TC RESPONSE TO AUFHEBEN 12

After reading your text on TC in Aufheben no. 12, and assuming a good
linguistic understanding on my part, it would seem that you raise four points on
which we diverge, or on which additional work is required by TC in order to
justify our analyses:

1) One of the three objections made by Dauvé and Nesic to the concept of
programmatism in their pamphlet “Une histoire d’amour…” (“Love of
labour lost…” ?? check title in English)
2) Doesn’t the proletariat have to recognise itself as a class before
abolishing itself?
3) The foundation of the possibility of a second phase of real subsumption
in the concepts of capital and real subsumption.
4) The concept of alienation.

I’ll happily leave the question of Althusser to one side. To approach this
question in its own right would, on both sides, only lead us up a blind alley.
However interesting it could be, on a number of questions, to examine and
criticise Althusser’s positions, to pose Althusser as the subject in his own right
would ensnare us in our discussions, as he would become the positive or negative
referent of the questions that we want to deal with. These questions would be
transformed by making Althusser the reference point.

1st point

Without ever saying it expressly, Dauvé and Nesic make three objections to the
concept of programmatism:

a) Workers don’t give their all for their boss. This objection would hardly
merit quotation if we didn’t find its inverse in the ideology of “social link”
and “adhesion” that they offer in their apologetic vision of the “post-war
boom” in the pamphlet “Whither the world?” (“Il va falloir attendre”).
Here they accept in the context of capitalism that which they deny in that
of the liberation of labour.

b) The liberation of labour, according to them, corresponds to the

organisations of the labour movement and not to the workers themselves.
This is to gloss over the fact that workers founded these organisations and
adhered to them at times in massive numbers. Furthermore, it is certainly
workers who, even if it is to defend their existence, create Councils and
Soviets, sometimes make attempts at self-management, take over
factories, participate in factory committees, set up co-operatives and found
organisations, parties and unions which have as their programme the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the liberation of labour.
 c) The third objection is more serious. This objection refers back to
Seidman’s pamphlet “Workers against work”. Seidman notes correctly that
on the rare occasions that production is resumed under workers’ control,
the leaderships of the organisations have great difficulty in imposing work
discipline on the workers who show little productive enthusiasm.

By programmatism we understand a model of workers’ struggles and

revolutionary supersession resting on the growing power of the working class,
through which the requirements of a social development of capital impose
themselves, thus paving the way for the liberation of the working class. For a
century and a half, the programmatic practice of the working class, the furthest
horizon of its struggles, was always ambiguous: on the one hand its
empowerment within the capitalist mode of production was the condition sine
qua non of its affirmation as a dominant class, but on the other hand it
systematically refused to accept that this growing power be identified with the
acceptance of capitalist exploitation. Programmatism, whose core is the
liberation and affirmation of productive labour as the reorganisation of society,
was never a “love story” between workers and wage labour. As early as the end of
the 19th century, within programmatism, the empowerment of the class (as a
result of its integration into the reproduction of capital) within the capitalist
mode of production had come into contradiction with the possibility of its
autonomous revolutionary affirmation. The rare occasions when such an
affirmation begins to be realised in practice, and necessarily under the leadership
of the organisations of the workers’ movement, such as in Russia, Italy or Spain,
it immediately reverts to that which it cannot escape being: a new form of
mobilisation of labour under the constraint of value and therefore of “maximum
output” (to which the CNT exhorted the workers of Barcelona in 1936),
reproducing ipso facto, even marginally, all the reactions of disengagement or
resistance on the part of the workers (cf. Seidman, Workers Against Work,
Echanges et Mouvement). The best illustration of this is the little anecdote drawn
from The Unknown Revolution by Voline that you point to in your text.

2nd point

To put it briefly, we define the current cycle of struggles as a situation

where the proletariat only exists as a class in its contradictory relation to capital,
which precludes any confirmation of a workers’ identity or any “return to itself”
in the face of capital; the contradiction with capital is for the proletariat its own
calling into question of itself.
The proletariat doesn’t become a “purely negative” being as a result of this,
except if we understand by this the critique of any conception of a revolutionary
nature of the proletariat. We pass from a perspective where the proletariat finds
in itself in the face of capital its capacity to produce communism, to a perspective
where this capacity is only acquired as an internal movement of that whose
abolition it enables, becoming in this way a historical process and the
development of the relation and not the triumph of one of its terms/poles
(termes) in the form of its generalisation. The proletariat only produces
communism in (and through) the course of the contradiction with capital and not
in and of itself, emancipating itself from capital or revealing itself against it; there
is no subversive being of the proletariat. If the negation is an internal moment of
what is negated, the supersession is a development of the contradiction, it arises
from this development, it is not the revelation or actualisation of a revolutionary
nature, but an internal historical production.
As dissolution of existing conditions, the proletariat is defined as a class
within capital and in its relation with it, that is to say as the class of value-
producing labour and more precisely surplus-value-producing labour. It is not as
the dissolution of these categories that the proletariat poses itself as class, is
constituted as class, rather it is as a class that the proletariat is this dissolution; it
is the very content of its objective situation as a class. Its capacity to abolish
capital and produce communism lies in its condition as class of the capitalist
mode of production. The dissolution of all existing conditions is a class, it is
living labour against capital. What has disappeared in the current
crisis/restructuring is not this objective existence, it is the confirmation within
the reproduction of capital of a proletarian identity. Exploitation simultaneously
defines the proletariat as the class of surplus-value producing labour and as the
dissolution of all existing conditions on the basis of these conditions, in the
dynamic, understood as class struggle, of the capitalist mode of production. For
the proletariat, its capacity to act for the abolition of this mode of production is
contained in its strict situation as class of this mode of production.
When we say that the proletariat only exists as a class within and against
capital, that it produces its entire being, all its organisation, reality and
constitution as a class in and against capital, we are merely stating that it is the
class of surplus-value producing labour. The class of productive labour, the
proletariat recognises itself constantly as such in the course of any given struggle,
whose most immediate effect is always the social polarisation of classes.
The simplest things are often the most difficult to conceive. A class
recognises itself as class through its relation to another class, a class only exists to
the extent that it has to wage a struggle against another class. A class has no prior
own definition explaining and producing its contradiction with another class, it is
only in the contradiction with another class that it recognises itself as class. What
disappears in the current cycle of struggles, is the ability of this general
relationship which defines classes to comprise a moment of return to itself for the
proletariat as the definition of its own identity which it could oppose to capital
(its own identity seeming inherent to the class and opposable to capital, when in
fact it was nothing other than the particular product of a certain historical
relation between the proletariat and capital, confirmed by the specific movement
of capital). The proletariat does not become a “purely negative being”, it is simply
a class.
We have such difficulty in ridding ourselves of the pervasiveness of
programmatism that the simple fact of saying that the proletariat is a class
because it is in a contradictory relation to capital, because its raison d’être as
class is its contradiction with another class, is understood as making the
proletariat a “purely negative being”. We can even say that in this moment of
fusion in the class conflict, where the fact of being a class is autonomised into an
external constraint, the proletariat becomes a “class for itself”. In knowing itself
to be, in practice, in its abolition of capital, the negation of all existing conditions,
and in knowing by all of its activity, that it is only a class in its relation to capital,
its consciousness of itself, its existence as “class for itself”, is that of its relation.
The proletariat, in the new cycle of struggles, is so little a “purely negative being”
that the struggle for the defence of immediate interests has to reach this climax in
which the definition as a class itself becomes an external constraint, for the
revolution to be the supersession produced by this cycle. There exists an old
framework which we have great difficulty in discarding: the confusion between
the positive recognition of the proletariat as class and the particular historical
forms of self-organisation and autonomy.
In its struggles, the proletariat assumes all the forms of organisation
necessary for its action. But does this mean that, when the proletariat assumes
the forms of organisation necessary for its immediate goals (communisation will
equally be an immediate goal), it exists for itself as autonomous class? No.
Self-organisation and union power belonged to the same world of the
revolution as affirmation of the class. Self-organisation or the autonomy of the
proletariat are not stronger or weaker constant tendencies in the class struggle,
but determinate historical forms of the latter. We can remove all content from
these forms and call self-organisation any coming together of people deciding in
common what they are going to do, but in this case all human activity is self-
organisation and the term no longer carries any interest. Self-organisation and its
content, workers’ autonomy, come from a contradiction between the proletariat
and capital which comprises the capacity for the proletariat to relate to itself as a
class, against capital, that is to say a relation to capital such that it comprises the
capacity for the proletariat to find in itself its basis, its own constitution, its own
reality, on the basis of a workers’ identity which the reproduction of capital, in its
historical modalities, had long been confirming. For the theories of self-
organisation and of autonomy, it was a question of linking immediate struggles to
the revolution by those elements in the struggles which could manifest a rupture
