[D66] Never Work!

[Nord]

http://www.variant.org.uk/35texts/NeverWork.html

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Never Work!
Karen Elliot


When Guy Debord of the Situationist International (SI) graffitied the 
slogan “Never Work!” onto the walls of a Parisian street in 1953, he 
struck a blow in solidarity with the radical current of left communism 
which locates the wage-labour relation as the central pillar of 
capitalist relations and therefore the prime locus of attack. It is, of 
course, a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our 
basic needs. But what is at question here is the nature of that work, 
for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? As Raoul 
Vaneigem of the SI argued, every appeal for productivity comes from 
above: “It is not from ‘productivity’ that a full life is to be 
expected, it is not ‘productivity’ that will produce an enthusiastic 
response to economic needs.”^1 Never mind. The aim of capital is not to 
produce useful products, or fully-rounded citizens; the chief aim is to 
augment capital through an increase in profit in a perpetual system of 
self-valorisation. The means of this valorisation is that peculiar form 
of commodity: labour-power. Labour power, in contrast to fixed capital 
(the means of production), creates/surplus wealth//for capital/over and 
beyond the immediate needs of the worker. This is the ABC of capitalist 
‘growth’. The drive to productivity and the concomitant tendency to 
force down wages and conditions at every opportunity is thus clear from 
capital’s perspective.
That work should be valorised universally comes then as no surprise. The 
recent welfare reform proposals of the former Work and Pensions 
Secretary, James Purnell, maintain that work is/the/best route out of 
poverty. As George Monbiot has recently commented, the political value 
of any project that claims to produce jobs, especially in times of 
recession, is given hyperbolic status. Yet, as Monbiot goes on to argue, 
“the employment figures attached to large projects tend to be 
codswallop”; the promise of jobs is routinely used “to justify anything 
and everything”.^2 Jobs, even when they do arrive, are far from 
guarantors against poverty. As Louis Wacquant in his recent study of 
advanced marginality has argued, it is a “delusion” to think that 
bringing people back into the labour market will durably reduce poverty: 
“[t]his is because the wage-labour relation itself has become a source 
of built-in insecurity and social instability at the bottom of the 
revamped class structure”.^3 Wacquant cites Wal-Mart, the largest US 
employer, as a prime example of endemic “working poverty”. Wal-Mart pays 
its “sales associates”, the most common company position, $13,861 
(nearly $1,000 dollars under the federal ‘poverty line’ for a family of 
three); one half of its employees are not covered by the company’s 
medical plan. This ensures that thousands of Wal-Mart’s staff must 
resort to welfare to meet their basic needs on a normative basis 
(welfare which is effectively a state subsidy to disguise Wal-Mart’s 
pathetic wages).
As the – ever so faint – spectre of Keynes re-emerges, Wacquant warns 
against undue faith in national, social-democratic measures of reflation 
for alleviating entrenched poverty: “[i]t is high time for us to forsake 
the untenable assumption that a large majority of the adults of advanced 
society can or will see their basic needs met by lifelong formal 
employment (or by the permanent employment of members of their 
households) in the commodified economy”.^4 Wacquant also casts doubt on 
the ability of the traditional trade unions to deal with the new 
conditions of urban marginality which effectively cut off large sections 
of advanced urban populations from macroeconomic trends: “… the trade 
unions are strikingly ill-suited to tackle issues that arise and spill 
beyond the conventional spheres of regulated wage work”.^5 Michael Hardt 
and Antonio Negri recently re-iterated this point: “… the old trade 
unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the 
mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short-term contracts. … 
the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks 
defined in the heyday of production … these traditional divisions (or 
even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and merely serve as 
an obstacle.”^6 Moreover, the trades unions’ narrow focus on issues 
relating to the workplace has meant their renunciation of wider 
political demands, and deepened their isolation from broader social 
movements.
Evidently, the drive to productivity and the valorisation of work is to 
be expected from the point of view of capital. However, the question is 
how have social-democratic institutions, nominally of the Left, come to 
be complicit in the subjugation of labour through the mantra of 
productivity? After all, socialism is not capitalism and the refusal of 
the wage-labour relation and the struggle against alienation must be at 
the heart of all those theories which seek an exit from capitalism.

The Advent of the Industrial Christ*

*“ ... every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as 
one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”
*Walter Benjamin**^7

*Benjamin’s most significant disagreement with social democracy was with 
its technocratic conformism which construed production as beneficial to 
workers/per se/: “[n]othing has corrupted the German working class so 
much as the notion that it was moving with the current … from there it 
was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed 
to tend toward technological process constituted a political 
achievement”.^8 For Benjamin, the Gotha Programme (which gathered 
together the two main wings of the German socialist movement in 1875) 
merely resurrected the Protestant work ethic in secular form by narrowly 
defining labour as the source of all wealth and all culture. Indeed, the 
Social Democrat, Josef Dietzgen, echoed Lamartine, the French writer, 
poet and politician, who had earlier proclaimed the “advent of the 
industrial Christ”^9 by declaring: “[t]he saviour of modern times is 
called work”.^10 Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat turned war 
patriot, meanwhile declared that socialism “means working hard”.^11 
Benjamin thought this reverence of work without reference to its 
alienating effects was fallacy and confusion. It amounted to a vulgar 
conception of labour and its proceeds that privileged distribution over 
production while downplaying the fact that labour-power was still bought 
and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity.
Benjamin’s critique of Social Democracy drew from Marx’s evaluation of 
the Gotha Programme’s resolutions. For Marx, it was a profound mistake 
to put the principal stress on distribution; on the potential of a 
‘fair’ distribution of the products of labour through ‘equal rights’, as 
long as distribution remained a concomitant feature of the exploitative 
mode of production itself. In Marx’s analysis, this half-hearted form of 
socialism merely borrowed from technocratic forms of bourgeois political 
economy by treating distribution as totally independent of production. 
This ideological manoeuvre was made possible by disavowing the real 
relations of production under capitalism which rested then, as they do 
now (albeit in historically contingent forms), on the ownership and 
control of the means of production and the exploitation of labour-power 
for surplus value (profit). The ideological cleavage of distribution 
from production by the German socialist movement meant that the 
presentation of socialism would tend to rest thereafter on the minimal 
question of distribution rather than the maximal one of production: of 
reform rather than revolution. In 1875, Marx could already comment: 
“[a]fter the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress 
again?”.^12 The question remains a potent one.

