Under the long counter-revolution, every generation has produced its own batch of modernizers, fixers and updaters of Marxism. Unable to explain the defeats of the proletariat through the objective course of class society’s development, due to their position outside the party as small circles of individual critical "thinkers", they have one after another, in their personal genius, decided that, in order to save humanity, they must take the Marxist doctrine, "back to the drydocks", fixing what appears broken to their discerning academic minds. Yet, isolated as they are, they can never conceive of the doctrine in its entirety, and always repeat errors they cannot see, errors already surgically treated by our Marxist forefathers long ago.

It is the recurring social position from which the deviation is generated: declassed intellectuals, students, and professionals formed by the individualist culture of the bourgeois academy, claiming Marx as one of their own while moronically dismembering his work. To the relativist philistines, Marxist theory is merely the construct of a few great “thinkers,” one opinion or perspective among many, a “grand narrative” in need of improving if not deconstructing altogether since it’s all a product merely of its time and all men being equal they only need to treat Marx with the same mediocrity that permeates their every fiber, the dialectical and materialist worldview essentially inconceivable by brains which have been thoroughly blended, shaken and stirred by the bourgeois academy. They serve up a theoretical cocktail filled to the brim with different ingredients that refreshes and brings relief to all those troubled with the heavy weight of the moral and social responsibilities that come with holding a true revolutionary Marxist materialist praxis. Who needs systematic historical evaluation of the complex real events of the counter-revolution when you can selectively pick and pull facts to establish theoretical platitudes based on bourgeois common sense which professes to know all to well the lessons and consequences of the Russian Revolution? This is the essence of the historical mutilation that is “When Insurrections Die” by Dauve in End Notes 1. You know what the revolution really needs? Supposedly another hack to fix the errors of the Italian Communist Left.

The reductive conceptualization of “value-form” critique, “real subsumption”, a-political anti-“work” refusalism and "anti-programmatism" merely conceals an old proposition: that capitalism can be abolished without the conquest of political power, without the dictatorship of the proletariat, without the communist party, and without the historical continuity of the programme. It is the immediatist and anarchist refusal of political mediation updated with the appropriation of select positions long defended by our tradition in order to create a blase demoralizing theoretical corpus to convince its readers against all of Marxism’s essential conclusions, prognosticating their adherents return to the nihilist and defeatist bogs from which these petit-bourgeosis vitalists have emerged baptized and born again.

Empirio-Monism and Immediatism

The philosophical roots of this revisionism had already been identified by Lenin long before communization emerged. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, he grouped Georges Sorel alongside the Machists, Bogdanovites, and neo-Kantian pragmatists in their common rejection of materialist theory of knowledge. Empirio-monism reduced knowledge to the organization of human experience rather than the reflection of an objective material world, treating scientific concepts as instruments constructed by thought instead of discoveries about independently existing reality. Objective truth was thereby dissolved into the organization of experience, practical utility, and conceptual coherence, replacing Marxist scientific realism with an idealist epistemology in which consciousness ultimately determines the terms of reality rather than reflecting its material development. It was precisely this philosophical tendency that Lenin identified in Sorel. Discussing Sorel’s attempt to reconcile Poincaré with Le Roy, Lenin highlighted the shared premise between the empiro-monists and Sorell "everything that is not thought is pure nothing", and that science does not mirror nature but merely "corresponds with the mechanisms created by us". Once scientific theory is reduced to conceptual construction rather than the reflection of objective material processes, the question of whether thought corresponds to an independent reality is dismissed as meaningless. Truth becomes a property of ideas themselves rather than of the material world they seek to explain. We have relativist nihilism and solipsism, the philosophical weapons of bourgeois counter revolution bashed against the heads of the proletarian the world over. Communization ultimately reproduces this same idealist method so popular in bourgeois universities today: theory follows the changing forms of consciousness, subjective lived experience, and historical appearance instead of expressing the objective development of capitalist society and the determinate laws governing its movement.