with the integration of the defence and the reproduction of the proletarian
condition: the conquest of its autonomy in relation to capital, in relation to the
political and union forms of this integration. Self-organisation and autonomy
were only possible on the basis of the constitution of a workers’ identity, a
constitution which restructuring has swept aside.
It is the very capacity, for the proletariat, of finding in its relation to capital
the basis for constituting itself as an autonomous class which has disappeared.
The particularisation of the valorisation process, the “big factory”, the submission
of fixed capital to the requirements of placing large numbers of workers side by
side on the line, the division between productive and unproductive activities,
between production and unemployment, production and training… etc., all that
which is superseded by the current restructuring was the substance, in the very
interior of the capitalist relation, of a proletarian identity and autonomy. Self-
organisation and autonomy are not constants whose reappearance we could wait
for, rather they constitute a cycle of struggles which is finished; for there to be
self-organisation and autonomy, it is necessary to be able to assert yourself as the
productive class as against capital. Today, self-organisation and autonomy have
paradoxically become the preserve of groups and militants (cf. the clear evolution
in France starting with the struggles in the steel industry in 1979) and above all of
“radical unions”. As a result, self-organisation militants have been reduced to
opposing a “pure” self-organisation (i.e. one which is confused with the struggle)
to any fossilisation or union development of this. But in the real process of self-
organisation, there was a constant evolution towards this fossilisation and
unionisation; this is intrinsic to the type of contradiction which expresses itself in
self-organisation as well as in the defence of the proletarian condition which
constituted its unsurpassable limit. Self-organisation, which in its purity is
confused with the struggle, has never existed. It is nothing other than an abstract
ideology of the real course of struggles.
The class struggle in general is not autonomous. The fact that the actors in
a struggle don’t delegate to anyone else the task of determining the conduct of
their struggle is not “autonomy”, rather it means that capitalist society is
composed of contradictory interests and of forms of representation which in
themselves reproduce the social relations which are being struggled against, it is
to have an activity which defines the others or the constraints to be defined, it
means that the group in struggle or the fraction of the class, or the class in its
entirety, don’t have their own definition in and of themselves, in some inherent
way, but that this definition is the ensemble of social relations. Finally, it means
considering society as organic totality and activity. Autonomy supposes that the
social definition of a group is inherent to that group, almost naturally, along with
the relations defined in the course of struggle as relations with other similarly
defined groups. Where there is organism, it only sees addition; where there is
activity and relation, it only sees object and nature.
We can only talk of autonomy if the working class is capable of relating to
itself against capital and of finding in this relation with itself the bases and the
capacity for its affirmation as dominant class. It comes down to a formalisation
of what we are in current society, as the basis of the new society to be
constructed as liberation of what we are. All that has disappeared. Autonomy as
perspective or content, is the emancipation of what the class is in the relations of
production which consequently only appear as constraint. It isn’t the decline of
workers’ struggles or their current essentially “defensive” character which
explains the decline of autonomy; rather this is explained by their
transformation, their inscription in a new relation to capital. In the current
struggles, whether they are “defensive” or “offensive” (a distinction linked to the
problematic of the empowerment of the class, and the “evidence” for which would
have to be criticised), the proletariat recognises capital as its raison d’être, its
existence standing opposite itself (son existence face à lui-même), as the only
reason for its own existence. From the moment where the class struggle is
situated on the level of reproduction, it is any given struggle that the proletariat
cannot nor wants to remain what it is.
It is not necessarily a question of failing declarations or “radical” actions, but
rather of all the practices which proletarians use to “escape” or deny their own
condition, the suicidal struggles at Cellatex, the strike at Vilvoorde and many
others where it is strikingly apparent that the proletariat is nothing separate from
capital and that it cannot remain nothing (that it demands to be reunited with
capital neither fills in the abyss opened up by the struggle, nor suppresses the
recognition and refusal on the part of the proletariat of itself as this abyss).
Self-organisation or autonomy sets in stone what the working class is in the
capitalist mode of production as the content of communism. It is “enough” to
liberate this being from the alien domination of capital (alien, since the
proletariat is autonomous). In itself, autonomy petrifies/fixes (fige) the
revolution as affirmation of labour and communist reorganisation of relations
between individuals on this basis and with this content. Most critiques of self-
organisation remain formal critiques, they merely state: self-organisation isn’t
“good in itself” but is only the form of organisation of a struggle, it is the content
which counts. This criticism fails to pose the question of the form itself, and does
not consider this form to be a content, nor significant in itself.
If autonomy disappears as a perspective it is because the revolution con only
have the communisation of society as its content, that is to say for the proletariat
its own abolition. With such a content, it becomes inappropriate to speak of
autonomy and it is unlikely that such a programme would involve what is
commonly understood as “autonomous organisation”. The “proletariat recognises
itself as class”, it recognises itself in this way in every conflict and even more so in
a situation where its existence as class is the situation it will have to confront. It is
important not to be wrong about the content of this “recognition”, nor to
continue to envisage it using categories from the old cycle as if these proceeded
from themselves as natural forms of the class struggle. For the proletariat, to
recognise itself as a class won’t be a “return to itself”, but will be a total
extroversion in recognising itself as a category of the capitalist mode of
production. In the conflict this “recognition” will in fact be a practical knowledge
of capital.

