What provided the impetus for a new conception of revolution and communism (as communisation) was not simply an understanding of the content of communism derived from a close reading of Marx and Bordiga, but also the influence of a whole wave of class struggles of the late sixties and early seventies which would give a new meaning to “the refusal of work” as a specific content of the revolution. By the early 1970s journalists and sociologists began to speak of a “revolt against work” afflicting an entire new generation of workers in traditional industries, with rapidly rising rates of absenteeism and sabotage, as well as a widespread disregard for the authority of the union. Commentators variously blamed: the feeling of expendability and insecurity brought about by automation; the increasing assertiveness of traditionally oppressed minorities; the influence of an anti-authoritarian counter-culture; the power and sense of entitlement afforded by the prolonged post-war boom and its hard-won “social wage”. Whatever the reason for these developments, what seemed to characterize the new struggles was a breakdown in the traditional forms through which workers sought to gain control over the labour process, leaving only the expression of an apparent desire to work less. For many of those who had been influenced by the SI, this new proletarian “assault” was characterized by a “refusal of work” shorn of the techno-utopian and bohemian-artistic elements which the SI had never been able to abandon. Groups like Négation and Intervention Communiste argued that it was not only the power of the union which was being undermined in these struggles, but the entire Marxist and Anarchist programme of the liberation of work and the triumph of “workers’ power”. Far from liberating their work, bringing it under their own control, and using it to seize control of society through self-managing their workplaces, in the French May and the subsequent “creeping May” in Italy, the “critique of work” took the form of hundreds of thousands of workers deserting their workplaces. Rather than an indication that struggles hadn't gone far enough, the absence of workers’ councils during this period was thus understood as an expression of a rupture with what would come to be known as “the old workers’ movement.” 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

Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy — by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them — all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and — most fundamentally — wage labour and the working class itself. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

For TC [Theorie Communiste] the communist revolution understood as communisation does not establish a “republic of labour” or any new form of management of the means of production. Rather, it is the overcoming of the alienated social relation of production which constitutes the separation of subjectivity and objectivity experienced in capitalism. In the overcoming of the separation of individuals from each other and from the means of production, communisation overcomes the separation of human subjectivity from “objectified labour,” i.e. the subject/object split that forms the basis of social reality under capitalism. TC envisage this as an overcoming of each dimension which Marx describes in the Grundrisse: labour ceases to exist as a separate activity; production no longer distinguishes itself from and dominates reproduction; needs are no longer separate from capacities; and individuals no longer confront their sociality through the mediation of the exchange of their products or in the form of the state — they become directly social. The revolution as communisation dissolves both the social form of things, i.e. their existence as carriers of ‘objectified labour’, of value (they become things again), and the atomised, empty and separated out subject-form of the individual. Thus for TC, as for Marx in the Grundrisse, the formerly “objective” moment of production no longer dominates the subjective, but rather becomes “the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals.” Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

Communism necessitates the abolition of a multifaceted relation [value] that has evolved over time, but to abolish it simply means that we cease to constitute value, and it ceases to constitute us. The radicality of our own period is that this is now the only way we can conceive it. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory