Through its name and its language, what the institution promises is that a single thing, in this lower world, will have transcended time, will have with­ drawn itself from the unpredictable flux of becoming, will have established a bit of tangible eternity, an unequivocal meaning, free of human ties and situations - a definitive stabilization of the real, like death. This whole mirage dissolves when a revolution breaks out. Suddenly what seemed eternal collapses into time as though into a bottomless pit. What seemed to plunge its roots into the human heart turns out to have been nothing but a fable for dupes. The palaces are vacated and one discovers in the prince's abandoned jumble of papers that he no longer believed in it all, if he ever had. For behind the facade of the institution, what goes on is always something other than it claims to be, it's precisely what the institution claimed to have delivered the world from: the very human comedy of the coexis­tence of networks, of loyalties, of clans, interests, lineages, dynasties even, a logic of fierce struggles for territories, resources, miserable titles, influence­ stories of sexual conquest and pure folly, of old friendships and rekindled hatreds. Every institu­tion is, in its very regularity, the result of an intense bricolage and, as an institution, of a denial of that bricolage. Its supposed fixity masks a gluttonous appetite for absorbing, controlling, institutionalizing everything that's on its margins and harbors a bit of life. The real model of every institution is universally the Church. Just as the Church clearly does not have as its goal leading the human flock to its divine salvation, but rather achieving its own salvation in time, the alleged function of an institution is only a pretext for its existence. In every institution the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is re-enacted year after year. Its true purpose is to persist. […] Reducing delinquency and "defending society" are only the pretext of the carceral institu­tion. If, during the centuries it has existed, it has never succeeded at these things - on the contrary - this is because its purpose is different; it's is to go on existing and growing if possible, which means tending to the breeding ground of delin­quency and managing the illegalities. […] Of course in every institution there are sincere people who really think they are there to accomplish their mission. But it's no acci­dent if those people see themselves systematically obstructed, are systematically kept out of the loop, punished, bullied, eventually ostracized, with the complicity of all the "realists" who keep their mouths shut. These choice victims of the institu­tion have a hard time understanding its double talk, and what is really being asked of them. Their fate is to always be treated there as killjoys, as rebels, and to be endlessly surprised by that. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.72-74

The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it. And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility of the real, an ultimate stabi­lization of phenomena. If the institution suits us so well, it's because the sort of legibility it guarantees saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever, from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the same as choosing not to exist. It's to resign from life. In reality, what we need are not institutions but forms. It so happens, in fact, that life, whether biological, singular or collective, is precisely a continual creation of forms. It suffices to perceive them, to accept allowing them to arise, to make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis. A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form. A work is a form. A profession is a form. Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.68-69

There's a perverse dialectic between institution and movements, which testi­fies to the former's relentless survival instinct. A reality as ancient, massive, and hieratic as that, inscribed in the bodies and minds of its subjects for the hundreds of years the French state has existed, could not have lasted so long if it had not been able to tolerate, monitor, and recuperate critics and revolutionaries as they presented them­ selves. The carnivalesque ritual of social movements function within it as a safety valve, as a tool for managing the social as well as for renewing the institution. They bring it the flexibility, the young flesh, the new blood that it so cruelly lacks. Generation after generation, in its great wisdom, the state has been able to co-opt those who showed themselves amenable to being bought off, and crush those who acted intransigent. It's not for nothing that so many leaders of student movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of the institution as mask. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.75-76

Nothing shocks us about this; nothing catches us unawares or radically alters our feeling toward life. We were born inside the catastrophe and we have established a strange and comfortable relation of habit with it. Almost an intimacy. For as long as we can remember there has been no news besides that of the Global Civil War. We have been raised as survivors, as machines of survival. We have been raised with the idea that life consists in continually going on; walking in indifference until crushed among other bodies who walk identically, who stumble and get crushed in turn. In the end, the only novelty of the present epoch is that none of this can be hidden anymore, that in a sense everybody knows it. Hence the most recent visible hardening of the system: its motives are exposed, it would be pointless to wish them away. Anonymous, Call, p.6-7

The real lie is not the one we tell others but the one we tell ourselves. The first lie is relatively exceptional in comparison with the second. The big lie is refusing to see certain things that one does see, and refusing to see them just as one sees them. The real lie is all the screens, all the images, all the explanations that are allowed to stand between oneself and the world. It's how we regularly dismiss our own perceptions. So much so that where it's not a question of truth, it won't be a question of anything. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.11-12

Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be called political without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is taken for reality and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of Existential Liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to have a rapport with the world based on the idea that each person has her own life. That such a life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each person can define herself by an ensemble of qualities, of properties, that make her, through her continual balancing of those properties, a unique and irreplaceable being. That the contract adequately epitomizes relations between individuals, and that respect epitomizes all virtue. That language is nothing but a means of arriving at an agreement. That, in reality, the world is composed on one side of things to manage, and on the other of an ocean of self-absorbed individuals, who in turn have a regrettable tendency to turn themselves into things, letting themselves become managed. Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical diagnoses of Existential Liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied affection, isolation, illusions of citizenship, and the loss of all generosity. Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that even the most sincere Leftists express their utopia with its very terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society in which each person makes her contribution and from which each person gets her needs met from it... As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each person consumes in proportion to the efforts she is ready to contribute. Naturally it will be necessary to redefine the method of evaluating the efforts contributed by each person,” write the organizers of the Alternative, Anti-capitalist, and Anti-war Village against the G8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When Capitalism and Wage Labor Will Have Been Abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of Empire: managing to keep in the shadows, to surround with silence the very terrain on which it maneuvers, the field upon which it fights the decisive battle: that of manipulating feelings, of defining the limits of the perceptible. In such a way it preventively paralyzes any defense at the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the militant, at the end of a hard day of Political Work, slumps down in front of an action movie. Anonymous, Call, p.7-8

The pervasiveness of the commodity has inserted itself everywhere. This pervasiveness is the most effective instrument for disconnecting ends from means, to reduce everyday life to a living-space we are only required to manage. Everyday life is what we are supposed to want to return to; the acceptance of a necessary and universal neutralization. It is the ever-growing renunciation of the possibility of an unpostponed joy. As a friend once said, it is the average of all our possible crimes. Anonymous, Call, p.14

Rare are the collectivities that can escape the abyss that waits for them: mashing of the real into an extreme flatness, community as the epitome of average intensity, a slow disintegration clumsily filled with a bunch of banal and falsely sophisticated banter. Neutralization is an essential characteristic of Liberal Society. Everybody knows the centers of neutralization, where it is required that no emotion stands out, where each person has to contain herself, and everybody experiences them as such: businesses (and what isn’t a business these days?), night clubs, bowling alleys and golf courses, museums, etc. Since everyone knows what these places are about, the real question is to know why — despite that — they can still be so popular. Why wish for, always and above all, that nothing happens that might provoke stirrings that go too deep? Out of habit? Because of despair? Because of cynicism? Or else: because you can feel the delight of being somewhere while not being there, of being there while being essentially somewhere else; because what we are at base would be preserved to the point of no longer even having to exist. […] The acceptance of these neutralizations can of course go hand in hand with great creative efforts. You can experiment up to the point of madness, on condition that you are a single creator, and that you produce the proof of this singularity in public (your works). You can still know what the stirrings are, but only on condition that you experience them alone, and that you are limited to passing them on indirectly. You will thereby be recognized as an artist or as a thinker, and, perhaps if you are politically engaged, you will be able to toss as many bottles into the ocean as you like, with the clear conscience of one who sees farther and who has warned others. Like many, we have experienced that emotions stuck internally turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the partitions that every person believes herself obliged to put up in order to define her own limits, and to contain within her self what must not burst forth. Anonymous, Call, p.15

At root it is here that we begin, where we find each other. What is most singular in us calls to be shared. But we note this: not only is what we have to share obviously incompatible with the dominant order, but this order strives to track down any kind of sharing for which it does not lay down the rules. For instance, the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the asylum, and the retirement home are the only forms of collective living allowed in the metropole. The normal condition is the isolation of everyone in their private cubicle. This is where they return endlessly, however strong the repulsion they feel, however great the encounters they make elsewhere. We have known these conditions of existence, and we will never return to them. They weaken us too much. Make us too vulnerable. Make us waste away. Isolation, in primal cultures, was the harshest sentence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is now the common condition. The rest of the disaster follows logically. It is on account of this narrow idea that everybody has of their own home that makes it seem natural to leave the street to the police. The world could not have been made so uninhabitable, nor sociality so controlled — from malls to bars, from boardrooms to backrooms — had not everyone been previously granted the shelter of private space. Anonymous, Call, p.17

We do not perceive humans to be isolated from each other or from the other beings of this world; we see them bound by multiple connections that we have learned to deny. This denial allows the blocking of emotional exchanges through which these multiple connections are experienced. This blockage, in turn, is necessary to make us accustomed to the most neutral, the most lifeless, the most average feelings; that which makes us long for vacations, lunch-breaks, or evenings out as a godsend — that is to say something just as neutral, average, and lifeless — but freely chosen. The imperial order, which is particularly Westernized, is nourished through this boredom. Anonymous, Call, p.15

Not so long ago, when one met some­ one it was still natural to ask: "So what do you do in life?" And the answer came just as naturally. One still managed to say what position one held in the general organization of production. That could even serve as a calling card. In the time since, the wage-earning society has imploded to such an extent that one avoids questions of this sort, which tend to make people uneasy. Everyone patches things together, gets by, branches off, takes a break, starts up again. Work has lost its luster and its centrality, not just socially but existentially as well. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.91-92

Waged labor was the form by which a certain order was maintained. The fundamental violence it contains, the violence that is obscured by the broken­ down body of the assembly-line worker, the miner killed in a methane explosion, or the burnout of employees under extreme managerial pressure, has to do with the meaning of life. By selling their time, by turning themselves into the subject of the thing they're employed to do, the wage worker places the meaning of their existence in the hands of those who care nothing about them, indeed whose purpose is to ride roughshod over them. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.94

The wage system has enabled generations of men and women to live while evading the question of life's meaning, by "making themselves useful," by "making a career," by "serving." The wage worker has always been free to postpone this question till later-till retirement, let's say-while leading an honorable social life. And since it is apparently "too late" to raise it once retired, all that's left to do is to wait patiently for death. We will thus have been able to spend an entire life without entering into existence. There is a good reason why Munch's painting, The Scream, portrays, still today, the true face of contemporary humanity. What this desperate individual on their jetty doesn't find is an answer to the question, "How am I to live?" The Invisible Committee, Now, p.94-95

It's necessary above all to maintain the reign of the economy beyond the extinction of the wage system. This has to do with the fact that if there is less and less work, everything is all the more mediated by money, be it in very small amounts. Given the absence of work, the need to earn money in order to survive must be maintained. Even if a universal basic income is established one day, as so many liberal economists recommend, its amount would need to be large enough to keep a person from dying of hunger, but utterly insufficient to live on, even fru­ gally. We are witnessing a change of regime within economy. The majestic figure of the Worker is being succeeded by the puny figure of the Needy Opportunist [le Crevard]-because if money and control are to infiltrate everywhere, it's necessary for money to be lacking everywhere. Henceforth, everything must be an occasion for generating a little money, a little value, for earning "a little cash." The present technological offensive should also be understood as a way to occupy and valorize those who can no longer be exploited through waged labor. What is too quickly described as the uberization of the world, unfolds in two different ways. Thus on the one hand you have Uber, Deliveroo and the like, that unskilled job opportu­nity requiring only one's old machine as capital. Every driver is free to self-exploit as much as they like, knowing that they must roll around fifty hours a week to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. And then there are Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, dating sites, "coworking," and now even "cohoming" or "costorage," and all the applications that enable the sphere of the valorizable to be extended to infinity. What is involved with the "collaborative economy," with its inexhaustible possibilities of valorization, is not just a mutation of life-it's a mutation of the possible, a mutation of the norm. Before Airbnb, an unoccupied room was a "guest room" or a room available for a new use; now it's a loss of income. Before BlaBlaCar, a solo drive in one's car was an occasion to daydream, or pick up a hitchhiker, or whatever, but now it's a missed chance to make a little money, and hence a scandal, economically speaking. What one gave to recycling or to friends one now sells on Le bon coin. It's expected that always and from every point of view one will be engaged in calculating. That the fear of "missing an opportunity" will goad us forward in life. The important thing is not working for one euro an hour or making a few pennies by scanning contents for Amazon Mechanical Turk, but where this participation might lead someday. Henceforth everything must enter into the sphere ofprofitability. Everything in life becomes valorizable, even its trash. And we ourselves are becoming needy opportunists, human trash, who exploit each other under the pretext of a "sharing economy." If a growing share of the population is destined to be excluded from the wage system this is not in order to allow it the leisure to go hunt Pokemons in the morning and to fish in the afternoon. The inven­tion of new markets where one didn't imagine them to be the year before illustrates this fact that is so difficult to explain to a Marxist: capitalism doesn't so much consist in selling what is produced as in rendering accountable whatever is not yet accountable, in assigning a measureable worth to what seemed to be absolutely unsusceptible to that the day before, in creating new markets. That is its oceanic reserve of accumulation. Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.96-98

With the theory of human capital, man is less the possessor of an indefinite duster of capitals-cultural, relational, professional, financial, symbolic, sexual, health­ than he is himselfthat duster. He is capital. He constantly arbitrates between increasing what he is as capital, and the fact of selling it in some market or other. He is inseparably the producer, the product, and the seller of the product. Football players, actors, stars, and popular YouTubers are logically the heroes of the era of human capital, people whose value fully coincides with what they are. Micro-economics thus becomes the general science of behaviors, whether this is in commerce, at church, or in love. Everyone becomes an enterprise guided by a constant concern with self­ valorization, by a vital imperative of self-promotion. In essence man becomes the optimizing creature­ the Needy Opportunist. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.99-100

The folly of evaluation obviously dominates every aspect of contemporary work, but it also rules as a mistress over everything that escapes that sphere. It determines even the solitary jogger's relationship with themselves, the jogger who, in order to improve their performances, needs to know them in detail. Measurement has become the obligatory mode of being of all that intends to exist socially. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.101

Monetary accumulation is the postponement of any actual enjoyment; since money brings into equivalence as possibilities the whole array of things that can be bought with it. Every expenditure, every purchase is first a for­feiture, relative to what money is capable of Every specific enjoyment it allows one to acquire is first a negation of the set of other potential enjoyments it contains within it. In the epoch of human capital and living currency, every moment of life and every real relation are haloed by a set of possible equivalents that gnaw at them. Being here involves the untenable renunciation of being everywhere else, where life is apparently more intense, as our smartphone has charged itself with informing us. Being with a particular person is an unbearable sacrifice of all the other persons with whom one could just as well be with. Every love is vitiated in advance by all the other possible loves. Hence the impossibility of being there, the ineptitude for being-with. Universal unhappiness. Torture by possibilities. Sickness unto death. "Despair," as Kierkegaard diagnosed it. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.105-106

What within us is anxious to protect the inner chains that bind us, What there is within us so sick that it clings to our conditions of existence, precarious though they are, What's so exhausted from troubles, jolts, needs, that on a given day tomorrow seems farther away than the moon, What finds it pleasant to pass the time in hip cafes sipping lattes with jungle in the background while surfing on one's MacBook-the Sunday of life alloyed with the end of history, Is expecting solutions. Cities in transition, social and solidarity economy, Sixth Republic, alternative municipalism, universal basic income, the film Tomorrow, migration into space, a thousand new prisons, expulsion of all foreigners from the planet, man-machine fusion. Whether they're engineers, managers, act1v1sts, politicians, ecologists, actors, or simple hucksters, all those who claim to offer solutions to the present disaster are really doing just one thing: imposing their definition of the problem on us, hoping to make us forget that they themselves are plainly part of the problem. As a friend said, "The solution to the problem you see in life is a way of living that makes the problem disappear." The Invisible Committee, Now, p.127-128

However repressed it may be, the question of communism remains the heart of our epoch. If only because the rule of its contrary-economy-has never been so complete. The delegations from the Chinese state who go every year to place flowers on Marx's tomb in London don't fool anybody. One can avoid the communist question, of course. One can get used to stepping over the bodies of the homeless or migrants on one's way to the office every morning. One can follow the melting of the polar ice in real time, or the rise of the oceans and the panicked pell-mell migrations of animals and humans alike. One can go on preparing one's cancer with every forkful of mashed potatoes that one swallows. One can tell oneself that the recovery, or a dose of authority, or ecofeminism will eventually fix all this. Continuing in such a manner is possi­ble, at the cost of suppressing our feeling that the society we live in is intrinsically criminal, and one that doesn't miss a chance to remind us that we belong to its little association of miscreants. Every time we come in contact with it-by using any of its devices, consuming the least of its commodities, or doing whatever job we do for it-we make our­ selves its accomplices, we contract a little of the vice on which it is based: that of exploiting, wrecking, undermining the very conditions of every earthly existence. There's no longer any place for innocence in this world. We only have the choice between two crimes: taking part in it or deserting it in order to bring it down. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.127-128

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. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143

Existential Liberalism is the spontaneous ethics suitable for Social Democracy seen as a political ideal. You will never be a better citizen than when you are capable of renouncing a relation or a struggle in order to maintain your status. It will not always be without suffering, but that is precisely where Existential Liberalism is efficient: it even provides the remedies to the discomforts that it generates. The check to Amnesty International, the fair trade coffee, the demo against the last war, seeing the latest Michael Moore film, are so many non-acts disguised as gestures that will save you. Carry on exactly as usual; that is to say go for a walk in the designated spaces and do your shopping, the same as always. But on top of that, in addition, ease your conscience; buy No Logo, boycott Shell. This should be enough to convince you that political action, at bottom, does not require very much, and that you too are capable of engaging in it. There is nothing new in this buying and selling of indulgences, but the problem becomes palpable in the prevailing confusion. The invocatory culture of Another World Is Possible leaves little room to speak of ethics beyond consumer etiquette. The increase in the number of environmentalist, humanitarian, and solidarity associations opportunely channels general discontent and thus contributes to the perpetuation of this state of affairs, through personal valorization, official recognition and its first prize of honestly awarded subsidies; the worship, in short, of social usefulness. Above all, no more enemies. At the very most, problems, abuses seen as catastrophes — dangers from which only the mechanisms of power can protect us. Anonymous, Call, p.14

Like many, we have experienced that emotions stuck internally turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the partitions that every person believes herself obliged to put up in order to define her own limits, and to contain within herself what must not burst forth. When, for some reason or other, these partitions happen to crack and break, then things come up that might be unpleasant, which may even appear frightful — but it is a fright capable of freeing us from fear. Calling into question both our individual limits and the borders drawn by civilization can be a life-saver. The existence of any real community necessitates a certain physical danger: when emotions and thoughts are no longer ascribable to any one person, when interactions are recovered in which feelings, ideas, impressions, and emotions are exchanged carelessly. It must be understood that community per se is not the solution: it is its disappearance, everywhere and always, that is the problem. Anonymous, Call, p.15

Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no individuals — only specters haunting the objects anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, striving toward unity will introduce other separations. The quest for a central activity leads to the formation of new specializations. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

Here is daylight, and here are perspectives that now no longer mean anything. The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, like all that secrecy of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

All existing equilibrium, however, is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it’s always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, confronted with just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention. It makes us disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We have let things go. I have let time slip away. I have lost what I should have defended. This general critique of separation obviously contains and covers some particular memories. A less recognized pain, the awareness of a less explainable indignity. Exactly what separation was it? How quickly we have lived! It is to this point in our unreflecting history that I bring us back. Everything that concerns the sphere of loss — that is to say, the past time I have lost, as well as disappearance, escape, and more generally the flowing past of things, and even what in the prevalent and therefore most vulgar social sense of the use of time is called wasted time — all this finds in that strangely apt old military expression, en enfants perdus, its meeting ground with the sphere of discovery, of exploration of unknown terrains; with all the forms of quest, investigation, adventure, avant-garde. It is the crossroads where we have found and lost ourselves. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible courses. We get used to it, it seems. No one has the enthusiasm on returning from a venture that they had on setting out on it. My dears, adventure is dead. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.519

The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking — of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved? Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.519

Campagna’s call for a “radial atheism” is based on the recognition that the precariousness that cannot be eliminated is that of life and the body. If there is no afterlife, then our time is finite. Curiously, however, we subjects of late capitalism act as if there is infinite time to waste on work. Work looms over us as never before.“In an eccentric and an extreme society like ours”, argue Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming in their book Dead Man Working, “working has assumed a universal presence — a worker’s society in the worst sense of the term — where even the unemployed and children become obsessed with it.” Work now colonises weekends, late evenings, even our dreams. “Under Fordism, weekends and leisure time were still relatively untouched”, Cederstrom and Fleming point out, “Today, however, capital seeks to exploit our sociality in all spheres of work. When we all become “human capital” we not only have a job, or perform a job. We are the job.” Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.519-520

We are required to live in the condition that Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention”, where our attention is habitually distributed across multiple communication platforms. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi has argued, we now live in the tension between the infinity of cyberspace and the vulnerable finitude of the body and the nervous system. “The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind,” Berardi writes in Precarious Rhapsody, "Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. [...] The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.” The consequence is a strange kind of existential state, in which exhaustion bleeds into insomniac overstimulation (no matter how tired we are, there is still time for one more click) and enjoyment and anxiety co-exist (the urge to check emails, for instance, is both something we must do for work and a libidinal compulsion, a psychoanalytic drive that is never satisfied no matter how many messages we receive). The fact that the smartphone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, “Fordist” boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis. The characteristic affective tonality for the insomniac drift of cyberspace, in which there is always one more click to make, one more update to check, combines fascination with boredom. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.520-521

Anxiety is the emotional state that correlates with the (economic, social, existential) precariousness which neoliberal governance has normalised. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.556

many cases of depression and anxiety are the effects of neoliberalism’s successful tendency to privatise stress, to convert political antagonisms into medical conditions. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.557

Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.558

Till now we have been considering the estrangement; the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker's relationship to the products of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarised the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself. What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him—that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. […] This relation [the relation of labour to the act of production] is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker's own physical and mental energy, his personal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 3 (International Publishers), p.274-275

Vea said, “But tell us about Anarres—what’s it really like? Is it so wonderful there really?” […] “I don’t know,” he [Shevek] said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. “No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!” Le Guin, The Dispossessed, p.298-299 (HarperCollins 2002 ISBN 0-06-050400-5)

One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it resists actual creations when they first appear, then eventually exploits them. This is because it needs to maintain a certain degree of criticality and experimental research among a minority, but must take care to channel this activity into narrowly compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines and avert any holistic critique and experimentation. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert the taste for in- novation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward certain confused, degraded and innocuous forms of novelty. Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could support them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions. The people within these tendencies who become well known are generally accepted as exceptional individuals, on the condition that they accept various renunciations: the essential point is always the renunciation of a comprehensive opposition and the acceptance of fragmentary works susceptible to diverse interpretations. This is what gives the very term “avant-garde,” which in the final analysis is always defined and manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a dubious and ridiculous aspect. Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.4

