by Lucien Sve Translation/synopsis by Carl Shames

To Begin With the Ends

Introduction: the trap of the term

"communism"

This book is not written for those who side with the hegemony of the dollar and see

capitalism today as the end of history. It is for those who take the side of revolutionary

action and thought, and who are willing to engage in a thorough re-thinking and

conceptual reconstruction of a present and future emancipation. The central issue is

what we may call the communist question. There has been very little research on this

question, that is, little real study of the possible alternative to capitalism.

The ideological attacks on communism have attempted to disqualify a priori the

possibility of thinking about an alternative future and the response from the left has

not, as of yet, been adequate. This is our starting point. Two recent books in particular

are illustrative: The Black Book of Communism, and Past of an Illusion.

A common characteristic of this ideological attack is the openly infra-conceptual use

of the term 'communism', despite this being the main focus of the books. One book

equates the 'communist illusion' with the Soviet Union, claiming that both have died.

Communism is equated with its Stalinist form. They speak of a 'general entity' of

communism rather than specific historical forms. There is no distinction between the

retrospective and prospective nature of communism. The political conclusions precede

the historical demonstration. The ultimate goal of all this is to criminalize and de-

legitimize all militant action and thought against capitalism, to de-historicize any

consideration of communism, by turning it into an abstraction presented as a tragedy.

There are real problems in defining communism. The Soviet Union used the terms

socialism and communism to describe itself. The Communist Manifesto speaks of

'scientific socialism'. Many theoretical and ideological issues underlie what on the

surface seems to be a matter of words.

Let us review the tasks corresponding to what I am calling the 'new communist

question': What was born in 1917 has disappeared and traditional communist forces

have dissolved; Stalinism is a mark of infamy; Lenin is being reappraised and even

Marx is closed for inventory. We are literally not in the same world as before: classes,

people, concepts are all totally different. We need to analyze in broad outline where we

are in history, why communism is a process more than ever on the order of the day,

how it would be radically different from what it was in the 20th century, and how can

we advance in this direction.

What needs to be done is to reconstitute theoretically a communist vision for our

time, and to lay out such a vision as a coherent whole, along with the motivating and

structuring concepts and primordial considerations it presupposes. What could the

term communism signify today, both as political struggle and future social form? This

involves grasping Marx's revolutionary perspective in all its vigor and rigor, in order to

rediscover the basics of deep social transformation.

Chapter I. Does the future have a name?

Many Marxists have mistakenly interpreted Marx's ideas as signifying an end to

philosophy, the idea being that materialist scientific analysis does away with the need

for specifically philosophical development and interpretation. In fact, the writings of

Marx, Lenin, Lukacs and Gramsci are permeated by theoretical considerations,

including the philosophical, on the theory and practice of politics. The Stalinist period,

however, is characterized by a theoretical regression and political decadence. The only

way out of this is to re-think matters to the core.

The path to the communist question is long, but having said that in general, I have

no difficulty specifying the particular philosophical need for a theoretical approach.

What we can call the theoretical is fundamental and non-negotiable.

Major changes in the notion of how capitalism will be replaced with another system

were underway in 1976 at the time of the 22nd Congress (of the PCF). The previously

sacrosanct notions of dictatorship of the proletariat, the insurrectional conquest of

power and violent installation of socialism were abandoned in favor of notions of

progressive democratic transformation of the capitalist mode of production. But these

changes were instituted top-down by a party leadership maintaining the old way of

doing things.

The main idea of the shift at that time is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is no

longer necessary because the working class now constitutes the great majority of the

population. Thus a political question was given a sociological answer. But this is not

the basic question. Socialism is seen as transitional to communism, and 'advanced

democracy' as transitional to socialism. The problem is in the non-theoretical, non-

critical way this transition is understood. It ignores the most essential aspects of the

Marxist historical perspective.

The problem was not the abandonment of the concept of dictatorship of the

proletariat but how this was done: in a top-down decision, and in the absence of a

theoretical context. This was the basis of Althusser's objection, and although I had

many disagreements with him, on this issue we were in agreement. The issue was

raised at that time of how theory can be freed from its role as justifying a political

course, as in the old doctrinaire 'Marxism-Leninism'.

The 23rd Congress of 1979 was one of real strategic innovation but for me it

emphasized the contrast between political wealth and theoretical poverty. On the one

hand the notion of 'self-managing socialism', in the absence of a theoretical

foundation, quickly became an empty formula. On the other, the statutes were purged

of the traditional references to Marxism. While there were good reasons for this, the

result was a weakening of the standards of theoretical thought this name represents.

The main obstacle to all advances more and more appeared to me to be the backward

conception of the functioning and mode of life of the party. The problem was not only

an indifference of the leadership to theoretical matters covering an entire range of

fundamental questions, but the unwillingness to look at the functioning and

organization of the party itself. My differences with the leadership were more and

more political as well as theoretical.

The secret of 'scientific socialism'

The best way to proceed to the communist question is through a summary of the

theses concerning the supersession of capitalism as traditionally presented by

'scientific socialism'. As we assess these theses, we cannot ignore their relation to what

they understand is being superseded. Socialism is seen as transitional, characterized

by the social ownership of the large means of production when the working class has

gained state power. This is a transition to a higher form, a future order totally freed of

the heritage of class society, as seemingly spelled out in Marx's Critique of the Gotha

Program. Socialism is described as 'to each according to his work' and communism as

'to each according to his needs'. With communism, the 'end of pre-history' is achieved;

communism then moves forward, freed from the past and based only upon itself.

But when we look at this we see that socialism can not be spoken of except in the

larger context of communism. This is why Lenin wanted to change the name of the

Marxist party to Communists. This is why Communist parties have this name.

We need a far more vigilant examination of the relationship between socialism and

communism than what is found in the manuals of scientific socialism. We can see right

away how unclear it all is. Socialism has been seen as the first stage of communism and

communism has been understood as the stage beyond socialism. The result is an

impoverished idea of communism. As a first step toward reconstructing this idea, let

us summarize Marx's characterization of communism:

- universal development of the productive forces;

- real appropriation by associated producers of their objectified social powers;

- supersession of the rule of monopoly capital and commodity relations;

- emancipatory transition of labor beyond the form it takes in the capitalist working class;

- free satisfaction of cultural and material needs, integral development of all individuals; - disappearance of the state

and of classes;

- de-alienation of social consciousness;

- universalization of exchange and of humanity itself;

- end of exploitation;

- elimination of oppressions based on class, race and gender;

- transition from the apparent freedom of contingency to real freedom;

- all in all, the end of human pre-history and the beginning of true human history.

It is impossible to consider this without being taken by the visionary audacity of the

Marxist idea of communism. Each of the above, of course, requires tremendous

clarification and elaboration. This should not be seen as an itemization, however, but

as an organic whole of interconnected aspects. For example, the universal

development of productive forces is not only a development of the various forces (such

as technical capacities), but is more essentially a development of the productive force,

humanity as a whole, as it incorporates science. A perfect example of this is today's

informatization of life. Without this development, no other aspect of communism can

come about. The decisive point here is that the appropriation by society as a whole of

the major means of production and exchange is impossible without the supersession of

the market and the capitalist working class, the integral development of individuals

and the disappearance of the state. The fact that so many theorists in the Marxist

tradition have failed to recognize this has resulted in the reduction of this core of

Marxist thought to simplistic formulas, i.e. socialism = social ownership of the means

of production + 'to each according to his needs'. Moreover, the whole concept of

socialism, in principle the first phase of communism, was massively reduced to simply

that of social ownership of the means of production and exchange. This had disastrous

theoretical and practical results.

