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Re-Collecting Our Past

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Re-Collecting Our Past re-collecting our past Translated from le roman de nos origines - La Banquise No. 2 (1983) Page 2 Contents re-collecting our past 4 the Birth of Modern Communism What Continuity ? 13 Eighteen Forty-Eight 15 From Utopia to the Critique of Capitalism 19 Nineteen-Seventeen and afterwards 23 understanding the counter-revolution and the revolutionary return From the German Left to Socialisme ou Barbarie 29 The Italian Left and Bordiga 34 Towards a Revolutionary Return ? 38 The Situationist International 44 La Vieille Taupe 48 history and personal narrative of the last fifteen years Nineteen Sixty-Eight 53 After May 58 Nineteen Seventy-Two 63 The Puig Antich affair 69 Crisis and Autonomy 73 The pirate Monde Diplomatique 83 La Vieille Taupe 2 and the Faurisson Affair 85 The spring of la Guerre Sociale 99 Meeting of the 22nd March 1980 – Paris 104 The autumn of la Guerre Sociale 107 The ultra-left 112 Prospects... 116 Page 4 re-collecting our past « One cannot transform capitalist terrain into proletarian terrain » Octobre, Nº 4, April 1938. Most of this issue of La Banquise is devoted to a summary of the modern revolutionary movement. Summing up the past, including the recent past, and taking soundings of the contemporary period in order to recognise some of its basic tendencies, is essential in order to know who and where we are. You will only find an assessment here, not the complete global summing up which will only be possible after the world revolution. Each revolutionary grouping can only take stock by starting from its own position, formation and particular experience. This text is not a group introspection, nor is it an assertion of general principles and movements which we pretend to describe as a whole, instead it seeks to be both universal in its basis, through the aspirations and struggles of which it is the product, and also particular, because its authors participated in the world communist movement in specific places and circumstances. It would be wrong, not to say untrue, to believe and to instil belief in an absolute summing up : like every revolutionary group we have a relative position and activity within the totality of a social movement, that is expressed and influenced, but not created, by collective efforts such as ours. It is obvious, for example, that a revolutionary who has come from anarchism would have conceived this assessment differently. He might arrive at similar conclusions, however his trajectory would be different. But just like us he would not have made Marx and the communist left into a dead end. On the other hand, we haven't written about everything that we consider important. The essential consideration was to deal with the things which have formed us, but this does not mean that the contribution of other critiques which are only mentioned or passed over in silence has been negligible. For the same reason, to deal with our relations with la Guerre Sociale and the Faurisson affair in a merely allusive way, would have been unacceptable and absurd. Fundamentally, the connecting thread of this text is the relation between capitalism and the human activity from which, without ever entirely exhausting it, it draws its dynamism. The proletarian movement is neither based on feelings, nor on the hope that one day capitalism will become truly unbearable. Revolt « with a human title », universal and non-categorial, is certainly born from a limit of Capital, one which is expressed amongst other things in economic crises, but which cannot be reduced to them. Capital doesn't find its limit in absolute misery, or in the loss of the sense of life, but in the difficulties it has in absorbing the energy of living labour, of the proletarian. While these difficulties appear above all within the organisation of work, they are also felt in the proletarian's whole life, especially as Capital has colonized the conditions of the reproduction of life. It is in those periods when new forms of the integration of labour by Capital are installed – in the middle of the 19th century, around 1914-18, and at the present time – that the critique of the basis of capitalism, rather than of its inevitable but secondary consequences, becomes possible. More exactly, in such periods, critique can rise from effects (poverty, unemployment, repression, etc.) to their cause : dispossession by the market and wage labour. Where can a society go which is based on work and yet which makes it impossible ? To take shelter from the social consequences of the crisis (unruly unemployed), it creates something which is an anomaly, if not an absurdity, in terms of its own logic : it gives a wage (« social » and not « productive ») without any equivalent work, a kind of insurance, a little like the way in which it (badly) pays the disabled and the elderly. Capital undermines its own coherence when non-work pays, albeit less than work does, but in the same manner. Similarly, the collective character of labour removes any sense of remuneration for personal effort. The individual wage is no longer anything except an instrument for dividing workers, whereas formerly individual wage negotiations responded to real differences in the work they provided. In all of this, as in automation, wage labour remains whereas work quite simply becomes, not superfluous, but inessential in a large part of society and of production. We are at the stage, already described by Marx, where all individual workers participate in the production of value. The struggles of unskilled workers, disputes in the space outside work, the refusal of work, (in which the left and leftism only see reactions, the consequences of exploitation), all contain something which confronts those things which future revolutionaries will dissolve, because these movements come up against (without being able to overthrow it) that which capitalises human activity. The reduction of everything to the minimum time necessary to accomplish it, the accumulation of small blocks of crystallised time, this is the domination of value. We devote the shortest time to the production of things, and in the same way, to each act of life. We thus produce objects incorporating the least possible time. The life of proletarians is subjected to this search for productivity, to the point that they partially internalise it. The secret and the madness of valorisation consists in always trying to obtain more from less, a maximum from a minimum. Something that is impossible, but which seems accessible by means of technology incorporating an accumulation of past labour, and turned into value by as small a living labour as possible. On the way what becomes of the person who provides this living labour ? In his life he knows the limit-experience of exhaustion which, in a different context, Capital forces the earth to undergo. In the factory as in the field, the obsession with productivity runs up against the same limitation : the conditions which it must meet, in order to constantly reduce the socially necessary labour time for the production of goods, turn against it. When we say that in twenty years, output per hectare has doubled or tripled, we forget that this increase presupposes raw materials and energy. In the United States the relation between the energy harvested in the form of grain and the energy given to its production was quantified. Setting aside prices, « the valorisation of the energy invested in 1970 was no more than 3/4 of what it had been in 1945 ». (L'Année économique et sociale 1978, Le Monde, 1979, p. 158.) Like the fall in industrial profitability, decreasing agricultural outputs are not insurmountable. But the solution depends on the social balance of power. While the earth only opposes its inertia to valorisation, proletarians are the active means for it and its critical threshold. The crisis of valorisation, which is simultaneously both cause and effect of action-reaction by proletarians, opens the possibility of a break Page 6 with a society based on the systematic search for productivity. Capitalism also finds itself in an open situation, which it dreams of filling by means of technology. Machine automation combines tools and programming. But the software remains separate from the hardware, the « programme » is distinct from the purely mechanical and (re)programmable part. The robot is typical of a world where to make and to learn, to do and to direct, are kept as distinct realities. The robot is a worker incorporating his boss. In spite of Taylor, man could not be made into a machine, so the aim is to make machines into living beings. Specialists in robotics constantly lapse into anthropomorphism : being simultaneously « arm », « eye », etc, the robot joins together body and head, muscles and intelligence. It is the ideal slave by which one measures « the degree of servitude ». A research project, one of whose creations was a machine for quadriplegics, was christened Spartacus. In this vision the robot is to become the prosthesis of a Capital that would be both disembodied, and freed from the harmful surplus of human activity, reducing the living being to an unavoidable but controlled pollution. Our attempt at a summing up ends with the prospect (only a possibility) of an upheaval as significant as the industrialisation of the first half of the 19th century, or the appearance of a new system of production at the beginning of the 20th. However it would be misleading to wait until proletarians simply revolted against the forward march of a system which crushes them. Big social movements don't have a motor, and cannot be deemed equivalent, for example, to economic crisis or the disastrous effects of technological progress.
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