I. Mortal Leap

"In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counterrevolution, but the creation of an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party." — K. Marx, The class struggle in France from 1848 to 1850

1.

In the last possible form of its “political” expression, the radical dialectic has already defined contemporary capital’s conditions of existence as those in which capital, taken beyond its formal modes of domination thanks to the counter-revolution, presently realises, over the entire planet as over the species and the whole life of every human, the modalities of an integral colonisation of the existent. This we denote in terms of its “real domination”.

“Capital, as a social mode of production, realises its real domination when it comes to replace all the social or natural presuppositions that existed before it, with its own specific forms of organisation, which mediate the submission of all physical and social life to its own needs. The essence of the Gemeinschaft of capital is therefore realised as organisation. In the phase of real domination, politics, as an instrument for the mediation of capital’s despotism, disappears. After having used it extensively in its formal phase of domination, capital can liquidate politics when it comes, as total being [essere totale], to rigidly organise the life and experience of its subordinates. The rigid and authoritarian status of the expansion of the form of equivalence in social relations (Urtext) becomes an elastic instrument of mediation in the sphere of business. As a consequence, the state and even “politics” are less than ever the subject of the economy and therefore less and less capital’s “masters”. Today more than ever, capital finds its real strength in the inertia of the process that produces and reproduces its specific needs of valorisation as generally human needs” (Camatte, “Transitions”).

2.

The transition process from the modes of capital’s formal domination to the modes of its real domination has been entirely mediated, both in “liberal” capitalist countries and in “state” capitalist countries, by the counter-revolution. The latter has assumed this as its specific task and has totalised every “political” sense of it, definitively integrating politics with capital’s modes of survival, thanks to which it is dominant. By recuperating and distorting the genuinely revolutionary drives expressed by the real movement during the first twenty years of the twentieth century, the counter-revolution objectively functioned as the mechanism of self-regulation that allowed the capitalist system to survive its own crises. It favoured and promoted the dislocation of fundamental contradictions inherent in the modes and relations of production, from the originally elementary level of productive organisation, to ever more complex and increasingly total levels. Presently, the economy dominates as much over every form of “life” organised on the planet, as over every survival of the forms in which organic life, reduced to mere “brute matter” of extractive nature or mere propellant of the social machine, has been forced to reproduce itself as a mystified “life”, the “natural” energy of the species.

3.

With the analyses of Marx and Engels, the radical dialectic inexorably defined the contradictions inherent in the modes and relations of production, indicating how capital’s process of quantitative valorisation, with the irreversible growth of dead labour’s domination over living labour, would have inevitably led capital — pushed, as a result of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, towards a forced increase of production — to a reckoning with its foundational limitation: having as the limit to its organic development those same productive forces that are at the root of its own organic process.

4.

In other words, capital nourishes in itself ab initio the logical vice — and the natural limit — of being a mode of production of the social machine which, while basing its own dynamics in process on the integration of the organic energies of the species to itself, is condemned to irreversibly fuel the increasingly autonomous growth of the machine itself. At the same time, it increasingly reduces the part of organic life integrated into the process, as the part of organic life integrated in the process is converted into an increasing accumulation of dead labour, thus the former is added, made machine, to the machine, contributing as much to its autonomisation as to its quantitative prevalence. “The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realisation of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour appears as the force that dominates living labour, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour power; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude” (Marx, Grundrisse).

5.

The law of value shows that profit can only come from surplus value and at the same time that surplus value can only be extracted from living labour. The organic composition of capital would short circuit its own process of valorisation in relatively short time if the process was concretely created within an immobile level of organisation, given once and for all, both quantitatively and qualitatively invariant. Yet the history of the last one hundred and fifty years shows that capital-being is not at all what it could appear to economists — and their vulgar critics — in the first decades of its development process: the essence of the will to organise civil society separated from the overall substance of civil society; the economic-political pressure exerted by an élite of entrepreneurial power, simply engaged in a struggle for supremacy — bellum omnium contra omnes — as much against the past modes of organisation of the society of labour, as, within itself, of the most ingenious and the most daring (the fastest to transform and to transform themselves) against the most torpid and conservative. On the one hand, this economic-political struggle produced evidence of capital’s foundational contradictions, at a level of emergence not yet mediated and rationalised; on the other, as capital’s capacity to articulate itself in an increasingly organised system, increasingly homogeneous in its substantial modes of reproduction at higher levels of valorisation, so the real essence of capital has come increasingly to overlap with, until completely coinciding with, the species’ global modes of evolution. Ever more and more, capital has integrated the real essence of the organisation of survival to all its levels of manifest activity.