3rd point

The current restructuring is a second phase of the real subsumption of labour

under capital. We will explain ourselves briefly here with canonical Marxian
references on the subject from Capital, from the Grundrisse, from the Missing
Sixth Chapter. We can’t amalgamate or put on the same level absolute surplus-
value and formal subsumption, or relative surplus-value and real subsumption.
That is to say we can’t confuse a conceptual determination of capital and a
historical configuration. Relative surplus-value is the principle unifying the two
phases of real subsumption. In this manner real subsumption has a history
because it has a dynamic principle which forms it, makes it evolve, poses certain
forms of the process of valorisation or circulation as fetters and transforms them.
Relative surplus-value, which affects the work process and all social
combinations of the relation between the proletariat and capital and
consequently the relation between capitals, is what allows a continuity to be
posed between the phases of real subsumption and a transformation of the latter.
If we conflate relative surplus-value and real subsumption, any comprehension of
a transformation of real subsumption becomes impossible, except by adding a
more or less heterodox element or configuration of the valorisation process in
relation to the concept of capital, because we already have everything (there is in
effect no third mode of extraction of surpus-value). If the two coincide, then
everything can only be taken as a given ever since the historical inception of real
subsumption.
The first point then is to avoid amalgamating the forms of extraction of
surplus-value and the historical configurations which relate to the concepts of
formal and real subsumption. The second point consists of seeing the difference
in the relation between absolute surplus-value and formal subsumption on the
one hand and between relative surplus-value and real subsumption on the other.
It is contained in the concept itself that the extraction of surplus-value in its
absolute mode can be understood only on the level of the work process. Capital
takes over an existing labour process which it lengthens and intensifies; at the
most it is satisfied with bringing the workers together. The relation between the
extraction of surplus-value in its relative mode and real subsumption is much
more complex. We can’t be satisfied with defining real subsumption only on the
level of transformations of the labour process. In fact, for the introduction of
machines to be synonymous with the growth in surplus-value in its relative mode,
the increase in productivity which this introduction causes has to affect the goods
entering into the consumption of the working class. This necessitates the
disappearance of small-scale agriculture, and capital’s hold over department 2 of
production (that of means of consumption). This occurs, in its evolution, well
after the introduction of machines in the labour process. But even this capitalist
development in department 2 must not be seized upon without reservations. In
fact, French and even English textile production at the beginning of the 19 th
century was mostly not destined for workers’ consumption, but was sold on rural
markets (and so depended on agricultural cycles), on the urban middle class
market, or for export (cf. Rosier and Dockés, Rythmes économiques and Braudel
and Labrousse, Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 2). The
extraction of relative surplus-value affects all social combinations, from the
labour process to the political forms of workers’ representation, passing through
the integration of the reproduction of labour-power in the cycle of capital, the
role of the credit system, the constitution of a specifically capitalist world market
(not only merchant capitalist), the subordination of science (this subsumption of
society occurs at different rhythms in different countries; historically Britain
played a pioneer role). Real subsumption is a transformation of society and not of
the labour process alone.
We can only speak of real subsumption, in accordance with the very concept
of relative surplus-value, at the moment when all social combinations are
affected. The process whereby totality is affected has its own criterion. Real
subsumption becomes an organic system, that is to say it proceeds from its own
presuppositions in order to create from itself the organs which are necessary to
it; this is how it becomes a totality. Real subsumption conditions itself, whereas
formal subsumption transforms and models a pre-existing social and economic
fabric according to the interests and needs of capital.
This allows us to introduce a third point: the real subsumption of labour (and
thus of society) under capital is by its nature always unfinished. It is in the
nature of real subsumption to reach points of rupture because real subsumption
overdetermines the crises of capital as unfinished quality of capitalist society.
This is the case when capital creates from itself the specific organs and modalities
of absorption of the social labour-power which had been created in the first phase
of real subsumption. Real subsumption includes in its nature the fact of being a
perpetual self-construction punctuated by crises; the principle of this self-
construction resides in its basic principle, the extraction of surplus-value in its
relative mode. In this sense, if the current restructuring can be considered to be
achieved, it is a defining element of the period; restructuring will never be
complete in the sense that the policies of restructuring are exhausted. On the
contrary they will be pursued in a sustained manner, the “liberal offensive” won’t
stop, it will always have new rigidities to overturn. It is the same for world
capitalist integration which constantly has to be redefined by pressures between
allies and military and policing interventions.
This permanent self-construction of real subsumption is included in the
extraction of surplus-value in its relative mode; it is this self-construction which
blocks itself and redefines itself in the crises of real subsumption. It is from
relative surplus-value that we must start in order to understand how the first
phase of real subsumption enters into crisis at the beginning of the 1970s. What
was constituted in its interior as a fetter to it in this phase?
In this restructuring, the contradiction which the old cycle of struggles had
thrown up is abolished and superseded – that is the contradiction between, on
the one hand, the creation and development of labour-power created, reproduced
and instrumentalised by capital in a collective and social manner, and, on the
other, the forms of appropriation of this labour-power by capital, whether this is
in the immediate production process (the assembly line, the system of the “big
factory”), in the process of reproduction of labour-power (welfare) or in the
relation between capitals (national areas of equalisation of the rate of
profit/distribution of capital proportional to mass ?? (péréquation)). This is
where, in the old cycle of struggles, the situation of conflict manifests itself as
workers’ identity confirmed in the very reproduction of capital – a situation
abolished by restructuring. It is the architecture of, on the one hand, the
integration of the reproduction of labour-power and on the other, the
transformation of surplus-value into additional capital and finally the increase in
surplus-value in its relative mode, which becomes a fetter on valorisation on the
basis of relative surplus-value.
The point is to situate this internal contradiction of the first phase of real
domination in relation to relative surplus-value, and so to analyse how it is from
the latter as dynamic principle that the axes of restructuring are established. In