The Law of Wages

“Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing to sell but his 
labour power, that he must sell it to an enterprise to be able to live, 
that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around 
exchange, are the result of a long and violent process.”
*Gilles Dauve**^13

*The basis of capitalism and wage-labour lie in pre-capitalist forms of 
primitive accumulation, defined by Marx as “nothing else than the 
historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of 
production”.^14 This transformation in the structure of servitude, from 
feudal to capitalist exploitation, was no simple progression through 
homogenous empty time. The expropriation of the immediate producers was 
accomplished, as Marx observed, with “merciless Vandalism”, and 
inscribed in the annals of history in “letters of blood and fire”. It is 
enough to cite the exploitation of gold and silver of the Americas 
through slavery; the “entombment” of the aboriginal population of 
Australia in mining operations; and the turning of Africa “into a warren 
for the commercial hunting of black skins”^15 to intimate the “rosy 
dawn” of primitive accumulation in colonial settings. Closer to home, 
the Enclosures of England^16 and the Clearances of Scotland^17 are the 
chief British markers of those violent rounds of primitive accumulation, 
where “great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their 
means of subsistence and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on 
the labour market”.^18
The capitalist system/presupposes/the separation of labourers from all 
property by which they can realise their labour. Once divorced from the 
means of production, the producer is immediately transformed into 
a/wage-labourer/and their means of subsistence and production 
transformed into accumulated capital. This then reproduces the original 
separation on a continually expanding scale: “[i]t cannot be otherwise 
in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the 
needs of the self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the 
contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development 
on the part of the labourer”.^19 Wealth generated from past, ‘dead’ 
labour (accumulated in the form of machines, factories, new technologies 
of production) is set in motion by ‘living’ labour to accumulate more 
value, which is then invested in new branches, new machinery. New 
technologies reduce necessary labour power and contribute to a reserve 
army of labour which holds the pretensions of the prevailing labour 
force in check: “[t]he greater the social wealth, the functioning 
capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore, also the 
absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, 
the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which 
develop the expansive power of capital develop also the labour power at 
its disposal”.^20 Higher productivity on the part of the worker leads 
inversely to higher unemployment and higher pauperisation rather than 
higher wages: “[t]he higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is 
the pressure of the labourers on the means of production, the more 
precarious, therefore becomes their condition of existence”.^21
This inexorable fact of capitalism was what led Marx to argue for its 
supersession, not merely its amelioration through social-democratic 
means. Reform under capitalism can only ever be partial and piecemeal 
under a system whose/raison d’être/is the extraction of surplus value 
from labour by the owners of capital. This essential system of 
‘squeezing’ is why the workplace has traditionally been the scene of “a 
constant silent war, of a perpetual struggle, of pressure and 
counter-pressure”.^22 The iron law of value precludes a diminution in 
the degree of exploitation of labour and a rise in the price of wages 
that might seriously undermine the continual reproduction, on an 
ever-enlarging scale, of the relations of capital.

Distribution or Production: Reform or Revolution

The means of this ‘perpetual struggle’ between labour and capital has of 
course been the subject of major discussion, and rifts, within the Left. 
Crucially, the debate between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg at the 
end of the 19th century marks a key juncture in the antagonistic 
relationship between social democratic and revolutionary thought within 
socialism. Bernstein, Engel’s literary executor and one of the most 
influential figures within reformist Marxism, argued in a series of 
articles under the title/The Problems of Socialism/(1897–98) that the 
‘final goal’ of socialism would be achieved/through/capitalism, not 
through capitalism’s destruction. As rights were gradually won by 
workers, he argued, their cause for grievance would be diminished and 
consequently so would the foundation and necessity of revolution. For 
Bernstein, capitalism had overcome its crisis-prone tendencies of boom 
and bust: the ‘anarchy’ of the market, he argued, was being 
re-constituted by the formation of new mechanisms within capitalism and 
by social-democratic measures for higher wages. These tendencies proved 
to Bernstein that the capitalist order was capable of reform through 
legal and parliamentary means.
Bernstein’s ideas were of major significance for the future of the 
international labour movement. At the turn of the century, the German 
Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which Bernstein was a member, was the 
largest socialist organisation in the world. His arguments represented 
the first time that ‘opportunist’ currents within the movement were 
given open theoretical expression. Yet for Luxemburg, Bernstein’s theory 
posited the/opposition/of the two moments of the labour movement by 
emphasising ‘minimum’ aims (immediate parliamentary reforms) over 
‘maximum’ aims (the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism). It tended to 
“counsel the renunciation of the social transformation, the final goal 
of Social Democracy, and, inversely, to make social reforms, which are 
the/means/of the class struggle, into its/end/”.^23 Luxemburg was not/a 
priori/opposed to social democracy;^24 instead, counter to Bernstein, 
she argued that there was an “indissoluble tie” between social reforms 
and revolution, but that the struggle for reforms was only the/means/, 
the social revolution the/goal/.
By treating the mode of exchange as independent of the mode of 
production, Bernstein had fallen into “one of the fundamental errors of 
bourgeois vulgar economics”:^25
“Vulgar economy, too, tries to find the antidote against the ills of 
capitalism in the phenomena of capitalism itself. Like Bernstein, it 
believes in the/possibility/of regulating the capitalist economy. And, 
still in the manner of Bernstein, it arrives in time at the desire 
to/palliate/the contradictions of capitalism, that is, at the belief in 
the possibility of patching up the sores of capitalism. In other words, 
it ends up with a reactionary and not a revolutionary program, and thus 
in a utopia.”^26
For Luxemburg, Bernstein’s theories led not to the realisation of a 
new/socialist world/, but to the reform of capitalism – not to the 
elimination of capitalism, but to the desire for the attenuation of the 
abuses of capitalism.
The principal instruments for Bernstein’s proposed reform of society 
were the co-operatives and the trade unions; the first to increase wages 
and lessen commercial profit, the second to do the same for industrial 
profit. Yet for Luxemburg, co-operatives were merely a hybrid form of 
capitalism: small units of socialised production remaining within 
capitalist exchange. They were coercively obliged to take up the role of 
capitalist entrepreneurs in order to stand up against their competitors 
in the market. The intensification of labour – exploitation of labour as 
commodity – is concomitant. For Luxemburg, this contradiction accounted 
for the usual failure of contemporary co-operatives. They either became 
pure capitalist enterprises, or, if the workers’ interests continued to 
predominate, ended by dissolving. Bernstein thought the failure of 
co-operatives in England was due to a lack of “discipline”, but for 
Luxemburg this language merely resurrected the authoritative axioms of 
the status quo, expressing “nothing else than the natural absolutist 
regime of capitalism”.^27
Trades unions, according to Bernstein, were another prime instrument in 
the “struggle of the rate of wages against the rate of profit”.^28 While 
Luxemburg defended unions as an expression of working-class resistance 
to the oppression of the capitalist economy, she also argued that they 
represented only the organised/defence/of labour power against the 
attacks of profit. Trade unions, however, were not able to execute an 
economic offensive against profit. The activity of unions, she argued: 
“does not take place in the blue of the sky. It takes place within the 
well-defined framework of the law of wages./The law of wages is not 
shattered but applied by trade-union activity/”.^29 Luxemburg argued 
that the workers share was inevitably reduced by the growth of the 
productivity of labour. These objective capitalist conditions 
transformed the activity of trade unions, subject to successive cycles 
of boom and bust, “into a sort of labour of Sisyphus”.^30 Bernstein’s 
theory that capitalism had resolved its inner contradictions was of 
course mercilessly exposed in the global Depression of the 1930s, not to 
mention the current crisis.
Trade unions and co-operatives, without challenging the mode of 
production, provide the economic support for a theory of revisionism. 
Luxemburg’s critique lambasted Bernstein’s regression to idealist forms 
of social justice^31 and his attempts to constrain socialist struggle 
within the field of distribution: “[a]gain and again, Bernstein refers 
to socialism as an effort towards a ‘just, juster, and still more just’ 
mode of distribution”.^32 This problematic tendency in trade unions 
became clearer with time. In 1948, the Dutch communist and advocate of 
workers councils, Anton Pannekoek, concisely summarised the role of 
trade unions as an “indispensable function” of capitalism: “[b]y the 
power of the unions capitalism is normalized; a certain norm of 
exploitation is universally established. A norm of wages, allowing for 
the most modest life exigencies, so that the workers are not driven 
again and again into hunger revolts, is necessary for uninterrupted 
production. … Though products of the workers fight, kept up by their 
pains and efforts, trade unions are at the same time/organs of 
capitalist society/”.^33

