Do not all uprisings, without exception, have their roots in the wretched isolation of men from the community [Gemeinwesen]? Does not every uprising necessarily presuppose isolation? Would the Revolution of 1789 have occurred without the wretched isolation of the French citizens from the community? It was intended precisely to abolish this isolation.

But the community [Gemeinwesen] from which the worker is isolated is a community of quite different reality and scope than the political community. The community from which his own labour separates him is life itself, physical and mental life, human morality [Sittlichkeit], human activity, human enjoyment, human being. Human being is the true community [Gemeinwesen] of mankind. [...]

A social revolution takes the standpoint of the whole because — ​even if it were to occur in only one factory district — ​ it represents man’s protest against a dehumanized life, because it starts out from the standpoint of a separate real individual, because the community [Gemeinwesen], against whose separation from himself the individual reacts, is man’s true community, human being.1 1. Marx, ‘Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”’ Vorwarts! no. 63 August 1844. (MECW 3): 204– Italian Invariance in the 1970s 205, translation adapted.

The Passion of Communism 249 INTRODUCTION alternative to capital”.4 Operaismo, on their analysis, tradition in the early 70s, failed to “pose that minimum Marxist objective: the while later it was reviews such as Insurrezione, Puzz While Jacques Camatte has received recognition from the English- negation of the proletariat”, and to understand the and especially Maelstrom speaking world, few have commented on members of the larger circle present historical task as “the negation of all the organ- that continued to work who contributed to or developed the ideas of the journal Invariance, ised structures that restrict being to the cage of through its implications. individuals such as Giorgio Cesarano, Gianni Carchia, Furio di Paola, professions and economy”.5 Similarly, the radical acts 4. Jacques Camatte, and Carsten Juhl. This tradition, given the name “radical critique” by of the young Metropolitan Indians6 and Autonomia ‘La révolte des étudiants Cesarano, had its greatest impact in Italy in the period from 1968 did not signal the emergence of new subject positions, Italiens: un autre moment through 1974, during which its adherents populated groups like but were rather themselves the signs of a crisis of sub- de la crise de la repré- Comontismo, Ludd, and Councilist Organisation. After Cesarano’s jectivity and of a desire for communism that could sentation’ in Invariance Series III nos. 5-6 (1980). suicide and the self-dissolution of these factions, the tradition’s influ- only be satisfied by humanity’s destitution of a his- 7 ence waned until the next wave of struggles were brought to an end torically contingent form, capital. This Italian devel- 5. Ibid. in the late 70s. Then a period of reflection opened; balance-sheets opment of Camatte’s thought goes against what were drawn, and “[Cesarano’s] works (especially Apocalypse and are perhaps the three central points of his English- 6. The Metropolitan Indians were an offshoot Revolution and Survival Manual) were read by many language reception: (1) that he became an anarcho- of Autonomia that 2 comrades, especially the young”. In the later period, 2. Furio di Paola, ‘Dopo primitivist advocate of the pre-capitalist community, emerged in 1975, marked Antonio Negri wrote polemics against this “pessimis- la dialetica’ in Aut Aut (2) that he advocates for a withdrawal from capital- by an emphasis on large 165 (1978). tic” thought, while for others like Mario Mieli and Gianni ist relations, and (3) that he is an abstract humanist.8 street confrontations. The name was inspired Carchia, the Invariance analysis grounded their own Rather than offering a systematic reading of Camatte’s 3. Camatte’s earliest writ- by the slogan ‘let’s leave 3 investigations. It is this context that is most relevant ings from the 1960s were work that would aim to absolve him of these three the reservation’, by which to contemporary debates in the English language, in first published in Bordigist readings, I examine how his work enabled the thinking was meant modern met- journals and, in addition which a relatively homogeneous narrative dominates of communisation as the destitution of capital’s form, ropolitan existence. to the single Italian edition the last century of developments in Italian political developed an ethical but non-quietist understanding of Invariance in 1968, his 7. Those who confuse thought, progressing neatly from Gramsci through texts were often translated of the pro-revolutionary milieu in its relation to the Camatte’s life choices Operaismo to Autonomia and finally the post-worker- and re-published in real movement and, finally, offered a non-humanist today for a position on Italy throughout the 1970s. ist theorists popularised during the anti-globalisation concept of dehumanisation. what might be necessary Mieli’s recently retrans- for revolution overlook movement. In this, Camatte and, to a greater extent, Cesar- lated Elements of a Gay the resolute critique of Crucial to examining this largely post-Bordigist Critique begins: ‘Contem- ano take a longer look at the history of domination in a activism on the part of and post-Situationist tradition is that it marks a dis- porary gay movements manner that is closer to the history of a civilisation the Bordigists: ‘I preserve have emerged in those tinct communist opposition both to insurrectionary comparable to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of intact my mentality: the countries in which capital men do not count, they militantism and workerism in Italy. While the former Enlightenment. This was not an abstract exercise, but has come to its real dom- do not represent anything, was rejected as a sacrificial ideology, the latter was ination’, followed by a two a way of grasping, largely through their reading of cannot have any influence; criticised for positing the existence of a proletarian page footnote explaining texts by Marx such as the “Urtext of the Critique of Po- the facts determine the Camatte’s analysis thereof. subject position — however​ sociologically updated as litical Economy” and the Grundrisse, the specific his- new situations. And when With respect to Carchia, the situations are ripe, the “mass worker” or “multitude” — ​that could affirm torical process through which a very particular form see the translated text then the men emerge... its own constitutive project. For the post-Invariance ‘Glosses on Humanism’ had become autonomous. The aim of such an investi- I am very happy to live far tradition, on the contrary, the present contained below. Journals such as gation was not to reject all technology and vestiges of from ridiculous and petty Agaragar and L’erba voglio “nothing human that could be stably posed… as an modernity — “a​ total rejection of the historical product… episodes of the so-called initially continued the militant politics, from →

Endnotes 5 250 The Passion of Communism 251 total retreat”9 — ​but to clarify precisely what the po- the mean chronicle, progress and modernisation be brought to a halt.11 Sit- of Apocalypse and Rev- tential death of capital might mean through what we from the events day after uated between a confidence that “not even the dead olution (translated below) day. Nothing of all that calls for the ‘irreversible could today call the destitution of its essential forms. are safe” and that “only a redeemed humanity obtains interests me’ — ​Bordiga “domestication” of the 12 The overall argumentation of Camatte’s work through- quoted in Arturo Peregalli the fullness of its past”, Camatte and Cesarano ar- machine, in all its possible out the 70s is thus neither a form of primitivism, and Sandro Saggioro, gued that the species, in its works and desires, had manners of appearing’. which would seek to return to pre-modern commu- Amadeo Bordiga: La become really dominated, subjected to an inhuman sconfitta e gli anni oscuri 10. Jacques Camatte, nal forms, nor accelerationism, which would seek to spectacle by that imperative towards valorisation (Edizioni Colibri 1998). Bordiga et la passion du overcome capitalism through a deepening of its con- whose name is capital. For the circle surrounding communisme (Spartacus tradiction-in-process, but precisely an anti-utopian 8. Point (1) is present in Invariance came up against the following paradox 1974). theory that aims to restore the historical process from texts such as Tim Barker, that remains our own: the law of value dominates life ‘The Bleak Left’ N+1 no. 11. Fyodorov argued that that reproductive fixed-point we call capitalism — ​a yet somehow our dehumanised species must effect 28 (June 2017), (2) has all of humanity should process that would develop, from fragmented poten- been debated by Ray a rupture with the particular mediations of capital unite in rejecting progress tials that exist today, the work of “millions of human Brassier, ‘Wandering Ab- in order to reclaim its integral past and “surrender by directing its attention beings who have laboured in obscurity for millen- straction’ in Mute (Febru- itself joyously to the true divisions and neverending towards the past through ary 2014), and (3) has the common task of res- nia… the immense process of becoming of millions of confrontations of historical life”.13 To this end, it re- been argued by Theorie urrecting the dead. This 10 forces that are crystallised at any given moment”. Communiste in François mains fruitful today to revisit Camatte and Cesarano’s led, through Bogdonov It is with respect to the latter point that Camatte Danel, Rupture dans la Gemeinwesen. and Tsiolkovsky, to the developed his concept of the Gemeinwesen, which théorie de la révolution foundation of Russian (Senonevero 2003). Cosmism and the first must not be understood as the pre-modern commu- AN OPERATION OF THE SPECIES, practical results in astro- nity or even a new universal community of humanity. 9. See Robin Mackay and NOT THE PRO-REVOLUTIONARY nautics. See Tsiolkovsky’s This concept should be grappled with as a response Armen Avanessian, ‘Intro- ‘Investigations of Outer to his problematisation of humanity’s historical life duction’ in The Accelera- I read of a Rain-King in Africa to whom Space by Rocket Devices’. tionist Reader (Urbanomic, ‘Progress is precisely the and what it might mean that it had become blocked. the people pray for rain when the rainy period 2014). Even in the 1970s, form of life in which the In this, Camatte can be understood on a plane of con- Camatte concluded that, comes. But surely that means they do not human race may come sistency with the investigations of Walter Benjamin, after the destruction of believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they to taste the greatest sum Aby Warburg, Gilbert Simondon, and Andre Leroi- capital and labour as the would do it when the land is “a parched and of suffering while striving material community, it for the greatest sum of Gourhan. The only coherence to such a constellation — ​ arid desert.” […] Or again: toward morning, will be possible to ‘take enjoyment... Although these non-humanists who nonetheless spent so in charge the automated when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak stagnation is death and much of their lives in the archives of humanity — would ensemble — ​the new are celebrated by the people, but not during regression no paradise, be the struggle to understand what it means for man- inorganic being of man — ​ the night, when they simply burn lamps.14 progress is truly hell, the that appears for the mo- truly human task is to save kind to unfold its historical life given that its intellec- ment as capital’. Jacques the victims of progress, tual and practical capacities are not biological givens Camatte, ‘Caractères du Italian Invariance and the SI to lead them out of hell’ but discovered in whatever trans-generational medi- movement ouvrier français’ Nikolai Fyodorov, What um contains and transmits the vital remnants of the in Invariance Series II no. In Italy, the reception of Invariance went hand-in- Was Man Created For? 10 (April 1971). Even in the (Honeyglen 1990), 51. past — ​whether images, utterances, technical forms hand with the slow reception of the Situationists and case of Cesarano, who or otherwise. They all understood that the avant- places a greater emphasis council communism in the early 1970s. Even though 12. Walter Benjamin, garde affirmation of the machine, indeed of modernity on a longue durée the Situationist International was both founded and ‘On the Concept of History’ as such, could be compatible with the demand that anthropology of machine dissolved in Italy, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in in Selected Writings 4 domination, the final line (Harvard 2006), 390.

Endnotes 5 252 The Passion of Communism 253 its entirety did not exist in a readable Italian translation 13. Guy Debord, Preface Debord’s analysis could be understood and, indeed, 18. Antonio Negri, Marx until the late 70s.15 Thus Vaneigem’s qualitative “art to the Fourth Italian developed through Camatte’s account of real sub- Beyond Marx (Autonome- Edition of the Society of dia 1984), 93. In an essay of living” and Debord’s concept of the spectacle were sumption as the alienation of the species from the the Spectacle (Chronos from 1981 Negri explicitly 19 initially received by readers such as Giorgio Cesarano 1979), 24. Gemeinwesen. While Debord, as evidenced in an im- calls out the ‘pessimis- and other young militants already under the influence portant letter from 1986, followed the development of tic’ understanding of of Camatte’s largely Bordigist writings.16 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, these groups closely — ​and believed that, rather than subsumption in ‘cata- Philosophical Occasions strophic terms that one Such theorists and the groups that they founded, the Italian SI, it was they who “did the most in Italy (Hackett 1993), 137. can even find in Marx’, like Comontismo discussed below, attempted to de- to import the spirit of [the French] May and notably where subsumption is the velop the concept of Gemeinwesen, which, following 15. And only after its among the workers” — ​he was a quick critic of “the ‘social domination of Camatte, they developed in terms of its dual sense as ultimate translator ‘found theory of [the Italian group] ‘Comontismo’” with its capital as the disappear- those responsible for this ance of antagonism’ a particular community, on the one hand, and its more “aberrant tactical slogan of making oneself ‘teppa’ excess in their offices… and thus the ‘harakiri of 20 literal and potentially universal sense of common hit them and… literally spat (equivalent of ‘underworld’ or ‘bad guy’)”. He sum- Operaismo’. Antonio [Gemein] being [wesen] on the other.17 This concept, in their faces, for such is marises the group’s trajectory through a dark joke Negri, Macchina Tempo related to but distinct from that of species-being, or naturally the way good based on a telling mistranslation: in a French appeal (Feltrinelli 1982), 164. translators act when Gattungswesen, was to provide a unity to the Marxian for solidarity with Italian political prisoners, the line they meet bad ones’. See 19. As Carchia affirms, corpus, explaining (1) the condition of possibility of the Preface to the fourth “the most beautiful [that is, proletarian] youth die in jail” explicitly linking the notion alienation, (2) the definition of the classless society, Italian Edition of The becomes “others [that is, pro-revolutionaries] spend of real domination to that and (3) the antinomies of that non-class, the only pos- Society of the Spectacle. their youth in prison”, whereby a traditional descrip- of spectacle, ‘The super- session of the physical sible subject of communisation, that in negating itself tion of capital’s domination becomes an elegy for the 16. The first and only instance of production, 21 would negate all classes. Camatte attempted to under- Italian issue of the SI wasted youth of the pro-revolutionary minority. despite the persistence stand systematically what Negri dismissed as the journal was published in of the instance of value as “literary” asymmetry of Marx’s work: that Marx devel- July 1969. It contained Ludd, OC, Comontismo the regulative law of a translation of ‘The social exchange has led — ​ oped a “theory of the subjectivity of capital, while… Proletariat as Subject through the force of this he did not develop a theory of the subjectivity of the and Representation’ from Both Ludd and the Councilist Organization (OC) were antinomy — ​to [capital’s] working class”.18 For Camatte, the structural unity of Society of the Spectacle. formed and dissolved during the same brief interval total domination of society Marx’s work was not antagonism but rather, as dis- between 1969 and 1971. Beginning with the SI jour- as appearance’ (Gianni 17. The word can be Carchia, La legittimazione cussed below, capital’s accession to the material nal’s termination and the state-linked Piazza Fontana traced to an 18th century dell’arte). community, on the one hand, and the classless society, German translation of bombing in Milan, this period emerges at the end of on the other, thought by him through the universality the Latin Res publica, a the cycle of struggles paradigmatically linked to the 20.Guy Debord, Letter of the Gemeinwesen. Marx’s work was understood term whose own history Parisian May. Through an ironic inversion, it was the to Semprun on March moves from the public 28, 1986. to move from the description of communism to the Ludd group that principally existed as a theoretical thing held in common accomplishment of capital’s real domination, from to the Roman state, under- organ weighed down by “cultural baggage”, while, 21. Ibid. his early assertion that “Human being is the true Ge- stood as that institution through the contingencies of extended stays in jail, meinwesen of man” (1844 Manuscripts) to his later which manages the public the innocuously named but heavily persecuted 22. Comontismo, ‘Note di interest. See ‘Gemein- preistoria contemporanea’ understanding that “Capital has become human Councilist Organization (OC) developed an everyday wesen’ in Jacob Grimm in Comontismo 1 (May, 22 being” (Grundrisse). and Wilhelm Grimm, practice and understanding of criminality. Looking 1972), 9-10. In Italy, then, the confusion of the spectacle with Deutsches Wörterbuch towards the growth of populations excluded from the either a conspiracy or the mass media was avoided; (Trier 2004). production process, the OC came to understand “the