this way we confer a meaning upon these axes, a necessity in relation to
exploitation and capital.
From this point of view, in relation to the production of relative surplus-value,
the axes which brought about the fall in the rate of profit in the previous phase
offer us a vision of the elements which capital has to abolish, transform, or
supersede in the current restructuring. However, at this level, the approach is still
empirical in that the list of what is to be superseded does not constitute in itself
the common principle of supersession, the law of transformation, its hierarchies
and conceptual structure. Already however, we can group all this together in two
great parts, covering the specificity of relative surplus-value in relation to
absolute surplus-value: on the one hand the immediate production process; on
the other social combinations (the reproduction of labour-power, the relation
between departments and capitals, and areas of accumulation).
For the first point, we have to consider all the characteristics of the immediate
production process (the assembly line, cooperation, production-maintenance, the
collective worker, the continuity of the production process, subcontracting, the
segmentation of labour-power), and all the separations (work, unemployment,
training), which gave rise to a workers’ identity and conferred upon the
contradiction between the classes its content: the production of surplus-value
(this production is not immediately adequate to the social relation which it
produces); it is on the basis of this production that the control over the whole of
society is played out as management and hegemony. This workers’ identity was
inherent to a contradiction in which the proletariat constitutes itself as an
autonomous force standing against capital in the very reproduction of the whole
of capital. As regards the second point, we have to consider the modalities of
accumulation and circulation (the relation between production and the market,
national accumulation, the differentiation between the centre and the periphery,
the global division into two areas of accumulation, the “material” emergence of
currency), which too combine in the constitution of this identity.
If, in relation to these two great categories, which group together those
tendencies which in an immediate manner emerge as the obstacles to the pursuit
of accumulation, we return to relative surplus-value as the principle of
development and mutation of real subsumption, and we ask ourselves in which
way these elements can form specific, qualitative obstacles to the growth of
relative surplus-value, we are led to find the principle, the synthetic basis of
restructuring.
We are dealing here with everything which can form an obstacle to the twin
cogs/twin mills/double grinder1 (double moulinet) of the self-presupposition of
capital, to their fluidity. We find on the one hand all the barriers of separation,
protection and specification which are erected against the falling value of labour-
power, which prevent the whole working class, globally, in the continuity of its
existence, its reproduction and its enlargement, from being confronted as such by
the whole of capital: this is the first cog/cycle (moulinet), that of the reproduction
of labour-power. We find on the other side all the constraints of circulation, of
turnover, of accumulation, which encumber the second cog/cycle (moulinet), that
of the transformation of the surplus product into surplus-value and additional
capital. Any given surplus product must be able to find its market anywhere, any
given amount of surplus-value must be able to find anywhere the possibility to
operate as additional capital, i.e. to transform itself into means of production and
labour-power, without any formalisation of the international cycle (countries of
the East, the periphery) predetermining this transformation. The fluidity of each
of these cogs/cycles (moulinets) is only achieved in and through that of the other.
Exploitation, which is the content of this relation, can be broken down into
three moments: the sale-purchase of labour-power; the subsumption of labour
1
Translator’s note: double moulinet conveys the idea of the two interconnected cogs/cycles of the
reproduction of capital and labour-power, intersecting in the immediate process of production.
under capital; and the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, i.e.
into new means of labour and modified labour-power. With the current
restructuring, it is the twin cogs (les deux bras du moulinet) which are rendered
adequate to the production of relative surplus-value, at the same time as the
immediate production process, their intersection, which confers on each one its
energy and the necessity of its metamorphosis. It is in this sense that the
production of surplus-value and the reproduction of the conditions of this
production coincide. It was the architecture on the one hand of the integration of
the reproduction of labour-power, and on the other of the transformation of
surplus-value into additional capital and finally of the increase in surplus-value
in its relative mode in the immediate production process, which had become a
fetter on valorisation on the basis of relative surplus-value. This means ultimately
the way in which capital, as organic system, constituted itself as society.
This non-coincidence between production and reproduction was the basis of
the formation and confirmation within the reproduction of capital of a workers’
identity; this was the existence of a hiatus between the production of surplus-
value and the reproduction of the social relation, a hiatus enabling competition
between two hegemonies, two forms of management, two forms of control of
reproduction. For relative surplus value and its three definitive determinations
(the labour process, the integration of the reproduction of labour-power, the
relations between capitals on the basis of the distribution of capital proportional
to mass /equalisation of the rate of profit?? (péréquation)) to be adequate to each
other, there necessarily has to be a coincidence between production and
reproduction; as a corollary, this necessarily implies a coalescence between the
constitution and the reproduction of the proletariat as class on the one side and
its contradiction with capital on the other.
It is clear that the passage from one phase of real subsumption to another
cannot have the same amplitude as the passage from formal to real subsumption,
but we can’t be satisfied with merely positing a continuity between the two phases
of real subsumption, a process of revelation to capital of its own truth; the change
would then merely be the elimination of archaisms, the transformation would
definitively only be formal in this case, fundamentally changing nothing of the
contradiction between proletariat and capital. Even the very notion of a crisis
between the two phases would disappear. We wouldn’t be passing from one
particular configuration of the contradiction to another, and the notion of
restructuring would disappear by the same count.
The ensemble of these modifications comprise a system as the elimination of a
workers’ identity and as the definition of the contradiction between the classes at
the level of their reproduction. And it is for this reason, because these
modifications define a counter-revolution, that they are a restructuring.
There can be no restructuring of the capitalist mode of production without a
workers’ defeat. This defeat is that of the workers’ identity, the communist
parties, syndicalism, self-management, self-organisation, the refusal of work. It is
a whole cycle of struggles which has been defeated, in every aspect; restructuring
is essentially counter-revolution, one which can’t be measured by the number of
deaths.
4th point

