It is clear that the theory of value and class-analysis cannot ultimately be separated. The categories of value and class are mutually implicated. By understanding capital as operating in terms of a “systematic dialectic” one can see that their relation is an internal one, both that “the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour — is the ultimate development of the value-relation”68 and that value relations are a product of the separation of living labour from objectified labour, that is of class. But although it must therefore be ultimately futile to look for the abolition of value anywhere else than in the class that is forced to produce it, and which is increasingly made redundant by it, the doubts about the revolutionary potential of the working class that are harboured by many of the value-critics have to be confronted. It seems to us that Théorie Communiste do this. At the heart of TC’s theory is the recognition of the reciprocal implication or mutual involvement of proletariat and capital. The fundamental question that this poses is that of how the struggle of a class that is a class of capitalist society can abolish that society. Part of the importance of the contribution of TC is to have resisted answering this by attributing a revolutionary human essence to the proletariat, beneath its merely class and capitalist nature, while at the same time not losing the centrality of the class contradiction. Their answer is rather to grasp the class relation as developing historically through cycles of struggle, while always involving a systematic implication. Crucially for TC “communisation” is not what communism and the revolution “always really was or as it always should have been.” Rather, the concept of communisation emerges historically with the end of a cycle of struggle in which communism and revolution appeared as something else. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

For TC, the classical workers’ movement from Marx through the 2nd and 3rd Internationals was part of a cycle of struggle which they term programmatism.70 In this period workers’ struggles and the vision of the overcoming of capitalism that emerged from them was based on an autonomy and positivity that workers were able to maintain within the capital-labour relation. The revolution of this period could be described as the impossible attempt to abolish a relation by affirming one of its poles. The tragedies of social democracy and Stalinism, and anarchism’s experience in Spain, were the product of the contradictions of the goal and methods set by the movement in its high period, which in turn were a product of the configuration of the class relation at that time — i.e. of the way that capital and class confronted each other. […] The determinate failure of this programmatic revolution bequeathed a post-WW2 capitalism where the workers’ movement had a certain power within capitalist society but no longer carried its earlier aspect of autonomous revolutionary affirmation. It was this situation that the development of a revolutionary theory had to confront. The struggles which then gave rise to new theoretical production in the 60s and 70s were — whatever the hopes of groups like the SI — not beyond programmatism. Rather, they took on a contradictory character: counter-cultural utopianism and “resistance to work,” issues of everyday life, coinciding with — and in many ways depending upon — the strength of a more programmatic movement. It was in this contradiction and these struggles that the theory of communisation and the new critical Marxism could arise. The resolution of these struggles in capital’s favour marked the end of that cycle in a restructuring in which the class’s possibilities of a positive autonomy and affirmation within capitalism would be suppressed. It is for TC exactly this defeat that creates a new configuration of the class relation in which the existence of the class is no longer experienced as a positivity to affirm but as an external constraint in the form of capital. And it is this configuration which necessitates both a new understanding of communism and a new reading of Marx. The critical reading of Marx grasps the radicality of what the revolutionary negation of value involves: we are speaking as much of the overcoming of our own selves as of something “out there.” The contribution of TC is to grasp how and why the configuration of the contradiction between capital and labour in an earlier period did not pose such an overcoming. In Marx’s day, and during the historical workers’ movement, the relation of capital and proletariat posed revolution in terms of the affirmation rather than the negation of labour, value and class. The work of TC suggests that the radical “way out” implied by value-form theory may be determined by the historical evolution of the capital-labour relation itself, rather than being the product of an ahistorically correct consciousness, free-floating scientific point of view or perspective of critique. The historical perspective on the class relation complements value-form theory. And the sophisticated analysis of capitalist social relations in systematic dialectic and value-form theory can inform the perspective of communisation by offering an elaboration of what exactly this class relation is, and how the particular social relations of capitalist society are form-determined as such. Systematic dialectic and value-form theory can help us to understand the character of the capitalist class relation, i.e. what it is exactly that can have a history in which revolution previously presented itself in the form of programmatism, and whose adequate horizon of supersession is now communisation. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

I disagree with this part of the analysis. I don’t think we needed the workers movement to fail its goals to be able to form a communization thesis. Kropotkin and the anarchist communists had formed it long before (at the end of the 19th century).