Under the riot gear

! "War machine and care machine", the Oakland Commune extended itself over ve weeks, one square and all over the newspapers. Admired rightly everywhere for its radicality, it peaked with the general strike of November 2nd, 2011. Since 1946, there was no question of a general strike in the US, and it was in Oakland, once again, that it was happening. ! The following text is an attempt to show the contours of this struggle, underlying its limits. With that, we do not intend to bring an external moral judgment but to understand the dynamics of this struggle. We will focus on the Oakland Commune as a singular event, only in so far as it allows us to understand the generality of the Occupy movement, and also, more broadly, the movement of square occupations. Understanding the limits of this struggle means then understanding the dynamics of a moment of the general crisis of accumulation. This crisis, in all of its moments, carries within itself a horizon: that of the abolition of the present state of capitalist relations, this "real movement which abolishes the present state of things". Communism as the horizon of the current cycle of struggles is for us communisation, abolition of all the classes by the proletariat, communism as an immediate process. This horizon "is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself". The "premises now in existence", those of the crisis and of the disciplinarization of the proletariat, will nd their abolition in the generalization of rifts, generalization that, then, can only be a rupture.

First limit: the sphere of circulation without that of production ! The rst limit of the Oakland Commune was that, even if people there tried to expand the struggle to the labour process, it was in the constitution of the movement that it could not accomplish it. The general strike was the most obvious attempt to overcome that constitution and expand it to the labour process. Trying to link the struggle with the closures of school was another one. Both failed. Not because something was missing in the strategies, but because it was a constitutive limit of the struggle. Located in Oakland, the struggle couldnt attack the labour process rst of all because most of the people on the Plaza had been expelled for life from this process, and second, because even those who have not been expelled relate to it only as a process of circulation and not of production (the port, the banks, the coffee shop or restaurants and the food stores being the only employers and San Francisco has little more to offer to those whom cannot
1

integrate into the Silicon Valley). One can argue on that point that the conveyance of commodities by boat is part of the production process. The same goes for labour in restaurants (only to the extent that the restaurant is paid by the salary and not by the revenue). The problem is to understand that those forms of labors are at the periphery of production. They are part of the circulation of capital. And if the circulation of capital is still partially within the production process, when considered alone, it autonomises itself. ! There is of course always a tendency to consider the process of circulation as a moment of the valorization process just as much as the production process and that, therefore, production does not lie at the center of the whole story. Behind that lies a tendency that feels the end of the old worker movement and the restructuring of the process of production in the 70s. The idea that accompanies this type of theory is always that programmatism was only about production. But somehow, it wasnt: it was only about distribution, production being for it an invariant horizon. The factory was an empty fortress, and communism could only be seen as the good redistribution of commodities within the society. ! Seeing circulation, the "annihilation of space by time", as a central process can not allow anyone to understand capital as production of commodities, as production of value, as production for exchange. In this way, the commodity becomes a ghost and the production process a haunted house. ! If in programmatism, the world was seen as capable of being turned upside down (from the Manifesto until Italian operaismo), it seems like with the restructuring, it is seen more and more as a world that can only be blocked. The meager reformist perspective of being able not to turn the economy upside-down but to manage it has disappeared with the beginning of this crisis. It is from then on that the rst perspective that this world has to offer is that of blockading; to blockade the economy has taken over the idea of the strike. Often, the "strikes" are nothing more than names over movements of blockading (from that follows the popularity of such a concept as the "human strike"). Some say that it is so out of efciency, some because many are being more and more excluded from production, but these are two sides of the same coin. The concentration of circulation of commodities at certain points, the absolute rise in the size of value manipulated per worker capita and the absolute rise in investment per worker capita, the boom of the economy paid out of revenue and not capital

(wrongly called "service sector"1 ) and the boom of unemployment are all characteristics of the same moment, that of the restructuring. ! It is true, circulation can raise the rate of prot. This is the reason why it has been more developed than production since the 70s. But this developement is neither due to a free choice nor to a proof of circulation being central, but rather it is just the reection of a drastic fall in the rate of prot in production. The capitalist mode of production cannot therfore "move its center from production to circulation". It develops periodically one compared to the other in accordance with the limits of the previous period. Circulation and production are both moments of the valorization process. But it is production that determines circulation, at the end. Therefore, even if circulation was to involve a larger mass of capital than production, it would still be determined by production. Production, under capital, is production of commodities for exchange. The moment of circulation is already encompassed in the moment of production. ! The circulation process is two-folded: it is the circulation of commodities just as much as the circulation of money, without which the realization lag would always be a barrier to production. The capitalist mode of production needs the circulation of capital like the body needs the circulation of blood, but it does so only because this circulation has its own content. This content is valorization. By grasping only at the circulation process, the US occupations could only see at best the ux of commodities, and at worst the parasitic circulation of moneynance" as pure parasitic theft covering over the "real economy". The key moment to understand the Oakland Commune in its relation with circulation and production is the rst general strike (and the blockading of the port) of November 2nd. Voted upon by almost 100% of the general assembly of a thousand people the day following the rst police raid on the camp, the general strike was a challenge. One can see it as something quite ridiculous: a general strike in which only people who are not striking participate. Indeed, none of the unions voted for the strike, although many

One can use the term "services" only if they are dened as immaterial production, which means nothing. There are only three sectors in the economy: that of the production of the means of production, that of the production for the consumption of the proletariat (paid for by the wage) and for the luxury consumption (paid for by revenue). Someone employed at McDonalds or in a call center selling mobile phone contracts makes now the labor that would have made a farmer picking up potatoes before: he works for the consumption of the proletariat (the idiotic idea of "real needs" and "fake needs" has no room in this, the reproduction of the proletariat is constantly extended, and its limits are what is socially necessary--"the transformation of what was previously superuous into what is necessary, as a historically created necessity -- is the tendency of capital" [Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, p. 528]). His labor, as that of the farmer, is paid by the salary, and nds itself in the next process of production only in the fact that the body of the proletarian was sent back in the face to face with capital during the selling of the commodity labor-power. From then on, the idea of a service sector that extends from nance unto fast-food chain is a carbon copy of the bourgeois economy and its wishful thinking.
3

