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- | ====== Introduction ====== | ||
- | It is of greatest importance to // | ||
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- | We realise that many of the readers of the journal feel that it has become steadily more difficult to dig into what we write in // | ||
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- | ===== Communist theory beyond the ultra-left ===== | ||
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- | The perspective we have wrestled during the last 60--70 weeks is the problematic posed by the Marseilles based group/ | ||
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- | The novelty in this perspective is first and foremost its profound historisation of class struggle. Class struggle is not something which goes on within a perennial framework only differing in whether we for a time have a working class offensive, defensive, once more an offensive and so on. Contrary to this invariance of class struggle we, and TC, stress that class struggle has to be historised both with the thin and wide brush. The aims and content given to the proletariat by every //cycle of struggle are produced by// the relations in which the proletariat face capital. Thus it is the very relation between proletariat and capital that determine the possible actions. TC gives us an exciting concept -- the //mutual implication of the proletariat and capital// -- that means that neither the proletariat nor capital can be regarded as the active party driving the contradiction between classes. | ||
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- | In the first text following this introduction, | ||
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- | ==== The class struggles in the post-WWI years. Social democrats, communists and left-communists ==== | ||
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- | The groups that were to become the historical ultra-left had their origins in the social democratic parties at the beginning of the last century. At first they acted within these as a Marxist left-wing tendency against the increasing bureaucratisation and the more and more obvious reformism. The years preceding 1914 Rosa Luxemburg and others violently propagated against the armaments race and the imminent world war. As early as in 1909 parts of the left in the Netherlands had found it necessary to completely break with the social democrats and to found their own party. David Wijnkoop and Herman Gorter became the leaders of this. The same did not occur in other countries until the outbreak of WWI, when social democracy finally and in open daylight proved its ‘social chauvinism’((A term Lenin came up with in 1915 to stigmatise those in the 2nd International who supported their respective countries in WWI.)) by voting for war credits (with the motivation that the war was a patriotic defence war), when the left in various European countries formed as formally independent parties. Initially there were no fundamental political divergences between people within this left such as for example Sylvia Pankhurst, Anton Pannekoek, Nikolai Bucharin or Vladimir Lenin, they were all very engaged in the Communist (3rd) International formed in 1919. The year of 1917 had been the start of an international revolutionary wave. In Russia, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, generally all over Europe, and sporadically in other continents as well, fierce class struggle occured. | ||
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- | In Germany the counter-revolution was embodied in the SPD((Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)). During November and December in 1918 Philipp Scheidemann and Friedrich Ebert of the SPD finally established a parliamentary republic. Karl Liebknecht and the KPD((Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands)) responded by organising an armed rebellion in Berlin in January 1919. It was defeated by a common offensive by the SPD, the remainings of the German army and para-military right-wing groups later to be called Freikorps. Even if the SPD with great violence suppressed workers’ rebellions the German workers, in what to some may seem as a paradox, in 1920 came to defend the Ebert Government against the nationalist Kapp--Lüttwitz Putsch. The social democratic government had initially sought help from the regular army who refused to put an end to the putsch (‘Reichswehr don’t shoot at the Reichswehr’ they said). When this did not work out the SPD instead turned to the workers and called a general strike which was massively followed. The putsch makers were defeated when the entire country was paralysed. After the putsch was over the Ebert government nonetheless recruited the same soldiers and Freikorps men that just before had tried to overthrow it to suppress the remaining rebellions in western Germany. The fierce class struggles in Germany continued until 1923. | ||
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- | In Russia the Bolshevik party came to power with the support of the masses of peasants in the country side and of the workers in cities such as Petrograd and Moscow. The establishment of the councils (‘spontaneously’ in 1905, with strong intervention from the Bolsheviks in 1917) provided the basis for the dual power that extinguished the tsar regime as well as the provisional government. Step by step soviet power was transferred to the Bolsheviks after October 1917 and they organised a new state apparatus. This state was, however, not more than the guardian of order -- not the least the economical order --, which found its perhaps purest appearance in how it suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, but it also went hand in hand with the ideal of the Bolshevik leaders of iron discipline in the factories. Under Stalin, so, the basis had been laid for a capitalist programme of modernisiation in the form of mass industrialisation and an extraordinarily bloody restructuring of production and of society as a whole.((We would like to recommend an interesting text: Loren Goldner, ‘Communism is the material human community: Amadeo Bordiga today’. Published (in Swedish) in // | ||