This denaturing reduction had its effect not only in the realm of ideas, where it

contributed to a substantial conceptual degeneration, but in the building of socialism

in the Stalin epoch, as it shaped strategic choices. The revolution was considered to be

complete from the moment, in the '30's, when the socialization of the means of

production and exchange had been instituted in the countryside and cities. Stalin

declared that the disappearance of the state was an impossibility in the conditions of

capitalist encirclement. The integral development of individuals, supersession of the

social division in between the functions of direction and execution, dealienation of

consciousness, were no longer on the agenda. As a result, things were converted into

their reverse. Social ownership clearly cannot effectively exist in conditions of the

persistence of an omnipotent state, of a fragmented individuality and a mystified social

consciousness. This requires what Marx envisioned as the appropriation by the

associated producers themselves of their means of production and more generally, of

their societal powers, that is, the taking possession and effective control, by working

people themselves over all the objective conditions of their activity. What happened

instead was a dispossession of the producers by a state/party bureaucracy. Cut off

from communism, this version of socialism actually reinforced social alienation.

Certainly, in the traditional culture of a party such as the PCF, 'socialism' has not

been limited to this formulation of the socialization of the means of production and

exchange, although this is considered essential to the definition. Although the

discourse has proclaimed the emancipatory virtues of communism, a closer look shows

that these have been essentially seen in the same terms. All social problems and

contradictions of capitalism will be resolved, in this view, when this primary struggle

to socialize the means of production is won. The emancipatory objectives projected for

socialism thus dwindle to a shadow of the communist vision.

Another issue in the PCF is its silence on the disappearance of the state. The result is

tacit acceptance of the entire bourgeois framework for thinking the relation of the

individual to the state, and the delegation of social power.

A crucial manipulation of Marx's thought

How do we account for the fact that socialism refused to transition to communism?

Socialism in its Stalinist form ceased seeing itself as transitional; the goals of

communism were forgotten in an expurgated version of Marxism. If 70 years was not

sufficient for the Soviet Union to at least begin the transition to communism, this

cannot be attributed solely to extrinsic factors - capitalist encirclement, etc. The main

reason has to be internal: socialism, after Lenin, repudiated its revolutionary essence

to the point of actually opposing the development of communism.

The more we look at this strange experience of the Soviet Union and its camp, the

more we have to confront the ambiguity in the vocabulary of socialism and

communism. Are they two phases of the same formation? If so, why two terms? Marx,

in the Critique of the Gotha Program, introduced the idea of two phases, but did not

call the first socialism, but rather the inferior, or undeveloped stages of communism.

Marx in fact never thought this first phase could be conceptualized in any way apart

from the second. Political thinking based on a limited vision of a socialist alternative is

thus totally foreign to Marxism.

Marx and Engels clearly chose the term 'communism' when they wrote the

Manifesto, to distinguish it from the non-theoretically based conceptions of 'socialism'

of that time. The contrast of 'socialism' to 'communism' in the mid 1800's, then, had to

do with political currents. The whole point of the Manifesto is that Marxism is a

theoretically grounded total confrontation with bourgeois forms of society,

individuality and thought. The 'socialist' parties of the time did not undertake this at

all. The politics of socialism, then and now, don't confront the world at the level found

in the Manifesto, for instance on the nature of individuality and state power.

Socialism and social democracy dominated politics at the turn of the century. Marx's

Critique of the Gotha Program was deliberately misinterpreted so that socialism

became a semi-independent first phase of communism while the latter was put off to

be thought about at another time. Communism thus became an ideal, a vague

possibility far in the future, while socialism came to be seen as real, pragmatic,

attainable. Social democracy, and dogmatized 'scientific socialism' share this reliance

on a non-Marxist conception of social transformation.

Lenin was the only one to see through this mystification and its implications.

Nevertheless this distortion characterized the workers' movements of the 20th century

including both the social democratic and communist parties. What has been

invalidated by the whole course of these movements is not communism, but this whole

conception of socialism.

Relearning communism

How do we re valorize the Marxist idea of communism in light of the failure not only

of the Eastern socialisms but of the communist and socialist parties of the West? A

central issue we have identified is the complete incapacity of both to fully

conceptualize revolutionary social transformation. The questions discussed above are

crucial in understanding the chronic impotence of the parties of the West. In the area

of strategy, the state is not questioned. Social transformation is seen as a coup, a

replacement of power from above, the revolutionary conquest of state power. The

whole strategy of seizing state power followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat has

lost all credibility but no alternative strategy or vision has been proposed in any depth.

While the French and other parties renounced the term (dictatorship of the

proletariat), they haven't truly abandoned that way of thinking.

If we want a conception that is real for the majority of people, the whole conception

of social transformation must be extended far beyond seizure of the means of

production and exchange to all the abolitions and metamorphoses and the subsequent

innovations, that is, a communism for our time, not projected in the future, but as it is

as a potential right now.

The second, and even more important, reason for the failure of the revolutionary

project in the developed capitalist countries was the crisis of historical relevance that

has devalued the very idea of socialism. From the start, Marx's ideas of communism,

enumerated above, were hard to conceive and impossible to place on a political

agenda. The very notion was tacitly dismissed as irrelevant and utopian. But how can

we fail to see its real development in today's reality? Isn't science becoming a universal

productive force? Aren't individuals struggling for a revolution in biography, of age,

sex and identity, presaging the integral development of individuals? Isn't the

unprecedented expansion of wage labor, leading to broader use of human capacities

the beginning of a supersession of the traditional working class? The growth of citizen

initiatives, globalization - although in monstrous form - represent a trend toward

human universality and planetary regulation.

The main point is that means, by which we understand human organization in the

production of goods, gradually become subordinate to ends: the development of

people, the humanity we aspire to be, the form of social life, our historic horizons.

There is no real answer to these questions outside the perspective of communism. The

communist parties have by and large failed to address this entire range of questions,

sticking to old conceptions, but recently dabbling with a little bit of ecologism. The fact

is, the social revolution of the 21st century will be communist, or it will not be.

It bears repeating that we are not attempting to depict an ideal future and to

formulate a politics of how to get there. We are not calling for the abandonment of real

present day struggles for social progress in favor of a focus on vague future ideals. By

communism we must understand not only a future social formation but a current

process. To speak of the communist vision is to call for seeing the tendencies at work

right now pushing toward overcoming the human limits of the present social order.

This way of thinking avoids both the socialist utopianism of imagining abolitions by

decree, and the reformist conceptions confined to a 'socialism' that retains the most

basic features of bourgeois society. It attempts to think the process of social

transformation in the deep dialectical complexity of the process in which concrete

things really change.

The real task, however, is to develop a new politics. Communist parties have never

tackled these issues. They have not seen their relevance to all aspects of political

thinking. Issues of the changes in the working class, the nature of the state, the relation

of the individual to the collectivity, the fragmentation of individuality and

development of the spectrum of human capacities - these questions are not in the

distant future, but are here today. In fact it is the limitation of our thinking to

'socialism' that ties our hands and limits the forms and terrains of struggle to defensive

measures against the ravages of capital. We must broaden the struggle to supersede

capitalism and to all fronts: capitalist forms, commodity-labor, the state, domination,

mystified consciousness, the hundreds of relations that produce and reproduce

alienation, etc. We must construct an authentic communist strategy, as realistic in its

immediate objectives as suggestive of the immense goals that provide their true

meaning. Thus, the actors of today begin to see the communist goal of their acts.

Did Marx over rationalize history?

This task of shifting our perspectives is of course more demanding than it may

initially appear. We have to inventory the theoretical contents of the communist vision

and invent the corresponding political practice in the conditions of our world. Nothing

is given in advance. It would not be sufficient to produce a new Communist Manifesto,

even if we could. We have to radically re interrogate Marxist theorization itself. How

do we know the future is called communism? The Manifesto claims to give us the

"theoretical knowledge of the movement of history as a whole", but how do we know if

this is true? What is it to be a communist, what remains of communist belief for today?

