Under the Riot Gear

7/27/2019 Under the Riot Gear

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Under the riot gear

! "War machine and care machine", the Oakland Commune extendeditself over five weeks, one square and all over the newspapers. Admired

rightly everywhere for its radicality, it peaked with the general strike of

November 2nd, 2011. Since 1946, there was no question of a general strike

in the US, and it was in Oakland, once again, that it was happening.

! The following text is an attempt to show the contours of this struggle,

underlying its limits. With that, we do not intend to bring an external moral

judgment but to understand the dynamics of this struggle. We will focus on

the Oakland Commune as a singular event, only in so far as it allows us to

understand the generality of the Occupy movement, and also, more

broadly, the movement of square occupations. Understanding the limits of

this struggle means then understanding the dynamics of a moment of the

general crisis of accumulation. This crisis, in all of its moments, carries

within itself a horizon: that of the abolition of the present state of capitalist

relations, this "real movement which abolishes the present state of things".

Communism as the horizon of the current cycle of struggles is for us

communisation, abolition of all the classes by the proletariat, communism

as an immediate process. This horizon "is for us not a state of affairs which

is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself". The"premises now in existence", those of the crisis and of the disciplinarization

of the proletariat, will find their abolition in the generalization of rifts,

generalization that, then, can only be a rupture.

First limit: the sphere of circulation without that of production

! The first limit of the Oakland Commune was that, even if people there

tried to expand the struggle to the labour process, it was in the constitutionof the movement that it could not accomplish it. The general strike was the

most obvious attempt to overcome that constitution and expand it to the

labour process. Trying to link the struggle with the closures of school was

another one. Both failed. Not because something was missing in the

strategies, but because it was a constitutive limit of the struggle. Located in

Oakland, the struggle couldnt attack the labour process first of all because

most of the people on the Plaza had been expelled for life from this

process, and second, because even those who have not been expelled

relate to it only as a process of circulation and not of production (the port,

the banks, the coffee shop or restaurants and the food stores being the only

employers and San Francisco has little more to offer to those whom cannot

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integrate into the Silicon Valley). One can argue on that point that the

conveyance of commodities by boat is part of the production process. The

same goes for labour in restaurants (only to the extent that the restaurant is

paid by the salary and not by the revenue). The problem is to understand

that those forms of labors are at the periphery of production. They are part

of the circulation of capital. And if the circulation of capital is still partiallywithin the production process, when considered alone, it autonomises itself.

! There is of course always a tendency to consider the process of

circulation as a moment of the valorization process just as much as the

production process and that, therefore, production does not lie at the center

of the whole story. Behind that lies a tendency that feels the end of the old

worker movement and the restructuring of the process of production in the

70s. The idea that accompanies this type of theory is always that

programmatism was only about production. But somehow, it wasnt: it was

only about distribution, production being for it an invariant horizon. The

factory was an empty fortress, and communism could only be seen as the

good redistribution of commodities within the society.

! Seeing circulation, the "annihilation of space by time", as a central

process can not allow anyone to understand capital as production of

commodities, as production of value, as production for exchange. In this

way, the commodity becomes a ghost and the production process a

haunted house.

! If in programmatism, the world was seen as capable of being turned

upside down (from the Manifesto until Italian operaismo), it seems like with

the restructuring, it is seen more and more as a world that can only beblocked. The meager reformist perspective of being able not to turn the

economy upside-down but to manage it has disappeared with the beginning

of this crisis. It is from then on that the first perspective that this world has to

offer is that of blockading; to blockade the economy has taken over the idea

of the strike. Often, the "strikes" are nothing more than names over

movements of blockading (from that follows the popularity of such a

concept as the "human strike"). Some say that it is so out of efficiency,

some because many are being more and more excluded from production,

but these are two sides of the same coin. The concentration of circulation ofcommodities at certain points, the absolute rise in the size of value

manipulated per worker capita and the absolute rise in investment per

worker capita, the boom of the economy paid out of revenue and not capital

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(wrongly called "service sector"1) and the boom of unemployment are all

characteristics of the same moment, that of the restructuring.

! It is true, circulation can raise the rate of profit. This is the reason why it

has been more developed than production since the 70s. But this

developement is neither due to a free choice nor to a proof of circulation

being central, but rather it is just the reflection of a drastic fall in the rate ofprofit in production. The capitalist mode of production cannot therfore

"move its center from production to circulation". It develops periodically one

compared to the other in accordance with the limits of the previous period.

Circulation and production are both moments of the valorization process.

But it is production that determines circulation, at the end. Therefore, even if

circulation was to involve a larger mass of capital than production, it would

still be determined by production. Production, under capital, is production of

commodities for exchange. The moment of circulation is already

encompassed in the moment of production.

! The circulation process is two-folded: it is the circulation of commodities

just as much as the circulation of money, without which the realization lag

would always be a barrier to production. The capitalist mode of production

needs the circulation of capital like the body needs the circulation of blood,

but it does so only because this circulation has its own content. This content

is valorization. By grasping only at the circulation process, the US

occupations could only see at best the flux of commodities, and at worst the

parasitic circulation of moneyfinance" as pure parasitic theft covering

over the "real economy".

The key moment to understand the Oakland Commune in its relation

with circulation and production is the first general strike (and the blockading

of the port) of November 2nd. Voted upon by almost 100% of the general

assembly of a thousand people the day following the first police raid on the

camp, the general strike was a challenge. One can see it as something

quite ridiculous: a general strike in which only people who are not striking

participate. Indeed, none of the unions voted for the strike, although many

3

1 One can use the term "services" only if they are defined as immaterial production, which meansnothing. There are only three sectors in the economy: that of the production of the means ofproduction, that of the production for the consumption of the proletariat (paid for by the wage) andfor the luxury consumption (paid for by revenue). Someone employed at McDonalds or in a callcenter selling mobile phone contracts makes now the labor that would have made a farmer pickingup potatoes before: he works for the consumption of the proletariat (the idiotic idea of "real needs"and "fake needs" has no room in this, the reproduction of the proletariat is constantly extended,and its limits are what is socially necessary--"the transformation of what was previouslysuperfluous into what is necessary, as a historically created necessity -- is the tendency ofcapital" [Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, p. 528]). His labor, as that of the farmer, is paid by the salary,

and finds itself in the next process of production only in the fact that the body of the proletarian wassent back in the face to face with capital during the selling of the commodity labor-power. Fromthen on, the idea of a service sector that extends from finance unto fast-food chain is a carboncopy of the bourgeois economy and its wishful thinking.


