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
In the final analysis, capitalism consists of nothing more than a reduction of all relations into relations of production. From business to the family, consumption itself appears as another episode in the general production, the production of society.
The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations.
Therefore the communism we are talking about is the exact opposite of what has been historically termed “communism,” which was mostly nothing but socialism, a form of monopolist state capitalism.
Communism is not made through the expansion of new relations of production, but rather in their abolition.
Not having relations of production within our milieu or among ourselves means never letting the search for results become more important than paying attention to the process, bankrupting all conventions of value, and watching that we do not disconnect affection and co-operation.
Being attentive to worlds, to their perceptible configurations, is exactly what renders the isolation of something like relations of production impossible. In the places we open, around the means we share, it is this favor that we seek, that we experience. To name this experience, we often hear about everything being free. Instead of free, we prefer to speak of communism — for we cannot possibly forget what the practice of this freedom implies in terms of organization, and in the short term, of political antagonism.
Anonymous, Call, p.22-23
The new code that was now to supplant valor and coercion also had a very old pedigree, notably in a reciprocity that had become standardized and lost its "accidental form" (to use Marx's terminology) as a mode of exchange; indeed, one that was built on a clear and codifiable notion of equivalents. The notion of equivalence, as distinguished from usufruct, the irreducible minimum, and the equality of unequals, was not without its cosmic grandeur in the literal sense of a formal, quantifiable, even geometric order. Tyche and Fortuna are too irascible to support the spirit of calculation, foresight, and rationality required by systematic commerce. Chance is in the "lap of the gods," and in Homeric Greece, these deities were hardly the most stable and predictable of cosmic agents. Until capitalism completed its hold on social life, merchants were the pariahs of society. Their insecurities were the most conspicuous neuroses of antiquity and the medieval world, hence their need for power was not merely a lust but a compelling necessity. Despised by all, disdained even by the ancient lowly, they had to find firm and stable coordinates by which to fix their destinies in a precarious world. Whether as chieftain or as statusless trader, he who would venture on the stormy waves of commerce needed more than Tyche or Fortuna by which to navigate.
The new code that edged its way into those preceding it picked up the principle of an exact, quantifiable equivalence from advanced forms of reciprocity, but without absorbing their sense of service and solidarity. Might was brought to the support of fair-dealings and contract, not merely to violent acquisition and plunder. The cosmic nature of equivalence could be validated by the most dramatic features of life. "Heaven and hell . . . hang together," declare Horkheimer and Adorno-and not merely in the commerce of the Olympian gods with the chtonic deities, of good with evil, of salvation with disaster, of subject with object. In deed, equivalence is as ancient as the very notions of heaven and hell, and is to have its own involuted dialectic as the substitution of Dike for Tyche and Justitia for Fortuna.
Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.147
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
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
The critical import of value-form theory is that it calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value. It recognises Marx’s work as an essentially negative critique of capitalist society. In reconstructing the Marxian dialectic of the value-form, it demonstrates how the social life process is subsumed under — or “form-determined” by — the value-form. What characterises such “form-determination” is a perverse priority of the form over its content. Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression. Rather, in a fundamental sense value — as the primary social mediation — pre-exists and thus has a priority over labour. As Chris Arthur argues:
"At the deepest level, the failure of the tradition that uses the model of “simple commodity production”, is that it focuses on the human individual as the originator of value relationships, rather than viewing human activities as objectively inscribed within the value form… In truth, however, the law of value is imposed on people through the effectivity of a system with capital at its heart, capital that subordinates commodity production is the aim of valorisation and it is the real subject (identified as such by Marx) confronting us.” [Chris Arthur, ‘Engels, Logic and History’ in Riccardo Bellofiori, ed., Marxian Economics a Reappraisal: Essays on Volume III of Capital, vol. 1 (Macmillan 1998), p. 14.]
While it seems true and politically effective to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital. Socially necessary labour time is the measure of value only because the value-form posits labour as its content."
Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory