In Light Years, How Far Away is the Constellation, Gilles Dauvé – Théorie Communiste?

To Work or Not to Work by Gilles Dauvé

Normative History and the Communist Essence of the Proletariat by Théorie Communiste

I do not intend to perform a complete topographical mapping of  the matters that exist in constellation between Gilles Dauvé and Théorie Communiste as they are expressed in the texts, Normative History and the Communist Essence of the Proletariat and To Work or Not to Work. I am more concerned with adding a little further to my initial survey of contemporary communist theories which forms part of the setting out and description of what we tentatively call anti-political communism.

This short piece takes a number of paragraphs from the texts named above and weighs them against anti-political ideas. It is admittedly a rather arbitrary approach but the prospect of anything more systematic is enough to prevent the project from even being started… nothing  is further from my interest than talking about Dauvé and Théorie Communiste and yet, we must hope, for the purposes of our own illumination we may still strike some sparks from these sodden sponges.

Ironically perhaps, my reluctance echoes the attitude that these two gravitational fields have towards each other. We can make this small beginning, daunting as the first step is, and perhaps we can add to it later. Dauvé doesn’t give much credence to the theories of Théorie Communiste, and Théorie Communiste don’t have much time for the formulations of Dauvé. Each develops their own theory in parallel to, but separately from, the other. The theory in particular  concerns the relationship of the proletariat to capitalism and of that relation to communism. Upon occasion, inevitably, both must recognise the other’s work, but they do so brusquely, as an adjunct to the continued unremitting development of their own narrative.

It is apposite to note straight away that neither Gilles Dauvé nor  Théorie Communiste address the most pressing issues of the day for communists:

(1) How, if at all, does our intervention make a difference in the class struggle?
(2) Who is going to read my text?
(3)  What is the contribution to communism made by of our intervention?
(4) What is the relation exactly between ourselves and those miillons who have no interest in us.

Both Théorie Communiste and Gilles Dauvé have developed a metaphysical representation of the proletariat. However, on the exclusive terms of each, the representations are entirely incompatible. According to Dauvé, Théorie Communiste are overly concerned with the mere ‘formatting’ of the proletariat and mistake such formatting for historical development. According to Théorie Communiste, Dauvé wishes to preserve a positive a-historical essence at the level of a ‘role’ for the proletariat when, they claim, there is only the expression of the contradiction of the capitalist relation; this expression is found in the actual, limited activity of the proletariat as it is transformed in response to the historical development of the social contradiction. The arguments put forward, talk past each other, it is not my role to attempt to resolve these contradictions; I am not convinced that the theories have much to do with anything beyond their own theoretical exposition – I do not see them as decisive at the moment, or even as necessarily contributive.

Théorie Communist eargue the Dauvé retains a Hegelian conception of struggle predicated on the concept of alienation. According to them, he sets the problem of the class struggle inherent to the capitalist social relation within an idealistic historical frame in which an essence of human community moving towards communism attempts to realise itself against the obstacles placed before it by fragmented interests (which presumably take themselves to be the totality of social potentials).

This energy apparently resides in this “a-classist and communitarian dimension”?. If this is so, once this dimension is proclaimed, everything else – that is the real history of class struggles – can be nothing more than a succession of forms more or less adequate to it. The general pattern of the argument is as follows – man and society are separate, all the historic forms of society are built on this separation and try to resolve them but only through alienated forms. Capitalism is the society where the contradiction is pushed to its limits, but simultaneously (Hegel to the rescue!), it is the society which gives birth to a class with this communal dimension, an a-classist class. Capital, for itself, is constrained to respond to the same problem of separation, (which, let’s not forget, is just a form of social bond), with the state, democracy, politics. We have arrived at the simple opposition of two answers to the same question. It is no longer proletariat and capital which are the terms of the contradiction within the capitalist mode of production, but the human community carried by the proletariat and politics (the state) which confront each other, the only connection between them being that they are opposing solutions to the trans-historical problem of the separation of man and society, individual and community.

In contrast, the theory of Théorie Communiste has abandoned the Hegelian problematic of the alienation of form from essence related to the project of its proposed eventual realisation, and instead view the particular limitations found at specific junctures in society to be the deciding factor in what has become possible at that moment, as those relations pass into a period of crisis.

