To Michel Bounan

French-français

13 December 1990

Dear Michel Bounan:

I thank you very much for your book.[1] Having read it, I retrospectively understand much better your previous letter: after mature reflection, I did not then know how to respond to you, [because] so many of the questions broached appeared to me to be far from my competencies. Without pretending now to understand you exactly on several different practical points, I can assure you that I find myself in very great sympathy with the bases of your thought and socio-historical critique, obviously. I will speak with you quite willingly about some of the perspectives that are opened up by this work. Tell me the days of the week that you are the freest.
Cordially,

Guy Debord

[1] The Time of AIDS.

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnote by the publisher.)

To Michel Bounan

22 December 1990

Dear Michel:
 
Thank you for the correspondence with the stupid publishers[1] and especially for the disk by Florencie,[2] which is so moving: I had never heard him sing "La Place Maubert."
Here are several documents from 1958.[3] The Moineau-Bistro was on rue Guenegaud after the first [one], at 22 rue du Four, around 1950-1955. La Manouche was very briefly at the rue Mazarine in 1957, and the Mont-Blanc was on the rue de la Huchette.
We were charmed to meet you, as with your book. We must see each other in January.
Cordially,

Guy

[1] Who had refused The Time of AIDS.
[2] Jacques Florencie sings Bruant and Coute.
[3] See the posters in Guy Debord, Works, Gallimard quarto edition, pp. 376-369.

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnotes by the publisher.)

To Michel Bounan

21 January 1991

Dear Michel:

To refuse your manuscript was not a good sign for the publishing house.[1] Or for the century?
See you Thursday,
Cordially,

Guy

[1] In June 1990, Anita Blanc [an employee of Editions Gerard Lebovici] returned, "due to the death of Madame Lebovici [...] The Time of AIDS, in which she had been interested." [Translator: Bounan's The Time of AIDS was eventually published by Editions Allia.]

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnote by the publisher.)

To Michel Bounan

6 February 1991

Note for Michel

The single document photocopied here[1] is sufficient; it is the basis for everything (the others are or will be hidden or suspect).
Nicolas [Lebovici] affirms that he never signed anything and that one has never made an accounting of anything to him; neither during his adulthood, when his mother was still alive, nor since her death. This is notably obvious with respect to Editions Gerard Lebovici, where he was clearly the majority owner, being the inheritor of 75% of Floriana Lebovici's estate, which itself represented 99% ownership of the firm.
One was happy to tell him, and he was happy to hear, that he was the owner of "half," but that his well-known [mental] incapacity prevented him from getting involved, with the result that he truly bears the responsibility for the stupidities sovereignly made by the other "half," supported by a dishonest secretary who was supposed to be "competent,"[2] with this agreement sufficing to make the enterprise run without any supervision. Nicolas thus found himself at the center of an extremely crude conspiracy (the lawyer played a role).
A criminal complaint of inveigling of inheritance is necessary. This must be [done] immediate[ly]. The mother having died on 19 February 1990. Isn't there a prescription of contestations after a year? From almost that date onwards, one has risked seeing the emergence of nicely fabricated documents.
It seems to me that the goal is not only to destroy Editions Lebovici, but to efface a certain number of books that have become too celebrated and could perturb the social peace that we so harmoniously enjoy. The possible political implications could come from the socialist coterie in power (many of the lawyers who are involved in this affair have long been part of Georges Kiejman's movement[3]).
It could also be that one arranges a conspiracy, "familial" or not, to make Nicolas appear crazy, delirious and "manipulated" by evil geniuses who have already done so much harm to the preceding Lebovici generation (there was a psychiatrist in the family, who no doubt will be against Nicolas, following the lies of his amiable half-brother). Thus you should immediately and formally become his doctor. You already wrote him a prescription.
I advised him to marry as soon as possible the charming and intelligent young woman with whom he has lived for a long time. He consented. I had more difficulty convincing him that he must not keep around him at that moment an old friend, whom he [Nicolas] believed was devoted to him, but who was in fact devoted to his enemy-brother. I am convinced that this person sought to exert influence in favor of the enemies, and could even be dangerous to him, simply by being there.
It would be a beautiful example of historical humor if the author who was fraudulently refused[4] by these ignoble saboteurs and thieves happened to save "our publisher." Thanks, in any case.
Pardon me for the comminatory tone of this note. I judge the danger to be very serious and very urgent (and not only for Nicolas). Therefore, you know your metier.
See you soon,