The first modern expression of this refusal in the practical, political sphere appeared in Sorelian syndicalism. Sorel presented himself not as an enemy of Marxism but as its saviour against the parliamentary degeneration of the Second International. Yet in the process, he rejected the very foundations of revolutionary Marxism and established the foundations of the tradition our Party calls “immediatism” and in which Lenin refers to as “left-wing communism” in the Infantile Disorder. Historical necessity gave way to voluntarism, political organization to the myth of the permanent general strike as the revolution itself, and the conquest of power to the immediate action of the producers. For Sorel, the revolutionary "myth" was valuable not because it corresponded to objective reality but because it inspired moral conviction and collective action, displacing scientific analysis with cultural and psychological mobilization. The revolution thus ceased to be the organized overthrow of the bourgeois State made possible by determined objective developments and instead became an ethical act of refusal, a transformation of consciousness rather than the political conquest of power. The same inversion that characterized Bernstein from the right characterized Sorel from the left: both abandoned the material continuity of the communist programme in favour of an immediate tactical solution. One trusted the ballot; the other the mythic general strike.

What Sorel exhibits here, and what every heir of his down to the communizers exhibits after him, is the petty-bourgeois thought’s characteristic infection: an obsession for the latest fashion, for the most recent patent, for the last brain-wave. The revolutionary syndicalists of Sorel’s own school, widely represented across Latin Europe and within elements of the I.W.W. in North America, proclaimed themselves the repository of the final revolutionary discovery, the supersession of party and programme by the union, direct action and the general strike.

The early Marxist Left in Italy confronted precisely this current. Against Arturo Labriola, Orano, Olivetti, De Ambris and the entire syndicalist milieu, it rejected the substitution of the trade union for the political party, insisting that the general strike became revolutionary only insofar as it was subordinated to the conquest of political power by the communist party. The syndicalists mistook a tactical form for a historical principle, replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat with the autonomy of economic organisations, and dissolving the political movement into the immediate struggles of the workshop. In doing so they merely reproduced the bourgeois cult of novelty under revolutionary colours.

The Bolsheviks refused the same seduction. However enticing syndicalism’s slogans appeared against the visibly decaying revisionist socialism of the Second International, they anchored themselves instead in the unfashionable granite of an already established programme, refusing to mistake the latest tactical innovation for a new theoretical foundation. Communization is only the latest terminus of this same chase: another patent taken out against Marxism by authors who, lacking any grasp of its programme, can only wage war against phantoms of their own invention.

Ordine Nuovo & the German-Dutch Left Follow Suit

After Sorell, the deviation reappeared following the First World War in the factory-council theories of Ordine Nuovo. Gramsci and his collaborators mistook organs born within the economic struggle for the sufficient organs of proletarian power itself. Against this illusion, in Seize the Factory or Seize Power, the Italian Left insisted that no socialist transformation can begin before the conquest of political power by the proletariat as a class. Factory councils possess revolutionary significance only insofar as they are subordinated to the dictatorship of the proletariat and its political organ, the communist party. Detached from that programme, they become instruments of self-management of capitalism rather than of revolution. The immediate administration of production cannot replace the prior destruction of the bourgeois State. Here already is the molecular endpoint every immediatism reaches by a different road: a half baked scheme at best, in which each workshop, each council, each locality pursues its own immediate, unmediated relation to production, with no organ capable of subordinating these particular interests to the general historical progress of the movement. Capitalist small-scale production is itself already a molecular phenomenon, an atomized field of disconnected private producers; a proletarian politics built the same way, factory by factory, council by council, local spontaneous insurrection by insurrection, cannot fight this fragmentation, it reproduces it. History has proven this lesson well.

Yet, the German-Dutch Left transformed this error into principle. Opposition to opportunist parties became opposition to the party as such. The communist programme was dissolved into the spontaneous movement of the workers, and organization itself came to appear as an alien force imposed upon the class, which was itself conceptualized as the mere sociological collection of individual workers. The continuity of doctrine gave way to the immediacy of personal experience. Truth, a reflection of the individual’s cognition, shared within the organ of the workers’ council which merely reflects the most popular opinion of the constitutive individuals, bourgeois empiricism and democratic fetishism as the only authentic organs of knowledge and political expression of the apparently wholly spontaneously self-knowing class of autonomous individuals. Here lies the immediatist’s essential confusion, mistaking the count of heads for the criterion of correctness, when the party’s actual authority rests on something the referendum cannot supply: what our tradition calls the theory of rightness.

