Foreword to the Spanish translation of Endnotes #4

The following is the foreword to the Spanish translation of issue 4 of Endnotes journal, published by Ediciones Extáticas. In this, the fundamental ideas of Endnotes’ theoretical work are critically presented.

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«The factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future»

— Endnotes

Utopias are a scarce good and the past weighs so heavily on us that it bends our heads towards books. At a juncture like this, the theoretical production of collectives such as Endnotes can be a good foothold to help us look forward. Since the magazine offered its first issue to the public, it has focused all its efforts on thinking about the conditions for the possibility of a communist overcoming of the present order. In that issue it presented the fundamental elements for the study of the class struggle experiences of the 20th century, not to look for in them a strategy or paradigm adequate to the present times, but to get rid of the dead weight of history. Endnotes resists the view that past history would provide us with the strategic keys to the present, a position that could only be taken on the false assumption that the present is essentially like the past. The fundamental elements of the society in which we live remain the same, but the concrete articulation of the class relation has changed since the times of a healthy workers’ movement, a variation which in turn has produced a change in the «conditions of possibility» of emancipation.

Addressing this situation, the collective focuses on the global tendencies that articulate capitalist society, tracing the nature of the struggles that periodically unfold in it, developing its study by indissolubly linking both aspects of the historical process. The logic that dominates society is that of capitalist accumulation, which develops through the class relation between labour and capital as a relation of exploitation and domination. This relation, or accumulation itself, has a history, a concrete development in time. And so it is that an effort to grasp this development becomes an effort to think through the presuppositions, dynamics and perspectives of struggle. Determining whether utopia is something really possible, if it is, depends on this effort.

Avoiding commonplaces, even to the point of revealing himself a rebellious son of the so-called ultra-left, Endnotes dives nakedly into the study of the thing itself: the struggle cycles must be approached from their own presuppositions and starting from the bets that are at stake within them. However, to explain these struggles by themselves would run into the problem of not being able to explain why they are fought in this way and not in any other way. General social trends are important here not simply as a context, but rather as what determines the internal dynamics of the struggle. Thus, from a communist position, the question is asked about the limits that these struggles continually face in the process of constituting a unitary force that overcomes the reactive moment and logic and pushes them towards the abolition of the capitalist social formation. Endnotes calls this acute inability to generate unity the problem of composition, a problem that constitutes one of the main concerns of the collective throughout its thinking. At a more general level, the problem is formulated as unity in separation: the universal dependence of human beings living in society, coexisting with their reciprocal indifference. The fact that this fourth issue of the journal is named after this formula, «unity in separation», already tells us about its content. The question of separation is a question of unity, perhaps both constituting the most general questions of emancipation. Questions that, beyond their abstract character, what they pursue is to find the link between the real struggles and the emergence of a unitary force oriented towards revolution.

The problem of composition

Since the problem of composition is central to Endnotes’ theoretical work, it is worthwhile to present it in its essential outlines, beginning with its own words:

«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 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.»¹

Thus defined, it is possible to notice what composition consists of and, above all, the reasons why it is a problem. It is a matter of «composing, coordinating or unifying proletarian fractions, in the course of their struggle». Now, for Endnotes this is problematic, since unlike in the past, this unity does not seem to present itself as a tendency or as given in itself. In this sense, what unifies workers is the community of capital, which gives them their character as variable capital, situating them in competitive dynamics as sellers and in reciprocal indifference as consumers; the cooperative unity of labour is the cooperation by and for capital, which unites workers in the production of an alienated and concentrated social power that then opposes them as a hostile and disintegrating force. Capital unites the proletarians in a social process of universal dependence, at the same time as it atomizes them². It unites them, but not as a class with its own interests:

«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»³

From these coordinates, the question arises: «how can the class act against capital, in spite of its divisions?»⁴ For Endnotes, the answer is not given as the affirmation of a latent subject whose potencies should be freed⁵. It is not a question of affirming the proletariat as a class on the basis of its being in itself. On the contrary, it adopts a point of view for which unity can only be posed in the course of the struggle itself, as an overcoming of being a proletarian; it will be by overcoming the limits found in the struggles that this unity will find its practical solution. As long as there is not «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»⁶.