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- | Parallel to the defeat of the international revolutionary wave the Communist International soon degenerated. Initially its aim was being an organ for spreading the world revolution, but it was transformed into an instrument for the national interests of the Russian state. The Communist parties of other countries linked to the ‘International’ ended up in being nothing more than the tentacles of Stalinist Russian dominance. The so-called German-Dutch communist left was among the first to leave the organisation (long before Stalin became its leader). It happened after polemic with Lenin in 1920 about, for example, the questions of the communist parties, the positions on parliamentary elections and on trade unions.((See Lenin’s pamphlet: //Left-wing communism – an infantile disorder// < | ||
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- | ==== The ultra-left and the mediations ==== | ||
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- | > Useful and progressive in their beginnings, the trade unions in the older capitalistic countries had turned into obstacles in the way of the liberation of the workers. They had turned into instruments of counter revolution, and the German left drew its conclusions from this changed situation. | ||
- | > -- -- -- | ||
- | > The ultra-left declared parliamentarianism historically passé even as a tribune for agitation, and saw in it no more than a continuous source of political corruption for both parliamentarian and workers. It dulled the revolutionary awareness and consistency of the masses by creating illusions of legalistic reforms, and on critical occasions the parliament turned into a weapon of counter revolution. It had to be destroyed, or, where nothing else was possible, sabotaged. (Otto Rühle, ‘The struggle against Fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism’, | ||
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- | What clearly distinguish the ultra-left from the Leninist and other lefts is its strong emphasis on what it sees as the // | ||
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- | We would like to stress that there were good reasons for these ideas to appear at the beginning of the last century. Indeed, the communist left produced good analyses of many fundamental issues: first and foremost that neither the social democrat nor the Leninist programme were any paths towards socialism but rather essentially capitalist. But could the decisive problem really be reduced to be such movements that from various accidental occasions managed to gain supporters and influence in the class rather than the hardline (ultra-) left advocating independent struggle? Our answer to this question is: no; what most of the ultra-left also would have said, however from different premises. From our approach, here rather influenced by TC, it is about examining how the proletariat concretely meets capital in a mutual implication, | ||
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- | Even the agenda of the ultra-left was based on //victory of labour//. It was so even though they, which TC find especially interesting, | ||
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- | > The revolution as affirmation of the being of the class was conserved by critiquing all the existing forms of this being. ((Théorie communiste, ‘Communist theory’ < | ||
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- | It was never about the ‘wrong ideas’, but always material and necessary causes existed to the affirmation of labour. When the organised workers’ movement grew strong at the end of the 19th century it was as ‘the empowerment of the class at the interior of the capitalist mode of production…: | ||
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- | > But in this case communism is no more than the management of production by the proletariat within the already given categories: property (collective, | ||
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- | > The Left only saw the integration taking place in the passage to real subsumption in the mediations of the empowerment of the class, and //separated these mediations from the definition of the proletariat as class// of the capitalist mode of production.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., our emphaisis.)) | ||
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- | The analysis of the Dutch-German communist left, however, does not end with the defeat of the revolution in 1923. With the deepening of real subsumtion the communist left faced a situation, with its background in the ongoing class struggle, where the actions containing the affirmation of the class at the same time as they fights the mediations contains a contradiction. With this in mind TC conclude that the Dutch-German communist left does not get stuck in this dead-end. ‘[I]t had, almost despite itself …, produced the conditions and the theoretical arms for its overcoming.’ What the ultra-left did not manage to articulate, however, was that the class ‘in its definition as class of the capitalist mode of production [finds] the capacity and the necessity to negate itself as a class in its contradiction with capital.’((Théorie communiste, op. cit.)) | ||
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- | ==== From the victory of labour to the abolition of the proletariat ==== | ||
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- | While TC says that the workers’ movement was captured within the framework of programmatism (i.e. the victory of labour) they nevertheless see another perspective for the struggle today. They pose revolution as //the abolition of the proletariat through the abolition of capital//. One thing that distinguish TC from other communist theorists close to them, such as Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic, is that, while the latter say that the self-abolition of the proletariat has been possible since the 19th Century, TC on the contrary say that their ‘faith’ in the new perspective -- and the actual explanation to this theoretical horizon has been brought into daylight -- has to be derived from the relations hitherto determining the conflict between capital and proletariat that has been transformed into //other// relations. They conclude that this appeared with a // | ||
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- | We publish one text in the present issue in which TC criticise Dauvé and his ‘When insurrections die’. In ‘Normative history and the communist essence of the proletariat’ TC address the fundamentally normative nature of Dauvé’s reasoning about the defeat of earlier proletarian movements (Spain in 1936, for example). They criticise Dauvé for not coming up with any real explanation of the failure of these movements, more than that they failed (to dissolve themselves) due to not being able to come any further, which doesn’t really say anything at all. They disagree with the way Dauvé, in his text, blame the workers involved and suggests what they should have done instead of what they actually did. According to TC the reasoning of Dauvé is the inescapable result of his perspective of a // | ||
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- | We say that TC’s historisation of struggles offers a new possibility as it at the same time acknowledges the role of the proletariat in a communist revolution and understands the class’ revolution as a revolution against the existence of classes. To abandon the perspective of revolution as the affirmation of the class has been the theme for several issues of // | ||
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- | ==== Real subsumption: | ||
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- | We regard it as impossible to approach the theorisation of Théorie communiste without considering the importance they make of the two categories: ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumption’. In the first volume of //Capital// Marx only mentions these concepts in passing (and the Swedish translation is really bad at that and totally misses the opportunity to introduce the concepts). | ||
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- | Marx formulates the concepts of formal and real subsumption in his analysis of the immediate process of production. He talks about capital // | ||
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- | It is more thoroughly discussed in the ‘chapter’ of //Capital// excluded from the published editions of // | ||
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- | > The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided. | ||
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- | > It therefore requires a specifically capitalis mode of production, a mode of production which, along with its methods, means and condistions, | ||
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- | Well, what TC and we, rather boldly, are admitting is that we go beyond Marx’s formulation in //Capital// and the concepts of ‘formal’ and ‘real subsumtion’ for us implies a wider definition than the narrow tie to the (assumed) immediate process of production. The concepts are // | ||
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- | > [T]he result of the process of production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the //relation of capital and labour itself//, of // | ||
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- | It is directly from what Marx himself writes that we can, or rather are obliged to, go beyond Marx, since, as Roland Simon says on page 221 in this issue((‘Interview with Roland Simon’)): ‘relative surplus-value can only exist if the commodities which enter into //the reproduction of labour power// are themselves produced in a capitalist manner. So in that sense real subsumption can not be defined simply on the basis of the transformation of the process of production.’ (our emphasis) | ||
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- | With the real subsumption of labour under capital, we say, the (apparently) immediate process of production absorbs society as a whole in its process as a process of reproduction and accumulation, | ||
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- | > It is inherent to the concept of capital that it must reproduce and accumulate, and in this it seeks to overcome all obstacles and to make the material reality it engages with conform as perfectly as possible to its requirements. But it takes time to do this, namely to make a reality of its ideal world of frictionless circulation and growth. Its opposite pole, labour, is indeed recalcitrant much of the time to the demands capital imposes on it. Thus, although the category of ‘real subsumption’ is logically implicit in the concept of capital, being required to perfect it, in actual fact a whole series of revolutions in the capitalist mode of production were requiered to create the requisite conditions for capital’s vindication of its hegemony.((Chris Arthur, ‘Dialectical development versus linear logic’, in //The new dialectic and Marx’s Capital//, Brill, Leiden/ | ||
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- | With real subsumption, | ||
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- | > While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, | ||
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- | It is from this perspective we see real subsumption, | ||
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- | ==== The double mill and the reproduction of capital and labour ==== | ||
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- | //Double moulinet// is the French translation of the German term // | ||
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- | {{en: | ||
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- | //Figure I. Double mill in motion. The reproduction of capital and labour?// | ||
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- | The original French translator of //Das Kapital//, Joseph Roy, decided to play on the sense of mill and came up with //double moulinet//, explicitly evoking the image of two cogs or cycles, with the added benefit that a moulinet was also a grinder. It seems as though Roy got a good aproximation, | ||
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- | This disquisition of the Mill game is of value in context because TC makes such a big deal about it and they think that it sheds light on an important problematic. The analogy is used to illustrate a picture of //the whole of the capitalist mode of production and the reproduction of its classes//, its // | ||
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- | //The whole// contests according to Marx of ‘the reproduction and new production of //the relation of capital and labour itself// | ||
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- | > Exploitation, | ||
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- | Seen through the analogy of the Mill game, //the first mill// in the double mill is the reproduction of labour power. In this reproduction such things as the housing of the workers, education, migration etc. is included. Here are ‘all the separations, | ||
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- | TC is telling us that during a first historical phase of real subsumtion, stretching from after the second world war up to the beginning of the 1970s, the accumulation of capital could for a period be secured in compromises within, in the first place, national frameworks. The production of surplus value could for example work hand in hand with building of the welfare states, with regulated labour markets etc., which at the same time guaranteed the existence of the workers. They say that it was during these conditions that the workers’ movement, a workers’ identity and reformist politics could find its clearest raison d’être. However, the crisis that appeared in the beginning of the 1970s marked a break with this compromise, because //at the same time// as the victories of the workers’ movement had been achieved hand in hand with the integration of the reproduction of labour with the capital relation and the //deeper// exploitation of the labour power, the power of the working class (how the working class, for capital, was divided into geographically separated spheres of exploitation etc.) made up fixed points which became too rigid and came to make up a drag on the self-presupposition of capital, a hindrance for a smooth flow from one cycle to the other. The workers’ uprisings in the 1970s was according to TC a rebellion aimed at the restraints that was demanded by capital in order to maintain the social contract. | ||
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- | > To the demand for self-sacrifice in order ‘to get out of the crisis’ it cheerfully replied that the obligation of wage-labour merited only a quick death. | ||
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- | > The capitalist class took up the challenge laid down by this vast movement of labour revolts. From the right to the left, it was a matter of clearing all the obstacles to the even flow of exploitation and its reproduction. In opposition to the previous cycle of struggles the restructuring abolished all specification: | ||
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- | > The restructuring at work since the middle of the seventies renders the process of the total reproduction of society adequate to the production of relative surplus-value, | ||
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- | These huge upheavals and their underlying causes have been given many names: ‘globalisation’, | ||
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- | Let us first just give the floor to TC to sum up what the analogy with the double mill can give: | ||
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- | > As a matter of fact, the worker is caugt in a trap but the strength of the image of the ‘double moulinet’ lies in the fact that it shows that he owes not his position and definition to a manoeuver but to a structural definition of reproduction. The proletariat cannot abolish capital without abolishing itself at the same time. (You get this idea in the phrase ‘double moulinet’.) If understanding the contradictory reproduction through the ‘double moulinet’ dismisses the liberation of the class, it nevertheless induces a terrible question: how can the abolition of its own rules be part and parcel of the game, as a relation between its terms and also as a movement of the whole? In the contradiction between its poles is the object itself (the mode of production) which is in contradiction with itself. Because capital is a contradiction in process proletariat against capital includes the negation of its own existence. | ||