6.

Capital’s dominant modes of development — the laws of its procession — are today legible in terms of general systems theory (but torn from the scientist’s philistine “neutrality”). Capital functions as an open system that has as its limit, due to the specific contradictions inherent in its development, a tendency to close (to become autonomous, with the alternative that follows: collapse or realise a “cyclic-static” economy, “steady state”), expelling from itself its own source of organic energy, human energy, and therefore founding the premises of its self-destruction. Yet in its history, this tendency has until now been accompanied by a capacity to evade its critical point of collapse by mediating its organic combination with its “naturing” energy at a higher level of integration, there where the process has been able to find new spaces for development — without yet having managed to expel such fundamental contradictions from itself. Thus far, it has only been possible to postpone the critical point of irreversible collapse through increasingly larger spatial and ever more meagre temporal dislocations. The history of capital shows how the process has been able to grow and become autonomous thanks to an automatism typical of self-regulating systems capable of expanding past, through integration and positive feedback, a situation that is virtually closed, virtually blocked by a critical limit, towards a superior structure that is virtually open — without, however, eliminating its tendency to closure or its critical limit, postponing collapse until that point of saturation when it would have reached the limit of any further practicable transcendence: the point at which the material contradiction and its very source of energy are confronted with such a limit.

Given the terms of such a contradiction-in-process, the collision between, on the one hand, the growth of development and devaluation and, on the other hand, the expansion of surplus populations and generalised proletarianisation, would have long ago led capital to an irreversible collapse if it had not from time to time taken, when confronted with the immanence of its final crisis, a “qualitative leap”. Precisely the latter has allowed capital to elude such crises, granting the system the possibility of transcending its immediate limit in order to accede, through mediation, to a higher level of organisation, relocating its developmental thrust as much as its inherent contradictions towards a “new” spatio-temporal dimension where the limit of the crisis will re-emerge, conveniently postponed.

7.

Capital’s development cannot be read as the story of a self-identical process’ “horizontal” expansion (like wildfire). Rather, it is the escalation of a specific and particular society’s mode of being — that of “industrial society”, born of the bourgeois revolution — from its lowest degree, as an economic-political struggle let loose between classes, to its maximum degree (measurable both in the quantitative terms of its planetary expansion and the qualitative terms of its “way of life”), as the global management of the species’ fate — whether capital’s problematic equilibrium with the biosphere’s chances of survival or the equally unlikely balance of its own way of surviving as the human species with the real substance of humanity as a species. Capital has therefore been able to continue to develop — although it has never ceased to drag along the contradictions that have undermined it since its origin — thanks to a double historical availability of spaces: both territorial, economic-political in a strict sense, and existential, the political economy of life in a broad sense. Nothing better demonstrates the history of capitalist political economy’s planetary colonisation, as nothing else could demonstrate the history of the economic-political colonisation of human life, than the gradual process of capitalist valorisation that has continued to make ever more broad, profound and generalised acquisitions of new levels in the organisation of the existent; in which it has introduced, with increasing acceleration, both the modes and relations of value’s production — as well as the unavoidable and unresolved contradictions that inhere in valorisation. The final period we are experiencing is the period in which, having completed this teleological work to colonise as much of the territorial system as the “human system”, having filled any possible residual space, having exhausted the field of “qualitative leaps” practicable in the direction of productive development expressed in terms of exponential growth, capital has come to strike against its insurmountable limits — without any further dimension of transcendence toward higher levels of organisation. At this point, the inertial force of its own growth process is the critical limit against which it must struggle. A reversal is required: a sudden shift from a mode of development that is best expressed in terms of exponential growth to a zero-growth equilibrium.

