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LIP and the self-managed counter-revolution


Chapter I
THE WORKERS' MOVEMENT AND ITS DECLINE


1. The Expropriation of the Expropriators

The workers' movement appeared with the first developments of capital. It was the movement of proletarians in struggle against the formal domination of capital over labor, the first historical mode of domination of capital.

What characterizes the functioning of this mode is the extraction of absolute surplus-value. The labor process consists principally of human labor. Moreover, the content of this labor remains artisanal and skilled. In this first period, capital is content with bringing about the separation between the means of production and the producer, the necessary condition for the appearance of the exchange of labor-power for wages, and with broadening the labor process to the level of manufacture.

The proletarian is thus simultaneously a "proletarian" (one who is constrained to exchange his labor-power for wages because he is without social reserves) and a "worker" (one who "works" or whose use-value is qualitatively important to the productive process).

Out of this comes the initial content of the workers' movement : on the one hand, struggles for the reduction of labor time, because the extraction of absolute surplus-value implies the lengthening of the working-day, and the creation of organs to defend the price of labor-power (craft and then industrial unions).

On the other hand, the preservation of the pre-capitalist content of the labor process determines within the proletarian a producer's consciousness, which is reinforced by the fact that, confronting him, the capitalist appears as a lazy parasite. Working "as an artisan," but for the accumulation of capital and under the direction of a capitalist, the struggle of the proletarian-producer also seeks the re-appropriation of the means of production, "the expropriation of the expropriators."

But, if the producers' attack on the ownership of the means of production was at the heart of the workers' movement of the 19th century, and if the question of socialism had thus seemed to sum itself up in that of property ownership, it was also because this ownership, under the guise of personal ownership, seemed both arbitrary and injurious to the workers.

Given the continuation of the pre-capitalist labor process, the capitalist's accession to property ownership changes nothing about production itself, but only its scale. It appears that the capitalist does nothing for production, but is content to live off it, while the workers do everything.

He thus appears all the more as simply the bearer of a title of ownership. The function which he has nevertheless acquired, the organization of the sale of products and the purchase of raw materials and labor-power, remains relatively simple, so that its being taken over by the association of the workers seems to pose no problem -- technically or economically.

In this period of general prosperity of capital and relative independence of capitals from each other, the function of the management of capital -- control over its insertion into the circulation process (both up and downstream from production itself), and the equally necessary control over its reproduction -- appears less as a separate function worthy of compensation than as a privilege connected to the ownership of capital and the product. Even at the time of the Amiens Charter (1906) which states that "the union, today an organization of resistance, tomorrow will be the organization of production and distribution, the basis of social reorganization," the question of the management of capital had not been posed as such.

Personal ownership of the means of production is arbitrary and also injurious to the producers. In effect, the weak unification of the capitalist process on the level of society allows the owner a large margin of social irresponsibility. The firm that he possesses is still small and is situated in a limited market. If he judges it necessary or useful for him, he may close it without provoking much of a fuss. The other capitalists (creditors aside) will view his disappearance favorably or indifferently, depending on the relative division of the markets. The workers, equally isolated for the same reason, cannot endanger other sectors by their response. Moreover, the continued existence of other modes of production within society -- and this is an important characteristic of the merely formal domination of Capital -- allows at least part of the discharged workers to survive in some other manner, often by returning to craft production or agriculture. The others swell the reserve army which grows in the cities.

These three characteristics (the consciousness of being a producer among the workers, due to the maintenance of the former labor process; the apparent arbitrariness of property ownership with the question of management not posing itself; finally, the social irresponsibility connected to personal property ownership) explain why the practical form assumed by the 19th century workers' movement was that of production co-operatives. Beyond defensive unions, and after the abandonment of the utopia of a return to small-scale individual property, one idea remains. It is the idea -- later to be taken up by unions (anarcho-syndicalism) -- that the workers can simultaneously be associated and the owners of their common means of production. Like the non-producing owner, they will thereby fulfill the role of manager, or according to the consciousness of the epoch, they will sell and divide among themselves the "whole product" of their labor (the slogan from Proudhon to the Gotha Social Democratic Program).

