Communizing Currents Jeff Diamanti University of Alberta, Diamanti@Ualberta.Ca

Criticism

Volume 57 | Issue 3 Article 7

2015 Communizing Currents Jeff Diamanti University of Alberta, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Diamanti, Jeff. Communizing Currents [Book Review]. Criticism, vol. 57, no. 3, 2015, pp. 491-498. doi: 10.13110/criticism.57.3.0491 COMMUNIZING Despite what sometimes appear as fundamental differences within CURRENTS communization theory, its coher- Jeff Diamanti ence proceeds from particular claims about class relations today Communization and Its or, more specifically, the forthright Discontents: Contestation, Critique, negation of standard political pro- and Contemporary Struggles edited tocols to which class formation by Benjamin Noys. London: serves as the first of many steps Minor Compositions, 2011. towards communism. At least on Pp. 280. $24.00 cloth, $21.64 paper, today’s communization the- paper. ory finds its precursors certainly in Karl Marx’s Capital, but more specifically in twentieth-century theorists of the value-form associated with Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Marx Reading) in Germany, Jacques Camatte in France, and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy.1 Though communization’s constellation is certainly not limited to these schools or the years surrounding 1968, its collective contribution to Marxism amounts to a position altogether antagonistic to other more gradualist or programmatic leftisms that take either labor or the state, rather than the value-form, as the political horizon of critique and struggle. Implicit in communization’s many valences today is that there is no “towards communism.” In this account, a “towards” implies a provisional series of steps or a program, which our recent historical experience provides no reason to trust, much less to think possible. Instead, communization’s immediacy, according to the Endnotes collective’s

Criticism Summer 2015, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 491–498. ISSN 0011-1589. 491 © 2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 492 Jeff Diamanti contribution to Communization section 4 (“No Future?”) reboots and Its Discontents, means an inten- the assumptions carried forward sive, generalized “self-abolition of from the volume’s first page, the working class, since anything Communization and Its Discontents short of this leaves capital with as a collection models precisely the its obliging partner, ready to con- necessary internal contradictions tinue the dance of accumulation” of the theory it addresses. (26). Although its history under “The Moment of Commun the specific name communization ization,” section 1 of Commun stretches back at least to Amadeo ization, gives us three timely Bordiga’s writings in the 1950s, at reflections on what an analysis present communization is most of communization would look closely associated with the collec- like in relation to our contempo- tively written journals Endnotes rary moment. For the Endnotes in the United States and United collective in “What Are We to Kingdom (formerly Aufheben), Do?” this means working back- and Théorie Communiste (TC) wards through a critique of the and Tiqqun in France. Yet, it Invisible Committee’s The Coming would perhaps make no sense as Insurrection (2007) and Call a theory should its own repro- (2004)—book-length texts affili- duction not depend on rather ated with the Tiqqun collective serious tensions internally and and its journal to which the name externally. The tensions specific communization increasingly links to our historical moment were itself—in order to highlight cru- finally gathered for an English- cial differences between a theory speaking audience in 2011, under of communization that imag- the title Communization and Its ines a “we” ready to subvert the Discontents and the editorship of rhythms of an enemy typically Benjamin Noys. Of course, the called Empire, and one instead collection itself is not, as Noys grounded in the labor theory of admits, exhaustive. The point, value. The discourse of something however, is “to find what paths like a Deleuzian theory of sub- there might be, to not accept the stance, for the Endnotes collective, (capitalist) desert as ‘natural phe- distracts us from the more system- nomenon,’ and to begin to detect atic, malicious condition of today’s the struggles that will (re)make capitalist political economy. With this terrain” (17). While section 2 the labor theory of value, however, (“Frames of Struggle”) and section neither Endnotes nor TC restrict 3 (“Strategies of Struggle”) col- themselves in their contributions lect accounts of communization’s to Communization to a demands- logical and historical limits, and based strategy limited to the wage ON COMMUNIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 493 relation, much less a ratification increasingly by rupture rather than of the proletariat as a class soon continuity. ready for “the