The Black Winding-Sheet: On Labor, Meat, and Form

[this is the text of the talk I gave in Zagreb recently.  Audio is available here, but given that I was having one of those days in which I speak far too quickly, it's perhaps better read than heard.  Large parts of this have appeared here previously, as they were in the process of getting folded into what became this text (and a longer work in process on substance and form), which aims to draw a red thread through them and, in so doing, revisits a number of my ongoing preoccupations.  The text largely sets its own ground, but it's worth framing this as part of a general attempt to develop a theory of communist pessimism.  

This is perhaps similar to the arguments about hostile objects, in which the concern was to move from the seeming hyperbolic figure of a "built world of hatred and spent time" to a demonstration that such a thing is far closer to a correct capture of our world than a fantastic and overextended description of how it might feel.  As in that instance, my point is not that we should paint political economy or political analysis in gore-smirched tones to ramp it up.  It's that a palette that leans heavily toward the black and red end of the color spectrum is far more likely to give some sense of the mechanisms and relations at stake.  The generic parceling off of such appearance and tropes into something called horror is a distancing mechanism, transposing the everyday into more safely delineated shapes that have things like fangs and knives.  

The point is, therefore, not to illustrate communist theory with Grand Guignol tricks.  It's to understand that dark times call for dark theses.  It's to try to become unlike ourselves, to not flee toward the vacancy of the other direction.

And I think a single image will suffice to visually frame this...]

Recently, a British woman was arrested for theft. She had taken spoiling food – primarily meat, specifically ham – thrown out by a Tesco supermarket after a power outage. After her arrest, Mrs. Hall said: "Tesco clearly did not want the food. They dumped it and rather than see it go to waste, I thought I could help feed me and my family for a week or two." However, in the case of Hall and Tesco, the shop said the contents of the bin belonged to them, even though it had been tossed out. And, we should note, Tesco has stated that they work to "minimise waste and where possible will seek to reuse and recycle it.” Of their green measures, most notable is the fact that every year, they send thousands of pounds of leftover meat to be burned for electricity.

Unsurprisingly, property – as relation – is thicker than hunger – as caloric need. And the material fact of having been discarded isn't enough. As a property lawyer commented on the case, "It isn't enough to throw it out. One needs to intend to abandon it.” Although this is wrong, as intention alone won't cover it. It is owned straight through the process of decomposition, until the ham goes green and liquifies, until it pools in a sludge at the bottom of the bin, seeping a bit out into the street on which there are bodies that have little meat and less work. That declaration of property and potential valorization is a form that clings to its object beyond any transformation of matter, barring one: only exchange (only M-C), an exchange between two parties, can affect this belonging. Without circulation, it cannot go properly unowned, even as it goes unvalued, wet and reeking. There is a tie that binds beyond the weave of sarcomere.

All the more as it does not rot but burns: not charred on a grill, not consumed in the furnace of a body, but burned plain and simple. Like the raising of food to be eaten by those who could work, this is caloric expenditure in the name of productive energy, yet without having to route back through living labor and all its complaints and requests. Just straight back into circulation, maintenance, upkeep, and reproduction. Into the electrical circuits, for example, that keep the Tesco lights burning white, to bathe the rest of the unbought meat as if in blue milk, where it waits to be burned and never to be disowned.

It's there, this triangulation between 

1) the rotting ham, letting loose caloric energy into an inedible puddle, between 2) her attempt to feed herself and her family, to take in calories in order to keep living, thereby requiring more activity to be undertaken to gather more calories, and between 3) the next batch of meat to come, which will require energy and exertion to maintain it, to get it turned into money, and perhaps energy, before it is fully devalorized,

that I want to address. For the sake of clarity, I'm addressing only a single text at length, namely Marx's 1857-1858 notebooks gathered as the Grundrisse. I'm not interested, in the least, of proving, disproving, or insisting that we need to “go back to”, Marx. Only that the hot mess that is the Grundrisse, inconsistent, wild, and provocative as it remains, is the occasion for these thoughts, although they bear beyond it.

To add a specific framing of my target to the one I share with Ben, it is that tendency which understands our living labor as an originary vital force of praxis and material transformation hemmed in, restrained, and dominated by the form of the wage relation, yet which remains always in excess to it, a boundless potential bent and pent up by the chronometrics and abstractions of value. As my title indicates, I'll approach this via three main notions: labor, form, and meat (or substance, in the less nekro version). As will become clear, I'm not engaging substantivelty with vitalism as a philosophical tradition. I am countering a set of notions that still, after all these years, after all this blithering idiocy we call the last three centuries, want to valorize labor as something worth doing and life something worth dying for.

Let us get back to meat, to a footnote late in the Grundrisse.

"In regard to the reproduction phase (especially circulation time), note that use value itself places limits upon it. Wheat must be reproduced in a year. Perishable things like milk etc. must be reproduced more often. Meat on the hoof does not need to reproduced quite so often, since the animal is alive and hence resists time; but slaughtered meat on the market has to be reproduced in the form of money in the very short time, or it rots."

To be alive - meat on the hoof, rather than just meat (in-itself, if you wish) - is to resist time. To reproduce oneself, as a continuation of a life, is to stave off another reproduction, a reproduction that will liquify frozen form. Rot being the failure of circulation, just as much as not decomposing (i.e. the frozen hoard) would be, in that it isn't a reproduction, transposition, and accumulation, through intitial decomposition, of the value bound in one form into another. Money, of course, is just such a correct liquidation, the necessary one: it's the universal commodity that bridges decomposition and recomposition. More prosaically, it's just a way to keep said meat animated after the fact, to recoup its loss and recuperate its supposed generative potential, via

1. The preservation of the meat: money exchanged for refrigeration, workers to make sure no one shoplifts a rack of beef, butchers to cut into smaller pieces

2. The monetary consumption of the meat: the cash exchanged before the point of no return (the "sell by date"), the meat as a vector or medium for other activities involving money (unwaged work of cooking, energy bought to grill it up)

3. [optional] The physical consumption of the meat: the caloric energy frozen in that meat is processed, albeit by an initial caloric expenditure of chewing and cutting, and thereby reproduces the potential labor-power of the eater. If unused, it will gather in convenient storage units around the thighs and belly.

4. [optional] The application of the meat: that caloric energy gets used by the one who ate it, thereby joining the ex-life of the meat with the life of the human "meat on the hoof" busy resisting time and rot.

As marked by the optional status of the last two, the mode of the meat's destruction is utterly irrelevant, provided that the first two conditions occur. It's "supposed" to get plowed back into circulation not just as money but also as caloric input into the reproduction of a body, preferably one that might do some work. But it does not matter. Only that it has been reproduced. That is to say, utterly transformed.

It might seem, then, that "we" humans are the exception here, not only because we are the source of value. Rather, because we are, in general, they whose reproduction requires a preservation of that existing thing in its distinct life and form (read: body able to sell labor-power, perhaps to actually expend some energy toward a hypothetically productive end, economic subject of getting paid, and point of transfer/proper name through which money flees back into the market). Would that it were so. Our reproduction, as subset of the circulation and accumulation of capital, cares not a whit about the preservation of these specific things, these individual bodies we are.

No: what matters is only the perpetuation of the life of these things in general. That's the core of the difference between living labor and labor-power: it is always a distinct I who does the laboring, but what is exchanged is labor-power as such, in a prescribed duration of time. This is a key difference to be stressed and clarified. As David Harvey puts it,

“There is, in Marx’s theory, therefore, a vital distinction between labor and labor power. ‘labor,” Marx asserts, ‘is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.’... What the laborer sells to the capitalist is not labor (the substance of value) but labor power – the capacity to realize in commodity form a certain quantity of socially necessary labor time.” (from Limits to Capital, 23)

[I want to mark this reference to the “substance of value” now, because one of my points is to consider the variegation and overdetermination of this substance.]

But if the point drawn out is the gap between the labor performed (a quantity of that universal measure) and the capacity to generate value, this gives a certain optic onto the strength of the historical workers movement, in its apexes and nadirs: namely, in the degree to which it tried to insist on the inseparability of these two things, insisting that labor-power not be understood via a general calculation of the factory's total hours of socially necessary potential surplus-labor but in terms of the concrete labor, the conditions and length of the working days, and the caloric-social requirements of these specific laborers. This is short, to tie labor to the lives of distinct instances of the working class, not the life of the working class – and all those else without reserves – as aggregate.

Yet this direction of the workers movement produced, in its very success (putting the brakes on the continued extension of the working day and thereby absolute surplus value), a major stumbling block: in binding the calculation of the wage to the costs of reproducing those individual workers (and, in certain periods [say, in the US and continental Europe, from the mid-19^th century until the 1960s] generally including their wives and children as part of that cost), it forfeited the possibility of a more equivalent and ultimately disruptive caloric calculation. Namely, between the living labor expended and the total costs of the reproduction of that labor power (which, necessarily, includes 1. the continued existence of those who are not employed, as downward pressure on the wage, and 2. the continued existence of those who literally reproduce the species and frequently wipe its asses, namely, women). Such that in insisting on the rights of workers, it necessarily accepted a far lower amount of remuneration than requisite for the continued life of the class.

 This isn’t to assert a counter-factual or that to venture that it was historically “possible” to do so, although given the counter-public sphere emerging in the worker’s clubs, self-organized class welfare, and the union in its widest incarnation of the industrial and Fordist period, we can nevertheless glimpse a different trajectory that, in fact, would demands wages for the class as a whole (or of a region or company), rather than for individual workers, an amount that can only be higher than a tally of the plausible wages of those actually employed. 


[Such a notion was posed, briefly, in the theoretical output of the Italian long 70s, in the social wage, although ultimately, their obsession with the wage did not serve them well, particularly since what I describe is compelling only insofar as it would be intended to rupture the very category of the wage by the impossibility of this demand, not extend it wider.]

Clearly, none of this came to pass, and therein the disavowal, on the part of the workers movement, of the necessary function for capital of those who do not work and who merely “are alive”: by not focusing on their cause, as part of the calculation of the wage, the workers movement could not adequately conceive of the total costs of reproduction of life, of value, and of the gray areas in between.

However, the impetus remained initially correct for a system in which there are not slaves (i.e. workers as fixed capital). And despite the attempts to yoke together labor-power (as a form in time) with the expendable capacity to work of those who did, or to join together a laboring life with living labor as a mass of exertion irrespective of the divisions of this or that body, it remains a real, structuring separation.

Unlike, say, a bandsaw in factory, which indeed aids in the production of value and the circulation of capital. Yet insofar as it is reproduced/maintained (with electricity, new parts, and living labor poured through it), it is in the name of this particular bandsaw continuing to work and do its job. Because it has already been bought in full, it is in the interest of its owner that this very distinct instantiation of the category of bandsaw keep functioning, as long as it performs competitively. It must, therefore, be cared for. (To telescope, from the the general perspective of capital, though, the sooner it busts, the better.)

I want to pause here, on this saw, and its relation to those who use or get used by it, to mark briefly the relation to automation. This is a far longer account that could be given, but it retains its shape in a sketch. Namely, in my reading of Capital, one born out elsewhere, in the long account given of the development of the full “machinic assemblage” of the factory, Marx lays out out how, initially and in line with formal subsumption, the technology employed was that which didn't fundamentally disrupt the flows of handicraft. It mimed that manual work, an equivalent tool/productive organ to machine of worker + tool, such that the worker still functioned as the “transmission mechanism” and “the motive force”, the latter of which to be quickly replaced by the “Promethean” power of steam and coal behind it. 


It is an imitation of labor: once set it motion, the machine “performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools.” Yet as more complex factory flows developed, which distanced further from an organization of bodies and materials inherited from craft production, the “similar tool” in question comes to be the laborer herelf, inserted into the machinic process as if mere implement, the pace and rhythm of labor time forced into accordance with that set by the factory. What this means, in short, is that living labor comes to imitate the machine, to ape its speed and patterns. Given that the machine was, first and foremost, an imitation of living labor, factory work is, it turns out, an imitation of an imitation of living labor.

In my immediate context, it is the general dynamic that's of particular interest, in which a form of structuring productive time emerges first as a description and imitation of a set of material processes, yet does not remain a labile, recalibrating capture adequate to the heterogeneous material falling beneath its sign. Rather, it unfolds its own formal logic, becoming instead into a structuring abstraction, such that, in this case, machinic labor comes to ape the working of machines that, in their initial incarnation, aped these relatively skilled humans.

In the present context, there are two versions of “giving form” to be brought out, versions which ultimately cannot be separated, least of all into an opposition of active and passive. First, in a rather infamous turn of phrase: “labor is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.” (361) Accounts concerned to locate a liberatory potential in the liberation of labor from the constraints of value find much ammo here, as it accords with a general sense of the creative potential to remake the world in our image, such that “all” it would take is to turn productive apparatuses off their current course and into fluid, “nomadic,” experimental applications of our never-fully exhausted capacity to give form in time.

Second: “labor also is consumed by being employed, set into motion, and a certain amount of the worker's muscular force etc. is thus expended, so that he exhausts himself. But labor is not only consumed, but also at the same time fixed, converted from the form of activity into the form of the object; materialized; as a modification of the object, it modifies its own form and changes from activity to being.” (300) This description, of the development of the product as frozen concretion, is not opposed to the first formal mode of labor, insofar as it represents a turn of the dialectical screw and insofar as it gives backing to that line of argument which understand the first mode as primary or originary, falsely captured by the commodity form and its material output.

However, there is, in Marx, another way to grasp the emergence of form that comes closer to articulating the fundamental tendency of what Sohn-Rethel understood as “real abstraction”. Take the rather notorious example from The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx writes, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcass.” This appears, initially, as just a conveniently catastrophic metaphor. However, two relevant interpretations.

1. In the loosest and more standard interpretation, that takes it primarily as a ramped up modifer of the preceding sentence concerning how “one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,” man is “time’s carcass” in that man’s specificity is killed, leaving man a carcass animated by value and made to labor, simply a material unit of potential activity subordinated to labor time. Man is as if dead labor.

2. If we recall the particular dialectic of form and content in Marx, we approach a different perspective. The active development, via the laboring of man as labor power (the content) produces the material conditions for labor time (the form). However, the perversity of capital is that this form does not remain adequate to its content. It becomes divorced from it and increasingly autonomous. But this is not the story of a form that simply takes leave from its content and “becomes everything,” merely dominant. Rather, it comes to determine the content in a relentless passage back and forth, to force it to accord with the divorced development of that form, such that any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent. As such, man is time’s carcass in that labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that formal relation of exchange, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth. Man, as that which labor, as the material grounding of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor. Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, rendering it incapable of generating further adequate forms. And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance.