Moreover, unlike the capitalist owner, the collective producer-owner (facing a variable capital which is only itself) is also thereby socially responsible for the continuation and smooth functioning of the firm. ". . . [t]he antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within [the co-operative factories], if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour." [1]

2. Dead Labor

Capitalist expansion and concentration at the end of the 19th century, the war of 1914-1918 and the revolutionary period which followed, marked an important turning point in the history of the workers' movement. This period is, in effect, the beginning of the painful passage to the real domination of capital over labor, which was completed only after two world wars and the great depression of the 30's.

In this second historical phase of Capital, the production process becomes specifically capitalist. It is based on the extraction of relative surplus-value, by the constant increase of productivity due to the perfection of techniques, the development of the productive forces and their increasing socialization. The extraction of surplus-value depends above all on these processes, which lower the price of commodities in order to increase the surplus-value that they contain by decreasing the necessary labor-time. The share of human labor in the production process now diminishes in comparison to dead labor; the "worker" disappears and only the "proletarian" remains. The use-value of the commodity labor-power loses its particular determinations and comes to depend entirely on the more or less large quantity of surplus-labor that it can be made to produce. This is the epoch of the "scientific organization of labor" and of the appearance of the "Ouvrier specialize' " ("specialized worker"). The term "specialized worker" is simply a euphemism to signify that the "work" of this worker has been stripped of all quality. His labor requires no training, no apprenticeship. Labor-power then becomes absolutely interchangeable, logically enough, since the only thing that counts is the ability to expend labor-time. All the skill is now in the machine, and the "specialized worker" is a good or a bad worker depending on whether or not he reports to his post on time.

The increasingly abstract relationship of the worker to the labor process makes the whole "producer-consciousness" disappear. This is clearly manifested in the current outbreak of absenteeism, sabotage and high turnover. Certainly, these forms of struggle are not new, nor have they replaced so-called "traditional" struggles over wages. But, like many other phenomena, they visibly acquire their full meaning in our epoch by reflecting both the secondary role of the human being in the actual labor process as well as his crucial position for capital. In effect, the increase of the organic composition of capital indicates not only the de-qualification of labor and the inter-changeability of workers, but also the pressure that this brings to bear on profits. This imposes a speed-up which reduces man to the level of a supplementary but decisive, machine for the capitalist mode of production. From the worker's point of view, these forms of struggle are thus human reactions, elementary in the face of a mode of production which can survive only by continually denying those by whom it lives. The key difference from the epoch in which Pouget advocated sabotage as a means of pressuring the boss without losing wages by striking is that these reactions can no longer be neutralized by a simple wage increase. It has even become necessary to invent "job enrichment" to try to conjure away the irreversible fact that, today, the proletariat is no longer the class of labor.

If only for this reason, the struggle of the proletariat can no longer be the struggle of the workers' movement either in its aims or in its means. It is no longer a matter of the associated proletarians becoming their own capitalist but of destroying the capitalist form itself, the firm, along with wage-labor and the market.

3. Variable Capital and the Unions

a) The CGT and Devalorization

The period when Capital achieves real domination over labor and over the totality of social relations is also the period when the profoundly contradictory nature of capital becomes clear.

The increase in the organic composition of capital, which makes possible an immediate increase in a firm's profits, rapidly leads to a decrease in the rate of profit on a social scale : the growth of the mass of profit brought about by the growth of invested capital is connected to the relative increase of constant capital, since it is by means of its superior productivity that a capital manages to absorb its competitors. In brief, today the process of valorization [2] can only be carried out through the process of devalorization; the capitalist who has nothing but exchange-value at heart ceaselessly endeavors to decrease it.

This contradiction contains another : the law of value, the relations of production, are increasingly opposed to the development of the productive forces, setting in motion ever more total crises, such as the one we are entering today.

As a consequence of the increasing devalorization, the traditional system of private ownership of the means of production is called into question, as is seen most clearly in nationalizations. Fundamentally, nationalization consists of entrusting a capital to the State. Since the State is satisfied with less profit, the share of other capitals in the division of total surplus-value is increased, and thus everything goes on "as if" the nationalized capital were worth less, since it earns less surplus-value.