What is the meaning of history? What is the potential of the 'human race' referred to in

the Internationale? These questions call for a broad re-examination of Marxist

theoretical thought. This itself is not the subject of this book, which is devoted

essentially to political questions.

A question to be taken up here, however, concerns the rationality of history. The

communist perspective has meaning only within a historical logic which implies

intelligibility of the present (up to a point) and pre-visibility of the future. Only in

these conditions can our objectives be deemed plausible and our actions effective. It

presupposes that we are still living in class society and that today's class contradictions

themselves engender the presuppositions for the transition to a classless society. If we

can name the present it is not absurd at all to suppose that we can name the future.

This is the historic rationality of the communist era.

The dominant ideology never ceases to force upon us the belief in the impossibility

of envisioning an alternative world, and with the demise of 'socialism', this view was

pushed ever more forcefully, joined by many erstwhile leftists who went along with the

idea that 'communism' can no longer be seen as an alternative.

This requires us to look briefly at a question of fact: did Marx over rationalize history

- not in an idealist way, as in Hegel, for whom the course of history is the

manifestation of Reason, but even in the materialist terms of necessity and most

importantly, in his conception of determinism? This issues has been raised and argued

over hundreds of times. Indeed, Marx adhered to a notion of causality in historical

movement - he saw a necessary connection between the general character of each

epoch of productive forces, human included, and the global structure of their class

relations, and more broadly and less strictly, with other structures and

superstructures. Each social formation, for Marx, is an organic totality whose

evolution is no more haphazard than that of a biological being. We can study the logic

of its functioning, and see the coming of a changes in its development and major

features of its contents. Thus, the capitalist mode of production, where we find class

contradictions heightened to their extreme, produces the conditions for transition to a

classless social formation where the class antagonisms that characterize thousands of

years of human history are left behind, relegated to the pre-history of social humanity.

History, for Marx, is not a dark night in which we don't see what we're doing, where

we're going or what we want. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between

this understanding and what is properly spoken of as determinism.

First of all, this materialist theorization includes the living consciousness that

concrete social formations contain inexhaustible singularities, an infinite variety of

historical trajectories based on general logics of development. Each capitalist society,

for instance, has a familiar air, basic similarities to all others, despite immense

differences. History is saturated with chance and to this extent is unforseeable. The

necessity that reigns in nature is not univocal but dialectical. It includes contradictions

and works ceaselessly through the range of possibles. The laws of evolution essentially

express tendencies and contra-tendencies in dynamics that can always lead to

unexpected results. No evolution is linear, no process mechanical, no development

identical to itself or others, no history written in advance. Moreover, unlike natural

processes, historical events can't occur without us. But human freedom doesn't

suspend necessity, just as the airplane doesn't suspend gravity. The future is never

closed. This open necessity, equally far from scientistic determinism and obscurantist

contingentism, is where the actors of history may draw theoretical and practical

lessons derived from their experience.

Deconstruction of historical time

How do we understand that not only anti-Marxism but ordinary Marxism as well

adhered to a deterministic caricature of this thinking, in which 'socialism' exists in

some pre-conceived way, achieved in a 'final struggle', in which whatever path or line

was taken was deemed the only correct one? Where do we find the roots of this

arrogance that reified the goal and so simplified history? Do we invoke the influence of

mass culture, pre-Marxist conceptions, etc.? No doubt we should. But don't we find

elements of this mechanical, necessitarist scheme in Marx himself? Not only in the

often quoted Preface to the Contribution, or in the Poverty of Philosophy, but toward

the end of Book I of Capital, where he writes that capitalism engenders its own

negation, "with the ineluctability of a natural process", a phrase echoing the slogan

that the victory of the proletariat is 'inevitable'.

Did Marx, in the euphoria of discovering the essential logics in history, ascribe to

them a determinist interpretation? Isn't this a fatalism that can lead to a fanaticism,

such as in Engels' letter to Bebel in which he claims that "the final success" of the

revolutionary party is "absolutely certain", or even when Lenin asserted, "the future

belongs to us"? Perhaps in Marx and his followers, despite the radical rupture with

speculative thought in the formation of historical materialism, there is a never fully

conquered over-rationalist view of history and overestimation of its necessities. We

can see here the enormous practical stakes of seemingly minor theoretical points.

These internal differences in Marxism are small compared to the objections raised

by the project of deconstructing the concept of history that gained influence in the last

decades. The objective rationality of the historical process had already been called into

question much earlier, for instance by Max Weber's thinking on the intrinsic

incompleteness of history and the arbitrariness of interpretation, by Dilthey, Jaspers

and Freud who showed that the meaning we attribute to our actions is essentially

illusory. After the war, Merleau-Ponty took up an earlier theme that logic and history

are intrinsically separate.

Without doubt the most important was Levi-Strauss who undertook the most radical

deconstruction. The final chapter of La Pense Sauvage was aimed overtly at Sartre

and covertly at Marx. It put forward enormous provocations as though they were

proven facts. All of history, according to Levi-Strauss, is an illusion, an artifact of a

discipline constituting its object. History in fact is a series of dates with no unity; it

decomposes into autonomous sequences based ultimately on infra-historical and

unconscious causalities - biological, geological and cosmological which he calls the

true infrastructures of historical materialism. Thus the linear continuity called history

is not linked to man, the meaning we ascribe to our historical experiences is never the

correct one, the supposed intelligibility of history, the meaning we ascribe to our

actions, is a myth. Levi-Strauss comes to this memorable conclusion: the French

revolution, as generally understood, in fact, never existed.

The theme of the illusion of historic rationality is developed further by many others.

Paul Veyne, for instance, in his study of Foucault (Foucault Revolutionizes History),

claims that "History, as we have spoken of it for two centuries, doesn't exist". All that

exists are "singular constellations"; the rest is "but a word". By demonstrating that

madness does not exist but is only constituted or dissolved by practices that give it the

appearance of an object, Foucault magisterially showed the way to a veritable

"completion of history", "dynamiting all rationalizing political philosophy". 'Ideology',

'the state', 'politics' even natural objects don't really exist, according to Veyne. Only a

Marxist would cling to the naive belief in an object.

This crusade is joined by F. Lyotard. Branding Marxist thought as the "totalizing

model and its totalitarian effects", he countered this peril with an irrevocable

decomposition of grand narratives. These are the broad mythologico-historic themes

such as class struggle and human emancipation that have always served to "legitimate"

authority. Post-modern science, with its understanding of the discontinuous,

catastrophic, paradoxical, sees human society for what it really is, "immense clouds of

linguistic matter". Notions such as class struggle, for Lyotard, are nothing but a

"protestation for honor".

A different direction is taken by Michel Serres, in his analysis of historical time. All

contemporary sciences, according to Serres, show that time is not linear, but turbulent

and chaotic. It "percolates", is "crumbled", "embossed", "pleated" .... All our problems

in the theory of history have to do with the naive way time has been understood. Ideas

based on a notion of temporal progression are disqualified, especially Marxism. The

dialectic is thus uninteresting and irrelevant. The entire Marxist mode of thought is

obsolete.

Where do we see the goal of our acts?

These assertions require a careful answer, not just polemics, for they address real

problems. Thus, regarding history as illusion, yes, the course of history as we represent

it is a construct which only naivet would take as an objective given. Yes the great

workers' movements from 1848 until today make use of self-legitimizing narratives.

Yes the forms of communist activism of the last century may not be appropriate for the

next. But, the French revolution, contrary to Levi-Strauss, was not an illusion or myth.

The dehumanization produced by finance capital is not an artifact of historical

methodology, a legitimating narrative. In fact it is the denial of these realities which is

the most flagrant example of mystifying ideologies, of wishful thinking.