Endnotes tends to identify struggle and revolt. It can not be said that it confuses them, but it often identifies them. The struggles that Endnotes studies are always embedded in cycles of explicit struggles: Arab Spring, movements of the squares such as those in Greece and Spain, Occupy Wall Street, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2014), Argentina (2001), England (2011), Black Lives Matter in the United States, Los Angeles (2020), etc. That these struggles can be so clearly situated in time and space already indicates their explicit, revolt character. Trying to search within the internal dynamics of these revolts for possible solutions or ways out of the problem of composition, one ends up in a dead end⁷. We should ask ourselves if, perhaps, this identification between struggle and revolt is an obstacle for thinking about the solution to the problem of composition.

Although its dynamics depend on causes and ends that exceed it, there can only be a «phenomenology of the experience of revolt»⁸. This is how Endnotes tries to distance himself from a «general theory of revolt». Because of the essentially unpredictable character of these struggles, theory can only be produced post festum. Now, the question for unity and for the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production already presupposes an excess with respect to that immediate experience; otherwise, the question for unity would have no foundation. In Endnotes’ theoretical work, the revolution acts as a limiting element, allowing to measure where to focus the theoretical effort in the study of the cycles of struggle. The limit of struggles is where revolution —or unity— could emerge or where its possibility vanishes. On the contrary, I think that a true immanent limit of struggle would be that which those who struggle would encounter and which limits the achievement of their objectives, if not prefixed, at least those that define the solution to their problems. That is to say, the question of composition already presupposes the horizon of unity. At the same time, unity, if it is not an end in itself, must be the means to something else. Otherwise, from a revolutionary point of view, who cares whether those who fight are united or not? Even in revolts where everything is pure passion, where the highest goal is the very reproduction of the revolt, if we stick strictly to its content, the limits can only refer to that which impedes its continuity. Thus, left alone at the mercy of the «phenomenology of the experience of revolt» that Endnotes proposes to us, communism can only appear to us with legitimacy in theory, but not in practice. «The concept of communisation marks out an orientation: an orientation towards the conditions of possibility of communism»⁹. However, it will appear as a theoretical horizon above the real content of the struggles, a horizon that assigns limits here and there, whose correspondence with reality, with the concrete practice of the struggles, will be null.

What are the causes and objectives of the cycles of struggle following the 2008 crisis? They are struggles against corruption and austerity; struggles for democracy. In them, 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»¹⁰. The appropriate political form for this type of movement is the democratic front, which explains the rise of populism. The subject of struggle is the people; the enemy, the elites —even globalism or immigrants, that is, any «enemy of the nation». Within the people, one finds all kinds of class differences and also between class fractions. Class unity among workers does not even appear as an objective and is only present when it is maintained «at the level of sectional struggles»¹¹. Paradoxically, contemporary struggles «remain the struggles of workers»¹². Subsuming all this diversity under some concept such as «the many» or «the precariat» does not solve the fragmentation, as Endnotes recognizes. What is the point, then, of asking about the unity of the proletariat starting from the revolts themselves, in whose development unity neither occurs nor seems likely to occur?

If we depart from explicit struggles, from revolts, it is difficult to affirm that in «every struggle, there is a tension towards unity», that «there is a tension towards the rupture» and that there is a «tendency towards formal innovation»¹³. Yet these affirmations do not seem to be far from a «fixed theory of struggle», from which precisely Endnotes sought to distance itself. In explicit struggles, the existing disintegration within the proletariat does not necessarily lead to unity; rather, the opposite seems to be the case. It is undoubtedly true that every struggle needs a degree of unity, whether organized or purely moral, in order to progress in its objectives. However, contemporary struggles seem to point to the interclassism of this unity —«the people», «the multitude», «the 99%»— or to its constitution as an aggregation of a myriad of sectorial interests of the population. That unity is composed to defend an idealized capitalism, rather than to achieve a post-capitalist society, seems to be more the rule than the exception. On the other hand, it is often observed that, instead of a tendency towards unity, the matter begins with a unity postulated at first on the basis of a common objective —for example, to reduce the exorbitant price of fuel or to avoid an unpopular reform of the Constitution— which is followed by a tendency towards disintegration and towards conciliation, instead of a «rupture». The proletariat goes to revolt divided for an infinity of reasons, a division which it is not capable of overcoming in long processes of non-explicit struggle, nor by means of explicit struggles not assimilable to revolts. Then, why seek in these revolts¹⁴ the solution to the problem of composition? Why would a revolt go to solve in a few days, weeks or months what a long more peaceful process of organization and struggle is not capable of solving? Why not look for the answer in those periods in which there are no revolts or why not look for it outside of them?