Guy

[P.S.] I add for you alone a confidential note, linked to the other (I will give Nicolas a copy of the latter). You will see that Nicolas is not at all gripped by persecution mania, but unfortunately the opposite: he most often believes that the entire world conspires in his favor; to admire him; to please him; to love him as he merits. Thus, being truly intelligent, he can make stupid mistakes that a half-cretin wouldn't even consent to hear about. Although very inexperienced, he has the artistic sensibility, and even an exact sense of what life must be. All this is gravely darkened by his dominant tendency to spontaneously and firmly believe that the world doesn't exist in any objective manner outside of himself.
I must suppose that all of those people who have clumsily flattered him have a very high opinion of their own intellectual value and good hearts, due to the sole fact that they have so unequivocally manifested their great taste and excellent intentions.
Alice and I are perhaps the only ones who have never flattered him. He tolerates Alice quite well, but finds me to be rude, especially now. Because he has felt, rather than understood, how others have hatefully thrown him into so many traps; due to the fact that, through what I call his musical sensibility, he follows the justness of my reasoning; because he sees that we are his only friends -- in sum, one can say that he puts his trust in us. But especially do not believe that he can be reassured because of my historical experience, or even my reputation as an author of his publishing house. Such trivialities do not have any influence on a way of thinking that is so grandiosely emancipated from illusions of vulgarity.


[1] A certificate of ownership, established by Mr. Voitey on 2 May 1984, was deposited by Michel Bounan at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, along with the totality of the letters and other documents that were communicated.
[2] Translator's note: Anita Blanc.
[3] Translator's note: Kiejman was a member of Francois Mitterand's "socialist" government from 1990 to 1992.
[4] Bounan's The Time of AIDS was refused by Editions Gerard Lebovici.

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)

To Michel Bounan

15 February 1991

Dear Michel:
 
I have a meeting on Tuesday with the lawyer[1] most highly recommended by the excellent Chanson.[2]
Your treatment appears to have already calmed my excessive tendency to stay awake. To complete your documentation, I send you a kind of graphological portrait drawn, without my knowledge, based upon three lines of my handwriting, by an important expert who knew me very vaguely by reputation and who had several motives to one day present me in an unfavorable light. Apart from two or three choices in his vocabulary, I can subscribe to it.
If you estimate that it would be useful in your struggle with the publisher at Allia,[3] at least to test the possibility of censorship, you can say to this person that I was surprised at the great futility of the "technical" pretext that he gave you.[4]
A friend in Italy who suffers from hypothyroid, I believe, and who is quite well cared for by an acupuncturist who also uses oligo-elements[5] will telephone you soon on my behalf. I will call you, so that we can see each other again, when things have cleared up a little. Thanks, again.
Cordially,
French-Français

Guy

[1] Mr. Yves Cournot, specialist in literary questions.
[2] Mr Jacques Chanson, introduced to Guy Debord by Michel Bounan.
[3] Translator's note: Editions Allia published Bounan's The Time of AIDS in 1990.
[4] Faced with the author's determination to place the Christ of Gruenewald (recovered from Issenheim) on the cover of his book.
[5] Translator's note: trace minerals suspended in a liquid glycerin aqueous solution.

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)

To Michel Bounan

Saturday, 23 March 1991

Dear Michel:

I thank you for the magnificent historical analysis of the illness that has thus merited my preference. Ah! in what gallant terms are such things described![1] I am quite convinced that I made the right choice among all the illnesses that have been accessible to me; and I hope that this will also be, as one previously used to say, "the judgment of history."[2]
If I cannot regret this illness, I would not say the same thing for the allopathic poisons that one has led me to ingest and that I hope you can deliver me from. I judge just as you do the intentions of such remedies. The society that worked so hard to suppress pleasure has also claimed that it suppressed sorrow: although here its success has remained much more questionable. I have begun your treatment.
We must see each other soon to speak of something else. Alice will telephone you.
I have given your book[3] to my English publisher (Verso). He writes me that he will ask for an option from [Editions] Allia. He agreed with me that the subject could impassion the Americans faster than [those] here.
Cordially,

Guy

French-Français

French2-français2

Logic of Terrorism

Le Temps du SIDA

[1] "The illnesses of gout are always of the living who are endowed with strong creative, intellectual, sexual or social activity [...] and Hippocrates remarked that it always spared the eunuchs."
[2] Translator's note: when Guy Debord took his life on 30 November 1994, he cited polynevrite alcoolique as the cause of his distress and dated its onset from Autumn 1990.
[3] Translator's note: The Time of AIDS (Editions Allia, 1990).