Dialectical Materialism Vs Solipsistic Nihilism

As we stated in our 1960 text, written in response to Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, A Condemnation of the Renegades to Come, the “theory of rightness” describes the relationship between the communist party, its programme, and the historical movement of the proletariat. The party does not derive the correctness of its political line from the immediate opinions or consciousness of the masses; it begins instead from the invariant Marxist programme and the accumulated theoretical and historical experience of the communist movement, using these to determine its strategy and tactics, making predictions and prescriptions to the class ahead of events. The party therefore precedes the masses politically without standing outside the class: it maintains contact with their struggles and seeks to raise their revolutionary capacity rather than adapting its political direction to their existing level of consciousness. Practice does not create the party’s programme after the fact; rather, the historical development of the struggle tests whether the party has correctly grasped the movement of the class and the conditions of its transformation. The party’s authority therefore rests not upon democratic ratification but upon the correctness of its programme and tactics, a correctness established theoretically in advance of events and verified only afterward as the masses pass through the historical experience the party has already anticipated. Legitimacy is not counted but demonstrated over time, in the political graveyard of the parties and tendencies whose false forecasts are discarded by the objective course of the class struggle.

Communization’s lead theorist Gilles Dauvé claims that "presenting a possibility as a historical necessity always contains the risk of cultivating a mapped-out vision... determinism is teleology for the materialist". This rests on the same indeterminist confusion that the Communist Party has long identified as characteristic of bourgeois philosophy. Marxist determinism neither attributes a purpose to history nor predicts revolution as a prophetic certainty. It simply affirms that social development proceeds according to objective causal laws, in which the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production necessarily generate recurring crises, class antagonisms, and the material conditions for proletarian revolution. To deny historical necessity because it supposedly implies teleology is to sever causes from their effects, reducing history to a succession of contingent possibilities, individual immediate moments, in which revolution becomes merely one conceivable outcome among infinite others, rather than the objective tendency arising from capitalism itself. This rejection of necessity belongs to a long philosophical tradition stretching from the Young Hegelians through Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel, and, later, Deleuze and Guattari, each displacing the motor of history from the objective development of material relations to subjective will, myth, desire, creativity, or lived experience. Communization inherits this same idealist current, locating the abolition of capitalism not in the historical development of class struggle and the conquest of political power but in the immediate ethical transformation of everyday life and the spontaneous affirmation of a human community against social mediation. The “insurrection” and the “revolt” of humanity, the “mythical” general strike only needs more communization believers.

Communization’s appeal to probability, rather than necessity, is on inspection equally hollow. Probability was long defined as the ratio between the cases favourable to an event and the total number of cases, all assumed "equally probable", a definition that is circular, since "equally probable" means nothing other than "having equal probabilities". Even Poincaré conceded that a satisfactory definition of probability was beyond the mathematician’s reach, that something in it remained irreducibly mysterious. Modern probabilism does not resolve this circularity but inverts it into a virtue, celebrating indeterminacy against the "dogmatism" it attributes to causal necessity. Marxist determinism needs no such apparatus: causality is not a chain of discrete events awaiting a probabilistic connector but runs like a rope, no single fibre spanning its whole length, yet their combined tension transmitting the pull unbroken from one end to the other. The class struggle propagates the same way, unevenly, through advance and retreat, but never severed. Only the party holds this thread through counter-revolution’s darkest phases, tracing continuity where others see only rupture, because only the party is built to carry a theory of rightness across a defeat rather than surrendering it to one. As the Party argues in The Probabilities of the Revolution, probability is not the opposite of necessity but the form through which necessity manifests itself in complex historical processes: the exact timing of revolutionary crises cannot be mechanically predicted, but their objective causes remain no less real. By rejecting this causal continuity for an open-ended philosophy of possibility, communization abandons historical materialism for the "weak thought" bourgeois ideology embraces to deny the objective necessity of class struggle and the party’s role as the thread connecting past defeats to future resurgence.

Because the party precedes the masses in this way, its internal discipline cannot rest upon the fluctuating opinions of its membership, nor upon pedagogical or formal democratic mechanisms, but upon fidelity to the historical programme itself. Its cohesion arises from the proletarian vanguard’s instinctive and voluntary adherence to that programme, expressed in devotion, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and revolutionary continuity rather than the educationist cultivation of individual opinion. The party "links up" with the masses not by lowering itself to their prevailing level of consciousness, as opportunism imagines, but by raising the revolutionary temperature of the class through its intervention, transforming the shapeless working masses into a genuine historical class organized for political struggle as its forces grow in sync with the developing capitalist crisis.

Here communization reproduces the old immediatist illusion in a new shade. Having rejected both the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat, it nevertheless assumes that the immense social coordination required to abolish wage labor, value, exchange, and class society will arise spontaneously from the proliferation of "communizing measures", as though conscious political organization could be dispensed with while its practical results somehow emerge of their own accord.

