LABOUR AS CONSTITUENT POWER

forthcoming in: diamantides M and M Rosenfeld, Handbook on the law and politics of sovereignty (Edward Elgar) labour as constituent power Emilios Christodoulidis University of Glasgow CONTENTS: I Troubling Demarcations II ‘Those Parisians Storming Heaven’: the legacy of the Paris Commune III Constituent Labour: later enactments St Petersburg, 1905 Turin, 1969 Gdansk, 1980 TROUBLING DEMARCATIONS Any discussion of the place of labour in the ‘law and politics of sovereignty’ begins, as it must, from a materialist premise. ‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire,’ wrote Marx memorably in the Grundrisse; social labour, as he put it, is the activity of producing and reproducing the world. The constitutive connection of labour to production and needs-satisfaction, and further to the creation of social value, are deeply embedded in the materialist perspective that understands, it will be argued, the ‘social question’ (the question of social recognition and need satisfaction) and the political question (of collective agency and self-determination) as inextricably linked. But this inextricable link cannot be merely read off the materialist premise. There is conceptual work to be done before we can connect labour to the ‘law and politics of sovereignty’. And if it appears more difficult today to connect workers to collective political subject-positions, and to think labour in democratic terms, it is because the ‘social question’ has so widely come to be distinguished from, and then contrasted to, the ‘political’ proper. For this widely held view, to understand the law and politics of sovereignty is in fact to distinguish them from - not to connect them to - the activity of labour: recall Hannah Arendt’s trichotomy in The Human Condition, where she distinguishes labour from work and pits them both against political action. Arendt, H (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press The impact of these demarcations, the severings and the contrasts, enthusiastically taken up by her epigones, has been staggering. See indicatively Habermas, J (1982) ‘A Reply to my Critics’, in J Thompson and D Held, Habermas: critical debates. London: Macmillan. Habermas is certainly not alone amongst the second-generation Frankfurt school thinkers to argue the contradistinction of politics and work. See also Wellmer, A. (1974). Critical theory of society. New York: Seabury Press, and Honneth, A (1982) ‘Work and instrumental action’, in 26 New German critique, 31 Their effect has been to depoliticise the question of work, to confine labour to instrumental rationalities and to leave it hostage to labour-market ‘signals’, mentalities and competition. It is not difficult to trace back to these conceptual demarcations the undercutting of workplace democracy, the rise of profit enhancing instrumentalities, and labour market ‘flexibilisation’, whereby ‘some are free to use others as means to an end and others are free to allow themselves to be used in this manner’. Lordon, Frédéric. Willing slaves of capital: Spinoza and Marx on desire. Verso Books, 2014, at ix The full gamut of the indignities visited on workers are sealed over as a matter of theory-construction once it becomes clear that they cannot be thematised as pathologies, but are sidelined ab initio as a matter of conceptual analysis and theory-construction. Thereafter the use of the language of democracy, virtue and sovereignty applied to labour, in a perverse reversal of critical theory, is viewed as a category mistake. To recover a language of redress that will enable us to, at least, thematise the link of labour to the ‘law and politics of sovereignty’, we will need to recuperate the concepts. And that means not beginning from the conceptual scheme that already consigns labour to a sphere where its energies are depleted, where its demands are treated as ‘signals’ to labour-markets, and where collective agency is disaggregated – at best a holding category for the competition amongst workers, and constituencies of workers: skilled and unskilled, blue collar and white collar, the underemployed, the part-timers, the nominally self-employed, the superfluous and redundant. The disaggregation in turn hands over ‘class composition’ (as we might call it borrowing the term from the ‘workerist’ and ‘autonomous’ strands of Marxism that we will visit) to be managed by the owners of capital. Instead let us begin to draw out the constituent dimension of labour, that as self-valorisation reclaims the social meaning of collective agency, the material meaning of social needs, and the political stage for democratic action. But to do so we will first need to return the terms to their proper semiosis and proper dignity. The first term that calls for our attention in this recuperation of concepts is the notion of self-valorisation: the creation of value that must find its own register rather than borrow the means of its recognition as value from capital. ‘Self-valorisation’ names the autonomous identification of needs and demands from within worker experience, and seeks the determination of value against the way it is effected in the circuits of capitalist circulation. ‘Self-valorisation’ as a political project finds its most explicit recent expression in the ‘autonomist’ current of Marxism in Italy in the 1970s. We will explore it later. If self-valorisation is the first term that imports a political dimension to the production of social value by labour, linking in this way the ‘social’ to the ‘political’ question, a second term, collective agency, links the subject-position to the cooperative dimension of social labour, in other words identifies collectively expended productive capacity, as that which enjoins labourers and impacts constitutively on their sense of identity. This is the standard reading of Marx’s departure which while drawing from Hegel’s account of work the idea of self-realisation, That work is a means of self-actualisation is an insight that Marx owes to Hegel. In the Phenomenology Hegel had analysed how work catalyses self-consciousness in the world; self-consciousness is objectified in the products of work and this objectification retroactively impacts on the worker because it provides him with the means of recognition. The point that Marx is at pains to make is that such recognition is both necessary (in order to register action and identity as meaningful) and at the same time detrimental to the demands of a collective self-realisation that does not already find expression within the ample accommodations of capitalism, and its voracious drive to ‘real subsumption’. turns to Ludwig Feuerbach in order to comprehend work as the ‘self-generative act of the species,’ In Habermas’ formulation, from Knowledge and Human Interests, (Trans J Shapiro) Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p 53 and, in the Paris Manuscripts, to suggest a rehabilitation of the anthropological concept of non-alienated labour as a constitutively co-operative endeavour. Marx thereby adopts the notion of ‘species-being’ from Feuerbach to complement his debt to Hegel. This connection, and the ‘Feuerbachian’ influence, is arguably abandoned in Marx’s late works. The meaning of labour is in all this constitutively tied to the process of collective self-realisation. Together these advances inform the constitutively political meaning of work by way of what appears to workers as self-generative practice and as site of intersubjective recognition. And of course this process of self-actualisation through work is tied to a critique of the capitalist mode of production. But how difficult this recuperation. Because even if, contra Arendt, Habermas, and the range of bourgeois philosophical arguments, ‘self-valorisation’ and ‘collective agency’ do indeed import a political dimension to social labour and stake it on sovereignty, does that not still require a third link, to the undertaking of political action? What will equip the collective action of labour with transcendent capacity, as constituent power, properly sovereign, self- and not other-determined? It does not require great insight to see why this is such a problem. Under capitalist conditions valorisation of labour is effected within the circuits of production and reproduction into which it enters as exchange value, that is, as the potential value that it has for capital. What does it mean, then to reclaim valorisation from within the context where value acquires its currency as a potential commodity? The same definitional process, and thus also definitional impasse, applies to the second of our terms, collective agency. If collective agency is defined through work, and the availability of work is dependent on the owners of capital, the class adversary controls class formation and class composition, the very possibility, therefore, of recognition. If what is available as recognition keeps the working class captive within a capitalist mode of reading value (as exchange value) and collective identity (as work-dependent identity) where is constituent collective action to gain its purpose and its elan? The difficulty is frontally addressed by Marx. In the famous passage that provides the climax to volume 1 of Capital on the general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx had argued that ‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour … mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man … [and] estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process’ Marx continues: ‘… they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working time; and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.... Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital." (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, undated, p. 604) The key difficulty he faces consequently, is to understand how the negative, expressed as alienation, might be transcended, when the negative finds expression in the meaning-shattering, crushing effects of factory work as well as in the many ways that capital annexes the world of labour to its needs. How, then, in practice, might the degradation of social labour nevertheless translate into political capacity? The difficulty is captured in Hans-Jürgen Krahl’s important question, ‘whether Marx has succeeded in presenting the dialectic of work not only as a misfortune in the utilisation of capital but also as an anti-capitalist productive, emancipatory force – that is whether Marx has proven that the forces of production as such can also be the forces of liberation?’ (Krahl, 1971, 387) Marx talks in The Holy Family of ‘an indignation necessarily aroused in the class by the contradiction between its nature and its life situation.’ I borrow the quote from Bloch, E (1986) Natural law and human dignity. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 156 His response is that it is the very experiential deficit that will mobilise resistance. Where proletarianisation becomes extreme alienation, degradation becomes the point of dialectical reversal. See E Bloch, (1986/2018) On Karl Marx, London: Verso, 21 We find this line of argument mainly in the early, Hegelian, works where Marx argues that the processes of social labour release learning potential and an emergent awareness of (suppressed) subject positions such that might be harnessed to overturn the means of domination. The acceleration of the capacity of production ushered in by Capitalism, he argued, brings the proletariat onto the world stage, and creates a universal class of labourers caught in the contradiction between forces and relations of production by a division of labour that traps them into submission to capital. The contradiction, as experienced and suffered in the form of submission, he further argued, will forge in the repressed class the capability to take over the mode of production that brought that class into being. The historical process that imposes those constraints is also therefore the process that will lead to their supersession. With the benefit of hindsight we might be more cautious today in assuming that social labour harbours the emergence of emancipatory conflict potential as a matter of the logic of history. But that is not what this paper is about. Instead we will venture on the terrain that Marx has laid out before us, and the paths that he has opened for us, to seek what we might call the phenomenological breakthrough of praxis as a matter of conceptual analysis, and in full view of its structural improbability. The breakthrough involves a rupture with the way that the three terms that have organised our analysis so far - valorisation, collective agency, and political action - might be given a new semiosis, a meaning that unshackles them from the ways in which capitalism overdetermines value, agency and action. In the sections that follow we will engage in a short genealogical exploration, genealogical to the measure that it is motivated to unearth a history with an eye to thwarted opportunity - apertures too quickly closed and sealed over - in the history of the undertaking of labour as a constituent endeavour. The Paris Commune is clearly its paradigmatic manifestation: autogestionnaire, reflexive, path-breaking; but we will explore the same ruptural logic at play in the strike action in the St Petersburg soviet in 1905, in the profound challenge that operaismo levelled during Italy’s hot autumn of 1969, and in the constituent assembly of the Gdansk dockworkers in 1980. Whatever the conceptual difficulties that attach to this pairing of labour and emancipation, it is fascinating how Marx draws the constitutive tie at their juncture, and locates there the site of praxis, the only proper foundation of sovereign democratic practice. From Marx we inherit the notion that praxis is constituent power as it inheres in social labour. The wielder of this power, its subject-to-be, is the labour movement. But its condition is opaque to it in the historical circumstances under which it labours. Labour under capitalist conditions is conceived as both the site of alienation as well as the site of recognition and emancipation. The challenge becomes how to give due credence to that opacity while at the same time giving theoretical expression to the undertaking of self-conscious revolutionary action. That first move, links to a second, where the two moments, the two advances, combine, to make the ‘economic’ concept of labour the source of self-formative (emancipatory) action. What we called above the phenomenological breakthrough in Marxism is the gesture whereby the class-in-itself (‘ein sich’) becomes the class-for-itself (‘für sich’), transparent to and cognisant of itself: the transition marks the comprehended moment of its becoming a ‘universal class’. We are of course on Hegelian territory here, the way in which the ‘rational’ and the ‘real’ come together, but we do not need to dwell on this. Let us simply take from it that we are talking about constituent power on the axis of collective agency, and that the breakthrough – the recognition of the collective subject-position (the first-person plural ‘we’) - is neither ‘carried’ nor warranted by history, as Marx has sometimes been taken to suggest in the ‘science of history’ interpretations, or where his voice is interpreted as a historicism. This, Maurice Blanchot describes, as the ‘first’ of ‘Marx’s three voices’, in Blanchot, Maurice, "Marx's three voices" in  New Political Science 7.1 (1986): 17-20. The class-for-itself comprehends itself in (its own) action. There inheres in this phenomenological emphasis of Marxism – and Marxism is nothing if not a critical phenomenology I argued in The Redress of Law – a profound ‘historical sense’ in the way Victor Serge, that extraordinary figure of the European revolutionary tradition, spoke of ‘le sens de l’histoire’: With Hegel and Marx the vision of history suddenly acquires a kind of plenitude; with Marx it is buttressed by a desire for dynamic, objective, impassioned action, and we might wonder whether the enormous spiritual magnetism of Marx’s work cannot be explained to a considerable measure by this revelation of a historical sense. Victor Serge, Diaries, 1985, 53. Diary entry: 5 January 1944 II ‘These Parisians Storming Heaven’: the legacy of the Paris Commune Marx’s famous above reference to the Paris Commune is found in his letter to Kugelmann, which he wrote on April 12th, while the movement was in full blood. ‘The present rising in Paris,’ he writes, ‘even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris. Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slave to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire…’ Of course Marx is here claiming as ‘a deed of our Party’ a movement which in its radical spontaneity far exceeds those confines. And in fact he will go on to write a new Preface Preface to the 1872 edition of the Communist Manifesto, ed D Ryazanoff (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963) 260 to the Communist Manifesto in the months that follow in which he acknowledges this. First he re-iterates: ‘However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever.’ And then, in the same text, he speaks of something astoundingly new having entered history: ‘In view of the practical experience gained in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’ (my italics) All references are to The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association, 1871. Within a year of its publication, the pamphlet had been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Croatian, Danish, and Polish and published both in newspapers and in pamphlet form. But things are not as straightforward when it comes to claiming the uprising as a ‘deed of our party’. On the one hand it is generally accepted that the Internationalists did indeed contribute to giving a revolutionary, socialist and proletarian content to the Paris movement and to its direct emanations (the Central Committee and the Commune), to its ideas and institutional forms. Marx’s seminal contribution to the First International a few years before the irruption of the Paris events had indeed been decisive in the direction that it took, and the rallying cry for the ‘collective ownership of the instruments of labour’ had certainly resounded on the streets of the city. And yet it was not the Internationalists that lead the social forces, prepared or directed the movement. ‘The International tried confusedly to intervene as a political party,’ writes Henri Lefebvre, ‘and was unsuccessful.’ (1965, 151) We know that Marx had little time for the reformist institutions of workers’ organisation, especially as they took the form of the institutionalisation of the councils, and in The Class Struggles in France he had spoken of them in terms of immaturity and political impotence. For a more comprehensive analysis see Negri, A (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp269ff. It is with The Civil War in France, the text that comes in the wake of the Commune, that something of a new turn in his theory is inaugurated. On this point see Ross, Kristin. The emergence of social space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Verso 2008, pp 21ff The Commune astounds Marx for its invention of a new political form whose enactment is the constituent power of labour’s self-organisation. The political form is at last discovered as an emergent form of labour’s own self-government. It is what made it ‘the greatest revolution of the century.’ For Marx, Paris had witnessed the expansive principle of constituent power in all its potentia: formative, ruptural, unarrestable. And crucially, at the same time, it is that which gave ‘thoroughly political form’ to the ‘self-government of the producers’ (1871, 210). ‘The Commune was to serve as a lever for uprooting the economic foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.’ (1871, 212) The Commune was a revolution against the state itself, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.’ (150) What Marx offers us in those last, extraordinary, writings of his, is as clear an account we possess of a labour constitution in the making, an account of constituent power in a clearly political key exercised as labour autogestion. The reflexive ‘auto’ of the movement (‘gestion’) refers to its dialectical moment: it enacts a political form in which it recursively finds expression, the simultaneity of giving form and finding expression capturing what is essential about the constituent. What happened in Paris during those extraordinary two months in 1871 was an unprecedented irruption of spontaneity, the constituent power of an ‘unplanned, unguided, formless revolution’ Ross, ibid., p25, quoting Edwards (ed) The Communards of Paris (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 19873, at 9) that harboured a plurality of currents, voices, worldviews and imaginaries. The events are well known. The seizing of power by the workers occurs in early 1871; the Paris Commune is established on March 18, 1871. The new Commune holds its first meeting on 28 March in a euphoric mood. The red flag replaces the tricolor, and the Vendome column is toppled. In the Declaration of the Central Committee of the National Guard’, the stake for a participatory workers’ democracy is put emphatically: ‘Workers make no mistake – this is an all-out war, a war between parasites and workers, exploiters and producers.’ Over the next two months the delegates adopt numerous proposals, declaring Blanqui the honorary president, abolishing the death penalty and military conscription. In the 60 days of its life, the Commune passed decrees on the abolition of child labour and night work in bakeries, the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege, the postponement of commercial debt obligations, the abolition of interest on the debts, the right of employees to take over and run enterprises, the prohibition of fines imposed by employers on their workmen. Just over two months later, and after a week-long battle, twenty five thousand workers were massacred in the streets of Paris by the army that had assembled in Versailles. The massacre will claim more victims amongst the Communards than the whole of the Franco-Prussian War, significantly more than the Terror. In one of the most significant analyses of the events of 1871 that we possess, Henri Lefebvre accounts for the currents of European thought that converge in the ‘proclamation’ of the Commune, ‘a truly explosive mixture destined to open the way for the most spontaneous forces’. Lefebvre, H: La Proclamation de la Commune. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. This edition: Paris: La Fabrique editions, 2018, p127. The translations are mine. Marx’s contribution to the First International, as mentioned already, had been influential, but the currents of thought that had been sidelined in the International, also returned emphatically, amongst them the anarchism of Bakunin, the radical pluralism and the federative principle of Proudhon, the radical egalitarianism of the Blanquists. There is competition and confluence in this polyphony. ‘For the Proudhonists, the Commune … meant decentralisation. For the Blanquists it was the revolutionary spirit of 1792 and 1793, that animated the Republic, one and indivisible, dictatorial and centralising. For the last Fourierists it was the realisation of the “phalanstère”, the wellspring of a new society. For those of the First International, it was a bit of all this and something else: confusedly generalised autogestion, for others already the summary communism they dreamt of, for others again it was confusedly the dictatorship of the proletariat. For all except Blanquists and neo-Jacobins … it was the destruction of the centralised state.’ (1965/2018, 126). For Daniel Bensaïd, it was a complex political event, ‘that articulated and enjoined discordant times and spaces, as well as closely mixed political motivations’. ‘ou s’articulent et se nouent des temps et les espaces discordants, et autant de motivations politiques étroitement melées.’ Preface to Lefebvre (1965, 13) Around this ‘historical nodal point,’ says Lefebvre, ‘gravitate multiple currents,’ and significantly these currents ‘find in it their source of illumination.’ (1965/2018, 126) Why ‘source of illumination’? Because the event of the Commune is not subsumable to the categories available to describe it. As Lefebvre quotes M Dommanget, ‘The Commune was at the same time the thing and the rallying word, the reality and the sign, the fact and the ideology.’ (1965/2018, 127) It is the startling novelty of an event that announces itself otherwise than in the semiosis of the old categories, that which is no longer couched in the ‘old wardrobe’ (remember Marx in the 18th Brumaire) or ‘pulled the flags of the bourgeoisie out of the mud’. We find ourselves,’ he protests, ‘with a revolutionary tradition that has pulled the flags of the bourgeoisie out of the mud.’ (in Negri, A (2000) The savage anomaly: The power of Spinoza’s metaphysics and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, at xx) It is reminiscent of what Maurice Blanchot identified as Marx’s ‘political voice’. Here is Blanchot on the ‘second’ – i.e. political – of Marx’s ‘three voices’: See Blanchot, above The second voice is political: it is brief and direct, more than brief and more than direct, because it short-circuits every voice. It no longer carries a meaning, but a call, a violence, a decision of rupture. Properly speaking, it says nothing; it is the urgency of what it announces, bound to an impatient and always excessive demand, since excess is its only measure: thus calling to arms, to the struggle, and even (which is what we hasten to forget) postulating the "revolutionary terror," recommending "permanent revolution" and always designating revolution not as a necessity whose time has come but as imminence, since it is the trait of revolution not to permit delay, in that it opens and traverses time, coming to life in an ever-present demand. ‘Bound to an impatient and excessive demand’; how fruitful this formulation as capturing the coincidence of ‘ the thing and the rallying word, the reality and the sign’ (Dommanget, above). ‘Excessive’ captures something of a profound unsettledness that doesn’t take root, that runs ahead of its embeddedness in any available locution. Part of this is certainly a question of lack of time. Writing in 1876, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray urged a view of the Commune as a barricade, something that ‘is for now and just a little while longer,’ but which is ‘necessarily temporary and temporizing” inasmuch as it “staves off finality, one minute at a time.’ Lissagaray, Prosper Olivier, History of the Commune of 1871. First Published: in French, 1876; Translated: Eleanor Marx, 1886; Source: New Park Publications, 1976 For Lefebre, the Commune is ‘utopian’ to the measure that the Communards ‘dreamt of a new life, born ardent and pure from the fire of the insurrection of the Commune.’ (127) And it is ideological because ‘social reality – praxis – was transported into an illusory representation’ and ‘turned into an absolute.’ The point about ideology is important in Lefebvre’s analysis: around a signifier that was ‘seemingly precise yet vague’ in its usage, a ‘unity of action could be achieved’. (137) Note how this unity is forged absent the coherent ideological framework that might have sustained it: praxis is in advance, underdetermined, at once potent and diffuse, leaning into a future that has not yet given it its semiosis. In this more unusual form of the theory-practice dialectic, it is the latter that drives the dialectic of history, and any ‘premature ideological clarification’ would have undercut the unity of praxis. ‘Like language every revolution tends to travel beyond its bounds,’ says Terry Eagleton. Eagleton, Terry, Foreword in K Ross (1988) The emergence of social space. London: Verso, xi How suggestive this formulation! As Rimbaud - the Commune’s quintessential poet – knew well, the epoch’s poetry was to be found in its future: ‘The invention of the unknown demands new forms.’ Arguably one of the most intriguing aspects of Marxism as a critical phenomenology, is the profound recognition that the language available to us to make sense of - what we might call perhaps anachronistically - the political conjuncture, or in any case in periods of political upheaval, of the revolutionary present, falls crucially short of the task. The 18th Brumaire, that ‘most semiotic’ of Marx’s texts at Eagleton aptly put it, Eagleton, ibid. is the most eloquent expression of the shortfall. It is indeed that ‘the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past,’ as Marx put it in that famous text, it is because the past – Marx reads this accurately from Hegel – cannot avail the language to give it adequate expression. It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. It is in this context that the challenge that the Commune presents for Marxism needs to be set. This was labour self-organising, its political praxis developing well ahead of the theories claiming it and the vocabularies available to voice it. However we assess Marx’s ambivalent gesture, both to claim the Commune and at the same time to revise his thinking in its wake, for him, as Lefebvre puts it, the Commune was an ideological-political complex of prodigious power (‘un “complexe” ideologico-politique d’une prodigieuse puissance’) destined to sustain a plane for the most spontaneous forces. No coherent ideology subtended it, and Lefebvre’s analysis shows this conclusively. And if the term utopian attaches to it, it is because it was ‘born ardent and pure’, the action running ahead of the theory that might have rationalised it, always premature, the unity achieved at the level of action where the collective identification of collective subject positions is forged in the undertaking itself: autogestion in its exemplary manifestation. And is this concept of autogestion that the Paris Commune inaugurates in modern history not what in constitutional theory is signified by constituent power? Reflecting on the ‘Importance and the Signification of the Commune’ in the last pages of his book, Lefebvre leaves us with the profound affirmation: ‘la plus grande mesure social de la Commune était sa propre existence en acte…’ ‘Cet acte revolutionnaire total qui s’est accomplice historiquement’ [This total revolutionary act that was accomplished historically] suffices to show that the Marxist promise of the end of human ‘pre-history’, of the overcoming of its alienations, of the inauguration of a history consciously lived and controlled by humans, does not rely, as is often said on an eschatology, on apocalyptic visions or vain utopian constructions. This utopia instead during the days of the Commune ‘entered the real and it entered lives.’ … ‘the insurgent Parisian masses, in taking to the roads, opened the horizon, the most vast.’ In Lefebvre’s beautiful phrase that ties the enactment of the Commune with the idea itself of potentiality, it acted on the hiatus of the possible and the impossible: ‘La Commune a anticipé, en acte, sur le possible et l’impossible, de sorte que même ses projets et décisions inapplicables gardent un sens profond ’ (355) (‘The Commune has given actuality to the possible and the impossible, so that even its unworkable projects and decisions retain a profound meaning.’) My profound thanks to Muriel Fabre-Magnan for elaborating this phrase for me, and – in the implicit reference to potentiality- suggesting an Aristotelian cadence. III Autogestion: 20th Century (european) enactments St Petersburg, 1905; the revolutionary soviet ‘Working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris; almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates - radiant in the enthusiasm of its historic initiative.’ (Marx, 1871) In May 1871 the Commune is liquidated in a bloodbath. In 1872 the anarchists are expelled from the First International. A year later, at their Congress at Geneva they proclaim the general strike as a weapon for overthrowing the bourgeoisie by the mere cessation of work. This debate that remained alive at the end of the 19th century in the turbulent currents of European Leftist politics, set the background for Rosa Luxemburg’s major theorisation of the mass strike, as did the more immediate tactics of the 1905 revolution in Russia, that ‘dress rehearsal’ as Lenin put it, with its extensive deployment of work stoppages. Luxemburg’s text of 1905 The Mass Strike Luxemburg, R (1906/1925) The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. (trans P Lavin). Marxist Educational Society of Detroit. London: Merlin press is marked by a belief in the pragmatics of strike action, certainly in the spontaneity of its eruption, and more importantly in its stakes. At the same time the text became a site of extraordinary polemics. It was caught in the crossfire of two conflicts with the reformist SPD on the one hand, and the anarchists on the other. The polemics with Bernstein in the context of the former, with the ‘Bakuninists’ on the other, and a decade later of course with Lenin, Trotsky and Lukács, are legendary. Historically, Luxemburg’s stance is here at odds with other strands of revolutionary syndicalism. The ‘auto-gestionnaire’ variant of industrial democracy that she develops with its emphasis on strike action is clearly separated from the state. It is a profound statement of labour’s constituent power as exercised as and evidenced in the withdrawal of labour. Luxemburg begins her essay by drawing on the experience of the 1905 revolution in Russia, and the institution of the Petersburg Soviet. ‘In order to carry out a direct political struggle as a mass the proletariat must be assembled as a mass,’ she writes in the Mass Strike as she extols the role that strike action has played in the self-education and self-organisation of the Russian proletariat. In Russia she sees ‘fermenting throughout the whole of the immense empire an uninterrupted economic strike of almost the entire proletariat against capital’ (1906, 29) and then: ‘a year of revolution has given the Russian proletariat the training which thirty years of parliamentary and trade union struggle cannot artificially give to the German proletariat.’ (1906, 64) Luxemburg struggles to sustain a refusal of any mediation of workers’ constituent self-expression, and this infects her discussion of the ‘form’ of the constituent, which sustains itself imperfectly in the rising levels of workers’ spontaneous organisation, in mobilisation and withdrawal, impossible to contain or predict its course. She will insist against any blueprint, abstract form or abstract Sollen, imposed on democracy as constituted by masses in struggle. She does not always navigate the terrain convincingly, but what surfaces above everything else in her text is its unwavering commitment to the ‘reciprocal relation’ that will allow (both Germany and Russia) to learn from ‘the un-invented tactics of spontaneous struggle seeking its way forward.’ Luxemburg’s is a metaphorical idiom that attests the antinomies in a language that carries the strike across many forms, in equivocation, transferral and displacement. I quote from her at some length: The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. … It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, at 43-4 There is much to discuss and admire in this piece, actions that cross, flow into and over one another, overflow, mass action that divides and bubbles forth. There is nothing abstract that can be superimposed as blueprint to identify the mass strike, and nothing law-like contains it or lends it legibility, as the political and the economic, the organised and the non-unionised ‘run side by side’. The labile form attests to the spontaneity of the strike action. And while one might note the antinomy of the way that the mass strike both undergirds and ‘overflows’ its spontaneous expression, there is at the same time something highly determinate about Luxemburg’s analysis, and instructive to political practice. Note that the extract ends on the term ‘revolution’ as the concept that ultimately gathers together the erratic and unsystematic developments, crossings and passages of the strike action. In the wake of the 1905 events in St Petersburg, Luxemburg is keen to read the breakup of the general strike into partial and local actions as configurations, tactics and manoeuvres of a revolutionary movement. If she is tracing the ‘transmission of struggle from one centre to another’, it is because the transmission expresses a deeper continuity of struggle, rather that the episodes (the barricades, the wage struggles, the occupations) being definitive or exhaustive of it; the surface heterogeneity taps the ongoing maturation of class consciousness, and the fluctuations track in proportionate forms the deeper currents of revolutionary intent. But there is more that Luxemburg’s analysis offers us to the theorisation of autogestion and rupture understood in tandem. There is rupture in Luxemburg’s insistence that the available forms will not suffice; her exacerbation with the excessive and debilitating organisation of German trade unions, their overly cautious and complacently teleological approach to struggle. Rose, G (1992) The broken middle. Oxford: Blackwell, at 213. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule (‘the mass strike is the rallying idea of the whole period of the class struggle’). Crucially the mass strike is premature: no historical logic delivers it, and the conditions of the legibility of class action are not given in advance of its undertaking. Her insistence on what is ‘fermented’ and ‘compounded’ in the undertaking itself runs through the text. And there is autogestion in the ‘spontaneity’: constituted power and the rules of representation dissolve before the mass strike that ‘alters its forms, its dimensions, its effects.’ So much is clear. But there is a final thought that Luxemburg offers us, and it holds autogestion and rupture together: the mass strike is not the exercise of constituent power tout court. ‘It is the river,’ said Luxemburg, ‘that overflows its banks, that divides into tributaries that join again’: it is the power that upsets and reconfigures its own path-dependencies as it is exercised, it is in the ‘crossings’ and ‘transmissions’ that it finds expression. In the deep equivocation between what is rationally gathered as the collective action of the emerging proletariat, that must remain spontaneous to the measure that nothing except its action collects it as an actor, and the law-like conditions that might offer us a general description of the mass strike, sharpening its features, relating them across particular contexts, and abstracting from the particularity of place and industrial organisation, there lies the spectre of available form and the limit, caught up in a restless affirmation and undermining of political form. If for Rosa Luxemburg autogestion must be guarded against the state form as the stake of a spontaneity that ultimately alone expresses the constituent ‘we’ of the workers’ self-expression in emergent, reversible, re-negotiable institutional forms, Lenin’s stance is significantly more ambivalent. This is an ambivalence that needs to be rescued from the sclerotic forms that led Bolshevism (for the most part after Lenin’s time, but certainly not exclusively post-Lenin) into sectarian and bureaucratic closure. We cannot afford here a longer discussion of the nature the revolutionary councils, or the way in which the spontaneity that the Paris Commune embodied was transferred to his thinking. Let us begin with the undisputed fact that Lenin, like Marx before him, was obsessed with the Paris Commune. Lenin writes: “ The memory of the fighters of the Commune is not only honoured by the workers of France but by the proletariat of the whole world, for the Commune did not fight for any local or narrow national aim, but for the freedom of toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed. .... This is why the cause of the Commune did not die. It lives to the present day in every one of us. (Lenin, ‘On the Paris Commune’, April 1911) Lenin knew well that without the spontaneity the fundamental impulse would be lost, that impulse that once taken up by the masses would become revolutionary political action. ‘Spontaneity is anarchistic (‘anarchisante’) powerfully destructive of existing institutions,’ writes Lefebvre. (1965, 145) In his rare revolutionary pragmatism, Lenin knew well that the form-giving moment – the acquisition of institutional form - must not destroy the spontaneous impulse. But note the profound cleavage around the meaning of labour ‘autogestion’ here. In Luxemburg we encounter the stubborn refusal of any institutional mediation of workers’ self-expression; with Lenin, we have the provision of direction by a revolutionary political directorate. And yet I think that it is fair to read Lenin not as abandoning constituent power even as he ‘entrusts’ it to the Party, guardian of its militancy, overseer that it does not withdraw into reformism. Whether constituent power can survive this oversight by the Party is indeed a crucial question. And yet the guardianship of the Party, for Lenin, is there not to extinguish the spontaneity of mass mobilisation, or to substitute for it, but to prevent it from settling into the accommodations of constituted power, the reformism of social democracy. Lenin’s stance here is unremitting against the Menshevik understanding of the ‘necessarily bourgeois’ character of the democratic revolution, against all the ways in which forms of collective worker organisation tend to become institutional outside the revolutionary process, subordinating the permanent aims of class struggle to the ‘false necessity’ of bourgeois organisational forms forcing them to function within the political dialectic of capital. The very particular role that Lenin envisages for the Party vis-à-vis the unfettered action of the masses has to do with his well-known diagnosis of the backward situation in Russia and the exigency that it go through two revolutionary stages. During the inevitable passage through the first, ‘bourgeois phase’ of the revolution, in a country that had not industrialised, and where therefore the industrial proletariat was a minority not yet possessing the means to stage any meaningful recuperation of the means of production, the role of the party was not to substitute for the working class but to direct its energies. The soviet, he comments earlier, is the ‘typical instrument that spontaneity has offered to the revolution.’ They are ‘peculiar mass organisations’, spontaneous forms and organisations of the insurrection. But they are not themselves organs of revolutionary self-government. Negri, 1999, 275, quoting Lenin’s ‘Lecture on the 1905 revolution’ If constituent power resides, for Lenin, in the always avant-garde Party, it is for its role in keeping the soviets alive to their class function, to their moving the revolutionary process beyond its first phase (and the Menshevik compromise) and toward communism. And while this line of argument about the role of the Party in sustaining class autonomy attracted from both Luxemburg and Trotsky the accusation of ‘ultra-centrism’, Lenin consistently in the early works (for example in What is to be Done?) held on to the significance of spontaneity as the constituent lever of the insurrection. And although in that work he argued that spontaneity is only consciousness in an ‘embryonic form’, it is its growth that needs to be directed to an increasingly high level of revolutionary consciousness. As Mario Tronti will remark in 1966: ‘With his masterstroke, Lenin’s strategy brought Marx to St Petersburg: only the working class point of view could have been capable of such revolutionary audacity.’ (Tronti, 1966/2019, 72) Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s respective views, and their disagreement, come into relief in the interpretation of the constituent moment that was the 1905 St Petersburg soviet, but in thinking constituent power as generated by the workers’ organisation they are in fact not as far apart as typically assumed. As is not Trotsky’s concern (certainly closer to Luxemburg than to Lenin on this point) to prevent the form of revolutionary organisation of the soviet from assuming an institutional form outside and against the revolutionary process, which led him to proclaim the soviet as the ‘typical organisation of the revolution’ because ‘the organisation itself of the revolution will be its organ of power.’ From his defence speech at the trial of the Soviet Deputies in October 1906. Quoted in Negri, 1999, 281 The continuity of democratic struggle and socialist struggle, which for Lenin was entrusted to the Party, is here for Trotsky, as it is for Luxemburg, warranted by the soviet itself, this radical form (at least in 1905) of workers’ self-management. For our purposes the analysis of the thinking of the soviet centres on spontaneity: what it means and how it is expressed – through, outwith, or against the institutional form. This difficult dialectic between spontaneity and institution is the dilemma that confronts the varied attempts to contain constituent power and give it expression in the fragile institutional forms of the time, the revolutionary councils, the soviets and, with Lenin, the ‘avant-guard party’. Might there be another register to harbour this ‘difficult dialectic’, one that might adequately attest to these profound tensions and equivocations of the constituent as it came to be expressed during this time? This other register would be literature, and the literary work I have in mind is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak was Lenin’s contemporary and compatriot, and for him the 1905 revolution was nothing short of a mythic moment precisely because it contained and brought forward something singular about the spontaneity of Russia’s historical wager. ‘Yesterday,’ Zhivago recounts, ‘I went to a nighttime rally. An extraordinary spectacle. Mother Russia is on the move, cannot stay still, is walking, does not know where she is, is talking and knows how to express herself.’ (Doctor Zhivago, 136) And then, memorably: ‘The revolution broke out almost unintentionally, like a sigh held back too long.’ This, writes Italo Calvino in 1958, commenting on the novel’s ‘political ideology’, is ‘socialism as the field of authenticity.’ In Calvino, I (2000) Why Read the classics? Trans. Martin MacLaughlin. London: Vintage. The page references to Doctor Zhivago are from the Collins Harvill (London) edition of 1988, trans by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. ‘The 1905 revolution contained for Pasternak all the myths of youth and all the points of departure for a certain kind of culture; it is a peak from which he surveys the jagged terrain of the first half-century,’ (184) and gradually, as we know from reading the novel, this involves a degeneration of the revolutionary impulse, an impulse that was not betrayed by the violence of the civil war but by its own later fossilisation, to end up, as Calvino summarises it, ‘with a condemnation not only of Marxism but of politics as the main testing ground for the values of [his] contemporary humanity.’ (188) But there is something here that goes deeper than this condemnation, and which speaks directly to constituent power as the spontaneous eruption of the nation’s energies, which ‘breaks out’ with the naturalness of a ‘sigh held back too long.’ Returning to 1905, these are the words Zhivago uses to describe the revolutionary spontaneity around him: ‘Everyone has been re-animated, reborn, everywhere there are transformations, upheavals. … Socialism seems to me to be the sea into which all the single, individual revolutions have to flow like rivulets, the sea of everyone’s life, the sea of everyone’s authenticity.’ (136) It is an eruption that does not adhere to what has been mandated, controlled, channelled or dictated as the true meaning of the situation, as the given pathways of its unfolding, or in terms of imputed motives, mechanisms of overseeing and harnessing the political energies the revolution had released. Instead, in the hiatus between the power which pushes the constituent forward, and the forces on which it is thwarted, a new ‘realism’ was forged, one that Pasternak was able clearly to glimpse, and his text poetically to deliver, as a rendering of a revolutionary event, and as an understanding of constituent power in which, to paraphrase Calvino, realism meant something deeper. Calvino asks at the end of his 1958 essay: ‘Will socialist literature be able to elaborate a response? This can be done only by a world which is in a ferment of self-criticism and creativity, and only by a literature which can develop an ever stricter adherence to things. From today onwards, realism means something deeper.’ (1991, 193) Turin, 1969: Italy’s ‘hot Autumn’ If spontaneous action mattered to the theorists of the 1905 uprising in St Petersburg as the means to achieve an increasingly high level of revolutionary consciousness, no such aspiration is shared by Mario Tronti, the towering figure of Italian operaismo, and author of the epoch-making Operai e Capitale of 1966. Tronti, Mario. Workers and capital. Verso Books, 1966/2019. Not for Tronti the projected coincidence of ‘societal full consciousness’ with proletarian self-awareness, a coincidence that would underlie the transition of the working class to a universal class ‘for itself’, securing the ‘higher level of mass revolutionary consciousness’ as the young Lenin wrote in 1902. Instead, what Steve Wright In Wright, Steve. Storming heaven. London: Pluto Press, 2002. calls the ferocious unilaterality of Tronti’s class outlook would be avowedly no less partial than that of capital. For Tronti labour power constituted ‘the truly active side of capital, the natural site of every capitalist dynamic.’ (1966/2019, 30) ‘The working class must discover itself materially as part of capital if it wants to counterpose all of capital to itself, … [it must] recognise itself as a particular aspect of capital if it wants to be capital’s general antagonist.’ ‘The working class point of view on productive labour is an essential point in the conquest of this ‘strategic overturn’. (1966/2019, 172-3) And further: ‘it must reach the point of having total capital – and thus also itself as part of capital – as its own enemy. Labour must see labour-power-as-commodity as its own enemy. … so as to dismantle the inner nature of capital from within those potentially antagonistic parts of its own organic composition.’ (Tronti, 1966/2019, 30) This is clearly at odds with the way that Marx conceptualises the problem of commodification. Even without delving too deep in the difficult discussion of how to break with the logic of the commodity form, we can see in Tronti’s heterodox Marxist a curious reversal. If ‘self-valorisation’, that key dimension of the constituent power of labour, faces such a steep challenge, it is because if value is indexed to exchange, then the value of work, of working lives, and agency, all become constitutively dependent on capitalist production, to the point where self-valorisation loses all traction. The difficulty receives in Tronti a startling solution: ‘the labour theory of value means labour power first, then capital. It means capital conditioned by labour power, moved by labour power, value measured by labour. Labour is the measure of value because the working class is the condition of capital.’ (Tronti, 1966/2019, 228) The curious reversal between labour and capital on the question of valorisation can only be effected at the sites of production. This topography consigns the revolutionary process to the factory and to mass production. It is here that the concentration of labour power can throw the contradiction within the commodity form into relief. It is here that the confrontation emerges most clearly around the stakes. ‘What the working class is,’ he famously announces, ‘cannot be separated from how it struggles’ And ‘the struggle manifests itself completely within the determinate production relations, and it is from here that it tends to socialise itself.,. There no longer exists, for the class a politics outside, external to its own mass location in the advanced capitalist cycle’ of industrial production. (Tronti, 1966/2019, 90) First published in 1964, Tronti’s political journal Classe Operaia helped to consolidate the ‘mass worker thesis’ thereby inaugurating the classical phase of workerism. The focus was exclusively on the mass worker; the wage struggle was the immediate terrain of political conflict; and, in the way that Tronti conceptualised it as mentioned, labour was the driving force within capitalist society. 