The articles in this issue do not speak very much in favor of the idea of looking for composition in the riots. In Brown V. Ferguson, which studies the development of the riots following the racist murders in the United States, we find a picture in which the radicalism of the black proletarians is mixed with the conditions for cooptation by an educated black middle class for whom political activism is offered as a professional career opportunity. The great democratizing dynamics of contemporary movements can be read in Gather us from among the nations. There, the struggles that occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina throughout 2014 are analyzed, where the movement, even if it was mostly composed of workers, «demanded more democratic institutions, less corruption, to replace a government of crooks with a government of experts», since «corruption was seen by protesters as the main cause of the economic problems affecting Bosnia-Herzegovina»¹⁵. In this cycle of struggles, very similar to Greece and Spain, unity was sought through a multiplicity of demands, trying not to leave anyone out, instead of grouping the multiplicity of sectors with different demands under a universal demand —a type of demand that, by the way, would not have solved the issue either. However, «it remained a weak unity, and as the movement ebbed, conflicts between the various fractions emerged in the plenums»¹⁶. The fact is that the demands, by means of their unification or by means of their merging into one or a few, cannot solve divisions rooted and continuously reproduced in the real process of life. These divisions are also reproduced by means of the urban spatial layout and the reorganization of productive chains, a conclusion that can be drawn from the article Its own peculiar decor. In this article, by tracing the relationship between capital and space, it is shown how the decentralization of class neighborhoods and productive centers is one of the factors that undermines the conditions for the emergence of the collective worker. After all, the existence of the collective worker depended to a large extent on its mass congregation in a spatial point, be it the factory or the working class neighborhood.

If revolutionary potential is supposed to lie in unity among fractions of the class of the dispossessed, but this unity does not seem to be a tendency that manifests itself or will manifest itself in revolts or in cycles of explicit struggle, it is very likely that to look for it we must look elsewhere, if it can be found at all.

Class and communisation

Given that, on the basis of contemporary struggles, a disruptive horizon with the capitalist mode of production does not seem to be in sight, it will at least have to exist as a latent possibility or as a tendency somewhere, at least if we want to avoid some voluntarist version of militant communism. By voluntarism I understand, here, the idea of a political position that stands above the world with a strategy drawn from the historical study of the past, from theoretical recipes or philosophical delusions, and intends to concretize it in the world independently of its state and tendencies. Forcing circumstances to dance to the rhythm of the organization: that is voluntarism. Neither Endnotes nor Théorie Communiste nor the theorists of communisation in general subscribe to this vision of revolutionary action. For them, there is a component of invariability in capitalist society which requires us to think a communist theory and which justifies the reality of emancipation, but this invariability is accompanied by the historical development of capitalism, which is what marks the possibilities, the horizons and the concrete perspectives of the struggle for communism.

Fundamentally, the vision of Théorie Communiste (TC) is formulated in this way: labour and capital are two poles of the capitalist class relation; between both poles there exists a relation of mutual dependence and reproduction, in such a way that one cannot be understood without the other; if emancipation is assumed as the affirmation of one of both poles, in this case the pole of labour, the process of emancipation finds in itself the elements for counter-revolution, since the affirmation of one of those poles necessarily implies the reproduction of the other pole, capital. A revolution posed as the affirmation of the working class must inevitably reproduce capital. This is the argument of TC, which passes barely uncritically into the theoretical corpus of Endnotes¹⁷ and which enjoys popularity among some of the heterodox and left communist thinkers. From this general syllogism, also known as the «antinomy of class struggle», several conclusions are derived that often appear in communisation theories. For example, the famous thesis that TC formulates in its critique of the paradigm of Autonomy¹⁸, which states that the first revolutionary act is self-organization and that the rest will run against it.

