There's a boatload of people nowadays who are trying to escape the rule of the economy. They're becoming bakers instead of consultants. They're going on unemployment as soon as they can. They're forming cooperatives, SCOPs and SCICs. They're trying to "work differently." But the economy is so well designed that it now has a whole sector, that of the "social and solidarity economy," which runs on the energy of those escaping it. A sector that merits a special ministry and accounts for 10% of the French GDP. All kinds of nets, discourses, and legal structures have been put in place to capture the escapees. They devote themselves in all sincerity to the thing they dream of doing, but their activity is socially recoded, and this coding ends up overshadowing everything they do. A few people take collective responsibility for the upkeep of their hamlet's water source and one day they find that they're "managing the commons." Not many sectors have developed such an obsessive love of bookkeeping, out ofa concern for justice, transparency, or exem­ plarity, as that ofthe social and solidarity economy. Any small to medium business is a bookkeeping bordello by comparison. However, we do have more than a hundred and fifty years of experience of cooperatives telling us they have never consti­ tuted the slightest threat to capitalism. Those that survive end up sooner or later becoming businesses like the others. There is no "other economy, " there's just another relationship with the economy. A rela­tionship of distance and hostility, to be exact. The mistake of the social and solidarity economy is to believe in the structures it adopts. It's to insist that what occurs inside it conforms to the statutes, to the official modes of operation. The only relationship one can have with the structures adopted is to use them as umbrellas for doing something altogether different than what the economy authorizes. So it is to be complicit in that use and that distance. A commercial print shop tended by a friend will make its machines available on the weekends it is idle, and the paper will be paid for under the table so there's no record. A group of carpenter friends will use all the equipment they have access to in their company to build a cabin for the ZAD. A restaurant whose name is known and respected throughout the city hosts after-hours discussions among comrades that musn't be heard by the intel­ligence services. We should make use of economic structures only on condition that we tear a hole in them. […] The fact remains that we must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do, and provide ourselves the means to do it. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.108-111

One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form. After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term. In sharp contrast to that, there are the inherited methods of activist construction, so grossly defec­tive, so exhausting, so destructive, when they are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action. It's a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A practical matter. What the perception of entities-individual or collective­ bars our access to is the plane where things really happen, where the collective potentials form and fall apart, gain strength or dissipate. […] To live communism is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong to, but to deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means cutting certain ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the smallest things. […] Perception in terms of bonds dismisses the whole alternative between individual and collective, and does so positively. In a real situation, an "I" that says what needs to be said can be a "we" of extraordinary power. And so, the particular happiness of any "commune" reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a certain quality of ties, the radiant energy of each frag­ment of world that it harbors-good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to individual and collective confinement, adios to the reign of nar­cissism. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143-144

What's curious is the list of priorities that this purely neoliberal reform sets out: "give more power to 'communities' (localism and decentralization), encourage individuals to engage actively in their 'community' (volunteer work), transfer responsibilities from the central government to local authorities, support coopera­tives, mutual societies, charitable associations and 'social enterprises,' publish public data (open government)." Liberal society's maneuver, at the moment when it can no longer hide its implosion, is to try and save the particular and particularly unappealing nature of the relations that constitute it by repli­cating itself in a proliferation of little societies or collectives. Work-based, neighborhood-based collectives, collectives of citizens, of activists, of associations, of artists, etc., collectives of every sort are the future of the social. There again, one joins as an individual, on an egalitarian basis, around an interest, and one is free to leave when one chooses. So they share society's loose and ectoplasmic tex­ ture. They appear to be simply a blurry reality, but that vagueness is their distinguishing trait. On the other hand, the theater troupe, the seminar, the rock group, the rugby team, are collective forms. They are assemblages composed of multiple hetero­ geneous elements. They contain humans allotted different positions, different tasks, who make up a particular configuration, with its distances, its spacings, its rhythm. And they also contain all kinds of non-humans-places, equipment and materials, rituals, cries, and refrains. This is what makes them forms, specific forms. But what charac­terizes "the collective" as such is precisely that it is formless. Even in its very formalism. The formalism, which claims to be a remedy for its absence of form, is only a mask for it or a ruse, and generally temporary. It's enough to apply for membership and be accepted in order to belong just like anyone else. The postulated equality and horizontality basically make any asserted singularity scandalous or meaningless, and enable a diffuse jealousy to set its prevailing mood. The average members find an opium there which allows them to forget their feelings of inadequacy. The tyranny peculiar to collectives is that of an absence of structure. That is why they have a tendency to spread everywhere. Thus nowadays when one is really cool, one doesn't just form a "music group," one establishes a "musicians collective." Ditto for contemporary artists and their "artist collectives." And since the sphere of art so often anticipates what will be generalized as the economic condition of every­ one, one won't be surprised to hear a management researcher and "specialist in collective activity" note this development: "Before, one considered the team as a static entity in which everybody had their role and their objective. One spoke then about a production team, an intervention team, a decision-making team. Now however, the team is an entity in motion because the individuals composing it change roles to adapt to their envi­ ronment, which also is changing. Today the team is regarded as a dynamic process." What salaried employee in one of the "innovative professions" still doesn't know what the "tyranny of the absence of structure" means? In this way the perfect fusion of exploitation and self-exploitation is brought about. While every business is not yet a collective, collectives are now already businesses-businesses that for the most part don't produce anything, anything other than themselves. Just as a batch of collectives could very well take over from the old society, it is to be feared that socialism will survive only as a socialism of collectives, of little groups of people who force themselves to "live together," that is, to be social. Nowhere is "living together" talked about more than where everyone basically hates everyone else. […] Self-entrepreneurs also need an oasis against the neoliberal desert. But the oases are annihilated in their turn: those seeking refuge there bring the desert sands in with them. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.145-148