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- | > To answer this question would amount to reconsider the whole analysis of the contradictory course of the capitalist mode of production, not only as contradictory and reflexive game between two classes which constitute the two poles of the same whole, but as an internal movement within a whole which has two poles. It is only in apprehending contradiction (exploitation) as the internal movement of a whole that we will only be able to grasp the way in which the game comes to the abolition of its own rule and in no way the transient and random victory of one of the players (who actually is always the same one). | ||
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- | > Exploitation makes it possible to build class struggle as contradiction, | ||
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- | > All this only functions if we achieve understanding the fall of the rate of profit as a contradiction between the classes and as a questionning of the proletarait by itself in the movement when the whole is, in its dynamics, contradictory to itself as the activity of a class.((See //Théorie communiste// | ||
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- | ==== From self-organisation to communisation ==== | ||
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- | > With the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production, the contradiction between the classes is found at the level of their respective reproduction. In its contradiction with capital, the proletariat puts itself into question.((Théorie communiste, ‘Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.’, | ||
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- | Presumably the most important of the texts by Théorie communiste that we have translated is // | ||
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- | In contrast with the view of communism as a paradise on earth that we are to enter ‘after the revolution’, | ||
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- | The proletarian revolution is centered around the dissolution of the proletariat, | ||
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- | > The supersession of really existing self-organisation will not be accomplished by the production of the ‘true’, the ‘right’, | ||
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- | In light of this view on the supersession of self-organisation, | ||
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- | A central idea in the text, which we find immensely important, is that the syndicalism which characterises all everyday class struggles can not be explained by the existence of trade unions, or that this nature would somehow disappear in the struggle outside the union; syndicalism does not exist //because of// institutionalisation. But if trade unions organise proletarians as workers and go into negotiations with the buyer of labour power, while the self-organised, | ||
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- | On the other hand, there is an important distinction between trade union and self-organisation when it comes to the possibilities for how far the syndicalist struggle can be fought. In the text TC claim that first self-organisation must be reached and triumph in order to be superseded later, and that this is the only way in which the proletarians gain practical knowledge of their situation, in other words that all capitalist categories and class belonging itself is constituted as an exterior constraint to the struggle, and their asking of the question of communisation is made possible. | ||
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- | > The self-organisation of struggles is a crucial moment of the revolutionary supersession of struggles over immediate demands. To carry on the struggle over immediate demands intransigently and to the very end cannot be achieved by unions, but by self-organisation and workers’ autonomy. To carry on the struggle over immediate demands through workers’ autonomy on the basis of irreconcilable interests is to effect a change of level in the social reality of the capitalist mode of production.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., pp. 27--28)) | ||
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- | TC are saying that nowadays the proletarians simply get fed up with self-organisation as soon as it is established, | ||
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- | > There is a qualitative leap when the workers unite against their existence as wage labourers, when they integrate the destitute and smash market mechanisms; not when one strike ‘transforms’ itself into a ‘challenge‘ to power. The change is a rupture.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., p. 40)) | ||
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- | > [The proletarians can] fight against market relations, seize goods and the means of production while integrating into communal production those that wage-labour can’t integrate, make everything free, get rid of the factory framework as the origin of products, go beyond the division of labour, abolish all autonomous spheres (and in the first place the economy), dissolve their autonomy to integrate in non-market relations all the impoverished …; in this case, it is precisely their own previous existence and association as a class that they go beyond as well as (this is then a detail) their economic demands. The only way to fight against exchange and the dictatorship of value is by undertaking communisation.((Théorie communiste, op. cit., p. 30)) | ||