/Ersatz/Marxism

Bernstein and the German and international socialist movement were 
indelibly shaped by Engels’ famous preface to Marx’s/Class Struggles in 
France/(1895). Evaluating the French Revolution of 1848, Engels argued 
that belief in an imminent socialist revolution had become obsolete: 
revolutionary street fighting had been superseded by parliamentary 
tactics as the most effective means to socialist change. The text 
represents a ‘classical’ documentation of the opinions prevailing in 
German social democracy at the time, and the tactics Engels expounded 
went on to dominate German social democracy, in Luxemburg’s phrase, “in 
everything that it did and in everything that it left undone”.^34 In 
1918, Luxemburg, battling against reformist social-democratic tendencies 
in Germany, argued that the preface represented the chief document of 
“the proclamation of the parliamentarism-only tactic”.^35 For Luxemburg 
this was the beginning of/ersatz/Marxism, the ‘official’ Marxism of 
social democracy – an ideology which has provided an illusory unity to 
the socialist movement ever since.
What remained hidden in this seismic shift of socialist tactics was the 
fact that the preface was written by Engels under the direct pressure of 
the SPD parliamentary delegation. The delegation pressed Engels, who 
lived abroad and had to rely on their assurances, to write the preface, 
arguing that it was essential to save the German labor movement from 
anarchist and allegedly adventurist deviations. Engels died the same 
year he wrote the preface, and with him went his protestations at the 
revision of the document, whose most radical passages were doctored to 
appease the Reichstag which was then considering a new anti-socialist 
law.^36 With Engels buried and Marx long departed, the theoretical 
leadership of the international socialist movement passed over to the 
social democrat, Karl Kautsky, who still proclaimed revolutionary 
Marxism even as he led the way on a reformist path. Luxemburg had 
already come into conflict with Kautsky when he suppressed her 
insurrectionary article on mass strikes for the sake of party unity and 
parliamentary grace. Her critique was typically direct: “Marxism [under 
Kautsky’s leadership] became a cloak for all the hesitations, for all 
the turnings-away from the actual revolutionary class struggle, for 
every halfway measure which condemned German Social Democracy, the labor 
movement in general, and also the trade unions, to vegetate within the 
framework and on the terrain of capitalist society without any serious 
attempt to shake or throw that society out of gear”.^37 With Engels’ 
text wielded with biblical status, Kautsky, “[t]he official guardian of 
the temple of Marxism”, attempted to neuter the revolutionary movement 
in the name of Marxist orthodoxy. For Luxemburg, the craven capitulation 
of the German social-democratic movement in the face of German 
Imperialism in 1914 for short-term political gain was the inevitable 
result of Kautsky’s reformist strategies.^38
Luxemberg’s critique of both Bernstein and Kautsky’s social-democractic 
vision found favour with George Lukács in his early writings. Both 
attacked ‘scientific’ Marxism for starting from the assumption that 
society progresses mechanically and teleologically, and for imagining a 
definite point of time, external to and unconnected with the class 
struggle, in which the class struggle would be won. For Lukács, the 
a-historical view of vulgar Marxism, preoccupied with the isolated 
‘facts’ of the specialist and reified disciplines of bourgeois political 
economy, lost the/active/dialectical side of Marx’s thought wherein 
theory and action, subject and history could be realised in praxis. 
Instead, the scientific view preached a contemplative, still ideological 
faith in scientific progress: a theory of ‘evolution’ without 
revolution; of ‘natural development’ without conflict. Drawing 
productively from Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Lukács argued 
that the scientific view had been seduced by the fetishistic character 
of economic forms under capitalism. Such forms isolated the various 
interacting elements of capitalist relations and masked the 
contradictory and hierarchical relations between men which lay behind 
the processes of production: “the reification of all human relations, 
the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour which 
subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, 
without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the 
immediate producers”.^39 For Marx, these formal objective conditions, if 
understood subjectively and in their/totality/by the working class, 
would provide the conditions for their eventual emancipation. Far from a 
static or objective scientific account of history, Marx’s theory, 
famously given expression in the eleven/Theses on Feuerbach/, was an 
endlessly relevant call to engagement: “[t]he philosophers have only 
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”.^40
Beyond the economic fatalism that has always been intimately bound up 
with the social-democratic project, and which has always left it to 
arrive on the scene of struggle too late, Rosa Luxemburg saw in the 
early days of the Russian revolution, especially in the explosion of 
mass strikes, direct democracy and the formation of soviets (workers 
councils), the “will to power of socialism”.^41 While Kautsky declared 
the conditions for revolution “unripe”, Luxemburg viewed the unbridled 
radicalism of the Russian workers as an exemplary example, evidence that 
“the masses do not exist to be schoolmastered”.^42 Yet even as she 
extolled the power of the soviets for crippling Tsarism and for the 
transformation of all existing class relationships, as early as 1918 
Luxemberg condemned the Bolshevik Party for its suppression of direct 
democracy and the will of the soviets. Despite the Bolshevik Party’s 
public condemnation of social democracy it would adopt, in crude and 
distorted form, many of the major flaws of the scientific determinism so 
typical of orthodox Marxism. Luxemburg, murdered by order of the German 
Social Democratic Party, would not live to see the results.