Dauvé presents this in an eternal, atemporal, fashion; so much so that if we finish more knowledgeable we have nonetheless made no advance on the essential question: why the revolution could be today what it wasn’t in the past?

Théorie Communiste have supplanted the general narrative history of alienation with the specific historicisations of exploitation.

The proletariat does not have an a-classist or communitarian (communal) dimension, it has, in its contradiction with capital, the ability of abolishing capital and class society and to produce community (the social immediacy of the individual). Yet this isn’t a dimension that it carries within itself, neither as a nature that comes to it from its situation in the capitalist mode of production, nor as the finally discovered subject of the tendency of history towards community.
Because, in this problematic, Dauvé cannot consider class struggle as the real history of its immediate forms and understand that its particular historic content exhausts the totality of what transpires in the struggle (that is, not as a historical form of something else), he cannot tell us why the revolution failed, why it is that every time the state, the parties, the unions want to destroy the revolutionary movement, it works.

As far as Théorie Communiste are concerned, the communist revolution has failed at previous critical moments because the proletariat could only express up to, and not beyond, the limits of the crisis as it played out – it was, and is, only able to operate within the format that the wage relation imposes during any given periodic structuration of capital.

That the proletariat can’t and doesn’t want to remain what it is, is not an internal contradiction in its nature, intrinsic to its being, but rather the actuality of its contradictory relation to capital in a historically specific mode of production. It is the relation of that particular commodity which is labour power to capital, as relation of exploitation, which is the revolutionary relation.

At any given moment, only certain possibilities are open to the proletariat, and its potential to go beyond its given circumstances may be expressed only within the margins defined by the social relation as it functions at that juncture.

The contradiction between the proletariat and capital must be considered as a relation of reciprocal involvement, thereby posing the revolution and communism as historical products and not as the result of the nature of the revolutionary class defined as such once and for all.

Broadly speaking, the proletariat has been organised historically, in the terminology of Théorie Communiste as a positive subjectivity, and has tended to re–validate the role of labour within production, and thus, in its organisational forms has tended to produce structures which seek to reproduce the capitalist social relation albeit in inverted terms of workers’ self-management. The communist revolution therefore, in answer to their own question ‘why it could be today what it wasn’t in the past?’ , now has a particular objective impediment removed from its path, i.e. certain internal, restrictive functions of the proletariat (the ideology of labour) have since been removed through practical internal critique of those forms. In conclusion they write, ‘The history of class struggle is production and not realisation.’

Dauvé observes, somewhat disdainfully, that the historicisations of Théorie Communisteare rather easily made after the fact. There is no objective proof that because a revolutionary attempt failed that this was because it had to fail, that failure itself was written historically within the eruptive subjective proletarian forms, and which in turn are inscribed historically within the general terms of the contemporary social relation. Such propositions are bound up in a formalisation of the inherited (and unanalysed) proposition, ‘what is, is what must be’.

It seems that Théorie Communiste are gripped by a kind of vertigo when considering ‘what might have beens’ or alternative or counter-histories; they refuse the unrealised potentialities of particular situations. Contingently, it is true that what occurred is the fact of history (there is no escaping failure) but it does not follow that a particular outcome from a set of circumstances was necessarily the only outcome, There are, of course, shaping forces exterior to any set of events, the general relation, which set events in a tendency; even so, we are concerned here with the exceptional, and this may well, must be, located in past events.

Théorie Communiste cannot see the future possibilities in past struggles, nor can they see the continuation of past limits of failure into the present. For them, it is inconceivable that the ‘future’ might be found in the past because everything totalises, like some historical calculator, at the bottom-line of the present. The periodisation which they use, coinciding with that of the concept of encroaching formal and real subsumption, robs the past of any access to the future, and thus misplaces the socialising trait for narrative and connection with the past. Théorie Communisteare convinced they have nothing to learn from outcrops of the Neolithic, they do not consider the landscape that surrounds them, and which is nothing but past activity. Their theory thus remains insulated and asocial in its pursuit of temporal categories – they ask contemptuously of Dauvé, ‘who then is this man?’ because for them there is nothing but historicisation which is also a form of contemptuous relativising of specificity and denial of the humanity lived at a particular moment. The adherence to a theory of historicisation becomes in itself an a-historical function.  Man is not a historical being – it is merely the case that we can understand certain developments by means of history. Nor is there any proof that the collapse of the workers’ movement indicates an objective strengthening of the proletariat’s ability to generalise its revolutionary potential.