But nationalizations are only an extreme case of the socialization of capital which is involved in devalorization. In general, a firm's capital loses its independence when, in order to compensate for the lowering of the rate of profit by increasing its mass, it becomes necessary to increase the size of an individual capital to the point that immobile property, financial capital, and the firm's capital pass into different hands. The creation of corporations by means of selling stocks is the first act of this process. To the capital accumulated by the firm itself is added a capital of external origin, which lays claim only to interest and thus does not insert itself into the equalization of the rate of profit. This capital rapidly becomes fictitious once revenues are "capitalized" on the basis of a rate of interest.

The next act in the process of socialization of capital is even more directly connected to devalorization. When profits have become too small and the appeal to the stockholders' capitals no longer suffices for the enlarged reproduction of capital, it becomes necessary to seek long-term credit. On a general level, capital itself pretends to overcome its contradictions through its "transformation" into fiction. [3]

Devalorization therefore means that financial capital takes control of the entire economy. Financial capital, itself highly concentrated, plays the role of "the general capitalist" in the same manner as the State when it takes direct charge of the most devalorized sectors, yet even more totally since credit becomes the nerve-center of production in all sectors. The banking system is furthermore veryclosely linked to the State, which, conforming to its nature, furnishes it support and "control."

In the context of the workers' movement, the cooperatives (firms weak in constant capital from the outset and whose expansion is limited to their self-financing) then crumble exactly like all the firms with similar organic compositions. Large numbers of workers' co-operatives are created in periods when, due to a structural or conjunctural disorganization of exchange, it is possible to create in semi-artisanal sectors (for example, printing), firms with a very limited constant capital and a decently paid qualified labor force. These periods have been : 18301848 and especially 1848-1850: [4] then the years 1919, 1936, 1945, insofar as France is concerned.

Some mid-nineteenth century workers' co-operatives survived over a long period although not without compromising their principles (for example, by employing wage laborers who were not members). However, they do not have comparably durable heirs today when the life span of 75% of such firms does not go beyond two years. [5]

It was also clear to Marx that a system of financing by credit was indispensable to the development of cooperatives :

"Without the factory-system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale." [6] Furthermore, this was not only Marx's perspective, but that of the 19th century workers' movement as a whole. (Unlike Marx, this movement saw in this the establishment of socialism.)

In fact, the financing of co-operatives by credit turned out to be impossible. The credit arising from the pooling of their not immediately re-invested profits turned out to be quite insufficient, while their insertion into the general credit system was impossible due to a lack of capitalist credibility.

This practical impossiblity due to the evolution of capitalism in general, in conjunction with the breakdown of "producer-consciousness" among the workers in most of the important sectors, created a crisis in the workers' movement. A shift was nevertheless made, but it was made by the unions which became federations representing variable capital within the context of the national system and no longer impelled by a "revolutionary" spirit nor the aim of creating associations of producers- proprietors. Anarcho-syndicalism died -- or very nearly -- with the cooperative movement. The unions, organs of real resistance to Capital during the mode of absolute extraction of surplus-value (lengthening of the working day), become integrated as purely capitalist operations with the generalized passage to relative surplus value.

The First World War, which covered a capitalist crisis, marks a split between the workers' movement and the union movement, out of which grew, for a time, the reality and the idea of "workers' autonomy." The workers' councils, which appeared in Germany at the end of the war, not only were manifestations of this autonomization produced by the necessity to re-create a resistance to Capital's attack on workers' living conditions, but they also are manifestations of a tendency for the proletariat to constitute itself as a distinct class, in a period when the reproduction of capital was blocked.

The specific role of the unions, in their phase that could be called social-democratic, is explained by the fact that the contradiction valorization/devalorization, which became omnipresent, was embodied in labor-power, whose price the union negotiates while at the same time controlling it. Thus, in addition to their role as managers of labor-power [7] they become promoters of reforms which confirm the devalorization and aspire to the role of national managers of all of Capital in times of crisis.