The more "society" falls apart the more the attrac­tion of collectives will grow. They will project a false escape. This scam works all the better as the atomized individual becomes painfully aware of the freakishness and misery of their existence. Collectives are designed to reintegrate those whom this world rejects, and who reject it. They may even promise a parody of "communism," which inevitably yields disappointment and swells the mass of those disgusted with everything. The false antinomy formed by individual and collective together is not hard to unmask, however. All the defects which the collective is in the habit of lending so generously to the individual-selfishness, narcissism, mythomania, pride, jealousy, possessiveness, calculation, the fantasy of omnipotence, self-interest, mendacity-are found in worse measure, more caricatured and unassailable, in collectives. No individual will ever be as possessive, narcissistic, self-centered, full of bad faith, and determined to believe in their own nonsense as a collective can be. One thinks of those who say "France," "the proletariat," "society'' or "the collective" without blinking an eye. Anyone with a good ear can't help but hear them saying "Me! Me! Me!" underneath those other words. In order to construct something collectively powerful, we should abandon the idea of "collective" and all the disastrous exteriority to oneself and to others that it conveys. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.148-149

Early in 1852 Marx observed that one response to political defeat was for the working class to retreat into essentially utopian schemes: "In part [the proletariat] throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionising of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck.” [Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp. 110–11.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.61

The articles on the co-operative movement by Ernest Jones, Chartist and editor of the weekly Notes to the People, contain ideas which Marx was to elaborate further in the "Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association" and other documents. In these articles, criticism is levelled against the theory and practice of the bourgeois co-operators, "Christian socialists" and others who were attempting to distract the workers from class struggle and convince them that it was possible to abolish social evils and exploitation by creating workers' co-operative societies. Jones contended that co-operation could never serve as a lever for social transformation so long as it was practised only in the form of scattered, local and isolated societies acting in the conditions, and on the basis, of the capitalist system. On the other hand, co-operative production and trade would be one of the main economic measures of the working class after it had won state power on a nation-wide scale. Co-operation must needs be nation-wide, and its success must depend on who commands political power. Political power was needed "to reconstruct the bases of society". "Under the present system," Jones wrote, addressing the co-op members, "... all your efforts must prove vain—have proved vain—towards the production of a national result”. Marx's direct participation in these articles by Jones bears witness to the close association of the founders of Marxism and the representatives of the revolutionary wing of the Chartist movement, and also to the extent of the influence of Marxist ideas on the Left-wing Chartists. Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, Preface, pp. XXV - XXVI