The Russian Tragedy

“The mirage of Leninism today has no basis outside the various 
Trotskyist tendencies, where the conflation of the proletarian subject 
with a hierarchical organisation grounded in ideology has stolidly 
survived all the evidence of that conflation’s real consequences.”
*Guy Debord**^43

*Despite Alexander Berkman’s initial euphoria at being placed in the 
epicenter of potentially “the most significant fact in the whole known 
history of mankind”,^44 his analysis upon leaving Russia was that the 
revolution had already been “done to death” by an authoritarian, 
dictatorial Bolshevik Party. Like Luxemburg, Berkman saw the 
significance of the Russian Revolution in the movement that lay behind 
the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” For Berkman, the initial power of 
the revolution lay in the unity of the revolutionary forces against the 
provisional, reformist Kerensky government. Bolsheviks, Anarchists, the 
left of the Social Revolutionary Party, revolutionary emigrants, and 
freed political prisoners had all worked together leading up to October 
1917 to achieve a revolutionary goal: “[t]hey took possession of the 
land, the factories, mines, mills, and the tools of production. They got 
rid of the more hated and dangerous representatives of government and 
authority. In their grand revolutionary outburst they destroyed every 
form of political and economic oppression”.^45 Immediately after the 
revolution, as a means to establish direct democracy and workers’ 
control over the means of production, the organised labour movement 
formed shop and factory committees co-ordinated by the soviets.
Berkman, however, would soon watch in horror as the Bolshevik Party 
declared the autonomy of the shop committees superfluous, filled the 
labour unions with its own representatives, and banned all public press 
except Bolshevik publications. Under Bolshevik authority the workers 
would now be bound by the industrial, scientific principles of 
productivity, with the shop committees subjected to the ideology of the 
ruling party. The hoped-for dictatorship/of/the proletariat over the 
bourgeoisie had swiftly moved under Bolshevik rule to a 
dictatorship/over/the proletariat. The soviets’ fate under the Party was 
sealed: “[a]ll who interpreted the Social Revolution as, primarily, the 
self-determination of the masses, the introduction of free, 
non-governmental Communism – they are henceforth doomed to 
persecution”.^46 The brief era of direct democracy was soon crushed 
under the weight of bureaucratic authority: “[t]he peoples’ Soviets are 
transformed into sections of the Ruling Party; the Soviet institutions 
become soulless offices, mere transmitters of the will of the center to 
the periphery”.^47
Under the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, which encouraged private 
enterprise to trade for profit, the position of the worker was returned 
to that of the worker under capitalism: “[t]he city worker today, under 
the new economic policy, is in exactly the same position as in any other 
capitalistic country. … The worker is paid wages, and must pay for his 
necessities – as in any country”.^48 The conditions experienced by the 
Russian worker replicated the worker’s fate under other capitalist 
regimes of private ownership: “[s]hops, mines, factories and mills have 
already been leased to capitalists. Labour demands have a tendency to 
curtail profits; they interfere with the ‘orderly processes’ of 
business. And as for strikes, they handicap production, paralyse 
industry. Shall not the interests of Capital and Labour be declared 
solidaric in Bolshevik Russia?”.^49 To cement these policies, the 10th 
Congress of the Communist Party of Russia in 1921 put a decisive veto on 
workers’ opposition when the demand to turn the management of the 
industries over to the proletariat was officially outlawed. The outcome 
of these authoritarian policies was seen in the infamous crushing of the 
Kronstadt rebellion by the Red Army and later in the rise of Stalin: 
“[h]ere with us – or out there with a gun in your hand – but not as an 
opposition. We have had enough of opposition”.^50
Berkman was not alone in his analysis. As early as 1920 in his/World 
Revolution and Communist Tactics,/Anton Pannekoek argued from within the 
communist movement that the Russian state had developed into state 
capitalism. The suppression of direct democracy and the soviets in the 
name of scientific Marxism led to a system of production which 
Pannekoek, with the benefit of hindsight in 1948, articulated quite 
precisely: “[t]he system of production developed in Russia is State 
Socialism. It is organized production with the state as universal 
employer, master of the entire production apparatus. The workers are 
master of the means of production no more than under Western capitalism. 
They receive their wages and are exploited by the State as the only 
mammoth capitalist. So the name State capitalism can be applied with 
precisely the same meaning”.^51 In Guy Debord’s later phrase, the 
Russian bureaucracy resolved itself into “a substitute ruling class for 
the market economy”.^52
For Debord, Lenin was simply a faithful Kautskyist who applied orthodox 
Marxism to the prevailing conditions in Russia. This ideology, asserting 
that its whole truth resided in objective economic progress overseen by 
the ideological representatives of the working class/,/could only ever 
reflect the specialisation and division of labour inherent within the 
Party hierarchy: “[i]n consequence the speciality of the profession in 
question became that of/total science management/”.^53 By usurping the 
name of revolution for a system of workers’ exploitation, Leninism and 
Bolshevism made the name of communism an object of hatred and aversion 
among workers and foes alike. For Debord, the moment when Bolshevism 
triumphed for itself marks the inauguration of the modern spectacle, the 
point at which a false banner of working-class opposition was advanced. 
It was the moment when “/an image/of the working class arose in radical 
opposition to the working class itself”.^54 The unity that Lenin 
demanded masked the class divisions and alienating working conditions on 
which the capitalist mode of production is based: “[w]hat obliges the 
producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what 
separates them from it. … What pushes for greater rationality is also 
what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and 
repression. What creates society’s abstract power also creates its 
concrete unfreedom”.^55
To the detriment of the working class, the orthodox Marxist line in its 
Bolshevik form held sway over the international labour movement up until 
the early 1950s, until the mutinous rebellions against Russian 
bureaucracy in East Berlin^56 and Hungary^57 helped put the questions of 
alienation and wage-labour, which lay at the heart of the production 
process, back on the agenda of class struggle.