Secondly, is it true that only the singular truly exists? This is a nominalism, guarding

its virtue against the speculative entities that have encumbered history. True, vulgar

Marxism substantified 'the bourgeoisie' and mythologized 'the working class' without

analyzing the complex realities and concrete attitudes encompassed by these

abstractions. But what could be more antithetical to the materialist dialectic than

thinking in terms of fixed generalities? The lesson is that a conception aspiring to be

Marxist must re-evaluate the role of the singular event in relation to general

necessities, and the role of its chance character in determining the final course of

things. But does this mean we should reduce the singular to only singularity? Each

person is unique, but being human is also universal. The universal as such doesn't

exist, but this doesn't prevent its existence in the singular. The class logic of capital

exists concretely in each layoff of workers, in financial speculation, where the universal

primacy of private interest is inscribed in detail. Historical rationality indeed exists in

each event.

The idea of a singular exclusively singular is akin to the methodological

individualism of Anglo-American sociology. The corresponding belief that all abstract

entities are in a sense images of Spirit cannot be attributed to Marx, who a century

before Foucault and the others, insisted that labor, for example, is always "a

determinate labor". At a certain stage of development as he showed in the Grundrisse,

"labor in general" becomes a practical truth. This becoming-singular of the general, a

process of historical rationality that only a materialist dialectic can grasp, totally

escapes the nominalism - not only methodological, but doctrinal - that Althusser offers

as the height of materialism. In fact, this is an idealist characterization of the universal,

that is, of essential logics and relations. This dialectic, seen as so impoverished by M.

Serres, allows us to comprehend an historic temporal topology that totally escapes

him.

The greatest objection of all is that, after the fall of communism, we can no longer

believe in the alluring legend of a history progressing toward a better future. This

objection would be stronger if it took on this thesis as is, rather than a mediocre

caricature. Everyone who knows Marx at all knows that he rejected the notion of a

linear development, a regular, fully predictable progress. What he did believe is that in

history as in nature there are processes that cumulatively lead in the same direction.

For instance, the tendency in capitalism toward growth of the productive forces and a

falling rate of profit. At the same time there are immense contradictions motivating all

historical movement, such as between the accumulation of wealth on the side of capital

and accumulation of poverty on the side of labor. This tendential impoverishment,

derided in the '50's and '60's, today can be seen by all, at the national and planetary

level, in a multiplicity of forms. The third point, most decisive yet most misunderstood

is that the non-linear development of these broad contradictions tends to produce the

negative and positive presuppositions of their own supersession. Thus, in following its

own blind logic, private capital inexorably engenders the ravages which bring into

being the individuals and the productivity that can create a system that gives back "to

each according to his needs".

Can Levi-Strauss and the others refute this argument? There is no sign of this. As

Marx wrote in the Preface to the Contribution, a statement that none of these critics

has the courage to confront, "humanity takes up only those problems it is able to

resolve". The ways they go about disqualifying Marx show that historical rationality as

Marx really conceived it is something these critics don't want to deal with.

In fact, after the definitive failure of Marxism was so widely proclaimed in the '70's,

absolutely all of Marx's proposed laws of development of capitalism has unfolded

before us and is accelerating. The forced revolutionizing of the ways of production and

life, globalization of the market, accumulation of wealth on one side and social distress

on the other, the ravageous efforts by capital to counter the falling rate of profit, the

inversion of the relation between persons and things, ends and means, even to the

point of endangering humanity's future. In the face of this, how can we continue to say

history is a play of appearances, with no continuity, no meaning we can identify and

thus that there is no reasonable enterprise for us to undertake? This looks to me not

only like an intellectual aberration but a civic defection. Unconsciously bearing a

rationality through its singular twists and turns, history is not even this pure "process

without subject or end", as in Althusser's reduction: not without grave limitations and

regressions up to now, somehow there has come to be a subject and finality.

Grafted onto the great historical tendencies, the great axiological visions have never

ceased to give birth to great political and human causes, whose mobilizing virtues,

transcending the borders of generations as well as nations, enabling us to construct

this partially civilized world of ours. The struggle for the French Republic, the long

march for de-colonization, the irrepressible emergence of an autonomous human

individuality, given impetus today by the struggle for true equality of women. How can

anyone dare to say, in light of the fruits of these struggles and many others, that they

are nothing but fictitious Grand Narratives, with no existence but in our imagination,

that 'the Republic', 'sovereignty', or 'equality' don't exist?

A new historic window

All this brings us to one ultimate question: does the demise of the Soviet Union, and

the abortion of a century and a half of revolutionary history forbid us from situating

ourselves in the continuity of such a history? This raises the question of whether there

can be both an essential continuity of the contradictions of capitalism and a

discontinuity of their supersession? This is the moment to be a dialectician. Can we

say, as I have several times that a non-resolved contradiction is not suspended, but to

the contrary, continues to work more deeply? Certainly yes, but only insofar as the

coming-to-be of the resolution has suffered a radical setback, when it inevitably

changes phase. History, as we know, doesn't serve the same dish twice.

Transition of historic phase of non-surmounted contradictions - an important new

notion in the living conceptualization of historical materialism. A century and a half

ago a revolutionary prospect was formulated as a socialist revolution to be

accomplished by a proletariat and led by an avant-garde party which would conquor

state power and socialize the means of production. The irretrievable failure of the

cause thus defined has already brought us into another epoch. All the essential realities

that made this enterprise plausible are being transformed: the ways of producing, class

structures, political logics, social realities, personal motivations, spirit of the times,

state of the world. Thus an historic window has been closed. By this I mean a

temporary framework that made one type of transformative strategy possible and

others impossible. While the term 'conjuncture' refers to the singularity of a moment,

historic window can refer to a whole period. The truth is, the previous window was

already closing in May of 1968, revealing the progressive obsolescence of traditional

communism, not to mention Brezhnevism.

Today this historic window, identified with the Manifesto, is irremediably closed.

The 'working class' is no longer the great figure identified with the potential forces of

social transformation. Its vision of socialism is not sufficient, of revolution not

adequate, and of the party not appropriate. The cause remains but in totally different

concrete determinations. This is the dividing line between an archaic communism,

refusing to acknowledge this closure, cut off from the future, and a communism that

takes on the task of exploring theoretically and practically the new historic window,

still so little understood. This means understanding the conflict between capital and

anti-capital today and inventing a new, authentically communist culture, politics and

organizational forms that will allow us to take part in this struggle.

No, Marx did not over-rationalize history. He tried to dialecticize it in a materialist

way. He did underestimate the time-frame for completion of the processes he

discerned. He saw the transition from the era of pre-history as a short, homogeneous

epoch, rather than a very long history of changing historic windows. It is this changing

that we will endeavor to clarify.

The future indeed has a name. Despite its contingencies, turbulence, discontinuities

and false appearances, history, in its stubborn objectivity harbors enough logic to offer

a combative subjectivity a reasonable chance to carry out a great cause. Now isn't it

ever more necessary, objectively as well as subjectively, to put an end to a class society,

always inhuman, but today dramatically unleashing a proliferating and irreversible

dehumanization of the human species?

Finally, one might ask, if we can say the future is a classless society, why use the

name 'communism', particularly if the 'communist question' is far from foreclosed?

Two objections have been raised to use of the word communism as the theoretical and

political designation of the movement for universal emancipation - its semantic

content and its historic resonance. Regarding the first, while the term implies

solidarity and collectivity, it itself doesn't signify Marx's conception of the end of

history - the "complete and free development of all individuals". But the decisive

novelty of the historic window taking shape today does not nullify the continuity with

the project Marx envisioned of finally emerging from the era of pre-history

characterized by class society. The term 'communism' has come to signify the non-

negotiable radicality of the social transformation to be undertaken. Perhaps in the

future there will be another word, but for today, this is the word with these

connotations.

