EVERLASTING CLASSICS VERSUS THE LIVING DEAD

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the
living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from
them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world
history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[…] the shock of May ‘68 caused a revival and a re-emergence of the currents of the
workers movement which had up to then been held in great disdain by the established
parties and consigned to oblivion: the council movement in all its variants, the old
German Communist Workers Party (KAPD), the ideas of individuals like Lukacs and
Korsch, and so on. This resurrection of the past was a sign that people had not grasped
directly the reality of the situation, and that the situation itself was unable to engender
new forms of struggle and other theoretical approaches.

Jacques Camatte “Against Domestication” (1973)

In 1962 the Situationist International called for a re-examination of the classical

workers’ movement “without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its
various political and pseudo-theoretical heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure”.
Thus, it might not be altogether too unreasonable reasonable to expect that, by now, at
least a few thorough and disillusioned studies might have emerged from the ranks of
contemporary S.I stalwarts regarding the social upheavals of the 1968-1978 period in order
to help the public to distinguish clearly between the dead and the living as pertains to that
specific period of the (fairly) recent past. Among other goals, this hypothetical research
project ought to have aimed at identifying the handful of extraordinary groups and
individuals who, back in the day, struck off all superstitions concerning the past and
committed themselves to the task of critically reactivating and transforming the legacy of
the heretical communist left of the 1917-1936 period, as opposed to those who chose
instead to recycle that legacy in order to update their ideology and keep it within the most
“classical” parameters possible.
The French group Négation’s text, “The Proletariat as Destroyer of Work” (1972), is an
exceptional document that clearly belongs to the former of those two categories. Hence, it
not only manages to serenely separate itself from its past, but to this day remains an
extraordinary settling of scores with all manner of current and future candidates to
perpetuate it. However, the exception proves the rule, and it is a general rule of
(pre)history that exceptions of this nature do not go unpunished, which explains the
paradox that right after being published, such a visionary and vigorous text was to be
buried under a thick and lasting cloak of silence.
As proof that neither Négation nor the more general theoretical contributions of the
milieu it belonged to went entirely unnoticed back in the day, we might point out that
another extraordinary text by this group, Lip and the self-managed counterrevolution,
was translated and published by Black & Red (Detroit) in 1975. This was preceded by Black
& Red’s edition of Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (Gilles Dauvé
and François Martin) and of The Wandering of Humanity (Jacques Camatte) in 1974. The
publication, a few years later, of two articles (“The Remaking of the American Working
Class” [1981] and “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga
Today1” [1991]) in which Loren Goldner pores over Négation’s 1972 text and congratulates
1 http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/the-remaking-of-the-american-working-class-the-restructuring-of-
global-capital-and-the-recomposition-of-class-terrain/ y http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/communism-
its authors, might be considered as further confirmation.
Indeed, in his first article, after recounting that

[…] the very rich discussion among the ultra-left currents in France in the 1968-1973 period […]
also resurrected value in order to insist, rightly, that communism was neither “nationalized
property” nor “workers’ control of production”, but the positive supersession of commodity
production and all its categories: value, wage labor, capital, the proletariat as a social
relationship, all grasped as an integral whole. But this discussion, for all its richness (we are
thinking of the texts of Invariance in the 1968-1972 period, of Mouvement Communiste,
Negation, the International Communist Current in the same period) gradually dissipated itself
in long dissertations on Value and the Self-Dissolution of the Proletariat without, except in a few
cases, approaching the problematic of the total capital/expanded reproduction/credit or posing
it.

Goldner ends the paragraph by referring to a footnote in which he explicitly mentions as

