11 Theses on Possible CommunismC17 January 31, 2018Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Composition, 1921
In January 2017, comrades from across the globe gathered in Rome to assess the conditions of contemporary capitalism and to plan communist strategies for our present. Viewpoint, as a co-sponsor of the conference, participated in discussions locally and translated interviews with key participants. Today, one year later, we present our translation of “11 Theses on Possible Communism,” a manifesto written by the Collettivo C17 and rooted in the contributions of the wide range of militants and theorists who converged in Rome. IntroductionThe following “Theses on Possible Communism” are the fruit of a common labor, which kicked off with the Rome Conference on Communism last January held at ESC Atelier and the Galleria Nazionale, and was then developed, in writing, by the “C17” collective. The Theses are not a balanced synthesis of the conference. The Theses simply try to repeat the power of those extraordinary days, in quality and in participation. But they do take a stance. Partial, assertive, just like the hastened, even provisory, present form. They are not a matter, indeed, of concluding a debate, but of relaunching what has only just – with the conference – been opened. With the theme presented, it is then a matter of insisting on variations and, when it will be possible again in person, to improvise ceaselessly. Only in this way will the Theses have had a non-marginal function. If the Theses are already, as they undoubtedly are, the way chosen by the “C17” collective to celebrate October, then above all – and in view of a new Conference on communism – they call for response and for disagreement: they call for the future.
1. Specter. Wherever the Communist Party is in the state [al potere], communism is long gone. There is a market and there is exploitation, but without parliaments and free speech. Communism is a degenerate, defeated, and obliterated history; in Europe and in the world. It rarely occurs that a defeat is also a specter, with the capacity to frighten again; such is the indeed rare case of communism. The word is unpronounceable, its meaning or project difficult to clarify. The enemy, however, continues to have clear ideas; surely it is not as terrorized as it was in 1848, and certainly it has learned to preempt. Contemporary capitalism frightens in order to not be frightened. We know, from Hobbes on, that fear constitutes the sovereign: today fear, the permanent blackmail of precarious lives, makes exploitation possible. But if this is so, there is something that does not return: lives, while precarious and always at work, are a danger, in addition to being in danger. Communism is the name of this excess that, despite everything, continues to frighten. The victory of capital, as a nemesis, does not cease producing this excess (of relations, mobility, inventive capacities, productive cooperation, etc.). The victory of capital, as a nemesis, does not cease producing the objective conditions of communism: the reduction of “necessary labor” to the social reproduction of labor-power.
2. Neoliberalism. “Capitalize the revolution”: from 1968 on, this is the sign of the
great transformation in which we are immersed. If with the struggles, life leaves the cornerstones and the factory, it is necessary to follow it everywhere, to valorize its unique and unrepeatable traits, to do business with aesthetic tastes and the behavior of each life, transforming machinery into prostheses of the “social brain” (digital and communication technologies: from the PC to the Web, from smartphones to social networks), and the general intellect into an algorithm. This has happened while globalization was running fast and a violent accumulation assailed the global South and East. Thinking the two processes separately, or in opposition, is an error laden with fateful consequences: neoliberal globalization is a weave of multiple and heterogeneous temporalities, a common space that is separated. We understand Silicon Valley with the economic zones of China or Poland, and vice versa. Neoliberalism, more precisely, is the counter-revolution, the capitalist response to 1968, an event of struggle that was – from the Sorbonne to Vietnam, from Berkeley to Prague, from Rome to Tokyo – completely global. Thinking globalization without having understood the decolonial uprisings means not thinking it at all. To focus on the economy of knowledge without paying attention to the student movements or the workers’ refusal of (repetitive) labor means entirely surrendering technological innovation to capitalist command. Neoliberalism has reintroduced – on a global scale, with differing intensities, rendering them chronic –
phenomena of primitive accumulation: the dispossession of millions of people by way of land grabbing as much as the enclosure of knowledge by patents; the erosion of indirect wages through regressive taxation and welfare cuts as much as the compression of the direct wage via processes of the precaritization of labor; the mass incarceration of the poor as much as the use of migrant labor-power to destabilize wage rigidity; the association, always morally condemned, between the criminal economy and “clean” business; the impoverishment, but generalized access to consumption, to technologies; renewed mobility and the diffusion of borders; the exaltation of differences and radicalization of exploitation: neoliberalism is the combination, always re-activated, of these processes.
3. Crisis. The economists say that the crisis we have continued to plunge into for the past ten years is a Great Depression, like that of the 1870s or that which exploded in 1929 and subsided, only after the death of tens of millions of people, in 1945. Taking up the lesson of the 1930s, several economists speak of “secular stagnation”: decades of low growth, low wages, high unemployment, high poverty. Always something to hope for… In this sense, crisis is no longer just an illness, but the “treatment” received each day because the disease flares up. The question imposes itself: why, if capitalism has won everywhere, is there a need for crisis to govern the world? A first answer shows us that the world is anything but governed: American hegemony wanes; a new multipolarism presents a threat; war kills in the periphery and the center, and is made with weapons, attacks, money, and trade. A second answer, instead, tells us that crisis is a form of governing labor-power. Precisely because the victory of capital does not cease producing, in spite of itself, the objective conditions of communism, the command of capital relentlessly renews that extra-economic violence that had characterized its origins since the 16th century. The more robots replace human labor, the less capitalism can afford social justice and democracy. The more subjects incorporate productive instruments, the more it will be necessary to demoralize, impoverish, and discipline them. The neoliberal management of the crisis connects the
control of behavior with the renewal of
discipline, whether it takes the form of the division of labor, masculine violence against women, the repression of the poor and migrant (from internment to expulsion). The best-known face of the capitalism-crisis is Donald Trump: a billionaire close to Goldman Sachs, and therefore Wall Street, he does not scorn but defends and, when he can, foments the nationalist and racist right. Neoliberalism, which for years has rhymed with globalization, strengthens its aggressive and authoritarian pole; the space of finance is combined with that of borders, discrimination, the fatherland. And what’s more: in the crisis, the archaic of Sovereignty, the civil war waged against the poor, reemerges. In this scenario, if the neoliberal left – the one in vogue in the time of Clinton, Blair, and Schröder – shrinks almost everywhere, the (neoliberal) chauvinist right is rediscovered, and this does not exclude fascist rhetoric.