiding sense that as long as struggles remained attached to the
workplace they could only express themselves as a defence of the condition of
the working class. In spite of their different approaches, Mouvement
Communiste, La Guerre Sociale, Ngation, and their descendants ended up
affirming the workplace revolts of the 1970s, and the growth of struggles around
reproduction with which they coincided, to the extent that they seemed to escape
the constraints of class identity, freeing the class for-itself from the class in-
itself, and thus revealing the potential for communisation as the realisation of the
true human community. A few people associated with this tendency (notably
Pierre Guillaume and Dominique Blanc) would take the critique of anti-fascism
(shared to some extent by all of those who defended the communisation thesis)
to an extreme and become entangled in the Faurisson Affair of the late-1970s.17
Another tendency, represented by Thorie Communiste (hereafter TC),
attempted to historicise the communisation thesis itself, understanding it in terms
of changes in class relations which were in the process of undermining the
institutions of the workers movement and working class identity in general. They
would go on to conceptualise this change as a fundamental restructuring of the
capitalist mode of production in accordance with the termination of one cycle of
struggle and the emergence, via a successful counter-revolution, of a new cycle.
The distinguishing feature of this new cycle for TC is that it carries within it the
potential for communisation as the limit of a class contradiction newly situated at
the level of reproduction (see the afterword for a clarification of TC's theory in this
respect). 18
Whilst TC developed their theory of the restructuring at the end of the 1970s,
others would follow suit in the 1980s and 90s, and the group Troploin (consisting

17Robert Faurisson is a bourgeois historian who attracted attention to himself in the late
70s by denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz (though not the Nazi's
systematic mass murder of civilians). For this Faurisson was put on trial. For reasons
only really known to himself, Pierre Guillaume became a prominent defender of
Faurisson and managed to attract several affiliates of La Vielle Taupe and La Guerre
Sociale (notably Dominique Blanc) to his cause. This created an internecine polemic
within the Parisian ultra-left which lasted more than a decade.
18Other groups which trace their descent from this (loosely defined) tendency in the
1970s: La Banquise, L'Insecurit Sociale, Le Brise Glace, Le Voyou, Crise Communiste,
Hic Salta, La Materielle, Temps Critiques.

15
principally of Gilles Dauv and Karl Nesic) has recently attempted something of
that order in Wither the World and In for a Storm. The difference between
these conceptions is marked, not least because the latter seems to have been at
least partly developed in opposition to the former. The exchange between
Thorie Communiste and Troploin we [published in Endnotes 1] took place in the
last ten years, and underlying the assessment of the revolutionary history of the
twentieth century to be found in these texts, are different conceptions of capitalist
restructuring and opposed interpretations of the current period.
The first text, When Insurrections Die, is based on an earlier introduction by
Gilles Dauv to a collection of articles from the Italian Left journal Bilan on the
Spanish Civil War. In this text Dauv is concerned to show how the wave of
proletarian revolts in the first half of the twentieth century were crushed by the
vicissitudes of war and ideology. Thus in Russia the revolution is sacrificed to the
civil war, and destroyed by the consolidation of Bolshevik power; in Italy and
Germany the workers are betrayed by unions and parties, by the lie of
democracy; and in Spain it is again the march to war (to the tune of anti-fascism)
which seals the fate of the whole cycle, trapping the proletarian revolution
between two bourgeois fronts.
Dauv doesn't address the later struggles of the 60s and 70s, but it is obvious
that judgements from this period, as to e.g. the nature of the workers movement
as a whole, inform his assessment of what was missing in this earlier defeated
wave of struggles. In their critique of When Insurrections Die, TC attack what
they consider to be Dauv's normative perspective, in which actual revolutions
are counter-posed to what they could and should have been to a never-
completely-spelled-out formula of a genuine communist revolution. TC broadly
agree with Dauv's conception of revolution (i.e. communisation) but criticise
Dauv for ahistorically imposing it on previous revolutionary struggles as the
measure of their success and failure (and thus of failing to account for the
historical emergence of the communisation thesis itself). According to TC it
follows that the only explanation that Dauv is capable of giving for the failure of
past revolutions is the ultimately tautological one that they didn't go far enough
the proletarian revolutions failed because the proletarians failed to make the
revolution.19 In contrast they argue that their own theory is able to give a robust
account of the whole cycle of revolution, counter-revolution and restructuring, in
which revolutions can be shown to have contained their own counter-revolutions
within them as the intrinsic limit of the cycles they emerge from and bring to term.

19 See Thorie Communiste, Much Ado About Nothing in Endnotes 1, p. 207.

16
 [] In the exchange [ ] a number of controversies are explored, including the
role of humanism in Troploin's conception of communisation, and the role of
determinism in that of TC. Yet for us the most interesting aspect of this
exchange, the reason we [published it], is that it constitutes the most frank
attempt we have come across to assess the legacy of 20th century revolutionary
movements in terms of a conception of communism as neither an ideal or a
programme, but a movement immanent to the world of capital, that which
abolishes capitalist social relations on the basis of premises currently in
existence. It is in order to interrogate these premises, to return to the present
our starting point that we seek to analyse their conditions of emergence in the
foregoing cycles of struggle and revolution.

17
 AFTERWORD
Endnotes 1 2008
The debate between Thorie Communiste (TC) and Troploin (Dauv & Nesic)
that we have reproduced revolves around the fundamental question of how to
theorise the history and actuality of class struggle and revolution in the capitalist
epoch. As we have stressed in our introduction, both sides of the debate were
products of the same political milieu in France in the aftermath of the events of
1968; both groups share, to this day, an understanding of the movement which
abolishes capitalist social relations as a movement of communisation. According
to this shared view, the transition to communism is not something that happens
after the revolution. Rather, the revolution as communisation is itself the
dissolution of capitalist social relations through communist measures taken by
the proletariat, abolishing the enterprise form, the commodity form, exchange,
money, wage labour and value, and destroying the state. Communisation, then,
is the immediate production of communism: the self-abolition of the proletariat
through its abolition of capital and state.
What sharply differentiates TC's position from that of Troploin, however, is the
way in which the two groups theorise the production, or the historical production,
of this movement of communisation. Neither grounds the possibility of successful
communist revolution on an objective decadence of capitalism; however,
Troploin's conception of the history of class struggle, in common with much of the
wider ultra-left, is of a fluctuating antagonism between classes, an ebb and flow
of class struggle, according to the contingencies of each historical conjuncture. In
this wider conception, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat appears to be
or is submerged at some points in history, only to re-emerge at other high points
(e.g. 1848, 1871, 191721, 1936, 19689). On this view, we are currently
experiencing a prolonged downturn in class struggle (at least in the advanced
capitalist countries), and it is a case of waiting for the next re-emergence of the
communist movement, or for the revolutionary proletariat to carry out its
subversive work: Well burrowed, old Mole!1
Thus for Troploin, communism as communisation is an ever-present (if at
times submerged) possibility, one which, even if there is no guarantee that it will
be realised, is an invariant in the capitalist epoch. By contrast, for TC
communisation is the specific form which the communist revolution must take in
the current cycle of struggle. In distinction from Troploin, then, TC are able to

1 Marx, 18th Brumaire (MECW 11), p. 105.

18
self-reflexively ground their conception of communisation in an understanding of
capitalist history as cycles of struggle.

CYCLES OF STRUGGLE AND PHASES OF ACCUMULATION

TC historicise the contradictory relation between capital and proletariat on the
basis of a periodisation of the subsumption of labour under capital; this
periodisation distinguishes cycles of struggle corresponding to the qualitative
shifts in the relation of exploitation. This history for TC comprises three
broadly identifiable periods: (1) formal subsumption ending around 1900; (2)
the first phase of real subsumption from 1900 to the 1970s; (3) the second
phase of real subsumption from the 1970s to the present.
Importantly for TC, the subsumption of labour under capital is not merely a
question of the technical organisation of labour in the immediate production
process, in which formal subsumption would be paired with the extraction of
absolute surplus value (through the lengthening of the working day) and real
subsumption with the extraction of relative surplus value (through increasing
productivity by the introduction of new production techniques, allowing workers to
reproduce the value of their wages in less time thus performing more surplus
labour in a working day of a given length). In TC's conception, the character and
extent or degree of subsumption of labour under capital is also, and perhaps
fundamentally, determined by the way in which the two poles of the capital-labour
relation, i.e. capital and proletariat, relate to each other as classes of capitalist
society. Thus for TC, the key to the history of capital is the changing mode of
reproduction of capitalist social relations as a whole according to the dialectical
development of the relation between classes. Of course this development is itself
intrinsically bound up with the exigencies of surplus-value extraction. In short, for
TC the subsumption of labour under capital mediates, and is mediated by the
specific historical character of the class relation at the level of society as a whole.
There is something problematic both in the way TC use the concept of
subsumption to periodise capitalism, and in the way this usage partially obscures
one of the most significant aspects of the development of the class relation which
their theory otherwise brings into focus. Strictly speaking, formal and real
subsumption of labour under capital only apply to the immediate process of
production. In what sense, for example, can anything beyond the labour-process
ever be said to be actually subsumed by capital rather than merely dominated or
transformed by it?2 TC, however, attempt to theorise under the rubric of these
categories of subsumption the character of the capitalist class relation per se

2 We will explore these issues further in the next issue of Endnotes, see p. 37.

19
rather than simply the mode in which the labour-process actually becomes the
valorisation-process of capital. Yet it is through their questionable theoretical
deployment of the categories of subsumption that TC are able to advance a new
conception of the historical development of the class relation. Within this
periodisation the degree of integration of the circuits of reproduction of capital
and labour-power is of decisive importance. The key to the historical
periodisation of the class relation is the extent to which the reproduction of
labour-power, and hence of the proletariat as class, is integrated with the circuit
of self-presupposition of capital.3
TC's period of formal subsumption is characterised by an un-mediated,
external relation between capital and proletariat: the reproduction of the working-
class is not fully integrated into the cycle of valorisation of capital. In this period,
the proletariat constitutes a positive pole of the relation, and is able to assert its
autonomy vis--vis capital at the same time as it finds itself empowered by
capitalist development. However the rising power of the class within capitalist
society and its autonomous affirmation steadily come into contradiction with each
other. In the crushing of workers autonomy in the revolutions and counter-
revolutions at the end of the First World War this contradiction is resolved in an
empowerment of the class which reveals itself as nothing more than capitalist
development itself. This qualitative shift in the class relation marks the end of the
transition from the period of formal subsumption to the first phase of real
subsumption. From this point on the reproduction of labour-power becomes fully
integrated, albeit in a heavily mediated fashion, into the capitalist economy, and
the process of production is transformed in accordance with the requirements of
the valorisation of capital. The relation between
capital and proletariat in this phase of subsumption is
one which is becoming internal, but mediated through
the state, the division of the world economy into
national areas and Eastern or Western zones of
accumulation (each with their accompanying models
of third world development), collective bargaining
within the framework of the national labour-market
and the Fordist deals linking productivity and wage
increases.

3 By self-presupposition of capital TC mean the sense in

which capital establishes itself both as condition and result
of its own process. This is expressed in TC's use (following
the French edition of Capital) of the term double moulinet,
signifying two intersecting cycles:

20
 The positivity of the proletarian pole within the class relation during the phase
of formal subsumption and the first phase of real subsumption is expressed in
what TC term the programmatism of the workers movement, whose
organisations, parties and trade unions (whether social democratic or communist,
anarchist or syndicalist) represented the rising power of the proletariat and
upheld the programme of the liberation of labour and the self-affirmation of the
working class. The character of the class relation in the period of the
programmatic workers movement thus determines the communist revolution in
this cycle of struggle as the self-affirmation of one pole within the capital-labour
relation. As such the communist revolution does not do away with the relation
itself, but merely alters its terms, and hence carries within it the counter-
revolution in the shape of workers management of the economy and the
continued accumulation of capital. Decentralised management of production
through factory councils on the one hand and central-planning by the workers
state on the other are two sides of the same coin, two forms of the same content:
workers power as both revolution and counter-revolution.
For TC this cycle of struggle is brought to a close by the movements of 1968
73, which mark the obsolescence of the programme of the liberation of labour
and the self-affirmation of the proletariat; the capitalist restructuring in the
aftermath of these struggles and the crisis in the relation between capital and
proletariat sweeps away or hollows out the institutions of the old workers
movement. The conflicts of 196873 thus usher in a new cycle of accumulation
and struggle, which TC term the second phase of real subsumption,
characterised by the capitalist restructuring or counter-revolution from 197495
which fundamentally alters the character of the relation between capital and
proletariat. Gone now are all the constraints to accumulation all impediments
to the fluidity and international mobility of capital represented by rigidities of
national labour-markets, welfare, the division of the world economy into Cold War
blocs and the protected national development these allowed on the periphery of
the world economy.
The crisis of the social compact based on the Fordist productive model and
the Keynesian Welfare State issues in financialisation, the dismantling and
relocation of industrial production, the breaking of workers power, de-regulation,
the ending of collective bargaining, privatisation, the move to temporary,
flexibilised labour and the proliferation of new service industries. The global
capitalist restructuring the formation of an increasingly unified global labour
market, the implementation of neo-liberal policies, the liberalisation of markets,
and international downward pressure on wages and conditions represents a
counter-revolution whose result is that capital and the proletariat now confront

21
each other directly on a global scale. The circuits of reproduction of capital and
labour-power circuits through which the class relation itself is reproduced
are now fully integrated: these circuits are now immediately internally related.
The contradiction between capital and proletariat is now displaced to the level of
their reproduction as classes; from this moment on, what is at stake is the
reproduction of the class relation itself.
With the restructuring of capital (which is the dissolution of all the mediations
in the class relation) arises the impossibility of the proletariat to relate to itself
positively against capital: the impossibility of proletarian autonomy. From being a
positive pole of the relation as interlocutor with, or antagonist to, the capitalist
class, the proletariat is transformed into a negative pole. Its very being qua
proletariat, whose reproduction is fully integrated within the circuit of capital,
becomes external to itself. What defines the current cycle of struggle in
contradistinction to the previous one is the character of the proletariat's self-
relation which is now immediately its relation to capital. As TC put it, in the
current cycle the proletariat's own class belonging is objectified against it as
exterior constraint, as capital.4
This fundamental transformation in the character of the class relation, which
produces this inversion in the proletariat's self-relation as pole of the relation of
exploitation, alters the character of class struggles, and causes the proletariat to
call into question its own existence as class of the capitalist mode of production.
Thus for TC the revolution as communisation is an historically specific
production: it is the horizon of this cycle of struggle.5

A PRODUCED OVERCOMING
For TC, the relation between capital and proletariat is not one between two
separate subjects, but one of reciprocal implication in which both poles of the
relation are constituted as moments of a self-differentiating totality. It is this
totality itself this moving contradiction which produces its own supersession
in the revolutionary action of the proletariat against its own class-being, against

4 This fundamental negativity in the proletariat's self- relation vis--vis capital is

expressed by TC's use of the term cart, which may be translated as divergence,
swerve or gap. For TC this concept expresses the idea that the proletariat's action as
a class is the limit of this cycle of struggle; for its struggles have no other horizon apart
from its own reproduction as a class, yet it is incapable of affirming this as such.
5 For a discussion of this problematic in relation to concrete struggles, see TC's Self-
organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the
revolution has to overcome. Available on libcom.org.

22
capital. This immanent, dialectical conception of the historical course of the
capitalist class relation supersedes the related dualisms of objectivism/
subjectivism and spontaneism/ voluntarism which characterised most Marxist
theory in the 20th Century and indeed up to the present. The dynamism and
changing character of this relation is thus grasped as a unified process and not
simply in terms of waves of proletarian offensive and capitalist counter-offensive.
According to TC, it is the qualitative transformations within the capitalist class
relation that determine the revolutionary horizon of the current cycle of struggle
as communisation. For us, it is also true at a more general level of abstraction
that the contradictory relation between capital and proletariat has always pointed
beyond itself, to the extent that from its very origins it has produced its own
overcoming as the immanent horizon of actual struggles. This horizon, however,
is inextricable from the real, historical forms that the moving contradiction takes.
It is thus only in this qualified sense that we can talk of communism
transhistorically (i.e. throughout the history of the capitalist mode of production).
As we see it, the communist movement, understood not as a particularisation of
the totality neither as a movement of communists nor of the class but rather
as the totality itself, is both transhistorical and variant according to the historically
specific configurations of the capitalist class relation. What determines the
communist movement the communist revolution to take the specific form of
communisation in the current cycle is the very dialectic of integration of the
circuits of reproduction of capital and labour-power. It is this which produces the
radical negativity of the proletariat's self-relation vis--vis capital. In this period, in
throwing off its radical chains the proletariat does not generalise its condition to
the whole of society, but dissolves its own being immediately through the
abolition of capitalist social relations.

23
 WHAT ARE WE TO DO?
Communization and its Discontents 2011
The term communisation has recently become something of a buzzword. A
number of factors have contributed to this, the most prominent being the coming
into fashion of various texts. Of these, The Coming Insurrection associated
with the French journal Tiqqun, and the Tarnac 9 who gained the doubtful
prestige of being at the center of a major terrorist scandal has been by far the
most influential. In addition to this, the voluble literature produced by autumn
2009s wave of Californian student struggles a literature partly inspired by
such French texts has been a significant factor.1 The confluence in this
Californian literature of, on the one hand, a language inflected by typically
grandiloquent Tiqqunisms, and on the other, concepts in part derived from the
works of a more Marxist French ultra-left and the convenient presence in both
of these reference points of a fairly unusual term, communisation has
contributed to the appearance of a somewhat mythological discourse around this
word. This communisation appears as a fashionable stand-in for slightly more
venerable buzzwords such as autonomy, having at least the sparkle of
something new to it, a frisson of radical immediatism, and the support of some
eloquent-sounding French literature. This communisation is, if anything, a vague
new incarnation of the simple idea that the revolution is something that we must
do now, here, for ourselves, gelling nicely with the sentiments of an already-
existent insurrectionist anarchism.
But this communisation is, in all but the most abstract sense, something other
than that which has been debated for some thirty years amongst the obscure
communist groups who have lent the most content to this term, even if it bears
traces of its ancestors features, and may perhaps be illuminated by their
theories. Of course, communisation was never the private property of such-and-
such groups. It has, at least, a certain minor place in the general lexicon of left-
wing tradition as a process of rendering communal or common. Recently some
have begun to speak, with similar intended meaning, of ongoing processes of
commonization. But such general concepts are not interesting in themselves; if
we were to attempt to divine some common content in the clutter of theories and
practices grouped under such terms, we would be left with only the thinnest
abstraction. We will thus concern ourselves here only with the two usages of the

1See for example the collection After the Fall: Communiqus from Occupied California,
afterthefallcommuniques.info/.

24
word that are at stake in the current discourse of communisation: that derived
from texts such as The Coming Insurrection, and that derived from writings by
Troploin, Thorie Communiste and other post-68 French communists. It is
primarily from these latter writings those of Thorie Communiste (TC) in
particular that we derive our own understanding of communisation, an
understanding which we will sketch in what follows. As it happens, these two
usages both proliferated from France into Anglophone debates in recent years, a
process in which we have played a part. But it would be a mistake to take this
coincidence for the sign of a single French debate over communisation, or of a
continuous communisationist tendency within which the authors of The Coming
Insurrection and, for example, TC represent divergent positions. What is common
to these usages at most, is that they can be said to signal a certain insistence on
immediacy in thinking about how a communist revolution happens. But, as we
shall see, one immediate is not the same as another; the question is which
mediations are absent?
If the tone of the following text is often polemical, this is not because we take
pleasure in criticising people already subject to a very public manhandling by the
French state, charged as terrorists on the meagre basis of allegations that they
wrote a book and committed a minor act of sabotage. It is because long-running
debates related to the concept of communisation debates in which we have
participated have become falsely associated with the theories presented in
texts such as The Coming Insurrection and Call, and are thereby in danger of
getting lost in the creeping fog that these texts have summoned.2 What is at
stake is not only these texts, but the Anglophone reception of communisation in
general. It has thus become necessary to make the distinction: the
communisation theory now spoken of in the Anglosphere is largely an imaginary
entity, an artefact of the Anglophone reception of various unrelated works. The
limited availability of relevant works in English, and the near-simultaneity with
which some of these works became more widely known, surely contributed to the
confusion; a certain traditional predisposition in relation to France, its theory and
politics, probably helped. The Anglosphere has a peculiar tendency to take every
crowing of some Gallic cock as a cue to get busy in the potting shed with its own

2 The following discussion will focus specifically on are The Invisible Committee, The
Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009) tarnac9.wordpress.com/
texts/the-coming-insurrection/ and The Invisible Committee, Call (2004),
bloom0101.org/call.pdf, rather than other works associated with Tiqqun, since it is these
texts that have been the most in uential in the current Anglophone reception of
communisation. It is primarily with this reception that we are concerned, rather than
any more general assessment of Tiqqun as, for example, a contributor to continental
philosophy.

25
theoretical confabulations; add to this a major political scandal, and it seems it is
practically unable to contain the excitement.
But our intention is not simply to polemicize from the standpoint of some
alternative theory. Insofar as it is possible to grasp the determinate
circumstances which produce texts like this, they do not simply present incorrect
theories. They present rather, the partial, broken fragments of a historical
moment grasped in thought. In attempting to hold fast to the general movement
of the capitalist class relation, communist theory may shed light on the character
of such moments, and thereby the theoretical constructs which they produce.
And, in so doing, it may also expose their limits, elisions and internal
contradictions. Insofar as such constructs are symptomatic of the general
character of the historical moment, their interrogation may draw out something
about the character of the class relation as a whole.
If communisation signals a certain immediacy in how the revolution happens,
for us this does not take the form of a practical prescription; communisation
does not imply some injunction to start making the revolution right away, or on an
individual basis. What is most at stake, rather, is the question of what the
revolution is; communisation is the name of an answer to this question. The
content of such an answer necessarily depends on what is to be overcome: that
is, the self-reproduction of the capitalist class relation, and the complex of social
forms which are implicated in this reproduction value-form, capital, gender
distinction, state form, legal form, etc. In particular, such an overcoming must
necessarily be the direct self-abolition of the working class, since anything short
of this leaves capital with its obliging partner, ready to continue the dance of
accumulation. Communisation signifies the process of this direct self-abolition,
and it is in the directness of this self-abolition that communisation can be said to
signify a certain immediacy.
Communisation is typically opposed to a traditional notion of the transitional
period which was always to take place after the revolution, when the proletariat
would be able to realise communism, having already taken hold of production
and/ or the state. Setting out on the basis of the continued existence of the
working class, the transitional period places the real revolution on a receding
horizon, meanwhile perpetuating that which it is supposed to overcome. For us
this is not a strategic question, since these matters have been settled by
historical developments the end of the programmatic workers movement, the
disappearance of positive working class identity, the absence of any kind of
workers power on the horizon: it is no longer possible to imagine a transition to
communism on the basis of a prior victory of the working class as working class.
To hold to councilist or Leninist conceptions of revolution now is utopian,

26
measuring reality against mental constructs which bear no historical actuality.
The class struggle has outlived programmatism, and different shapes now inhabit
its horizon. With the growing superfluity of the working class to production its
tendential reduction to a mere surplus population and the resultantly tenuous
character of the wage form as the essential meeting point of the twin circuits of
reproduction, it can only be delusional to conceive revolution in terms of workers
power. Yet it is still the working class which must abolish itself.3
For us, communisation does not signify some general positive process of
sharing or making common. It signifies the specific revolutionary undoing of the
relations of property constitutive of the capitalist class relation. Sharing as such
if this has any meaning at all can hardly be understood as involving this
undoing of capitalist relations, for various kinds of sharing or making common
can easily be shown to play important roles within capitalist society without in any
way impeding capitalist accumulation. Indeed, they are often essential to or
even constitutive in that accumulation: consumption goods shared within
families, risk shared via insurance, resources shared within firms, scientific
knowledge shared through academic publications, standards and protocols
shared between rival capitals because they are recognized as being in their
common interest. In such cases, without contradiction, what is held in common is
the counterpart to an appropriation. As such, a dynamic of communisation would
involve the undoing of such forms of sharing, just as it would involve the
undoing of private appropriation. And while some might valorize a sharing that
facilitates a certain level of subsistence beyond what the wage enables, in a
world dominated by the reproduction of the capitalist class relation such practices
can occur only at the margins of this reproduction, as alternative or
supplementary means of survival, and as such, they are not revolutionary in
themselves.
Communisation is a movement at the level of the totality, through which that
totality is abolished. The logic of the movement that abolishes this totality
necessarily differs from that which applies at the level of the concrete individual
or group: it should go without saying that no individual or group can overcome
the reproduction of the capitalist class relation through their own actions. The
determination of an individual act as communising flows only from the overall
movement of which it is part, not from the act itself, and it would therefore be
wrong to think of the revolution in terms of the sum of already-communising acts,
as if all that was needed was a certain accumulation of such acts to a critical
point. A conception of the revolution as such an accumulation is premised on a

3 For a fuller discussion of these issues, see the next two essays.

27
quantitative extension which is supposed to provoke a qualitative transformation.
In this it is not unlike the problematic of the growing-over of everyday struggles
into revolution which was one of the salient characteristics of the programmatic
epoch.4 In contrast to these linear conceptions of revolution, communisation is
the product of a qualitative shift within the dynamic of class struggle itself.
Communisation occurs only at the limit of a struggle, in the rift that opens as this
struggle meets its limit and is pushed beyond it. Communisation thus has little
positive advice to give us about particular, immediate practice in the here and
now, and it certainly cannot prescribe particular skills, such as lock-picking or
bone-setting, as so many roads, by which insurrectionary subjects to heaven go.5
What advice it can give is primarily negative: the social forms implicated in the
reproduction of the capitalist class relation will not be instruments of the
revolution, since they are part of that which is to be abolished.
Communisation is thus not a form of prefigurative revolutionary practice of the
sort that diverse anarchisms aspire to be, since it does not have any positive
existence prior to a revolutionary situation. While it is possible to see the question
of communisation as in some sense posed by the dynamic of the present
capitalist class relation, communisation does not yet appear directly as a form of
practice, or as some set of individuals with the right ideas about such practice. is
does not mean that we should merely await communisation as some sort of
messianic arrival in fact, this is not an option, for engagement in the dynamic
of the capitalist class relation is not something that can be opted out of, nor into,
for that matter. Involvement in the class struggle is not a matter of a political
practice which can be arbitrarily chosen, from a contemplative standpoint.
Struggles demand our participation, even though they do not yet present
themselves as the revolution. The theory of communisation alerts us to the limits
inherent in such struggles, and indeed it is attentive to the possibilities of a real
revolutionary rupture opening up because of, rather than in spite of, these limits.
For us then, communisation is an answer to the question of what the revolution
is. is is a question which takes a specific historical form in the face of the self-
evident bankruptcy of the old programmatic notions, leftist, anarchist, and ultra-

4For a discussion of the concept of programmatism, see Thorie Communiste, Much

Ado About Nothing, Endnotes 1: 154206, endnotes.org.uk/articles/13.
5 Plato could well have refrained from recommending nurses never to stand still with
children but to keep rocking them in their arms; and Fichte likewise need not have
perfected his passport regulations to the point of constructing, as the expression ran,
the requirement that the passport of suspect persons should carry not only their
personal description but also their painted likeness. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy
of Right, p.21.

28
leftist alike: how will the overcoming of the capitalist class relation take place,
given that it is impossible for the proletariat to affirm itself as a class yet we are
still faced with the problem of this relation? Texts such as Call or The Coming
Insurrection however, do not even properly ask the question of what the
revolution is, for in these texts the problem has already been evaporated into a
conceptual miasma. In these texts, the revolution will be made not by any
existing class, or on the basis of any real material, historical situation; it will be
made by friendships, by the formation of sensibility as a force, the deployment
of an archipelago of worlds, an other side of reality, the party of insurgents
but most of all by that ever-present and always amorphous positivity: we. The
reader is beseeched to take sides with this we the we of a position to join
it in the imminent demise of capitalism, civilization, empire, call it what you wish.
Instead of a concrete, contradictory relation, there are those who can hear the
call, and those who cannot; those who perpetuate the desert, and those with a
disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice,
they snatch from the enemy most of its force. Regardless of their statements to
the contrary, 6 do these pronouncements amount to anything more than the self-
affirmations of a self-identifying radical milieu?
In this more insurrectionist incarnation, communisation emerges as an answer
to a real historical question. But the question in this case is the what should we
do? posed by the conclusion of the wave of struggles that had the anti-
globalization movement at its center.7 The authors correctly recognize the
impossibility of developing any real autonomy to what is held in common within
capitalist society, yet the exhaustion of the summit-hopping, black-blocking
activist milieu makes it imperative for them to either find new practices in which to
engage, or to stage a graceful retreat. us the TAZ, the alternative, the commune
etc., are to be rethought, but with a critique of alternativism in mind: we must

6 See, for example, The Coming Insurrection, p.101: All milieus are counter-
revolutionary because they are only concerned with the preservation of their sad
comfort. They protest too much.
7 Of course, Tiqqun distinguish their approach from the leftist problematic of what is to
be done? because they see this as denying that the war has already begun. Instead,
the direct question to be posed for Tiqqun is how is it to be done? But we are not
merely concerned with this question as literally posed by Tiqqun. The what should we
do? in question is that of the post-anti-globalization impasse itself, an impasse which
as we shall see structures the theoretical content of texts such as Call and The
Coming Insurrection.

29
secede, yes, but this secession must also involve war.8 Since such supposedly
liberated places cannot be stabilised as outside of capitalism, civilization,
empire, call it what you wish, they are to be reconceived as part of the expansion
and generalization of a broad insurrectionary struggle. Provided the struggle is
successful, these alternatives will not turn out to have been impossible after all;
their generalization is to be the condition of their possibility. It is this dynamic of
generalization that is identified as one of communisation communisation as,
more or less, the forming of communes in a process that doesnt stop until the
problem of the alternative has been solved, since it no longer has to be an
alternative. But all of this is without any clear notion of what is to be undone
through such a dynamic. The complexity of actual social relations, and the real
dynamic of the class relation, are dispatched with a showmanly flourish in favor
of a clutch of vapid abstractions. Happy that the we of the revolution does not
need any real definition, all that is to be overcome is arrogated to the they an
entity which can remain equally abstract: an ill-defined generic nobodaddy
(capitalism, civilization, empire etc) that is to be undone by at the worst points
of Call the Authentic Ones who have forged intense friendships, and who still
really feel despite the badness of the world.
But the problem cannot rest only with this they, thereby fundamentally
exempting this we of a position from the dynamic of revolution. On the contrary,
in any actual supersession of the capitalist class relation we ourselves must be
overcome; we have no position apart from the capitalist class relation. What we
are is, at the deepest level, constituted by this relation, and it is a rupture with the
reproduction of what we are that will necessarily form the horizon of our
struggles. It is no longer possible for the working class to identify itself positively,
to embrace its class character as the essence of what it is; yet it is still stamped
with the simple facticity of its class belonging day by day as it faces, in capital,
the condition of its existence. In this period, the we of revolution does not a rm
itself, does not identify itself positively, because it cannot; it cannot assert itself
against the they of capital without being confronted by the problem of its own
existence an existence which it will be the nature of the revolution to
overcome. There is nothing to affirm in the capitalist class relation; no autonomy,
no alternative, no outside, no secession.
An implicit premise of texts like Call and The Coming Insurrection is that, if our
class belonging ever was a binding condition, it is no longer. Through an

8 By alternative and alternativism here, we refer to practices which aim to establish

liberated areas outside of capitalist domination, grasping this as possible independently
of, and prior to, any communist revolution. Counter-cultural milieus in general can be
said to be alternativist.

30
immediate act of assertion we can refuse such belonging here and now, position
ourselves outside of the problem. It is significant perhaps that it is not only the
milieu associated with Tiqqun and The Coming Insurrection that have developed
theory which operates on this premise over the last decade. In texts such as
Communism of Attack and Communism of Withdrawal Marcel, and the Batko
group with which he is now associated, offer a much more sophisticated variant.
Rather than the self-valorizations of an insurrectionist scene, in this case the
theory emerges as a reconceived autonomism informed by a smorgasbord of
esoteric theory Marxian and otherwise but ultimately the formal
presuppositions are the same.9 Taking the immanence of the self-reproduction of
the class relation for a closed system without any conceivable terminus, Marcel
posits the necessity of a purely external, transcendent moment the
withdrawal on the basis of which communists can launch an attack. But, within
this world, what can such withdrawal ever mean other than the voluntaristic
forming of a kind of radical milieu which the state is quite happy to tolerate as
long as it refrains from expressing, in an attempt to rationalise its continued
reproduction within capitalist society, the kind of combativity which we find in The
Coming Insurrection?
To insist, against this, on the complete immanence of the capitalist class
relation on our complete entwinement with capital is not to resign ourselves
to a monolithic, closed totality, which can do nothing other than reproduce itself.
Of course, it appears that way if one sets out from the assumption of the
voluntaristically conceived subject: for such a subject, the totality of real social
relations could only ever involve the mechanical unfolding of some purely
external process. But this subject is a historically specific social form, itself
perpetuated through the logic of the reproduction of the class relation, as is its
complement. Not insensitive to the problem of this subject, The Coming
Insurrection sets out with a disavowal of the Fichtean I=I which it finds
exemplified in Reeboks I am what I am slogan. The self here is an imposition
of the they; a kind of neurotic, administered form which they mean to stamp
upon us. 10 The we is to reject this imposition, and put in its place a conception
of creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving

9 For an excellent critique of the position of the Batko group see Per Henriksson, Om
Marcel Crusoes exkommunister i Intermundia. Ett bidrag till
kommuniseringsdiskussionen, Riff-Raff 9 (March 2011), riff-raff.se/texts/sv/om-marcel-
crusoes-exkommunister-i-intermundia; English translation forthcoming.
10 The Coming Insurrection, pp.2934.

31
the flesh of the world.11 But the we that rejects this imposition is still a voluntarist
subject; its disavowal of the self remains only a disavowal, and the replacement
of this by more interesting-sounding terms does not get us out of the problem. In
taking the imposition of the self upon it to be something unidirectional and
purely external, the we posits another truer self beyond the first, a self which is
truly its own. is authentic selfhood singularity, creature, living flesh need
not be individualistically conceived, yet it remains a voluntarist subject which
grasps itself as self-standing, and the objectivity that oppresses it as merely
something over there. The old abstraction of the egoistic subject goes through a
strange mutation in the present phase in the form of the insurrectionist a truly
Stirnerite subject for whom it is not only class belonging that can be cast off
through a voluntarist assertion, but the very imposition of the self per se. But
while our class belonging is unaffirmable a mere condition of our being in our
relation with capital and while the abstract self may be part of the totality
which is to be superseded this does not mean that either is voluntarily
renounceable. It is only in the revolutionary undoing of this totality that these
forms can be overcome.
The prioritisation of a certain tactical conception is a major outcome and
determinant of this position. Theory is called upon to legitimate a practice which
cannot be abandoned, and a dualism results: the voluntarist we, and the
impassive objectivity which is its necessary counterpart. For all their claims to
have overcome classical politics, these texts conceive the revolution ultimately
in terms of two opposed lines: the we that gets organized, and all the forces
arrayed against it. Tactical thought is then the guide and rule for this we,
mediating its relations with an object which remains external. Instead of a
theoretical reckoning with the concrete totality that must be overcome in all its
determinations, or a reconstruction of the real horizon of the class relation, we
get a sundering of the totality into two basic abstractions, and a simple set of
exhortations and practical prescriptions whose real theoretical function is to bring
these abstractions into relation once more. Of course, neither Call nor The
Coming Insurrection present themselves straightforwardly as offering a theory.
Call in particular attempts to circumvent theoretical questions by appealing from
the outset to the evident, which is not primarily a matter of logic or reasoning,
but is rather that which attaches to the sensible, to worlds, that which is held in
common or sets apart.12 The ostensible point of these texts is to stage a simple
cri de coeur an immediate, pre-theoretical stock- taking of reasons for

11 The Coming Insurrection, pp.3233.

12 Call, p.4.

32
rebelling against this bad, bad world on the basis of which people will join the
authors in making the insurrection. But this proclamation of immediacy disguises
a theory which has already done the mediating, which has pre-constructed the
evident; a theory whose founding commitments are to the we that must do
something, and to its paternal they commitments which forestall any grasp of
the real situation. Theory which substitutes for itself the simple description of
what we must do fails at its own task, since in renouncing its real standpoint as
theory it gives up the prospect of actually understanding not only what is to be
overcome, but also what this overcoming must involve.
Communist theory sets out not from the false position of some voluntarist
subject, but from the posited supersession of the totality of forms which are
implicated in the reproduction of this subject. As merely posited, this
supersession is necessarily abstract, but it is only through this basic abstraction
that theory takes as its content the determinate forms which are to be
superseded; forms which stand out in their determinacy precisely because their
dissolution has been posited. This positing is not only a matter of methodology, or
some kind of necessary postulate of reason, for the supersession of the capitalist
class relation is not a mere theoretical construct. Rather, it runs ahead of thought,
being posited incessantly by this relation itself; it is its very horizon as an
antagonism, the real negative presence which it bears. Communist theory is
produced by and necessarily thinks within this antagonistic relation; it is
thought of the class relation, and it grasps itself as such. It attempts to
conceptually reconstruct the totality which is its ground, in the light of the already-
posited supersession of this totality, and to draw out the supersession as it
presents itself here. Since it is a relation which has no ideal homeostatic state,
but one which is always beyond itself, with capital facing the problem of labor at
every turn even in its victories the adequate thought of this relation is not of
some equilibrium state, or some smoothly self-positing totality; it is of a
fundamentally impossible relation, something that is only insofar as it is ceasing
to be; an internally unstable, antagonistic relation. Communist theory thus has no
need of an external, Archimedean point from which to take the measure of its
object, and communisation has no need of a transcendent standpoint of
withdrawal or secession from which to launch its attack.
Communist theory does not present an alternative answer to the question of
what shall we do?, for the abolition of the capitalist class relation is not
something on which one can decide. Of course, this question necessarily
sometimes faces the concrete individuals and groups who make up the classes
of this relation; it would be absurd to claim that it was in itself somehow wrong to
pose such a question the theory of communisation as the direct abolition of

33
the capitalist class relation could never invalidate such moments. Individuals and
groups move within the dynamics of the class relation and its struggles,
intentionally oriented to the world as it presents itself. But sometimes they find
themselves in a moment where the fluidity of this movement has broken down,
and they have to reflect, to decide upon how best to continue. Tactical thought
then obtrudes with its distinctive separations, the symptom of a momentary
interruption in the immediate experience of the dynamic. When this emergent
tactical thought turns out not to have resolved itself into the overcoming of the
problem, and the continuation of involvement in overt struggles presents itself for
the time being as an insurmountable problem, this individual or group is thrust
into the contemplative standpoint of having a purely external relation to its object,
even as it struggles to re-establish a practical link with this object.
In Call and The Coming Insurrection this basic dilemma assumes a theoretical
form. Lapsing back from the highs of a wave of struggles, the tactical question is
posed; then as this wave ebbs ever-further and with it the context which
prompted the initial question theory indicates a completely contemplative
standpoint, even as it gesticulates wildly towards action. Its object becomes
absolutely external and transcendent while its subject is reduced to fragile, thinly-
veiled self-affirmations, and the what we must do that it presents becomes
reduced to a trivial list of survival skills straight out of Ray Mears. In the moment
in which Tiqqun was born, as the structures of the old workers movement lay
behind it and the eld of action became an indeterminate globalization the
horizon of a triumphant liberal capitalism class belonging appeared as some-
thing which had been already cast aside, a mere shed skin, and capital too
became correspondingly difficult to identify as the other pole of an inherently
antagonistic relation. Here lies the historically-specific content represented by
these texts: the indeterminacy of the object of antagonism, the voluntaristic
relation to the totality constructed around this antagonism, the indifference to the
problem of class and its overcoming. The desert in which Tiqqun built its
sandcastles was the arid, featureless horizon of a financialized, fin-de-sicle
capitalism. Setting out in this desert, unable to grasp it as a passing moment in
the dynamic of the class relation, Tiqqun could never have anticipated the
present crisis, and the struggles that have come with it.
The what shall we do? posed by the end of the wave of struggles which had
the anti-globalization movement at its center is now passed; there is little need in
the present moment to cast around for practical tips for the re-establishment of
some insurrectionary practice, or theoretical justifications for a retreat into
radical milieus. It is a cruel historical irony that the French state should find in
this standpoint defined precisely by its helplessness in the face of its object, its

34
fundamental reference to a moment that has passed the threat of terrorism
and an ultra-left worth crushing even further. And that, while it busies itself with
the defiant, melancholy outpourings of a stranded insurrectionism, pushing its
unhappy protagonists through a high-profile terrorist scandal, tectonic
movements are occurring within the global capitalist class relation far more
significant, and far more threatening for capitalist society.
The global working class is at present under a very overt attack as the
functionaries of capital attempt to stabilise a world system constantly on the brink
of disaster, and it has not had any need of insurrectionary pep-talk to get started
in its response. The Tiqqunist jargon of authenticity accompanied the outbreak of
student occupations in California, but these were of course not the struggles of
an insurrectionary communisation waged voluntaristically in the desert, against
some undefined they. These struggles were a specific conjunctural response to
the form that the current crisis had taken as it hit the Californian state, and the
higher education system in particular. This was a situation which demanded
resistance, yet without there being any sense that reformist demands would be at
all meaningful hence the no demands rhetoric of the first wave of these
struggles. At the same time, communisation of course did not present itself as a
direct possibility, and nor was any other ostensibly revolutionary dynamic
immediately on the cards. Caught between the necessity of action, the
impossibility of reformism, and the lack of any revolutionary horizon whatsoever,
these struggles took the form of a transient generalization of occupations and
actions for which there could be no clear notion of what it would mean to win. It
was the demandless, temporary taking of spaces in these struggles that came to
be identified with communisation. Yet, given the absence of any immediate
possibility of actual communisation here, the language of yesteryear TAZ,
autonomy etc. would have been more appropriate in characterizing such
actions. While such language was, ten years ago, that of the radical wing of
movements, in California this flowering of autonomous spaces was the form of
the movement itself. Perversely, it was the very anachronism of the Tiqqunist
problematic here that enabled it to resonate with a movement that took this form.
If Tiqquns communisation is an insurrectionary reinvention of TAZ, autonomy
etc., formulated at the limit of the historical moment which produced these ideas,
in California it met a movement finally adequate to such ideas, but one that was
so only as a blocked yet at the same time necessary response to the crisis.
It is as a result of this blocked movement that communisation has come to be
barely differentiable from what people used to call autonomy; just one of the
latest terms (alongside human strike, imaginary party etc) in the jargon of a
basically continuous Anglo-American sensibility. is sensibility always involved a

35
proclivity for abstract, voluntarist self- affirmation in Tiqqun it merely finds itself
reflected back at itself and it should thus be no surprise that here,
communisation is appropriately abstract, voluntarist, and self-affirming. This
arrival of communisation at the forefront of radical chic probably means little in
itself, but the major movement so far to find its voice in this language is more
interesting, for the impasse of this movement is not merely a particular lack of
programme or demands, but a symptom of the developing crisis in the class
relation. What is coming is not a Tiqqunist insurrection, even if Glenn Beck thinks
he spies one in the Arab uprisings. If communisation is presenting itself currently,
it is in the palpable sense of an impasse in the dynamic of the class relation; this
is an era in which the end of this relation looms perceptibly on the horizon, while
capital runs into crisis at every turn and the working class is forced to wage a
struggle for which there is no plausible victory.

36
 CRISIS IN THE
CL ASS REL ATION
Endnotes 2 2010

YES! THERE WILL BE GROWTH IN THE SPRING!

The history of capitalist society is the history of the reproduction of the capitalist
class relation. It is that of the reproduction of capital as capital, and its
necessary concomitant of the working class as working class. If we assume
the reproduction of this relation is not inevitable, what is the possibility of its non-
reproduction?
For a brief moment the recent crisis perhaps seemed to present us with a
glimpse of such non-reproduction: the phenomenon of bank runs returned to the
capitalist core, a wave of fuel and food price riots swept numerous countries,
stock markets slid and corporations filed for bankruptcy, the Icelandic economy
collapsed, the world as a whole entered a crisis widely announced as the worst
since the Great Depression, Greece was lit up with insurrection, and forms of
class struggle that have not been seen for decades reappeared in the UK. For a
few months empty words were thrown around about a return of Marx and
mainstream economists became catastrophists, before talk of green shoots
returned and the usual idea began to set in that this crisis was, at most, a
particularly severe glitch in the normal functioning of the capitalist economy,
caused by some arbitrary, non-systemic factor. In such a situation, rather than a
posing of the possible non-reproduction of the capitalist class relation, it is
perhaps more plausible to interpret crisis as an aspect of the self-regulation of
the capitalist world economy; at most a particularly extreme shake-out of some
excesses or irrationalities in an otherwise healthy, fully functional system.
But there is no healthy equilibrium state, no normal, fully functional condition
at the core of capitalist society. Crisis is the modus vivendi of the capitalist class
relation, the life-process of this contradiction. Insofar as the accumulation of
capital is always a fraught, problematic process; insofar as, even in its victories
over the proletariat, capital still approaches impasses of over-accumulation;
insofar as the dance of the capitalist class relation cannot take place without both
of its reluctant partners, crisis is always here. In the capitalist mode of production
labour is the source of value, yet with the progress of accumulation necessary

37
labour is a tendentially diminishing magnitude. Crisis is always with us because,
for capital, labour is a problem.
Yet crisis is also a discrete event. The spectacular catastrophism that reigned
in global stock markets around the fall of Lehman Brothers, the waves of
mortgage foreclosures sweeping the US, the looming bankruptcy of entire states,
the vast bailouts and forecasts of depression, the hailing of an end of the
neoliberal era and the appearance no matter how illusory of ideas of a
return to Keynes: all of these are the very real signs of a particular crisis in the
capitalist class relation. The particular crisis betrays the general contradiction of
this relation, as if suddenly the lid had been blown off of the machine, and all the
crunching gears exposed. Like all crises, this represents the deeper shifting
structure of the class relation: where an aspect of the reproduction of the relation
runs up against its limits, a moment of systemic openness and a fleeting glimpse
of the possibility of rupture appears. Then, where one gear had slipped from the
flywheel, through some chaotic mechanics another re-engages at a now-altered
momentum. The contradictory reproduction of the capitalist class relation
continues for now, with some modifications; Chance the gardeners green
shoots announce the end of winter, and crisis is naturalised once again not as
chronic or permanent condition, but as the eternal recurrence of a natural cycle.
What is the character of the reproduction of the class relation now, and how is
it transforming itself? What intimations can we find in this of the possibility of its
non-reproduction? What that is to say is the possibility now of a complete
rupture with this self-reproduction? These are the questions to which a
revolutionary theory must address itself. It is in the changing modalities of this
reproduction that we can grasp the real history of capitalist society as something
more than a contingent assemblage of facts, narratives or concepts, strategic
victories, defeats or recuperations, because it is in its self-reproduction that the
capitalist class relation constructs itself as a totality. For the same reason, it is in
these modalities that we must look for the possibilities of an immanent
destruction of that totality.

THE REPRODUCTION OF THE RELATION

[T]he result of the capitalist process of production is not just commodities
and surplus value; it is the reproduction of this relation itself [...] Capital
and wage labour only express two factors of the same relation. 1
If there is a defining characteristic of capital which singles it out from a mere sum
of money, or some unspecified mass of materials with which one might make

1 Marx, 6163 Manuscripts (MECW 30) pp. 1135.

38
money, it is that it expands: it is money which becomes more money, value that
self-valorises. In order to persist as capital, capital must perpetually increase its
quantity. In this sense, it has a clearly teleological character: it has a clear goal
its own expansion and it pursues this goal relentlessly. Since, on the
systemic level, such expansion clearly cannot be maintained through the mere
reallocation of value from one capital to another, in order for valorisation to take
place there must be some possibility of producing new value. This possibility is
labour-power.
Since workers do not necessarily need to spend the entirety of the working
day producing enough to be able to reproduce themselves as workers for the
next day, a surplus can exist between the amount of labour actually performed by
workers, and the social average of labour that is expended in producing the
goods with which these workers reproduce themselves. A distinction between
labour and labour-power thus arises, and it is reasonable to say that the entire
edifice of capitalist society is erected on the basis of this distinction.
Whilst of course workers must be compelled to work this surplus, this
compulsion is a systemic one. What, for the worker, is merely the number of
working hours necessary to earn the wage requisite for reproducing her life at a
given level, is for capital both an outlay in wages and the possibility of profit
beyond the mere value of these wages. Whilst the position of the worker with
regards to property means that her formal freedom is at the same time coupled
with systemic coercion, both parties in this arrangement remain consenting
bourgeois subjects, freely taking themselves to market. This meeting on the
labour-market between capital and labour has of course certain inherent
frictions, and like all good traders, both parties will always be looking for ways to
obtain more for less. Workers drag themselves reluctantly to work, steal back as
much time as possible, and sometimes strike for higher wages, whilst capital
imposes the working day as rigorously as possible and will always be searching
to expand the surplus portion of the labour that takes place in its production
process.
This day-to-day meeting of capital and labour is not merely a contingent fact.
If it were, then the persistence over time of capitalist society would be nothing
short of miraculous. It is not a fact because it is a process in which we are all
ceaselessly involved, and it is not contingent because in its repetition we
can trace a certain systematicity to the way in which this meeting comes about.2

2By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency
becomes a real and ratified existence. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (The Colonial
Press 1900), p.313.

39
Workers do not merely happen to meet capital on the labour market with only
their labour-power to sell, and capital does not merely happen to confront these
workers as amassed means of production, possessed as private property.
Rather, workers as sellers of labour-power and capital as amassed means of
production are both produced as such by a determinate process. This process is
the process of production itself: as well as producing value and distinct use-
values, the production process at the same time is the process of production of
the capitalist class relation.
If we consider not the start of the production process but its result, the
successful capitalist has appropriated surplus-value from the workers, realised it
in exchange, and can now employ this value in the next cycle of the production
process; whereas the worker, being paid for her labour-power only, leaves the
production process only with a wage to cover the cost of her reproduction for the
next cycle of production. Both parties thus return, at the end of the process of
production, to the structural locations from which they entered it. The worker has
little choice but to sell her labour-power again, since she has not amassed
anything of her own in the course of the production process, and the capitalist is
impelled by the expansive logic of capital to employ her once more. Once the
capitalist process of production has begun, its continuity is at least in this
sense automatic. There is a necessity to the continuing reproduction of the
capitalist class relation which follows from the character of the capitalist process
of production itself.3 Since the process of production is nothing but this class
relation in actu, we may say that the reproduction of the capitalist class relation
follows necessarily from the character of this relation itself.

THE TOTALITY
The self-founding of the capitalist class relation is also that of the totality of
capitalist social relations. With this process of self-reproduction, it is not only
workers and capital that are reproduced, but also the state and all its organs, the
family structure and the system of gender relations, the constitution of the
individual as a subject with a specific internality opposed to the world of
production and so on. It is only through the repetition of their reproduction
pivoting upon that of the capitalist class relation that these many moments
come to bear any systematicity, and thus to constitute a totality.

3 This is not the same as inevitability. That something is necessary does not tell us
whether it will occur or not. Though the self-reproduction of the capitalist class relation
has an automatic character and thus a certain necessity, this does not make this
continuing reproduction inevitable any more than the continuing operation of a
combustion engine is the inevitable result of its construction.

40
 It is a trivial truth that the social structures which constitute this totality cannot
persist without the founding of society in production. Taken in only its immediate
material aspect production presents itself as a quasi-natural basis for the
reproduction of society. Yet in the capitalist mode of production it is value not
the general production of human life through any human metabolism with
nature that is the direct object of production, and it is first and foremost not
society, but the capitalist class relation that is reproduced. Society as such
or the social formation is the appearance in the abstract of the totality of
relations that are reproduced through the self-reproduction of the capitalist class
relation. A theory which sets out from the self-reproduction of the social totality in
the abstract can only express the existence of this totality tautologically: the
persistence of the parts is functionally necessary for the persistence of the whole,
and the persistence of the whole is nothing but the persistence of these
functional parts. The Althusserian notion of structural causality takes this
tautology for a metaphysical principle a mistake inseparable from the
functionalist tendency within Althusserian Marxism.4
But an assertion of the contingency or open-endedness of class struggle, or a
Copernican turn to the working class as subject of such struggle, is not an
adequate alternative to a functionalism or naturalism of social reproduction. In its
systematic self-reproduction the class relation is specifically not a contingent
affair, and as the concomitant pole to capital in a relation of mutual reproduction,
the working class as such cannot be the focus of revolutionary theory. The
totality, of course, has many levels of concreteness, and is cut through with
complex and contingent factors that cannot all be adequately accounted for
through some simple liturgy of class relations. But as the locus of capitalist
production, as the point from which it sets out, and to which it always returns, as
the moment of the self-founding of the mode of production, the reproduction of
the capitalist class relation has a centrality for any theory of revolution.

THE HORIZON
[F]or any era, to be present means having horizons.
To pass is to lose those horizons.5

4 See, for example Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, et al., Reading Capital (New Left
Books 1970), p. 189: the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing
object, element or space in which the structure comes to imprint its mark: on the
contrary [] the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in
the Spinozist sense of the term, [] the structure, which is merely a specific
combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.
5 Jean Paul Sartre, War Diary, New Left Review 59 (2009).

41
To pose the question of revolution is to put at stake the continuing existence of
this capitalist class relation itself. Revolution cannot be the mere expropriation of
capital, the seizing of the means of production by or on behalf of the working
class. It must be the direct destruction of the self-reproducing relation in which
workers as workers and capital as self-valorising value are and come to be.
The revolution will be communist, or it will not be. We call the revolution thus
conceived communisation.
The immanent self-perpetuation of the capitalist class relation presents itself
as an eternalization: in its self-founding the class relation appears infinite, without
a beyond. Since this relation projects itself onto an infinite future, revolutionary
theory necessarily concerns itself with rupture, with an interruption in the very
temporality of the relation. But self-reproduction is not a simple tendency towards
equilibrium, or the dynamic preservation of an essentially static state. To posit the
self-reproduction of this relation is not to take a starting point which can only ever
demonstrate the functional closure of the system, and against which we must
assert the radical open-endedness of class struggle, or a vision of revolution as
radically exterior, messianic or transcendent. An organic metaphor is perhaps
more appropriate than a cybernetic or mechanical one: an organism is inherently
homeostatic, but it necessarily changes throughout its life span, it still must die,
and its tendency towards death cannot be understood as exterior to its very
living. Yet the capitalist class relation does not merely reproduce itself with a unity
of function that must, like all good things, one day come to an end. Rather, as a
class relation a relation of exploitation it is inherently antagonistic. Insofar
as each has a directionality to its assertion against the other, the logical
culmination of which would be final victory, both poles in the relation can project
themselves as its ultimate truth, its final victor. Both capital and the proletariat
can legitimately lay claim to being the essence at the heart of capitalist society,
but such claims will always be contradictory, since neither pole in this relation is
anything without the other.
Since each pole of this relation can claim contradictorily to be its truth, and
since it is a dynamic relation with a directionality at its heart ensuing from the
future-orientedness of capitals valorisation process, the class relation always
bears within it an immanent temporal horizon. It does not simply eternalize itself
as a monolithic, closed totality. Rather, as a relation of struggle it carries as its
own horizon a vision of the future as projected resolution to this antagonism. The
final victory of the working class, the permanent establishment of liberal
capitalism, looming barbarism, or ecological apocalypse: the class struggle
always has a singular horizon, and depending on the dynamic of the class
relation at any given moment, this horizon has a variant quality. Within this

42
horizon, a supersession appears which may be more or less contradictory. If the
overcoming of the capitalist class relation on the basis of the simple victory of
one or the other of its poles is impossible for each pole is nothing without the
other then, insofar as the affirmation of the working class as working class
was their content, the revolutions of the 20th Century can be said to have posed
an impossible overcoming of the capitalist class relation. In contrast, the
revolution as communisation appears only in the struggle which carries the direct
non-reproduction of the class relation in its immanent horizon.
It is only through its systematic reproduction that this relation presents itself as
a unity rather than as an ad hoc arrangement, and if by history we understand
more than the impossible description of a formless flux it is only as such a
unity that it is capable of having a history. Just as the basis of the accumulation
of capital is internal to the capitalist class relation, so on the social level are
its effects. Falling profitability directly affects the ability not just of capital to
reproduce itself, but also of the working class. Incessant technical reorganisation
of the labour process brings radically varied patterns of experience to the lives of
workers. Reorganisation of gender roles away from the single wage family
through the increasing employment of women brings a different shape to the
family and the experience of personal life outside of the production process.
The expansion of the credit system enables capital to move globally with an
increasing fluidity that alters the roles of states in the world system, and
undermines national-level bargaining on the part of the working class. The
tendency of labour-saving innovations to expel workers from the production
process and generate a surplus population, where this population is able
potentially to join the labour market, puts a downward pressure on wages and job
security, and where it cannot join the labour market, vast slums are thrown up to
house a human surplus whose reproduction is increasingly precarious and
contingent. All of these tendencies are immanent to the capitalist class relation.
The history of the development of the capitalist mode of production is that of the
unfolding, within the capitalist class relation, of these tendencies, and thus the
internal alteration of the quality of this relation itself.
The horizon of supersession which the class relation carries within it has a
variant quality: its character at any given moment is inextricable from the
historical modification of the class relation. What is invariant is that there is such
a horizon at all. The changing character of this horizon is the primary basis and
object for revolutionary theory. In posing the question of the revolutionary
overcoming of the capitalist class relation, we traverse the theoretical terrain of
this horizon as it presents itself now, to us. This is a stratified terrain with its own
geology of sediments, irruptions, and fault lines. We trace the line of this horizon

43
as it exists approaching as close as possible to the conceptualisation of our
exit from this landscape and as it once was, differentiating the landscape
which faces us from those of the past. Communist theory is the theory of the
immanent horizon of the class struggle. In tracing this horizon, and in
conceptualising its passing-over, we render the class struggle in its historicity a
determinate object of theory and take it up in its finitude. In putting the class
relation itself at stake through positing its ultimate supersession we can view this
relation for what it is. We can grasp its truth not through the projection of a
spurious neutrality, but through the opposite: through assuming the partisan
standpoint of its overcoming, an overcoming that exists not merely in theory but
in the immanent dynamic of the class relation itself.

TENDENCIES OF THE CLASS RELATION

the rate of profit
To the degree that labour time the mere quantity of labour is posited by
capital as the sole determinant [of value], to that degree does direct labour and
its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production of the creation
of use values and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and
qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment [] Capital
thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production. 6
If the capitalist class relation is a contradictory one in which reproduction is
never a simple matter of the preservation of a stable state, this is because as
we indicated above labour is a problem for capital. As the sole source of
surplus value, surplus labour is always something which capital requires more of
in its constant drive to accumulate. In increasing the productivity of labour, capital
benefits by increasing the ratio of surplus to necessary labour, yet at the same
time it thereby diminishes the role of labour as the determinant principle of
production. This ultimately means that fewer workers are required to produce the
same mass of commodities, and with this reduction comes a reduction in the
possibilities for valorisation. From this simple contradiction we can derive some
of the fundamental tendencies within the reproduction of this relation, and it is in
this simple contradiction that we can see how capital works towards its own
dissolution.
The fabled law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit expresses aspects of
this simple contradiction. In its canonical formulation this law derives from the
fact that in its competitive battle against other capitals, any capital will tend over
time to increase the productivity of its workers through technical developments in

6 Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 29), pp. 856 (Nicolaus translation).