[…] the working classes are exhorted to subscribe their pence, under the conviction that, by so doing, they will soon be enabled to beat the monopolist out of the field, and become workers and shopkeepers for themselves. They are told that the pence of the working-man are, collectively, more powerful than the sovereigns of the rich—that they can outbuy the money lords in their own markets—that they can outbuy the landlords on their own acres. The fallacy of this is proved by the fact, that out of the annual income of the empire, a by far greater portion is absorbed by the rich than by the working classes (a fact too well known to need statistics)—a fact most forcibly conveyed to us by the recollection, that during the last fifty years, while the savings of the working classes (a great portion of the same, however, belonging to the middle classes) have been £43,000,000, the rich classes have increased their capital by £2,414,827,575. It is, therefore, an error to say, that capital against capital—pence against pounds—the co-operation of the working classes can beat down the combination of the rich, if their power of so doing is argued on the ground, that they possess more money collectively. […] “Again," say they, "admitting that our capital is smaller than that of our masters, we do not merely intend to balance capital against capital as it stands, and there to stop, but so to employ whatever capital we possess, as to make it reproduce itself, while the effect of our success is to impoverish the great employer, and thus daily lessen the discrepancy in our relative resources." It must, however, be recollected, that while the working classes are trying to do this with their little capital, the monied classes will be trying to do the same thing with their enormous riches; that the monied classes, further, have the advantage of being already far ahead in the race—that they wield all the national power—that they are, to a great extent, independent of home trade—that their cannonballs open new markets, of which they will take good care to maintain exclusive possession—that they control the entire monied and commercial system, and can, therefore, expand or contract the currency, raise or depreciate the various interests, glut or restrict the market, and create panic upon panic whenever their interest is enlisted in the measure. It may be said, that they would injure themselves by resorting to some of these means for crippling working class co-operation: granted. But, remember! they can afford to lose—you cannot! That which would but pinch their little finger would amputate your entire arm. Thus they would counteract the expansion of your capital by reproductive means. Again—never lose sight of this: they wield all the political power as well! If they should fail in other ways, they can destroy you by new laws—they can throw legal obstacles in the way of co-operation that would prove insurmountable: in this the middle class would support them, every shopkeeper, little or large, every profitmonger, down to the smallest, would be against you—for you profess to put an end to profitmongering—you profess to supersede the shopocratic class. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.574-575

It is amusing to remark, that many of those who advise a union with the middle classes are strenuous supporters of the present co-operative system; they seek the support of the middle class, and tell us to expect it—with the same breath shouting to the world, that their "co-operation" will destroy the shopkeepers! Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.575

1. The Land. Consider, firstly, the enormous amount you must subscribe for the purchase of land in sufficient quantity to relieve the labour market of its competitive surplus. Secondly, remember that the more an article is in demand, the more it rises in price. The more land you want, the dearer it will become, and the more unattainable it will be by your means. Thirdly, recollect that your wages have been falling for years, and that they will continue to fall; consequently, while the land is rising in price on the one hand, your means of purchase are diminishing on the other. Fourthly, two parties are required in every bargain—the purchaser and seller. If the rich class find that the poor are buying up the land, they won't sell it to them—we have had sufficient instances of this already. They have sagacity enough not to let it pass out of their hands, even by these means. Fifthly, never lose sight of this fact: only a restricted portion of the land ever does come into the market—the laws of primogeniture, settlement, and entail lock up the remainder; a political law intervenes, that political power alone can abrogate. It may, however, be urged, in answer to the first objection, that the capital invested in the purchase of land would reproduce itself. I answer, reflect on how our forefathers lost the land—by unequal legislation. It was not taken from them by force of arms, but by force of laws — not by direct legal confiscation, but they were taxed out of it. The same causes will produce the same effects. If you re-purchase a portion of the land, you would re-commence precisely the same struggle fought by your ancestors of yore—you would wrestle for a time with adversity, growing poorer every year, till holding after holding was sold, and you reverted to your old condition. This can be obviated only by a re-adjustment of taxation—a measure that can be enforced by political power alone. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.575-576

This brings me to the consideration of the co-operative plan by which you endeavour to effect the regeneration of society. The co-operative power you have evoked can be applied to only three objects: 1. To the purchase of land; 2. To the purchase of machinery, for the purpose of manufacture; 3. To the establishment of stores, for the purposes of distribution. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.575-576

2. Machinery and Manufacture. The second object to which co-operation is directed, consists in the purchase of machinery for purposes of manufacture. It is argued, "we shall shut up the factories, and competing with the employer, deprive him of his workmen, who will flock to us to be partakers of the fruits of their own industry." It is impossible for you to shut up the factories, because the great manufacturer is not dependent on home-trade—he can live on foreign markets; and in all markets, both home and foreign, he can undersell you. His capital and resources, his command of machinery, enables him to do so. Is it not an undeniable fact, that the working-men's associations—the co-operative tailors, printers, etc.,are dearer than their monopolising rivals'? And must they not remain so, if their labour is to have a fair remuneration? It is impossible to deprive the employer of workmen to such an extent as to ruin him—the labour surplus is too great; and were it even smaller, the constantly developed power of machinery, which he can always command the readiest, would more than balance the deficiency you caused. If, then, we do not shut up the factories, we only increase the evil by still more overglutting the market. It is a market for that which is manufactured, far more than a deficiency of manufacture under which we labour. If we add to manufacture we cheapen prices; if we cheapen prices we cheapen wages (these generally sink disproportionately)—and thus add to the misery and poverty of the toiling population. "But," you may argue, "we shall make a market—create home-trade, by rendering the working classes prosperous " You fail a leverage: the prosperity of the working classes is necessary to enable your co-operation to succeed; and, according to your own argument, the success of your co-operation is necessary to make the working classes prosperous! Do you not see you are reasoning in a circle? You are beating the air. You want some third power to ensure success. In fine, you want political power to re-construct the bases of society. Under the present system, on your present plan, all your efforts must prove vain—have proved vain—towards the production of a national result. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.576-577

3. Co-operative Stores.— By these you undertake to make the working-man his own shopkeeper, and to enable him to keep in his own pocket the profits which the shopkeeper formerly extracted from his custom. These stores must be directed towards the distribution of manufactures or of food. If the former, you must either manufacture your goods yourselves, or else buy them of the rich manufacturer. If you manufacture them yourselves, the evil consequences, alluded to in the previous paragraph, meet you at the outset. If you buy them, the manufacturer can undersell you, because the first-hand can afford to sell cheaper than the second—and recollect the wholesale dealer is every year absorbing more and more the retailing channels of trade. We then suppose your stores to be for the retailing of provisions. Under this aspect, their power, as a national remedy, is very limited. Food is wealth—money is but its representative; to increase the real prosperity of a country, you must increase its wealth, whereas these stores do not create additional food, but merely distribute that which is created already. But the question is here raised: "If the working-man has to pay a less exorbitant price for the articles he wants, he will have so much more of his wages left to purchase land, and otherwise emancipate himself from wages' slavery. Therefore the co-operative stores are the very means for obviating one of the objections urged: they are the very means for counteracting the threatened fall of wages, and consequent diminution of subscriptions." This observation brings me to the second division of the subject, as in that the answer is contained; and here again I admit that co-operation on a sound basis is salutary, and may be a powerful adjunct towards both social and political emancipation. The solution of this question, however, depends not only on the means at command, but also on the way in which those means are used—and I contend: II. That the co-operative system, as at present practised, carries within it the germs of dissolution, would inflict a renewed evil on the masses of the people, and is essentially destructive of the real principles of co-operation. Instead of abrogating profitmongering, it re-creates it. Instead of counteracting competition, it re-establishes it. Instead of preventing centralisation, it renews it—merely transferring the rôle from one set of actors to another. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.577-578

1 It [cooperativism] is to destroy profitmongering: Here I refer you to the confessions at the recent meeting of Co-operative Delegates; it was the boast contained in every reported speech, that the society to which the speaker belonged had accumulated a large capital—some as high as £2,000 and £3,000 in a very short space of time—some having started with a capital as small as £25, others having borrowed large sums (in one instance as much as £9,000) from rich capitalists, a measure not much calculated to emancipate co-operation from the thraldom of the rich. But to revert to the accumulated capital; how was this sum accumulated? By buying and selling. By selling at cost price? Oh no! By buying for little, and selling for more—it was accumulated by profits, and profits to such an extent, that in one case, 250 members accumulated a capital of £3,000 in a very short space of time! "Down with profitmongering!" What is this but the very same thing as that practised by the denounced shopocracy? Only that it has not yet reached so frightful a stage. They are stepping in the footprints of the profitmongers, only they are beginning to do now what the others began some centuries ago. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.578