Chapter II. What communism after

'communism'?

The use of the Marxist term 'communism' serves to suggest a deeply thought-out way

to trace the broad outlines of the perspective of a social transformation appropriate for

our times. To develop its concrete content, however, is a completely different job,

requiring not only an intimate knowledge of many areas, but the capacity to reactualize

the approach at each conjuncture. This is not a project for one or even several people,

nor for a political force that seeks to 'direct the masses' by formulating in advance, and

from above, an agenda of changes to be made. The true conceivers of this social

transformation will be the actors themselves. But what is gained in pertinence through

this democratization can be lost in the overall coherence of thinking, and therefore in

political effectiveness. The coherence of the whole is completely different from the

empirical sum of the particular contents that it articulates. It is the organic relation

that unifies them, the essential logic running through them. It is theoretical. It is this

theorization that is so clearly lacking today. This is why a re-worked concept of

communism is so important, to serve as a unifying thread in the quest for this new

coherence, enabling us to make sense of a radically revolutionary enterprise. Our aim

in the present chapter, both very limited and ambitious, is to begin anew from Marx's

heritage, and through its confrontation with the organic contradictions of our world as

well as with the historic window of our epoch, to sketch the transformed reality of the

communist vision in its general characteristics. Limited, in that these are personal

reflections with many arguable points; ambitious, in that the goal is no less than to see

how to succeed where the revolutionary movement of the 20th century failed.

Marx's procedure was to undertake a deep analysis of the contradictions of the real,

to identify the objective presuppositions for their supersession, and, following from

this, to determine a plausible revolutionary goal. Thus, the communist question for

him above all is a question of fact - how does the movement of capital pave the way for

its own negation? This approach contrasts with all utopianism, not in the sense of

great hopes, but of grand illusions. To lay out the ensemble of major contradictions

that Marx revealed in his time is far from simple, due to an essential characteristic of

his work. Departing from the global conception of communism found in the Manifesto,

which speaks not only of capital and labor, but of the individual, the family, state,

nation, law and morality, Marx undertook a colossal enterprise of economic critique in

a much more limited area. And of the plan of work he outlined for this subject in 1857-

9, Capital dealt with only a part - leaving out, with the State, the global market and its

crises, which would have completed the long march from the most simple abstraction

of commodity production to the concrete complexities of the capitalist economy. These

reductions and omissions have led to terrible misunderstandings. The dominant

reading of Capital, from the workers' movements of the 19th century to Althusser, has

been essentially limited to Book I, with enormous theoretical and political

consequences. The question is still open, therefore, of the extent to which Marxist

materialism has suffered from an intrinsic underestimation of the superstructural in

relation to the base, and more generally, of the symbolic in relation to the thing. As we

critically project the concept of communism onto the realities of the contemporary

world, we must always bear in mind everything that such a concept may be leaving out,

especially with regard to an historical window that no contradiction will be too many

to open wide.

The movement of capital and sources of communism

That noted, let us begin with the most determinant contradictions that Marx traced

in analyzing the movement of capital. The elaboration follows considerations on two

overall processes: the process of production (book I of Capital), and the process of

development of the capitalist economy as a whole (book III of Capital). The central

contradiction of the process of production is formulated as the "general law of

capitalist accumulation": where capital dominates, there is an accumulation of wealth

at one social pole and the inexorable accumulation of material and moral distress at

the other, to the point of complete impoverishment, enslavement and human

degradation (book I 724-5). This formulation of the contradiction corresponds to the

intent of book I to reveal the secret of capitalist exploitation, i.e. the extortion of

surplus value in which, despite its appearance, the wage is not equal to the price of

labor furnished, but, quite differently, to the market purchase price of the labor power

invested. Labor power, alone among commodities, produces more value than is

represented in its cost. This exploitation is the source of many other contradictions

leading periodically to crises, notably between the incessant growth of the production

of goods, and the chronic shortage of purchasing power for the working class.

Most fundamental in this process is that capitalism, based on the private form of

ownership of the means of production, on which all extortion of surplus value is based,

imparts to the product a more and more social character. This is a pre-condition for all

development of productivity, but at the same time it renders this private form obsolete.

Thus, it is the development of capital itself that unwittingly creates the conditions for

the socialization of these means, which in turn can put an end to class exploitation.

The anarchy of the market is replaced with a social mastery consisting of rational plans

for human needs. Here we find the roots of the revolutionary culture oriented toward

socialism, in the classic sense of the term. Many have seen this notion of

transformation as the quintessence of Marxism, to which nothing essential can be

added or subtracted.

But if we study Capital up to book III, we discover a far broader panorama opening

up revolutionary horizons that have yet to be developed. The fundamental

contradiction the analysis now concerns is the tendential fall of the rate of profit, i.e.

the relationship between profit gained and capital advanced which constitutes the true

'motive force' of capitalist production (book III p. 271 ES 1957). This tendency has to

do with the most essential logics of capital: as it unendingly accumulates past labor

which is now objectified as fixed capital in the form of the means of production, i.e.

machinery, technology, etc., it increasingly valorizes this 'dead labor', in relation to

'living labor', the productive work of living people in the present. The profit yield from

living labor steadily decreases relative to the yield from dead labor. According to Marx,

"from all points of view, this is the most important law of modern political economy

and the most essential for the comprehension of the most complex relations

(Grundrisse book II p. 236)."

In this law, we are able to see capitalism's deeply historical and essentially transitory

function: to assure the unlimited advance of productivity in a form where in which

dead crush the living, which contradictorily imposes on this advance the most severe

and absurd limits. At the same time its violent efforts to counteract this falling rate of

profit in every possible way become clear: above all through an insatiable super-

exploitation of workers, but also by the massive devalorization of capitals, resulting in

tremendous waste; an aggressive international expansion creating a world market; the

technological appropriation of the formidable powers of science, which raises

productivity to unprecedented heights while unleashing contradictions themselves

unprecedented.

Marx's approach to the two processes we have been considering - the process of

production and the development of the capitalist economy as a whole - can be summed

up as follows: the general law of capitalist accumulation enables us to grasp the

recurrent functioning of the system while the law of the tendential fall of the rate of

profit allows us to understand the development of its strategies and ultimately of its

present structural crisis.

Through these processes, new pre-conditions for capitalism's supersession

accumulate, in particular those of the possible and necessary transition to a mode of

the advancement of productivity based, contrary to the preceding, on economies of

fixed capital made possible by the incorporation of science into the productive

apparatus, which in turn allow the financing of the most ambitious development of

capacities in all individuals. This inversion of the previous historic tendency opens the

way to unparalleled economic efficiency and human development. This brings us to a

major conclusion: when we consider the form of ownership of the means of production

we touch on the essential only to the extent that it can create a situation far more

favorable to the thorough transformation of the content of management of financial

and economic activities. Here is the root of the problem: in the absence of this, nothing

of importance can change, as we have seen in the French experience of the

nationalizations of 1981.

The supersession of capitalism, in other words, requires far more than socialism as it

has been ordinarily understood - that is, where the socialization of the means of

production is considered to be the fundamental act which in itself puts an end to

human exploitation. This supersession requires a communist transformation that

revolutionizes many other essential relations and historic tendencies of class society,

not only in their form but in their content, and which we can summarize as this

cardinal reversal: human development finally comes to predominate over the

production of goods.

But does this formulation mean we are allowing our rigorous economic analysis to

regress into a vague philosophical humanism? This point is even more decisive than

we might at first believe. When we read Capital carefully, we cannot help but see the

deliberate persistence of 'philosophical' formulations by means of which Marx situates

the very essence of capitalism in its irrepressible propensity to reverse the most

universal of relations: those of person to thing and of means to ends. Capitalism, he

writes many times, is that social form which personifies things and thingifies (reifies)

persons, which promotes means to ends and demotes ends to means. (Author lists

numerous pages in Grundrisse and Capital).