44
the production process: its technical composition will tend to rise. With
productivity increases it takes less labour-time to produce the same commodity,
and the individual capital thus gains an advantage over other capitals, but in time
these same productivity gains become generalised, wiping out the initial gain,
and leading to a lower value of the commodity, since its production now requires
less socially necessary labour-time. Thus even at this abstract level we can
locate a first appearance of this simple contradiction, for the drive to accumulate
surplus value through the production of commodities a surplus which is
constituted from surplus labour leads to a reduction in the labour-time, and
thus the scope for surplus labour, involved in the production of the very same
commodities.
This is, however, by itself not a loss for capital, since in increasing the
productivity of labour it also lowers the cost of labour by cheapening the goods
which workers consume. Wages can thus be relatively decreased, and the part of
the working day spent producing surplus value for capital can be extended. If
however we assume that, over time, such rising technical composition will lead,
at the level of total social capital, to a rising value composition a rising ratio of
capital devoted to means of production (constant capital) in relation to that
devoted to wages (variable capital)7 this means that a capital of which a
growing proportion is devoted to means of production must valorise itself on the
basis of a diminishing proportion of variable capital. Since the working day
cannot be extended indefinitely (the day has only 24 hours, and the worker must
spend some of these reproducing herself as a worker), and the part of the
working day devoted to necessary labour can only be reduced towards zero, the
amount of surplus value which capital can extract from an individual worker has
definite limits. Thus eventually capital will be unable to extract enough surplus
value to continue accumulation at the same scale. If the direct reduction
through productivity increases in the labour-time necessary for the production
of a given commodity represented a first appearance of the problem of labour for
capital, we see here a further appearance of the same contradiction at a more
concrete level.
All of this follows quite simply from a rising value composition of capital. For
the sake of this argument, rising value composition is something assumed to
follow from a rising technical composition. However, various factors complicate
the relation between the technical and value composition, and allay the tendency
for the rate of profit to fall as a result of the direct effect of the former on the latter.
In particular, it must be noted that the same rising productivity of labour which

7 A relation which Marx terms organic composition.

45
would otherwise directly increase the ratio of constant to variable capital, at the
same time decreases the value of means of production, thereby at least
mitigating any tendency towards such an increase. Thus it is by no means self-
evident that such a tendency will manifest itself in the actual unfolding of
capitalist accumulation. However, if the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit
to fall helps to highlight the extent to which labour is a problem for capital, Marxs
theory of the general law of accumulation and of the constant generation of
surplus populations, is both more revealing and more historically palpable in this
respect.8

TENDENCIES OF THE CLASS RELATION

surplus population
The relative decline of necessary labour appears as a relative increase of
superfluous labour capacities i.e. as the positing of surplus population.9
It is self-evident that capitalist production tends to massively increase the
productivity of labour. We do not need to concern ourselves with the relation
between the technical and value compositions of capital to establish this. This
means quite simply that, over time, fewer workers are required to produce the
same quantity of use values. There is thus a tendency within capitalist
accumulation to reduce the contribution of direct labour. If this tendency is not
cancelled by any opposing tendency, and is left to play itself out historically, this
will mean that more and more workers will be rendered superfluous to the
production process. Viewed in terms of population, capital thus tends to produce
a proletarian population that is surplus to the requirements of production: a
surplus population. This is another mode of appearance of the basic problem of
labour for capital.
This tendency is not an absolute one, and as in the case of the falling rate of
profit there are countervailing factors. Capital may find new use values in the
production of which workers can be employed, and with an increasing scale of
production in any given line, productivity increases need not translate directly into
an absolute decline in productive employment. Though of course environmental
destruction presents itself as a very real problem of capitalist accumulation, the
quantity of use values that can be consumed does not have clearly defined limits.
It might thus reasonably be argued that, even if capital tends over time to reduce
the number of workers required to produce any given quantity of use values, it

8 For an in-depth account of this tendency see the article Misery and Debt, p. 50.
9 Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 29), p. 528 (translation modified).

46
can prevent this tendency from becoming a chronic problem by moving into the
production of different use values and, concomitantly, developing new needs
for such use values or expanding production of existing goods.
Of course, a number of factors complicate this. A given population can only
consume so much of a particular type of commodity, and the productivity of
labour is not simply a blank slate in the production of any new use value.
Productivity-enhancing techniques will very often be generalised across different
lines of production, meaning that production in new lines often quickly takes on
the productivity gains developed elsewhere, as well as bringing about further
advances which may themselves be generalised. The ability of total social capital
to overcome its own tendency to reduce the number of productively employed
workers is thus dependent upon its ability to keep pace with a growing rate of
social productivity gains.
Historically, this has not occurred. At the global level, the number of wage-
labourers productively employed in first agriculture, and now in manufacturing
too, have declined relative to world population. This is the real meaning of the
deindustrialisation that has taken place in the last 30 years. Though it is of
course easy to demonstrate that plenty of industrial production still takes place,
and that this is not only in important exporter nations such as China, the share of
workers actually employed in manufacture has now been declining for almost two
decades at the global level.10 As we explain in the article which follows, the result
has been a rise in low wage (and formally subsumed) service work, and vast
slums in what used to be known as the third world.
If the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production takes place essentially
through the double reproduction of workers as workers, and of capital as capital,
each producing the other; if the two wheels of this double
moulinet meet at the point of production through the
mediation of the wage form; as capital tendentially renders
the proletarian population superfluous to production, the
integrity of the double moulinet is undermined.11

10 Table 4: Employment in Manufacturing in Sukti Dasgupta and

Ajit Singh Will Services be the New Engine of Indian Economic
Growth? Development and Change 36(6) (2005) p. 1041
11The term double moulinet is the French translation of Marxs
Zwickmhle, a term which carries both the meaning of double
bind and, in its context in chapter 23 of Capital, of the grinding
of two mill-stones representing the reproduction cycles of capital
and labour-power:

47
Increasingly it is no longer a reciprocal and cyclical relation in which the
proletariat reproduces capital, and capital reproduces the proletariat. Rather, the
proletariat increasingly becomes that which is produced by capital without
producing capital. As the population that is simply superfluous to capitalist
production, yet one which has no autonomous mode of reproduction, the surplus
population is reproduced as a side-effect of capitalist production. Since its self-
reproduction is not mediated through the exchange with capital of productive
labour for the wage, it does not close the circuit with capital, and its existence
thus appears as contingent or inessential relative to that of capital.12 Such a
consolidated surplus population represents the tendential disintegration of the
double moulinet of capitalist reproduction.
The very concept of the free labourer already implies that he is a pauper: a virtual
pauper. [] If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, he cannot perform
his necessary labour; nor produce his means of subsistence. He cannot, in this
case, obtain them by means of exchange. If he does obtain them, it can only be
because alms accrue to him from the revenue.13
For Marx, to the extent that she has only her own labour-power to sell, and is not
even guaranteed of being able to do this, the worker is a virtual pauper. For the
consolidated surplus population whose reproduction has ceased to be mediated
by the exchange of productive labour for the wage, this pauperisation has
become actual. The labour-power that the class of virtual paupers must sell is
itself, in the long run, that which reduces it to a class of actual paupers. The
proletarianisation of the worlds population thus does not take the simple form of
the conversion of all people into productive workers, for even if they become
productive for capital, these same workers ultimately produce their own
superfluity to the process of production.
As that part of the global population diminishes whose reproduction is
mediated through the exchange of productive labour for the wage, the wage form
as the key mediation in social reproduction may appear increasingly tenuous.
With these shifting conditions, the horizon of the class relation, and the struggles

12 Labour capacity can only perform its necessary labour if its surplus labour has value
for capital, if it can be valorised by capital. If there are obstacles of one kind or another
to its being valorised, labour capacity itself [] appears to fall outside the conditions of
the reproduction of its existence; it exists without the conditions of its existence, and is
thus a mere encumbrance; it has needs and lacks the means of satisfying them. Marx,
Grundrisse (MECW 28), p. 528.
13 Ibid., p. 5223. Marx continues: Only in the mode of production based
on capital does pauperism appear as the result of labour itself, the result
of the development of the productive power of labour. Ibid.

48
in which this horizon presents itself, must inevitably change. In this context, the
old projects of a programmatic workers movement become obsolete: their world
was one of an expanding industrial workforce in which the wage appeared as the
fundamental link in the chain of social reproduction, at the centre of the double
moulinet where capital and proletariat meet, and in which a certain mutuality of
wage demands an if you want this of me, I demand this of you could
dominate the horizon of class struggle. But with the growth of surplus
populations, this very mutuality is put into question, and the wage form is thereby
decentred as a locus of contestation. Tendentially, the proletariat does not
confront capital at the centre of the double moulinet, but relates to it as an
increasingly external force, whilst capital runs into its own problems of
valorisation.
In such conditions the simple self-management of production by the
proletariat no longer presents itself on the horizon of the class relation. As
production occupies a diminishing proportion of the proletarian population a
proportion which is itself rendered increasingly precarious as it potentially
competes on the labour market with a growing mass of surplus workers and
as this disintegration of the reproductive circuits of capital and proletariat gathers
pace, the horizon of the overcoming of this relation perhaps appears apocalyptic:
capital gradually deserts a world in crisis, bequeathing it to its superfluous
offspring. But the crisis of the reproduction of the capitalist class relation is not
something that will simply happen to the proletariat. With its own reproduction at
stake, the proletariat cannot but struggle, and it is this reproduction itself that
becomes the content of its struggles. As the wage form loses its centrality in
mediating social reproduction, capitalist production itself appears increasingly
superfluous to the proletariat: it is that which makes us proletarians, and then
abandons us here. In such circumstances the horizon appears as one of
communisation; of directly taking measures to halt the movement of the value
form and reproduce ourselves without capital.

49
 MISERY AND DEBT
ON THE LOGIC AND HISTORY OF
SURPLUS POPUL ATIONS AND SURPLUS C APITAL
Endnotes 2 2010
We tend to interpret the present crisis through the cyclical theories of an older
generation. While mainstream economists root around for the green shoots of
recovery, critical critics ask only if it might take a little longer to restore growth.
Its true that if we begin from theories of business cycles, or even long waves, its
easy to assume that booms follow busts like clockwork, that downturns always
prepare the way for resurgent upswings. But how likely is it that, if and when
this mess clears, we will see a new golden age of capitalism?1
We might begin by remembering that the miracle years of the previous golden
age (roughly 19501973) depended not only on a world war and an enormous
uptick in state spending, but also on an historically unprecedented transfer of
population from agriculture to industry. Agricultural populations proved to be a
potent weapon in the quest for modernisation, since they provided a source of
cheap labour for a new wave of industrialisation. In 1950, 23 percent of the
German workforce was employed in agriculture, in France 31, in Italy 44 and in
Japan 49 percent by 2000, all had agricultural populations of under 5 percent.2
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, capital dealt with mass unemployment,
when it occurred, by expelling urban proletarians back to the land, as well as by
exporting them to colonies. By eliminating the peasantry in the traditional core at
the same time as it came up against the limits of colonial expansion, capital
eliminated its own traditional mechanisms of recovery.
Meanwhile, the wave of industrialisation that absorbed those who had been
pushed out of agriculture came up against its own limits in the 1970s. Since then,
the major capitalist countries have seen an unprecedented decline in their levels
of industrial employment. Over the past three decades, manufacturing
employment fell 50 percent as a percentage of total employment in these
countries. Even newly industrialising countries like South Korea and Taiwan
saw their relative levels of industrial employment decline in the past two

1 This article was co-written by Endnotes and Aaron Benanav.

2FAOSTAT Statistical Database, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, fao.org/FAOSTAT (2009).

50
decades.3 At the same time the numbers of both low-paid service-workers and
slum-dwellers working in the informal sector have expanded as the only
remaining options for those who have become superfluous to the needs of
shrinking industries.
For Marx, the fundamental crisis tendency of the capitalist mode of production
was not limited in its scope to periodic downturns in economic activity. It revealed
itself most forcefully in a permanent crisis of working life. The differentia specifica
of capitalist economic crises that people starve in spite of good harvests, and
means of production lie idle in spite of a need for their products is merely one
moment of this larger crisis the constant reproduction of a scarcity of jobs in
the midst of an abundance of goods. It is the dynamic of this crisis the crisis of
the reproduction of the capital-labour relation which this article explores.4

SIMPLE AND EXPANDED REPRODUCTION

Despite the complexity of its results, capital has only one essential precondition:
people must lack direct access to the goods they deem necessary for life, finding
that access instead only through the mediation of the market. Hence the very
term proletariat, referring originally to landless citizens living in Roman cities.
Lacking work, they were pacified first by state provision of bread and circuses,
and ultimately by employment as mercenaries. However, the proletarian
condition is historically uncommon: the global peasantry have, throughout history,
mostly had direct access to land as self-sufficient farmers or herders, even if they
were almost always coerced into giving a portion of their product to ruling elites.
Thus the need for primitive accumulation: separating people from land, their
most basic means of reproduction, and generating an all-round dependence on
commodity exchange.5 In Europe, this process was completed in the 50s and

3Robert Rowthorn and Ken Coutts, Deindustrialisation and the Balance of Payments in
Advanced Economies (United Nation Conference on Trade and Development,
Discussion paper no. 170, May 2004), p. 2.
4 By noting the tendency of capital to generate a scarcity of jobs amidst an abundance
of good (which are thereby made artificially scarce in relation to effective demand) we
are not lending sustenance to demands for more jobs. As we will show, such demands
will be futile for as long as selling ones labour remains the primary way of acquiring the
means of life.
5 This need not always occur through the violent means described by Marx. In the 20th
century many peasants lost direct access to land not by expropriation but rather through
an excessive subdivision of their holdings as land was passed from generation to
generation. Becoming thus increasingly market dependent, small farmers found
themselves at a disadvantage to large farmers and eventually lost their land.

51
60s. On a global scale it is only now with the exceptions of sub-Saharan
Africa, parts of South Asia, and China beginning to approach completion.
The initial separation of people from the land, once achieved, is never
enough. It has to be perpetually repeated in order for capital and free labour to
meet in the market time after time. On the one hand, capital requires, already
present in the labour market, a mass of people lacking direct access to means of
production, looking to exchange work for wages. On the other hand, it requires,
already present in the commodity market, a mass of people who have already
acquired wages, looking to exchange their money for goods. Absent those two
conditions, capital is limited in its ability to accumulate: it can neither produce nor
sell on a mass scale. Outside of the US and UK before 1950, the scope for mass
production was limited precisely because of the limitation of the size of the
market, that is, because of the existence of a large, somewhat self-sufficient
peasantry not living primarily by the wage. The story of the post-war period is that
of the tendential abolition of the remaining global peasantry, first as self-
sufficient, and second as peasants at all, owning the land on which they work.
Marx explains this structural feature of capitalism in his chapter on simple
reproduction in volume one. We will interpret this concept as the reproduction, in
and through cycles of production-consumption, of the relationship between
capital and workers.6 Simple reproduction is maintained not out of habit, nor by
the false or inadequate consciousness of workers, but by a material compulsion.
This is the exploitation of wage-workers, the fact that all together, they can
purchase only a portion of the goods they produce:
[Capital prevents its] self-conscious instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it
removes their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole
of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their
maintenance and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation
of the necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in the
labour-market.7

6 Marx sometimes refers to simple reproduction as an abstract thought experiment

capitalism without growth but to leave it at that is to miss what the concept tells us
about the inner mechanism of the process of accumulation. The chapter on simple
reproduction concludes: Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a
continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only
commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist
relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer. Marx, Capital,
vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573.
7 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573.

52
The accumulation of capital is not a matter, then, of the organisation of either the
sphere of production or the sphere of consumption. Over-emphasis on either
production or consumption tends to generate partial theories of capitalist crises:
over-production or under-consumption. Wage-labour structures the
reproduction process as a whole: the wage allocates workers to production and,
at the same time, allocates the product to workers. This is an invariant of capital,
independent of geographic or historical specificities. The breakdown of
reproduction creates a crisis of both over-production and under-consumption,
since under capital they are the same.
However, we cannot move so directly from an unfolding of the structure of
simple reproduction to a theory of crisis. For simple reproduction is, of its very
nature, also expanded reproduction. Just as labour must return to the labour
market to replenish its fund of wages, so too capital must return to the capital
market to reinvest its profits in an expansion of production. All capital must
accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive
price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-
sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by
reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super
profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead
to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an
equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of
higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on
new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual
movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors
establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits,
irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves.
Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-
establish accumulation short of the slaughtering of capital values and the
setting free of labour which re-establish the conditions of profitability.
Yet this formalistic conception of the valorisation process fails to capture the
historical dynamic to which Marxs analysis is attuned. The law of profitability
alone cannot ensure expanded reproduction, for this also requires the
emergence of new industries and new markets. Rises and falls in profitability act
as signals to the capitalist class that innovations have occurred in specific
industries, but what is important is that over time the composition of output
and therefore employment changes: industries that once accounted for a large
portion of output and employment now grow more slowly, while new industries

53
take a rising share of both. Here, we have to look at the determinants of demand,
as independent from the determinants of supply.8
Demand varies with the price of a given product. When the price is high, the
product is purchased only by the wealthy. As labour-saving process innovations
accumulate, prices fall, transforming the product into a mass-consumption good.
At the cusp of this transformation, innovations cause the market for a given
product to expand enormously. This expansion stretches beyond the capacity of
existing firms, and prices fall more slowly than costs, leading to a period of high
profitability. Capital then rushes into the line, pulling labour with it. At a certain
point, however, the limits of the market are reached; that is, the market is
saturated.9 Now innovations cause total capacity to rise beyond the size of the
market: prices fall more quickly than costs, leading to a period of falling
profitability. Capital will leave the line, expelling labour.10
This process, which economists have called the maturation of industries,
has occurred many times. The agricultural revolution, which first broke out in
early modern England, eventually hit the limits of the domestic market for its
products. Labour-process innovations such as the consolidation of fragmented
land holdings, the abolition of the fallow, and the differentiation of land use
according to natural advantages meant under capitalist conditions of
reproduction that both labour and capital were systematically pushed out of
the countryside. England rapidly urbanised as a result, and London became the
largest city in Europe.
It is here that the key dynamic of expanded reproduction comes into play. For
the workers thrown out of agriculture were not left to languish indefinitely in the
cities. They were eventually taken up in the manufacturing sector of an
industrialising Britain, and especially in the growing textile industry, which was
transitioning from wool to cotton cloth. But once again, labour-process

8 Marxists have tended to avoid issues of demand because of a supposed neoclassical

monopoly on the discourse, but Marx had no such reticence. The compulsion to expand
markets and fight over market share is fundamental to the workings of the law of value.
e.g. Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.434.
9Saturation is a matter, not of the absolute amount of a product bought and sold, but of
a changed relationship between the rates of growth of capacity and of demand.
10 This process applies only to consumer-goods industries. Capital-goods industries,
tend to expand and contract in accordance with the needs of the particular consumer-
goods which lead each cycle. But the relationship between the two departments is
never so simple. As we will show, labour-saving process-innovations in dept. 1 may
lead to product innovations in dept. 2, expanding the market as a whole.

54
innovations such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and the power loom
meant that eventually this industry, too, began to throw off labour and capital. And
the decline in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution, as a percentage of
total labour employed and capital accumulated, made way for those of the
second Industrial Revolution (chemicals, telecommunications, electric and
engine-powered commodities). It is this movement of labour and capital into and
out of lines, based on differential rates of profit, that ensures the continued
possibility of expanded reproduction:
[E]xpansion is impossible without disposable human material, without an
increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the
absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process
that constantly sets free a part of the working class; by methods which lessen
the number of workers employed in proportion to the increase in production.
Modern industrys whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant
transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-
employed hands.11
Expanded reproduction is, in this way, the continual reproduction of the
conditions of simple reproduction. Capitals that can no longer reinvest in a given
line due to falling profitability will tend to find, available to them on the labour
market, workers who have been thrown out of other lines. These free quantities
of capital and labour will then find employment in expanding markets, where
rates of profit are higher, or come together in entirely new product lines,
manufacturing products for markets that do not yet exist. An increasing number
of activities are thus subsumed as capitalist valorisation processes, and
commodities spread from luxury into mass markets.
The bourgeois economist Joseph Schumpeter described this process in his
theory of the business cycle.12 He noted that the contraction of older lines rarely
happens smoothly or peacefully, that it is usually associated with factory closures
and bankruptcies as capitals attempt to deflect losses onto one another in
competitive price wars. When several lines contract simultaneously (and they
usually do, since they are based on linked sets of technological innovations), a
recession ensues. Schumpeter calls this shedding of capital and labour creative
destructioncreative not only in the sense that it is stimulated by innovation,
but also because destruction creates the conditions for new investment and
innovation: in a crisis, capitals find means of production and labour-power

11 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 627 (Fowkes translation).

12Joseph Schumpeter. Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical
Analysis of the Capitalist Process (Martino Pub, 2005).

55
available to them on the market at discount prices. Thus, like a forest fire, the
recession clears the way for a new bout of growth.
Many Marxists have espoused something similar to Schumpeters conception
of cyclical growth, to which they merely add the resistance of workers (or
perhaps the limits of ecology) as an external constraint. Hence the Marxist notion
of crisis as a self-regulating mechanism is complemented by a conviction that
crises provide opportunities to assert the power of labour (or correct the
ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism). In these moments, another
world is possible. Yet Marxs theory of capitalism contains no such distinction
between internal dynamics and external limits. For Marx it is in and through
this process of expanded reproduction that the dynamic of capital manifests itself
as its own limit, not through cycles of boom and bust but in a secular
deterioration of its own conditions of accumulation.

THE CRISIS OF REPRODUCTION

People usually look for a theory of secular decline in Marxs notes on the
tendential fall in the rate of profit, which Engels edited and compiled as chapters
13 to 15 of volume three of Capital. There, the tendency of the profit rate to
equalise across lines combined with the tendency of productivity to rise in all
lines is held to result in an economy-wide, tendential decline in profitability.
Decades of debate have centred on the rising organic composition of capital, to
which this tendency is attributed, as well as on the complex interplay of the
various tendencies and counter-tendencies involved. Yet those engaged in this
debate often neglect that the same account of the composition of capital
underlies another law, expressing itself in both cyclical and secular crisis
tendencies, one that may be read as Marxs more considered re-formulation of
this account chapter 25 of Capital volume one: The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation.13
This chapter, which follows immediately after the three chapters on simple
and expanded reproduction, is typically read as having more limited ends.
Readers focus on the first part of Marxs argument only, where he provides an
account of the endogenous determination of the wage rate. There Marx shows
how, through the structural maintenance of a certain level of unemployment,

13 Though earlier in the series, the published version of volume one written in 1866
67 actually postdates volume three, most of the material for which was written in
18635. It thus seems plausible to account for the striking parallels between chapter 25
of volume one and chapter 15 of volume three on the supposition that Marx introduced
key elements of the volume three material into the published version of volume one in
anticipation of the difficulty of finishing volume three in a reasonable time.

56
wages are kept in line with the needs of accumulation. The industrial reserve
army of the unemployed contracts as the demand for labour rises, causing
wages to rise in turn. Rising wages then eat into profitability, causing
accumulation to slow down. As the demand for labour falls, the reserve army
grows once again, and the previous wage gains evaporate. If this was the sole
argument of the chapter, then the general law would consist of nothing more
than a footnote to the theories of simple and expanded reproduction. But Marx is
just beginning to unfold his argument. If the unemployed tend to be reabsorbed
into the circuits of capitalism as an industrial reserve army still unemployed,
but essential to the regulation of the labour market they then equally tend to
outgrow this function, reasserting themselves as absolutely redundant:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its
growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and
the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same
causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-
power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus
increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army,
the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in
inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The
more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial
reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of
capitalist accumulation.14
In other words, the general law of capital accumulation is that concomitant
with its growth capital produces a relatively redundant population out of the
mass of workers, which then tends to become a consolidated surplus population,
absolutely redundant to the needs of capital.15
It is not immediately obvious how Marx reaches this conclusion, even if the
tendency Marx describes seems increasingly evident in an era of jobless
recoveries, slum-cities and generalised precarity. Marx makes his argument
clearer in the French edition of volume one. There he notes that the higher the
organic composition of capital, the more rapidly must accumulation proceed to
maintain employment, but this more rapid progress itself becomes the source of
new technical changes which further reduce the relative demand for labour. This
is more than just a feature of specific highly concentrated industries. As

14 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 638.

15 This surplus population need not find itself completely outside capitalist social
relations. Capital may not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus
forced to offer themselves up for the most abject forms of wage slavery in the form of
petty-production and services.

57
accumulation proceeds, a growing superabundance of goods lowers the rate of
profit and heightens competition across lines, compelling all capitalists to
economise on labour. Productivity gains are thus concentrated under this great
pressure; they are incorporated in technical changes which revolutionise the
composition of capital in all branches surrounding the great spheres of
production.16
What, then, about new industries; wont they pick up the slack in
employment? Marx identifies, in and through the movements of the business
cycle, a shift from labour-intensive to capital-intensive industries, with a resulting
fall in the demand for labour in new lines as well as old: On the one hand ... the
additional capital formed in the course of further accumulation attracts fewer and
fewer workers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, old capital
periodically reproduced with a new composition repels more and more of the
workers formerly employed by it.17 This is the secret of the general law: labour-
saving technologies tend to generalise, both within and across lines, leading to a
relative decline in the demand for labour. Moreover, these innovations are
irreversible: they do not disappear if and when profitability is restored (indeed, as
we shall see, the restoration of profitability is often conditioned on further
innovations in new or expanding lines). Thus left unchecked this relative decline
in labour demand threatens to outstrip capital accumulation, becoming
absolute.18
Marx did not simply deduce this conclusion from his abstract analysis of the
law of value. In chapter 15 of Capital he attempts to provide an empirical
demonstration of this tendency. There he presents statistics from the British
census of 1861 which show that the new industries coming on line as a result of
technological innovations were, in employment terms, far from important. He
gives the examples of gas-works, telegraphy, photography, steam navigation,
and railways, all highly mechanised and relatively automated processes, and
shows that the total employment in these lines amounted to less than 100,000
workers, compared to over a million in the textile and metal industries whose

16 Translations of the French edition of Capital vol.1 from Simon Clarke, Marxs Theory
of Crisis (St Martin's Press 1994), pp.1725.
17 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), pp. 6223.
18 Marx sometimes envisages this as a revolutionary crisis: A development of
productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers, i.e., enable
the entire nation to accomplish its total production in a shorter time span, would cause a
revolution, because it would put the bulk of the population out of the running. (Marx,
Capital, vol.3 (MECW 37), p. 262).

58
workforce was then shrinking as a result of the introduction of machinery.19 From
these statistics alone it is clear that the industries of the second industrial
revolution had not absorbed anything like as much labour as those of the first in
the moment of their initial appearance. In chapter 25 Marx provides additional
statistical evidence that, from 1851 to 1871, employment continued to grow
substantially only in those older industries in which machinery had not yet been
successfully introduced. Thus Marxs expectation of a secular trajectory of a first
relative then absolute decline in the demand for labour was born out by the
available evidence in his time.
What Marx is here describing is not a crisis in the sense usually indicated by
Marxist theory, i.e. a periodic crisis of production, consumption or even
accumulation. In and through these cyclical crises, a secular crisis emerges, a
crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself. If expanded
reproduction indicates that workers and capital pushed out of contracting
industries will try to find places in new or expanding lines, the general law of
capital accumulation suggests that, over time, more and more workers and
capital will find that they are unable to reinsert themselves into the reproduction
process. In this way the proletariat tendentially becomes an externality to the
process of its own reproduction, a class of workers who are free not only of
means of reproduction, but also of work itself.
For Marx this crisis expresses the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist
mode of production. On the one hand, people in capitalist social relations are
reduced to workers. On the other hand, they cannot be workers since, by
working, they undermine the conditions of possibility of their own existence.
Wage-labour is inseparable from the accumulation of capital, from the accretion
of labour-saving innovations, which, over time, reduce the demand for labour:
The working population ... produces both the accumulation of capital and the
means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an
extent which is always increasing.20 It might seem that the abundance of goods,
which results from labour-saving innovations, must lead to an abundance of jobs.
But in a society based on wage-labour, the reduction of socially-necessary
labour-time which makes goods so abundant can only express itself in a
scarcity of jobs, in a multiplication of forms of precarious employment.21
Marxs statement of the general law is itself a restatement, a dramatic
unfolding of what he lays out as his thesis at the beginning of chapter 25. There,

19 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 449.

20 Ibid. p.625

59
Marx writes, somewhat simply: Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication
of the proletariat. Marxists of an earlier period took this thesis to mean that the
expansion of capital necessitates an expansion of the industrial working class.
But the proletariat is not identical to the industrial working class. According to
what Marx sets out in the conclusion to this chapter, the proletariat is rather a
working class in transition, a working class tending to become a class excluded
from work. This interpretation is supported by the only definition of the proletariat
Marx provides in Capital, located in a footnote to the above thesis:
Proletarian must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other
than wage-labourer, the man who produces and valorises capital, and is
thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for
valorisation.21

FROM RE-INDUSTRIALISATION TO DEINDUSTRIALISATION

The general law of capitalist accumulation, with its clear implications for the
interpretation of Capital, has been overlooked in our own time because under the
name of the immiseration thesis it was taken up and abandoned many times
over in the course of the 20th century. It was held that Marxs prediction of rising
unemployment, and thus the increasing immiseration of the working population,
has been contradicted by the history of capitalism: after Marxs death, the
industrial working class both grew in size and saw its living standards rise. Yet
quite apart from the fact that these tendencies are often over-generalised, more
recently their apparent reversal has made the immiseration thesis seem more
plausible. The last 30 years have witnessed a global stagnation in the relative
number of industrial workers. A low-wage service sector has made up the
difference in the high GDP countries alongside an unparalleled explosion of

21 It is possible to imagine a world in which labour-saving innovations would lead to a

reduction, not of the number of workers in a given line, but the amount of time each of
them works. Yet because capitalists derive their profit from the value added by the
worker beyond that required to pay his wages, it is never in the interest of capitalists to
reduce the number of hours each individual works (unless, of course, they are forced to
do so by action of the state or agitation of workers). Such reductions would cut directly
into profits unless wages were also reduced concomitantly. Because of the peculiarities
of a social form based on wage-labour, therefore, capitalists must shed the individuals
themselves rather than the hours each individual works, decreasing the costs of labour
relative to value added, and pushing great masses of people into the streets.

60
slum-dwellers and informal workers in the low GDP countries.22 So is the
immiseration thesis correct after all? That is the wrong question. The question is:
under what conditions does it apply?
Marx wrote about the growth of consolidated surplus populations in 1867. Yet
the tendency he described by which newer industries, because of their higher
degree of automation, absorb proportionally less of the capital and labour thrown
off by the mechanisation of older industries did not play out as he had
envisaged. As we can see from the graph on the facing page, Marxs view was
correct, in his own time, for the UK: the rising industries of the early second
Industrial Revolution such as chemicals, railways, telegraph etc. were not
able to compensate for declining employment in the industries of the first
Industrial Revolution. The result was a steady fall in the rate of growth of
manufacturing employment, which looked set to become an absolute decline
sometime in the early 20th century. What Marx did not foresee, and what actually
occurred in the 1890s, was the emergence of new industries that were
simultaneously labour and capital absorbent, and which were able to put off the
decline for more than half a century. The growth of these new industries,
principally cars and consumer durables, depended on two 20th century
developments: the increasing role of the state in economic management, and the
transformation of consumer services into consumer goods.23

22In this article we have opted to use the epithets high-GDP/low-GDP (meaning GDP
per capita) to describe the division of the world between a wealthy minority of capitalist
states and a more impoverished majority. We adopt these not entirely satisfactory terms
because of the absence of associations with dubious political and theoretical analyses
that are carried by other divisions (e.g. first world/third world, core/periphery, developed/
underdeveloped, imperialist/oppressed).
23 In the following we deal only with the latter phenomenon. For an account of the
former see the article Notes on the New Housing Question below.

61
 Graph 1: Employment in UK Manufacturing: 18411991
source: Brian Mitchell, International Historical Statistics:
Europe, 1750-2005 (Palgrave Macmillan 2007)
The emergent industries of which Marx wrote in the 1860s gas-works,
telegraphy, and railways, (we would add only electrification) were already in
his time beginning to be made available to consumers. Yet the consumer
services generated from these technologies initially reserved for the
enjoyment of a wealthy elite were secondary to the services they provided
within the internal, planned economy of industrial firms. Railways emerged as a
labour-saving innovation within mining, which was subsequently extended to
other industries. It became a service offered to consumers only after extensive
national-rail infrastructures had been developed by state-supported cartels. Even
as costs fell and mechanised transportation via rail became available to more
and more people, as a consumer service it preserved many of the features of its
initial employment as a process innovation within industry. National railways,
carrying passengers in addition to freight, absorbed large amounts of capital and

62
labour in their construction but were subsequently relatively automated
processes requiring less capital and labour for their upkeep.24
The advent of the automobile industry, subsidised by state funding of roads,
eventually transformed the consumer service of mechanised transport into a
good that could be purchased for individual consumption. This segmentation and
replication of the product the transformation of a labour-saving process
innovation into a capital-and-labour absorbing product innovation meant that
this industry was able to absorb more capital and labour as its market expanded.
A similar story can be told of the shift from telegraphy to telephones, and from
electronic manufacture to consumer electronics. In each case, a collectively
consumed service often emerging from an intermediary service within industry
was transformed into a series of individually purchasable commodities,
opening up new markets, which in turn became mass markets as costs fell and
production increased. This provided the basis for the mass consumerism of the
20th century, for these new industries were able to simultaneously absorb large
amounts of capital and labour, even as productivity increases reduced relative
costs of production, such that more and more peasants became workers, and
more and more workers were given stable employment.
Yet, as the unprecedented state deficit-spending which supported this process
indicates, there is no inherent tendency to capital that allows for the continual
generation of product innovations to balance out its labour-saving process
innovations. On the contrary, product innovations themselves often serve as
process innovations, such that the solution only worsens the initial problem.25
When the car and consumer durables industries began to throw off capital and
labour in the 1960s and 70s, new lines like microelectronics were not able to
absorb the excess, even decades later. These innovations, like those of the 2nd
industrial revolution described above, emerged from specific process innovations
within industry and the military, and have only recently been transformed into a

24 The difference between the economy of time that rail transport offered to the
consumer, and the economy of time and labour it offered to the capitalist, was itself a
vanishing difference as the capitalist notion of time as a scarce resource to be allocated
with maximum efficiency increasingly came to dominate society at large.
25 It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a
constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers,
or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed
those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation
becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated
diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. Marx, Capital, vol.1
(MECW 35), p.6234.

63
diversity of consumer products. The difficulty in this shift, from the perspective of
generating new employment, is not merely the difficulty of policing a market in
software it is that new goods generated by microelectronics industries have
absorbed tendentially diminished quantities of capital and labour. Indeed
computers not only have rapidly decreasing labour requirements themselves (the
microchips industry, restricted to only a few factories world-wide, is incredibly
mechanised), they also tend to reduce labour requirements across all lines by
rapidly increasing the level of automation.26 Thus rather than reviving a stagnant
industrial sector and restoring expanded reproduction in line with
Schumpeters predictions the rise of the computer industry has contributed to
deindustrialisation and a diminished scale of accumulation in line with Marxs.

SURPLUS POPULATIONS UNDER DEINDUSTRIALISATION

service work and slums
Deindustrialisation began in the US, where the share of manufacturing
employment started falling in the 1960s before dropping absolutely in the 80s,
but this trend was soon generalized to most other high-GDP countries, and even
to countries and regions that are seen as industrializing.27 The explosive growth
of a low-wage service-sector partially offset the decline in manufacturing
employment. However, services have proven incapable of replacing
manufacturing as the basis of a new round of expanded reproduction. Over the
last 40 years average GDP has grown more and more slowly on a cycle-by-cycle
basis in the US and Europe, with only one exception in the US in the late 90s,
while real wages have stagnated, and workers have increasingly relied on credit
to maintain their living standards.
If, as we have argued, expanded reproduction generates dynamic growth
when rising productivity frees capital and labour from some lines, which then
recombine in new or expanding industries, then this has an important
consequence for an understanding of service industry growth. Services are,
almost by definition, those activities for which productivity increases are difficult
to achieve otherwise than on the margin.28 The only known way to drastically

26 See Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

27In no country (with the exception of the UK) did deindustrialisation involve a decline in
real industrial output. In 1999, manufacturing still accounted for 46 percent of total US
profits, but only 14 percent of the labour force.
28 Robert Rowthorn and Ramana Ramaswamy, Deindustrialization: Causes and
Implications (IMF Working Paper 97/42, April 1997).

64
improve the efficiency of services is to turn them into goods and then to produce
those goods with industrial processes that become more efficient over time.
Many manufactured goods are in fact former services dishes were formerly
washed by servants in the homes of the affluent; today, dishwashers perform that
service more efficiently and are themselves produced with less and less labour.
Those activities that remain services tend to be precisely the ones for which it
has so far proven impossible to find a replacement in the world of goods.29
Of course the bourgeois concept of services is notoriously imprecise,
including everything from so-called financial services to clerical workers and
hotel cleaning staff, and even some outsourced manufacturing jobs. Many
Marxists have tried to assimilate the category of services to that of unproductive
labour, but if we reflect on the above characterisation it becomes clear that it is
closer to Marxs conception of formal subsumption. Marx had criticised Smith
for having a metaphysical understanding of productive and unproductive labour
the former producing goods and the latter not and he replaced it with a
technical distinction between labour performed as part of a valorisation process
of capital and the labour performed outside of that process for the immediate
consumer. In the Results of the Direct Production Process Marx argues that
theoretically all unproductive labour can be made productive, for this means only
that it has been formally subsumed by the capitalist valorisation process.30
However, formally subsumed activities are productive only of absolute surplus
value. In order to be productive of relative surplus value it is necessary to
transform the material process of production so that it is amenable to rapid
increases in productivity (co-operation, manufacture, large-scale industry and
machinery) i.e. real subsumption. When bourgeois economists like Rowthorn
speak of technologically stagnant services they recall without knowing it Marxs
concept of a labour process which has been only formally but not really
subsumed.
Thus as the economy grows, real output in services tends to grow, but it
does so only by adding more employees or by intensifying the work of existing
employees, that is, by means of absolute rather than relative surplus value
production. In most of these sectors wages form almost the entirety of costs, so
wages have to be kept down in order for services to remain affordable and
profitable, especially when the people purchasing them are themselves poor:

29Jonathan Gershuny, After Industrial Society?: the Emerging Self-Service Economy

(Humanities Press, 1978).
30 Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process (MECW 34), p. 121 46.

65
thus McDonalds and Wal-Mart in the US or the vast informal proletariat in
India and China.31
It is a peculiar failure of analysis that today, in some circles, the
deindustrialisation of the high-GDP countries is blamed on the industrialisation of
the low-GDP countries, while in other circles, the de-industrialisation of low-GDP
countries is blamed on IMF and World Bank policies serving the interests of high-
GDP countries. In fact, almost all the countries of the world have participated in
the same global transformation, but to different degrees. In the early post-war
period, many countries turned to Fordism that is to say, the import of
methods of mass production, made possible by government-sponsored
technology transfers from high-GDP countries. Fordism is often taken to be a
national economic-development policy, based on an agreement between capital
and workers to share the gains of productivity increases. But Fordism was,
almost from the beginning, predicated on an internationalisation of trade in
manufactures. Europe and Japan benefited the most from the resurgence of
international trade in the 1950s and 60s: capitals in these countries were able to
achieve massive economies of scale by producing for international trade, thereby
overcoming the limits of their own domestic markets. By the mid-60s, capitals in
low-GDP countries like Brazil and South Korea were doing the same thing: even
if they could capture only a small portion of the rapidly expanding international
export market, they would still grow far beyond what was possible in their home
markets. Thus, in the period before 1973, the internationalisation of trade was
associated with high rates of growth in all industrialising countries.
After 1973, the situation changed. Markets for manufactures were becoming
saturated, and it was increasingly the case that a few countries could provide the
manufactures for all of the world (one chinese firm currently supplies over half
the world's microwaves). Thus the resulting crisis of the capital-labour relation,
which is to say, a combined crisis of over-production and under-consumption,
signalled by a global fall in the rate of profit and issuing in a multiplication of
forms of unemployment and precarious employment. As the capital-labour accord
snapped, having always been based on healthy rates of growth worldwide,
wages stagnated. Capital in all countries became even more dependent on
international trade, but from now on, capitals in some countries would expand

31 Many service jobs only exist because of wage differentials that is, massive social
inequality. Marx noted that domestic servants outnumbered industrial workers in
Victorian Britain (Marx, Capital, vol.1 [MECW 35], p. 449). With rising real wages it
became increasingly untenable for middle class households (such as Marxs) to employ
servants. For much of the 20th century this destitute labour force was reduced to a
memory, only to reappear as service workers in every corner of the modern world.

66
only at the expense of those in others. Though they had not yet caught up to the
high-GDP countries, the low-GDP countries took part in the same international
crisis. Structural Adjustment Programs only accelerated their transition to a new,
unstable international framework. Deindustrialisation, or at least the stagnation of
industrial employment, set in almost universally among industrialising countries in
the 1980s and 90s. 32
For countries that remained agricultural, or relied on traditional or resource
exports, the crisis was even more devastating, as prices of traditional
commodities collapsed in the face of falling demand. Here, too, we must look
back at longer-term trends. In the early post-war period, developments in
agriculture radically increased the availability of cheap food. First, synthetic
fertiliser was manufactured in demobilised munitions-factories after World War II,
making it possible to raise the productivity of land with new high-yield varieties of
crops. Second, motor-mechanisation raised the productivity of agricultural labour.
Both technologies were adapted to production in tropical climates. Thus, almost
immediately after the global peasantry was drawn into the market by high
agricultural-prices stemming from the Korean War boom, those same prices
began to fall continuously. Exit from agriculture in the low-GDP countries was
therefore already underway in the 1950s. It was the result, not only of the
differentiation and expulsion of the peasantry according to market viability, but
also of the massive boost to population itself (sustained by cheap food and
modern medicine). Rising household sizes meant that traditional forms of
inheritance now pulverised land holdings, while rising population density strained
ecological limits, as resources were used unsustainably.33 Again, the Structural
Adjustment Programs of the 1980s and 90s, which forced indebted countries to
lift agriculture subsidies, merely dealt the knockout blow to peasants who were
already on their last legs.
It should thus be clear that de-industrialization is not caused by the
industrialization of the third world. Most of the worlds industrial working-class

32Sukti Dasgupta and Ajit Singh Will Services be the New Engine of Indian Economic
Growth? Development and Change 36:6 (2005).
33 This does not mean that the world is overpopulated relative to food production. As we
have shown, exit from the countryside was related to a massive increase in the
productivity of agriculture. Food production per person has constantly risen even as
population growth slows with the coming completion of the world demographic
transition. It would be even higher if the overproduction of grains had not led to
subsidizing the corn-feeding of animals for meat production. There is nothing
Malthusian about the Marxian concept of surplus populations, which are surplus with
regard to capital accumulation and nothing else.

67
now lives outside the first world, but so does most of the worlds population. The
low-GDP countries have absolutely more workers in industry, but not relative to
their populations. Relative industrial employment is falling even as agricultural
employment collapses. Just as de-industrialisation in the high-GDP countries
entails both the exit from manufacturing and the failure of services to take its
place, so also the explosive growth of slums in the low-GDP countries entails
both the exit from the countryside and the failure of industry to absorb the rural
surplus. Whereas the World Bank used to suggest that the growing surplus
populations throughout the world were a mere transitional element, they are now
forced to admit the permanence of this condition. More than a billion people
today eke out a terrible existence via an endless migration between urban and
rural slums, searching for temporary and casual work wherever they can find it.34

SURPLUS CAPITAL ALONGSIDE SURPLUS POPULATIONS

We have described how accumulation of capital over long periods leads old lines
to throw off labour and capital, which are then recombined in new and expanding
lines. This is the dynamic of capital, which becomes at the same time its limit.
Since capital is thrown off whether or not it can find productive avenues of
investment, a point is reached at which surplus capital begins to build up in the
system, beside the surplus labour it no longer employs. Marx discusses these
phenomena in a section of Capital vol. 3, entitled surplus capital alongside
surplus population.35 For most of this article we have focused on the latter
phenomenon, due in large part to the neglect of this tendency among readers of
Marx. In this final section we look at some recent manifestations of the former, as
the story of surplus capital both mediates and distorts the story of surplus
populations. Unfortunately we will be able to do little more that touch on this
subject matter here, leaving a more extended treatment to Endnotes no.3.
The US emerged unscathed from World War II as the most advanced
capitalist country, with the largest domestic market, the smallest agricultural

34 See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006).

35 It is no contradiction that this over-production of capital is accompanied by more or
less considerable relative over-population. The circumstances which increased the
productiveness of labour, augmented the mass of produced commodities, expanded
markets, accelerated accumulation of capital both in terms of its mass and its value, and
lowered the rate of profit these same circumstances have also created, and
continuously create, a relative overpopulation, an over-population of labourers not
employed by the surplus-capital owing to the low degree of exploitation at which alone
they could be employed, or at least owing to the low rate of profit which they would yield
at the given degree of exploitation. Marx, Capital, vol.3 (MECW 37), pp. 2545.

68
population (as a percentage of employment), and the most advanced industrial
technologies. By some estimates it was responsible for more than half of the
worlds output. 36 It also emerged from the war as the global creditor par
excellence, owning two thirds of global gold reserves and with most allied powers
owing it tremendous sums of money. Under these conditions, the US was able to
reconstruct the international monetary order, in a shambles since the Great
Depression, on its own terms. At Bretton Woods, the dollar was established as
the international reserve currency, the only one to be directly backed by gold, and
all other currencies were pegged to the dollar (creating a fixed exchange rate
system, which nevertheless allowed for periodic adjustments). On the one hand,
by fixing their own currencies to the dollar, European powers were given
temporary relief from balancing their budgets during reconstruction. On the other
hand, the US, by facilitating reconstruction, was assured of markets for its capital
exports, which in turn facilitated the European purchase of American goods. In
this way European budget deficits were funded by US capital exports, and a
persistent trans-Atlantic trade imbalance was effectively written into the Bretton
Woods agreements. It was an imbalance, however, which soon evaporated.
On the back of an influx of dollars, via direct foreign investment (often
military), loans and credit, European countries, as well as American firms
operating in Europe, had been importing US capital goods to expand European
productive capacity. The same process occurred in Japan, with the Korean War
playing the role of the Marshall Plan (though in Japan, US subsidiaries were
notable by their absence). All this was encouraged by the US, which facilitated
the transfer of its technologies of mass production and distribution all over the
world. Yet by the 1960s, many countries had developed their productive capacity
to the extent that they no longer relied on US imports. Furthermore, some of
those countries were beginning to compete with the very US producers on whom
they had previously relied. This competition played out first in third markets and
then in the US domestic market itself. The resulting reversal of the US balance of
trade in the mid sixties signified that the build out of global manufacturing
capacity was approaching a limit. Henceforth competition for export share would
become a zero-sum game.
While during the post-war boom the export of dollars via foreign direct
investment had enabled rapid growth in deficit countries, this phase change

36Daniel Brill, The Changing Role of the United States in the World Economy in John
Richard Sargent, Matthijs van den Adel, eds., Europe and The Dollar in the World-Wide
Disequilibrium (Brill 1981) p.19.

69
meant that US capital exports became increasingly inflationary.37 The spiralling
US budget deficits of the Vietnam war only intensified this problem of inflation, as
the seemingly inevitable devaluation of the dollar threatened to undermine the
reserves, and hence the balance of payments, of all nations, straining the fixed
exchange rate system to its limits. The result was that on the one hand many
central banks began to cash in their dollars for gold (forcing the US to effectively
end convertibility in 1968), while on the other hand surplus dollars accumulated
in Eurodollar markets began to put speculative pressure on the currencies of
export-based economies who were most at risk from the effects of dollar
devaluation. These included both those developing countries which had pegged
their currencies to the dollar, and thus risked seeing their primary commodity
exports fall in value relative to the manufactured imports on which their
development depended, as well as developed nations whose export markets
risked being undermined by the revaluation of their currencies relative to the
dollar. In its subsequent abandonment of Bretton Woods and its policy of benign
neglect of the deficit, the US used this threat of dollar devaluation to impose a
new flexible dollar reserve currency standard on the rest of the world, effectively
delegating the job of stabilizing the dollar to foreign central banks who would be
compelled to spend their surplus dollars on US securities in order to maintain the
dollar value of their own currencies. This to all intents and purposes removed
budgetary constraints from the US, allowing it to run up deficits and issue dollars
at will, knowing that foreign nations would have no choice but to recycle them
back to US financial markets, particularly into US government debt which quickly
replaced gold as the global reserve currency.38
Recycled surplus dollars provided an enormous boost to global financial
markets, where they became the key factor in the suddenly highly volatile
currency markets as both the reason for this volatility and the only available
resource for hedging against it. Yet surplus dollars also transformed the
landscape and shaped the growth of the global economy for the next 30 years.

37 Most Marxists attribute inflation in this period either to the exploding US budget deficit
(due in large part to the Vietnam war) or to the rising strength of labour. Yet Anwar
Shaikh convincingly argues that the restricted supply in relation to which inflation is the
index of excess demand is not full employment or labour recalcitrance, but rather the
maximum level of accumulation, or the maximum capacity profit rate whose decline
during this period is the leading factor behind stagflation. Anwar Shaikh, Explaining
Inflation and Unemployment in Andriana Vachlou, ed., Contemporary Economic Theory
(Macmillan 1999).
38See Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World
Dominance (Pluto Press, 2003).

70
Because it was far in excess of global investment demand, this giant pool of
money became the source of expanded state and consumer debt, as well as
speculative financial bubbles. In the latter sense surplus dollars have become
something of a spectre stalking the planet, running up unprecedented asset
bubbles in whichever national economy has the misfortune to absorb their
attention.39
This chain of bubbles and busts began in Latin America in the late 70s. An
influx of recycled petro-dollars (stimulated by sub-zero real interest rates on the
dollar) generated a whole series of risky financial innovations (including the
infamous adjustable rate loan), which all collapsed when the Volcker shock
brought interest rates back up. It was recycled surplus dollars from Japan that
saved the US economy from the subsequent deflation and enabled Reagans
redoubled Keynesian spending programmes. Yet the US thanked Japan for its
kindness by devaluing the dollar relative to the Yen in the Plaza Accords of 1985,
sending the Japanese economy into a asset-price bubble of even greater
proportions, which finally collapsed in 1991. This in its turn set off a series of
bubbles in the East Asian economies, to which Japan had exported its
manufacturing capacity (in order to get around an appreciating Yen). These
economies, as well as other Latin American economies that had pegged their
currencies to the dollar, then imploded as a delayed result of the dollar
revaluation in the reverse Plaza Accords of 1995. Yet this merely shifted the
bubble back to the US, as the US stock market bonanza created by the
appreciating dollar gave way to the dot-com bubble. In 2001 the latter turned
over into a housing bubble, when US corporate demand for debt proved to be an
insufficient sink for global surplus dollars. If the last two bubbles were largely
restricted to the United States (although the housing bubble also extended its
reach to Europe), it is because due to its size and seniorage privileges it is now
the only economy able to withstand the influx of these surplus dollars for any
sustained time period.
If we place this phenomenon in the context of the story of deindustrialisation
and stagnation described above, it becomes plausible to envisage it as a game
of musical chairs in which the spread of productive capacity across the world,
compounded by rising productivity, continually aggravates global overcapacity.
Excess capacity is then only kept in motion by a continual process that shifts the
burden of this excess on to one inflated economy after another. These latter are
only able to absorb the surplus by running up debt on the basis of excessively

39The following account owes much to Robert Brenners analysis. See in particular the
prologue to the Spanish translation of Economics of Global Turbulence: What is Good
For Goldman Sachs is Good For America: the Origins of the Current Crisis (2009).

71
low short term interest rates and the fictitious wealth this generates, and as soon
as interest rates begin to rise and the speculative fever abates the bubbles must
all inevitably collapse one after another.
Many have called this phenomenon financialisation, an ambiguous term
suggesting the increasing dominance of financial capital over industrial or
commercial capital. But the rise of finance stories, in all their forms, obscure
both the sources of financial capital, and the reasons for its continued growth as
a sector even as finance finds it increasingly difficult to maintain its rate of return.
For the former, we must look not only at the pool of surplus dollars, which we
have already described, but also the fact that stagnation in non-financial sectors
has increasingly shifted investment demand into IPOs, mergers and buy-outs,
which generate fees and dividends for financial companies. As for the latter, the
dearth of productive investment opportunities, combined with an expansive
monetary policy, kept both short and long-term interest rates abnormally low,
which compelled finance to take on greater and greater risk in order to make the
same returns on investment. This rising level of risk (finances measure of falling
profitability) is in turn masked by more and more complex financial innovations,
requiring periodic bailouts by state governments when they break down.
Unprecedented weakness of growth in the high-GDP countries over the
1997-2009 period, zero-growth in household income and employment over the
whole cycle, the almost complete reliance on construction and household debt to
maintain GDP all are testament to the inability of surplus capital in its financial
form to recombine with surplus labour and give rise to dynamic patterns of
expanded reproduction.40 The bubbles of mid-19th century Europe generated
national rail systems. Even the Japanese bubble of the 1980s left behind new
productive capacity that has never been fully utilized. By contrast the two US-
centred bubbles of the past decades generated only a glut of telecommunication
wires in an increasingly wireless world and vast tracts of economically and
ecologically unsustainable housing. The Greenspan put the stimulation of a
boom within the bubble was a failure. It merely demonstrated the diminishing
returns of injecting more debt into an already over-indebted system.

AND CHINA?
A common objection to the account we have so far provided would be to point to
China as an obvious exception to this picture of global stagnation, particularly in

40 Josh Bivens and John Irons A Feeble Recovery: The fundamental economic
weaknesses of the 200107 expansion, EPI Briefing Paper no. 214, Economic Policy
Institute (2008).

72
so far as it relates to otherwise global trends of deindustrialisation and under-
employment. Of course, over these years China became a global industrial
powerhouse, but it did so not through opening new markets or innovating new
productive techniques, but rather by massively building out its manufacturing
capacity at the expense of other countries.41 Everyone assumes that this
expansion must have brought about a historic increase in the size of the Chinese
industrial working class, but that is flatly false. The latest statistics show that, on
balance, China did not create any new jobs in manufacturing between 1993 and
2006, with the total number of such workers hovering around 110 million
people.42 This is not as surprising as it must seem at first glance, for two reasons.
First, over the last thirty years, the industrialization of the new southern
industries based initially on the processing of exports from Hong Kong and
Taiwan has kept pace with the gutting of the old, Maoist industrial northeast.
That may provide part of the explanation of why China, unlike Germany, Japan,
or Korea (earlier in the postwar period), saw almost no rise in real wages over
decades of miracle growth rates.
Second, China has not only grown on the basis of labour-intensive
manufacturing. Its low wages have helped it to compete across a spectrum of
industries, from textiles and toys to cars and computers. The incorporation of
existing labour-saving innovations into the firms of developing countries,
including China, has meant that, even with growing geographic expansion, each
set of industrialising countries has achieved lower heights of industrial
employment (relative to total labour force). That is to say, not only has China lost
manufacturing jobs in its older industries; the new industries have absorbed
tendentially less labour relative to the growth of output.
In the 19th century when England was the workshop of the world, 95 percent
of that world were peasants. Today, when the vast majority of the worlds
population depends on global markets for their survival, the ability of one country
to produce for all the others spells ruin, both for those who must be kept
impoverished in order to maintain export prices, and for the vast multitudes
whose labour is no longer necessary, but who, equally, can no longer rely on their
own resources to survive. In this context the remainder of the worlds peasantry

41 In the 1990s Japan devolved its more labour-intensive industries onto developing
countries in Asia first to the East Asian Tigers, then to the ASEAN countries and then
to China. But the absorption of industries by China has undermined the hierarchy of
production within the region.
42Erin Lett and Judith Banister, Chinese manufacturing employment and compensation
costs: 20022006, Monthly Labor Review no. 132 (April 2009), p. 30.

73
can no longer act as a weapon of modernisation, i.e. as a pool of both labour and
consumer demand that can be drawn on in order to accelerate the pace of
industrialisation. It becomes a pure surplus. This is true in India and sub-Saharan
Africa and in China.

CONCLUSION
Today many speak of a jobless recovery, but if the general law of capital
accumulation applies then all capitalist recoveries are tendentially jobless. The
tendency of mature industries to throw off labour, whilst facilitating expanded
reproduction, also tends to consolidate a surplus population not fully absorbed by
the subsequent expansion. This is due to the adaptability of labour-saving
technology across lines, which mean that the manufacture of new products tends
to make use of the most innovative production processes. Yet process
innovations last forever, and they generalize across new and old capitals, while
product innovations are inherently limited in their ability to generate a net
expansion of output and employment. Here the problem is not merely that
product innovations have to emerge at an accelerated rate to absorb the surplus
thrown off by process innovations, it is that an acceleration of product innovation
itself gives rise to an acceleration of process innovation. 43
Yet if the general law was suspended for much of the 20th century for the
reasons we have outlined above, the current growing global masses of under-
employed cannot be attributed to its reassertion, at least in any simple sense. For
the trajectory of surplus capital distorts the trajectory of surplus labour described
by Marx, and not only in the ways that we have already described. Most
importantly, surplus capital built up in international money markets over the last
30 years has masked some of the tendencies to absolute immiseration, through
the growing debt of working class households. This tendency, which has kept the
bottom from falling out of global aggregate demand, has equally prevented any
possibility of recovery, which would be achieved only through the slaughtering of
capital values and setting free of labour. For while asset-price deflation may
raise the possibility of a new investment boom, the devalorisation of labour-
power will, in this context, only lead to increasing levels of consumer default and

43 See note 26 above.

74
further financial breakdowns.44 Thus it is not only its capacity to generate
employment, but the sustainability of the recovery itself which remains in
question today.
The coming decades may see a series of blowouts, if states fail to manage
global deflationary pressures, or they may see a long and slow decline. While we
are not catastrophists by inclination, we would warn against those who might
forget that history sometimes rushes forward unpredictably. Regardless, the
catastrophe for which we wait is not something of the future, but is merely the
continuation of the present along its execrable trend. We have already seen
decades of rising poverty and unemployment. Those who say of the still-
industrialized countries that it is not so bad, that people will soldier on in a
phrase, that the proletariat has become indifferent to its misery will have their
hypothesis tested in the years to come, as levels of debt subside and household
incomes continue their downward trend. In any case, for a huge chunk of the
worlds population it has become impossible to deny the abundant evidence of
the catastrophe. Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has
been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons,
marginalised in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by
war.

44 See Paulo Dos Santos, At the Heart of the Matter: Household Debt in Contemporary
Banking and the International Crisis, Research On Money And Finance, Discussion
Paper no. 11 (2009). On the capital side, Phelps and Tilman outline a series of
limitations to the potential of innovators to exploit the crisis: Edmund Phelps and Leo
Tilman, Wanted: A First National Bank of Innovation Harvard Business Review (Jan
Feb 2010).