The problem with this vision is due to an excess of formalism, to a sin of abstraction. It could even be said that it is a dialectical trick to give an abstract and universal answer to questions that in the concrete are not only more complex, but also different. If we leave aside the content of the relation and its poles, disregard its own dynamics and abstract ourselves from other more concrete aspects of its nature, from any relation in which both aspects or poles are in a situation of mutual dependence and reproduction we could conclude that they can not be understood one without the other and that the affirmation of one implies the affirmation of the other. We could exchange labour and capital for any other concepts that are in such a relation and we would find the same result. Now, if we do not want to think by means of the logic of appearance, whose critique is a necessary condition for revolutionary theory, then we must grant validity to these abstract relations only insofar as they articulate the logic of concrete knowledge. Otherwise, by starting from such a formalist position, one can only arrive at the adoption of uncomfortable positions. One of these positions is expressed in many variants, but they all are reduced to a common determinant: the revolution does not follow from the internal necessity of the capitalist mode of production, but is derived from the parameters of a consciousness that has placed itself above or on the margins of the world. Surprisingly, this first position is more common than it seems, but it is not the one Endnotes holds, as can be seen if one studies his critical stance towards Camatte’s romanticism, towards Agamben’s communalism and towards different vanguardisms. The second position can explain neither emancipation nor its possibility, no matter how much it thinks it can; it makes communism unintelligible, because it either does not link the existing communist tendencies in the development of the capitalist formation with their positive resolution in a communist society —the case of TC; or else it diagnoses tendencies that only allow us to accept the possibility of a world in which profit-oriented production does not reign and to seek in the struggles the moment in which the proletarians —or the «demonstrators»— become aware of that possibility and produce a rupture —this is the case of Endnotes; consequently, they are reluctant to admit a positive content of emancipation.

The communist horizon of the experiences of the period of the workers’ movement is articulated by the phenomenon of social labour. The capitalist mode of production not only develops without precedent the technical realm of the productive forces, but also develops the set of social relations that allow —or at least allowed— to glimpse the emancipation contained in this development. In the process of life within capitalist society there is a tension between the increasingly social character of production and its private appropriation. Workers cooperate in production, acquire the capacities to manage and participate in the labour process and the administration of things, free themselves from personal dependencies, develop the productivity of labour by reducing the time that would have to be spent in the «realm of necessity», make the exploitation of labour and oppression on the basis of nationality, race or gender increasingly superfluous at the historical level and produce an infinity of other tendencies which, if developed, come into direct contradiction with the relations of private appropriation and derivatives that result from the capitalist mode of production. Emancipation as positive freedom, as the capacity to affirm the individuality of the human being, becomes intelligible and possible only insofar as these tendencies exist. Now, these tendencies, which we might call communist, develop at the cost of others, whereby both workers and capitalists are subjected to a domination of things over persons, to a mute compulsion and, in general, to a set of material constrictions and forms of consciousness which continually undermine the full development of the communist potentialities to be found in the movement of capitalist society as a whole. Nowhere is this double soul of capitalism better described than in Capital, where the internal law of the capitalist mode of production is studied as a totality that finds as one of its moments its own negation. Communism is possible and thinkable only in this sense.

It is common to quote that communism is the «real movement which abolishes the present state of things», as if, here, «real movement» meant that communism is an organized practical movement. Without disdaining the need for organized practice, what this idea claims is that capitalism produces the conditions and tendencies that work towards its abolition: it produces its own gravedigger. That is why emancipation is not justified because the productive forces have developed so much, because we live through wars or because capitalism devours nature. This only allows us to affirm that capitalism is undesirable, possibly unfair, surely unbearable, but in no case does it justify that the capitalist mode of production can be abolished. Nor can the possibility of its abolition be found in the mere critique of the ahistoricism that dominates bourgeois ideology; that is to say, to demonstrate that capitalism is not eternal, that there have existed other social formations governed by logics radically different from the present ones, although it is one of the pillars of revolutionary critique —again, Marx’s Capital is paradigmatic in this sense—, it is not sufficient to justify emancipation on solid grounds, because from establishing that capitalism is something that has become, it does not follow that capitalism can or will become something else. Emancipation was postulated, at least for scientific socialism, its followers and even many of its detractors, as the development of the tendency of the socialization of labour towards its transformation into a society of free and associated producers. Although each doctrine expressed it in its own way, this was the positive content of communism and the horizon of the communist revolution. The means, tactics and strategies varied, and even the formulation of the problem; but, in general, the revolutionary expressions of the workers’ movement were oriented towards a society based on free cooperation, without domination, where no one would appropriate the work of others, where society would decide what to produce and how to manage itself, and where private property would be abolished. Under this paradigm and with many nuances, the affirmation of the proletariat —as a party, as a confederation, as a system of councils or whatever— was conceived as a moment of its abolition.

