The publication of “On the Jewish Question” and of “For a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” responds not only to a necessity of fact. Indeed, one cannot find these texts at present, yet there is also a profound theoretical need for them: the critique of democracy and its definitive supersession by the proletariat — communism.

Nonetheless, if the antidemocratic aspect of these texts has often been highlighted, the essential question, that of the Gemeinwesen (community), has never been raised. Now, in “On the Jewish Question” as in “Critical Gloss in the Margins”, Marx considers this question, showing that the separation of the human from its Gemeinwesen makes revolution inevitable — this is possible, as will later be made clear, only in response to an economic crisis that weakens the force of repression of the dominant class and provides the necessary energy to the oppressed class to attempt the insurrectional assault. Moreover, we find the affirmation that only human being is the true Gemeinwesen (community) of man. Now, who in this society could represent this Gemeinwesen? What is the class that in this society can claim the human title? It is the proletariat. This response given in “For the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (Introduction)” shows at what point there exists a profound unity between all of these texts. There is a unity because:

“The question of the community is the central question of the proletarian movement. In a synthetic mode, this can be presented as:

(a) Primitive human community

(b) Destruction of this through the development of two movements, that of value and that of the expropriation of human beings

(c) Formation of the material community with the fusion of two separate preceding movements: capital-value in process

(d) Scientific communism, the human community rediscovered, that integrates all of the acquisitions of the previous periods”

On the other hand, Marx shows that bourgeois society derived from a social revolution with a political soul destroys politics. This would seem to be a contradiction if one doesn’t recall that the essential in capitalist society is to find the political means to dominate humans become slaves to capital. Politics is no longer the question of the relation of human beings amongst themselves, but uniquely the relation of humans with the material community, that is with capital of which the state is the representation.

To capital which has become the material oppressor of humans, one can only oppose the proletariat in as much as it — when constituted as a class — is what struggles for the triumph of a finally found human being: the social man of communist society.

Philosophy was the research into this being, it was the interpretation, continual accommodation to the exigencies of a being where it felt the necessity and the alienated given of this world. With the emergence of the proletariat, this theoretical research is resolved in practice. The proletariat realises philosophy in superseding it.

Radical emancipation was the only emancipation possible in Germany; yet it was the revolution on high that triumphed here. But Germany is still sick from this victory, this victory that made it participate on a social stage above that which it possessed in itself: communism.

Radical emancipation was also the solution for Russian society. The Russians were the theoretical contemporaries of the modern peoples; the Russian proletariat was the theoretical contemporary of the European workers’ movement but it could not become its real contemporary unless, in the West, the proletariat had become itself the effective contemporary of what has long been veiled by society: communism.

The book of the Russian revolution was written before its history. Unfortunately, the Russian proletariat accomplished the romantic task of realising capitalism that the bourgeois class, at least in Russia, could not.

After this detour, as was also the case in China and various countries that gained their independence after the second world war, there reappears more powerfully the necessity of a radical revolution, of a revolution with a human title. Human society cannot survive unless it is transformed into a human Gemeinwesen (community). The proletariat has no romantic tasks to complete, but only its human work [son oeuvre humaine, to ergon tou anthropou].

“MARX AND GEMEINWESEN”

Jacques Camatte,Revue Invariance, (1977)

It is in the Urtext of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1858) and in the Grundrisse, Marx’s unfinished works and drafts, where the most is possible, where the system is open. It is a moment that stands in essential connection with the so-called philosophical works of his youth. This is not to suggest that Marx subsequently abandoned all contact with philosophy, on the contrary: the first book of Capital is fully comprehensible only if one knows, at least, what Aristotle wrote about form and matter in his Metaphysics as well as Hegel’s logic. There is also of course an undeniable Spinozian resonance to be found in many pages of Capital. In the Urtext, Marx is attached to a young Hegel, a Hegel who he could not have known; this Marx who deeply investigated the Gemeinwesen, especially the Greek one, and that, beyond Hegel, he subterraneously connected to individuals such as Joachim da Fiore, Nicholas de Cusa, etc.

Autonomisation of exchange value, community, relation between the state and the general equivalent, definition of capital as value in process — these are the essential points confronted in the Urtext. They are not particular to it, of course, because they can also be found in the Grundrisse and Capital. However, in this text the study is more synthetic and the various elements are tackled simultaneously; they are salient, especially with respect to autonomisation and community. In the first volume of Capital, the exposition is more analytical.

Overall on the subject of the community, in the works published during his lifetime, Marx reasons as follows: the destruction of the old community due to the autonomisation of exchange value also leads to the autonomisation of its various constituent elements (the individual, politics, religion, the state), which constitutes the starting point for a vast movement whose development the bourgeoisie profits off of. Yet, for Marx, it does not appear that the latter can in fact found another community. This question is addressed even less with respect to capital. Only the proletariat can, by destroying the latter — the last moment of the movement-becoming of value, of class society — found a new community, the human community.

However, in posthumous works such as the Urtext and the Grundrisse (and taking into account as well all those that are not yet published) we find that Marx poses the possibility that a community could be formed either through gold or capital. This is the fundamental interest of these texts. With them, one can demonstrate that gold is unable to provide the foundation for a community and the accession, on the contrary, of capital to the material community.