Workerism And The Return Of Class Agency

“From the working-class point of view, political struggle is that which 
tends consciously to place in crisis the economic mechanism of 
capitalist development.”
*Mario Tronti**^58

*Tronti was a key figure within the strand of Italian Marxism known as 
Operaismo (‘workerism’) that emerged in the early 1960s as a response to 
the conservatism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Franco Piperno, 
associated with Operaismo, captured the general perception of the PCI 
within the movement when he identified the Party as: “the working class 
articulation of capitalist social organization”.^59 As opposed to the 
term ‘workerism’ in its narrow sense (evoking the industrial proletariat 
at the expense of other social groups), Operaismo was concerned with the 
heterogeneous, ever-changing dynamic of/class composition/in contrast to 
the eternal, unchanging working-class subject of the Party. As its most 
famous proponent, Antonio Negri, noted, Operaismo was initiated as an 
attempt to reply politically to the crisis of the Italian labour 
movement in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II. For many workers 
– after their prominent role in the struggles against Mussolini and the 
Wermacht – the future held out the promise of socialism, or, at the very 
least, major improvements in work conditions and pay alongside more 
participation in the production process. Yet Palmiro Togliatti, the 
leader of the PCI, had other ideas. Above all, Togliatti sought a 
programme to unite the broad mass of people against the group of 
capitalists yoked to fascism. The decisive arena for political gains, 
according to Togliatti, was in formal, parliamentary politics where 
accommodation with other groups was deemed a necessity. The quest for 
these political objectives, within the Constituent Assembly and the 
Constitution, led inexorably to the subordination of working-class 
antagonism and the struggle for fundamental economic change.^60
Togliatti, saw productivity as/the/path to Italy’s salvation: the 
resumption of economic growth within the framework of private ownership 
would ensure the construction of a “strong democracy”. As the “[t]rue 
children of the Comintern”, the PCI were willing to concede shop-floor 
organisation for unitary economic reconstruction through “the 
restoration of the managerial prerogative” within the factories. Hostage 
to nationalist ideology and private forms of management technique, the 
PCI facilitated the extraction of high levels of exploitation from the 
workers by placing labour discipline and productivity at the top of 
their agenda. As one Fiat worker put it when Togliatti and Christian 
Democrat leader De Gaspari came to visit his factory: “[t]hey both 
argued exactly the same thing; the need to save the economy. … We’ve got 
to work hard because Italy’s on her knees, we’ve been bombarded by the 
Americans … but don’t worry because if we produce, if we work hard, in a 
year or two we’ll all be fine. … So the PCI militants inside the factory 
set themselves the political task of producing to save the national 
economy,/and the workers were left without a party/”.^61
Such compromise had predictable results. In 1947, the historic left was 
expelled from the De Gaspari government and an intense regime of 
accumulation was established based on production for international 
markets, underpinned by low wages, low costs and high productivity. 
Workplace organisers, disorientated and disillusioned by PCI policy, 
were mercilessly attacked as Italian capital sought labour docility 
through the disciplinary law of value. This was the context for the 
development of autonomist Marxism, which in its most militant sense 
expressed itself as a radical new rationality counter-posed to the 
‘objective’ occult rationality of modern productive processes. Raniero 
Panzieri’s ‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx versus the 
Objectivists’^62 written in the early 1960s, was, according to Sandro 
Maccini, “the first demystifying analysis of technological 
rationality”^63 produced by an Italian Marxist. Against the ruling PCI, 
Panzieri argued that the struggle for socialism must come from below in 
the form of “total democracy”. New class formations were required in the 
economic sphere, “the real source of power”, so that the “democratic 
road” would not become “either a belated adherence to reformism, or 
simply a cover for a dogmatic conception of socialism”.^64 Union work, 
he said, had devoted itself for too long to political questions “with a 
capital P” whilst ignoring the reality of changing work conditions.
Togliatti, and others within the CPI, following the outline of orthodox 
Marxism, had led the Italian left to believe that productivity and 
technological progress somehow stood apart from class antagonism. 
Instead of accepting the reigning production relations as ultimately 
rational, beneficial and eternal, however, Panzieri, returned in earnest 
to Marx (an unusual step at that time for a ‘Marxist’) to theorize 
machinery as accumulated ‘dead labour’, fully determined by capital 
which utilised technological development to further the exploitation and 
subordination of ‘living labour’.^65 Elements of the Italian left, in 
thrall to social democracy, were obsessed by the productivist idea that 
technology could liberate humankind from the limitations of environment 
and surroundings. But for Panzieri, these elements passed over the 
crucial question of the ownership of the workplace and the role 
mechanisation and automation played in increasing the authoritarian 
structure of factory management and organisation.
Panzieri, criticised the Leninist belief that socialist planning was 
entirely neutral and that science and technique were socially 
disinterested forces. Instead, for Panzieri, planning was a form of 
“social despotism” which hid the social relationships of domination and 
exploitation behind the language of bourgeois political economy. Denied 
of this understanding by a blind ideological adherence to scientific 
Marxism, the consequence of Lenin’s policies in the USSR was, for 
Panzieri, “the repetition of capitalist forms in the relations of 
production both at the factory level and at the level of overall social 
production”.^66 The autonomists’ great contribution to debates around 
the negation of capitalism was to re-instate, after decades of 
suppression in the name of productivity, the idea of/alienation/and 
antagonism at the heart of the production process, positing a radical 
rupture from the ‘golden chains’ of the wage-labor relation in Italy and 
beyond. News also travelled from abroad. In the aftermath of May ‘68 in 
France, Massimo Cacciari would state that liberation/from/labour, not 
merely the liberation/of/labour, had become the key aim of revolutionary 
politics. When young Renault workers in France, during May ’68, demanded 
a minimum wage of 1000 francs per month (an exorbitant and impossible 
demand), Bologna and Daghini saw that the demand, which threatened to 
“blow up” the labour market, was symptomatic of a desire on behalf of 
the workers, “to negate their own figure as producers”.^67 The “strategy 
of refusal” first posited by Mario Tronti in 1965 was now a widespread 
actuality.

