Communism & Transition

Communism is in no case a product of capitalist development, it is its radical inversion. It is the demystification which becomes the reversal of capitalist development. Communism is neither a teleology of the capitalist system nor its catastrophe. It is a new subject which takes form. which transforms reality and destroys capital. Communism is thus a concept that we can only formulate within the form of the transition. The movement of inversion is powerful, so much so that the form of the transition is not simply antithetical, but rather constitutive of a new subject, and of its potential for total transformation. To mark this transformation in the most rigorous way possible, Marx insists on the abolition of work. Work which is liberated is liberation from work. The creativity of communist work has no relation with the capitalist organization of labor. Living labor - by liberating itself, by reconquering its own use value, against exchange valueopens a universe of needs of which work can become a part only eventually. And in this case, it is a question ofwork as essential, collective, nonmystified, communist work: instead of work as capitalist construction. The reversal is total, it allows no kind of homology whatsoever. It's a new subject. Rich and joyous. Marx said it: there is no need to exaggerate it. Marx said it ten times, a hundred times.

Antonio Negri

1933 - 2023

Marx beyond Marx

All Marxists categories of communism. Marxist categories are not only permeated by a permanent and irreducible duality, but this duality appears in the form of antagonism, and that antagonism in the form reversal. To make use of Marxist categories means to push them to this necessary reversal, to allow oneself to be pushed to this incredible experience. Marxist categories are subversive categories; categories that emerge from the process of subversion. The categories are taken in the logic of the antagonitic tendency whose development is made up of successive displacements of the system of categories.

Materialist logic - in so far as it is adequate to grasp the real - is rich with the power (potenza) of creation of the real, of the class struggle. Communism is only concept from the point of view of method, in so far as it remains a dynamic term of transformation.

Communism appears as the concept of the overthrow of work, of its substraction from command. That which seems the conclusion of a process - the constitution of social production - has as its only effect to produce another, the social liberation of the subject. The subject thus begins to constitute itself.

The subject is able to develop itself, to liberate itself from the relations of production in so far as it liberates them and dominates them. The self-valorization of the proletarian subject, contrarily to capitalist valorization, takes the form of auto-determination in its development.

Communism has the form of subjectivity. Communism is a constituting praxis. There is no part of capital that is not destroyed by the impetuous development of the new subject. This subject shows such a power of subjective upheaval that all the vestiges of the old order are carried away. The transition is a constituting process in the fullest sense, which is based entirely on that space defined by the most radical alternatives. Marx beyond Marx. Beyond vulgar determinism. Beyond all hypothesis implying homogeneity.

The capitalist inversion, with alienation, plays not only on distribution but finds itself at the foundation of the mode of production: the inversion of the inversion reaches this foundation.

The revolutionary subject emerges from the relatin with capital at this stage. The inversion that this - the subject - operates against capital is an operation which is not even any longer a reappropriation. Reappopriation is a term which becomes insufficient and ambiguou when there are new foundations.

Antonio Negri

1933 - 2023

Hero of Socialist Labor

 

Sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich

1908 - 1974

Marx beyond Marx

Communism is only reversal of work in so far as this reversal is suppression: of work. Liberation of the productive forces: certainly, but as a dynamic of a process which leads to abolition, to negation in the most total form. Turning from the liberation-from-work toward the going-beyond of-work forms the center, the heart of the definition of communism. We must not be afraid to insist on this theoretical moment: the liberation of living labor exalts its creative power, the abolition of work is what gives it life in every moment. The content, the program of communism are a development of universal needs which have emerged on the collective but miserable basis of the organization of waged work, but which in a revolutionary way signify the abolition of work, its definitive death.

Antonio Negri

1933 - 2023

Teocracia

O fundamentalismo é feio, muito feio. No socialismo não há espaço para a feiura e a irracionalidade. 

O fundamentalismo, embora não seja um adversário racional, possui seu centro de atividades nitidamente localizável no mundo: a casa branca.

Grundrisse

Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny (Bestimmung) is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves - and on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations (Geschlechter), has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species (Geschlecht) and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

Communism & transition

Marx analyses the fundamental law (and the mystification) of capitalist development, the law of competition, and in so doing he insists on the power of capitalist liberty: but this liberty has a narrow base. "It is nothing more than free development on a limited basis-the basis of the rule of capital. This kind of individual freedom is therefore at the same time the most complete suspension of all individual freedom, and the most complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which assume the form of objective powers, even of overpowering objects - of things independent of the relations among individuals themselves". The law of competition is also an outline of what the development of capital contains as force of opposition and of separation: communism, a potent reversal of everything. 

To demystify the categories of capital means to expose to the light of day the laws of movement of history. The fundamental law is that which constructs the possibility of communism. From this point of view, to remain at demystification, communism is building itself. It is in the process of building itself as radical and extreme antithesis. The theme of liberty and the wealth of needs, of the contradictory development of the forms of production, and finally the theme of crisis, all meet here. They are present within each category as its reversal. Here, when we speak of communism, the reversal is powerful and synthetic. The contradictory form has the appearance of an insurmountable obstacle, of an obstacle that grows larger along with the development of the "permanent revolution" of capital. There is no solution to this process. No capitalist equilibrium can hold. Even less can a proposition that seeks socialism remain solid: the theory of state property, of planning, of equality in exploitation are all derived from the permanent revolution of capital. There is no possible equilibrium, not even a categorical one, when each element of the ideal synthesis is invalidated by antagonism. This emerges because the development of opposition is at least as tendentious as is the development of capital. Each one has its objectives. We know that of capitalism, and that of the working class and the proletariat we begin to see as a reversal of poles. It is not enough. In the Grundrisse, beyond this reaffirmation of the categories (reversal of the categories of capital, a new workers' foundation to these categories) we can still read passages where this term of demystification begins to constitute itself as subject and to convert the process which consists of defining "communism" as a residue - incompressible perhaps, but still a residue - in order to make it the motor of an alternative.

Toni Negri

1933 - 2023

О́бщество безбо́жников

 

Religion is not merely an expression of gullibility and ignorance but a firmly entrenched system for ordering family and community relationships.

Fundamentalism

Zealotry rarely makes for good poetry and good person.

Capital

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an append into a age of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power... But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, con versely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883

The capitalist production of space

The theme of increasing polarization between the social classes is writ large in Capital. In the "general law of capitalist accumulation", Marx shows that the necessary consequence of the real processes at work under capitalism is the reproduction of "the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers at that". Furthermore these processes also produce a "relative surplus population", a "reserve army" of unemployed "set free" primarily through technological and organizational change. This reserve army helps to drive wage rates down and to control workig-class movements and is, therefore, a "prime lever" for further accumulation. The net effect, as Marx puts it, invoking imagery deeply reminiscent of Hegel, is that the "accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, Ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital".

Capitalist development & class

The development of capital within the state-form, the insertion of political mechanisms within the dynamic of accumulation, the elaboration of the way of producing (that some call "post-Taylorism") where at center is the question of political control, all of that places the antagonism worker-state at the center of the critical dynamic. Marx indicated, and often too frequently, especially in the Grundrisse, that to say state is only another way of saying capital. The development of the mode of production leads us to recognize that to say State is the only way to say capital: a socialized capital, a capital whose accumulation is done in terms of power, a transformation of the theory of value into a theory of command; the launching into circuit and the development of the state of the multinationals.

Fundamentalism

Deny the dialectic: that eternal formula of judeo-christian thought, that circumlocution for saying - in the western world - rationality.

The Marxian theory of the state

Reading Marx, it is very difficult to imagine the birth of capitalism without the exercise of state power and the creation of state institutions which prepared the ground for the emergence of fully-fledged capitalist social relations.

The notion that capitalism ever functioned without the close and strong involvement of the state is a myth that deserves to be corrected.

Hey, kid, Karl Marx have a message for you:

Locke championed the new bourgeoisie in every way, taking the side of the industrialists against the working class and against the paupers, the merchants against the old-fashioned usurers, the financial aristocracy against the governments that were in debt, and he even demonstrated in one of his books that the bourgeois way of thinking was the normal one for human beings.

The marxian theory of the state

In the Marxian theory of distribution, the surplus acquired through capitalist production is split into industrial profit, interest to finance capital, and rent to landlords. The homogeneity within the capitalist class breaks down into fractions of capital which are potentially in conflict with each other. Other fragmentations - between merchant capital and industrial capital, for example - can arise out of the divisions of function within the capitalist system. These fragmentations lead to conflicts of interest within the capitalist class as a whole. Factional struggles which from time to time may become highly destructive are therefore to be expected within the capitalist class.

The marxian theory of the state

 

Individuals, each in pursuit of his or her private interests, cannot possibly take "the common interest", even of the capitalist class, into account in their actions. Thus, the capitalist state has also to function as a vehicle through which the class interests of the capitalists are expressed in all fields of production, circulation and exchange. It plays an important role in regulating competition, in regulating the exploitation of labor (through, for example, legislation on minimum wages and maximum hours of employment) and generally in placing a floor under the processes of capitalist exploitation and accumulation.

The marxian theory of the state

Money provides the vehicle for accumulation; it permits the individual to carry his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. Capital is nothing more, of course, than money put back into production and circulation to yield more money. If money is to represent real values, the same kind of state regulation of money supply and credit is called for. Also, if the profit rate is to be equalized then both capital and labor must be highly mobile, which means that the state must actively remove barriers to mobility when necessary. In general, the state, and the system of law in particular, has a crucial role to play in sustaining and guaranteeing the stability of these basic relationships. The guarantee of private property rights in means of production and labor power, the enforcement of contracts, the protection of the mechanisms for accumulation, the elimination of barriers to mobility of capital and labor and the stabilization of the money system (via central banking, for example), all fall within the field of action of the state. In all of these respects the capitalist state becomes the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The capitalist state cannot be anything other than an instrument of class domination because it is organized to sustain the basic relation between capital and labor.

The origin of the family, private property and the state

The state is by no means a power imposed on society from without; just a little is it "the reality of the moral idea", "the image and the reality of reason", as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in unsoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume thenselves and society in fruitless struggles, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of "order", and this power, arising out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state. 

As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed classes. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slaveowners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital.

Friedrich Engels

1820 - 1895

The capitalist production of space

We find Marx frequently portrayed as depicting men and women as dominated by rational economic calculation when it was exactly Marx's point that it is the capitalist mode of production which forces such rationality upon us against all of the evidence as to what human beings are really all about. We find Marx portrayed as an economic determinist when it was precisely Marx's point that the realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity ends and that it is only through struggle, political and personal, that we can achieve the command over our social and physical existence which will yield us that freedom.

David Harvey