Thus, in Marx’s complete works, there is a juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the individualisation of that movement through which capital constitutes itself as the material community and, on the other, an affirmation of the impossibility thereof, linked to a mad hope that the proletariat will, in time, rebel and destroy the capitalist mode of production (CMP). Yet, capital’s community exists; this implies an abandonment of any classist theory and the understanding that an immense historical phase is over.

Marx’s work on community has been left to the side. In Germany, theorists such as Weber and Tönnies do not refer at all to the various works we have just mentioned. In noting this we do not propose to recompose a new Marx, but simply to note the extent to which reflection on community is a fundamental axis of all his work.

To understand the significance of this Marxian approach to social becoming, we must link the Urtext to the Grundrisse chapter “Die Formen, die der kapitalistischen Produktion vorgehen [The forms that precede capitalist production].” In this text, Marx studies the different historical periods that preceded capital’s development, starting from the forms of community; an immense work, as attested by the various studies and notebooks that have been preserved on ethnology and the prehistoric period. Here again, it is not a question of wanting to organise differently what has been given to us, trying to place one chapter in relation to another. One must simply consider the various approaches of this study and grasp, despite what is lacking, in the direction that Marx indicated in his own reflexive effort. It is then that we realise that the Urtext is a privileged point of articulation for such an understanding.

The question then arises of how Marx could have presented the missing chapter on the state, one of the six that the Critique of Political Economy was meant to contain. It seems that, as with capital, Marx became aware of the difficulty of treating it in isolation, since the state can only be conceived from the community and, moreover, the future of the state blends intimately with that of value; at two historical moments it tends to constitute itself as a community: with gold, where it does not succeed, and with capital, where it does.

The question of the state is not posed in the same terms in his political works. As a result, two discourses coexist: 1. Exchange value achieves autonomy and through this movement creates the community, towards which end it subjugates the state; 2. The state is a product of the class struggle: the ruling class erects the state in order to dominate the opposing class of society.

In the Urtext, there is a tendency towards a synthesis of these two discourses. However, Marx does not really confront the time and place of the birth of classes. This would have led him to relativize his schema of social evolution even more than he did during his discussion with the Russian populists. Classes are only manifested in the West because only there do we find the autonomisation of the individual. However, the state phenomenon is not peculiar to it. This is where the Marxian analysis is inadequate. In “Die Formen ...” Marx intuits certain realities when he approached the Inca society as a state within a communist society, but he does not sufficiently emphasise that the state is an abstraction of the community, that it is more or less autonomous, separated from the ancient social body linked to nature.

Research subsequent to Marx has sometimes revealed and especially specified the existence of states not yet separated from the community and nature. Thus, among the Sumerians, as Thorkild Jacobsen has shown, one finds “the cosmos as a state”. The organisation of the cosmos dictates that of the community, defining hierarchy and therefore the state. It is a moment when the separation between interiority and exteriority has not yet been accomplished, is not yet over. A posteriori, we can say that it is a given type of community which implied such a relation to the cosmos that attributed to it a determining function, but it is also clear that such reasoning, in truth, is absolutely not valid for the moment when men and women of that community lived. For them, there was a communitarian whole.

Men and women had not yet abandoned the old representation-conception of the world of peoples who were not sedentary. The separation of all that they form from the piece of land where they live had not yet come to be. We therefore cannot speak of state, class, religion, art, etc in such a case. It is we who, according to what has happened in recent centuries, abstract such elements in these communities.

With different determinations, we find a similar absence of separation in ancient Egypt. The state, however, had to some degree become autonomous.

In the case of China this separation was sketched, but was not in fact effected. What the Europeans called Emperor was in fact the “son of heaven” who received his mandate from the latter. Natural events could sometimes indicate that his mandate had been removed, which well conveys the particular relationship of this “emperor” to the cosmos and his function within it. In particular, by guaranteeing social order, he simultaneously guarantees a fundamental achievement: the separation of man from animality. When disorder reigns, there is a return to the latter. Thus the emperor governs the relationship between the cosmos and the social milieu.

Various other examples could be cited as special cases that cannot be unilinearly available because the process of autonomisation did not operate identically in the distinct communities. The study of African and Amerindian societies reveals all the possibilities. In Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres has highlighted the mechanisms there that prevented the autonomisation of power, hierarchy, state.

It is in Greece that we find separation and autonomisation, as well as where we find the state, individuals, and classes at the same time as separation from “mythical” thought, the birth of science, logic and, we will come back to it more in other works, therapeutics. The state is still a sensible expression of the ancient Gemeinwesen; the movement of value has not yet reached too great a development. With the Roman Empire comes the need for a state that must dominate, be above, and control a host of communities, hence the attempt to resolve the issue through the dissolution of all communities in Romanity, with the concordant loss of diversity (a phenomenon already attempted with the Greeks, the Hellenisation of the barbarians). Christianity played a big role here. It is it that will realise the homogenisation or destruction, indeed the domestication, of human groups, after putting force in check; this is what happened to the Sardinians, for example.

During the Renaissance, the state emerged more clearly as the general equivalent state (see Marx in the Urtext), accelerating the passage from the verticality of value’s movement to its horizontality. The end was no longer a god and therefore a temple but, as a result of the disappearance of sacred hoarding, value came to move in all horizontal directions; there was therefore the need for an element of regulation and control.