Synonymous with endless accumulation, in the dual sense of the word, capitalism

makes the frenzy of private enrichment, paid for by the immense sacrifice of

individuals, the most absurd 'goal in itself'. Here, in the final analysis, and by

definition what should be its triumph, is the deep anthropological reason that denies

historical permanence to this mode of social organization, and even to humanity itself

if it cannot free itself from it. Isn't the immense question of ends, far too little familiar

to traditional communist culture, presently becoming more and more crucial? We will

come back to this.

Thinking in terms of alienation

This philosophical approach, in the least speculative sense of the word, finds its

exhaustive expression in Marx in the vocabulary of alienation. This term, far more

diversified in German than in French (or English) has at its center the concept of

Entfremdung, which means, the process of becoming-foreign. But the minute this

word is uttered it is met with the most ferocious objections: it is accused of being a

typical term that "still believes in philosophy", that reverts to the Feuerbachian

illusions of the young Marx and that conjures away all class analysis. Althusser, in For

Marx, made the claim that in Capital, "alienation disappears". In fact, this is one of his

most patent errors, which he had to admit later (cf. Letter to John Lewis), but he failed

to draw the right conclusions. In fact, the idea and vocabulary of alienation/de-

alienation runs throughout the mature works of Marx and Engels, from the Manifesto

to the Grundrisse and to Anti-Dhring. In Capital, the term is at the very heart of the

expositions of the law of capitalist accumulation and of the tendential fall of the rate of

profit. The French (and English) reader rarely sees this, however, because the

translators, like everyone else, have been a little blind to the fact that in Marx there is

not one but two successive and very different concepts of alienation. In his early works

it is a speculative concept: it is what people are in a given social context. When this

condition is not concretely understood as produced in history, it is metamorphosed, as

in Feuerbach, into an abstract nature, or 'essence' of 'man', which is understood to be

inherent in individuals. In this conception, we don't know why people are dispossessed

in religious, political or economic alienation or how they can reappropriate

themselves.

This immature concept of alienation disappears forever in Marx and Engels in 1845-

6. The 'human essence' they now understand, is the evolving 'ensemble of societal

relations' (note re: translation of Gesellschaftliche = societal not social). It has been

transmuted into another concept, fundamentally re-thought, and now in terms

consistent with historical materialism. Alienation is now the ensemble of processes by

which the societal powers of people, their collective capacities to produce, exchange,

organize, know, are detached from them to become foreign, even monstrously

autonomous, forces which subjugate and crush them. Examples are capital and the law

of the market, the state and the logic of power, the international arena and the

"inevitability of war", dominant ideas and illusory appearances...

But why are these powers alienated? This has to do not with some natural fate but

with an historic situation. Specifically human activities are based in the ceaselessly re-

beginning and expanding cycle of their social objectivation in productions of

cumulative complexity, from the first tools and signs to the technologies and

theorizations of today, and of their constant subjective appropriation by individuals. In

this process, the individuals themselves are developing. As history progresses, the

elements of the cycle become more complex. But this complexification is paralleled by

a triple process of social division: the division of labor, which, as Engels said, "also

divides people", fragmenting their capacity for reappropriation; the divisions of class,

which place the majority of material and cultural riches outside the reach of the great

majority of individuals; and at the present stage of history, what we could call the

division of phase. In this division, we see that human capacities that have been

objectified in gigantic social powers begin to enter an era in which they are no longer

governable in the existing social framework which prevents the development of

universal cooperation and integral individuality.

Thus, we are living the paroxysm of alienation, this antagonistic form that inevitably

imprints the objectivation of human powers with the epoch of fragmented humanity.

Alienation, therefore, is not a social science concept limited to a specific sector, such as

exploitation; it is a global category of historic anthropology, less explicative than

interpretive, but more generally, critical and prospective, philosophical without any

vagueness, and rigorously indispensable to conceive the general logic of humanity's

trajectory. The concept of alienation encompasses, without dissolving, the concept of

economic exploitation, as well as biographical fragmentation, social reification,

political subjection, and ideological illusion. While the concept of exploitation enables

us to conceive of socialism; alienation constitutes the category par excellence of

communism, for which it even supplies a basic definition: communism is both the

process and result of supersession of all the great historic alienations through which

the human species has contradictorily developed until now.

What do we gain practically from these very theoretical considerations for the

challenges that face us today? It is here that we must take stock of the effects of the

historic reduction of communist culture to its socialist version, whose assigned task

can be summed up as putting an end to the exploitation of workers. We can do this by

pursuing the reverse - by studying the enrichment that the re-production of Marx's full

original conception can provide in today's conditions. The traditional culture of

socialism focuses on the production of material goods, its means and their forms of

ownership, its actors and thus the working class. These are the basic terms of more

than a century of revolutionary history. To go from here to a communist culture of

general de-alienation doesn't imply at all losing sight of this - quite the opposite: the

exploitation of labor is itself a 'great historic alienation' because, as Marx repeatedly

emphasized, it is based on the separation of the producers from their means of

production. This remains a major concern for all adversaries of capital.

Thinking in terms of de-alienation calls for an enormous expansion of the area of

contradictions brought within the scope of the communist perspective. Even in

Capital, with all its limitations from the point of view presented here, we find briefly

but clearly indicated the ravageous tendencies of capitalism such as the exhaustion of

nature or the falsification of products, the growing needs, such as for a radical change

of content in the education of the younger generation or for a relation between the

sexes that opens the way to a family of a new type, for the demystification of

consciousness, freeing its universe from the commodity and its fetishism: these are all

possible bases for seizing the transformative initiatives too often left to others, or even

treated as diversions. Furthermore, alienation, understood unambiguously as a socio-

historical process, is at the same time the most profound biographical logic, since all

forms of society imply forms of individuality. This double category thus enables us to

think social antagonism and personal suffering together, to join in practice the

motivations for transformation of the world and for recovery of the self. This would

render to politics its full anthropological and ethical dimension, a decisive expansion.

Ultimately involving the whole person, the culture of dealienation concerns everyone.

This is why increasingly, the forces likely to contribute to the supersession of

capitalism can be found well beyond the ranks of workers, in all social sectors.

Towards a strategy of de-alienation

To this expansion, which has already changed many things, we add a transmutation

which changes still more. If capitalism ultimately amounts only to the exploitation of

man by man, its historic role is only negative, and its contribution lies only in its

abolition. This understanding has defined an entire way of fighting it. When we shift to

the point of view of alienation a completely different perspective is created. Not that

the dispossession of workers becomes less unacceptable, but alienation is not only the

ruthless dispossession of individuals, it is also an unprecedented development of

human capacities, although in a form that affects them to their core. This is what Marx

never hesitated to call the "historic mission" of capitalism, and endeavored to

understand its tremendous vitality. Capitalism must not be seen solely as destructive.

Alienation is to be found in everything it produces, for instance in the cataclysmic

contour it imposes on globalization, while it plays a positive role in its constant

propensity to destroy all timeworn barriers.

Thinking in terms of alienation ultimately re-establishes a dialectical vision of

things, as opposed to a discourse of pure denunciation that doesn't offer a true

alternative and as a result finds only a small audience. This leads to the rejection of the

idea, no doubt correct for Russia when Lenin formulated it in 1918, but absurdly

codified as a general law by Stalin, that 'socialism' doesn't find 'ready-made relations'

in bourgeois society except perhaps those of 'state capitalism': a terrible idea for a new

society which is essentially seen as in some way imposed from outside on a recalcitrant

reality. This is the very opposite of a Marxist conception in which the development of

capital itself, and the reactions to it produce many presuppositions of communism

from within . This brings into play a crucial change in communist thought and

practice: from a culture of negativism and exteriority, which inevitably marginalizes a

political force, to another where, whatever its influence at a given moment, the future

is on its side.

