To understand the dimensions of the crisis that is on everyone’s lips – the arrival of which was considered impossible 20 years ago, at the time Bordiga predicted it¹  – we need to consider the solutions that were employed for the crises of 1913–1945.²  We have generally characterised it as the ensemble of economic and social upheavals necessary for the realisation of capital’s accession to the real domination of society. Since 1945, this domination has taken place in the most developed regions of the capitalist mode of production (CMP). At the same time, in other regions, capital’s formal domination of society got underway. Given the significant resistance provoked by this process, we witnessed a period of major upheavals from 1945 to 1952, and then another one from 1954 to 1962. During these years, the old colonial empires were eliminated (the last vestiges are currently being swept away with the independence of Angola and Mozambique) and, primarily in the USA, we saw considerable technological development that enabled a more complete rationalisation of the process of the circulation of capital. Meanwhile the tendency toward the realisation of the totality expanded with the completion of Europe’s reconstruction, the doctrine of peaceful coexistence (1956), and the rise of China after 1960. These phenomena all being more or less chaotic, they undermined the old order and contradicted the old representations. The outcome was that the tendency of capital to impose its being as a general representation, and secondly (the split between the two not being strict) to become pure representation, was profoundly revealed first during the 1967 monetary crisis and in the insurrectional movement of 1968, and again – now at the level of the representation of capital itself – at the time of Nixon’s decisions in 1971.³  Since then, various phenomena shaking the foundations of the CMP have piled up, but they take place in an isolated manner and do not seem to be linked to each other. Meanwhile, the Club of Rome’s publications beginning in 1972, the “crisis” linked to the Yom Kippur War, and the current figures on the recession in the USA which is also spreading to Western Europe⁴  all testify to the necessity of a different representation such that the overall reproduction of capital is assured.

Apart from the two world wars, the remedies for the crisis of 1913–45 were the implementation of full employment, and state intervention: incomes policies and the welfare state, interventions in the setting of interest rates, the regulation of investments, etc. In other words, as Bordiga claimed, as soon as the Second World War was over, the fascists were defeated but fascism prevailed. Which means the accession, in mystified form, of the proletariat to the position of the dominant class, its exaltation and its integration into the CMP. This could only take place in accordance with capital’s mode of being; whence, following the realisation of the material community, the ever more accentuated tendency of turning proletarians into consumers, which provoked a massive expansion of credit.

All the modifications that were possible within the framework of the system as it was defined at the end of the second global conflict have taken place; it has become inadequate. The slightest tremors destabilise it, and the particular details of the crisis, apart from structural phenomena, namely those that are intrinsic and common to the different moments of capital and only vary quantitatively (the destruction of nature and human beings, the exhaustion of resources, increasing pollution, etc.), have their origins in the solutions devised for the preceding crisis.

Full employment was achieved but, given the downward inflexibility of wages, there is a tendency to inflation. The maintenance of full employment often conflicts with capital’s necessities of modernisation and rationalisation. Moreover, with the massive expansion of fixed capital (via automation)⁵  from the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a substantial disruption of the composition of the population, which enters into contradiction with the privileged role that was accorded to the proletariat in the preceding phase.

Capital had overcome the contradiction it faced in relation to the proletariat by integrating it (incorporating the barrier that had limited it) but, as a result of its development which led to the devalorisation of the worker, this barrier became evanescent. The previous solution then appears as an obstacle to the recognition of its new being, which demands a different representation. Several phenomena indicate this calling into question of labour, and of productive labour in particular: people seeking part-time work, the struggle against assembly lines, which capitalist managers themselves recognise as valid, as well as the refusal of work all being recuperated in a more or less immediate way. Moreover, with the help of the previous measures, at the same time as this becomes generalised, the significance of immaterial labour such as service work increasingly becomes central to the economic problematic. Now, after 1972, labour, considered as a manifestation of the creativity of human beings, has been recuperated. This is directly connected with the desire to pillage their entire substance (their material productive capacity having long since been absorbed) with the proclamation of the necessity of immaterial production, which is supposedly founded on the aesthetic, even “transcendental”, determinations of human beings. The privileged character of the productive proletarian-worker is thereby totally dissolved. This not only makes possible the completion of the disappearance of classes, it also eliminates an anachronistic representation. Yet there is substantial resistance to this from various quarters, on the right and the left. The proletariat is still spoken of as a class that is distinct, operative, etc. The CMP will therefore have to destroy the myth that it had itself taken up at a certain moment and that it reinvigorated by perverting, by reducing it to an ensemble of material facts of the current mode of production; facts necessary for its own exaltation in that capitalist production could not exist without waged work (Marx).

The CMP thus finds itself faced with a human population that is being homogenised and that has grown enormously. Trying to realise full employment would lead to an impasse.⁶  There is also the tendency, in order to avoid the social problems caused by unemployment, to provide basic economic security by means of a negative tax, the “allocation of resources to a human being by the simple fact that it is alive” (Drouin). Yet such a measure is laden with inflationary consequences.