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thought the ILWU 2 would. Hence, besides the precarious workers, the

unemployed and the homeless, people attended who could take a day off

for holiday, those who, working as civil servants, had the right not to come,

those who, like the port employees and some people working in restaurants

and cafs, had a free day by the impossibilitymore or less aidedof

keeping the work place open, or those who took a sick day. But this is onlylooking at one side of the picture. What was noticeable on the 2nd of

November is the crowd. Images of a crowd blockading the portthats what

remains from that day. Since 1946, no one in the US had marched under

the banner of a general strike.

! Seeing the general strike just as the result of an activist tendency within

the movement cannot answer these two questions: Why did more than a

thousand people vote for that strike? Why did more than 10,000 people

come that day in a country that has forgotten its strike tradition? If, instead

of proposing a general strike, a few anarchists had proposed to retaliate to

the eviction of the camp by burning down the city hall, would 10 000 people

have showed up with Molotov cocktails?

! The general strike represented the desire to extend the movement to

the sphere of production, that is to say, to the workplace. This strike only

took place as an answer to the quasi-military eviction of the camp. Some

might say that people just wanted to express their disgust against the city

hall and its decision to destroy the camp, that they wanted to send a

warning to the mayor. But, if so, why was there any need to talk about a

general strike instead of having a saturday afternoon march like what

happened in New York after the mass arrests on the Brooklyn bridge?There were many marches after the murder of Oscar Grant, but no one

ever spoke of a general strike back then. What is important for the 2nd of

November is that everyone came with their little sign saying something

about the general strike.

! It is confronted with the police under its real uniform, that of the

discipline that the population of Oakland, at that point largely sympathetic to

the movement, turned itself naturally against what makes it a compact

whole: the labour process. And that whole then got a name: the proletariat.

What can be seen on the night of the 26th of October, during the vote, is ageneralisation, a contamination. As with cells, contamination propagates

itself from one body to another. "Its the terrain, not the germ".! But this strike, at the same time, didnt happen in as much as no onestruck. The moment where a possibility emerged to recognize oneself as a

worker with her power became straight away a handicap. In other words,

the moment where a class belonging was outlined, it was only as an

external constraint.

4

2 ILWU is a union representing mainly dockers of the West coast founded after the general strike of1934 and considered one of the last unions that can sometimes have more "radical positions. Itplayed the central role in the Longview strike. (see note 4)


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! An interesting parallel can be drawn with Greece. The occupation of

Syntagma square managed to force unions to call for 3 days of general

strikes, the 15th, 28th and 29th of June 2011, during which the vote on

austerity measures in Parliament took place. In Greece, unions were

compeletly left behind by the movement and so tried to catch up with it.

Just like in the US, the phrase "general strike" means little in Greece.There, general strikes are still numerous3 although they are more and more

abandoned, and the feeling that they cant obtain anything is growing (the

participation in the three strikes went down drastically from each day on). In

the US, the victories of the old workers movement have all been destroyed,

and hence that situation can tell us much more about the content of the

present moment. In that respect, Oakland is nothing but the crystalizationof

the present moment.

Once a struggle which thinks of itself as being only political (and not

economic) ends up confronting one of its limits and goes through the

process of transforming itself, then it is a natural feeling to acknowledge

yourself as labor-power. But the transformation of this struggle into

something else by means of the acknowledgment of everyone as labor-

power can no longer take place. The general strike did not bring any more

victories in Oakland than in Athens. In both cases, the general strike was

the first step in the rupture created by the movement. The second step was

the general strikes own faillure. The announcement of everyone to each

other that they were not what they thought they were was then the real

victory of the general strike. The first of the radical chains that attaches us

to the present moment becomes then the one that makes us labor-power.We can still pretend that we could be everthing, but we ve never been so

nothing. One can spurn the dust, there aint any prize no more.4

Circulation needs to be grasped as such, as a moment defined by

production. Being far from any center of production, it seems that circulation

of commodities or money was never grasped by the occupations as a part

of an organic whole.

! The restructuring in the 70s was due to a crisis of valorization that

could only be overcome by a recentralization in favor of the growth of

5

3There were 38 general strikes in Greece between 1980 and 2008 (by comparison, 10 in Franceduring the same time, and of course, none in the US).

4 The disaster of the Longview strike (that ended up with contracts that were at the best,disappointing) played the same role but negatively: instead of opening new horizons, it onlyannounced that the party was over. Once confronted by the impossibility to unify the Occupymovement and a classical struggle around working conditions, the Longview strike ended up ininternal and bitter fights between the two camps. If struggle over the wage or the working

conditions are still present, moments like this show their structural incapacity to now be able tomake a leap beyond it. To struggle as a worker is to struggle, very often, for a lost cause, denyingones own identity of being nothing. It is only by seeing this that one can make the leap whichseparates, now, a particular struggle from generality.


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revenue and a dismantling of the old production process. As comrades

point out, "the invention of the shipping container and container ship is

analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the

1970s" [Blockading the port is only the first of many last resorts, Society of

Enemies, bayofrage.com].

!

The restructuring must be considered "as in itself". It is a moment withits own conditions, but also with its own ideological forms in which this

mode of production appears.

! The blockading of the economy can only leap into the abolition of the

economyif production and circulation are seen as two individual moments

of the same valorization process, with labor as its core, commodity as a

passing form and value as its essence. This understanding will be produced

by the struggles trying to overcome their own limits. Until then, the economy

will be only seen as a mass of circulating commodities or just as a flux of

the money-commodity.

Second limit: the sphere of reproduction without that of production

! First of all, it is important to note the difference between the Oakland

Commune and the riots of December 2008 in Greece. The riots in Greece

took place at the levelof the reproduction of the proletariat, but never within

it. The questions of gender, food, housing, care, and health were never

even challenged in December 08 because the struggle appeared only as

the confrontation with police, that is, it only took this one form. Thereproduction of the proletariat as a whole was in front of them, but only

under the uniform of the cop. Looting was the only horizon to challenge it.

! The Greek riots in December 2008 were a turning point because they

sounded the beginning of a new cycle of struggle at the same time that the

news of bank crashes announced a new economic cycle. Since then,

revolts deepened simultaneously with the crisis. The sphere of reproduction

(by sphere of reproduction, we do not mean the reproduction of capital as a

whole, neither the reproductionand productionof the "race of workers"within the private sphere but the reproduction of the proletariat as a whole)

is the main sphere in the present moment where struggles appear. The

reason behind that is becauseeven in countries like Greece which, once

austerity measures were enforced, saw a drastic lowering of the nominal

wagethe first relation of proletarians to the crisis is through the

devaluation of the real wage ("real wage" in its broadest sense, i.e. taking

into account all the indirect wages): dismantling of the welfare state,

uncontrolled rise of unemployment, a housing bubble due to a withdrawal of

the investments from production to the rent, the burst of this bubble forprivate credit and a rising inflation.