Communisation theorists will agree that this was the perspective of a century ago, except perhaps with the affirmation of a positive content of communism in authors such as Marx. For TC and Endnotes, this perspective of communism as a program to be realized, is catalogued as programmatism. In turn, this would be the emancipatory horizon of the period of the «old workers’ movement» and not an invariable communist horizon. The central idea in its thought is that this horizon would have been exhausted long ago. Moreover, as we have seen, TC and his followers see a problem in this perspective, because the affirmation of the proletariat as a class would necessarily imply the affirmation of capital as a class. After all, one class cannot exist without at least one other class existing, and what gives the ruling class function to one is what gives its dominated class function to the other. This is self-evident. What is a sophist trick, a discursive play, is to maintain that the affirmation of the proletariat and of an identity¹⁹ that accompanies it necessarily implies its affirmation as a class and, therefore, the affirmation of capital. TC defends that this perspective consists in «the affirmation of the proletariat as the dominant class of society, through the liberation and affirmation of labour as the organisation of society», an affirmation that implies «formalisation of what they are in existing society as the base or anchorage point of the new society to construct as the liberation of what they are» and concludes that self-organisation «is the self-organised struggle with its necessary extension the self-organisation of the producers; in a word, liberated labour; in another word, value»²⁰. This, sooner or later, can only produce counter-revolution:

«The proletariat self-organizes, it breaks with its previous situation, but if this rupture is only its “liberation”, the reorganization of what it is, of its activity, without capital, rather than the destruction of its previous situation, that is to say if it remains self-organized, if it doesn’t go beyond this stage, it will automatically be defeated.»²¹

It is obvious that self-organization will have to be transformed as its tasks change. The clearest example is that of a union, which loses its meaning in a context where wages no longer exist. Of this, at most, could remain its assembly or some committee, if they fulfill a necessary function for society; but in no way will they be part of a union properly speaking. TC knows this and develops a long argument to simply say that the organized proletariat will have to fight against that which determines it as a class. And with this it believes to tell us something new. Under TC’s perspective, the relation between economic form and material content is disfigured, making a specific social form of the product of labour something necessarily linked to social production in general. The social conditions under which the product of labour acquires the form of the value of commodities ceases to be the object of science, and the Critique of Political Economy is replaced by a paraphrase or Analytic of the concept of «value» or «labour». Since here it wants to start from concepts and operate with them, incurring in the imprecision already pointed out, communism can only come to be conceived as pure contingency, as a rupture without continuity. What is for the proletariat «the reorganization of what it is, of its activity, without capital» but «the destruction of its previous situation»?

The existence of a sector of society to which, by virtue of its position in the social division of labour, the capitalist economic form can be presented as an increasingly historically obsolete form is what makes the proletariat a class that can establish a positive relationship between its struggle and emancipation. But not only because of this possibility of becoming conscious, but more importantly, because the affirmation of labour, that is, the extension of the condition of the worker to all members of society, immediately corresponds to the abolition of the system of wage labour and of the bases on which all class distinction rests, because it is an immediately universalizable position without prejudice to anyone except the exploiters and those who live off the labour of others. Hence, the old agitative formula that pointed to the capitalists as parasites is not entirely misguided, although it is evidently lame. What is misguided is the critique of the theoretical content expressed by this agitative resource, when it is reduced to its most infantile posture. Indeed, if we replace capitalists by other subjects that assume the functions of capital, that embody it, be they state functionaries or cooperativist members, it is clear that the capitalists pointed out as parasites were not the problem, but whoever embodies that function, that is, the capitalists under another form, a necessary function insofar as there are private and independent producers regulating production through the market mechanism, continues to be the problem. It is even understandable that if we want to reason at abstract levels, the affirmation of the working class in the sense in which the communist doctrine has always defended it is incompatible with the existence of capital as its necessary correlate, because, here, the affirmation is accompanied by extension, making the determinations of one aspect the determinations of the whole of the relation and, to the same extent, negating the relation itself and what this puts in its «poles». Without the dynamics of the relation, which is not a scholastic problem, but a practical one, and which is therefore situated at a more concrete level, we are left only with its reproduction ad infinitum and its unsolvable character, unless a rupture emerges through a rift as deus ex machina.

If in this class only pure negativity were enclosed, communism would be an arbitrary horizon, based on bare possibilities. Thus it is that the first act of the communist revolution is self-organization, but the following ones can not go against it, but at most against its outdated forms, as we have seen in the case of the trade union, forms that will become superfluous as long as the relations of production are transformed. The association of the proletariat in its struggle against capital —which implies movement, process and, consequently, change and adaptation in forms— is the basis on which communist society, the society of free and associated producers, is built, because it is this very association which renders capitalism superfluous and gives communism its actuality. It is not the self-organization of the proletariat that necessarily produces capital as the opposite pole, but the inability of this self-organization to extend and intensify, on the one hand, and to revolutionize the way in which it is produced and lived in accordance with this extension and intensification. It was precisely the weakness of these two factors that produced, roughly speaking, the defeat of the revolutions of the twentieth century²².