With the development of bourgeois society the class struggle became decisive, if only because the protagonists of the drama no longer reasoned according to a community or, if you will, they did so reduced to the limits of a class. It is at this moment when classes became really decisive, operational. We will have the various revolutions that, from the 16th century to the present day, mark the stages of the establishment of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and, now, the community of capital. The state is considered an “artifice”, an institution necessary to unite the various social elements; hence its importance, its possible autonomisation and the fact that it can become stronger than society (Marx). Now its importance is still considerable but it tends to be absorbed in the community of capital.

I have indicated elsewhere the movement through which the material community is formed and its fundamental characteristics; material community because it is the dead, crystallised element, the work of millions of human beings exteriorised in the form of that fixed capital which founds the community. This is the essential moment in which capital replaces its presuppositions with its conditions of development, that of its accession to the community, but that still does not tell us everything about the community of capital. I have demonstrated elsewhere the important role played by circulating capital in the latter’s realisation. However, it could not have been established, let alone reproduced, if the mentality of men and women had not been modified so that it corresponded to the new requirements of that form of life determined by capital. At first, class ideologies allow the different actors to represent with more or less adequacy their role in the life process of capital, even when they oppose it (as in the case of the limits to the working day), subsequently it becomes the movement of capital itself — capital posing as representation — that grounds the representations of human beings and guides them in their praxis. At this level, wanting to define what comes first and what second is to debate the chicken and the egg. What is undeniable is the seemingly indestructible force of representation. The becoming of what is in place appears eternal.

The irony is that it is precisely at this moment that historical materialism triumphs, posing as an adequate representation of the capitalist world, which is itself at a very distant stage from the one that engendered it!

The realisation of the community of capital and the end of the historical phase that began with the rise of exchange value is reflected in the appearance of new disciplines: systems theory (Bertalanffy), general semantics (Korzybski), “complexity theory” (Morin) and in the importance of certain terms: structure, totality, organisation, system, code, etc. Hence the preponderance of semiotics: we must know the meaning of a system, that of its different parts; we must perceive its signifiers where man has no more meaning.

A world losing more and more of its references, its constraints (“everything is possible”; it should be noted in this connection that there is a certain contradiction between an evanescence of the central state as point of reference, seat of the general equivalent, and the need for a more or less centralised law enforcement agency) imposes the requirement of a science of information’s meaning. Everything has been externalised, autonomized: men and women have before themselves the community of their own despoilment. It takes a code to understand what is happening and this code is the reduction of communication. It is no longer possible to speak in terms of antipathy or sympathy; beings are neutral particles of information recording and reference to this information. The ancient faith that was so important in earlier times has been replaced by credit, which is faith in a system in which man is still a reference, and then by inflation, which is the faith of capital in itself. Its acceptance brings humanity to an increasingly absurd life. Every human being will be nothing but an existent “thrown” into the community of capital and set in motion by its becoming. It is no longer a question of reasoning in terms of the mode of production in order to face current reality. There is no longer a capitalist mode of production, but the community of capital in which the state is ever more immersed.

More generally it can be said that there is a definite mode of production when production really becomes a problem because of material, technical and social difficulties. Capital produces everything, even what appears to be outside the sphere of industrial production, and reduces human beings to the same situation of dependence on itself. It is accomplished alienation. Human beings have become totally different or, what amounts to the same thing, slaves have accepted the power of their master to such an extent that they have become its simulacra. In doing so, any dialectic of the concepts of productive forces and relations of production, as discussed by Marx in his 1857 Introduction, is over; on the other hand, production is no longer simply production for production’s sake: it is now production for the reproduction of capital. It finds a subject and thereby loses its character as object.

“All the concepts of the dialectic that we have reached do not imply that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they constitute the members of a totality” (Introduction, 1857).

Especially those that were centred and articulated around human activity: labour-leisure, labour time-free time, value-surplus value; and even those that have freed themselves from it (profit-loss, etc.) have lost any operationality. It is obviously the couple shortage-wealth, underpinned by the concept of need, that most clearly vanishes. When human beings are torn from their community, the realities that founded the concepts of need, scarcity, working time, etc. still arise, but to the extent that a community has been rebuilt where all the elements that had individualised, autonomised, have been resorbed as no more than the moments of articulation of the community of capital’s becoming. These are the determinations of human behaviour once men and women have been detached from their community.

More generally, it signals the end of political economy, especially if one refers to Marx’s affirmation that: “Real economy — savings — consists in saving working time... “ (Grundrisse 599). Yet, capital has captured duration and human time.

Economy in the sense of saving is only possible when time is autonomous and is counted; besides, Marx insists in Capital on the relation between the measurement of time and the development of the economy or the development of fixed capital; to economise, to save, can lead to a situation in which the individual will even save his life, once he has taken out life insurance and bought himself a tomb. This is a grotesque manner of indicating a reality: the economy is the dissimulation of our life.

For Marx, the economy of labour time is ultimately the essential point and almost determines human evolution. However, as he himself shows, it is only with the development of capital in the fifteenth century that this imperative really appears, engendering a secular struggle between capitalists and workers that will reach its paroxysm in England in the nineteenth century with the struggle for the limit of the working day — a real civil war that lasted 50 years (Marx). In other countries, it occurred later, yet carried out in other forms. The result is the structuring of the community of capital, the subjection of human beings to quantified time and the acceptance of fulfilling one’s life in a rigid framework. We have arrived at capital’s organisation of time and it is from there that the latter can produce the programming of all moments of human life. It is debited in time slots during which we must perform certain functions, certain vital processes. Better, there is now in virtue of this division a production which is appropriate to all the men and women crucified on these quanta of time: for the youth with its many subdivisions, for the adults, the elderly, for the dead (thanatology, for capital death is the absolute capitalisation of time, it is the homogeneous time that includes no opposition).