75
 NOTES ON THE NEW
HOUSING QUESTION
H O M E - O W N E R S H I P, C R E D I T
AND REPRODUCTION IN
THE POST - WAR US ECONOMY
Maya Gonzalez
Endnotes 2 2010
We are in a new Great Depression. Mortgages are in default today, just as they
were in the 20s and 30s. Unemployment is rising along with living costs. The
economy was saved from stagnation and depression then, through a
restructuring of the state and capital facilitated by war, but what will save it now?
Ours is a crisis of reproduction in a new sense. All crises are crises of capital
accumulation and thereby of the reproduction of the life of the worker; however,
because the life of the worker and her reproduction have been increasingly
permeated by capital, this crisis has also moved deeper, to become a crisis of the
class relation itself. The development of this deeper crisis will be the story of the
21st century.1
The story of the 20th century was characterized by the increasing integration
of working class life into the circuit of capital. Some characterize these
transformations as the transition from an era of formal subsumption to a new
regime of accumulation marked by the real subsumption of labour under capital.
While this periodization may be problematic, the deepening integration which it
describes is apparent in the home itself that realm of reproduction whose
separation from production produces the conditions for capitalist accumulation.
In the years immediately leading up to the previous Great Depression, a
speculative bubble in housing and consumer credit ballooned and then burst,
sending shock waves throughout the US banking system. While both forms of
credit already played a significant role in US prosperity and profitability, the 30s
marked a dramatic shift in credit and mortgage markets. The United States was
already by this time a rising economic powerhouse whose productivity
especially in agriculture was leading to rising real wages and standards of

1 Thanks to Alex Wohnsen for help editing these notes.

76
living among the working class, while the introduction of the assembly line and
other industrial innovations offered the potential for previously luxury
commodities to enter into workers consumption. The mere existence of this
potential was not sufficient however, for in spite of wage increases (such as
Henry Fords 5 dollars a day) in certain sectors, wages generally remained too
low and credit too restricted to allow for true mass-consumption of the new
products that were emerging from the second industrial revolution. What
transformed the situation was the introduction of a new political and economic
program which set out to increase employment and credit, in what we now know
as the New Deal.
The New Deal is commonly understood to have been a series of state
interventions that centred around socially progressive policies, such as the high-
profile and often controversial efforts to create jobs, protect workers rights,
regulate prices, build public infrastructure, and provide social insurance or relief.
Against this simplistic picture, historians typically point to a shift within the New
Deal from an early developmental state phase orientated towards equality and
social justice, to a fiscalist state characterized by Keynesian pump-priming
the shift coinciding with the Roosevelt recession of 1937-38 when New Dealers,
desperate to revive domestic markets, embraced both deficit spending and a
compensatory fiscal policy.
Yet economists have long told another story, one where earlier federal
initiatives, beginning in the Hoover administration and culminating with the
Banking Act of 1935, created essential preconditions for post-war growth by
revolutionizing the states ability to manage the money supply and subsidize
credit markets. Most importantly, it was during these years that the state began to
regulate and provide capital for private banks and the savings and loan industry,
transformed the Federal Reserve into a federal regulatory body, and assumed
control of interest rates. By 1935, it had abolished the gold standard, was
insuring a host of private lenders against loss, and had expanded its ability to buy
and sell Treasury securities as a means to supplement private bank reserves,
while greatly expanding its powers to provide emergency loans to institutional
lenders.
Thus by the mid-1930s, the federal government had set up the mechanisms
to promote a new kind of national economic growth by creating and sustaining a
very safe and flexible market for consumer credit. Put simply, the state made it
easier in many cases risk-free for the private sector to lend and borrow,
while simultaneously making the national currency more elastic so that it could

77
meet producers and consumers changing needs.2 The new system gave the
state considerable control over both money creation and credit cycles, so it could
strategically target chosen industries and consumer markets for subsidy. And,
most importantly, the states credit had now become the linchpin for both
stabilizing the economy and fuelling a debt-driven economic expansion. Taken
together, these early interventions fundamentally transformed the operations of
American banking and credit markets.
The policy of the fiscal state facilitated a monetary and credit revolution that
both enabled and actively promoted a new kind of economic growth based on the
mass production and consumption of consumer durables. The end of World War
II provided the material for this revolution, both in the form of the requisite
consumers returning home from war, and in the key commodity which enabled
the boom to take shape in its magnitude housing.

THE POST-WAR STATE-DRIVEN HOUSING MARKET

American troops returning from battle in 1945 were armed by the US government
with a panoply of fiscal provisions which they were encouraged as good
patriots to deploy in the interests of the national economy. The GI Bill was one
of the main conveyors of these benefits, offering veterans up to two years
vocational or college education, one years unemployment pay and,
importantly loans to start businesses or buy homes. In practice the bill was
notoriously racist, denying black vets access to their promised provisions. Yet the
millions of white vets who did gain access to home loans were confronted with a
homeland in short supply of available housing for themselves and their families.
Rather than responding to this situation through the production of social housing
as in Europe, the US state chose instead to subsidize private provision for this
basic need. Swiftly, massive construction and infrastructural projects were
undertaken, providing a supply of houses to the returning population. Rates of
homeownership have since grown steeply and steadily, save a few blips during
financial crises (see graph 1).

2 Before the New Deal the nations money supply was relatively inelastic because the
Treasurys specie reserves limited the amount of new money that banks could inject into
the economy (either through lending or draft withdrawals). Following abandonment of
the gold standard and the creation of a multifaceted federal regulatory, reserve, and
insurance system, the money supply became more elastic, enabling private lenders to
expand the amount of liquid capital provided to both businesses and consumers.

78
 Graph 1: US Homeownership Rates 1900-2008 (percent)
source: Hoover Instituion Facts On Policy: Homeownership Rates (2008)
The selective credit initiatives that were essential for this housing market to
function were the Federal Housing Association (FHA) mortgage insurance
programs established by the National Housing Act in 1934, and the Veterans
Administration (VA) mortgage guarantee programs, established in 1944. By
insuring private lenders against loss, and popularizing the use of long-term,
amortizing mortgages, the FHA and VA revived and dramatically expanded the
markets for home-improvement and for privately owned homes, eventually
making these markets the bedrock of the new consumer economy.
Federal officials designed, promoted, staffed, and eventually managed credit
agencies by working closely with the building, home finance, and real estate
industries. From the outset, the FHA enlisted private organizations to collect data
from every metropolitan region on tenancy patterns, property values, building
permits, volume of housing sales, employment trends, payrolls, and the financial
conditions of local lenders. FHA technical staff organized educational
conferences nationwide to introduce the insurance system to businesspeople
and municipal officials and to coordinate local lending efforts, while in
Washington, FHA administrators consulted with developers and bankers to

79
assess the programs impact, propose legislative reforms, and lobby
congressmen for their passage.
In sum, the state did not simply revive and expand existing housing markets,
or awaken hibernating capital, but rather was instrumental in creating new
supply, new demand, and new wealth. As early as the 1930s James Moffett, the
FHAs first administrator, told business audiences that the agency was creating a
year-round market for home improvement, and educating the banks to carry on
indefinitely a tremendous amount of lending activity that would develop far more
business than in the past. Moffett predicted that there were billions of dollars to
be taken out of the mortgage insurance programs, and claimed that no such
market had ever been offered to industry. 3
The expansion in homeownership stimulated the economy above and beyond
the housing and mortgage markets proper. At Fed-controlled interest rates
kept low throughout the expansion investment could take place in products
that accompany growing homeownership, such as cars, washing machines and
other expensive appliances. The home became a concentrated node of the
creation of new needs for the American working class a space that needed to
be filled with household commodities, that usually necessitated car ownership,
and that could be infinitely improved and renovated. Finally, it represented an
investment, a debt to be repaid, and ultimately an asset, and thus consistently
produced a more compliant working population.
Home-ownership and access to credit became a material force representing
and entrenching the divisions and inequalities within the working class. This in
turn reconfigured the situation of labour with respect to capital, and the horizon of
class struggle. These shifts in the capitalist class relation were intensified as the
promise of homeownership and credit were extended to larger and larger
sections of the working class, at the same time as profitability declined and debt
was increasingly financialized.

INTEGRATION OF THE (WHITE) WORKING CLASS

INTO HOUSING AND CREDIT MARKETS
The initial distribution of the newly built post-war housing stock among the
returning working class was done in a rather ad hoc manner, as families
scrambled to find decent shelter, and to return to lives now marked by depression
and war. Standards were relatively low, and people of all stations lived side by

3Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue, The New Suburban History. (Universiy of Chicago
Press, 2006), p. 20.

80
side. However, because of their access to the GI Bill and thus property,
college placements, welfare, employment, and even for some the capital with
which to begin a small business veterans were placed in a position of
substantial advantage. Gradually a new stratification of the working population
thus began to take shape, as well as a particular American conception of the
middle class growing and cohering into its own communities, increasingly
divided from the often-racialized lower classes.
Access to mortgages and the subsidies provided by the state made it more
reasonable for many white Americans to eventually purchase homes than to rent
them. Yet racial minorities were continually frustrated in their attempts to obtain
the benefits of homeownership regardless of how crucially they had
participated in the war effort. Explicitly racist regulations around mortgages and
lending existed in the FHAs manual until the late 1940s, but even after their
removal both the FHA and the VA actively supported racial covenants on a local
basis well into the 1960s, excluding millions of people from the growing market
for homeownership. Less than 2% of the homes that were built with help from the
$120 billion in housing equity loans from the 40s to the early 60s went to non-
whites. Yet that $120 billion represented nearly one-half of all new single-family
home purchases between 1947 and 1964. These loans facilitated not only the
purchase of more than 12 million mostly suburban housing units, almost
exclusively for whites, but also helped secure debt financing for billions of dollars
of home-repair work.
Property-ownership allowed some of the working class to act in a pseudo-
capitalist manner, managing capital relations in their own lives as owners of
futures the rising value of their commodified existence projected in time
through credit. The credit provided by increasing home values in the good times
allowed homeowners to take out loans for the purchase of various commodities
with which to fill their homes, and cars which carried them between work and
their increasingly diffuse and distant suburbs. Although median and mean family
incomes doubled between 1946 and 1970, the average debt to income ratio rose
to 20% during this period, allowing for an even larger increase in the
consumption of the working class.
While prior to World War II the reproduction of the household was
supplemented by a variety of subsistence activities, in the post-war period these
activities and the production of household goods were gradually replaced
by the purchase of household commodities found on the market, and externally
purchased services were replaced by self-service goods. Many products that had
been substantially innovated and marketed in the 20s, but had suffered in sales
during the Great Depression, were improving their designs and expanding their

81
consumer markets exponentially by the late 40s. In 1940, 60% of the 25 million
wired homes in the US had an electric washing machine produced by one of two
or three companies. Instant cake mix, first introduced in the 20s, became a
phenomenon in the 40s. The freezer and refrigerator also developed in the
20s and 30s became standard household staples in the late 40s and 50s,
enabling frozen foods previously a luxury item to become commonplace.
Here we see the commodity in the form of the consumer durable
entering the household in unprecedented ways, and substantially altering the
experience of the domestic (or reproductive) sphere. The heightened
consumption of consumer durables lead to a transformation in the kind of work
performed in the domestic sphere, as well as transformations in the relationships
between people within the household (the family) which become further
permeated and mediated by commodities.

DE-DIFFERENTIATION OF THE
REPRODUCTIVE AND PRODUCTIVE SPHERES
Prior to the rise of specifically capitalist relations of production, there did not exist
a domestic sphere in isolation from the sphere of production. Production of
goods even those produced for exchange often occurred in or around the
home (the place where workers lived). In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, in order to avoid the regulations of the guilds, merchants contracted
out the production of a range of goods to rural households. This putting-out
system eventually gave way to the modern factory and, in the course of
capitalist accumulation, the modern separation between home and workplace.
The home was henceforth the place where the worker rested and consumed a
fraction of the product of his labour in the form of wage goods. It was also the
place where womens oppression became further ossified. Expected either to
stay at home and do the work of reproduction or to submit themselves to worse
pay and worse labour standards than those of male workers, pushed out of the
common spaces where they had maintained a degree of autonomy and collective
power, womens access to the means of production was blocked or restricted
through the patriarchy of the wage-form. In sum, the home became the exclusive
site of the reproduction of labour-power, which for the first time appeared as
distinctly outside the relations of production and thus also, for many, outside the
purview of Marxism.
Yet, over the course of the post-war period in the US, the reproduction of the
working class and the reproduction of capital came to fold in on one another,
integrated increasingly tightly. More and more working class people became
involved in the housing market, which meant that the home became not only the

82
commodity which physically contained all the others, but was also a workers
main asset the commodity for which all others were sold, and eventually the
one which also purchased all the others.
Thus we see in the post-war period the tendential overturning of separations
that were central to the development of capitalism. In the originating moment of
capitalist social relations a primary separation occurs in which workers are
separated from the means of production. In spatial terms this separation takes
the form not only of the strengthening opposition between town and country, and
of a zoning of the former into residential and industrial areas, but also the
fundamental categorical distinction between domestic, reproductive space and
the point of production, each side implying the other. So, while capitalism
initially subordinated the reproduction of labour-power through separating
reproduction from production, beginning in the post-war period we find social
relations and forms of everyday life increasingly subordinated to the prerogatives
of capitals own reproduction through an equally coercive unification of these
spheres within the logic of capital.
In the post-war period, this re-unification or de-differentiation of reproduction
and production took the form of a house with a two-car garage, a room for each
child, and additional spaces for inserting the proper appliances a complete
commodity package with a higher ticket price, and therefore a higher equity value
upon which one could take out loans. It became crucial to those with homes to
protect their property, and to preserve or increase its value by all means possible.
Homeowners thus had higher stakes in the perpetuation of the capitalist class
relation, and often came to believe the bourgeois dictum that value breeds value,
and that all commodities can equally be capital. Wage workers however by
definition do not accumulate capital, but only valorize the capital of others. And
at the end of the day, the worker returns home with only his wage, to pay for a
future that is increasingly on loan.
This situation of growing working class indebtedness, combined with rising
living costs, meant that women and mothers were forced to enter the labour
market in new numbers. Although the family wage under Fordism implied that
the male breadwinner would be capable of supporting both wife and child, as
early as the 1950s wives began to increasingly supplement the incomes of their
husbands with jobs of their own. But while in the 1950s the re-entry of women
into the workforce indicated the desire to maintain the pattern of a rising standard
or living, after the 1960s the wifes or mothers wage was largely pursued in order
to offset the decline in real wages suffered by male workers. Thus was created a
reserve army of women workers, temporarily and precariously plugged into
capital, supplying it with flexible and expendable labour, maintained in this

83
position by patriarchal structures in both corporate practice and the labour
movement.
Womens entrance into the labour force was a double-boon to capital,
because the goods that could replace the various activities internal to the
household and reproductive services external to the home were the very
same consumer durables which were so crucial to growth during this period. Both
the need and ability of the household to purchase such expensive commodities
grew in direct proportion to the degree in which women left the home. The
diminished time allocated to domestic labour fed into growing demands for self-
service consumer durables, as well as the now necessary additional car. As
consumer needs grew absolutely, the ability to pay for them was ensured by the
expansion of the labour supplied by households. All in all, this was a self-
perpetuating cycle of reproduction: couples returned to the labour market in order
to pay for the goods that they had purchased on loan, in order to reproduce
themselves for that same labour market.
The family also was substantially transformed in the process. Children went
from being productive members of the household to liabilities. The formation of
the normalized nuclear family, along with the upkeep of the household itself,
became a series of purchases and risks subject to the logic of cost-benefit
analyses, while the home became a container for compartmentalized anxieties
regarding the future of its own sustainability. The life of the individual took on its
own generational temporality determined by capital and projected through credit:
the breadth of the thirty year mortgage eveloping childhood, adolescence,
college-years, marriage and children; all the stages of life became entirely bound
to the reproduction of the wage-relation.
The expansion of the housing market and access to credit invigorated
capitalist accumulation in the face of lagging consumer demand, but the growing
integration of the sphere of reproduction into that of production, rather than
disrupting the oppressions built on this division, reinforced severe separations
and inequalities amongst the working class. Racialized and gendered barriers to
acquiring housing and credit, alongside the commodification of familial
relationships and activities, successfully effected a general movement of
isolation amidst a controlled reintegration of workers depending on the needs of
production and consumption.4
This could only be sustainable however, as long as wages increased in
proportion to productivity. Until the 1970s, debt-financing for the household thus
never went too far beyond remuneration, and average housing values tended to

4 Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, 1992), 172.

84
hover around average wages, with needs rising not too far ahead of the ability to
fulfill them. People were borrowing somewhat beyond their immediate means,
but their rising wages generally compensated for this expansion of debt. So long
as capitalist expansion continued to thrive, the projected future of the
reproduction of the working class seemed inevitable. After 1975, household debt
already significant began to spin out of control. Mortgage equity withdrawal
began to rise in 1975, booming in the 80s, and growing exponentially in the late
90s, to the extent that it was the only thing that kept the US economy out of
recession in 2000 and 2001(see graph 3). General debt-to-income ratios, which
had first boomed briefly in the mid-20s before they dropped in the Great
Depression, also begin to increase in the late 70s, surpassing the 30s boom in
the late 90s and doubling its peak (see graph 2). Around 1989, the homes in the
lowest 20 percentile income bracket saw their debt increase above and beyond
that of all the other income brackets.

Graph 2: Total US Credit Market Debt as a percent of GDP

source: Ned Davis Research (2007)

85
 Graph 3: US GDP growth and Mortgage Equity Withdrawal
source: Calculated Risk (2006)

Today we are witnessing the breakdown of the ability of the working class to
reproduce itself on the level to which it has become accustomed. In the most
recent housing-consumer cycle, investment in housing failed to jumpstart
production, which experienced its worst performance in the entire post-war
period. As investment opportunities for capital dwindled in the productive sector,
over-investment in mortgage and debt instruments took place, thereby creating
an over-accumulation of housing stock. Now we have a similar predicament to
that immediately after the war, except in a perverted form: today we are not in
short supply of housing, but of the money and credit to afford it. Money in the
form of wages is limited by the constraints of capital accumulation, for which
housing and easy money can no longer provide the basis of a renewal.

86
 THE HISTORY OF
SUBSUMPTION
Endnotes 2 2010

THE PERIOD
This is a period of cataclysmic crisis for capital, yet it is one in which the old
projects of a programmatic working class are nowhere to be seen. This
inescapable fact compels us to trace the discontinuities between the past and the
present. Understanding what distinguishes the current period can help us to
bury the dead of the failed revolutions of the 20th Century, and put to rest any
wandering spirits that still haunt communist theory.
What is most at stake in periodisation is the question of where the past stops
and the present begins. The identification of historical ruptures and
discontinuities helps us to avoid the implicit metaphysics of a theory of class
struggle in which every historical specificity is ultimately reduced to the eternal
recurrence of the same. Yet periodisations can easily appear not as the
recognition of real historical breaks, but as the arbitrary imposition of an abstract
schema onto the dense fabric of history. For every line of rupture that is drawn,
some remnant or holdover from another historical epoch may be located which
appears to refute the periodisation. Then, satisfied that such declarations of
rupture cannot hold absolutely, we may feel justified in falling back on the
comfortable idea that nothing really changes. Since here it is difference against
which the sceptic can set herself, the historical same takes on the default
certainty of common sense.
Alternatively, perhaps, the rupture is something to which we make a show of
facing up; of recognising the misery of retreat, and holding ourselves in the
melancholy recognition of the passing of all that was good, meanwhile nursing a
flame for its eventual return. Either way it is the same: whether as presence or
lack, the past shrouds the specificity of the present.
That a rupture with what some have called the old workers movement or
with what Thorie Communiste (TC) call programmatism occurred some
30-40 years ago confronts us as self-evident. But it is not enough to hold to the
immediate self-evidence of historical rupture. The question is how to think rupture
without either sliding into a dogmatic and abstract schematism, or an equally
dogmatic appeal to immediate historical experience. This problem needs to be

87
confronted theoretically, yet we should perhaps be wary of leaving the partial
standpoint of the present, this side of the rupture; of rushing too quickly into the
universalising standpoint of a historical schema that would claim to abstract from
particular standpoints.
For us, the periodisation of TC has been of central importance in facing up to
the character of the capitalist class relation as it exists, not metaphysically but
historically. Their division of the history of capitalist society into phases of
subsumption has proved useful in identifying real shifts in the character of the
capitalist class relation. And, whilst it may often appear as precisely the kind of
abstract schema which we should aim to avoid, TCs periodisation is less that of
the disinterested intellect, pushing each historical datum into its arbitrary
taxonomic container, than a partisan declaration of historical break by
communists who lived through it, compelling them to grapple with this rupture as
a real problem.
If then, in what follows, we criticise some core categories of TCs
periodisation, we do not do so in order to deny that the shifts which TC identify
with these categories actually took place. For us as for TC the reproduction
of the capitalist class relation is something which has changed over time, and the
character of struggles has changed with it. We can hardly doubt that the
proletarian movement passed through a programmatic phase a phase which
is no more or that class struggles today no longer carry the horizon of a
workers world. The identification, beyond this, of exactly how this reproduction
has changed is a task which cannot be accomplished merely through the
deployment of different categories, or the exchange of one abstract schema for
another. We need to remain attentive to the detail of the real movement of
history, without shying away from the need to adequately theorise this
movement.
In the 1970s in the midst of the historical break with the programmatic
epoch of class struggle the concept of subsumption emerged in Marxist
discourse in the process of a general return to Marx, and in particular to the
drafts of Capital. In a moment of rupture, the need to periodise the history of the
capitalist class relation was evident. Since the distinction between the formal
and real subsumption of labour under capital which was prominent in texts of
Marx which were only then becoming known seemed to identify something
important about the historical deepening of capitalist relations of production, it
provided an obvious starting point for such periodisations. Thus the concept of
subsumption was employed not only in the periodisation of TC, but also in those
of Jacques Camatte and Antonio Negri periodisations which often overlap
significantly. We will here examine the concept of subsumption and its

88
employment in these periodisations; first by excavating the philosophical roots of
this concept, and examining the systematic role it plays in Marxs work, then by
drawing out some problems in its employment as a historical category.

THE ABSURDITY OF SUBSUMPTION

In its more general usage, subsumption is a fairly technical philosophical or
logical term, referring to the ranging of some mass of particulars under a
universal. As such, some basic logical or ontological relations may be described
as relations of subsumption: whales, or the concept whale, can be said to be
subsumed under the category mammal. In German idealist philosophy
where it appears in the work of Kant, Schelling, and occasionally Hegel the
term is often used in a more dynamic sense to indicate a process whereby
universal and particular are brought into relation. It is from this thread that the
concept of subsumption makes its way into Marxs work.
Kant considers the relation between the manifold and the categories of the
understanding to be a relation of subsumption. 1 This subsumption involves a
process of abstraction through which the truth of the manifold is obtained. In
terms of this process, the relation of subsumption here has some formal
resemblance to that which Marx finds between particular use values and money
as universal equivalent: in both cases, some particular is brought into relation
with some otherwise external universal by being subsumed under it. The
homology perhaps stretches further: concerned with the problem of how a pure
concept of the understanding might be related to the appearances which it
subsumes, Kant posits the transcendental schema as a third thing uniting the
two sides,2 just as Marx posits labour as the third thing enabling comparison
between two commodities.3
For Hegel, the process of subsumption and abstraction performed by the
understanding in Kant is problematic precisely because it takes an abstracted

1 [T]to the use of a concept there also belongs a function of the power of judgment,
whereby an object is subsumed under it Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
(Cambridge 1998), B304/ p.359.
2Now it is clear that there must be some third thing, which must stand in homogeneity
with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes
possible the application of the former to the latter. This mediating representation must
be pure (without anything empirical) and yet intellectual on the one hand and sensible
on the other. Such a representation is the transcendental schema. Ibid., A138/B177 p.
272.
3 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 47

89
universal to be the truth of the particulars which it subsumes, and thereby
transforms and obscures the very thing that is supposed to be thereby known:
Subsumption under the species alters what is immediate. We strip away what is
sensory, and lift out the universal. The alteration underway here we call
abstracting. It seems absurd, if what we want is knowledge of external objects, to
alter these external objects by our very [abstractive] activity upon them. [...] The
alteration consists in the fact that we separate off what is singular or external,
and hold the truth of the thing to lie in what is universal rather than in what is
singular or external.4
There is something absurd about a relation of subsumption. When the
particular is subsumed under a universal, that universal presents itself as the
truth of this particular; indeed it is as if this particular has become nothing other
than an instantiation of the universal that subsumes it. Yet it seems that there
must be something left over in this process, for the abstract universal is still just
what it was at the start, while the particularity which the particular had in
opposition to the universal has now been abstracted away entirely. Subsumption
thus appears to involve a kind of domination or violence towards the particular.5
Hegel, it seems, wants to see the movement of the concept less as the
abstractive process of the subsumption of particulars under a universal, in which
the universal ultimately is seized upon as the truth of a thing, than as the finding
of a concrete universal present already in such particulars, necessarily
mediating and mediated by its relation to these particulars. On Hegels reading of
Kant, it is the externality of the manifold to the pure categories of the
understanding which means that the process of knowledge must be one of
subsumption, since particulars must somehow be brought under the categories.
That Hegel does not himself describe the movement of the concept in terms of
subsumption may be taken as an example of his attempting to get beyond the
epistemological divides characterising the standpoint of reflection with which he
frequently identifies Kants philosophy, and with which Lukcs would go on to
identify bourgeois thought per se.6

4 Hegel, Lectures on Logic (Indiana University Press 2008) pp.12-13.

5 In English translations of Marx, the German term subsumtion is often rendered as
domination rather than subsumption. While this translation is problematic in the sense
that it obscures the logical/ontological significance of this concept, it is appropriate to
the extent that it identifies something of the violence implied here.
6 For a discussion of these aspects of the Kant-Hegel-Marx relation in terms of the
value-form see Isaak Rubin, Essays on Marxs Theory of Value (Black & Red 1972), p.
117.

90
 In the Philosophy of Right however, Hegel describes a relation that involves a
subsumption of the particular under the universal just as external as that of the
manifold under the categories in Kants conception indeed, this relation is one
of fairly straightforward political domination. This is the relation between the
universality of the sovereigns decision and the particularity of civil society. In
this case, rather than struggling to present the sovereigns decision as a concrete
universal already immanent within particulars, Hegel presents it as an abstract,
external universal to which particulars must be subordinated by the executive
power, acting through the police and the judiciary:
The execution and application of the sovereigns decisions, and in general the
continued implementation and upholding of earlier decisions[...] are distinct from
the decisions themselves. This task of subsumption in general belongs to the
executive power, which also includes the powers of the judiciary and the police;
these have more immediate reference to the particular affairs of civil society, and
they assert the universal interest within these [particular] ends. 7
We might infer from his usage of a category which he seems to associate with a
problematic, external relation, that Hegel is being critical of the relation between
sovereign and civil society, but it is far from clear that this is the case. Indeed, for
the young Marx, as for many others, the Philosophy of Right represents the most
conservative moment in Hegels oeuvre, where political domination is given the
seal of approval of speculative philosophy. In Contribution to the Critique of
Hegels Philosophy of Right, Marx criticises Hegels usage of the concept of
subsumption here as the imputation of a philosophical category onto objective
social processes:
The sole philosophical statement Hegel makes about the executive is that he
subsumes the individual and the particular under the general, etc.
Hegel contents himself with this. On the one hand, the category of subsumption
of the particular, etc. This has to be actualised. Then he takes any one of the
empirical forms of existence of the Prussian or Modern state (just as it is),
anything which actualises this category among others, even though this category
does not express its specific character. Applied mathematics is also
subsumption, etc. Hegel does not ask Is this the rational, the adequate mode of
subsumption? He only takes the one category and contents himself with finding
a corresponding existent for it. Hegel gives a political body to his logic; he does
not give the logic of the body politic.8
The irony here is that it is just such a usage of this category that Marx himself
goes on to develop. From the 1861-63 draft of Capital onwards, subsumption, for

7 Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Cambridge 1991), 287/ p.328.

8 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right (MECW 3) p. 48.

91
Marx, is the subsumption of the particularities of the labour-process under the
abstract universality of the valorisation-process of capital.9 The abstract category,
it seems, really does find itself a body. Marxs critique of German idealist
philosophy is thus paralleled in his critique of capital. However, now the error is
not on the part of the speculative philosopher, for it resides, rather, in capitalist
social relations themselves. The abstract universal value whose existence
is posited by the exchange abstraction, acquires a real existence vis--vis
particular concrete labours, which are subsumed under it. The real existence of
abstractions, which acquire the ability to subsume the concrete world of
production under them and posit themselves as the truth of this world is for
Marx nothing other than a perverted, enchanted, ontologically inverted reality.
The absurdity and violence which Hegel perceives in a relation of subsumption
applies not only to Hegels system itself, but also to the actual social relations of
capitalist society.10

THE FORMALITY AND THE REALITY OF SUBSUMPTION

For Marx, the production process of capital can only occur on the basis of the
subsumption of the labour process under capitals valorisation process. In order
to accumulate surplus value, and thus to valorise itself as capital, capital must
subordinate the labour process to its own ends and, in so doing, transform it. The
German idealist roots of the concept of subsumption are apparent here in the
way that Marx conceptualises this process: the particular is subordinated to the
abstract universal, and thereby transformed or obscured. The distinction between
formal and real subsumption identifies the implicit distinction between two
moments that we have here: capital must subordinate the labour process to its
valorisation process it must formally subsume it if it is to reshape that
process in its own image, or really subsume it.
In Results of the Direct Production Process (hereafter Results) Marx
associates the categories of formal and real subsumption very closely with those

9 Whilst the category of subsumption is used in a wide-ranging, unsystematic manner in

the Grundrisse, it is in the 61-63 and 63-64 drafts of Capital, that Marx develops a
concept of subsumption as that of the labour process under the valorisation process of
capital. Subsumption may be seen as implicitly informing the middle third of Capital
volume 1 on the categories of absolute and relative surplus-value, although it is
explicitly referred to only in one section. Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 511
10 See The Moving Contradiction, Endnotes 2.

92
of absolute and relative surplus-value.11 We can identify more specifically what
distinguishes real from formal subsumption in terms of these two categories.
Formal subsumption remains merely formal precisely in the sense that it does
not involve capitals transformation of a given labour process, but simply its
taking hold of it. Capital can extract surplus value from the labour process simply
as it is given with its given productivity of labour but it can do so only
insofar as it can extend the social working day beyond what must be expended
on necessary labour. It is for this reason that formal subsumption alone could
only ever yield absolute surplus value: the absoluteness of absolute surplus
value lies in the fact that its extraction involves an absolute extension of the
social working day it is a simple quantity in excess of what is socially
necessary for workers to reproduce themselves.12
The subsumption of the labour process under the valorisation process of
capital becomes real insofar as capital does not merely rest with the labour
process as it is given, but steps beyond formal possession of that process to
transform it in its own image. Through technological innovations and other
alterations in the labour process, capital is able to increase the productivity of
labour. Since higher productivity means that less labour is required to produce
the goods which the working class consumes, capital thereby reduces the portion
of the social working day devoted to necessary labour, and concomitantly
increases that devoted to surplus labour. The relativity of relative surplus value
lies in the fact that the surplus part of the social working day may thus be surplus
relative to a decreasing necessary part, meaning that capital may valorise itself
on the basis of a given length of social working day or even one that is

11If the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal
subsumption of labour under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may
be viewed as its real subsumption. Marx, Results of the Direct Production
Process (MECW 34), p.429.

12Figure 1: Absolute surplus value extraction, on the basis of formal subsumption.

A--------B-C
A--------B--------C
The necessary part of the working day (AB) here is a given magnitude, so the only
possibility of increasing the magnitude of the surplus portion (BC) is by extending the
working day absolutely (AC).

93
diminished in absolute length.13 The production of relative surplus-value, and the
real subsumption through which this takes place, are driven by the competition
between capitals: individual capitalists are spurred on to seize the initiative by the
fact that, while the value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary
labour-time for their production, if they introduce technological innovations which
increase the productivity of labour, they will be able to sell commodities at a price
above their individual value.14
Despite their usage by Marx in close association with systematic categories
like absolute and relative surplus-value, and their abstract philosophical
provenance, there are at least two senses here in which we may consider the
categories of formal and real subsumption to have a historical significance.
Firstly, as capitals simple taking hold of the labour process, the formal
subsumption of labour under capital can be understood as the transition to the
capitalist mode of production: it is the subsumption under capital of a mode of
labour already developed before the emergence of the capital-relation.15 Marx
describes the transformation of slave, peasant, guild and handicraft forms of
production into capitalist production as producers associated with these forms
were transformed into wage-labourers as a process of formal subsumption. It
is only on the basis of this formal subsumption that real subsumption can
proceed historically: formal subsumption of labour under capital is both a logical/
systematic and a historical prerequisite for real subsumption.
Secondly, real subsumption has a historical directionality, for it entails a
constant process of revolutionising the labour process through material and
technological transformations which increase the productivity of labour. From
these secular increases in productivity follow broader transformations in the
character of society as a whole, and in the relations of production between
workers and capitalists in particular. Real subsumption, as the modification of the
labour-process along specifically capitalist lines, is exemplified in the historical
development of the productive powers of social labour as the productive powers

13Figure 2: Relative surplus value extraction, on the basis of real subsumption.

A-------------B--C
A---------B--B--C
The length of the working day (AC) is a given magnitude, so the only possibility of
increasing the magnitude of the surplus portion (BC) is by decreasing the necessary
part of the working day (AB). Surplus value gained in this way is relative surplus
value.
14 Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process (MECW 34), p.428.
15 Ibid., p. 426.

94
of capital. This occurs through cooperation, the division of labour and
manufacture, machinery and large-scale industry, all of which are discussed by
Marx under the heading of The Production of Relative Surplus-Value in volume
one of Capital.
It is for these reasons that the categories of formal and real subsumption may
seem appropriate for employment in the periodisation of capitalist history. There
is undoubtedly a certain plausibility to schematising the history of capitalism
broadly in terms of categories which identify an initial extensive taking hold of the
labour process by capital, and a subsequent intensive development of that
process under a dynamic capitalist development, for at an abstract level it is
absolutely fundamental to capital that these two moments must occur. Such an
employment of these categories also has the apparent virtue of staying close to
the core of Marxs systematic grasp of capitalist value relations, while grasping
key moments of their historical existence: they seem to suggest the possibility of
unifying system and history. It is undoubtedly for some if not all of these
reasons that TC, Camatte, and Negri all formulated periodisations of capitalist
history oriented around the concept of subsumption.

THE HISTORY OF SUBSUMPTION

In the course of an interpretation of the Results, Jacques Camatte sketches an
abstract periodisation of capitalist history on the basis of the formal and real
subsumption of labour under capital. For Camatte, what distinguishes the period
of real subsumption from that of formal subsumption is that, with real
subsumption, the means of production become means of extracting surplus
labour; the essential element in this process is fixed capital.16 The period of real
subsumption is characterised by the application of science in the immediate
process of production, such that the means of production become no more than
leeches drawing off as large a quantum of living labour as they can.17 Thus for
Camatte the real subsumption of labour under capital is characterised by an
inversion: real subsumption is the period in which workers become exploited by
the means of production themselves.
Yet Camatte goes further, speaking of a total subsumption of labour under
capital in which capital exercises an absolute domination over society, indeed

16 Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (Unpopular Books 1988), p.43.

17 Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process (MECW 34), p. 397 (Fowkes
translation).

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tends to become society.18 This period is characterised by the becoming of
capital as totality, in which capital is erected as a material community standing
in the place of a true human community. 19 It is as if capital has come to envelop
the social being of humanity in its entirety; as if subsumption has been so
successful that capital can now pass itself off not only as the truth of the labour
process, but of human society as a whole. It is easy to see in this theory of total
subsumption and material community the logic which would propel Camatte
towards a politics involving little more than the abstract assertion of some true
human community against a monolithic capitalist totality, and of the need to
leave this world.20
Camatte is not the only theorist to describe the latest epoch in capitalist
development in terms of a certain kind of completion of capitalist subsumption;
indeed, this is a common theme across divergent Marxist traditions. Though he
does not use the term subsumption itself, in Jamesons Marxist recasting of the
concept of postmodernity, those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the
Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical
effectivity are colonised, and the individual is submerged in the ubiquitous logic
of a capitalist culture.21 As with Camatte, it is as if the very success of a kind of
capitalist subsumption means that we can no longer grasp that which subsumes
as an external imposition. In the form of the social factory thesis, Tronti
presents a conception of the historical epoch as that of a kind of completed
subsumption but with the customary sanguinity of operaismo this is
understood as a result of the essential creativity and resistance of the working
class. In the moment of its total victory, where social capital has come to
dominate the whole of society, capital is forced by the resistance of the working
class to extend its domination beyond the factory walls to the whole of society.
Echoing Trontis social factory thesis, Negri describes a total subsumption of
society in the period beginning after 1968.22 This, argues Negri, marks the end

18 Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (Unpopular Books 1988), p.45

19 Ibid.
20Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave in This World We Must Leave: and
Other Essays (Autonomedia 1995).
21Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso
1991), pp.48-9.
22 Antonio Negri, Twenty Theses on Marx, Interpretation of the Class Situation Today,
in S. Makdisi, C. Casarino and R. Karl., eds., Marxism beyond Marxism (Routledge.
1996), p.159.

96
of the centrality of the factory working class as the site of the emergence of
revolutionary subjectivity.23 In this period, the capitalist process of production
has attained such a high level of development as to encompass even the
smallest fraction of social production. Capitalist production is no longer limited to
the sphere of industrial production, but rather is diffuse, and occurs across
society. The contemporary mode of production is this subsumption.24
Although he frequently employs the categories of subsumption historically,
Negri warns against constituting a natural history of the progressive
subsumption of labour under capital and illustrating the form of value in the []
process of perfecting its mechanisms.25 Apparently attempting an autonomist
Copernican turn within the periodisation of subsumption, Negri thus describes
specific class compositions and models of contestation corresponding to each
period of capitalist history. To the first phase of large-scale industry corresponds
the appropriative phase of the proletarian movement (1848-1914) and the
professional or craft worker; to the second phase corresponds the alternative
phase of the revolutionary movement (1917-68) and a class composition based
on the hegemony of the mass worker; and finally, to the current phase of
capitalist development corresponds the socialised worker (operaio sociale) and
the constituent model of proletarian self-valorisation. Similarly for TC, the
periods of a history of subsumption identify not only the history of capital itself,
but also of specific cycles of struggle. Rather than the result of a Copernican
turn to the positivity of the working class however, for TC this is because the
categories of subsumption periodise the development of the relation between
capital and proletariat.
TC follow Marx in drawing a relation between the categories of formal and real
subsumption and those of absolute and relative surplus-value. The key to TCs
historical periodisation lies in their interpretation of this systematic interrelation of
categories. For TC, absolute and relative surplus-value are conceptual
determinations of capital, and formal and real subsumption are historical
configurations of capital. Thus while the formal subsumption of labour under
capital proceeds on the basis of absolute surplus-value, relative surplus-value is
both the founding principle and the dynamic of real subsumption; it is the
principle which gives structure to and then overturns the first phase of [real

23 Ibid., p.149
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p.151.

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subsumption].26 Thus relative surplus-value is both the principle which unifies
the two phases into which TC divide real subsumption, and that in terms of which
it is possible to explain the transformation of real subsumption (and its
consequent division into phases): real subsumption has a history because it has
a dynamic principle which forms it, makes it evolve, poses certain forms of the
process of valorisation or circulation as fetters and transforms them.27
TC posit a conceptual distinction between formal subsumption and real
subsumption in terms of their extension: formal subsumption affects only the
immediate labour-process, while real subsumption extends beyond the sphere of
production to society as a whole, just as it does for Camatte and Negri. Thus
formal subsumption for TC corresponds to the configuration of capital based on
the extraction of absolute surplus-value, which is by definition limited to the
immediate labour-process: capital takes over an existing labour-process and
intensifies it or lengthens the working-day. The relation between real
subsumption and relative surplus-value is more complex however. The increased
productivity of labour resulting from transformations in the labour-process can
only increase relative surplus-value insofar as this increased productivity lowers
the value of commodities entering into the consumption of the working class. As
such, real subsumption brings into play the reproduction of the proletariat, insofar
as the wage becomes a variable quantity affected by the productivity of labour in
industries producing wage goods. Real subsumption thus establishes the
systematic and historical interconnection between the reproduction of the
proletariat and the reproduction of capital:
The extraction of relative surplus-value affects all social combinations, from the
labour process to the political forms of workers representation, passing through
the integration of the reproduction of labour-power in the cycle of capital, the role
of the credit system, the constitution of a specifically capitalist world market,
the subordination of science Real subsumption is a transformation of society
and not of the labour process alone.28
The reproduction of the proletariat and the reproduction of capital become
increasingly interlocked through real subsumption; it integrates the two circuits
(of the reproduction of labour-power and the reproduction of capital) as the self-
reproduction (and self-presupposition) of the class relation itself. Thus TC define

26Thorie Communiste, Rponse Aufheben in Thorie Communiste 19 (2004), p.

108.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p.109

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the real subsumption of labour under capital as capital becoming capitalist
society i.e. presupposing itself in its evolution and the creation of its organs.29
The criterion for the predominance of real subsumption itself defined in
terms of transformations of the labour-process must thus be sought outside
the labour-process, in the modalities (both political and socioeconomic) of
reproduction of labour-power which accompany, and are to some extent
determined by, the material transformations accomplished in the labour-process.
Examples of such modalities include social welfare systems, the invention of the
category of the unemployed, and the importance of trade unionism. These all
help to ensure (and confirm) that labour-power no longer has any possible ways
out of its exchange with capital in the framework of this specifically capitalist
labour process. It is these modalities of the reproduction of labour-power which
are fundamentally altered by the restructuring of the capitalist class relation
which begins in the 1970s. And it is on this basis that TC argues that the broad
phases of transformation at the level of the modalities of the general reproduction
of the proletariat should serve as criteria for the periodisation of real
subsumption.30
TCs dating corresponds closely to that proposed by Negri. For TC, the phase
of formal subsumption of labour under capital, up to the turn of the century or
around the First World War, is characterised by the positive self-relation of the
proletariat as pole of the class relation. In this period the proletariat affirms itself
as the class of productive labour, against capital, which is an external constraint
from which the proletariat must liberate itself.31 Proletarian self-affirmation can
never beget proletarian self-negation and the negation of capital; thus in this
phase the communist revolution was impossible, or rather the communist
revolution as affirmation/liberation of labour carried within it the counter-
revolution. The period of transition to communism proved to be nothing other
than the renewal of capitalist accumulation, and was determined as such by the
very configuration of the class relation and the (counter-)revolutionary movement
that this configuration of the class relation produced.
In the subsequent first phase of real subsumption of labour under
capital (from the First World War to the end of the 1960s), the relation between
capital and proletariat becomes increasingly internal such that the autonomous

29 Thorie Communiste, Thorie Communiste in Thorie Communiste 14 (1997), p.50.

30Thorie Communiste, Rponse Aufheben in Thorie Communiste 19 (2004), p.
127-8.
31 Thorie Communiste, Thorie Communiste in Thorie Communiste 14 (1997), p.57.

99
affirmation of the class enters into contradiction with its empowerment within
capitalism, in that this is more and more the self-movement of the reproduction of
capital itself.32 In the transition from formal to real subsumption the class relation
undergoes a qualitative transformation, in that the reproduction of the proletariat
is now increasingly integrated with the circuit of reproduction of capital, via
certain mediations. These include the institutional forms of the workers
movement, trade unions, collective bargaining and productivity deals,
Keynesianism and the Welfare State, the geo-political division of the World
Market into discrete national areas of accumulation, and on a higher level
zones of accumulation (East and West).
Formal subsumption and the first phase of real subsumption of labour under
capital are characterised by the programmatic self-affirmation of the proletariat;
the first phase of real subsumption is increasingly revealed, however, to be the
decomposition of this programmatic proletarian self-affirmation, even as the
proletariat is increasingly empowered within the class relation. With the capitalist
restructuring after 1968-73 which must be understood as a restructuring of the
relation between capital and proletariat all these mediations are at least
tendentially dissolved. The new period the second phase of real subsumption
of labour under capital is then characterised by a more immediately internal
relation between capital and the proletariat, and the contradiction between them
is thus immediately at the level of their reproduction as classes. Proletarian
programmatic self-affirmation is now dead and buried, yet class antagonism is as
sharp as ever. The only revolutionary perspective afforded by the current cycle of
struggles is that of the self-negation of the proletariat and the concomitant
abolition of capital through the communisation of relations between individuals.

CRITIQUE OF THE HISTORY OF SUBSUMPTION

The periodisations proposed by Camatte, Negri and TC apply beyond the
immediate process of production. Camatte and Negri hold real subsumption to be
true of society, and for TC, formal and real subsumption can be said to
characterise the fundamental relation between capital and labour in a sense that
is not reducible to the immediate production process. There may appear to be
some ground in Marx for pursuing such a usage of these categories, since Marx
refers to transformations in the actual social relation between capitalist and
worker beyond production that arise with or as a result of real subsumption:
With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete revolution takes
place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labour, and in the

32 Ibid., p.49.

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 relation within production between the capitalist and the worker, as also in
the social relation between them.33
It is evident that, with the constant revolutionising of production that occurs in real
subsumption, the world beyond the immediate process of production is itself
dramatically transformed. The important qualification here, however, is that these
transformations occur with or as a result of the real subsumption of the
labour process under the valorisation process: they do not necessarily constitute
an aspect of real subsumption itself; nor do they define it, and indeed they may
actually be considered mere effects of real subsumption. Though massively
significant changes to society as a whole and to the relation between capitalist
and worker may result from the real subsumption of the labour process under
capital, it does not follow that these changes can themselves be theorised in
terms of the concepts of subsumption.
As we have seen, subsumption has a distinct ontological character. The
violence that is committed by a subsuming category lies in the fact that it is able
to pass itself off as the truth of the very thing which it subsumes, to transform that
particular into the mere instantiation of a universal. When the labour process is
subsumed under the valorisation process, it becomes capitals own immediate
process of production. As Camatte argues:
Subsumption means rather more than just submission. Subsumieren really
means to include in something, to subordinate, to implicate, so it seems that
Marx wanted to indicate that capital makes its own substance out of labour, that
capital incorporates labour inside itself and makes it into capital.34
The labour process in both real and formal subsumption is the immediate
production process of capital. Nothing comparable can be said of anything
beyond the production process, for it is only production which capital directly
claims as its own. While it is true that the valorisation process of capital in its
entirety is the unity of the processes of production and circulation, and whilst
capital brings about transformations to the world beyond its own immediate
production process, these transformations by definition cannot be grasped in the
same terms as those which occur within that process under real subsumption.
Nothing external to the immediate production process actually becomes capital
nor, strictly speaking, is subsumed under capital.

33Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 (MECW 34), p.107-8, our emphasis. A similar
passage occurs also in the Results with the qualification that this revolution is complete
(and constantly repeated). Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process (MECW 34),
p.439.
34 Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (Unpopular Books 1988), p 72

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 Even if we were to accept the idea of an extension of real subsumption
beyond the immediate process of production, the viability of subsumption as a
category for periodisation is doubtful. Since formal subsumption is a logical
prerequisite of real subsumption as well as a historical one, it characterises not
just one historical epoch, but the entirety of capitalist history. Furthermore,
according to Marx, though formal subsumption must precede real subsumption,
real subsumption in one branch can also be the basis for further formal
subsumption in other areas. If the categories of subsumption are applicable to
history at all, this can therefore only be in a nonlinear fashion: they cannot apply
simplistically or unidirectionally to the historical development of the class relation.
Whilst we could plausibly say that at the total level, at any given stage in the
development of this relation, the labour process is more or less really
subsumed under the valorisation process than at any other given moment, this
can only be a weak and ambiguous claim, and can hardly form a systematic
basis for any account of actual historical developments.
The work of some theorists in the area of value-form theory or systematic
dialectic such as Patrick Murray and Chris Arthur puts such periodisation
further in doubt. For Arthur, though formal subsumption may well precede real
subsumption temporally in the case of any given capital, real subsumption is
inherent to the concept of capital from the outset.35 If real subsumption is thus
something always implicit, which is only actualised in the course of capitalist
history, this would further undermine any attempt to demarcate a specific period
of real subsumption. Murray argues that the terms formal subsumption and
real subsumption refer first to concepts of subsumption and only secondarily
if at all to historical stages. According to Murray, Marx considers the possibility
of a distinct historical stage of merely formal subsumption, but finds no evidence
of one.36
If subsumption cannot rigorously apply to historical periods per se, nor to
anything beyond the immediate process of production, we must conclude that it
is not ultimately a viable category for a periodisation of capitalist history. We need
other categories with which to grasp the development of the totality of the
capitalist class relation, and in a manner which is not limited to the production
process alone. Yet what is at stake is a great deal more than having the correct
set of categories. That so many periodisations, regardless of their categorial

35 Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Brill 2002) p.76.
36Patrick Murray The Social and Material Transformation of Production by Capital:
Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume I, in R. Bellofiore and N. Taylor, eds.,
The Constitution of Capital (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) p.252.

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framework, converge around the same dates 37 recognising, in particular, that
some fundamental rupture took place between the late 60s and mid-70s is a
strong indication that there is more to periodisation than some aphasiac
proliferation of terms, periods and arbitrary constellations of data. These
periodisations and that of TC in particular are compelling because they tell
us something plausible about the character of the class relation as it exists today.
But categorial frameworks are of course not neutral, and a problematic core
category will have implications for the rest of a theory.
TCs phase of formal subsumption has much in common with the regulation
school concept of a period of extensive accumulation, and indeed both locate a
transition from these respective phases around the First World War. It is only at
this point that real subsumption begins for TC, because it is at this point that the
increasing productivity of labour begins to cheapen consumer goods, and thus to
mutually implicate the reproduction of working class and capital. Similarly for the
regulationists, prior to the proper development of mass consumption,
accumulation must be primarily extensive. In both cases, a period of primarily
absolute surplus value extraction is perceived as existing prior to the full
development of the specifically capitalist mode of production and a shift of focus
to relative surplus value. But there are significant problems with this notion of a
period of extensive accumulation, as Brenner and Glick have forcefully argued.38
Capitalist production tends to commoditise and cheapen consumer goods from
the outset, and agriculture is not something that is capitalised late, except
perhaps in particular cases such as that of France, whose rural landscape
remained dominated throughout the 19th century by small peasant owner-
producers. It is tempting to surmise that the apparent fit of the French case to
the concept of a historical phase of formal subsumption is the real basis for this
aspect of TCs periodisation. But if this is the case, the viability of at least this
aspect of the periodisation for the history of the capitalist class relation per se
looks severely in doubt.
Yet our criticisms of TCs history of subsumption need not lead us to reject
everything in TCs theory en masse. We will need, of course, to think through the
implications, for this theory, of doing away with a historical concept of
subsumption. But it is in the concept of programmatism, and the analysis of the
subsequent period up to the present that the heart of the theory lies. The concept

37To those that we have already mentioned here we could add the regulation school,
the social structure of accumulation school, and the Uno school.
38Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, The Regulation Approach: Theory and History, New
Left Review I/188 (July-August 1991), pp. 45119.

103
of programmatism identifies important dimensions of class struggle as it was
throughout much of the 20th Century, and thus helps us to understand the way in
which the world has changed. Perhaps because of this recognition of rupture, TC
have not shied away from confronting with clear eyes the character of struggles
as they happen today, or from continuing to pose the fundamental question of
communist theory:
How can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in
its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish
classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism?39

39 Thorie Communiste, Thorie Communiste in Thorie Communiste 14 (1997), p. 48.

104
 THE HOLDIN G PATTERN
THE ONGOING CRISIS AND THE
C L A S S S T R U G G L E S O F 2 0 11 2 0 1 3
Endnotes 3 2013
In 2007, following the deflation of the housing bubble that had held it aloft, the
world economy plunged into a deep depression. Homeowners found themselves
underwater. Firms were inundated. Unemployment shot upwards. Most
dramatically, the financial architecture of the world economy nearly collapsed.
Pirouetting their way onto the scene, government ministers undertook
coordinated action to prevent a repeat of the 1930s. Shortly thereafter, those
same ministers were forced to implement austerity in order to assure
bondholders that they remained in control of the slow-motion catastrophe. Public
employees were sacked; those that persisted saw their wages slashed. Schools,
universities and hospitals faced massive cuts. Meanwhile, in spite of the crisis,
food and oil prices remained elevated. Unemployment, too, remained stubbornly
high, and youth unemployment above all. Finally, despite the best efforts of
politicians or perhaps, precisely because of those efforts some national
economies found themselves mired in not one or two but three separate
recessions, in the space of a few years.
Under these conditions, increasing numbers of proletarians have been forced
to rely on government assistance in order to survive, even as that assistance is
under threat. Outside of the formal wage relation, informality is proliferating, from
under-the-table work to petty crime.
Yet, in spite of all that, both wage-earners and the unwaged mostly responded
to the onset of this crisis which is itself merely the latest consequence of a
decades-long economic decline by adapting to it.1 Of course, that was not
universally true: many proletarians set about defending their conditions of life. In
200810, there were demonstrations, some of which included blockades of roads
and refineries. There were riots, as well as incidents of looting. General strikes
stopped work for a day. Students occupied universities, and public sector
employees occupied government buildings. In response to plant closures,
workers not only took over their workplaces; in a few locales, they also
kidnapped bosses or burned factories down.

1 On the long-term decline, see below, as well as Misery and Debt, p. 50.

105
 Some such actions occurred in response to police killings or workplace
accidents. Many more had as their goals to stop the implementation of job losses
and austerity, and to reverse rising inequality and corruption. However, as
Kosmoprolet noted, conventional means of class struggle were unable to put
enough pressure behind their demands anywhere and the protests failed in every
respect despite the enormous mobilisation efforts.2 Then, in 2011 a year
portentously accompanied by earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns and floods a
wholly unanticipated form of struggle washed onto the shores of the
Mediterranean.

1 THE MOVEMENT OF SQUARES

Starting in Tunisia, the movement of squares spread throughout the Middle East
and across the Mediterranean before arriving in the anglophone world as
Occupy. In reality there were more differences than similarities among the many
square movements, such that it might seem foolhardy to try to generalise across
them. Yet it is not we, the commentators, who draw the connections, but the
movements themselves, both in the form of their emergence and in their day-to-
day practice. An internationalist phenomenon from the beginning, the movement
of squares linked struggles across a mosaic of high- and low-income countries.
Oakland and Cairo were suddenly one fist.
Unlike the anti-globalisation protests but like the anti-war movement of
2003 a growing conflictuality was not contained within one city, nor did it hop
sequentially from one city to the next. Instead, occupations proliferated across
city centres, attracting precarious wage-earners and frightened middle strata, as
well as organised labour, the slum-dwellers and the new homeless.
Nevertheless, besides chasing a few ageing dictators down from their perches,
the movement of squares achieved no lasting victories. Like the 200810 wave
of protests, this new form of struggle proved unable to change the form of crisis
management let alone to challenge the dominant social order.
However, the movement of squares did change something: it allowed the
citizenry a cross-class formation to come together, to talk about the crisis
and its effects on everyday life (in North Africa, it really freed them to do so).
Previously, such discussions had occurred only in private: individuals were made
to feel personally responsible for unemployment, homelessness, arbitrary police
violence, and debt; they were never given a chance to discuss collective

2Kosmoprolet, The Crisis, Occupy, and Other Oddities in the Autumn of Capital,
Kosmoprolet 3 (2011).

106
solutions to their problems. For that reason alone, all the talk of occupy was no
trifling matter.
As the occupations unfolded, occupiers own activity became the main topic of
debate. What should they do to defend the squares against the police? How
could they extend the movement into new areas? The popularity of such
discussions, even outside of the occupations themselves, suggested that a
growing portion of the population now recognised that the state was powerless to
resolve the crisis. At the same time, no one had any clue what to do with this
knowledge. The occupations became spectacles. The occupiers were spectators
of their own activity, waiting to find out what their purpose had been all along.
The main problem the occupiers faced was that the very manner in which they
came together made them too weak to pose a real threat to the reigning order.
The occupations concerned everyone, but with the exception of the homeless
they concerned no one directly. The occupiers found one another, but only by
abandoning the concrete situations (neighbourhoods, schools, job centres,
workplaces) that might have provided them with leverage. As a result, occupiers
controlled no material resources and no choke points or territories, aside from the
squares themselves. 3 It was rare for people to arrive at the occupations as a
delegate of a neighbourhood or workplace, let alone some other fraction of the
social body. The occupiers had little to offer one another but their own bodies,
their indignant cries echoing across hitherto barren central plazas. Outside of
certain cities in North Africa, occupiers largely proved incapable of transmitting
their indignation from the squares into everyday life, where self-activity would
necessarily involve larger numbers and more substantial risks.
In this context, the occupiers opted for a set of negative demands: ash-shab
yurid isqat an-nizam (the people want the regime to fall) and que se vayan todos
(they all should go). However, to get rid of governments, to reverse austerity, to
lower the price of food and housing even under the most favourable
conditions, what might these demands achieve? If they could prevent the
implementation of austerity, occupiers might be able to spook holders of
government debt, thereby forcing the state into bankruptcy. To drop into the
abyss: not even the most opportunist political parties with the possible
exception of the Tea Party in the US have been willing to take up that call.

3 Holding the squares meant more in some places than in others. In Tunis and Cairo,
the police were not only pushed out of the squares. They were prevented from entering
the surrounding area for weeks or months. By contrast, in lower Manhattan an area of
only 100 by 330 feet was (more or less) liberated.

107
 And yet, without the ability to demand a reflation, let alone re-industrialisation
of the economy, what is left but the sectional interests of various fractions of the
proletariat (and other classes)? If they have no choice but to accept the
economic status quo, how can these fractions divide up a limited set of resources
of both public handouts and private employment without antagonising one
another? It is easy enough to say that there is nothing left to do but make the
revolution, but which revolution will it be?
In the twentieth century, proletarians were able to unite under the flags of the
workers movement, with the goal of rebuilding society as a cooperative
commonwealth. The coordinates of this older form of liberation have been
thoroughly scrambled. The industrial workforce was formerly engaged in building
a modern world; it could understand its work as having a purpose, beyond the
reproduction of the class relation. Now, all that seems ridiculous. The industrial
workforce has been shrinking for decades. The oil-automobile-industrial complex
is not building the world but destroying it. And since countless proletarians are
employed in dead-end service jobs, they tend to see no purpose in their work,
besides the fact that it allows them to get by. Many proletarians today produce
little more than the conditions of their own domination. What programme can be
put forward on that basis? There is no section of the class that can present its
interests as bearing a universal significance. And so, instead, a positive project
would have to find its way through a cacophony of sectional interests.
In lieu of that, the movement of squares took shape as a new sort of frontism.
It collected together every class and class fraction that had been negatively
impacted by the crisis, as well as by the austerity measures that followed
corporate bailouts. Thus, the sinking middle classes, the frightened but still-
securely employed, the precarious and the newly unemployed, and the urban
poor individuals from these groups came together as an impassioned cross-
section of society because none of them could accept the options that the crisis
had put in front of them. However, their reasons for not accepting those options
were not always the same. In North Africa these fronts could be mobilised to
topple governments, but in this case their success was precisely their
factionalisation.
Our contention is that the movement of squares took this form for a reason. In
essence although certainly not in every manifestation its struggle was an
anti-austerity struggle. That it was such a struggle should strike us as odd. Every
talking head seemed to know, in 2008, that a deep recession, comparable to that
of the 1930s, should elicit not austerity but its opposite, namely massive fiscal
spending. Certain low-income countries (China, Brazil, Turkey and India, among
others) took this route often in a limited way, and sometimes only after

108
experiencing deep recessions. But crucially, the high-income countries did not go
down that road. Where is the much vaunted green capitalism, which was
supposed to set the global economy on a new path? The last few years seem to
have provided the chance for capital to wholly reinvent itself as humanitys
saviour. That hasnt come to pass. Our sense is that it is precisely the depth of
the crisis that has forced states in high-income countries into slashing budgets.
They are locked into a dance of the dead.
As we will show below, those states have been made to dance in the face of
two contradictory pressures. On the one hand, they have had to borrow and
spend, in order to stave off deflation. On the other hand, they have been forced
to implement austerity, in order to slow the growth of what were already massive
public debts (attendant on decades of feeble economic growth). This spinning-in-
circles has not resolved the crisis. However, it has blunted its fallout, so that it
has become the crisis of certain individuals or sections of society and not of
society as a whole.
That is what has given struggles an odd character: by implementing austerity,
in the face of the crisis, the state made it seem as if it also had the power to
reverse the crisis. In short, it seemed as if the state was acting irrationally.
According to occupiers everywhere, if the state was acting irrationally, then that
had to be the result of corruption: the state had been captured by moneyed
interests. Whereas, in fact, what appeared to be the states strength was actually
its weakness. Austerity is a symptom of the inability of the state in the face of
decades of slow growth and periodic crisis to do anything except to continue
to temporise. That, it has done, for now. Order reigns.

2 A HOLDING PATTERN WITH A GRADUAL LOSS OF ALTITUDE

The present economic malaise certainly began as a financial crisis.4 Mortgage-
backed securities and credit default swaps suddenly became the topics of an
endless televisual discourse. Lehman Brothers collapsed. AIG was loaned $85
billion. Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck, causing commercial paper
markets to seize up. Acting as lenders of last resort, central banks were able to
keep financial flows from freezing entirely thereby averting a repeat of the
Great Depression. Where do we stand now, four years after the end of the Great
Recession? How are we to understand the crisis? Was it merely a momentary
setback along the highway to the Chinese Century? Recent developments
suggest otherwise.