Very well: what of that carcass? What of this substance? As mentioned previously, and throughout Marx's work, the most common notion of the “substance of value” is labor (as unspecified living or objectified): the most general substance which, in terms of labor time, forms the measure of all value. Substance is an unruly and slippery notion in Marx's thought, though: consider elsewhere in the Grundrisse, where money is both Gemeinswesen (real community) and the “general substance of survival” (225). More widely, substance is, I'd argue, one of the ways that Marx is able to think through an impasse in thought, an impasse that gives fundamental shape to the relations of capital: how are we to square capital's indifference to particular material form while nevertheless producing a set of limits and strictures in which the range of formal expressions of matter are, on the one hand, radically heterogeneous and, on the other, utterly interchangeable? Substance is the subtending that allows this emergence and flattening, the realm of formal potential and potential forms.

In the Grundrisse, though, there are two notions of substance raised powerfully. First, there is:

“The communal substance of all commodities, i.e. their substance not as material stuff, as physical character, but their communal substance as commodities and hence exchange values, is this, that they are objectified labor.” (271-272)

While the determination is not material, and their character not physical (because it is the quality of being past labor, hence a temporal fact of a duration of once-labor persisting into the present), it appears in that present as as “present in space,” as opposed to living labor which is “present in time.” Space-time turns out to be, then, just degrees of living labor. However, labor – in the present – cannot sustain itself untethered from something that lives, for it must be present not as a mass of labor (that would be objectified/dead labor) but as a present capacity:

“If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exits as a capacity, as possibility; hence as worker.” (272)

Immediately, though, this raises the prospect of another substance: the one that makes up that worker in question, who is, at first glance, not exactly just an accretion of labor. There is, then, a second general substance:

“For the use value which he offers exists only as an ability, a capacity of his bodily existence; has no existence apart from that. The labor objectified in that use value is the objectified labor necessary bodily to maintain not only the general substance in which his labor power exists, i.e. the worker himself, but also that required to modify this general substance so as to develop its particular capacity.” (282-283)

The second substance at hand is that of the flesh and bones of the worker, quite literally: the bodily frame that is the medium, matter, and basic content to be developed/shape/betrayed by the specific forms living labor takes. However, we should account for the precise relationship between these two substances, and this is an aspect that I've yet to make explicit. Namely, that the real purpose of living labor is to preserve, maintain, and animate the dead, or objectified/past living labor, that absorbs it. Living labor is employed in that race against time and rot. For left alone, objectified living labor is a “mere thing at the prey of processes of chemical decay.” In a crucial passage:

“The dissolution to which its substance [here meaning literal material that can decay] is prey therefore dissolves the form [material form, and, in this case, form of value value] as well. However, when they are posited as conditions of living labor, they are themselves reanimated. Objectified labor ceases to exist in a dead state as an external, indifferent form on the substance, because it is itself again posited as a moment of living labor.” (360)

The point, then, is not merely that living labor reawakens the value embedded in objectified labor (as raw materials and instruments of production which transfer value across the duration of their use or consumption): that is, not just a relation of present labor toward past labor. It goes in the other direction as well, as objectified labor is posited, materially, as a “moment of living labor.” Elsewhere, Marx speaks of this as the “living quality of preserving objectified labor time by using it as the objective condition of living labor in the production process” (364). In short, the condition of living labor, which “preserves the material in a definite form, and subjugates the transformation of the material to the purpose of labor,” is that dead labor as such. So while living labor “add a new value to the old one, maintains, eternizes it” (365), it is far from a unidirectional process. Rather, there is a total collapse of the dividing wall between the two zones: the process of production is an indistinct muddling of living and dead labor.

What I want to propose is that we can start to venture a third general substance, between that of the worker (that baseline of literal flesh) and that of value (i.e. the product of already objectified living labor). This third general substance, which is the meat of my argument, is the terrain of living labor as the impossible mediation – a relation, formalized in the shape of labor-power – between the two. It is, in short, the expenditure of life in the name of holding off the rotting of life already spent. It is an immanent relation, with an increasingly blurry line, of living labor to itself in two modes: objectified and present. It incorporates, at once, those two other general substances: the reproducing bodies of the working class and the materially fixed remainders of past labor which needs constant reproduction, in terms of a) maintenance, b) living labor as transmission mechanism and source of surplus value, or c) complete transfer of value across an extended period of production.

[Let me note quickly that this is not just a problem for meat theorists: it also represents a difficulty for political economy, in the calculation of the value composition of capital. Namely, at what point in the production cycle do you stop considering living labor – with its rate of surplus-value – living? As these two charts borrowed from Harvey's Limits to Capital show, we get a very different portrait of the composition [fixed vs. relative capital] if a commodity is produced entirely in one plant as opposed to passing between industries.]

Here we can double back around toward some crucial general positions.

1. Recall first that what is particular about the generative power of living labor is not that it produces more use-values, or that it bears any resemblance other than coincidence to the production of materials that would help it live. The point of living labor is that it produces surplus value. As such, when considered in terms of this third general substance (that is, living labor as a total medium, in the present but including the full range of accreted values and labor required presently to reawaken them), we gain a very different portrait of living labor, that cuts against the dominant fantasy of it as a generative potential to be freed from the regime of value. Namely, it is living labor not because it is active, and not because those who labor are living. It is because it makes what is already dead almost live again.

2. Of course, this substance involves things that seem – at least politically and juridically – very different: living human beings and “dead” non-human material.

And it is there we see just how they relate, and the inversion of care for those things. For while it matters that the objectified living labor already present in the factory be maintained in its particularity (this machine, this pile of once living labor, in which capital is already invested), for living laborers, this is flatly not the case, from either a local or system-wide perspective. It is of no grand importance if a particular one breaks down, and it just slows down circulation to have to keep it running (via the insistence of political pressures to keep manufacturing at home, via the rarer insistence of other workers to strike if this busted one is not given a modicum of attention or remuneration). Especially when there are new, cheaper models elsewhere (read: Asia, Latin America, the global South). What matters is the reproduction of labor-power in general, both in its local instance (the labor pool in a particular zone) and in its global scale (the hypothetically employable portion of the species). So while it demands there be particular workers (obviously, there can be no such thing as labor-power, and hence no surplus labor, without laborers), it is opposed, violently, to them in their particularity.

Instead, it is only in the name of that human in general. And in a very, very perverse analogue to the incorrect demand that communism be the flowering of the universal or the common, the reproduction and requirement of living labor is in the name of a) past life of the collective [the maintenance and remobilization of a mass of living labor already past but not gone], and b) life to come [ the general expansion of the ranks of the species, I.e things that could contribute living labor],

But it is directly – and far from accidentally – opposed to the upkeep of the individual humans who make up part of the species that labors productively, and it is opposed to the continued animation of the individual humans that make up the other part that does not produce value. All this is to say, living labor is literally, not figuratively, opposed to particular lives. Unfortunate, then, that we know no other way to live. For it is in the name only of a generalized life, a substance that is, ultimately, like our meat, off the hoof but not yet off the hook, required to keep hustling.

So if there is any “life” to speak of here, it is first and foremost surplus-life: too much of it, and incapable, coerced, badgered into keeping itself still fresh, in pretending that it, like that bin of ham, could still be sold. I've written about this elsewhere, in a context I don't particularly want to breach today, namely, films of the undead, specifically about zombies, for the basic reason that I'm sick of that topic. But the structural condition I detected in those films remains relevant. That is, what drives especially the genre-founding films of George Romero isn't that the dead suddenly come back to life, nor is it that all that have ever died stand up, a rather literally earth-shattering prospect. Rather, there is an unnoticed event that effects the totality, that brings about a new general state of affairs, after which the living will not stay dead, cannot truly die. In short, the fundamental problem of the films is that of surplus-life, not the living dead. It is the conatus gone haywire.