The theory of "rightness" rejects precisely this magical conception. The historical movement does not abolish the need for conscious organization; it produces the need for the only organization capable of anticipating its course and directing the transition in accordance with the invariant programme, the organic Party. Likewise, a workers’ council, commune, or any other localist body that merely aggregates the present opinions of its constituent individuals possesses no comparable criterion of truth; it can only ratify what is already believed in the moment. It is therefore condemned to stupid immediacy, incapable of anticipating the course of history or extending its power beyond isolated centres; it just exists in the present moment like a zen monastic. Every defeat of the proletarian movement strengthened the immediatist conviction that political mediation and organization itself was the source of failure. Yet history demonstrated the opposite: wherever councils remained without the centralized leadership of the revolutionary party and the conquest of political power, economic revolt petered out leading to nothing other than a new method of managing the capitalist firm. We are supposed to be led to believe that it is the “bureaucracy”, the Party, domination and power itself which reproduces capitalism. When in reality it is the continued existence of fragmentary productive units forced into exchange relations. Relative economic autonomy and liberty is exactly the basis of the peasant proprietary economy which gave rise to capitalism itself and it’s what the communizers in all their monastic zeal imply in their proposals.

The Bugbear of “Bureaucracy” and the Modernizers Revelations

The error of this fixation on the bureaucratic bogeyman cannot be overstated. As we argued in On the Thread of Time: The Batrachomyomachia, the moment bureaucracy is elevated from an administrative function within definite class relations into an autonomous historical subject, Marxism’s material analysis begins to disintegrate. The article rejects the notion that "bureaucracy" constitutes a class or mode of production in itself, insisting instead that "bureaucracy has never been a mode of production", but only "a form, an apparatus, a network of agents serving a dominant class". Once this distinction is abandoned, the Russian counter-revolution ceases to be explained through the historical defeat of the international proletariat, the isolation of the revolution, and the penetration of bourgeois influences into the workers’ movement, and is instead reduced to the abstract triumph of "bureaucracy" or "power". The critique shifts from class content to organizational form, transforming Marxism into a moral condemnation of administration, authority, and centralization as such. This theoretical slide first found systematic expression in Socialisme ou Barbarie, survived in the Trotskyist theories of the "bureaucratic caste" and "bureaucratic collectivism", and today reaches its logical conclusion in communization and the broader anarchist milieu, while persisting in diluted form within the liberal reformist labour left through its worship of horizontalism, decentralization, and anti-political activism. Having severed political forms from their class content, these currents can only conclude that every centralized organization reproduces domination, so that the revolutionary party and the dictatorship of the proletariat appear not as the indispensable instruments of communist revolution but as the primary obstacles to it.

Communization’s claim that the defeats of the twentieth century inaugurated entirely "new conditions" or a fundamentally new stage of capitalism demanding the revision of the communist programme rests upon this same philosophical error. The "real subsumption", globalization, social factory, and total integration of the proletariat into capital that it presents as unprecedented historical developments are nothing other than the fuller unfolding of capitalist imperialism already charted by Marx and developed systematically by Lenin. The concentration and centralization of capital, the extension of the world market, the subsumption of every sphere of life beneath commodity production, and the continual transformation of social relations were never unforeseen ruptures requiring a new doctrine, but precisely the historical tendencies classical Marxism anticipated. Yet the declassed intelligentsia and labour-aristocratic milieu emerging from the defeats of 1968 could no longer conceive of their own historical role within this process. Confronted with the temporary stabilization of imperialism, they mistook a conjunctural defeat of the proletariat for its permanent historical integration into capital, reproducing the bourgeois mythology of the "end of history". From this, followed a retreat into bourgeois naturalism and humanism and its associated idealist obscurantism: political revolution gave way to ethical self-transformation, the dictatorship of the proletariat to the immediate dissolution of identities, and scientific historical materialism to the empiricism of lived experience. How bold! How brave! Our renegades! Instead of recognizing that capitalism was merely confirming the trajectory already explained by Marx and Lenin, communization trumpets to the cheer of every bourgeois that Marxism itself had been superseded, the working class defeated!