This requires a clarification of vocabulary. When we read Marx in the available

French (or English) translations, we often encounter the term abolition, as in the

Manifesto which often evokes the image of an "abolition of existing social relations".

This idea has for a long time been closely identified with communist discourse: we

must abolish the ownership of the means of production, abolish capitalism, etc. But

most of the time this term is translated from the famous German term Aufhebung,

which, in popular usage means primarily abolition, suppression, etc., but in the

theoretical language of Hegel - who explained its etymology and usage, and of Marx

following him, expressly had a much more dialectical meaning: suppression,

preservation and elevation, that is, the transition to a higher form, which the

contemporary translations of Hegel render by the neologism 'sublation' ('sursomption'

in French; just as the French author has replaced this neologism with the more

common French term 'depassement', I have replaced the English neologism with the

term 'supersession' - cs). The classical and universal translation of Marx, in which

Aufhebung is unilaterally rendered as abolition therefore constitutes a patent

deformation of his thought, with incalculable consequences. when Marx speaks of an

Aufhebung leading to a higher form, we should translate this as supersession . In fact,

when he is speaking of an abolition pure and simple he most often uses different

terms, such as Abschaffung or Beseitigung.

In the absence of adequate explanations of these matters, this terminological shift

from the language of abolition to that of supersession may appear to represent a

reformist retreat. (note - this has been the case in France in responses to new

translations of Marxist works and to texts put out by the Communiste Refondateur

group, both of which Sve has been deeply involved in.) Quite to the contrary, this shift

represents re-establishing our understanding of what Marx had in mind: that since

capitalism is an antagonistic and transitory form of the development of human forces,

the revolutionary task is inseparably to suppress this form in order to maintain and

promote the already acquired contents in new forms, and thereby to supersede

capitalism in the full sense of the term. Can we, for example, abolish fixed capital, all

the accumulated past labor which is an essential part of national wealth? The

mistaken, non-Marxist idea of abolition, so central to the 'communist identity' up to

now, has paid the terrible price of a stunted political practice in which 'theory' has had

interest for only a handful of intellectuals. And this when what Gramsci said in his

time is becoming more true than ever: "everyone is a philosopher".

A greatly expanded area, a dialectized content - we still haven't exhausted the most

essential contributions of the perspective of de-alienation until we add: a new type of

strategic approach. The idea of changing the mode of ownership of the means of

production all at once envisions a broad politico-juridical act that presupposes the

conquest of state power over the bourgeoisie in a classical perspective of recourse to

violence. This is a conception of great revolutionary allure whose result has most often

been, in a country such as ours, to await the hour that never comes, that is, a political

practice too little revolutionary, often limited to defensive struggles, verbal

denunciations, trade union actions, etc. This whole ensemble is overturned by a

perspective of reappropriation. Does that mean that the vision of revolution is out-

dated? Not at all: to supersede capitalism continues to be, in the strongest sense of the

word, a revolution, that is, a radical reversal of the existing order. But the idea of

revolution is not necessarily linked to that of a violent conquest of state power, nor

with an abrupt social transformation enacted from above. This is only one historic

form of revolution, among others.

The effective reappropriation of their social powers by the masses of individuals,

revolutionary indeed, doubly rejects this form: it cannot be instantaneous, constituting

rather a long process requiring a favorable balance of forces; it has no need to await a

hypothetical propritious moment, aspiring instead to take on truly serious affairs

without delay. What emerges here is a truly new concept of revolution: revolutionary

without revolution - a revolutionary evolution, or perhaps an evolutionary revolution.

To begin with the ends

We now begin to see the renewed analytical capacity offered by the transition from a

culture of socialization of means of production to another, far broader and deeper, of

reappropriation of all human forces, of which I have offered only a few glimpses.

Furthermore, the idea of alienation encompasses not only this cleavage of human

forces from living humans, but the loss of meaning as well. An immense chapter of our

contemporary drama falls under this formula. In a non-alienated cycle of

objectivation, socially reified human powers reclaim subjective meaning in their

constant personal reappropriation: thus come to be able to experience the reason for

our tools, words and institutions. But the mercilessly alienating split of human

possessions, powers and knowledge from their producers cuts off the route to

meaning, in two ways. Means without ends on the one hand, because the enormous

growth of human powers tends to metamorphose into a blind and too often crushing

'natural force'; ends without means on the other, as individuals are condemned to

bounce absurdly between chimera and impotence. We are living the most historical of

crises of meaning. a sure sign that in one way or another our social prehistory cannot

last much longer. The choice is a naissant communism or a final dehumanization.

Perhaps the strongest accusation we can bring against capitalism is its total

incapacity to explain why we should suffer the thousand deaths it inflicts upon us.

Humanity is materially and morally destroying itself literally for nothing, for a frenetic

accumulation of abstract wealth, stripped of all anthropological sense. This is why the

most central question we can pose today has to do with the ends of our human

activities. Failure to pose these questions was no doubt one of the major insufficiencies

of the culture of socialism in its focus on the means of production: behind the 'how' it

forgot the 'why'.

To begin with the ends: this is the proper starting point for a communism of our

times. Why, that is to say, for what, do we work, go to school, vote, etc.? What is the

human purpose? No social activities should escape this question. Any de-alienation of

politics must begin by truly hearing these questions of meaning, and by working with

the questioners to come up with meaningful answers. Capital, for its part, is no longer

even making a pretense, however cynical, of having any human purpose: it is money

for the sake of money and its power, whose ultimate end can only be itself. This

absence of human ends is its true condemnation. But, is it possible to find, at a

completely different ethical level, a for what that is valid in itself?

Ecological thinking pays considerable attention to this question of ends, which

confirms shared heredity between it and communism. Its most notorious philosopher,

Hans Jonas, formulates in Le Principe Responsabilit (1990) - a book he intended as a

response to the Principe Esprance by the Marxist Ernst Bloch - this major imperative

which enjoins us not to compromise by our actions "the permanence of an

authentically human life on earth." But what is an authentically human life? To follow

Jonas, the answer is behind us, provided ultimately by living nature of which we are

members, and probably of a transcendent, therefore sacred essence, because humanity

itself cannot be the autonomous source of its goals, and still less can it propose the task

of human progress. In opposition to this project, which he terms totalitarian, he

proposes the obligation to transmit the unchanging heritage that ultimately constitutes

us. Men and women as they are in nature, as it is, is ultimately the end in itself of this

deliberately conservative thinking. Of course, there are many Greens on the left and it

would be worthwhile to open deep discussions with them on the question of the

human ends of an emancipatory political project for our times.

Communist thought, no less preoccupied with similar questions, in contrast, is

oriented toward the development of human forces in their constant appropriation by

all individuals. But for what, in sum, do we find in this the ultimate value? Marx

answers as follows: engendered at first by nature, developed humanity is then self-

producing through the course of its own history, and it is "historical development"

itself that makes an "end in itself... of this development of all human forces as such"

(Grundrisse vol. 1 p. 424). Here also the last for what turns into an end in itself, but of

a very different sort. It is not behind us, arrested in advance by nature, but open ahead

of us in history as a veritable practical finality which consists of taking on the immense

responsibility of extending the biological and then social hominization of yesterday

and today into a more and more civilized future humanization, a process with clearly

internalizable meaning for all of humanity.

An authentically Marxist concept of communism, renewed by a reflection on its

history in the East as well as the West, still proves to be the most productive for

reconceiving in a plausible way the supersession of capitalism in the conditions of our

time and tracing the lasting ways of development of a more humanized humanity.