2. It [cooperativism] is to put an end to competition, but unfortunately it re-creates it. Each store or club stands as an isolated body, with individual interests. Firstly, they have to compete with the shopkeeper—but, secondly, they are beginning to compete with each other. Two or more stores or co-operative associations are now frequently established in the same town, with no identity of interests. If they fail, there is an end of it, but if they succeed, they will spread till they touch, till rivalry turns to competition—then they will undermine each other—and be either mutually ruined, or the one will rise upon the ashes of its neighbour. I ask every candid reader—is not this already the case in several of our northern towns? Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.578-579

3. It is to counteract the centralisation of wealth, but it renews it. We proceed one step further—the fratricidal battle has been fought in the one town,—the one association has triumphed over the others, it absorbs the custom of its neighbours—the co-operative power falls out of many hands into few— wealth centralises. In the next town the same has been taking place—at last the two victor-associations dispute the prize with each other—they undersell each other—they cheapen labour—the same results attend on the same causes, and the working classes have been rearing up a strong, new juggernaut, to replace the worn out idol under which they bowed before. Let us reflect, what are the great canal-companies, joint-stock companies, banking companies, railway companies, trading companies—what are they but co-operative associations in the hands of the rich? What have been their effects on the people? To centralise wealth, and to pauperise labour. Where is the essential difference between those and the present co-operative schemes? A few men club their means together. So did they. Whether the means are large or little, makes no difference in the working of the plan, otherwise than in the rapidity or slowness of its development. But many of our richest companies began with the smallest means. A few men start in trade, and accumulate profits. So did they. Profits grow on profits, capital accumulates on capital—always flowing into the pockets of those few men. The same with their rich prototypes. What kind of co-operation do you call this? It is the co-operation of Moses and Co., only a little less iniquitous—but, based on the same principle, who guarantees that it will not run to the same lengths? What benefit are the people to derive from this? What is it to us if you beggar the Moseses and the Rothschilds tomorrow, and create another Rothschild and Moses in their place? My idea of reform is not to ruin one man to enrich another—that is merely robbing Peter to pay Paul. As long as there are to be monied and landed monopolists in the world, it matters little to us, whether they bear the name of Lascelles or of Smith. Such is the present system of co-operation,—a system unstable in itself, and, if successful, injurious to the community. A system that makes a few new shopkeepers and capitalists to replace the old, and increases the great curse of the working classes, the aristocracy of labour. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.579-580

The present co-operative movement, I repeat, must perish as its kindred have done before it—and, if not, its success would be a new curse to the community. Why do the rich smile on it? Because they know it will prove in the long run harmless as regards them—because they know it has always failed, hitherto, to subvert their power. True the attempts often succeed in the beginning—and why? Because the new idea attracts many sympathisers—while it is too weak to draw down the opposition of the money lord. Thence the co-operators are enabled to pick up some of the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich. But what is the £3,000 of Rochdale amid the proud treasures of its factory lords? Let the shock come among the mighty colossi of trade, and the pigmies will be crushed between them. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.580-581

Then what is the only salutary basis for co-operative industry? A national one. All co-operation should be founded, not on isolated efforts, absorbing, if successful, vast riches to themselves, but on a national union which should distribute the national wealth. To make these associations secure and beneficial, you must make it their interest to assist each other, instead of competing with each other—you must give them unity of action, and identity öf interest. To effect this, every local association should be the branch of a national one, and all profits, beyond a certain amount, should be paid into a national fund, for the purpose of opening fresh branches, and enabling the poorest to obtain land, establish stores, and otherwise apply their labour power, not only to their own advantage, but to that of the general body. This is the vital point: are the profits to accumulate in the hands of isolated clubs, or are they to be devoted to the elevation of the entire people? Is the wealth to gather around local centres, or is it to be diffused by a distributive agency? This alternative embraces the fortune of the future. From the one flows profitmongering, competition, monopoly, and ruin; from the other may emanate the regeneration of society. Again—the land that is purchased, should be purchased in trust for the entire union—those located thereon being tenants, and not exclusive proprietors, of the farms they cultivate. Freehold land-societies, companies, etc., but perpetuate the present system—they strengthen the power of landlordism. We have now 30,000 landlords—should we be better off if we had 300,000? We should be worse off—there are too many already! The land can be more easily and more rapidly nationalised, if held by merely 30,000 than if possessed by ten times that amount. And, again, the rent would increase the national fund—while the contributions of the freeholders would be but a chimerical treasure. […] A national fund thus established, would, in all probability, be a large one—and place a great power in the hands of the association. Persecution would be far more difficult. Now each society stands isolated, and is attacked in detail by the combined forces of monopoly—then to touch one would be to touch all. The national centralisation of popular power and popular wealth (not its local centralisation), is the secret of success. […] If, then, you would re-create society, if you would destroy profitmongering, if you would supplant competition by the genial influence of fraternity, and counteract the centralisation of wealth and all its concomitant evils, NATIONALISE CO-OPERATION. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.580