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! More broadly, it looks like this cycle of struggle is just accentuating a

general tendency of the restructuring: that of decentering class struggle

from the sphere of production to the sphere of reproduction.

! The sphere of reproduction is not the same as the private sphere. It

includes it, but includes also the moment of the relation to the State which is

constituted in the public sphere (the public sphere is equal to the relation toproduction and the relation to the State). In the sphere of reproduction, one

is, theoretically, an individual and a citizen as labour-power destined to find

itself once again in the face-to-face with capital. The disconnection that is

produced by the restructuring, is that this face-to-face is not a given

anymore, and that the individual and citizen is not at the same time

necessarily a labour-power. From then on, what had made a constant

mediation between the sphere of production and that of the reproduction, as

much as it was a domination of the first over the second, is not a given

anymore, and the sphere of reproduction appears as an autonomous

moment, although it cannot be such (it can only exist for the sphere of

production). Its from then on that everything that was not questioned by

programmatism becomes all the more obvious: gender, sexuality, domestic

labour, housing, etc. And that struggles mainly take place around those

categories through a constant direct confrontation with the State.

! It is true that some of the movements of square occupations were partly

identifying themselves in opposition to only one moment of the reproduction

process (the rentier State in the Arab Spring, the austerity-cuts in Greece,

the housing in Israel), while others placed themselves directly within thewhole of reproduction (Spain and US). The first ones could be contained

only for a time, under a form of frontism. This fell apart as soon as the main

"demand" was realized (fall of Mubarak or Ben Ali, turning itself into a

never-ending cycle of riots (the epic battles of the Cairo proletariat) and

wildcat strikes (never-ending sit-ins in Tunisia). When this "demand" failed

(vote of anti-austerity measures in Greece, maintenance of the regime in

Quatar, launching of a civil war by Gadhafi, clear signs of the Israeli

government that nothing serious would be done), the movement fell apart.

Spain and US were the only two struggles that could never identifythemselves under any demand, struggles which started as a pure general

product of the crisis rather than as a product of one aspect of the crisis. But,

and thats one of their common points (the other main common point being

their link with the crisis), all of those movements had to deal with the

reproduction of the proletariat as a whole.

! The relation with the police is the other side of the autonomization of the

moment of reproduction. "If the major result of the production process is the

reproduction of the face-to-face between the proletariat and capital, it is notguaranteed that this face-to-face leads ipso facto to the first moment of

exchange between capital and labour (the purchase and sale of labour

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power). The disciplining of labour-power, facing a proletarian that has

become again, as proletarian, a poor, is everywhere on the agenda. The

forms of intervention are disciplinary ones." [Thorie Communiste, The

glass floor]. There is a being-together, only because all proletarians have

become again, poor. There is reunification by capital of all that had made

the proletariat fragmented into various stratas, which had allowed anymoron to pretend that the proletariat had disappeared or had been

integrated. But this bringing together is done without any other basis than

that of the discipline, and discipline is the task of the State. Discipline, in

that case, is only the police.

! Its for this reason that the figure of the cop ends up being, everywhere,

that of the main enemy. Not out of misunderstanding, but by a simple effect

of counter-strike: the geographical zoning within countries becomes more

and more pronounced and police violence is a daily affair, and, often, the

only relation with the State and capital.5

! Police violence effaced some frontiers in the Occupy movement (the

700 arrests of October 1st in NYC, the pepper-spraying of a line of students

quietly sitting in UC Davis by a copper with an impassive face,..) and

brought it about that many participants considered to be "liberals"

transformed themselves into radicals within a few days. The destruction of

the camps (and particularly the first destruction of the Oakland campin a

military style that evoked more Fallujah than "social dialogue"on the 25th

of October, and the image of the marine vet Scott Olson, with his face

wounded by a bean-bag shot while he was reading the first amendment to a

line of cops), was in certain places the swan song of the movement, but inmany, the moment of radicalization.

! Oakland was, in that respect, a particular place. Within the first days,

the general assembly voted the camp a police-free zone. Patrols at night

were taking place in order to make sure they wouldnt come too close. The

reasons were thus: a high presence of "radicals", a high presence of people

who grew up in the ghetto, and one of the most notoriously violent police

departments of the country left little room for the natural liberal embracing of

uniforms.6 One of the main forms of organization against the police was the

FTP marches organized each end of the week from the 7th of January on. If

8

5 For a more through development of the role of the police in the rentier State, refer to "Hanging bya Thread: Class, Corruption and Precarity in Tunisia", L.S., Mute magazine: "Corruption is then (...)a moment in the states habitual, harassing reproduction of the mass of marginals in therestructuring Tunisian economy. Thus the increasingly particularised experience of the relationshipto the state, is a universal experience of the class. One could say that in the moment of recognitionthat sparked the revolt, the particularisation of the individuals fate and the fragmentation ofexperience is understood as a class experience."

6

To all the previous reasons, one must be added: the mayor, Jean Quan, represent the leftierfringe of the Democratic Party. She started politics in the 70s in Maoist groups and was in the frontof the marches following Oscar Grants murder. There is, therefore, no room for any belief that itwould be possible to humanize the structure of the city (and that of the police).


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those marches were never of a particularly impressive number, what was

remarkable about them was that they had a large echo for the people who

grew up in West Oakland, one of the black middle-class bastions

transformed from the end of the 60s on, by pauperization, the

transformation of the production process (for that matter, the transformation

of ports and then the implementation of the containers system), the urbanpolitics dictated by rich neighborhoods and the intense repression against

the Black Panthers 7 and the "gangs" (and, from then on, the transformation

of those "gangs" into real mafias), as well as the massive arrival of heroin

and then crack (with the support of the CIA and political mafias). That

neighborhood is, in that sense, not an exception, but a blueprint of all the

nightmares that are Americas cities.8

Withdraw from production? The haunted-house and its glorious

tenants.

! Production, circulation and reproduction are three moments of the same

totality, of the same process, in which production is the "predominant one"

because it is the "real point of departure". One could write about circulation

and reproduction exactly as Marx wrote about distribution: "Distribution is

itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of

production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specific kind of

participation in production determines the specific forms of distribution, i.e.

the pattern of participation in distribution." [Grundrisse, 1857] We absolutely agree with Theorie Communiste when they say, "if class

struggle remains a movement at the level of reproduction, it will not

integrate its own raison-dtre, which is production. This is currently the

recurring limit of all riots andinsurrections, which defines them asminority

struggles. Revolution will have to penetrate production in order to abolish it

as a specific moment of the relation between people and, at the same time,

to abolish labour through the abolition of wage labour." [The present

moment, SIC 1, p.135] But when they then add that: "That is the key role of

productive labour and of those who at a specific moment are the directbearers of its contradiction, because they live this contradiction in their

9

7 The influence of the Black Panthers played the only role of historical referent on the imaginary ofthe Oakland Commune. The organization was born in Oakland and stayed there, throughout the70s, the highest of point of focus for social tensions. Somehow, the Black Panthers appeared atthis precise moment of the collapsing of programmatism, which means that their means of struggletook place only in the sphere of reproduction (free meals, free school, committees of neighborhoodprotection, womens rights,...) while their theoretical and organizational structure was still purelyprogrammatist.