(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol 7: Janvier 1988-Novembre 1994 by Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2008. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! January 2009. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)

LA CONTRADICTION FONDAMENTALE DU CAPITALISME

(extrait de Théorie critique et réflexivité historique publié dans Marx. Relire Le Capital, PUF, 2009)

Marx décrit « la production fondée sur la valeur »[1] en tant que rapport dont « la prémisse [...] est que la masse du temps de travail immédiat [...] représente le facteur décisif de la production de richesses »[2]. Ce qui, selon Marx, caractérise la valeur en tant que forme sociale, tient au fait qu'elle est constituée par la dépense de « travail immédiat effectué par l'homme »[3] dans le processus de production mesuré en temps. En tant que catégorie des rapports sociaux constitutifs du capitalisme, la valeur exprime ce qui est, et reste, le fondement premier de la production capitaliste. Cependant, la production basée sur la valeur engendre une dynamique donnant lieu à une tension croissante entre ce fondement même et les effets de son propre développement historique : « A mesure que la grande industrie se développe, la création de richesses dépend de moins en moins du temps de travail et de la quantité de travail utilisée, et de plus en plus de la puissance des agents mécaniques qui sont mis en mouvement pendant la durée du travail. L'énorme efficience de ces agents est, à son tour, sans rapport aucun avec le temps de travail immédiat que coûte leur production. Elle dépend bien plutôt du niveau général de la science et du progrès de la technologie [...]. La richesse réelle se développe maintenant, d'une part grâce à l'énorme disproportion entre le temps de travail utilisé et son produit et, d'autre part, grâce à la disproportion qualitative entre le travail, réduit à une pure abstraction, et la puissance du procès de production qu'il surveille. »[4]

Marx avance alors l'idée que le capitalisme donne constamment lieu à d'énormes augmentations de productivité dont le résultat est que, ce qu'il appelle la « richesse réelle », en vient à dépendre moins du temps de travail que de l'avancement général des sciences et de la technologie. Un décalage apparaît entre une productivité basée sur « le travail immédiat effectué par l'homme » et les forces productives telles qu'elles se développent dans le cadre du capitalisme.

Le contraste que Marx établit entre valeur et « richesse réelle » est aussi celui qui distingue une forme de richesse fondée sur le temps de travail et une autre qui ne dépend pas directement de la dépense de temps travail et qui peut être engendrée par le savoir. Ce qui veut clairement dire que la valeur ne renvoie pas à la richesse sociale en général, mais qu'elle est une forme historiquement spécifique de richesse intrinsèquement liée à un mode de production historiquement spécifique.

Nombre de discussions relatives à l'analyse de Marx quant au caractère unique du travail comme origine de la valeur passent à côté de la distinction entre « richesse réelle » et valeur. Les Grundisse montrent, en outre, que la « théorie de la valeur » chez Marx n'est pas une théorie des propriétés uniques du travail en général, mais qu'elle est au contraire une analyse de la spécificité historique de la valeur en tant que forme de richesse, et donc, implicitement, du travail qui en est constitutif. Ceci marque une différence entre la critique de l'économie politique propre à Marx et le genre d'économie politique critique qu'on lui a trop souvent attribué.

Pour Marx, la valeur est donc une catégorie critique qui exprime la spécificité historique de la forme de la richesse et de la production caractéristiques du capitalisme. Il ne s'agit pas d'une catégorie normative devant permettre de juger le capitalisme. Dans cette section de Grundisse, Marx explique qu'avec le développement du mode de production basé sur la valeur, cette dernière s'avère de moins en moins appropriée en tant que forme de richesse sociale. Elle devient anachronique du point de vue du potentiel du système de production qu'elle fait apparaître. L'accomplissement de ce potentiel passerait par l'abolition de la valeur elle-même.