revolution.” Yet In their Communization con- their reasoning for both main- tribution, Endnotes consider the taining the labor theory of value, ruptured contract between labor and dispensing with the typical and capital a fundamental contra- political program associated with diction of capitalist accumulation it, stems from what has become and therefore reject communism the analytic kernel of contempo- as a revolutionary project exclusive rary communization theory. In an to the working class. Their hypoth- earlier essay, Endnotes developed esis, however, is not that the revo- Marx’s General Law of Capitalist lutionary project should include all Accumulation from chapter 25 of classes, but that its aim is rather the Capital, volume 1: with each suc- abolition of class, as such. The insis- cessive crisis of overproduction and tence on the contemporary break- overaccumulation, they argue, “a down in the value-form means that secular crisis emerges, a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour in this period, the “we” of relation itself” (emphasis mine)2 revolution does not affirm wherein the proletariat (understood itself, does not identify itself not just as the industrial working positively, because it can- class but as relative and absolute not; it cannot assert itself surplus labor—the unemployed against the “they” of capital and the unemployable) reproduces without being confronted by itself to a point beyond which the the problem of its own exis- market can contain. It’s difficult to tence—an existence which overemphasize the theoretical and it will be the nature of the political implications of this obser- revolution to overcome. (31)3 vation, especially for a leftism that has tended in the past to begin and A number of rigorous critiques end at the site of production. Here of this position appear in the the emphasis is rather on the dis- later chapters of Communization. tinct reproduction of capital and Alberto Toscano, for example, labor outside of their symbiosis argues in “Now and Never” that at the site of production. Certain what results from the hypoth- factory-based organizational strat- esis that a revolutionary nega- egies might have made sense in tion of class, as such, is possible the past, in other words, but are only after the breakdown of the entirely inadequate to the his- labor–capital relation is an invari- torical nature of the labor–capital ant communism all but unwill- relation today—a relation defined ing to account for mediations in 494 Jeff Diamanti and the uneven development of Communization” section, is the capitalism. “Rather than confront- historically specific limits of self- ing the problems that beset the organization and autonomy as construction of effective solidari- revolutionary programs for the ties across polities, and especially working class.4 The form these across a transnational division of limits take, however, is for TC labor,” Toscano suggests, an immediate and double decoupling today of, on the one hand, communization theory takes “the valorization of capital and the its account of real subsump- reproduction of labor power and, tion as warrant to sideline all on the other, a decoupling between of these problems, thereby consumption and the wage as ignoring precisely those very income” (52). The position here is real obstacles which demand not, in other words, that a certain strategic reflection instead of fabric of false consciousness fore- the rather unscientific pre- closes class unification, but rather supposition that everything that the core mechanism by which will be resolved in the strug- labor came to recognize itself in gle. (95) capital—namely, the wage relation—has reached a historical, The answer, for Toscano, to the logical limit. question of transition—“not As a hypothesis about the polit- whether communism requires a ical economy of global capitalism, thinking of transition, but which TC’s provocation takes anticapi- transition” (95)—would likely talist approaches of all varieties emerge for Endnotes and TC back to their core assumptions. As in specific struggles over the a political position, TC’s critique reproduction of the value-form of political economy unfolds into itself, but the precision of the a project for freeing up materi- problem emerges elsewhere in als in the world from their func- Communization. tion as capital. Here we might In fact, one such prompt comes not have a contradiction between from within another variant of Endnotes and TC (though both communization theory around TC and Endnotes regularly posi- the point at which TC links the tion themselves against many mediation of capital and labor positions supported by the jour- to the same breakdown of which nal Tiqqun) but at the very least a Endnotes speaks. The empha- crucial addendum: sis in TC’s “Communization in the Present Tense,” the sec- The attack against the capi- ond essay in “The Moment of talist nature of the means of ON COMMUNIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 495