“an exception to this tendency the excellent pamphlet of the French group Négation
entitled ‘Lip, or the self-managed counterrevolution’”.
In the second article —and we now get to the nitty-gritty of the compliments he
bestows on the “neo-Bordigists”— Goldner points out that “all of the French currents put at
center stage a text of Marx which, in the long run, may be more important than all the
other new material that started to come to light in the 1950’s and 1960’s: the so-called
‘Unpublished Sixth Chapter’ of Vol. I of ‘Capital’”. And again, just a few lines further on, he
mentions Négation and emphasises that, according to this group, capitalism, in passing
from the stage of formal to real domination “de-substantiates the worker to leave only
the proletarian” (A distinction involving a multitude of consequences, among which “The
Proletariat as Destroyer of Work” mentions the huge increase in the ranks of the
permanently unemployed in the U.S. —most of them African Americans— as a
consequence of generalised automation in industry.)
It is no secret that the author of this novel periodisation of both capitalism and the
history of the workers’ movement was Jacques Camatte. According to Goldner, “for the
first time, in my experience, it became possible to connect 20 th century working-class
history not merely to bureaucracy but to the shifting nature of capital accumulation that
produced and required bureaucracy2”. What could be more natural, therefore, than for
Loren Goldner —given the ample and fruitful application he has made of this specific
contribution of “French Neo-Bordigism” in his extensive and varied body of work— to
acknowledge such a debt?
That said, in (neo-orthodox) post-68 “left communist” circles not everyone has been as
keen to openly acknowledge the contributions of Camatte and other “neo-Bordigists” —a
label, by the way, which Négation would have rejected outright— to the “very rich
discussion” regarding the period 1968-1973. Quite the opposite. What is more, on the rare
occasions this milieu breaks its stone-cold silence on this matter, it prefers to juggle around
secondary and subsequent motivations for its hostility rather than recalling those that truly
hit home3. It is worth mentioning that Goldner himself has by no means embraced the
more controversial theses that both Camatte and Négation derived from the new
periodization, nor has he ever ventured to refute the alleged “mistakes” they would contain.
Perhaps even more revealing is that his moderate defence of Camatte’s “early work” 4 seems
utterly incapable of assuaging the outraged indignation of certain activists, who suspect —
confusedly but quite rightly— that regardless of how “early” that work may be, it still
is-the-material-human-community-amadeo-bordiga-today/ .
2 “Left Communism and Trotskyism: A Round Table” (http://bthp23.com/LeftCommTrot.pdf).
3 Thus Camatte is usually berated —in not entirely unwarranted fashion— for renouncing the theory of value
and his subsequent theoretical wandering, whereas Gilles Dauvé and other “neo-Bordigists” (sic) are accused
of a lukewarm attitude (if not outright collusion) vis-à-vis the Holocaust denial of former Socialisme ou
Barbarie member and erstwhile éminence grise of La Vielle Taupe bookshop, Philippe Guillaume.
4 “Left Communism and Trotskyism: A Round Table”.
undermines essential postulates of the “ruling revolutionary ideology” in depth.
Let us examine, then, without further ado, some of the corollaries —so unspeakably
awkward and unacceptable to some quarters— contained within the new paradigm
promoted by Camatte and Co.
The first one is that the main vector in the transition from the prevalence of absolute
surplus value extraction in capitalist accumulation (formal domination) to the prevalence
of relative surplus value extraction (real domination) was none other than the activity of
the working class in defence of its own interests. In other words, despite what their
protagonists may have believed and the (intensely) rosy hue with which revolutionary
ideology usually depicts the classical workers’ movement —including its most “glorious”
moments and those richest in “lessons”—, in the final analysis, this movement turned out
to be an internal moment of capitalist development itself, a conclusion which sounds the
death knell for the myth according to which the worker’s movement supposedly “betrayed”
its true purpose for reasons somehow foreign to its own inherent dynamic.
The transition from one phase to another not only entailed a gigantic increase in the
organic composition of capital and the consequent need for “scientific management”; the
resulting technological leap and the intensification of labour also required more
sophisticated and internalised means of discipline, as well as the concomitant need to mass
produce everything related to the reproduction of the labour force (consumer goods,
household chores, healthcare, leisure activities). It was, therefore, a complete social
overhaul that also required the progressive integration or elimination of pre-capitalist
sectors.
This first corollary is the easiest one to accept —and the most difficult one to refute—
for a fraction of the new “communist left” born in the early and late 1970s (i.e. Loren
Goldner or Internationalist Perspective). However, it is rejected outright —explicitly or not
— by its largest and most militant sector, which senses that beyond the demystification of
the historical role of the workers’ movement only further catastrophes may lie in store. For
example:

What the concept of the transition from formal to real domination lacks is a compelling political
vision, a clear perspective on the necessity of revolution, for communism now. (Mac Intosh, The
Political Need for a Conception of Decadence, Internationalist Perspective 44)

Indeed, the next corollary, instead of constituting some form of new departure
concerning capitalism’s “mortal crisis”, heralds the mortal crisis of the workers’ movement
—both “classical” and “new”— which was just beginning to make itself felt back then. The
fully capitalist configuration of the labour process and the integration of the reproduction
of the labour force make everything which, under formal domination, turned the condition
of the working classes into something to be “emancipated” from capital disappear (which
does not mean —at least according to Négation’s conception— that the antagonistic nature
of capitalist social relations themselves disappears or becomes diluted, on the contrary).
Therefore, and given that under real domination the negation of the proletarian condition
represents the only possible overcoming of capitalism, every notion of such an overcoming
based on the assertion of a “working class community” pitted against a “parasitic” ruling
class, and the subsequent seizure of the means of production by the producers is also
thrown into crisis. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the widespread “refusal of work” and
the resulting forms of struggle were already hinting at the fact that it had become
impossible to go on picturing the revolutionary process as a unilateral opposition between
“them” and “us” (clues of which could be found both in the outcome of May 68 and of the
Italian movement of 1977)5.