The necessity of state intervention has also manifested in the most developed countries, but this does not lead, as some think, to state capitalism, as capital has constituted itself as a material community.⁷  The classical state is just a particular kind of business, often anachronistic relative to the development of capital. Nations, which were necessary at the dawn of capital in order to destroy feudal particularism, dominate the proletariat (formal domination), domesticate and integrate it (real domination), and become frameworks that are inadequate to the movement of capital. The multiplication and growth of multinational corporations suffices to demonstrate this. Formerly the non-intervention of the state at the national level could have entailed a revolutionary explosion, for, pursuing their particular interests, various businesses could very well destroy the general interest. This is what we saw at the global level with the clash of states (without forgetting that the wars were an excellent means to domesticate proletarians, human beings). The creation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations was an attempt to establish a global state capable of maintaining the regulation of capital at the global level. Today, the real operators of quanta of capital are the multinational corporations, for which management is fundamental and represents the state element within them; to such a degree that the state can only endure by itself practising management. The nation and the state are no longer capable of representing capital, for they actually only represent contradictory elements. Moreover, one chance of survival that nations have is perhaps in an extreme degree of specialisation, in which case, as Attali suggests, they would ultimately become a prop for two or three multinational corporations.⁸  That could only be a transitional phase prior to the absorption of all nations into a global capitalist community which would be something completely different to the super-state that the UN wanted to be.

Multinational corporations are opposed not only to states but also to the UN. They will play an effective role in its reconstruction and reorientation. The global community of capital cannot be the expression of the sum of the capitalist states; it will rather be that of all capital globally. Yet multinational corporations present themselves as the organisms that are the most capable of manifesting the rationality of capital; particularly now that the disastrous consequences of its process of production are being felt.

The difficulties experienced by the countries of the East in integrating into the world market as well as those arising from forms of resistance opposed to the establishment of capital in various countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America necessitate not only a different overall strategy but also a different structuring of the CMP so as to be able to resolve all of its problems. Here too, multinational corporations are playing a role that will only increase over time.

In the absence of a global unification, the monetary crisis will not be resolved, just as it is the mediation of the latter that would effectively lead to globalisation. Hence Special Drawing Rights⁹  can only function provided that there is a shared representation of them (and it is precisely here that the crisis becomes most visible); a safe-haven standard such as that of gold must not be allowed to exist, for example. Those who still maintain the utility of the yellow metal hold to the idea that it would represent a “definitive act” (Fabra) that would be palpable in some way (the physiocratic view), which could only be achieved by taking a step backwards. Capital is movement; what it produces cannot be retracted, it must be maintained. At its most developed stage, its production is its movement-capitalisation. Gold would then represent what had been really, materially produced: surplus value. Yet given the evanescence of the latter, which derives from capital’s fictitiousness, from the immateriality of production, gold is no longer necessary. It is also becoming less and less necessary as a sign of ownership over the work of others as a result of capital’s accession to the material community as well as  the generalisation of waged labour. The social fabric thus tends to become an ensemble of relations that are so interdependent that everyone participates in some way in the exploitation of the others and is exploited by them in turn. The title deed is held by capital, by the community.

As the various countries of the world have not all attained the same level of development of the CMP, capital struggles to impose its own representation; hence the difficulties experienced by the international monetary system (a real crisis of representation) where the dollar plays a dual role: that of US capital-currency and that of an international capital-currency of reference.

The nefarious consequences of the process of production (pollution, etc.) call out for another way of utilising nature and human beings. This leads to the rise of the anti-pollution industry, immaterial production (as already mentioned), the aesthetic determination of human beings as well as the “religious” one, and even to the struggle against capital. We witness the development of a neo-Christianity founded on a kind of renunciation of the goods of the world, exalting the capitalism of dearth after the so-called capitalism of abundance… It is clear that, in this context, the various trends that recommend eating in moderation (and a plant-based diet) and fasting as a necessary physiological rest for the digestive organs can be recuperated (as with Marcuse regarding sensibility-sensuality) to the extent that such “practices” are isolated from the rest of an overall conception of the relations between human beings to nature; to the extent that they are made into practices of survival.

The old representation must disappear. It comprises the following elements: the becoming of man from penury to abundance; the emergence out of nature (animality) to a human stage thanks to the development of the productive forces (the ideology of growth); infinite progress, perpetually increasing individualisation implying an emancipation whereby the individual liberates itself from its various natural and human determinations and becomes a business venture that, thanks to money-capital, may do as it pleases within the limits of the system. From the immediate point of view, it posits full employment (the generalisation, and glorification, of work) and the development of the inclination to consume. The state is what facilitates the latter two phenomena.

A mutation of the CMP is underway. It demands a new representation so that the reproduction of the entire community of capital can be effectuated, particularly since its economic cycle cannot take as its presupposition the outcome of the previous one.