The Chinese box historcisiations of Théorie Communiste are, so argues Dauvé, overly one-sided in their conclusions. The analysis of the historical workers’ movement, is he says, too positive in its evaluation of the collapse of the historical workers’ movement both at the level of individual consciousness and organisational structure.

The affirmation of labour has not been the principal factor of counterrevolution, only (and this is important !) one of its main expressions. But unions conveyed this ideology through what remains their essential function: the bargaining of labour power.

He wonders whether Théorie Communiste throw the baby out with the bath water – is it really the case that the proletariat has undertaken a critique of the ideology of labour, and thereby consciously abandoned the organisational forms which carried it?

The eagerness to celebrate the twilight of worker identity has led some comrades to forget that this identity also expressed an understanding of the irreconcilable antagonism between labour and capital. The proletarians had at least grasped that they lived in a world that was not theirs and could never be. We’re not calling for a return to a Golden Age. We’re saying that the disappearance of this identification owes as much to counterrevolution as to radical critique. Revolution will only be possible when the proletarians act as if they were strangers to this world, its outsiders, and will relate to a universal dimension, that of a classless society, of a human community.

Is the proletariat really in a better position now that its organisations have lost their mass base and structural cohesion?

On the other hand, non-adherence to work is not enough to guarantee the possibility of revolution, let alone its success. A proletarian who regards himself as nothing will never question anything. The unskilled worker of 1970 was convinced he was doing a stupid job, not that he was stupid himself: his critique addressed precisely the emptiness of an activity unworthy of what he claimed to be. A purely negative vision of the world and of oneself is synonymous with resignation or acceptance of anything. The proletarian only starts acting as a revolutionary when he goes beyond the negative of his condition and begins to create something positive out of it, i.e. something that subverts the existing order. It’s not for lack of a critique of work that the proletarians have not “made the revolution,” but because they stayed within a negative critique of work.

Thus, Dauvé begins again on an account of human nature and in the style that Théorie Communistefind so infuriating.

The failure of the proletarian movement up to now is to be related to its own activity, not to its specific formatting by capital at specific historical moments. Formatting provides the conditions: it does not give nor ever will give the means to use them. And we’ll only have a true answer once the transformation of the world is achieved.

The categories that Dauvé use in the paragraphs above are hypothetical and individualised, he draws a conclusion about revolutionary socialisation from an hypothesised individual’s attitude… if an individual lacks a positive creativity then he cannot be a revolutionary. It is apparent here that the role of volition for Dauvé is overvalued in an account of context which neglects the inertia of what has been objectively given in social relations. It is true that mass representational organisations occurred where there had been an increased frequency of critical events. This is not to say either that either the organisations were the cause of those events or that the consciousness of the proletariat played a vital role. On the contrary, the formation of organisations, and their membership expansion, tends to indicate the end of a cycle of events which are then fetishised (as a memory trace) in the ideology of the organisation. And consciousness, with no pre-cognitvie capacity, tends to bob about, drawn along in the wake of events,  whose cause is located in other, irresistible, forces and their unforeseen knock-on effects – it is not because masses of workers believe in their revolutionary capacity that there must be a revolution. Welcome back to the cock-up theory of history.

When the proletariat seems absent from the scene, it is quite logical to wonder about its reality and its ability to change the world. Each counter-revolutionary period has the dual singularity of dragging along while never looking like the previous ones. That causes either a renunciation of critical activity, or the rejection of a revolutionary subject, or its replacement by other solutions, or a theoretical elaboration supposed to account for past defeats in order to guarantee future success. This is asking for unobtainable certainties, which only serve to reassure. On the basis of historical experience, it seems more to the point to state that the proletariat remains the only subject of a revolution (otherwise there won’t be any), that communist revolution is a possibility but not a certainty, and that nothing ensures its coming and success but proletarian activity.