thought the ILWU 2 would. Hence, besides the precarious workers, the unemployed and the homeless, people attended who could take a day off for holiday, those who, working as civil servants, had the right not to come, those who, like the port employees and some people working in restaurants and cafs, had a free day by the impossibilitymore or less aidedof keeping the work place open, or those who took a sick day. But this is only looking at one side of the picture. What was noticeable on the 2nd of November is the crowd. Images of a crowd blockading the portthats what remains from that day. Since 1946, no one in the US had marched under the banner of a general strike. ! Seeing the general strike just as the result of an activist tendency within the movement cannot answer these two questions: Why did more than a thousand people vote for that strike? Why did more than 10,000 people come that day in a country that has forgotten its strike tradition? If, instead of proposing a general strike, a few anarchists had proposed to retaliate to the eviction of the camp by burning down the city hall, would 10 000 people have showed up with Molotov cocktails? ! The general strike represented the desire to extend the movement to the sphere of production, that is to say, to the workplace. This strike only took place as an answer to the quasi-military eviction of the camp. Some might say that people just wanted to express their disgust against the city hall and its decision to destroy the camp, that they wanted to send a warning to the mayor. But, if so, why was there any need to talk about a general strike instead of having a saturday afternoon march like what happened in New York after the mass arrests on the Brooklyn bridge? There were many marches after the murder of Oscar Grant, but no one ever spoke of a general strike back then. What is important for the 2nd of November is that everyone came with their little sign saying something about the general strike. ! It is confronted with the police under its real uniform, that of the discipline that the population of Oakland, at that point largely sympathetic to the movement, turned itself naturally against what makes it a compact whole: the labour process. And that whole then got a name: the proletariat. What can be seen on the night of the 26th of October, during the vote, is a generalisation, a contamination. As with cells, contamination propagates itself from one body to another. "Its the terrain, not the germ". ! But this strike, at the same time, didnt happen in as much as no one struck. The moment where a possibility emerged to recognize oneself as a worker with her power became straight away a handicap. In other words, the moment where a class belonging was outlined, it was only as an external constraint.

ILWU is a union representing mainly dockers of the West coast founded after the general strike of 1934 and considered one of the last unions that can sometimes have more "radical positions. It played the central role in the Longview strike. (see note 4)
4

! An interesting parallel can be drawn with Greece. The occupation of Syntagma square managed to force unions to call for 3 days of general strikes, the 15th, 28th and 29th of June 2011, during which the vote on austerity measures in Parliament took place. In Greece, unions were compeletly left behind by the movement and so tried to catch up with it. Just like in the US, the phrase "general strike" means little in Greece. There, general strikes are still numerous 3 although they are more and more abandoned, and the feeling that they cant obtain anything is growing (the participation in the three strikes went down drastically from each day on). In the US, the victories of the old workers movement have all been destroyed, and hence that situation can tell us much more about the content of the present moment. In that respect, Oakland is nothing but the crystalization of the present moment. Once a struggle which thinks of itself as being only political (and not economic) ends up confronting one of its limits and goes through the process of transforming itself, then it is a natural feeling to acknowledge yourself as labor-power. But the transformation of this struggle into something else by means of the acknowledgment of everyone as laborpower can no longer take place. The general strike did not bring any more victories in Oakland than in Athens. In both cases, the general strike was the rst step in the rupture created by the movement. The second step was the general strikes own faillure. The announcement of everyone to each other that they were not what they thought they were was then the real victory of the general strike. The rst of the radical chains that attaches us to the present moment becomes then the one that makes us labor-power. We can still pretend that we could be everthing, but weve never been so nothing. One can spurn the dust, there aint any prize no more.4 Circulation needs to be grasped as such, as a moment dened by production. Being far from any center of production, it seems that circulation of commodities or money was never grasped by the occupations as a part of an organic whole. ! The restructuring in the 70s was due to a crisis of valorization that could only be overcome by a recentralization in favor of the growth of

There were 38 general strikes in Greece between 1980 and 2008 (by comparison, 10 in France during the same time, and of course, none in the US).
3

The disaster of the Longview strike (that ended up with contracts that were at the best, disappointing) played the same role but negatively: instead of opening new horizons, it only announced that the party was over. Once confronted by the impossibility to unify the Occupy movement and a classical struggle around working conditions, the Longview strike ended up in internal and bitter ghts between the two camps. If struggle over the wage or the working conditions are still present, moments like this show their structural incapacity to now be able to make a leap beyond it. To struggle as a worker is to struggle, very often, for a lost cause, denying ones own identity of being nothing. It is only by seeing this that one can make the leap which separates, now, a particular struggle from generality.
4

revenue and a dismantling of the old production process. As comrades point out, "the invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s" [Blockading the port is only the rst of many last resorts, Society of Enemies, bayofrage.com]. ! The restructuring must be considered "as in itself". It is a moment with its own conditions, but also with its own ideological forms in which this mode of production appears. ! The blockading of the economy can only leap into the abolition of the economy if production and circulation are seen as two individual moments of the same valorization process, with labor as its core, commodity as a passing form and value as its essence. This understanding will be produced by the struggles trying to overcome their own limits. Until then, the economy will be only seen as a mass of circulating commodities or just as a ux of the money-commodity.

Second limit: the sphere of reproduction without that of production ! First of all, it is important to note the difference between the Oakland Commune and the riots of December 2008 in Greece. The riots in Greece took place at the level of the reproduction of the proletariat, but never within it. The questions of gender, food, housing, care, and health were never even challenged in December 08 because the struggle appeared only as the confrontation with police, that is, it only took this one form. The reproduction of the proletariat as a whole was in front of them, but only under the uniform of the cop. Looting was the only horizon to challenge it. ! The Greek riots in December 2008 were a turning point because they sounded the beginning of a new cycle of struggle at the same time that the news of bank crashes announced a new economic cycle. Since then, revolts deepened simultaneously with the crisis. The sphere of reproduction (by sphere of reproduction, we do not mean the reproduction of capital as a whole, neither the reproductionand productionof the "race of workers" within the private sphere but the reproduction of the proletariat as a whole) is the main sphere in the present moment where struggles appear. The reason behind that is becauseeven in countries like Greece which, once austerity measures were enforced, saw a drastic lowering of the nominal wagethe rst relation of proletarians to the crisis is through the devaluation of the real wage ("real wage" in its broadest sense, i.e. taking into account all the indirect wages): dismantling of the welfare state, uncontrolled rise of unemployment, a housing bubble due to a withdrawal of the investments from production to the rent, the burst of this bubble for private credit and a rising ination.
6