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- | For TC, it is the class relation understood as exploitation which gives the proletariat its position as a capitalist category and at the same time delivers the key to the dissolution of the classes and the capitalist categories. With exploitation class struggle does not become one thing and the Marxian (economic) concepts something else. ‘It is the insufficiency of surplus-value in relation to accumulated capital which is at the heart of the crisis of exploitation.’((Théorie communiste, op. cit., p. 76)) The falling rate of profit does not trigger class struggle, as the ‘objectivists’ would have it. Nor is the opposite true, that class struggle triggers the falling rate of profit, as the ‘subjectivists’ would have it. ‘[T]he fall of the rate of profit is a contradiction between classes.’((Théorie communiste, ‘Communist theory’ < | ||
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- | In 2003 the publishing collective Senonevero, where TC among others participate, | ||
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- | ==== Some last words on the first part ==== | ||
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- | Let us finalise this first part of the issue by saying a few words about the texts. The issue begins with a number of texts, originally published as a debate between Théorie communiste and Aufheben in their respecive magazines. Through this debate we came in contact with the ideas of TC for the first time. Aufheben presents TC for their readers, partly in their own words, partly through a couple of translated texts. We have translated these texts, as well as the debate itself and a few other texts by TC. We hope that it will be sufficient to let the debate present itself. A few texts by TC follows and a couple of these texts have already been mentioned. We are especially happy to present an interview from the last summer with a leading member of TC. With this interview we got an opportunity to follow up the discussion with Aufheben, TC’s view on the debate, and to listen to what they have to say about the position of communist theory in class struggle. The text ‘A fair amount of killing’ treats the second, ongoing, war in Iraq in light of the global restructuring. | ||
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- | Concerning the translations, | ||
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- | ===== Debate ===== | ||
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- | The second part is a discussion on a text from the last issue, ‘Communism of attack and communism of withdrawal’ by Marcel. Marcel received two critical comments (one by Per Henriksson and the other by Björkhagengruppen from Stockholm), and Marcel wrote a reply. Henriksson argues, among other things, that Marcel misplaces the historical and logical relation between capitalism and communism, where the former is a precondition for the latter, and that Marcel’s perspective therefore becomes utopist. | ||
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- | Björkhagengruppen criticises Marcel on the basis of partly different conditions. For instance, they argue that Marcel did not do a proper reading of Hegel and thus fails to preserve a distinction between the concepts of essence and appearance. Furthermore, | ||
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- | Marcel states in his reply that he acknowledges the critique in the mentioned articles, but he also refers to a coming publication, | ||
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- | Furthermore, | ||
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- | We find it very pleasant and positive that people like to take part in the discussion we have tried to conduct in and through riff-raff, that they have understood that we have never intended discussion in some sort of isolation. On top of that, the fact that they are both ambitious and constructive creates a feeling of acknowledgement amongst us; and the project which we devote our time to seems to have some relevance outside our group as well. | ||
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- | ===== Marx–Engels series ===== | ||
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- | We introduce in our eighth issue three seemingly disparate texts in our series of novel translations of Marx and Engels: the years 1844--1845, 1860 and 1877. The first one is a few passages from Marx’s and Engel’s jointly produced writing //The holy family or Critique of critical criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and company//. This book has never before been published in Swedish, either as a whole or (which is all too common) in the form of a commented selection. It was written about the same time as Marx’s now famous, as well as controversial, | ||
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- | Apart from this we publish two letters by Marx from two different time periods. Neither do we feel like writing anything about these other than that they contain interesting formulations which surely might suprise one or two Marx necrophiles. We find one in a comment on the dissolution of the Communist League where some words are spent on the party and in the historical way he always intended. In the second letter we find a tired Marx who shares his view on the idolising of his personality. | ||
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- | riff-raff, October 2006 | ||
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- | ~~DISCUSSION: |