As regards the fourth point, I think that our divergences are not very great
and I don’t want to add any new ones between us on what seems to me to be, on
reading your text, more a question of vocabulary than a theoretical difference. My
critique of the concept of alienation is not a “war” on the utilisation of the term;
we in TC use the term ourselves, and in Critical Foundations… I use the concept
of alienated labour or the alienation of labour. My critique bears explicitly upon
the Hegelian or Feuerbachian usage of the concept which quickly pollutes it. I
explain myself below in the chapter on the S. I. and in the chapter on cooperation
in Critical Foundations… In my opinion, things appear clearest in the one on
cooperation where the critique of the speculative character of the concept is not
made for its own sake but appears through the analysis of the relation of
exploitation. We can come back to this if you want.

Passages on the S.I.:

“Not only is history posited from the outset as a category of the human
essence (and not the inverse as history itself would have it), but, worse, it is the
nature of this history which is predefined as alienation. We start from an
identity, we return to an identity; as the original identity can be nothing other
than “unstable”, by the very definition of the human essence, between the two
there can only be a loss of this identity: subject and object are alien to each other.
But take note, this loss is itself only a form of the identity in itself in the process
of becoming for itself, and this is the very concept of alienation, and this is the
reason why Marx abandons it: the loss is only a form of the identity, its necessary
becoming in order to find itself once more, negative identity. History flows from
the true reality of man, which he regains at the end of alienation.
In alienation, the separation between labour and property or labour and
capital, the separation between men, is brought back to the movement of a
single/unique/unitary being (être unique) (the original phantasm), the
separation is never real. If I conceive of capital on the model of the “essential
powers of man transposed opposite and against him”, then I have “man” on both
sides: as labour and as capital. Then the splitting of society into classes has no
sense, no reality, it is just a form which already has within it its own supersession
as its resolution, because the schism is absurd; so the form already carries
something within itself that means that it has no sense in relation to itself since,
as schism, it is merely a moment of the existence of the identity. It becomes
“irrational” and has to leave the stage of history. This is completely different to
conceiving of this separation and this transposition as the movement of wage
labour and capital, for now we no longer have any single/unique/unitary being
(être unique) which is split, while continuing to determine (chapeauter) totality.
Each term/pole (terme) is given in its singular reality, whose reciprocal
implication we produce. The “transposition” doesn’t bring me back to a
single/unique/unitary being (être unique), but to a social relation of production,
in which capital is the transposition of the social powers of labour; because this
labour is wage labour, it is itself “transsubstantiation”. In the ideology of
alienation, its supersession is the “Truth” of man which, even defined as history,
makes the latter one of its predicates. Communism becomes the realisation of the
human essence; alienation can only be posited if we have already posited its
return to the subject. Alienation implies its own suppression in its own
conceptual structure and not as history, which is for it nothing but a detail and
about which it has, in fact, nothing to say. Just as the origin of religion is not
within man as abstraction, but within society itself, the separation that alienation
seeks to account for is not an “alienation of man”, nor is it given by the nature of
his “Activity” (the two intersect), but a contradiction in particular historical
societies setting particular classes against each other.” (Critical Foundations…,
pp. 512-513)
“The method of alienation with its complement, “human essence”, has the
particular quality of being able to be applied to anything and everything. One of
its favourite subjects is the State, where alienation is seen as the separation
between generic universal life contemplated in the State and personal life which
corresponds to immediate practical activities. All this is not “wrong”, it is the
method which is; this method, having been the spiritual complement to every
reformism, has become a lifejacket for all the theories swallowed up by the
disappearance of programmatism. The State, as we have said, is certainly the
“separation of universal life”, an abstraction of the individual engaged in class