! More broadly, it looks like this cycle of struggle is just accentuating a general tendency of the restructuring: that of decentering class struggle from the sphere of production to the sphere of reproduction. ! The sphere of reproduction is not the same as the private sphere. It includes it, but includes also the moment of the relation to the State which is constituted in the public sphere (the public sphere is equal to the relation to production and the relation to the State). In the sphere of reproduction, one is, theoretically, an individual and a citizen as labour-power destined to nd itself once again in the face-to-face with capital. The disconnection that is produced by the restructuring, is that this face-to-face is not a given anymore, and that the individual and citizen is not at the same time necessarily a labour-power. From then on, what had made a constant mediation between the sphere of production and that of the reproduction, as much as it was a domination of the rst over the second, is not a given anymore, and the sphere of reproduction appears as an autonomous moment, although it cannot be such (it can only exist for the sphere of production). Its from then on that everything that was not questioned by programmatism becomes all the more obvious: gender, sexuality, domestic labour, housing, etc. And that struggles mainly take place around those categories through a constant direct confrontation with the State. ! It is true that some of the movements of square occupations were partly identifying themselves in opposition to only one moment of the reproduction process (the rentier State in the Arab Spring, the austerity-cuts in Greece, the housing in Israel), while others placed themselves directly within the whole of reproduction (Spain and US). The rst ones could be contained only for a time, under a form of frontism. This fell apart as soon as the main "demand" was realized (fall of Mubarak or Ben Ali, turning itself into a never-ending cycle of riots (the epic battles of the Cairo proletariat) and wildcat strikes (never-ending sit-ins in Tunisia). When this "demand" failed (vote of anti-austerity measures in Greece, maintenance of the regime in Quatar, launching of a civil war by Gadha, clear signs of the Israeli government that nothing serious would be done), the movement fell apart. Spain and US were the only two struggles that could never identify themselves under any demand, struggles which started as a pure general product of the crisis rather than as a product of one aspect of the crisis. But, and thats one of their common points (the other main common point being their link with the crisis), all of those movements had to deal with the reproduction of the proletariat as a whole. ! The relation with the police is the other side of the autonomization of the moment of reproduction. "If the major result of the production process is the reproduction of the face-to-face between the proletariat and capital, it is not guaranteed that this face-to-face leads ipso facto to the rst moment of exchange between capital and labour (the purchase and sale of labour
7

power). The disciplining of labour-power, facing a proletarian that has become again, as proletarian, a poor, is everywhere on the agenda. The forms of intervention are disciplinary ones." [Thorie Communiste, The glass oor]. There is a being-together, only because all proletarians have become again, poor. There is reunication by capital of all that had made the proletariat fragmented into various stratas, which had allowed any moron to pretend that the proletariat had disappeared or had been integrated. But this bringing together is done without any other basis than that of the discipline, and discipline is the task of the State. Discipline, in that case, is only the police. ! Its for this reason that the gure of the cop ends up being, everywhere, that of the main enemy. Not out of misunderstanding, but by a simple effect of counter-strike: the geographical zoning within countries becomes more and more pronounced and police violence is a daily affair, and, often, the only relation with the State and capital.5 ! Police violence effaced some frontiers in the Occupy movement (the 700 arrests of October 1st in NYC, the pepper-spraying of a line of students quietly sitting in UC Davis by a copper with an impassive face,..) and brought it about that many participants considered to be "liberals" transformed themselves into radicals within a few days. The destruction of the camps (and particularly the rst destruction of the Oakland campin a military style that evoked more Fallujah than "social dialogue"on the 25th of October, and the image of the marine vet Scott Olson, with his face wounded by a bean-bag shot while he was reading the rst amendment to a line of cops), was in certain places the swan song of the movement, but in many, the moment of radicalization. ! Oakland was, in that respect, a particular place. Within the rst days, the general assembly voted the camp a police-free zone. Patrols at night were taking place in order to make sure they wouldnt come too close. The reasons were thus: a high presence of "radicals", a high presence of people who grew up in the ghetto, and one of the most notoriously violent police departments of the country left little room for the natural liberal embracing of uniforms.6 One of the main forms of organization against the police was the FTP marches organized each end of the week from the 7th of January on. If

For a more through development of the role of the police in the rentier State, refer to "Hanging by a Thread: Class, Corruption and Precarity in Tunisia", L.S., Mute magazine: "Corruption is then (...) a moment in the states habitual, harassing reproduction of the mass of marginals in the restructuring Tunisian economy. Thus the increasingly particularised experience of the relationship to the state, is a universal experience of the class. One could say that in the moment of recognition that sparked the revolt, the particularisation of the individuals fate and the fragmentation of experience is understood as a class experience."
6

To all the previous reasons, one must be added: the mayor, Jean Quan, represent the leftier fringe of the Democratic Party. She started politics in the 70s in Maoist groups and was in the front of the marches following Oscar Grants murder. There is, therefore, no room for any belief that it would be possible to humanize the structure of the city (and that of the police).
8

those marches were never of a particularly impressive number, what was remarkable about them was that they had a large echo for the people who grew up in West Oakland, one of the black middle-class bastions transformed from the end of the 60s on, by pauperization, the transformation of the production process (for that matter, the transformation of ports and then the implementation of the containers system), the urban politics dictated by rich neighborhoods and the intense repression against the Black Panthers 7 and the "gangs" (and, from then on, the transformation of those "gangs" into real maas), as well as the massive arrival of heroin and then crack (with the support of the CIA and political maas). That neighborhood is, in that sense, not an exception, but a blueprint of all the nightmares that are Americas cities.8

Withdraw from production? The haunted-house and its glorious tenants. ! Production, circulation and reproduction are three moments of the same totality, of the same process, in which production is the "predominant one" because it is the "real point of departure". One could write about circulation and reproduction exactly as Marx wrote about distribution: "Distribution is itself a product of production, not only in its object, in that only the results of production can be distributed, but also in its form, in that the specic kind of participation in production determines the specic forms of distribution, i.e. the pattern of participation in distribution." [Grundrisse, 1857] We absolutely agree with Theorie Communiste when they say, "if class struggle remains a movement at the level of reproduction, it will not integrate its own raison-dtre, which is production. This is currently the recurring limit of all riots and insurrections, which denes them as minority struggles. Revolution will have to penetrate production in order to abolish it as a specic moment of the relation between people and, at the same time, to abolish labour through the abolition of wage labour." [The present moment, SIC 1, p.135] But when they then add that: "That is the key role of productive labour and of those who at a specic moment are the direct bearers of its contradiction, because they live this contradiction in their
7