This is what the cybernetic scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — and not only them — have just confessed, with all the false “detachment” and simulated “neutral objectivity” that characterises false scientific conscience; they add nothing new, in regards to substance, to what the radical dialectic foretold, with Marx and Engels, over a century ago: capital’s inevitable course, as a mode of economic-political production, towards an irreversible self-destructive crisis.

8.

Radical dialectics must not be content to find the cybernetic confirmation of its own foresight in the MIT scientists’ report. The false detachment and the simulated neutral objectivity with which they arrange the gag of the “specialist” and present, with their hand on their heart and the face of Buster Keaton, to a capital already disposed to contract an account of its errors — this could only mislead those beautiful souls immediately predisposed, by affinity of false conscience, to any new falsity. Precisely because radical critique has always known the concrete ground of the inevitable showdown, it knows how to render an instant account of all fictions, unmask actors and mise en scène, and while reaffirming its natural competency — natural in as much as it is has been lived — in the state of things, denounces the reign of fiction for what it really is: that of the state, now that the state is understood as the autonomous domination of the economy over the realm of appearances. Dressed in the immaculate white coat of science, the MIT authors recite the part of conscientious scholars, resolved to no longer keep silent over burning truths, whatever the cost, and to show that they have cast off any service to the dominant ideologies in order to finally serve the naked truth: they speak as if in the confessional. Yet this coat has such a worn texture that it is immediately transparent as the old livery of the master sorcerer, the same of every extermination and of every extortion, of Auschwitz (salary of bone) as of Hiroshima (the demographic solution); of bacteriological and defoliating assaults in war (the disinfestation of life) as of the therapeutically necrotized neurotic peace (the need to live as a mental illness). If the economy’s reign seems to dispose itself to self-criticism, then it is time to believe that it is not the realm of the economy that has had its time, but criticism that has entered, as a regulatory mechanism, into the service of the economy. In the robotic hands of the robot-scientists, the critique of political economy is transmitted into self-critical economics: should radical thought then leave its hide to the taxidermist?

9.

More than ever, it is now necessary to remember with Marx that capital’s valorisation process is one with the development process of both the means of production and of productive forces (a contradiction that is mediated only at the price of an ever-wider and ever-deeper colonisation of ever “new” quantitative and qualitative spaces). Further, if the proletariat is the natural antagonist of capital, it is determined by its own developmental dynamic from which it is essentially inseparable, whether as active or reserve labour power or as a reservoir of exclusion, until it comes to deny itself as a class and to overturn, by negating every class, the autonomous power of the economy over life. Yet the time in which capital exercised its domination in the exclusive sphere of political economy, the time of its formal domination, has come to an end, as have the conditions of disorganic and territorially fragmentary development that capital, transcending the limits of its first crises, has left behind (1914-1945).

Thanks to a mechanism of interaction and feedback that is significant in quite another sense than that outlined by the MIT authors, capital has been able to guarantee itself, by mediating its contradictions through a homogenisation of world markets and the liquidation of a good part of the young proletariat during the two wars, a much stronger and more widespread power to integrate the natural human community (Gemeinwesen); indeed, it has managed to establish itself as the hegemonic mode — the only one concretely practiced — of producing and reproducing the natural human community on the planet. As the valorisation process has as its exclusive object the autonomous survival of value beyond the limits of its crises, it integrates into itself, into the organic composition of value, the survival of the species as a crisis in the life process. It is in this phase of the integration of capital-being with the being of the species (a formal integration, as we will see later, but one that is pragmatically operative) that the counter-revolution comes into play, as a mechanism of self-regulation in the direct service of capitalist rationalisation.

10.