8 The meticulous description of that process is brilliantly exposed by Mike Davis in City of Quartz(Verso). For the city of Oakland, refer to American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for PostwarOakland, Robert O. Self, Princeton University Press.


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existence which is both necessary and superfluous for capital at the same

time. Objectively, they have the capacity to make of this attack a

contradiction for capital itself, to turn the contradiction that is exploitation

back on itself as well as against themselves. The path of the abolition of

exploitation passes through exploitation itself; like capital, the revolution is

also an objective process." [op. cit.]this is when our roads diverge.Productive labour is a category within the reproduction of capital, not a

class division.

! There was an active subject in programmatism 9 that was not the same

as the proletariat, the working class, because programmatism had

production as its sole horizon (and distribution as its sole sphere of attack).

Its from then on that the notion of productive labour (and therefore of the

productive worker) was the Trojan horse of programmatism. Since the end

of that epoch, some try in vain to prove that every labour is

"productive" (including the "reproductive labour"), some persist in tracing an

old model and look desperately where could be hiding the new productive

worker that could act as a revolutionary subject, while others want to get rid

of those categories, seeing them as only moral. Going back to Marx allows

us to understand what really is productive labour as a categoryand not as a

class. Undertaking that question is not starting a theoretical debate on the

sexuality of angels, it is rather the attempt to practically liquidate the

categories in communist theory that cant see over a dead horizon: that of

programmatism.

! From Marx, we can say that any labour paid for by capital is productive(which implies, wage labour, surplus-value and the transformation of

surplus-value into additional capital). Its no coincidence that in the Missing

Chapter VI10, the section on productive and unproductive labour follows

that of subsumption. We can go so far as saying that any labour really

subsumedby capital is productive.

! Therefore, in the present time, we can say that almost all labour

performed by the global work force is productive. But it is only under the

measure of a particular capital.

10

9 We call programmatism the period from the midlle of the 19th century to the 1970s, the years ofthe restructuring. The point is not, unlike Moishe Postone, to look at this period as a mistake or asthe result of a poor understanding of Marx, but as a period of the class struggle. Lenin, Makhno orPannekoek were all programmatists. Describing the german left, Gilles Dauv gives a precisedefinition of what programmatism is: "The reality of the enterprise, as a form of productionspecifically capitalist, was not questioned. Thinking the abolition of economywas even less in thecards. (...) Self-management by the workers councils is capital seen from the point of view of theworker, i.e. from the point of view of the cycle of productive capitalism." [Ni Parlement ni syndicats:les conseils ouvriers!, new edition, Les nuits rouges, p.6, personal trans.] It is futile to try to

understand the "mistakes" of programmatism. One has to understand now, throughprogrammatism, how it is possible to affirm that we live in a different period.

10The Appendix in the Penguin version of Capital


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! Individual labor is productive when it fulfills the aforementioned three

conditions (wage, surplus-value, additional capital), i.e. the three moments

of the immediate process of production(the selling and buying of the labour

force, surplus-labour and accumulation). But it is only on the level of the

individual capital. "Hence labour as producing value always remains the

labour of the individual, but expressed in the form of general labour.

Consequently productive labouras labour producing valuealways

confronts capital as labour of the individual labour-power, as labour of the

isolated labourer, whatever social combinations these labourers may enter

into in the process of production. While therefore capital, in relation to the

labourer, represents the social productive power of labour, the productive

labour of the workmen, in relation to capital, always represents only the

labour of the isolated labourer." [Theories of Surplus-Value, volume I,

addenda 12, section B, mark 1321]

! What Marx lacked, is to unify the theory of productive and unproductive

labour (which was only fully elaborated in the manuscripts of the Theories

of Surplus-Value and the Missing Chapter VI) with the theory of the

schemes of capital reproduction based on the division of total social capital

into three sections, as developed in the third section of Capital, Volume II.

! At the level of total social capital, a labour is productive only according

to the section where it is realised. Therefore, there can be productive

labours in an unproductive sector and unproductive labours in a productive

one. Those two dynamics have nothing in common.

! A worker of the sector of luxury consumption can be productive for the

individual capitalhis boss represents, but he is not productive for the totalsocial capitalbecause the surplus-value that he produces will be realised

only when the commodity produced will be bought, and this buying can only

be done with the profits of another section. The surplus-value that he

produces for the individual capital is realised only by the consumptionof a

part of the surplus value of total social capital (using the revenue, the

capitalist "spends the fruit of his capital" [Grundrisse, p.468])11. That

surplus-value that the individual capital realizes will be divided into

additional capital and consumption. At the level of total social capital, that

surplus-value didnt disappear, it piled up in an unproductive sector. Thereis no possibilty of accumulation from an unproductive sector, whatever the

productivity of labour that it has obtained.

! For the individual capital, there is a subsumption of the productive

worker, for the total social capital, a distinction. Productive labor can

therefore only be understood at the level of the total social capital. It

corresponds to a sector that cannot even be delimited to some

commodities: the same flat screen sold to a proletarian who saved for

11

11

"The money which A here exchanges for living labour -- service in kind, or service objectified in athing -- is not capitalbut revenue, money as a medium of circulation in order to obtain use value,money in which the form of value is posited as merely vanishing, not money which will preserveand realize itself as such through the acquisition of labour." [Grundrisse, p.467]


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months and to a capitalist who did not is in the first case paid out of the

wage, in the second, out of the revenue. It therefore contains productive

labor in the first case, unproductive labor in the second. The commodity that

is being produced has therefore no importance of any kind ("this

'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as

does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give adamn for the junk." [Grundrisse, p.273]). Neither does the labor because,

as seen previously, a worker is nowadays always productive for her own

capitalist. The experience of labor is the same, the exploitation of the

"productive worker" being the same as that of anyone else.