Situationist critique and construction concerns, at every level, the use value of life. Just as our conception of urbanism is a critique of urbanism; just as our experience of leisure is in fact a refusal of leisure (in the dominant sense of separation and passivity); our designation of everyday life as our field of action means a critique of everyday life, one that will have to be "radical critique accomplished, and no longer advocated or indicated" […]. We do not claim to have invented extraordinary ideas within modern culture, but rather to have begun to draw attention to how extraordinary the nothingness of modern culture is. Specialists in cultural production are the ones who resign themselves most easily to their separation, and thus to their deficiency. But it is the whole of present society that cannot avoid the problem of the recuperation of its countless alienated, uncontrolled capabilities. The Situationist Frontier, Internationale Situationniste #5, https://libcom.org/article/situationist-frontier

Existential Liberalism is the spontaneous ethics suitable for Social Democracy seen as a political ideal. You will never be a better citizen than when you are capable of renouncing a relation or a struggle in order to maintain your status. It will not always be without suffering, but that is precisely where Existential Liberalism is efficient: it even provides the remedies to the discomforts that it generates. The check to Amnesty International, the fair trade coffee, the demo against the last war, seeing the latest Michael Moore film, are so many non-acts disguised as gestures that will save you. Carry on exactly as usual; that is to say go for a walk in the designated spaces and do your shopping, the same as always. But on top of that, in addition, ease your conscience; buy No Logo, boycott Shell. This should be enough to convince you that political action, at bottom, does not require very much, and that you too are capable of engaging in it. There is nothing new in this buying and selling of indulgences, but the problem becomes palpable in the prevailing confusion. The invocatory culture of Another World Is Possible leaves little room to speak of ethics beyond consumer etiquette. The increase in the number of environmentalist, humanitarian, and solidarity associations opportunely channels general discontent and thus contributes to the perpetuation of this state of affairs, through personal valorization, official recognition and its first prize of honestly awarded subsidies; the worship, in short, of social usefulness. Above all, no more enemies. At the very most, problems, abuses seen as catastrophes — dangers from which only the mechanisms of power can protect us. Anonymous, Call, p.14

Whether dramatic or documentary, the cinema functions to present a false, isolated coherence as a substitute for a communication and an activity that are absent. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

The neoliberal gambit was that the destruction of social security would have a dynamic effect on culture and the economy, liberating an entrepreneurial spirit that was inhibited by the red tape of bureaucratic social democratic institutions. The reality, however, is that innovation requires certain forms of stability. The disintegration of social democracy has had a dampening, rather than a dynamic, effect on culture in highly neoliberalised countries such as the UK. Fredric Jameson’s claims that late-capitalist culture would be given over to pastiche and retrospection have turned out to be extraordinarily prophetic. We’ve grown so accustomed to repetition and recycling that we no longer notice them. Yet it’s no surprise that this is the case. New cultural production requires a use of time that communicative capitalism is profoundly hostile towards. Most social energy is sucked into the vortex of late-capitalist labour and its vast simulation of productivity. Innovation depends upon an absorbed (rather than distracted) drift; but it is increasingly difficult to muster the attentional resources necessary for such immersion. Cyberspatial urgencies — the smartphone’s flashing red light, the siren call of its alert — function like trance-inhibitors or alarm clocks that keep waking us out of collective dreaming. In these conditions, intellectual work can only be undertaken on a short-term basis. Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone. To understand the time-crisis, we only have to compare the current situation with the height of punk and post-punk in the UK and the US. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of punk and post-punk culture happened at a time when cheap and squatted property was available in London and New York. Now, simply to afford to pay rent in either city entails giving up most of your time and energy to work. The delirious rise in property prices over the last twenty years is probably the single most important cause of cultural conservatism in the UK and the US. In the UK, much of the infrastructure which indirectly supported cultural production has been systematically dismantled by successive neoliberal governments. Most of the innovations in British popular music which happened between the Sixties and the Nineties would have been unthinkable without the indirect funding provided by social housing, unemployment benefit and student grants. These developments precisely opened up a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being. It is this kind of time, not the harassed time of the business entrepreneur, which gives rise to the new. This kind of time, where the collective mind can unfurl, also allows the social imagination to flourish. The neoliberal era — the time when, we were repeatedly told, there was no alternative — has been characterised by a massive deterioration of social imagination, an incapacity to even conceive of different ways to work, produce and consume. It’s now clear that, from the start (and with good reason) neoliberalism declared war on this alternative mode of time. It remains tireless in its propagation of resentment against those few fugitives who can still escape the treadmill of debt and endless work, promising to ensure that soon, they too will be condemned to performing interminable, meaningless labour — as if the solution to the current stagnation lay in more work, rather than an escape from the cult of work. If there is to be any kind of future, it will depend on our winning back the uses of time that neoliberalism has sought to close off and make us forget. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.521-522

Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.558

As for the order we live under, everyone knows what it consists of: the empire is staring us in the face. That a dying social system has no other justification to its arbitrary nature than its absurd determination — its senile determination — simply to linger on; that the global and national police have received a free hand to get rid of those who do not toe the line; that civilization, wounded in its heart, no longer encounters anything but its own limits in the endless war it has begun; that this headlong flight, already almost a century old, produces nothing but a series of increasingly frequent disasters; that the mass of humans accommodate themselves to this order of things by means of lies, cynicism, brutalization, or pills — no one can claim to ignore these things any longer. Anonymous, Call, p.3

But what is most striking, for the time being, is not the arrogance of empire, but rather the weakness of the counter-attack. Like a colossal paralysis. A mass paralysis, which will sometimes cause people to say that nothing can be done, but who will sometimes concede, when pushed to their limit, that “there is so much to do” — which isn’t any different. Anonymous, Call, p.3

We call the situation that we are backed into Global Civil War. Where there is no longer anything that can limit the confrontation between the opposing forces. Not even the law, which comes into play as one more form of the generalized confrontation. Anonymous, Call, p.5

Some have tried to name the desert. To point out what has to be fought — not as the action of some foreign agent, but as an ensemble of relations. They have talked about the Spectacle, about Biopower, about Empire. But this only adds to the current confusion. The spectacle is not an easy abbreviation for mass media. It lives just as much in the cruelty with which our own false image is endlessly thrown back at us. Biopower is not a synonym for social security, the welfare state, or the pharmaceutical industry; but it pleasantly lodges itself in the care that we take of our pretty bodies, in a certain physical estrangement from oneself as well as from others. Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a worldwide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational corporations. Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. Everywhere things are working. Everywhere the status quo reigns. We continue to see the enemy as a subject that faces us — instead of experiencing it as a relationship that binds us — we confine ourselves to the struggle against confinement. We reproduce the worst relationships of dominance under the pretext of an alternative. We set up shops for selling the struggle against the commodity. We see the rise of the authorities of the anti-authoritarian struggle, macho feminism, and racist attacks by anti-fascists. At every moment we are taking part in a situation. Within a situation there are no subjects and objects, I and the other, my desires and reality — only an ensemble of relationships, an ensemble of the fluxes that traverse it. There is a general context — capitalism, civilization, empire, as you wish — a general context that not only intends to control each situation but, even worse, seeks a way to make sure as often as possible, that there is no situation. They have planned out streets and homes, language and emotions, even the global tempo that drives all of it, only for that purpose. Everywhere different realms are made to slide by each other and be ignored. The normal situation is this absence of a situation. Anonymous, Call, p.4-5

Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and which means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary lower middle-class that currently (and from now on) lives in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its programmed annihilation. Just as they know that from now on the counter-revolution they lead is inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many new towns. Anonymous, Call, p.24

The attitude of realism that dominant capitalism requires is essentially depressive. The management of this collective depression goes through a series of thresholds. First of all, we come to expect very little: nothing will ever happen again. Then we think that maybe the things that once happened weren’t actually so great. Finally, we accept that nothing has ever happened, nor could ever happen. The more that depression is normalised, the harder it is to even identify it. Radically lowered expectations become habituated. Time flattens out. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, For Now, Our Desire is Nameless - The Reality of Class Continues, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.598

One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it resists actual creations when they first appear, then eventually exploits them. This is because it needs to maintain a certain degree of criticality and experimental research among a minority, but must take care to channel this activity into narrowly compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines and avert any holistic critique and experimentation. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert the taste for in- novation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward certain confused, degraded and innocuous forms of novelty. Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could support them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions. The people within these tendencies who become well known are generally accepted as exceptional individuals, on the condition that they accept various renunciations: the essential point is always the renunciation of a comprehensive opposition and the acceptance of fragmentary works susceptible to diverse interpretations. This is what gives the very term “avant-garde,” which in the final analysis is always defined and manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a dubious and ridiculous aspect. Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.4

In Europe, the integration of workers’ organizations into the state management apparatus — the foundation of social democracy — was paid for with the renunciation of the least ability to be a nuisance. Here too the emergence of the labor movement was a matter of material solidarities, of an urgent need for communism. The Maisons du Peuple were the last refuges for this confusion between the need for immediate communization and the strategic requirements of a practical implementation of the revolutionary process. The labor movement then developed as a progressive separation between the co-operative current, an economic niche cut off from its strategic raison d’être, and the political and union forms working on the terrain of electoralism or joint management. It is from the abandonment of any secessionist aim that this absurdity was born: the Left. The climax is reached when unionists denounce any resort to violence, loudly proclaiming to all who wish to hear it, that they will collaborate with the cops to control rioters. Anonymous, Call, p.18

There's a perverse dialectic between institution and movements, which testi­fies to the former's relentless survival instinct. A reality as ancient, massive, and hieratic as that, inscribed in the bodies and minds of its subjects for the hundreds of years the French state has existed, could not have lasted so long if it had not been able to tolerate, monitor, and recuperate critics and revolutionaries as they presented them­ selves. The carnivalesque ritual of social movements function within it as a safety valve, as a tool for managing the social as well as for renewing the institution. They bring it the flexibility, the young flesh, the new blood that it so cruelly lacks. Generation after generation, in its great wisdom, the state has been able to co-opt those who showed themselves amenable to being bought off, and crush those who acted intransigent. It's not for nothing that so many leaders of student movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of the institution as mask. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.75-76

The workers’ failures were necessary since it was capital that constituted their organizing principle: “The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions, shows that the proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social order which presented an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, and thus to the development of capital, but that at the moment that it became a matter of establishing a different community, it remained a prisoner of the logic of the rationality of the development of those productive forces, and confined itself within the problem of managing them.” [Jacques Camatte, ‘Proletariat and Revolution’, 1975] In a recent text Dauvé sums up this estimation of the old workers’ movement: “The workers’ movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. … The purpose of the old labour movement was to take over the same world and manage it in a new way: putting the idle to work, developing production, introducing workers’ democracy (in principle, at least). Only a tiny minority, ‘anarchist’ as well as 'marxist', held that a different society meant the destruction of State, commodity and wage labour, although it rarely defined this as a process, rather as a programme to put into practice after the seizure of power…” [Gilles Dauvé, ‘Out of the Future’ in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement (1997) pp. 12-13.] Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

The spectacle in its entirety is the era, an era in which a certain youth has recognized itself. It is the gap between this image and its results; the gap between the vision, the tastes, the refusals and the projects that previously defined it and the way it has advanced into ordinary life. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and which means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary lower middle-class that currently (and from now on) lives in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its programmed annihilation. Just as they know that from now on the counter-revolution they lead is inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many new towns. Anonymous, Call, p.24

Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be called political without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is taken for reality and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of Existential Liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to have a rapport with the world based on the idea that each person has her own life. That such a life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each person can define herself by an ensemble of qualities, of properties, that make her, through her continual balancing of those properties, a unique and irreplaceable being. That the contract adequately epitomizes relations between individuals, and that respect epitomizes all virtue. That language is nothing but a means of arriving at an agreement. That, in reality, the world is composed on one side of things to manage, and on the other of an ocean of self-absorbed individuals, who in turn have a regrettable tendency to turn themselves into things, letting themselves become managed. Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical diagnoses of Existential Liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied affection, isolation, illusions of citizenship, and the loss of all generosity. Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that even the most sincere Leftists express their utopia with its very terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society in which each person makes her contribution and from which each person gets her needs met from it... As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each person consumes in proportion to the efforts she is ready to contribute. Naturally it will be necessary to redefine the method of evaluating the efforts contributed by each person,” write the organizers of the Alternative, Anti-capitalist, and Anti-war Village against the G8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When Capitalism and Wage Labor Will Have Been Abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of Empire: managing to keep in the shadows, to surround with silence the very terrain on which it maneuvers, the field upon which it fights the decisive battle: that of manipulating feelings, of defining the limits of the perceptible. In such a way it preventively paralyzes any defense at the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the militant, at the end of a hard day of Political Work, slumps down in front of an action movie. Anonymous, Call, p.7-8

The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it. And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility of the real, an ultimate stabi­lization of phenomena. If the institution suits us so well, it's because the sort of legibility it guarantees saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever, from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the same as choosing not to exist. It's to resign from life. In reality, what we need are not institutions but forms. It so happens, in fact, that life, whether biological, singular or collective, is precisely a continual creation of forms. It suffices to perceive them, to accept allowing them to arise, to make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis. A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form. A work is a form. A profession is a form. Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.68-69

Far from representing the emergence of a coherent agent, the expansion of the surplus population marks the tendential disappearance of the previous revolutionary horizon. It was once possible — indeed quite reasonable — to think of the proletariat as an emergent social subject, becoming ever larger and more unified with the global spread and development of the capitalist mode of production, and particularly with the incorporation of a growing portion of the class into industrial employment. Today, in an era of slowing economic growth — which is also an era of general deindustrialisation — the revolutionary orientations of the past no longer make sense. The working class — always internally differentiated — displays a diminishing capacity for unification under a single hegemonic figure, thus realising its always latent tendency to decompose into fragments, facing off one against the other. At the heart of this fractiousness is the division of the class into two parts: (1) a shrinking one that retains higher wages and social protections, but must constantly fight rearguard actions against capitalist “reforms” and restructurings; and (2) a growing one that faces poor prospects of employment and is offered few social protections. The more secure sector — which is also more organised — often needs the support of the more precarious in order to win its struggles. However, calls for greater “inclusion” of such people may stoke valid fears that this will undermine more secure positions, opening up access to education and training, and thereby increasing labour supply and reducing bargaining power. At the same time, members of the more precarious part may be rightly suspicious of the motives of the more secure: after the sacrifices have been made, won’t it be merely the latter’s rearguard battles that have been won? After all, those with security rarely take to the streets when it is the less fortunate who are getting screwed. The expansion of the surplus population is important in explaining this division, but it is not the only meaningful one within the class. There is a potentially infinite variety of such distinctions, so the question of explaining current divisions can in a sense be reversed: What was the unity that is now in advanced stages of decay? How did it come about? This is a question that we have attempted to answer elsewhere in this issue, in ‘A History of Separation’. For our purposes here though, it is enough to note simply that there was once a hegemonic identity and orientation among workers that could provide grounds for affirming certain struggles as central, while excluding others as secondary or unimportant. It is equally clear that this affirmation seems less and less plausible today. In place of the identity of the worker, we are now faced with so many competing alternatives, each with its own strategic priorities: those who want more jobs against those who want to stave off environmental catastrophe; those who want to preserve the family wage for unionised male workers against those who want gender equality; those of dominant national or racial identities against those of racialised minorities, and so on. In this sense, the fractiousness of “identity politics” is symptomatic of an era. In a period of increasingly slow economic growth under the threat of ecological catastrophe, it seems diminishingly plausible to claim that fighting the battles of one part of the class will advance the class as a whole. This is why we reject any attempt to find in surplus populations an ersatz social subject that might replace the hegemonic role played by the white male factory worker in the workers’ movement. At present there seems to be no class fraction — whether “the most strategically placed” or “the most oppressed” — whose struggles express a general interest. At the same time, attempts to conjure up a new unity from this diversity by simply renaming it as “multitude” or “precariat”, for example, merely gloss over this fundamental problem of internal division. If there is any revolutionary potential at present, it seems that it stands to be actualised not in the struggle of any particular class fraction, but rather, in those moments when diverse fractions are drawn together in struggle in spite of their mutual suspicions; despite the lack of a stable, consistent hegemonic pole. In such moments, the demands of various sections of the class come into conflict with one another — a conflict that may bring the prospect of destabilising or undermining mutually exclusive demands and identities. The modes by which social life is organised and segmented within capitalist societies can then come to appear as obstacles to further struggle, dividing workers against one another. The question of how to move forward is then at least raised, though with no easy answers. After all, a definitive answer would involve an overcoming of the unity-in-separation that organises social life. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the con­temporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hege­monies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorpo­rated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmenta­tion is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre. The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone clois­tered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggre­gates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming con­nections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other. The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49

In the longer term it seems that the plan of Capital is to separate out a network of high-security zones on a global scale, continuously linked up with each other, and where the process of capitalist valorization would encompass all the expressions of life in a perpetual and unhindered way. This Imperial comfort zone, comprised of deterritorialized citizens, would form a kind of policed continuum where a more or less constant level of control would prevail, politically as well as biometrically. As they advance the process of its pacification, the rest of the world could then flourish as a foil and, at the same time, as a gigantic Outside to civilize. Anonymous, Call, p.24-25

The present catastrophe is that of a world actively made uninhabitable. A sort of methodical devastation of everything that remained liveable in the relations of humans with each other and with our environments. Capitalism could not have triumphed over the whole planet if it was not for techniques of power, specifically political techniques — there are all kinds of techniques: with or without tools, corporal or discursive, erotic or culinary, the disciplines and mechanisms of control, and it is pointless to denounce the reign of technics. The political techniques of capitalism consist first of all in breaking the attachments through which a group finds the means to produce, in the same movement, the conditions of its subsistence and its existence. In separating human communities from innumerable things - stones and metals, plants, trees that have a thousand purposes, gods, djinns, wild or tamed animals, medicines and psycho-active substances, amulets, machines, and all the other beings in their realms that co-exist with humans. Ruining all community, separating groups from their means of existence and from the knowledge linked to them: it is political rationality that dictates the imposition of the commodity as the mediator of every relation. Just as it was necessary to liquidate the witches — which is to say their medicinal knowledge as well as the movement between the visible and invisible worlds which they promoted - today peasants have to renounce their ability to sow their own seeds in order to maintain the grip of multinational agribusinesses and other organizations of agricultural politics. These political techniques of capitalism find their maximal point of concentration in contemporary metropoles. Metropoles are precisely the arena where, in the end, there is almost nothing left to reappropriate. A milieu in which everything is done so the human only relates to itself, only creates itself separately from other forms of life, bumps into or uses them without ever meeting them. Anonymous, Call, p.10-11

As it is reorganized and progressively recaptured, public space is blanketed with cameras. It is not only that surveillance is now possible, it is that is has become particularly acceptable. All sorts of lists of suspects circulate from department to department, and we can barely make out their probable uses. Protected by the police, gangs of paramilitaries replace the positions once held by gossips and snitches, figures of another era. Anonymous, Call, p.6

In France a new weapon of crowd dispersal, a kind of wooden fragmentation grenade is being tested. In Oregon it is proposed that demonstrators blocking traffic receive twenty-five year sentences. The Israeli army is becoming the most prominent consultant in urban pacification; experts from all over the world rush to marvel at the latest discoveries, both formidable and subtle, in methods to eliminate subversives. It would appear that the art of wounding — injuring one to frighten a hundred — has reached new heights. And then, of course, there’s what gets called Terrorism. That is, “any offence committed intentionally by an individual or a group against one or more countries, their institutions or their populations, and aiming at threatening and/or seriously undermining or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country.” That’s the definition of the European Commission. In the United States there are more prisoners than farmers. Anonymous, Call, p.6

The social media outline very logically the future of all-points evaluation that we are promised. On this point, one can rely on the prophesies of Black Mirror as well as those of this analyst who is enthusiastic about contemporary markets: "Imagine that tomorrow, with every little word posted on the Web, for no matter what online babble, exchange, meeting, transaction, share, or behavior, you will need to consider the impact this might have on your reputation. Consider next that your reputation will no longer be a kind of immaterial emanation that certain people will be able to inquire about with your friends and professional partners, but an actual certificate of all-round ability established by complex algorithms based on the intersection of a thousand and one pieces of information about you on the Web...data which are themselves cross­ referenced with the reputations of the persons you have rubbed shoulders with! Welcome to an imminent future, where your "reputation" will be concretely recorded, as a universal file accessible to all: a relational, professional, commercial door-opener, capable of allowing or preventing an opportunity for car sharing on Mobizen or Deways, a romantic meeting on Meetic or Attractive World, a sale on eBay or Amazon. . . and more, this time in the quite tangible world: a professional appointment, a real estate transaction, or a bank loan . . . increasingly, our appearances on the Web will constitute the foundation of our reputation. Furthermore, our social value will become a major indicator of our economic value." What is new in the current phase of capital is that it now has the technical means at its disposal for a generalized, real-time evaluation of every aspect of beings. The passion for rating and cross-rating has escaped the classrooms, the stock market, and supervisors' files and invaded every area of life. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.102-103

Currently the employer federation MEDEF is proposing that a SIRET number, a business identification number, be assigned to every French citizen at their birth. The value of beings becomes the set of their "individual characteristics"-their health, their humor, their beauty, their know-how, their relations, their "social skills," their imagination, their creativity, and so on. That's the theory, and the reality, of "human capital." The value field has incorporated so many dimensions that it has become a complex space. It's become the whole ensemble of the socially sayable, legible, and visible. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.104

As social cybernetization progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. As a consequence, situations of crisis and malfunction multiply in a completely logical way. From the point of view of Empire, a power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement are all the same. They are disturbances. They must be managed. Anonymous, Call, p.26

"Kettling" does not simply constitute a technique of psychological warfare which the French order belatedly imported from England. Kettling is a dialectical image of current political power. It's the figure of a despised, reviled power that no longer does anything but keep the population in its nets. It's the figure of a power that no longer promises anything, and has no other activity than locking all the exits. A power that no one supports anymore in a positive way, that everyone tries to flee as best they can, and that has no other perspective than to keep in its confining bosom all that is on the verge of escaping it. The figure of kettling is dialectical in that what it is designed to confine, it also brings together. It is a site where meet-ups take place between those who are trying to desert. Novel chants, full of irony, are invented there. A shared experience develops within its enclosure. The police apparatus is not equipped to contain the vertical escape that occurs in the form of tags that will soon embellish every wall, every bus shelter, every business. And that gives evidence that the mind remains free even when the bodies are held captive. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.33

Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it with other, less brutal weapons): dictatorship is one of its tendencies, a tendency realised whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred in Germany after 1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship: anyone would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the choice? Even the gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be turned into a dictatorship if circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it fulfils democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

The enemy, we said, is the capitalist social synthesis, the peculiarly tight logic of social cohesion in capitalist society. This cohesion draws us back into its arms in different ways. The most obvious are perhaps the state and our own personal 'failings', but the most insidious and forceful is value. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.53