Two intersecting but distinct series of mediations must be distinguished in the transition phase from the formal domination to the real domination of capital. In the first exclusively economic-political structure of capital (formal domination) there could not be a counter-revolution: the proletariat as a class incubated in itself the development of a thrust that directly negated, and that was therefore immediately revolutionary, the material conditions of its very existence. The proletariat as a mass, together with an elite of intellectual deserters from the dominant bourgeoisie (but not, as will be seen, of its enlightenment culture), concurred to develop a class consciousness destined to express through insurrection the rejection of the frontal exploitation of labour-power produced and treated as a commodity, and to protest the frontal exclusion of the proletariat from the enjoyment of wealth, of which it was itself the conscious producer. It was in this stage that the proletariat lived its forced estrangement from a world of “values” (wealth as freedom from need, equality as the division of opulence, brotherhood as emancipation from the misery that generates hatred) that were themselves handed down from the bourgeois revolution, and that appear to have been realised, that is, enjoyed, by the sole dominant class, as the intolerable price of its own labour. The subject of valorisation (the proletariat) is represented to itself as excluded from the enjoyment of values: without criticising them, it claims them, proposing itself as the historical force destined to gather its inheritance, universalising it. It is at this stage that politics has already clouded the gaze of radical dialectics, hiding the millennial truth of the identity between culture and modes of oppression, denying the right/duty to recognise that culture’s valorisation process is not the “heritage” of the human race. Rather, it is the most ancient, the most ancestral, “genetic” mode of production of the human community as a social machine, in which organic life is enslaved to the preservation and development of inorganic value: it is the very metal in whose timbre the voice of power vibrates, this power to which life is subjected in the “rational” effort to supply oneself as energy. The historical task of the radical dialectic, that of liberating the species from work, can only be fulfilled on the day when it is clear in everyone’s mind what is already clear in the (negated) organic body of all: the necessity of the destruction of ideology’s domination, the necessary liberation from the first and most unnatural of works: the sacrifice of free organic expression to the language of having to be slaves, the capture of “natural” reason in the service of alienated “rationality”, the sale of living sense to the process of eternalising dead sense.

11.

It is in this same phase that the radical dialectic, hostage to political “rationality”, represented the revolutionary proletariat as a formal party: no longer the historical party, but rather the historicised party of the abolition of classes. The point of view of the totality, which allowed Marx and Engels to grasp in its real essence the valorisation process as the negation in process of life as a natural good, is already, in the hand-to-hand struggle of political rationality with the reason of the state (the state, under capital, is always the state of things, its reason always an armed body), the point of view of the totality broken into fragments of particular spheres. If one approaches such spheres by enlarging the specific details of the struggles in course, if one gains in political optics a levantine competence of tactics, they pay for this ever closer intimacy with the ways of the enemy by losing the distancing dimension of strategy, the total competence of the stakes. The more that the spontaneous intelligence of the rejection of every condition that introduces death into life bends to the needs of survival, even of the survival to fight, the more it is transformed into the spontaneous intelligence of the enemy. Tactics are always the “reasonable” face of the counter-revolution.

12.

The Russian revolutionary explosion, while apparently projecting onto the planetary scene the triumphant (and for the bourgeoisie terrifying) spectacle of a proletariat who had come to embody its liberated subjectivity, soon put on stage, realiter, in the now merely fictitious forms of the revolution in power, the recuperative and substantially restorational mediation of the powerful counter-revolution. Hunted bloodily from below, essentially capitalist modes and relations of production fall bloodily over the deluded (but not all) heads of the revolutionary proletariat, reintroduced by decree from above. The pretext — and it is here that the dazzling power of the scientific “rationality” that mediates capital appears for the first time — is that of the need to conquer, through a long process of so-called socialist “transition”, the material bases for the realisation of communism. This is not the place to perpetuate the semi-secular anti-leninist polemic, nor does it make sense to ask ourselves once again what the feasible alternatives might be: the revolutionary struggle always lives the present as the battleground between a future project linked to the fate of the species and the sum of its past defeats, which have influence only in that they indicate the traps into which the species can no longer fall. Instead, this is the place to attest how this lesson of realism was learned and made its own by international capital, to its exclusive and automatic advantage: a lesson that allowed it not to fear applying force to this world, capable of destroying its essence, until it could successfully appear as the material mode of production of every human community. Capital learned from its crises to dispose of its past in order to revive its modes of production at higher, more integral, more totalising levels of organisation. It learned to mask its own faculty of transcription by covering it with formal, spectacular transformations. It learned above all to flow as a necessary water under any flag, to take as much the form as the substance of a basic and neutral way of being, so similar to life and nature as to be able to clothe itself in appearances. Mediated through clashes in which the maximum possible amount of proletarian blood ran, capital learned to transform itself into ways of being less specific than a class and increasingly intrinsic to a people, thus overcoming a first degree (a first level or threshold of limits) of its connatural contradictions.