The new representation is determined by the manifestation of the material limits to the development of capital, and because of this it will primarily be a question of managing the products of the earth and the activities of human beings, such that economics will lose its chrematistic dimension, which disgusted Aristotle and which, in other forms, Marx excoriated;¹⁰  this will spell the end of political economy.

“We need to completely overhaul our conception of ‘profit’ and arrange the different categories in a different order on the scale of social values” (Quelles limites? Le Club de Rome répond…, Éd. Seuil, p. 140).

The new representation will consider the collective to be of prime importance, the individual being programmed, which given the foregoing implies things being free of charge and the realisation of a vast global ensemble.

“The chauvinism and egotism of nations are merely projections of the egocentrism, the aggression, and the will to power of human individuals. It is highly likely that if, in its conception of the relations between man and nature, our species does not succeed in the transition from national sovereignty to a global vision, it will ultimately be condemned; we individuals too, we have to subordinate a fraction of our own interests to the general needs of society” (Le rapport de Tokyo sur l’homme et la croissance, Éd. Seuil, p. 85).

The internalisation of the limits revealed by the development of the CMP, the ideology of not overdoing it, ecological sin, the necessity of changing our behaviour: such are the elements of the ethics proposed by the Club of Rome. Yet has it not been the lot of the majority of human beings for millennia to resign themselves to a life within limits? In this case a different foundation is given, such that it is not possible to emphasise other forms of life. The MIT theorists reason about the human in its current impoverished state and draw their conclusions:

“The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems.” (Jay W. Forrester, “Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems”)¹¹

Yet linear and binary thought only managed to prevail in people’s minds once they’d been domesticated!

Hence, the theorisations of the Club of Rome and MIT constitute the elements of an approach to a new representation of capital. They have nothing to do with communism. Nor do they confront the fundamental aspects of the development of the CMP, based as they are on physiocratic conceptions, that is to say that they do not take material production into account and do not envisage capital’s immateriality. In fact, capital develops a response that encompasses various ad hoc responses to the various questions posed by its current situation: inflation. It cushions the contradictions that might arise from piecemeal solutions; it allows them to be overcome but it does not stave off the point of culmination toward which they all tend: an ever more ferocious despotism. Inflation is the global credit that the CMP extends to itself and in doing so capital acts according to its nature: always master the future (which implies that there cannot be a revolution unless there is a real rupture with the current representation); all instabilities, all the difficulties are dodged by that representation always with the view that tomorrow all will be resolved. Inflation is the imagination of the system in the sense that it projects an image of itself into the future, an image in which all contradiction is eliminated. The crisis of representation began in 1968. There we clearly see the phenomenon of anthropomorphosis. The CMP realises one of the possibilities of human becoming. At the same time, the crisis is the indication of the serious difficulty the CMP has in holding together all the different moments of the present. The old representation has lost its operational force. The solution passes through this imaginary image of universal mutual recognition in the absence of antagonism. Inflation realises capital’s utopia in becoming: men and women recognize themselves in capital (otherwise they would not be able to bear it), even if they struggle against it; moreover, so far they have always only risen up against its consequences. Inflation is fundamentally anticipation:

“In short, anticipation is the root and the fruit of inflation. It presides over growth, feeding and amplifying it” (Ronze “L’inflation ou la démesure de l’homme” in Études, article reprinted in Problèmes économiques No. 1,388).

Specifically, let us note that:

“The U.S. economy stands atop a mountain of debt $2.5-trillion high—a mountain built of all the cars and houses, all the factories and machines that have made this the biggest, richest economy in the history of the world” (“The Debt Economy,” in Business Week, 12.11.74).

The credit economy that the authors speak of is just another term for the society of inflation that other economists have discussed. Regarding inflation, we can therefore see clearly that, for the theorists of the economy, it is a representation. This is said in a more or less clear and striking way, with the aim of either defining or combatting it.

“Essentially, inflation is a phenomenon linked to behaviours and thus to the expectations of economic agents. The struggle against inflation first implies a resolute faith in economic stability” (Jean Mouly in the Revue internationale du travail, October 1973, reprinted in Problèmes économiques, No. 1,361).

Those who explain inflation through demand tend to turn it into a political phenomenon and thereby aim to emphasise the intervention of people and class struggle, whence their diatribes against union leaders whom they consider the creators of the disorder.

Inflation is another indication of what I have elsewhere called the escape of capital. Indeed, at the time of its struggle against prior modes of production, the CMP appears capable of lowering the prices of manufactured goods; in its origins it seems tormented by a contradiction in that it struggles to achieve the same feat in agriculture. In fact, in the zones where the CMP is the most developed, there is a parallelism of action between the two sectors (cf. the USA and the power of its agriculture which, since the end of the nineteenth century, was the determining cause of the hegemony of US capital and the ruin of Europe, as Engels foresaw). Yet this period is the one in which the CMP develops on the foundation of the law of value and tends to dominate it. When it has abolished the other modes of production and achieved the real submission of labour to capital’s process of production, it can integrate the downward inflexibility of wages (a means of fully transforming the proletarian into a consumer and thus to immerse them in the rationality of capital) and it thereby escapes the constraints of the law of value. This culminates in a major crisis: that of a given representation of the social relations in place. How must the material community of capital be perceived by people such that they internalise the process and ensure its reproduction? In this regard, we must not forget that the crisis has always been aggravated by the intervention of people trying to force capital into rigid channels such as they conceive them by means of their representations.

With inflation, it would seem that there is an agreement between people’s aspirations, henceforth determined by centuries of the development of the forces of production, and capital. Similarly, credit succeeded in becoming general once it took the human as its subject;¹²  another moment of the anthropomorphism of capital. By means of credit, the human was torn from the immediacy of its material life. An economic tide carried off its private spiritual and moral life, which was also removed from the purely private sphere so as to become the guarantee of public life: a moment of deconsecration. Inflation is a mechanism of the total deracination of the species that appears as a liberation vis-à-vis the immediate existence of capital; a necessary moment of severing all links to the past, and that carries the species off in a whirlwind in which it will ultimately lose all memory of what it was, such that, once disorder is established, people will no longer be able to find themselves anywhere except in the rationality of capital. The objective of the latter is always to destroy the weight of the past. Hence the necessity of abstracting humanity in its entirety so that it is situated in a movement where all the old presuppositions will evaporate and the sole reference point will be the movement of capital. Alienation directly concerns the species in its totality: dispossession [dépouillement] now operates not just on the individual but on the species, as inflation is the means of buying off the latter by luring it with the promise of tomorrows spent working and singing. It is thereby the realisation of the human being’s will to be outside of nature, and we can find ourselves in agreement with R. Ronze who claims that inflation is an expression of human excess, that it is “the language of a society undergoing transformation.” He adds:

“Inflation is then the sign of a new economic logic that pertains to a technologically evolved society. Steadfast in its project of having a ‘totalitarian’ hold over the individual, today this society is moving from social security to economic security [an idea already developed by Bordiga regarding fascism – J.C.], a transition that is all the more natural given that the second extends and develops the first” (op. cit.).

Consumption and leisure are the two main elements that make human beings enter into the sphere of inflation. Leisure is no longer the moment of free time, the time of non-work; it is the time of consuming, for everything must be sold, consumed-used, whence the generalisation of non-jouissance, of the category of the ephemeral which enables capital to become eternal. Marx anticipated this in the Grundrisse. The human being is therefore increasingly taken as a consumer, as a predator in the material community; it is the latter that produces and offers up for consumption: inflation is the permanent incitement to abandon the sphere of immediacy, to renounce being-there and to propel oneself into a becoming in the form of evanescent acquisitions.

Inflation realises fictive capital, a kind of conjunctive fabric of total capital, a system of linkages and articulations.¹³

“From the moment when the projects of the different partners become incompatible, only inflation can make them (artificially) compatible with each other. Yet for all that, inflation does not abolish class struggle. It prevents it from degenerating into a civil war, successively giving the illusion to both sides that they have won. It thus appears as the fruit of what might be called the instinct of preservation” (Ph. Simonnot, “Pour une théorie ludique de l’inflation”, in Bulletin de la S.P.G.F., reprinted in Problèmes économiques, No. 1,373).

In fact, it is not a case of an opposition between different classes but between different elements of capital that tend to become autonomous. To resolve the crisis, it would be necessary to block the attainment of that autonomy and subjugate all the agent-partners to the rationality of capital as a totality, the material community.

In the phenomenon of inflation, there clearly emerges the conflict between the materiality of capitalist production and immateriality, between what is fixed and what is mobile, what is unique and what is infinitely reproducible. This conflict was already analysed by Marx regarding the value of certain things, but also in terms of surplus value (in which case money-capital would be the immateriality of what was added to production).

“Finally, it should be borne in mind […] that the price of things which have in themselves no value, i.e., are not the product of labour, such as land, or which at least cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques and works of art by certain masters, etc., may be determined by many fortuitous combinations. In order to sell a thing, nothing more is required than its capacity to be monopolised and alienated” (Marx, Capital Vol. III, Part VI, Chapter 37: Introduction).

Capital succeeds in making alienable what seems not to be alienable, things whose attributes make it impossible to set them in motion, for example land; with the purchase and sale of title deeds (a phenomenon of representation) this becomes possible and this is also the moment at which the human is no longer linked to it. Yet Marx also remarks:

“this natural force, which can be monopolised in this manner, is always bound to the land” (Ibid.).

This stage is surpassed in turn with the creation of industrial agriculture, in which the earth is reduced to no more than a medium for chemical processes. Capital thus succeeds in separating qualities and monopolising them. It was the same with universal labour, defined by Marx as follows:

“Incidentally, a distinction should be made between universal labour and co-operative labour. Both kinds play their role in the process of production, both flow one into the other, but both are also differentiated. Universal labour is all scientific labour, all discovery and all invention. This labour depends partly on the co-operation of the living, and partly on the utilisation of the labours of those who have gone before. Co-operative labour, on the other hand, is the direct co-operation of individuals” (Marx, Capital Vol. III, Part I, Chapter 5, V: Economy Through Inventions).