relations; but it is not this, as the whole problematic in The Jewish Question
poses it, because man is separated into two. It is thus because it is society which
is divided in two (before this there is no State) because it is the State of the
dominant class and because this latter subsumes the whole of society under the
reproduction of its particular interests. The problem with the concept of
alienation is that it cannot function without reversing subject and predicate, and
this is true in every domain. History, as succession of particular social forms,
becomes the predicate of subject-man or, in a supposedly more concrete version,
these social forms become the predicate of activity or of labour (cf. above). In
fact, all this wisdom was already served up in 1932 by the “discoverers” of the
“young Marx”: Landsuth and Mayer. “In his work from 1840-1847 Marx opens up
little by little the entire horizon of historical conditions and pins down the
general human foundation without which the entire explanation of economic
relations remains the simple intellectual work of a shrewd economist.” This
human foundation is of course defined in the mode of alienation: “the liberation
of his existence in relation to conditions exterior to himself which falsify all the
true manifestations of the essential being of man, (…) all the manifestations of his
being will immediately be what they really are” (our emphasis); “After Marx
arrived at this result by separating himself from Hegel and Feuerbach, and put
this realisation in front of him, the efforts of the rest of his life would be directed
solely to denominating the forces of reality at work, which act to resolve the
contradictions between the idea and reality. But these forces are the forces of the
alienation of the self, of the power of conditions, the domination of political
economy: capital.” (Landshut and Mayer, “Avant-Propos” in the collection of
“Oeuvres de jeunesse” of Marx (“Works of the Young Marx”) – published under
the title: “Le Matérialisme historique” -; in French in “Avant-Propos” of vol. 4 of
“Oeuvres philosophiques”, Ed Costes).
 In the Manuscripts, Marx considers private property and all the notions
developed by political economy as being, for political economy, “facts without
necessity”. The critique of political economy consists of searching for their
necessity elsewhere, in philosophy. The conceptions of the economists and the
realities that they mask are considered to be a whole; it is true that he is not yet “a
shrewd economist” - in reality there isn’t in the Manuscripts a critique of political
economy (cf. the whole first third of the book is dedicated mostly to “profits and
losses”). In order to find “necessity”, political economy is filtered through the
subject-object relation of the philosophy of alienation: the product of my labour
which is a manifestation of myself becomes a commodity, therefore it becomes
alien to me, so labour ceases to be a human manifestation. The necessity of
political economy is thus founded in the nature of man: “political economy has
failed to recognise alienation in labour” and the latter as “the becoming for
himself of man in alienation”. And we fall back on the aporias (apories) and the
teleology of the essence of man: a human phenomenon, private property has its
origin in man but it becomes the negation of human activity, and so a non-sense,
therefore it has to be suppressed.
“The shrewd economist”, showing himself to be a better philosopher, is
“satisfied” with understanding the fundamental form of capital, production
oriented to the appropriation of the labour of others, as a historical form. “Our
conception fundamentally diverges from that of the economists who, tangled up
in the capitalist system, certainly see how production occurs in the capitalist
system (that’s not all! author’s note), but not how this relation itself is produced
and creates at the same time the material conditions of its own dissolution,
undermining at the same time its historical justification as a necessary form of
economic development and of the production of social wealth” (Marx, Missing 6th
Chapter, Ed 10/18, p264). “Necessity”, “historical justification”, “production of
its supersession”, the terms are still there, but no longer any trace of “facts
without necessity” to be transcended by Work or Man. Here we have a completely
different problematic. Capital suppresses its own historical meaning: all the
difference is there. And when, in the new cycle of struggles, this movement is the
structure and content of the very contradiction between the proletariat and
capital, it is all the ideologies which could still form the basis for understanding
this movement as alienation which must necessarily collapse, including Marx’s
objectivism. (Critical Foundations…, p.515-516)