The contradiction does not appear as such, seeming inexistent or resolved, in phases when the expanded reproduction of capital takes place without difficulties. However, the union then virtually and "theoretically" takes charge of this contradiction and elaborates reform programs which fit in with the viewpoint of the devalorization of Capital : a program of nationalizations of sectors with low profit rates and, especially, the credit sector. But these reform programs only acquire their full implications and appear plausible when Capital, entering a crisis, is forced to recognize its contradictions which are then visibly concentrated in the existence of living labor. It then tends to become immediately practical for the union to take charge of this contradiction.

The CGT was formed out of these "old" unions in industries born during the development and concentration of capitalism at the end of the 19th century, which made syndicalism in general and anarcho-syndicalism itself limited modes of organization.

Nevertheless, created at the very outset of the transitional phase in France, between the two modes of the submission of labor to capital, the CGT managed to preserve, at its foundation, some notably anarcho-syndicalist traits (cf. the Charter of Amiens) which it quickly abandoned once its integration was brought about by rallying to the cause during the First World War.

In the years which followed the war, the CGT smoothly implanted itself in the expanding public sector (whose expansion is immediately contradictory : simultaneously a devalorizer because it is not productive of profits and, as an infrastructure, absolutely indispensable for a society tending to be capitalized); the CGT also implanted itself in the private sectors which were connected to the former major industries (railroads, mines) whose nationalization it has demanded since the beginning of the 1920's.

The crisis of the 30's and the popular front of 1936 that was its consequence publicized and diffused these demands which found their satisfaction in the waves of nationalizations following the Second World War : Capital launched its real domination over French society.

In the period immediately after the war, the CGT found itself entrusted with various State responsibilities due to the promotion of several union bureaucrats to governmental positions. As a confederation, it dug in by taking charge of the capitalist contradiction resolved for a time during the war, and then the nationalizations. Because of its new situation, the CGT, in reality, was to exhibit the greatest dependence on the State, which was penetrating more and more deeply into all the machinery of the economy. Its feudal relationship to the PCF, [8] begun during the depths of the crisis and definitively accomplished by the end of the war, is the consequence and not the cause, as some argue, of this management of the contradiction which culminated in the realization of its program.

The CGT becomes increasingly unable to manipulate reforms for capital at the heart of social movements. The relegation of the PCF to an oppositional role once its task is accomplished, increasingly leads this union to transfer workers' demands directly to the electoral realm with the perspective of a reappearance of the CP in the management of the State.

The 30th Congress of the CGT, in June 1955, openly expressed this situation : "The majority (overwhelming : 5,334 against 17 in the minority), following M. Benoit Frachon, decides to set aside the economic program adopted in 1953, which had implied structural reforms and especially new nationalizations (a program which is also found in the "common program" of the political left), in order to replace it with an action program consisting exclusively of demands." [9]

The CGT most often limits itself -- ritually -- to denouncing the so-called "dangers" of the re-privatization of certain sectors such as Regie Renault !

In crisis periods the CGT must even -liquidate" the "hardest fought" workers' struggles, as this is a condition of the credibility of the Left and of the CP in particular (without considering for the moment the question of knowing if this credibility can concretize itself today in the management of the State; in other words, if the counter-revolution from now on needs this type of Left. In any case, it will be seen later that the popular front as it appeared in the last crisis is no longer the most appropriate form of the counter-revolution in France.)

From this point on, it is the CGT's confederal position that determines its specific positions in conflicts and this occasionally leads to divergences between the Confederation and this or that section of a firm participating in struggles which "go too far."

b) The CFDT and Self-Management

Once the program of the social-democratic unions had been realized in the course of the crisis of the 30's, the last world war and the reconstruction, Capital's contradictory process goes on at a higher level and the few reforms of this type which were still possible no longer suffice to resolve the developing crisis. From this point on, the real importance of the problem of management, as well as the myths connected to it result from the growing devalorization of Capital.

The management of a firm becomes a very "technical" problem : the general fall in the rate of profit and the extreme interdependence of markets prohibit the success of amateurism (or of the arbitrariness of ownership).

The control of labor-power in particular takes on a crucial importance, and, at the same time, the management of one firm assumes a social scope, depending on the extent to which (unlike what happened in the 19th century) the unification of the capitalist process and the increasing interdependence become so tight that a rupture at any one point of society rapidly leads to consequences nearly everywhere. For example, the bankruptcy of Rolls Royce in England immediately provoked reactions in Seattle, where an airplane requiring Rolls Royce engines was manufactured. Similarly, should an enterprise lay off its personnel, the revenues of a city or region are threatened. In short, the general conditions of Capital today are such that each fraction of Capital requires that all the others behave responsibly in relation to the totality of Capital. (This economic responsibility, from the boss's side as well as the union's, is the very civics [civisme] of real domination : there is no longer any other manner of participating in society, of being a citizen, than to "take charge" of the problems of Capital in its totality).

However, the firm's management escapes the capitalist-entrepreneur, at the same time that the ownership of capital escapes him, once stock corporations and the generalized use of banking credit have been established. Parallel to this dispossession, the management of the firm passes to a board of directors theoretically representing the stockholders, and is exercised by hired "managers" or "technocrats" dependent upon banking groups who are no longer even fictitious owners but merely the firm's creditors, but who nevertheless possess the real power over the product and the reproduction of capital. In effect, as the late Serge Mallet, theoretician of self-management, wrote : "the taking over of the management of firms by a stratum of technicians independent of the stock-holders is rendered possible only by the incapacity of the boards of directors to confront, by means of the sale of stocks alone, the costs of operation and the new investments required by expansion." [10]

In this movement of Capital, "the capitalist" must disappear, giving way to the anonymous powers of credit on the one hand, and the hired managers on the other. "On the one hand, the mere owner of capital, the money capitalist, has to face the functioning capitalist, while money-capital itself assumes a social character with the advance of credit, being concentrated in banks and loaned out by them instead of its original owners, and since, on the other hand, the mere manager who has no title whatever to the capital, whether through borrowing it or otherwise, performs all the real functions pertaining to the functioning capitalist as such, only the functionary remains and the capitalist disappears as superfluous from the production process." [11] If he nevertheless seeks to maintain himself, he is increasingly relegated to sectors on their way to a slow death. The juridical form of property becomes an obstacle which Capital twists around by reforms, but is unable to suppress it because private property remains its necessary presupposition, in the same way as the development of fictitious capital collides with the law of value and seeks to "surpass" it without being able to suppress it, because this would be to negate itself.

Furthermore, not only the management of the enterprise but also that of financial capital itself tends to appear as a simple technical function of a social sort. "We are proceeding toward a sort of divorce between ownership and capital; capital is increasingly separated from ownership, while it is diluted, concealed, or even presented as the ownership of collective organisms in statizations, socializations, and nationalizations which pretend that they are no longer forms of capitalist management. [12] By the game of fictitiousness, financial capital also pretends that it is no longer a form of private property, but rather an independent social regulator of the relations of production which it claims to surpass.

However, this whole structure rests on real capital, on the law of value, and the extraction of surplus-value. "The dynamic of the capitalist process remains intact and under its most ruthless form : but this economic relation is anything but new."  [13] This is the relationship that engenders the proletariat. "The fact that the investing capitalist can perform his function of making the labourers work for him, or of employing means of production as capital, only as the personification of the means of production vis-a-vis the labourers, is forgotten in the contradiction between the function of capital in the reproduction process and the mere ownership of capital outside of the reproduction process." [14]

But the union movement -- conforming to its nature as the representative of variable capital -- by laying claim to national management, lays claim to the management of each firm and increasingly diverges from the entire developing proletarian base. In so doing it seeks to rejoin the workers' movement, whereas the self-management movement differs fundamentally from, the co-operative movement; the common point, however, is that, in the same way that the questioning of the ownership of capital from the workers' point of view had formerly masked the proletarian question of the destruction of capital (which includes that of the enterprise form regardless of its owner), likewise today raising the question of the management of capital masks that of its destruction (which includes that of the enterprise form no matter who its manager is).

The history of the CFDT sheds light on this renewal of the union movement. At the beginning of the 50's, French capitalism underwent a transformation which was only the continuation and full realization of a tendency manifested before the war : the basic industries -- oil, chemicals, and petro-chemicals (among others, but especially these) -- became by degrees the foundation of the new cycle of accumulation. It can be stated that the CFDT was born (in 1964) principally out of the implantation of the ex-CFTC in these new "key sectors" of industry.

To prove our point, it is sufficient to demonstrate the growing importance of the chemical union whose general secretary, Edmond Maire, became general secretary of the Confederation; we must also take note of the recent promotion of J. Moreau, Maire's successor as general secretary of the chemical union to a post in the political sector within the executive committee.

Along with electronics, the basic industries are the sectors where, in conformity with their nature, the automation of the production process is pushed the farthest; a small portion of living labor is incorporated there, of which the technicians and researchers constitute an essential element.

Moreover, these are the sectors which experience most profoundly the divorce between juridical property and capital because of the impossibility of their self-financing.

Thus, the technicians, engineers and researchers find themselves directly confronting management at the workplace : who is the best manager, those who control the production process every day or the man who is arbitrarily promoted to the management of the business because he belongs, directly or not, to the banking group which is in reality the owner ?

Here we find, transposed to the final limits of capitalist production (quasi-automation), the same professional indignation confronting the "capitalists' qualifications" which had marked its dawn; but its content is entirely different. In order to understand the ever-spreading demand for (self)management as the fundamental demand first of the "advanced" fringe of the CFTC and then of the CFDT, the best idea is to let Serge Mallet, a pioneer in the matter, speak, as his remarks are sufficient in themselves

"The specificity of working conditions in the firm (insofar as this concerns the sectors in question), the link established between the demands and the economic condition of the firm, the fact that the latter may in itself be a powerful homogeneous unit of production even when its various establishments are geographically isolated, increasingly force the union to organize itself on the basis of the firm itself, in other words, not the factory or the laboratory, but the firm, the complete economic unit. A new organizational structure arises in the union movement which will progressively replace the trade structure and the territorial structure and will merge with the industrial structure by debureaucratizing it." [15]

To debureaucratize, in Mallet's conception, means to adapt unionism to the new reality of the firm which renders the traditional structure (represented at its best by the CGT) useless because it is inoperative. Moreover, at this level of his analysis, he is in agreement with the following journalistic expression of progressive management : "Just as it must be certain of outlets when it manufactures for its market and of the products it will sell there (this is the role of advertising), the firm must also be certain of the labor supply in negotiating with the representatives of the wage-workers. . . One of the reasons the unions have found themselves out of step in recent conflicts is precisely that they have been organized on the level of the industry : it is here that they negotiate. . . We are witnessing an 'atomization' of social conflicts : each will fight for itself, with its arms and objectives, and it will be necessary to negotiate much more on the level of the firm; but the leaders of the latter have become accustomed to arbitration by specialists and their professional organizations. As this will no longer be possible, they themselves will have to go to the negotiations and, consequently, they will have to prepare themselves." [16]

Mallet continues : "We are thus witnessing, alongside the political and traditional front maintained by the parties and the social front maintained by the unions, the opening of a third front in the perpetual struggle of Capital and Labor : this is a matter of an economic front. by which the workers' movement contests the capitalist system, not out of ideological choices or social demands, but out of the practical experiences of the inability of this system to ensure the harmonious and uninterrupted development of the productive forces. By the same process, the traditional distribution of roles between the union movement and the political movement of the working class is called into question, and the unions as economic organizations are led to politicize themselves in the true sense of the term, in other words not to echo in a dull manner the electoral slogans of this or that political party, but to intervene in an active way in the political life of the country with the means and forms of action which are specific to them. . . The development of modern society completely integrates the political and economic processes. It is impossible for a serious syndical organization not to intervene directly as a syndical power in political problems, insofar as it wants to play its role as a syndical power effectively. . . Protection of already acquired advantages today demands not the regulation of the existing economic system, but the organization of the economic totality in which the wage-workers will have to live. And economic demands of a total character are obviously related to political problems in a modern state." [17]

He concludes : "The apathy [absenteisme] of the citizen, deplored today by all good democratic consciences, is compensated for by the development of a spirit of responsibility within socio-economic organizations. This is probably the most interesting and serious consequence of the evolution of firm-based unionism. In effect, we are led to revise fundamentally all of our political habits and our conceptions of democratic practices." [18]

Mallet is only expressing in sociological terms the absorption of politics and democracy by Capital, which destroys them as particular spheres of activity. This movement takes place through the full conquest of the State by Capital and reflects the level of its contradictions :

Capitalism developed on the basis of the law of value within petty commodity production, and it represents value in movement. As long as its domination is only formal, it reactivates democracy by bringing to the forefront the producer "liberated" by the bourgeois revolution. [19]

Once it is fully tied up to value, Capital enters into contradiction with the basis of its existence. It tends continually to surpass it without being able to accomplish this. Neither can it really suppress democracy, so it swallows it up.

Because of the development of this contradiction, Capital henceforth tends to confer citizenship through the productive act and the act of labor in general (one who cannot sell his labor-power is not a "man" according to capitalist logic).

At the heart of this movement, as Mallet suggests, the firm acquires all of its omnipresence by emancipating itself simultaneously from juridical forms of property and its own financing. This "autonomization" in turn gives the firm its capacity to exercise its own planning, its self-organization in terms of the fundamental and unique dynamic of the system : valorization of Capital.

The intervention of the State becomes proportionately more important as it increasingly functions through financial operations, either direct or indirect.

The famous "democratic planning" elaborated by the CFTC since 1959 expresses this new stage of contemporary capitalist development. It is democratic insofar as it takes into account this "autonomous" planning of the firm; this "autonomy" from then on forbids any unilateral centralized planning. At the level of the State, this planning would consist especially of the organization of credit by means of its complete nationalization : "if the State connected the few large private business banks to the four credit banks that it possesses, it would thereby entirely control French industry without resorting to the slightest change in the theoretical ownership of the industrial means of production. It remains to be seen who controls the State, whom it serves !" [20]

This sort of "control" over industry could result only from the submission of the State to the sole capitalist dynamic -- the firm -- moving in a context of extreme devalorization.

This would produce the following absurdity : the firm, emancipated" and organizing all activity around itself and for itself, cannot respond to the law of value ! As these sectors of high devalorization (basic industries) are the key sectors for accumulation, they differ from their pre-war homologues which were, or consisted of, the sectors of the infrastructure. Only the existence of transformation industries with a sufficient profit rate has allowed these key sectors to be maintained through the system of the equalization of profit rates and the conceding of excess profits.

At such a level of contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, the outbreak of a general crisis due to the over-all impossibility of the expanded reproduction of capital must lead to labor power itself taking charge of the contradiction, in other words it takes charge of itself. This self-management is the result of the proletariat's atomization inscribed in the "autonomy" of the firm, as we have defined it above; this is a manifestation of the necessity for a type of control over the proletarians which can no longer be exercised by its first boss, but only by themselves.

But this atomization does not stop at the doors of the firm; the social invasion of the firm is accompanied by the atomization of the proletariat in the entire society : the crisis, in which value becomes decrepit, and with it political democracy, will bring about the promotion of the producer to the status of the only recognizable citizen. Self-management will necessarily be generalized. (In the latter part of this text, we will confront several concrete modalities of the self-managed counter-revolution in the countries where it is a possibility.)

For the time being this does not reduce the existence of the unions to nothingness; on the contrary, as Mallet has shown, some of them have come to take on considerable importance at the heart of the counter-revolution. However, this very importance implies that, outside of them, distinct organizations of workers (including some propelled and controlled by them) are forming. Already during the Italian mini-crisis [21] of 1968-69, rank and file committees and other factory councils appeared which took on and performed functions which the union structure could no longer carry out.

