TROPLOIN

Introduction

The current crisis raises the issue of what could be a revolutionary exit from the crisis. Crisis is generally the crucible in which communist theory is forged, in its specificity as neither a science nor political, neither economic nor philosophy, but a category of its own. What makes this theory unique is that the class that upholds it is also unique: the proletariat is the first (and last) exploited class in history, whose exploitation periodically results in the impossibility of working and calls into question its most immediate reproduction. When the capitalist crisis breaks out, the proletariat is forced to rise up in order to find another social form capable of restoring its socialization and immediate reproduction. Throughout the history of capitalism, this alternative form was called communism, even though the content attributed to the word varied greatly depending on the period. However, communist theory has in any case always been characterized as the iterative movement between analysis and critique of capitalist society and the projection of the exit from the capitalist crisis brought about by the proletariat. The communist society projected at each period had its own specific features derived from the historical conformation of the relationship between capital and proletariat. In other words, the notion of communism has a history, just as the class relationship itself does. The invariance of the fundamental content of the capitalist social relationship (extraction of surplus value) does not exclude its historical embodiments.

Until now, what characterized communist theory was its construction around a program of measures to be applied once the proletarian insurrection has taken power. This general formulation differed depending on the period. The Manifesto program (nationalizations) is not the same as that of the Paris Commune (direct collective democracy), which in turn differs from that of the Russian and German revolutions in 1917-1918 (workers councils). Despite these differences, however, the principles are the same: in one way or another, the outcome of the insurrection to which the proletariat is compelled by the capitalist crisis is the seizure of political power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which dictatorship always, whether democratic (the councils) or autocratic (the party), amounts to dispossessing the capitalists of their property and imposing work on everyone. At that point begins the transitionperiod during which society must move from the reign of necessity to that of liberty. Such is the so-called programmatic schema of the communist revolution. It is obsolete.

The aim of this working document is to present the so-called communizing alternative to the programmatic schema. On the scale of history, this is a new alternative, since its birth can be dated to the crisis in the 60s-70s.