Endnotes 5 254 The Passion of Communism 255 reality of the new forms of expression of the modern proletariat” in “the of what is authentic and properly liveable for man” that “will be the reality of a criminal and subversive practice of the everyday”, but large- actualisation of the real human community”. Comontismo itself was ly expressed itself in terms of councilist ideology. Ludd, on the other understood to be nothing but the “real movement that suppresses hand, was a national space for discussion, with membership across existing conditions” that would bring “the destruction of the fictitious Turin, Genoa, Rome, Milan, and Trento, and with a prominent pub- community of capital and of the installation of the total community” lishing house La Vecchia Talpa [the old mole], most through the “re-appropriation” of the Gemeinwesen.28 notable for its critique of councilist ideology.23 23. For a more complete 28. Comontismo, ‘Per Active between 1972 and 1973, Comontismo historical account of Critique of the Racket and Civil War la ultima internazionale’. this period, see Miguel represented the short-lived synthesis of Ludd’s cri- Amoros’s account of the tique of councilism with the OC’s analysis of the Italian Situationists Cesarano himself came to express one of the most powerful critiques “modern proletariat’s new forms of expression… in the alongside Francesco of this tendency. He grasped that the Comontisti insurrectionaries, criminal subversion of the everyday”.24 From their Santini’s ‘Apocalypse and despite their rejection of councilism as a hypostasised form and their Survival’. reading of Invariance, they posited the “sense of theoretical understanding of the contemporary conjuncture, remained communism” as the “realisation of the Gemeinwesen”, 24. Comontismo, ‘Note stuck in a routine of the “nostalgic repetition of insur- which was a “human essence that cannot be under- di preistoria contempora- rectional creativity”.29 The Comontisti ideology of 29. Giorgio Cesarano, stood in an eschatological, metaphysical, or moral nea’, 10. “teppism” was but “the obsolete style of the political Apocalypse and Revolu- tion, §125. See translation sense, but as the natural and social ground in opposi- militant” as there is not “any comportment or line of 25. Comontismo, ‘Pre- below. tion to the reified world of commodities in which all liminari sul Comontismo’ conduct that can be defined as revolutionary in itself… the alienated human senses have lost their capacity to (Genoa 1972). such a pure stylisation of conflictuality is like the 30. Ibid, §121. sense that which is to come”.25 As discussed below, ‘realisation of a work of art’”.30 Following Vaneigem’s 31. Ibid. this is broadly consistent with Camatte’s understanding thereof, which Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations, Cesa- draws more thoroughly on philosophical discussions of humanity’s rano emphasised the ethical imperative to reject any participation in a common substance than it does on a sociological neo-christian figure of the pro-revolutionary founded upon sacrifice definition of the particular community. and militancy. He sought to distinguish the spectacular civil war of Yet the name of the group already contains its ownmost antino- the militant from the revolt of the “proletarian body of the species”, my: it is the “translation of Gemeinwesen, Com-ontos, of being”. On evidenced by the very real and escalating manifestations of negativity the one hand, Comontismo was the “community of intent and action” at the time.31 constituted by “individuals that… place themselves By this, Cesarano did not mean to critique the intentions of the outside of this society and against its mechanisms”.26 26. Ibid. Comontisti, whose actions would otherwise appear inseparable from They were “qualitative and conscious individuals” the more generalised insurrectionary situation that had developed 27. Comontismo, ‘Note di with a “mode of life” such that “every partiality, every only a year prior during the so-called Italian “Hot Autumn” of 1969. On preistoria contemporanea’. separation… tends dialectically to resolve itself”.27 On the contrary, he attempted to articulate a third path for the pro-revo- the other hand, Comontismo was “the most complete lutionary between militancy and quietism: the real movement is not to expression of the nascent ‘human class’ (historical heir to the revolu- be found in the proliferation of forms of revolt already identified in the tionary proletariat), negator of capital” that must “live, extend, radical- past, but located in the potential self-transcendence of every “form ise and concretely organise the negative that the world of capital has of politics which arises from even minimal conflict with inside itself”. A particular group, then, that “finds its own finality in the the ‘concrete’ given”.32 The Comontisti’s illegalism 32. Ibid. realised community of human being, thus in the world of the qualitative, “drown[ed their] own project of being in a simple and

Endnotes 5 256 The Passion of Communism 257 caricatural disobedience to the normative as such”.33 33. Ibid, §127. afterwards — ​even if in another form… Expression is the Cesarano thus sought to conceive of a path towards universal interpretive principle. Memory conserves some- 34. Indeed, while Cesar- revolt that passed first of all through the capitalised thing and manifests it: it is appropriate to call this ano himself still conceived 37 individual’s damaged subjectivity and the struggle the primacy of a more the expression of something that was first. 37. Giorgio Colli, Filisofia for their needs and indeed happiness, a matter de- active struggle, it is no dell’espressione (Adelphi Edizioni 1969), 21. veloped more rigorously in his final book Survival surprise to see how such Gattungswesen and the Species a position could lead the Handbook, which draws heavily on Lacan and the pro-revolutionary group 34 anti-psychiatric tradition. Cesarano critiqued the to conceive of its function As Invariance stressed, the affirmation of the human that is necessary Comontisti for blocking the emergence of the “true as closer to group analy- to the communist line is not a matter of hypostasising any past, pres- struggle” by presenting their own acts as exempla- sis than militancy, and why ent, or future community, but rather of standing in a particular continu- his work was influential ry, perpetrating the “infamous spectacle of civil war” ity with the entire history of humanity while recognising a very real and among Italian feminists, that “continues to usurp the places, the modalities see especially Lea ongoing dehumanisation. In this way, Invariance enabled a theoreti- and time of revolution”.35 The revolutionary process, Melandri and her journal cal shift away from the too psychological and humanist discourse of argued Cesarano, “can never again take the exclusive L’erba voglio. alienation: rather than a purported reconciliation with a lost human traits of the civil war”, but rather must find the sense of essence, they advocated for the development of the species’ innu- 35. Giorgio Cesarano, a “disaggregation actively pursued”, only conceivable Cronaca di un ballo merable possibilities and forms of living — its​ count- if in fact these impulses find expression at the level mascherato (Varani 1983). less possible natures.38 This was to try and find 38. The imperative to of the species.36 another ground for the political, as the potentially think from the vantage 36. Giorgio Cesarano, point of the species is in According to Cesarano, then, what is crucial is antagonistic struggle over manners of living that Lampi di Critica Radicale large part derived from not the auto-affirmation of a particular institution or (Mimesis 2005). would neither culminate in a clash of civilisations, nor the influence of Amadeo party as standing in for the negative of the world, but a unified cosmopolitan society. This development is Bordiga, for whom it was the revolt of the species as remainder to the process located in the way that Camatte, and Cesarano after not just the narrow con- fines of Italian civil society of capitalist subsumption. Comontismo, a paradoxical “criminal gang — ​ him, attempted to think the relation between the that mattered — ​the historical party — ​human community”, was the result of an exclu- species and the Gemeinwesen. specificity of the Russian sionary gang-form well-defined through its own criteria of militancy, Invariance’s position must be distinguished from experience was as impor- posing as the human community at war with the inhuman who stood humanism as the presupposition of a fixed human tant as the history of de- colonial struggles, which apart. Through the valorisation of criminality as such, they remained essence, of a determinate figure of man etched in the were as important as the incapable of offering a critique of those subjectivities emerging from sand, whether ahistorical or to be realised at history’s most ancient ethnological social disintegration — ​themselves above all — ​and thus functioned end. Humanism, the triumph of Humanitas, has never record. ‘Communism as a sort of Operaismo in negative. been concerned with reversing a very real deca- is a world view’, said Bordiga to that provincial dence of the human. It is rather the belief in humanity humanist Gramsci, ‘Marx THE SPECIES, THE COMMON, AND REAL DOMINATION as a self-sufficient species composed of individual deals with the relation persons, who hold on to thinking as their most prized between man and the Expression is a hypothesis, an interpretation that comes possession since birth. The history of humanism is earth. For us, man is the Species; for bourgeois to be justified by the primigenial mechanism of memory. inseparable from that of society and capital alike. It gentlemen, man is the in- Its product is conditioned by the persistence of and follows that longue durée in the West from the ancient dividual’. Amadeo Bordiga, by its community with the extra-representational immediacy political communities through the Roman societas ‘Specie umana e crosta of something that “was” first and that will be again generis humani to the French société civil. From terrestre’ Il Programma Comunista no. 6 (1952).

Endnotes 5 258 The Passion of Communism 259 “living well” atop the slaves, to the spread of (Roman) citizenship Humanity, for Camatte and Cesarano, is a collection 40. Giorgio Cesarano, against the barbarians, to the achieved universality of rights and the without presupposition or condition of belonging, Manuale di sopravvivenza, 227. The quote is from market with its own inhuman remainder relegated to slums and refu- without spatial or temporal borders, that, cutting Theodor Adorno, ‘Pro- gee camps. With each step one finds, on the one hand, the contingent across all past and given social forms into the future, gress’ in Can One Live history of those impersonal forces that, expropriating all particular involves no possible exclusion of the modalities that after Auschwitz? communities, progressively produce that depoliticised population human existence might take. In this way they sought to (Stanford 2003), 128f. which will, in modern times, become dominated by the law of value; understand both the struggle of humanity against a 41. Jacques Camatte, and, on the other, the exterminating logic of humanism’s biopolitical particular historical form that has been globalised ‘Errance de l’humanité’, in racism eradicating an outside that it refuses to recognise. It is within (“it is all of humanity perceived through time that is Invariance Series II no. 3 these successive definitions of humanity’s determinate essence, and hostile to capital”41) and what the historical life of this (1973). the sequence of groups or national communities that have estab- species could be as its own constant “autopoetic” 42. Cesarano, Manuale 42 lished themselves as the embodiment thereof, that we see how a self-overcoming. di sopravvivenza, 227. determinate human essence has always been consti- Yet, if the species is neither united by a deter- tuted alongside a genocidal division between Homo 39. In Camatte’s words: minate essence nor any particular social form, what 43. Jacques Camatte, ‘Vers le communauté hu- humanus and Homo barbarus.39 ‘there is a movement of non-religious or utopian sense could this common or unification, of reunification main’ in Invariance Series In this long history, a logical problem of the to- generic being of the species possibly have? “Invar- through the will to inte- III No. 3 (June 1978). tality mixes with a political reality of domination. For a grate all… but by exclusion, iance varies”, Camatte claims, but “only as the affir- paradox poses itself in thinking the possible unity of destruction of the others… mation of the human community’s becoming”.43 The 44. Ibid. The relation between common and the human species which is neither defined by any This was manifested, for fabled invariance is affirmed as the Gemeinwesen example, in the formation species being (Gemein- particular essence nor as anything like a united com- which cannot be a “human nature” or a transhistor- of the vast Persian em- and Gattungswesen) may munity. Where the state and the market present at pires, of the Syrians, the ical anthropological invariant but rather the “corpus be clarified by consider- once the expropriation of particular communities and Greeks, the Romans, Chi- in which the diverse human generations can redis- ing the etymological roots of the Latin species, their reunification at a juridical level, Camatte and es- nese… but also the Nazi cover one another in perceiving their difference… the reich. Each time that such derived from Greek eidos. pecially Cesarano instead attempt to think the onto- common being of humans in their becoming [and] a an empire was formed, ‘Special [or species] being 44 logical problem of a non-exclusive unity to the species. there was the production form that this common being can take”. is the being that is com- To explain this point — ​“the paradox that radical critique of a definition of what the mon or generic and this is something like the deepens and sets off from” — ​Cesarano cites a pas- human should be (and Gemeinwesen and the Common therefore an elimination)’. image or the face of hu- sage from Theodor Adorno which defines humanity Humans have ‘not known manity’. Giorgio Agamben, as “that which excludes absolutely nothing”, for: their possibilities’ and As the above quote indicates, Gemeinwesen is an ‘Special being’ in Profana- ‘remained sick in their ontological notion. In English, it is this dimension of tions (MIT 2005). If humanity were a totality that no longer held ghettos that they claim to Camatte’s works that has been lost in translation. be human groups, to be 45. While ‘Gemeinwesen’ within it any limiting principle, then it would also Camatte’s reasoning remains unintelligible if, as seen humanity, defined by is left untranslated as a be free of the coercion that subjects all its those distinguishing prop- in most English-language commentaries and indeed technical term in the members to such a principle and thereby would erties that allow them to translations, Gemeinwesen is understood as a par- French original and Italian translations of Camatte’s no longer be a totality… only with the decompo- exclude others’. Jacques ticular community.45 For Camatte, communism is not Camatte, ‘Marx et le Ge- work, English-language sition of the principle of totality that establishes the revindication of the human being, but rather of meinwesen’ in Invariance translators have sub- limits… would there be humanity and not its Series III nos. 5-6 (1980). human being. For, according to him, particular com- stituted ‘community’. This deceptive image.40 See translation below. munities “cannot simply live as a collection of human makes it impossible →

Endnotes 5 260 The Passion of Communism 261 beings”;46 there must be a pre-individual and imper- to determine where Ca- living together. […] For us, true materialists, 51. Camatte, ‘Marx and sonal common movement or substance. Particular matte is in fact employing there is a collective brain, and the social human the Gemeinwesen’. the everyday French communities, then, would exist as singular ways of indi- will be a development, unknown to the old ‘communauté’ and where 52. Ibid. viduating this substance. Camatte understands the he is developing his own generations, of the social brain. That one thinks pre-individual Gemeinwesen precisely as that medium concept. For instance the with the heads of others is a positive fact, 53. Amadeo Bordiga, in which particular communities past, present, and title of his principal work, both ancient and contemporary.53 ‘The Original Content of Capital et Gemeinwesen, the Communist Program’ future unfold and communicate themselves, through appears in English as Il Programma Comunista their linguistic and technical production — ​or, at the Capital and Community. For both thinkers, history is not to be understood as a nos. 21 and 22 (1958). limit, even conflict. The Gemeinwesen is nothing process that progressively “swallows past possibili- less than the generic mode of existence of human 46. Camatte, ‘Marx and ties”54, but as an electrical field and site of tensions, 54. Camatte, ‘Errance the Gemeinwesen’. de l’humanité’. potential: the manner in which forms, paradigms and a result of “the work of millions who have laboured in technical means of living persist — ​Marx’s “book of hu- 47. Indeed, Camatte’s obscurity of millennia… the immense process of be- 55. Camatte, Bordiga man powers”.47 In the Gemeinwesen, “all the varied argument is structurally coming of millions of forces”.55 Even if, in Bordiga’s et la passion pour productions of the past — ​art, philosophy, science — ​ similar to Gilbert Simon- own words, today the “historical ‘field’ is a cesspool” communisme. don’s account of the are fragments. Elements of the vast despoliation of where “person-molecules” pretend to be the subject historical emergence of 56. Ibid. 48 human beings as well as attempts to remedy it”. the ‘technical universe’, of of history, the truly historical will “fly all along its line In the history of philosophy, Camatte’s problem how it became a separate of force”.56 That line (and the notion of the Gemein- 57. Camatte, ‘Errance is most comprehensible in terms of the post-Averroë- and alienated sphere — ​ wesen) points towards a world in which the dead de l’humanité’. technology — that,​ through sian tradition, which attempts to think the manner in labour of the past would not dominate the present, the logic of progress, 58. I thus disagree with which human thought takes place not as a matter of excluded past results from which is not to suggest that praxis would be sui gen- Brassier’s claim in ‘Wan- individual cognition, but rather through contact with a human use. eris but always an unworking of what once was. dering Abstraction’ that common intellect.49 Camatte, drawing upon Bordiga Here we glimpse the full sense of what it means Camatte ‘hypostatises 48. Camatte, ‘Errance a set of human expressive and the seminal French anthropologist of technology that, on the one hand, the “human being… only is by de l’humanité’. capacities that persist 50 André Leroi-Gourhan, understands one of Marx’s superseding the given to which it can never be re- not only independently essential insights to be what the latter calls “universal 49. See Ernst Bloch, duced”, and, on the other, that the Gemeinwesen, is of capitalism but of every work” or “the universal character of every human be- Avicenna and the Aris- “non-human” — ​that the human to be affirmed, the hu- form of social organisation’. totelian Left (Columbia By defining the human ing’s thought”.51 It is the “social brain” that is our own man that is the locus of the communist project, has University Press 2019). in terms of its relation to 57 as much as that of the “species”, as “the summation no nature. That is, the human is precisely located in the non-human corpus of all the beings that encircle us and that preceded 50. André Leroi-Gourhan this multiplicity of possible relations to, and forms of, of the Gemeinwesen Marx us”. 52 Bordiga’s “Content of the Communist Program” was a seminal French its non-human exterior (the common), and not defined precisely avoids this anthropologist of the 20th problem. Nonetheless, affirmed the centrality of this line to Marxism: by an innate possession or faculty, such as its “ra- century, who developed it is certainly the case 58 an empirically rigorous ac- tionality” or “creativity”. Here we begin to see, on that Gianni Carchia, In Marxism, production does not only conserve count of anthropogenesis Camatte’s reasoning, the sense in which this dimen- translated below, is more the single human animal but is a circuit for (see his Gesture and sion of historicity could be blocked by modern forms consistent on this point. Speech) and of humanity’s its reproduction. […] Every brain does not pulse of domination — ​where capital could insert itself in technical capacities. only with the sensations of its own life, but It is this anthropological separating human praxis from its works — just​ as much as how the pre- also those of its progenitors… [so] does every- tendency of Camatte’s supposed communities of the past, regarding themselves as eternal, one think also with the brain of the other, thought that Cesarano in could mask the emergence of this dimension in its fullness. particular develops.