! The attempt to identify productive labour and the productive sector was

not just a poor understanding of Marxian categories, it was the Achilles

heel of programmatism. Marx himself could not go beyond his epoch, and

he steps back towards the end of the section on productive and

unproductive labour in the Theories of surplus-value. Thus he comes back

to what he just affirmed and attempts to identify productive labour and

material production [op. cit., addenda 12, section G]. It is obvious that

material production can in no way be a valid category ("to be productive

labouris a quality of labour which in and for itself has absolutely nothing to

do with the particular contentof the labour, its particular usefulness or the

specific use value in which it is expressed" [Draft Chapter VI of Capital,

Results of the Direct Production Process, mark 483]). The capitalist mode

of production is production of commodities, material or not and one can in

no way divide the sectors of production into material and immaterial. Thishardly convincing last minute about-turn is only the proof that in

programmatism, productive labour could never be understood as a

category, but always under a moral sign.

! Marx couldnt avoid being programmatist. This era is over and one can

only understand now productive and unproductive labour as a category.

! For all that, we cannot make this step which consists in saying that

every proletarian is a productive worker or that it doesnt matter. Not

because it is wrong (that wouldnt matter), but because putting the problem

in this fashion is always doing it for political reasons. And those politicalreasons always hide whats at stake: the understanding of what capital is.

For it is only from that, negatively, that our understanding of communism is

outlined. An analysis that doesnt attack productive labour as a category

resolves in thinking the capitalist mode of production as simple circulation of

objects, or as a system of good citizens ripped off by a rapacious banker. Its

horizon, at best, can not envisage the abolition of production.

Third limit: the sphere of the political, a sphere between the public and

private spheres. Class alliance, unsustainable subject and

percentages.

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During more than two months, the Oakland Commune faced the

reproduction of the proletariat as a whole, with all of its differences that

makes it an unsustainable subject. What does it mean to be part of the

proletariat in Oakland? It can mean being a 50 year old port employee who

has seen his social level fall from comfortably middle-class12

of the Fordistepoch to a proletarianized suburbanite who knows shell never be able to

come up with the payments of the life she bought with credit. It can mean

being a teacher wholl get laid off in the next six months and have

absolutely no idea where shell end up on the labour market. But most of

the time, it just means growing up as surplus-population, as absolutely

dispossessed, having for their sole horizon of survival the crack or meth

economy, prostitution and the porn industry. 13 And in that case, it also

means being a walking target for any scumbag with a uniform.14 In any

case, to be a part of the proletariat means the impossibility of identifying

oneself under any such identity except that of having "No Future". What

made people go to the Oscar Grant Plaza was not the idea of a communal

identity but of a communal lack. It was on that base that people

organized.15 And on that basis, they could not organize differently than they

13

12The ambiguous term of "middle-classes" is here used in lack of anything better. If it isundeniable that a good part of the American "middle-classes" are composed by workers (ortheir herons) who saw their living standards rising in the same time as their credits during the

years of economical boom, those classes have always had a particular vision of the world.Therefore, putting them under the term "proletariat" without understanding their particularities,is not to understand the collisions within it once that the many stratas collapse. The re-proletarianization of a part of the "middle-classes" is one of the main aspects of this crisis.Those people play therefore a major but also particular role. It is this particularity that we haveto address.

13 Official unemployment rate in Oakland is 16.2% (U.S. avg. is 9.1%). Recent job growth isnegative. Oakland jobs have decreased by 2.7% in 2011. Violent crimes official rate is of 16 per1000 in Oakland compare to 4 nationwide.

14 The murder of Oscar Grant, executed in cold blood by the Bay Area Transportation Police onNew Years Eve 2009, while he was handcuffed, head against the ground and unarmed was one ofthe ferment of Occupy Oakland. Many riots happened the following weeks and the night of thecourt verdict (the cop was sentenced to two years of jail) in July 2010. The particularity of thismurder (somehow quite banal for the Oakland Police Department or the BART) is that a train ofpassengers was on the other side. The videos of the murder were seen by hundred of thousandsof times in the following days. The changing of the Frank Ogawa Plaza into Oscar Grant Plaza inthe first days of the camp proves the resonance of that murder in the collective ideal of the camp,as much as a general noncompromising attitude with the police, and not one limited to the radicalmilieu.

15 The Tumblr blog "wearethe99percent gives a quite precise idea of what all those who thought

joining the Occupy movement had in common: nothing, if it is not a life shattered by economicmisery. Beyond the harrowing aspect of those texts, what is central is that no demand can get outoff them. People expose their personal economic misery with the sad variety that goes with it andwithout a trace of hope, only the one of a "Together we stay!"


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did: on the level of the reproduction of the proletariat. Which is anything -

but labour.

! The division between the public and private spheres is not the same as

the one between the spheres of production and reproduction. In the public

sphere, the individual exists vis--vis production i.e. as a laborer, but also

vis--vis the State, i.e. as a citizen. In the private sphere, the laborer existsonly as an individual. The State, in the capitalist mode of production, is a

necessary sphere of mediation between the public and the private sphere. It

is the sphere that ensures that the proletarian reproduces herself as a

proletarian, that is to say as an individual going back to the face-to-face

between labour force and capital. But the State, by definition, has to be a

separate sphere, although by definition too, the State cannot be something

else than a bourgeois State, i.e. a State serving capital. The sphere of the

politicalis the creation of another sphere, parallel to that of the State, a kind

of in-between, a sphere where the public pretends to be private and the

private pretends to be public. At the end of the day, this sphere exists only

outside of the public and private sphere (to the contrary of the State, which

exists only to maintain the separation between those two spheres and their

mediation), only because the two others are untouched. The sphere of the

political is the idea of a civil society not separated from the State, that is to

say not separated from politics. It is the idea of society in its broadest

bourgeois-liberal meaning (and society is nothing else than the last result of

the production process).

! It is important to emphasize that the Occupy movement in the US never

really went out of the squares despite the noteworthy and praiseworthyefforts such as "Occupy the Hood". Considered as a neutral place, the

squares had the aspect of the reconquest of a public space (often privatized

as has shown the legal complications around Zuccotti Park), while making it

a private space where anyone can bring her own tent and expose her

existence. The comparison, often made, with a Baptist protestant church is

not without sense: what its all about is to feel born again, to recognize a

new belonging, to lay bare ones difficulties and feelings, to make them

public. The human microphone as a form of relations of struggle

expresses that the best. Developed only to counter the ban against soundequipment in Zuccotti park, it ended up being the only form in which the

movement could recognize itself, its differentia specifica, in that it served

before all to express the public sharing of a private suffering.

! Another example, already mentioned, of this impossibility to get out of

the square is that of the elementary schools in Oakland. The budget of the

district, voted on during the third week of the Oscar Grant plaza

Occupation, settled on the closing of 5 schools (all located in the poorest

neighborhood) at the end of the year. That measure is part of a larger plan

which attempts to restructure the school system in Oakland before the endof 2013. There could be up to 30 schools closed out of 101 schools in the

district. Despite that, no real longlasting link was created between the

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square and the schools, although some of them are only a walking distance

from the plaza. This shows that the Oakland Commune could not recognize

itself in the most basic struggle on the level of the reproduction of the

proletariat. Outside of the square, nothing could be attacked, nothing could

be seen.

!

Delimited to this space, this "commune", the movement could neitheraddress the public sphere nor the private one. To address the public sphere

would have required it to be able to address labour, production. To address

the private sphere would have required it to be able to pull down the Jericho

walls that surrounded it, to attack neighborhood after neighborhood, and

address there the causes that determine, that construct the private sphere.

! If the movement placed itself on the level of the political sphere, it can

also be explained by the variety of classes that came to the squares. In a

city like Santa Cruz, which counts a huge population of homeless (mainly

vets of the last wars), and a general population mainly composed of liberal

middle-classes (the university of Santa Cruz is the main economic motor of

the city and the price of real estate is amongst the highest in the country),

the camp could never get the same cohesion as elsewhere due to the lack

of a middle-strata. In then end, it quickly turned into a homeless camp with

discussions organized by and for middle class liberals. When the

occupation of a bank was happening literally on the other side of the river

(namely a separation of less than a mile and a complete view of each

other), and that place is about to be taken over by the police, some present

in the occupation went the camp to ask for some support. A friend recalledthat after trying to convince a homeless person that it was in the interest of

the camp to defend the occupation, this person pointed at the American flag

in front of his tent and replied, "Have you seen that? Does it read "Occupy"

on it?"

! This counter-example is just here to show us a rule: the physical

cohesion of the movement (in as much as its limits) was due to the class

variety in it. As we have seen, the geographical situation of the Oscar Grant

Plaza, located 4 blocks from the frontier between Downtown and West

Oakland, played a major role. By comparison, Zuccotti park in New York islocated 18 miles from the Bronx, which explains the difference of

composition between the two movements, since many couldnt go to

Zuccotti. The weakness of many of those square occupations was seen as

a feeling of non-unification, in the lack of middle-stratas. Seen through

cynical eyes, one can say that in some cities, those camping are those

condemned to it and those who can afford it. In those cities, the moment of

disintegration always comes when the higher stratas leave out of disgust for

their proximity with the lowest ones. This disgust was present in New York,

it was a central dynamic in Santa Cruz, but, to the exception of individualquarrels, it never took shape in Oakland.

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! This question of unification is related to the sole slogan that can be

highlighted from the US occupations (a slogan that sometimes pretended to

be a demand but that can be nothing more than a sand castle) is: "we are

the 99%". It echoed the reality of a cross-class struggle just as much as it

echoed the ideal of maintaining it as an impossible identity. This movement

of occupations was a cross-class struggle, admittedly, to the extent that apart was composed by diverse middle-classes petrified for their future. But

the slogan reflects the idealism that drove a part of the crowd: that of a

trans-class struggle, of a struggle where all classes would melt together

under a common banner, but remain as they are. The disgust that quickly

took over the liberal middle-classes towards the presence of homeless in

most camps is the most basic proof that this slogan was nothing but a

fantasized identity, this identity being absolutely unsustainable per se.

Furthermore, the other side of the coin of the 99% slogan is the police, and

the recurring (and absolutely idiotic) question "Are cops part of the 99%?"

was somehow the most sober confession of helplessness of the movement

of occupations in the US. It is only because there could be this fantasized

unity of the 99% that this unity can extend to the only executioner that faces

it.

! At the same time, the slogan of the 99% has a richness to it, which is

that of generalization.16 Beyond the numerous critiques that the radicalmilieux have formulated, one must try to understand why, in a country

where no one was speaking of classes anymore, such a slogan was able to

bring together such varied classes; and one must also understand why

such a question always brought forth ones belonging to the "99%" (whichwas becoming, like in a Baptist church, a purely performative function). The

crisis, like all crises, comes with a possibility of generalization as much as a

possibility of separation. The first aspect is that of a revolutionary moment,

the second being the counter-revolution. A generalization is only possible

once all the classes involved attack the mode of production. It is then that

their class belonging falls apart and that they became the class, the

historical party. The body of the proletariat enters then in the process of

chemical precipitation. It becomes a body more solid than the milieu where

it was born. This process of precipitation is the "class-belonging". But thisclass-belonging is already a handicap, an obstacle, an external constraint

which, once accepted, turns out to be solely a burden with which one

doesnt know what to do. The slogan of the "99%", particularly in the US

context, is a class-belonging slogan (a weak one, but still a class belonging

slogan). And it is in that fashion that it becomes such a handicap. In the

internal struggle of this becoming class, the movement of communisation

16

16For us, generalizationis opposed to unification. Unification imposes the subsumption of all under

a unity. In generalization, particularities are intact but become linked with each other, organically.Unification could only function in programmatism - since there was subsumption of all under aunique subect: the male white worker. Generalization is the only communist horizon of the presentmoment.


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will be the tendency which, once class belonging is posed as an external

constraint, will tend towards the abolition of this class (and from then on, of

all classes). But before that, the question of generalization, neither as

impoverishment nor as compromise, but as radicalization, will be the main

question. This generalization will be a moment of rupture that will turn on

the masses.! At its peaks, there was a glimpse of that in the Oakland Commune.

! Another aspect of this internal tendency of the movement to recognize

itself under an unsustainable identity is the presence of the national flag. In

the US, the question of patriotism did not have the same resonance as in

the occupation of Syntagma square in Athens. Blaumachen underlines four

reasons explaining the presence of Greek flags in the Indignados

movement: the social structure of the movement and the links between

class struggle and anti-imperialism, the perception of austerity measures as

imposed by "foreigners", the meager place of Greece in the capitalist

nations hierarchy, the migratory crisis in Greece [The "Indignados"

movement in Greece, SIC 1]. But none of those reasons can explain the

presence of American flags in the Occupy movement (not even the social

structure, since it is not necessarily the petty-bourgeoisie whos carrying the

flags but often the most impoverishedvets with no future on the labour

market). In the same way as with the constant reference to the First

Amendment, those flags appear within the terrain opened by the idea of a

civil society not separated from politics. This idea can only take place once

the struggle attacks neither the private nor the public sphere, but insteadstagnates in the sphere of the political.

! In this fashion, any attempt to go beyond the sphere of the political and

to attack the private or the public sphere was an attempt to overcome the

limits of the struggle. Somehow, self-organizing as precarious workers or as

women or queers were two sides of the same attack. But then one must

answer the question: why did women and queers self-organize and not

precarious workers?17 This answer, for us, lies within the limits of a struggle

that takes into account the sphere of reproduction without that of

production. Somehow, one could say that this third limit of the struggle (thesphere of the political) is the product of the first two, their logical extension

in which both take form.