Mai ’68

“Forward to a communist society without capital or waged work!”
*10 May Group, 1968

*When Rene Resiel of the/Enragés/put forward his demands at the student 
occupation of the Sorbonne University in 1968 – “the abolition of class 
society, wage-labour, the spectacle, and survival” – he gave voice to 
the theory of the Situationist International and its radical critique of 
everything. Against the reasonable demands put forward by the emissaries 
of social democracy, the SI and their followers exhibited the greatest 
of contempt for the “pseudo thinkers of details” and the maximum 
disrespect for all those who would attempt to find a concord with 
capital within the left parties. The unacceptable demand became the 
chief tool of breaking with all the dead generations of the past. Work, 
for so long the ABC of social-democratic thinking, duly came in for a 
kicking. In 1967, Raoul Vaneigem declared his opposition to the 
wage-labour relation thus: “every call for productivity under the 
conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economics is a call to 
slavery”.^68 With work – “the punishment for poverty” – widely defined 
as “hard labour”, society as a “racket”, and trade unionists as 
“cops”,^69 Vaneigem argued that every appeal for productivity is always 
an appeal from above at the behest of the commodity. In the 
“post-scarcity” era, the alleged imperative of production under the 
former imperative of survival was no longer valid: “from now on people 
want to live, not just survive”.^70
The role of the SI in May ‘68 is deeply disputed, but it is clear that 
the theory of the spectacle, associated first and foremost with Debord, 
held considerable sway. Debord’s writing, which reworked the ideas of 
Hegel, Marx and Lukács, among many others, borrowed deeply from Marx’s 
concept of commodity fetishism, whereby in the production and exchange 
of commodities the relations/between people/assume the form of 
relations/between things/. In this he returned to early Lukács who had 
engaged in a similar project in the late 1910s. In order to produce 
commodities for exchange, the workers’ labour and what they produce come 
to dominate their life. Commodity relations take on a mysterious force: 
the products of labour are turned against the worker, appearing now as 
an autonomous, alienating power, a “social hieroglyphic” which elides 
the human labour that produced the commodity. While Marx concentrated on 
alienation within production, asserting that at least the worker had 
access to non-alienated relations outside of work, the SI argued that 
the restless expansionism of capitalism and its need to secure new 
markets had extended commodity relations, and thus alienation, into all 
areas of social experience. No longer a mere adjunct to production, 
consumption is integral to the circulation of commodities, the 
accumulation of capital, and the survival of the economic system. For 
Debord, extending Marx’s original thesis beyond production, modern 
society had produced The Society of the Spectacle, a “vast accumulation 
of/spectacles/” and a concrete inversion of life which created a social 
relationship between people mediated by images. The SI project embodied 
a refusal to co-operate with this logic of commodity exchange and a 
radical negation of the capitalist relations that reproduce the 
abstract, alienating equivalence of the spectacle.^71
Much of the language, tactics and expressions of the events of May ‘68 
seemed to affirm the theories of the SI: “[t]hat the increasing 
modernization of capitalism entails the proletarianisation of an 
ever-widening portion of the population; and that as the world of 
commodities extends its power to all aspects of life, it produces 
everywhere an extension and deepening of the forces that negate it”.^72 
The first signs of what was to come emerged from the student milieu of 
Strasbourg University in November 1966, when students in collaboration 
with the SI produced ‘Of Student Poverty Considered in its Economic, 
Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, 
and a Modest Proposal for its Remedy’. The pamphlet, which should be 
essential reading for the student of today, ridiculed student privileges 
and the illusory forms of rebellion adopted as specialised ‘roles’ 
within the milieu. Students must understand one thing, the pamphlet 
declared: “… there are no ‘special’ student interests in revolution. 
Revolution will be made by/all/the victims of encroaching repression and 
the tyranny of the market”.^73 Hastily translated into more than ten 
languages, the pamphlet encouraged widespread discussion of Situationist 
analysis. The publication of Guy Debord’s/The Society of the 
Spectacle/and Raoul Vanegeim’s/The Revolution of Everyday Life/in 1967 
further intensified these discussions. New student agitations persisted 
throughout the first half of the year including the formation 
of/Enragés/and the/Mouvement du 22 Mars/, two groups which would have a 
significant impact on the May events. Yet far from being a mere student 
revolt, the May events sustained a general wildcat strike of ten million 
workers alongside a critical position that encompassed every aspect of 
capitalist life.
In terms of the economic and political analysis of orthodox Marxism, the 
events were simply unthinkable, yet the general wildcat strike, with 
three weeks of action, brought the country to a halt. On 19 May,/The 
Observer/called the revolution “a total onslaught on modern industrial 
society”. It went on to describe the contemporary conditions: “[i]n a 
staggering end to a staggering week, the commanding heights of the 
French economy are falling to the workers. All over France a calm, 
obedient, irresistible wave of working-class power is engulfing 
factories, dockyards, mines, railway depots, bus garages, postal sorting 
offices. Trains, mail, air-flights are virtually at a standstill. 
Production lines in chemicals, steel, metalworking, textiles, 
shipbuilding and a score of industries are ground to a halt. … Many a 
baffled and impotent manager is being held prisoner in his own carpeted 
office”.^74 Rene Vienet’s highly subjective/Enragés and Situationists in 
the Occupation Movement, France, May ‘68/left the best general account 
of the events from a Situationist perspective:
Everyday life, suddenly rediscovered, became the center of all possible 
conquests. People who had always worked in the now-occupied offices 
declared that they could no longer live as before, not even a little 
better than before. … Capitalised time stopped. Without any trains, 
metro, cars, or work the strikers recaptured the time so sadly lost in 
factories, on motorways, in front of the TV. People strolled, dreamed, 
learned how to live. Desires began to become, little by little, reality.^75
The May ‘68 events presented impossible demands irreducible to higher 
wages or the details of workplace organisation. The radical critique of 
existing capitalist relations was evidenced throughout the events: e.g. 
the Schlumberger factory workers who stated that their demands “had 
nothing to do with wages” before going on strike for the highly 
exploited workers at the nearby Danone factory. Similarly, the workers 
at the FNAC chain of stores declared: “[w]e, the workers of the FNAC 
stores, have gone on strike not for the satisfaction of our particular 
demands but to participate in a movement of ten million intellectual and 
manual workers. … We are taking part in this movement (which is not 
about quantitative demands) because ten million workers don’t stop work 
at the same time for a pay rise of F6.30 or 100 centimes, but to 
challenge the legitimacy of the whole leadership of the country and all 
the structures of society”.^76 The Censier worker-student Action 
Committee likewise declared: “[i]t’s not a case of demanding more of 
this or more of that. It’s a case of demanding something else 
altogether. … In this way the/totality/of demands will appear, and their 
incalculable number will produce the evidence that the capitalist regime 
cannot really satisfy the least of them”.^77 In a strident document 
signed by ‘Some postmen’ (usurping beautifully the status of ‘roles’ 
endemic to the specialized division of labour under capitalism) the 
postmen stated with exemplary simplicity that, “open struggle against 
the ruling class” would be the condition of their emancipation: “[t]he 
renowned participation that power can afford us is in fact only 
integration into its system of exploitation. We have fuck all to do with 
helping them with their profits”.^78
The reaction to all this revolutionary activity by the established 
unions is shrouded in infamy. Vienet succinctly described the 
trade-union counter-offensive: “[t]he trade-union strategy had a single 
goal: to defeat the strike. In order to do this the unions, with a long 
strike-breaking tradition, set out to reduce a vast general strike to a 
series of isolated strikes at the individual enterprise level … the 
union leadership assumed the task of reducing the entire movement to a 
program of strictly professional demands”.^79 The Communist Party’s 
trade union, the biggest in France, meanwhile played the heaviest 
counter-revolutionary role in the May events: “[i]t was precisely 
because the CGT had the most powerful organization and could administer 
the largest dose of illusions that it appeared all the more obviously as 
the major enemy of the strike”.^80 While the workers, six million by 20 
May, soon to be ten million, voted for a perpetuation of the general 
wildcat strike and the occupation of the factories, the leadership of 
the CFDT and CGT, the main union organisations in France, were agreed on 
the basic social-democratic principle of the necessity for negotiations 
with state and management.
The result of these meetings, triumphantly produced by Seguy, the leader 
of the CGT, on 27 May at the rebellious Renault-Billancourt factory was 
the ‘Grenelle agreement’, concluded by the timeworn social-democratic 
triumvirate: the unions, the government and the employers. The agreement 
would raise wages 7% and lift the legally guaranteed minimum wage from 
2.22 to 3 francs. The days lost in the strike would not be paid until 
they were made up in overtime. Given that “[a] higher percentage of 
French workers than ever before, across every sector and in every region 
of the country, had been on strike for the longest time in French 
history”,^81 the poverty of the ‘gains’ agreed by the union leaders was 
dwarfed by the scale of the movement. The workers knowing full well 
“that such ‘benefits’ would be taken back in kind with imminent price 
rises”^82 famously rained down insults on Seguy and rejected the 
agreement. The unions learned their lesson. The refusal of the agreement 
was met with an acceleration of integration by the CGT: rigged ballots, 
false information (e.g. informing individual railway stations that the 
other stations had gone back to work), prevention of secondary 
picketing, and organised train delays which prevented workers’ 
solidarity. By these methods, and acting in collusion with the hated 
national riot police (CRS), the CGT were able to bring about the 
resumption of work almost everywhere. Ultimately, the CGT and the CFDT 
proved themselves perfect instruments for the integration of the working 
class into the capitalist system of exploitation.
For Vienet, the future for the radical left would now involve an 
unequivocal fight against the reformism of its own unions. He criticised 
many of the groups in May ‘68 for remaining entrenched in their own 
stale ideology, drawing proud experience from past working-class defeats 
and the traditions of the ‘dead generations’: “[t]hey seemed to perceive 
nothing new in the occupation movement. They had seen it all before. 
They were blasé. Their knowing discouragement looked forward to nothing 
but defeat, so that they could publish the consequences as they had so 
often done before”.^83 Yet May ’68 for all that it was defeated, 
astounded almost everyone by its very existence in modern capitalist 
conditions. That the unthinkable took place at all suggests that it can 
take place again.*