Endnotes 5 262 The Passion of Communism 263 Camatte argues that the accession of humanity to the Gemein- translated as the “submission” of labour to capital,61 translations by Bruno wesen with the end of class society must be distinct from the pre- placing the emphasis on the working class’ action Maffi, Roger Dangeville, Mario Tronti, Galvano capitalist plurality of social substances or “anthropomorphised property” rather than its domination by capital. As Camatte della Volpe, Enzo Grillo, analysed by Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Rather, concludes, “we have always preferred to use the M.L. Boggeri, were politi- it signals the end of the epochal dissemination of presupposed or expression of real or formal domination (while under- cally motivated’ (Jacques reified ways of living, in reference to that “closure of standing that that implies the submission of the prole- Camatte, Il capitale totale (Dedalo libri 1976), 6). prehistory” discussed by Marx.59 The Gemeinwesen 59. Marx ‘Preface to tariat) because the principal, dominant, subject is in This resulted in a 1977 A Contribution to the is neither a future global society nor a return to the pre- fact capital. It isn’t for nothing that Marx wrote Capital dual-language translation Critique of Political Econ- modern community, but rather the common substance and not Proletariat”. 62 More importantly, Camatte of the Urtext by Carchia omy’ (MECW 29), 263f. that allows for the development of a sense of the sought to emphasise that the relation of subsumption with an important intro- duction by Camatte, political that would be non-identical to the illusions is not just either an act of domination or submission, ‘Marx and the Gemein- of bourgeois democracy. Here, once again, we find that the more we but a process by which capital “includes” or “appro- wesen’, that is translated explore the concept of the Gemeinwesen, the more we understand priates to itself” the life process of the species as its below. Karl Marx, Urtext: the very real possibility — ​and, of course, reality — ​of dehumanisation, own substance — ​and thus something on the order of frammento del testo originario di ‘Per la critica and the terrible difficulty of grasping the nature of that operation that an anthropological transformation.63 dell’economia politica’ could destitute the material ground of separation. The Invariance circle looked across the Marxian (Savona 1977). corpus to understand the development and eventual Domination and the Biological Revolution real domination of capital as the unity and completion 61. Karl Marx, Un chapitre inédit du Capital (Paris of two movements: “the expropriation of communities, 1971), translated by Roger We have seen how the concept of the Gemeinwesen 60. The Grundrisse and creating the proletariat” and “the autonomisation of Dangeville. was understood by Camatte as a relation between the ‘Results of the Immedi- value”. 64 Fundamental to such a reading is the chapter ate Process of Production’ the universality of the species and the common, rath- on pre-capitalist social forms in the Grundrisse which 62. Jacques Camatte, appeared in French and ‘La phénomène de la er than as a valorisation of the pre-modern commu- recounts “how [human] activity was externalised, Italian in 1968 and 1969 valeur’ Invariance Series nity. We now turn towards the manner in which this respectively. Much of autonomized and made into an oppressive power IV No. 5 (1986). concept shifted Marxist discussions of subjection Camatte’s work through- which dissolved communities… [and developed] out the 1960s was intend- and revolt, primarily examining his turn away from the classes”.65 That humanity lives in relation to a material 63. Camatte, Capital et ed as an intervention in Gemeinwesen, 113. notion of the real or formal subsumption of the pro- the reception of these community, then, and not to either a Gemeinwesen duction process towards that of capital’s formal or works and indeed as crit- or a plurality of particular communities, signifies that 64. Jacques Camatte, real domination. icism of their translations, it has been totally reduced to living in relation to a ‘Bordiga et la révolution especially those by his For Camatte, the concept of real domination form embodied in “the dead, crystallised element, the russe’ Invariance Series former Bordigist comrade II No. 4 (1974). emphasises a dimension of Marx’s thought that had Roger Dangeville. When work of millions of human beings exteriorised in the 66 been lost in the then new translations of texts such as Gianni Carchia and the form of fixed capital that founds the community”. 65. Camatte, Capital et “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” and other Italian translators of Individuals, argues Marx in the “Urtext”, have “given Gemeinwesen. Camatte’s Capital et the Grundrisse.60 The German concept Subsumtion, themselves reified being through their products” Gemeinwesen attempted 66. Camatte, ‘Marx and especially as developed in Marx’s unpublished drafts for whom “their Gemeinwesen itself appears as an to recover the appropriate the Gemeinwesen’. and notebooks, has two components: the submission citations from Marx they external thing”, so that “on the one hand, [they are] not of the particular and the domination of the concept. ‘arrived at the conclusion, subsumed under any naturally evolved community for which we assume In French and Italian, however, the term was initially and, on the other, they are not consciously communal individuals responsibility, that the

Endnotes 5 264 The Passion of Communism 265 subsuming the Gemeinwesen under themselves”.67 67. Marx, ‘The Original in the work of Giorgio Cesarano. Indeed, Apocalypse and Revolution In these key texts for Camatte — the​ “Urtext” and “Re- Text of A Contribution can be considered as a systematisation of Camatte’s writings of the to the Critique of Political sults of the Immediate Process of Production” as well time that deepens the anthropological dimension through a theory Economy’ (MECW 29), as “Forms which Precede Capitalist Production” — ​ 465. of anthropogenesis. The Survival Handbook, on the other hand, is a we are able to look upon the historical production of more original work that, drawing on Lacan and the anti-psychiatric the population as that living, vital material, certainly not liberated as tradition as much as on Adorno, attempts to think in a more decisive social labour, but rather organised and managed, inscribed into the manner the “economy of interiority” and how “human beings who process of social reproduction and denied any but the most desperate have internalised capital adapt to its life process”.72 capacities to resist. By turning to the latest results of psychoanalysis and 72. Camatte, ‘Marx and Within Marx’s own categories, this transition is tied to the pas- empirical anthropology, Cesarano represents one the Gemeinwesen’. sage from the primacy of absolute surplus value, generated through attempt to move beyond the consciousness and rep- the direct extension of the working day, to that of relative surplus value, resentation-based theory of alienation one can still find in Camatte. extracted through the devaluation of labour power by “revolution[ising] At the same time, drawing upon concepts derived from the out and out the technical processes of labour and the pages of Invariance as much as his own experience, Cesarano devel- composition of society”.68 From education to the state, 68. Marx, Capital oped a clear understanding of contemporary forms of revolt, which there is a movement to “replac[e] all the preexisting Volume 1 (MECW 35), 511. no longer appeared restricted to the traditional workplace. Even if social and natural presuppositions with its own par- there has been a mutation of the species, a universal proletarianisa- 69. Jacques Camatte, ticular forms of organisation which mediate the sub- ‘Transition’ in Invariance tion that has defined the human as worker, this subsumption into cap- mission of the whole of physical and social life to its Series I no. 8 (1969). ital can never be completed and there remains a heterogeneous mass: real needs of valorisation”.69 In this way, the transition the “necessary pollution” that is the “corporality of 70. Marx, Economic and is linked to humanity’s increased dependence on the the species… irreducible to the people of capital”.73 73. Cesarano, Lampi di Philosophical Manuscripts critica radicale. capitalist production process, both in terms of the of 1844 (MECW 3), 284. Fundamental to Cesarano’s analysis is the ever- production of necessary goods and the provision of increasing devaluation through which, alongside 74. Giorgio Cesarano, 71. Camatte, ‘Transition’. work. The development of capitalism towards the surplus capital, surplus populations are produced as Danzica e Stettino come stage of its real domination coincides with the produc- excluded from the production process and thus from Detroit (Genoa 1971). tion of a depoliticised population as a brute matter only present to be capital’s new humanity. In a 1971 pamphlet “1970: consumed by fixed capital for its reproduction. As Marx argued, “pro- Danzica and Stettino as Detroit”, Cesarano located the paradigmatic duction does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human experience of 1968 not in the Parisian student-worker strikes of that commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping year, but in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanised being… Its Jr. that took place across the United States — ​understood as the most product is the self-conscious and self-acting [human] commodity”.70 mature site of capital’s real domination where the exclusionary pro- Workers thereby become “capitalised” and consider themselves as cess is most visible, “manifested in racial and national factors”.74 capital that must bear fruit — Homo​ oeconomicus. We find after univer- For Cesarano, the species, in the course of its everyday survival, sal proletarianisation not a collective or socialised worker qua revolu- finds that capital’s fictitious Gemeinwesen can only be individualised tionary subject, but a human being who “is despoiled and tends to be in one manner, and that this “cannot comfort human beings and give reduced to its biological dimension”. 71 them energy to support their situation, except for a It is this element of Camatte’s work that contributed towards the suicidal energy”.75 The manifestations of this energy 75. Camatte, ‘Marx and most interesting aspects of his reception in Italy, especially as present are to be found in various forms of seemingly mad and the Gemeinwesen’.

Endnotes 5 266 The Passion of Communism 267 gratuitous violence that are the only human forms that can be given to WHAT REMAINS the concrete destruction of humanity. Hence the increasingly desper- ate character they take whereby, against capitalist totalisation — ​“the I have attempted to give a theoretical introduction to the Invariance survival of death in the non-life of all” — ​the real movement responds circle’s contributions throughout the 1970s with an emphasis on their with “the organic totalisation of its own radical revolt against the Italian reception. The latter problematisation of the contemporary death of all” at a level that “all the bodies of the species conjuncture became the basis for the most critical positions in post- know instinctively”. 76 As Cesarano develops in his 76. Cesarano, Apoca- 1977 Italy, in the period of reflection that opened after the eradication unfinished major work: lypse and Revolution. — ​whether by violence, imprisonment, penitentism, or heroin — ​of the movements. This post-Bordigist perspective was important in such Every time a ‘crazy’ man launches a violent protest against a context, not as an expression of communist melan- the prison in which he is held and declares that what exists choly, but in order to produce a space of critique from 79. Furio di Paola, ‘Dopo does not exist or is false, the imagination is at work. This which it might be possible to rethink the political. This la dialetica’ in Aut Aut 165 (1978). ‘every time’ is becoming ‘always’. In the increasing rates of is most evident in Furio di Paola’s important article crime, neurosis and insanity, in the increasingly more from 1978, “Dopo la dialetica”, which traces a line from 80. The concept of frequent collective explosions of ‘unmotivated’ rage, in Camatte, Cesarano and the tradition of “radical cri- destitution may be traced insubordination… in the insidious absenteeism, we see an tique” through to then contemporary feminist practic- to a translation of Walter Benjamin’s key concept intermediate stage on the road that the imagination is es. The latter groups, such as those surrounding Lea of ‘Entsetzung’ in his ‘Crit- taking… that will put an end to the capitalist utopia, to pre- Melandri’s journal L’erba voglio, sought, through the ique of Violence’, wherein history, and allow the commencement of history critique of individual and group subjectivity, to dissi- it crucially serves to as an equilibrium of existence and being.77 77. Giorgio Cesarano, pate “the old phantoms of the ‘political’ that continue articulate the subjectless suspension or destitu- Critica dell’utopia capitale to operate as the mystical paralysis of a social body (Colibri Edizioni 1993). tion of law and the state Cesarano was here able to develop a non-roman- that subsists only through the effective interventions as such, rather than a 79 tic understanding of the “biological revolution” that, 78. Ibid. of the technologies of capital’s domination”. particular configuration against the Comontisti, certainly had no need for prop- Fundamental is everything that is not said: all thereof. While the concept has taken on a different agation or apology by pro-revolutionaries, who had succumbed to that was left to subsequent generations, especially meaning in contemporary 78 “the alibi of the ‘necessity of the struggle’”. Rather, the struggles our own. Crucially, three lines of inquiry remain open: French and Italian thinking, carried out by this heterogeneous remainder to subsumption, where (1) how to render concrete the ontological ground it is perhaps the most “resistance” to any particular identity becomes a universal “fact of the of capital’s real domination in the relation between precise term to indicate the challenge, central to species”, are meant to dispel the anguish of every present figure and subjectivity and the dialectical movement of history — ​ communisation theory, social identity, every predication — ​especially that of the militant. Such subjectivation; (2) what, if any, is the place of the of deposing a form (such acts and the enthusiasm increasingly found for them constitute the pro-revolutionary after the collapse of militancy, the as law, the state, value, sublime sign of this seemingly universal and almost biological rejection party, and gauchism alike — ​that is, does a specifically etc.), rather than a particu- lar political order. Its use of capital’s organisation of life — ​and thus of the utopian dimension of political vocation remain?; and finally, (3) following in this sense would follow capital’s own development projects. Bordiga’s own “original content of the communist pro- Bordiga’s rejection of gram”, what does it mean to destitute those particu- the term abolition (a ‘voli- lar historical forms, from property to money, that con- tional act … good for anarchists’). See Bordiga, stitute us as capitalised individuals separated from ‘The Original Content of 80 the common? How one answers these questions the Communist Program’.

Endnotes 5 268 The Passion of Communism 269 determines how contemporary strands of communisation might be “TRANSITION” distinguished. It determines, as well, how one might avoid melancholic Jacques Camatte, Revue Invariance (1969) resignation in the face of the community of capital — ​as much as any impatient substitution for the unrealised human community, or hypo- The starting point for the critique of the the economy and so “bosses” of capital. statisation of apparent revolutionary processes. existing society of capital has to be the Today, more than ever, capital finds its restatement of the concepts of formal and own real strength in the inertia of the — Cooper real domination as the historical phases process which produces and reproduces of capitalist development. All other period- its specific needs of valorization as human isations of the process of the autonomis- needs in general. ation of value, such as competitive, mono- (The defeat of the May ’68 move- poly, state monopoly, bureaucratic etc. ment in France was the clearest manifes- capitalism, leave the field of the theory of tation of this “occult power of capital”.) the proletariat, that is, the critique of polit- The economy reduces politics (the ical economy, to begin with the vocabulary old art of organizing) to a pure and simple of the practice of social-democracy or epiphenomenon of its own real process. “Leninist” ideology, codified by Stalinism. It lets it survive as the museum of horrors All this phraseology with which one such as parliament with all its farces, or pretends to explain “new” phenomena else in the rancorous undergrowth of really only mystifies the passage of value the small “extra-parliamentary” rackets, to its complete autonomy, that is, the which are all identical regarding their for- objectification of the abstract quantity in mal or informal organisation, but compete process in the concrete community. obscenely with their “strategic” chatter. Capital, as a social mode of pro- The destiny of the other instruments duction, accomplishes its real domination of mediation or of ideology seems to be when it succeeds in replacing all the the same. They still enjoyed a certain ap- pre-existing social and natural presuppo- parent autonomy (philosophy, art, etc.) sitions with its own particular forms of during the period of formal domination, organisation which mediate the submis- as remainders of the previous epochs. sion of the whole of physical and social All apparent distinction between ideology life to its real needs of valorisation. The and the social mode of production is essence of the Gemeinschaft of capital is destroyed and, today, value that has organisation. achieved autonomy is its own ideology. Politics, as an instrument for me- Just as the passage from absolute diating the despotism and capital, disap- to relative surplus-value has, capital pears in the phase of the real domination (its movement constantly tending to total of capital. After having been fully used in expropriation) has divided all the social the period of formal domination, it can be and technical connections of the work disposed of when capital, as total being, process that existed beforehand in order comes to organise rigidly the life and then to reunify them as intellectual powers experience of its subordinates. The state, of capital’s own valorisation; so today, in as the rigid and authoritarian manager the passage of capital to an overall social of the expansion of the equivalent forms power, aiding in the disintegration of in social relation (“Urtext”), becomes an the entire social fabric and all its mental elastic instrument in the business sphere. connections with the past and their re- Consequently, the state, or directly, “pol- composition in a delirious unity, organised itics”, are less than ever the subject of by the ever accelerating cycles of the