By absorbing universal labour,¹⁴  capital inflated itself with immateriality, thereby making less essential the share of immediate labour contributed by each individual; at the same time, it intensified the conflict mentioned above.

Thanks to money, to credit, to inflation – in a word to capital – everything has been wrested from its context and set in movement. From this moment, is there any need for a continual growth of material production? Just as art emancipated itself first from nature and then from its own forms by considering that everything is possible, capital tends to develop by abolishing its material frame of reference. Inflation is a means of doing so.

“What we are perhaps going to experience is pure inflation, without growth. [Another economist also speaks of nominal growth. – J. C.] The situation is revolutionary in all senses of the word” (Ph. Simonnot, op. cit.).

Hence the fear a large number of individuals have of the phenomenon itself and all the uncertainties that it creates.

The result of the mutation of capital will be complete domestication – something sensed since 1968 – if human beings do not abandon the community of capital, especially as in order to be carried out this mutation requires the elements of capital’s mode of being and those contributed by its adversaries and dissenters (environmentalists, for example).

Returning to the present, it is clear that, economically speaking, there is no possibility of a crisis conceived as a moment in the collapse of the system. Which is not to deny the possibility of catastrophes due to the consequences of capital’s production processes. Climatic variations of small amplitude would suffice to reveal the destruction of soils and cause significant disequilibrium leading to a reduction in agricultural production, and, from there, to famine; major livestock epidemics are also possible due to artificial insemination and the use of antibiotics, etc.

For the partisans of the idea that technology will develop exponentially (as the defenders of the MIT project define it), there is only a momentary pause in growth. In terms of raw materials, it is clear there are still resources under the seabed and even in the earth’s core, that geo-chemical energy captured at a great depth could solve the problem of energy scarcity, etc. Yet that will only generate cost-push inflation (from now on, the price of petroleum can no longer be reduced in order to make other sources of energy profitable; inflation and anticipation are linked!) From this technological perspective, one can very well imagine a planet carrying 100 billion human beings and the disappearance of all non-human life; with oxygen being produced in factories.¹⁵  When all frames of reference disappear and are replaced by indefinite progress (a deliberate pleonasm since the concept of progress contains indefiniteness), all that remains is escape, desire without end, which from a human point of view culminates in the absurd. And this loss of frames of reference is absolutely necessary for humanity to totally abandon itself to the movement of capital.

Ultimately very similar to the groups just mentioned are the groups that affirm that the crisis is actually a bluff, a position symmetrically opposed to those who believe that the collapse of the CMP is inevitable and imminent. In the first case, capital is the sorcerer’s apprentice, while in the other it is the perfect demiurge! According to these groups, the human is not immediately threatened; the crisis solely concerns capital. The dominant class uses it as a bogeyman or as a form of blackmail in order to make people accept the installation of nuclear power plants or oil pipelines like the one in Alaska (which still implies that there are real problems regarding the provision of energy). This is all the more true as the people who take this position reason according to the logic of the development of the forces of production. There is no doubt that crises are exploited in this way. The crisis of 1973, for example, was entirely incited by multinational corporations and the United States. We see a repetition of what the dominant class in Germany did in the 1920s: exploiting the crisis as a weapon against the proletariat, which the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany emphasised at the third congress of the Communist International [in 1921 in Moscow]. But we must also not forget that the dominant class was unable to bring the situation under control and especially that it was completely oblivious to the fact that it was fostering the birth and triumph of Nazism; a movement required for capital to achieve real domination over society and over the dominant class of the time, the old bourgeoisie that, from then on, started to disappear.

The crisis is doubtless manipulated, but the facts are on the table. There can only be a bending of the phenomena in a particular direction. This can, for the moment, favour certain groups but, in the longer term, it will culminate (in the absence of revolution) in a bolstering of the despotism of capital, within which many organisations that currently have a degree of autonomy, and some possibility of dominating, will disappear; from a much broader perspective, nation states will also suffer this fate.

If one denies the bogeyman-crisis stirred up by the Club of Rome people or by certain factions within the capitalist sector, it is nevertheless the case that very concrete facts remain: overpopulation, not just in Asia but in Europe; overpopulation that can inhibit the movement of reinserting human beings into nature, or at least dangerously slow it down; various forms of pollution, the destruction of nature, with the accelerated extinction, since the beginning of the 20th century, of various animal and vegetable species that cannot be replaced, as happened in previous geological epochs (the replacement of reptiles by mammals, for example). Where once animals and plants lived, now concrete flourishes exuberantly, a cold, tentacular monster.