*Times change

“…the revolutionary organisation must learn that it can no longer combat 
alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle.”
*Guy Debord**^84

*Capital’s response to the show of strength by working-class 
organizations in the sixties and early seventies marked a shift to what 
has broadly been termed ‘post-fordist’ or ‘flexible’ modes of 
accumulation, a shift characterised by increasingly flexible labour 
processes and markets, intensified geographical mobility of capital 
flows, rapid shifts in consumption practices, and the 
erosion/destruction of Fordist-Keynesian modes of labour regulation and 
control. Beyond a few notable exceptions such as the miners’ strike, the 
working-class in the advanced capitalist countries has been in disarray 
ever since, even if struggles elsewhere, in South America, India, and 
China for instance suggest that global capital might meet its nemesis in 
an ever-expanding global proletariat. But if the fight over the global 
workplace is not just to become, in Panzieri’s expression, “either a 
belated adherence to reformism, or simply a cover for a dogmatic 
conception of socialism”, then we might do well to return to, and 
update, Rosa Luxemburg, who brilliantly theorised the inexorable 
destruction immanent to capitalism’s incessant drive for self-expansion, 
and whose intense opposition to reformist compromise suggests a 
pro-revolutionary, fiercely anti-capitalist alternative to contemporary 
capitalism.
In her speech to the Founding Congress of the Communist Party of Germany 
(Spartacus League) in December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg argued that the 
Erfurt Program, “the founding document of the Second International”, 
authored by Karl Kautsky in 1891, had imprisoned German Social Democracy 
within a hopelessly reformist paradigm. By placing immediate minimum 
aims (parliamentary reform) in the tactical foreground, while relegating 
maximum gains (the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism) to the misty 
realms of a utopian future, the Erfurt Program created a new dichotomy 
within the movement. The tactics of piecemeal attrition were 
now/opposed/to the overthrow of capitalism; and minimum and maximum aims 
were presented in separate, distinct realms instead of combined in a 
productive dialectical tension. By defining themselves in direct 
opposition to the Erfurt Program, Luxemburg and the Spartacus League 
expressed their profound disagreement with the strategies of the 
dominant reformist German Social Democratic movement: “[f]or us there is 
no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing: 
this is the minimum we have to realize today”.^85
This tension, between minimum and maximum demands, falsely separated in 
the Erfurt Program of 1891, suggests a theoretical stratagem that might 
avoid the illusory hopes of reformist practice, while circumventing the 
isolating, and isolated, ghetto of ‘more radical than thou’ Puritanism. 
Raoul Vanegeim’s advice to those seeking a way out of capitalism, prior 
to May ‘68, offers a way of understanding which acknowledges that none 
of us are born ‘radical’, that solidarity will be central to any mass 
movement, while at the same time challenging the stasis of purely 
reformist measures: “it is impossible to go wrong so long as we never 
forget that the only proper treatment for ourselves and for others is to 
make ever more radical demands”.^86 One such demand, if we are really 
serious about an exit from capitalism, should return us to the 
continuing resonance of Guy Debord’s salutary statement: ‘Never Work!’