The connection more broadly with horror as a genre and mode, particularly when concerned around the practice and figure of the economic misuse of the body, deserves two further points.

1. The strongest versions of labor horror have not been those openly focused on the contradictions and brutality of capital as such: they have either been allied to state socialism (Platonov, Pilnyak, Müller), to mechanized warfare (Walter Owen's criminally underread Cross of Carl, in which a British man left dead on the battlefields is bundled up to be salvaged in a rendering plant that will plow the dead back into the war effort; elsewhere, David Jones' In Parenthesis, Kurzio Malaparte), or “technology” as a self-determining force of domination (a good half of robot and cyborg oriented horror, Tobe Hooper's The Mangler). The full hostility of dead labor, in films from the heart of developed capitalism, have been best articulated in slapstick (see here Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.) or, and this is my temporary focus today, on the figure of the cannibal or the butcher (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for instance, in which they find a creative solution to three things at once, a meat shortage, an influx of lost teens, and the loss of their jobs.)
2. However,what's at stake in this horror of the cannibal is not so much disgust, in Baumgarten's sense, of the proximity and incorporation into the body of the excresent or dead, and still less some violation of a fundamental taboo. Rather, it is in the thought that one's dead body will not be given the chance to simply rot away, to finally sever itself from the third substance. Instead, it will contribute to the reproduction – calorically, and potentially in terms of monetary exchange – of the species and the capital relation.

It's for this reason I've spoken of meat. For as opposed to flesh, meat designates that which is not alive, yet which is destined, or intended, to participate in the reproduction of life: it is to be consumed. More than that, the word is linked etymologically to the notion of measure: it is, in this way, the general substance of labor living and lived, in various degrees of animation, across which our time is splayed out. We're part of an order of being in which it is neither the reproduction of what resists time nor the suspended pseudo-animation of that poised between rot or money: rather, it is the continual reproduction of slaughtered meat.

Regarding the “political stakes,” I want to buck the natural progression of this kind of argument in which I would give some prescription for communist thought, or, far worse, for “the left.” I won't do that, in part because I doubt that a unified meat theory is unlikely to find much popular support, in part because the conclusions that follow, I believe, point not to how we'd like things to go but to a central blockage of our epoch. As such, it resists prescription.

In this sense, then, the “political” upshot of my comments can be only that it's high time to further sever the ties between labor and communist thought. Not because those who work are remotely excluded from real struggles of seizure and appropriation. Rather, because insofar as communism bears a relationship and commitment to any sense of “life” that isn't merely plowed back into circuits of reproduction, it bears it to a fully contradictory life that insists on the end products of the labor relation - we want food, we want roofs, we want medicine – yet which refuses to play the dwindling game of living labor. It is the imposition of communist measures, not because they are theoretically correct, but because other measures show themselves to be voided of adequacy and effectivity, capable only of replicating the very bonds that necessitate such a severing to start. Whatever we mean by communism certainly won't be a new mode of production, and not a new society either. The only sure thing is that it will be very messy.

I want to end elsewhere, though, further back in the 19^th century than the Grundrisse, with Byron's “Song to the Luddites,” sent in a letter to Thomas Moore on December 24, 1816:

. . . Are you not near the Luddites? By the Lord! If there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers--the breakers of frames--the Lutherans of politics--the reformers?

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

So we, boys, we

Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

When the web that we weave is complete,

And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,

We will fling the winding-sheet

O'er the despot at our feet,

And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.

Though black as his heart its hue,

Since his veins are corrupted to mud,

Yet this is the dew

Which the tree shall renew

Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Of course, if we read with a close eye, what is the actual horror here? It's the slipping hinge between "the gore he has pour'd" and the "black" heart of the machine/despot, with its "veins corrupted to mud."

That is, the dyeing of the shroud - black - is done in the gore already spilled (read: that of lives destroyed in the course of being employed as living labor), not in that of the slain master. The shroud is not oil-slicked. No, it is dyed in the dying that had been happening, such that even at the point of the despot/machine's death, it lies cloaked in the winding-sheet that was the very product it made all along. From absorption of labor power, in the name of production, to the sopping up of life lost, in the name of the mocking burial of what never lived.

But if it is not its blood but our own in which it is dyed, then we too must have those same black hearts (“Though black as his heart is its hue”), that busted pump that shoves our cheap gore around worked veins, the same general flesh of labor. To truly exchange shuttle for swords, we lay ourselves down next to the slain machine, pulling the wet shroud over us all, tuck us all in, and open a vein.

Let the living bury themselves as, and with, their dead.

Softly, ye who once were from where once there was light

Marine snow.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Fire to the Commons

[this is a long version of a text, from which a shorter version in the forthcoming Autonomedia communization volume is drawn.  Caveat emptor: this is a bit "drier" (i.e. more Camatte and Marx citations, more grammatically correct sentences)  than much of what appears here, although, as you'll see, the rot-heat rising from a corpse means that it's ultimately a shift in prose, not in thought.]

 

            There is a medieval community, a small village on a lord's estate.  It's announced by the lord that there is a coming danger – an invading horde, the armies of another estate –  that will ruin all of their livelihoods.  The lord calls them to arms, to put down their plows and pick up swords, as it were.  Those in the community agree that such a threat could ruin them, and even though some recognize the lord's interest is not in their well-being but in the protection of his assets, they get that not fighting will lead to the destruction of their community and resources, individual belongings and things used by all alike.  They therefore become militants: that is, not professional soldiers, but coming together as an army of sorts, an exceptional measure to deal with an exceptional threat.  And they leave to head off this invasion rather than wait for the battle on their own land.  They fight battles, many of them die, but ultimately, the invading army pulls back. When the militants return to their village, they find it in flames.  It has been laid to waste by another threat when they were off fighting the battle to which their lord had directed them.  Everything is wrecked.  At the center of the village, one of the only things that remains standing is the unburnable communal oven, now charred both inside and out.  Whether or not the cooking fire within had been kept going seems unimportant. 

             The topic of this essay is that oven.  More than that, it has to do with the connection between that oven as “common” to its users and that fighting mass as an assembly of those with something “in common.”  It has to do with the mode of relation designated as common.  We could change the story such that the villagers are not responding to the injunction of a lord to defend but are leaving their world (their everyday circuits, locales, and patterns) to mount an insurrection, to do away with their lord, to make civil war.[1]  However, distinct as it seems,  it changes little in this case.  For the question is: do common things, having things in common, and what is common amongst us have to do with communism?

            The bigger change is that we are speaking of the social and material relations of capital: there has long been no village to which we might return.  As such, the story is both an imprecise allegory for the contradictions of the present and a marker of a mode of life and “cause” for struggle that seem definitively bygone.  Yet there is a tendency, recurring across the spectrum of communist writing, and particularly in positions often seen as aligned to those at stake in this volume, to relate to such a lost commons[2] or “being in common” in one of three ways:

1)    We have lost our commons and our common essence, and communism is the return to what has been left behind: it is an overcoming of the present in the name of this betrayed unity.

2)    There are older vestiges of the commons, often material resources such as water, that persist, against capital's attempts to privatize/expropriate/enclose them, and one of our tasks is to defend them.  Related argument: capital has generated – or there have generated in spite of capital – new commons, often electronic resources, and one of our tasks is to defend them, “proliferate” their use, and encourage the spread of the form of the common.

3)    The elaboration of communism – the infamous how of “transition,” the question of communist measures as neither means nor end but as the material negation of the social relations of capital, and therefore as the practice and substance of communism – is a “making common”: acts of sharing, including reappropriation from the ownership of one into the ownership of all (or, in better formations, the ownership of none), are the acts that produce or reveal what is common across singularities.

I do not, as such, disagree with any of these in full.[3]  Rather, my targets at hand are:

-       the thought  of return

-      the thought that acts of “making common,” outside of a scenario of economic and political upheaval, are capable of significantly accelerating a movement toward – or of – communism

-      the thought that “the commons” constitute a rupture in the reproduction and circulation of value (that is, that they are disruptive or “unthinkable” for capital)

-      most importantly, the idea that communism has to do with what we have in common with each other[4]

  

My rejection of these comes from a conviction that communism – the reversal, inversion, and full elaboration of capital's contradictions – doesn't begin with what capital hasn't quite gotten around to colonizing.  Such a search for pockets, remnants of the past or degraded kernels of the present to be exploded outward, too often becomes a nostalgia, a holding pattern, or, worse, a conception of communism as the project of unfolding a category of capital, rather than the development of the contradiction of that category.  For capital is a relation, and it is the relation between that which is capital and that which could be capital.  In this way, capital is always a mode of reproduction and exclusion: surplus-value is produced by living labor, but the social relations that enable, insist upon, and are bolstered by the material consequences of production and circulation are never made “for the first time.” Class indexes only this relation of capital and what could be, even as it's composed on the fact of what cannot be capital, that growing mass of surplus labor power that cannot be incorporated so as to make use of its potential surplus labor, and of what can no longer enter circulation, from decimated resources to overproduction's unrecuperable goods and dead factories.  Such a threat is, for capital, at best a corrective.  At worst, it is what it necessarily brings about yet cannot manage.  However, the crucial point is that even that which can't be capital isn’t so because of an essence or property of its own, because of a fundamentally “uncapitalizable” content: if it had anything so unique, capital would be sure to find a way to make use of it.  It is what simply doesn't compute in this relation, the material of the contradiction thrown to the side, the slag of the dialectic, what Adorno would call the “non-identical.”  And it is the basis of the thoughts here.

            As such, this title is more than a provocation, though that it is.[6]  It's intended to capture a sequence of moves.  It is, first, a description of what is the case, what has been happening for centuries: capital gives fire to the commons, lets them remain a bounded zone with the hope that it generates new sparks outside of “market forces” and that such dynamism can be made profitable, or it burns them clear and begins laying other groundwork.  It is also a gesture toward the sense of an active, changing, sparking “commons” rather than a dwindling reserve (as in, give fire to the commons, for they have long been banal).  Lastly, it's an injunction for the real movement of communism (fire to the commons, that loathsome exception, and on to the messy, difficult fact of figuring out how to live beyond the category!). It's the last that deserves initial clarification, as I'm not questioning the force of thought or deed of groups such as the Diggers or Levelers, the necessity of struggles over access to land and water, or the ways in which histories from below have brought forth constant battles.[7] 

            Rather, my drive is to trouble the concept of the common itself, as it is the drive of communism not to “develop new social relations” but to dissolve this society, and its open enclosures and well-spring of phantom commonness,  as such.  It's on these terms that I turn to a particular corner of left communist thought, grouped around Amadeo Bordiga and those who drew from him, however “dissidently,” including my concern here, the work of Jacques Camatte and others associated with Invariance.  In particular, it is Camatte's major work Capital and community: the results of the immediate process of production and the economic work of Marx[8] on which I’ll focus, along with a set of loose theses on form, content, and banality, on “time's carcass” and nothing in common, and, finally, on transition at once necessary and unable to articulate where it's going.

 [Hugo Gellert on circulation]

            Capital and community begins with an extended reconstruction of aspects of Marx's project, particularly the “autonomization of exchange-value,” circulation, the relation between dead and living labor, real and formal subsumption, and a special emphasis on an interpretation of capital as “value in process.”   However, it is the set of historical and anthropological[9] conclusions gathered in the second half that concern us, particularly the exploration of how class is no longer coherent the way it had been figured by major lineages of Marxism.[10]  Such is the consequence not of a perspectival shift from Marxism but of an historically situated Marxist claim as to the fully transformative effects of the increasing “autonomisation” of capital.  Such a claim is present in Bordiga's work as well, particularly in the discussion of the “universal class” and the senza riserve (the without-reserves) that Camatte incorporates.  But it's also close to a disparate set of theses, ranging from the 70’s work of Italian Marxists on “social capital” (most pointedly in Negri's 1978 lectures on the Grundrisse, gathered in English as Marx Beyond Marx) to theories of proletarianization, not just in terms of Debord's point about "the extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of services and intellectual professions” but a wider-sweeping claim about the dissolution and dissemination of a previously distinct category of proletarian experience and identity.[11]

            One of the major questions posed by Capital and community - a question that remains arguably the dominant research of left and ulta-left communist thought, in all its different stripes - is the relation between the “defeat of the proletariat” (i.e. the successive collapses of revolutionary movements in the 20^th century) and the recomposition, or “negation”, of a previous order of class differentiation. For Camatte,

the attempt to negate classes would have had no chance of success if there had not been another cause for its birth: the defeat of the world proletariat in the period 1926-28.  Mystification means power of capital plus the defeat of the proletariat.  Present-day society lives from a momentarily defeated revolution.

Excluding for the moment a longer discussion of causality and counter-factual possibility (might that defeat have not been?), consider this sense of a double “defeat”: first, of a concrete, however discontinuous and heterogeneous, political program of the proletariat, and second, of the particular coherency of the working class as an entity unified, or capable of coming together, by having something in common, namely, a common relationship to capital.  In another sense, this might be understood as a story of decomposition, for the “mystification” is not of the simple order of ideological inversion.  Rather, it is about a dissipation of energy, a diffusion of antagonism, away from historical worker's parties into an increasingly jumbled set of alliances, temporary associations, and positions, a double consequence of that real historical defeat and a transition in the organization of capital.

            However, this should be taken as a particular element, and phase, of the wider trajectory sketched by Camatte, that of the loss of the ancient (and subsequently medieval, in his account) community (Gemeinswesen), the subsequent slow emergence of the “material community” of capital, and the task of the development of the “human community” of the real domination of communism.  As such, it is a story of loss and supplantation, of what has been materially, not just ideologically, displaced in the shift from communities exchanging as a whole to individuals as the arbiters – and, as laborers, the “content” – of exchange.         

The shift described is two-fold.  First, from communities that exchange as communities (i.e. there is potentially exchange between communities) to the introduction of exchange into those communities (between individuals) and the development of a diffuse community of exchange.  Second, the developing “autonomization” of exchange, in the money form, begins to generate an “outside” external to the community’s relations that becomes the fully formed material community of capitalism, as value will come to subordinate property relations per se.  It is the runaway outcome of the generalization of exchange: “So exchange produces two results: the formation of money, the general equivalent that tends to autonomy; and the autonomization of a single relation.”  In other words, the general equivalent leads to the autonomy of money as increasingly unbound from its particular applications in discrete acts of exchange, and this produces the autonomization not of money as such (the “monetary community” as mid-stage in the domination of capital) but of the single relation.  This relation, however, is not a relation between distinct entities: it is the single relation of singular things becoming irrelevant, as it is the general form of equivalence – everything is in common with everything else – that forms the real abstraction of value.  This general process is what underpins Marx’s notion of money as the real community,[12] which Camatte extends as the “material community”, the further autonomisation of this double community (as general substance, i.e. medium and measure, and as external contingency) of money.  This constitutes the basic position of the proletariat, which

stands against capital which completes its domination by constituting itself into a material community.  The proletariat's power is created by capital itself.  Capital is the cause of its growth and unification, and it is also capital that creates the objective base of the new social form: communism. 

For this occasion, and this occasion alone, I'm not concerned with working through the  promises and consequences of his “political” conclusion: the political act that inaugurates the “formal domination of communism” and liberates this society toward the “end of politics” and development of a new human community (the “real domination of communism”), of which the party is a superstructural figuration.  Of more immediate interest is a note added in May 1972, following his theory of the formal domination of communism and, among other things, the proposition that in that period, “No more value, man is no longer ‘time’s carcass’” (emphasis mine).  The note begins:

 

The study of the formal domination of communism above is valid only for the period during which the communist revolution ought to take place on the basis of the formal domination of capital over society, and also, to a certain degree, for the transition period to real domination. But since the generalization of real domination world-wide (1945) this has been totally superseded.

This, then, is a calling into doubt of “transition programs” that might imply a new bureaucratic structure[13] and, more importantly, the scale of that anthropomorphic inversion of man and capital, the final evacuation of determinant differences that would let one speak of a human, under capital, that was “formally” dominated but not “really dominated” in full.  In short,  that retained a content that, however bent into and constrained by the forms of capital, was something else: a species being that was not mere instinct and biological trait, a content common and ready to be freed by the liberation of productive forces or liberation from production, to take two well-known variants.

            My stress on content is not accidental, as a survey back through Marxist thought, and especially left communist traditions, reveals the enormous and fraught conceptual weight invested in the opposition of form and content.  It would be a mistake to pass this off as a consequence of the rhetorical utility of such terms.  Running from debates about organizational form (for instance, critiques, such as Gilles Dauvé’s, of councilism as preserving capitalist “content” while swapping out the form of management) to the content of communism (and the degree to which it is positive and “transhistorical”), to take just two indicative examples, the problem of form/content obsesses and curses communist thought. In one of its many mobilizations in Camatte’s writing, we read in the “Conclusions” of Capital and community:

However, the dialectic does not remain empty in Marxism, its presupposition is not a material, but a social, fact. It is no longer a form which can have whatever content, but that this content, being, provides it with the form. The being is the proletariat, whose emancipation is that of humanity.

This is a relatively faithful account of how form and content function in the Marxian dialectic.  Following Hegel, for Marx, the active development of content gives forth to the form latent in it: form is neither an external abstraction that qualifies content nor is it a pre-existing structure of intelligibility.  It emerges from the particularity of the content.  Such a notion, and such a commitment to this model of form and content, is at the root of that critique of councilism mentioned, insofar as it grasps that to have “swapped the forms” does not alter the underlying capitalist content as such, does not allow the content of communism to develop a form adequate to itself, and, lastly, mistakes capital for a problem of form, as if due to a slippage between the value form and “forms of organization”.

            Briefly, I want to flesh out a notorious example to give a sense of how this conceptual opposition bears on “the common” and the degree to which we should speak of a “content of communism,” particularly insofar as that content has to do with the flourishing of the common.[14]  In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcass.  This appears, initially, as just a conveniently catastrophic metaphor. However, we might read it in three ways.

1.     In the loosest interpretation, that takes it primarily as a ramped up modifer of the preceding sentence concerning how “one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour,” man is “time’s carcass” insofar as man’s specificity is killed, leaving man a carcass animated by value and made to labor, simply a unit of potential activity subordinated to labor time.

2.     If we recall the particularity of form and content in Marx, however, we approach a different perspective, a trajectory sketched in a single sentence.  The active development, via laboring of man as labor power (the content)[15] produces the material conditions for labor time (the form).  However, the perversity of capital is that this form does not remain adequate to its content.  It becomes divorced from it and increasingly autonomous.  But this is not the story of a form that simply takes leave from its originary content and “becomes everything,” simply dominant.  Rather, it comes to determine the content in a constant passage back and forth, to force it to accord with the development of that form: any opposition between form and content becomes increasingly incoherent.  As such, man is time’s carcass in that living labor power is valued only in accordance with its form: it is that form, fully developed into the general equivalence of value, alone which is of worth.  Man, the original source of that form, is a husk dominated by an abstraction with no single inventor.  Form fully reenters and occupies the content as if it were dead matter, incapable of generating further adequate forms.  And when it is productive to do so, time makes those bones dance.

3.     Man – or rather, the human as more than the common man of capital – is that which is born in the death of time.  It is the leftover of the collapse of capital, and it is the faint prospect, in the decomposition of the dominant social relation (the representation that mediates between labor power and labor time), of an existence that outlives capital. 

We are finally in a position to return back to the question of the common.

If one recognizes, as we must, that both the “human community” of communism and a denser form of older community life are fully displaced by the material community of capital, and, furthermore, that appeals to either seem unconvincing as scalable models of resistance capable of contesting the social relations of capital  [16], then the only thing common to us is our incorporation into that material community.  But this is not a deadening or a subtraction of what we once had: it is the construction and imposition of a common position, the production of a negative content in accordance with a universal form.  Camatte writes that,

The proletarian (what man has become) can no longer recognize himself in a human community, since it no longer exists[...]  Men who have become pure spirits can rediscover themselves in the capital form without content.

Without content, indeed, insofar as content is taken to be that from which form emerges.  But capital (as social relation) is nothing if not the generative collapse of a distinction between form and a content. The common becomes, then, the quality across individuals that is neither a form nor a content: it is the form of general equivalence taken as general content.  Marx points out that “The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself.”[17]  The full subsumption of experience to the law of equivalence, accelerated all the more during a period of the “socialization of labor,” therefore produces with it a hollow identity that defines man, an echo chamber of value with itself.  Capital founds a negative anthropology, in that the subject common to it is the subject defined only by being potentially commensurable, as source of value, with all else that exists.  There is a double move described by Marx here:

Labor capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labor - the means of subsistence for actively producing labor capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labor capacity separated from the conditions of its realization - and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification.[18]

First, "labor capacity" (read: those who labor) only appropriates for itself "subjective conditions": the active work of appropriation, that marks a subject, takes on only the conditions that allow it to reproduce itself as mere labor capacity.  Second, even that paltry haul of subjective conditions are then posited, materially and perspectivally, as a set of hostile objects and conditions, a personification external to itself and no more.  If we have something in common, it is this very motion.  More bluntly, we have nothing in common, and not because we are atomized individuals.  No, what is common across us, the reserve of common ground to which those “without-reserves” could turn, the site on which the universal class begins,[19] is nothing but the rendering of all things as formally common to each other (belonging to none, able to be endlessly circulated and reproduced) and of ourselves as the grounding unit of that dissolution of particular content.  

            What, then, of those ovens?  Not of the common relation between us but the commons, the material things around which such relations are crystallized?  A first issue is raised above, in that common can, and often does, point not to the owned by all but rather to the potential exchange of all by all, the equivalence of what is rendered in common with everything else through the form of value and the medium and measure of money.   Of more interest is a point initially grounded on definitions and their histories.[20]  Rather, an etymology gives a way in.  Etymologies are not in themselves useful, and often denote a certain preciousness. That said, sometimes they help us say what we mean and remind us of what we have been saying in place of that.[21]

In casual speech, common runs alongside banal as its nobler cousin.  Everyday, popular, yes, but linked to a deep, rooted essence, a content that persists despite the accidents of form.  Banal has none of that.  It is gray ephemera, the stupidity of a fleeting present, what should and will be forgotten.  Quotidian, forgettable, known to all but of genuine interest to none.

            The word banal came into English from French, from the Old French banel, or “communal.”  But further back, in its 13^th century usage, it comes from ban, which includes both the sense of legal control or decree and the payment for the use of a communal resource, like an oven.  In other words, the oven is not common.  It is banal, because it is owned by none of those who use it communally, but it is still beholden to the logic and relations of property.  It is a resource for the reproduction of a form of life and masquerades as an exception to that form, if any pretense would be made about its social use.

So too so much of what we claim as “the commons” today: they are simply banal.  They are those things still in circulation, even as we figure them as exceptions to the regime of accumulation and enclosure.  Capital has not, as some claim, rendered things common in the way that “new social relations” could allow us to transform the logic of the present into a basis for upheaval.  It has rendered all things common in that they are commensurable.  The other side of the nothing-in-common we have become is this pseudo-commons of the banal.  The point of communism is to develop contradictions, but this general acceleration of banality – the counterpart to the emiseration of entire populations and evisceration of resources, the tack taken by states who prefer to make social institutions “communal” again so as to dodge the bill of social welfare spending – is neither contradiction nor generative potential.  To take it as such is to simply gather around that last remaining oven, poking at its dull embers.

I have not yet spoken of communization, for the simple reason that I have not yet spoken of transition.  My concern has been how we understand the position  in which we find ourselves and how that relates to our discontinuous instances, to what might chain them together, to what forms of thought could aid that work.  This is a speculative venture, and I don’t pretend any “practical application” or anything so direct of my comments.  The notion of communization, as I understand its lineages and theoretical utility, means not that the transition to communism has already begun simply because the limits of a previous sequence of working class struggles are becoming unavoidable.  Nor does it mean that it can begin at our behest, through the development of practices of being in common and making common, through the commune as form and through doubled tactics of expropriation and sharing, the end result of which is a general withdrawal of singularities (bodies and commodities as stripped of exchange value) from circulation.  Rather, it is a theory that casts doubt on the notion of transition and that concerns what used to be called a revolutionary period.  I am not alone in severely doubting the degree to which, given the current geopolitical order, any notion of a “general revolution against capital” obtains.  Uprisings, revolts, and insurrections seem even less likely now than previously to be “about” value in any explicit way: if anything, a more precise theory should make sense of how the apparent, and real, content of historically determined struggles over democratic representation, outright repression of the populace, racism and patriarchy, food shortages, changes in pension and retirement law, denial of social services, real wages, and ecological catastrophe have already and will continue to run into an increasing set of deadlocks shaped by the limits of the material and social form of the reproduction of capital.  Despite this, one of the values of guarding a notion of “revolution” is that it marks a distinct sequence that exacerbates and explodes a set of given conditions and that cannot be produced ex nihilo by radical practices.  

If one of the deep contradictions of capital is the way in which it generates a cursed dialectic of form and content, such that the form dominates the content at the same time that it cannot be separated from it, the elaboration of communist thought and strategy is to inflect and impel this worsening contradiction. Not to pathetically cheer at the failure of “reformist” struggles and not to scour them in the hopes of finding the common element hidden in them, but to see in them the determined contours of the relations of capital, the demands placed on those bodies that work and die, the representations that bind together and mediate “the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.”  The vicious fact of it is that it simply is not our decision.  We choose a period of capital as much as we choose an earthquake.  Yet to make of this a principle, not of withdrawal but of holding on and forth: such would be a courage and a line worth taking.  To hate the ruined and the unruined alike, with neither fetish nor indifference, to know that we cannot make our time, but that it does not, and never will, unfold untouched.  Communization, then, is not an option we choose to take, but it is not an inevitability.  It is a situation that will present itself, given the limits of capital, and it is a situation that has no guarantee of “leading to communism.”  To say that such a state of affairs will come to pass is very different from saying how they will come to pass, how the necessary measures of what has no reserve left will happen, and what kind of resistance, physical and intellectual, they meet and for how long.  

The concept of invariance is an important one for the Bordigist tradition on which I’ve drawn, and it remains one today, though not in the sense of a transhistorical organizational form, a universal communist content, or unchanging line of attack and analysis.  Rather, I mean the invariance of this sort of principle, persisting across transformations, that refuses to look “elsewhere,” to a far past or future after capital, to ground any communist project and that insists that things will not unfold as we expect them to.  Between those material reversals and inversions of communization, we can expect only that there will be difficult losses and gains.  Not the quick falling away of forms of thought or the development of new relations as such, but a falling apart of what we’ve come to expect “resistance” to look like and the coming forth of what had no place before.  And moreover, a recognition that the processes of the decay and dismantling of social relations, and the world built in their image, can only be messy, contradictory, and frequently incoherent.

All the more reason for us to be rigorous, to keep clear heads, to build up the kind of analyses and practices that may be of use or necessity.   Because one cannot exclude from those infamous "objective conditions" all that constitutes the given terrain of a period, including an enormous set of "subjective" and "affective" conditions: words that have been in the air, that sense of things getting worse at work, home, and in the streets, successes and failures of struggles over wages, reproductive rights, and access to social services, the networks and connections built between comrades over years, attacks on minorities and immigrants, the skills and resources we have or take, the social habits of the rich, the trends of cultural production, and a learned familiarity of not knowing if a day will start and end in a world that feels remotely the same. It is the deadlocks, impasses, and cracks composed of all of this that are our concern.  For such a time of catastrophe breaks onto a shore that’s never a bare fact of economy.  We’re ground down and smoothed, sure, such that we become channels or levies designed to simply mitigate, but our thinking and fighting inflect that break all the same.  In this way, the intellectual and material practice of what could be called the Party is, at its best, a general angle of inflection.  It is an exertion of pressure that makes us capable of reading in the scattered field of breakdowns a correlation, a fraying pattern from which our modes cannot be separated.

For communism has no content, and it is not form.  It is decomposition.  It is the mass, committed, and uncertain undoing of the representations that mediate form and content, time and labor, value and property, and all the real relations that sustain between them.  It begins not outside, before, or after, but right there, with the absent content of having nothing in common.  It starts in times when a set of material limits show themselves as being unsurpassable other than by a practical appropriation of necessary goods and an accompanying rejection of social forms.  Such times do and will come, though not everywhere at once.  How it will go is hard to say.  But we should not forget that when bodies decompose and start to fall apart, they give off heat, loosing that energy bound up and frozen in its particular arrangement.  That carcass of time, the subject of equivalence, is one such shape, petrified as it may appear.  At the least, let’s stop coming back to the scorched village and the banal oven, stop blowing on its cold coals.  We gather around that corpse instead and warm our hands there, over the hot wind rising from the end of the common and the start of a slow thaw a long time coming.

---

[1] And for obvious reasons, this second version is more exciting to us, at least affectively: it joins that broken red thread of instances of revolt, a defense not of the dominant order but of an insistence on a possible quality and form of life, however degraded and ground down by the historical facts of that order.