A Return to Bourgeosis Naturalism

The philosophical tendency Lenin identified in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism did not disappear with Machism but re-emerged after the Second World War in the neo-Hegelian current of Western Marxism, a tradition today perpetuated by obscurantist celebrities such as Slavoj Žižek, who continue to attempt to relocate the center of Marxism from the objective movement of material relations to philosophy, subjectivity, and ideology. Against the materialist conception of history, thinkers such as Lukács increasingly shifted emphasis from the objective laws of capitalist development toward consciousness, reification, and subjective praxis, reopening precisely the idealist problems Marx had overcome. Lenin opposed this neo-Hegelian revival separately from his earlier polemics, rejecting attempts to subordinate Marxism to Hegelian philosophy and insisting that dialectical materialism remained the indispensable scientific foundation of revolutionary theory. The Situationist International inherited this Western Marxist turn and became one of communization’s principal intellectual antecedents. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord famously defined modern capitalism as a condition in which "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation". Although presented as a critique of capitalist social relations, the emphasis shifts from the objective relation of exploitation to its forms of appearance, mediation, and lived experience. Capital increasingly is presented not as an objective social relation rooted in the extraction of surplus value but as a domination of consciousness to be overcome through recovering authentic experience.

Here the influence of empirio-monist and neo-Hegelian assumptions becomes apparent: alienation is understood less through the material relation between capital and wage labour than through the mediation of consciousness itself, reducing revolutionary politics to the dissolution of ideological forms rather than the conquest of political power. The revolutionary problem consequently becomes one of breaking the "spell" of representation, uncovering an authentic natural human community supposedly concealed beneath capitalist appearances, captured in the Situationist slogan of finding the "beach beneath the street". In this way, the material struggle over State power gives way to the immediate transformation of lived experience, preparing the theoretical ground for communization’s claim that revolution consists in the direct abolition of capitalist social relations without the mediating role of the revolutionary party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the transitional political struggle through which Marxism has always explained the path to communism. In abandoning the objective material development of society as the basis of revolutionary science, this tradition also abandons the materialist understanding of class rationality itself. Consciousness ceases to be the product of the historically developed human brain interacting with an objective world within a human society defined by definite class antagonisms and instead becomes the privileged site of generalised human emancipation.

Italian Operaismo and the later writings of Jacques Camatte supplied communization with its final conceptual elements. Operaismo dissolved the critique of exploitation into a generalized refusal of work and the notion of the "social factory", while Camatte progressively dissolved the proletariat itself into an undifferentiated humanity subsumed by capital. After the defeats of the 1970s, these currents increasingly abandoned the workers’ movement for the bourgeois academy, where figures such as Antonio Negri became integrated into the post-1968 French philosophical establishment surrounding institutions like the Collège international de philosophie and the broader milieu of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other post-structuralist theorists who were enlisted into the ranks of the French State to establish the philosophical basis for the further attack on Marxist conceptions, amid the so called “deindustrialization” and the opening of the new phase of renewed capitalist economic crisis and State restructuring in the period.

There the political defeat of the proletariat was recast as a philosophical virtue, translated into the language of postmodernism, cultural theory, and identity, far removed from the terrain of class struggle. Although communization rejects Camatte’s abandonment of class struggle in its most explicit form, it preserves the essential movement this entire degenerated camps uninspired defeatist thought. The proletariat no longer appears as the historically constituted class but a group which simply must abandon "work" and the "worker" as an identity category for the revolution to succeed. A fighting ideology for a vacillating intelligencia to justify their class treachery and abandonment of the proletarian cause to serve the bourgeois in salaried university positions. Yet for the masses of workers who have to work to live or face the jack boot of the capitalist State police or starvation in the streets such a fantastic tale holds little weight.