13.

From that moment on, the proletariat no longer exclusively represented, in the eyes of capital, labor-power to be produced and treated like a commodity, but rather it began to appear to capital as its own people to come — no longer in the form and substance of brute matter, a mere propellent to keep alive as long as it gives strength. Rather, in form, it became the living matter of capital’s own body (social body, discrete assistant of the social brain, embodied by capital made science); in substance, the natural propellant of a process of autonomisation in which the more “naturally” capital separates itself as if from a slag, the more it shows itself capable of integrating the species profoundly and in a capillary manner into the mechanisms of the valorising machine. The process of emancipating capital from the first critical level of its development (the first level of closure of the system within its limits, with the consequent inevitable “en masse”) then passes through the fictitious emancipation of its natural antagonist, the fictitious emancipation of the proletariat enlisted in the self-responsible subjectivity of the labour process. From that moment, while capital sees in the proletariat its future people — and perceives for itself the chance to mediate its own contradictions by integrating into its “spirit”, into its own surreptitiously socialised subjectivity, the very body of the species made its own body — the proletariat dazzled by the counterrevolution sees its own future in the development of capital, transforms its intolerance into a new patience, presenting itself the historical task of carrying out at its own expense, but voluntarily, the material bases for the realisation of a neo-christian capitalism: “socialist”.

14.

The fictitious and spectacular contrast between the two blocks, East and West, — in both of them, through different formal realisations, capitalist development and counter-revolution have embodied by the same dazzled subject — has for decades polarised, while followed by flowing proletarian blood, the completely ideological imagination of revolutionary “thought”, holding back theory in a grotesque fight to enlist militants under different banners of the same process. The counter-revolution mimics all the clichés of dialectics, degraded to a comedy of misunderstandings; while the unsatisfied need to really live and the toil of “virtuous” labour broods under the ashes, in the bodies of a proletariat defeated more than just in their minds (or estranged or drugged by politics), ready to explode in a vital fire, after eighty years of latency, in the first events of ’68.

But integration has been so deep, the chain so firm, that those who appear with torches in their hand are not those who, inserted and included, obtain through their brutalised hours a salary that allow them to continue the “work of living”: as always, the defectors of the dominant “spirit” move first along with those excluded from the assembly line, voluntary escapees and the forcibly proscribed. In Paris, as everywhere in Europe, students, misfits, hippies and punks; in the USA, the same together with the “race” of the excluded, the blacks of the ghettos, the ex-slaves “redeemed” from collector of cotton to collector of trash. They begin by rejecting the horror of non-life, these two qualities of very different “competences”, but immediately fraternise, both external to the hardest heart of the process: voyeurs from above, these students of social engineering (in all the faculties they are taught the faculty of directing beings made to be directed); voyeurs from below, those excluded from the waste society, which consumes them; on the one hand, the “imagination” revolts, before being co-opted, on the other, a denuded vitality revolts, after having been humiliated.

15.

On the one hand, politics takes onto itself the role of mediator of the process, questioning everything except the foundations that support it, working to preserve both the suicidal development of production as well as the model of life that is the real product here; on the other hand, the strategic (“scientific”) lucidity of capital sees more clearly in front of it the threshold of a new limit that only a mortal leap will allow it to overcome. The ever closer limit of its own planetary expansion obliges capital to invent a new world, just as it is about to “finish” this world. Wars, guerrillas, national liberation campaigns, electoral brawls for the election (or capital execution) of this or that super-star — all equally fungible and functional — overlap on the screens of the glass oracles, in those fragments that mix together at the same level this weekend’s massacres, whether those of the Indians or those due to DDT; parades displaying the new quality of life, debates on this quality of life, psychodramas on the loss of this quality. In the service of a politics that swaps the critique of everything with the victory of the Nothing, fictitious and real gears, unrecognisable from one another, drag into their mechanisms, together with the bodies of an ever more abundant proletariat, the shredded image of living a real struggle, the fated illusion of fighting for a matter of life or death, while death gains ground inadvertently in everyone’s daily survival.