This mode of existence of Capital is certainly not new, having existed as a tendency since Capital achieved its real domination over the labor-process in a given sector, but it is fully realized in the sectors where this domination is complete. Once these sectors have shaped the industrial totality (if only on the level of the organization of the market), the preparation of general reforms becomes even more necessary for Capital, so that these sectors can co-exist (as in France and Italy) with sectors which are on the path to real submission and to which they tend to confer their mode of management during the passage to full submission. But, reciprocally, only these "archaic" sectors, to the degree that the portion of labor which is incorporated in them is still relatively large and implies a movement of labor power, can carry out these reforms.

If the labor force's taking charge of itself in varying degrees is now an immediate necessity, it is because the maturation of certain sectors is today synonymous with crisis; the labor force can intervene only through the evermore contradictory movement of value.

If the strength of the CFDT in the sectors of devalorization ultimately represents a small part of its total strength :

a) its foundation, as a union, has for its origin this contradictory dynamic of the capitalist social movement on which its own theoretical and practical dynamic rests.

b) this dynamic utilizes such tools as localized and genuinely sectoral conflicts of small productive units in generally "disfavored" regions, where the CFDT has experienced a rapid growth. These conflicts are usually marked by direct opposition to the right of ownership (sit-down strikes, sequestration of officials, etc.). They are not the CFDT's laboratories for experiments in self-management but, rather they constitute the local starting points of the process of taking charge of the crisis which is itself still localized.

The divergences between the CFDT and the CGT on the subject of the common program of the Left reflect their respective positions : The CFDT emphasizes social struggles in order to carry out the reforms of the crisis, whereas the CGT submits to electoral politics. These divergences are fully borne out in the present conflicts [March 1974], in particular at Houillères in Lorraine, where they are transformed into spectacular oppositions. The deepening of the crisis could cause the confederal agreements, which were gradually established between these two unions during the past few years to be called into question. This is the time for the CFDT to affirm and demonstrate its union leadership in the midst of the counter-revolution in formation; moreover, despite its noisy declarations, the CGT has already adopted some significant characteristics of the CFDT plans. [22]

Footnotes

 [1] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1966), p. 440.

 [2] The profitable expansion of capital.

 [3] Entreprise, No. 967, p. 56, gives an example of this transformation into fiction of a capital, that of British Petroleum : At a time (1972) when, for all the large oil companies investment needs increased while profits fell, B.P., in order to finance installations in the North Sea, resorted to a loan from a syndicate of banks which would be repaid after a delay of 5 to 10 years from funds coming from the sales of oil from this new source. B.P.'s new productive capital can thus function on an expanded level, whereas its money capital will only have attained the corresponding size in five years at the earliest.

 [4] cf. G. Lefrancais, Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, Paris : Ed. La Tête de Feuilles.

 [5] cf. Problèmes Economiques, No. 1.357, January 30, 1974.

 [6] Capital, III, p. 440.

 [7] In developed states their role as managers of labor-power, which marks their integration as a machinery within capitalist society, is particularly clear in the establishment -- in collaboration with the managers of the total capital -- of periodic contracts for wage increases by branches of production.

 [8] French Communist Party.

 [9] G. LeFranc, Le syndicalisme en France, P.U.F.

[10] Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, Paris : Seuil, 1963.

[11] Capital, III, p. 388.

[12] Bordiga, Propriété et Capital, Ch. 4.

[13] Bordiga, Propriété et Capital, Ch. 4.

[14] Marx, Capital, III, pp. 380-381.

[15] Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, pp. 86-87.

[16] Report by Jean Boissonat, editor in chief of L'Expansion, to the European Commission, published in Problèmes Economiques, No. 1272, May 17, 1972.

[17] Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, pp. 102-103.

[18] Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, p. 245.

[19] Democracy appeared along with the law of value at the time of the dissolution of primitive communities. Athenian democracy was the lot only of free men, only recognized citizens; the slaves, progressively becoming the principal producers, were excluded by the definition of the social being.

[20] Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, p. 167.

[21] "Mini" in comparison to the generalized crisis which is coming.

[22] cf. especially the "democratic management" of the firm, democratic planning, in the new CGT perspective presented in the official organ of the CGT : Le Peuple, No. 927, October 16-31, 1973.

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