The universal pressure to conform comes from the social cohesion of capitalist social relations. We can make a protest, we can scream, we can throw stones, but then the capitalist social relations seems to flow around us and suck us back into the system. We go and hurl our fury at the meetings of the G8, but then what? We still must eat and we still must sell our labour power or otherwise bow to capital in order to get money to buy food. We can occupy a factory, but then what? We still must find a way of selling the products we make if we carry on producing, we still must bow to market forces. We, can overthrow the government, perhaps, if we all go on the streets and protest enough, but then what? What happens after our moments of rebellion, our moments of excess? We still have to find a way of reinserting ourselves into the world order, and that world order is capitalist. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.53

Any society is based on some sort of social cohesion, some form of relation between the activities of the many different people. In capitalist society, this cohesion has a particular logic often described in terms of the laws of capitalist development. There is a systemic closure that gives the social cohesion a particular force and makes it very difficult to break. To underline the close-knit character of the social cohesion of capitalist society, I refer to it as a social synthesis. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.52

Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal labor of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labor of others materialized either in money or in some other object. We saw that in order to convert money into capital something more is required than the production and circulation of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money, on the other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one side, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing but labor-power, must confront one another as buyer and seller. The separation of labor from its product, of subjective labor-power from the objective conditions of labor, was therefore the real foundation in fact, and the starting point of capitalist production. But that which at first was but a starting point, becomes, by the mere continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist production. On the one hand, the process of production incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for the capitalist. On the other hand, the laborer, on quitting the process, is what he was on entering it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means of making that wealth his own. Since, before entering on the process, his own labor has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labor-power, has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital, it must, during the process, be realized in a product that does not belong to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the capitalist consumes labor-power, the product of the laborer is incessantly converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks-up the value creating power, into means of subsistence that buy the person of the laborer, into means of production that command the producers. The laborer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces labor-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realized; in short he produces the laborer, but as a wage laborer. This incessant reproduction, the perpetuation of the laborer, is the sine qua non of capitalist production. […] Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labor-power and the means of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the laborer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor-power in order to live and enables the capitalist to purchase labor-power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and laborer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself that incessantly hurls back the laborer on to the market as a vendor of his labor-power and that incessantly converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillations in the market-price of labor-power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage laborer. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.403, 407

[…] like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable in the present conditions; the best we can do is to work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters. Now, The SI, Internationale Situationniste #9, https://libcom.org/article/now-si

Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stock-jobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. *Après moi le deluge!* is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.275-276

The present catastrophe is that of a world actively made uninhabitable. A sort of methodical devastation of everything that remained liveable in the relations of humans with each other and with our environments. Capitalism could not have triumphed over the whole planet if it was not for techniques of power, specifically political techniques — there are all kinds of techniques: with or without tools, corporal or discursive, erotic or culinary, the disciplines and mechanisms of control, and it is pointless to denounce the reign of technics. The political techniques of capitalism consist first of all in breaking the attachments through which a group finds the means to produce, in the same movement, the conditions of its subsistence and its existence. In separating human communities from innumerable things - stones and metals, plants, trees that have a thousand purposes, gods, djinns, wild or tamed animals, medicines and psycho-active substances, amulets, machines, and all the other beings in their realms that co-exist with humans. Ruining all community, separating groups from their means of existence and from the knowledge linked to them: it is political rationality that dictates the imposition of the commodity as the mediator of every relation. Just as it was necessary to liquidate the witches — which is to say their medicinal knowledge as well as the movement between the visible and invisible worlds which they promoted - today peasants have to renounce their ability to sow their own seeds in order to maintain the grip of multinational agribusinesses and other organizations of agricultural politics. These political techniques of capitalism find their maximal point of concentration in contemporary metropoles. Metropoles are precisely the arena where, in the end, there is almost nothing left to reappropriate. A milieu in which everything is done so the human only relates to itself, only creates itself separately from other forms of life, bumps into or uses them without ever meeting them. Anonymous, Call, p.10-11

The pervasiveness of the commodity has inserted itself everywhere. This pervasiveness is the most effective instrument for disconnecting ends from means, to reduce everyday life to a living-space we are only required to manage. Everyday life is what we are supposed to want to return to; the acceptance of a necessary and universal neutralization. It is the ever-growing renunciation of the possibility of an unpostponed joy. As a friend once said, it is the average of all our possible crimes. Anonymous, Call, p.14

We do not perceive humans to be isolated from each other or from the other beings of this world; we see them bound by multiple connections that we have learned to deny. This denial allows the blocking of emotional exchanges through which these multiple connections are experienced. This blockage, in turn, is necessary to make us accustomed to the most neutral, the most lifeless, the most average feelings; that which makes us long for vacations, lunch-breaks, or evenings out as a godsend — that is to say something just as neutral, average, and lifeless — but freely chosen. The imperial order, which is particularly Westernized, is nourished through this boredom. Anonymous, Call, p.15

Like many, we have experienced that emotions stuck internally turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the partitions that every person believes herself obliged to put up in order to define her own limits, and to contain within herself what must not burst forth. When, for some reason or other, these partitions happen to crack and break, then things come up that might be unpleasant, which may even appear frightful — but it is a fright capable of freeing us from fear. Calling into question both our individual limits and the borders drawn by civilization can be a life-saver. The existence of any real community necessitates a certain physical danger: when emotions and thoughts are no longer ascribable to any one person, when interactions are recovered in which feelings, ideas, impressions, and emotions are exchanged carelessly. It must be understood that community per se is not the solution: it is its disappearance, everywhere and always, that is the problem. Anonymous, Call, p.15

At root it is here that we begin, where we find each other. What is most singular in us calls to be shared. But we note this: not only is what we have to share obviously incompatible with the dominant order, but this order strives to track down any kind of sharing for which it does not lay down the rules. For instance, the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the asylum, and the retirement home are the only forms of collective living allowed in the metropole. The normal condition is the isolation of everyone in their private cubicle. This is where they return endlessly, however strong the repulsion they feel, however great the encounters they make elsewhere. We have known these conditions of existence, and we will never return to them. They weaken us too much. Make us too vulnerable. Make us waste away. Isolation, in primal cultures, was the harshest sentence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is now the common condition. The rest of the disaster follows logically. It is on account of this narrow idea that everybody has of their own home that makes it seem natural to leave the street to the police. The world could not have been made so uninhabitable, nor sociality so controlled — from malls to bars, from boardrooms to backrooms — had not everyone been previously granted the shelter of private space. Anonymous, Call, p.17

Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the con­temporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hege­monies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorpo­rated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmenta­tion is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre. The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone clois­tered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggre­gates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming con­nections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other. The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49

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

It's necessary above all to maintain the reign of the economy beyond the extinction of the wage system. This has to do with the fact that if there is less and less work, everything is all the more mediated by money, be it in very small amounts. Given the absence of work, the need to earn money in order to survive must be maintained. Even if a universal basic income is established one day, as so many liberal economists recommend, its amount would need to be large enough to keep a person from dying of hunger, but utterly insufficient to live on, even fru­ gally. We are witnessing a change of regime within economy. The majestic figure of the Worker is being succeeded by the puny figure of the Needy Opportunist [le Crevard]-because if money and control are to infiltrate everywhere, it's necessary for money to be lacking everywhere. Henceforth, everything must be an occasion for generating a little money, a little value, for earning "a little cash." The present technological offensive should also be understood as a way to occupy and valorize those who can no longer be exploited through waged labor. What is too quickly described as the uberization of the world, unfolds in two different ways. Thus on the one hand you have Uber, Deliveroo and the like, that unskilled job opportu­nity requiring only one's old machine as capital. Every driver is free to self-exploit as much as they like, knowing that they must roll around fifty hours a week to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. And then there are Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, dating sites, "coworking," and now even "cohoming" or "costorage," and all the applications that enable the sphere of the valorizable to be extended to infinity. What is involved with the "collaborative economy," with its inexhaustible possibilities of valorization, is not just a mutation of life-it's a mutation of the possible, a mutation of the norm. Before Airbnb, an unoccupied room was a "guest room" or a room available for a new use; now it's a loss of income. Before BlaBlaCar, a solo drive in one's car was an occasion to daydream, or pick up a hitchhiker, or whatever, but now it's a missed chance to make a little money, and hence a scandal, economically speaking. What one gave to recycling or to friends one now sells on Le bon coin. It's expected that always and from every point of view one will be engaged in calculating. That the fear of "missing an opportunity" will goad us forward in life. The important thing is not working for one euro an hour or making a few pennies by scanning contents for Amazon Mechanical Turk, but where this participation might lead someday. Henceforth everything must enter into the sphere ofprofitability. Everything in life becomes valorizable, even its trash. And we ourselves are becoming needy opportunists, human trash, who exploit each other under the pretext of a "sharing economy." If a growing share of the population is destined to be excluded from the wage system this is not in order to allow it the leisure to go hunt Pokemons in the morning and to fish in the afternoon. The inven­tion of new markets where one didn't imagine them to be the year before illustrates this fact that is so difficult to explain to a Marxist: capitalism doesn't so much consist in selling what is produced as in rendering accountable whatever is not yet accountable, in assigning a measureable worth to what seemed to be absolutely unsusceptible to that the day before, in creating new markets. That is its oceanic reserve of accumulation. Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.96-98

Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of power, and its extension in the 20th century completes capital’s domination by intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the separation between man and community, between human activity and society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to strengthen the “social bond”, democracy contributes to its dissolution. Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so by tightening the hold of the net which the state has placed over social relations. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

Here is daylight, and here are perspectives that now no longer mean anything. The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, like all that secrecy of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

the incursion of capitalist cyberspace into every area of life and the psyche has intensified the processes of de-socialisation. This is not to say that there are no progressive potentials in the web, but these have almost certainly been overrated, while the impact of cyberspace in de-socialising culture and subjectivity has been massively underestimated. Here I merely rehearse Bifo’s account of semio-capitalism and Jodi Dean’s critique of communicative capitalism, but it is important to operationalise this critique. Blogs and social media have allowed us to talk to ourselves (but not to reach out beyond the left bubbles); they have also generated pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger — they waste time and energy, our most crucial resources. Email and handhelds, meanwhile, have produced new forms of isolation and loneliness: the fact that we can receive communications from work anywhere and anytime means we are exposed to work’s order-words when we are alone, without the possibility of support from fellow workers. In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it — as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution — but not live inside it. The problem is that this goes against the tendencies of handhelds. We all recognise the by now clichéd image of a train carriage full of people pecking at their tiny screens, but have we really registered how miserable this really is, and how much it suits capital for these pockets of socialisation to be closed down? Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - Socialization Beyond Social Media, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.592

Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the con­temporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hege­monies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorpo­rated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmenta­tion is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre. The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone clois­tered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggre­gates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming con­nections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other. The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49

The real lie is not the one we tell others but the one we tell ourselves. The first lie is relatively exceptional in comparison with the second. The big lie is refusing to see certain things that one does see, and refusing to see them just as one sees them. The real lie is all the screens, all the images, all the explanations that are allowed to stand between oneself and the world. It's how we regularly dismiss our own perceptions. So much so that where it's not a question of truth, it won't be a question of anything. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.11-12

Those in charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It's as if we needed to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social obligation. Moreover the technological equipment of leisure increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores, levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.95