There is no necessary progression from positive consciousness to revolutionary capacity – one may have positive consciousness and share it with millions of others and this will still not make a fundamental difference to the outcomes of social struggles if the established set of relations are not susceptible to the force and manifestations of popular opinion. And Dauvé does not consider that the opposite might equally be the case that if a hypothetical mass individual maintained a negative attitude towards work that he would then advance further in his ‘assault’ on conditions because of his scepticism concerning solutions which are always thrown up by conditions to obscure their own rottenness.  It is beyond him to consider that change in social conditions produces different frames for consciousness; consciousness is the product, and slave, of unconscious accumulative forces which occur at a social level ‘pre-consciously’, that is structurally anterior to strategic capacity – instead, he reverses this and insists, without any evidence, on a model in which the objective effects of incremental conscious, positive creativity takes central stage and becomes capable (at what point?) of directing social forces. In reality, a cycle of positive events and behaviours occurs only when fortuitous circumstances accidentally align and thereby provide the opportunity of the cycle. There has never been any hesitation before opportunity, and it is only the current drought of this, in our present circumstances, that holds us back.

We would prefer to say that there is no other limit to the life-span of capital than the conscious activity of the proletarians. Otherwise, no crisis, however deep it might be, will be enough to produce such a result. And any deep crisis (a crisis of the system, not just in it) could be the last if the proletarians took advantage of it.

If we discount his narrative of agency and movement we find other a-historical formulations, such as that stated above, which coincide with those of anti-political communism. The same is true of the following paragraphs which seem to exist in contradiction to his theory of communist movement; in contradiction that is up until the last two words:

Revolution is not a problem, and no theory is the solution of that problem. (Two centuries of modern revolutionary movement demonstrate that communist theory does not anticipate the doings of the proletarians.)….

History does not prove any direct causal link between a degree of capitalist development, and specific proletarian behaviour. It is unprovable that at a given historical moment the essential contradiction of a whole system would bear upon the reproduction of its fundamental classes and therefore of the system itself. The error does not lie in the answer but in the question. Looking for what would force the proletarian, in his confrontation with capital, to attack his own existence as a wage-earner, is tantamount to trying to solve in advance and through theory a problem which can only be solved – if it ever is – in practice.

There is no evidence that ‘practice’ (however that might be defined) is more capable of solving a ‘problem’ which according to Dauvé (as quote above) ‘is not a problem’ anyway. It does not follow that because a theory cannot articulate human existence and the possibilities open to it, that a ‘practice’ can. Both theory and practice (we must assume he means something like Marx’s ‘lived activity’ here) are derived from the same set of relations, both express the limits of that relation. Just as (he argues, in a Monsieur Dupont style) the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, so are all ideas equally penetrated with the unconscious and preconscious contradictions of the social relation. It is not possible to separate either thought or activity from its circumstances. It is not possible to sustain categorically the argument that a particular of thought or action is pure and unmediated – in other words, the ‘communist movement’ must also, because it appears within the capitalist social relation, be understood as a phenomena of the present capitalist circumstances and not the embodied anticipation of a future free from capitalism. When Dauvé argues contrary to this he is making a claim for an independent sphere of socialisation which is not subject to the general rule of value:

We’ve often emphasised that there’s no point in trying to arouse a consciousness prior to action: but any real breakthrough implies some minimal belief in the ability of the people involved to change the world. This is a big difference with the 60s-70s. Thirty years ago, many proletarians were not just dissatisfied with this society: they thought of themselves as agents of historical change, and acted accordingly, or at least tried to.

What the proletarian thought and what they think now is not decisive. The workers in the past did not understand that capital was part of them and that they were part of capital. They, as Dauvé still does, attempted to exteriorise their contradictions and attempted to understand the ‘problem’ as something apart from themselves. Evidently, this level of ‘positive’ consciousness was not sufficient to sustain their struggle at the level of theory or practice – their consciousness of themselves as agents of change was not a decisive element.