16.

To the increasingly accelerated clashes against its classical contradictions, capital responds elastically by miming the cries of its people, claiming for itself the causes of this growing despair, but inverted into a voice of promise and immanent hope. In its formal domination, capital took the proud and ferocious traits of a class that had conquered power through revolution: the bourgeoisie, when it was still alive, was not ashamed to defend its rightful privileges as it could appreciate them — even just a little bit — as the good of the earth and the taste for life, and therefore defended them without questioning itself, offering itself, despite the economic-political struggles, an image in which wealth justified the price of poverty. The transition to real domination, however, leads capital to produce a politics — the new image through which it smuggles itself — that is as much more elastic and co-opting as it is more formally disposed to question, to problematise. Yet the problems of the day, in the apparent forms of an openness to the demands and needs of the people, are always capital’s problems. The people are increasingly capital in person: the people who have the vote, the people who represent themselves, the people who have the “privilege” of the word, assume without realising it the role of a puppet that speaks with the voice and covers the hands of its ventriloquist.

17.

Quantity is the exclusive reign of valorisation, which consists in this: in the production of apparent qualities upstream of which always lies a given quantity of labour. Since capital limited itself to praising the quality of its commodities, the necessary time has passed in order to capture all forms of life in the commodity form, so that today we can discuss a “quality of life” — where behind every produced “life” lies a given quantity of labour, of devalorised life. This is anthropomorphic capital’s new conquest: having colonised every trait of social coexistence for value, it must reassemble beyond the explosive threshold of its organic vices in the organic composition of capital-life; to transcribe itself from the intoxicated kingdom of commodity-waste in exteriority to the realm of survival in inwardness, all the more degraded the more it is buried and raised to a new area of the market. A macabre archaeology is called to resurrect, in the living dead, the Phoenician soul of the adventurous businessmen; but under the constellations of the flood, the dead souls cannot but trade relics: the death of desire is the general equivalent that informs all the mints of the depressive “personality”. Let the dead valorise their “life”.

VIII. Real Dialectics

“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.” – F. Kafka, “The Wish to be an Indian”

119.

The point of view of radical dialectics sublates politics through the same movement in which, defining the latter to be the exclusive instrument of the counter-revolution, it definitively separates itself from it.

120.

If the radical dialectic has no “what is to be done” to sell on the competitive market of “alternative” ideologies, if it cannot slip into any theoretical precipitate without being disqualified as dialectics and as a qualitative point of view, it is because it knows the “concrete” as the dominant utopia’s Champ de Mars: it is here that every act, realising itself in the context of organised unreality, leaves its position on the field and witnesses its own funeral glorification. But it is from here that the radical biological thrust, denying any validity — any authentic reality — to its fictitious realisations, shows itself its ability to endure beyond, to go beyond, and finally to establish itself beyond the counter-revolution. The affirmation of the biological revolution, or of qualitative subjectivity at the level of the species, can only be found where the counter-revolutionary utopia has burned all its stocks of false aims, all of its representations.

121.

There is no behaviour or line of conduct that can define itself to be, as such, revolutionary. As soon as it is established as a mere stylisation of conflictuality, and therefore becomes a “work of art”, every behaviour, every line of conduct is to be placed in order of the incident as its particular accident.

122.

The real movement is not a metaphysical entity, the panther of revolution lurking in an ineffable latency, but rather the very force with which revolutionary subjectivity continually exceeds (in a continuity that can only be grasped at the level of its generalisation and of the universal) the forms of fictitious realisation, in which the organisation of non-essence [inessenza], that concrete pseudo-continuum, involves it without capturing but the ideological dregs, with or without the “dead” bodies of the dazzled.

123.