The inuence of the Black Panthers played the only role of historical referent on the imaginary of the Oakland Commune. The organization was born in Oakland and stayed there, throughout the 70s, the highest of point of focus for social tensions. Somehow, the Black Panthers appeared at this precise moment of the collapsing of programmatism, which means that their means of struggle took place only in the sphere of reproduction (free meals, free school, committees of neighborhood protection, womens rights,...) while their theoretical and organizational structure was still purely programmatist.
8

The meticulous description of that process is brilliantly exposed by Mike Davis in City of Quartz (Verso). For the city of Oakland, refer to American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, Robert O. Self, Princeton University Press.
9

existence which is both necessary and superuous for capital at the same time. Objectively, they have the capacity to make of this attack a contradiction for capital itself, to turn the contradiction that is exploitation back on itself as well as against themselves. The path of the abolition of exploitation passes through exploitation itself; like capital, the revolution is also an objective process." [op. cit.]this is when our roads diverge. Productive labour is a category within the reproduction of capital, not a class division. ! There was an active subject in programmatism 9 that was not the same as the proletariat, the working class, because programmatism had production as its sole horizon (and distribution as its sole sphere of attack). Its from then on that the notion of productive labour (and therefore of the productive worker) was the Trojan horse of programmatism. Since the end of that epoch, some try in vain to prove that every labour is "productive" (including the "reproductive labour"), some persist in tracing an old model and look desperately where could be hiding the new productive worker that could act as a revolutionary subject, while others want to get rid of those categories, seeing them as only moral. Going back to Marx allows us to understand what really is productive labour as a category and not as a class. Undertaking that question is not starting a theoretical debate on the sexuality of angels, it is rather the attempt to practically liquidate the categories in communist theory that cant see over a dead horizon: that of programmatism. ! From Marx, we can say that any labour paid for by capital is productive (which implies, wage labour, surplus-value and the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital). Its no coincidence that in the Missing Chapter VI 10 , the section on productive and unproductive labour follows that of subsumption. We can go so far as saying that any labour really subsumed by capital is productive. ! Therefore, in the present time, we can say that almost all labour performed by the global work force is productive. But it is only under the measure of a particular capital.

We call programmatism the period from the midlle of the 19th century to the 1970s, the years of the restructuring. The point is not, unlike Moishe Postone, to look at this period as a mistake or as the result of a poor understanding of Marx, but as a period of the class struggle. Lenin, Makhno or Pannekoek were all programmatists. Describing the german left, Gilles Dauv gives a precise denition of what programmatism is: "The reality of the enterprise, as a form of production specically capitalist, was not questioned. Thinking the abolition of economy was even less in the cards. (...) Self-management by the workers councils is capital seen from the point of view of the worker, i.e. from the point of view of the cycle of productive capitalism." [Ni Parlement ni syndicats: les conseils ouvriers!, new edition, Les nuits rouges, p.6, personal trans.] It is futile to try to understand the "mistakes" of programmatism. One has to understand now, through programmatism, how it is possible to afrm that we live in a different period.
10

The Appendix in the Penguin version of Capital

10

! Individual labor is productive when it fullls the aforementioned three conditions (wage, surplus-value, additional capital), i.e. the three moments of the immediate process of production (the selling and buying of the labour force, surplus-labour and accumulation). But it is only on the level of the individual capital. "Hence labour as producing value always remains the labour of the individual, but expressed in the form of general labour. Consequently productive labouras labour producing valuealways confronts capital as labour of the individual labour-power, as labour of the isolated labourer, whatever social combinations these labourers may enter into in the process of production. While therefore capital, in relation to the labourer, represents the social productive power of labour, the productive labour of the workmen, in relation to capital, always represents only the labour of the isolated labourer." [Theories of Surplus-Value, volume I, addenda 12, section B, mark 1321] ! What Marx lacked, is to unify the theory of productive and unproductive labour (which was only fully elaborated in the manuscripts of the Theories of Surplus-Value and the Missing Chapter VI) with the theory of the schemes of capital reproduction based on the division of total social capital into three sections, as developed in the third section of Capital, Volume II. ! At the level of total social capital, a labour is productive only according to the section where it is realised. Therefore, there can be productive labours in an unproductive sector and unproductive labours in a productive one. Those two dynamics have nothing in common. ! A worker of the sector of luxury consumption can be productive for the individual capital his boss represents, but he is not productive for the total social capital because the surplus-value that he produces will be realised only when the commodity produced will be bought, and this buying can only be done with the prots of another section. The surplus-value that he produces for the individual capital is realised only by the consumption of a part of the surplus value of total social capital (using the revenue, the capitalist "spends the fruit of his capital" [Grundrisse, p.468])11 . That surplus-value that the individual capital realizes will be divided into additional capital and consumption. At the level of total social capital, that surplus-value didnt disappear, it piled up in an unproductive sector. There is no possibilty of accumulation from an unproductive sector, whatever the productivity of labour that it has obtained. ! For the individual capital, there is a subsumption of the productive worker, for the total social capital, a distinction. Productive labor can therefore only be understood at the level of the total social capital. It corresponds to a sector that cannot even be delimited to some commodities: the same at screen sold to a proletarian who saved for
"The money which A here exchanges for living labour -- service in kind, or service objectied in a thing -- is not capital but revenue, money as a medium of circulation in order to obtain use value, money in which the form of value is posited as merely vanishing, not money which will preserve and realize itself as such through the acquisition of labour." [Grundrisse, p.467]
11