From the genius mind of Camatte, whose thought would go on to inspire the noble anarcho-primitivist tradition, moving innumerable trust fund kids and declassed youth of the white middle class across North America into lunatic buckskin-wearing antics “rewilding” & evading “domestication” in the wilderness now consumed with apocalyptic wildfires on an annual basis, came another novel theory of new “stages” of capitalism that fundamentally changed the game. We are told that under the first stage of formal subsumption, capital merely takes hold of an existing labour process without transforming it; the worker retains a certain exteriority to capital, a residual identity against which the affirmation of labour as the basis of a future society could still make sense. Under real subsumption, by contrast, capital remakes the labour process, and with it the worker, entirely in its own image: the working class no longer confronts capital as an external antagonist but is itself constituted, reproduced, and defined by capital’s own movement. From this, Théorie Communiste draws the conclusion that the worker’s very identification as a worker, and the struggles waged on that basis, no longer point beyond capitalism but circulate within it, since the category "worker" is now nothing other than a moment of capital’s own reproduction. The affirmation of labour, once the rallying point of “programmatism”, is thus recast as complicity: to organize as a class is, on this account, merely to perform one’s assigned function within real subsumption, to willingly perpetuate capitalism itself, reinforcing the very relation it claims to negate. The solution? The declassed middle class should get comfortable with their proletarianization and potential pauperization, idolize the lumpen and become lifestyle anarchists, anything but organize and constitute itself as a class. Through Camatte’s theory of domestication, Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization, and Kaczynski’s anti-technological philosophy, an anti-civilizational milieu emerged that increasingly abandoned the Marxist question of class and programme in favour of humanity’s flight from civilization itself. While neither Camatte nor Zerzan advocated the nihilistic violence later embraced by eco-extremists, their rejection of industrial society, domestication and progress became part of the wider intellectual atmosphere from which groups such as Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ITS) selectively drew, combining these themes with anti-humanism, misanthropy, and an explicit celebration of indiscriminate violence. Parallel currents within insurrectionary anarchism likewise displaced the proletariat and the communist party with diffuse networks of affinity groups, spontaneous attack, sabotage and permanent revolt, treating insurrection not as a moment within a historical programme but as an end in itself. Despite their differences, both tendencies converge in replacing the communist movement with immediate acts of negation, abandoning the Marxist conception of revolution as the organised political conquest of power by the proletariat in favour of fragmented resistance against "civilization", "technology", or "authority" as such.

Back to Tribal Primitivism or Proudhondian Peasant Capitalism?

Modern communizers have attempted to salvage this tradition by stripping it of its most overtly extremist conclusions and presenting it in a more theoretically respectable form, but the underlying method remains unchanged. What once appeared as the cult of immediacy in Sorel or the councilists now returns clothed in the language of "communization", horizontalism, and local autonomy. As this current diffused into the milieu surrounding The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, and adjacent anarchist circles, its practical horizon steadily contracted toward mutual aid, affinity groups, occupations, autonomous zones, and prefigurative forms of life, converging in practice with the logic of liberal non-profit volunteerism and community activism. The movement itself becomes everything, the end nothing; survival within capitalism gradually replaces the revolutionary conquest of power as the practical horizon. When these fragmented experiments predictably fail to overcome the social totality, the explanation is never sought in the absence of centralized political power capable of generalizing the revolution, but instead in the supposed incompleteness of the rupture itself, demanding only a purer immediacy next time.

This outlook ultimately reproduces the very Proudhonism Marx spent decades demolishing, while lacking even Proudhon’s willingness to confront the concrete economic implications of his own proposals. Marx’s critique was never directed merely against exchange or money in isolation, but against the illusion that commodity production could be abolished while society remained divided into autonomous producers. Later, the same methodological weakness resurfaced in Socialisme ou Barbarie, where the party rightly criticized the councilist fetish of self-management for mistaking the administration of separate enterprises for the abolition of capitalist social relations. Modern communization inherits precisely this illusion, but evacuates even the serious engagement with the material problems of reproduction, planning, and social coordination that earlier heterodox currents at least attempted. Its categories remain aesthetic and moral rather than economic. Separate productive units, local communes, occupations, or neighbourhood assemblies are simply presumed to dissolve the value relation by virtue of their form, despite every historical experience demonstrating the opposite.

This contradiction appears clearly in the historical experiences communization celebrates. Revolutionary communes, workers’ collectives, neighbourhood assemblies, and local organs of self-management are treated as anticipations of communism because they begin to suppress money, wages, or commodity exchange within their immediate sphere. Yet wherever these experiments remained isolated, they were compelled to reintroduce mediation between independent productive units. The experience of the Spanish collectives demonstrates this with particular clarity. Labour-time accounting, barter, local currencies, and exchange between enterprises did not arise because the revolutionaries lacked sufficient revolutionary enthusiasm. They arose because separate productive units necessarily confront one another as separate economic entities unless production is consciously organized on the scale of society as a whole. Exchange reappears wherever political centralization is absent; the molecular fragmentation of both economic production and social forms inevitably reasserts itself the moment no centralized organ exists capable of holding the whole together, exactly as it did in every council-communist and factory-council experiment before it. This was already the substance of Marx’s critique of Proudhon: abolish money while preserving independent producers, and the value relation simply assumes another form. Modern communization merely repeats the error while refusing even to investigate its determinate economic consequences.