4An earlier version of this section appeared as a dispatch on the Endnotes website:
endnotes.org.uk/articles/16

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 After recovering in 2010 from two years of deep recession, GDP-per-capita
growth-rates in the high-income countries began to decelerate in 2011 and
2012. 5 In the latter year, they grew at a meagre rate of 0.7 percent. The recovery
has been historically weak the only rival, in terms of the length and severity of
this downturn, is the Great Depression and is weakening further. In fact, in the
high-income countries as a whole, GDP per capita in 2012 was still below its
2007 peak. That has made it extremely difficult to reduce unemployment
(especially given that, in the interim, labour productivity has continued to rise).
Unemployment levels peaked at 10 percent in the US and over 12 percent in the
Eurozone they have hardly fallen to the present.6 In some hard-hit countries,
unemployment is much higher. In mid 2013, it continues to grow: in Cyprus,
unemployment levels have reached 17.3 percent; in Portugal, 17.4 percent; in
Spain, 26.3 percent, and in Greece, 27.6 percent. Youth unemployment, in those
same countries, has reached astronomical proportions: 37.8 percent, 41 percent,
56.1 percent, and 62.9 percent, respectively. 7
More potentially explosive are recent developments in the so-called emerging
markets which seemed for a moment at least to be capable of pulling the
entire world economy forward. Now, all are slowing down. In Turkey and Brazil,
per-capita GDP growth-rates fell precipitously, in 2012, to 0.9 and 0 percent,
respectively. The Chinese and Indian juggernauts are also decelerating. In China
despite one of the largest stimulus programs in world history economic
growth rates fell, in per capita terms, from 9.9 in 2010 to 7.3 in 2012. In India,
growth rates fell further, from 9.1 in 2010 to 1.9 in 2012 (the latter is Indias
lowest per capita growth rate in over two decades).
Nevertheless, in spite of the extremely weak recovery and stubbornly high
unemployment levels, a new consensus reigns in the high-income countries: the
Keynesian moment is over; governments need to cut back on spending.
As the crisis evolves past its opening act, it is becoming clear that the real
problem is not a failure to regulate finance. If anything, the banks are now too

5All statistics taken from the World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2013 edition,
and the IMF, World Economic Outlook, 2013, unless otherwise noted.
6 In the US, unemployment levels have fallen to 7.3 percent (in Autumn 2013); however,
this fall was only achieved through a massive reduction in the labour force participation
rate (LFPR). The latter fell from 66 percent in 2007 to 63 percent in 2013. Thats the
lowest LFPR, in the US, since 1978. In fact, 2000-2013 saw the first sustained fall in the
LFPR since women joined the labour force en masse in the mid 1960s.
7Statistics taken from Unemployment in the Eurozone, The Washington Post, August
11, 2013.

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cautious, too reluctant to take on risk. The real problem is the growth of surplus
populations alongside surplus capital.8 Misery is the long-term tendency of the
capitalist mode of production, but misery is mediated by debt. Massive pools of
surplus capital formed in the 1960s, and have only expanded since then.
Internationally, these pools appear mainly as an excess of dollars: eurodollars in
the mid-1960s, petrodollars in the 1970s, Japanese dollars in 1980s and 90s,
and Chinese dollars in the 2000s. As these dollars scour the earth in search of
returns (because they were not used to purchase goods), they have caused a
rapid decline in the price of money, and thus, in turn, they have blown up a series
of bubbles, the largest of which, in the last century, were in Latin America in the
mid-1970s, Japan in the mid-1980s, and East Asia in the mid-1990s. In the lead
up to this crisis there were the US stock market and housing bubbles of 1998
2007. 9

Figure 1: Surplus capital and surplus population

as disintegrating circuits of capital and labour

As US stock market indexes and house prices climbed ever higher, individuals
with assets felt richer. The value of their assets rose towards the sky. Rising

8 On surplus capital and surplus population, see Misery and Debt, p. 50, and figure 1.
9See Richard Duncan, The Dollar Crisis (Wiley 2005) Chapter 7, Asset Bubbles and
Banking Crises.

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asset values then led to a long-term decline in the savings rate. And so in
spite of declining rates of investment, a long-term slowdown in economic growth-
rates, and an intense immiseration of the workforce bubble-driven
consumption kept the economy ticking over, and not only in the US. The US
economy sucked in 17.8 percent of the rest of the worlds exports in 2007. US
imports were equivalent to 7 percent of the rest of the worlds total GDP in 2007.
Suffice to say: it was a huge stimulus to the world economy. But debt-based
consumption in the US was not allocated equally across the US population.
Proletarians increasingly find that they are superfluous to the capitalist production
process; the demand for their labour has been low. Consequently, workers real
wages have been stagnant for going on 40 years. That has caused a massive
shift in the composition of demand, in the United States. Consumption
increasingly depends only on the changing tastes of the super-rich: the top 5
percent of income-earners account for 37 percent of US spending; the top 20
percent of income earners account for more than the majority of spending
60.5 percent.10
Now, with falling housing and stock market prices, the wealth effect is moving
in reverse.11 Households are paying down already accumulated debts. They are
trying to reduce their debt-to-asset ratios. As a result, businesses are not
investing, no matter how low the interest rates fall. And we still have a long way
to go. Total debt state, businesses and households is roughly 350 percent
of GDP in the US. In the UK, Japan, Spain, South Korea and France, total debt
levels are even higher, up to 500 percent of GDP.12 De-leveraging has only just
begun. Meanwhile the slowdown in high-income countries has been transmitted
to low-income countries by stagnant or declining US and EU imports. The result
is pressure on government spending, from two directions:
1) Governments are forced to spend in order to prevent the return of recession.
If they are unable to pass large stimulus programs, then they rely on
automatic spending increases (or the maintenance of spending in the face of
falling revenues). Gross debt to GDP in the G7 countries rose from 83 percent
in 2007 to 124 percent in 2013. Over the past six years, the US government
took on a debt larger than the entire yearly output of the country in 1990, just

10Robert Frank, U.S. Economy Is Increasingly Tied to the Rich, Wall Street Journal,
August 5, 2010.
11 Robert Brenner, Whats Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America, 2009
(sscnet.ucla.edu), 3440.
12Charles Roxburgh et al., Debt and Deleveraging: Uneven Progress on the Path to
Growth, McKinsey Global Institute, 2012 (mckinsey.com).

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 in order to prevent the economy from going into a tailspin! Why are
economies running so hard to stay in place?
In essence, there has been little private borrowing in spite of zero
percent short-term interest-rates and historically low long-term rates. That
people continue to save rather than borrow, across the private economy, has
opened up a so-called spending gap. The private economy would shrink if
the government did not step in to fill that gap. The purpose of fiscal stimulus
today is not to restart growth. That would only happen if people spent the
money that the stimulus put in their pockets. Instead, households are using
that money to pay down debts. In the present crisis, the point of state
spending is to buy time to give everyone a chance to reduce debt-to-asset
ratios without causing deflation.13 By lowering asset values, deflation would
make those ratios even worse, causing a debt-deflation spiral.
Meanwhile, at the heights of the international economy, certain states are
experimenting with other ways to restore health to private balance sheets:
they are trying to raise asset values rather than lower debts. The US Federal
Reserve and Bank of England, with other central banks have engaged in
quantitative easing. They purchased their own governments long-term
bonds, lowering interest rates on those bonds. Investors were thus pushed
out of bond markets, where yields were falling, into riskier assets. Temporary
success was reflected in a return of rising stock prices. The hope was that
rising prices would reduce debt-to-asset ratios of businesses and wealthy
households not by paying down or writing off their debts, but rather by re-
inflating the value of their assets. The problem is that the effects of
quantitative easing seem to last only as long as the easing itself. Stock
markets arent rising because the economy is recovering. A spate of bad news
and worst of all the news that central banks will end quantitative easing
causes these miniature stock-market bubbles to collapse.
More than that: it is only now becoming clear how much of an effect
quantitative easing has had, outside of the US and UK, that is, on the world
economy. Most importantly, it caused the prices of commodities (e.g. food and
fuel) to rise immensely immiserating the worlds poor, and inducing the food
riots that directly preceded the Arab Spring.14 At the same time, QE also gave
rise to massive foreign-exchange carry trades: investors the world over have

13See Richard Koo, QE2 has transformed commodity markets into liquidity-driven
markets, Equity Research, May 17, 2011
14M. Lagi, K.Z. Bertrand, Y. Bar-Yam, The Food Crises and Political Instability in North
Africa and the Middle East, 2011 (arXiv.org).

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been borrowing at extremely low interest rates in the US, in order to invest in
emerging markets. That strengthened some low-income countries
currencies, severely weakening what had previously been vigorous export
machines. States in low-income countries counteracted that weakening with
huge programs of fiscal stimulus (partly relying on the inflows of foreign
capital to do so). That stimulus explains why low-income countries were able
to recover so quickly from the Great Recession, compared to the high-income
countries. But they recovered not on the basis of a real increase in
economic activity but rather, through the sort of bubble-fueled construction
booms that pulled the rich countries along in the 2000s. Now, with the
possibility that QE will come to an end, it is not only the weak recovery in the
US, but apparently also the bubble-fueled recovery in the emerging markets,
that has been put in danger. States will have to keep spending to keep the
temporary fixes theyve put in place from falling apart.

Table 1: GDP
per capita
percentage
growth rates
for selected
countries,
20082012

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 Table 2: Government debt as percentage of GDP for selected OECD countries, 200713

2) But there is a second pressure on governments: in the US and EU, stimulus

has given way to austerity, in order to reassure bondholders. In Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, long-term interest rates rose rapidly, relative
to the German ten-year bund. Greece had to default, partially. Elsewhere,
austerity measures have been necessary to keep interest rates from rising
further. The problem is that government debts were already large in 2007, at
the start of crisis. This fact has been entirely ignored by Keynesians. Over the
past 40 years, debt-to-GDP ratios tended to rise during busts, but refused to
fall, or rose even further, during booms. States have been unable to use
growth during boom years to pay off their debts, because booms have been

115
 increasingly weak, on a cycle-by-cycle basis. Any attempt to pay down debts
risked undermining increasingly fragile periods of growth. As a result, state
debts expanded, slowly but surely, in many high-income countries, over a
period of decades. But the growth of that debt only mitigated an implacable
slowdown in growth rates. Per capita GDP growth-rates fell, decade by
decade, in high-income countries, from 4.3 percent in the 1960s, to 2.9
percent in the 1970s, to 2.2 percent in the 1980s, to 1.8 percent in the 1990s,
to 1.1 percent in the 2000s.
And so, at the start of this crisis, debt levels were already much higher
than they were in 1929. For example, on the eve of the Great Depression, US
public debt was valued at 16 percent of GDP; ten years later, by 1939, it rose
to 44 percent. By contrast, on the eve of the present crisis, in 2007, the US
public debt was already valued at 62 percent of GDP. It reached 100 percent
just four years later.15 Thats why rising debt levels have raised the spectre of

default, throughout the high-income countries.

High levels of state debt, carried over from previous decades, limit the
capacity of states to take out debt today. They need to keep their powder dry
to maintain, for as long as possible, their ability to draw on inexpensive
lines of credit. States will need credit as they attempt to ride out the coming
waves of financial turbulence. Austerity in the midst of the crisis has been the
paradoxical result. States need to convince bondholders of their ability to rein
in debt now, in order to preserve capacity to take out debt later. Some states
(Ireland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) seem to have already maxed out their
credit limits.
These two pressures to spend in order to stave off deflation and to cut
spending in order to stave off default are equally implacable. Thus,
austerity is not only the capitalist class attacking the poor. Austerity has its
basis in the overgrowth of state debt, which is now reaching an impasse (as it
had in the low-income countries in the early 1980s).
Greece is at the centre of the resulting austerity storm, having been bailed
out twice by the EU and IMF. The first bailout package came in May 2010 and
the second in July 2011. That there will need to be a third package, in 2014,
seems almost inevitable. In order to win these bailouts, Greece was forced to
implement at least five separate austerity packages, the worst of which was

15 We use the US statistics, here, because these are the only ones that allow for a
comparison between 1929 and in 2007. But the US is a unique case; because the dollar
is an international reserve currency, it is more or less impossible for the US state to be
pushed into bankruptcy through over-borrowing.

116
voted through in June 2011. Public sector workers salaries were cut by 15
percent. 150,000 public sector workers are to be laid off by 2015. The
retirement age was raised. There was a 36 percent reduction in spending on
pensions and social benefits. Many utilities (telephones, water and electricity),
as well as state-owned ports, mines, airports, were partially privatised. Income
taxes and sales taxes were raised. Deep cuts came, again, in July 2013,
when 25,000 public employees were sacked, in spite of high levels of
unemployment in the private sector. As a result of austerity, Greek incomes
shrank by a fifth between 2007 and 2012. Since that shrinkage also meant a
reduction in government revenues, austerity measures have only pushed
Greece further from fiscal health. Like so many low-income countries in the
1980s, structural adjustment has made Greece ever more dependent on
outside financing.
In Portugal, Spain and Italy, similar austerity measures have been
implemented, at a lower level of intensity. But even the US has seen schools
closing, rising tuition and health care costs, and disappearing retirement
benefits. Public sector workers have been laid off en masse; those that remain
have seen wages cut.
Coordinated action of central banks, massive assistance to financial firms,
increasing levels of state debt, and now in order to prevent scares on bond
markets turns to austerity: all have prevented the Great Recession from
turning into another Great Depression. The way these operations were
undertaken has further centralised control in the hands of government
ministers in the US and Germany, which function as spenders and lenders of
last resort for the world economy. But as is clear given very high levels of
public and private debt, slow or even persistently negative economic growth,
and extremely elevated levels of unemployment (especially youth
unemployment), in many countries the turbulence is far from over.
We like to think of the present period as a holding pattern. But we note that
the economy is losing altitude all the time. For that reason, the holding pattern
can only be temporary. Perhaps it is possible, through some miracle, that the
world economy will achieve enough speed, pull up on the throttle and soar
through the sky. But there are significant downside risks. The turn to
austerity is endangering the stability that it is meant to prop up, since austerity
means that governments are doing less to make up for the lack of spending in
the private sector. That raises, once again, the spectre of deflation; an
indefinite program of quantitative easing remains the only force pushing back
against deflationary pressures. Yet, even without deflation, there is still a high
likelihood that the present economic turbulence may end with a crash. After

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 all, sovereign defaults when examined on a world-scale arent actually
that rare: they come in waves and play a major part in the global unfolding of
crises.
Can states somehow defy the working of the law of value, massively
increasing their debts without decreasing the expected future growth-rates of
their economies? Those who believe they will be able to do so will have their
thesis tested in the coming period. We cant rule out the possibility that they
will be right: after all, a massive accumulation of debts held by
corporations, households and states, and always in novel ways has
deferred the onset of a new depression over and over again, for decades.
Who is to say whether the present pattern will be maintained only for a few
more weeks, or for a few years?
However, if it is to be maintained, this will require that there not be a
blowout, somewhere in the world economy, that would test the strength of the
worlds financial architecture once again. AIG may have been too big to fail,
but Italy is too big to save. The Eurozone has been pulled back from the brink
a number of times, but the Eurozone crisis has not been resolved definitively.
Potentially more turbulent is the possibility that the ongoing slowdown in the
BRICs will give way to what is euphemistically called a hard landing. That
already seems to be happening in India and Brazil, but the real worry remains
a blowout in China. Massive government stimulus, since 2007, has only
exacerbated over-capacity in construction and manufacturing. Banks are
hiding huge numbers of bad loans in a massive shadow banking sector.
Most tellingly, there has been an extremely rapid increase in housing prices
orders of magnitude larger than the housing-price bubble that just popped in
the US. The Chinese government reassures us that this time its different,
but the US government said exactly the same thing in the mid 2000s

3 THE RETURN OF THE SOCIAL QUESTION

The capitalist mode of production is caught, at present, in a deep crisis; however,
we must guard against the tendency to mistake the crisis of this mode of
production for a weakness of capital in its struggle with labour. In fact, crises tend
to strengthen capitals hand. For, in a crisis, the demand for labour falls at the
same time as, due to massive layoffs, its supply rises. That alone weakens the
bargaining position of workers. But more so: while it is true that capital suffers
losses in the course of a downturn, it is nevertheless the case that individual
capitalists rarely face an existential threat as a result of those losses. On the
contrary, it is workers who, in a downturn, are threatened with the loss of their

118
jobs and thus the loss of everything they have. Crises weaken the position of
workers, as workers.
That is why, in the midst of a crisis, capitalists can argue correctly, from the
point of view of many workers that the restoration of the rate of profit must be
put before all else. As long as workers accept the terms of the class relation, they
find that their lives (even more than those of capitalists) depend on the health of
the system. Restoring the profit rate is the only way to create jobs, and in the
absence of a massive assault on the very existence of class society, individual
proletarians have to try to find jobs or to keep them. It is thus no surprise that
many workers have responded to the onset of the crisis by accepting austerity
measures. It is because workers are vulnerable, now more than ever, that
capitalists and their representatives are pressing their interests; they are defining
what it will take to restore the system to health in ways that directly benefit them.
Thats why austerity never means just temporary reductions in social spending
in the midst of an economic downturn. On the contrary, social-spending programs
have not only been cut back; they are being gutted or done away with entirely. In
many countries, the crisis is being used as a lever with which to destroy long-
held rights and entitlements, including the right to organise. And everywhere, the
crisis has served as an excuse to further centralise power in the hands of
technocrats, acting in the service of the most powerful states (the US, Germany).
These manoeuvres are not merely cyclical adjustments in response to an
economic downturn. They are about restoring profits in the most direct way
possible: suppressing wages. The Keynesian notion that, if states were acting
rationally, they could somehow convince capital not to press its advantage, in the
course of the downturn, is the purest ideology.
Paradoxically, it is for these very reasons that crises are associated not
with a continuation of class struggle along normal lines but rather, with crisis
activity. 16 Self-organising struggles break out more frequently: big
demonstrations and general strikes, riots and looting, and occupations of
workplaces and government buildings. In the midst of a crisis, workers find that
they can only lose if they continue to play by the rules of capitals game. That is
why more and more workers have stopped playing by those rules. Instead, they
are engaged in struggles that challenge the terms of the capital-labour relation
(without necessarily challenging its existence).
The question then arises: what specific sorts of spontaneous struggles are
proletarians engaged in today? In Endnotes 2, we focused on the appearance

16 Bruno Astarian, Crisis Activity and Communisation, Hic Salta (hicsalta-

communisation.com).

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and expansion of surplus populations, as the human embodiment of capitals
contradictions. For that, we were criticised in some quarters. After all, surplus
populations make little direct contribution to accumulation; they lack the leverage
of traditional productive workers, who can bring the system to halt by withdrawing
their labour. Moreover, surplus populations can be marginalised, imprisoned, and
ghettoised. They can be bought off with patronage; their riots can be allowed to
burn themselves out. How could surplus populations ever play a key role in the
class struggle?
In late 2010, surplus populations answered this question, themselves. On
December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside a police station in
Sidi Bouzid. Two days later Hussein Nagi Felhi climbed an electricity pole in the
same town, shouted no to misery, no to unemployment, and electrocuted
himself. Within days riots had spread to almost every city, and within weeks the
president had fled. In the month that followed, acts of self-immolation, like signal
flares, lit up the slums of North Africa: in Algeria, in Morocco, in Mauritania, and in
Egypt.
Abdou Abdel-Moneim, an Egyptian baker, self-immolated on Jan 17, 2011,
after being refused an allocation of subsidised flour. Traditional patronage
relations were breaking down.17 That was one side of a vice pressing down on
Egypts poor. The other, signalled by the brutal murder of Khaled Said in police
custody the year before, was a ramping up of police repression. Here was the
context in which Egypts young activists taking their cue from the overthrow of
Ben Ali in Tunisia decided to take their stand against Mubarak. Crucially, they
began their marches, on January 25 (a day traditionally reserved for celebrating
the police), from Cairos poorest neighbourhoods, and they added bread to their
already promulgated demands for freedom and social justice. In response,
people from these neighbourhoods spilled out into the streets. Emboldened by
the example of Tunisia, this new, amalgamated struggle bringing together
class fractions whose struggles had previously unfolded in isolation quickly
spread to every major city (unlike the failed-strike-cum-bread-riot in Malhalla, in
2008).
And so, if the self-immolations were the initial moment of this struggle, then
the anti-government protests that followed were its culmination. The tactics of the
current wave of struggle were solidified: (1) mass riots, capable of widespread

17Since Egypt imports most of its wheat, rising global food prices in late 2010 helped to
undermine the subsidised provision of bread to the Egyptian poor. Flour sold by the
government at discounted prices was hemorrhaging into a black market characterised
by high prices and rampant adulteration.

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diffusion, but often focusing on a territory; (2) the transformation of that territory
into an occupation, a centre of debate and display (and confrontation with the
police); and (3) attempts to extend from that centre out to the surrounding areas,
by means of wild demonstrations, neighbourhood assemblies, solidarity strikes,
and blockades.
Of course, slum-dwellers were neither the only nor even the principal
constituents of this new wave. Who else located themselves in the squares? Paul
Mason, a BBC journalist who was on the ground for most of the movements,
identified three class fractions, which all played key roles in the 2011 movement
of squares: graduates with no future, the youth underclass, and organised
workers.18 It is the first in this list that is, indebted graphic designers,
impoverished administrative assistants, unpaid interns and, in North Africa,
graduates on long waiting lists for bureaucratic jobs who take the centre stage
in Masons account. However, looking back on 2011, it is apparent that the
struggles of these disaffected graduates only became explosive when they were
invaded and overwhelmed by the poor. In Egypt, as we saw, the January protests
took off because the young activists started their marches in the slums. The
same was true in England: a key turning point in the 2010 student protests was
the entry of the young and restless, who came out in force to protest the
discontinuation of the Education Maintenance Allowance.19
The point here is a more general one: insofar as the 2011 protests
generalised, they tended to do so in ways that destabilised their central
demands. There was a pressure towards generalisation, which nonetheless
failed to unify the class. After all, what does it mean to demand freedom in a sea
of Cairos slum-dwellers? There is no chance that they will be integrated as
normal workers/consumers into any economy, whether that of an autocratic or
a liberal Egypt. By the same token, what does it mean to fight tuition hikes
alongside youth from the council estates? They are likely to be excluded from the
very economy into which university students are seeking entry. For that reason,
alliances between college students and poor youth have been uneasy.
Nevertheless, we should be clear: this tension is not the same as the one that
rent the 1960s, dividing middle-class from working-class youth.
Thats because higher education has been thoroughly transformed in the half-
century since 1968. In the rich countries, universities are populated, not only by
the children of the elite, but also and largely by children of the working

18 Paul Mason, Why Its Still Kicking Off Everywhere (Verso 2012), 61.
19 See A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, Endnotes 3 (endnotes.org.uk/articles/20).

121
class. These students typically work their way through college. Even so, they
rack up massive debts in order to get a degree. In that sense, the so-called
neoliberal era was not only about the globalisation of misery. It was also about
the globalisation of hope. Education plays a central role, here: the American
Dream freedom through private enterprise universalised itself by means of
an expanding access to university education. Get yourself a degree has replaced
Guizots enrichissez-vous.
Heeding the call, families everywhere are trying to send at least one of their
children to school (even Mohamed Bouazizi was putting money towards his
sisters degree). In this context, the sheer size of the student population means
that it is a transmitter of unrest to a much wider section of the population than
before. This applies both in the developed world and in the global south. Since
2000, the global participation rate in higher education has grown from 19 to 26
percent; in Europe and North America, a staggering 70 percent now complete
post-secondary education.20 For that reason, the 1990s and 2000s were an era,
not only of class defeat, but also of class compromise. Now, that compromise
has been shaken, or undermined, by the crisis. The kids are screwed, and that
makes a lot of sense: someone had to pay, and it was easier to delete their
futures, with a keystroke, than to take away the actual jobs of older workers. In
Egypt, today, unemployment is almost 10 times as high for college grads as it is
for people who have only gone through elementary school. The crisis played
itself out as a generational conflict.21
For Mason, it was the lack of synthesis between, on the one hand, the
struggles of the two youth fractions, and on the other hand, those of the
organised workers, that broke the protest movements strength: hence, the
disjunction between the black bloc tearing up Oxford Street and the TUC
demonstrators massing in Hyde Park, for the biggest (and most ineffectual)
trade-union demo in British history.22 Hence also, we might add, the strained
relation between the ILWU longshoremens union on the West Coast of the
United States and Occupy. From the first port blockade on November 2 against
the repression of Occupy Oakland, to the second blockade on December 12 in
defence of the union in Longview, tensions rose as both sides feared co-optation.

20 Mason, Why Its Still Kicking Off, 70.

21To point that out is not to downplay the inter-generational solidarity displayed in these
movements. All the square occupations were at least implicitly testament to this; the
Casseroles in support of the Quebec student strike were explicitly so. Solidarity,
however, presupposes a material separation.
22 Ibid., 57 and A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, 139141.

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Things played out similarly in Greece. Partly in response to the Syntagma
Square occupiers and other social movements, the Greek unions announced
one-day general strikes. But in spite of their high turnout those strikes had only a
minimal impact, and this impact diminished over time. In response, the unions
increased the frequency of the general strikes, at times extending them to 48
hours instead of the usual 24; yet the strikes remained auxiliaries to the mass
demonstrations and riots taking place on the same days, in which union stewards
were reduced to bystanders.23
The strained relation of workers to the broader protest movements was
overcome only in Egypt and even there, only momentarily. In the final days of
the Mubarak regime, workers began to form autonomous organisations, separate
from the corrupt, state-run unions. More and more workers went out on strike
against the regime. Mason describes this process of contagion with a phrase
lifted from a psychiatrist interviewed in Cairo: what he saw was the collapse of
invisible walls.24 This psychiatrist was referring to the walls between fractions of
workers. In the hospitals, doctors, nurses and porters all began talking to each
other as equals, making demands together. The walls came down.
Masons central argument is that, if these walls did not come down,
elsewhere, this was due to a clash between organisational forms: while the
graduates without a future and the urban youth-underclass both formed
networks, workers continued organising themselves into hierarchies. A deeper
limit was confronted here, however, one bearing not only on the form of the
struggle, but its content as well. There was a real conflict of interests at stake in
the movement of the squares.
Among the protesters, there were those who experienced the crisis as an
exclusion from secure employment: students, young precarious workers,
racialised minorities, etc. But among those who were already included in secure
employment, the crisis was experienced as one more threat to their sector. In
short, youth were locked out of a system that had failed them; whereas the
organised workers were concerned with trying to preserve what they knew to be
a very fragile status quo ante. That status quo ante had to be preserved not
merely against the onslaughts of the austerity state, but also against the hordes
of students and the poor who were trying to force their way in. That became clear
in the aftermath of the protests, when, continuing an earlier trend, youth were

23 In Spain and Portugal, where the general strikes generated more momentum, it
seems to have been precisely because the organising was not dominated by the
unions, instead taking the form of blockades involving numerous class fractions.
24 Ibid, 21.

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easily rebranded as immigrants, stealing jobs from deserving citizens. Here, we
are concerned with the question of the content of the struggle. But what were
protesters fighting for, in 2011?

4 TO BE DELIVERED FROM THE BONDAGE OF CORRUPTION

Cairo and Tunis, Istanbul and Rio, Madrid and Athens, New York and Tel Aviv
a great cacophony of demands was on display in the occupied spaces of these
cities. But if one demand stood out, from among the many, it was to put an end to
crony-capitalism. The shibboleth of the occupiers was corruption, to get
money out of politics was their goal. In every square, one found signs painted
with disgust: corrupt businessmen and politicians had destroyed the economy.
Under the cloak of freeing up markets, they helped one another to the spoils.
Perhaps that clarifies some of the other generic demands of the movements:
demands for democracy and equality were precisely demands that everybody
count as one, in a world where some individuals clearly counted for much more
than others.
In opposing corruption, the occupiers found themselves taking up two
mutually contradictory positions. (1) They criticised neoliberalism in terms of its
own ideals: they wanted to eradicate corruption handouts for the cronies to
establish a level playing field for the play of market forces. At the same time, (2)
they called for the replacement of neoliberalism with a more egalitarian form of
patronage: they wanted to redirect government patronage from the elites to the
masses (a popular bailout to replace the bailout of the banks). It is worth pausing
to consider these demands to try to figure out what was behind them, and why
their appeal was so universal, across the global movement of squares.
Leftists typically think of neoliberalism as a conspiracy to consolidate class
power.25 However, in its self-presentation as a technocratic agenda
neoliberalism is first and foremost concerned with opposing corruption, in the
form of rent-seeking by special interests. What is supposed to replace rent-
seeking is market competition, with its promise of fair outcomes. In that sense,
neoliberalism is not so much about shifting the balance of power from the state to
the market; rather, it is about fashioning a state that is compatible with market
society: a capitalist state. The paradox, for neoliberal ideologues, is that their
reforms have everywhere led to rising inequality, and concomitantly, to the
capture of state power by a class of the extremely wealthy (centred on finance,

25 Neoliberalism has also become a catch-all term for an entire era, one that all-too-
easily conflates state policy with economic turbulence, distracting from the capitalist
tendencies that really unite them.

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insurance and real estate, as well as the military and oil extraction). That class
has itself come through dodgy deals and bailouts to represent the epitome
of corruption. Neoliberalism then provides a framework with which to oppose its
own results.
But what is corruption, exactly? To define it in a precise way is rather difficult.
In many ways, corruption simply names the imbrication of capitalism with non-
capitalist old regimes. Corruption is then synonymous with patronage. Non-
capitalist elites as well as upstart notables compete to capture fractions of the
state. They fight over ownership of income streams so, for example, elites
may control the import of flour or command state-run enterprises that weave
textiles. Elites then use state-generated incomes to fund retinues, which trade
their allegiance for a slice of the pie. Where property rights are still politically
constituted, everyone from the lowliest ticket-collector to the highest politician
must play the game of bribes and kickbacks.
Modernisation is, in part, a project of eradicating patronage arrangements. By
centralising the state, increasing tax efficiency, and replacing direct transfers to
constituents with infrastructural investment and targeted subsidies,
modernisation supposedly forces everyone to secure incomes, not by state
capture, but rather by competing in markets. Of course, modernisation remains
woefully incomplete, in this sense. The incompleteness of the modernising
project was one of the main targets of neoliberal programs of structural
adjustment. But far from implying an end to corruption, the modernisation of the
state now in a neoliberal guise actually exacerbated it. In the context of a
sagging world economy, neoliberal reforms had little chance of expanding
participation in markets, in virtuous cycles of growth (that was especially true,
since neoliberalism was associated with a decline in public investments in
infrastructure, without which modern economic growth is all but impossible).
What neoliberalism achieved, then, was to make corruption more discreet,
while funnelling it towards the upper echelons of society. Corruption is now less
ubiquitous but involves much larger sums of money. The small-scale bribery of
officials has been supplanted by the large-scale bribery of corrupt privatisation
deals and public investment projects which flow to the wealthiest clients. The
family members of dictators, Gamal Mubarak above all, have become prime
targets of popular hatred, for that reason. The massive payouts they receive look
all the more egregious now that (1) the state is supposed to be eradicating
corruption, and (2) those lower down are no longer in on the game. This is why
neoliberalism is about inequity: when old forms of patronage are undone with the
promise that new sources of wealth will come to replace them, the failure of that

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promise reveals the new as a version of the old patronage, only now more
egregious, more unfair.
In the high-income countries, a similar process of neoliberalisation took place.
The target of reforms in the rich countries was not, however, old-regime
patronage arrangements but, rather, social democratic corporatism. The latter
had replaced the former in the course of the twentieth century; now, it was itself
to be dismantled. Once again, the much-vaunted freeing of the market was
supposed to benefit everyone. When economic growth failed to appear,
neoliberalism meant only that handouts had been funnelled up towards the top.
That process was perhaps most clear on the Northern and Eastern shores of
the Mediterranean, where state funds (and flows of hot money) were channeled
into infrastructural investment. From the late 80s to the 2008 crash, the
economies of Spain, Greece and Turkey were largely kept afloat by a massive
construction boom. Construction is, by its very nature, a temporary form of
stimulus: many people can be employed, to build a road network, but only a few
are needed for upkeep or maintenance, once that network has been built. For
that reason, urban development projects can offset a decline in profitability only
temporarily. An infrastructure boom merely defers the crisis by locking up surplus
capital in the expansion of the built environment.
When this growth machine runs out of fuel, it sometimes leaves behind
impressive but useless ruins. Corruption today appears as empty airports in
isolated corners of Spain; half-built tower-blocks overlooking an Athenian port;
and plans for a shopping mall in a poor neighbourhood of Istanbul. What makes
these projects corrupt is not so much the insider deals that directed government
agencies to throw away their money on follies. In truth, those deals appeared as
corrupt only retrospectively: when the tourists stopped coming, the housing
market collapsed and consumer spending declined. In that moment, insider deals
were no longer experienced as relatively harmless accompaniments to economic
growth. Instead, they started to look like the old patronage, but now, with much
larger sums of money at stake (due to the greater borrowing capacity of states in
the run-up to the crisis) and also, a much smaller circle of beneficiaries.26

26 It is not only around the shores of the Mediterranean that anti-corruption demands
circulated. Like Turkey, Brazil also witnessed a construction bonanza, putting money in
the hands of stadium builders even as the cost of living was rising sharply for the urban
poor. Added to that, a series of political scandals made it inevitable that denunciations of
corrupt politicians would be a major theme of the riots that swept the country in June
2013.

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 In the UK and US, too, corruption was a common theme of UK Uncut and
OWS.27 However, in both countries, the demand to end corruption was not a
matter of shady construction projects and political kickbacks. Instead, that
demand was formulated in response to the gigantic corporate bailouts
orchestrated in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and RBS. But
the same rule holds here, as elsewhere: what made these bailouts corrupt was
less the shady circumstances under which they were made, than the fact that
they seemed to have nothing to do with restoring economic growth (that is,
creating jobs, etc.).
In opposing these different manifestations of corruption, the occupiers of the
squares seemed to be promoting two somewhat divergent ideas.
1) The rich should be made to feel the pain of the crisis, and of the austerity that
followed. After all, neoliberal ideologues argued that everyone should take
personal responsibility for themselves and their actions; in that sense,
everyone should aspire to be petty bourgeois. The target of this discourse
were the unions, as well as anyone drawing state benefits. As we saw above,
however, the biggest handouts went not to the unions or the ultra-poor, but
quite visibly to the ultra-rich. They made out like bandits, while everyone else
suffered, through not only economic crisis, but also austerity. To get money
out of politics would mean: to force the ultra-rich to take responsibility for their
own actions.
2) At the same time, to the extent that venal politicians were cutting supports for
the poor while handing out money to the rich, the occupiers demanded, not a
levelling of the playing field, but rather, its tilting in their favour. State
patronage should be directed away from fat cats and towards populist
constituents (the nation). Occupiers thus demanded a popular bailout, both
out of a sense of what is frequently called social justice and also because,
like good Keynesian economists, they hoped that a popular bailout would
restore the economy to health.
Behind this second demand rests a truth that has become increasingly obvious: a
large portion of the population has been left out of the economic growth of the

27 Adbusters initially proposed that the one demand of OWS be to get Obama to start a
Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our
representatives in Washington. In the end this demand was not taken up, but the one
demand that was passed by an OWS general assembly, to support the Citizens United
campaign against corporate personhood, was also centrally about the undue influence
of corporations on the government. Such sentiments were constantly on view at occupy,
e.g. I cant afford my own politician so I made this sign.

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past few decades, and there is no plan to bring them back in. Throughout low-
income countries, direct state patronage to the poor a crucial foundation of the
clientelist state has gradually eroded, while privatisation deals benefit a slim
layer of the elite. The limited partnership, in which the poor had been able to
enjoy some of the gains of the nationalist project, is being dismantled.
It is worth noting that this dismantling has a generational aspect particularly
important in developing countries where population growth rates are high.
Politicians know that populist measures cannot be wound down across the board
without provoking mass anger and potentially mass rebellion. Instead, the state
proceeds sector by sector. It begins by taking away the as yet unrealised
privileges of the next generation. This process is clearly at work in the shrinking
urban formal sector in Egypt now accounting for roughly ten percent of the
workforce (including food processing, textiles, transport, cement, construction,
and steel). Young people find themselves locked out of good jobs. Instead, they
are confined to the non-agricultural informal sector, which absorbs over two-
thirds of the workforce.
However, the state has not only retreated. When it can no longer afford to
keep up its side of the patrimonial bargain, the state replaces handouts to the
poor with police repression. The lines of patronage are thereby contracted and
rearranged: the police and army benefit from an increased access to patronage,
even as many other sectors lose such access. The police and army come to
employ a fraction of those who would otherwise have found themselves on the
outside of the new patronage system, but they employ that fraction only to keep
the rest in line. Hence the potent symbolism of Bouazizi and Abdel Moneim. One
body burnt to signal police repression, the other to signal a breakdown of popular
state patronage. These two experiences are directly intertwined.28
It is for these reasons that the police have become the most potent
manifestation, and the most hated symbol, of corruption. The expansion and
militarisation of the police force seems to be the worst sign of the times. States
everywhere are demonstrating that they are willing to spend huge amounts of
money paying police, constructing prisons, and so on even while they cut
funding for schools and hospitals. States are no longer oriented, even
superficially, towards treating their populations as ends in themselves. On the
contrary, states now see their populations as security threats and are willing to
pay to contain them.

28L.S. Hanging by a Thread: Class, Corruption and Precarity in Tunisia, Mute, January
2012 (metamute.org).

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 Such containment is an everyday reality, especially for marginalised sections
of the proletariat. Since the police are usually underpaid, they often supplement
their incomes with bribes and kickbacks that are extracted from the poor. Daily
interactions with the police thus reveal the latter to be some of the last remaining
beneficiaries of the old corruption. At the same time, in squeezing the most
vulnerable sections of the population, the police enforce the new corruption: they
quash any resistance to an increasingly wealthy, neo-patrimonial elite.
The police do not only extract money from the poor; they are also out for
blood. The overgrowth of police forces has everywhere been accompanied by a
rise in arbitrary police violence and police killings, often the trigger for riots. Each
time another body hits the ground, a section of the population receives the
message loud and clear: you no longer matter to us; be gone. This same
message is on display, in a more punctuated way, in the anti-austerity protests.
The police are there, on the front-lines of the conflict, making sure that the
population stays in line and does not complain too much about the injustice of it
all.
Opposition to corruption thus has a real basis in the immediate experience of
the protestors. The fight against corruption registers a bitter experience of getting
shut out, in a double sense. On the one hand, individuals are unable to enjoy the
growing wealth of the new globalised economy, which is on display in the
conspicuous consumption of the new rich. On the other hand, those same
individuals find that they have been equally shut out of older systems of
patronage which were also systems of recognition (whether in its old regime
or workerist form). Thus, to complain of corruption is not only to register the
extremes to which inequality has risen, or the unfairness with which wealth is
redistributed upwards in so many shady contracts. It is also about decrying a lack
of recognition, or the fear of losing it: rampant corruption means that, at a basic
level, one does not really count (or is in danger of not counting) as a member of
the nation. What takes the place of a national community is only the police, as
the arbiters of the shakeout. What would repair this situation, and restore the
community? The occupations were themselves an attempt to answer this
question.

5 THE PROBLEM OF COMPOSITION

The 2011 protesters put their bodies and their suffering on display, in public
squares, in order to reveal the human consequences of an unrelenting social
crisis. But they did not remain in that conceptual space for long. Occupiers
spontaneously opted for direct democracy and mutual aid, in order to show the

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powers that be that another form of sociality is possible: it is possible to treat
human beings as equal in terms of their right to speak and their right to be heard.
In the course of the occupations, horizontalist models of organisation tended
to become ends in themselves. Faced with implacable and/or insolvent state-
power, the occupiers turned inwards, to find within their self-activity a human
community one in which there was no longer a need for hierarchy, leadership
or status differentiation. It was enough to be present in the squares, in order to
be counted. No other affiliation or allegiance was necessary; indeed, other
affiliations were often viewed with suspicion. In this way, anti-government
protests which took it as their goal to shoo the plutocrats out of office
became anti-government protests in another sense. They became anti-political.
Of course, this transformation should not be seen solely as a progression: it
marked an oscillation in the orientation of the protesters, from outwards to
inwards and back out again.
Searching for precursors to this feature of the movement of squares has
proven difficult. The movements horizontalism was there in Argentina, in 2001.
The movement also replicated the forms consensus-based decision-making,
above all of the anti-globalisation protests (and before that, of the anti-nuclear
protests). But the movement of squares was different because the square
occupations lasted for so long. For that reason, the occupiers were forced to take
their own reproduction as an object.29 The occupiers had to decide how to live
together. Their ability to persist in the squares to occupy for as long as it took
to have an impact was their only strength; their leverage was that they refused
to leave. They adopted forms of governance that they claimed were better than
the ones on offer in this broke and broken society.
It may be that the most relevant precursor to this feature of the movements is
to be found in a previous square occupation, one that seems not to have been a
direct reference for the 2011 protesters. That is Tiananmen Square. Despite his
simplifications, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben captured something of the
spirit of Tiananmen, in a way that is prescient of the 2011 protest movement. In
The Coming Community, Agamben, speaking of a herald from Beijing,
characterises Tiananmen as a movement whose generic demands for freedom
and democracy belie the fact that the real object of the movement was to
compose itself. 30 The community that came together, in Tiananmen, was
mediated not by any condition of belonging nor by the simple absence of

29 See Rust Bunnies & Co., Under the Riot Gear in SIC 2, 2014 (sicjournal.org)
30 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (University of Minnesota Press 1993), 85.

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conditions, but rather, by belonging itself.31 The goal of the demonstrators was
to form a community without affirming an identity where humans co-belong
without any representable condition of belonging.32
Agamben claims that, by disassociating themselves from all markers of
identity, the occupiers of Tiananmen became whatever singularities.33 These
whatever singularities remain precisely what they are, regardless of the qualities
they happen to possess in any given moment. According to Agamben, in
presenting themselves in this way, the occupiers necessarily ran aground on the
representational logic of the state: the state sought to fix the occupiers into a
specific identity, which could then be included or excluded as such. Thus,
Agamben concludes: wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their
being-in-common, there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will
appear.34
To form a community mediated by belonging itself, in Agambens sense,
means the following: (1) The community is composed of all those who happen to
be there; there are no other conditions of belonging. (2) The community does not
mediate between pre-existing identities, in a coalitional politics; instead, it is born
ex nihilo. (3) The community does not seek recognition by the state. It presents
itself, at the limit, as an alternative to the state: real democracy, or even the
overcoming of democracy. (4) The task of such a community is to encourage
everyone else to desert their posts, in society, and to join the community, as
whatever singularities. This description matches the self-conception of the 2011
occupiers. They, too, wanted to be whatever singularities, even if they referred to
themselves in a less philosophical fashion.
But we should be clear: for Agamben, Tiananmen already consisted of
whatever singularities. The separation between students and workers that
pervaded the square, down to the details of where one could sit, falls out of his
account, entirely. Yet despite its failings as a description, Agambens account
captures something of the normative orientation of the movements. For it seems
that in Tiananmen as in the Plaza del Sol, Syntagma Square and Zucotti Park
the participants believed themselves to be beyond the determinations of the

31 Ibid., 85.
32 Ibid., 86.
33 Ibid., 85. The term is explained in the books opening chapter.
34 Ibid., 87.

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society in which they lived. The 2011 protesters certainly felt that way: they
proposed to fight crony capitalism on that very basis.
The truth was, however, that the protesters remained firmly anchored to the
society of which even their squares were a part. That was clear enough in the
divisions between more middle class participants and the poor. But it wasnt
only that: individuals with all sorts of pre-existing affinities tended to congregate
in this or that corner of the square. They set up their tents in circles, with the
open flaps facing inwards. More insidious divisions emerged along gender lines.
The participation of women in the occupations took place under the threat of rape
by some of the men; women were forced to organise for their self-defence.35
Such divisions were not dissolvable into a unity that consisted only of consensus-
based decision-making and collective cooking.
Heres the thing: the fact that the 2011 movements presented themselves as
already unified, as already beyond the determinations of a horrible society, meant
that their internal divisions were usually disavowed. Because they were
disavowed, those divisions could only appear as threats to the movement. That is
not to say that internal divisions were simply suppressed: it was rather that
divisions could only be resolved within the confines of the squares by
forming another committee or promulgating a new rule of action. 36
The movement was forced to look inward, in this way, because it was barred
from looking outward. Without the capacity to move out of the squares and into
society without beginning to dismantle society there is no possibility of
undoing the class relation on which the proletariats internal divisions are based.
The occupiers were thus contained within the squares, as in a pressure cooker.
Class fractions that typically keep their distance from each other were forced to
recognise one another and sometimes live together. In the tensions that resulted,
the movement came up against what we call the problem of composition.
The composition problem names the problem of composing, coordinating or
unifying proletarian fractions, in the course of their struggle. Unlike in the past
or at least, unlike in ideal-typical representations of the past it is no longer

35 The best accounts of anti sexual harassment organising in Egypt can be found in the
videos produced by the Mosireen collective (mosireen.org), and the testimonies
translated on the facebook page of OPANTISH (Operation ANTI-Sexual Harassment,
facebook.com/opantish).
36 Because it went so much further than all the other movements, Egypt was something
of an exception in this respect. After the massacres of Mohamed Mahmoud St., the
division between the Brotherhood and everyone else was clearly marked, with
irreversible results.

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possible to read class fractions as already composing themselves, as if their
unity were somehow given in-itself (as the unity of the craft, mass or social
worker). Today, no such unity exists; nor can it be expected to come into
existence with further changes in the technical composition of production. In that
sense, there is no predefined revolutionary subject. There is no for-itself class-
consciousness, as the consciousness of a general interest, shared among all
workers. Or rather, such consciousness can only be the consciousness of capital,
of what unifies workers precisely by separating them.
The composition of the class thus appears, today, not as a pole of attraction
within the class, but rather, as an unresolved problem: how can the class act
against capital, in spite of its divisions? The movement of squares was for a
while able to suspend this problem. The virtue of the occupations was to
create a space between an impossible class struggle and a tepid populism,
where protesters could momentarily unify, in spite of their divisions. That made
for a qualitative leap in the intensity of the struggle. But at the same time, it
meant that when the protesters came up against the composition problem, they
found that problem impossible to solve.
For the occupiers came together by sidestepping the composition problem.
They named their unity in the most abstract way: they were indignant citizens or
the 99 percent. It would have been unfashionable to say that they were the
working class or the proletariat, but it would have made no difference: every
universal is abstract when the unity it names has no concrete existence. For
these reasons, the unity of the occupiers was necessarily a weak unity. It could
hold together only so long as the occupiers could contain the divisions that
reappeared inside the camps divisions that were already present in everyday
social relations: race, gender, nation, age, etc.37 Is it possible to approach the
composition problem from the opposite angle, to begin from the divisions within
the proletariat, and on that basis, to pose the question of unity?
Perhaps it is only by deferring unity, to make divisions appear as such, that
proletarians will be forced to pose the question of their real unification, against
their unity-in-separation for capital. In that case, in order to really unite,
proletarians will have to become the beyond of this society and not in an

37 We should remember, however, that there are many divisions that escape these
terms or that are invented only in the course of concrete struggles. The proletariat is
divided up in ways that cannot be named in advance. Thus, the point is not to name the
terms of the composition problem, but only, to name the problem itself, as a key
strategic question of our times.

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imagined way, but rather, by relating to one another, materially, outside of the
terms of the class relation.
Why is the proletariat so hopelessly divided, today, as compared to the past?
This question is more accurately posed as follows: why do divisions within the
proletariat appear so clearly on the surface of society? How did identity politics
come to replace class-based politics?
In the past, it seemed possible to disavow non-class identities, on the basis of
an all-encompassing class identity. That disavowal was supported by ongoing
transformations in the mode of production: capital had created the industrial
working class; it seemed that it would now draw more and more workers into the
factories (or else, that all work would be transformed after the fashion of the
factories). As the industrial working class grew in size and strength, it was
expected to become more homogeneous. The factory would render divisions of
race, gender and religion inessential, as compared to class belonging that was
the sole identity that mattered, at least according to the workers movement.
We would like to suggest that this vision of the future was possible only on the
basis of a high demand for labour in industry. Of course, a high demand for
labour has never really been a regular feature of capitalist societies (long booms
are actually few and far between in capitals history). Nevertheless, it is possible
to say that the demand for labour in industry was typically higher in the past than
it has been since the 1970s. For, in the past, workers were drawn into the
industrial sector, not completely, but tendentially. That had effects: when the
demand for labour in industry is high, capital is forced to hire workers who are
normally excluded from high value-added segments of production, on the basis
of gender, race, religion, etc. A high demand for labour breaks down prejudices
among both managers and workers, on that basis. What is supposed to follow is
a material convergence of workers interests.
That convergence did take place, at least to some extent, in the course of the
workers movement.38 For example, in the US, agricultural mechanisation in the
South displaced black sharecroppers, propelling their migration to booming
Northern cities. There, blacks were absorbed into factories, and so also, into
workers unions. The integration of black workers into unions did not occur
without a struggle, nor was it ever completed. Nevertheless, it was underway in
the 1960s.

38However, this process of unification was always incomplete. The workers movement
constituted itself as an attempt to force its completion, see p. 203.

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 Then, this integration ran up against external limits. Just as the door to
integration was beginning to open, it was suddenly slammed shut. The industrial
demand for labour slackened, first in the late 1960s and then, again, in the crisis
years of the early 1970s. The last hired were first fired. For black Americans, jails
replaced jobs. The growth of the prison population corresponded closely to the
decline in industrial employment.
A similar turn of events took place on the world-scale. During the postwar boom,
low-income countries were tendentially integrated into the club of industrialised
nations. But they were integrated only as the postwar boom was reaching its
limits. Indeed, they were integrated precisely because it was reaching its limits:
as competition intensified, firms were compelled to scour the globe in search of
cheap labour. Once the boom gave way to a long downturn, that integration
broke down.
What has happened, since the 1970s, is that the surplus population has
grown steadily. In essence, the growth of surplus populations put class
integration into reverse; integration became fragmentation. Thats because the
industrial demand for labour is low. With many applications for each job,
managers prejudices (e.g certain races are lazy) have real effects, in
determining who does or does not get a good job. As a result, some fractions of
the class pool at the bottom of the labour market. What makes those fractions
unattractive to certain employers then makes them very attractive to others
particularly in jobs where a high employee turnover is not really a cost to
employers. The existence of a large surplus population creates the conditions for
the separation out of a super-exploited segment of the class, which Marx called
the stagnant surplus population. That separation reinforces prejudices among
privileged workers, who know (on some level) that they got their good jobs
based on employers prejudice. It also reinforces non-class identities among the
excluded, since those identities form the basis of their exclusion.
However, while capital is no longer overcoming divisions, the very scrambled
nature of the new divisions seems to weaken them, in certain ways. Because it is
an ongoing process, we can perhaps say that, tendentially, the unfolding of the
general law of capital accumulation undermines stable identity formations in all
segments of the labour market. More and more people are falling into the surplus
population; anyone can, potentially. Increasingly, the stable-unstable distinction is
the one that regulates all the other distinctions within the working class. That
leads to a widespread sense that all identities are fundamentally inessential, in
two senses:
1) Not everyone, even within the most marginalised sections of the class, is
excluded from stable jobs and public recognition. The present era has seen

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 the rise of individuals from marginalised populations to the heights of power.
That there are many women CEOs and one black US president gives
everyone the impression that no stigma, no mark of abjection, is wholly
insurmountable.
2) But also, the very nature of precarity is to dissolve fixed positions. Very few
proletarians identify any of their qualifications or capacities as essential
determinants of themselves. In a world without security there can be no
pretence to normality, to identities that remain stable over time. Instead, lives
are cobbled together, without a clear sense of progression. All lifestyles are
commodified, their parts interchangeable. These features of a fragmented
proletariat were present in the squares.

6 CONCLUSION
points of no return
What comes next? It is impossible to say in advance. What we know is that, at
least for the moment, we live and fight within the holding pattern. The crisis has
been stalled. In order to make the crisis stall, the state has been forced to
undertake extraordinary actions. It is hard to deny that state interventions, over
the past few years, have seemed like a last ditch effort. Interest rates are
bottoming out at zero percent. The government is spending billions of dollars,
every month, just in order to convince capital to invest in a trickle. For how long?
And yet, for this long, at least, state interventions have worked. The crisis has
been petrified. And its petrification has been the petrification of the struggle.
Indeed, since the crisis has been stalled, the class struggle remains that of
the most eager and the worst off. Everyone else hopes that, if they keep their
heads down, they will survive until the real recovery begins. Meanwhile, those
engaged in struggle are themselves mostly lost in false hopes of their own: they
hope that the state can be convinced to act rationally, to undertake a more
radical Keynesian stimulus. The protesters hope that capitalism can be forced to
rid itself of cronies and act in the interest of the nation. Unlikely to abandon this
perspective as long as it seems remotely plausible anti-austerity struggles
are themselves stuck in a holding pattern. They confront the objectivity of the
crisis only in the states impassiveness in response to their demands.
We see three scenarios, going forward:
1) The holding pattern could be maintained for a while longer, so that a second
wave of struggle, like the 201113 wave, might emerge within its confines.
That second wave may remain tepid, like its predecessor often was. But it is
also possible that it could become stronger, on the basis of real bonds that

136
 have been created over the past few years. If that happens, we could see the
resurgence of a radical democratic movement, more popular than that of the
anti-globalisation era. This movement would not necessarily focus on square
occupations; it may announce itself by means of some other tactic,
impossible to foresee. Such a movement, were it able to find a leverage
point, might be able to renegotiate the terms on which the crisis is being
managed. For example, protesters may be able to foist the fallout of the crisis
on to the super rich: with a new Tobin Tax, progressive income taxes, or
limitations on CEO pay. Perhaps rioters will form substantial organisations,
which are able to press for the end of arbitrary police violence and a partial
de-militarisation of police forces. Maybe Arab states can be made to raise
public employment levels, in order to absorb a backlog of unemployed
university graduates. In any case, all of these demands, even if they were
achieved, would be like forming a workers council on the deck of the Titanic.
They would be self-managing a sinking ship (though, admittedly, since the
icebergs are melting, what that ship would hit is as yet unknown).
2) The holding pattern could be maintained for a while longer, but the second
wave of struggle, within its confines, could look radically different than the first
one. Perhaps taking their cue from the movement of squares
proletarians will see an opening for a new, more or less informal, rank-and-file
unionism. This unionism, if it infected the huge mass of unorganised, private-
sector service workers, could radically transform the terms within which the
crisis is managed. It might be possible, on that basis, to approach the
composition problem from the other way around. Fast food workers are
currently striking in the United States, demanding a doubling of their wages.
What if they succeed and that success acts as a signal for the rest of the
class to pour out onto the streets? It is important to remember that a massive
shift in the terms of the class struggle does not always correspond to a rise in
the intensity of the crisis. The objective and subjective moments of the class
relation do not necessarily move in sync.
3) Finally, there could be an intensification of the crisis, a global bottoming out,
beginning with a deep downturn in India or China. Or else, the winding down
of Quantitative Easing could spiral out of control. The end of the holding
pattern would scramble all the terms of the era we have described. Ours
would no longer be an austerity crisis, but rather, something else entirely,
affecting much broader sections of the population. To blame corrupt
politicians would no longer be possible, or at least, it would no longer be
useful, since the possibility of a state management of the crisis would be
foreclosed. That is not to say that revolution will suddenly appear on the

137
table, as the only option left. To get worse is not necessarily to get better. The
divisions within the proletariat run deep, and they only deepen with the further
growth of the surplus population. It is entirely possible to imagine that class
fractions will turn against each other, that hating one another, and ensuring
that no one gets slightly better than anyone else, will take precedence over
making the revolution.

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 THE LOGIC OF GENDER
ON THE SEPARATION OF SPHERES
AND THE PROCESS OF ABJECTION
Endnotes 3 2013
Within marxist feminism we encounter several sets of binary terms to analyse
gendered forms of domination under capitalism.1 These include: productive and
reproductive, paid and unpaid, public and private, sex and gender. When
considering the gender question, we found these categories imprecise,
theoretically deficient and sometimes even misleading. This article is an attempt
to propose categories which will give us a better grasp of the transformation of
the gender relation since the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis.
The account that follows is strongly influenced by systematic dialectics, a
method that tries to understand social forms as interconnected moments of a
totality.2 We therefore move from the most abstract categories to the most
concrete, tracing the unfolding of gender as a real abstraction. We are only
concerned with the form of gender specific to capitalism, and we assume from
the outset that one can talk about gender without any reference to biology or
prehistory. We begin by defining gender as a separation between spheres. Then,
having done so, we specify the individuals assigned to those spheres.
Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial terms, but rather in the same way
Marx spoke of the two separated spheres of production and circulation, as
concepts that take on a materiality.
The binaries listed above appear to limit ones grasp of the ways in which
these spheres function at present, as they lack historical specificity and promote
a transhistorical understanding of gendered domination, which takes patriarchy

1 In the broadest strokes, marxist feminism is a perspective which situates gender

oppression in terms of social reproduction, and specifically the reproduction of labour-
power. Often it considers the treatment of such topics in Marx and in subsequent
marxist accounts of capitalism deficient, and in light of the unhappy marriage and dual
systems debates, it generally supports a single system thesis. It is also worth noting
that this article is meant to continue a conversation from the 1970s, the domestic labour
debate, which turns on the relationship between value and reproduction, and which
deploys Marxist categories in order to consider whether domestic and reproductive
labour are productive.
2 See Communisation and Value-Form Theory, Endnotes 2 (April 2010).

139
as a feature of capitalism without making it historically specific to capitalism. We
hope to delineate categories that are as specific to capitalism as capital itself.
We argue that these binaries depend on category errors whose faults become
clear once we attempt to illuminate the transformations within capitalist society
since the 70s. Forms of domestic and so-called reproductive activities have
become increasingly marketised, and while these activities may occupy the
sphere of the home, just as they did before, they no longer occupy the same
structural positions within the capitalist totality, despite exhibiting the same
concrete features. For this reason, we found ourselves forced to clarify,
transform, and redefine the categories we received from marxist feminism, not for
the sake of theory, but to understand why humanity is still powerfully inscribed
with one or the other gender.

1 PRODUCTION/REPRODUCTION
Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous
process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no
more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a
connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of
production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.3
When Marx speaks of reproduction he does not refer to the production and
reproduction of any commodity in particular; rather, he is concerned with the
reproduction of the social totality. However, when marxist feminists speak of
reproduction, what they often aim to specify is the production and reproduction of
the commodity labour-power. This is because, in Marxs critique, the relationship
between the reproduction of labour-power and the reproduction of the capitalist
totality is incomplete.

I
WHEN MARX SPEAKS OF LABOUR-POWER,HE CLAIMS IT IS A
COMMODITY WITH A DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER, UNLIKE ANY OTHER
Although Marx speaks of the specificities of the commodity labour-power,4 there
are some aspects of this specification which require more attention.
First, let us investigate the separation between labour-power and its bearer.
The exchange of labour-power presupposes that this commodity is brought to the
market by its bearer. However, in this particular case, labour-power and its bearer
are one and the same living person. Labour-power is the living, labouring

3 Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), 565.

4 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), chapter 6.

140
capacity of this person, and as such, it cannot be detached from the bearer. Thus
the particularity of labour-power poses an ontological question.
Going back to Capital, at the outset of Chapter One we encounter the
commodity, and it is only a few chapters later that we will fully discover its most
peculiar manifestation, that is to say, labour-power. In accord with Marx, it is
correct to begin with the naturalised and self-evident realm of commodity
circulation, in order to render the commodity a curious and unnatural thing
indeed. We will not, however, enquire only about what organises these things,
these objects; but rather in terms of a gender analysis we will enquire into
these other bodies, human objects, which bumble about in their own natural
way, and who, like the fetishised commodity, appear to have no history. Yet they
surely do.
For at the heart of the commodity form is the dual character of labour both
abstract and concrete and accordingly, Chapter One of Capital introduces the
contradiction between use-value and (exchange) value. This is the contradiction
which unfolds from the first pages of Marxs critique to the very end. Indeed, the
split between these two irreconcilable aspects of the commodity form is the
guiding thread that allows Marx to trace and disclose all the other contradictory
forms that constitute the capitalist mode of production.
Let us summarise briefly this contradiction. On the one hand, the commodity
in its aspect as use-value stands, in all its singularity, as a particular object
differentiated from the next. It has a definite use which, as Marx claims, is
necessary for its production as exchange-value. In addition, because it is
singular, it is a single unit, one of many which add up to a sum, a quantity of
individual things. It does not amount to a sum of homogeneous labour-time in the
abstract, but a sum of concrete individual and separable labours. On the other
hand, in its aspect as exchange-value, it represents an aliquot portion of the
total social labour within society a quantum of socially necessary labour time,
or the average time required for its reproduction.
This contradiction, the contradiction far from being specific only to
things is fundamentally the very condition of being in the world for a
proletarian. From this standpoint, the proletarian confronts the world in which the
capitalist mode of production prevails as an accumulation of commodities; the
proletarian does this as a commodity and therefore this confrontation is at
once a chance meeting between one commodity and another, and at the same
time an encounter between subject and object.
This ontological split exists because labour-power is neither a person nor just
a commodity. As Marx tells us, the commodity labour-power is peculiar and unlike

141
any other. The peculiarity of the commodity labour-power is what gives it a
central place in a mode of production based on value, as the very use-value of
labour-power (or living labour capacity) is the source of (exchange-) value.
Furthermore, the contradiction between use-value and (exchange) value has
additional implications, when we consider the very production and reproduction
of labour-powers. This peculiar production is specific enough to deserve extra
attention, for, as far as we know, at no time does a labour-power roll off an
assembly line.
How then is labour-power produced and reproduced? Marx identifies the
particularity of the use-value of labour-power. But does he adequately distinguish
the production of labour-power from the production of other commodities? He
writes:
the labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power reduces itself
to that necessary for the production of [its] means of subsistence.5
When raising the problem of the value of labour-power, Marx concludes that it is
equal to the labour-time necessary for its production, as is the case for any other
commodity. However, in this case, it is mysteriously reduced to the labour-time
necessary for the production of the workers means of subsistence. But a cart full
of means of subsistence does not produce labour-power as a ready-made
commodity.
If we were to compare the production of labour-power with the production of
any other commodity, we would see that the raw materials used for this
production process, i.e. the means of subsistence, transmit their value to the end
product, while the new labour needed to turn these commodities into a
functioning labour-power adds no value to this commodity. If we were to push this
analogy further, we could say that in terms of value labour-power consists
only of dead labour.
In the above quote, Marx reduces the necessary labour required to produce
labour-power to the raw materials purchased in order to accomplish its
(re)production. Any labour necessary to turn this raw material, this basket of
goods, into the commodity labour-power, is therefore not considered living labour
by Marx, and indeed, in the capitalist mode of production it is not deemed
necessary labour at all. This means that however necessary these activities are
for the production and reproduction of labour-power, they are structurally made
non-labour. This necessary labour is not considered as such by Marx because
the activity of turning the raw materials equivalent to the wage into labour-power

5 Marx, Capital vol. 1 (MECW 35), 181.

142
takes place in a separate sphere from the production and circulation of values.
These necessary non-labour activities do not produce value, not because of their
concrete characteristics, but rather, because they take place in a sphere of the
capitalist mode of production which is not directly mediated by the form of value.
There must be an exterior to value in order for value to exist. Similarly, for
labour to exist and serve as the measure of value, there must be an exterior to
labour (we will return to this in part two). While the autonomist feminists would
conclude that every activity which reproduces labour-power produces value,6 we
would say that, for labour-power to have a value, some of these activities have to
be cut off or dissociated from the sphere of value production.7

II
THEREFORE, THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOUR-POWER
PRESUPPOSES THE SEPARATION OF TWO DIFFERENT SPHERES
As articulated above, there is a sphere of non-labour or extra-necessary labour
which envelops the process of transforming dead labour, that is commodities
purchased with the wage, into the living labour capacity found on the market. We
must now look at the specificities of this sphere.
Terms like the reproductive sphere are insufficient for identifying this sphere,
because what we are trying to name cannot be defined as a specific set of
activities according to their use-value or concrete character. Indeed, the same
concrete activity, like cleaning or cooking, can take place in either sphere: it can
be value-producing labour in one specific social context and non-labour in
another. Reproductive tasks such as cleaning can be purchased as services, and
prefab meals can be bought in place of time spent preparing meals. However, to
fully appreciate how beyond labour-power gender is reproduced, it will be
necessary to differentiate reproduction that is commodified, monetised, or mass
produced from that which is not.
Because the existing concepts of production and reproduction are themselves
limited, we need to find more precise terms to designate these two spheres.
From now on we will use two very descriptive (and therefore rather clunky) terms
to name them: (a) the directly market-mediated sphere (DMM); and (b) the
indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM). Rather than coming up with jargonistic

6 Such as Leopoldina Fortunati: see The Arcane of Reproduction (Autonomedia 1981).

7 On this point, we are very much influenced by Roswitha Scholzs value-dissociation
theory, even if there remain major differences in our analyses, especially when it comes
to the dynamics of gender. See Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus
(Horleman 2000).

143
neologisms, our aim is to use these as placeholders and to concentrate on the
structural characteristics of these two spheres. In the course of our presentation
(see Part 2) we will have to add another set of descriptive terms (waged/
unwaged) to sufficiently elaborate the nuanced characteristics of these spheres.
The production and reproduction of labour-power necessitates a whole set of
activities; some of them are performed in the directly market-mediated or DMM
sphere (those that are bought as commodities, either as product or service),
while others take place in that sphere which is not directly mediated by the
market the IMM sphere. The difference between these activities does not lie in
their concrete characteristics. Each of these concrete activities cooking,
looking after children, washing/mending clothes can sometimes produce value
and sometimes not, depending upon the sphere, rather than the actual place, in
which it occurs. The sphere, therefore, is not necessarily the home. Nor is this
sphere defined by whether or not the activities taking place within it consist of
those that reproduce labour-power. It is defined by the relationship of these
reproductive tasks to exchange, the market and the accumulation of capital.
This conceptual distinction has material consequences. Within the directly
market-mediated sphere, reproductive tasks are performed under directly
capitalist conditions, that is, with all the requirements of the market, whether they
are performed within the manufacturing or the service sector. Under the
constraints and command of capital and the market, the production of goods and
services, regardless of their content, must be performed at competitive levels in
terms of productivity, efficiency and product uniformity. The index of productivity
is temporal, while that of efficiency pertains to the ways in which inputs are
economically utilised. Furthermore, the uniformity of the product of labour
requires the uniformity of the labouring process, and of the relationship of those
who produce to what they produce.
One can immediately see the difference between tasks performed in this
sphere, and that outside of it. In the DMM sphere, the rate of return on a
capitalist investment is paramount and therefore all activities performed even
if they are reproductive in their use-value character must meet or exceed the
going rate of exploitation and/or profit. On the other hand, outside the DMM
sphere, the ways in which the wage is utilised by those who reproduce the use-
value labour-power (via the reproduction of its bearer) is not subject to the same
requirements. If those ways are uniform at all, they are nevertheless highly
variable in terms of the necessary utilisation of time, money and raw materials.
Unlike in the DMM sphere, there is no direct market-determination of every
aspect of the reproduction process. (In Part 2 we will address the indirectly
market-mediated sphere of state-organised reproduction).

144
 The indirectly market-mediated sphere has a different temporal character. The
24-hour day and 7-day week8 still organise the activities within this sphere, but
socially necessary labour time (SNLT) is never directly a factor in that
organisation. SNLT applies to the process of abstraction occurring through the
mediation of the market, which averages out the amount of time required within
the labour process to competitively sell a product or service. Bankruptcy and the
loss of profit are factors weighing on this process; likewise the innovative use of
machinery in order to decrease the time required to produce goods. Thus, the
increase of profit or market share dominates the DMM sphere. Of course,
mechanisation is also possible in the IMM sphere, and there have been many
innovations of that sort. In this case, however, the aim is not to allow the
production of more use-values in a given amount of time, but to reduce the time
spent on a given activity, usually so that more time can be dedicated to another
IMM activity. When it comes to the care of children, for example, even if some
activities can be performed more quickly, they have to be looked after the whole
day, and this amount of time is not flexible (we will return to this in part 5).
In addition, different forms of domination characterise these spheres
respectively. Market dependency, or impersonal abstract domination, organises
DMM relations of production and reproduction, through the mechanism of value-
comparison in terms of socially necessary labour time. The kind of direct market-
mediation within this sphere is abstract domination, and as such, it is a form of
indirect compulsion determined on the market (behind the backs of the
producers). Hence, there is no structural necessity toward direct violence, or
planning, in order to allocate labour per se.
In contrast, there is no such mechanism comparing the various performances
of the concrete activities occurring in the IMM sphere which is to say, as being
socially determined. They cannot be dictated by abstract market domination and
the objective constraints of SNLT, except in an indirect way such that the
requirements of production transform the requirements of labour-powers
maintenance outside of the DMM sphere. Instead, other mechanisms and factors
are involved in the division of IMM activities, from direct domination and violence
to hierarchical forms of cooperation, or planned allocation at best.9 There is no
impersonal mechanism or way to objectively quantify, enforce or equalise

8 That is, homogeneous time. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social
Domination (Cambridge University Press 1993), chapter 5, Abstract Time.
9 The gendered internalisation of this allocation of IMM activities, what we will call
naturalisation, obviously plays a large role in this. We will look closer at this mechanism
in Part 4.

145
rationally the time and energy spent in these activities or to whom they are
allocated. When an equal and just sharing of these activities is attempted, it
must be constantly negotiated, since there is no way to quantify and equalise
rationally the time or energy spent. What does it mean to clean the kitchen,
what does it mean to look after a child for one hour: is your hour of childcare the
same as my hour of childcare? This allocation cannot but remain a conflictual
question.

2 PAID/UNPAID
Marxist feminists have often added to the distinction between production and
reproduction another one: that between paid and unpaid labour. Like many
before us, we find these categories imprecise and we prefer to use the waged/
unwaged distinction. As we further explicate the spheres of DMM and IMM in
relation to that which is waged or unwaged, we elucidate the overlapping of these
spheres through the principle of social validation. En route we will explore the
ways in which the activities in question can be called labour or not; that is, if they
qualify as labour or not in this mode of production.
The difference between paid/unpaid on the one side, and waged/unwaged on
the other is blurred by the form of the wage, by what we must name the wage
fetish. The wage itself is not the monetary equivalent to the work performed by
the worker who receives it, but rather the price for which a worker sells their
labour-power, equivalent to a sum of value that goes one way or another into the
process of their reproduction, as they must reappear the next day ready and able
to work.10 However, it appears that those who work for a wage have fulfilled their
social responsibility for the day once the workday is over. What is not paid for by
the wage appears to be a world of non-work. Therefore, all work appears to be
paid tautologically as that which is work, since one does not appear to get paid
for that which one does when not at work. However, it is imperative to
remember that Marx demonstrated that no actual living labour is ever paid for in
the form of the wage.
Obviously, this does not mean that the question of whether an activity is
waged or not is irrelevant. Indeed, she who does not go to work does not get a

10 The fact that the wage itself does not come with a training manual is interesting. One
may do with it as one pleases particularly those who are its direct recipients and
so it is not distributed according to the specificities of the IMM sphere, i.e. the size of
ones family, standard of living or the responsible/economical use of a particular income
stream. This point would require more attention, but for now it will suffice to say: it is just
not the capitalists responsibility

146
wage. Wage-labour is the only way the worker can have access to the means
necessary for their own reproduction and that of their family. Moreover, validation
by the wage qualitatively affects the activity itself. When an activity that was
previously unwaged becomes waged, even when it is unproductive, it takes on
some characteristics that resemble those of abstract labour. Indeed, the fact that
labour-power is exchanged for a wage makes its performance open to
rationalisations and comparisons. In return, what is expected from this labour-
power is at least the socially-average performance including all its
characteristics and intensity regulated and corresponding to the social
average for this kind of labour (clearly the absence of value makes it impossible
to compare it with any other kind of labour). An individual who cannot deliver a
proper performance in the necessary amount of time will not be able to sell their
labour-power in the future. Therefore, the wage validates the fact that labour-
power has been employed adequately, whilst universally recognising it as social
labour, whatever the concrete activity itself might have been, or whether it was
productively consumed.
Now we must consider this distinction between the waged and unwaged,
insofar as it intersects with that between the IMM and DMM spheres. When we
consider those activities which are waged, we are referring to those which are
social11; those which are unwaged are the non-social of the social: they are not
socially validated but are nonetheless part of the capitalist mode of production.
Importantly, however, these do not map directly onto the spheres of IMM and
DMM.
We see that within the interplay of these four terms there are some waged
activities which overlap with those of the IMM sphere: those organised by the
state (the state sector). Within this imbricated set of categories, the sphere of
IMM activities intersects with the sphere of waged labour. These waged and IMM
activities are forms of state-organised reproduction that are not directly market-

11Clearly, all activities taking place in the capitalist mode of production are social, but
certain reproductive activities are rejected by its laws as non-social, as they form an
outside within the inside of the totality of the capitalist mode of production. This is why
we use the social/unsocial binary, sometimes found in feminist accounts, with caution. A
problem with the term is that it can imply that reproductive labour occurs in a non-
social sphere outside of the capitalist mode of production, in either a domestic mode of
production (see Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Womens
Oppression [Hutchinson 1984]), or as a vestige of a previous mode of production. It can
even sometimes be used to argue that it is another mode of production left unsocial
because of its lack of rationalisation and that what is needed is the socialisation of this
sphere. We think it is less confusing, and far more telling, to focus on the process of
social validation itself.

147
mediated (see figure 1). These activities reproduce the use-value of labour-
power but are waged and thus socially validated. Nevertheless, these activities
are not productive of value, nor are they subject to the same criteria of direct
market-mediation (see above). They are social because they are remunerated
through the social form of value. Because they are not productive of value, they
are the forms of reproduction which are a collective cost to capital: they are paid
indirectly through deductions from collective wages and surplus-value in the form
of taxes.
Let us now turn things round one more time and look at what the wage buys;
that is, what is an element of the wage, what constitutes the exchange-value of
labour-power. The wage buys the commodities necessary for the reproduction of
labour-power, and it also buys services which participate in this reproduction,
whether directly (by paying a private nanny, for example) or indirectly (for
example, by paying taxes for state-expenditure on education, which is part of the
indirect wage). These services, whether they are productive of value or not,12
have a cost that is reflected in the exchange-value of labour-power: they imply, in
one way or another, a deduction from surplus-value.
What remains are the activities that are non-waged, and that therefore do not
increase the exchange-value of labour-power. These
are the non-social of the social, the non-labour of
labour (see Addendum 1). They are cut off from
social production; they must not only appear as, but
also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised. 13
They constitute a sphere whose dissociation is
necessary to make the production of value possible:
the gendered sphere.
In the next part we will finally turn to the
individuals who have been assigned to this sphere.
However, we should first consider another binary:
public/private.
Figure 1: A graphical representation of the relation
between the DMM/IMM and waged/unwaged spheres.

12Services that are paid from revenue are unproductive, and, in this sense, are part of
the waged IMM sphere.
13 Marx provides a useful insight into the process of naturalisation: Increase of
population is a natural power of labour for which nothing is paid. From the present
standpoint, we use the term natural power to refer to social power. All natural powers of
social labour are themselves historical products. Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 28), 327.

148
 ADDENDUM 1 ON LABOUR
For us, labour will be defined, in its opposition to non-labour, as an activity that is
socially validated as such, because of its specific function, its specific social
character in a given mode of production. Other bases for definitions of labour are
also possible, to cite a few: exchange between man and nature, expense of
energy, distinction between pleasant/unpleasant activities. However, we think
that none of these definitions can help us understand anything about the
character of unwaged IMM activities. These definitions only take into account
their concrete characteristics, and in the case of unwaged IMM activities, this
leads to banal or absurd descriptions. Is comforting a child an exchange with
nature? Is sleeping a labour that reproduces labour-power? Is brushing ones
teeth labour? Brushing somebody elses teeth? We think that our definition of
labour, while it may seem banal at first glance, is the only one capable of passing
over these meaningless questions, and that it constitutes the right starting-point
for research into the specific character of these activities.

3 PUBLIC/PRIVATE
Many people use the category public to designate the state sector. And marxist
feminists often use the concept of the private sphere to designate everything
within the sphere of the home. We find it necessary to hold fast to the traditional
dichotomy of private/public as that which separates the economic and the
political, civil society and the state, bourgeois individual and citizen.14 Prior to
capitalism the term private referred to the household, or oikos, and it was
considered the sphere of the economic. With the advent of the capitalist era the
private sphere moved outward beyond the household itself.
Here we begin to see the inadequacy of the concept of the private sphere as
a place outside of the public sphere that includes the economy, as for example
in feminist theory. For the private is not merely that which is located in the
domestic sphere, and associated with domestic activities. Rather, it is the totality
of activities inside and outside of the home. As a result of the structural
separation between the economic and the political (political economy)
corresponding to the spread of capitalist social (production) relations the
private sphere becomes increasingly diffuse, rendering the home only one
amongst many moments of the economic or the private. Therefore, contrary to
most feminist accounts, it was only within the context of pre-modern relations

14For Marx, civil society or what in most political theory is considered natural
society stands opposed to the state.

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prior to the separation of the political and the economic under capitalism that
the private sphere constituted the household. In contrast, in the modern capitalist
era,the scope of private exploitation spans the entire social landscape.
Where then is the public if the private is the totality of productive and
reproductive activities? Marx claims that the public is an abstraction from society
in the form of the state. This sphere of the political and the juridical is the real
abstraction of Right separated from the actual divisions and differences
constituting civil society. For Marx, this abstraction or separation must exist in
order to attain and preserve the formal equality (accompanied, of course, by
class inequality) necessary for self-interested private owners to accumulate
capital in a manner uninhibited rather than controlled or dictated by the state.
This is what distinguishes the modern state, which is adequate to capitalist
property relations, from other state systems corresponding to other modes of
production, whether monarchical or ancient democratic.
This means that the modern capitalist state and its public sphere is not an
actually existing place, but an abstract community of equal citizens. Hence,
the differentiation between the sphere of economic relations and that of the
political including relations between unequals mediated by relations between
abstract equal citizens renders citizens only formally equal according to the
state and civil rights. As a result, these individuals appear as equals on the
market even though in real life (the private sphere of civil society) they are
anything but.15 This abstraction, the public, must exist precisely because the
directly market-mediated sphere is mediated by the market, a space of mediation
between private labours, produced independently from one another in private
firms owned and operated by private (self-interested) individuals.
What then is the relationship between on the one hand, the spheres of public/
private, political/economic, state/civil society, and on the other hand, the spheres
of direct and indirect market-mediation? The meeting-point of these spheres
marks the moment of their constitutive separation, and defines those anchored to
one as distinct from the other, as different. This difference is determined by
whether those individuals defined by the state directly exchange the labour-
power commodity they bear within their person as their own property, or if that
exchange is mediated indirectly through those with formal equality.
Now we are ready to look at the individuals who have been assigned to each
sphere. What we see at first, when we look at the dawn of this mode of
production, is individuals who have different rights, which are defined by the law
as two different juridical beings: men and women. We will be able to see how this

15 See Marx, On the Jewish Question (MECW 3).

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juridical difference was inscribed on the biological bodies of these individuals
when we come to analyse the sex/gender binary. For now, we must see how the
dichotomy between public and private does the initial work of anchoring
individuals as men and women to the different spheres reproducing the capitalist
totality through their differential right not merely to private property, but to that
property which individuals own in their persons.
This peculiar form of property is necessary to generalised wage-relations
because value presupposes formal equality between the owners of commodities
so that free exchange (capital and labour-power) can occur despite the fact that
there is a structural real inequality between two different classes: those
possessing the means of production and those dispossessed of that form of
property. However, free exchange can only occur through a disavowal of that
class difference, through its deferral to another binary: citizen and other, not
between members of opposed classes but between those within each class. In
order to found the bourgeois mode of production, it was not necessary for all
workers to be given equality under the sign of the citizen. Historically, citizen
only names a specific category to which both property owners and certain
proletarians are able to belong. As capitalist juridical relations disavow class
through the reconstitution of the difference between citizen and other, the
historical conditions under which the bourgeois mode of production was itself
constituted were various forms of unfreedom. For this reason we have citizen
and other as mapping onto: male (white)/ non-(white) male.
For instance, under the conditions of slavery in North America, the
classification of white was necessary to maintain the property of masters over
slaves. Women were also classified as other, but for different reasons, as we
shall see. One factor worth mentioning here is that within this relation of white/
person of colour/woman, the preservation of the purity of the white master, as
opposed to the black slave is of the utmost importance as well as the strict
preservation of the dominant master signifier of equality (white blood and
therefore white mothers) across future generations of the bourgeoisie.
Therefore the division between white and non-white women was also closely
regulated in order to preserve such a taxonomy, within the mixed context of both
plantation-based commodity production in the New World and the rise of
industrial capitalism.16
However, what constitutes the citizen/other binary in this mode of production
is not based upon a negative definition of slavery but rather upon free labour,
consisting of those with, as opposed to without, the same formal freedom. Free

16 See Chris Chens The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality, p.166.

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labour as Marx identified it that is, the technical definition of freedom for the
wage labourer requires what we might call double freedom:
For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must
meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free
man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the
other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for
the realisation of his labour-power.17
Nevertheless, havent women always been wage-labourers? Of course, since the
origin of capitalism, women have been bearers of labour-power, and their
capacity to labour has been utilised by capital; but they have only quite recently
become the owners of their labour-power, with double freedom. Prior to the last
quarter century, women were indeed free from the means of production, but they
were not free to sell their labour-power as their own.18 The freedom of ownership,
which includes mobility between lines of work, was historically only for some at
the expense of others. Those struggling for political and public freedom, or
double freedom, were caught in a double-bind. They were forced to make
arguments on behalf of their (but-different) equality, while at the same time
having interests in contradiction with those of others who identified with the same
fight for equality on different terms.19
This is especially true in the case of women, who were caught between
demanding freedom as the ideal, equal human, and freedom as different. This is
because their real difference under capitalism is not ideal or ideological but
embodied, and structurally reproduced through the practices which define
women as different. This real difference is entangled within a web of mutually
constitutive and reinforcing relations which necessarily presuppose the citizen,
state and public sphere to which women might appeal for human and civil rights
on the one hand, and reproductive rights on the other.

17 Marx, Capital, vol.1, (MECW 35), 179.

18 In France, before 1965, women could not engage in wage-labour without the
authorisation of their husband. In West Germany, that was not before 1977 see Part
5 below.
19 We find the need for a class analysis which can cut through this thicket of intra-class
disparities, while attending to the disparities of each with regard to their own particular
and differential relation to capitalist domination. In short, proletarian identity, as an
abstraction based upon a common form of unfreedom, was never going to account for
everyone, even at the most abstract level. Another more nuanced analysis would be
needed one which would come up against the problematic of workers identity itself.

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 Therefore, even if it is true that formal freedom itself was a precondition for
value production and exchange, nevertheless, what it organised the civil
society of bourgeois individuals was necessary for the continuing reproduction
of the public or legal sphere. The right to be equal and thus equally free, does
not itself reorganise the distribution of property, nor as we shall see, the
conditions of possibility for capital accumulation. These spheres work in concert.
If this were not the case, it would be possible to abolish the actually existing
forms of historically-specific difference through legal and political actions,
within the state. This would amount to the abolition of the private through the
public sphere a revolution through reform which is structurally impossible.
Equality as double-freedom is the freedom to be structurally dispossessed.
This is not to say that it is not worthwhile. The question is, can it also become
worthwhile to capital, the state and its attendant apparatuses of domination? As
most of us will have experienced first-hand, the gender distinction has persisted
long after differential freedom was abolished for the majority of women. If this
differential freedom was in fact what anchored women to the indirectly market-
mediated sphere, why did its abolition not free women from the category
woman and the gendered sphere of reproduction?

DOUBLE-FREEDOM AND THE SEX-BLIND MARKET

When looking at the history of the capitalist mode of production, it is striking that,
in many cases, once inequalities have been secured by juridical mechanisms,
they can take on a life of their own, making their own basis in law superfluous. As
women in many countries slowly but surely received equal rights in the public
sphere, the mechanism that reinforced this inequality in the private sphere of
the economic of the labour-market was already so well established that it
could appear as the enactment of some mysterious natural law.
Ironically, the reproduction of dual spheres of gender and the anchoring of
women to one and not the other is perpetuated and constantly re-established by
the very mechanism of the sex-blind labour-market, which obtains not for the
man/woman distinction directly but rather for the price distinction, or the
exchange-value of their labour-power. Indeed, labour markets, if they are to
remain markets, must be sex-blind. Markets, as the locus of exchanges of
equivalents, are supposed to blur concrete differences in a pure comparison of
abstract values. How then can this sex-blind market reproduce the gender
difference?
Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as those who have children
(see Addendum 2) and once this social activity, having children, is structurally

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formed as constituting a handicap,20 women are defined as those who come to
the labour-market with a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation
through the market-determined risk identified as childbearing potential keeps
those who embody the signifier woman anchored to the IMM sphere. Therefore,
because capital is a sex-blind abstraction, it concretely punishes women for
having a sex, even though that sexual difference is produced by capitalist social
relations, and absolutely necessary to the reproduction of capitalism itself. One
could imagine a hypothetical situation in which employers did not enquire about
the gender of an applicant, but only rewarded those who have the most mobility
and those who are the most reliable, 24/7; even in this case gender bias would
reappear as strong as ever. As an apparent contradiction, once sexual difference
becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as a bearer of labour-
power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the commodity labour-
power with a cheaper price.
Indeed, the better-remunerated jobs that is, those which can tendentially
pay for more than the reproduction of a single person are those for which a
certain degree of skill is expected. In those skilled sectors, capitalists are ready
to make an investment in the workers skills, knowing that they will benefit from
doing so in the long term. They will therefore privilege the labour-power that is
likely to be the most reliable over a long period. If the worker is potentially going
to leave, then she will not be as good an investment, and will get a lower price.
This lower price tag, fixed to those who look like the kind of people who have
children, is not determined by the sorts of skills that are formed in the IMM
sphere. Even though the sphere a woman is relegated to is full of activities which
require lifelong training, this does not increase the price of her labour-power,
because no employer has to pay for their acquisition. As a result, capital can use
womens labour-power in short spurts at cheap prices.
In fact, the general tendency towards feminisation is not the gendering of the
sex-blind market, but rather the movement by capital towards the utilisation of
cheap short-term flexibilised labour-power under post-Fordist, globalised
conditions of accumulation, increasingly deskilled and just-in-time. We must
take this definition of feminisation as primary, before we attend to the rise of the
service sector and the increasing importance of care and affective labour, which
is part and parcel of the feminisation turn. This turn comes about through the
dynamic unfolding of capitalist social relations historically, a process that we will
see in the last two parts of the text. But first we must summarise what we have

20 Because the creation of a future generation of workers who are for a period of their
life non-workers is a cost to capital which it disavows, and because this activity is
posited as a non-labour that steals time away from labour.

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learned about gender until now, and attempt a definition. This requires analysis
and criticism of another common binary: sex and gender.

ADDENDUM 2 ON WOMEN, BIOLOGY AND CHILDREN

The definition of women as those who have children presupposes a necessary
link between 1) the fact of having a biological organ, the uterus 2) the fact of
bearing a child, of being pregnant 3) the fact of having a specific relation to the
result of this pregnancy. Conflating the three obscures:
1) On the one side, the mechanisms that prevent, favour, or impose the fact that
somebody with a uterus will go through pregnancy, and how often that will
occur.21 These mechanisms include: the institution of marriage, the
availability of contraceptives, the mechanisms that enforce heterosexuality as
a norm, and (at least for a long time and still in many places) the interdiction/
shame associated with forms of sex that do not risk leading to pregnancy
(oral/anal sex, etc.).
2) On the other side, the changing definition of what a child is and what level of
care a child necessitates. While there was a period in which children were
considered as half-animal, half-human creatures who only had to be cleaned
and fed until they became small adults that is, able to work the modern
reality of childhood and its requirements often make having children a
never-ending business.

4 SEX/GENDER
We are now prepared to address the gender question. What then is gender? For
us, it is the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of
social activities. The result of this anchoring process is at the same time the
continuous reproduction of two separate genders.
These genders concretise themselves as an ensemble of ideal
characteristics, defining either the masculine or the feminine. However, these
characteristics themselves, as a list of behavioural and psychological qualities,
are subject to transformation over the course of the history of capitalism; they
pertain to specific periods; they correspond to certain parts of the world; and
even within what we might call the West they are not necessarily ascribed in the
same way to all people. As a binary however, they exist in relation to one

21See Paola Tabet, Natural Fertility, Forced Reproduction, in Diana Leonard and Lisa
Adkins, eds, Sex in Question: French Materialist Feminism (Taylor and Francis 1996).

155
another, regardless of time and space, even if their mode of appearance is itself
always in flux.
Sex is the flip side of gender. Following Judith Butler, we criticise the gender/
sex binary as found in feminist literature before the 1990s. Butler demonstrates,
correctly, that both sex and gender are socially constituted and furthermore, that
it is the socializing or pairing of gender with culture, that has relegated sex to
the natural pole of the binary nature/culture. We argue similarly that they are
binary social categories which simultaneously de-naturalise gender while
naturalising sex. For us, sex is the naturalisation of genders dual projection upon
bodies, aggregating biological differences into discrete naturalised semblances.
While Butler came to this conclusion through a critique of the existentialist
ontology of the body,22 we came to it through an analogy with another social
form. Value, like gender, necessitates its other, natural pole (i.e. its concrete
manifestation). Indeed, the dual relation between sex and gender as two sides of
the same coin is analogous to the dual aspects of the commodity and the
fetishism therein. As we explained above, every commodity, including labour-
power, is both a use-value and an exchange-value. The relation between
commodities is a social relation between things and a material relation between
people.
Following this analogy, sex is the material body, which, as use-value to
(exchange) value, attaches itself to gender. The gender fetish is a social relation
which acts upon these bodies so that it appears as a natural characteristic of the
bodies themselves. While gender is the abstraction of sexual difference from all
of its concrete characteristics, that abstraction transforms and determines the
body to which it is attached just as the real abstraction of value transforms the
material body of the commodity. Gender and sex combined give those inscribed
within them a natural semblance (with a phantomlike objectivity), as if the social
content of gender was written upon the skin of the concrete individuals.
The transhistoricisation of sex is homologous to a foreshortened critique of
capital, which contends that use-value is transhistorical rather than historically
specific to capitalism. Here, use-value is thought to be that which positively
remains after revolution, which is seen as freeing use-value from the integument
of exchange-value. In terms of our analogy with sex and gender, we would go
one step further and say that both gender and sex are historically determined.
Both are entirely social and can only be abolished together just as exchange-

22 See her critique of Simone de Beauvoirs uncritical reproduction of the Cartesian

distinction between freedom and the body. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge
1990), chapter 1: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.

156
value and use-value will both have to be abolished in the process of
communisation. In this light, our feminist value-theoretical analysis mirrors
Butlers critique in so far as we both view the sex/gender binary as being socially-
determined and produced through social conditions specific to modernity.

THE DENATURALISATION OF GENDER

But gender is not a static social form. The abstraction of gender becomes
increasingly denaturalised, making sex appear all the more concrete and
biological. In other words, if sex and gender are two sides of the same coin, the
relation between gender and its naturalised counterpart is not stable. There is a
potential discrepancy between them, which some have called a troubling, and
we term denaturalisation.
Over time gender is ever more abstracted, defining sexuality more and more
arbitrarily. The marketisation and commodification of gender appears increasingly
to de-naturalise gender from naturalised biological concerns. One might say that
capitalism itself deconstructs gender and denaturalises it. Nature whose
increasing superfluity is in juxtaposition to genders ongoing necessity appears
as the presupposition of gender rather than its effect. In more familiar terms,
reflecting capitals problem with labour: nature (the natural side of the sex/
gender binary) becomes increasingly superfluous to the generational
reproduction of the proletariat, while the cost assigned to female bodies or
the counter-pole to sex becomes increasingly imperative to capital
accumulation as the tendency toward feminisation. Hence, the reproduction of
gender is of utmost importance, as labour-power with a lower cost, while a
reserve army of proletarians as surplus population is increasingly redundant.
What the female gender signifies that which is socially inscribed upon
naturalised, sexuated bodies is not only an array of feminine or gendered
characteristics, but essentially a price tag. Biological reproduction has a social
cost which is exceptional to average (male) labour-power; it becomes the burden
of those whose cost it is assigned to regardless of whether they can or will
have children. It is in this sense that an abstraction, a gendered average, is
reflected back upon the organisation of bodies in the same way exchange-value,
a blind market average, is projected back upon production, molding and
transforming the organisation of the character of social production and the
division of labour. In this sense, the transformation of the condition of gender
relations goes on behind the backs of those whom it defines. And in this sense,
gender is constantly reimposed and re-naturalised.

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 5 THE HISTORY OF GENDER WITHIN CAPITALISM
from the creation of the IMM sphere to the
commodification of gendered activities
To understand this dialectical process of de-naturalisation and re-naturalisation
we first have to retrace the transformations within the gender relation over the
course of the capitalist mode of production, and attempt a periodisation. At this
more concrete level, there are many possible points of entry to take, and we opt
for a periodisation of the family, since it is the economic unit that brings together
the indirectly market-mediated (IMM) and the directly market-mediated (DMM)
spheres which delimit the aspects of proletarian reproduction. We must try to
figure out whether changes in the family form correspond to transformations in
the process of labours valorisation.

I PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AND THE EXTENDED FAMILY

During the era of primitive accumulation, a major problem facing the capitalist
class was how to perfectly calibrate the relationship between the IMM and DMM
spheres such that workers would, on the one hand, be forced to survive only by
selling their labour-power, and on the other, be allotted only enough personal
property to continue self-provisioning without bringing up the cost of labour-
power.23 Indeed, at the moment when the IMM was constituted, it had to take on
as much as possible of the reproduction of labour-power, to be as big as
possible, but just enough so that the proportion of self-provisioning allowed
nevertheless required the habitual re-emergence of labour-power on the market.
Therefore, the sphere of IMM supplementing the wage was subordinated to the
market as a necessary presupposition of wage-relations and capitalist
exploitation, and as its immediate result.
In the course of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, the family
centred in the home as a unit of production became the economic unit
mediating between the IMM and DMM spheres of labour-powers reproduction.
However, for the first part of the 19th century, as long as no retirement benefits
existed and as long as it was also the case that children were expected to go to
work before they even reached puberty, the family comprised several
generations residing in one home. In addition, the activities of the IMM sphere
were not carried out by married women alone; indeed they were done with the
participation of children, grandmothers and other female relatives, even lodgers.

23See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and
the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke University Press 2000).

158
If it was the case that only the singly free adult male members of the family
could legally be owners of the wage, this did not mean that adult women and
young children did not also work outside the home.
Indeed, at the beginning of industrialisation, women represented one third of
the workforce. Like children, they did not decide if or where they would take
employment, or which job they would perform; they were more or less
subcontracted by their husbands or fathers. (Marx even compared it with some
forms of the slave trade: the male head of the family bargained the price of the
labour-power of his wife and children and chose to accept or decline. And let us
not forget that in some countries, such as France and Germany, women only got
the right to work without the authorisation of their husbands in the 1960s or 70s).
Far from being a sign of the emancipation of women, or of the modern views of
the husband, women working outside the home was a blatant indicator of
poverty. Even if married women were generally expected to stay at home when
the family could afford it (where they often did home-based production, especially
for the textile industry), many women never married for it was an expensive
business and some were not supposed to become pregnant, forming their
own family. Younger daughters were often sent to become servants or helpers in
other families, remaining officially single. Therefore, even if those responsible
for the IMM sphere were always women, and those responsible for the wage
were always men (one could say, by definition), the two genders and the two
spheres did not map one to one in that period.

II THE NUCLEAR FAMILY AND FORDISM

In the second part of the 19th century, what some call the second industrial
revolution, there was a progressive move towards the nuclear family as we think of it
today. First, after decades of labour struggles, the state stepped in to limit the
employment of women and children, partly because it was faced with a crisis in the
reproduction of the work force. Labour-power was expected to become more skilled
(for example literacy increasingly became a skill required to access a job), and
increasing attention was given to the education of children. A new category
emerged, that of childhood, with its specific needs and phases of development.
Looking after children became a complicated business, which could no longer be
provided by elder siblings.24
This process culminated with Fordism, and its new standards of consumption
and reproduction. With the generalisation of retirement benefits and retirement

24For the effects of compulsory education on working-class families see Wally

Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial
Revolution to the Fertility Decline (Verso 1993).

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homes, generations came to be separated from each other in individual houses.
The allocation of family responsibilities between husband and wife became
strictly defined by the separation between the spheres. IMM activities that used
to be carried out together with other women (such as washing clothes) became
the individual responsibility of one adult woman per household. The married
womans life often came to be entirely confined to the IMM sphere. It became the
fate of most women, and their entire lives (including their personality, desires,
etc.) were shaped by this fate.
It was therefore with the nuclear family (in a specific period of capitalism, and
importantly, in a specific area of the world) that gender became a rigid binary,
mapping one to one with the spheres. It became a strict norm, which does not
mean everyone fitted into it. Many feminists who refer to gender as a set of
characteristics that define femininity and masculinity have the norms of that
period in mind. From this point on, individuals identified as women were born with
different life-destinies than individuals defined as men they lived on two
different planets (some on Mars), and were socialised as two distinct kinds of
subjects. This distinction cut across all classes.
No longer helped by other members of the family, doing the IMM activities
isolated behind four walls, married women were made to bear the entire burden
of IMM activities on their own. This isolation would not have been possible
without the introduction of household appliances turning the most extreme
physical tasks into chores that could be carried out alone. The washing-machine,
the indoor water-tap, the water heater these helped to dramatically reduce the
time spent on some IMM activities. But every minute gained was far from
increasing the housewifes leisure time. Every spare moment had to be used to
increase the standards of reproduction: clothes were washed more often, meals
became ever more varied and healthy, and most importantly, childcare became
an all-consuming IMM activity from infant care to the facilitation of childrens
leisure activities.

III THE 70s

real subsumption and the commodification of IMM activities
The commodification of IMM activities is clearly not a new phenomenon. From
the beginning of capitalism it was possible to buy ready-made meals instead of
cooking them, to buy new clothes instead of mending them, to pay a servant to
look after the children or to do the housework. However, those were privileges of
the middle and upper classes. Indeed, each time an IMM activity is turned into a
commodity, it has to be paid for in the wage. Therefore, the mass-consumption of
these commodities would only have been likely in periods of steady wage

160
increases, since these services, as long as they were only formally subsumed,
increased the exchange-value of necessary labour in an inverse ratio to surplus-
value.
However, as a result of the possibilities opened by real subsumption, the
value of some of these commodities can decrease at the same time as they are
mass-produced. Advances in productivity make these commodities more and
more affordable, and some of them particularly ready-made meals and
household appliances slowly but surely became affordable with the wage.
Nevertheless, some IMM activities are more difficult to commodify at a price low
enough to be paid for by every wage. Indeed, even if it is possible to commodify
childcare, it is not possible to make advances in productivity that would allow its
cost to become ever cheaper. Even if the nourishing, washing of clothes, and so
on, can be done more efficiently, the time for childcare is never reduced. You
cannot look after children more quickly: they have to be attended to 24 hours a
day.
What is possible is to rationalise childcare, for example, by having the state
organise it and thereby reducing the adult-to-child ratio. However, there are limits
to how many children one adult can possibly handle, especially if, in that process,
this adult has to impart a specific standard of socialisation, knowledge and
discipline. This work can also be performed by the cheapest labour possible; that
is, by women whose wage will be lower than the wage of a working mother. But
in this case, IMM activities are simply deferred to the lowest-paid strata of the
total population. Therefore the problem is not reduced. Rather, its negative
effects are redistributed, often to poor immigrants and women of colour.
So we see that all these possibilities are limited: there is always a remainder,
which we will refer to as the abject,25 that is, what cannot be subsumed or is not
worth subsuming. It is obviously not abject per se it exists as abject because
of capital, and it is shaped by it. There is always this remainder that has to
remain outside of market-relations, and the question of who has to perform it in
the family will always be, to say the least, a conflictual matter.

6 CRISIS AND AUSTERITY MEASURES

the rise of the abject
With the current crisis, all signs indicate that the state will be increasingly
unwilling to organise IMM activities, since they are a mere cost. Expenses in

25We take this term in its etymological sense: ab-ject, that which is cast off, thrown
away, but from something that it is part of.

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childcare, elderly-care and healthcare are the first to be cut, not to mention
education and after-school programs. These will become DMM for those who can
afford it (privatisation), or lapse into the sphere of unwaged indirect market-
mediation therefore increasing the abject.
The extent of this remains to be seen, but the trend in countries affected by
the crisis is already clear. In the US, and in most countries of the Eurozone (with
the notable exception of Germany), governments are cutting their spending to
reduce their debt-to-GDP ratios.26 Countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but
also the UK, are drastically scaling down their expenses in healthcare and
childcare. In Greece and Portugal public kindergartens are closing down.
Infringements on the rights of pregnant women to maternity leave and benefits,
or to resume their jobs after maternity, have been reported in Greece, Portugal,
Italy, and the Czech Republic.27 In the UK, where state-run nurseries are closing
one by one, the situation is described by an anti-capitalist feminist group involved
in the Hackney nurseries campaign, Feminist Fight Back:
All over the UK local authorities have begun to announce significant reductions of
funding to social services, from libraries and healthcare to playgrounds and art
groups, from rape crisis centres to domestic violence services. Of particular
relevance to women are the profound effects that will be felt in childrens services,
both in council and community nurseries and in New Labours flagship Sure Start
Centres, which provide a variety of services to parents on a one-stop basis. 28
In a country where the Prime Minister himself advocates the organisation of
community services on a voluntary basis, under the central policy idea of the
Big Society, a culture where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in
their neighbourhoods, in their workplace feel both free and powerful enough to
help themselves and their own communities,29 anti-state feminists are faced with
a dilemma:
Our aim is for provision in and against the state. This raises a core question in the
struggle over public goods and shared resources and labour: how are we to ensure
that our autonomous efforts to reproduce our own communities do not simply create

26 See the previous article in this issue, The Holding Pattern, p. 105.
27Francesca Bettio, Crisis and recovery in Europe: the labour market impact on men
and women, 2011.
28Feminist Fightback Collective, Cuts are a Feminist Issue. Soundings 49 (Winter
2011).
29 Speech by David Cameron on the Big Society, Liverpool, 19 July 2010.

162
 Camerons Big Society for him? thereby endorsing the logic that if the state will no
longer provide for us we will have to do it ourselves?30
The struggle around kindergartens which took place in Poznan (Poland) in 2012
also reflects this dilemma. The municipality is slowly transferring all the public
kindergartens to private institutions to save costs. When the workers of one of
the nurseries protested with parents and activists, against privatisation, the local
authorities came up with the option of letting the workers organise the nursery,
but without providing them with any subsidies or guarantees. This made it a very
dim option that was eventually rejected by the workers and parents.31
However, some marxist feminists seem to glorify the self-organisation of IMM
activities by women as a necessary step in the creation of an alternative society.
For example Silvia Federici, in her 2010 text Feminism and the Politics of the
Common in an Era of Primitive Accumulation:
If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is women, historically
the house-workers and house-prisoners, who must take the initiative to reclaim the
house as a center of collective life, one traversed by multiple people and forms of
cooperation, providing safety without isolation and fixation, allowing for the sharing
and circulation of community possessions, and above all providing the foundation for
collective forms of reproduction. [] It remains to clarify that assigning women this
task of commoning/collectivizing reproduction is not to concede to a naturalistic
conception of femininity. Understandably, many feminists would view this possibility
as a fate worse than death. [] But, quoting Dolores Hayden, the reorganisation of
reproductive work, and therefore the reorganisation of the structure of housing and
public space is not a question of identity; it is a labour question and, we can add, a
power and safety question.32
Silvia Federici is right we do consider this possibility worse than death. And
her answer to this objection, which quotes Dolores Hayden rather freely, misses
the point: the labour question is an identity question. 33 Even if we might, in the

30 Feminist Fightback Collective, Cuts are a Feminist Issue.

31Women with Initiative (from Inicjatywa Pracownicza-Workers Initiative), Women
workers fight back against austerity in Poland, Industrial Worker 1743, March 2012.
32 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist
Struggle (Common Notions 2012), 147.
33 This is obviously not to say that we dont value the whole of Federicis contribution to
the marxist feminist debate. Along with Dalla Costa and Jamess, The Power of Women
and the Subversion of the Community, Silvia Federicis texts are surely the most
interesting pieces from the domestic labour debate of the 1970s. What we want to
criticise here is a position that is currently influential within the commons debate, and
that we consider highly problematic.

163
crisis, have no choice but to self-organise these reproductive activities and
even though, most likely, abject reproduction will in the end mainly be foisted
upon women we must fight against this process which reinforces gender. We
must treat it as it is: a self-organisation of the abject, of what no one else is
willing to do.
It is important here to state that, even if unwaged IMM activities and the abject
might refer to the same concrete activities, these two concepts must be
differentiated. Indeed, the category of the abject refers specifically to activities
that became waged at some point but are in the process of returning into the
unwaged IMM sphere because theyve become too costly for the state or capital.
While IMM is a purely structural category, independent of any dynamic, the
concept of the abject grasps the specificities of these activities and the process
of their assignment in our current period. Indeed, we can say that, if many of our
mothers and grandmothers were caught in the sphere of IMM activities, the
problem we face today is different. It is not that we will have to go back to the
kitchen, if only because we cannot afford it. Our fate, rather, is having to deal
with the abject. Contrary to the IMM activities of the past, this abject has already
been to a large extent denaturalised. It does not appear to those performing it as
some unfortunate natural fate, but more like an extra burden that one must deal
with alongside wage-labour.34 Being left to deal with it is the ugly face of gender
today, and this helps us to see gender as it is: a powerful constraint.35
Indeed, the process of de-naturalisation creates the possibility of gender
appearing as an external constraint. This is not to say that the constraint of
gender is less powerful than before, but that it can now be seen as a constraint,
that is, as something outside oneself that it is possible to abolish.
A last thought, to conclude: if it happens to be true that the present moment
allows us to see both our class-belonging and our gender-belonging as external
constraints, this cannot be purely accidental. Or can it? This question is critical

34 A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have

been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome.
Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A something that I do not recognise as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and
which curses me. Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia
University Press 1982), 2.
35Obviously there are nowadays some men, even if few, who do a considerable part of
the abject. And they get to know what many women experience: that the abject sticks to
ones skin. Many of these men, especially when they end up having to do most of the
childcare, seem somehow to be undergoing a process of social castration.

164
for an understanding of the struggle which leads to the abolition of gender, that
is, to the reproduction by non-gendered individuals of a life in which all separate
spheres of activity have been abolished.

165
 THE LIMIT POINT OF
C APITALIST EQUALIT Y
N O T E S T OWA R D S A N
ABOLITIONIST ANTIRACISM
Chris Chen
Endnotes 3 2013
Without an account of the relationship between race and the systematic
reproduction of the class relation, the question of revolution as the overcoming of
entrenched social divisions can only be posed in a distorted and incomplete form.
And without an understanding of the dynamics of racialisation from
capitalisms historical origins in primitive accumulation to the US states
restructuring in the post-World War II era continuing struggles against evolving
forms of racial rule can only be misrecognised as peripheral to an ultimately race-
neutral conflict between capital and labour. Rather than waning with the decline
of what is sometimes construed as a vestigial system of folk beliefs, resistance to
racial subordination in the US has continued. Race has not withered away:
rather, it has been reconfigured in the face of austerity measures and an
augmented post-racial security state which has come into being to manage the
ostensible racial threats to the nation posed by black wageless life, Latino
immigrant labour, and Islamic terrorism.
Through race, black chattel slavery in the United States constituted free
labour as white, and whiteness as unenslaveability and unalienable property. The
formal abolition of slavery has subsequently come to define the American
achievement of what Marx called double freedom: the freedom of forcible
separation from the means of production, and the freedom to sell labour-power
to the collective class of owners of those means.1 However, race doesnt simply
complicate any periodisation of the historical origins of capitalism; it was the
protagonist of a global array of national liberation, anti-apartheid, and civil rights
movements in the mid-twentieth century. A planetary anti-racist offensive called
into question nearly four and a half centuries of racial common sense and
largely discredited white supremacy as explicit state policy. Race has been
reconfigured in response to this world-historical anti-racist upsurge, and

1 See The Logic of Gender, p. 139.

166
continues to exist as a body of ideas but also as a relation of domination
inside and outside the wage relation reproduced through superficially non-
racial institutions and policies. Two dynamics have reproduced race in the US
since the mid-twentieth-century anti-racist movements: first, economic
subordination through racialised wage differentials and superfluisation, and
second, the racialising violence and global reach of the penal and national
security state. Most contemporary ascriptive racialisation processes are to a
great extent politically unrepresentable as race matters because they have
been superficially coded as race-neutral disciplinary state apparatuses, for
example, defined through discourses of national security threats, illegal
immigration, and urban crime.
Without an understanding of the structuring force of race in US foreign policy
and as a driver of the rise of the US carceral state in response to the end of legal
segregation, one can have only a partial understanding of the institutional fusion
and seemingly unlimited expansion of police and military power over the last forty
years. The anti-racist critiques of recent social movements like Occupy Wall
Street, and the consolidation of opposition under the banner of a politics of
decolonisation, illuminate a major faultline in US political life cleaving a politics of
race from a politics of class. The intellectual polarisation between these two
political formations has revealed the inadequacy of both Marxist approaches to
class, and theories of race couched in an idiom of cultural difference rather than
domination.
Overlapping with yet conceptually distinct from class, culture, caste,
gender, nation, and ethnicity, race is not only a system of ideas but an array of
ascriptive racialising procedures which structure multiple levels of social life.
Despite its commitment to challenging racial ideology as the assignment of
differential value to physical appearance and ancestry, much anti-racist analysis
and practice continues to treat race as a noun, as a property or attribute of
identities or groups, rather than as a set of ascriptive processes which impose
fictive identities and subordinate racialised populations. To distinguish racial
ascription from voluntary acts of cultural identification and from a range of
responses to racial rule from flight to armed revolt requires a shift in focus
from race to racism. But focusing on the phenomenon of racism tends to narrow
the terrain upon which race is structurally enforced to personal attitudes or
racial ideologies rather than institutional processes which may generate profound
racial disparities without requiring individual racist beliefs or intentions.
As a result, race gets theorised in divergent cultural or economic terms as
evidence of the need to either affirm denigrated group identities or integrate
individuals more thoroughly into capitalist markets momentarily distorted by

167
individual prejudice. On the one hand, race is a form of cultural stigmatisation
and misrepresentation requiring personal, institutional, and/or state recognition.
On the other, race is a system of wage differentials, wealth stratification, and
occupational and spatial segregation. Whether defended or derided by critics
across the political spectrum, the concept of racial or cultural identity has become
a kind of proxy for discussing race matters in general. Conversely, dismissals of
identity politics grounded in functionalist or epiphenomenalist accounts of race
propose an alternative socialist and social democratic politics of class based
upon essentially the same political logic of affirming subjects i.e. workers
within and sometimes against capitalism. This division between economic and
cultural forms of race naturalises racial economic inequality and transforms the
problem of racial oppression and exploitation into either an epiphenomenon of
class or the misrecognition of identity.2
Both the cultural and economic stratification theories have tended to frame
racial inequality as fundamentally a problem of the unequal distribution of existing
privilege, power, and resources while continuing to posit the economy as
fundamentally race-neutral or even as an engine of racial progress. A dearth of
materialist analyses of the bundle of ascriptive and punitive procedures
organised under the sign of race has meant that critics from across the political
spectrum have continued to downplay the severity and extent of racial
domination organised by putatively colourblind social institutions. Saddled with
discourses of meritocratic racial uplift, race continues to be represented either
as a cultural particularity or as a deviation from colourblind civic equality. In either
case, race is articulated in terms of real or illusory difference from a political or
cultural norm rather than as a form of structural coercion.
If race is thus understood in terms of difference rather than domination, then
anti-racist practice will require the affirmation of stigmatised identities rather than
their abolition as indices of structural subordination. Formulating an abolitionist
anti-racism would require imagining the end of race as hierarchical assignment,
rather than a denial of the political salience of cultural identities. Race here
names a relation of subordination. The conceptual elision of the difference
between racial ascription and individual and group responses to racial

2 See Nancy Fraser and Linda Alcoff, who stake out nuanced, though largely opposed,
theoretical positions on the political possibilities and limits of identity politics. As this
article goes on to argue, both positions are fundamentally informed by the historical
promise of a social-democratic coalitional subject, uniting labour, feminist, and anti-
racist political campaigns. See Alcoff, Visible identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
(Oxford University Press 2006); and Fraser, Rethinking Recognition, New Left Review
3 (May-June 2000).

168
interpellation is endemic in much of the literature either denouncing or defending
a politics of identity. From the point of view of emancipation, a social order freed
from racial and gender domination would not necessarily spell the end of identity
as such, but rather of ascriptive processes so deeply bound up with the historical
genesis and trajectory of global capitalism that the basic categories of collective
sociality would be transformed beyond recognition.3
A precipitous 21st century decline in the US labour share of business income,
and the transition to austerity, has completely altered the terrain, the stakes, and
the chances of success for not only the American labour movement but all
contemporary anti-racist political struggles as well. The legacy of racial and
gender exclusions which have structured the US labour movement has been
steadily eroded at the same time that the relative size and strength of organised
labour has dwindled. Because the public sector, with its robust anti-discrimination
mandates, represents the last bastion of US organised labour, hostility to the US
labour movement is frequently couched in racist rhetoric. As Kyriakides and
Torres argue, 1960s-era visions of a Third World, non-aligned, or anti-colonial
coalitional subject in the US have, in an age of declining growth, fractured into
multiple ethnically determined subjects of identity in competition not only for a
shred of an ever-shrinking economic settlement but for recognition of their
suffering conferred by a nation-state in which the Right won the political battle
and the Left won the culture war.4

ADDENDUM ON TERMINOLOGY
Race has been variously described as an illusion, a social construction, a
cultural identity, a biological fiction but social fact, and an evolving complex of
social meanings. Throughout this article, race appears in quotation marks in
order to avoid attributing independent causal properties to objects defined by
ascriptive processes. Simply put, race is the consequence and not the cause of
racial ascription or racialisation processes which justify historically asymmetrical
power relationships through reference to phenotypical characteristics and
ancestry: Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an
attribute of the object.5

3 See Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture, p. 183.

4Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo Torres, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism,
Politics of Possibility (Stanford University Press 2012), 119.
5Barbara J. Fields, Whiteness, racism, and identity, International Labor and Working
Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56.

169
 I have also enclosed race in quotation marks in order to suggest three
overlapping dimensions of the term: as an index of varieties of material
inequality, as a bundle of ideologies and processes which create a racially
stratified social order, and as an evolving history of struggle against racism and
racial domination a history which has often risked reifying race by revaluing
imposed identities, or reifying racelessness by affirming liberal fictions of
atomistically isolated individuality. The intertwining of racial domination with the
class relation holds out the hope of systematically dismantling race as an
indicator of unequal structural relations of power. Race can thus be imagined as
an emancipatory category not from the point of view of its affirmation, but through
its abolition.

1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF RACIAL SUBORDINATION

from impieza de sangre to global superfluity
The trajectory of racial domination, from slavery to racialised surplus populations,
traces a long historical arc between the colonial creation of race in 16th century
Spanish notions of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), and its structural
reproduction under a restructured global capitalism a history which can only
be briefly sketched here. The genealogy of race and its precursors can be
traced back to the spatial expansion of European colonialism from the
baroque racialised caste system of Spanish and Portuguese colonial
administrations to the later, more Manichaean racial order produced by the
British colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The extermination,
enslavement, or colonisation of racialised populations often at the hands of a
colonial class of indentured servants consolidated race through the waning
of European servitude and the emergence of black chattel slavery. This was the
flipside of what Marxists call proletarianisation. Marked by ongoing histories of
exclusion from the wage and violent subjugation to varieties of unfree labour,
racialised populations were inserted into early capitalism in ways that continue to
define contemporary surplus populations.
The cursory treatment of racial violence in the historical narration of primitive
accumulation remains a fundamental blind spot in Marxist analyses of the
relationship between race and capitalism. In the era of the conquista and in the
transition to capitalism, race came into being through plunder, enslavement,
and colonial violence. At the very same time, primitive accumulation in England
produced a dispossessed and superfluous ex-peasantry, for the factory system
that might absorb them had not yet been created. Many of these ex-peasants
were eventually sent to the colonies, or inducted into imperial enterprises the
navy, merchant marines, etc. In the 18th and 19th centuries, more of these

170
surplus populations were integrated into the developing capitalist economy,
whether as chattel slaves or as wage labourers, according to an increasingly
intricate typology of race. Finally, after decades of compounding increases in
labour productivity, capital began to expel more labour from the production
process than was absorbed. That, in turn, produced yet another kind of
superfluous population in the form of a disproportionately non-white industrial
reserve army of labour. At the periphery of the global capitalist system, capital
now renews race by creating vast superfluous urban populations from the close
to one billion slum-dwelling and desperately impoverished descendants of the
enslaved and colonised.
In the 21st century, the substantial over-representation of racialised US
groups among the unemployed and underemployed last hired and first fired
demonstrates the concessionary, uneven incorporation of these groups into a
system of highly racialised wage differentials, occupational segregation, and
precarious labour. As capital sloughs off these relative surplus populations in the
core, the surplus capital produced by fewer and more intensively exploited
workers in the Global North scours the globe for lower wages, and reappears as
the racial threat of cheap labour from the Global South. In the US, with the end of
secure wage labour and the withdrawal of public welfare provisions, a massive
post-racial security state has come into being to manage the supposed
civilisational threats to the nation by policing black wageless life, deporting
immigrant labour, and waging an unlimited War on Terror. The catastrophic rise
of black mass incarceration, the hyper-militarisation of the southern US border,
and the continuation of open-ended security operations across the Muslim world,
reveal how race remains not only a probabilistic assignment of relative
economic value but also an index of differential vulnerability to state violence.6

2 READING WHITE SUPREMACY BACK INTO THE BASE

While Marx and Engels generally insisted on the need for workers to oppose
racism in its more blatant 19th century manifestations, they did not attempt to

6See Nikhil Pal Singh, Racial Formation in an Age of Permanent War in Daniel
HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, eds, Racial Formation in the Twenty-First
Century (University of California 2012), 276-301.

171
articulate the relation of race and class at a categorical level.7 As Derek Sayer
observes, Marx was a man of his time and place:
Like most other Victorians, Marx thought both race and family natural
categories (even if subject to some historical modification), and had little trouble
in distinguishing between civilisation (which for him was white, western and
modern) and barbarism. His views on the beneficial results of European
colonialism would embarrass many twentieth-century Marxists, notwithstanding
his denunciations of the violence of its means8
The theoretical relation between race and class has subsequently become the
subject of a long debate in the varieties of academic Marxism that emerged as a
New Left generation inspired by the struggles of the sixties entered the
university. In an early and influential contribution to this conversation, Stuart Hall
asserted that race was the modality in which class is lived, the medium
through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is
appropriated and fought through.9 Hall and other cultural theorists
supplemented Marxist categories of base and superstructure with the ideas of
Western Marxist figures such as Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci
in particular, and his development of the concept of hegemony with its room
for more nuanced theories of culture, ideology, and politics has been a central
reference in academic attempts to rearticulate the relation of race and class. In
this vein, anti-racist struggle is viewed as a contest for democratic hegemony,
which followed from the mid-twentieth century discrediting of white supremacy as
explicit state policy.10 Until recently, the Gramscian analytic of hegemony, which

7 Marxs pronouncement that labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as
labour in the black skin is branded ([MECW 35], 305) is often quoted by his defenders,
as are his denunciations of anti-Irish racism. Less often mentioned are Marx and
Engelss opinions about lazy Mexicans and the cause of the political immaturity of
Lafargue, Marxs son-in-law, being the stigma of his Negro heritage and Creole blood.
See Frederick Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung 231
(MECW 8), 362; Babacar Camara, Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and
Racism (Lexington 2008), 71-2.
8 Derek Sayer, Introduction to Readings from Karl Marx (Routledge 1989), ixx-xx.
9Stuart Hall, Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance, Black British
Cultural Studies (University of Chicago Press 1996), 55.
10Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge
1994).