Cette possibilité historique n'est cependant pas simplement quantitative (et ne présuppose pas que des volumes toujours plus grands de marchandises pourraient être produits dans les conditions de productions déjà existantes et distribuées plus équitablement). La logique de la contradiction croissante entre « richesse réelle » et valeur permet aussi d'envisager la possibilité d'un procès de production différent qui ne serait plus directement basé sur le travail humain : « Avec ce bouleversement, ce n'est ni le temps de travail utilisé, ni le travail immédiat effectué par l'homme qui apparaissent comme le fondement principal de la production de richesse ; c'est l'appropriation de sa force productive générale, son intelligence de la nature et sa faculté de la dominer [...] ; en un mot, le développement de l'individu social représente le fondement essentiel de la production et de la richesse. Le vol du temps de travail d'autrui sur lequel repose la richesse actuelle apparaît comme une base misérable par rapport à la base nouvelle, créée et développée par la grande industrie elle-même. »[5]

Dans cette section des Grundisse, il ne fait aucun doute que, pour Marx, le dépassement du capitalisme passe par l'abolition de la valeur en tant que forme sociale de richesse, ce qui implique alors un dépassement du mode de production développé dans le cadre du capitalisme. Ceci entraîne une transformation fondamentale de la structure du travail social au-delà de l'abolition de la distribution capitaliste de la richesse et du pouvoir.

Néanmoins, la transformation radicale de l'organisation du travail social esquissée précédemment n'est pas une conséquence quasi automatique de la croissance rapide du savoir scientifique et technique. Elle est au contraire une possibilité résultant d'une contradiction intrinsèque de plus en plus forte : bien que la dynamique du développement capitaliste crée la possibilité d'une structure de travail social nouvelle et émancipatrice, son accomplissement général est impossible dans les conditions du capitalisme : « Le capital est une contradiction en procès : d'une part, il pousse à la réduction du temps de travail à un minimum, et d'autre part, il pose le temps de travail comme la seule source et la seule mesure de la richesse. Il diminue donc le temps de travail sous sa forme nécessaire pour l'accroître sous sa forme de surtravail. Dans une proportion croissante, il pose donc le surtravail comme la condition - question de vie ou de mort* - du travail nécessaire. »[6]

Ainsi, même si le capitalisme tend à développer de puissantes forces de production dont le potentiel rend de plus en plus obsolète une organisation de la production basée sur la dépense directe du travail humain, sa structure est telle qu'elle ne permet pas le plein accomplissement de ce potentiel. En dépit de l'insuffisance historique croissante de la valeur, ou si l'on préfère, de la dépense de temps de travail social général comme mesure de la richesse sociale produite, elle n'est pas simplement dépassée par une nouvelle forme de richesse. Selon Marx, au contraire, elle reste la précondition structurelle nécessaire de la société capitaliste[7]. Voilà la base de la contradiction fondamentale du capitalisme.

Ces passages des Grundisse indiquent que l'idée que se fait Marx de la contradiction structurelle du capitalisme ne devrait pas être immédiatement identifiée à l'antagonisme social, à la question du conflit de classe par exemple, pas plus qu'elle ne renvoie fondamentalement à une contradiction entre appropriation privée et production socialisée dans la mesure où la production elle-même est mise en formes par les rapports capitalistes. Au contraire, l'analyse de Marx fait apparaître une contradiction entre la réalité effective de la forme de production constituée par la valeur et son potentiel (qui fonde la possibilité même d'une nouvelle forme de production). Plutôt que d'entraîner un accomplissement du prolétariat, le dépassement du capitalisme impliquerait l'abolition matérielle du travail prolétaire. La contradiction entre l'organisation de la société fondée sur la valeur et le potentiel auquel elle donne lieu établit la possibilité historique de la négation du capitalisme et, par là même, de la théorie critique du capitalisme.

Moishe Postone 

Pour lire la totalité de Théorie critique et réflexivité historique PDF ici

---

NOTES:

[1] K. Marx, Fondements de la critique de l’économie politique ou Grundrisse, vol. I, trad. R. Dangeville, Paris, Anthropos, 1967, p. 29-38.

[2] Ibid., p. 220-221.

[3] Ibid., p. 221.

[4] Ibid.

* En français dans le texte.

[5] Ibid., p. 221-222.

[6] Ibid., p. 222.

[7] Ibid. L'idée d'une reconstitution de la nécessité de la valeur distingue nettement l'analyse dialectique de Marx de l'analyse la plus linéaire que l'on trouve chez des théoriciens de la société postindustrielle tels que Daniel Bell ou Fred Block. Pour cette dernière, le décalage entre le potentiel et la réalité effective du capitalisme est fonction d'une compréhension insuffisante de la conscience.