11

months and to a capitalist who did not is in the rst case paid out of the wage, in the second, out of the revenue. It therefore contains productive labor in the rst case, unproductive labor in the second. The commodity that is being produced has therefore no importance of any kind ("this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk." [Grundrisse, p.273]). Neither does the labor because, as seen previously, a worker is nowadays always productive for her own capitalist. The experience of labor is the same, the exploitation of the "productive worker" being the same as that of anyone else. ! The attempt to identify productive labour and the productive sector was not just a poor understanding of Marxian categories, it was the Achilles heel of programmatism. Marx himself could not go beyond his epoch, and he steps back towards the end of the section on productive and unproductive labour in the Theories of surplus-value. Thus he comes back to what he just afrmed and attempts to identify productive labour and material production [op. cit., addenda 12, section G]. It is obvious that material production can in no way be a valid category ("to be productive labour is a quality of labour which in and for itself has absolutely nothing to do with the particular content of the labour, its particular usefulness or the specic use value in which it is expressed" [Draft Chapter VI of Capital, Results of the Direct Production Process, mark 483]). The capitalist mode of production is production of commodities, material or not and one can in no way divide the sectors of production into material and immaterial. This hardly convincing last minute about-turn is only the proof that in programmatism, productive labour could never be understood as a category, but always under a moral sign. ! Marx couldnt avoid being programmatist. This era is over and one can only understand now productive and unproductive labour as a category. ! For all that, we cannot make this step which consists in saying that every proletarian is a productive worker or that it doesnt matter. Not because it is wrong (that wouldnt matter), but because putting the problem in this fashion is always doing it for political reasons. And those political reasons always hide whats at stake: the understanding of what capital is. For it is only from that, negatively, that our understanding of communism is outlined. An analysis that doesnt attack productive labour as a category resolves in thinking the capitalist mode of production as simple circulation of objects, or as a system of good citizens ripped off by a rapacious banker. Its horizon, at best, can not envisage the abolition of production. Third limit: the sphere of the political, a sphere between the public and private spheres. Class alliance, unsustainable subject and percentages.
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During more than two months, the Oakland Commune faced the reproduction of the proletariat as a whole, with all of its differences that makes it an unsustainable subject. What does it mean to be part of the proletariat in Oakland? It can mean being a 50 year old port employee who has seen his social level fall from comfortably middle-class12 of the Fordist epoch to a proletarianized suburbanite who knows shell never be able to come up with the payments of the life she bought with credit. It can mean being a teacher wholl get laid off in the next six months and have absolutely no idea where shell end up on the labour market. But most of the time, it just means growing up as surplus-population, as absolutely dispossessed, having for their sole horizon of survival the crack or meth economy, prostitution and the porn industry. 13 And in that case, it also means being a walking target for any scumbag with a uniform.14 In any case, to be a part of the proletariat means the impossibility of identifying oneself under any such identity except that of having "No Future". What made people go to the Oscar Grant Plaza was not the idea of a communal identity but of a communal lack. It was on that base that people organized.15 And on that basis, they could not organize differently than they

