The starting point for the critique of the existing society of capital has to be the restatement of the concepts of formal and real domination as the historical phases of capitalist development. All other periodisations of the process of the autonomisation of value, such as competitive, monopoly, state monopoly, bureaucratic etc. capitalism, leave the field of the theory of the proletariat, that is, the critique of political economy, to begin with the vocabulary of the practice of social-democracy or “Leninist” ideology, codified by Stalinism.

All this phraseology with which one pretends to explain “new” phenomena really only mystifies the passage of value to its complete autonomy, that is, the objectification of the abstract quantity in process in the concrete community.

Capital, as a social mode of production, accomplishes its real domination when it succeeds in replacing all the pre-existing social and natural presuppositions with its own particular forms of organisation which mediate the submission of the whole of physical and social life to its real needs of valorisation. The essence of the Gemeinschaft of capital is organisation.

Politics, as an instrument for mediating the despotism and capital, disappears in the phase of the real domination of capital. After having been fully used in the period of formal domination, it can be disposed of when capital, as total being, comes to organise rigidly the life and experience of its subordinates. The state, as the rigid and authoritarian manager of the expansion of the equivalent forms in social relation (“Urtext”), becomes an elastic instrument in the business sphere. Consequently, the state, or directly, “politics”, are less than ever the subject of the economy and so “bosses” of capital. Today, more than ever, capital finds its own real strength in the inertia of the process which produces and reproduces its specific needs of valorization as human needs in general.

(The defeat of the May ’68 movement in France was the clearest manifestation of this “occult power of capital”.)

The economy reduces politics (the old art of organizing) to a pure and simple epiphenomenon of its own real process. It lets it survive as the museum of horrors such as parliament with all its farces, or else in the rancorous undergrowth of the small “extra-parliamentary” rackets, which are all identical regarding their formal or informal organisation, but compete obscenely with their “strategic” chatter.

The destiny of the other instruments of mediation or of ideology seems to be the same. They still enjoyed a certain apparent autonomy (philosophy, art, etc.) during the period of formal domination, as remainders of the previous epochs. All apparent distinction between ideology and the social mode of production is destroyed and, today, value that has achieved autonomy is its own ideology.

Just as the passage from absolute to relative surplus-value has, capital (its movement constantly tending to total expropriation) has divided all the social and technical connections of the work process that existed beforehand in order then to reunify them as intellectual powers of capital’s own valorisation; so today, in the passage of capital to an overall social power, aiding in the disintegration of the entire social fabric and all its mental connections with the past and their recomposition in a delirious unity, organised by the ever accelerating cycles of the metamorphoses of capital, everything is reduced to degraded ingredients of the extra-ordinary synthesis of value that is self-valorising.

The real domination of capital therefore means that not only the tempo of life and the mental capacity of the proletariat are expropriated, but that circulation time now prevails over production time (on a spatial level). The society of capital creates an “unproductive” population on a large scale, i.e. it creates its own “life” in function of its own need: to fix them then in the sphere of circulation and the metamorphoses of accumulated surplus-value.

The cycle closes with an identity: all men’s time is socially necessary time for creation and circulation – realization of surplus-value. Everything can be measured by the hands of a clock.

“Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass” (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy). The abstract quantity in process (value) constitutes itself as the social mode of production and of life (material community).

The theories of the workers’ movement have grasped this social process merely to mystify it. To give just one example: absolute subordination of the state and its insertion as a particular moment of the valorization process becomes the exact opposite, that is, a “state capitalism”, so capital can become not a social mode of production and of life, but a bureaucratic, democratic etc. mode of management.

Once they have arrived at this point of view, they have to make the revolution no longer the overthrow of one “existence” and the affirmation of another, but a political-statist process with the “organisation” of it as the key problem or, more, the panacea that resolves everything. Here again the degraded conception of the revolution no longer as a world relation of power between the proletariat and capital, but immediately as a question of “forms” or “models” of organization – the passage is very short.

One cannot otherwise explain the preponderance of the categories mentioned above in the workers’ movement (state, bureaucratic capitalism etc.), which merely bracket the real being of capital so as to affirm the centrality of one of its epiphenomena theorised as the supreme phase, last phase etc.

On the contrary, one must remain on the ground of the critique of political economy (the critique of the existence of capital and the affirmation of communism) to understand the totality of social life in the period of its reduction to a means of the process of development of the autonomised productive forces.

The society of capital, in fact, appears superficially to be divided into fields that are apparently opposed and thus gives rise to the separate descriptions of them (sociology, economics, psychology etc.). The existence of all these “fields of research” only explains in mystifying the unified absolute value-created reality, the modern sacrum, characteristic of a process which goes from the decomposition of a pre-existing organic reality to the fixation of diverse elements which are then recomposed and put into use only by the growing social inertia, created by the opaque and despotic movement of the productive forces, forces which grow out of themselves and which necessitate the representation of the true movement of cohesion of the whole social totality.

That is why all “critical theory” wishing to found itself on raising up one or other “sector” ends up reducing itself to having neither subject nor object.

No subject to the extent that value as an abstract object in a material being (Grundrisse) avoids all immediate determination. One must say about this imperceptibility of the real tendencies of capital in the epoch of its absolute domination, that the most obvious and dazzling manifestations of fetishism and mystification of the social relations created by its development is afforded us by the concept accepted by all the “innovating” theories, critical or apologetic, of “industrial society” and its appendix: “consumer society”.

This concept, an expression of a mystification perpetrated by capital in social relations, becomes possible insofar as the valorisation (thus the life needs of capital) increasingly dominates the labour process. Marx defined the labour process as the organic exchange between man and nature, purposeful activity turned to the creation of use values.

Capital tends to present its own general needs as exclusively and immediately identical to those of humanity to the extent that it creates an increasing identity between these two processes. In fact, given the real domination of its own existence, this mystification seems to be based rationally on the movement when sociability, conviviality, customs, language, desires, or needs, in a word, the social being of humans, have become nothing other than the valorisation requirement of capital, internal components of its own enlarged reproduction.

If capital dominates everything to the point of being able to identify itself with the social being, it seems, on this basis, to disappear.

This is the most glaring fetishism ever produced by exchange value in the history of its own autonomisation. A “neutral” category can arise from this, like that of industrial society. Thus all possible distinction between abstract labour which valorises capital (the proletariat) or which enables the total existence of its being (the middle classes) and “useful” human activity as it unfolded in pre-capitalist epochs can disappear (and in fact does disappear).

Revue Invariance, 1969