In this sense, every form of politics which arises from even minimal conflict with the “concrete” given has in itself, inseparable from its destiny as counter-revolutionary recuperation and frustration in the fictitious, a potential push towards its own overcoming; that is, in the direction of the real movement understood as a dialectical process that guides essence to manifest itself as such beyond its partial negations.

124.

From counter-revolutionary liberation movements such as those for nations, sexuality, women, students, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, drug addicts, workers, children, animals, employees and nature, can come, as in fact a day does not pass in which there does not arise, the hard-won awareness of the real stakes: the liberation of the species from ideology, the necessary overcoming of every separation, the conquest of the point of view of the totality.¹

125.

Ultimately, the ideology of hooliganism [teppismo] and crime, if it actually exceeds the obsolete stylistic elements of militant politics, effects a recuperation on revolutionary subjectivity, convincing it that “criminal” and generically illegal behaviour are expressed at the level of individual choices, and instantly discharges any positive tension. As soon as one is satisfied with being the habitual transgressor of every norm, the “criminal” drowns his own project of being in a simple and caricatural disobedience to the normative as such, which therefore becomes, quite simply, the norm in negative: having in place of being. The compulsion to repetition is the miserably maniacal trait that degrades to routine, to nostalgic repetition, the actual insurrectional creativity of the coup.

126.

None of “being’s options” listed above, and indeed none at all, escapes the design of what has been called a “mortal leap”: every possible comportment has already been catalogued and filed in the cybernetic offices or the image production centres. If this is certain, the failure of neo-Enlightenment rationality is even more certain, the disaster of the capitalist utopia is even more certain, the one that has been summarised as the attempt to make political economy disappear by realising it in the “life” of each and of all: political economy, first-born inheritor of religious alienation.

127.

What will be revealed in the years to come as the manifest insolvency of capitalist utopia, in the apocalyptic and tragicomic spectacle of its landslide, which will shake every residual illusion from anyone who has not lost their capacity to understand in the meantime. But the bankruptcy of this utopia — this dominant hic et nunc — does not in itself mean the immediate triumph of qualitative and liberated corporality. Precisely because anthropomorphised capital, through self-criticism, valorises the fictitious capital of its own becoming (an anticipated future in the economic-political utopias that capital-being subjects to the desperate project to ensure the survival of every subjectivity, in credit of life), devalorisation internally negates every particular utopia, “sublated” before being able to overcome itself as utopia, that is, before it could realise itself. And precisely as the being of the fictitious, capital, at the last stage of the autonomisation of dematerialised value, is not realised in particular utopias but rather in forms of its own general becoming (of its own utopia in process), forms that cannot be realised as substance due to the rapidity of the very process: the dynamic of the fictitious. It is in this process, and in the increasingly explosive contradiction between the domination of forms and the overcoming, in form, of their own substance, that qualitative subjectivity, the corporal substance of the species, sees its own revolutionary task fulfilled, its concrete destiny: that of realising the dialectic, pressing, with the will of the essence that clamours to be, the increasingly accelerated ruin of representations. The subjectivity of the species will separate itself only in the last ruins of political utopia. Before recognising itself as the subject of the biological revolution, the proletarian body of the species will have to free itself from all the hypotheses that communist ideologues throw on its future as the realisation of the human end, that Gemeinschaft in harmony with ecological codes, the latest and most coherent metamorphosis of fictitious capital into “invisibility”, the mimesis of liberated life.

128.

The supreme consistency of the fictitious is that of showing itself, finally, to be perfect representation and therefore as the organisation of perfectly unreal appearances: that of ending in its definitive separation from the concrete, in its own sensitive disappearance (the fictitious is the essence of every religion). But only by manifesting itself as a substance impervious to the fictitious, therefore only by affirming itself as a subjectivity consubstantial to the organic movement of nature [naturante], to its global corporeality in process, can the species definitively emancipate itself from the domination of prosthesis, free itself from the fictitious and its religions. The biological revolution consists in the definitive inversion of the relationship that has seen, since prehistory, the corporeality of the species subject to the domination of the social machine; in the liberation of organic subjectivity; and in the irreversible “domestication” of the machine, in all its possible manners of appearing.

Edizioni Dedalo, June-September 1972