The social media outline very logically the future of all-points evaluation that we are promised. On this point, one can rely on the prophesies of Black Mirror as well as those of this analyst who is enthusiastic about contemporary markets: "Imagine that tomorrow, with every little word posted on the Web, for no matter what online babble, exchange, meeting, transaction, share, or behavior, you will need to consider the impact this might have on your reputation. Consider next that your reputation will no longer be a kind of immaterial emanation that certain people will be able to inquire about with your friends and professional partners, but an actual certificate of all-round ability established by complex algorithms based on the intersection of a thousand and one pieces of information about you on the Web...data which are themselves cross­ referenced with the reputations of the persons you have rubbed shoulders with! Welcome to an imminent future, where your "reputation" will be concretely recorded, as a universal file accessible to all: a relational, professional, commercial door-opener, capable of allowing or preventing an opportunity for car sharing on Mobizen or Deways, a romantic meeting on Meetic or Attractive World, a sale on eBay or Amazon. . . and more, this time in the quite tangible world: a professional appointment, a real estate transaction, or a bank loan . . . increasingly, our appearances on the Web will constitute the foundation of our reputation. Furthermore, our social value will become a major indicator of our economic value." What is new in the current phase of capital is that it now has the technical means at its disposal for a generalized, real-time evaluation of every aspect of beings. The passion for rating and cross-rating has escaped the classrooms, the stock market, and supervisors' files and invaded every area of life. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.102-103

The only thing capable of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society into a historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the movements of the adver­sary, everything that identifies the usable paths and the obstacles-the systematic character of the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can well be improvised. A strategic verticality of this kind can only emerge from a constant, generous discussion, undertaken in good faith. In this epoch, the means of commu­nication are the forms of organization. It's our weakness, for the means aren't in our hands, and those who control them are not our friends. So there's no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation between worlds that is cruelly deficient, but from which, in contact with the situation, the right decision must emanate. Such a discussion can gain the center, from the periphery where it is cur­rently contained, only through an offensive from the domain of sensibility, on the plane of percep­tions, and not of discourse. We're talking about addressing bodies and not just the head. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.158

Our epoch accumulates powers and dreams of itself as being rational. But no one recognizes these powers as their own. No one becomes an adult — there is only the possible eventual transformation of this long restlessness into a routine somnolence. Because no one ceases to be held under guardianship. The problem is not that people live more or less poorly, but that they live in a way that is always out of their control. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no individuals — only specters haunting the objects anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, striving toward unity will introduce other separations. The quest for a central activity leads to the formation of new specializations. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it with other, less brutal weapons): dictatorship is one of its tendencies, a tendency realised whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred in Germany after 1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship: anyone would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the choice? Even the gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be turned into a dictatorship if circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it fulfils democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

All capital must accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors — establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits , irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves. Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-establish accumulation short of the “slaughtering of capital values” and the “setting free of labour” which re-establish the conditions of profitability. Yet this formalistic conception of the valorisation process fails to capture the historical dynamic to which Marx’s analysis is attuned. The law of profitability alone cannot ensure expanded reproduction, for this also requires the emergence of new industries and new markets. Rises and falls in profitability act as signals to the capitalist class that innovations have occurred in specific industries, but what is important is that over time the composition of output — and therefore employment — changes: industries that once accounted for a large portion of output and employment now grow more slowly, while new industries take a rising share of both. Here, we have to look at the determinants of demand, as independent from the determinants of supply. Demand varies with the price of a given product. When the price is high, the product is purchased only by the wealthy. As labour-saving process innovations accumulate, prices fall, transforming the product into a mass-consumption good. At the cusp of this transformation, innovations cause the market for a given product to expand enormously. This expansion stretches beyond the capacity of existing firms, and prices fall more slowly than costs, leading to a period of high profitability. Capital then rushes into the line, pulling labour with it. At a certain point, however, the limits of the market are reached; that is, the market is saturated. Now innovations cause total capacity to rise beyond the size of the market: prices fall more quickly than costs, leading to a period of falling profitability. Capital will leave the line, expelling labour. [10] [10]: This process applies only to consumer-goods industries. Capital-goods industries, tend to expand and contract in accordance with the needs of the particular consumer-goods which ‘lead’ each cycle. But the relationship between the two ‘departments’ is never so simple. As we will show, labour-saving ‘process-innovations’ in dept. 1 may lead to ‘product innovations’ in dept. 2, expanding the market as a whole. This process, which economists have called the “maturation” of industries, has occurred many times. The agricultural revolution, which first broke out in early modern England, eventually hit the limits of the domestic market for its products. Labour-process innovations such as the consolidation of fragmented land holdings, the abolition of the fallow, and the differentiation of land use according to natural advantages meant — under capitalist conditions of reproduction — that both labour and capital were systematically pushed out of the countryside. England rapidly urbanised as a result, and London became the largest city in Europe. It is here that the key dynamic of expanded reproduction comes into play. For the workers thrown out of agriculture were not left to languish indefinitely in the cities. They were eventually taken up in the manufacturing sector of an industrialising Britain, and especially in the growing textile industry, which was transitioning from wool to cotton cloth. But once again, labour-process innovations such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and the power loom meant that eventually this industry, too, began to throw off labour and capital. And the decline in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution, as a percentage of total labour employed and capital accumulated, made way for those of the second Industrial Revolution (chemicals, telecommunications, electric and engine-powered commodities). It is this movement of labour and capital into and out of lines, based on differential rates of profit, that ensures the continued possibility of expanded reproduction: [E]xpansion … is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increase in production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed hands. Expanded reproduction is, in this way, the continual reproduction of the conditions of simple reproduction. Capitals that can no longer reinvest in a given line due to falling profitability will tend to find, available to them on the labour market, workers who have been thrown out of other lines. These “free” quantities of capital and labour will then find employment in expanding markets, where rates of profit are higher, or come together in entirely new product lines, manufacturing products for markets that do not yet exist. An increasing number of activities are thus subsumed as capitalist valorisation processes, and commodities spread from luxury into mass markets. The bourgeois economist Joseph Schumpeter described this process in his theory of the business cycle. He noted that the contraction of older lines rarely happens smoothly or peacefully, that it is usually associated with factory closures and bankruptcies as capitals attempt to deflect losses onto one another in competitive price wars. When several lines contract simultaneously (and they usually do, since they are based on linked sets of technological innovations), a recession ensues. Schumpeter calls this shedding of capital and labour “creative destruction”—“creative” not only in the sense that it is stimulated by innovation, but also because destruction creates the conditions for new investment and innovation: in a crisis, capitals find means of production and labour-power available to them on the market at discount prices. Thus, like a forest fire, the recession clears the way for a new bout of growth. Many Marxists have espoused something similar to Schumpeter’s conception of cyclical growth, to which they merely add the resistance of workers (or perhaps the limits of ecology) as an external constraint. Hence the Marxist notion of crisis as a self-regulating mechanism is complemented by a conviction that crises provide opportunities to assert the power of labour (or correct the ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism). In these moments, “another world is possible”. Yet Marx’s theory of capitalism contains no such distinction between “internal” dynamics and “external” limits. For Marx it is in and through this process of expanded reproduction that the dynamic of capital manifests itself as its own limit, not through cycles of boom and bust but in a secular deterioration of its own conditions of accumulation. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour. As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.541-542

Marx explains this structural feature of capitalism in his chapter on “simple reproduction” in volume one. We will interpret this concept as the reproduction, in and through cycles of production-consumption, of the relationship between capital and workers: Marx sometimes refers to simple reproduction as an abstract thought experiment – capitalism without growth – but to leave it at that is to miss what the concept tells us about the inner mechanism of the process of accumulation. The chapter on simple reproduction concludes: “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer” (Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573). Simple reproduction is maintained not out of “habit”, nor by the false or inadequate consciousness of workers, but by a material compulsion. This is the exploitation of wage-workers, the fact that all together, they can purchase only a portion of the goods they produce: "[Capital prevents its] self-conscious instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of the necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in the labour-market.” (Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p.573.) Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

All capital must accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors — establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits , irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves. Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-establish accumulation short of the “slaughtering of capital values” and the “setting free of labour” which re-establish the conditions of profitability. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso. This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, “to decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour. As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.541-542

However much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation, but, on the contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this clear once more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose culminating point is capitalist accumulation. We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a sum of values into capital was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his labor-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use value – labor – is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labor equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise lawfully his. The value of the product includes: first, the value of the used-up means of production. Useful labor cannot consume these means of production without transferring their value to the new product, but, to be saleable, labor-power must be capable of supplying useful labor in the branch of industry in which it is to be employed. The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent of the value of labor-power together with a surplus-value. This is so because the value of labor-power – sold for a definite length of time, say a day, a week etc – is less than the value created by its use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value of his labor-power and by so doing has alienated its use value – this being the case in every sale and purchase. The fact that this particular commodity, labor-power, possesses the peculiar use value of supplying labor, and therefore, of creating value, cannot affect the general law of commodity production. If, therefore, the magnitude of the value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product, but is found there augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used up by the buyer. The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities given in exchange for one another. From the very outset, it presupposes even a difference between their use-values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption, which only begins after the deal is closed and executed. Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless, the result is: 1. That the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker 2. That the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital originally advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labor but the capitalist nothing, and which nonetheless becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist 3. That the worker has retained his labor-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer. Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation; each time money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken; on the contrary, it is merely enabled to operate continuously. [...] Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist squanders the whole surplus-value in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and converting the rest into money. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.413-414

Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction. The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the only mode by which it can reproduce its wealth, and maintain it at one level, is by replacing the means of production – i.e., the instruments of labour, the raw material, and the auxiliary substances consumed in the course of the year – by an equal quantity of the same kind of articles; these must be separated from the mass of the yearly products, and thrown afresh into the process of production. Hence, a definite portion of each year’s product belongs to the domain of production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the most part, in the shape of articles totally unfitted for individual consumption. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.401

Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by the personal labor of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labor of others materialized either in money or in some other object. We saw that in order to convert money into capital something more is required than the production and circulation of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money, on the other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one side, the possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing but labor-power, must confront one another as buyer and seller. The separation of labor from its product, of subjective labor-power from the objective conditions of labor, was therefore the real foundation in fact, and the starting point of capitalist production. But that which at first was but a starting point, becomes, by the mere continuity of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist production. On the one hand, the process of production incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for the capitalist. On the other hand, the laborer, on quitting the process, is what he was on entering it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means of making that wealth his own. Since, before entering on the process, his own labor has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labor-power, has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital, it must, during the process, be realized in a product that does not belong to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the capitalist consumes labor-power, the product of the laborer is incessantly converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks-up the value creating power, into means of subsistence that buy the person of the laborer, into means of production that command the producers. The laborer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist as constantly produces labor-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth, separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realized; in short he produces the laborer, but as a wage laborer. This incessant reproduction, the perpetuation of the laborer, is the sine qua non of capitalist production. […] Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labor-power and the means of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the laborer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor-power in order to live and enables the capitalist to purchase labor-power in order that he may enrich himself. It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and laborer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself that incessantly hurls back the laborer on to the market as a vendor of his labor-power and that incessantly converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillations in the market-price of labor-power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage laborer. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.403, 407

Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p.410

In so far as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labor-power, the laborer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far as all of this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor-power is itself but a portion of the product of other’s labor appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this – the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man’s own labor. [...] Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its products, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.412-413

Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form of appearance of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because the product he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital. But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer’s own labour, realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the capitalist. Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He works on his own land, with his own means of production, for, say, 3 days a week. The 3 other days he does forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return, his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side, never acquires the character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of production of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to the lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before, 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the means of production as means of production, and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that the forced labour is changed into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund, which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord. The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the fact, that it is but here and there on the face of the earth, that even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.402