Endnotes 5 270 The Passion of Communism 271 metamorphoses of capital, everything “models” of organization — ​the passage is that the most obvious and dazzling mani- based rationally on the movement when is reduced to degraded ingredients of the very short. festations of fetishism and mystification sociability, conviviality, customs, language, extra-ordinary synthesis of value that is One cannot otherwise explain the of the social relations created by its devel- desires, or needs, in a word, the social self-valorising. preponderance of the categories men- opment is afforded us by the concept being of humans, have become nothing The real domination of capital there- tioned above in the workers’ movement accepted by all the “innovating” theories, other than the valorisation requirement fore means that not only the tempo of life (state, bureaucratic capitalism etc.), which critical or apologetic, of “industrial society” of capital, internal components of its own and the mental capacity of the proletariat merely bracket the real being of capital and its appendix: “consumer society”. enlarged reproduction. are expropriated, but that circulation time so as to affirm the centrality of one of its This concept, an expression of If capital dominates everything now prevails over production time (on a epiphenomena theorised as the supreme a mystification perpetrated by capital in to the point of being able to identify itself spatial level). The society of capital creates phase, last phase etc. social relations, becomes possible insofar with the social being, it seems, on this an “unproductive” population on a large On the contrary, one must remain as the valorisation (thus the life needs of basis, to disappear. scale, i.e. it creates its own “life” in func- on the ground of the critique of political capital) increasingly dominates the labour This is the most glaring fetishism tion of its own need: to fix them then in the economy (the critique of the existence of process. Marx defined the labour pro- ever produced by exchange value in the sphere of circulation and the metamor- capital and the affirmation of communism) cess as the organic exchange between history of its own autonomisation. A “neu- phoses of accumulated surplus-value. to understand the totality of social life in man and nature, purposeful activity turned tral” category can arise from this, like that The cycle closes with an identity: the period of its reduction to a means of to the creation of use values. of industrial society. Thus all possible all men’s time is socially necessary time the process of development of the auton- Capital tends to present its own distinction between abstract labour which for creation and circulation — realization​ omised productive forces. general needs as exclusively and immedi- valorises capital (the proletariat) or which of surplus-value. Everything can be meas- The society of capital, in fact, ap- ately identical to those of humanity to the enables the total existence of its being ured by the hands of a clock. pears superficially to be divided into fields extent that it creates an increasing identity (the middle classes) and “useful” human “Time is everything, man is nothing; that are apparently opposed and thus between these two processes. In fact, activity as it unfolded in pre-capitalist he is, at the most, time’s carcass” (Marx, gives rise to the separate descriptions of given the real domination of its own exis- epochs can disappear (and in fact does The Poverty of Philosophy). The abstract them (sociology, economics, psychology tence, this mystification seems to be disappear). quantity in process (value) constitutes etc.). The existence of all these “fields itself as the social mode of production and of research” only explains in mystifying of life (material community). the unified absolute value-created reality, The theories of the workers’ move- the modern sacrum, characteristic of a “PROLETARIAT AND GEMEINWESEN” ment have grasped this social process process which goes from the decompo- Jacques Camatte, Revue Invariance (1968) merely to mystify it. To give just one ex- sition of a pre-existing organic reality to ample: absolute subordination of the state the fixation of diverse elements which are and its insertion as a particular moment of then recomposed and put into use only The publication of “On the Jewish Ques- from its Gemeinwesen makes revolution the valorization process becomes the by the growing social inertia, created by tion” and of “For a Critique of Hegel’s inevitable — ​this is possible, as will later exact opposite, that is, a “state capitalism”, the opaque and despotic movement of the Philosophy of Right” responds not be made clear, only in response to an eco- so capital can become not a social mode productive forces, forces which grow out only to a necessity of fact. Indeed, one nomic crisis that weakens the force of production and of life, but a bureaucrat- of themselves and which necessitate cannot find these texts at present, yet of repression of the dominant class and ic, democratic etc. mode of management. the representation of the true movement there is also a profound theoretical need provides the necessary energy to the Once they have arrived at this point of cohesion of the whole social totality. for them: the critique of democracy oppressed class to attempt the insurrec- of view, they have to make the revolution That is why all “critical theory” and its definitive supersession by the tional assault. Moreover, we find the no longer the overthrow of one “existence” wishing to found itself on raising up one or proletariat — ​communism. affirmation that only human being is the and the affirmation of another, but a politi- other “sector” ends up reducing itself to Nonetheless, if the antidemocratic true Gemeinwesen (community) of man. cal-statist process with the “organisation” having neither subject nor object. aspect of these texts has often been Now, who in this society could represent of it as the key problem or, more, the pana- No subject to the extent that value highlighted, the essential question, that this Gemeinwesen? What is the class that cea that resolves everything. Here again as an abstract object in a material being of the Gemeinwesen (community), has in this society can claim the human title? the degraded conception of the revolution (Grundrisse) avoids all immediate deter- never been raised. Now, in “On the Jewish It is the proletariat. This response given no longer as a world relation of power mination. One must say about this imper- Question” as in “Critical Gloss in the in “For the Critique of the Hegelian Philos- between the proletariat and capital, but ceptibility of the real tendencies of capital Margins”, Marx considers this question, ophy of Right (Introduction)” shows at immediately as a question of “forms” or in the epoch of its absolute domination, showing that the separation of the human what point there exists a profound unity

Endnotes 5 272 The Passion of Communism 273 between all of these texts. There is a unity Philosophy was the research into “MARX AND GEMEINWESEN” because: this being, it was the interpretation, con- Jacques Camatte, Revue Invariance (1977) tinual accommodation to the exigencies “The question of the community is of a being where it felt the necessity and the central question of the proletar- the alienated given of this world. With It is in the Urtext of the Contribution to the leads to the autonomisation of its various ian movement. In a synthetic mode, the emergence of the proletariat, this Critique of Political Economy (1858) and in constituent elements (the individual, poli- this can be presented as: theoretical research is resolved in practice. the Grundrisse, Marx’s unfinished works tics, religion, the state), which constitutes The proletariat realises philosophy in and drafts, where the most is possible, the starting point for a vast movement a. Primitive human community superseding it. where the system is open. It is a moment whose development the bourgeoisie prof- b. Destruction of this through the Radical emancipation was the only that stands in essential connection with its off of. Yet, for Marx, it does not appear development of two movements, emancipation possible in Germany; yet it the so-called philosophical works of his that the latter can in fact found another that of value and that of the expro- was the revolution on high that triumphed youth. This is not to suggest that Marx community. This question is addressed priation of human beings here. But Germany is still sick from this subsequently abandoned all contact with even less with respect to capital. Only the victory, this victory that made it partici- philosophy, on the contrary: the first book proletariat can, by destroying the latter — ​ c. Formation of the material commu- pate on a social stage above that which it of Capital is fully comprehensible only if the last moment of the movement-becom- nity with the fusion of two separate possessed in itself: communism. one knows, at least, what Aristotle wrote ing of value, of class society — ​found a new preceding movements: capital- Radical emancipation was also the about form and matter in his Metaphys- community, the human community. value in process solution for Russian society. The Russians ics as well as Hegel’s logic. There is However, in posthumous works d. Scientific communism, the human were the theoretical contemporaries of also of course an undeniable Spinozian such as the Urtext and the Grundrisse community rediscovered, that the modern peoples; the Russian prole- resonance to be found in many pages of (and taking into account as well all those integrates all of the acquisitions tariat was the theoretical contemporary Capital. In the Urtext, Marx is attached that are not yet published) we find that of the previous periods” of the European workers’ movement but to a young Hegel, a Hegel who he could Marx poses the possibility that a com- it could not become its real contemporary not have known; this Marx who deeply munity could be formed either through On the other hand, Marx shows unless, in the West, the proletariat had investigated the Gemeinwesen, especially gold or capital. This is the fundamental that bourgeois society derived from a become itself the effective contemporary the Greek one, and that, beyond Hegel, he interest of these texts. With them, one can social revolution with a political soul of what has long been veiled by society: subterraneously connected to individuals demonstrate that gold is unable to provide destroys politics. This would seem to be communism. such as Joachim da Fiore, Nicholas de the foundation for a community and the a contradiction if one doesn’t recall that The book of the Russian revolution Cusa, etc. accession, on the contrary, of capital to the essential in capitalist society is to find was written before its history. Unfortu- Autonomisation of exchange value, the material community. the political means to dominate humans nately, the Russian proletariat accom- community, relation between the state and Thus, in Marx’s complete works, become slaves to capital. Politics is no plished the romantic task of realising the general equivalent, definition of capital there is a juxtaposition between, on the longer the question of the relation of capitalism that the bourgeois class, at as value in process — ​these are the essen- one hand, the individualisation of that human beings amongst themselves, but least in Russia, could not. tial points confronted in the Urtext. They movement through which capital con- uniquely the relation of humans with the After this detour, as was also the are not particular to it, of course, because stitutes itself as the material community material community, that is with capital of case in China and various countries that they can also be found in the Grundrisse and, on the other, an affirmation of the which the state is the representation. gained their independence after the and Capital. However, in this text the impossibility thereof, linked to a mad hope To capital which has become the second world war, there reappears more study is more synthetic and the various that the proletariat will, in time, rebel and material oppressor of humans, one can powerfully the necessity of a radical elements are tackled simultaneously; destroy the capitalist mode of production only oppose the proletariat in as much as revolution, of a revolution with a human they are salient, especially with respect (CMP). Yet, capital’s community exists; it — ​when constituted as a class — ​is what title. Human society cannot survive unless to autonomisation and community. In the this implies an abandonment of any clas- struggles for the triumph of a finally found it is transformed into a human Gemein- first volume of Capital, the exposition is sist theory and the understanding that an human being: the social man of commu- wesen (community). The proletariat has more analytical. immense historical phase is over. nist society. no romantic tasks to complete, but only Overall on the subject of the Marx’s work on community has its human work [son oeuvre humaine, to community, in the works published during been left to the side. In Germany, theorists ergon tou anthropou]. his lifetime, Marx reasons as follows: the such as Weber and Tönnies do not refer at destruction of the old community due to all to the various works we have just men- the autonomisation of exchange value also tioned. In noting this we do not propose to

Endnotes 5 274 The Passion of Communism 275 recompose a new Marx, but simply to note class struggle: the ruling class erects the form from the piece of land where they With the Roman Empire comes the need the extent to which reflection on commu- state in order to dominate the opposing live had not yet come to be. We therefore for a state that must dominate, be above, nity is a fundamental axis of all his work. class of society. cannot speak of state, class, religion, art, and control a host of communities, hence To understand the significance of In the Urtext, there is a tendency to- etc in such a case. It is we who, ac- the attempt to resolve the issue through this Marxian approach to social becoming, wards a synthesis of these two discourses. cording to what has happened in recent the dissolution of all communities in we must link the Urtext to the Grundrisse However, Marx does not really confront centuries, abstract such elements in these Romanity, with the concordant loss of di- chapter “Die Formen, die der kapitalis- the time and place of the birth of classes. communities. versity (a phenomenon already attempted tischen Produktion vorgehen [The forms This would have led him to relativize his With different determinations, we with the Greeks, the Hellenisation of the that precede capitalist production].” In schema of social evolution even more than find a similar absence of separation in barbarians). Christianity played a big role this text, Marx studies the different he did during his discussion with the Rus- ancient Egypt. The state, however, had to here. It is it that will realise the homogeni- historical periods that preceded capital’s sian populists. Classes are only manifest- some degree become autonomous. sation or destruction, indeed the domes- development, starting from the forms of ed in the West because only there do we In the case of China this separation tication, of human groups, after putting community; an immense work, as attested find the autonomisation of the individual. was sketched, but was not in fact effected. force in check; this is what happened to by the various studies and notebooks that However, the state phenomenon is not What the Europeans called Emperor was the Sardinians, for example. have been preserved on ethnology and peculiar to it. This is where the Marxian in fact the “son of heaven” who received During the Renaissance, the state the prehistoric period. Here again, it is not analysis is inadequate. In “Die Formen his mandate from the latter. Natural emerged more clearly as the general a question of wanting to organise differ- …” Marx intuits certain realities when he events could sometimes indicate that his equivalent state (see Marx in the Urtext), ently what has been given to us, trying to approached the Inca society as a state mandate had been removed, which well accelerating the passage from the place one chapter in relation to another. within a communist society, but he does conveys the particular relationship of this verticality of value’s movement to its hori- One must simply consider the various ap- not sufficiently emphasise that the state is “emperor” to the cosmos and his function zontality. The end was no longer a god and proaches of this study and grasp, despite an abstraction of the community, that it is within it. In particular, by guaranteeing so- therefore a temple but, as a result of the what is lacking, in the direction that Marx more or less autonomous, separated from cial order, he simultaneously guarantees a disappearance of sacred hoarding, value indicated in his own reflexive effort. It is the ancient social body linked to nature. fundamental achievement: the separation came to move in all horizontal directions; then that we realise that the Urtext is a Research subsequent to Marx of man from animality. When disorder there was therefore the need for an ele- privileged point of articulation for such an has sometimes revealed and especially reigns, there is a return to the latter. Thus ment of regulation and control. understanding. specified the existence of states not yet the emperor governs the relationship With the development of bourgeois The question then arises of how separated from the community and nature. between the cosmos and the social milieu. society the class struggle became deci- Marx could have presented the missing Thus, among the Sumerians, as Thorkild Various other examples could be sive, if only because the protagonists of chapter on the state, one of the six that the Jacobsen has shown, one finds “the cited as special cases that cannot be uni- the drama no longer reasoned according Critique of Political Economy was meant cosmos as a state”. The organisation of linearly available because the process of to a community or, if you will, they did so to contain. It seems that, as with capital, the cosmos dictates that of the commu- autonomisation did not operate identically reduced to the limits of a class. It is at this Marx became aware of the difficulty of nity, defining hierarchy and therefore the in the distinct communities. The study of moment when classes became really deci- treating it in isolation, since the state can state. It is a moment when the separation African and Amerindian societies reveals sive, operational. We will have the various only be conceived from the community between interiority and exteriority has not all the possibilities. In Society Against revolutions that, from the 16th century to and, moreover, the future of the state yet been accomplished, is not yet over. A the State, Pierre Clastres has highlighted the present day, mark the stages of the blends intimately with that of value; at two posteriori, we can say that it is a given the mechanisms there that prevented the establishment of the CMP and, now, the historical moments it tends to constitute type of community which implied such a autonomisation of power, hierarchy, state. community of capital. The state is consid- itself as a community: with gold, where it relation to the cosmos that attributed to it It is in Greece that we find separa- ered an “artifice”, an institution necessary does not succeed, and with capital, where a determining function, but it is also clear tion and autonomisation, as well as where to unite the various social elements; hence it does. that such reasoning, in truth, is absolutely we find the state, individuals, and classes its importance, its possible autonomi- The question of the state is not not valid for the moment when men and at the same time as separation from sation and the fact that it can become posed in the same terms in his political women of that community lived. For them, “mythical” thought, the birth of science, stronger than society (Marx). Now its works. As a result, two discourses coexist: there was a communitarian whole. logic and, we will come back to it more importance is still considerable but it 1. Exchange value achieves autonomy and Men and women had not yet aban- in other works, therapeutics. The state is tends to be absorbed in the community through this movement creates the com- doned the old representation-conception still a sensible expression of the ancient of capital. munity, towards which end it subjugates of the world of peoples who were not Gemeinwesen; the movement of value has I have indicated elsewhere the the state; 2. The state is a product of the sedentary. The separation of all that they not yet reached too great a development. movement through which the material

Endnotes 5 276 The Passion of Communism 277 community is formed and its fundamental of certain terms: structure, totality, outside the sphere of industrial production, working time… “ (Grundrisse). Yet, capital characteristics; material community be- organisation, system, code, etc. Hence and reduces human beings to the same has captured duration and human time. cause it is the dead, crystallised element, the preponderance of semiotics: we must situation of dependence on itself. It is Economy in the sense of saving is the work of millions of human beings ex- know the meaning of a system, that of its accomplished alienation. Human beings only possible when time is autonomous teriorised in the form of that fixed capital different parts; we must perceive its signi- have become totally different or, what and is counted; besides, Marx insists in which founds the community. This is the fiers where man has no more meaning. amounts to the same thing, slaves have Capital on the relation between the meas- essential moment in which capital replac- A world losing more and more of its accepted the power of their master to urement of time and the development of es its presuppositions with its conditions references, its constraints (“everything such an extent that they have become the economy or the development of fixed of development, that of its accession to is possible”; it should be noted in this its simulacra. In doing so, any dialectic capital; to economise, to save, can lead the community, but that still does not tell connection that there is a certain contra- of the concepts of productive forces and to a situation in which the individual will us everything about the community of diction between an evanescence of the relations of production, as discussed by even save his life, once he has taken out capital. I have demonstrated elsewhere central state as point of reference, seat of Marx in his 1857 Introduction, is over; on life insurance and bought himself a tomb. the important role played by circulating the general equivalent, and the need for a the other hand, production is no longer This is a grotesque manner of indicating a capital in the latter’s realisation. However, more or less centralised law enforcement simply production for production’s sake: reality: the economy is the dissimulation it could not have been established, let agency) imposes the requirement of a sci- it is now production for the reproduction of our life. alone reproduced, if the mentality of men ence of information’s meaning. Everything of capital. It finds a subject and thereby For Marx, the economy of labour and women had not been modified so that has been externalised, autonomized: loses its character as object. time is ultimately the essential point and it corresponded to the new requirements men and women have before themselves “All the concepts of the dialectic almost determines human evolution. of that form of life determined by capital. the community of their own despoilment. that we have reached do not imply that However, as he himself shows, it is only At first, class ideologies allow the different It takes a code to understand what is production, distribution, exchange and with the development of capital in the actors to represent with more or less happening and this code is the reduc- consumption are identical, but that they fifteenth century that this imperative really adequacy their role in the life process of tion of communication. It is no longer constitute the members of a totality” appears, engendering a secular struggle capital, even when they oppose it (as in possible to speak in terms of antipathy (Introduction, 1857). between capitalists and workers that the case of the limits to the working day), or sympathy; beings are neutral particles Especially those that were centred will reach its paroxysm in England in the subsequently it becomes the movement of of information recording and reference and articulated around human activity: nineteenth century with the struggle for capital itself — ​capital posing as rep- to this information. The ancient faith that labour-leisure, labour time-free time, the limit of the working day — ​a real civil resentation — ​that grounds the representa- was so important in earlier times has value-surplus value; and even those that war that lasted 50 years (Marx). In other tions of human beings and guides them in been replaced by credit, which is faith in have freed themselves from it (profit-loss, countries, it occurred later, yet carried out their praxis. At this level, wanting to define a system in which man is still a reference, etc.) have lost any operationality. It is obvi- in other forms. The result is the struc- what comes first and what second is to and then by inflation, which is the faith ously the couple shortage-wealth, under- turing of the community of capital, the debate the chicken and the egg. What is of capital in itself. Its acceptance brings pinned by the concept of need, that most subjection of human beings to quantified undeniable is the seemingly indestructible humanity to an increasingly absurd life. clearly vanishes. When human beings are time and the acceptance of fulfilling one’s force of representation. The becoming of Every human being will be nothing but an torn from their community, the realities life in a rigid framework. We have arrived what is in place appears eternal. existent “thrown” into the community of that founded the concepts of need, scarci- at capital’s organisation of time and it is The irony is that it is precisely at capital and set in motion by its becoming. ty, working time, etc. still arise, but to the from there that the latter can produce the this moment that historical materialism It is no longer a question of reasoning in extent that a community has been rebuilt programming of all moments of human life. triumphs, posing as an adequate rep- terms of the mode of production in order where all the elements that had individual- It is debited in time slots during which we resentation of the capitalist world, which to face current reality. There is no longer ised, autonomised, have been resorbed as must perform certain functions, certain is itself at a very distant stage from the a capitalist mode of production, but the no more than the moments of articulation vital processes. Better, there is now in one that engendered it! community of capital in which the state is of the community of capital’s becoming. virtue of this division a production which The realisation of the community of ever more immersed. These are the determinations of human is appropriate to all the men and women capital and the end of the historical phase More generally it can be said that behaviour once men and women have crucified on these quanta of time: for the that began with the rise of exchange value there is a definite mode of production been detached from their community. youth with its many subdivisions, for the is reflected in the appearance of new when production really becomes a More generally, it signals the end adults, the elderly, for the dead (thana- disciplines: systems theory (Bertalanffy), problem because of material, technical of political economy, especially if one tology, for capital death is the absolute general semantics (Korzybski), “complex- and social difficulties. Capital produces refers to Marx’s affirmation that: “Real capitalisation of time, it is the homogene- ity theory” (Morin) and in the importance everything, even what appears to be economy — ​savings — ​consists in saving ous time that includes no opposition).

Endnotes 5 278 The Passion of Communism 279 Capital is the accumulation of time; and greater deprivation of human beings… and Revolution when they speak of an the right place. However, economic devel- it reabsorbs it, absorbs it (one can have when they realise it, which is to say when “economy of interiority”. opment has increased availability, which both modalities) and, as a result, it is they question capital’s diktat, otherwise Insofar as a concept tends to invade raises at all levels the problem of knowing posed for eternity. Marx addresses this the latter seems to immediately fulfil them domains which are originally foreign to how to choose products, means of pro- question of eternity on the formal side. He or at least it will in a not too distant future. it, it means the extension of the phenom- duction, etc. The economic act would then speaks of Unvergänglichkeit expressing Economics as a science of trade enon that it represents and the loss of be the very act of choosing. Hence the the idea of ​​something imperishable, as also vanishes. I have shown elsewhere strict limits, of those rigid determinations importance of calculation which replaces well as the idea that we cannot move on to how capital tends to go beyond exchange which made it possible to characterise that simple judgment that was linked something else. and succeeds (Grundrisse). There is and define it. Economics comes to mean to the concept of value; and this act of Eternity — ​the duration of value in its no more exchange but only attribution. the organisation of something, of a whole choosing of course implies the adaptation capital form — ​is only posited by produc- Significantly, modern economists speak of or functional process; it indicates the of human beings to the economic system. tion itself which is twofold: “reproduction economic flows. mode according to which propositions Knowing how to choose is knowing how as a commodity, reproduction as money There is another ground of the are organised, of affirmations to establish to adapt. Is this not simultaneously the and unity of these two processes of repro- economy that loses its operability: the a certain sense. Consider this sentence creed of all futurists: we must adapt to the duction” (Grundrisse). division of labor. This has often been by Fresquet: “This is the economy of shock of the future which is that of capital Developed from the point of view compared between different modes of the gospel: Jesus freed man from his escaping from any constraint, any refer- of substance, the eternity of capital also production. Yet, with capital it becomes sin. Humanity has been redeemed by his ence, developing on its own account and implies the evanescence of men, which is a simple differentiation between capital’s love” (“Meaning and defence of sin”, in Le striking full force the slower way of life of to say their weak durability as well as their moments, a relation between the means of Monde, 6.3.1976). the species that engendered it? insignificance. Capital takes time, what production and means of consumption. Fi- Economics as a science of organ- We find here a convergence with for Marx is the very element of human nally, economics in the sense of manage- isation of a certain geographical area ecology, which can be simply defined as development, away from man. It creates a ment (as Xenophon already employed it), tends to be supplanted by ecology given the science of the conditions of existence void in which time is abolished; the human both private and public, also disappears; the problems of pollution and the scarcity and of interactions between living beings loses an important reference; she can no because management involves a manag- of raw materials (but there is no shortage and environmental conditions — ​which is longer recognise herself, perceive herself. ing subject and an object to manage. This of human beings and thus always the to say ecology is fundamentally a science It is congealed time that she faces. is valid as long as men still have a force possibility of ersatz!). The field of the of the adaptation of the individual and This marks the end of economics as of intervention, but it is the rationality of economy expands until it no longer has a the species to its milieu. Economics is the science of wealth, whether under- capital that is now essential. Those who real consistency, the concept is diluted the science of adaptation to a specific stood as the accumulation of use values or want to manage must simply recognise more and more. Land is envisioned as a environment, that of capital. the accumulation / hoarding of exchange capital’s movement. Insofar as they want total ecosystem that capital must exploit Political economy was the science value ​​(money, capital). But it has been to intervene, they can only temporarily to an ever lesser extent through the inter- of capital developing into its totality. In shown that with capital, it is no longer use upset the movement. They do not manage mediary of man. order to account for this, it not only inven- values ​​that are essential for man, but the anymore, they record. One finds a very good expression toried the purely economic phenomena movement of valorisation-capitalisation Some wanted to extend the cate- in the definition that some economists concerning exchange value, utility, capital, within which any difference between use gories of political economy to areas that give to economic science (one no longer etc, but it more or less explicitly described value and exchange value has been abol- were previously foreign to it, hence all the speaks of political economy): the science how men internalise phenomena, be- ished. The search for wealth has become theories on libidinal economy (Lyotard) of adaptation. This conception incorpo- coming ever more compatible with… as a the search for a privileged position within or desiring machines, where desire rates the old categories: wealth, exchange, result of those clashes and struggles that capital’s life process in order to benefit replaces need (Deleuze-Guattari). But price, utility, etc. It also allows him to made them abandon their ancient concep- from its material community. how, from the moment when one grasps give an account of “human nature”. The tions. With the realisation of the material This search for wealth was coupled the incapacity of Marxist theory (its aporia, human being has an “infinite need” which community capital comes to exist as a with the fight against scarcity, but it really according to the new theoreticians) to stumbles on the “finitude of creation” (H. world. The only thing left to do is to study starts with the autonomisation of ex- understand new social phenomena, can Guitton in his article “Economic Science” how human beings who have internalised change value. “Primitive communities” did one transpose the former into psychology, in the Encyclopedia Universalis), thus capital adapt to its life process: this is the not know it, just as they did not know the for example, and build a global theory on needs are innumerable while the means to task of economics. obsessive fear of free time. The present such a foundation? One can make a simi- satisfy them are limited; on the other hand, Economics represented reflection lack would concern life itself, the greater lar reproach to the authors of Apocalypse they may not be at the right time and in on the phenomena that developed after

Endnotes 5 280 The Passion of Communism 281 the autonomisation of exchange value and that it was a critique of political economy, such a past state, but to show that the that will grasp all economic and social thus an attempt to intervene within them to individualise the contradictions of the eternalisation of capital has been realised processes); it also founded fascism (the in order to reconcile them with the social CMP, which would lead to the proletar- only to the extent that our memory has Nazis wanted the Volksgemeinschaft, the relations already in place; it has always ian revolution that would constitute the been abolished. Without memory, there community of the people!) which is itself a been more or less imbued with humanist emancipation-liberation of a whole class can be no human community. movement that, by its action, enabled the ideals. of men and humanity itself. Yet, as we One would think that the transi- community of capital to establish itself. With the introduction of the capital- have seen, the dynamics of emancipa- tion from one community to another, if With respect to political democracy, ist mode of production, social movement tion-liberation are those of capital. It is the it poses practical problems and causes it is certainly true that it had the merit and economic movement converge. The great revolutionary and all the revolutions multiple rifts, can at least be grasped and of limiting any overflowing of violence. struggle of the proletariat within this have benefited it. The series of revolutions understood by men and women. Yet, and Indeed — ​and this is the important argu- mode of production has made it possible is thus finished and concludes with the this is an essential contribution of the ment that all the current Democrats and to structure this unity-unification. From realisation of the community of capital. Urtext, Marx shows the extent to which all those who, horrified by Nazism and then on, economics can no longer be Human becoming can no longer be linked the movement of exchange value that Stalinism, consider it to be a lesser evil — ​it anything but capital’s discourse which, to revolution. dissolves the old communities and tends should be noted that in the countries in acceding to the material community, Thus ends the movement of to pose itself as a community distorts its where the old communities crumbled and renders the whole content of political externalisation-autonomisation and libera- own comprehension by human beings. where democracy could not be estab- economy obsolete. tion-emancipation, which we have here What they believe to be determinant are lished, where there was no rule and no Economics translates a certain analysed starting from the dissolution in fact their relationships with one another, institution to curb the social phenomenon, behaviour by a part of the species that of “primitive communities” in the West. or the institutions they have set up on the there was no brake on violence. What was existed upon the earth. At the moment So, too, is the master-slave dialectic basis of economic relations that they have human, something that had been defined when this science loses its reality, it abolished, that representation of this not understood. Marx reveals the extent of by the community that had collapsed, and signifies that this behaviour tends towards movement, through the disappearance of this false historical consciousness. Thus where could one find a point of reference? its own abolition: it multiplies indefinitely classes. Even the movement of alienation the French bourgeois thought to limit or Thus a host of atrocities were committed (there is a drop in the birth rate in all the disappears since, in the community of equalise wealth and did not realise that in the USSR as a result of the impossibility most capitalised countries), posing itself capital, one finds the juxtaposition of the through their intervention they removed of establishing a parliamentary democracy as ever more different from the rest of the being that has been stripped bare with all obstacles to its free development in the and as a result of the failure of the world living world, considering the earth as an that of which he has been alienated, the form of capital. proletarian revolution. It was this violent object of exploitation, abandoning itself two reunited but as separate realities. Re- In The Holy Family, Marx had outburst that was feared by various Rus- to technology and the exaltation of the ligion itself loses its function because it no already approached this “illusion” without sian revolutionaries, from Dostoevsky — ​ productive forces, to progress. longer serves to connect beings, a matter giving it its real economic foundation. which made him hate the revolution as One path of the species’ evolution left to capital as representation. The latter, This illusion manifested itself trag- Berdiaev reminds us on several occasions, has been fully traveled. It follows that by more and more destroying human roots, ically when Saint-Just, on the day of his especially in his book devoted to the the self-perception of the behaviour destroys the memory of what religion pre- execution, pointed to a copy of the rights author — ​to Lenin himself since, according that has been adopted as well as that served and that preserved it. All religions of man in the Conciergerie and declared: to Victor Serge, he feared the generalised reflection on it must end. Thus it is the end of salvation are based on remembrance. “I am the one who made that.” This docu- breakup of the class struggle which might of philosophy which was, among other And how, indeed, can there be alienation ment rightly proclaimed the right of a man happen following the example of the things, reflection on values, on value; it when there is no memory of another state? who is no longer the man of the ancient Czechoslovakian mutiny (see Year I of the was a theoretical behaviour which created The absurd limit of capital’s movement is Gemeinwesen (community), any more than Revolution). a hierarchy of the world of beings and a human community without man, thereby current industrial and economic relations The same horrors were repeated things according to the exteriority-interi- exacerbating the automatic subject that could be those of ancient society. with folkloric variants in Asia, Latin Amer- ority dichotomy. Marx, after Ure and Owen, spoke of in They did not perceive that the exter- ica, and Africa. In African countries, the For Marx, economics was the Capital. nalised activity of men reached a proper trauma of the destruction of community is science that allowed us to describe how Consequently, the historical study autonomy over which they had no control. even deeper; the clash with the world of “primitive communities” had been de- of the development of the species over This false bourgeois conscience founds capital is in itself a generator of madness, stroyed, to reveal the determinism of the time since its emergence makes it possi- representative, parliamentary democracy: in the sense of an absolute loss of refer- evolution of different human societies, to ble to preserve or to recover a memory of the belief that with institutions one can ence and acute impossibility of being in a explain the revolutions and, to the extent a different state, certainly not to restore constitute the nation (a new community community.

Endnotes 5 282 The Passion of Communism 283 This does not mean that Western in order to go against this derangement recuperation it is due to an erroneous not to find ourselves again: the realisation Democracies have not committed any in- of the productive forces, the need for an consciousness. Individuals consider a of madness. In this passage, Baudrillard ternal violence, no torture, no crime… cer- intervention that will make it possible to certain phenomenon to be effectively strikingly indicates the movement of tainly not. But they first operated outside regenerate its course, to clean up and heal antagonistic to capital; yet, it later turns inflation. Europe, in countries where they were not it! Simultaneously, communism would be out to realise what it should have de- It is at the moment of the destruc- “hindered” by democratic laws. That is why the true consciousness of the movement stroyed. And there we meet in another way tion of a community in place that false the war of 1914–1918 and above all fascism of production in action for millennia that capital’s anthropomorphosis. It is thanks consciousness comes out most clearly; it that brought to Europe the methods that had only been waiting for a favourable to inadequate representations of the real is then that unbridled searches are made had been reserved for other countries sign moment to manifest itself. movement, due to false consciousness, for its reconstitution in whatever more or the death sentence of political democracy. The same mistake is found in the that capital continues to achieve its less fantastic form. Some try to do this The ever-widening disappearance thought that communism could develop domination. It could be thought that this by partaking of the same, throwing them- of all ideals and all democratic rules meant on the basis of the reduction of the work- movement would continue only until that selves into a frenzied sexuality, others by that, in a decaying world, especially when ing day. In doing so, one still maintained moment when capital would finally absorb indulging in mysticism, drugs, or music the community of capital is refused, there a presupposition of capital (the quanti- a foreign substance and thereby explode (the phenomenon of pop music). is no longer any obstacle to violence. fication of time) and sought to use what or exhaust itself. This might be true for In the second and third centuries Hence the repeated and vain invocation capital had brought about; which is to say, various institutions, which thus makes of our era, an immense distress took hold of a return to political democracy and the that with the development of the produc- them inadequate and inoperative such of many men and women, following the various proposals for tinkering with and tive forces a phenomenon was under way, that at the least shock they collapse (and collapse of the ancient cities (polis) in reinvigorating it. As if, after the tremen- but capital prevented its full development revolution really was that moment when which they held recognised and concrete dous bankruptcy of 1914 and 1933, it could and even distorted it. Hence the need for everything collapsed and where everyone roles. There followed a collapse of the be a bulwark against the tide of violence an intervention of which I have already escaped from the various institutions, cosmopolitanism that the Roman Empire that swelled and began to sweep over the spoken. False consciousness is caught in roles, etc.), but capital seizes everything had engendered but which it could not world… especially because it had only the trap of immediate phenomenon linked and, by anthropomorphising itself, only realise, due to the extraordinary tensions been an accommodation since its origin. to a will to intervene in order to make this increases in potential because at the that traversed it and the ignoble relations We find the same false conscious- phenomenon work in the direction of limit it can appear human. Similarly, one that then reigned. Hence the Gnostics ness among the French socialists: “From human interests. The human community could think that this movement of recuper- and Manichaeans posed the problem not this follows the error of those socialists, cannot be built on time only, it is possible ation could be the cause of an imbalance only of an exit from the world constituted especially the French socialists, who only through a constructed unity of which would introduce a flaw in the by the Roman Empire, but of the cosmos. wanted to prove that socialism was the humanity-nature that encompasses space community of capital. However, a serious Among the Greeks, human society and realisation of bourgeois ideas […] and who and time. danger accompanies this possibility: the cosmos were still in continuity, among tried to demonstrate that exchange value Finally, when Marx wrote that no so- total loss, the complete externalisation the Romans this survived in a schematic […] was a system of socialism, freedom cial form disappears until it has exhausted and thus the realised emptiness of human fashion, hence the Gnostic theme of the and equality for all; but which would have all the possibilities it contains (see Preface beings, resulting in a community with- evil cosmos. been falsified by money, capital, etc.“ (Ur- to the Contribution of Political Economy, out men. The “Gnostic” path followed after — ​ text). The socialist world movement has 1859), he created fertile ground for the All the more, one cannot come onto as RM Grant asserts in his Gnosticism had the same end as political democracy. engendering of illusions. This includes the capital’s ground, forcing its becoming, as and Early Christianity — ​the failure of the This was all the more inevitable as it often belief that there is a decadence of capital Baudrillard thinks: “the challenge that Jewish people’s attempts at self-libera- came to be its true realisation. from the moment that a certain number of capital launches in its delirium, shame- tion (Jesus Christ himself was understood But does not Marx himself ulti- possibilities, which Marx recognised from lessly liquidating the law of profit, surplus as a failed emancipator), such that the mately consider that the development of the start, were achieved and that an inter- value, productive ends, structures of prophets would be understood to an- the productive forces (neutral given) is vention — ​that of the proletariat — ​is always power, and still finding at the end of its nounce the moment of liberation. It arises, distorted by the movement of capital? predictable in a never-distant future. In process the profound immorality (but in fact, as a result of the collapse of all Is there not a false historical conscious- reality if there is a decadence it is that of also seduction) of primitive rituals of apocalyptic hopes. ness in wanting to found communism on humanity! destruction, such a challenge must be Much closer to us, the war of 1914- the basis of a development of the very False consciousness and recuper- met with an even higher bid.” To rise to the 1918 was experienced as an apocalypse productive forces that allowed for the es- ation are closely linked. The second being challenge would be to abandon oneself that had not been prophesied. Hence tablishment of capital? Hence, of course, like the reduction of the first. If there is to the complete escape of capital, so as the fascination it exerted, at least in the