It is clear that overpopulation¹⁶  is a major problem for capital. Human beings appear as its pollution; the larger the population, the more likely capital is to enter into antagonism with them, especially when they are young. It obstructs its process of production, which tends toward automation. Yet the phenomenon is doubled because overpopulation is simultaneously a means to domesticate people by stacking them into the prisons that the major metropolitan areas are, where they lose all community and all relation to (what remains of) nature. Overpopulation and urbanisation go hand in hand with the reduction of human beings to insignificant particles. The more the population grows, the less it is possible to think along the lines of the Gemeinwesen (community); there is a destruction of humanity at the same time as a loss of its diversity in the world, since soon, all over the planet, there will only remain people subjected to capital.

To maintain that all this is only a problem for the latter ultimately boils down – given that often it is acknowledged that the species is more or less capitalised – to taking a Manichean position, positing the opposition between those in the know who have fled the influence of capital, and the others. How then to destroy the capitalisation of the others (without destroying them entirely)? Were that to succeed, overpopulation would remain, and could obviously, from that moment on, be tackled in a humane way.

Moreover, capital is not something that has appeared out of nowhere. It is a human creation; its anthropomorphosis amply proves this.

The position of these groups is founded on the postulate that revolution only exists from the moment when there is a rupture of the system and that it is only from that moment that it is possible to really attack various problems that are therefore only recognised a posteriori. But to accept this postulate is to condemn oneself to inaction while capital tends to resolve such problems in its own way. In the communist programme as envisaged by Bordiga, it was clearly absolutely necessary that, after the revolution, developed countries would give products and machinery and even technical know-how to the poorer countries, whose forces of production were at a less advanced stage of development, so that communism would be able to become generalised on a global scale. In our time, the Club of Rome is proposing something similar in order to avoid the explosion of the CMP, to stave off the apocalypse. Once again, capital has plundered the programme, mystified the drive toward communism. It realises it by stripping it of all that is human. Ridiculing the proposals of the Club of Rome amounts to ridiculing the communist programme while completely ignoring the question of why capital is able – after having emptied them of their human content – to realise measures that lead toward communism. Because the latter had been conceived as a moment of the complete development of the productive forces. It is the ones who most doggedly defend technology, the neutrality of which they posit, and science, which is supposedly fundamentally innocent, who maintain this conception of the becoming of communism. In this case we are, to differing degrees, on the terrain where Marxism and anarchism are both placed:¹⁷  Science is a necessity for the emancipation of human beings; the bourgeoisie cannot allow it to play this role fully; a revolutionary class will accomplish the task that is immanent to, or as it were inscribed in, science.

We need to think the becoming of the human community¹⁸  in an extremely diverse way, from the last remaining more or less archaic communities to the human communities that are breaking with capital.

We have individualised one of the causes of the movement of May ’68 in the disequilibrium¹⁹  that occurred in the United States in 1967, the initial manifestation of the monetary crisis that is still ongoing at present. In a sense, it is another definition of the crisis, one that has the advantage of demystifying its importance, its grandiose revolutionary effects, and of still noting what in it may correspond to a certain reality. It is certain that if the CMP no longer enters into a critical phase, revolution becomes highly improbable or even impossible. But it is equally certain that the existence of such phases is not sufficient to lead to revolution, if men and women maintain their antiquated perspective and see the crisis according to the terms of 1929, depending on an external event to catalyse the revolutionary process. It is no longer a matter of struggling against capital but of placing oneself outside of its dynamic. The malfunctions of that dynamic play a very important role in the production of revolutionaries; analysing them and demystifying their integral subversive properties, that is, those generative of revolution, enables us to remain in contact with all those who were unable to take the necessary step. It is not a matter of putting oneself in a ghetto by creating an anti-organisation in a mythological beyond of capital.

With May ’68, we saw the emergence of revolution and the commencing of the production of revolutionaries on a global scale. The rupture of the current equilibrium can only widen the circle. Yet, it must also provoke in them a radicalisation, by seeking to get to the root of what leads to the incapacity of men and women to destroy the CMP as they desire to; it must also arouse a self-questioning in them. For now, all that manifests is a certain kind of withdrawal due to the fact that all that was supposed to be solid has melted into air and, furthermore, that no dynamic has yet concretely appeared and cannot do so in the immediate future. Moreover, there is nothing more conservative than revolutionaries, because they doggedly cling to a schema, a lifeline valid for all time and, when a certain rift opens up in society, they withdraw into themselves rather than ridding themselves of their inhibiting schema.

It is necessary to intervene as far as possible in the moment of these ruptures in order to amplify the production of revolutionaries, as there is no rigorous certainty that any given economic crisis is capable of generating a vast insurrectional movement. This is what has failed to happen since 1913 and the new Middle Ages that some Italian writers speak of (which they locate in the near future), or the era of barbarism feared by Adorno and the Frankfurt School, began at that time. The various crises have provoked the death of bourgeois society but the forces opposed to it were incapable of imposing themselves and making possible the victory of communism. A period of upheaval followed where the determining factor was capital’s becoming the material community (the achievement of real domination) in the West; the moment we are living through is one in which the instauration of this community risks completing itself globally and becoming definitive. This would imply the disappearance of the human species. Thus, to take up the comparison of the Italian writers, the revolutionaries at the time of the fall of the Roman empire were incapable of imposing the formation of a human community due to their own weakness but also because of the power of the mercantile phenomenon that was already extensively developed at the time, the Church’s submission to the powers that be, the weakness of the barbarian communities that had been perverted in the course of their migrations and contaminated through contact with Greco-Roman civilisation. It took centuries for the feudal community to establish itself, a community from which the movement of exchange value was banished.

The moments of the greatest upheaval in human history are those where a community, whether natural or mediated, collapses and the formation of a new one becomes necessary. The more unstable and violent an era is, the longer it needs to arrive at a solution, and all the more fluid is the opposition between the deep desire of human beings to create a human community and the movement of exchange value, and then of capital. For over a century, communism has been considered to be the realisation of a process internal to capital, namely the development of the forces of production that will ultimately make it possible to abolish alienation by ensuring that all have a decent material life that is compatible with human demands, and not as the establishment of a human Gemeinwesen (community), as the young Marx maintained. The events that have unfolded since 1913 have swept away the first conception of communism and made the second necessary as the only one that is capable of allowing human beings to pursue their lives in the cosmos; one that rekindles in their minds their old communitarian desire, while giving it a new consistency.

Among the crucial, turbulent moments that humanity has lived through (humanity in a more or less vast sense, for in some cases only a portion of the whole was affected), we may note those periods that appear as if they were a time of the flood: the end of the major empires such as the Akkadian and Roman, the Warring States Period in China, the moments of the decomposition of the feudal community due to overpopulation that led to agrarian difficulties, which lay behind the Crusades and the fears regarding the millennium. Now, in addition to the ancestral fear that these facts have managed to leave within human beings, there is also that of a very concrete apocalypse, the premonitions of which have been witnessed in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, more recently, in the desertification of the Sahel.

The fear that lies in the very heart of the world has many other sources. The disappearance of frames of reference, of values; no more revolutionary party, no more class that will assure emancipation; hence the dissolution of all “ideals”, which inhibits all movement; the perversion of socialism and communism, in that what was declared and realised as such turned out to be a more or less gilded prison: Sweden or the USSR! Fear that all our dreams will turn into nightmares, like communism turned into a system of concentration camps and insane asylums.

On the one hand, human beings have not managed to draw on their own forces, to resubstantialise themselves, to win back their lost stature, nor have they managed to conceive the movement towards the human community in its totality and in its unities–diversities; they perceive nothing but a void and so hesitate to throw themselves into any movement whatsoever. It’s the loss of all drive, of all enthusiasm. But, more deeply, there is the sense of a profound insecurity. Being in the world is never assured, for everything that exists is open to question, and the world itself in its absurdity is incapable of reassuring living beings. If in primitive communities, human beings had recourse to magic to obtain a confirmation of the reality of their existence, of their being in the world,²⁰  for human beings today there remains only searching for reality and life in the various religious sects that have arisen over the course of the last twenty years. Taking refuge in religion is just the warding-off of fear.

Ignorance of the dynamic leading to the community,²¹  doubled by human beings’ ignorance of each other, is paralysing. It has often been pointed out that racism begins when the alterity or otherness of a human being is experienced as an aggression, as a challenge, for it undermines the deep, hidden, obscure frames of reference that provide certainty regarding the presence of being in the world; if these frames of reference are trampled, all reality seems to collapse. Terrorism often manifests a fear of the other; destroying it seems like the only way to ward off this fear that is at the same time an anxiety due to the loss of the security of being in the world.

In its day, existentialism expressed well the social anxiety about this loss of security, but at present the problem is even more profound, for everything seems to be called into question. It is no longer immediate existence such as it can be determined by current social relations, but existence in its historical dimension, the tradition of human beings; religion, science, art have been considered dead, so there only remains a void adorned with desires, that is, a few impulses to be, to live. The frenzied pursuit of the satisfaction of desires is perhaps just an attitude that seeks to ward off this void. Moreover, inflation that is more often verbal (e.g. hyperbole) rather than gestural or fully practical is, as in the case of capital, an attempt to create something beyond the sphere of immediacy by evading the difficulties of the present.

Humanity must take the leap – which has long been possible – that is, break with the dynamic that arose at the time of its break with nature, with the community, and take another route, or else it will be subjected to a mad dream – the desire to dominate nature, to be outside of it – which is realised via capital and which culminates in humanity’s total subjection, running multiple different risks of destruction, the most serious of which are environmental. But it is this leap that it is afraid of; it is what causes it to fall behind previous positions, the precapitalist periods that were antagonistic toward capital. Human beings, in their desire to oppose capital, to destroy it, fundamentally privilege the periods of the past that were often only the presuppositions of its becoming. In doing so, struggle is led astray and human beings do not confront the real issues. Adorno calling for a society ruled by equal exchange is a good example, as are those who defend democracy as the lesser evil, or regionalist movements and all those who want to eliminate the devastating consequences of the CMP while conserving its rationality. Many leftist groups are afraid of calling tools, machines, and technology into question, and refuse to consider science as merely a therapeutic treatment for the pathology of human action.

