The Health unto Death

Recalling what Marx said about the nationalization of the land, that the land cannot belong to either the direct producers or even to any particular generation of humanity, but rather to the species as a whole, Bordiga emphasized the fact that the communist revolution cannot serve to benefit a single class, regardless of how universal that class may be. Were it to do so, it would remain in the stage of the generalization of the proletariat and would not proceed towards its abolition. If one then declares that every person should become a producer, one mutilates humanity at the same time that one casts aside an entire historical-practical acquisition; man does not have to intervene directly, personally, in order to produce! And furthermore, such a demand is revealed to be more and more contradictory with each passing day. As a consequence of the enormous productivity of labor, the act of production can no longer define man; only human activity, the development of the human forces as ends-in-themselves, can be the fundamental determination of a humanity that is finally liberated from capital.

While the slogan “luxury for all” criticises the exclusion of the majority of the world’s population from social wealth, it nonetheless fails to bring into critical perspective the specific form of this wealth. Not only are questions of health and ecology left out; above all, this approach tacitly accepts the consumer monad, individualism of consumption, and separation of the spheres of consumption and production. By accepting this separation, this perspective mistakes emancipation for mechanisation because it ignores the crucial question of the control, construction, and programming of machines. Yet the sphere of consumption is every bit as much a product of modern capitalism as are the spheres of circulation and production. Objectively, its construction is necessary to locate demand for all produced commodities - that is, to keep accumulation going. While labour is construed as pure exertion, toil, or duty, the customer is a queen whose freedom to choose is only limited quantitavely, by money. The qualitative limits of the consumer’s options can be expressed as three options: buy, don’t buy, and steal. While labour is shaped by the hierarchies of subordination to the pressures of the production process, the money commodity lends its possessor control over the labour time of others. That’s why money bears a certain fetish of masculine autonomy. Capital shapes all products as commodities, whether in their particular durability, quality, and specificity, or symbolically in their branding, distinction, and standardisation. The addiction to consumption as a sphere separated from production stands fundamentally at odds with full social emancipation. Critcising capitalism from the standpoint of consumption extends the ideological function of accepting the promise of happiness by means of commodities. The goal is rather to collectively transform all social spheres so that the need to escape - into “leisure” time, the mall, or television - is overwhelmingly minimised.

Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognises the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not “concoct” them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class-consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defence and attack. Marxism, therefore, positively does not reject any form of struggle. Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at the given moment only, recognising as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation, changes. In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim what ever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by “systematisers” in the seclusion of their studies.