*Notes
*1. Vaneigem, R, The Revolution of Everyday Life, Rebel Press, 1994, p.55.
2. Monbiot, G, ‘Snow 
jobs’.http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/01/snow-jobs/
3. Wacquant, L, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Study of Advanced 
Marginality, Polity Press, 2008, p.251.
4. Ibid, p.253.
5. Ibid, p.246
6. Hardt, M, Negri, A, Multitude, Penguin, 2006, p.136.
7. Benjamin, W, Illuminations, Pimlico, 1990, p.247.
8. Ibid, p.250.
9. Cited in Benjamin, W, The Arcades Project, The Belknap Press of 
Harvard University Press, p.123.
10. Benjamin, W, Illuminations, Pimlico, 1990, p.250.
11. Debord, G, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, p.67.
12. Ibid, p.616.
13. Dauve, G and Martin, F, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the 
Communist Movement, (Revised Edition), Antagonism Press, 1997, p.18.
14. McLellan, D, ed, ‘Primitive Accumulation’, in, ‘Karl Marx: Selected 
Writings’, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.522.
15. Ibid, p.376.
16. See, e.g, Thompson, E.P, The Making of the English Working Class, 
p.233-259.
17. See, e.g, Prebble, J, ‘The Highland Clearances’, Penguin.
18. Mclellan, D, ed, see above, p.365.
19. Mclellan, D, ed, ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, in, 
‘Karl Marx: Selected Writings’, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.522.
20. Ibid, p.519.
21. Ibid, p.520.
22. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press, 2003, p.8
23. Anderson, K, and Hudis, P, (eds), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, Social 
Reform or Revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2004, p.129.
24. The term’s meaning has shifted over the years to a reformist 
definition, but for Luxemburg it approximated something closer to 
current definitions of ‘direct’ democracy.
25. Ibid, p.149.
26. Ibid, p.145.
27.http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm. 
This revised version of ‘Social Reform of Revolution’ from 1908, 
includes the critical chapter 5, ‘Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy’, 
which is absent from the original draft of 1899 featured in ‘The Rosa 
Luxemburg Reader’ cited above.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. “The old war horse on which the reformers of the earth have rocked 
for ages”, Luxemburg, R, Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press, 2003, p.61.
34. Luxemburg, R, ’Our Program and the Political Situation’ 
(1918),http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid. At this time, Rosa Luxemburg did not know the full details of 
the falsification of the document. These only came to light later on. 
“It was not Engels who wrote the seemingly revisionist views cited here. 
The Party leaders, arguing that because the Reichstag was considering 
passage of a new anti-socialist law it would be dangerous to give them 
grounds to attack Social Democracy, eliminated all the passages in the 
Preface which seemed too radical. Engels protested, but died before any 
changes could be made”.
37. Ibid.
38. See Luxemburg’s ‘The Junius Pamphlet’ (The Crisis in German Social 
Democracy).
39. Ibid, p.6.
40. Mclellan, D, ed, ‘Theses of Feuerbach, in, ‘Karl Marx: Selected 
Writings’, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.171.173..
41. Anderson, K, and Hudis, P, (eds), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, The 
Russian Revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2004, p.310.
42. Ibid, Introduction, p.12.
43. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.80
44. Berkman, ‘A Russian Tragedy’, Phoenix Press, p.14. Berkman’s account 
of his arrival, in fact, exhibits an almost religious faith in the 
possibilities for world transformation that the revolution seemed to 
open up.
45. Ibid, p.36.
46. Ibid, p.45.
47. Ibid, p.40.
48. Ibid, p.29.
49. Ibid, p.31.
50. Cited in, Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.72.
51. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press, 2003, p.78
52. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.72
53. Ibid, p.68.
54. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.69
55. Ibid, p.46.
56. Benno Sorels account is related by Hardt and Negri in ‘Multitude’, 
Penguin, 2006: “...he emphasizes that the most important demand of the 
factory worker was to abolish the production quotas and destroy the 
structural order of command over labour in the factories. Socialism, 
after all, is not capitalism!”.
57. See for example, Anderson, A, ‘Hungary 56’, co-published by Active 
Distribution, AK Press, Phoenix Press.
58. Cited in, Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.66.
59. Ibid, p.117.
60. This section on workerism and post-war Italy is broadly drawn from 
Wright’s account in ‘Storming Heaven’.
61. Ibid, p.10. Original citation in Partridge, H, ‘Italy’s Fiat in 
Turin in the 1950’s’, in Nichol’s, T (ed) Capital and Labour: A Marxist 
Primer, (London: Fontana).
62.http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/panzieri.html
63. Citation, Ibid, p.45.
64. Ibid, p.18.
65. Marx put the argument very well in his ‘General Law of Capitalist 
Accumulation’: “The law of capitalist accumulation, metamorphosed by 
economists into a pretended law of Nature, in reality merely states that 
the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution of in the 
degree of the exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of 
labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction of, on 
an ever expanding scale, the capitalist relation. It cannot be otherwise 
in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the 
needs of self expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, 
material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part 
of the labourer”. McLellan, D, ‘Karl Marx: Selected Writings’, Oxford 
University Press, p.515-521.
66. Cited in Wright, S, ‘Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle 
in Italian Autonomist Marxism’, Pluto Press, p.45.
67. Ibid, p.115.
68. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’, Rebel Press, 1994, p.53.
69. Untitled tract by the Vandalist Committee of Public Safety, April 
68. See Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages and Situationists in the Occup[ation 
Movement, France, May ’68, Rebel Press, p.127.
70. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’, Rebel Press, 1994, p.53.
71. This section is more or less freely appropriated from Sadie Plant’s 
excellent overview of the Situationsit International. See, Plant, S, 
‘The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a 
Postmodern Age’, Routledge, p.23.
72. Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation 
Movement, France, May ’68, Rebel Press, p.71.
73. Cited in, Plant, S, ‘The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist 
International in a Postmodern Age’, Routledge, p.94.
74. Cited in, Ibid, p.98.
75. Ibid, p.77.
76. Ibid, p.151.
77. Ibid, p.150-151.
78. Ibid, p.152.
79. Ibid, p.62.
80. Ibid, p.85.
81. Ross, K, ‘May ’68 and its Afterlives’, The University of Chicago 
Press, p.68.
82. Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages and Situationists in the Occupation 
Movement, France, May ’68, Rebel Press, p.92.
83. Ibid, p.105.
84. Ibid.
85. Luxemburg, R, ’Our Program and the Political Situation’ 
(1918),http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm
86. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’, Rebel Press, 1994, 
p.150.


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