12 The

ambiguous term of "middle-classes" is here used in lack of anything better. If it is undeniable that a good part of the American "middle-classes" are composed by workers (or their herons) who saw their living standards rising in the same time as their credits during the years of economical boom, those classes have always had a particular vision of the world. Therefore, putting them under the term "proletariat" without understanding their particularities, is not to understand the collisions within it once that the many stratas collapse. The reproletarianization of a part of the "middle-classes" is one of the main aspects of this crisis. Those people play therefore a major but also particular role. It is this particularity that we have to address.
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Ofcial unemployment rate in Oakland is 16.2% (U.S. avg. is 9.1%). Recent job growth is negative. Oakland jobs have decreased by 2.7% in 2011. Violent crimes ofcial rate is of 16 per 1000 in Oakland compare to 4 nationwide.
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The murder of Oscar Grant, executed in cold blood by the Bay Area Transportation Police on New Years Eve 2009, while he was handcuffed, head against the ground and unarmed was one of the ferment of Occupy Oakland. Many riots happened the following weeks and the night of the court verdict (the cop was sentenced to two years of jail) in July 2010. The particularity of this murder (somehow quite banal for the Oakland Police Department or the BART) is that a train of passengers was on the other side. The videos of the murder were seen by hundred of thousands of times in the following days. The changing of the Frank Ogawa Plaza into Oscar Grant Plaza in the rst days of the camp proves the resonance of that murder in the collective ideal of the camp, as much as a general noncompromising attitude with the police, and not one limited to the radical milieu.
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The Tumblr blog "wearethe99percent gives a quite precise idea of what all those who thought joining the Occupy movement had in common: nothing, if it is not a life shattered by economic misery. Beyond the harrowing aspect of those texts, what is central is that no demand can get out off them. People expose their personal economic misery with the sad variety that goes with it and without a trace of hope, only the one of a "Together we stay!"
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did: on the level of the reproduction of the proletariat. Which is anything but labour. ! The division between the public and private spheres is not the same as the one between the spheres of production and reproduction. In the public sphere, the individual exists vis--vis production i.e. as a laborer, but also vis--vis the State, i.e. as a citizen. In the private sphere, the laborer exists only as an individual. The State, in the capitalist mode of production, is a necessary sphere of mediation between the public and the private sphere. It is the sphere that ensures that the proletarian reproduces herself as a proletarian, that is to say as an individual going back to the face-to-face between labour force and capital. But the State, by denition, has to be a separate sphere, although by denition too, the State cannot be something else than a bourgeois State, i.e. a State serving capital. The sphere of the political is the creation of another sphere, parallel to that of the State, a kind of in-between, a sphere where the public pretends to be private and the private pretends to be public. At the end of the day, this sphere exists only outside of the public and private sphere (to the contrary of the State, which exists only to maintain the separation between those two spheres and their mediation), only because the two others are untouched. The sphere of the political is the idea of a civil society not separated from the State, that is to say not separated from politics. It is the idea of society in its broadest bourgeois-liberal meaning (and society is nothing else than the last result of the production process). ! It is important to emphasize that the Occupy movement in the US never really went out of the squares despite the noteworthy and praiseworthy efforts such as "Occupy the Hood". Considered as a neutral place, the squares had the aspect of the reconquest of a public space (often privatized as has shown the legal complications around Zuccotti Park), while making it a private space where anyone can bring her own tent and expose her existence. The comparison, often made, with a Baptist protestant church is not without sense: what its all about is to feel born again, to recognize a new belonging, to lay bare ones difculties and feelings, to make them public. The human microphone as a form of relations of struggle expresses that the best. Developed only to counter the ban against sound equipment in Zuccotti park, it ended up being the only form in which the movement could recognize itself, its differentia specica, in that it served before all to express the public sharing of a private suffering. ! Another example, already mentioned, of this impossibility to get out of the square is that of the elementary schools in Oakland. The budget of the district, voted on during the third week of the Oscar Grant plaza Occupation, settled on the closing of 5 schools (all located in the poorest neighborhood) at the end of the year. That measure is part of a larger plan which attempts to restructure the school system in Oakland before the end of 2013. There could be up to 30 schools closed out of 101 schools in the district. Despite that, no real longlasting link was created between the
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square and the schools, although some of them are only a walking distance from the plaza. This shows that the Oakland Commune could not recognize itself in the most basic struggle on the level of the reproduction of the proletariat. Outside of the square, nothing could be attacked, nothing could be seen. ! Delimited to this space, this "commune", the movement could neither address the public sphere nor the private one. To address the public sphere would have required it to be able to address labour, production. To address the private sphere would have required it to be able to pull down the Jericho walls that surrounded it, to attack neighborhood after neighborhood, and address there the causes that determine, that construct the private sphere. ! If the movement placed itself on the level of the political sphere, it can also be explained by the variety of classes that came to the squares. In a city like Santa Cruz, which counts a huge population of homeless (mainly vets of the last wars), and a general population mainly composed of liberal middle-classes (the university of Santa Cruz is the main economic motor of the city and the price of real estate is amongst the highest in the country), the camp could never get the same cohesion as elsewhere due to the lack of a middle-strata. In then end, it quickly turned into a homeless camp with discussions organized by and for middle class liberals. When the occupation of a bank was happening literally on the other side of the river (namely a separation of less than a mile and a complete view of each other), and that place is about to be taken over by the police, some present in the occupation went the camp to ask for some support. A friend recalled that after trying to convince a homeless person that it was in the interest of the camp to defend the occupation, this person pointed at the American ag in front of his tent and replied, "Have you seen that? Does it read "Occupy" on it?" ! This counter-example is just here to show us a rule: the physical cohesion of the movement (in as much as its limits) was due to the class variety in it. As we have seen, the geographical situation of the Oscar Grant Plaza, located 4 blocks from the frontier between Downtown and West Oakland, played a major role. By comparison, Zuccotti park in New York is located 18 miles from the Bronx, which explains the difference of composition between the two movements, since many couldnt go to Zuccotti. The weakness of many of those square occupations was seen as a feeling of non-unication, in the lack of middle-stratas. Seen through cynical eyes, one can say that in some cities, those camping are those condemned to it and those who can afford it. In those cities, the moment of disintegration always comes when the higher stratas leave out of disgust for their proximity with the lowest ones. This disgust was present in New York, it was a central dynamic in Santa Cruz, but, to the exception of individual quarrels, it never took shape in Oakland.
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! This question of unication is related to the sole slogan that can be highlighted from the US occupations (a slogan that sometimes pretended to be a demand but that can be nothing more than a sand castle) is: "we are the 99%". It echoed the reality of a cross-class struggle just as much as it echoed the ideal of maintaining it as an impossible identity. This movement of occupations was a cross-class struggle, admittedly, to the extent that a part was composed by diverse middle-classes petried for their future. But the slogan reects the idealism that drove a part of the crowd: that of a trans-class struggle, of a struggle where all classes would melt together under a common banner, but remain as they are. The disgust that quickly took over the liberal middle-classes towards the presence of homeless in most camps is the most basic proof that this slogan was nothing but a fantasized identity, this identity being absolutely unsustainable per se. Furthermore, the other side of the coin of the 99% slogan is the police, and the recurring (and absolutely idiotic) question "Are cops part of the 99%?" was somehow the most sober confession of helplessness of the movement of occupations in the US. It is only because there could be this fantasized unity of the 99% that this unity can extend to the only executioner that faces it. ! At the same time, the slogan of the 99% has a richness to it, which is that of generalization. 16 Beyond the numerous critiques that the radical milieux have formulated, one must try to understand why, in a country where no one was speaking of classes anymore, such a slogan was able to bring together such varied classes; and one must also understand why such a question always brought forth ones belonging to the "99%" (which was becoming, like in a Baptist church, a purely performative function). The crisis, like all crises, comes with a possibility of generalization as much as a possibility of separation. The rst aspect is that of a revolutionary moment, the second being the counter-revolution. A generalization is only possible once all the classes involved attack the mode of production. It is then that their class belonging falls apart and that they became the class, the historical party. The body of the proletariat enters then in the process of chemical precipitation. It becomes a body more solid than the milieu where it was born. This process of precipitation is the "class-belonging". But this class-belonging is already a handicap, an obstacle, an external constraint which, once accepted, turns out to be solely a burden with which one doesnt know what to do. The slogan of the "99%", particularly in the US context, is a class-belonging slogan (a weak one, but still a class belonging slogan). And it is in that fashion that it becomes such a handicap. In the internal struggle of this becoming class, the movement of communisation
For us, generalization is opposed to unication. Unication imposes the subsumption of all under a unity. In generalization, particularities are intact but become linked with each other, organically. Unication could only function in programmatism - since there was subsumption of all under a unique subect: the male white worker. Generalization is the only communist horizon of the present moment.
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will be the tendency which, once class belonging is posed as an external constraint, will tend towards the abolition of this class (and from then on, of all classes). But before that, the question of generalization, neither as impoverishment nor as compromise, but as radicalization, will be the main question. This generalization will be a moment of rupture that will turn on the masses. ! At its peaks, there was a glimpse of that in the Oakland Commune. ! Another aspect of this internal tendency of the movement to recognize itself under an unsustainable identity is the presence of the national ag. In the US, the question of patriotism did not have the same resonance as in the occupation of Syntagma square in Athens. Blaumachen underlines four reasons explaining the presence of Greek ags in the Indignados movement: the social structure of the movement and the links between class struggle and anti-imperialism, the perception of austerity measures as imposed by "foreigners", the meager place of Greece in the capitalist nations hierarchy, the migratory crisis in Greece [The "Indignados" movement in Greece, SIC 1]. But none of those reasons can explain the presence of American ags in the Occupy movement (not even the social structure, since it is not necessarily the petty-bourgeoisie whos carrying the ags but often the most impoverishedvets with no future on the labour market). In the same way as with the constant reference to the First Amendment, those ags appear within the terrain opened by the idea of a civil society not separated from politics. This idea can only take place once the struggle attacks neither the private nor the public sphere, but instead stagnates in the sphere of the political. ! In this fashion, any attempt to go beyond the sphere of the political and to attack the private or the public sphere was an attempt to overcome the limits of the struggle. Somehow, self-organizing as precarious workers or as women or queers were two sides of the same attack. But then one must answer the question: why did women and queers self-organize and not precarious workers? 17 This answer, for us, lies within the limits of a struggle that takes into account the sphere of reproduction without that of production. Somehow, one could say that this third limit of the struggle (the sphere of the political) is the product of the rst two, their logical extension in which both take form.

End of the "alternative"? From one counter-revolution to the next. Tthe cycle of struggle of anti-globalization, rested on the idea of the alternative. "The alternative doesnt present itself as the managing of the
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Attempts to self-organize as precarious workers happened only once the movement had lost his breath and had lost the hope to reconquer a space. Furthermore, they never went beyond the radical milieus.
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really existing society, but as the other side of the present society, reconstructed and redened according to its needs." [R. Simon, Le dmocratisme radical, Senonevero, p.106, perso. trans.] The movement of square occupations (Arab Spring, Indignados and then Occupy) showed as if it was even neededthat this alternative is obsolete. If one looks at the Occupy movement, the main characteristic is the absence of demands, not by choice, but out of impossibility. But when one takes a closer look to those demands (because behind this absence, one must see an uncontrollable multitude of individual demandseach one coming to the square with her own home-made placard), what one can see is a brand new reformism (but one that cant be recuperated politically). Abolish the Fed, make the bank pay, stop speculation, everyone comes with her little idea of management and all that gets blended in the middle of yoga classes, never-ending bongos playing, the shouting of a homeless person pretending hes an FBI agent and the smell of incense. ! The characteristic of the present moment is the impossibility of the slightest reform. In such a context, the avalanche of reformist propositions that made up the daily bread in all those camps should be seen only in their entirety, i.e. in the fact that no single slogan could emerge. ! But if one considers that the era of the "alternative" is over, one must recognize that the present struggles have many common grounds. One is the personication of capital under the vulgar feature (and structurally antiSemitic, although this anti-Semitism didnt work there, contrary to the English occupations) of the nance capitalist, of the speculator. That is, to see the capitalist but not capital, and hence, to consider the economy as a natural process. ! Another of those grounds is the role played by civil society. In Oakland, reaction was the terrain of the non-prots, which, with their inuence on black or brown populations, were one of the pillars of the movement in as much as a break pedal. Those non-prots have put into question the idea of political legacy, of the transfer of radicalism from one generation to another. Some who are part of them pretended that without their work--that is, once the movements of the 70s broke down, carrying the duty of spreading radical councisouness and maintaining struggles within local structures throughout the years--the Oakland Commune would have never been possible. This is probably a factor, but then one must ask the question of the rupture. If non-prots were able to carry a form of the radical tradition (a quite meager and questionable tradition, however, seeing the compromise that the non-prots had done with the administration), their role during the Oakland Commune was to try to contain the movement. If some have seen a battle over the question of legitimacy towards the movement between radicals and non-prots, the answer is of little matter. What matters is that, in most cases, it was the measures proposed by radicals (refusing to compromise with the police, unpermitted demonstrations, the general strike,
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the occupation of buildings, posing the gender question...) and not the ones proposed by the non-prots that were chosen by the movement. ! But the non-prots raised a crucial question: that of racial legitimacy. One cannot think of a movement in the US without tackling the question of race. Each time the non-prots were trying to bring back order, they always did it under the banner of "Follow those whiteys and youll end up in jail!" The fact that this question found a recurring echo in the debates shows that it is a central one. Even if not all the members of non-prots are from ethnic minorities, they are respected by them. Which is not always the case of radicals, who, for the most part, moved to Oakland out of free choice in the last years. It is certain that a black or chicano person from the ghetto does not have the same position in front of a judge as a white person, especially if their cases are considered political.18 The question of risks and legitimacy was therfore central in the debates around and in the movement, not even to mention the question of involving undocumented immigrants in the movement. What must be underlined is that, although there is some truth in it, racial conicts were very rare19 and radicals found a lot of support with the people coming from the ghetto. ! Somehow, one could say that the limits underlined in this text were already inherent to the period of anti-globalization. The key leap from that period to the current one is the withdrawal of the idea of the alternative. The slogan "Another World is Possible" would sound now as faded as "Bring the War Home!" and it is note-worthy that none of the slogans of the antiglobalization era were in the Oakland Commune, although the references to the Black Panthers were constant.20 But one should see the alternative only in the way it interlinked revolution and counter-revolution in the previous cycle of struggle. The alternative was formalizing practices of struggle once it was obvious that any workers identity was gone. The alternative wasnt in itself a counter-revolution. It is counter-revolution that was using it, that was its achievement. ! This cycle of struggle, as any cycle of struggle, contains within itself its own counter-revolution. This counter-revolution has for its main content the creation of an identity that can only exist in the sphere of the political. "Every stage of the development of the class struggle must overcome the traditions of previous stages if it is to be capable of recognizing its own tasks clearly and carrying them out effectively -- except that development is
During the movement, the differences of sentencing according to race were more than obvious. The fact must be added that growing up in the ghetto means often carrying with you a police record, past jail sentences or a suspended sentence. In any case, risks are not the same.
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Beyond all that, one question can be asked: why did the movement never succeed in integrating the chinese population since the plaza is only a block from Chinatown?
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As well as, in a broader way, references to the cycle of struggle of the 70s. "Power to the people!" was heard constantly, for example.
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now proceeding at a far faster pace. The revolution thus develops through the process of internal struggle. It is within the proletariat itself that the resistances develop which it must overcome; and in overcoming them, the proletariat overcomes its own limitations and matures towards communism." [A. Pannekoek, World revolution and communist tactics, Chapter III] ! When there is no generalization, there is then the loss of the content of rupture that was present in a practice. In Egypt, Tahir square allowed a completely new role of women within struggles, in the begining, at least by the very simple fact that every one had to share the same place day and night. A year later, aggressions and rape of women are more and more common there and demonstrations denouncing sexual harrassment are violently attacked. ! Any activity that tends to go beyond those practices, beyond this identity, beyond the sphere of the political, attacks then what the present moment produces of counter-revolution.