Thus, the self-organization of the proletariat is not merely a temporary logistical resource by means of which to implement measures to abolish capitalism; it is not a whim. In the communisation theories, there is frequent mention of an unspecified collective unity²³ applying measures such as the extension of gratuity, as if any collective unity could produce communism. The doors are thus left open to a non-analytical dissociation between a «subjective» and an «objective» element, which is the same as opening the doors to voluntarism; that from which the communisation theorists wanted to avoid. The conditions of possibility of communism on the one hand, the consciousness of them on the other, and what it would be a matter of is that the latter organizes itself to appropriate those conditions, even in a critical way. But as we have seen that the advocates of communisation are averse to organized prefigurative practice, this voluntarism is only expressed in theory, and is therefore not incoherent with a critique of practical voluntarism.

In the approach of the communisation theorists, consistent with the above ideas, any possibility of the intellection of a positive content of communism is obliterated, and yet, although they oppose programmatism, in practice they are forced to operate with a kind of program. All the immediate measures of communisation already presuppose a positive content: the measures are what is eliminated or applied in order to arrive at that positive content or goal. The communism of communisation refers to the immediate abolition²⁴ of value, commodity, state,… and measures such as the extension of gratuity, etc. Now, these measures cannot be carried out by themselves, but only insofar as they are replaced by a new form of production, a form that cannot be arbitrarily postulated. They can present them as negative measures²⁵ only to the extent that they are not consistent in their consideration of why these measures and not others²⁶. Paradoxically, all these measures are abstracted from the context in which they were conceived and made sense, precisely that of programmatism, in order to be applied in a situation where this perspective is supposed to have disappeared. For example, the measure par excellence of programmatism, the expropriation of the means of production by the workers —id est, its affirmation—, was a necessary, although insufficient, measure for the abolition of commodity production. If we abstract the abolition of the commodity-form from its positive measure, the former loses all foundation. The measures of programmatism are inverted in the perspective of communisation; they are the same horizon turned upside down. This is the inversion that runs through this new perspective, formulated in the context of the exhaustion of the era of programmatism. It remains to be discussed what are the differences between this new period and that of the workers’ movement.

Class relation and communism

«[If] the conception of proletariat as the motive force of the coming social revolution were abandoned, then I would have to admit that I was through, that my life no longer had any meaning»

— Karl Kautsky²⁷

The fact that there is a tendency towards the socialization of labour, however, does not imply the existence of a tendency towards the unity of workers on the basis of their interests, towards the association of workers. The two ideas should not be confused. What is interesting in Endnotes is the thesis that communisation is the horizon of struggles today because this can no longer be conceived as the extension of workers’ association or as the affirmation of the class. This is the idea to be highlighted from the historical study made in A history of separation, the central work in this issue. In this review of the history of the workers’ movement (1883-1982), the foundations on which its rise was sustained, mainly based on a context where «the factory system» constituted «the kernel of a new society in formation», as well as its fall, due to the progressive dismantling of this engine, are pointed out. The transformations that took place in capitalist society in turn transformed the prospects of a tendency towards association into its opposite, demonstrating that it was «this atomising feature of the new world, not the cooperative aspects of work in the factory, that would prove dominant»²⁸.

A history of separation is a balance sheet with a consequently critical approach, because instead of assuming a priori that strategies or tactics useful for the present are going to be recovered or instead of seeking to identify laws, successes, errors or betrayals, the aim is to explain the context in which those strategies and tactics made sense, if they have disappeared and what are currently the conditions that make communism possible, if there are any. While many communist organisations base their lines of action on the same premises as those of the rise of the workers’ movement and many other organisations, while recognizing this decline, try to apply the same tactics to resurrect what is already dead, Endnotes contests this procedure²⁹. Moreover, as opposed to the usual inclination to narrating the history of the workers’ movement through the institutions it created —parties, internationals, confederations, trade unions, etc.— and the debates that took place within them, the collective puts these in relation to the variations in the mode of production, the development of the class relation and its composition, the crises, the international division of labour, the weight of the productive sectors, etc. That is to say, it does not construct a narrative based on an immediate relationship of struggle in which the workers’ movement and capital are contenders who win or are defeated, but rather shifts the point of view to the global social dynamics where the possibilities and foundations for the strength or weakness of one or the other are situated³⁰.