Capital is the accumulation of time; it reabsorbs it, absorbs it (one can have both modalities) and, as a result, it is posed for eternity. Marx addresses this question of eternity on the formal side. He speaks of Unvergänglichkeit expressing the idea of ​​something imperishable, as well as the idea that we cannot move on to something else.

Eternity — the duration of value in its capital form — is only posited by production itself which is twofold: “reproduction as a commodity, reproduction as money and unity of these two processes of reproduction” (Grundrisse 339).

Developed from the point of view of substance, the eternity of capital also implies the evanescence of men, which is to say their weak durability as well as their insignificance. Capital takes time, what for Marx is the very element of human development, away from man. It creates a void in which time is abolished; the human loses an important reference; she can no longer recognise herself, perceive herself. It is congealed time that she faces.

This marks the end of economics as the science of wealth, whether understood as the accumulation of use values or the accumulation/hoarding of exchange value ​​(money, capital). But it has been shown that with capital, it is no longer use values ​​that are essential for man, but the movement of valorisation-capitalisation within which any difference between use value and exchange value has been abolished. The search for wealth has become the search for a privileged position within capital’s life process in order to benefit from its material community.

This search for wealth was coupled with the fight against scarcity, but it really starts with the autonomisation of exchange value. “Primitive communities” did not know it, just as they did not know the obsessive fear of free time. The present lack would concern life itself, the greater and greater deprivation of human beings... when they realise it, which is to say when they question capital’s diktat, otherwise the latter seems to immediately fulfil them or at least it will in a not too distant future.

Economics as a science of trade also vanishes. I have shown elsewhere how capital tends to go beyond exchange and succeeds (see Marx, Grundrisse, 456 and 491). There is no more exchange but only attribution. Significantly, modern economists speak of economic flows.

There is another ground of the economy that loses its operability: the division of labor. This has often been compared between different modes of production. Yet, with capital it becomes a simple differentiation between capital’s moments, a relation between the means of production and means of consumption. Finally, economics in the sense of management (as Xenophon already employed it), both private and public, also disappears; because management involves a managing subject and an object to manage. This is valid as long as men still have a force of intervention, but it is the rationality of capital that is now essential. Those who want to manage must simply recognise capital’s movement. Insofar as they want to intervene, they can only temporarily upset the movement. They do not manage anymore, they record.

Some wanted to extend the categories of political economy to areas that were previously foreign to it, hence all the theories on libidinal economy (Lyotard) or desiring machines, where desire replaces need (Deleuze-Guattari). But how, from the moment when one grasps the incapacity of Marxist theory (its aporia, according to the new theoreticians) to understand new social phenomena, can one transpose the former into psychology, for example, and build a global theory on such a foundation? One can make a similar reproach to the authors of Apocalypse and Revolution when they speak of an “economy of interiority”.

Insofar as a concept tends to invade domains which are originally foreign to it, it means the extension of the phenomenon that it represents and the loss of strict limits, of those rigid determinations which made it possible to characterise and define it. Economics comes to mean the organisation of something, of a whole or functional process; it indicates the mode according to which propositions are organised, of affirmations to establish a certain sense. Consider this sentence by Fresquet: “This is the economy of the gospel: Jesus freed man from his sin. Humanity has been redeemed by his love” (“Meaning and defence of sin”, in Le Monde, 6.3.1976).

Economics as a science of organisation of a certain geographical area tends to be supplanted by ecology given the problems of pollution and the scarcity of raw materials (but there is no shortage of human beings and thus always the possibility of ersatz!). The field of the economy expands until it no longer has a real consistency, the concept is diluted more and more. Land is envisioned as a total ecosystem that capital must exploit to an ever lesser extent through the intermediary of man.

One finds a very good expression in the definition that some economists give to economic science (one no longer speaks of political economy): the science of adaptation. This conception incorporates the old categories: wealth, exchange, price, utility, etc. It also allows him to give an account of “human nature”. The human being has an “infinite need” which stumbles on the “finitude of creation” (H. Guitton in his article “Economic Science” in the Encyclopedia Universalis), thus needs are innumerable while the means to satisfy them are limited; on the other hand, they may not be at the right time and in the right place. However, economic development has increased availability, which raises at all levels the problem of knowing how to choose products, means of production, etc. The economic act would then be the very act of choosing. Hence the importance of calculation which replaces that simple judgment that was linked to the concept of value; and this act of choosing of course implies the adaptation of human beings to the economic system. Knowing how to choose is knowing how to adapt. Is this not simultaneously the creed of all futurists: we must adapt to the shock of the future which is that of capital escaping from any constraint, any reference, developing on its own account and striking full force the slower way of life of the species that engendered it?

We find here a convergence with ecology, which can be simply defined as the science of the conditions of existence and of interactions between living beings and environmental conditions — which is to say ecology is fundamentally a science of the adaptation of the individual and the species to its milieu. Economics is the science of adaptation to a specific environment, that of capital.