Endnotes 5 284 The Passion of Communism 285 early days, on a great number of minds, infested as it was with Eurocentrism and knowing what is decisive in the evolution state as a solution to the current evils. especially in Germany where it tended to undermined by a badly disguised and of human beings. Indeed, at the moment it Communism is not a simple affirmation persist until the advent of Nazism (which chauvinistic nationalism. It is therefore is a “marginalist” theory that tends to pre- of the community; it can no longer be had a deeply religious character), and logical if, once again in the West, the vail. It is to be those on the margins who characterised by common or collective we cannot say exactly to what extent it fashion of Orientalism prevails and we will invent new behaviours and gradually property because this would be to pre- does not impregnate the whole era of the find echoes of the themes and practices impose them on the rest of the commu- serve the presuppositions of capital itself: latter’s domination. It was experienced put forth by the Gnostics and the various nity. Like the economic theory of the ownership and separation (to the extent as the manifestation of a lesser evil, like religious currents from the beginning of same name, it favours certain elements: that various socialist theorists advocated the final resolution of certain tensions our era. here, the elite! It demonstrates even more for an egalitarian distribution). In a word, that could no longer be tolerated and also This moment we are experiencing is clearly the cut interpreted by the theory it should not be considered in opposition experienced as a laceration from which the end-exhaustion of a whole evolution of the party-mass relationship. In both to anything, because it is a question of another way could be seen. of human beings. The pre-Gnostic period cases, there is a non-contemporaneity of exiting from any dialectic that would Nowadays, in a palpable, fascinat- knew a movement in which the sacred human beings living at a given moment. sooner or later bring back antagonism as ing, and tragic way, the failure of Marx’s and profane were connected and it was The upheavals that affect the community a repressed moment. What is at stake is apocalyptic prophecy imposes itself on in virtue of these two elements that men can only be perceived by certain elements. the being of men and women and their re- us all — ​the promised emancipation of hu- and women revolted. With the triumph Such privileged people would share their lationship to the totality of the living world manity through the proletarian assault on of Christianity, there is a secularisation concerns with the others. Such a theori- implanted on our planet, which we could the citadels of capital — ​whether because and separation of the sacred from the sation is the recognition of the destruction no longer conceive as appropriation, as it collapsed, or did not show up for its profane: “render therefore unto Caesar of any Gemeinwesen because here one Marx thought, but only as enjoyment. historical rendezvous. The same is true of the things which are Caesar’s; and unto only finds particularised beings in relation Just as the human whole should Bordiga’s which, reordering Marx’s predic- God the things that are God’s”. This to one another and arranged side-by-side. no longer be divided in order to become tion through the integration of the fate of all secularisation-profanation is responsible However, insofar as the Gemeinwesen di- a community, so the individual must no peoples of colour and set in motion by the for the bourgeois revolutionary movement, mension persists even a little bit in human longer be divided in order to become tremors of the two world wars, predicted first of all with the Reformation, then with beings, they can really coexist even if their individuality, thus we find an end of the an apocalypse-revolution for our present the various revolutions until 1789 that threshold of perception of phenomena is cut between state-individuals, party-mass, years. The collapse of the communist rev- carried out precisely such a profanation. different. spirit (brain)-body. To get out of this olution is the end of the community-party On this plane, the proletarian movement Finally, to conclude on this aspect world one has to acquire a body tending and the party-community. does not constitute any discontinuity; of the community as human group, let us towards a community, and thus to not lock On this basis we can better the “sacred” element is definitively set point out that there are two determining oneself into an individual phenomenon, understand the vast confusion of our aside and it is only posited that human modalities of the relationship between the but to rediscover the dimension of the times linked to the loss of reference, the beings must create another community. individual and the community in the world: Gemeinwesen. total permissiveness and the end of the The impossibility of a “profane” movement that of the West, where the individual has It is here that we find the fundamen- communities born with the bourgeois rev- to ensure the liberation of human beings become independent, as has the state; tal theme of Marx’s philosophical works: olution, nations, and their states. There is reinforced the idea that the “salvation” and that of the East, where the community to explain the relationship between the certainly a higher unity — ​the UN — ​but, just of humanity could only be ensured by is despotic and the individual does not individual and society and how to abolish as under the Roman Empire, all cosmo- religious, sacred movements. Yet what achieve autonomy. There are variants in their antagonism. More than a social being, politanism is unachievable, since the very have all the reactionary currents that have Africa and in both Americas. However, man is a being who has the dimension idea of ​​a cosmos has been lost. Interna- tried to preserve such a sacred element now, with the accession of capital to the of the Gemeinwesen, that is to say that tionalism, in the nineteenth and especially done, but participate in the tragedy of material community we find a conver- every human being carries in herself, during the mid-twentieth century, played the development in course, by every time gence between West and East. The first subjectivated, the Gemeinwesen. This is the role of ancient and eighteenth century making a pact with the power in place? has effected an intermediary movement expressed in a very reductive way when cosmopolitanism. In all three cases, one is The solution is therefore neither on the in order to arrive at an identical, but much we affirm the universal character of the effectively dealing with moments defined side of the sacred nor on the side of the more powerful result. Thus it transforms, thought of every human being. by the disintegration of particular commu- profane. The human community is outside by replacing it, the ancient Asian despotic Capital has realised its commu- nities. If proletarian internationalism has of this world. community. nity not only as a social tie but also in failed this is due in large part to the fact One can place the question of the We cannot be content to oppose the dimension of the Gemeinwesen that it was unable to encompass diversity, community in relation to the problem of community to the individual and to the because what constitutes the foundation

Endnotes 5 286 The Passion of Communism 287 of thought and conduct (ethics), etc., is therefore implies a knowledge-recogni- species and in its connection to the living that of becoming communism. Hence the capital, thanks to its having become a tion of all others, their acceptance in their world; thus she will find her place in the loss of perspective and all certainty — ​a representation exclusive of all others. diversity. Not an intellectual or spiritual continuum of life. loss of history that cannot be compensat- In the community of capital, humans gnosis but a total gnosis; knowledge must I say that the quest must end, and ed for by the perception of a soteriological are united by means of technology, the grasp the whole of being through the not that it will end because there is not a fact buried in the social cosmos. In reality, famous mass-media which are all the reunification of each being. rigorous determinism that would lead to there is only one meaning that can be indi- more necessary as human beings become It is not a question of making evil such an end, which would in fact justify vidualised from the despotic community of more numerous. They do not manage to disappear! The human species has also the intermediate movement between the capital: a becoming towards absurdity, to properly coexist, to become contemporar- developed the possibilities of evil, often immediate community and the human the destruction of humanity. This cannot ies, because they have been enclosed in the most hideous and vilest that can be community to come. No, history as a set comfort human beings and give them their social, national, etc. limits. justified by any historical eschatology. of experiences lived by men and women energy to support their situation, if not All the elements that constitute the Concretely this means that we cannot can only be a fact; we can explain various a suicidal energy. Hence the injunction: fundamental determination of the Gemein- accept those who kill, torture, want to futures, for example that of capital in a we must abandon this community and wesen have been destroyed: so-called dominate others, etc. This refusal of the deterministic way, but we cannot infer a everything that it presupposes. It’s the parapsychological potentialities such as “path of evil” cannot be attained until the more global determinism that would con- refusal of a millenary wandering. telepathy as well as various types of lang- moment when, as Marx said in a termi- cern us all, that of our realisation, finally, as Since the 1960s the community of uages ​​such as that of the body; meanwhile, nology still imbued with economy: the human beings. When any human phenom- capital has become increasingly intolera- verbal language has become more and greatest wealth for man is his fellow man. enon occurs, it is a posteriori possible to ble to a large number of men and women, more impoverished, as it loses its univer- The Gemeinwesen dimension can find in previous events a determinism that mostly young people. There has been a sal dimension and is reduced to a code also be seen in what he called universal led towards it implacably. Yet that would huge uprising of youth that is looking for that reflects the community of capital. work, the social brain (an expression taken negate the various possibilities that have the human community. It was accompa- Unitary communities as an integral up by Bordiga), a social brain theorised emerged and the fact that the species, nied by a host of phenomena that cannot community cannot live simply as a col- in another form by Leroi-Gourhan in Le currently insane, will have made the jump be considered here, but which testify to lection of human beings. It is necessary geste et la parole. We think with our own only in a constrained and forced manner. breaks that are often fragmentary, but that between all there is a common thread, brain but also with that of the species as a It is not said that this will be true; human breaks with the community of capital all common substance, because they realise summation of all the beings that surround disappearance in various forms can also the same. These phenomena manifest a the human being and this is accessible us and have preceded us. This is why Bor- be seen in the not distant future. That’s new sensibility that is able to perceive only if each being realises in herself diga’s concept of the species is another why there is a must-be. different alienations or injustices that the Gemeinwesen being an irreducible statement of the Gemeinwesen. Various philosophers of history, and had been carefully camouflaged by the element and simultaneously the mode Finally, the manner in which we are Marx in particular, have been reproached various political rackets. This movement that to the community to be realised in present in the world asserts itself in a kind for having an eschatological and soteri- is now masked by a certain revitalisation her, the mode she has to perceive in all of consciousness of being an individuality ological conception of history (the prole- of politics, but it is maturing in depth. Men its duration. This is where the difficulty of the species and in the species. With tariat is the saviour that saves itself not as and women must realise to what extent that has emerged over thousands of an accession to the community, human the proletariat but by becoming humanity); they can only tend to found the human years arises: men and women who do not beings will have finally found their world. correlatively we can add that for the community by breaking completely with know who they are, do not know what Indeed, against other species that have latter the “social cosmos” had a meaning the dynamics of this world and with the they can do, have locked themselves up an immediate relation between being and (Engels added his “philosophy of nature” revolution / counter-revolution dialectic; in ghettos that they say are human groups, the world because they have a portion which was an attempt to give meaning to from then on, we will break the lock humanities, defined by distinctions that of the globe that is imparted to them the cosmos in its totality). On the other that prevents creativity and inhibits the allowed others to be excluded. Thus, for (the famous ecological niche), man has hand, nowadays the “social cosmos” is creation of a new way of life. The fear that the ancient Egyptians, foreigners were none. Since the mutation that has thrown considered as neutral, it does not have in plagues us will be abolished and we will not human. They could be sacrificed to the biped that is to become man out of itself any meaning, any sense, for example enter our future. the gods. They were strangers because the forest, this being has been anxiously they did not live like them, determined that searching for a world in which she can they were by another geography, another be sure of her existence, of her reality. At history, because they had developed other the end of millennia, this quest must end possibilities. Accession to the community by finally realising what it is in diversity of

Endnotes 5 288 The Passion of Communism 289 EXCERPTS FROM “APOCALYPSE AND REVOLUTION” machine, has been forced to reproduce appropriating it, but in the real production Giorgio Cesarano, Edizioni Dedalo (1973) itself as a mystified “life”, the “natural” process itself; the relation of capital as energy of the species. value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as I. Mortal Leap authoritarian status of the expansion of the 3. machinery, posited at the same time as form of equivalence in social relations With the analyses of Marx and Engels, the the relation of the use value of capital to “In a word: the revolution made progress, (Urtext) becomes an elastic instrument of radical dialectic inexorably defined the the use value of labour power; further, the forged ahead, not by its immediate tragi- mediation in the sphere of business. As a contradictions inherent in the modes and value objectified in machinery appears comic achievements but, on the contrary, consequence, the state and even ‘politics’ relations of production, indicating how as a presupposition against which the by the creation of a powerful, united are less than ever the subject of the econ- capital’s process of quantitative valorisa- value-creating power of the individual counterrevolution, but the creation of an omy and therefore less and less capital’s tion, with the irreversible growth of dead labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanish- opponent in combat with whom the party ‘masters’. Today more than ever, capital labour’s domination over living labour, ing magnitude” (Marx, Grundrisse). of overthrow ripened into a really revo- finds its real strength in the inertia of the would have inevitably led capital — ​pushed, lutionary party.” process that produces and reproduces its as a result of the tendency of the rate of 5. specific needs of valorisation as generally profit to fall, towards a forced increase The law of value shows that profit can only — K. Marx, The Class Struggle in France human needs” (Camatte, “Transitions”). of production — ​to a reckoning with its come from surplus value and at the same from 1848 to 1850 foundational limitation: having as the limit time that surplus value can only be extrac- 2. to its organic development those same ted from living labour. The organic compo- 1. The transition process from the modes of productive forces that are at the root of its sition of capital would short circuit its own In the last possible form of its “political” capital’s formal domination to the modes own organic process. process of valorisation in relatively short expression, the radical dialectic has al- of its real domination has been entirely time if the process was concretely created ready defined contemporary capital’s mediated, both in “liberal” capitalist coun- 4. within an immobile level of organisation, conditions of existence as those in which tries and in “state” capitalist countries, In other words, capital nourishes in itself given once and for all, both quantitatively capital, taken beyond its formal modes by the counter-revolution. The latter has ab initio the logical vice — ​and the natural and qualitatively invariant. Yet the history of domination thanks to the counter-rev- assumed this as its specific task and has limit — ​of being a mode of production of of the last one hundred and fifty years olution, presently realises, over the entire totalised every “political” sense of it, de- the social machine which, while basing its shows that capital-being is not at all planet as over the species and the whole finitively integrating politics with capital’s own dynamics in process on the integra- what it could appear to economists — ​and life of every human, the modalities of an modes of survival, thanks to which it is tion of the organic energies of the species their vulgar critics — ​in the first decades integral colonisation of the existent. This dominant. By recuperating and distorting to itself, is condemned to irreversibly fuel of its development process: the essence we denote in terms of its “real domination”. the genuinely revolutionary drives expres- the increasingly autonomous growth of the will to organise civil society sepa- “Capital, as a social mode of produc- sed by the real movement during the of the machine itself. At the same time, rated from the overall substance of civil tion, realises its real domination when it first twenty years of the twentieth century, it increasingly reduces the part of organic society; the economic-political pressure comes to replace all the social or natural the counter-revolution objectively func- life integrated into the process, as the part exerted by an élite of entrepreneurial presuppositions that existed before it, tioned as the mechanism of self-regulation of organic life integrated in the process is power, simply engaged in a struggle with its own specific forms of organisation, that allowed the capitalist system to converted into an increasing accumulation for supremacy — ​bellum omnium contra which mediate the submission of all phys- survive its own crises. It favoured and of dead labour, thus the former is added, omnes — ​as much against the past modes ical and social life to its own needs. The promoted the dislocation of fundamental made machine, to the machine, contrib- of organisation of the society of labour, as, essence of the Gemeinschaft of capital contradictions inherent in the modes and uting as much to its autonomisation as to within itself, of the most ingenious and the is therefore realised as organisation. In the relations of production, from the originally its quantitative prevalence. “The increase most daring (the fastest to transform and phase of real domination, politics, as an elementary level of productive organisa- of the productive force of labour and the to transform themselves) against the most instrument for the mediation of capital’s tion, to ever more complex and increas- greatest possible negation of necessary torpid and conservative. On the one hand, despotism, disappears. After having used ingly total levels. Presently, the economy labour is the necessary tendency of capi- this economic-political struggle pro- it extensively in its formal phase of domi- dominates as much over every form of tal, as we have seen. The transformation duced evidence of capital’s foundational nation, capital can liquidate politics when “life” organised on the planet, as over every of the means of labour into machinery is contradictions, at a level of emergence it comes, as total being [essere totale], to survival of the forms in which organic life, the realisation of this tendency. In machin- not yet mediated and rationalised; on the rigidly organise the life and experience of reduced to mere “brute matter” of extrac- ery, objectified labour appears as the force other, as capital’s capacity to articulate its subordinates. The rigid and tive nature or mere propellant of the social that dominates living labour, not only by itself in an increasingly organised system,