The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p.412

All capital must accumulate, or it will fall behind in its competition with other capitals. Competitive price formation and variable cost structures within sectors lead to divergent intra-sectoral profit rates, which in turn drives efficiency-increasing innovations, for by reducing their costs beneath the sectoral average firms can either reap super profits, or lower prices to gain market share. But falling costs will in any case lead to falling prices, for the mobility of capital between sectors results in an equalisation of inter-sectoral profit rates, as the movement of capital in search of higher profits drives supply (and thus prices) up and down, causing returns on new investment to fluctuate around an inter-sectoral average. This perpetual movement of capital also spreads cost-reducing innovations across sectors — establishing a law of profitability which forces all capitals to maximise profits , irrespective of the political and social configuration in which they find themselves. Conversely, when profitability falls, there is nothing that can be done to re-establish accumulation short of the “slaughtering of capital values” and the “setting free of labour” which re-establish the conditions of profitability. Yet this formalistic conception of the valorisation process fails to capture the historical dynamic to which Marx’s analysis is attuned. The law of profitability alone cannot ensure expanded reproduction, for this also requires the emergence of new industries and new markets. Rises and falls in profitability act as signals to the capitalist class that innovations have occurred in specific industries, but what is important is that over time the composition of output — and therefore employment — changes: industries that once accounted for a large portion of output and employment now grow more slowly, while new industries take a rising share of both. Here, we have to look at the determinants of demand, as independent from the determinants of supply. Demand varies with the price of a given product. When the price is high, the product is purchased only by the wealthy. As labour-saving process innovations accumulate, prices fall, transforming the product into a mass-consumption good. At the cusp of this transformation, innovations cause the market for a given product to expand enormously. This expansion stretches beyond the capacity of existing firms, and prices fall more slowly than costs, leading to a period of high profitability. Capital then rushes into the line, pulling labour with it. At a certain point, however, the limits of the market are reached; that is, the market is saturated. Now innovations cause total capacity to rise beyond the size of the market: prices fall more quickly than costs, leading to a period of falling profitability. Capital will leave the line, expelling labour. [10] [10]: This process applies only to consumer-goods industries. Capital-goods industries, tend to expand and contract in accordance with the needs of the particular consumer-goods which ‘lead’ each cycle. But the relationship between the two ‘departments’ is never so simple. As we will show, labour-saving ‘process-innovations’ in dept. 1 may lead to ‘product innovations’ in dept. 2, expanding the market as a whole. This process, which economists have called the “maturation” of industries, has occurred many times. The agricultural revolution, which first broke out in early modern England, eventually hit the limits of the domestic market for its products. Labour-process innovations such as the consolidation of fragmented land holdings, the abolition of the fallow, and the differentiation of land use according to natural advantages meant — under capitalist conditions of reproduction — that both labour and capital were systematically pushed out of the countryside. England rapidly urbanised as a result, and London became the largest city in Europe. It is here that the key dynamic of expanded reproduction comes into play. For the workers thrown out of agriculture were not left to languish indefinitely in the cities. They were eventually taken up in the manufacturing sector of an industrialising Britain, and especially in the growing textile industry, which was transitioning from wool to cotton cloth. But once again, labour-process innovations such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and the power loom meant that eventually this industry, too, began to throw off labour and capital. And the decline in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution, as a percentage of total labour employed and capital accumulated, made way for those of the second Industrial Revolution (chemicals, telecommunications, electric and engine-powered commodities). It is this movement of labour and capital into and out of lines, based on differential rates of profit, that ensures the continued possibility of expanded reproduction: [E]xpansion … is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increase in production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed hands. Expanded reproduction is, in this way, the continual reproduction of the conditions of simple reproduction. Capitals that can no longer reinvest in a given line due to falling profitability will tend to find, available to them on the labour market, workers who have been thrown out of other lines. These “free” quantities of capital and labour will then find employment in expanding markets, where rates of profit are higher, or come together in entirely new product lines, manufacturing products for markets that do not yet exist. An increasing number of activities are thus subsumed as capitalist valorisation processes, and commodities spread from luxury into mass markets. The bourgeois economist Joseph Schumpeter described this process in his theory of the business cycle. He noted that the contraction of older lines rarely happens smoothly or peacefully, that it is usually associated with factory closures and bankruptcies as capitals attempt to deflect losses onto one another in competitive price wars. When several lines contract simultaneously (and they usually do, since they are based on linked sets of technological innovations), a recession ensues. Schumpeter calls this shedding of capital and labour “creative destruction”—“creative” not only in the sense that it is stimulated by innovation, but also because destruction creates the conditions for new investment and innovation: in a crisis, capitals find means of production and labour-power available to them on the market at discount prices. Thus, like a forest fire, the recession clears the way for a new bout of growth. Many Marxists have espoused something similar to Schumpeter’s conception of cyclical growth, to which they merely add the resistance of workers (or perhaps the limits of ecology) as an external constraint. Hence the Marxist notion of crisis as a self-regulating mechanism is complemented by a conviction that crises provide opportunities to assert the power of labour (or correct the ecologically destructive tendencies of capitalism). In these moments, “another world is possible”. Yet Marx’s theory of capitalism contains no such distinction between “internal” dynamics and “external” limits. For Marx it is in and through this process of expanded reproduction that the dynamic of capital manifests itself as its own limit, not through cycles of boom and bust but in a secular deterioration of its own conditions of accumulation. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor. This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour power that vivifies them, is reflected again in its value composition, by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. This law of the progressive increase in constant capital, in proportion to the variable, is confirmed at every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities, whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative magnitude of the element of price, which represents the value of the means of production only, or the constant part of capital consumed, is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other element of price that pays labour (the variable part of capital) is in inverse proportion to the advance of accumulation. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.438-439

The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play – the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals. Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there develop the two most powerful levers of centralisation – competition and credit. […] Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or centralisation, whether centralisation is accomplished by the violent method of annexation – when certain capitals become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to themselves – or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organising joint-stock companies – the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting point for a more comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider development of their material motive forces – in other words, for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by customary methods, into processes of production socially combined and scientifically arranged. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.441

Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring population through the usual channels. […] The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.443

This is the secret of the “general law”: labour-saving technologies tend to generalise, both within and across lines, leading to a relative decline in the demand for labour. Moreover, these innovations are irreversible: they do not disappear if and when profitability is restored (indeed, as we shall see, the restoration of profitability is often conditioned on further innovations in new or expanding lines). Thus left unchecked this relative decline in labour demand threatens to outstrip capital accumulation, becoming absolute. […] What Marx is here describing is not a “crisis” in the sense usually indicated by Marxist theory, i.e. a periodic crisis of production, consumption or even accumulation. In and through these cyclical crises, a secular crisis emerges, a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself. If expanded reproduction indicates that workers and capital pushed out of contracting industries will try to find places in new or expanding lines, the general law of capital accumulation suggests that, over time, more and more workers and capital will find that they are unable to reinsert themselves into the reproduction process. In this way the proletariat tendentially becomes an externality to the process of its own reproduction, a class of workers who are “free” not only of means of reproduction, but also of work itself. For Marx this crisis expresses the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, people in capitalist social relations are reduced to workers. On the other hand, they cannot be workers since, by working, they undermine the conditions of possibility of their own existence. Wage-labour is inseparable from the accumulation of capital, from the accretion of labour-saving innovations, which, over time, reduce the demand for labour: “The working population ... produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing” [Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 638]. It might seem that the abundance of goods, which results from labour-saving innovations, must lead to an abundance of jobs. But in a society based on wage-labour, the reduction of socially-necessary labour-time — which makes goods so abundant — can only express itself in a scarcity of jobs, in a multiplication of forms of precarious employment. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

It is significant that fascism first defined itself as a form of organisation and not as a programme. The word referred both to a symbol of state power (fasces, or bundles, borne before high officials in Ancient Rome), and to a will to get people together in bundles (groups). Fascism’s only programme is to organise, to forcibly make the components of society converge. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

Fascism’s goal was the authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state structure capable (in contrast to democracy, Mussolini said) of limiting big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding values, social ties and work. For decades, the bourgeoisie had denied the reality of social contradictions. Fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence, denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the struggle between nations, denouncing Italy’s fate as a “proletarian nation”. Mussolini was archaic in so far as he upheld traditional values ruined by capital, and modern in so far as he claimed to defend the social rights of the people. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

On August 1st, the Alliance of Labour, which included the railway workers’ union, the CGL and the anarchist USI, called a general strike. Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on the 3rd. In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course, reinforced by the fascists. Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by the state and the fasci, but it was also smothered by democracy, and its failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis. What followed was less a coup d’état than a transfer of power with the support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the Duce (who actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power. His ultimatum of October 24 (“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-21) legitimate authority caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the 30th he asked the Duce to form a new government. The liberals — the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism — joined the government. With the exception of the socialists and the communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist MPs, supported Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had been head of state many times before the war, and then again in 1920-21, whom fashionable thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. Democracy not only surrendered its powers to the dictator, but ratified them. We might add that in the following months, several unions, including those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves “national”, patriotic, and therefore not hostile to the regime: repression did not spare them. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die

I find the third, and decisive, weakness of the theory of value to be the overgeneralization of a specific case of the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system. Even if we trace the dynamics of class conflict back to the "fundamental contradiction" between wage labor and capital, processes of reification need not appear only in the sphere in which they were caused-in the sphere of social labor. As we have seen, the economy steered by money depends on being functionally supplemented by an administrative system differentiated out via the medium of power. Thus, formally organized domains of action are able to absorb communicative contexts of life through both media-money and power. The process of reification can manifest itself just as well in public as in private domains, and in the latter areas it can attach to consumer as well as to occupational roles. By contrast, the theory of value allows for only one channel through which the monetarization of labor power expropriates from producers work activities abstracted into performances. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

There is in the action-theoretic foundations of the theory of value an error similar to the one found in Weber and in two lines of Weber reception, Western Marxism and Parsons: the model of purposive rationality is viewed as fundamental for social action as well. Marx was unable to conceive the transformation of concrete into abstract labor as a special case of the systemically induced reification of social relations in general because he started from the model of the purposive actor who, along with his products, is robbed of the possibility of developing his essential powers. The theory of value is carried through in action-theoretic concepts that make it necessary to approach the genesis of reification below the level of interaction, and to treat as derived phenomena the de-formation of interaction relations themselves-the deworlding of communicative action that is transferred over to media and the technicizing of the lifeworld that follows upon this. "The one-sided interpretation of basic action concepts, according to which action can be understood only as productive-objectifying activity, takes its revenge in underestimating the extent of neutralization that comes with the reduction of abstract labor. Marx is too harmless, in categorial terms, when it comes to determining the neutralizations of action required for system integration” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

Marx was right to assign an evolutionary primacy to the economy in such societies: the problems in this subsystem determine the path of development of the society as a whole. But this primacy should not mislead us into tailoring the complementary relationship between the economy and the state apparatus to a trivial notion of base and superstructure. As opposed to the monism of the theory of value, we have to allow for two steering media and four channels through which the two complementary subsystems subject the lifeworld to their imperatives. Reification effects can result in like manner from the bureaucratization and monetarization of public and private areas of life. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.343

As against these revolutionary expectations, Weber's prognosis has proven correct: the abolition of private capitalism would not at all mean the destruction of the iron cage of modem industrial labor. Marx's error stems in the end from dialectically clamping together system and lifeworld in a way that does not allow for a sufficiently sharp separation between the level of system differentiation attained in the modern period and the class-specific forms in which it has been institutionalized Marx did not withstand the temptations of Hegelian totality-thinking; he construed the unity of system and lifeworld dialectically as an "untrue whole:' Otherwise he could not have failed to see that every modem society, whatever its class structure, has to exhibit a high degree of structural differentiation. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.340