Political economy was the science of capital developing into its totality. In order to account for this, it not only inventoried the purely economic phenomena concerning exchange value, utility, capital, etc, but it more or less explicitly described how men internalise phenomena, becoming ever more compatible with... as a result of those clashes and struggles that made them abandon their ancient conceptions. With the realisation of the material community capital comes to exist as a world. The only thing left to do is to study how human beings who have internalised capital adapt to its life process: this is the task of economics.

Economics represented reflection on the phenomena that developed after the autonomisation of exchange value and thus an attempt to intervene within them in order to reconcile them with the social relations already in place; it has always been more or less imbued with humanist ideals.

With the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, social movement and economic movement converge. The struggle of the proletariat within this mode of production has made it possible to structure this unity-unification. From then on, economics can no longer be anything but capital’s discourse which, in acceding to the material community, renders the whole content of political economy obsolete.

Economics translates a certain behaviour by a part of the species that existed upon the earth. At the moment when this science loses its reality, it signifies that this behaviour tends towards its own abolition: it multiplies indefinitely (there is a drop in the birth rate in all the most capitalised countries), posing itself as ever more different from the rest of the living world, considering the earth as an object of exploitation, abandoning itself to technology and the exaltation of the productive forces, to progress.

One path of the species’ evolution has been fully traveled. It follows that the self-perception of the behaviour that has been adopted as well as that reflection on it must end. Thus it is the end of philosophy which was, among other things, reflection on values, on value; it was a theoretical behaviour which created a hierarchy of the world of beings and things according to the exteriority-interiority dichotomy.

For Marx, economics was the science that allowed us to describe how “primitive communities” had been destroyed, to reveal the determinism of the evolution of different human societies, to explain the revolutions and, to the extent that it was a critique of political economy, to individualise the contradictions of the CMP, which would lead to the proletarian revolution that would constitute the emancipation-liberation of a whole class of men and humanity itself. Yet, as we have seen, the dynamics of emancipation-liberation are those of capital. It is the great revolutionary and all the revolutions have benefited it. The series of revolutions is thus finished and concludes with the realisation of the community of capital. Human becoming can no longer be linked to revolution.

Thus ends the movement of externalisation-autonomisation and liberation-emancipation, which we have here analysed starting from the dissolution of “primitive communities” in the West. So, too, is the master-slave dialectic abolished, that representation of this movement, through the disappearance of classes. Even the movement of alienation disappears since, in the community of capital, one finds the juxtaposition of the being that has been stripped bare with that of which he has been alienated, the two reunited but as separate realities. Religion itself loses its function because it no longer serves to connect beings, a matter left to capital as representation. The latter, by more and more destroying human roots, destroys the memory of what religion preserved and that preserved it. All religions of salvation are based on remembrance. And how, indeed, can there be alienation when there is no memory of another state? The absurd limit of capital’s movement is a human community without man, thereby exacerbating the automatic subject that Marx, after Ure and Owen, spoke of in Capital.

Consequently, the historical study of the development of the species over time since its emergence makes it possible to preserve or to recover a memory of a different state, certainly not to restore such a past state, but to show that the eternalisation of capital has been realised only to the extent that our memory has been abolished. Without memory, there can be no human community.

One would think that the transition from one community to another, if it poses practical problems and causes multiple rifts, can at least be grasped and understood by men and women. Yet, and this is an essential contribution of the Urtext, Marx shows the extent to which the movement of exchange value that dissolves the old communities and tends to pose itself as a community distorts its own comprehension by human beings. What they believe to be determinant are in fact their relationships with one another, or the institutions they have set up on the basis of economic relations that they have not understood. Marx reveals the extent of this false historical consciousness. Thus the French bourgeois thought to limit or equalise wealth and did not realise that through their intervention they removed all obstacles to its free development in the form of capital.

In The Holy Family, Marx had already approached this “illusion” without giving it its real economic foundation.

This illusion manifested itself tragically when Saint-Just, on the day of his execution, pointed to a copy of the rights of man in the Conciergerie and declared: “I am the one who made that.” This document rightly proclaimed the right of a man who is no longer the man of the ancient Gemeinwesen (community), any more than current industrial and economic relations could be those of ancient society.

They did not perceive that the externalised activity of men reached a proper autonomy over which they had no control. This false bourgeois conscience founds representative, parliamentary democracy: the belief that with institutions one can constitute the nation (a new community that will grasp all economic and social processes); it also founded fascism (the Nazis wanted the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people!) which is itself a movement that, by its action, enabled the community of capital to establish itself.

With respect to political democracy, it is certainly true that it had the merit of limiting any overflowing of violence. Indeed — and this is the important argument that all the current Democrats and all those who, horrified by Nazism and Stalinism, consider it to be a lesser evil — it should be noted that in the countries where the old communities crumbled and where democracy could not be established, where there was no rule and no institution to curb the social phenomenon, there was no brake on violence. What was human, something that had been defined by the community that had collapsed, and where could one find a point of reference? Thus a host of atrocities were committed in the USSR as a result of the impossibility of establishing a parliamentary democracy and as a result of the failure of the world proletarian revolution. It was this violent outburst that was feared by various Russian revolutionaries, from Dostoevsky — which made him hate the revolution as Berdiaev reminds us on several occasions, especially in his book devoted to the author — to Lenin himself since, according to Victor Serge, he feared the generalised breakup of the class struggle which might happen following the example of the Czechoslovakian mutiny (see Year I of the Revolution).