A co-operative association is formed; after payment of its working charges (including labour in production or distribution), it finds itself at the end of the year with a surplus in hand; instead of dividing this surplus among the members, it employs it to purchase land or machinery, which it lets out to other bodies of workingmen, on the associative principle. The rent paid for the land or the machinery, and the surplus of each concern beyond the working charges, is again to be applied to the further purchase of machinery and land, on the same terms, and under the same conditions; and so on, continually extending the power, strength, and resources of association. This is co-operation. It is co-operation, because it establishes a community of interest—the success of each "branch" furthers the success of every other, and of the whole collectively. There can be no conflicting interests—no rivalry—no competition—for the greater the success of each undertaking, the more the stability and permanency of the whole is ensured. It makes it the interest of each and of all to see co-operative associations spread and multiply. This, I repeat emphatically, this is real co-operation. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.587-588

But what is the present isolated system? It is based on individual and antagonistic interests. It makes the vital interest of the "co-operator" to prevent others from co-operating—to hinder the spread of the associative principle. And it does it in this way: a co-operative trading concernais started on the present isolated plan; that is, the concern forming a "close borough,"—admitting no more within its pale—making what profits it can, and pocketing them among the same few individuals. What now becomes the interest of these individuals? To prevent another co-operative concern from being started in their immediate neighbourhood—to prevent another body of workingmen from deriving the advantages of co-operation. Because, if the original concern flourishes, it absorbs all the trade of the locality (if one don't, two or more do, it becomes merely a question of numbers—of how many customers there are in a place); if another independent concern is started, it must have a portion of that custom, or it cannot exist. Consequently it becomes a rival of the other association; it begins to compete; there not being customers enough for all, the one concern too many must try to draw away customers from those already established. To do this, it must undersell—it must buy still cheaper, and pay still cheaper for its labour, in order that it may undersell; the other concerns must do the same in self-defence; and there you have the old system of competition, with its necessary consequences, wages-slavery, plunder, ruin on the one hand, and monopoly on the other, added to that profitmongering on which the present plan, as already shown, is altogether based! Therefore, the present plan is not true co-operation; it is essentially hostile to the spread of associated labour; instead of ending profitmongering, it renews it; instead of abolishing competition, it recreates it; instead of abrogating monopoly, it re-establishes it, and is the death-blow to the hopes of labour's emancipation. Ernest Jones, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp.588

All the positive aspects of the power of workers councils must already be embryonically present in any revolutionary organization aiming at their realization. Such an organization must wage a mortal struggle against the Leninist theory of organization. The 1905 revolution and the Russian workers’ spontaneous self-organization into soviets was already a critique in acts of that baneful theory. But the Bolshevik movement persisted in believing that working-class spontaneity could not go beyond “trade-union consciousness” and was thus incapable of grasping “the totality.” This amounted to decapitating the proletariat so that the Party could put itself at the “head” of the revolution. Contesting the proletariat’s historical capacity to liberate itself, as Lenin did so ruthlessly, means contesting its capacity to totally run the future society. In such a perspective, the slogan “All power to the soviets” meant nothing more than the conquest of the soviets by the Party and the installation of the party state in place of the withering-away “state” of the armed proletariat. “All power to the soviets” must once again be our slogan, but literally this time, without the Bolshevik ulterior motives. The proletariat can play the game of revolution only if the stakes are the whole world; otherwise it is nothing. The sole form of its power, generalized self-management, cannot be shared with any other power. Because it represents the actual dissolution of all powers, it can tolerate no limitation (geographical or otherwise); any compromises it accepts are immediately transformed into concessions, into surrender. “Self-management must be both the means and the end of the present struggle. It is not only what is at stake in the struggle, but also its adequate form. It is itself the material it works on, and its own presupposition” (“The Class Struggles in Algeria”). On the Poverty of Student Life - Members of Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg University (1966), theanarchistlibrary.org, p.17