Endnotes 5 290 The Passion of Communism 291 increasingly homogeneous in its sub- that is virtually open — ​without, however, with the real substance of humanity as a objectivity” that characterises false scien- stantial modes of reproduction at higher eliminating its tendency to closure or its species. Capital has therefore been able tific conscience; they add nothing new, in levels of valorisation, so the real essence critical limit, postponing collapse until that to continue to develop — ​although it has regards to substance, to what the radical of capital has come increasingly to overlap point of saturation when it would have never ceased to drag along the contra- dialectic foretold, with Marx and Engels, with, until completely coinciding with, the reached the limit of any further practicable dictions that have undermined it since over a century ago: capital’s inevitable species’ global modes of evolution. Ever transcendence: the point at which the its origin — ​thanks to a double historical course, as a mode of economic-politi- more and more, capital has integrated the material contradiction and its very source availability of spaces: both territorial, cal production, towards an irreversible real essence of the organisation of surviv- of energy are confronted with such a limit. economic-political in a strict sense, and self-destructive crisis. al to all its levels of manifest activity. Given the terms of such a contradic- existential, the political economy of life in tion-in-process, the collision between, on a broad sense. Nothing better demon- 8. 6. the one hand, the growth of development strates the history of capitalist political Radical dialectics must not be content Capital’s dominant modes of develop- and devaluation and, on the other hand, economy’s planetary colonisation, as to find the cybernetic confirmation of ment — ​the laws of its procession — ​are the expansion of surplus populations and nothing else could demonstrate the histo- its own foresight in the MIT scientists’ today legible in terms of general systems generalised proletarianisation, would ry of the economic-political colonisation report. The false detachment and the theory (but torn from the scientist’s have long ago led capital to an irreversible of human life, than the gradual process of simulated neutral objectivity with which philistine “neutrality”). Capital func- collapse if it had not from time to time capitalist valorisation that has continued they arrange the gag of the “specialist” tions as an open system that has as its taken, when confronted with the imma- to make ever more broad, profound and and present, with their hand on their heart limit, due to the specific contradictions nence of its final crisis, a “qualitative leap”. generalised acquisitions of new levels in and the face of Buster Keaton, to a capital inherent in its development, a tendency Precisely the latter has allowed capital to the organisation of the existent; in which already disposed to contract an account to close (to become autonomous, with elude such crises, granting the system the it has introduced, with increasing accel- of its errors — ​this could only mislead those the alternative that follows: collapse or possibility of transcending its immediate eration, both the modes and relations of beautiful souls immediately predisposed, realise a “cyclic-static” economy, “steady limit in order to accede, through mediation, value’s production — ​as well as the una- by affinity of false conscience, to any new state”), expelling from itself its own to a higher level of organisation, relocating voidable and unresolved contradictions falsity. Precisely because radical critique source of organic energy, human energy, its developmental thrust as much as its that inhere in valorisation. The final period has always known the concrete ground of and therefore founding the premises of inherent contradictions towards a “new” we are experiencing is the period in which, the inevitable showdown, it knows how its self-destruction. Yet in its history, this spatio-temporal dimension where the limit having completed this teleological work to to render an instant account of all fictions, tendency has until now been accompa- of the crisis will re-emerge, conveniently colonise as much of the territorial system unmask actors and mise en scène, and nied by a capacity to evade its critical postponed. as the “human system”, having filled any while reaffirming its natural competency — ​ point of collapse by mediating its organic possible residual space, having exhausted natural in as much as it is has been lived — ​ combination with its “naturing” energy at 7. the field of “qualitative leaps” practicable in the state of things, denounces the reign a higher level of integration, there where Capital’s development cannot be read in the direction of productive development of fiction for what it really is: that of the the process has been able to find new as the story of a self-identical process’ expressed in terms of exponential growth, state, now that the state is understood spaces for development — ​without yet “horizontal” expansion (like wildfire). Rath- capital has come to strike against its as the autonomous domination of the having managed to expel such funda- er, it is the escalation of a specific and insurmountable limits — ​without any further economy over the realm of appearances. mental contradictions from itself. Thus particular society’s mode of being — ​that of dimension of transcendence toward high- Dressed in the immaculate white coat of far, it has only been possible to postpone “industrial society”, born of the bourgeois er levels of organisation. At this point, the science, the MIT authors recite the part the critical point of irreversible collapse revolution — ​from its lowest degree, as inertial force of its own growth process of conscientious scholars, resolved to through increasingly larger spatial and an economic-political struggle let loose is the critical limit against which it must no longer keep silent over burning truths, ever more meagre temporal dislocations. between classes, to its maximum degree struggle. A reversal is required: a sudden whatever the cost, and to show that they The history of capital shows how the pro- (measurable both in the quantitative shift from a mode of development that is have cast off any service to the dominant cess has been able to grow and become terms of its planetary expansion and the best expressed in terms of exponential ideologies in order to finally serve the autonomous thanks to an automatism qualitative terms of its “way of life”), as the growth to a zero-growth equilibrium. naked truth: they speak as if in the con- typical of self-regulating systems capable global management of the species’ fate — ​ This is what the cybernetic scien- fessional. Yet this coat has such a worn of expanding past, through integration whether capital’s problematic equilibrium tists from the Massachusetts Institute texture that it is immediately transparent and positive feedback, a situation that with the biosphere’s chances of survival of Technology (MIT) — ​and not only as the old livery of the master sorcerer, the is virtually closed, virtually blocked by a or the equally unlikely balance of its own them — ​have just confessed, with all the same of every extermination and of every critical limit, towards a superior structure way of surviving as the human species false “detachment” and simulated “neutral extortion, of Auschwitz (salary of bone) as

Endnotes 5 292 The Passion of Communism 293 of Hiroshima (the demographic solution); able to guarantee itself, by mediating its a commodity, and to protest the frontal “rationality”, the sale of living sense to the of bacteriological and defoliating assaults contradictions through a homogenisation exclusion of the proletariat from the process of eternalising dead sense. in war (the disinfestation of life) as of the of world markets and the liquidation of a enjoyment of wealth, of which it was itself therapeutically necrotized neurotic peace good part of the young proletariat during the conscious producer. It was in this 11. (the need to live as a mental illness). If the the two wars, a much stronger and more stage that the proletariat lived its forced It is in this same phase that the radical economy’s reign seems to dispose itself widespread power to integrate the nat- estrangement from a world of “values” dialectic, hostage to political “rationality”, to self-criticism, then it is time to believe ural human community (Gemeinwesen); (wealth as freedom from need, equality as represented the revolutionary proletariat that it is not the realm of the economy indeed, it has managed to establish itself the division of opulence, brotherhood as as a formal party: no longer the historical that has had its time, but criticism that as the hegemonic mode — ​the only one emancipation from the misery that gener- party, but rather the historicised party of has entered, as a regulatory mechanism, concretely practiced — ​of producing and ates hatred) that were themselves handed the abolition of classes. The point of view into the service of the economy. In the reproducing the natural human commu- down from the bourgeois revolution, and of the totality, which allowed Marx and robotic hands of the robot-scientists, the nity on the planet. As the valorisation that appear to have been realised, that is, Engels to grasp in its real essence the critique of political economy is transmit- process has as its exclusive object the enjoyed, by the sole dominant class, as valorisation process as the negation in ted into self-critical economics: should autonomous survival of value beyond the the intolerable price of its own labour. The process of life as a natural good, is already, radical thought then leave its hide to the limits of its crises, it integrates into itself, subject of valorisation (the proletariat) is in the hand-to-hand struggle of political taxidermist? into the organic composition of value, represented to itself as excluded from the rationality with the reason of the state (the the survival of the species as a crisis in enjoyment of values: without criticising state, under capital, is always the state of 9. the life process. It is in this phase of the them, it claims them, proposing itself as things, its reason always an armed body), More than ever, it is now necessary integration of capital-being with the being the historical force destined to gather its the point of view of the totality broken into to remember with Marx that capital’s of the species (a formal integration, as we inheritance, universalising it. It is at this fragments of particular spheres. If one valorisation process is one with the will see later, but one that is pragmatically stage that politics has already clouded approaches such spheres by enlarging the development process of both the means operative) that the counter-revolution the gaze of radical dialectics, hiding the specific details of the struggles in course, of production and of productive forces (a comes into play, as a mechanism of millennial truth of the identity between if one gains in political optics a levantine contradiction that is mediated only at the self-regulation in the direct service of culture and modes of oppression, denying competence of tactics, they pay for this price of an ever-wider and ever-deeper capitalist rationalisation. the right / duty to recognise that culture’s ever closer intimacy with the ways of the colonisation of ever “new” quantitative valorisation process is not the “heritage” enemy by losing the distancing dimension and qualitative spaces). Further, if the pro- 10. of the human race. Rather, it is the most of strategy, the total competence of the letariat is the natural antagonist of capital, Two intersecting but distinct series of ancient, the most ancestral, “genetic” stakes. The more that the spontaneous it is determined by its own developmen- mediations must be distinguished in the mode of production of the human commu- intelligence of the rejection of every tal dynamic from which it is essentially transition phase from the formal domina- nity as a social machine, in which organic condition that introduces death into life inseparable, whether as active or reserve tion to the real domination of capital. In life is enslaved to the preservation and bends to the needs of survival, even of the labour power or as a reservoir of exclusion, the first exclusively economic-political development of inorganic value: it is the survival to fight, the more it is transformed until it comes to deny itself as a class and structure of capital (formal domination) very metal in whose timbre the voice of into the spontaneous intelligence of the to overturn, by negating every class, the there could not be a counter-revolution: power vibrates, this power to which life is enemy. Tactics are always the “reasonable” autonomous power of the economy over the proletariat as a class incubated in subjected in the “rational” effort to supply face of the counter-revolution. life. Yet the time in which capital exercised itself the development of a thrust that oneself as energy. The historical task of its domination in the exclusive sphere of directly negated, and that was therefore the radical dialectic, that of liberating the 12. political economy, the time of its formal immediately revolutionary, the material species from work, can only be fulfilled The Russian revolutionary explosion, while domination, has come to an end, as have conditions of its very existence. The on the day when it is clear in everyone’s apparently projecting onto the planetary the conditions of disorganic and territori- proletariat as a mass, together with an mind what is already clear in the (negated) scene the triumphant (and for the bour- ally fragmentary development that capital, elite of intellectual deserters from the organic body of all: the necessity of the geoisie terrifying) spectacle of a proletar- transcending the limits of its first crises, dominant bourgeoisie (but not, as will be destruction of ideology’s domination, the iat who had come to embody its liberated has left behind (1914–1945). seen, of its enlightenment culture), con- necessary liberation from the first and subjectivity, soon put on stage, realiter, Thanks to a mechanism of inter- curred to develop a class consciousness most unnatural of works: the sacrifice of in the now merely fictitious forms of the action and feedback that is significant destined to express through insurrection free organic expression to the language revolution in power, the recuperative and in quite another sense than that outlined the rejection of the frontal exploitation of of having to be slaves, the capture of substantially restorational mediation of by the MIT authors, capital has been labour-power produced and treated as “natural” reason in the service of alienated the powerful counter-revolution. Hunted

Endnotes 5 294 The Passion of Communism 295 bloodily from below, essentially capitalist intrinsic to a people, thus overcoming a 14. which consumes them. On the one hand, modes and relations of production fall first degree (a first level or threshold of The fictitious and spectacular contrast the “imagination” revolts before it is bloodily over the deluded (but not all) limits) of its connatural contradictions. between the two blocks, East and West — ​ co-opted; on the other, a denuded vitality heads of the revolutionary proletariat, in both of them, through different formal revolts after having been humiliated. reintroduced by decree from above. The 13. realisations, capitalist development and pretext — ​and it is here that the dazzling From that moment on, the proletariat no counter-revolution are embodied by the 15. power of the scientific “rationality” that longer exclusively represented, in the eyes same dazzled subject — ​has for decades On the one hand, politics takes onto itself mediates capital appears for the first of capital, labor-power to be produced polarised, while followed by flowing pro- the role of mediator of the process, ques- time — ​is that of the need to conquer, and treated like a commodity, but rather letarian blood, the completely ideological tioning everything except the foundations through a long process of so-called it began to appear to capital as its own imagination of revolutionary “thought”, that support it, working to preserve both socialist “transition”, the material bases people to come — ​no longer in the form holding back theory in a grotesque fight to the suicidal development of production for the realisation of communism. This is and substance of brute matter, a mere enlist militants under different banners of as well as the model of life that is the real not the place to perpetuate the semi-sec- propellent to keep alive as long as it gives the same process. The counter-revolution product here; on the other hand, the stra- ular anti-leninist polemic, nor does it strength. Rather, in form, it became the mimics all the clichés of dialectics, de- tegic (“scientific”) lucidity of capital sees make sense to ask ourselves once again living matter of capital’s own body (social graded to a comedy of errors. Meanwhile, more clearly in front of it the threshold of a what the feasible alternatives might be: body, discrete assistant of the social brain, the unsatisfied need to really live and the new limit that only a mortal leap will allow the revolutionary struggle always lives embodied by capital made science); in efforts of “virtuous” labour simmers under it to overcome. The ever closer limit of its the present as the battleground between substance, the natural propellant of a pro- the ashes, in the bodies of a proletariat own planetary expansion obliges capital a future project linked to the fate of the cess of autonomisation in which the more defeated more than just in their minds (or to invent a new world, just as it is about to species and the sum of its past defeats, “naturally” capital separates itself as if from estranged or drugged by politics), ready to “finish” this world. Wars, guerrillas, nation- which have influence only in that they a slag, the more it shows itself capable of explode in a vital fire as, after eighty years al liberation campaigns, electoral brawls indicate the traps into which the species integrating the species profoundly and in of latency, in the first events of 1968. for the election (or capital execution) of can no longer fall. Instead, this is the place a capillary manner into the mechanisms But integration has been so deep, this or that super-star — ​all equally fungible to attest how this lesson of realism was of the valorising machine. The process the chain so firm, that those who appear and functional — ​overlap on the screens learned and made its own by international of emancipating capital from the first with torches in their hand are not those of the glass oracles, in those fragments capital, to its exclusive and automatic critical level of its development (the first who, inserted and included, obtain that mix together at the same level this advantage: a lesson that allowed it not to level of closure of the system within its through their brutalised hours a salary that weekend’s massacres, whether those of fear applying force to this world, capable limits, with the consequent inevitable “en allow them to continue the “work of liv- the Indians or those due to DDT; parades of destroying its essence, until it could masse”) then passes through the fictitious ing”: as always, the defectors of the dom- displaying the new quality of life, debates successfully appear as the material mode emancipation of its natural antagonist, the inant “spirit” move first along with those on this quality of life, psychodramas on the of production of every human community. fictitious emancipation of the proletariat excluded from the assembly line, voluntary loss of this quality. In the service of a pol- Capital learned from its crises to dispose enlisted in the self-responsible subjectiv- escapees and the forcibly proscribed. In itics that swaps the critique of everything of its past in order to revive its modes of ity of the labour process. From that mo- Paris, as everywhere in Europe, students, with the victory of the Nothing, fictitious production at higher, more integral, more ment, while capital sees in the proletariat misfits, hippies and punks; in the USA, and real gears, unrecognisable from totalising levels of organisation. It learned its future people — ​and perceives for itself the same together with the “race” of the one another, drag into their mechanisms, to mask its own faculty of transcription by the chance to mediate its own contradic- excluded, the blacks of the ghettos, the together with the bodies of an ever more covering it with formal, spectacular trans- tions by integrating into its “spirit”, into its ex-slaves “redeemed” from collector of abundant proletariat, the shredded image formations. It learned above all to flow as a own surreptitiously socialised subjectivity, cotton to collector of trash. Starting from of living a real struggle, the fated illusion necessary water under any flag, to take as the very body of the species made its a rejection of the horror of non-life, these of fighting for a matter of life or death, much the form as the substance of a basic own body — ​the proletariat dazzled by the two qualities of distinct “competences” while death gains ground inadvertently in and neutral way of being, so similar to life counterrevolution sees its own future in soon fraternise, both driven by being ex- everyone’s daily survival. and nature as to be able to clothe itself in the development of capital, transforms its ternal to the hardest heart of the process: appearances. Mediated through clashes intolerance into a new patience, present- voyeurs from above, these students of 16. in which the maximum possible amount ing itself the historical task of carrying social engineering (in all the faculties they To the increasingly accelerated clashes of proletarian blood ran, capital learned out at its own expense, but voluntarily, are taught the skill of directing beings against its classical contradictions, capital to transform itself into ways of being less the material bases for the realisation of a made to be directed); voyeurs from below, responds elastically by miming the cries specific than a class and increasingly neo-christian capitalism: “socialist”. those excluded from this waste society, of its people, claiming for itself the causes