The same horrors were repeated with folkloric variants in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In African countries, the trauma of the destruction of community is even deeper; the clash with the world of capital is in itself a generator of madness, in the sense of an absolute loss of reference and acute impossibility of being in a community.

This does not mean that Western Democracies have not committed any internal violence, no torture, no crime... certainly not. But they first operated outside Europe, in countries where they were not “hindered” by democratic laws. That is why the war of 1914-1918 and above all fascism that brought to Europe the methods that had been reserved for other countries sign the death sentence of political democracy.

The ever-widening disappearance of all ideals and all democratic rules meant that, in a decaying world, especially when the community of capital is refused, there is no longer any obstacle to violence. Hence the repeated and vain invocation of a return to political democracy and the various proposals for tinkering with and reinvigorating it. As if, after the tremendous bankruptcy of 1914 and 1933, it could be a bulwark against the tide of violence that swelled and began to sweep over the world... especially because it had only been an accommodation since its origin.

We find the same false consciousness among the French socialists: “From this follows the error of those socialists, especially the French socialists, who wanted to prove that socialism was the realisation of bourgeois ideas [...] and who tried to demonstrate that exchange value [...] was a system of socialism. freedom and equality for all; but which would have been falsified by money, capital, etc.“ (Urtext). The socialist world movement has had the same end as political democracy. This was all the more inevitable as it often came to be its true realisation.

But does not Marx himself ultimately consider that the development of the productive forces (neutral given) is distorted by the movement of capital? Is there not a false historical consciousness in wanting to found communism on the basis of a development of the very productive forces that allowed for the establishment of capital? Hence, of course, in order to go against this derangement of the productive forces, the need for an intervention that will make it possible to regenerate its course, to clean up and heal it! Simultaneously, communism would be the true consciousness of the movement of production in action for millennia that had only been waiting for a favourable moment to manifest itself.

The same mistake is found in the thought that communism could develop on the basis of the reduction of the working day. In doing so, one still maintained a presupposition of capital (the quantification of time) and sought to use what capital had brought about; which is to say, that with the development of the productive forces a phenomenon was under way, but capital prevented its full development and even distorted it. Hence the need for an intervention of which I have already spoken. False consciousness is caught in the trap of immediate phenomenon linked to a will to intervene in order to make this phenomenon work in the direction of human interests. The human community cannot be built on time only, it is possible only through a constructed unity of humanity-nature that encompasses space and time.

Finally, when Marx wrote that no social form disappears until it has exhausted all the possibilities it contains (see Preface to the Contribution of Political Economy, 1859), he created fertile ground for the engendering of illusions. This includes the belief that there is a decadence of capital from the moment that a certain number of possibilities, which Marx recognised from the start, were achieved and that an intervention — that of the proletariat — is always predictable in a never-distant future. In reality if there is a decadence it is that of humanity!

False consciousness and recuperation are closely linked. The second being like the reduction of the first. If there is recuperation it is due to an erroneous consciousness. Individuals consider a certain phenomenon to be effectively antagonistic to capital; yet, it later turns out to realise what it should have destroyed. And there we meet in another way capital’s anthropomorphosis. It is thanks to inadequate representations of the real movement, due to false consciousness, that capital continues to achieve its domination. It could be thought that this movement would continue only until that moment when capital would finally absorb a foreign substance and thereby explode or exhaust itself. This might be true for various institutions, which thus makes them inadequate and inoperative such that at the least shock they collapse (and revolution really was that moment when everything collapsed and where everyone escaped from the various institutions, roles, etc.), but capital seizes everything and, by anthropomorphising itself, only increases in potential because at the limit it can appear human. Similarly, one could think that this movement of recuperation could be the cause of an imbalance which would introduce a flaw in the community of capital. However, a serious danger accompanies this possibility: the total loss, the complete externalisation and thus the realised emptiness of human beings, resulting in a community without men.

All the more, one cannot come onto capital’s ground, forcing its becoming, as Baudrillard thinks: “the challenge that capital launches in its delirium, shamelessly liquidating the law of profit, surplus value, productive ends, structures of power, and still finding at the end of its process the profound immorality (but also seduction) of primitive rituals of destruction, such a challenge must be met with an even higher bid.” To rise to the challenge would be to abandon oneself to the complete escape of capital, so as not to find ourselves again: the realisation of madness. In this passage, Baudrillard strikingly indicates the movement of inflation.

It is at the moment of the destruction of a community in place that false consciousness comes out most clearly; it is then that unbridled searches are made for its reconstitution in whatever more or less fantastic form. Some try to do this by partaking of the same, throwing themselves into a frenzied sexuality, others by indulging in mysticism, drugs, or music (the phenomenon of pop music).

In the second and third centuries of our era, an immense distress took hold of many men and women, following the collapse of the ancient cities (polis) in which they held recognised and concrete roles. There followed a collapse of the cosmopolitanism that the Roman Empire had engendered but which it could not realise, due to the extraordinary tensions that traversed it and the ignoble relations that then reigned. Hence the Gnostics and Manichaeans posed the problem not only of an exit from the world constituted by the Roman Empire, but of the cosmos. Among the Greeks, human society and cosmos were still in continuity, among the Romans this survived in a schematic fashion, hence the Gnostic theme of the evil cosmos.

The “Gnostic” path followed after — as RM Grant asserts in his Gnosticism and Early Christianity — the failure of the Jewish people’s attempts at self-liberation (Jesus Christ himself was understood as a failed emancipator), such that the prophets would be understood to announce the moment of liberation. It arises, in fact, as a result of the collapse of all apocalyptic hopes.

