#dauve

The fundamental contradiction of our society (proletariat-capital) is only potentially deadly to capitalism if the worker confronts his work, and therefore takes on not just the capitalist, but what capital makes of him, i.e. if he takes on what he does and is. It’s no use hoping for a time when capital, like a worn out mechanism, would find it impossible to function, because of declining profits, market saturation, exclusion of too many proletarians from work, or the inability of the class structure to reproduce itself

Dauve+Martin

The interpretation of fascism as an instrument of big business has been classic since Daniel Guerin. But the seriousness of his analysis conceals a central error. Most of the "marxist" studies maintain the idea that, in spite of everything, fascism was avoidable in 1922 or 1933. Fascism is reduced to a weapon used by capitalism at a certain moment. According to these studies capitalism would not have turned to fascism if the workers' movement had exercised sufficient pressure rather than displaying its sectarianism. Of course we wouldn't have had a "revolution", but at least Europe would have been spared Nazism, the camps, etc. Despite some very accurate observations on social classes, the State, and the connection between fascism and big business, this perspective succeeds in missing the point that fascism was the product of a double failure; the defeat of the revolutionaries who were crushed by the social democrats and their liberal allies; followed by the failure of the liberals and social democrats to manage Capital effectively. The nature of fascism and its rise to power remain incomprehensible without studying the class struggles of the preceding period and their limitations.

The subject/object couple is one of those philosophical expressions that a human community would supersede. The declared definitive opposition between individual and society, soul and body, spirit and matter, theory and praxis, art and economy, ideals and reality, morals and politics… all relate to the dissolution of communities into classes through the combined action of property, money and State power. Though not synonymous with perfect harmony, communism would try and live beyond such tragic splits in human life. “Subject” and “object” don’t exist separate from each other. A crisis is not something exterior to us, that happens and forces us to react. Historical situations (and opportunities) are also made of beliefs and initiatives, of our actions — or inaction.

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its 'military' dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this 'weapon'. - The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys. - To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems—in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man.

The problem with the “transition period” is, then, not the problem of transition (as Dauvé makes clear), but the problem of the “pause” as opposed to the continued movement, the “plateau” versus the upward “path” (to use de Mattis’ quasi-Maoist language). Similarly, the problem of counter-revolution sitting within revolution begins when the supposedly “revolutionary” fraction (be it a party, a syndicalist union, a Blanquist leadership or people in general) begins to pose itself as the “party of order,” opposing civil stability and consistent economic production to general dissolution of the present world, “anarchy” or chaos. Contemporary theories of communization are most similar, historically, to those of the factions in previous struggles who fought to take the risk (even if openly chaotic) and push without pause in constant revolution inward (socially) and outward (geographically), even when this meant renewed civil war. This doesn’t mean that the real movement of communization cannot be at all tempered or variable. The movement need not be at a single, set speed—it simply needs to be real movement with actual communist measures taken, rather than the building of an entire stable social(ist) system on the basis of capitalist categories (even if that system goes, in some limited way, beyond capitalism).

Marx defined ideology as the substitute for a real but impossible change : the change is lived at the level of the imaginary.