production is their abolition circulation side of valorization as value absorbing labor in within TC and Endnotes’ hypoth- order to valorize itself; it is esis and links it, in “The Double the extension of the situation Barricade and the Glass Floor,” where everything is freely to the political economy of post- available, the destruction secondary institutions. As with (perhaps physical) of cer- TC, Bernes takes the limits of tain means of production . . . previous political modes of orga- Relations between indi- nization not as a “failure of will” viduals are fixed in things, (160), but as a misrecognition of because exchange value is by the technical composition of the nature material. The aboli- labor–capital relation following tion of value is a concrete restructuring during the 1970s and transformation of the land- 1980s. Growth during this period, scape in which we live, it is according to Bernes, “occurred a new geography. The abo- primarily in industries involved lition of social relations is a with the circulation or realization very material affair. (54) of commodities” (161) rather than in the sphere of production. By cir Communization, understood culation, Bernes means everything here as a transformation not just ranging from transport and retail of social but of material relations, to education and health care, all unfolds in at least two directions. organized by new data-processing One direction is a commitment to technologies and financialization. abolishing the material basis for Two important points emerge the valorization of capital. Insofar from the intensification of “unpro as the “attack against capital” ductive spheres” (161). First, bar- involves “the extension of the situ- riers to communization are both ation where everything is freely internal to a labor force compressed available,” however, it is, in the by increased circulatory efficiency other direction, also the drawing and externalized in the form of the up of redistributive plans. The marketplace itself where “these verb “to extend” here reminds us fragmented parts come together— that communization’s moment of where the working-class is itself negation is already its moment of reassembled” (162) and where all mediation, where the precise logic manner of attacks on the “material by which everyone takes care of coordinates of the current mode of everyone sorts itself out amidst the production” unfold. Second, this rubble of capitalism. material limit “renders incoher- Elsewhere in Communization, ent all attempts to imagine, as past Jasper Bernes takes up the revolutions did, an egalitarian set 496 Jeff Diamanti of social relations laid atop the as communization must abolish existing means of production” all divisions within social life,” (163)—that is, a “redistributive” Gonzalez argues, “it must abol- communism. Thus, while labor ish gender relations—not because remains imbricated with capital gender is inconvenient or objec- for the time being through “robust tionable, but because it is part of institutions” such as banks and the totality of relations that daily universities, the point is that a reproduce the capitalist mode of vanishing “worker’s identity” is production” (220). The empha- the precondition for a new current sis on gender is not in opposition of communism that is beginning to, but in conjunction with, other to threaten even those institutions relational modes defined and func- most hoisted by capital (163).5 “If tioned by capital. But gender, spe- we want communism,” Bernes cifically its role in the reproductive remarks, “then we will have no division of labor, forms “an essen- choice but to take our radical- tial element of the class relation” ism to the root, to uproot capital upon which all other elements not merely as social form but as rely, and must therefore gener- material sediment, not merely ate a rupture or a “rift (l’ecart), as relations of production but as a deviation in the class conflict productive forces” (163). Berne’s that destabilizes its terms” (234). contribution to the volume is What it means to “uproot capi- to highlight the intensity with tal” for Gonzalez, in other words, which capital reorganizes spheres is to uproot the conditions of the that we tend not to associate with reproduction of labor in any mode production, an argument under- defined by or acquainted with cap- scored by the 2012 student strike ital—that is, gendered modes alto- in Montreal. gether. Communization’s affinity In the final section of with Marxist feminism of the Communization, Maya Gonzalez 1970s here replaces the problem elaborates the contradiction of gender equality with the more featured and intensified in the radical commitment not just to recent history of capital and better gender relations but to the labor to its terminus: not merely abolition of gender relations, as a rupture in relations of produc- such, and the insistence that gen- tion, but in reproductive forces, der (given its primary function in as such. With great clarity, the reproduction of labor power) Gonzalez’s “Communization and form the sine qua non of struggle. the Abolition of Gender” situ- So, despite the uneven develop- ates gender at the heart of class ment of capital and thereby labor struggle. “Since the revolution relations across the globe, the ON COMMUNIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 497 gender question implicit in the What most historical versions of answer “communization” is indis- communism desire as their end criminate to regional particularity. point, in other words, is immanent Gonzalez’s contribution to com- to all moments of its working out munization theory thus gets to the here amidst the historical feature heart of its international scale. of the international breakdown of The internationalization of the value-form. Communization struggles, which implies a dialec- and Its Discontents, however, is as tic between the particular char- much about the former of its title acteristics of struggles and the (communization) as it is about the international division of labor in latter (its discontents)—a dialectic which struggles are at least for- whose unfolding is nothing but mally framed, appears at first as the unfolding of communization a knot within much communiza- itself. tion theory. The political impera- tives contained in the breakdown Jeff Diamanti is a postdoctoral fellow of the value-form within a fully with the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta. He is coeditor globalized capitalism, however, of Contemporary Marxist Theory already implicate a global divi- (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2014) and sion of labor. This includes both Companion to Marx (Bloomsbury Academic Press, forthcoming 2017), in addition to relative (the unemployed) and Marxism and Energy (MCM Prime Press, absolute (the unemployable) sur- forthcoming 2016). plus populations whose function within the global labor supply makes local conditions immedi- NOTES ate markers of a more general cartography of capital. Readers 1. For a fuller history of European threads of communization, see of Communization looking for a “Communisation and Value-Form theory of communism after glo- Theory,” Endnotes, no. 2 (2010), balization, as it were, will have to http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/4. first confront the collection’s pri- 2. “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes, no. 2 mary refrain that “there will only (2010), http://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2. be a unity of the proletariat in the 3. The argument is that all that is contained in a class in itself is neces- very movement of its abolition” sarily ruptured, as are all relations to (20). Communization in its many capital and its reproduction, with the theoretical variants operates on a class for itself. Classical Marxism is no register altogether disinterested stranger to this formulation. The dif- ference here, however, derives from the in the question of international- emphasis on rupture in the latter form, ization, at least as a conceptual a rupture in class itself the moment it or organizational precondition realizes unity, rather than a ratification for so-called true communism. of unity. 498 Jeff Diamanti

4. TC works out with great detail the workers at the University of Alberta historical limits of self-organization (1 February 2012). Perhaps the univer- and autonomy in the transition from sity’s militant response to “No tuition Fordism to Post-Fordism in their increases!”—despite the reformism 2009 pamphlet “Self-Organization is of such a demand—should no longer the first act of the revolution; it then surprise anyone. At stake is a very pre- becomes an obstacle which the revolu- cious relation between labor and capital tion has to overcome” where much of operating in today’s post-secondary “Communization in the Present Tense” institute where student debt, cheap first appears. labor, and an unprecedented mass of capital assets form an economic unit 5. Indeed, I wrote a portion of this faced altogether indispensable to the capitalist off against a three-hour-long police state as it functions now. barricade with hundreds of students, faculty, support staff, and service