Much closer to us, the war of 1914-1918 was experienced as an apocalypse that had not been prophesied. Hence the fascination it exerted, at least in the early days, on a great number of minds, especially in Germany where it tended to persist until the advent of Nazism (which had a deeply religious character), and we cannot say exactly to what extent it does not impregnate the whole era of the latter’s domination. It was experienced as the manifestation of a lesser evil, like the final resolution of certain tensions that could no longer be tolerated and also experienced as a laceration from which another way could be seen.

Nowadays, in a palpable, fascinating, and tragic way, the failure of Marx’s apocalyptic prophecy imposes itself on us all — the promised emancipation of humanity through the proletarian assault on the citadels of capital — whether because it collapsed, or did not show up for its historical rendezvous. The same is true of Bordiga’s which, reordering Marx’s prediction through the integration of the fate of all peoples of colour and set in motion by the tremors of the two world wars, predicted an apocalypse-revolution for our present years. The collapse of the communist revolution is the end of the community-party and the party-community.

On this basis we can better understand the vast confusion of our times linked to the loss of reference, the total permissiveness and the end of the communities born with the bourgeois revolution, nations, and their states. There is certainly a higher unity — the UN — but, just as under the Roman Empire, all cosmopolitanism is unachievable, since the very idea of ​​a cosmos has been lost. Internationalism, in the nineteenth and especially during the mid-twentieth century, played the role of ancient and eighteenth century cosmopolitanism. In all three cases, one is effectively dealing with moments defined by the disintegration of particular communities. If proletarian internationalism has failed this is due in large part to the fact that it was unable to encompass diversity, infested as it was with Eurocentrism and undermined by a badly disguised and chauvinistic nationalism. It is therefore logical if, once again in the West, the fashion of Orientalism prevails and we find echoes of the themes and practices put forth by the Gnostics and the various religious currents from the beginning of our era.

This moment we are experiencing is the end-exhaustion of a whole evolution of human beings. The pre-Gnostic period knew a movement in which the sacred and profane were connected and it was in virtue of these two elements that men and women revolted. With the triumph of Christianity, there is a secularisation and separation of the sacred from the profane: “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. This secularisation-profanation is responsible for the bourgeois revolutionary movement, first of all with the Reformation, then with the various revolutions until 1789 that carried out precisely such a profanation. On this plane, the proletarian movement does not constitute any discontinuity; the “sacred” element is definitively set aside and it is only posited that human beings must create another community. The impossibility of a “profane” movement to ensure the liberation of human beings reinforced the idea that the “salvation” of humanity could only be ensured by religious, sacred movements. Yet what have all the reactionary currents that have tried to preserve such a sacred element done, but participate in the tragedy of the development in course, by every time making a pact with the power in place? The solution is therefore neither on the side of the sacred nor on the side of the profane. The human community is outside of this world.

One can place the question of the community in relation to the problem of knowing what is decisive in the evolution of human beings. Indeed, at the moment it is a “marginalist” theory that tends to prevail. It is to be those on the margins who will invent new behaviours and gradually impose them on the rest of the community. Like the economic theory of the same name, it favours certain elements: here, the elite! It demonstrates even more clearly the cut interpreted by the theory of the party-mass relationship. In both cases, there is a non-contemporaneity of human beings living at a given moment.The upheavals that affect the community can only be perceived by certain elements. Such privileged people would share their concerns with the others. Such a theorisation is the recognition of the destruction of any Gemeinwesen because here one only finds particularised beings in relation to one another and arranged side-by-side. However, insofar as the Gemeinwesen dimension persists even a little bit in human beings, they can really coexist even if their threshold of perception of phenomena is different.

Finally, to conclude on this aspect of the community as human group, let us point out that there are two determining modalities of the relationship between the individual and the community in the world: that of the West, where the individual has become independent, as has the state; and that of the East, where the community is despotic and the individual does not achieve autonomy. There are variants in Africa and in both Americas. However, now, with the accession of capital to the material community we find a convergence between West and East. The first has effected an intermediary movement in order to arrive at an identical, but much more powerful result. Thus it transforms, by replacing it, the ancient Asian despotic community.

We cannot be content to oppose community to the individual and to the state as a solution to the current evils. Communism is not a simple affirmation of the community; it can no longer be characterised by common or collective property because this would be to preserve the presuppositions of capital itself: ownership and separation (to the extent that various socialist theorists advocated for an egalitarian distribution). In a word, it should not be considered in opposition to anything, because it is a question of exiting from any dialectic that would sooner or later bring back antagonism as a repressed moment. What is at stake is the being of men and women and their relationship to the totality of the living world implanted on our planet, which we could no longer conceive as appropriation, as Marx thought, but only as enjoyment.

Just as the human whole should no longer be divided in order to become a community, so the individual must no longer be divided in order to become individuality, thus we find an end of the cut between state-individuals, party-mass, spirit (brain)-body. To get out of this world one has to acquire a body tending towards a community, and thus to not lock oneself into an individual phenomenon, but to rediscover the dimension of the Gemeinwesen.

It is here that we find the fundamental theme of Marx’s philosophical works: to explain the relationship between the individual and society and how to abolish their antagonism. More than a social being, man is a being who has the dimension of the Gemeinwesen, that is to say that every human being carries in herself, subjectivated, the Gemeinwesen. This is expressed in a very reductive way when we affirm the universal character of the thought of every human being.