There is no other that can claim a similar relevance. The question is how to bring it

more into phase with the social changes represented by the historic window discussed

earlier. We can begin by examining the lesser of these changes and progress toward the

more radical. This poses a problem in principle. Since this book is intended as a

philosophical contribution to the theory of a politics, with the communist idea as the

leading thread, and is not the work of a specialist in the various social sciences, I will

limit myself to discussion of the most obvious changes, the sources of the necessary

recasting of our concept of communism, with an acknowledgment in advance of the

risks of arguable interpretations and diagnostic errors.

Humanization in the service of finance

By examining these most striking changes in social reality, we can consider the

extraordinary metamorphosis underway in what the Marxist tradition calls the

productive forces, or more generally, in the tremendous ensemble of effects that come

to constitute all the objective means of human activities. We have to replace a

communism of the industrial age, characterized by the discipline of the factory worker

and the creation of mass society, which imprinted the spirit of Marx's time, with a

communism of the information age, appropriate for a new century, characterized by

educated initiatives in networks and an interdependent individuation. But this is more

than a matter of technological changes; at the heart of the question are changes of an

anthropological order. In this regard the new fundamental fact is without any doubt

the still very uneven, but ever more massive, spread of private capital, in particular in

its financial form, to the immense sphere of market and non-market services, which

have become, in the most developed countries, the greater part of economic activity,

especially where the most vital human capacities are involved: health, education,

research, information, sports, leisure time, the development of culture and

communication, etc. These activities are often differentiated from so-called productive

or material activities, as though they have no material effect. This is a completely

ideological view of the issue, which reduces materiality to things. The distinction we

would suggest is as follows: service activities are those in which the useful effect is not

concretized, at least essentially, in things, but that directly affect the human being.

These are par excellence activities of anthropological significance. And their more or

less advanced development under the rule of capital, has produced enormous changes,

calling for a major rethinking of the Marxist concept of communism.

Without doubt the most immediate of these effects consists simply of creating new

categories of exploited workers, a process that is not new, except that it extends the

concept of exploitation to these categories, which requires some theoretical

clarification. The development of these services under the rule of capital has

characteristically disruptive consequences for the contents of activity and their ends.

To submit them to its law of profitability, capital must recast them more or less

entirely, altering their very meaning. The first imperative here is commodification,

since the first necessity for the extraction of profit is the pre-requisite objectivation of

value in a product. But nothing is more contrary to the essence of service activities

whose direct recipient is the human being. Capitalism thus kills their very reason to be.

We see this in highly financed sports, where everything has a price and is for sale, or in

scientific information, where new ideas are metamorphosed into salable products.

Knowledge ceases to be a public good. (note - health care, education, transportation,

the whole ideology of doing away with 'big government', i.e. the public sphere - to be

replaced by private, profit-making interests)

The second imperative is confiscation. The commodification of services forces their

submission to the criterion of capitalist efficiency. But how can we bend them in the

interest of maximal short term profitability in an atmosphere of open discussions? The

capitalist seizure of services signifies the death of all true democracy in matters of

choice, and above all with implications in health, information, culture .... where

nothing less than our humanity is decided. Isn't this the seed of what could be a 21st

century totalitarianism?

The worst is that in this commodification and confiscation we see the implacable

inversion of relations between ends and means. Not that it was ever otherwise with

capital. As Marx repeatedly emphasized, capital pursues nothing but its own

valorization. Its goal is not to satisfy needs but to make profits. Thus its constant

tendency to sacrifice the quality of the product to the rate of profit. But what is new is

that the 'product' whose quality is turned into a simple means in the pursuit of profit is

nothing other than the human ends of service activity. A logic of dehumanization is

thus begun whose effects continue to get more monstrous until this inversion can be

reversed. Thus, in the 'biomedical revolution' underway, in many ways so promising,

increasingly it is not finance that is the means for research, but research that has

become a means for finance. The results are visible everywhere, and above all in the

U.S. where, for example, the catalog sale of frozen embryos has developed, as well as

genetic testing by companies and its intrusion into personal life, not to mention the

eventual development of cloning, all while there is scarcely any money for struggles

such as against AIDS in Africa.

Service capitalism has thus induced in the most highly human activities a

hemorrhaging of meaning that has already enfeebled many aspects of cultured life, in

the truest sense of the term 'culture'. Television, for example, with its extraordinary

possibilities, has become a means for sale of advertising to an audience, whose screen

exalts everything from banks to toilet paper. A perfect image of a total perversion:

meaning dies in the interest of the means of non-sense. Only through immense efforts

have some limits been placed on this development which threatens all services today,

including schools, which emphasizes all the more the urgency of greatly expanded

struggles.

The civilized future of the world put on automatic pilot by the profitability of

finance: no doubt this is a new chapter in the book of capital, but how does this call for

a reconfigured concept of communism? Unlike all forms of exploitation, the alienation

involved here doesn't constitute its victims into a class, a radical departure from the

traditional Marxist framework. Is this a process in some way outside of class? Not at

all, in a sense: the spread of capital to these services is the clearest of the class-based

seizures, and the struggle against it is unequivocally an anti-capitalist struggle. But

while there is surely a class at one pole of the contradiction, the disconcerting fact is

that there is no class at the other. The problem of alienation goes beyond the interests

of a determinate social category; it is the human finality of everyone's activities. This

dissymmetry has profound implications: it calls for engaging in a class struggle not

only in the name of a class but for people's humanity itself. This is not at all a slide into

a simplistic humanism, but rather the most rigorous confrontation with the

dehumanization produced by capital. This is how Marx saw a new stage of history

prefigured in the development of the working class which produces everything while

owning nothing. The working class ultimately represents, for Marx, the 'dissolution of

all classes', that is, the negative prefiguration of a future de-alienated relation between

people and their social wealth.

We see outlined here, some new possibilities for the joining forces of partners who

otherwise have extreme differences. While broad coalitions have come together, for

example, in the struggle for peace, in this case the direct object for the first time would

be the supersession of capitalism. While this assemblage of persons and forces will no

doubt reach universality, it will at least be a broad plurality. Alienation impacts

everyone, but each as an individual in his or her personal singularity and

unpredictable reaction. Thus we see here and there early signs of overcoming the

traditional schisms between left and right, for example in matters of health, education,

ecology or bioethics, as people find agreement on values such as respect for the

integrity of the person. This offers truly unprecedented chances to create relations of a

majoritarian, indeed irresistible force that could bring about changes involving

essential de-alienations.

Civilized humanity against the dehumanizing economy of profit: in this ethico-

political way of posing the question, both in terms of class and not in terms of class,

don't we already see on the horizon the goal of our struggles to emerge from our pre-

history, in a transparent opening toward a future classless society?

Some misunderstandings

These considerations can be easily misunderstood as we shall see. For instance, the

preceding in no way declares that class struggles in the traditional sense of the term

are obsolete. Exploitation persists, and is more ferocious than ever; the struggle for its

class victims remains entirely on the political agenda. But it would be blind not to see

the equally serious enormous new extension of forms of alienation, in which major

social activities are deprived of their meaning, so that all participants, regardless of

class differences, find themselves qualitatively attacked in their very life. Therefore, a

fundamental trait of the new historic window for the supersession of the current state

of affairs is that the class struggle against capital can become a general struggle for a

more civilized humanity in all areas.

(note 5 pages of discussion of controversies, differences and misunderstandings

within PCF and outside, on some of these points. Sve's main point is that the

supersession of communism requires the communist vision and theory of de-

alienation right now - thinking only in economic terms, with the goal of socialization of

the means of production, or establishment of a 'socialist market' is not enough.

However, this does not at all mean underestimating or abandoning traditional

struggles against exploitation or a class understanding. Also, While broader issues of

raci