With all of the above, it is now possible to understand the fundamental orientation that is at the basis of this and the rest of Endnotes’ writings, namely, that which investigates the differences between the era of programmatism and that of communisation. Programmatism was the communist perspective in conditions where the tendency towards social labour was accompanied by the tendency towards the class unity of the workers³¹, in which a direct correlation was glimpsed between the affirmation of the class as representative of associated labour and the abolition of the wage-labour system. The development of capitalist social relations was conceived as being accompanied by an increasing consciousness of the workers as those who really lifted the world on their shoulders, so that they could afford to trace a route that consisted of seizing political power and expropriating the capitalists. What capitalist development seemed to bring with it, however, was not a greater class consciousness of the workers, but a greater integration of the workers into the capitalist way of life and, what is worse, especially through those institutions that represented their organization as a class. This integration was accompanied by an ever greater atomisation that would eventually lead to the death of the workers’ movement. As if that were not enough, a possible resurgence of the workers’ movement would eventually be banished by factors such as the decline of industry and the reorganization of production worldwide, but above all, by the increasingly noticeable trend towards surplus population, a thesis that constitutes Endnotes’ key argument.

Under capitalist social conditions, more and more people are reduced to wage workers. This is expressed in terms of absolute and relative proletarianisation. Absolutely, insofar as the peasantry and other anachronistic classes disappear and are pushed into the proletarian condition. Relatively, to the extent that an ever greater proportion of the population already involved in capitalist social relations tends to become impoverished, ruined and more and more dependent on the sale of its labour power. Now, as workers put their labour power in motion, the accumulation of capital increases the productivity of labour and makes it increasingly superfluous. The reduction of necessary labour produces a relative increase in the superfluity of labour capacity and this is expressed in a growing surplus population, absolutely redundant. This surplus population does not appear immediately or necessarily as an army of unemployed, but expresses itself through forms of underemployment, informal employment, sporadic work, dependence on subsidies, worse working conditions and wages, etc. Endnotes’ position on the importance and impact of these tendencies are well set out in Misery and debt and in Crisis in the class relation, where they argue, with Marx, that the increase of the surplus population is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation:

«With these shifting conditions, the horizon of the class relation, and the struggles 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.»³²

As capitalist production develops, instead of witnessing a greater development of the collective worker and its class consciousness, what has been revealed has been the opposite, so that it does not seem «possible to believe in the collective worker as the hidden truth of capitalist social relations»³³. According to Endnotes’ diagnosis, insofar as class belonging is precisely what divides proletarians and insofar as the form of the wage as the point of confrontation between proletariat and capital loses ever more centrality, there is no longer room to appeal to the notion of class consciousness. Instead, what seems to bring workers together are those communities discussed above: the people, the 99%, real democracy, etc. When workers, under these kinds of communities of struggle, confront the elites, the 1%, the corrupt, the bankers, global warming and similar notions, while not acting as a class or immediately against the capitalist class, they nevertheless carry out a moment of critique of capitalism. Considering that for Endnotes and TC the communist horizon varies with each cycle of struggle, «the communist horizon of the present may announce itself, not in a growing class consciousness, but rather, in a growing consciousness of capital»³⁴. What this means is that in the present one can no longer expect revolutionary consciousness to be given as the recognition of the emancipatory powers that would enclose the collective worker, but, instead, it can be expected to develop as a consciousness against capital and, therefore, against one’s own belonging to a class. The proletarians will become conscious of the need for revolution not because of what they could be, but because they understand that capital is the cause of an myriad of problems. The affirmation of the proletariat, for Endnotes, can no longer be a moment of emancipation: «the revolution as communisation appears only in the struggle which carries the direct non-reproduction of the class relation in its immanent horizon»³⁵.

It is difficult to reject outright all the conclusions offered by Endnotes, since the tendencies it points out, the thesis on the dissolution of the workers’ movement and the logical description guiding the struggles taking place today, have many moments of truth. Nevertheless, the conclusion that, departing from the same approach, is consequently drawn from a diagnosis such as the one described so far, cannot be, strictly speaking, the existence of a different communist horizon, but quite the contrary, the inability to establish any concrete horizon at all. Communism is not just any type of society that comes to replace capitalism, nor is the association of workers one of many collective units that could apply communist measures. The classless society born from the entrails of capitalism can only be conceived and postulated as a society of associated production, since this is the higher social formation which necessarily follows from the development of the present mode of production and which strictly derives from its immanent critique. No matter how many theoretical turns are taken in this sense, this always ends up being recognized³⁶. The abolition of capitalism on its own basis can only be conceived in this way; the abolition of commodity production and of the state are not immediate decisions that can be taken, but must be substituted by positive forms of social organization and only insofar as they are substituted can they be abolished. This positive social formation can only be deduced from the materialization of the tendency to the socialization of labour, which is the only one that can make communism intelligible as the abolition of all these capitalist forms and institutions, a tendency that can only be expressed politically through workers’ self-organization. If this perspective disappears, the negative measures of communisation which, as we have seen, are not measures, but results, lose all their raison d’être; if, because of present conditions, the association of the workers and their class consciousness is impossible, communism becomes likewise impossible, which in this context means that there is no rational basis for affirming that it can be achieved.

I am not arguing, by the way, that an eventual overcoming of the capitalist mode of production will necessarily be so, but that all other scenarios are abstract possibilities, on the same level as a return to feudalism: they can simply be imagined. If, for example, the final battle against capitalism takes the form of a struggle against ecological catastrophe, it will only lead to communism if the workers become aware of their class status and the developed powers of social labour. Otherwise, at most we can allow ourselves to talk about post-capitalism, but its possibility and its content will necessarily be arbitrary or unintelligible; no longer the object of science, but of faith; the form that this post-capitalist society will have will not necessarily consist of a classless society or a society where the capitalist categories are abolished; we will not be able to think what this society will be like, nor even to say with criteria that there will be another form of society. Under these parameters, communisation, if it is some kind of communism, is therefore an arbitrary postulate³⁷. If one were to stick to the struggles as they are hic et nunc, one would have to conclude that the emancipatory horizon is the idealized bourgeois society, without impurities such as corruption, avarice, wars or crises, which is what most of the struggles are aiming at. Communisation is not the immanent horizon of the struggles of the present, but a theoretical projection: that which the struggles could become, but without being able to argue that they tend to be so.

The world we are currently experiencing is characterized by tendencies that can be read in Endnotes and this is what makes the journal something that any communist with his boots on the ground should study. The accentuation of phenomena such as the progressive superfluity that living labour represents for capital, deindustrialization, the secular stagnation of production, the growing proletarianisation, the growth of the informal proletariat and so many other tendencies are those that have marked the global dynamics for several decades. In this context, the conditions that once produced the integration of large sectors of workers into the capitalist way of life now seem to be breaking down. All those factors are the ones that can produce the actuality of revolution, but to the same extent, by their very nature and paradoxically, they hinder the emergence of an associated proletariat, the only form on which communism can be conceived. When it is difficult to think communism in a positive way or as a power implicit in the development of society, it is logical that theories such as that of communisation are developed, based mainly on the proposal of negative measures and on the emphasis on rupture. But this existence will only be reserved for theory, as long as it cannot be proved that, indeed, communisation appears as an immanent and real horizon of struggles, instead of constituting a transcendent horizon. Endnotes’ virtue lies in the fact that it first investigates and then deduces. However, in my opinion, its main error resides in the fact that it deduces a communist, communising horizon, from where it can not rationally be deduced.

It is one thing that under present conditions communism is impossible —improbable is perhaps a more humble and friendly adjective— and it is quite another thing that it will remain so. When Lukács spoke of the actuality of the revolution, he was referring to this concrete possibility of communism: «neither Marx nor Lenin ever thought of the actuality of the proletarian revolution and its aims as being readily realizable at any given moment»³⁸. As long as capitalist society continues to exist, the material conditions for a higher social formation will exist, but if the revolution does not have an actuality, the classless society will only represent a «world historical horizon arching above the self-liberating working class»³⁹.

What is to be done in the face of this scenario is difficult to determine. That is why any revolutionary proposal constantly appears to us as a vagary. The communist organisation, in this context, can be a great basis of support for the rearticulation of the actuality of the revolution, but it is difficult for it to be the fundamental force that rearticulates it, which forces us to pay attention to the transformations of the social dynamics at the international level and to study the nature of contemporary struggles. As Endnotes points out, «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»⁴⁰. Communist militancy should overcome this dilemma, in the same way that the gap between a model of militancy based on leading events and one based on lagging behind events should be overcome.

Etsai

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