The passage on cooperation:

‘It is thus absurd to ask oneself if capital is productive or not. Labour itself is
only productive if it is absorbed by capital, which constitutes the basis of
production commanded by the capitalist. The productivity of labour becomes the
productive powers of capital, just as the exchange value of commodities is
crystallised in money. Labour is not productive if it exists for the worker himself
in opposition to capital, if it has an immediate existence exterior to capital. It is
not productive as the direct activity of the worker because it merely ends up in
simple circulation where transformations have a purely formal character. Certain
people claim that the productive force attributed to capital is a simple
transposition of the productive force of labour; but they forget that capital is
precisely this transposition, and that wage labour implies capital in such a way
that it too is transubstantiation, that is to say an activity which seems alien to the
worker.’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Ed Anthropos, vol. 1, p 256).

The social character of labour and the social worker (travailleur social) only
exist in objectifying themselves in capital and as process of this objectification;
this social character is not even a latent quality in the individual worker which
capital appropriates, it is produced and only exists in its objectification as an
element, a power of capital. This social character can therefore never be a quality
inherent in the individual worker nor even in the sum of individual workers, for
when it exists, workers no longer belong to themselves.” (Critical Foundations…,
p.92)
I’m aware that it is not worthy of a gentleman to quote himself, I hope you’ll
excuse me, but I think that these extracts will shed light on the sense of our
critique of the concept of alienation.
These four points don’t exhaust all the discussions that we could have, but I
hope that I’m not wrong in thinking that they were the most important ones.

In friendship,
for Théorie Communiste
R.S.

It goes without saying that you can do what you like with this letter, if you
envisage publishing it and you consider it too long, then you are at liberty to
make the cuts that you consider necessary and that your conscience permits.