The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced. Instructions for an Insurrection, Situationiste Internationale #6, https://libcom.org/article/instructions-insurrection

To transform the world and to change life are one and the same thing for the proletariat, the inseparable passwords to its suppression as a class, the dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and the finally possible accession to the reign of freedom. The radical critique and free reconstruction of all the values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program. Free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival. Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce. Play (*) is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints. (*) [The ending is stronger and more scandalous in the original: the French word jouir (“to enjoy”) also means “to come” in the sexual sense.] On the Poverty of Student Life - Members of Situationist International and Students of Strasbourg University (1966), theanarchistlibrary.org, p.19

People's creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. The only way to "arouse the masses" is to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and the present poverty of life. Without a critique of everyday life, a revolutionary organization is a separated milieu, as conventional and ultimately as passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure. [...] The revolution of everyday life cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. Instructions for an Insurrection, Situationiste Internationale #6, https://libcom.org/article/instructions-insurrection

The groups that recognize the fundamental (not merely circumstantial) failure of the old politics must also recognize that they can claim to be an ongoing avant-garde only if they themselves exemplify a new style of life, a new passion. There is nothing utopian about this lifestyle criterion: it was constantly evident during the emergence and rise of the classical workers movement. […] Otherwise the militants of these groups would only constitute dull propaganda societies, proclaiming quite correct and basic ideas but with virtually no one listening. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0

For Mouvement Communiste, Négation, Intervention Communiste, and others the breakdown of the old workers’ movement was something to be celebrated, not because the corrupt leadership of the workers’ organisations would no longer be able to restrain the autonomy of the masses, but because such a shift represented a transcendence of the historical function of the workers’ movement, a transcendence that would mark the reemergence of the communist movement, the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. And it did so in an immediate sense, for the riots and wildcat strikes of that decade were read by these writers as a total refusal of all the mediations of the workers’ movement, not in favour of some other more “democratic” mediation like that of workers’ councils, but in a way that posed the immediate production of communist relations as the only possible revolutionary horizon. Thus whereas communism had previously been seen as something that needed to be created after the revolution, the revolution was now seen as nothing other than the production of communism (abolishing wage labour and the state). The notion of a period of transition was jettisoned. Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

[…] groups like Mouvement Communiste, Négation, and La Guerre Sociale advocated a conception of revolution as the immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production, or “communisation”. As we shall see, the understanding of communisation differed between different groups, but it essentially meant the application of communist measures within the revolution — as the condition of its survival and its principal weapon against capital. Any “period of transition” was seen as inherently counter-revolutionary, not just in so far as it entailed an alternative power structure which would resist “withering away” (c.f. anarchist critiques of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”), nor simply because it always seemed to leave unchallenged fundamental aspects of the relations of production, but because the very basis of workers’ power on which such a transition was to be erected was now seen to be fundamentally alien to the struggles themselves. Workers’ power was just the other side of the power of capital, the power of reproducing workers as workers; henceforth the only available revolutionary perspective would be the abolition of this reciprocal relation. Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

The central issue is the counterposing of a distinctly different logic here and now to the logic of capitalism. There is nothing unusual in this: it is part of everyday life. It is the anti-logic of what we think of as humanity, of decency, of dignity; even in the most harmless-looking examples, there is always an underlying insubordination or non-subordination. Dignity will not wait: the crack is a here-and-now insubordination, not a project for the future. It is not 'after the revolution, our lives will not be subordinated to capital', but 'here and now, we refuse to subordinate our activity to the rule of capital: we can and will and are doing something else.' There is a shift in the temporality of rebellion. In all sorts of ways, the urgency of the situation of humanity imprints itself on the way that people struggle. The old notion of planning for the future revolution sounds hollow when we know that there may be only a very limited future. Communism (or whatever we choose to call it) becomes an immediate necessity, not a future stage of development. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.26