5 Both the “refusal of work” and the Camattian critique of “organization” led to heated —but very scarcely
publicised— debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Besides Échanges et Mouvement’s « Refus du travail, faits
et discussions », (published in 1979 in the U.K. under the title “The Refusal of Work”
 The third and final corollary of the penetration of all spheres of existence by the law
of value is the crisis of politics. Under formal domination, antagonisms between classes
which represented rival modes of production —not to mention the existence of a large
numbers of small independent producers— transformed politics into a necessary form of
mediating class conflict. For the working class, still in the infancy of its development, it was
both possible and necessary to participate in this sphere in order to foster alliances and
protect its own interests, and “working class” politics and unionism eventually built a
genuine and autonomous “parallel society” within capitalist society.
Once the transition to real domination has been carried out, value in process, now
capable of organising the existence of the “material community” on its own, displaces
politics as a source of social cohesion; the former survives, basically, as a superficial form
of social integration and alternation in power at the same time that the consumers of
ideology recede before the ideologies of consumerism. During the “transitional period”, the
workers’ movement progressively loses its former autonomy as its organizations are
integrated into the machinery of the state, while the weight of the political sphere
continually declines in the face of the constant expansion of the spheres of mass sports, the
film industry, scheduled leisure, “popular” music, etc.
Since 1968 and the “return of social revolution”, the crisis of politics confronted the
post-68 “communist left” with two intimately related problems which it cannot even pose
correctly without beginning to renounce itself.
On the one hand, given that it still conceives communist revolution in the perspective
of formal domination —as a process of political unification of the proletariat leading up to
the seizure of power and the implementation of a programme 6—, it continues to believe in
the need for a “a programmatically-armed militant stratum” whose mission would be, if
not to become a hegemonic political organization just in time for its date with “revolution”,
at least to transform its “consciousness” into the dominant revolutionary consciousness.
This induces it to periodically fall prey to the illusion that social movements that do not
manage to go beyond the sphere of politics (no matter how many “radical” moments they
may contain) are somehow destined to flow into communist revolution, resulting in
astounding flops which “revolutionary theory” cannot explain satisfactorily and from
which it is unable to draw any other conclusion than “we’ll have to do better next time”.
On the other hand, under real domination any organization that does not contribute
direct or indirectly to the valorisation process soon finds itself confronting the dilemma of
either adopting practices that will allow it to survive and thrive (if need be, by merging
with the most successful ventures in its field) or stagnating in irrelevance until it folds.
Should a political crisis of the system require it —as we have seen in recent years— the
demand for greater “radicalism” is quickly catered to, either by the founding of new
organizations or the radicalization of those already in existence (or both). Truly
superfluous political and trade union groupings, however, can only perpetuate themselves
as rackets, using the same general techniques of those who “make it” but with more
specifically sectarian features, such as mythical narratives and messianic programmes
destined to bolster the ideological enthusiasm of the rank and file, foster competition with
other groups within the same “milieu”, isolate “its” audience from noxious outside
influences and establish scapegoats in order to unleash purges when needed.
In the specific case of the post-68 “communist left”, however, its utter inability to
[https://libcom.org/library/echanges-movement-refusal-work]), we should mention “The Illusions of
‘Solidarity’” (http://libcom.org/library/illusion-solidarity-david-brown), as well as “On Organization: Two
Reviews of the Camatte/Collu Pamphlet” (https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/279-december-1976/on-
organization/) and “Camatte, Collu & On Organization” (https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/280-february-
1977/camatte-collu-on-organization/).
6 The crisis of politics leads to a crisis of the “communist programme” from the very moment the
communization of society can no longer be conceived of as the application of a “programme” that would be in
line with the historical needs of the proletariat, but which would require its ratification or approval as a result
of its simultaneously external character in regard to its being and its real activity.
seriously deal with these two “blind spots” of its being without signing its own death
warrant is merely the flipside of its refusal, back in the day, to embrace certain theses,
which were explained with crystal-clear clarity, among others, by Jacques Camatte and the
Négation group:

We must say right away that when the proletariat expresses itself as a class, it constitutes, in
its immediately destructive dimension, the positive refusal of the material community and of all
its forms of organization. […] The crucial moment of this manifestation is […] the refusal […] to
accept any split between decision and action, and hence, the split between being and thought
upon which the possibility of a political direction based on the mechanism of direct democracy
was built in the past (cf. soviets or councils) or, more generally, upon which the mechanism of
democratic-despotic representation within the old art of organizing society from outside was
founded: politics. […]
Any formal party is no more than an organization quickly reabsorbed as a racket. The
historical party can only be realised by the proletarian movement constituting itself as a class.
[…] All other conceptions of the party’s foundation , such as that founded on the theory of
consciousness coming from outside, rest on the implicit negation of the proposition that the
proletariat will realise theory. (Jacques Camatte, “Transition”, 1969)

F. Corriente

June 2017