[2] “The commons” may be understood as a material organization, point of condensation, and resource/support structure, of a community.

^[3]  Other than any position that could utter phrases about the emancipatory potential of either YouTube or the sort of desperate networks of informal labor in slums: to affirm this is utter stupidity.

[4] As will become clear, I ultimately agree with this position, albeit from an entirely negative position.  That is, insofar as “having nothing in common” or a “common” relationship to the form of equivalence could count as something common across individuals and insofar as the undoing of exchange relations is understood as the process of communism.

[6]   Let me ward off at the pass: no, I don't think commons and prisons are equivalent.  Although they do stand as an obscene pair of collective sites, one “positive”, one brutal, that will both be torn down, one in thought, as a category to be dismantled as “private” no longer obtains, one in material, brick-by-brick consequence of freeing comrades jailed along the way.

[7] If anything, one of the benefits accrued from the material gathered around the idea of the commons (less around “in common”) is a real sense of just how rarely attempted secessions from, exceptions to, and lashings back against capital have taken a form we recognize as such, how the wage is only one part of it, and how, given increasingly unmistakable ecological constraints, these other elements seem likely rise all the more to the fore in years to come.  And these are important not just as potential moments of explosion, when the gap between the demands that can be ventured and the capacity of capital to answer those demands becomes unbridgeable.  In short, such struggles are critical because they get what this is about: not representation, not democracy, but real material concerns, and a sense that, at the end of the day, our relations are necessarily founded upon how we relate to needs and goods, shelter, subsistence, the passage of time and pleasure.

[8] Original title in French is Capital et Gemeinswesen.  English translation by David Brown, from which passages are drawn, is available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/capcom/index.htm

[9] “Anthropological” in the older sense of the term, not as a particular discipline, but as the concern of works such as Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

[10] Given that his later work disavows much of the Marxist tradition and shares elements of anarcho-primitivist thinking, largely at the knowing expense of a commitment to class as a determinant category, it would be tempting to see this work as either “before the fall”[10] or beholden to that later tendency.  And indeed, one finds a language of “mystification” and “domination” that seem to point toward a logic of civilizational critique, rather than attention to the contradictions of accumulation. The fact of it is more complicated, particularly when read alongside the post-scripts and restatements from 1972.

[11] Camatte’s definition of “proletarianization”, in the 1970 remarks to Capital and community, is simply “formation of those without reserves.”

[12] The well-known passage from Marx, which forms the basis of this investigation, is as follows:

Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the  real community [Gemeinwesen], since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external, accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means for his satisfaction as an isolated individual.  (225-226; Grundrisse references throughout are from: Marx, Karl.  Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft).  Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books, 1973.)

“Accidental” is a crucial qualifier here, as we confront that which appears accidental and contingent, which need could have been or could have not been, yet which, as the general equivalent, becomes the general substance: it is literally necessary, insofar as it is the medium and measure in which what exists can take and maintain form.  In many ways, Camatte's text, and the real innovations of his work more broadly, is an extended elaboration of this, of what it means

for it to be the case that we have not just lost our pre-existing community.  Rather, have born ourselves into a total community, horrible in its double necessity and contingency.

[13] Additionally, it’s a point of contact with other thinkers of communization, or, at least, with the tenor of the debates between Théorie Communiste and Gilles Dauvé regarding the degree to which communization is a particular response to a distinct historical deadlock regarding the decline of “programmatism” or a revolutionary prospect recurrently betrayed.  Camatte’s shift from the emphasis on “formal domination” to what remains unspoken here (if that entire program laid out in the preceding pages no longer obtains in the same way, then what?) marks a similar recognition of the distinct shifts in the horizons of labor politics, determined (for Camatte) by the degree to which the material community of capital becomes entirely dominat, and the consequent horizons for the end of work.

[14] Note: in the discussion that follows and throughout the piece, I guard the specifically gendered term “man” that Marx and Camatte use.  This is done so in part for consistency with the texts I am discussing, but more seriously in order to mark a terminological distinction.  Namely, I use “man” to signal the discussion of a figure particular to capital and the history of its theorization (man as labor power and attendant potential “rights”), in which “man” stands in for a restricted notion of what counts as “our common essence,” with the particular pitfalls of essentializing and the dominant historical figuration of the worker (especially the revolutionary worker) as specifically male.  Conversely, I use “human” to describe a wider field of the species.  In other words, to say that “man is time’s carcass” is to speak specifically of the dominant notion of “man” and the material practices that aim to reduce the entire range of human experience to that restricted zone.

[15] Camatte himself, in Capital and community, points to a reading of labor power as the “real content of man”: “Democracy is comparison par excellence.  However, its standard is abstract man, while the real content of man – labor-power – enters into the economic movement.”

[16] That is, an appeal to the human community to come cannot, in my opinion, ground a general program of communism or a concrete sequence of communization.  Or rather, it does not add anything other than a potential distraction and a nasty tendency to discount the real terrains and limits of struggle as not “being communist enough.”  As for the limits of the relations of smaller communities as potentially antagonistic to capital, this is an issue of scale, not of quality as such.  Clearly, such bonds provide part of the real networks of knowledge and care that enable masses of people to attack the social relations and institutions of capital.  However, I do not think that they can constitute a threat as such to capital, if only because they have never gone away as such, and there is no necessary opposition between a community that “puts its interests first” and capital, provided that the community believe, as many do, that capital is the best option available for the organization of life.

[17] Marx Grundrisse 324

[18] ibid 452-435

[19] The “without reserves” (senza-riserve) and the universal class are Bordigist concepts employed by Camatte.  The former is juxtaposed to the mistaken notion of the “reserve army of labor” and functions as a way to understand the production of surplus populations with nothing to fall upon and which cannot be adequately “incorporated” by capital.  The universal class is an extension of this notion to include the “new middle classes” – those who are a representation of surplus value” – in a version of a proletarianization thesis.  As Camatte puts it, “The result of the total movement is the production of a universal class, a numerous proletariat, proletariat is the sense of the totality of men who have no reserves (old proletariat + new middle classes). It is a universal class as it forms the largest part of the population and 'because it cannot demand in a particular way, but only in a human way. It is the universal class Marx mentioned in The German Ideology. Capital does everything to prevent the unification of this class by tending to oppose the workers in work to those unemployed, foreign workers (real proletarians) to the integrated metropolitan proletarians (in both cases using racism), the new middle classes to the workers, finally preventing the students, who do not form a class, from playing a role as liaison between the new middle classes and the proletarians.”

[20] I’m not particularly interested in the glancing point that common is a term that exists in a conceptual pair with its opposite (common/singular, or, if we prefer, common [owned by non/all]/private [owned by one/some]) and therefore is a concept “of capital”, rather than of communism.  As far as I am concerned, there are no concepts of communism other than the elaboration of the contradictions of capital, and those contradictions include its conceptual binaries.

[21]   Such that class recalls Servius Tullius dividing the Roman populace into six orders of taxation: class as that which is a process, an action that puts into relation yet which produces the illusion of a coherent or natural identity between that which happens to fall into that category.  In short, a classification.  But it also bears out calare, to call, as in to call to arms, a naming that brings about not a static position from which wealth can be extracted but those who designated you as such in the first place but something that fights together.  In this way, class itself carries both its misuse and its promise, both the limits of the working class as a stuck end in itself, belonging to what it never chose in the first place, and a sense that even if you don't choose such a call, a cursed mass attack is still a mass attack.