Marx's misperception also has consequences for his theory of revolution. He does not want merely to describe how the systemically autonomous process of capital's self-realization is experienced from the lifeworld perspective of the wage laborer as a continual exploitation, how the subsumption of labor power under the commodity form tears the workers out of their traditional conditions of life, uproots feudal modes of existence in a plebian fashion, and then shapes them into proletarian forms. Rather, he projects a practical-political perspective for action, which, in its assumptions, is exactly contrary to the perspective tacitly adopted by systems functionalism. Systems theory presupposes that the world-historical process of instrumentalizing the lifeworld, particularly the sphere of social labor, in line with the imperatives of self-regulating systems - the process that Marx denounces-has already come to a close. The marginalized lifeworld can, it is supposed, survive only if it transforms itself in tum into a media-steered subsystem and leaves be- hind the communicative practice of everyday life as the empty shell of formally organized domains of action. As opposed to this, Marx has in view a future state of affairs in which the objective semblance of capital has dissolved and the lifeworld, which had been held captive under the dictates of the law of value, gets back its spontaneity. He foresees that the forces of the industrial proletariat, at first merely in revolt, will, under the leadership of a theoretically enlightened avant-garde, form them- selves into a movement that seizes political power for the purpose of revolutionizing society. Along with the private ownership of the means of production, the movement will also destroy the institutional foundations of the medium through which the capitalist economic system was differentiated out, and will bring the systemically autonomous process of economic growth back again into the horizon of the lifeworld. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.339-340

System and lifeworld appear in Marx under the metaphors of the "realm of necessity" and the "realm of freedom:· The socialist revolution is to free the latter from the dictates of the former. It seems as if theoretical critique has only to lift the spell cast by abstract labor (subsumed under the commodity form). The intersubjectivity ofworkers associated in large industries is crippled under the self-movement of capital; theo- retical critique has only to free it of its stiffness for an avant-garde to mobilize living-critically enlivened-labor against dead labor and to lead it to the triumph of the lifeworld over the system of deworlded labor power. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.340

This new equilibrium between normalized occupational roles and upgraded consumer roles is, as we have seen, the result of a welfare arrangement that comes about under the legitimation conditions of mass democracy. The theory of value was wrong to ignore the interchange relations between the political system and the lifeworld. For the pacification of the sphere of social labor is only the counterpart to an equilibrium established on the other side, between an expanded, but at the same time neutralized, citizen's role and blown-up client's role. The establishment of basic political rights in the framework of mass democracy means, on the one hand, a universalization of the role of citizen and, on the other hand, a segmenting of this role from the decision-making process, a cleansing of political participation from any participatory content. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

For Marx, this development toward a disenchanting "science" was theoretically and historically progressive. Adorno may have said more than he realized when he sardonically accused Marx of wanting to turn the whole world into a factory. For Marxian theory, the reduction of concrete labor into abstract labor is a historical as well as theoretical de­sideratum. Abstract labor may be a creature of capitalism but, like capi­talism itself, it is a necessary "moment" in the dialectic of history. Not only is it a medium for rendering exchange ratios possible on an exten­sive scale, but, from an even larger perspective, it becomes part of the technical substrate of freedom. By its very plasticity, abstract labor ren­ders human activity interchangeable, the rotation of industrial tasks possible, and the use of machinery flexible. Its capacity to flow through the veins of industry as mere undifferentiated human energy renders the manipulation and reduction of the working day possible and, con­ currently, the expansion of the "realm of freedom" at the expense of the "realm of necessity." If Marx's communism was meant to be a "society of artists," he was not prepared to recognize that the colors on their can­vases might be limited to varying tints of gray. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.230

To Marx, both the labor process and the cerebral design that guides it are essentially utilitarian: they have an irreducible technical ground, a modus operandi, that acquires the neutrality and rigor of scientific lawful­ ness. While their effectiveness may be enhanced or diminished by his­ tory, the design and the labor processes that execute it are to him ulti­mately a physical interaction. Indeed, without such an underlying, socially neutral interaction, Marx's theory of "historical materialism"­ with its deus ex machina called the "means of production"- would be as meaningless in Marxian social theory as Hegel's ruthless teleological system would be without the Hegelian notion of "Spirit." Both systems must be moved by something that is not itself bogged down in the con­tingent. Hence the design process and the labor process are necessarily equipped with a suprahistorical refuge from which they can preside over history-and into which Marx retreats from time to time with all the second thoughts that riddle so much of his theoretical corpus. That Marx and many of his Victorian contemporaries disparaged "nature idolatry" in extremely harsh terms is not accidental. The Ro­ mantic movement of the nineteenth century echoed a much broader and ancient sensibility: the view that production should be a symbiotic, not an antagonistic, process. Although the movement was primarily aesthetic, it combined with anarchist theories of mutualism - notably Kro­potkin's extraordinarily prescient writings-to ferret out a much broader "natural design": a "marriage" between labor and nature that was con­ceived not as a patriarchal domination of "man" over nature but as a productive relationship based on harmony, fertility, and creativity. Lib­ertarian and aesthetic movements in the nineteenth century were still heir to the image of a fecund interaction between humanity's craft and nature's potentialities. But labor was seen not as "fire," or industry as a "furnace." The imagery of these movements was drastically different. Labor was viewed as the midwife, and tools as the aids, in delivering nature's offspring: use-values. Such a view implied that the very "imagination" in which the "ar­chitect raises his structure" is socially and ethically derivative . Perceived reality involves an epistemology of domination-or liberation-that cannot be reduced to technical grounds alone. Hence the design images of production, the very figures reared in the minds of engineers, archi­tects, artisans, or laborers, are not socially or ethically neutral. There is no irreducible technical ground from which to formulate a value-free theory of technics and of labor. The images of labor as "fire" and of natural phenomena as enshrouded by a "death-sleep" are formed from the visual reservoir of a highly domineering sensibility. The imagery of modern technical design has its origins in the epistemologies of rule; it has been formed over a long period of time by our very specific way of "knowing" the world-both one another and nature-a way that finds its ultimate apotheosis in industrial agriculture, mass production, and bureaucracy. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.227-228

"Natural scarcity," "property," and "rule" thus persist in the very name of the critique of class society, exploitation, private property, and the acquisition of wealth. By veiling the primordial blood oath that con­strains the development of hierarchy and domination into class society, economic exploitation, and property, the class critique merely replaces the constraints of kinship with the constraints of economics instead of transcending both to a higher realm of freedom. It reconstitutes bour­geois right by leaving property unchallenged by usufruct, rule unchal­lenged by nonhierarchical relationships, and scarcity unchallenged by an abundance from which an ethical selectivity of needs can be derived. The more critical substrate of usufruct, reciprocity, and the irreducible minimum is papered over by a less fundamental critique: the critique of private property, of injustice in the distribution of the means of life, and of an unfair return for labor. Marx's own critique of justice in his remarks on the Gotha Program remains one of the most important contributions he made to radical social theory, but its economistic limitations are evi­dent in the tenor of the work as a whole. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.87

That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.379

The capitalist who produces surplus-value – i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, etc., who fulfill other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value. On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider accumulation from an abstract point of view – i.e., as a mere phase in the actual process of production. So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital. Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation. Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner mechanism. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.400

Such a fall in the value of labor-power [from 10 work-hours to 9 work-hours] implies, however, that the same necessaries of life which were formerly produced in ten hours can now be produced in nine hours. […] and this cannot be done, except by an alteration in his tools or in his mode of working, or in both. Hence, the conditions of production, i.e., his mode of production, and the labour process itself, must be revolutionised. By increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration in the labour process, of such a kind as to shorten the labour time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use value. Hitherto in treating of surplus value, arising from a simple prolongation of the working day, we have assumed the mode of production to be given and invariable. But when surplus value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour, it by no means suffices for capital to take over the labour process in the form under which it has been historically handed down, and then simply to prolong the duration of that process. The technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised, before the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means alone can the value of labour power be made to sink, and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value, be shortened. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.319-320

In order to effect a fall in the value of labour power, the increase in the productiveness of labour must seize upon those branches of industry, whose products determine the value of labour power, and consequently either belong to the class of customary means of subsistence, or are capable of supplying the place of those means. But the value of a commodity is determined, not only by the quantity of labour which the labourer directly bestows upon that commodity, but also by the labour contained in the means of production. For instance, the value of a pair of boots depends, not only on the cobbler's labour, but also on the value of the leather, wax, thread, etc. Hence, a fall in the value of labour power is also brought about by an increase in the productiveness of labour, and by a corresponding cheapening of commodities in those industries which supply the instruments of labour and the raw material, that form the material elements of the constant capital required for producing the necessaries of life. But an increase in the productiveness of labour in those branches of industry which supply neither the necessaries of life, nor the means of production for such necessaries, leaves the value of labour power undisturbed. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.320

Let us assume, that some invention enables the spinner to spin as much cotton in 6 hours as he was able to spin before in 36 hours. His labor is now six times as effective as it was, for the purposes of useful production. The product of 6 hours’ work was increased six-fold, from 6 lbs to 36 lbs. But now the 36 lbs of cotton absorb only the same amount of labor as formerly did the 6 lbs. One-sixth as much new labor is absorbed by each pound of cotton, and consequently the value added by the labor to each pound is only one-sixth of what it formerly was. On the other hand, in the product, in the 36 lbs of yarn, the value transferred from the cotton is six times as great as before. By the 6 hours’ spinning, the value of raw material preserved and transferred to the product is six times as great as before, although the new value added by the labor of the spinner to each pound of the very same raw material is one-sixth of what it was formerly. This shows that the two properties of labor, by virtue of which it is enabled in one case to preserve value, and on the other to create value, are essentially different. On the one hand, the longer the time necessary to spin a given weight of cotton into yarn, the greater is the new value added to the material; on the other hand, the greater the weight of the cotton spun at a given time, the greater is the value preserved, by being transferred from it to the product. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p. 143

The exceptionally productive labour operates as intensified labour; it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of the same kind. […] the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus labour a greater portion of the working day, than other capitalists of the same trade. […] On the other hand, however, this extra surplus value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish. The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness of labour. And so, too, is the value of labour power, because it depends on the values of commodities. Relative surplus value is, on the contrary, directly proportional to that productiveness. It rises with rising and falls with falling productiveness. […] if, in consequence of increased productiveness, the value of the necessaries of life fall, and the value of a day's labour power be thereby reduced from five shillings to three, the surplus value increases from one shilling to three. […] Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. The value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the capitalist. What alone interests him, is the surplus value that dwells in it, and is realisable by sale. […] Now, since relative surplus value increases in direct proportion to the development of the productiveness of labour, while, on the other hand, the value of commodities diminishes in the same proportion; since one and the same process cheapens commodities, and augments the surplus value contained in them; we have here the solution of the riddle: why does the capitalist, whose sole concern is the production of exchange value, continually strive to depress the exchange value of commodities? […] The shortening of the working day is, therefore, by no means what is aimed at, in capitalist production, when labour is economised by increasing its productiveness. It is only the shortening of the labour time, necessary for the production of a definite quantity of commodities, that is aimed at. he fact that the workman, when the productiveness of his labour has been increased, produces, say 10 times as many commodities as before, and thus spends one-tenth as much labour time on each, by no means prevents him from continuing to work 12 hours as before, nor from producing in those 12 hours 1,200 articles instead of 120. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.323-326

In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versa, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.50

The object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.326

[…] let some one capitalist contrive to double the productiveness of labour, and to produce in the working day of 12 hours, 24 instead of 12 such articles. […] If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value of one shilling, he sells it for threepence above its individual value, and thus realises an extra surplus value of threepence. […] This augmentation of surplus value is pocketed by him, whether his commodities belong or not to the class of necessary means of subsistence that participate in determining the general value of labour power. Hence, independently of this latter circumstance, there is a motive for each individual capitalist to cheapen his commodities, by increasing the productiveness of labour. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.322-323