These positions of withdrawal are manifold due to the fact that, arriving at the current moment of mutation, a swarm of contradictions, which manifested in prior eras but were only incorporated, are now reappearing in a more or less virulent way. Some individuals are capable of concentrating themselves around these secondary contrasts and building theory and praxis upon them. But they will be placed outside the real movement, even if they oppose, even if they hurl insults, even if, and this may often happen, they commit to terrorism. The latter often appears at the moment where nothing (yet) seems possible, at the moment where the confusion is such that the only attitude that can make something happen seems to be the implacable affirmation of violence. Terrorism is the impasse, and it’s an opportunity for capital to calmly eliminate disruptive elements.

We therefore see a fear of the future, either the one Toffler celebrated, because it appears as the exacerbation of what is already manifest, or the one that we advocate for because it is unknown and it implies the rejection of the old representations. No terrorism, no counter-fear can facilitate the perception of the becoming that we envisage. Yet we need to move quickly because we have come to a point at which a decision needs to be made fast.

We have tried to make clear what the material community of capital consists of and the determinism that is at work within it, not in order to recognise that it is difficult to do anything at all because of this determinism, but in order to refuse it. It is obvious that, in the concrete practice of everyday life, it is difficult to realise such refusal, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility, at least, of affirming it, and thereby of rejecting all compromise with the dynamic of anti-capitalist struggle, which only bogs us down further in the material community.

We have repeatedly emphasised the extent to which consciousness has mostly only been repressive consciousness, and how thought lags far behind reality. Here too, the absence of adequation between these two elements, their lack of alignment, generates anxiety, fear, even if only as the apprehension of what may come. More generally, we can only be painfully struck by the extent to which a species that boasts of being superior, brags about its ability to think, its consciousness, will only accomplish a movement that is generative of life when constrained and forced to do so. Thought will turn out to have been ineffective. Thus, there will have been no vast generosity to put an end to a becoming that for more than a century has only brought about wars, alienation, the destruction of human beings and nature. We will have to go to the very depths of abjection so that, threatened in its very biological existence, the species will finally “decide” to revolt.

Even when the situation becomes favourable due to a weakening of all constraints, it is not certain that the species, as domesticated as it is, will be capable of really rebelling. This fear of a possible excessive domestication destroys all hope, which is merely a planned and staggered suicide. We have an urgent problem here and now. We cannot wait for revolution to break out before we undertake to do something. We need to take seriously Bordiga’s injunction to comport ourselves as if the revolution had already taken place; there are no more experiments to be done, to undergo; experiments that would generate new ideas or behaviours. Again, it is obvious that, in the immediate present, practically speaking, the possibilities are limited but we can be as radical as possible at the level of affirmation by sweeping away all of the old representations and by vigorously calling into question the intermediate movement between primitive communities and the human community to come. We must, from now on, take the other route which allows us to save ourselves and to constitute an energetic human pole by, on the one hand, drawing on the energies discharged during the rebellions against the becoming of capital throughout history, and, on the other, by completing the convergence of the different elements, not in order to proclaim a revolutionary solidarity, for that would imply that such elements are atomised, separated, and that a certain “ethics” would enable them to be reunited. No, it is a matter of discovering an unmediated communication between human beings. That is what we need to attain what is lacking and what renders all groupings impotent. Men and women come together to struggle against something, and it’s the enemy that unites them, but from the moment they are forced to confront their own positivity, their really human work, they fail because they no longer have a human dimension, they are too foreign to one another, too reduced to being particles of capital, rendered inexpressive unless they are within the latter’s field of activity. The difficulty of communicating derives at once from human beings’ absence of content and from the presence of mediating membranes such as representations, roles, characters, etc.

Fear in its multiple forms may lead to a rebellion, but at the same time it is inhibitory; it paralyses the impetus that therefore is incapable of creating all that it should. We need to recognise it in a way similar to Marx, when he said it was necessary to be ashamed of the social situation he was in, not to achieve a new understanding, but to break with a dynamic that crushes us. Given that we have come to a point where, in a sense, the species is taken at its word in terms of its discourse on consciousness, thought, its own possibilities, its relations with nature and that, ultimately, the details of the solution are to be found within itself, there only remains to paraphrase the old Latin proverb prized by both Hegel and Marx: “Here is fear, jump here!”

From Invariance, Série II, №6, 1975
Translated by Marty Hiatt, in mourning, for the Chamet, 2025
Original text at  http://www.revueinvariance.net/lapeursauter.html