172
has informed both Marxist cultural theory and many highly influential critical
accounts of race and slavery, has largely gone unquestioned.11
Recent critical writing by Frank Wilderson part of a group of contemporary
theoreticians of black politics whom Wilderson has broadly labelled Afro-
pessimist, including Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Jared Sexton, and Joy
James sharply challenges the appropriateness of this Gramscian framework.
Wilderson assesses the limits of a political economy of race centered on wage
work, rather than on direct relations of racial violence and terror from black
chattel slavery to black mass incarceration. In contrast to a Marxist perspective
that focuses on the struggle around the wage, or around the terms of
exploitation, Wilderson identifies the despotism of the unwaged relation as the
engine that drives anti-black racism.12
Wilderson presents a devastating critique of the relevance of a Gramscian
analysis of hegemony for understanding structural anti-black violence. For
Wilderson it is the focus on the wage which leads to the inability of Marxism to
conceptualise gratuitous violence against black bodies, a relation of terror as
opposed to a relation of hegemony.13 Wilderson is right to point out that the
privileged subject of Marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by
variable capital a wage.14 This is because access to the wage was a
prerequisite for both labour and later identity-based civil struggles after the end of
legal segregation, throughout the 20th century. From the point of view of the
classical workers movement, racism was thus seen as an unfortunate
impediment to a process of progressive integration into an expanding working
class. Yet it is precisely the racialisation of the unwaged, unfree, and excluded
which constitutes civil society as a space where recognition is bestowed via
formal wage contracts and abstract citizenship rights for its members.15 Thus for

11For Marxist alternatives to the Gramscian analytic of hegemony, see Bonefeld

Holloway, Richard Gunn, and Kosmas Psychopedis Open Marxism, vols. 1-3 (Pluto
1995).
12Frank Wilderson III, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society? Social
Identities 9 (2003), 230.
13 Ibid., 230.
14 Ibid., 225.
15 For a book-length critique of the fiction of colour-blind and gender neutral
participatory parity which governs much social contractarian thought, see Charles W.
Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP 1997); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Stanford UP 1988); Pateman and Mills, Contract and Domination (Polity 2007).

173
Wilderson the black subject reveals Marxisms inability to think white supremacy
as the base.16
Against a Gramscian reading of Marx, with its affirmationist focus on wage
labour, value-form theorists provide an alternative framework for charting the
complex interplay between direct and indirect forms of domination. If capital is
first and foremost an indirect or impersonal form of domination (unlike black
chattel slavery or feudalism, for example), in which production relations are not
subordinated to direct social relations, there is no necessary incompatibility
between this and the persistence or growth of direct, overt forms of racial and
gender domination. At play here are not only unwaged, coerced or dependent
forms of labour, but also, crucially, the management of those populations which
have become redundant in relation to capital. Such populations are expendable
but nonetheless trapped within the capital relation, because their existence is
defined by a generalised commodity economy which does not recognise their
capacity to labour. The management of such populations could be said to be
form-determined by the capital relation without being subsumed by it.
The form-determination theory of the state may also help overcome some of
the limits of a Gramscian view of the state as an object over which contending
social forces struggle to gain control. From the state-derivation debate of the
1970s there emerged an alternative view of the state as a particular
manifestation of the capital relation constituted by the separation of the
indirect, impersonal relations of production from direct political power. Thus the
state, with its expanded penal or carceral capacities, can impose direct relations
of racial domination while for instance involving itself in the disciplinary regulation
and expulsion of immigrant labour. In those relations mediated by free
exchange, where wage labour as a commodity is traded, the state is obliged to
ensure the terms of exchange and contract, while unwaged relations put one or
both parties in the relation potentially outside or beyond the law. The increasingly
punitive criminalisation of the purchase, sale, and transportation of illicit drugs
provides perhaps one of the most infamous examples of a racialised and
racialising informal economy fundamentally structured by state violence.
Womens former legal status as chattel vis--vis marriage offers another, in which
women did not traditionally have protection from their husbands within the law,
but only protection from men who were not their husbands. The limited protection
of this legal status as chattel was revoked in the case of black domestic
labourers in order to rationalise widespread rape and sexual exploitation by white

16 Wilderson, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?, 225.

174
male employers.17 In either case, the racial division of both productive and
reproductive labour consistently maintains racial hierarchies within gender
categories, and gender hierarchies within racial categories.18
The workers movement with its valorisation of wage-labour, work, and the
worker as the subject of history failed to grasp that wage-labour is not the only
stable form of exploitation on the basis of which capitalists can profit. Capitalism
has not only proven fully compatible with unfree labour from slavery,
indentured servitude, convict leasing, and debt peonage to gendered forms of
home-work and unwaged reproductive labour it has required the systematic
racialisation of this labour through the creation of an array of effectively non-
sovereign raced and gendered subjects. These modes of exploitation are not
destined to disappear with the expansion of capitalist social relations around the
world e.g. through the massive campaigns of independent states in Africa,
Latin America, and Asia to subjugate local populations to projects of
industrialisation. Instead they are reproduced through the creation of caste-like
surplus populations, deserted by the wage but still imprisoned within capitalist
markets. Race is not extrinsic to capitalism or simply the product of specific
historical formations such as South African Apartheid or Jim Crow America.
Likewise, capitalism does not simply incorporate racial domination as an
incidental part of its operations, but from its origins systematically begins
producing and reproducing race as global surplus humanity.
As Marx famously noted, the basis for primitive accumulation, requiring the
dispossession of the peasantry in England and Scotland, lay in New World
plantation slavery, resource extraction, and the extermination of non-European
populations on a world scale:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest
and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the
commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moment of primitive
accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations,
with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from

17See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in
the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive labour, Signs 18: 1 (1992), 1-43.
18 As P. Valentine has observed, rigorous efforts to engage with and integrate analyses
of race that do not mesh seamlessly with Marxist categories will inevitably require both
rethinking some of those categories and challenging some entrenched orthodoxies of
anti-racist thought. P. Valentine, The Gender Distinction in Communisation Theory,
Lies 1 (2012), 206. This article is in part an attempt to respond to this invitation.

175
 Spain, assumes giant dimensions in Englands Anti-Jacobin War, and is still
going on in the opium wars against China, &c.19
While non-racially determined varieties of slave labour predated the European
colonial Age of Discovery, capitalism bears the unique distinction of forging a
systematic racist doctrine from the 16th to 19th centuries culminating in 19th
century anthropological theories of scientific racism to justify racial domination,
colonial plunder, and an array of racially delineated varieties of unfree labour and
unequal citizenship. The history of capitalism isnt simply the history of the
proletarianisation of an independent peasantry but of the violent racial
domination of populations whose valorisation as wage labour, to reverse a
common formulation, has been merely historically contingent: socially dead
African slaves, the revocable sovereignty and terra nullius of indigenous peoples,
and the nerveless, supernumerary body of the coolie labourer.
Racial disparities have been reproduced as an inherent category of capitalism
since its origins not primarily through the wage, but through its absence. The
initial moment of contact between a European colonial order and an unwaged,
racialised outside to capital has been progressively systematised within
capitalism itself as a racialised global division of labour and the permanent
structural oversupply of such labour, which has produced one billion city-
dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums.20
Insofar as labour markets organise the ratio of paid to unpaid labour, race as
a marker of economic subordination is grounded both in a permanently
superfluous population and entrenched racialised wage differentials. The
expulsion of living labour from the production process places a kind of semi-
permeable racialising boundary bifurcating productive and unproductive
populations even within older racial categories: a kind of flexible global colour line
separating the formal and informal economy, and waged from wageless life.
Though this wageless colour line is minimally permeable and explicit racial
criteria are no longer formally sanctioned, the material reproduction of racial
domination, including the proliferation of intra-national non-white ethnic
hierarchies, is grounded in intertwined processes of exclusion from the wage, the
increasing criminalisation of informal economies, and elevated vulnerability to
state terror.

19 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), 739.

20 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso 2006), 19.

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 3 RACIAL DOMINATION AFTER THE RACIAL BREAK
What Howard Winant and Michael Omi have called the racial break or great
transformation driven by a world-historical anti-racist upsurge of
decolonisation, civil rights, and anti-apartheid social movements in the mid-
twentieth century has discredited white supremacy as explicit state policy
across the globe. For Omi and Winant, racial domination has given way to the
struggle over racial hegemony, and coercion has given way to consent. But fifty
years after the racial break, racial domination has also evolved. Many
ostensibly post-colonial states have resorted to racial violence and ethnic
cleansing in the name of nation-building and economic development. After the
racial break, capital and race intertwine both inside and outside the wage
relation. Insofar as labour markets organise the ratio of paid to unpaid labour,
race as a marker of economic subordination is grounded both in a permanently
superfluous population and entrenched wage differentials. After the repeal of
most Jim Crow laws and racialised national immigration restrictions, two anti-
racist political orientations emerged. In the case of US black-freedom struggles
after World War II, persistent racialised wage differentials and racial
discrimination in housing, education, and credit markets became the target of
a late civil-rights-movement politics of equitable inclusion and electoral
representation. At the same time, racial exclusion from the wage, de facto
segregation in ghettos and exposure to systemic police violence, made state
institutions like welfare, prisons, and policing the target of a black feminist
welfare-reform movement, waves of ghetto and prison riots, and a more militant
politics of self-defense and self-assertion.21
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, popular US stereotypes of the
relative economic productivity of racial subgroups have justified the exposure of
such groups to state surveillance, policing or incarceration from border patrol
shootings of illegals to black mass-incarceration. At the same time, the post-
racial civilising mission of the US, and its prosecution of a multi-trillion dollar
military campaign across the Islamic world, has been vouchsafed by a national

21Recent studies of the history of armed self-defense in the Civil Rights Movement, for
example by groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, have emphasised the
complexity of the commitment of movement activists to Ghandian strategic nonviolence.
See Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the
Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press 2013); Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the
Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of
Florida 2007).

177
mythology of the progressive overcoming of the legacy of slavery and legal
segregation.
The changing relationship between the US state and superfluous domestic
populations highlights the global, foundational role of state violence as a
racialisation process. The role of the state itself as an ostensibly neutral agent of
racial reform, rather than the principal agent of racial violence, provides the
missing third term in theorising the relationship between race and capital.
Contemporary US racial politics is fundamentally structured by the decline of US
global economic hegemony and by the hyper-militarisation of a post-racial
security state in response to three racialised civilisational threats: the criminal
threat of black surplus populations, the demographic threat of Latino immigrant
labour, and the unlimited national security threat posed by an elastically
conceived Islamic terrorist menace whose adherents are subject to collective
punishment, torture, and preemptive eradication. All three are directly targeted
and racialised by the states penal, citizenship-conferring, and domestic security
institutions. The rise of the anti-black US carceral state from the 1970s onward
exemplifies rituals of state and civilian violence which enforce the racialisation of
wageless life, and the racial ascription of wagelessness. From the point of view
of capital, race is renewed not only through persistent racialised wage
differentials, or the kind of occupational segregation posited by earlier split
labour market theories of race, but through the racialisation of unwaged surplus
or superfluous populations from Khartoum to the slums of Cairo. 22

4 RACE AND SURPLUS HUMANITY

The colonial and racial genealogy of European capitalism has been encoded
directly into the economic base through an ongoing history of racial violence
which structures both unfree and informal labour, and which binds surplus
populations to capitalist markets. If superfluity, stratification, and wage

22 To be clear, these populations are not outside but firmly within capitalismwith labour
regulation enforced by an array of punitive state apparatusesso that while the wage
no longer directly mediates collective access to basic needs like food and shelter, a vast
informal economy has arisen for securing the basic means of survival. In the example of
the partial proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry and the creation of a massive,
160-million-person rural migrant labour force, agricultural workers, or small peasants,
have often become unwaged, self-employed informal sector workers. The historical
workers movements dream (a dream which also sustained the US civil rights
movement and an array of anti-colonial national liberation movements), of progressive
incorporation into the wage, has run up against the reality of persistent structural
unemployment and superfluity.

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differentials are deracialised and the racial content of such categories rendered
contingent, then race can only appear as epiphenomenal, and possess a de
facto specificity, which severs any causal link between capitalism and
racialisation. The racial typologies which emerged from and enabled the spatial
expansion of European capitalism as a mode of production, have been renewed
over the course of centuries by an immanent tendency within capitalism to
produce surplus populations in ghettos, slums, and favelas throughout the world.
After the mid-twentieth century racial break, formal decolonisation in places
like Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia left in its wake developmentalist
states which absorbed ideologies of industrialisation and, so also, racialised
indigenous populations, ethnic groups, and stigmatised castes as peripheral to
the wage relation. Such populations will never be fully integrated into capitalist
accumulation processes except as bodies to be policed, warehoused, or
exterminated.
In the US, the postwar Keynesian states grudging extension of public social
provisions to non-white communities in the 1960s has now been withdrawn and
largely replaced by carceral and state-mandated work regimes applied to
disposable populations who inhabit the politically unrepresentable dead zones of
raced, gendered, and sexualised poverty. The only alternative to low wage,
precarious service work for these populations is a criminalised informal-economy
abutting Americas vast carceral system. The US in particular has served as a
global model for a new government of social insecurity founded on a punitive
upsurge in surveillance, policing, and incarceration in response to the
disappearance of secure wage work.23
Race is thus rooted in two overlapping processes of allocation and control.
Past and present racial discrimination is cumulative and distributes precarity,
unemployment, and informality unevenly across the economy along race and
gender lines. But race is also operationalised in various state and civilian
political projects of social control which classify and coerce deserving and
undeserving fractions of various racial groups while determining their fitness for
citizenship. Eroding the institutional separation between policing, border
securitisation, and global warfare, a massively expanded security state now
sends 1 in 3 black men to prison in their lifetime, deports nearly half a million
undocumented immigrants annually, has exterminated anywhere from 100,000 to
over a million civilians in Iraq alone, and is now gearing up for a $46 billion dollar

23 Loc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
(Duke University Press 2009). See A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, in Endnotes 3, for a
discussion of how such a model was developed in the case of Britain.

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border surge which includes drone surveillance and biometric exit scanning.
21st century race emerges from this matrix of securitisation.

5 THE TROUBLE WITH CLASS

class politics as identity politics
As a rhetoric of racial diversity has been used increasingly to conceal or even
justify deepening economic inequality, recent theorists from Slavoj iek and
Ellen Meiksins Wood to Walter Benn Michaels contend that what they call
multinational or neoliberal capitalism has come to champion a politics of race
against a politics of class. For these critics, identity-based social movements,
and liberal multiculturalism in particular, is at best indifferent and at worst hostile
to what Michaels considers the more urgent problem of class inequality.
Conversely, anti-racist theorists from Howard Winant to David Theo Goldberg
have argued tirelessly for the irreducibility of race to political economy. The
institutionally reinforced division between anti-racism and Marxism has a long
history. It has been a commonplace of recent popular historical accounts of the
political trajectory of the 1960s-era New Left to blame the fragmentation of a
unitary revolutionary class subject on the emergence of various anti-racist
struggles: from US ethnic nationalisms aligned with mid-twentieth century African
and Asian anticolonial movements; to black feminist critiques of the centrality of
white, heterosexual, middle class womens experiences in second-wave
feminism; to what both liberal and conservative critics have lamented as the rise
of a balkanising identity politics.
The intellectual polarisation of theoretical traditions which address either race
or class could be termed the unhappy marriage of anti-racism and Marxism. In
the latter half of the twentieth century, with the waning of Third Worldist, Maoist,
Guevarist or World-Systems Marxist analyses of race and colonialism and of
bodies of writing aligned with and informed by mass anti-capitalist and anti-racist
political movements academic theorists have invoked Marx to reread race as
historical contingency. Race typically persists in academic Marxist discourse as
a social division internal to the working class and sown by economic elites in
order to drive down wages, fragment worker insurgency, and create the
permanent threat of a nonwhite reserve army of labour. In these accounts race
becomes a functional or derivative component of class rule. This functionalist or
class reductionist account of race has been thoroughly challenged by anti-
racist scholars over the last half century, yet these challenges have customarily
emphasised the irreducibility or relative autonomy of race as one among many
equivalent though entangled systems of domination which can be simply
superadded to class. In turn, both Marxist and anti-racist theories assert,

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though for vastly different reasons, that there is no constitutive relation between
race and capitalism.
Sweeping critiques of identity politics, or of liberal multiculturalism as
neoliberal mystification, conceal a deeper elision of the identitarian logic at work
in a socialist and social democratic politics of class. The classical workers
movement, with its concept of class consciousness, was premised upon a
dream that the widespread affirmation of a working-class identity could serve as
the basis for workers hegemony within nationally constituted zones of capital
accumulation and so also for a workers revolution. Like much contemporary
anti-racist scholarship, the Marxist critique of identity politics typically remakes
capitalism as a problem of identity, specifically of class identity, and reduces
structural exploitation to distributive inequalities in wealth. Labour and identity-
based struggles, assumed to be qualitatively different in such accounts, are in
fact structured by the same representational logic of affirming identities within
capitalism. The difference that constitutes class as an identity, Ellen Meiksins
Wood writes, is, by definition, a relationship of inequality and power, in a way
that sexual or cultural difference need not be:
the working class, as the direct object of the most fundamental and determinative
though certainly not the only form of oppression, and the one class whose
interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes, can create the conditions
for liberating all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself.24
This argument from Wood highlights three interrelated problems of framing the
interaction between systems of racial, gender, and economic domination which
plague both Marxist critiques of identity politics and contemporary theories of
racial difference. If for Wood race, gender and sexuality are definitionally non-
economic categories of social life which index economic inequality only
contingently, then it is simply a tautology that these identities are not constitutive
of capitalism as such. The abolition of sexual or racial domination, here
understood primarily as vestigial forms of historical injustice, therefore would not
in principle be incompatible with capitalism. Finally, the reasoning goes, the
qualitative difference between class and other forms of identity rests on the fact
that class identity cannot be celebrated. And yet the argument elides a
fundamental contradiction between the abolition of class inequality and an
implicit agent of emancipation in the figure of the working class. While poverty
may not be a form of difference which can be celebrated, Wood nevertheless
produces an implicitly affirmationist account of the working class as that social

24See Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. (Aakar

Books 2007), 258; and Marxism Without Class Struggle? Socialist Register 20 (Merlin
1983), 242.

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agent both responsible for and uniquely capable of ending capitalism. The
question of how the affirmation of such an identity could bring about the end of
class oppression, without simply reaffirming capitalism under the guise of worker
self-management, is passed over in silence. Despite the attempt to criticise the
logic of identity-based struggles, Wood ultimately offers what I want to call an
affirmationist politics of class structurally indistinguishable from similarly
affirmationist accounts of race and gender difference.
But what if we did not center anti-racist struggles on difference but on
domination? To understand race not as a marker of difference but as a system
of domination poses the question of the material abolition of race as an
indicator of structural subordination. Both anti-racist critics of class reductionist
Marxisms and Marxist critics of liberal reformist, merely cultural anti-racisms
gloss over the strategic similarities between the increasingly desperate,
defensive struggles of the US labour movement and the race and gender-based
identity politics to which it is so consistently counterposed. As the 2011 labour
struggles in Wisconsin so dramatically revealed, the US labour movements turn
toward the state and electoral politics to secure its very right to exist mirrors the
extreme difficulty of securing even minimal racially redistributive programs in the
aftermath of the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Which is to say that, in an
era of declining membership in mass-based labour and civil rights organisations,
the prospects are dim for both a politics of race and a politics of class. Shifting
the analytic focus from difference to domination directs our attention to the
entanglement of race and superfluity, as well as the racialising impact of
violence, imprisonment, and warfare. Rejecting an understanding of capitalism as
an increasingly inclusive engine of racial uplift, and the state as an ultimate
guarantor of civic equality, an abolitionist anti-racism would categorically reject
the continuing affirmation of the fundamental respectability, productivity or
patriotism of racialised groups as a way to determine their relative fitness for
racial domination. Beginning from radically different histories of racialisation,
abolitionist anti-racist struggles would aim to dismantle the machinery of race at
the heart of a fantasy of formal freedom, where the limit point of capitalist
equality is laid bare as the central protagonist of racial ordering.25

25Kyriakides and Torres, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility,

36.

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 SPONTINEIT Y,
MEDIATION ,
RUPTURE
Endnotes 3 2013
We do not know whether the [contrasting] destinies of Luxemburg and Lenin
were to be tied to the fact that Lenin and his group armed the workers, while the
Spartacists continued to view the organisation as coordination and the refusal
to work as the only adequate workers weapon. The essence of Leninism shifts
from the relationship between spontaneity and the party to the relationship
between the party and insurrection.1
Are present-day struggles unfolding towards revolution? We try to find our
bearings, with respect to this question, in the only way we can: not only in our
experience of the present, but also, by consulting the revolutionary theories of
the past. However, to look to past revolutionary theories is a problematic venture:
those theories emerged in response to a set of problems which arose in the
course of a particular era an era that is not our own. Indeed, the revolutionary
theories of the twentieth century were developed in the course of a sequence of
struggles that we call the workers movement. Those theories do not only bear
the traces of the workers movement in general. They formed in response to the
limits that movement confronted at its highest point of intensity that is, in the
era of revolutions, 190521.
The limits of the workers movement had everything to do with the problem of
instilling a class consciousness in a population that had been proletarianised only
incompletely. Facing a large peasantry in the countryside and a motley
assortment of working classes in the cities, the strategists of the workers
movement looked forward to a future moment, when full proletarianisation
attendant on a further development of the productive forces would eradicate
existing divisions among proletarians. The objective unity of the class would then
find a subjective correlate. As it turned out, this dream never became a reality.
The further development of the productive forces reinforced certain divisions
among proletarians, while creating others. Meanwhile, that development
eradicated the basis of workers unity. Workers found that they were no longer

1Sergio Bologna, Class composition and the theory of the party at the origins of the
workers council movement (1972).

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the vital force of the modern era; instead, they were made over into appendages
attachments to a sprawling set of machines and infrastructures that escaped
their control. 2
Returning, however briefly, to the revolutionary high point of the last century
before the destitution of the workers movement may help us to understand
the context in which the revolutionary theories of the past were born. On that
basis, we will begin to articulate a revolutionary theory for our own times. But we
should be wary in undertaking such a project today: the emergence of revolutions
is, by its very nature, unpredictable; our theory must somehow incorporate this
unpredictability into its very core. The revolutionaries of an earlier era mostly
refused to open themselves towards the unknown even though the revolutions
they experienced never played out as they had imagined.
After all, twentieth-century revolutions turned out not to be the result of
methodical projects, of slowly building up union and/or party memberships, which
were expected to expand in step with the industrialisation and homogenisation of
the class. Instead, the revolutionary waves of 190521 emerged chaotically, with
self-organising struggles forming around the tactic of the mass strike. Neither the
emergence nor the development of the mass strike was foreseen by
revolutionary strategists, in spite of decades of reflection (and the historical
examples of 1848 and 1871).3
Among the few revolutionaries who did not oppose this new form of struggle
outright, Rosa Luxemburg came to identify it as the revolutionary tactic par
excellence. Her book, The Mass Strike, is one of the best texts in the history of
revolutionary theory. However, even Luxemburg saw the mass strike as a means
of revitalising the Germany Social Democratic Party. As Dauv points out: if
[Luxemburg] was the author of the formula, After August 4, 1914, social
democracy is nothing but a nauseating corpse, she proved to be quite the
necrophiliac.4

2 See A History of Separation, p. 203.

3 The mass strike of the early twentieth century had little in common with the dream of
the general strike, the grand soir, of the late nineteenth century.
4Gilles Dauv and Denis Authier, The Communist Left in Germany, 19181921 (1976),
Chapter 4.

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 PRELUDE
the mass strike
The history of the mass strike is a subterranean history; it is largely unwritten. But
it can be outlined as follows. 5
In 1902, roving strikes occurred in Belgium and Sweden, as a means of
pressing for universal male suffrage. The tactic then spread to the Netherlands
and Russia before arriving in Italy, in 1904, as a protest against the violent
repression of workers uprisings. In Italy, workers councils were formed for the
first time. This first wave reached its high point in the enormous Russian mass
strikes of 1905, which culminated in an insurrection the first Russian
Revolution in December of that year. With the Russian example serving as the
model, the mass-strike tactic circulated rapidly through European cities.
It soon appeared in Germany, the heart of Second International Marxism,
where the question of the purpose of the mass strike which had already
been used to a variety of different ends was first raised. For union
representatives, the mass strike appeared to be an obstacle to their unions own,
plodding attempts to organise the class. A German trade-unionist declared: To
build our organisations, we need calm in the workers movement.6 Yet the tactic
continued to spread, and its scope widened, despite the pronouncement of the
Second International that it supported the mass-strike tactic only as a defensive
weapon.
After the wave of 190207, struggles quieted down before bursting forth again
in 191013. In the course of these two waves, union membership surged; the
vote was won in Austria and Italy, while the Scandinavian states were forced to
liberalise. Anarcho-syndicalism and Left Communism appeared as distinct
tendencies. The start of World War I put an end to the second strike wave, which
was already beginning to peter out. But this seemingly permanent blockage
turned out to be another temporary impediment. Across Europe, the number of
strikes was already rising from low levels in 1915. Activity spilled outside the
workplace: there were rent strikes in Clydeside and demonstrations against food
prices in Berlin. In 1916, mass strikes were called in Germany, but this time in
order to protest the imprisonment of Karl Liebknecht, a symbol of principled
opposition to the War. By 1917, labour unrest was matched by mutinies in the

5 See Philippe Bourrinet, The workers councils in the theory of the Dutch-German
communist left.
6 Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 19051917 (Harvard University Press
1955), 39.

185
army and food riots in the streets, among other actions. These actions
proliferated through new forms of organisation: the shop-stewards movements in
England and Germany and the internal commissions in Italy.
Thus, even before the Bolshevik Revolution in October, struggle was heating
up across European cities. Mass strikes in Austria and Germany were the largest
ever in each countrys history. People forget that World War I ended, not because
of the defeat of one side, but because more and more of the countries involved in
hostilities collapsed in a wave of revolutions, which surged and then receded
from 1917 to 1921. We will not dwell on this final wave of struggle, except to
quote the words that Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD, spoke to the frightened
German bourgeoisie, in 1918: We are the only ones who can maintain order
What can we learn from this brief history of the mass-strike tactic? Were a
revolution to occur today, it would also have to emerge out of a massive
intensification of spontaneous, self-organising struggles. Those struggles would
have to break out and extend themselves across vast geographic spaces, in an
ebb and flow that lasts for decades. It is only within such a context that is, a
context of an unfolding sequence of struggles that revolution becomes
possible, not just theoretically, but actually. It is thus also only in the course of
intensifying struggles that the strategic questions of an era can be asked and
answered, in a concrete way.
However, we cannot learn much more than that, from the past. The tactic of
the mass strike was specific to its time, a time that witnessed: (1) an
unprecedented consolidation of firms and workplaces; (2) the arrival, in new
industrial towns, of recently proletarianised peasants, bringing with them certain
cultures of solidarity; (3) the fight of workers to defend their control over the
labour process, against mechanisation and rationalisation; and finally, (4) the
fight against a persistent old regime a fight for equality of citizenship, the right
to organise, and the vote which elites refused to grant proletarians. The
horizon of struggle is very different today, yet the tools that we have for grasping
the relation between struggles and revolution still bear the traces of the workers
movement.
Those tools must be re-forged. The quotation from Bologna, with which we
began, touches on the key concepts of revolutionary theory, as it was understood
in the course of the workers movement: spontaneity and organisation, party and
insurrection. The question that faces us is: how do we articulate the relations
among this constellation of concepts today, that is, after the end of the workers
movement (which has meant also, and necessarily, the end of all the
revolutionary traditions that animated the last century: Leninism and the ultra-left,

186
social democracy and syndicalism, and so on)? We offer the following reflections
on three concepts spontaneity, mediation, rupture as an attempt to re-
fashion the tools of revolutionary theory, for our times. By taking cognisance of
the gap that separates us from the past, we hope to extract from past theories
something of use to us in the present.

THE COORDINATION PROBLEM

Before we discuss the key concepts of revolutionary theory, we must pause to
say something about the specificity of struggle in capitalist societies. Outside of
those societies, human beings are mostly organised into face-to-face
communities. When they clash, they do so as communities that pre-exist those
clashes. By contrast, in capitalist societies, human beings are mostly atomised.
Proletarians confront one another, not as members of face-to-face communities,
but rather, as strangers. This atomisation determines the character of
contemporary struggles. For the basis on which proletarians struggle does not
pre-exist those struggles. Instead, the foundations of struggle have to be built
(out of the materials of social life) in the course of struggle itself. This feature of
capitalist societies has two basic causes:
1) In the markets where they sell their labour-power, proletarians compete with
one another for jobs. It is given in the nature of the exploitative relation that
there are never enough jobs to go around. In this situation, some proletarians
find it worthwhile to form gangs and rackets based on gender, race, nation,
creed and to oppose other groups of workers on that basis.7 The
opposition between proletarians plays out, not only with respect to jobs and
wage differentials, but also with respect to working conditions, family time,
educational opportunities and so on. Intra-class competition is also reflected
outside of labour markets, in ruthlessly enforced status hierarchies, on
display through conspicuous consumption (flashy cars) and countless lifestyle
markers (tight pants). Thus, an increasingly universal situation of labour-
dependence has not led to a homogenisation of interests. On the contrary,
proletarians are internally stratified. They carefully differentiate themselves
from one another. Where collective interests have been cultivated by
organisations, that has often re-inscribed other competitive differences in the
boundaries of race, nation, gender, etc.
2) Labour-dependency not only issues in competition between workers,
repelling them from one another. Insofar as individuals are able to secure

7Gangs and rackets act to ensure that some proletarians get good jobs at the expense
of others.

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 work, the wage also frees proletarians from having to deal with one another.
No longer dependent on an inheritance, wage-earners are not beholden to
their parents or anyone else (except their bosses!).8 They can escape from
the countryside to the cities, from the cities to the suburbs, or from the
suburbs back to the cities. As long as they find work, proletarians are free to
move about as they please. They can flee the admonishing eyes of ancestral
and religious authorities, as well as former friends and lovers, in order to
partner with whomever they want, to pray to whatever gods, and to decorate
their homes any which way. Proletarians do not have to see anyone they do
not like, except at work. Thus, the community dissolves not only by force; its
dissolution is also actively willed. The result is an historically unique social
structure, in which people dont really have to depend on each other, directly,
for much of anything. Yet, proletarians individual autonomy is won at the
expense of a collective powerlessness. When revolt ends, proletarians tend
to revert to atomisation. They dissolve back into the cash nexus.
Because proletarians begin from a situation of nearly universal atomisation,
they face a unique coordination problem. Proletarians have to find ways to band
together, but in order to do so, they have to overcome the real opposition of their
interests. Insofar as they have not yet overcome these barriers, they find that
they are powerless in their struggle with both capital and the state. Thus, the
problem proletarians face in non-revolutionary times is not the lack of a
proper strategy (which could be divined by clever intellectuals), but rather, the
presence of real power asymmetries, attendant on their atomisation. Nothing in
the individual workers arsenal can match the power of capitalists to hire and fire
at will, or the proclivity of policemen to shoot, beat or jail.
Workers have historically overcome their atomisation and the power
imbalances that result in waves of coordinated, disruptive activity. But workers
face a double-bind: they can act collectively if they trust one another, but they
can trust one another in the face of massive risks to themselves and others
only if that trust has already been realised in collective action. If revolutionary

8 Not all who are labour-dependent have achieved the autonomy that comes with it. For
example, proletarian women have always worked, at least for part of their lives. But for
another part of their lives (especially before 1970), they were relegated to a domestic
sphere, where they earned no wages of their own. Even when women did earn wages,
their wages were sometimes handed over directly to their husbands. In this way, the
development of the capitalist mode of production prevented women from winning the
autonomy from fathers and husbands that young men were able to achieve, early on.
That women, today, do earn and retain their own wages has given them an increased
autonomy, even though they are still saddled with most of the domestic work.

188
activity is exceptional, it is not because ideology divides workers, but rather
because, unless revolutionary action is already taking place, it is suicidal to try to
go it alone. The ideas in our heads, no matter how revolutionary they are,
mostly serve to justify and also to help us to cope with the suffering borne
of this situation.
The seemingly indissoluble problem of struggle, of the double bind, is finally
solved only by struggle itself, by the fact that struggle unfolds over time.
Computationally, this solution can be described as the possible result of an
iterated prisoners dilemma.9 Our term is spontaneity.

1 SPONTANEITY
Spontaneity is usually understood as an absence of organisation. Something
spontaneous arises from a momentary impulse, as if occurring naturally. Second
International Marxists believed that workers revolt was spontaneous, in this
sense: it was a natural reaction to capitalist domination, which must be given
shape by the party. This notion relies on what might be called a derivative
meaning of the term spontaneity. In the eighteenth century, when Kant described
the transcendental unity of apperception the fact that I am aware of myself as
having my own experiences he called this a spontaneous act.10 Kant meant
the opposite of something natural. A spontaneous act is one that is freely
undertaken. In fact, the word spontaneous derives from the Latin sponte,
meaning of ones own accord, freely, willingly. In this sense, spontaneity is not
about acting compulsively or automatically. It is a matter of acting without
external constraint. We participate in capitalist social relations everyday: by going
to work, by making purchases, etc. But we are free to decide not to do that,
whatever the consequences may be (in fact, the consequences are sometimes
severe, because our participation in capitalism is not a choice, but rather, a
compulsion).11
Four points follow, from this re-interpretation of the term:
1) Spontaneity precisely because it is freely willed is inherently
unpredictable. For this reason, there can be no fixed theory of struggle. There

9 See, for example, Robert Alexrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books 1984).
10 See Robert Pippin, Hegels Idealism (Cambridge University Press 1989), 16-24.
11 Individuals act spontaneously, in this sense, all the time. Sometimes they have a plan
and sometimes they do not. We are interested, however, not in such individual acts of
freedom, but rather, in collective acts of spontaneity. That is to say, we are interested,
here, only in mass activity.

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 can only be a phenomenology of the experience of revolt. Of course, revolt
does bear a relation to crisis, economic or otherwise, since crises make
proletarians existing ways of life untenable. But the relation between crisis
and revolt is never mechanical. Revolt remains fundamentally un- or
overdetermined: it never happens just when it is supposed to, and when it
does happen, it often arises from the unlikeliest of corners. Discontent may
simmer, but then a police murder or a rise in bread prices suddenly triggers
revolt. However, no one knows beforehand what will be the trigger event, in
any given case. This is not to say that revolt is unplanned or that militants
do not play a role in sparking revolts. In fact, militants try to spark revolt all
the time. The point is that their success lies in something outside of
themselves (that something reveals itself in key moments, when the human
material on which militants work suddenly stops responding to their micro-
management a struggle either leaps out in an unexpected direction, or
else, it wilts).12 Who can predict when showing up at a park will lead to just
another protest, and when it will explode into a civil war?
2) Spontaneity being a break with the everyday is also necessarily
disruptive. Spontaneity appears as a set of disruptive acts: strikes,
occupations, blockades, looting, rioting, self-reduction of prices and self-
organisation more generally. But spontaneity is not merely a concoction of
these ingredients. Spontaneity has a history, and in the history of spontaneity,
there is a primacy of particular tactics, in two senses. (a) Tactics are what
resonate, across workplaces or neighbourhoods, across countries or even
continents. Someone sets themselves on fire, or some individuals occupy a
public square. Spontaneously, other people start doing something similar. In
the course of events, proletarians adapt a given tactic to their own
experiences, but what is key is that insofar they are adopting tactics that
are taken from somewhere else there is an interruption of the continuous
flow of time. Local history becomes something that can only be articulated
globally. (b) The primacy of tactics is also given in the fact that people take
part in waves of disruptive activity, even while debating why they are doing
so. Participants may make contradictory demands; the same tactics are used
towards different ends, in different places. Meanwhile, as struggles grow in
intensity and extent, participants become more bold in making demands or
in not making any at all. Barriers between people begin to break down. As the

12To point that out is not to denigrate militants: it is to remind us that while militants are
an active agent in any wave of struggle, they do not hold the key to it. They solve the
coordination problem much as computers solve math problems: by trying every possible
solution, until one of them fits.

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 walls fall, individuals sense of collective power increases. The risks of
participation drop as more and more people participate. In its unfolding, the
struggle builds its own foundations.
3) Spontaneity is not only disruptive, it is also creative. Spontaneity generates a
new content of struggle, which is adequate to proletarians everyday
experiences. These experiences are always changing, along with changes in
capitalist social relations (and culture more generally). Thats why revolt that
arises from within spontaneously tends to spread more widely and
wildly than revolt that comes from the outside from militants, etc. This is
true, even when militants intervene on the basis of their own prior
experiences of revolt (in the sixties, many militants denounced sabotage and
absenteeism as infantile forms of struggle; in fact, they presaged a massive
wave of wildcat strikes). Thus, militants place themselves in a difficult
position. Militants are the human traces of past conflict, mobile across time
and space. If there are local/national histories of struggle, that is partly
because militants establish continuities of experience. Strong militant
formations can become agents of intensification in the present; however, in
trying to apply lessons learned in the past to an ever changing present,
militants run the risk of trivialising the new, in the moment of its emergence.
This is a dangerous position, insofar as it remains axiomatic, for us, that we
have to put our trust in the new as the only way out of capitalist social
relations.
4) Spontaneous revolt involves, not only the creation of a new content of
struggle, but also, necessarily, of new forms of struggle, adequate to or
matching up with that content. Hegel once said, regarding the antithesis of
form and content: it is essential to remember that the content is not
formless, but that it has the form within itself, just as much as the form is
something external to it. 13 That form may be incipient at first; it may exist
only in potential, but it comes into its own as struggles extend and intensify.
Here, too there is something creative the emergence of a form without
historical precedent. History bears witness to this fact, again and again: newly
emergent struggles disdain existing forms. Instead, they generate their own
forms, which are then disdained, in turn, in future waves of revolt. This
feature of spontaneity, its tendency towards formal innovation, undermines
any account of communisation that makes it seem as if a communising
revolution would be fundamentally formless. We cannot know what forms of

13 Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (Hackett 1991) 133, p. 202.

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 spontaneous organisation will play a role in and will have to be overcome
in the moment of communisation.
Against the revolutionary theories of the past, we can say today that
organisation is not external to spontaneity. On the contrary, mass revolt is always
organised. To give this term a definition proper to its role in revolutionary theory,
we might say that organisation is the necessary accompaniment to the
coordination and extension of spontaneous disruptive activity. But that does not
mean that organisation is always formal. It can also be completely informal, and
in fact, at the highest levels, it is always informal. Coordination means the spread
of tactics by word of mouth, newspapers, radio, television, videos captured on
cell phones, etc. (not that any particular technology is necessary: a global strike
wave already spread across the British Empire in the 1930s; technologies merely
afford different opportunities for struggle).
Within any revolt, debates take place around the question of organisation:
what is the best way to coordinate and extend this particular disruptive activity?
The answers to this question are always specific to the context of the revolt in
question. Many individuals, whether out of ignorance or fear, ask themselves
different questions: how can we bring this disruption to an end? how can we
wrap it up or get a win, so we can return to the familiar miseries of our everyday
lives? Overcoming ignorance and fear coming to trust one another to act and
to do so in a coordinated way, with hundreds, thousands, millions and finally
billions of people this coordination problem cannot be worked out in advance.
It is only solved in and through an unfolding sequence of struggles.

2 MEDIATION
We usually come across the term mediation in its privative form, as immediacy,
taken to mean, now, at once. Again, this meaning is a derivative one.
Immediacy means, first and foremost, lacking mediation. What, then, is
mediation? It is the presence of an intervening term (in its early usage, the word
mediation described the position of Jesus Christ, who intervened between God
and man). To speak of the immediacy of the revolution does not mean to call for
revolution immediately, in the sense of right now, but rather, immediately, in
the sense of lacking an intervening term. But which term is lacking, in this
case?
It should be clear that the immediacy of the revolution is not simply a matter of
lacking organisation (although any revolution will be chaotic). On the contrary,
disruptive activities must be highly coordinated and extensive in a word,
organised so much so as to precipitate a desertion from the armed forces

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(which is the sine qua non of a revolutionary moment). Nor is this point clarified
by saying that the revolution will take place without an intervening, or transitional
period. Because in fact, there will inevitably be a transition, even if there will be
no transitional economy or transitional state in the sense these terms had in
the twentieth century. The communisation of social relations among seven billion
people will take time. It will involve sudden surges as well as devastating
setbacks, zones of freedom emerging alongside zones of unfreedom, etc. Even if
communisers were to rout the counter-revolution, there would inevitably follow a
period of de- and reconstruction. Relations among individuals, no longer
mediated by markets and states, would have to realise themselves, in the world,
as a thoroughgoing transformation of material infrastructures.14
For us, it is not so much the revolution as a process that should be
understood with the category of immediacy. To speak of immediacy, with
respect to the revolution, is merely a shorthand for the fact that the revolution
abolishes the mediations of the modern world. To speak of the immediacy of
communism is thus to affirm that, unlike the revolutionaries of the past,
communisers will have to take seriously the coherence of the modern world. The
worker, the machine, the factory, science and technology: none of these terms
appears as an unqualified good, to be opposed to capital and the state, as
unqualified evils. There is no neutral ordering of this world that can be taken over
by the working class and run in its interest. Thus, the revolution cannot be a
matter of finding new ways to mediate relations among workers, or between
human beings and nature, the state and the economy, men and women, etc.
Instead, the revolution can only be a set of acts that abolish the very distinctions
on which such mediations are based. Capitalism is a set of separations, or
ontological cleavages between human beings and their innermost capacities
that are subsequently mediated by value and the state. To undo these
mediations is to destroy the entities that underlie them: on the one hand to
reconnect everyone to their capacities, in such a way that they can never be
forcibly separated, and on the other hand, to empower each singular individual to
take on or divest from any particular capacity, without thereby losing access to all
the others.
The actual means of reconnecting individuals to their capacities, outside the
market and the state, are impossible to foresee. But that does not mean that
human existence will take on an ineffable quality, a sheer flux. New mediations
will inevitably be erected out of the wreckage of the old. Thus, communism will
not mean the end of mediation. It will mean the end of those mediations that fix

14 See Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect in Endnotes 3.

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us in our social roles: gender, race, class, nation, species. Just as the end of
abstract domination will not mean the end of abstraction, so too, the overcoming
of these mediations will leave plenty of others intact: language, music, games,
etc.
However, that is not to say these mediations wont be fundamentally
transformed by the end of asocial socialisation. Take language for example, as
the primordial mediation: language has been transformed by global commerce,
which has led to a massive reduction in the number of languages, and to the
corresponding dominance of a few: Spanish, English, Mandarin. We do not know
whether the overcoming of this world will continue to maximise communication
between social groupings around the world. Perhaps, instead, it will issue in a
proliferation of languages. Universal comprehension may be sacrificed to make
words more adequate to mutually unintelligible forms of life.

3 RUPTURE
During periods of quiescence, revolt takes place. But it remains disarticulated.
The clash between classes breaks out, here and there, but then subsides.
Periods of quiescence last for decades, but eventually, they come to an end. The
re-emergence of class struggle announces itself in a torrent of activities. A new
sequence of struggles begins. Waves of proletarian activity ebb and flow, over a
period of years, as new content and new forms of struggle develop. The intensity
of the fight rises, although never in a linear way, as proletarians link up,
extending their disruptive activities. The articulation of those activities begins to
reveal the outlines of that which is to be overcome. In this way, there is a tension
towards the rupture, which throws off sparks in all directions. A rupture is, by
definition, a break a break that is qualitative in nature but a break with or
within what? Where do we locate the rupture that is synonymous with the advent
of a revolutionary period?
It is all too easy to speak of spontaneous disruption as if it were itself a
rupture, that is, with the everyday. Revolution would then be understood as an
accumulation of ruptures. There is some truth in this perspective. After all,
struggles never extend themselves along a linear path of rising intensity. On the
contrary, the clash moves by means of discontinuities. Its dynamism gives rise to
periodic shifts in the very terms of the struggle: in one moment, it may be workers
versus bosses, but in the next, it becomes tenants versus landlords, youth versus
the police, or a confrontation among self-organised sectors (all of these fights
can occur simultaneously as well). This instability in the very basis on which
individuals are called to confront one another is what makes it possible to call
everything into question, both generally and in every specificity.

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 Yet these terms must be kept separate: on the one hand, spontaneous
disruption, and on the other hand, the rupture, which splits open spontaneous
disruption itself. The rupture forces every individual, who is engaged in struggle,
to take sides: to decide whether they align themselves on the side of the
communist movement as the movement for the practical destruction of this
world or else, on the side of continuing to revolt, on the basis of what is. In that
sense, the rupture is a moment of partisanship, of taking sides.15 It is a question
of joining the party and of convincing others to do the same (it is by no means a
matter of leading the people). Just as we separate spontaneity from rupture, we
must also draw a distinction between organisation, which is proper to
spontaneity, and the party, which is always the party of rupture. 16
The party cleaves its way through proletarian organisations, since it calls for
the destitution of the social order (and so also, the undoing of the distinctions on
which proletarian organisations are founded). The difference between
organisations and the party is, therefore, the difference between, on the one
hand, committees of the unemployed, neighbourhood assemblies and rank-and-
file unions which organise the disruption of capitalist social relations and on
the other hand, groups of partisans who reconfigure networks of transportation
and communication and organise the creation and free distribution of goods and
services. Communist tactics destroy the very distinctions (e.g. between employed

15 In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx writes of a polarisation of social forces into a Party
of Order and a Party of Anarchy. Here, it is not a matter of pre-existing social groups,
but rather, of emergent ones, finding their organisational forms in the struggle itself: the
bourgeoisie and its supporters coalesce around a force that offers the best chance of
restoring order, while the proletariat gathers around a force that is trying to create a
situation which makes all turning back impossible.
16 The concept of the party merely registers this fact: like spontaneous revolt itself, the
rupture will not proceed automatically, out of a deep or even final crisis of the capital-
labour relation. The proletariat will not suddenly find itself holding the levers to power,
after which point it is only a matter of figuring out what to do with it. Instead, the
revolution will be the project of a fraction of society, i.e. the party, which solves the
coordination problem in the only possible way by abolishing class society.

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and unemployed) on which proletarian organisations are based.17 In so doing,
they initiate the unification of humanity.
And so, while revolts disrupt the old world, the rupture is its over-turning (thus,
the standard term for the rupture: revolution). This overturning has both
quantitative and qualitative dimensions, which distinguish it from revolt. For
example, the scale of revolt is typically restricted; whereas the revolution today
can only mean seven billion people trying to find ways to reproduce themselves,
in non-capitalist ways. Of these billions, even an active minority would have to
number in the hundreds of millions (that is to say, if individuals are able to
determine the course of events, that in itself suggests that we are still far from a
revolutionary moment). The revolution will require that billions of individuals draw
diverse aspects of their lives into an open struggle, which ends in those
individuals calling the totality of their lives into question. The rupture calls life
itself into question, but in a way that allows us to carry on living.
According to Thorie Communiste, the revolutionaries of an earlier era did not
have a concept of rupture. They supposedly saw revolution as a matter of
struggles growing over, that is, of struggles extending themselves across
society and intensifying towards a tipping point, when they would spill over into a
revolution. In the course of the twentieth century, many theories of this kind were
proposed (the term itself apparently comes from Trotsky, but the idea is more
common among autonomists). However, those sorts of theories were not very

17 This is a difficult point to make rigorously. It is clear that, insofar as spontaneously

self-organising struggles build their own foundations, they often connect individuals to
one another in ways that belie their unity-in-separation for capital. For example,
individuals may occupy a government building, even though they have no everyday
connection to it. In so occupying, they may organise themselves according to a shared
trait that has no meaning, for capital. The key point here is that spontaneously
organising struggles disrupt the unity-in-separation of capital, but they do not overcome
it, in a permanent way. Thus, the tendency of distinctions of gender, race, nationality,
etc., to reappear in the square occupations of 2011, that is, precisely where those
distinctions were supposed to have been rendered inoperable.

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common.18 Most revolutionaries, including Trotsky, drew their own distinction
between revolt and rupture.
So, for example, in Italy, in the course of the bienno rosso (191920), when
revolution seemed like a real possibility, Amadeo Bordiga, future leader of the
Italian Communist Party, announced the following:
We would not like the working masses to get hold of the idea that all they need
do to take over the factories and get rid of the capitalists is set up councils. This
would indeed be a dangerous illusion. The factory will be conquered by the
working class and not only by the workforce employed in it, which would be
too weak and non-communist only after the working class as a whole has
seized political power. Unless it has done so, the Royal Guards, military police,
etc. in other words, the mechanism of force and oppression that the
bourgeoisie has at its disposal, its political power apparatus will see to it that
all illusions are dispelled.19
In essence, Bordiga (like many communists in the twentieth century) argued as
follows: by taking over the factories and demonstrating in the street, it is
sometimes possible to bring society to a halt, but not to produce a rupture. The
rupture will only take place when proletarians risk civil war, in an attempt to
permanently transfer power to themselves. It followed that the primary task of the
party was, at the critical moment, to distribute arms among the workers and to
call for a transfer of power to these armed bodies. Indeed, arming the workers
might be thought of as the key programmatist tactic (other such tactics included

18 The insurrectionists may be the true inheritors of the growing-over theory of

revolution. For them, the intensification of existing struggles is already the rupture. The
concept of revolution is thereby abandoned as overly holistic a false universalisation
in time and space. In fact, struggles universalise themselves not by merging
together, so that everyone can march behind the one true banner but rather, by
posing universal questions about the overcoming of this world. In that way, struggles
themselves construct the universal, not as an abstract object of an idealised revolution,
but as the concrete object of an actual revolution.
19 Amadeo Bordiga, Seize Power or Seize the Factory? (1920).

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establishing political bodies of recallable delegates).20 The link between this
concept and Bolognas, quoted earlier, should be apparent.
Thus, it is clear that the revolutionaries of an earlier era did have a concept of
rupture (the revolutionary was the one who, in every opening, pronounced De
Sades famous slogan: one more effort, comrades). Nevertheless, it is true
that, for us, such a concept is inadequate. A revolution today cannot take place
by means of armed bodies taking state power or even over-turning it,
according to the anarchist conception with the goal of setting up a society of
associated workers. Even if that sort of revolution remains appealing to some, it
is predicated on the will and the capacity of workers to organise around their
identity as workers, instead of around other identities (i.e. nationality, religion,
race, gender, etc). Workers only share a common interest to the extent that they
can project a universal solution to their coordination problem (an injury to one is
an injury to all is not universally true).
Facing up to the pressures of competitive labour markets, workers did
construct their common interest, in the course of the twentieth century, by
building workers organisations, which were linked together through the workers
movement. That movement forged from among a multitude of specific
workers experiences an actually general interest. But the actuality of this
general interest was predicated on two things. First, it was predicated on winning
real gains, both within capitalist societies and against an old regime, which
sought to exclude workers from the polity. Second, it was predicated on a lived
experience of many proletarians: they identified with their work, as the defining
trait of who they were (and they imagined that, with the extension of the factory
system to the entire world, this identity would become a common human
condition). Workers felt that they shared a common destiny as the vital force of
modern society, which was growing all the time.
All that is now in the past. A massive accumulation of capital has made the
productive process ever more efficient, rendering workers ever more superfluous
to it. Under these conditions, capitalist economies have grown slowly, due to
chronic overproduction; at the same time, most workers find it hard to win any

20 Certain communists have taken a different tack. They take it as their primary task to
identify and infiltrate what they perceive to be the key economic sector(s), the part that
represents the whole. Militants within that sector will supposedly be able, at the right
moment, to intervene decisively, to produce the revolution, or else to prevent the
betrayal of the revolution (which was supposed to come from elsewhere). See, for
example, Monsieur Duponts Nihilist Communism, on the question of the essential
proletariat (Ardent Press 2002). These are false solutions to real problems, but again,
for that reason, they will find their actual solutions in time.

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real gains, in a context of high levels of unemployment. Moreover, this superfluity
of workers has found its correlate in a changed experience of work itself. Insofar
as they are employed, most proletarians do not identify with their work as the
defining trait of who they are. Either they are peripheral to a more or less
automated production process and thus, cannot see themselves as the vital
force of modern society or else they are excluded from production altogether,
and toil away in dead-end service sector jobs. This is not to say that there arent
still proletarians who dream of doing similar jobs in a better world, where they
could organise their work democratically. It is just that this minority can no longer
claim to represent the future of the class as a whole especially when so many
proletarians are un- or underemployed, or else are lost in the informal sector,
where seventy percent of workers are self-employed, because they cannot find
jobs.
As a result of these transformations, the revolutionary horizon of struggle is
itself transformed. It must be something other than what it was. We can neither
remain who we are, nor take over things as they are. That is all the more true,
insofar as the apparatuses of modern society (factories, networks of roads and
airports, etc.) which proletarians helped to build have turned out not to
presage a new world of human freedom. On the contrary, those apparatuses are
destroying the very conditions of human life on earth. It is difficult to say,
therefore, what would constitute a communising tactic, replacing the
programmatist tactic par excellence, namely the arming of the workers or
generalising the armed struggle. We know what those tactics will have to do:
they will have to destroy private property and the state, abolish the distinction
between the domestic sphere and the economy, etc. But that tells us nothing
about the tactics themselves. Which will be the ones that break through?
In the end, communising tactics will turn out to be whichever tactics finally
destroy the link between finding work and surviving. They will reconnect human
beings and their capacities, in such a way as to make it impossible to sever that
connection ever again. In the course of struggle, a process may unfold,
somewhere in the world, which seems to go all the way, to bring an end, once
and for all, to capitalist social relations. Just as today, proletarians adopt and
adapt whatever tactics resonate with them, so too, some proletarians will adopt
these communising tactics. However, these tactics will not extend the struggle.
On the contrary, they will split that struggle open, turning it back against itself.
If there are such breakthroughs, anywhere in the world, it is possible to
imagine that, as a feature of partisanship, communist parties will form (or will
align themselves with the new tactics). They may not call themselves parties, and
they may not refer to their tactics as communising tactics. Nevertheless, there

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will be a separation out of those who, within struggle, advocate and apply
revolutionary tactics, whatever they may be. There is no need to decide in
advance what the party will look like, what should be its form of organisation, if it
should be formalised at all, or whether it is just an orientation shared among
many individuals. Communism is not an idea or a slogan. It is the real movement
of history, the movement which in the rupture gropes its way out of history.

CONCLUSIONS
The concept of communisation marks out an orientation: an orientation towards
the conditions of possibility of communism. The concept enjoins us to focus on
the present, to discover the new world through the critique of everything that
presently exists. What would have to be overturned or undone, in order for
communism to become a real force in the world? There is both a deductive and
inductive way of approaching this question: (1) what is capitalism, and therefore,
what would a communist movement have to abolish, in order for capitalism to no
longer exist? (2) What, in the struggles and experiences of proletarians, points
towards or poses the question of communism? In fact, our answers to this first
question are shaped by our answers to the second. Proletarians are always
fighting capital in new and unexpected ways, forcing us to ask, again, What is
capital, such that people are trying to destroy it, like that? The theory of
communisation sets itself up, in relation to these questions, as a set of
propositions, regarding the minimal conditions of abolishing capitalism. These
propositions can be enumerated, briefly, as follows:
(1) The unfolding crises of capitalism cause proletarian struggles both to
proliferate and to transform in character. (2) These struggles tend to generalise
across society, without it becoming possible to unify concurrent struggles under a
single banner. (3) In order for fundamentally fragmented struggles to pass over
into a revolution, communising measures will have to be taken, as the only
possible way of carrying those struggles forward. (4) It will thus become
necessary to abolish class divisions as well as the state, distinctions of gender
and race, etc. in the very process of revolution (and as the revolution). Finally,
(5) a revolution will therefore establish, not a transitional economy or state, but
rather, a world of individuals, defined in their singularity, who relate to one
another in a multitude of ways. This last point will hold true, even if those
individuals inherit a brutal world, ravaged by war and climate catastrophe and
not a paradise of automated factories and easy living.
We must recognise that this set of propositions is rather weak: a starting point
rather than a conclusion. It should also go without saying: these propositions tell
us nothing about whether a communist revolution will actually happen. Having

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gone through a conceptual topology of revolutionary strategy, the question
remains: does any of this affect what we do? Do these reflections have any
strategic consequences?
Today, those who are interested in revolutionary theory find themselves
caught between the terms of a false choice: activism or attentisme. It seems that
we can only act without thinking critically, or think critically without acting.
Revolutionary theory has as one of its tasks to dissolve this performative
contradiction. How is it possible to act while understanding the limits of that
action? In every struggle, there is a tension towards unity, which is given in the
drive to coordinate disruptive activity, as the only hope of achieving anything at
all. But, in the absence of a workers movement which was able to subsume
difference into a fundamental sameness this tension towards unity is
frustrated. There is no way to solve the coordination problem on the basis of
what we are. To be a partisan of the rupture is to recognise that there is no
collective worker no revolutionary subject which is somehow hidden but
already present in every struggle.
On the contrary, the intensification of struggles reveals, not a pre-existing
unity, but rather, a conflictual proliferation of difference. This difference is not only
suffered; it is often willed by participants in struggle. Under these conditions, the
weak unities of this or that anti-government front which are imposed on so
many differences merely offer yet another confirmation that, within struggle,
we remain disunited. In that sense, we might even say that, today, all struggles
lead away from revolution except that it is only through activation,
intensification, and failed attempts at generalisation that unification may one day
become possible, in and through a revolutionary rupture with struggle itself.
This observation raises a paradox. There is nothing for us to do but support
the extension and intensification of struggles. Like everyone else engaged in
struggle, we may seek to introduce a new content into our struggles. We may try
out new tactics and forms of organisation (or else, we might adopt tactics and
forms of organisation from elsewhere, when they occur in a way that resonates
with us). We may put forward what we believe to be the watchwords of the
moment. In any case, we understand that the limits of our own power are the
limits of everyone elses participation: the extent of their coordination, the degree
of their mutual trust, and the intensity of their disruption.
But we also recognise that, as we participate in struggles as we organise
ourselves we are pushed towards or fixed into identities from which we are
fundamentally alienated. Either we can no longer affirm those identities, or else
do not want to, or else we recognise that they are sectional and for that reason
impossible to adopt among the broad mass of humanity. Struggles pit us against

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one another but often not for reasons that we experience as absolutely
necessary. On the contrary, sometimes, we come to see our differences as
inessential the result of a fractious differentiation of status or identity, within
capitalism.
In facing these limits of struggle, we are completely powerless to overcome
them. The trouble for activists is that an awareness of limits appears as loss and
defeat. Their solution is to desperately force a resolution. We recognise, by
contrast, that the fight will not be won directly, by leaping over the limits. Instead,
we will have to come up against those limits, again and again, until they can be
formalised. The impossibility of solving the coordination problem while
remaining what we are, in this society must be theorised within struggle, as a
practical problem. Proletarians must come to see that capital is not merely an
external enemy. Alongside the state, it is our only mode of coordination. We
relate to one another though capital; it is our unity-in-separation. Only on the
basis of such a consciousnessnot of class, but of capitalwill revolution
become possible, as the overturning of this society.
In the meantime, what we seek is not premature answers or forced
resolutions, but rather a therapy against despair: it is only in wrestling with the
limit that proletarians will formalise the question, to which revolution is the
answer. As it stands, ours is thus a meagre offering, based more on speculative
argument than hard evidence. Except among a tiny minority of participants, a
concept of communisation (or a concept bearing its essential characteristics) has
not yet arisen within struggles. We are still speaking of a new cycle of struggle in
the worn-out language of the old. We can refine that language as best we can,
but we have to recognise that it is nearly, if not completely exhausted.