Capital has realised its community not only as a social tie but also in the dimension of the Gemeinwesen because what constitutes the foundation of thought and conduct (ethics), etc., is capital, thanks to its having become a representation exclusive of all others.

In the community of capital, humans are united by means of technology, the famous mass-media which are all the more necessary as human beings become more numerous. They do not manage to properly coexist, to become contemporaries, because they have been enclosed in their social, national, etc. limits.

All the elements that constitute the fundamental determination of the Gemeinwesen have been destroyed: so-called parapsychological potentialities such as telepathy as well as various types of languages ​​such as that of the body; meanwhile, verbal language has become more and more impoverished, as it loses its universal dimension and is reduced to a code that reflects the community of capital.

Unitary communities as an integral community cannot live simply as a collection of human beings. It is necessary that between all there is a common thread, common substance, because they realise the human being and this is accessible only if each being realises in herself the Gemeinwesen being an irreducible element and simultaneously the mode that to the community to be realised in her, the mode she has to perceive in all its duration. This is where the difficulty that has emerged over thousands of years arises: men and women who do not know who they are, do not know what they can do, have locked themselves up in ghettos that they say are human groups, humanities, defined by distinctions that allowed others to be excluded. Thus, for the ancient Egyptians, foreigners were not human. They could be sacrificed to the gods. They were strangers because they did not live like them, determined that they were by another geography, another history, because they had developed other possibilities. Accession to the community therefore implies a knowledge-recognition of all others, their acceptance in their diversity. Not an intellectual or spiritual gnosis but a total gnosis; knowledge must grasp the whole of being through the reunification of each being.

It is not a question of making evil disappear! The human species has also developed the possibilities of evil, often the most hideous and vilest that can be justified by any historical eschatology. Concretely this means that we cannot accept those who kill, torture, want to dominate others, etc. This refusal of the “path of evil” cannot be attained until the moment when, as Marx said in a terminology still imbued with economy: the greatest wealth for man is his fellow man.

The Gemeinwesen dimension can also be seen in what he called universal work, the social brain (an expression taken up by Bordiga), a social brain theorised in another form by Leroi-Gourhan in Le geste et la parole. We think with our own brain but also with that of the species as a summation of all the beings that surround us and have preceded us. This is why Bordiga’s concept of the species is another statement of the Gemeinwesen.

Finally, the manner in which we are present in the world asserts itself in a kind of consciousness of being an individuality of the species and in the species. With an accession to the community, human beings will have finally found their world. Indeed, against other species that have an immediate relation between being and the world because they have a portion of the globe that is imparted to them (the famous ecological niche), man has none. Since the mutation that has thrown the biped that is to become man out of the forest, this being has been anxiously searching for a world in which she can be sure of her existence, of her reality. At the end of millennia, this quest must end by finally realising what it is in diversity of species and in its connection to the living world; thus she will find her place in the continuum of life.

I say that the quest must end, and not that it will end because there is not a rigorous determinism that would lead to such an end, which would in fact justify the intermediate movement between the immediate community and the human community to come. No, history as a set of experiences lived by men and women can only be a fact; we can explain various futures, for example that of capital in a deterministic way, but we cannot infer a more global determinism that would concern us all, that of our realisation, finally, as human beings. When any human phenomenon occurs, it is a posteriori possible to find in previous events a determinism that led towards it implacably. Yet that would negate the various possibilities that have emerged and the fact that the species, currently insane, will have made the jump only in a constrained and forced manner. It is not said that this will be true; human disappearance in various forms can also be seen in the not distant future. That’s why there is a must-be.

Various philosophers of history, and Marx in particular, have been reproached for having an eschatological and soteriological conception of history (the proletariat is the saviour that saves itself not as the proletariat but by becoming humanity); correlatively we can add that for the latter the “social cosmos” had a meaning (Engels added his “philosophy of nature” which was an attempt to give meaning to the cosmos in its totality). On the other hand, nowadays the “social cosmos” is considered as neutral, it does not have in itself any meaning, any sense, for example that of becoming communism. Hence the loss of perspective and all certainty — a loss of history that cannot be compensated for by the perception of a soteriological fact buried in the social cosmos. In reality, there is only one meaning that can be individualised from the despotic community of capital: a becoming towards absurdity, to the destruction of humanity. This cannot comfort human beings and give them energy to support their situation, if not a suicidal energy. Hence the injunction: we must abandon this community and everything that it presupposes. It’s the refusal of a millenary wandering.

Since the 1960s the community of capital has become increasingly intolerable to a large number of men and women, mostly young people. There has been a huge uprising of youth that is looking for the human community. It was accompanied by a host of phenomena that cannot be considered here, but which testify to breaks that are often fragmentary, but breaks with the community of capital all the same. These phenomena manifest a new sensibility that is able to perceive different alienations or injustices that had been carefully camouflaged by the various political rackets. This movement is now masked by a certain revitalisation of politics, but it is maturing in depth. Men and women must realise to what extent they can only tend to found the human community by breaking completely with the dynamics of this world and with the revolution/counter-revolution dialectic; from then on, we will break the lock that prevents creativity and inhibits the creation of a new way of life. The fear that plagues us will be abolished and we will enter our future.

Revue Invariance, 1968