End of the "alternative"? From one counter-revolution to the next.

Tthe cycle of struggle of anti-globalization, rested on the idea of the

alternative. "The alternative doesnt present itself as the managing of the

17

17 Attempts to self-organize as precarious workers happened only once the movement had lost hisbreath and had lost the hope to reconquer a space. Furthermore, they never went beyond theradical milieus.


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really existing society, but as the other side of the present society,

reconstructed and redefined according to its needs." [R. Simon, Le

dmocratisme radical, Senonevero, p.106, perso. trans.] The movement of

square occupations (Arab Spring, Indignados and then Occupy) showed

as if it was even neededthat this alternative is obsolete. If one looks at

the Occupy movement, the main characteristic is the absence of demands,not by choice, but out of impossibility. But when one takes a closer look to

those demands (because behind this absence, one must see an

uncontrollable multitude of individual demandseach one coming to the

square with her own home-made placard), what one can see is a brand

new reformism (but one that cant be recuperated politically). Abolish the

Fed, make the bank pay, stop speculation, everyone comes with her little

idea of management and all that gets blended in the middle of yoga

classes, never-ending bongos playing, the shouting of a homeless person

pretending hes an FBI agent and the smell of incense.

! The characteristic of the present moment is the impossibility of the

slightest reform. In such a context, the avalanche of reformist propositions

that made up the daily bread in all those camps should be seen only in their

entirety, i.e. in the fact that no single slogan could emerge.

! But if one considers that the era of the "alternative" is over, one must

recognize that the present struggles have many common grounds. One is

the personification of capital under the vulgar feature (and structurally anti-

Semitic, although this anti-Semitism didnt work there, contrary to the

English occupations) of the finance capitalist, of the speculator. That is, to

see the capitalist but not capital, and hence, to consider the economy as anatural process.

! Another of those grounds is the role played by civil society. In Oakland,

reaction was the terrain of the non-profits, which, with their influence on

black or brown populations, were one of the pillars of the movement in as

much as a break pedal. Those non-profits have put into question the idea of

political legacy, of the transfer of radicalism from one generation to another.

Some who are part of them pretended that without their work--that is, once

the movements of the 70s broke down, carrying the duty of spreading

radical councisouness and maintaining struggles within local structuresthroughout the years--the Oakland Commune would have never been

possible. This is probably a factor, but then one must ask the question of

the rupture. If non-profits were able to carry a form of the radical tradition (a

quite meager and questionable tradition, however, seeing the compromise

that the non-profits had done with the administration), their role during the

Oakland Commune was to try to contain the movement. If some have seen

a battle over the question of legitimacy towards the movement between

radicals and non-profits, the answer is of little matter. What matters is that,

in most cases, it was the measures proposed by radicals (refusing tocompromise with the police, unpermitted demonstrations, the general strike,

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the occupation of buildings, posing the gender question...) and not the ones

proposed by the non-profits that were chosen by the movement.

! But the non-profits raised a crucial question: that of racial legitimacy.

One cannot think of a movement in the US without tackling the question of

race. Each time the non-profits were trying to bring back order, they always

did it under the banner of "Follow those whiteys and youll end up in jail!"

The fact that this question found a recurring echo in the debates shows that

it is a central one. Even if not all the members of non-profits are from ethnic

minorities, they are respected by them. Which is not always the case of

radicals, who, for the most part, moved to Oakland out of free choice in the

last years. It is certain that a black or chicano person from the ghetto does

not have the same position in front of a judge as a white person, especially

if their cases are considered political.18 The question of risks and legitimacy

was therfore central in the debates around and in the movement, not even

to mention the question of involving undocumented immigrants in the

movement. What must be underlined is that, although there is some truth in

it, racial conflicts were very rare19 and radicals found a lot of support with

the people coming from the ghetto.

! Somehow, one could say that the limits underlined in this text were

already inherent to the period of anti-globalization. The key leap from that

period to the current one is the withdrawal of the idea of the alternative. The

slogan "Another World is Possible" would sound now as faded as "Bring the

War Home!" and it is note-worthy that none of the slogans of the anti-

globalization era were in the Oakland Commune, although the references tothe Black Panthers were constant.20 But one should see the alternative only

in the way it interlinked revolution and counter-revolution in the previous

cycle of struggle. The alternative was formalizing practices of struggle once

it was obvious that any workersidentity was gone. The alternative wasnt in

itself a counter-revolution. It is counter-revolution that was using it, that was

its achievement.

! This cycle of struggle, as any cycle of struggle, contains within itself its

own counter-revolution. This counter-revolution has for its main content the

creation of an identity that can only exist in the sphere of the political."Every stage of the development of the class struggle must overcome the

traditions of previous stages if it is to be capable of recognizing its own

tasks clearly and carrying them out effectively -- except that development is

19

18During the movement, the differences of sentencing according to race were more than obvious.The fact must be added that growing up in the ghetto means often carrying with you a policerecord, past jail sentences or a suspended sentence. In any case, risks are not the same.

19Beyond all that, one question can be asked: why did the movement never succeed in integrating

the chinese population since the plaza is only a block from Chinatown?

20 As well as, in a broader way, references to the cycle of struggle of the 70 s. "Power to thepeople!" was heard constantly, for example.


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now proceeding at a far faster pace. The revolution thus develops through

the process of internal struggle. It is within the proletariat itself that the

resistances develop which it must overcome; and in overcoming them, the

proletariat overcomes its own limitations and matures towards

communism." [A. Pannekoek, World revolution and communist tactics,

Chapter III]! When there is no generalization, there is then the loss of the content of

rupture that was present in a practice. In Egypt, Tahir square allowed a

completely new role of women within struggles, in the begining, at least by

the very simple fact that every one had to share the same place day and

night. A year later, aggressions and rape of women are more and more

common there and demonstrations denouncing sexual harrassment are

violently attacked.

! Any activity that tends to go beyond those practices, beyond this

identity, beyond the sphere of the political, attacks then what the present

moment produces of counter-revolution.

Rifts and rift activity

In its constitution, the Oakland Commune had to deal with the whole of

the reproduction of the proletariat, without a revolutionary process around it.

This meant organizing for food, health care, shelter, activities, and all the

rest of it, but still being imprisoned in the relations and categories of

capitalism and all the "old filthy business that comes with it". It thereforeconstituted itself around a community that was the real community of the

struggle inasmuch as it was a community within the capitalist world. That

became, for example, obvious to anyone when a young guy was shot by a

gang member who was looking for him exactly a month after the beginning

of the camp. Reality then struck back and everyone present describes the

scene as a moment where no one knew what to do. The Oakland

Commune was not a form or a model, it was a dynamic.