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 selections from
A HISTORY
OF SEPARATION
Endnotes 4 2015

P R E FAC E
We have no models.
The history of past experiences serves only to free us of those experiences.
Mario Tronti, Lenin in England, 1964

BETRAYAL AND THE WILL

What should we be doing today, if we are for the revolution? Should we build up
our resources now, or wait patiently for the next rupture? Should we act on
invariant revolutionary principles, or remain flexible, so we can adapt to new
situations as they arise? Any response to these questions inevitably tarries with
the history of revolutions in the twentieth century. The failure of those revolutions
accounts for the fact that we are still here asking ourselves these questions. All
attempts to account for our agency, today, are haunted by the debacles of the
past. That is true even, or perhaps especially, for those who never mention the
past in the first place. The reason for this is plain to see.
The history of communism is not only the history of defeats: taking risks,
coming up against a stronger force and losing. It is also a history of treachery, or
of what the Left has typically called betrayal. In the course of the traditional
labour movement, there were many famous examples: of the Social Democrats
and the trade union leadership at the start of World War I, of Ebert and Noske in
the course of the German Revolution, of Trotsky in the midst of the Kronstadt
Rebellion, of Stalin when he assumed power, of the CNT in Spain, when it
ordered revolutionaries to tear down the barricades, and so on. In the anti-
colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century, Chairman Mao, the Viet Minh,
and Kwame Nkrumah were all called betrayers. Meanwhile, in the last major

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upsurge in Europe, it was the CGT in 1968 and the PCI in 1977, among others,
who are said to have betrayed. The counter-revolution comes not only from the
outside, but apparently also from the heart of the revolution itself.
That defeat is ultimately attributed to the moral failings of Left organisations
and individuals, at least in leftist histories, is essential. If revolutions were
defeated for some other reason (for example, as a result of the exigencies of
unique situations), then there would be little for us to learn with respect to our
own militancy. It is because the project of communism seemed to be blocked
not by chance, but by betrayalthat communist theory has come to revolve, as
if neurotically, around the question of betrayal and the will that prevents it. The
link between these two is key: at first glance, the theory of betrayal appears to be
the inverse of a heroic conception of history. But betrayal delineates the negative
space of the hero and thus of the figure of the militant. It is the militant, with her
or his correct revolutionary line and authentic revolutionary willas well as their
vehicle: the partywho is supposed to stop the betrayal from taking place, and
thus to bring the revolution to fruition.1
The origins of this thought-form are easy to identify: on 4th August 1914,
German Social Democrats voted to support the war effort; the trade unions
vowed to manage labour. The Great War thus commenced with the approval of
socialisms earthly representatives. A year after the war began, dissident anti-war
socialists convened at Zimmerwald, under the pretence of organising a bird-
watching convention, in order to reconstruct the tattered communist project. But
even here, splits quickly emerged. The Left of that dissident group which
included both Lenin and representatives of the currents that would become the
Dutch-German left communists broke away from the main contingent, since
the latter refused to denounce the Social Democrats outright. In their own draft

1 To give just one example, in 1920 at the Second Congress of the Communist
International, Grigory Zinoviev asserted that: A whole series of old social democratic
parties have turned in front of our eyes ... into parties that betray the cause of the
working class. We say to our comrades that the sign of the times does not consist in the
fact that we should negate the Party. The sign of the epoch in which we live consists
in the fact that we must say: The old parties have been shipwrecked; down with them.
Long live the new Communist Party that must be built under new conditions. He goes
on to add: We need a party. But what kind of party? We do not need parties that have
the simple principle of gathering as many members as possible around themselves ...
[We need] a centralised party with iron discipline. It is impossible to read these lines
without remembering that, fifteen years later, Zinoviev would stand accused in the first
Moscow show trial. He would be executed by the same party he had stalwartly
defended. By then Trotsky, who stood by him in the second congress, had already been
run out of the country and would soon be murdered.

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proposal, the Left did not hold back: Prejudiced by nationalism, rotten with
opportunism, at the beginning of the World War [the Social Democrats] betrayed
the proletariat to imperialism.2 They were now a more dangerous enemy to the
proletariat than the bourgeois apostles of imperialism.3 But this denunciation
was only one instance of a trope repeated a thousand times thereafter. The
organisations created for the purpose of defending working class interests
often doing so on the basis of their own notions of betrayal and the will
betrayed the class, time and again, in the course of the twentieth century.
Whether they call themselves communists or anarchists, those who identify as
revolutionaries spend much of their time examining past betrayals, often in
minute detail, to determine exactly how those betrayals occurred.4 Many of these
examinations try to recover the red thread of history: the succession of
individuals or groups who expressed a heroic fidelity to the revolution. Their very
existence supposedly proves that it was possible not to betray and, therefore,
that the revolution could have succeededif only the right groups had been at
the helm, or if the wrong ones had been pushed away from the helm at the right
moment. One becomes a communist or an anarchist on the basis of the
particular thread out of which one weaves ones banner (and today one often
flies these flags, not on the basis of a heartfelt identity, but rather due to the
contingencies of friendship). However, in raising whatever banner, revolutionaries
fail to see the limits to which the groups they revere were actually responding
that is, precisely what made them a minority formation. Revolutionaries get lost in
history, defining themselves by reference to a context of struggle that has no
present-day correlate. They draw lines in sand which is no longer there.

2 Draft Resolution Proposed by the Left Wing at Zimmerwald, 1915.

3 Ibid.
4 This was a political milieu where the minute study of the month-to-month history of the
Russian revolution and the Comintern from 1917 to 1928 seemed the key to the
universe as a whole. If someone said they believed that the Russian Revolution had
been defeated in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, or 1936, or 1953, one had a pretty good
sense of what they would think on just about every other political question in the world:
the nature of the Soviet Union, of China, the nature of the world CPs, the nature of
Social Democracy, the nature of trade unions, the United Front, the Popular Front,
national liberation movements, aesthetics and philosophy, the relationship of party and
class, the significance of soviets and workers councils, and whether Luxemburg or
Bukharin was right about imperialism. Loren Goldner, Communism is the Material
Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today, Critique 23, 1991.

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 THE PERIODISING BREAK
We might be tempted to read the runes again, to try to solve the riddle of the
history definitively: what was the right thing to do in 1917, 1936, 1968? However,
the purpose here is not to come up with new answers to old questions. Instead,
our intervention is therapeutic: we aim to confront the questioners, to challenge
their motivating assumptions. Any strategic orientation towards the past must
base itself, at least, on the assumption that the present is essentially like it. If the
present is not like the past, then no matter how we solve the riddle of history, it
will tell us very little about what we should be doing today.
Our goal is therefore to introduce a break, to cleave off the present from the
past (and so, too, to sever the relation between betrayal and the will). If placed
successfully, this periodising break will allow us to relate to the past as past, and
the present as something else. Of course, this periodisation cannot be absolute.
The present is not wholly unlike the past. The capitalist mode of production
remains. Indeed, the capital-labour relation defines the shape of our lives more
than it ever did those of our ancestors, and it does so in at least two fundamental
ways.
First, compared to the past, a greater share of the worlds population today
consists of proletarians and semi-proletarians: they must sell their labour-power
in order to buy at least some of what they need. Second, this some of what they
need has expanded massively so that today, peoples lives are deeply
submerged within market relations: in the high income countries, and also in
parts of the low-income world, workers not only pay rent and buy groceries. They
purchase ready-made meals, talk to their families on cell phones, put their
parents in nursing homes, and pop pills in order live, or live better. They must
continue to work in order to afford these things, that is, in order to maintain their
social ties.
Many revolutionaries take this ever-deepening imbrication within market
relations as a sufficient proof that the present is like the past, in whatever senses
are relevant. The result is that they relate to the past through a screen. The past
becomes a fantasy projection of the present. Often enough, that screen is called
the Left. Debates about history become debates about the Left: what it was,
what it should have done (and there are some who, on that same basis, come to
see themselves as post-Left). What escapes notice, thereby, is the absence, in
our own times, of the context that shaped the world in which the Left acted in the
course of the twentieth century, namely, the workers movement and its cycles of
struggle.

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 The workers movement provided the setting in which the drama of the Left
took place. That movement was not simply the proletariat in fighting form, as if
any struggle today would have to replicate its essential features. It was a
particular fighting form, which took shape in an era that is not our own. For us,
there is only the latecomers melancholy reverence.5 It is our goal, in this essay,
to explore this totality as past and to explain its dissociation from the present.
Our contention is that, if the historical workers movement is today alien to us,
it is because the form of the capital-labour relation that sustained the workers
movement no longer obtains: in the high-income countries since the 1970s and in
the low-income countries since the 1980s (late workers movements appeared in
South Africa, South Korea and Brazil, but all now present the same form: social
democracy in retreat). Indeed, the social foundations on which the workers
movement was built have been torn out: the factory system no longer appears as
the kernel of a new society in formation; the industrial workers who labour there
no longer appear as the vanguard of a class in the process of becoming
revolutionary. All that remains of this past-world are certain logics of
disintegration, and not only of the workers movement, but also of the capital-
labour relation itself. To say so is not to suggest that, by some metric, all workers
are really unemployed, or to deny that there is an emergent industrial proletariat
in countries like India and China.
It is rather to point out that the following. The world economy is growing more
and more slowly, on a decade by decade basis, due to a long period of
overproduction and low profit rates. That sluggish growth has been associated, in
most countries of the world, with deindustrialisation: industrial output continues to
swell, but is no longer associated with rapid increases in industrial employment.
Semi-skilled factory workers can thus no longer present themselves as the
leading edge of a class-in-formation. In this context, masses of proletarians,
particularly in countries with young workforces, are not finding steady work; many
of them have been shunted from the labour market, surviving only by means of
informal economic activity. The resulting low demand for labour has led to a
worldwide fall in the labour-share of income, or in other words, to immiseration.
Meanwhile, the state, in an attempt to manage this situation, has taken on
massive amounts of debt, and has periodically been forced to undertake

5The more we seek to persuade ourselves of the fidelity of our own projects and values
with respect to the past, the more obsessively do we find ourselves exploring the latter
and its projects and values, which slowly begin to form into a kind of totality and to
dissociate themselves from our own present. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity:
Essay on the Ontology of the Present (Verso 2002), p. 24.

207
reforms a term which in our era has come to mean a falling away of social
protectionsleaving a larger portion of the population in a tenuous position.
The social links that hold people together in the modern world, even if in
positions of subjugation, are fraying, and in some places, have broken entirely.
All of this is taking place on a planet that is heating up, with concentrations of
greenhouse gases rising rapidly since 1950. The connection between global
warming and swelling industrial output is clear. The factory system is not the
kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future.
These are not merely political consequences of neoliberalism; they are
structural features of the capitalist mode of production in our time. Struggles
within and against this world are just beginning to take on a greater global
significance, but they have not found a coherence comparable to that which
pertained in an earlier era. A key feature of struggles today is precisely that,
although they remain the struggles of workers, they present themselves as such
only when they remain at the level of sectional struggles, that is, struggles of
particular fractions of the class, which are almost always defensive struggles
against ongoing reforms and restructurings. When struggles take on a wider
significance, that is, for the class as a whole, then the unity they present, both to
themselves and to others, goes beyond a class identity. Workers find a shared
basis for struggle, not by means of the class belonging they have in common, but
rather, as citizens, as participants in a real democracy, as the 99 percent, and
so on. Such forms of identification sharply distinguish these workers struggles
from the core struggles of the era of the workers movement. They have also
made it difficult to see the way forward, to a communist future.
It is this contextthat of the disintegration of the capital-labour relation, and
of the unrealised potential for struggles to generate new sorts of social relations
that distinguishes the epoch in which we find ourselves from the past.

THEIR PERIODS AND OURS

In the first issue of Endnotes we published a series of texts that we called
preliminary materials for a balance sheet of the twentieth century. In this issue
we draw up that balance sheet as it presents itself to us today. But before we do
so it will be useful to contrast our approach with that of Thorie Communiste
(TC), whose texts featured prominently in that first issue, and have continued to
influence our thinking over the years.

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 The periodising break we present in this article has much in common with
TCS.6 Our perspective emerged, in part, out of an attempt to measure TCs
theory against the global history of the workers movement in the course of the
twentieth century. One difference between our account and theirs is that TC try to
ground their periodisation in Marxs categories of formal and real subsumption.
For Marx, these terms referred specifically to the transformation of the labour
process; TC apply them to the capital-labour relation as a whole, and even to
capitalist society.7 They place the break between formal and real subsumption
around WWI, then divide the latter into two distinct phases. They then overlay
this structural periodisationof the form of the capital-labour relationwith a
second periodisation of communism, or what they call cycles of struggle
where the current phase, beginning in the 1970s, corresponds to a second phase
of real subsumption:

However, somewhat strangely, the key break in one sequence does not match up
with the key break in the other: a complete transformation in the cycle of
struggle (the 1970s) corresponds to a minor transformation in the form of the
capital-labour relation. This gives TCs periodisation the tripartite form of a
narrative structure, with beginning, middle and end. As usual in such structures,
the middle term tends to dominate the others: TC define the first and last phases
negatively in relation to the height of programmatism from the 1910s to the
1970s.8 Thus in their texts the ghost of programmatism, supposedly long slain,
has a tendency to hang around and haunt the present moment. A more serious
problem is that the schematism fits neatly, if at all, only in France (at best, it might

6 See Endnotes 1, October 2008.

7TC were not the first to do so: Jacques Camatte, Negation, and Antonio Negri did the
same. See The History of Subsumption, p. 87, for our critique of these attempts.
8 For this thought, see Error in the next issue of Endnotes.

209
apply to Western Europe).9 It can only with great difficulty be extended to the rest
of the world, and is particularly inapposite to poor and late-developing countries.
In this article, we begin from what we consider to be the grain of truth in TCs
distinction between formal and real subsumption. Rather than two phases, we
argue that their distinction roughly corresponds to two aspects of the world in
which the workers movement unfolded. The first formal aspect had to do with
the persistence of the peasantry extended here to include the persistence of
old regime elites whose power was based in the countryside as a kind of
outside to the capitalist mode of production. This outside was in the process of
being incorporated into capitalist social relations, but this incorporation took a
long time. The second, real aspect was the development of the productive
forces, that is, cumulative increases in labour productivity and the accompanying
transformations, both of the productive apparatus and of the infrastructure of
capitalist society, on which it relies.
These two aspects in turn gave rise to the two imperatives of the workers
movement: on the one hand, to fight against the old regime elites, who sought to
deny workers the freedoms of liberal capitalist society (e.g., the right to vote, the
freedom to choose ones employer), and on the other hand, to set loose the
development of the productive forces from the fetters that they encountered,
particularly in late developing countries (those fetters often resulting, in part, from
the persistence of the old regime).10 In each case our focus will be on the
divergence between the expected and the actual consequences of capitalist
development.
However, the concepts of formal and real subsumption are inadequate to the
task of explaining the history of the workers movement. The two aspects of the
movement that these concepts vaguely describe are not distinct periods, which
could be precisely dated, but rather unfold simultaneously, much like the formal

9 Perhaps this is because TC seem to derive their structural periodisation from the work
of Michel Aglietta, the Regulation School economist who sees French history mirrored in
the US (Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, Verso, 1976).
Aglietta ignores the growth of labour productivity and wages in the late 19th century,
and imagines that Fordism in the US had a state-led form similar to post-war France.
See Robert Brenner and Mark Glick, The Regulation Approach: Theory and History, nlr
I/188, July 1991.
10 TC touch on these two tendencies with their notion of a conflict between the demands
for autonomy and a rising strength of the working class within capitalism, but they fail
to draw the connection with their categories of formal and real subsumption, as if the
former were purely subjective whilst the latter purely objective features of the class
struggle.

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and real subsumption of the labour process itself. Nonetheless TCs periodisation
of communism remains close to our own. The key periodising break, for us as for
TC, begins in the mid 1970s. The two aspects of the workers movement which
we have described were both radically transformed in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. Instead of a break between two phases of real subsumption,
marked by revolution and counter-revolution, we see this transition in terms of
the ongoing transformation of the labour process, the end of the peasantry, the
slowing down of capitalist accumulation on a global scale, and the corresponding
onset of a long period of deindustrialisation, all of which have transformed the
conditions of workers struggles, for reasons explored in detail below. A
communist horizon broke apart and dissolved in this moment, enclosing us, for a
time, within a capitalist world seemingly without a vanishing point.

HORIZONS OF COMMUNISM
There is another distinction between our periodisation and TCs, one more
concerned with content than form. TC often refer to the workers movement (the
era of programmatism) as a cycle of struggle. They thus fail to clearly
distinguish between, on the one hand, cycles or waves of struggle, and on the
other, the horizon of communism, within which cycles unfold. Both of these
concepts are necessary to our balance sheet of the twentieth century.11
The concept of a cycle of struggle describes how the class clash takes place.
The latter typically unfolds neither in long marches nor in short outbursts, but
rather, in waves. There are times of reaction, when revolutionary forces are weak
and episodic, but not entirely absent. These reactionary eras may last for
decades, but they do end, at a moment that is extremely difficult to predict in
advance. Revolt then breaks out, more and more frequently. Militants, who
formerly made little impression on their fellows, now find their numbers swelling.
Meanwhile, struggles take on a new content, evolve new tactics, and discover
new forms of organisation (all three are won only through the frightening mele of
suffering and retribution). Over time, struggles coalesce but never in a linear
way in waves that ebb and flow over years. That is what makes revolution
possible. Insofar as revolutions fail or counter-revolutions succeed, the cycle
comes to an end, and a new period of reaction begins.
Revolutionary strategists have mostly concerned themselves with the high
points of various cycles of struggle: 1917, 1936, 1949, 1968, 1977, and so on. In
so doing, they usually ignore the context in which those cycles unfold. The
workers movement was that context: it provided the setting in which distinct

11 On communist horizons see Crisis in the Class Relation, p. 37.

211
cycles unfolded: e.g. (in Europe) 19051921, 19341947, 196877. It was
because each cycle of struggle unfolded in the context of the workers movement
that we can say of their high points: these were not just ruptures within the
capitalist class relation but ruptures produced within a particular horizon of
communism.12 It is worth examining such ruptures in detail, although that is not
the task we set for ourselves in this text.13 Our contention is that it is only by
looking at the workers movement as a whole, rather than at distinct high points,
that we can see what made these points distinct, or even, exceptional. The
revolutions of the era of the workers movement emerged in spite of rather than in
concert with overall trends, and did so in a manner that went wholly against the
revolutionary theory of that era, with all its sense of inevitability.
Thus, for us, the workers movement was not itself a cycle of struggle. It made
for a definite communist horizon, which imparted a certain dynamic to struggles
and also established their limits. To say that the workers movement was a
horizon of communism is to say that it was not the invariant horizon. It is
necessary to reject the idea that communism could become possible again only
on the basis of a renewal of the workers movement (which is not the same thing
as organised workers struggle). We will here try to understand the conditions
that, between the late 19th century and the 1970s, opened up the era of the
workers movement, made for several cycles of struggle, and then irreversibly
collapsed. We focus, in other words, on the longue dure of the movement.

TWO FALLACIES
The essential thing to understand about the workers movement is that it
represented the horizon of communism during the era of the long rise of the
capitalist mode of production, that is, an era in which all fixed, fast frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions were
swept away. Marxists have often drawn the wrong conclusions from this
passage in the Communist Manifesto. Thus, before we begin it will be helpful to
first disabuse ourselves of two common fallacies.
The first fallacy is that capitalism is an inevitable or evolutionary stage of
history. Marxists in the late 19th century often imagined that capitalist social
relations were relentlessly spreading across the globe. They thought the city, the
factory, and wage labour would soon absorb everyone. In actual fact by 1950,

12 On the idea of a produced rupture, see Thorie Communiste, Sur la critique de

lobjectivisme, TC 15 Feb 1999
13See Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture, p. 183, for a discussion of the concept of
cycles of struggle and revolutionary strategy.

212
some two-thirds of the worlds population remained in agriculture, the vast
majority self-sufficient peasants or herdsmen. Even in the high-income countries,
some 40 percent of the workforce was in agriculture. It was not until the late
1970s and early 1980s that a tipping point was reached: the agricultural
population of the high-income countries shrank to a vanishing point, and globally,
for the first time in thousands of years, the majority of the worlds workers were
no longer working in the fields. Thus, the global peasantry, and the fast-frozen
relations with which it was associated, were not so quickly swept away. This
house cleaning took longer than expected because in contrast to what
historical materialists imaginedthere was no natural or automatic tendency for
the global peasantry to fold into the proletariat, whether by the corrosion of
market forces or by some tendency of capitalists to expropriate peasants en
masse.
Indeed, capital did not inevitably draw peasants into its orbit. Whenever
possible, peasants fought to secure their non-market access to land. In the 19th
and most of the 20th century, peasants eviction from the land was necessarily a
political act. But then, such acts were rarely undertaken by capitalists, who
preferred to employ non-free or semi-free labour wherever it was available, in
order to produce for world markets (where levels of inequality were high,
domestic markets were tiny). In fact, when expropriation was undertaken, it was
often by representatives of the labour movement, or at least, with their support.
Proletarians could support the project of de-peasantisation because peasants
were embedded in pre-capitalist class relations with landlords. These patriarchal
social forms, stratified into castes or estates, offered little opportunity for change
or mobility. Old-regime elites, oriented towards military affairs, were to some
degree interested in pursuing alliances with capitalists (often the children of those
elites, facing up to a changing world); however, this amalgamated elite-class saw
nothing to gain by extending the franchise. Elites often did not even consider
workers to be of the same species, that is, human beings capable of managing
the affairs of the polity, let alone deserving of doing so. Such elites did not give
up their privileges without a fight. Observers in the nineteenth century or for
that matter, in the twenty-first can be forgiven for imagining that free labour
was the inevitable accompaniment of capitalist accumulation. The history of the
twentieth century showed that free labour had to be won.
The second fallacy is that the development of capitalism tends to unify the
workers. The labour market may be singular, but the workers who enter it to sell
their labour power are not. They are divided by language, religion, nation, race,
gender, skill, etc. Some of these differences were preserved and transformed by
the rise of capitalism, while others were newly created. Such remixing had

213
ambivalent consequences. Most divisions proved to be obstacles to organising
along lines of class solidarity. However, some pre-existing forms of collectivity
proved to be their own sources of solidarity, an impetus to mass direct-action.
Champions of the workers movement declared that the development of the
forces of production would get rid of divisions among the workers. The dispersed
masses, the class in itself, would be formed by factory discipline into a compact
mass, which might then be capable of becoming the class for itself. Thus if the
workers would only give up on their attempts to preserve the old ways, if they
would only give in to the scientific (and constant) reorganisation of the workplace,
they would soon find themselves positively transformed: they would be unified by
the factory system into a collective worker. For a while, in the early part of the
twentieth century, this vision seemed to be coming true.
But in fact, these transformations led to the integration of workers (for the
most part, former peasants) into market society, not only at the point of
production, but also in exchange and in consumption, where workers were
atomised. It was this atomising feature of the new world, not the cooperative
aspects of work in the factory, that would prove dominant. That was true not only
in consumer markets, where workers exchanged wages for goods, but also in
labour markets, where they exchanged their promise to work for a promised
wage and even in the factories themselves, since divisions among workers
were retained and made anew. The resulting intra-class competition was only
partly mitigated by unions, which acted as rival salesmens associations,
attempting to corner the market in labour power.
Here is the unity-in-separation of market society. People become ever more
interdependent through the market, but this power comes at the expense of their
capacities for collective action. Capitalist society reduces workers to petty
commodity sellers, providing them with some autonomy, but always within limits.
In hindsight, it is clear that the dream of the workers movementthat an actual
unity of workers, as opposed to their unity-in-separation, would be realised in the
factories through the further development of the productive forceswas not true.
Such an actual unity can come about only by means of a communist
transcendence of capitalist social relations.

214
 AFTERWORD
The first issue of SIC lays out the main historical claim of the communisation
current. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a whole historical period entered into
crisis and came to an endthe period in which the revolution was conceived ...
as the affirmation of the proletariat, its elevation to the position of ruling class, the
liberation of labour, and the institution of a period of transition.1 This claim leaves
unanswered what would seem to be an essential question: what was it that this
period of transition, for which revolutionaries fought, was a transition to?
After all, the socialists and communists of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries did not take as their final goal to hoist the proletariat into the position of
a new ruling class. Their final goal was to abolish all classes, including the
proletariat. This aim was stated in the Erfurt Programme of 1891, which became
the model for many revolutionaries, across the world: the German Social
Democratic Partydoes not fight for new class privileges and class rights, but
for the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves. 2 Towards that end, the
SPD fought against not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners
but also against every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed
against a class, party, sex, or race.3 To focus on the transition period onlythe
so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is to miss its intimate connection with
this final goalthe abolition of class society.
Some might respond that, when the SPD spoke of the abolition of classes,
they meant something very different than we do. What did the SPD mean by the
abolition of classes themselves? In his commentary on the Erfurt Programme,
published as The Class Struggle in 1892, Karl Kautsky provides the following
gloss: he says, it is not the freedom of labour for which the socialists are

1 Editorial, SIC 1.
2 The Erfurt Programme, 1891; available on marxists.org.
3 The Erfurt Programme. That the SPD vowed to fight oppression directed against
parties is presumably a reference to the passage of the 1878 Anti-Socialist Laws in
Germany, which limited organising around social democratic principles.

215
fighting, but rather the freedom from labour.4 They are fighting to bring to
mankind freedom of life, freedom for artistic and intellectual activity.5 Kautsky did
not see socialist parties as fighting to preserve or extend an already grey world, a
world of choking smog, a world of mental and physical exhaustion brought on by
years of work.
On the contrary, the goal of socialism was to reduce the role of work in
everyones lives, to create time for other pursuits. This goal was already given in
the major workers struggle of Kautskys time, the campaign for the eight-hour
day: the struggle of the proletariat for shorter hours is not aimed at economic
advantages the struggle for shorter hours is a struggle for life.6 In Kautskys
estimation, only socialism could realise this goal. The party programme claimed
that only socialism could transform the constantly growing productivity of social
labour from a source of misery and oppression into a source of the greatest
welfare and universal harmonious perfection.7 Productivity growth was widely
seen as the source of present-day misery, but also of a potential liberation, which
could not but be the liberation of humanity.
Kautskys own vision of productivity-based liberation was of a world of art and
philosophy not unlike ancient Athens. Whereas Athenian culture was based on
the slavery of men, socialism would be based on the work of machines: What
slaves were to the ancient Athenians, machinery will be to modern man.8
Socialism would thus realise the dream of Aristotle, who imagined that if every
instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of
others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus there would no

4 Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 1892; on marxists.org. We will quote from Kautsky a
lot here. Much more than Marx, and precisely because he interpreted him for a broader
audience, Kautsky laid out the basic theoretical perspective of the the labour movement.
Insofar as Lenin, Trotsky, or even Pannekoek reacted against Kautsky, it was usually on
some basis that they shared with him. See Masimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the
Socialist Revolution (Verso 1990); Paul Mattick, Karl Kautsky: from Marx to Hitler, 1938
in Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Merlin Press 1978); Gilles Dauv, The
Renegade Kautsky and his Disciple Lenin, 1977. In Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to
Be Done? in Context (Brill 2006), Lars Lih has recently made similar arguments whilst
drawing the opposite political conclusions.
5 Kautsky, The Class Struggle.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.

216
longer be any need for the debasement of the many to create free time for the
few.9

THE PRIMARY CONTRADICTION OF THE WORKERS MOVEMENT

So, was Kautsky the original theorist of anti-work? How did this liberatory
perspective turn into its opposite in the twentieth century? That is to say, how did
the liberation from labour become a liberation of labour? What we need to
recover here is the primary contradiction of the labour movement. The socialists
and communists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted to abolish
the working class and with it class society. However, they believed this abolition
could be achieved only through the universalisation of the proletarian condition.
To end a world of hard labour, most of humanity had to be transformed into
labourers: they had to be set to work according to the latest techniques and
technologies of production.
Today, most of humanity has been proletarianised. Across the globe, huge
masses of people must sell their labour in order to buy what they need to survive.
That is true in spite of the fact that, for many, proletarianisation has taken place
without an accompanying integration into modern capitalist enterprises: a large
portion of the worlds labour force consists of workers without (regular) access to
work. It is obvious that this situation has not brought us any closer to being
liberated from a world of work. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how anyone might
have thought otherwise, in the past: how could you seek to end domination by
spreading one of its forms to the ends of the earth? Yet this idea animated an era
of revolutionary energies: to usher in a world of workers became the order of the
day.
That explains why, almost half a century after the publication of the Erfurt
Programme, Leon Trotsky could look back on his interventions in Russian history
as having pushed towards the realisation of the socialist project, in spite of the
Stalinist nightmare that the USSR became. He thought he had contributed to this
project, not because the Bolsheviks had reduced the amount of work the Russian
people performed, but rather, because they had increased it: socialism has
demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an
industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the Earths surface not in the
language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement, and electricity.10 It
was a massive increase in production, not a reduction in labour hours, that was
the measure of socialisms success.

9 Aristotle, Politics 1:4 in Complete Works (Princeton 1984).

10 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 1936 (Socialist Alternative 2013).

217
 Although he did not himself oversee it, it was in this vein that Trotsky praised
the war against the Russian peasants undertaken in the course of the
collectivisation drives of the early 1930sas a supplementary revolution to that
of 1917.11 This supplementary revolution had been demanded since the kulak
did not wish to grow evolutionarily into socialism (by this Trotsky meant that the
peasants had refused voluntary proletarianisation, and thus subjection to the will
of the central planner and local bureaucrat).12 Trotsky saw a fuller
proletarianisation as a necessary step before any reduction in labour time was
possible.
Indeed, he believed that the threshold at which work could be reduced was
still far in the future, even in advanced capitalist countries: A socialist state, even
in Americacould not immediately provide everyone with as much as he needs,
and would therefore be compelled to spur everyone to produce as much as
possible. The duty of the stimulator in these circumstances naturally falls to the
state, which in its turn cannot but resort to the method of labour payment
worked out by capitalism.13 Not only a world of work but also a system of wage
payments would have to be retained for the time being!14 We take Trotsky, here,
as one key example (he is not necessarily representative of the range of socialist
perspectives).
The point is that, in any case, the extension to the world of the English factory
system (later, the American one displaced the English)with its frightful pace, its
high rate of industrial accidents, its periodic speed-ups, and its all-round
subjugation of human beings to the needs of the machinethis was the dream

11 Ibid. p. 59.
12 Ibid. p. 59.
13 Ibid. p. 64.
14 As Lenin says, The whole of society will have become a single office and a single
factory, with equality of labour and pay. Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution, chapter 5,
1917; available on marxists.org. Lenin imagines this office-factory as organised on the
lines of the postal service, with all technicians, as well as workers, receiving a
workmans wage.

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of many revolutionaries.15 On that basis, it is easy to see why socialism, in its
seemingly interminable, intermediate stage of development, came to seem to
many people to be not so different from capitalism. Indeed, many socialists saw
themselves as doing the work that capital had not done or had refused to do. The
incompletion of capitalist development presented itself as a communist problem.

THEIR FUNDAMENTAL VISION

In the vision of the future laid out in the Communist Manifesto, the development
of the productive forces was supposed to bring about heaven on earth. As we
have seen, the socialists looked forward to a time, not far in the future, when
machines moving by themselves and producing a cornucopia of goods
according to designs of scientists were going to bring about an end of
suffering, and so also of the conflict born of that suffering, which made man into a
wolf for other men. The fuller development of the productive forces was not going
to end suffering immediately: all this productive power would as yet remain
concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who used it for their own ends (hence
the impoverishment of the masses in a world of plenty). Nevertheless, in stoking
development, what these capitalists were producing above all was their own
grave-diggers.16
Here we come to the as yet unmentioned key to the labourist vision of the
future. The fuller development of the productive forces was expected to propel
the workers into the leading role. The development of the productive forces was
simultaneously the multiplication of the proletariat, its becoming the majority of
bourgeois society.17 Crucially, proletarians were not only becoming the majority;
they were also made over into a compact mass: the Gesamtarbeiter, or collective
worker. The factory system was pregnant with this collective worker, which was
born of bourgeois society in such a way that it would destroy that society.

15 Antonio Gramsci not only popularised the term Fordism, he also identified with it.
Fordism was the ultimate stage of the socialisation of the means of production, based
on the primacy of industrial capital and the emergence of a new kind of morality. Such
intimations of the new man could emerge in America because the US lacked the
unproductive classes that formed the social base of European fascism. The moral
depravity of the latter conflicted with the new methods of production, which demand a
rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts and with it a strengthening of the family.
Prison Notebooks (International Publishers 1971), p. 299.
16 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 (MECW 6), p. 496.
17Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (MECW 35) p. 609 (Fowkes trans.). See Misery and Debt,
Endnotes 2 for a more thorough discussion of this famous line from Marx.

219
 Antonio Gramsci captured this vision best when, in his pre-prison years, he
described the collective worker in terms of workers growing consciousness of
being an organic whole, a homogeneous and compact system which, working
usefully and disinterestedly producing social wealth, arms its sovereignty and
actuates its power and freedom to create history. 18 Of course, in order to
become conscious of themselves as an organic whole, workers would have to
give up various particularising identities related to skill, ethnicity, gender, etc.
Coaxing them to do so turned out to be more difficult than socialists supposed.
Yet in spite of such difficulties, workers were confident that history was moving
in their favour. Theirs was no free-floating vision. It was grounded in an
experience of historys unfolding. The working class could feel history unfolding,
in stages: the old world begets capitalism, and capitalism begets socialism. The
transition through these stages could be read off the landscape, as the
countryside gave way to cities. The same disjunction was reflected in the surface
of British steel: one could compare its straightness to ones own crooked
instruments. The factories of England were supposedly the most advanced point
in history. They had traveled the furthest along a linear trajectory. All of England
was being made over by the factories; all of Europe was becoming England; and
all of the world was becoming Europe.
This allegorical reading of the English factory system grounded a fervently
held belief that the future belonged to the working class: The proletariat was
destined one only had to look at industrial Britain and the record of national
censuses over the yearsto become the great majority of the people.19 It was
inevitable. By contrast, every other social stratum was doomed to disappear:
peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers, etc. On that basis, many socialists felt no
need, at least at first, to take a stand against colonialism, or against the genocide
of faraway populations, in settler-colonial countries, to make space for
Europeans. History was going to stamp these peoples under its boots and march
on.

SOME PROBLEMS
Yet history marched at a halting pace. The Marxist understanding of history
turned out to be only partially correct. The entire world was not made over in the
image of the English factory. Industrialisation took place in some regions;

18Antonio Gramsci, Unions and Councils, 1919. Gramsci thought that the council was
the proper form for this collective worker, and also the germ of a future society. See A
Collapsed Perspective, below.
19 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987) p. 117.

220
however, it largely failed to give birth to the collective worker as a compact mass.
We have provided a historical account of these problems, above. Here, we focus
on internal debates among socialists and communists. At issue was the question:
would capital eventually give rise to a working class that was large and unified
enough to take over and then to destroy bourgeois societyand how quickly?
Kautsky made the clinging-on of the moribund classes into a centerpiece of
his commentary on the Erfurt Programme. He admitted that there was still a large
remainder of peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers in Europe (to say nothing of
the world as a whole, where these classes were preponderant). Kautsky
explained this reality as follows: in capitalist society, private property in the
means of production fetters the small producers to their undeveloped
occupations long after these have ceased to afford them a competence, and
even when they might improve their condition by becoming wage workers
outright.20 In essence, smallholders refused to become wage-workers because
to do so would require that they subject themselves to the insecurities of the
market and the despotism of the factory director. In the face of these dire
prospects, smallholders did whatever they could to retain their autonomy.
Of course, Kautsky still thought these smallholders were doomed. But he now
supposed that capitalism would snuff them out much more slowly than Marx and
Engels had expected. Socialism, once achieved, would have to complete the
process of proletarianisation. In socialism, to be a proletarian would no longer
mean a life of insecurity and subordination. For that reason, socialism would be
able to coax the remaining smallholders into the factory: they would willingly give
up their small pieces of property to join the proletariat, thereby reducing
economic irrationality and bringing us ever closer to communism. Kautsky thus
conceived the leveling down of the new world as a precondition for absorbing the
remainder of the old world.
In his revisionist critique, Eduard Bernstein argued that smallholders would
never get the chance to partake in these sorts of socialist schemes. Bernstein,
too, began from the argument that, in fact, the industrial workers are everywhere
the minority of the population.21 At the turn of the century and even in
Germany, one of the leading industrial powers the remainder of peasants,
artisans, and shopkeepers was very large. Industrial wage-earners, including
industrial home-workers, represented merely 7,000,000 out of 19,000,000

20 Kautsky, The Class Struggle.

21 Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, 1899; available on marxists.org.

221
people earning incomes, or in other words, about 37 percent of the workforce.22
Below the 50-percent hurdle, it was flatly impossible for the class to obtain a
majority in parliament.
Even more problematic, for Bernstein, was the fact that these modern wage-
earners are not a homogeneous mass, devoid in an equal degree of property,
family, etc., as the Communist Manifesto foresees.23 That is to say, the factory
system was not giving birth to the collective worker as a compact mass. Between
workers of different situations and skills, it might be possible to imagine a lively,
mutual sympathy; however, there is a great difference betweensocial political
sympathy and economic solidarity.24 Moreover, the factory system was tending
to accentuate divisions between workers, not reduce them.
Bernstein argued that socialists would have a hard time maintaining equality
among workers, even if they managed the factories themselves. For as soon as
a factory has attained a certain size which may be relatively very modest
equality breaks down because differentiation of functions is necessary and with it
subordination. If equality is given up, the corner-stone of the building is removed,
and the other stones follow in the course of time. Decay and conversion into
ordinary business concerns step in. 25 Bernsteins solution to these
embarrassments was to to give up on the goal of a revolutionary transition to
socialism altogether and to try to find a more inclusive, liberal-democratic way
forward.
For the mainstream of the socialist movement, it was not yet time to give up
on the goal. One part of the movement drew the conclusion that it was now
necessary to bide ones time: they should allow capitalism to mature, and await
the further integration of the population into the modern industrial workforce;
meanwhile, they should continue to organise that workforce into a conscious,
coherent mass through the mediations of the trade unions and the social
democratic parties. By contrast, for the romantic revolutionaries including
Trotsky there was no time to wait. History had stalled, half-complete. The
revolutionary communist international would thus constitute itself in the decision
to de-arrest the dialectic of history. What was supposed to be a historical

22 Ibid.
23 Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.

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inevitability would now become an act of will. Everyone is being proletarianised,
and so, to achieve communism, we must proletarianise everyone!
Regardless of which faction they joined, socialists shared this overall
perspective. As the catastrophes of history piled ever higher, they put their faith in
the full development of the productive forces. Movement strategists saw that
development, and the class power it would bring, as the only way to break out of
the penultimate stage of history and into the final one.

A COLLAPSED PERSPECTIVE
Before we go any further, it is important to recognise that what we have called
the primary contradiction of the labour movementthat the generalisation of one
form of domination was seen as the key to overcoming all domination
eventually resolved itself in a collapsed perspective, which fused the two sides
of the contradiction together. Thus, the universalisation of the proletarian
condition was identified directly with the abolition of class rule, rather than as a
precondition of the abolition of all classes. In fact, this collapsed perspective
we might call it Lasallianwas hegemonic before the Marxist vision displaced
it, and it also became popular once again in the middle of the twentieth century.
Lasallianism had its root in the defensive struggles of artisanal workers against
capitalist industrialisation.
For artisans, capital appeared as an external parasite: artisans did the same
amount of work as before, but instead of receiving all of the income from the sale
of the products of their labour, they received back only a portion of those
revenues as wages. Hence the nearly universal slogan among struggling craft
workers was that labour was entitled to its full product. Artisans struggles were
not only about resisting the wages system. Craft workers also fought battles
over shopfloor control. They resisted employers efforts to rationalise the labour
process, to increase the division of labour and to introduce labour saving
technical change.26
Although the artisans were eventually defeated (in fact, the battle dragged on
for a long time), their vision of skilled workers self-management was adapted for
an industrial era. What semi-skilled workers lost in terms of skill and control,
they gained in terms of numbers: they formed to a greater extent than any
other set of workers a compact mass in large-scale workplaces, which could
be seized as strongholds. Workers dreamed that, once they were in control, they
would be able to run the now-established factory system in the interest of the
workforce, without the capitalists. In terms of both wages and shopfloor control,

26 See David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labour (Cambridge 1989).

223
class conflict was perceived more or less as a zero-sum game: it was class
against class, with the possibility that the exploited class might take the full
product, eliminating the capitalist. 27
This Lasallian perspective was the one that Marxism defeated, in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century: a Marxist story about dynamic productivity
growth displaced the Lasallian one about a zero-sum contest between classes.
However, such a static perspective was later revived in the early twentieth
century, above all in the radical current of the labour movement called anarcho-
syndicalism (which is not to suggest that syndicalists were pro-market, like
Lasalle, just that they came to see communism as a sort of workers paradise).
This sort of perspective also became the de facto position of the socialists and
communists, if not their de jure position, throughout the first half of the twentieth
century, and into the mid 1960s, when the goal of wholly or nearly automated
production having already receded towards the horizon fell below that
horizon and disappeared completely from view.
The dynamic given by growing productivity, and the tendency towards
automation (which was so central to Marx and the socialists of the late nineteenth
century) thus fell out of the story, once again. Only the struggle to end capitalist
exploitation remained. As Rudolf Rocker explained, For the Anarcho-
Syndicalists, the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon
bound up with the duration of capitalist society; it is the germ of the Socialist
economy of the future, the elementary school of Socialism in general.28 Here, it
really was explicit that the working class was to be the ruler of society. Taking
over society was to inaugurate a transition, not to a world without work, but
rather, to a workers world.

27 [T]he craftsmen pushed together in the manufacture ... could dream of an

industrialisation that would turn its back on the big factory and return to the small
workshop, and to a private independent property freed of money fetters (for example,
thanks to free credit la Proudhon, or to Louis Blancs Peoples Bank). In contrast, for
the skilled electricity or metal worker, for the miner, railwayman or docker, there was no
going back. His Golden Age was not to be found in the past, but in a future based on
giant factories without bosses. His experience in a relatively autonomous work team
made it logical for him to think he could collectively manage the factory, and on the
same model the whole society, which was conceived of as an inter-connection of firms
that had to be democratically re-unified to do away with bourgeois anarchy. Gilles
Dauv and Karl Nesic, Love of Labour, Love of Labour Lost, Endnotes 1, 2008.
28 Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, 1938. Rockers summary
of anarcho-syndicalism does not mention productivity-enhancing technical change.

224
 A History of Separation has attempted to explain why the primary
contradiction of the labour movement resolved itself into this collapsed
perspective. The key was that, for a long time, the development of the productive
forces really did tend to increase the size of the industrial workforce. Like Marx,
Kautsky and the other socialists expected a second phase of industrial
development to arrive and sooner rather than later: rising productivity was
supposed to bring about a reduction in the demand for labour and hence the
ejection of the workers from the space of the factory, leading to widespread
unemployment. In fact, this second phase did not arrive until the 1970s.29 When it
finally did, it spelled doom for the labour movement.

A PARTIAL CRITIQUE
Rummaging around in our theoretical toolbox, we might be inclined to retrieve the
following critical perspective. The socialists lacked a proper theory of value, as
well as of the possibility and the inner tendency of its self-abolition.30 According to
this critique, the labour movement failed to conceive of a real break with the
value-form. It therefore ended up reinforcing the categories of the capitalist mode
of production, not least the category of productive labour. Hence, finally, the
labour movement affirmed the proletariat, instead of abolishing it.
The mistake of the theorists of the labour movement was as follows. They
often described capitalist social relations in terms of a foundational fracturing: the
separation of peasants from the land generated a propertyless proletariat.
However, the class relation is not only established through a foundational
fracturing; it also confirms that fracturing in every moment. Capitalism realises
the fracturing of social existence as the unity-in-separation of market society, an
interdependence of everyone on everyone else, which nevertheless reduces
individuals to isolated atoms, facing off against one another in market
competition.31 This is especially true for proletarians, whose very survival
depends on competing with other proletarians, and who therefore face the most
barriers to collective organisation (as we have argued elsewhere, it is not the

29 It was probably difficult to see the collapse of 1929/30 as having its source in
automation, but it would be worthwhile to examine that periods politics carefully.
30For a reading of Endnotes along these lines see Matthijs Krul, Endnotes: A Romantic
Critique?, The North Star, 28 January 2014. For a critical response see At, Romantic
Fiction: Notes on Kruls critique of Endnotes, Endnotes blog, February 2014.
31Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle, 1967, 7.

225
eventual decline of working class identity, but rather its emergence despite these
barriers, which needs to be explained).
The cleaving off of human beings from their capacitiesthe expropriation of
workers set against the means of production is simultaneously the social
separation of individuals from one another, of the sphere of production from that
of reproduction. It is also the separation of the economy from politics. All that is
given in the phenomenon of market dependence and market exchange: we are
cut off from nature and from other people, in such a way that we relate to both
almost exclusively through the mediation of markets, overseen by states. We
remain dependent on one another, but in a way that keeps us separate from one
another. This practical unity-in-separation instantiates itself in a set of ideas,
which come to seem self-evident: a fair days work for a fair days pay; he who
does not work shall not eat.
All of these separations, together, would have to be overcome in order to
achieve communism, that is, a world in which the connection between how much
one works and how much one eats has been definitively broken. For the
labour movement, only the initial separation of workers from means of production
came clearly into view as something to be overcome: this they hoped to achieve
by abolishing private property in the means of production, and replacing private
exchange with centralised planning of production and distribution.32 By contrast,
the commodity as use-value but not as exchange-value appeared to be
neutral and transhistorical; it was the same in every era. And so, they thought,
the more the better: if more wheat will feed everyone, then why not more of
everything else? That can only be a good thing.33 Commodities, heaped together
in great piles (an immense collection of commodities), were seen as the
overcoming of alienation, not its realisation. More importantly, the factory system
as labour process, but not as valorisation processwas to survive the end
of the capitalist mode of production. It was understood as the foundation of
socialism, not as the material embodiment of abstract domination.
To call these notions productivist or progressivist is to mark out the
obviousness of our disconnection from a former era. But neither of these epithets
should be taken to mean that, today, we think the dream of freeing human beings
from existential insecurity is not a beautiful dream. Nor would we question the

32Socialists often spoke about a future moment when the separation between mental
and manual labour would be overcome, but they saw this overcoming as a technical
matter.
33When Spanish anarchists speculated about their utopia, it was in terms of electricity
and automatic waste-disposal machines. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 138.

226
human needs, however apparently frivolous, which such production was
imagined to satisfy (the critique of consumerism is itself an outgrowth of
productivism). It is simply to point out that the identification between the
realisation of this dream that no-one shall go hungry any more34 and the
extension of capitalist social relations, or the massive expansion of the factory
system, is not only false; due to global warming, it now has the potential to bring
extreme harm to humanity as a whole.
As few were able to see in advance, the machinery and products of the
capitalist production process were not neutral; they reproduced all the
separations of capitalist society. 35 It is perhaps surprising that contributions
towards a critique of the neutrality of the factory system did not emerge within the
workers movement until the 1950s (in the writings of Phil Singer and Grace Lee
Boggs, as well as Raniero Panzieri and Cornelius Castoriadis).36
Among the few who did see this side of things, in an earlier moment, was
Marx himself. Quoting Fourier, he equated the factories to mitigated jails.37 For
the factory is the very embodiment of capitalist domination, of the separation of
human beings from their capacities and from one another. It is the perfect
realisation of the topsy-turvy world of capital in which man is dominated by the
products of his own labour. Marx failed to finish Capital, his masterwork on these
phenomena of alienation and embodied domination (or real subsumption).
However, based on the volume he did finish, it is hard to see how the factory
could be thought to have a liberatory content. In her critique of Bernstein, Rosa
Luxemburg conceded this point: It is one of the peculiarities of the capitalist
order that within it all the elements of the future society first assume, in their

34 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Verso 2005), p. 156.

35 Orthodox Marxism tends to see technology as neutral between alternative socialist
and capitalist uses, c.f. Lenins interest in scientific management and his definition of
communism as soviets plus electrification. In fact, the capitalist transformation of the
labour process does not take place simply as a means of increasing productivity, but
also as a means of increasing the control of the capitalist over the workers.
36 Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The American Worker (Facing Reality 1969) and
Raniero Panzieri, The Capitalist Use of Machinery in Phil Slater ed., Outlines of a
critique of technology (Ink Links 1980).
37 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), p. 553.

227
development, a form not approaching socialism, but, on the contrary, a form
moving more and more away from socialism.38

A SELF-UNDERMINING TRAJECTORY
That the factory was part and parcel of the unity-in-separation of capitalist society
made it difficult for the collective worker to struggle its way into existence. In spite
of rhetorical statements to the contrary, it turned out that the actual unity of
factory workers as opposed to their unity-in-separation could be achieved
only through the mediations of the trade unions and the parties, as well as
through their myriad cultural organisations (we will come to the problems
associated with unifying through those mediations, as opposed to directly on the
factory floor, a little later). We can go beyond this critique.
The theorists of the labour movement expected that the unity of workers
within the four walls of the factory would cut against the tendency of capitalist
society to atomise workers and to oppose them to one another outside the
factory (in labour-market competition and in the isolation of household
reproduction). Yet this strategy seems likely to have been effective only in the
early phases of industrialisation, that is, during the phases of what Marx, in
Capital, called cooperation and manufacture.39
During these phases, capitalists took workers from many small shops and
collected them together in gigantic combines, where they were able to see and
experience themselves all working in concert, producing all the materials of a
new world. Thus, it was in these early phases that workers appeared to be the
ultimate source of material wealth (as we showed, above, remnants of these
phases tended to last a very long time, much longer than Marx expected).
Bernstein dismissively pointed out that it was precisely cooperative work that
people usually thought of when they imagined the collective workers self-
actualisation: What one usually understands by associated labour is only a
mistaken rendering of the very simple forms of cooperative work as they are
practiced by groups, gangs, etc., of undifferentiated workers.40

38Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900) in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg

(Haymarket 2008), p. 92.
39 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), chapters 13 and 14.
40 Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, chapter 3.

228
 With the advent and extension of large-scale industry, this sort of imagining
lives on only as nostalgia. 41 Machines, designed according to the latest scientific
knowledge, become ever more central to the production process. The very centre
of society shifts: science and, perhaps more than that engineering, replaces
labour at the heart of the production process, as the key source of material
wealth. Indeed, here is the fundamental, self-undermining tendency of the
capitalist mode of production: social life continues to be founded on the
exchange of labours; yet with the extension and development of the fixed capital
base, labour is no longer the key to production. Direct human labour plays an
increasingly subsidiary role in production, even though the exchange of
equivalents continues to be measured in terms of labour time.
The development of large-scale industry expresses itself, finally, in the
extrusion of workers from the factory deindustrialisation. Beyond the factory
gates, workers find themselves wandering in an immense infrastructure, that of
modern life, which reflects back to them not their growing power, but rather, their
impotence. They see not a world of their making, but rather a runaway world, a
world beyond their control, perhaps beyond anyones control.
Insofar as they put their faith in the development of the productive forces
(insofar as they themselves contributed to that development), industrial workers
actually undermined the basis of their power. The fuller development of the
productive forces did eventually lead to everything Marx imagined: worsening
crises, the expansion of surplus populations, and the immiseration of vast
numbers of people in a world of plenty. But at the same time, that development
made it impossible for workers to experience themselves as an aliquot part of the
collective industrial worker, and hence as the savior-destroyer of society. In short,
atomisation won out over collectivisation (and did so in the USSR as much as in
the US).42

WAS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE?

In the above sections, we have noted a gap between Marxs late critique of
political economy and the theories of the labour movement, towards which Marx
otherwise expressed an infinite fidelity. Some have described this gap in terms of
an exoteric and an esoteric teaching. Evidence for their perspective can be

41 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 36), chapter 15.

42 Because the production relations are transparent, most individuals in inferior social
positions are dissatisfied with the systemThe only way the system can be maintained
is through the effective atomisation of the population. Hillel Ticktin, Towards a Political
Economy of the USSR, Critique, vol. 1, no. 1, 1973, p. 36.

229
found in Marxs critique of the Gotha Programme, an 1875 pre-cursor to the
Erfurt Programme of the 1890s, quoted above. The first line of the Gotha
Programme affirmed that labour is the source of all wealth and all culture, to
which Marx replies, no! Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as
much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth
consists!) as labour. 43 It is only within a value-producing society that labour
becomes the centre of social activity, and nature is pushed into the background
as something to be used, but not really valued in itself. Marx is confident that the
further development of capitalist economies will render this Lasallian perspective
moot.
But do Marxs later writings really present us with an alternative to the path
taken by the labour movement? In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx
goes on to lay out his vision of the stages by which capitalism will actually be
overcome. In the first phase of communist society, he explains, the same
principle will apply as in bourgeois society, except that content and form are
changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything
except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the
ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption.44 Marx here
expresses the same sort of contradictory position that Kautsky and Trotsky
expressed in their writings: to achieve the abolition of the proletariat, it is first
necessary that each individual be reduced to a proletarian. The universalisation
of this form of domination is the precursor to the end of domination.
For Marx, it is only in the higher stage that domination is actually overcome.
This overcoming is, once again, apparently possible only on the basis of a fuller
development of the forces of production: after labour has become not only a
means of life but lifes prime want; after the productive forces have also
increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantlyonly then can the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!45 Marxs
statement is, to be sure, a beautiful one, laden with mysteries worthy of further
consideration. For our purposes, it is pertinent simply to note that, even
according to Marx, it is not until we achieve a state of abundance that we can

43Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875 (MECW 24), p. 81. Marx is here
explicitly expressing his frustration with the Lasallian perspective, which lacks the
dynamic given by the tendency towards automation.
44 Ibid. p. 87.
45 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 87.

230
hope to break the link, inaugurated by capitalism, between the amount of work
one does for society and what one receives back from it.46

THE FINAL MARX

Yet very late in his life, Marx called this whole stagist perspective into question.
Indeed, he came to believe that the theory of the succession of modes of
production, which he had laid out in the Communist Manifesto, as well as his
vision of the stepwise transition to communism, was incorrect. Instead of finishing
Capital, Marx became increasingly obsessed with non-capitalist communities,
among them the Russian peasant commune, the Mir.47 Marxs insight was that,
while there were classes in the Russian countryside, the domination of one class
over another was not achieved on the basis of private property; on the contrary,
domination was imposed externally on a community that retained common
property in the land.48 Within the Mir, relations were not mediated by markets,
but by communal decisions made in accord and in conflict with local customs.
That was of course true outside of Russia, as well, in the vast global countryside
beyond the European continent.
On the basis of these investigations, Marx upended the stage-theory of
history. Maybe universal proletarianisation was unnecessary. In areas where
proletarianisation was not yet achieved, it might be possible to move directly from
the rural commune to full communism, without an intermediate stage. In a draft
letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx suggested as much: the rural commune may
become a direct starting-point of the economic system towards which modern
society is tending; it may open up a new chapter that does not begin with its own
suicide; it may reap the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched
humanity, without passing through the capitalist regime.49 It is important to note
that Marx is not looking backwards here, or imagining some alternate reality in
which capitalism had never arisen; the point is that communes could take on
capitalist innovations, without proletarianising.

46 Even more than Kautsky, George Plekhanov was the one who developed these ideas
into a fully fledged stage-theory. See, for example, his The Development of the Monist
Theory of History (1895).
47 See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago 2010).
48Karl Marx, draft letters to Vera Zasulich, in Theodor Shanin, Late Marx and the
Russian Road (Monthly Review 1983), p. 100.
49 Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, p. 112.

231
 The same idea was expressed publicly in the corrective preface to the
Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1882, that is, just one
year before Marx died. With Engels, he wrote: If the Russian Revolution
becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both
complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may
serve as the starting point for a communist development.50 The hopeful note
Marx sounded, here, on the role that the peasant communes might play in the
coming Russian revolution was echoedat least initiallyin the spontaneous
activity of the peasants themselves, in the course of the revolutionary era that
opened in 1917.
According to Jacques Camatte, in his 1972 text, Community and
Communism in Russia, the communes, which had undergone a process of
dissolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were actually
revived in the course of the Russian Revolution.51 Camatte suggestswoefully
considering what was about to happen that this could have been the
beginning of the reformation of the communities on a higher level, on the
condition that the peasants were supported by the new state, which had to
remove the elements harmful to the development of the communes, as Marx had
stated in the drafts of his letters to Zasulich.52 Perhaps there would have been a
way forward, here, for the world as a whole, a new sort of revolution, which would
have made possible the reconciliation of men at various moments of their
development, without necessarily putting these on an axiological scale.53
It is not clear how this new revolution would have been achieved, when
Russia was decimated by the Civil War, and when revolutions in Europe failed to
come off. Ignoring these impediments, Camatte simply notes: the victory of
Marxism hindered the realisation of this solution.54 Camatte is surely right that,
instead of being repudiated by events on the ground, Marxs earlier, stagist
perspective was hereby codified in the name of Marxism, as a programme of

50Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1882 Russian Edition (MECW 24), p.
426.
51Jacques Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia, Part II. See also Loren
Goldner, The Agrarian Question in the Russian Revolution, Insurgent Notes 10, July
2014.
52 Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia, Part II.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.

232
economic development and then put into practice by the Bolsheviks. 55 The latter
determined that everything archaic and Asiatic had to be eliminated over the
whole huge empire (and given that the revolutionary flood affected the peripheral
countries, this took on a global importance).56 Realising that the peasants could
not really be coaxed into this modern world in formation, the Bolsheviks
eventually set out to destroy the commune, to proletarianise the peasants, and to
develop the forces of production as Russian capital had not. This programme
became that of communist revolution in the twentieth century.

A MOMENT FOR REFLECTION

For Camatte, humanity had the possibility of leaping over the CMP [capitalist
mode of production], but has now lost that possibility.57 We have paused to
consider this lost possibility for a few reasons. First, among all the vaunted red
threads of historywhich trace their way back to an initial moment of betrayal,
and hence to an unrealised potential for salvationthis one seems to go back
furthest: to the conflicts within Marxs own conception of the pathway to
communism. But more than that, this alternative vision seems to us to get closer
than any other to the heart of the matter, that is, the primary contradiction of the
labour movement: to end all domination supposedly required the extension of
one form of domination, namely proletarianisation, to the ends of the earth, with
all the violence this process necessitated.58 The proletarian classunified in and
through the extension of the factory systemwas thought to be the only class
powerful enough to make the revolution.
In fact, instead of being a century of proletarian revolution, the twentieth
century turned out, like the centuries that had passed before it, to be largely a
century of peasant revolts. These revolts were aimed, initially, at securing a

55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Camatte continues: We have been most incapable of conceiving of [the leap over the
CMP], infested as we were by the idea that progress is for all people the development of
the productive forces. i.e. in the end, capital, which was the affirmation inside the
proletariat of the interiorisation of capitals victory. Thus it is natural that, before the
peoples whom we have forced to submit by our agreement with the deadly enemy, the
infamous path of the passage to the CMP, we should stand accused (violent criticisms
of Marxs ethnocentrism have been made by various ethnologists originating among
these people). Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia.
58Alas, we who wished to lay the foundation for kindness, could not ourselves be kind.
Bertolt Brecht, To Posterity.

