Revolutionary Motives:

Here, I draw upon the theory of communisation pioneered by [[Gilles Dauvé]], Bruno Astarian, Theorie Communiste and other French theorists, and extended in the pages of journals such as Sic and Endnotes.

Beyond this book’s autonomist sources, it has, however, been significantly shaped by the ‘communisation’ theory that emerged strongly after 2008 (see Cunningham 2009; Noys 2011). This current is in fact highly critical of autonomist Marxism’s ‘workerist’ tendencies but nevertheless shares with it a problematic of ‘class composition’ and ‘cycles of struggles’ (two concepts described in the next chapter). Especially important for the analysis of cybernetics and class struggle is Theorie Communiste’s discussion of the growing disjunctions between capital’s requirements for its own reproduction and those of its proletariat (Simon 2011), and Endnotes’ (2010; 2013) revival of Marx’s concept of ‘surplus populations’ Cyber-Proletariat p.14

One of these is the group Theorie Communiste (TC), whose work informs recent communisation theory. Like operaismo, TC had its origins in the 1960s and ’70s, though in France not Italy. TC shares with it the concept of the ‘cycle of struggles’ (Simon 2011), but seeks to explain not so much worker movements’ moments of strength as their repeated failures. These, TC argues, cannot be accounted for merely in terms of mistakes, or betrayals, but are intrinsic to the ‘reciprocal implication’ of capital and proletariat, which, rather than being simply antagonistic are also integrated as two poles of a single system (Endnotes 2008: 215). This integration, TC argues, has intensified historically. In early capitalism, the proletariat is very much outside capital, a hostile and unruly force to be coercively subdued. As capital subsumes production an increasingly formalized working class is absorbed into capital, through the mediation of institutions such as trade unions, political parties and the welfare state. The very factors that strengthen the mass worker also give it a place within capital, as a bargaining interlocutor: the reproduction of capital and its workers mesh together. All the programmatic reforms to capital that are proposed on the basis of working-class power, from state planning to self-management, and various autonomist alternatives, can in fact be digested by capital as ways of improving value-extraction. However, TC argues, capital’s own compulsive drive to integrate the proletariat as a factor of production to be used or ejected at will ==eventually breaks down any appearance of a social contract==. This begins to occur from the 1970s on with what is colloquially called ‘neoliberal’ globalization, privatization and technological assault on the organized working class. TC (2011) makes a Pascalian ‘wager’ that facing this no-holds barred offensive, reformist compromise will become impossible; the proletariat will have to throw into question its own existence as one pole of the capitalism that attacks it. Communisation theory seems to stand at an opposite extreme from the revolutionary optimism of autonomism. It is very critical of [[Empire (Hardt and Negri)|Hardt and Negri’]]s post-operaismo line and its concept of a spontaneously unified multitude. It insists that, on the contrary, the proletariat’s implication in capital results in an endless series of divisions and conflicts between its more and less favoured segments. At the same time, communisation theory’s insistence that such divisions ride towards a revolutionary denouement seems highly implausible absent the active circulation of struggles to overcome such divisions theorized by autonomists. We therefore read autonomist and communisation theory with and against each other, taking up those lines of autonomist thought that deal not with multitude, but with proletarianization, and understanding this as a contradictory process both of and against capital, a current within the vortex than can twist back on itself to collapse the very storm of which it is an intrinsic part. Cyber-Proletariat pp.31-32