! The most obvious of those categories that the Oakland Commune had

to deal with was the gender division. By "category", we do not mean anabstraction or a vague sociologizing classification. Each mode of production

has its own categories and they existand not appearat the most

concrete level. But they exist only as relations, not as beings.

! Peoples lives have been crushed by capitalism, their perception is only

through this alienated violence that capitalism offers, but every man has

always the last resort of dominating the one subject that capitalism creates

as reproductive and sexual object: the woman. That particular domination

exists only through capital but is not the attribute of any class. This doesnt

justify anything, it just helps us understand what our starting point is: the"present conditions" that must be abolished.It is then obvious that if

thousands of people are to meet for an undetermined period of time, then

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sexual harassment is going to be a constant challenge. Because if the

camp was to bea haven for anyone, it had obviously to be first of all one for

women or queers. And it is on this question that "rift activity" shows exactly

what it is. Women and queers had toself-organize for a matter of survival,21

but they had to self-organize withinthe totality that was the camp. And this

totality, as we said, couldnt exist as such. Women and queers self-

organizing were one of the main dynamics that would prevent the camp

from falling into a fantasized identity, that of the "we are the 99%", because

the 99% is a compact whole of the individual poverty and violence of

capitalist relations. The 99% is harassment, rape and murder. The

organization of an Occupy Patriarchy front was a constant reminder that

there was nothing that united this camp but negativity. That became

extremely clear when, in the second camp, women and queers were not as

strongly organized.

! The connection between the gender question and the two limits of the

struggle (circulation and reproduction) is obvious: it is because the Oakland

Commune couldnt face labor as a category (a category is complete only

once it contains all of its attributes) that it couldn t face gender. Labour is

what allows the separation of the totality into spheres: production and

reproduction, public and private. Without facing labour, the totality cant be

grasped, and neither can its common distinction: labour creates gender and

without labour, gender can only be grasped through an essentialization.

! What is a "rift"? It is any class struggle activity that says: "We have to

act as a webut we cannot exist as a we". It is any moment that shows apossible overcoming from self-organization to generalization. "Whether

there is unification, but then there is the abolition of the same which is self-

organizable, or whether there is self-organization but then unification, is a

dream which is lost in the conflicts that the diversity of situations

implies." [Thorie Communiste, Self-organization is the first act of the

revolution...]22

What are rift activities? It is taking part in struggles, understanding their

limits and hitting against it, defending measures and practices that will open

self-organization towards its abolition.! Communisation will be the abolition of all classes by the proletariat and

this overcoming is already being produced in present struggles inasmuch

as its counter-revolution. But if communisation is nothing but a set of

measures, those measures will have to be pushed for and defended. They

wont come down from heaven. Some groups have coined the term "rift" to

name the activities in the present moment that announce communisation. It

21

21 Concerning the Queer movement, survival and self-organization, see the Bashback comrades

[Bashback! Queer ultraviolence, anthology, Ardent Press]

22 Thorie Communiste uses the term "unification" where we use "generalization". We believethose two have an absolutely different meaning (see note 16).


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is of course obvious that those activities are not the property of a

"communising tendency" or even of a political milieu, but a current, in the

sense of a shared horizon.

! What is central is that those activities are not the germs for a revolution

to come, they are not a model for what communisation could/should/will be,

neither are they the beginning of the revolution. They are the activities thatare necessary in the present moment because they struggle with

communisation as their horizon. They are nothing else than practices within

the current struggles, practices that can never be formalized. Their point is

to act within self-organization but hitting against the limits of self-

organization.

! Capital wants to turn any limit into a barrier that it can overcome. So

does anyone in a struggle, at the moment of a rift. This barrier, built or

present as a necessary first step, is self-organization. Capital, as a mode of

production, can never overcome its own limits. When a mode of production

transforms its barriers into limits and overcome them, it means that it grows

into a new mode of production. Every limit is always definitive. Once a

struggle overcomes its own limits, it leaves "the struggle" behind and

engages in a revolutionary process. There, there is no growth, but rupture.

Farewell to the Commune

! Some might question the fact that we chose to call the Occupy Oaklandmovement the "Oakland Commune". But this name didnt come from a

purely wishful-thinking militantism, but somehow reflect a reality of the

struggle, with its splendor and its weaknesses. Grasping the sphere of

reproduction and that of circulation without the sphere of production,

battling within the sphere of the political, the Oakland Commune was one of

the most prominent and sharpest moments of the present crisis (neither its

product, nor its cause, but a moment of the crisis), but at the same time

bound to be an enclave. If we have tried to analyze this struggle, it is to see

towards which horizon it leads. Analyzing a struggle is not to"see in povertynothing but poverty", but to see "in it the revolutionary, subversive side,

which will overthrow the old society." [Marx, Poverty of philosophy]

! In all that it achieved, the Oakland Commune was the strongest echo

from the future that if there will be a communist revolution, its content will be

the complete abolition of all the categories and relations of capitalist mode

of production. It showed it everyday, in its victories as much as in its

defeats. As crystalization of the present moment, the Oakland Commune

showed everyday, in its defeats as much as in its victories, that every

category of the capitalist mode of production creates a limit that the strugglemust overcome. This overcoming is possible only through generalization,

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contamination of all the cell tissues of society. This generalization is not an

enlargement, but a moment of rupture.

! The expansion of struggles outside the work place taking reproduction

as a whole into consideration is a moment of the crisis, something that no

one could have envisioned. In this fashion, the US Occupations, and in

Oakland more than anywhere else, went a step further than December2008 in Greece. Struggles now are mainly within the reproduction sphere,

and when they grasp labour, it is only in its circulation sphere.

Consequently, the autonomization and the personification of the moments

of the production process are the horizon of struggles. Three reasons for

that: the end of the worker identity and its tradition of struggle (which is as

well the clearance of its juridical framing), the diversity of the proletariat in

times of crisis (once the different strata collapse) and, above all, the drastic

fall in the real salary compared to the nominal one. If labor and production

are still ghosts in those struggles, it doesnt mean at all that the productive

workers will be the central figure of the coming struggles. Labour and

production will have to be absorbed fully as categories before measures

can be taken for their abolition.

! The coming struggles will overcome the seclusion of those spheres, not

by considering production as the so far missed or unseen center, but by

grasping production as a process, and therefore grasping capital as value in

process. That day, the struggles will blow the trumpets, they will pull down

the walls that surrounds them, and they will see that under the riot gear lies

a mode of production.

Documents

Under the Riot Gear