233
renewed access to non-market means of existence, which had been eroded both
by the capillary action of capitalism and by the violent impositions of colonial
administrations. Peasants were often backed by communists, who adopted
peasant slogans while simultaneously turning them towards the new goal:
industrial development, with the aim of creating the preconditions for full
communism. Communists aimed at the maximal programme: freedom from want,
freedom from labour, freedom of life, to be achieved, first of all, through the
incorporation of humanity into the industrial proletariat, and only later by the
abolition of that class and by the withering away of the state.59
As mentioned above, the premise behind this project proved false. Universal
proletarianisation has now been achieved: through the combined action of
capitalist and socialist development, as well as by means of other, unforeseen
forces (the spread of the demographic transition). Consequently, there is no
longer an outside to capitalist social relations. Almost everyone has been
incorporated into the modern world, at least tendentially, although frequently
without finding employment within capitalist enterprises. Yet the train wreck of
world history has not arrived at communism, nor even come nearer to it.
Universal proletarianisation did not give rise to the collective worker, as a real
unity to stand against the unity-in-separation of capitalist society. And of course
the peasants on to whose revolts this project was grafted were defeated
even when their revolts were victorious.

REFLECTIONS CONCLUDED
In his textswhich to our mind pose the greatest challenge to Marxist history
Camatte seems almost exasperated that false ideas, or in other words, the
Marxist-developmentalist project, somehow won out over the true ideas, based in
Marxs repudiation of stagism. This exasperation signals his failure to supercede
an idealist perspective, which is the primary perspective that revolutionaries have
taken with respect to their own history. In fact, history is not made by ideas,
whether true or false, but rather, only in a clash of forces. There is one force that
Camatte did not include in his discussion
The peasantry, the peasant commune, persisted well into the twentieth
century, that much is true. But almost everywhere the persistence of peasant

59 Its easy enough to denigrate this project retrospectively, but it was only terrible
insofar as it failed to achieve its goal. If it had succeeded, it would have been worth it.
The sufferings of humanity, already an omnipresent reality, but augmented by the
communists, would have been redeemed by the victory of communism. That
redemption never came.

234
communities also meant the persistence of old regime elites, whose massive
power was also based in the countryside. These elites did not really form one
class, but a set of overlapping power-structures. Their power was based, not in
successful competition, but rather, on privileged access to resources, such as
land and credit, and rights, such as the right to streams of income deriving from
their ownership of, e.g., mines or positions in government.
As it turned out, these same elites were not displaced by bourgeois factory
owners, with their purportedly enlightened, liberal ideals. Instead, the bourgeoisie
was largely absorbed into the sabre-rattling old regime. This amalgamated ruling
class typically set out to exclude workers from the polity. In some regions, they
wanted more: they tried to turn back the clock, to re-introduce caste society, that
is, human groups with radically different entitlements and duties, and so to re-
establish regimes of personal domination in place of abstract ones.60 Such was
true not only of the fascist parties of the mid-twentieth centuries. It was the notion
of a whole range of political groupings, basing themselves on Social Darwinist
ideas.
As long as these amalgamated elites retained power in fact, their power
was often augmented by what modernisation took place the overall
development of the productive forces was blocked outside of the core capitalist
states. Trotsky makes precisely this point, at the start of The Revolution
Betrayed, which we quoted above: the history of recent decades very clearly
shows that, in the conditions of capitalist decline [they were actually just a
middling phase of capitalisms rise], backward countries are unable to attain that
level which the old centres of capitalism have attained.61 He attributes this to the
persistence of the old regime: the overthrow of the old ruling classes did not
achieve, but only completely revealed the task, namely to undertake
proletarianisation, as the precondition of communism.62 This task was not
otherwise going to be undertaken, according to Trotsky, due to the insignificance
of the Russian bourgeoisie, and the consequent weakness of the proletariat.63
Indeed, wherever the old regime remained at the helm, the peasantry
persisted, while the proletariat remained small and weak, unable to play a
decisive role in history. This peasantry, while sometimes willing to rise up against

60 G.M. Tams, Telling the Truth about Class, Socialist Register 2006, p. 24.
61 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.

235
its oppressors, was at other times obedient to its overlords, particularly in the
context of (often rigged) parliamentary elections. The same could be said of
small but formally employed industrial workforces, which were often conciliatory
towards the forces of order. All of this is clearly on view in the histories of low-
income countriesparticularly in Latin America, the Middle East, and South and
Southeast Asia, but not in East Asiawhere old regime elites retained much of
their power.
It was in this context that, as we mentioned before, the strategists of the
labour movement came to see history itself as blocked, and the unblockage of
history as an urgent task. That task would require a further development of the
productive forces, whether within capitalist society or in a planned, socialist
developmentalist one. In either case, further development seemed to be the only
way to strengthen and unify the proletariat against its enemies, which were legion
(and this in spite of the fact that, in reality, that development spelled the doom of
the labour movement itself). Meanwhile, old regime elites, backed by imperial
powers later including the United States were actively engaged in turning
back any movement in a liberatory direction.
Without condoning or condemning, we claim that these facts grounded the
workers movement. Marxs idea had been that the industrial working class would
come to exist, and that circumstances beyond its control would force that class to
call itself into question. But really, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
question was whether the class would exist at all, as a class of free commodity
sellers, outside of a few centers in Northern Europe and among whites in the
white-settler colonies. The world was changing rapidly, and it did so in ways that
tended to enhance the power of the oppressors, both in the factories of Europe
and in the colonies. In this context, fighting to exist became a revolutionary
position.

236
 AN IDENTICAL
ABJECT-SUBJECT?
Endnotes 4 2015
In Endnotes 2, we presented an account of capitals immanent tendency towards
crisis that revolved around a theory of surplus population. What follows is an
attempt to refine, clarify and develop the central categories of that theory.1 Our
motivation to do so derives from certain misapprehensions weve encountered,
which seem to betray a general tendency to directly map the category of surplus
population onto a singular, coherent social subject or sociological group, with the
potential implication that this group is to be viewed as a new kind of revolutionary
agent. Far from representing the emergence of a coherent agent, the expansion
of the surplus population marks the tendential disappearance of the previous
revolutionary horizon.
It was once possibleindeed quite reasonableto think of the proletariat as
an emergent social subject, becoming ever larger and more unified with the
global spread and development of the capitalist mode of production, and
particularly with the incorporation of a growing portion of the class into industrial
employment. Today, in an era of slowing economic growthwhich is also an era
of general deindustrialisation the revolutionary orientations of the past no
longer make sense. The working class always internally differentiated
displays a diminishing capacity for unification under a single hegemonic figure,
thus realising its always latent tendency to decompose into fragments, facing off
one against the other.
At the heart of this fractiousness is the division of the class into two parts: (1)
a shrinking one that retains higher wages and social protections, but must
constantly fight rearguard actions against capitalist reforms and restructurings;
and (2) a growing one that faces poor prospects of employment and is offered
few social protections.2 The more secure sectorwhich is also more organised

1This article is based on a talk given in Berlin in early 2014. Arguments in sections 2
and 3 draw on Aaron Benanav, A Global History of Unemployment, forthcoming from
Verso.
2While, in the low-income countries, this second sector is in fact the overwhelming
majority, similar divisions and conflicts of interest are also in evidence.

237
 often needs the support of the more precarious in order to win its struggles.
However, calls for greater inclusion of such people may stoke valid fears that
this will undermine more secure positions, opening up access to education and
training, and thereby increasing labour supply and reducing bargaining power.3 At
the same time, members of the more precarious part may be rightly suspicious of
the motives of the more secure: after the sacrifices have been made, wont it be
merely the latters rearguard battles that have been won? After all, those with
security rarely take to the streets when it is the less fortunate who are getting
screwed. The expansion of the surplus population is important in explaining this
division, but it is not the only meaningful one within the class.
There is a potentially infinite variety of such distinctions, so the question of
explaining current divisions can in a sense be reversed: What was the unity that
is now in advanced stages of decay? How did it come about? This is a question
that we have attempted to answer elsewhere in this issue, in A History of
Separation. For our purposes here though, it is enough to note simply that there
was once a hegemonic identity and orientation among workers that could provide
grounds for affirming certain struggles as central, while excluding others as
secondary or unimportant. It is equally clear that this affirmation seems less and
less plausible today. In place of the identity of the worker, we are now faced with
so many competing alternatives, each with its own strategic priorities: those who
want more jobs against those who want to stave off environmental catastrophe;
those who want to preserve the family wage for unionised male workers against
those who want gender equality; those of dominant national or racial identities
against those of racialised minorities, and so on.
In this sense, the fractiousness of identity politics is symptomatic of an era. In a
period of increasingly slow economic growth under the threat of ecological
catastrophe, it seems diminishingly plausible to claim that fighting the battles of
one part of the class will advance the class as a whole. This is why we reject any
attempt to find in surplus populations an ersatz social subject that might replace
the hegemonic role played by the white male factory worker in the workers
movement. At present there seems to be no class fractionwhether the most
strategically placed or the most oppressed whose struggles express a
general interest. At the same time, attempts to conjure up a new unity from this
diversity by simply renaming it as multitude or precariat, for example, merely
gloss over this fundamental problem of internal division.

3Partly for that reason, the more precarious are often rendered as undeserving in one
way or another: as upstart youth, illegal immigrants, and so on. See the section on the
abject, below.

238
If there is any revolutionary potential at present, it seems that it stands to be
actualised not in the struggle of any particular class fraction, but rather, in those
moments when diverse fractions are drawn together in struggle in spite of their
mutual suspicions; despite the lack of a stable, consistent hegemonic pole. In
such moments, the demands of various sections of the class come into conflict
with one another a conflict that may bring the prospect of destabilising or
undermining mutually exclusive demands and identities. The modes by which
social life is organised and segmented within capitalist societies can then come
to appear as obstacles to further struggle, dividing workers against one another.
The question of how to move forward is then at least raised, though with no easy
answers. After all, a definitive answer would involve an overcoming of the unity-
in-separation that organises social life.

WHAT IS A SURPLUS POPULATION?

The theory of surplus population derives from arguments presented by Marx in
the first volume of Capital, chapter 25 in particular, on the general law of
capitalist accumulation. Marx defines the surplus population as workers without
regular access to work: a worker belongs to the surplus population when he is
only partially employed or wholly unemployed.4 Marx refers to this surplus
population as a relative surplus population, because these workers are not
absolutely surplus, as in a Malthusian account (which is to say, it is not a matter
of there not being enough food, water, shelter, etc). Instead, these workers are
surplus relative to the needs of capitalthat is, relative to capitals demand for
labour.
In the history of capitalist societies, large masses of people have been absorbed
into the labour market and have come to depend entirely upon earning wages in
order to survive. They cannot leave the labour market unless they can get other
workers to support them. In other words, workers have to work regardless of
what sort and how much work is available. They are at the mercy of capitals
demand for labour. When that demand falls and there isnt enough work to go
around, workers do not stop working altogether unless they really have no
options, in which case they become paupers. Instead, they enter one or another
branch of an extensive and variegated surplus population.
Marx describes all kinds of forms of surplus population. Due to transformations
of production, workers are constantly being churned out of old and into new
industries, depending upon the shifting needs of capital. This gives rise, in Marxs
account, to both latent and floating surplus populations, the latter of which

4 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35) pp. 634-635.

239
Marx often called the reserve army of labour. However, as a consequence of
this ongoing development, capital also produces a super-exploited stagnant
surplus population, when it fails to re-absorb displaced workers into new lines.
Marx thought that the problem of the surplus populationultimately a problem of
the growing oversupply of, and under-demand for, labourwould intensify over
time and, as a result, people would increasingly find themselves disconnected
from labour markets, and hence from regular access to the wage. Indeed, Marx
describes this as the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. What
happens is that capitals ongoing accumulation process leads to rising labour
productivity, which in turn expands the industrial reserve army, causing the
consolidated surplus population whose misery is in inverse ratio to the
amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour to grow, and
increasing official pauperism; that is, those who cannot make enough in wages
to survive, and so must beg for their bread.5 The overall result is that the
accumulation of wealth occurs alongside an accumulation of poverty.
In Marxs account, the main reason capitalist development leads to the growth
of the surplus population has to do with what we have called technological
ratcheting.6 In essence, Marx argues that the demand for labour in each industry
eventually falls as labour productivity rises. New industries do come on line, at a
faster or slower pace, increasing the demand for labour. However, these new
industries never start out from zero: they do not need to reinvent e.g. steam
power, the assembly line, the electric motor. Instead, new lines absorb
technological innovations that preceded them. As a result, the emergence of new
industries is less and less effective in increasing the demand for labour. Hence
capital has what Marx terms a rising organic composition. Marx argues that it is
the older lines, which have not yet been technically renewed, which tend to
absorb the most labour.
This theory could be fleshed out further by developing links with Marxs notes
on overaccumulation in volume 3, but that is another project. Here we simply
note that, today, what renders many workers surplus to the requirements of
capital is a dual tendency: on the one hand, towards overaccumulationwhich
reduces profit rates and hence slows the expansion of outputand on the other
hand, towards the ongoing growth of labour productivity, which arises out of
capitalist competition and results in a loss of jobs in those economic sectors
where output does not increase at a rate equal to productivity. The combination

5 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), pp. 638-647.

6 See Misery and Debt, p. 50.

240
of these factors ensures that, in an economy wracked by overaccumulation, the
demand for labour will fail to keep up with its supply. That, in turn, will expand the
surplus population.
In Endnotes 2 we argued that these developments would tendentially lead to
the reproduction of the proletariat becoming contingent to that of capital. If the
post-war settlement had formalised the reciprocal but asymmetrical relation in
which the reproduction of the working class is necessary to that of capital, with
the end of that settlement and the rise in surplus populations, those who are
surplus are effectively reproduced as a sort of side-effect of capitalist
production.7 What this means is that capitalist productivity, especially in
agriculture, is increasingly capable of supporting sections of the global population
far removed from the dynamic industries at the core of capitalist accumulation.
But when this happens, the dual interlocking cycles of the mutual reproduction of
capital and class seem to make less and less sense. As Screamin Alice has
argued, this leads in some senses to disintegration of these circuits at the same
time as integration deepens in other respects in the financialisation of ever
new areas of life, for example.8

DEINDUSTRIALISATION, THEN AND NOW

In the 20th century, this idea of the tendency of capital to increasingly produce
workers as surplus was largely dismissed as an immiseration thesis, on the
grounds that history had proven it wrong: the working class had clearly failed to
become immiserated; on the contrary, living standards had risen. Industrial

7 One should not treat the mutual capital-labour reproduction as if it captured a singular
social system, valid at the level of each and every nation-state; the basic frame of
analysis for such matters is necessarily global. But nor, of course, can we think in terms
of an undifferentiated global level: individual national economies must be grasped
differentially within a global frame. The post-war settlement was thus, of course, not
some uniform global arrangement: it applied particularly to the Western industrialised
countries, while some analogous arrangements may be perceived in Eastern Bloc
countries (and, indeed, the pressure for such a settlement was partly given by the
geopolitical polarisation between the two). But insofar as those places in which it
applied represented the bulk of the industrialised world, it is reasonable to think of this
settlement as characterising the general nature of capitalist class relations in that
epoch. The essential nature of this settlement was that the state would regulate the
reproduction of the working class on whom capital depended, since individual
capitalistsnecessarily relating to that reproduction as an externalitywere incapable of
looking after it themselves.
8 Screamin Alice, On the Periodisation of the Capitalist Class Relation, SIC 1,
November 2011.

241
employment had grown dramatically, suggesting that the industrial working class
would eventually account for the vast majority of the workforce. While Marx
appears to have been broadly correct in interpreting mid-19th century tendencies
(which limited the growth of the demand for labour in industry), he did not foresee
the emergence of new lines of production that would prove capable of absorbing
the surpluses of capital and labour that were being produced elsewhere in the
economy. These industriessuch as the auto and white goods industrieslay
at the very core of 20th century capitalist development and industrial
employment. The semi-skilled factory worker was the key figure in the old labour
movement. But in Endnotes 2 we posed the question: What if Marx had just been
wrong on the timing?
It is now clear that those twentieth century industries have long been in
relative decline as employers. Newer industries, although they have emerged,
have not absorbed all of the labour being shed from elsewhere. As a result,
deindustrialisation has been ongoing since the mid 1970s across the high-
income countries. But even newly industrialised countries like South Korea,
Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Egypt have seen the industrial shares of
total employment in their economies stagnate or decline since the mid 1980s or
mid 1990s. China seems to be an exception to the rule, but even there,
construction constitutes a large component of the new industrial labour force,
and the Chinese manufacturing share of employment actually remained stagnant
at between 14 and 16 percent of the labour forceduring the period of rapid
growth from 1980 to 2006. New industrial firms were opening up and absorbing
labour, such as in the Pearl River Delta region, but this only tended to balance
not reversethe overall effects of the closures of state-owned enterprises, and
the laying off of workers in Chinas northeast.9 Chinas manufacturing
employment share only rose beyond previously achieved levels in 2006, reaching
19 percent in 2011 (the last year for which data is available). While the absolute
number of people employed in industry in China is certainly staggering, the
manufacturing share of employment in the new workshop of the world is
nowhere near as high today as it was in the West during the heyday of
industrialisation. In fact, the Chinese share is closer to the level that prevails in
Mexico and Brazil today than to the level of Germany or the UK at mid-20th
century (which hovered between 31 and 35 percent).
According to an old developmental narrative, agricultural employment would
decline as agriculture became more productive, precipitating lots of potential new

9See Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labour Struggles in Chinas Rustbelt and
Sunbelt (University of California 2007).

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workers into towns, who would then be taken up by expanding industrial
production. These developments would eventually bring every country into
modernity. For orthodox Marxists, this would tendentially form a proletariat unified
under the hegemony of its most advanced fractions in industry. But as the
global peak of industrialisation recedes into history, it looks like something else is
now happening. While agricultural employment has not halted its decline, those
workers shed are less likely to join the ranks of the industrial working class than
to enter a vast and heterogeneous service sector. At the world level, there are
now twice as many workers in services as compared to industry: services
account for 44 percent of global employment, while industry accounts for just 22
percent. The share employed in factories is even smaller than that 22 percent
suggests, not only because it includes the labour-intensive construction sector,
but also because a sizable portion of industrial employment in the low-income
countries is accounted for by the petty production of informal, self-employed
proletarian households.

SERVICES AND SUPERFLUITY

Many commentators will argue that the ongoing stagnation or decline in
manufacturing employment, which we described above, is nothing to worry
about. It is supposedly a matter of a quasi-natural evolution in consumer
demand, driven by market forces. Just as agriculture comes to employ a
decreasing share of the workforce, since there are limits to growth in the demand
for food, so too with manufacturing: there are supposedly limits to the demand for
goods (apparently, there is, however, a limitless demand for services). The result,
according to this perspective, is that over time, a rising demand for services will
dynamically pull workers into the service sector, just as in an earlier phase
workers were pulled into the industrial sector.
In reality, the dynamic draw of manufacturing during industrialisation was
unique to that sector. To manufacture something is to take a good or to
transform a service, such as dishwashing, into a good, such as a dishwasher
and to produce that good in a factory, according to ever-more efficient
techniques. It is the resulting rise in the efficiency of production within the space
of the factory that rapidly lowers costs of production in manufacturing lines. That
leads, in turn, to a rapid fall in relative prices. Markets for manufactures expand,
making possible a dramatic expansion of output. Concomitantly, huge masses of
humanity are pulled into work in manufacturing lines. That is the key to the
dynamic growth of manufacturing output and employment: the former is very
rapid, and that is why, in spite of high rates of labour productivity growth, the
latter expands, raising the manufacturing employment share.

243
 The same does not take place in the service sector. Services are precisely the
sorts of activities that cannot beor have not yet beensubstituted by goods.
In services, labour productivity tends to increase slowly if at all, and
concomitantly, prices follow the same trajectory. In fact, as long as real wages
are rising, the relative price of services will itself tend to increase. Since relative
prices do not fall dramatically, there is no impetus for markets for services to
expand rapidly. Hence, there is no dynamic tendency to dramatically expand
output and thus to draw lots of labour into the sector; instead, employment in the
service sector expands slowly.
On this basis, it is possible to describe a major distinction between phases of
industrialisation and deindustrialisation in the history of capitalist societies.
During the former phase, the demand for labour in industry not during busts,
but at least during booms was very high. That affected the entire labour
market, diminishing slack, reducing the size of the surplus population and
increasing workers bargaining power. Once industrialisation went into reverse,
the industrial sector became, alongside agriculture, another source of growing
slack in the labour market, increasing the surplus population and reducing
workers bargaining power. All the while, the demand for labour in services has
been characteristically low. It has expanded, but slowly, due to the fact that more
labour is generally needed to increase service-sector output, which is itself
growing slowly. The shift from industrialisation to deindustrialisation is necessarily
the shift from an economy that grows rapidly, with big booms and busts, to one
that grows slowly, tending towards stagnation. In such a context, booms and
busts are given merely by financial bubbles being blown up and deflated around
the world by surplus capital.10
There is a corollary to this theory, which explains why a large portion of the
surplus population ends up in the service sector, particularly in the low-wage,
super-exploited section and in the informal, self-exploiting section. As service
work tends to be labour-intensive, a large proportion of the final costs are made
up of wages. Because real wages do not usually fall across the economy, it is
difficult for service sector firms to lower their costs on a regular basis (general
tendencies towards falling costs in industry and agriculture are due to increases
in the efficient use of more expensive labour). This results in a relatively low level
of output growth in services. But precisely for that reason, when workers are
expelled from other sectors, it is possible to get much cheaper workers into
services as those discarded as surplus will usually have to accept a lower

10The fact that this slowdown is taking place across the world with, of course, local
exceptionsis itself proof against the theory of a simple demand-shift from industry to
services.

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wage level. This lowers costs and allows for some expansion in demand for, and
output of, services. In the service sector, there is greater room to expand the
market by lowering wages. By contrast, in most manufacturing activities, wages
make up only a small portion of the final cost of the product, so there is less room
for manoeuvre.
Of course, this doesnt mean that each and every specific service stands no
chance of becoming a basis for dynamic growth. Many jobs which were once
performed as services have been at least partially turned into manufactured
commodities in the course of capitalist history, either for the individual household
or for collective spaces. As mentioned above, the service of washing clothes by
hand was replaced by the washing machine, in peoples homes or in
launderettes. The transformation of services into goods is part of industrialisation,
which transforms activities, making them amenable to constant increases of
productivity in what Marx called the real subsumption of the labour process,
opening up markets and allowing for long-term growth.
While it is difficult to identify a precise and determinate logic as to why some
activities become really subsumed and others do not, the fact that certain
activities require delicate work or direct human contact, and therefore must
remain labour-intensive, is clearly key. There appears always to be a remainder
of such activities, an assortment of differentiated tasks, mostly in services.11
Insofar as services remain services, they tend predominantly to be a source only
of absolute, and not relative surplus value. This is simply another way of
saying that there are limits to raising productivity. Consequently, economies that
are post-industrial and concentrated around service work tend to be low-growth.
In such conditions, it is imperative for capitalists to get as much out of their
workers as possible, by increasing the duration or intensity of labour. To some
extent, the prerequisite for the existence of many jobs becomes pressurised work
conditions. If super-exploited sectors take up a growing share of the labour
market, this also puts downward pressure on all wages, and increases insecurity,
as workers lose bargaining power and bosses are emboldened to demand ever
more flexibility. With this, the door is opened for a whole range of abuses to be

11 Not all of these sorts of labour are services. For example, apparel manufacture has
always required very delicate sewing work. Since the invention of the sewing machine, it
has proven difficult to further mechanise this work, and so apparel manufacture remains
a large employer. Whether product or service however, one thing seems to be constant:
because wages make up such a large part of the final cost of these commodities, these
sectors have been employing overwhelmingly women, whose labour-power can be
found on the labour-market at a below average cost. See The Logic of Gender, p. 139,
for the relation between gender and differentiation in the price in labour-power.

245
unleashed upon the workersexual, emotional and psychological, as well as the
stealing or retention of wages and chronic overworking. Certain positions, such
as that of the low-wage service sector worker, thus appear as a kind of special
category of surplus worker, akin to the informally self-employed in low-income
countries (and in high income countries over the past decade or so). Low-wage
service workers must become extreme self-exploiters, as well as being super-
exploited, if they are to get work. Many of these jobs (deliveries, house-cleaning,
supermarket baggers, and so on) can only exist because the wages of the
people performing the service are a fraction of what those consuming the service
are paid. Thus, the condition for finding a job in a growing service sector is often
accepting a significantly lower than average wage.

SURPLUS POPULATIONS AND UNEMPLOYMENT

As is now hopefully apparent, the tendency towards increasing superfluity is not
a tendency towards a literal extrusion of a part of the working class from the
economy. Surplus workers still need to buy at least some of what they need to
survive, and therefore they must earn or acquire money in order to live. Those
who are produced as surplus to the needs of capital may still receive wages in
super-exploited sectors, or they may be informally self-employed and thus self-
exploiting (since they lack access to capital).
Marx clarifies some of these points in his discussion of the stagnant surplus
population. One cannot read his account without thinking of the global informal
economy, much of which would have been included, in Marxs time, under the
rubric of home-work or domestic industry. The stagnant surplus population:
forms a part of the active labour market, but with extremely irregular employment.
Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour. Its
conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it
is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of
capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by a maximum of working time and a
minimum of wages. We have already become familiar with its chief form under
the rubric of domestic industry ... Its extent grows in proportion as, with the
growth in the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus
population also advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and
self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater
part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. 12
It would thus be a mistake to identify surplus populations with the unemployed.
This category is, to some extent, an artifact of 20th century high-income
countries provision of unemployment insurance. In the 19th century, as in most

12 Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), p. 637.

246
low-income countries today, being unemployed in this sense was simply not an
option. Unemployment insurance did not existand today covers few workers in
low-income countriesso workers could not afford to be without work for long:
they needed to find employment as soon as possible, regardless of the degree to
which their labour was demanded by capital. If there was no demand, they
needed to set up shop for themselves, without any employer by picking
through rags, for example.
In the high-income countries, the category of unemployment is currently
being undermined once again, and appears as increasingly less defined. As a
general tendency, the welfare state has been dramatically transformed, such that
unemployment benefit, typically paid to a part of the workforce structurally
excluded from employment, has tended to give way to means-tested benefits.
These are meant to supplement and support incomes only at the very lowest end
of the employment scale, rather than support those simply without work, and are
contributing to major increases in low-wage, service sector employment. This
transformation is of course occurring at different paces in different high-income
countries. In many European countries, protections have remained in place much
longer, preventing the bottom from entirely falling out of the labour market. For
that reason, a major jobs gap opened up between the US and UK on the one
hand, and continental Europe on the other, wherein the latter have experienced
higher unemployment rates, as well as lower rates of labour force participation,
particularly for women. This gap can be explained entirely in relation to the
relative lack of service-sector employment in continental Europe, and in
particular, low-wage employment. The service sector share of employment is
lowest in Germany and Italy, at around 70 percent, as compared to the US, UK,
and France, at around 80 percent. 13
Additionally, in the global economyin which mobile flows of surplus capital
discipline states high-income states must do everything they can to prevent
outright unemployment, and thus unemployment provisions, from growing too
dramatically. Welfare expenditures, which are ultimately funded from tax receipts,
must be kept to a minimum to avoid worrying bondholders and taxpayers.
Current UK government policy, for example, is to try to eradicate, as far as
possible, possibilities for unemployment as any kind of stable category,
transforming welfare into workfare. As a result, in the high-income countries,
many workers fall in and out of relative superfluity during their lifetime, due both
to the increasing flexibilisation of the labour market and its destabilisation of

13 The service sector share of employment is also lower in Japan, at 70 percent.

247
categories of employment at a structural level, as well as the falling demand for
labour.14
Beginning from the identification of specific social subjects typically means
reaching for pre-packaged figures who signify to the popular imaginary a simple
economic marginality, such as the slum dweller. But the surplus population
cannot be so easily identified. Though differential positions in relation to the
labour process can certainly be empirically identified and taxonomised according
to types and degrees of surplusness, it is necessary to first identify the broader
logic at play, before mapping the complexly variegated ways in which this logic
plays out; none of this permits a straightforward identification of surplusness with
a singular social subject or group.15 As we have seen, what facilitates the
increasing production of workers as surplus is capitals dual tendency towards
both overaccumulation and an increase in the productivity of labour, which in turn
decrease the number of workers needed to perform many tasks. But from their
initial condition as surplus, these workers may turn out to compose just a
floating surplus population being reabsorbed into production at some later
point or go on to subsist in one or another relatively stagnant part of the
economy (the latter is, of course, much more common in low-income countries).
In neither case are surplus workers necessarily either unemployed or
unproductive of surplus-value. And at a general level surplus population refers
to a large, massively varied part of the population, characterised by all sorts of
internal divisions and stratifications, all sorts of relations to the labour process.

AN IDENTICAL ABJECT-SUBJECT?
On the one hand, this relatively simple theory of the tendential production of
surplus population can help greatly in explaining various key aspects of the
present global situation. It gives us a basis for explaining deindustrialisation, the
relative growth of services, the spread of forms of insecure and flexible labour,
and the numerous abuses for which this opens the way. In turn, these tendencies
intensify and exacerbate the difficulty of unifying the working class under the
hegemony of the industrial worker, in the way traditional Marxism anticipated; it
thus gives us a basis for explaining the crisis of the left and present strategic

14 This is less true of the low-income countries, in which there are basically no social
protections, and where over half of the labour force is often informal, with only a portion
of this population ever experiencing the fluidity to move either into, or out of, the formal
sector.
15 We have discussed this issue previously in relation to the English riots of 2011. See
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, Endnotes 3, September 2013, pp. 11819.

248
predicaments. It also seems to offer an explanation for declining growth rates
over recent decades, as relative surplus value-producing labour has become a
diminishing share of global labour. There are other things we could add to this list
too, for instance: the difficulty of states balancing between welfare demands and
those of markets; the formation of mega-slums; post-industrial forms of urbanism.
Or, on the other side: financialisation, neoliberalism, and so on. Insofar as
these combined tendencies sketch out the major dynamics and outlines of the
present global situation, we take the theory of surplus populations to be an
important reference point in framing the present.
On the other hand, when a theory has clear explanatory power, it can be
tempting to slide into a sort of conceptual overreach, where the theory is
presumed to explain things which it really cant explain, or to say things which it
doesnt. It may be the case that Marxists have particularly bad habits on this
level: for example, capital or subsumption are concepts that are often reached
for too hastily, called upon to do more explanatory work than they are actually
able to. For a theory to have real explanatory power, one has to be able to
identify its limits clearly and honestlyto say what it cannot, as well as what it
can, explain.
What seems to be a standard misinterpretation or over-extension of the theory of
surplus population is characterised by a hypostatisation of the surplus
population as a singular social subject, with the apparent implication that this
may be viewed as the new revolutionary agent, or at least that it is the agent
behind various forms of contemporary struggle. This involves a conceptual
slippage between general tendency and particular sociological or empirical
cases. While it would of course ultimately be false to separate the two, it is also
important not to identify them too immediately or simplistically. Thus, the theory of
surplus population does not involve some kind of neo-Bakuninite romanticisation
of a surplus subject more radical or more dangerous than the organised
working class; nor does it involve a reading of present struggles as those of
some surplus subject.

ABJECTION
Such thinking was in the air in discussions around the 2011 English riots, which
we analysed at some length in Endnotes 3. Briefly revisiting problematics that
were at play at that time will help us to flesh out and specify these points about
surplus population.
It seemed back then that for some the riots should be read as a rebellion of
the surplus population. However, such readings appeared in some ways a

249
simple and disconcerting inversion of standard and reactionary
interpretations of such events, stoked by mainstream media, which held the riots
to be the work of a disorderly and dangerous underclass. The latter is little more
than a pseudo-concept, an ideological generalisation from the ungeneralisable.
For this reason, it cannot simply be inverted into something positive that one
might valorise.
And, in any case, it was clear that the British urban poor who came out on the
streets could not be straightforwardly identified with the concept of surplus
population. First of all, as we have already seen, the concept of surplus-
population is relatively non-specific in sociological terms. It can apply to a large
variety of workers, some of whom are fully employed but super-exploited, others
of whom are underemployed or informally self-employed. It is reasonable to
surmise that a substantial portion of the British working class is relatively
surplus in one sense or another.16 Nor can the identity of the British urban poor
be easily captured under specific categories of surplusness, such as the
unemployed. While unemployment of course tends to be higher in poor urban
areas, the unemployment rate in Britain has been relatively low in recent years,
compared to other European countries, and a majority of the urban poorand of
those who riotedwere either employed or in full time education. Nor could they
be simply identified with informality, in terms of the grey economy, or with
illegality, in terms of the black economy. Early reactionary claims that most of
the rioters were involved in criminal gangs predictably proved unfounded.17 And
as we have already seen, it doesnt make sense to see the urban poor as
surplus in the stronger sense of being excluded from the economy per se.
Another often ideological concept that gets thrown around when people
discuss the urban poor is that of the ghetto. This has related connotations to the
ideas of superfluity that we have already discussed: the ghetto is conceived as a
sort of social dustbin where the sub-proletariat is thrown, where state agents
often fear to go and where the market is absent. The concept of the ghetto
signifies superfluity, exteriority to the (formal) economy, and also tends to link the
latter up with the concept of race. Ghettos are, of course, a reality in some parts
of the world. But the British urban poor do not live in ghettos in anything other
than a metaphorical sense: poor British housing estates are small, often

16 Marx himself even extends this category to orphans and the elderly!
17 Informality is usually distinguished from illegality. The global informal sector includes
all those doing legal work, but without protections, or in firms consisting of five or fewer
people. Thus, it does not include those doing illegal sex-work, or engaged in the drug-
trade, etc.

250
ethnically mixed, incorporated into the broader cities in which they are placed,
and managed as well as patrolled by the state. They are not surplus or external
in any simple sense to either the state or the market.
If we can say unproblematically that what weve been calling the urban poor
were a key active agent in 2011, this only works because this is a weak, vague,
merely descriptive category. As soon as we try to apply the more technically
specific category of surplus population here, we run into problems. Of course, it
was not completely irrational to want to do so: there was a sort of intuitive fit at
least at the level of representational thinking. The palpable, disruptive presence
of strata of people on the street who are habitually cast out, excluded in various
ways, was one of the most striking aspects of 2011.
This confronted us with three questions. Firstly, how to theorise the social
subjects who came out in revolt in 201011, and to identify the ways in which
these people really do appear as excluded or marginal, without collapsing this
into the general political-economic logic of the production of a surplus
population? Secondly, how to relink this exclusion or marginality with the concept
of surplus population once it has been distinguished from it? Thirdly, how might
these matters be related to deeper problems of revolutionary subjectivity and
organisation?
It is clear when looking at the history of urban riots in Britain that they are
distinctly periodisable, and that the period of the real emergence of their modern
form isas are so many thingscontemporary with the capitalist restructuring
that has occurred since the 1970s. If the tendential production of a surplus
population at a global level gives us some basis for explaining this period of
restructuring, then this tendency could presumably be linked with the emergence
of the modern urban riot in this period, without necessarily needing to establish
an immediate identity between urban rioters and surplus population as a simple
and coherent social subject.
Since the 1970s, we have of course seen growing and generalising insecurity,
as stable industrial employment has given way to employment by the state and
the service sector. But these developments were uneven, hitting some sections
of the working class before others. Prior to Britains full-scale deindustrialisation,
the British working class was of course stratified, with a more insecure, informal,
racialised stratum at the bottom, prone to being ejected from employment in
times of economic stress, such as occurred throughout the 1970s: a classic
industrial reserve army. These workers, at the racialised margins of the organised
working class, were some of the first to feel the crisis of the 1970s. They were hit
disproportionately by unemployment and they were not to be re-employed in

251
newly emergent lines of production, since these lines did not in fact employ many
people.
If surplus population is useful anywhere in this history in identifying an
immediate sociological reality, it is here, where it can be used to distinguish a
particular stratum in relation to the rest of the working class. However, in
interpreting the deindustrialisation that really kicked in from this point on, it is
necessary to move beyond the strictly political-economic level on which this
theory is forged. This is because the timing and character of Britains
deindustrialisation are inextricable from the particular dynamics of class struggle
in Britain, and from the political mediations of this struggle. Though Britains
industrial base had long been in decline, its trashing by the Thatcher government
was pushed through actively, at least in part for strategic reasons. If the insecure
margins of the workforce grew in England from the 1970s onwards, this is not
completely reducible to the general global tendency towards the production of a
surplus population. We need reference to the specific political mediations, even if
this general tendency can help inform our understanding of what is being
mediated by such mediations.
It is amongst these pressurised sections of the working class the more
insecure, informal, racialised stratum, which struggled to be reabsorbed by the
labour market that the riot became particularly prominent as a mode of
struggle, from the mid to late 1970s, and it seems reasonable to hypothesise that
this newfound prominence is directly related to the absence of possibilities for
normal, regulatory, demands-making of the corporatist type. In developments
dialectically entwined with the struggles of this section of the working class, the
police in this period increasingly developed new tactics of repression specifically
targeted at poor urban neighbourhoods. One might even say that the riot and its
repression became a sort of proxy way in which class relations were regulated, in
the absence of the normal mode of regulation exercised by wage bargaining,
etc. This is not a perverse point: historically riots have pushed demands towards
which the state has made concessions. This proved true of 2011 just as it did of
1981; more recently it has proved true in the US, after the 2014 Ferguson riots.18
In Endnotes 3 we termed the social logic of stigmatisation associated with
such developments abjectiona concept borrowed from Imogen Tylers recent

18 See Brown v. Ferguson, Endnotes 4, for an analysis.

252
book Revolting Subjects.19 With its in some ways dubious provenance, we were
not especially fond of this term, but it seemed nonetheless quite appropriate as a
name for certain problematics with which we were grappling.20 What was useful
was that this term named a particular kind of abstract structure in which
something is cast off, marked as contingent or lowly, without actually being
exteriorised. The relevance of such a structure here should be obvious: the
initially racialised communities subject to the forms of oppression that develop
through this period are socially marked as a problem or even as a sort of
rejection from the healthy core of the body politic without being literally
exteriorised in any sense from either economy or state. Police repression looms
large in the immediate experience of abjection in this sense, but the term is also
intended to capture broader social processes, such as the moral crusades of
reactionary press, or the constant obsessing of politicians over the various failed
subjects of the nation. These are not simply unconnected moments; concrete
connections between all of them could be articulated such that we see a
particular socio-political pattern of oppression.
It seems that abjection may be relatable, in a mediated way, to the production
and management of a surplus population in that specific historical moment of the
1970s, as the restructuring began. But the mediations require careful articulation.
After allthough there was at least a significant overlapthe stigmatised urban
communities who were the primary abjects of this new style of policing were of
course not composed exclusively of workers at the margins of industrial
employment. Moreover, as Britain deindustrialised, and as broader global
tendencies towards the production of surplus population were felt particularly in a
generalised decomposition of the working class, the association of these typically
racialised communities with a specifically reserve army function declined.
Unemployment became highly generalised in the British economy, to then be
slowly superseded by a highly flexibilised and insecure labour market. While this
association of racialised margins of the working class with a reserve army
function diminished, police repression of the poor mounted.
If the development of new styles of policing might be partially linked to the
management of a surplus population at the outset then, this tie becomes

19 Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (Zed
Books 2013). Tyler has developed this as a general-purpose category of psycho-social
theory, through a critical engagement with Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva,
distancing herself especially from the latters reactionary politics.

We also deployed the term abject as a name for some partially analogousbut by no
20

means identicalstructures, in The Logic of Gender, in the same issue.

253
increasingly tenuous as we get into the 1980s and 90s. One might speak of a
developing autonomisation of the apparatus of repression and its related
stigmatising and racialising logics. By this we mean that an apparatus which
initially seems to apply in particular to clear, economically marginal, parts of the
class, becomes dissociated from that strict function. While those who are subject
to these processes of abjection come to symbolise the limits of affirmable class,
these limits are in actuality unstable, shifting and ill-defined. They become more
a socio-political, or perhaps socio-cultural, than a political-economic construct. If
this is the case, it is doubtful whether we are likely to have any luck constructing
the object of this apparatus in purely political-economic terms. Who is abjected
then? We might provisionally reply, somewhat tautologically: those who are
defined as such by the fact that they are the object of these processes of
repression. There is no particular pre-existing trait or social categorisation which
must, in itself, necessarily or inevitably mark one out as an object of these
processes, which is not to say that certain social categories do not end up being
reproduced in such positions. Abjection is closely relatedthough not identical
to racialisation.
If the mechanisms of abjection could once be related to a certain function in
the states management of the insecure margins of the industrial working class,
as the object of that management dissipates socially, the function itself would
seem to be thrown into question. If something is being managed through
abjection, it is no longer self-evident exactly what, by who, or to what end. We
have blind social patterns of stigmatisation and oppression which are quite
general, and can thus not be viewed as the work of some conspiracy. And we
also have the continuing operation of formalised structures of power and
oppression within these patterns, with police, politicians and media playing
important active roles though generally in part responding to the very real
sentiments of the citizenry. In the process a new kind of function may be
perceived, as the generalised insecurity of the post-industrial workforce is
exacerbated by the waning of solidarities here, and people all too readily turn on
each other. But this is functional only in a perverse sense: it is the product of no
design or intent; a purely irrational outcome, albeit one which can in some ways
prove useful to capital and state after the fact, insofar as it further disempowers
their potential antagonists.21
If we are now speaking of the subjects of abjection rather than surplus
population here, how about the abject as a social subject? These developments

21 Indeed, from another perspective that of a speculative proletarian unity one may
view such developments as a matter of pure dysfunction.

254
signify, however, not the creation of a new form of social (or potentially,
revolutionary) subject, but rather the problem of any class subject at all. In itself,
that which is abjected would seem to be by definition unaffirmable, ununifiable,
for it is not a positive existence of its own, but merely the negative of something
else. Those who are abjected are not something other than the proletariat. More
often than not they are workers, students etc. Only, they are workers, students
etc who are vilified, cast beyond the pale of social respectability. These
developments represent problems for the constitution of a unified class subject;
indeed, they are direct expressions of the decomposition of the class. The abject
is projected as a sort of limit-concept of affirmable social class, in an operation
where that class is itself negatively defined against what has been abjected. We
are not like them replaces the workers united will never be defeated. And as
such, abjection can have a somewhat fractal quality: not applying uniformly to
one social group, but across and between social groups, depending to some
extent on where one stands in the social landscape. There is always someone
more abject than you.
This is not something that should be valorised or romanticised, or projected as
the positive basis for some future social subject. If it is a curse to be reduced to
the proletarian, it is doubly so to be abjected. Neither surplus population nor the
abject provide any ultimate answer to the problem of revolutionary agency, but
both describe aspects of the problem, and it is with the problem that we must
start. What seems clear is that whatever shape a future unity of the class could
take, it is not one that is likely to be hegemonised by an advanced industrial
worker; though it seems equally clear that no abject or surplus subject offers
itself up as an obvious alternative. Nonetheless, the problem will continue to be
confronted, as people in struggle strain to compose and extend some unity in
order to push forwards. And the combinatory processes of struggle can be
endlessly generative.

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 S L E E P - WOR KE R S
ENQUIRY
Endnotes 2 2010
This morning, floating through that state between sleep and consciousness
where you can become aware of the content of your dreams immediately before
waking, I realised that I was dreaming in code again. This has been occurring on
and off for the past few weeks in fact, most times I have become aware of the
content of my unconscious minds meanderings, it has been something abstractly
connected with my job. I remember hearing the sound of the call centre in my
ears as I would drift in and out of sleep when that was my job, and I remember
stories from friends of doing an extra shift between going to sleep and waking
of the repetitive beeps of a supermarket checkout counter punctuating the night.
But dreaming about your job is one thing; dreaming inside the logic of your job is
quite another. Of course it is unfortunate if ones unconscious mind can find
nothing better to do than return to a mundane job and carry on working, or if
ones senses seem stamped with the lingering impression of a days work. But in
the kind of dream that I have been having the very movement of my mind is
transformed: it has become that of my job. It is as if the habitual, repetitive
thought patterns, and the particular logic which I employ when going about my
job are becoming hardwired; are becoming the default logic that I think with. This
is somewhat unnerving.
The closest thing that I can think of to this experience is that of someone
rapidly becoming acquainted with a new language, and reaching that point at
which dreams and the rambling thoughts of the semi-conscious mind start to
occur in that language. Here too it is a new kind of logic that the mind is
assuming that of the structures and patterns of a language, and here too the
mind is able to scan across its own processes with a pseudo-objectivity and
determine the nature of their logic as something particular something which
does not yet possess the whole mind, but inhabits it and takes command of its
resources. One never really gains this kind of perspective on thoughts in ones
own language; one never normally develops an awareness of the particularity of
ones own thought. But right now I experience it as a clear split: that between the
work-logic-me, and the spectator on that me.

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 * * *
I work in IT. Specifically I am a web developer. That means I write potentially
all the original code that goes into a website: markup like HTML and XML, the
visual styling, the functional logic that happens behind the scenes and in your
web browser, and the scripts that keep a site running on a web server. I work in a
small company, in which I am the main web developer, working alongside one
other who also deals with the graphical side. My line manager is the IT manager
who, apart from programming himself, takes a lead in organising how our
projects come together. Above him are the CEOs, who are a couple of oddball
born-again Christians with a serious work ethic. They asked me about my religion
in my interview, and set alarm bells ringing straight away. My response was that I
didnt see religion as mere superstition like banal atheism does, but that I see it
as the real expression of a particular life situation, with its own meaningful
content. I could have added that it is the heart of a heartless world, but I
seemed to have convinced them by that stage that I was a good-ish guy, if not
one of them.
After I had worked here for a while the stories started emerging: one of the
CEOs claims to be an ex-gangster who saw the living God in a bolt-of-lightning
revelation when he was contemplating a new scam that involved setting up a
fake religion. The other was a successful businesswoman around the dot-com
boom, but she fell into a crisis when the father of her child left her, and was
converted in a low moment by her new partner the other CEO. In drunken
ramblings at the Christmas do, they have spoken emotively of the living God,
with that I was blind but now I can see way of thinking that is the hallmark of
born-agains. They used to try to put all new staff through The Alpha Course
a cross-denominational charismatically-inflected project to convert people to
Christianity, and to organise monthly God days in which all staff would get to
take the day off work on the condition that they spend it taking tea with a
preacher. Unsurprisingly, many members of staff skipped these days actually
preferring to work than go through some kind of attempted conversion.
They had eased off a little by the time I started someone had apparently
told them that they were at legal risk if they continued to use their business as a
missionary organisation. But God still comes to work on a regular basis
intervening to turn the annual business forecast into prophecy, or melding the
fortunes of the company with providence. The most notable example for me is
the time when I fixed a problem with the speed of our websites. The company
had been held up for a while with an appallingly slow performance on each of the
many small websites it runs, and people had been searching around for an
answer. As long as our performance was that bad, we wouldve only been able to

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deal with a very limited volume of traffic, and thus a similarly limited number of
potential customers. When I figured out the solution the bosses were clearly very
happy: suddenly the amount of potential customers we could serve on each site
was multiplied by about 30. But rather than thanking me directly, the female CEO
simply said that I couldnt take all of the credit as shed been praying for better
site performance, and we thus had to give God his due. In response I stammered
out some over-hasty and awkward attempt at a gag, which trailed into a
meaningless murmur.
In an everyday sense, probably the worst part of this job is that I have to deal
with the paranoia that comes from knowing that your bosses are insane to the
extent that they may not always act in the companys interest: at least you know
where you are with a capitalist who acts with the straightforward rationality of
calculated self-interest. When the living God takes precedence in deciding
company policy, and when stories abound of random and reckless sackings such
as that of an employee fired because his wife disagreed with the CEOs attitudes
towards homosexuality, the sense of a guillotine poised over ones neck never
quite goes away. My line manager is a freakish bipolar who bounces around the
office like a well-oiled space hopper one day, and behaves like the drill instructor
in Full Metal Jacket the next. But he is decent enough, and easy to deal with
once you get to know the cycle.

* * *
One of the most notable characteristics of the politics of this type of job is
another kind of bipolarity the split and antagonism between two poles: the
business pole and the technical. The techies always feel that business are
making arbitrary decisions based on insufficient knowledge of the way that things
really work; that things could be done so much better if only we who understand
were left to do it ourselves. Business always feel that the techies are being
sticklers, pedants, needlessly and pathologically recalcitrant. Whilst business
wishes it could just take flight into the ether, and rid itself of the recalcitrance of
its technical staff, the technical staff wish that business would just leave them
alone to get the job done properly: that the recalcitrance is that of the real world
and its demands. In some ways this makes it easier to deal with the immediate
people that I work with: since contact with the business side is mostly supposed
to be mediated through a specific project manager, I primarily deal with those
on my side of the great divide, so it is even possible to develop a certain us
against them attitude with my line manager, and to hide behind the formal
mediations when the shit hits the fan.

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 This side of the divide we live partially in the worldview of productive capital:
business and its needs appear as a parasitic externality imposed upon the real
functioning of our great use-value producing enterprise. This side of the divide,
we are also strangely tied to a certain normativity; not just that of doing the job
right in a technical sense, but also that of thinking in terms of provision of real
services, of user experiences, and of encouraging the free flow of information.
This sometimes spills over into outright conflict with business: where business
will be advocating some torturing of language and truth to try to present the
product, the techies will try to bend the rod back towards honesty, decency, and
transparency. What goes around comes around seems to be more or less the
prevalent attitude in the world of web development in the era after Web 2.0:
provide the services for free or cheap, give away the information, open
everything up, be decent, and hope that somehow the money will flow in. If
business acts with the mind of money capital, encountering the world as a
recalcitrance or friction from which it longs to be free, and if a tendency to try to
sell snake oil can follow from that, in the strange world where technical pride
opposes itself to capital as capitals own developed super-ego, use-value rules
with a pristine conscience, everything is sanity checked (to use the terminology
of my boss), and the aggregation of value appears as an accidental aside.
I am then, under no illusions that the antagonism which inhabits this company
provides any ground for romantic revolutionary hopes. The solidarity that we
develop against business, apart from providing us with respite and shelter from
individualised victimisation, provides a sanity check for the company itself.
Indeed, the company is well aware of this situation, and this is more or less
acknowledged in the creation of a project manager role which is explicitly
intended for the management of relations between the two sides. The
contradiction between technical staff and business is a productive one for capital:
the imperative to valorise prevents the techies from going off too far into their
esoteric concerns, whilst the basic need for realism is enforced reciprocally upon
business by the techies as they insist on the necessity of a more or less
scientific way of working.
There is little space left in this relation for a wilful refusal of work: with the
technical, individualised, and project-centred character of the role, absenteeism
will only amount to self-punishment where work that is not done now must be
done at some point later, under greater stress. Apart from that, there is the heavy
interpersonal pressure that comes with the role: since a majority of the work is
collaborative in a loose sense, heel-dragging or absenteeism necessarily
involves a sense of guilt towards the technical workers in general. Whilst I used
to consider previous jobs as crap places to go to with a hangover, I now find that

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I must moderate my social life in order not to make working life a misery.
Sabotage also, is hardly on the cards, not because of some alleged pride which
comes with being a skilled worker, but because of the nature of the product that I
am providing: whilst sabotage on a production line may be a rational technique,
where ones work resembles more that of the artisan, to sabotage would be to
make ones own life harder. One hears of freelancers and contractors who
intentionally write unmaintainable and unmanageable spaghetti code in order to
keep themselves in jobs. This technique may make sense where jobs rely heavily
on particular individuals, but where one works in a typical contemporary
development team that employs such group-focused and feedback-centred IT
management methodologies as agile and extreme programming, and where
ownership of a project is always collective, high-quality, clearly readable code
has a normative priority that goes beyond whatever simple feelings one might
have about doing ones job well.
Of course, there is that banal level on which I drag myself reluctantly out of
bed, strike off as early as I can, and push my luck in terms of punctuality; on
which I try to make work time my time as much as possible by listening to my
iPod while working, sneaking bits of reading time into my working day, or having
discreet conversations with friends over the net. This sort of thing is the real
fodder of workers enquiry. But the bottom-line recalcitrance here is simply that. It
is on the same kind of level as the recalcitrance of the human body to work
pressure: capital has never been able to make people work a regular 24 hour day
or even close and people will always test the permissible limits of their own
working day. Such is the fundamental logic of the capital-labour relation, and it
does not take the pseudo-sociology of a workers enquiry to uncover it. Such
actions only ever take place in the framework of what is permissible in a given
job and, indeed, are defined by this framework. The apparent insubordination of
my frequent lateness would soon turn to naught if it threatened my livelihood.
And the attendant social pressures that come with this job are such that whatever
time I can claim back through slack behaviour is more than made up for when
the deadline approaches on a project and I work unpaid extra hours into the
evening or start work in the middle of the night to fix servers when nobody is
using them.
It is only when sickness comes, and I am rendered involuntarily incapable of
work, that I really regain any extra time for myself. It is a strange thing to rejoice
at the onset of the flu with the thought that, in the haze of convalescence, one
may finally be able to catch up on a few things that have been pushed aside by
work. Here illness indeed appears a weapon, but one that fights its own battle,
not wielded by the erstwhile aggressor. Yet I wonder sometimes whether this

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sickness itself can be seen as merely pathological; a contingency imposed upon
the body from without. The illness that comes sometimes feels almost willed a
holiday that the body demands for itself. Perhaps there is a continuity between
genuine illness and the man-flu that a matronly temping agent once accused
me of when I wilfully ducked out of work for a week on hammy claims to terrible
sickness. It is at least certain that if sickness is all that we have, there is little
hope here for meaningful resistance.

* * *
If then, workers enquiry is about unearthing a secret history of micro-rebellions,
exposing the possibilities for struggle in the fine grain of lived experience, and in
the process, bringing consciousness of this to oneself as well as other workers,
this is workers enquiry in the cynical mode. We struggle. We are recalcitrant.
But as techies against business our struggle and our recalcitrance are integral to
the movement of capital, and as workers against capital our struggle has
absolutely no horizon and, indeed, is barely struggle at all. Our day-to-day
interest as workers is, in the most part, practically aligned with that of this
particular capital. If programmers are a vanguard in the enshrinement of use-
value, of technological libertarianism, of collaborative work, of moralistic best-
practices, of the freedom of information, it is because all of these things are
posited as necessary in the movement of capital. The systematic normativity with
which our working practice is shot through is merely a universalisation of capitals
own logic.
Just as social capital posits its own constraint in the form of the state in order
to not destroy itself through the rapacious self-interest of each individual capital,
after an early period of ugly coding due to the fragmentation of the internet into a
babel of different platforms, browsers and languages, a consensus formed in the
development world that standards were important. Central to these standards is
an idea of universalism: anything that adheres to these standards should work
and be supported. If you dont adhere to these standards, you are asking for
trouble, and it is your own fault if you find yourself pissing your capital away up a
technological back-ally. Microsoft became a pariah due to their continual
contempt for these standards, and their penchant for developing proprietary
annexes on the great public space of the net. Developers began to proudly sport
web standards badges on their personal sites, and to become vocal advocates of
technologies like Mozillas Firefox which, apart from the fact that it is open
source, always beat Internet Explorer hands-down in terms of standards-
compliance. Standards became enshrined in the moral universe of the developer,
even above open source. To adhere to standards is to take the standpoint of a

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moral absolute, whilst to diverge from them is a graceless fall into the
particularistic interests of specific groups. The universalisability of working
practices became the particular imperative of informational capital; a duty to the
invisible church of the internet.

* * *
Whilst some of these traits that come with the particularly collective character of
work do not occur in the same way for the freelancer, being your own boss
tends to amount literally to imposing upon oneself what can otherwise be left to
others. I have worked freelance a little before this job, and also in my spare time
whilst doing this job, and the very thought of such work now causes my soul to
whither a little. In freelancing, one can easily end up working uncountable hours,
fiddling with projects in ones own time, with work colonising life in general due
to the inevitable tendency to fail to self-enforce the work/life separation that at
least guarantees us a fleeting escape from the lived experience of alienated
labour. At least, when I walk out of the office I enter the world of non-work.
Indeed, the hardened work/life separation of the Mon-Fri 9-5 worker looms
increasingly large in the totality of my experience. Whilst Sunday is a gradual
sinking into the harsh knowledge that the return to work approaches and a
sometimes dragging of the dregs of the weekend into the wee small hours of the
morning, Friday evening is the opening of a gaping chasm of unquenchable
desire, and the desperate chasing after satisfaction whose ultimate logic is also
that of boozey self-annihilation. I become increasingly a hedonistic caricature of
myself, inveighing against others to party harder, longer, and blowing much of my
free time away in a fractured, hungover condition. This is the desiring state of the
old fashioned rocknroller: the beyond of work as a state of pure transcendent
desire and consumption, the nothingness of a pure abstract pleasure beyond the
mere reproduction of labour-power. The refusal to merely reproduce ourselves as
workers coupled to a desire to annihilate ourselves as humans. This is what the
Stooges 1970 means.

* * *
But when Im lying in that splintered early morning consciousness the night after
partying, slipping in and out of dreams, and as the previous nights fleeting
attempt at liberation recedes, I often find that I am dreaming in code. It can be
one of various kinds of code any of those that I work with. A sequence will pop
into my head and rattle around, unfolding itself as it goes, like a snatch of melody
or conversation repeating itself in your ears. Much of the time, if I was conscious
enough to re-examine it, itd probably be nonsense: I have enough difficulty

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dealing with the stuff when Im awake, and I suspect that my unconscious mind
would fare little better. But sometimes it is meaningful.
One morning recently I awoke with the thought of a bug in some code that I
had written a bug which I had not previously realised was there. My sleeping
mind had been examining a weeks work, and had stumbled upon an
inconsistency. Since I am a thought-worker, and since the identification and
solution of such problems is the major aspect of my job, it is not that fantastical to
say that I have been performing actual labour in my sleep. This is not the magical
fecundity of some generalised creative power, churning out value somehow
socially, beyond and ontologically before the labour process. It is actual work for
capital, indistinguishable in character from that which I perform in my working
day, but occurring in my sleeping mind. Suddenly the nightmarish idea of some
new kind of subsumption one that involves a transformation of the very
structures of consciousness begins to look meaningful. Indeed, I find that
standard paths of thought seem increasingly burned into my mind: the
momentary recognition that there is a problem with something prompts a fleeting
consideration of which bit of code that problem lies in, before I consciously jolt
my mind out of code-world and into the recognition that bugfixing does not
solve all problems. Comical as it sounds, there is something terrifying here.
Beyond the specific syntax of a language, isnt it a particular logic, or way of
operating that is brought into play when one thinks in this way? It is one that I
suspect is not neutral: the abstract, instrumental logic of high-tech capitalism. A
logic of discrete processes, operations, resources. A logic tied to particular
ontologies: the objects, classes, and instances of object-oriented
programming, the entities of markup languages like HTML. This is the logic
which increasingly inhabits my thought. And when thought becomes a mode of
activity that is productive for capital the work for which one is actually paid
when that mode of activity becomes a habit of mind that springs into motion as if
by love possessed, independent of ones willed, intentional exertion, doesnt this
prompt us to wonder whether the worker here is entirely the bourgeois subject
that capital always summoned to the marketplace: whether the subject of this
labour process is the centred individual who would set about making his own
world if it were not for the alienating, abstractive power of value? When I find
myself observing myself sleep-working, I observe myself acting in an alienated
way, thinking in a manner that is foreign to me, working outside of the formal
labour process through the mere spontaneous act of thought. Who is to say that
the overcoming of this alienation will not be that language taking its place as
mother-tongue: that alienation will not entirely swallow that which it alienates?

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 If the workplace here is the forlorn site, no longer of that exteriority of the
worker in which it is meaningful and possible to commit daily acts of
insubordination, to develop a sense of a latent autonomy posited in the very
exteriority of the worker to the process of production, but of a productive
antagonism in which technical workers give capital its sanity check and in which
recalcitrance is merely that of the bodiliness of these materials through which
capital flows; and if labour becomes a mere habit of thought that can occur at any
time even in sleep what hope is there here for the revolutionary overcoming
of capitalism? What does our revolutionary horizon look like? It must surely
appear foolish to place any hope at least in an immediate sense in the
nature of this mental work and its products, in the internet or in immaterial
labour.

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