Rifts and rift activity In its constitution, the Oakland Commune had to deal with the whole of the reproduction of the proletariat, without a revolutionary process around it. This meant organizing for food, health care, shelter, activities, and all the rest of it, but still being imprisoned in the relations and categories of capitalism and all the "old lthy business that comes with it". It therefore constituted itself around a community that was the real community of the struggle inasmuch as it was a community within the capitalist world. That became, for example, obvious to anyone when a young guy was shot by a gang member who was looking for him exactly a month after the beginning of the camp. Reality then struck back and everyone present describes the scene as a moment where no one knew what to do. The Oakland Commune was not a form or a model, it was a dynamic. ! The most obvious of those categories that the Oakland Commune had to deal with was the gender division. By "category", we do not mean an abstraction or a vague sociologizing classication. Each mode of production has its own categories and they existand not appearat the most concrete level. But they exist only as relations, not as beings. ! Peoples lives have been crushed by capitalism, their perception is only through this alienated violence that capitalism offers, but every man has always the last resort of dominating the one subject that capitalism creates as reproductive and sexual object: the woman. That particular domination exists only through capital but is not the attribute of any class. This doesnt justify anything, it just helps us understand what our starting point is: the "present conditions" that must be abolished.It is then obvious that if thousands of people are to meet for an undetermined period of time, then
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sexual harassment is going to be a constant challenge. Because if the camp was to be a haven for anyone, it had obviously to be rst of all one for women or queers. And it is on this question that "rift activity" shows exactly what it is. Women and queers had to self-organize for a matter of survival,21 but they had to self-organize within the totality that was the camp. And this totality, as we said, couldnt exist as such. Women and queers selforganizing were one of the main dynamics that would prevent the camp from falling into a fantasized identity, that of the "we are the 99%", because the 99% is a compact whole of the individual poverty and violence of capitalist relations. The 99% is harassment, rape and murder. The organization of an Occupy Patriarchy front was a constant reminder that there was nothing that united this camp but negativity. That became extremely clear when, in the second camp, women and queers were not as strongly organized. ! The connection between the gender question and the two limits of the struggle (circulation and reproduction) is obvious: it is because the Oakland Commune couldnt face labor as a category (a category is complete only once it contains all of its attributes) that it couldnt face gender. Labour is what allows the separation of the totality into spheres: production and reproduction, public and private. Without facing labour, the totality cant be grasped, and neither can its common distinction: labour creates gender and without labour, gender can only be grasped through an essentialization. ! What is a "rift"? It is any class struggle activity that says: "We have to act as a we but we cannot exist as a we". It is any moment that shows a possible overcoming from self-organization to generalization. "Whether there is unication, but then there is the abolition of the same which is selforganizable, or whether there is self-organization but then unication, is a dream which is lost in the conicts that the diversity of situations implies." [Thorie Communiste, Self-organization is the rst act of the revolution...]22 What are rift activities? It is taking part in struggles, understanding their limits and hitting against it, defending measures and practices that will open self-organization towards its abolition. ! Communisation will be the abolition of all classes by the proletariat and this overcoming is already being produced in present struggles inasmuch as its counter-revolution. But if communisation is nothing but a set of measures, those measures will have to be pushed for and defended. They wont come down from heaven. Some groups have coined the term "rift" to name the activities in the present moment that announce communisation. It
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Concerning the Queer movement, survival and self-organization, see the Bashback comrades [Bashback! Queer ultraviolence, anthology, Ardent Press] Thorie Communiste uses the term "unication" where we use "generalization". We believe those two have an absolutely different meaning (see note 16).
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is of course obvious that those activities are not the property of a "communising tendency" or even of a political milieu, but a current, in the sense of a shared horizon. ! What is central is that those activities are not the germs for a revolution to come, they are not a model for what communisation could/should/will be, neither are they the beginning of the revolution. They are the activities that are necessary in the present moment because they struggle with communisation as their horizon. They are nothing else than practices within the current struggles, practices that can never be formalized. Their point is to act within self-organization but hitting against the limits of selforganization. ! Capital wants to turn any limit into a barrier that it can overcome. So does anyone in a struggle, at the moment of a rift. This barrier, built or present as a necessary rst step, is self-organization. Capital, as a mode of production, can never overcome its own limits. When a mode of production transforms its barriers into limits and overcome them, it means that it grows into a new mode of production. Every limit is always denitive. Once a struggle overcomes its own limits, it leaves "the struggle" behind and engages in a revolutionary process. There, there is no growth, but rupture.

Farewell to the Commune ! Some might question the fact that we chose to call the Occupy Oakland movement the "Oakland Commune". But this name didnt come from a purely wishful-thinking militantism, but somehow reect a reality of the struggle, with its splendor and its weaknesses. Grasping the sphere of reproduction and that of circulation without the sphere of production, battling within the sphere of the political, the Oakland Commune was one of the most prominent and sharpest moments of the present crisis (neither its product, nor its cause, but a moment of the crisis), but at the same time bound to be an enclave. If we have tried to analyze this struggle, it is to see towards which horizon it leads. Analyzing a struggle is not to "see in poverty nothing but poverty", but to see "in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society." [Marx, Poverty of philosophy] ! In all that it achieved, the Oakland Commune was the strongest echo from the future that if there will be a communist revolution, its content will be the complete abolition of all the categories and relations of capitalist mode of production. It showed it everyday, in its victories as much as in its defeats. As crystalization of the present moment, the Oakland Commune showed everyday, in its defeats as much as in its victories, that every category of the capitalist mode of production creates a limit that the struggle must overcome. This overcoming is possible only through generalization,
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contamination of all the cell tissues of society. This generalization is not an enlargement, but a moment of rupture. ! The expansion of struggles outside the work place taking reproduction as a whole into consideration is a moment of the crisis, something that no one could have envisioned. In this fashion, the US Occupations, and in Oakland more than anywhere else, went a step further than December 2008 in Greece. Struggles now are mainly within the reproduction sphere, and when they grasp labour, it is only in its circulation sphere. Consequently, the autonomization and the personication of the moments of the production process are the horizon of struggles. Three reasons for that: the end of the worker identity and its tradition of struggle (which is as well the clearance of its juridical framing), the diversity of the proletariat in times of crisis (once the different strata collapse) and, above all, the drastic fall in the real salary compared to the nominal one. If labor and production are still ghosts in those struggles, it doesnt mean at all that the productive workers will be the central gure of the coming struggles. Labour and production will have to be absorbed fully as categories before measures can be taken for their abolition. ! The coming struggles will overcome the seclusion of those spheres, not by considering production as the so far missed or unseen center, but by grasping production as a process, and therefore grasping capital as value in process. That day, the struggles will blow the trumpets, they will pull down the walls that surrounds them, and they will see that under the riot gear lies a mode of production.

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