Endnotes 5 296 The Passion of Communism 297 of this growing despair, but inverted into threshold of its organic vices in the organ- every act, realising itself in the context generalisation and of the universal) the a voice of promise and immanent hope. ic composition of capital-life; to transcribe of organised unreality, leaves its position forms of fictitious realisation, in which the In its formal domination, capital took the itself from the intoxicated kingdom of com- on the field and witnesses its own funeral organisation of non-essence [inessenza], proud and ferocious traits of a class that modity-waste in exteriority to the realm glorification. But it is from here that the that concrete pseudo-continuum, involves had conquered power through revolution: of survival in inwardness, all the more radical biological thrust, denying any it without capturing but the ideological the bourgeoisie, when it was still alive, degraded the more it is buried and raised validity — ​any authentic reality — ​to its ficti- dregs, with or without the “dead” bodies was not ashamed to defend its rightful to a new area of the market. A macabre tious realisations, shows itself its ability to of the dazzled. privileges as it could appreciate them — ​ archaeology is called to resurrect, in the endure beyond, to go beyond, and finally even just a little bit — ​as the good of the living dead, the Phoenician soul of the to establish itself beyond the counter- 123. earth and the taste for life, and therefore adventurous businessmen; but under the revolution. The affirmation of the biological In this sense, every form of politics which defended them without questioning itself, constellations of the flood, the dead souls revolution, or of qualitative subjectivity at arises from even minimal conflict with the offering itself, despite the economic-po- cannot but trade relics: the death of desire the level of the species, can only be found “concrete” given has in itself, inseparable litical struggles, an image in which wealth is the general equivalent that informs all where the counter-revolutionary utopia from its destiny as counter-revolutionary justified the price of poverty. The transi- the mints of the depressive “personality”. has burned all its stocks of false aims, recuperation and frustration in the ficti- tion to real domination, however, leads Let the dead valorise their “life”. all of its representations. tious, a potential push towards its own capital to produce a politics — ​the new im- overcoming; that is, in the direction of the age through which it smuggles itself — ​that 121. real movement understood as a dialectical is as much more elastic and co-opting as VIII. Real Dialectics There is no behaviour or line of conduct process that guides essence to manifest it is more formally disposed to question, that can define itself to be, as such, itself as such beyond its partial negations. to problematise. Yet the problems of the “If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, revolutionary. As soon as it is established day, in the apparent forms of an openness and on a racing horse, leaning against as a mere stylisation of conflictuality, and 124. to the demands and needs of the people, the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the therefore becomes a “work of art”, every From counter-revolutionary liberation are always capital’s problems. The people quivering ground, until one shed one’s behaviour, every line of conduct is to movements such as those for nations, are increasingly capital in person: the spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw be placed in order of the incident as its sexuality, women, students, homosexuals, people who have the vote, the people who away the reins, for there needed no reins, particular accident. ethnic minorities, drug addicts, workers, represent themselves, the people who and hardly saw that the land before one children, animals, employees and nature, have the “privilege” of the word, assume was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s 122. can come, as in fact a day does not without realising it the role of a puppet neck and head would be already gone.” The real movement is not a metaphysical pass in which there does not arise, the that speaks with the voice and covers the entity, the panther of revolution lurking in hard-won awareness of the real stakes: — F. Kafka, “The Wish to be an Indian” hands of its ventriloquist. an ineffable latency, but rather the very the liberation of the species from ideolo- force with which revolutionary subjectivity gy, the necessary overcoming of every 17. 119. continually exceeds (in a continuity that separation, the conquest of the point Quantity is the exclusive reign of valor- The point of view of radical dialectics sub- can only be grasped at the level of its of view of the totality.* isation, which consists in this: in the pro- lates politics through the same movement duction of apparent qualities upstream in which, defining the latter to be the exclu- of which always lies a given quantity of sive instrument of the counter-revolution, * Trans: The essential dialectic of 122 through discovering what underlies them but cannot labour. Since capital limited itself to prais- it definitively separates itself from it. 124 must be emphasised. Here, Cesarano be expressed by them in its entirety and ing the quality of its commodities, the nec- critiques the limitations of existing ‘partial’ totality. The real movement is not the revolu- essary time has passed in order to capture 120. struggles at the same time as he places them tionary army staked out and ready to pounce all forms of life in the commodity form, so If the radical dialectic has no “what is to as the only site of contestation. Rather than in ineffable latency; rather it is the living that today we can discuss a “quality of be done” to sell on the competitive market condemning them, he wants to emphasise articulation, contained in the contradictions life” — ​where behind every produced “life” of “alternative” ideologies, if it cannot their partiality. In Chronicles of a Masked of the existing world and the deception of fic- lies a given quantity of labour, of deval- slip into any theoretical precipitate with- Ball, this point is expressed as follows: ‘It tive struggles, of the eruption that transcends orised life. This is anthropomorphic out being disqualified as dialectics and as is not a matter of stripping the living meaning them without being destroyed by them, capital’s new conquest: having colonised a qualitative point of view, it is because from struggles that still remain prisoners an eruption that is renewed and reinforced every trait of social coexistence for value, it knows the “concrete” as the dominant of separation, but rather, by liberating them beyond the traps set up to capture it and it must reassemble beyond the explosive utopia’s Champ de Mars: it is here that from their slavery to dead meaning, of hijack it.’

Endnotes 5 298 The Passion of Communism 299 125. the meantime. But the bankruptcy of this 128. [naturante], to its global corporeality in Ultimately, the ideology of hooligan- utopia — ​this dominant hic et nunc — ​does The supreme consistency of the fictitious process, can the species definitively ism [teppismo] and crime, if it actually not in itself mean the immediate triumph is that of showing itself, finally, to be emancipate itself from the domination of exceeds the obsolete stylistic elements of qualitative and liberated corporality. perfect representation and therefore as prosthesis, free itself from the fictitious of militant politics, effects a recuperation Precisely because anthropomorphised the organisation of perfectly unreal ap- and its religions. The biological revolution on revolutionary subjectivity, convinc- capital, through self-criticism, valorises pearances: that of ending in its definitive consists in the definitive inversion of the ing it that “criminal” and generically the fictitious capital of its own becoming separation from the concrete, in its own relationship that has seen, since prehisto- illegal behaviour are expressed at the (an anticipated future in the economic-po- sensitive disappearance (the fictitious is ry, the corporeality of the species subject level of individual choices, and instantly litical utopias that capital-being subjects the essence of every religion). But only by to the domination of the social machine; discharges any positive tension. As soon to the desperate project to ensure the sur- manifesting itself as a substance imper- in the liberation of organic subjectivity; as one is satisfied with being the habitual vival of every subjectivity, in credit of life), vious to the fictitious, therefore only by and in the irreversible “domestication” of transgressor of every norm, the “crimi- devalorisation internally negates every affirming itself as a subjectivity consub- the machine, in all its possible manners nal” drowns his own project of being in a particular utopia, “sublated” before being stantial to the organic movement of nature of appearing. simple and caricatural disobedience to the able to overcome itself as utopia, that is, normative as such, which therefore be- before it could realise itself. And precisely comes, quite simply, the norm in negative: as the being of the fictitious, capital, at having in place of being. The compulsion the last stage of the autonomisation of “PROVOCATION” to repetition is the miserably maniacal trait dematerialised value, is not realised in Giorgio Cesarano, Puzz (1974) that degrades to routine, to nostalgic rep- particular utopias but rather in forms of its etition, the actual insurrectional creativity own general becoming (of its own utopia of the coup. in process), forms that cannot be realised The political squads of the police and the the political game; if it signifies informal as substance due to the rapidity of the parties always want to know who we are. nuclei that slip away from any schema of 126. very process: the dynamic of the fictitious. Since, on the contrary, we only recognise hierarchical rackets; if it names experi- None of “being’s options” listed above, It is in this process, and in the increasingly ourselves in the critique that clarifies ences irreducible to the precepts of “rev- and indeed none at all, escapes the explosive contradiction between the what we are not and what we do not want; olutionary” theory crushed by history and design of what has been called a “mortal domination of forms and the overcoming, since we speak the language of those who appropriated by the counterrevolution; leap”: every possible comportment has in form, of their own substance, that quali- live contradiction and non-identity; since if it distinguishes those who cannot put up already been catalogued and filed in the tative subjectivity, the corporal substance we exist as a plural subject only on the with the interiorization of capital and who cybernetic offices or the image produc- of the species, sees its own revolutionary condition of collectively experimenting our struggle against every form of self-valori- tion centres. If this is certain, the failure task fulfilled, its concrete destiny: that contradiction in process in the very form sation; if it qualifies the development of neo-Enlightenment rationality is even of realising the dialectic, pressing, with of its realization, at the same time as these of a theory and a practice that refuse to be more certain, the disaster of the capitalist the will of the essence that clamours to forms are subjected to every sort of recu- constituted as separate spheres of indi- utopia is even more certain, the one that be, the increasingly accelerated ruin of peration; the effort at identifying us accord- vidual and collective life; if “provocateur” has been summarised as the attempt to representations. The subjectivity of the ing to a logic well-tested through two signifies all of this, today we are provo- make political economy disappear by species will separate itself only in the last centuries of counterrevolution backfires cateurs! We are the provocateurs of that realising it in the “life” of each and of all: ruins of political utopia. Before recognis- laughably and ignobly on those who would process of demystification that forces the political economy, first-born inheritor of ing itself as the subject of the biological like to imprison us in a formula, so as police, politicians of the regime and lead- religious alienation. revolution, the proletarian body of the to deliver us that much more easily to the ers of the fictitious opposition’s rackets, species will have to free itself from all the prison walls. “Provocateur” is the term to unmask their substantial identity. Thus 127. hypotheses that communist ideologues that appears indistinguishably in the infec- are they united against us publicly, em- What will be revealed in the years to come throw on its future as the realisation of the tious prose of the regime’s press, which ploying the same techniques of snitching, as the manifest insolvency of capitalist human end, that Gemeinschaft in harmony forms a chorus with and thus unites in the terror, slander, using the same language utopia, in the apocalyptic and tragicomic with ecological codes, the latest and most same trench “democratic” journalism and and the same logic, resorting to the same spectacle of its landslide, which will shake coherent metamorphosis of fictitious the “militant” press. We accept the term, wretchedness and the same trivial lies. every residual illusion from anyone who capital into “invisibility”, the mimesis of turning it on its head. We are the provocateurs of that process has not lost their capacity to understand in liberated life. If “provocateurs” signifies men and of sublation that induces sincere revolu- women that do not accept the misery of tionaries to break with their past and to

Endnotes 5 300 The Passion of Communism 301 participate in the historical heights and capitalist domination to recognise the syn- It is for this reason that, once mean, anyway, to think in anti-humanist radical tensions of the time. Who get out thesis of every alienation fragmented and grasped down to their foundation, the terms, always despotic, arbitrary, violent: in from the bottlenecks and of all the archaic particular, the summa and the point of humanist and anti-humanist attitudes a word, humanist. One cannot get out and restrictive ideologies, in order to fuse explosion of every past oppression that are not, in fact, alternatives, but immedi- from the dialectic, from the evil of such a themselves with that tendency towards the has already been overcome. We are and ately identical. If, by whatever bitter irony, brutal history, by simply changing the sign, point of view of the totality that, alone, will be until the end, in sum, the provoca- the Stalinist rapprochement of the hazy ‘turning it on its head’: each determinate leads the critique of the actual forms of teurs of the revolutionary process. idealism expressed by both Lukács in overturning is but another confirmation. History and Class Consciousness and by To take one’s distance from the human, radical communism is true, it is because from the history of the possessive subject in these dangerously idealist results, you in which unreconciled nature is preserved “GLOSSES ON HUMANISM” do not find the impatience of the revolu- unrecognised does not mean to give in to, Gianni Carchia, L’erba voglio (1977) tionary gesture, but an insistence on identifying oneself with the aggressor, the alienation and the obscurity of the the dehumanisation in course, to the ob- human as the cardinal point of the critique jectivity of a linear destiny that in hindsight From the origin of bourgeois society and through the exaltation of one or the other. of capitalism, a common point then — ​ is seen to have been pursued by imper- across the entire course of its existence, While Hegel defined and glorified the the critique of fetishism and a call for the sonal subjects. the emphasis on the human has been the development of the essence of capitalist ‘lived’ — ​to phenomenology and existen- The critique of ideology, the con- price paid for the development and the society as a process in which substance tialism. Nothing is more paradoxical than frontation between reality and its ideal autonomisation of exchange value, as well becomes subject, his immediate adversar- the call for a supersession of alienation premises, as well as the unmasking as the progressive reification of human ies, materialists and existentialists, looked pursued through the return to a human of false consciousness and false reconcili- relations. The more that capitalist dehu- to find the true and authentic subject in subject, to make such a subject — ​if it were ation are today — ​even in the extreme form manisation — ​the ‘organic composition’ the ruin of capital’s ‘automatism’. This possible — ​more proprietary as if it were assumed by ‘critical theory’ — ​vain in face of society and individuals — ​has developed, subject, illuminated by the Hegelian dia- not the case that, as with anti-humanism, of late-capitalist society’s absolute inte- so the more one begins to discover as the lectic, would have developed through the final union of capitalism and barbarism gration of the yearning for true appearan- referent of whatever ideology — ​against the the process of alienation and, in the end, wasn’t inscribed in mechanisms of gener- ces and the human. Culture, critique, artificial, the fictitious and the despotic — ​ become again, sometimes mythically, alised self-preservation, in that universally democracy — ​all only have sense outside the natural, genuine, and human. But if, substance, human nature, only no longer human that cancels and exterminates all of domination and reification. But if this according to bourgeois apologetics, the counterfeit and disfigured. The human that which does not reflect it. Today, finally, integration has also demonstrated that the invariance of human nature was the obvi- is here understood as something subter- it has certainly become clear that the return to significance, fullness, use value — ​ ous guarantee of the system of planetary ranean, a substratum temporarily lost and humanist referent even in its most radical in a word, the human — ​is the alibi of barba- exploitation, it was a fatal misunderstand- rediscovered in the exteriorisation of every variants, is nothing but the expression, rism and that it cannot be invoked without ing thereof that induced the proletarian immediate, living relation, but destined, albeit turned on its head, of the ‘anthro- bad conscience, the consequence to be movement to exalt, against capital and the after the pain of alienation, after the odys- pomorphosis of capital’, of the ‘death of drawn from all of this is not any abandon injustices of the relations of production, sey of history as ‘prehistory’ or as ‘fallen’ man’. Yet the anti-humanism theorised by to the truth of the facts, to an inhuman labor and the mere development of pro- ‘exteriority’, to reemerge and to triumph. dominant thought, above all through struc- survival. The non-human, that which ductive forces, understood as the general From here one finds the blind abandon, turalism — ​which would like, with a pro- remains outside of the dialectic and of the equivalent of the subject and emancipated as certain as it is desperate, to the force found albeit involuntary irony, to replace false alternative between humanism and man. The same reprimand and warning of objective reason, to progress, to history. philosophy with the ‘human sciences’ — ​ anti-humanism, that is perhaps the utopia that Marx offered in his Critique of the Go- The theory that revindicates the human, is in fact, as the ‘mimesis of death’, always of thought: something that is neither in the tha Programme was insufficient — ​in virtue in the face of its alienation and capitalisa- directed towards the triumph of self- affirmation nor the violent death of the of the tenacious roots of the alternative tion, could carry out such an affirmation, preservation and the subject: humanism in human and appearances, but rather in theory that, while critical, was naturalist however, only by ignoring that such cor- disguise. Neither is it comforting that here their suspense and dispersal. What could and positive — ​to illustrate to the proletariat ruption, far from being in contrast to any the problem of a change in thought is al- be the profile of a thought that was nour- the fact that, as is so clearly written in the historically revealed human essence, was ways expressed — ​as in the case of the ished on the non-human, on the trace of critique of political economy, capital and neither more nor less than the result of problems of ‘decision’, ‘choice’, and ‘will’ — ​ that which no longer exists or does not yet labor are poles of a single relationship and its exaltation, the extension of its natural in ultimately subjective terms. To really exist, of the no longer, not yet human, of must be accepted or rejected en bloc, not traits, exterminating and death bearing. think in a non-humanist manner does not that which in the human is not so cruelly

Endnotes 5 302 The Passion of Communism 303 subjective and natural? While its prophe- rights, of needs, of production — ​thus the cy — ​as a limit, inquietude, promise — ​fed all disposition to give oneself to that which is of idealism, from the doctrine of the intelli- repressed and imprisoned within and out- gible in Kant to the self-consciousness of side of oneself, welcoming it in itself and absolute spirit in Hegel, even to the reign thereby taking away all of its malignant, of liberty in Marx, here it still only serves immediate urgency. It would be — ​as differ- the function of reparations, compensation, ence — ​that line where the impure mix reintegration. Established through the of subject and object, characteristic of the pain of appearance, self-recognition, his- realised dialectic at its end, is dissolved, tory, the non-human did not seem to ever separated. Thus the non-human would be really be free, in idealism, from its guilty neither fallen into the movement of history, and evil roots: its fulfilment had all of the nor the immobility of myth: rather it would characteristics, only with an inverted sign, be history’s arrest; neither the extension of its odyssey. of the subject, nor merely its annihilation: The non-human, the radically rather its fracture; neither the exaltation different, would be in contrast, perhaps, of consciousness nor the formless silence a moment of opening in the gesture of of the unconscious: rather irreducible taking leave from the idealist dynamic, voice. To disintegrate identity, to dismantle a goodbye to the exaltation of the human the totality: neither because its fragments — carried through to the point of explosion. ​asymmetrical and formless forced to ‘go It would be the renunciation of the substi- outside themselves’ — ​have returned as tution of the dead god with a human that, contradictions, momentary engines of the in losing the meaning of its identity, begins destiny of the world, nor because they to overflow according to a consuming have been abandoned to their own blind impulse as it empties and annexes every drift, easy targets once again for the judg- limit, every transcendence, every infinite. ment of the dialectic. Rather, because they It would be the refutation of the subject of are sustained in their own non-identity.

LETTER TO LOTTA CONTINUA Marisa Fiumano, Lotta Continua (1978)

Assigned part; ineluctable destiny. To My political project is to exit the habits everyone their sex and their role. But can of the scene or to know at least that I we not at least expose the theatricality, am reciting and what, and to encounter laugh at the farce? The political scene those who are acting or who desire to act (there is no more correct way to say this!) otherwise. Recognizing one’s own phan- is packed with actors and each believes tasms is the measure with which I believe that they coincide with their script, one should measure humanity. as if the mask exhausted the subject.

Endnotes 5 304