1963 had been the year of extensive wildcat strikes at the FIAT plant in Turin. This, for the workerists of Classe Operaia, was the mass vanguard in motion. The battlelines were drawn, on the one side with the state whose recourse to violence had become pronounced during the whole decade, and on the other with ‘union officialdom’ (129). “We are all delegates,” famously became a key slogan, against the power wielded by union officials or representatives. By 1969, during what came to be known as the ‘Hot Autumn’, occupations, strikes and mass assemblies had spread across industrialised Italy. In Italy’s industrial heartland, and specifically in the city of Turin, the Hot Autumn had been precipitated by strikes over wages, housing, and protests over the police shooting of striking Sicilian land workers, police actions that had served to unite northerners and southerners, skilled and unskilled workers, workers and students. In 1969, massive demonstrations swept through the city. It was the great factories of Northern Italy, Pirelli and Fiat amongst them, that became the epicentre of industrial unrest and it is here in particular that the influence of the radical leftists of workerism could be felt. Except that this was no longer exclusively centred on the ‘wage struggle’; the industrial action became more broadly about national and international worker solidarity. It is indicative in that respect, that the situation exploded in Milan in September of that year when Pirelli imported tyres from its plant in Greece which at the time was under military dictatorship. Pirelli’s headquarters were blockaded for three days. Lorry loads of tyres were set alight in protest. In response the company declared a lock-out, then retreated from that, and sacked the lead syndicalists. The situation exploded into the biggest strike wave in recent European history. Strikers’ roadblocks were joined by thousands of students, together with delegations from hundreds of factories. On November 19th, 20 million Italians turned out in solidarity for a nationwide general strike. In 1969 alone it is estimated that more than 520 million hours were ‘lost’ to the strikes. Much has been written about the Hot Autumn of 1969, the societal fracture that it reflected, and effected, and the turn to extremism that followed it in the 1970s in the decade that came to be known in Italy as the ‘years of lead’. In the early part of the decade Italy witnessed the emergence of the significant political movement of the Autonomia Operaia, led by the influential figure of Antonio Negri with a new insistence, no longer on the mass factory worker but on the ‘socialised worker’ (operaio sociale), spreading the notion of the proletariat to new constituencies, eventually (some decades later) to be reconceived through Negri’s totalizing gesture as the ‘multitude’ of Empire. We shall not follow him there. Instead, for our more specific purposes and our theorization of labour’s constituent power, there is much to take from 1960s workerism. Our discussion of constituent power has involved three key terms and their articulations (self-valorisation, collective agency, and political action), constituent power, arguably, naming the point of their dialectical synthesis. Self-valorisation was the lever that drove workerist ideology, and with Tronti, as we saw, it expressed itself neither through the avant-guard Party nor in the growing self-awareness of the class of labourers, but instead in the dogged, stubborn insistence on the partiality of the point of view of the labour class, and the factory worker at that, where the ‘truly active side of capital’ could be discerned. The factory worker’s experience was a lived ‘partiality’ that would lead to its overcoming – and collective agency assumed - once the ‘point was reached of having total capital – and thus also itself as a part of capital - as its enemy.’ The ‘machinery of the bourgeois state,’ proclaimed Tronti, ‘must today be broken within the capitalist factory.’ (1966/2019, 34) Self-valorisation for the workerists had always been a central tenet of their thought, and it refers to the workers’ reclaiming of valorisation, in other words the internal – to the proletariat – production and organisation of needs and desires. Negri puts it as follows in ‘Domination and Sabotage’: ‘the aim of the process of self-valorisation is the complete liberation of living labour within production and reproduction.’ In Negri, Antonio. Books for burning: Between civil war and democracy in 1970s Italy. Verso, 2005, p270 The power of self-definition is re-claimed – a self-definition on the materialist register of living labour’s desire and need. And the reason why this move at the level of valorisation is constituent is because, as we know so well from Marx’s analysis in the sixth chapter of the first volume of Capital, the value of social reproduction is set by capitalism at the level of reproducing the specific variable of production – labour power that is reproduced as the cost of the labourer’s subsistence. Like every commodity its value is determined by the labour necessary for its production. So it is with labour power: its value is the labour necessary to keep the labourer alive and working. That is what the capitalist buys, and he buys it for its (exchange) value. In Marx’s words: ‘the labour time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words the value of labour power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.’ Marx, K (1867/1970) Capital. London: Lawrence & Wishart,, 168 Self-valorisation breaks with that logic of value, to return to ‘living labour’ the constituent power to define needs; its modality of action, as constituent, is conceived as counter-power to capital; and its constituent self-understanding is measured against capital’s hegemonic position to define the self-understanding of the proletariat as dependent on the availability of the work it was able to offer and withhold. Gdansk 1980; Polish Solidarity What unfolded in 1980 and 1981 in Poland was one of the most striking experiments in industrial democracy in Europe, a leaf out of Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass Strike. If the events are today largely forgotten, this is partly because of Solidarity’s [Solidarność] later co-option and involvement as the party in government during the socially destructive programme of market implementation that took place in Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. But if it failed to impact on the democratic imagination of the West it was for another reason too. What was distinctive about the Gdansk uprising was that it was an exercise both in autogestionnaire politics, and a re-assertion of the meaning of work buttressed by a collective commitment to its protection. Solidarity was an instance of a worker’s movement rising against a workers’ republic, unclassifiable in terms of the blunt binarisms that dominated the political imagination of the time. It was ‘unclassifiable’ because both the agent and the action defied locution in the constitutional space available to them at the time. This double negotiation (of agency and action) was only possible as an exercise of constituent power in the dynamic process of enactment of a labour constitution. We will not be able to give here a full account of events, For a fuller analysis see Christodoulidis, The Redress of Law (Cambridge 2021) chapter 4.3 though a brief historical account the extraordinary experiment that was the ‘Polish summer’ of 1980 may be useful. Poland 1981, 241. All references from: Poland 1981: Solidarity, Programme Adopted by the First National Congress’, in Raina Peter, ed, Poland 1981: Towards Social Renewal, London 1981. Other useful bibliography: MacDonald, O (1983) ‘The Polish Vortex: Solidarity and Socialism’ in 139 NLR, 5; Laba, R (1991) The Roots of Solidarity. Princeton NJ: Princeton; Glasman, M. (1996). Unnecessary suffering: Managing market utopia. London: Verso. The first stoppages of work took place at Warsaw steelworks on July 2, 1980 as a result of a steep rise in food prices, and a first wave of strike action spread across the west of the country. It was only at the beginning of August that the strikes spread to the Gdansk shipyards. Here the action took a definite political character, as the first all-out strike on the 14th of August demanded, inter alia, the erection of a memorial for the fallen victims of the 1970 Baltic strikes, the re-instatement of dismissed colleagues, and free trade unions. The government reacted with a communications blackout in Gdansk, at which point 50,000 workers joined the strike. On August 16th the Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) was established in Gdansk to coordinate the strike and represent all strikers, those of the Lenin Shipyard and 20 other striking units. MKS drew up a list of sixteen demands including freedom of speech, authentic union representation and freedom for the political prisoners, with Lech Walesa now emerging as strike leader, head of a 15-member presidium, representing 500 delegates from over nearly 400 factories. The first round of talks, on August 23rd, was inconclusive. Other rounds followed. On the last day of August 1980 the government and the strikers signed the ‘Gdansk Accord’, an agreement that met all the workers’ demands including the right to establish independent trade unions. With direct reference to ILO convention 87, article 1 of the Accord ‘acknowledges the necessity of creating new self-governing labor unions, genuinely representing the working class’; art. 2 committed the unions to defending ‘the social and material interests of the workers’, ‘based on the principle of the collective ownership of the means of production’; art. 3 recognised the right to organise and conduct collective negotiations, according to ILO convention 98; art. 4 gave the Interfactory Strike Committee the form it would take as the ‘constituent committee’ of ‘the new self-governing labor unions’. Indeed, months after the Accord, and having garnered the momentum of the mass strike, Solidarity, by now numbering nine and a half million members were able assemble as constituent assembly to enact nothing short of a Labour Constitution. The recognition of status, the application of subsidiarity in democratic decision-making and the establishment of enterprise democracy formed the basis of the proposed reforms, drawing from ‘the workers’ and democratic traditions of the labour world,’ it claimed, while Part VI of the document made reference to the ‘Self-Governed Republic’. Thesis 19 defended ‘[p]luralism of social, political and cultural ideas [as] the basis of democracy in the self-governed republic.’ The emphasis is on re-invigorating civil society: ‘For this reason, we shall struggle both for a change in state structures and for the development of independent, self-governing institutions in every field of social life. Only such a course can guarantee that the institutions of public life are in harmony with human needs.’ Thesis 20 countered managerial prerogative: ‘Genuine workers' self-management is the basis of the self-governing republic. The only solution is to create workers' self-management committees which would make the workforce true masters of enterprises. Our union demands that the self-management principle should be reintroduced into the cooperatives. It is essential to pass a new law protecting the cooperatives against interference by the state administration.’ And concludes: ‘The only way to change the situation is to create genuine self-management groups. The establishment of employees’ councils was the means by which the responsibility of decision-making and the knowledge for successful enterprise adaptation were facilitated by access to information and the negotiation of strategic choices by all employees in the firm.’ And in what reads like a direct passage from Karl Polanyi, ‘work is for man, and what determines its sense is its closeness to man, to his real needs. Our national and social rebirth must be based on the restored hierarchy of those goals.’ The State Enterprise and Employee Self-Management Acts were passed in October 1981. Solidarity made all other goals subordinate to co-determination, threatening a general strike if it were not implemented. This was the high mark of labour constitutionalism, its pure autogestionnaire expression, enacting an ‘unfettered’ economic democracy in a gesture of constituent power. What followed is well known. A few months later Jaruzelski’s government ordered the arrest of Solidarity’ s leaders and the organisation was outlawed. ‘In Poland in 1981, as in France in 1848, the army was sent in … and democracy in the economy was decried as damaging to the national interest. The nomination of management by the state was restored.’ (Glasman, 1995, 96) In the end it was not repression, but co-option, that ‘extirpated the ghost of Solidarity’. The fall of the communist regime in 1989 ushered in a policy of State centralization to create competition, and any notion of enterprise democracy was abandoned for good. The installation of market discipline took a massive toll on society and on working people. Alain Supiot makes the important point, in ‘L’Esprit de Philadelphie, that in the discourse of ‘enlargement’, Europe significantly missed an opportunity to understand the process as one of re-unification. Supiot, A (2010) L’esprit de la Philadelphie: la justice social face au marché total. Paris: Seuil The difference is one of asymmetry. In exporting the market model eastwards, he says, no attempt was made to take account of the experience of these countries which did not share our political culture or anything like our material wealth. He argues that re-unification would have instead implied a kind of Marshall plan for the East with the condition attached that these countries would abstain from recourse to social dumping in order to compete with the western counterpart. What we saw instead was the opposite. The West made all aid conditional on pursuing a reform strategy ‘the likes of which no modern western nation had ever considered imposing on itself for fear of the effects it would have on people’s lives and livelihoods.’ (Glasman, 1996, pxiv) One could add the following twist to Supiot’s concern that Europe may have been ‘won over to the “communist market economy’: that the annexation of the East followed the pattern of a market Leninism, (Glasman, ibid.) led by market commissars on the basis of managerial prowess, technique and superior knowledge. See more generally Glasman, 1996 Let us stay with Solidarity’s constituent achievement, because the accord of 1980 and the Programme of 1981 offer us rare insight into the exercise of constituent power. The transferral of democratic categories from the sphere of citizenship to the sphere of work taps the rich, if under-theorised, resource of European constitutional thinking that enjoins democratic and collective categories. At stake here is the capacity to use political and democratic categories to conceptualise and regulate work, as is the question of recognition that concerns the constitutively political, collective and human activity that is labour. That this is more than a loose metaphor is borne out by how significant an opportunity was missed after the fall of the Iron Curtain to tap the resources of a civil society in a moment of genuine emergence, to understand the ‘conjuncture’, to promote the vital reserves of societies submitted to decades of devastation and undercutting. Granted, the promise of the market resonated with the form of the East’s eagerness to negate the past. But Negri is surely right when he writes in his 1990 ‘postscript’ from the Rebibbia prison, that in those mobilizations of 89 we ‘saw the expression of a potential that was unknown to us in the West – a fully active civil society capable [in those moments at least] of expressing a collective political will in a way no longer found in the west.’ In Negri, A & F Guattari (1990) Communists like us. New York: Semiotext(e), p169 These were indeed extraordinary accomplishments of working men and women, and they are sacrifices that the historiography of Europe as breathless pursuit of market integration has by and large mis-interpreted or simply eliminated. That the ‘praxis that revolutionised reality’, to borrow a formulation from Lukacs, was received by the other side, first, in 1981, as an attack on socialism orchestrated by foreign forces, then, in 1989, as a call to be annexed to the market economy of maximising financial returns and at the cost of painful ‘learning’ processes of market discipline, misreads its message (as it is programmed to do.) In terms of the constitutional imaginary, on both registers of agency and action, Solidarity was a workers movement that sought representation where it was already represented; that sought a republic of work in what was nominally a workers’ republic; that levelled a political demand where the demand could never have been more than an economic demand for wage or price adjustment. In every sense theirs was a différend in the precise way in which Jean-Francois Lyotard introduces the term where the means available to ‘litigate’ the conflict, here between workers and the government, compounds the wrong inflicted on the workers. Lyotard, J-F (1988): The Differend. (translated by G van den Abbeele). Manchester: Manchester U P The constituent strains against forms of the constituted that always-already lend it expression and before which it appears as theoretically naïve and politically dangerous. If further evidence of the latter is required, look at how we are today inundated by urgent or apocalyptic renewals of the same banal warning. Amongst many here, see Verdugo, Sergio. "Is it time to abandon the theory of constituent power?" International Journal of Constitutional Law 21.1 (2023): 14-79. By way of conclusion let me also introduce a caveat: In the Paris Commune, in the revolutionary soviet of 1905, in Italy’s ‘hot autumn’, in the Gdansk uprisings, we encounter a startling novelty of political form, the exercise of labour’s constituent power. My own emphasis on the European examples suggests nothing except the limits of my competence properly to talk about autogestionnaire political action outside Europe. Inside Europe too, of course, there have been further significant experiments with forms of self-organisation. See, for example, Suvin, Darko (2018) Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Haymarket Books: Chicago Any comprehensive reckoning with the subject would include the strong currents that we encountered in the insurgencies in South America, and elsewhere, where the constituent appears in profoundly anti-systemic forms. Across these instances the constituent dimension of labour finds expression in the self-valorisation that reclaims the material meaning of social needs, in the cooperative dimension of social labour that reclaims a collective speaking position, and collective agency for workers, and in the spontaneous praxis that provides for the political staging of industrial as democratic action. 23