Pour en finir avec le concept de peuple

Attaque un peu sommaire contre les bisounours anti-alter. Le mauvais peuple et les gentils banquiers... 
Se plaindre de l'insuffisance d'un fait que nous n'avons pas les moyens de changer: La Seule souveraineté connue  repose sur la Nation, en effet mais elle gène désormais le capitalisme qui pour autant n'a rien à proposer d'autre que le "Gouvernement Technique" de la totalité du monde par l'économie, c'est-a-dire la dictature de la Valeur.
Que sont les "Révolutions Arabes" ?
Des révoltes populaires (le peuple) dans le cadre de leurs Etats respectifs, il faut le voir comme un "rattrapage" mettant fin à des tyrannies obsolètes du types : Spectaculaire Concentré pour aller vers le Spectaculaire Intégré comme tout le monde de la marchandise... 
Le Peuple n'est pas un concept (création des fisolopheuuux..) c'est un tout organique ainsi désigné lors  de périodes historiques ou les gouvernement se voient contraint a des décisions politiques par l'action concerté des masses prolétariennes et/ou bourgeoises. 
C'est ainsi mes canards...

La semaine dernière lors d’une manifestation au Havre contre la tenue du sommet du G8, on a pu voir des altermondialistes brandir le slogan « les peuples, pas la finance ». Il est bien triste de voir des gens qui s’inscrivent dans une idée d’émancipation proclamer des devises aussi nulles. Pour eux, il s’agit de se référer de manière positive à l’idée de peuple, et de lui opposer le mal qui serait la finance, le bon peuple contre les méchants banquiers – deux non-sens dans une seule phrase.

D’abord le bon peuple : dans son origine latine, le concept de peuple désigne l’ensemble des citoyens d’une cité, c’est-à-dire ceux qui ont des droits. Dans l’histoire moderne, le terme de peuple est indissociable de celui de la nation ou du territoire. C’est pour cela qu’en général il est suivi d’un adjectif, le peuple français, américain, espagnol, etc… En fonction de la culture politique, il est associé plutôt à l’idée de la nation – c’est le cas en France avec le droit du sol – ou alors à celle de l’ethnie comme par exemple en Allemagne avec le droit du sang. Cela explique d’ailleurs aussi qu’aujourd’hui en Allemagne ce sont en général les milieux d’extrême droite qui utilisent de manière positive la référence au Volk (peuple). Vers la fin du 19^ème siècle était né en Allemagne se qui s’appelait le mouvement « völkisch », qui définissait l’appartenance à un peuple par la descendance (par le sang). Il prônait un retour à la nature, une identification des gens avec leur terroir et avec leur pays (au sens géographique) et faisait découler de cela une identité nationale. Cette identité, soi-disant allemande, se manifestait dans la musique, les beaux arts et plus tard aussi dans la politique. La suite de l’histoire est bien connue : les nazis se sont nourris massivement du mouvement völkisch et ont mis en place la domination et l’éradication de ceux qui étaient définis comme étant non allemands.

Un autre problème est que des concepts tels que peuple et nation fonctionnent toujours logiquement aussi par l’exclusion : si je remplis les critères d’adhésion (nationalité, ethnie, lieu de naissance…), je peux en faire partie ; si je ne remplis pas ces critères, j’en suis exclu. Aujourd’hui en France par exemple, si on s’en tient à la définition du Petit Robert, un sans-papiers ne fait pas partie du peuple car pour cela il faudrait « avoir en commun un certain nombre de valeurs et d’institutions ».

A titre purement personnel, n’importe qui peut constater qu’il est ridicule dans une perspective d’émancipation de vouloir s’attacher à l’idée d’un peuple. Je suis étranger vivant depuis presque trente ans en France, à quel peuple devrais-je me sentir appartenir ? Ces tentatives de définitions d’identité sont grotesques. La seule possibilité est de critiquer radicalement ces concepts tout à fait réels que sont peuples, Etats et nations. Il faut également démontrer la fausse opposition entre politique et économie, Etat et marché ainsi que planification et concurrence.

Vous allez me rétorquer que les altermondialistes qui parlent du peuple veulent dire le peuple du bas, en gros vous et moi contre eux, le vrai peuple quoi. Là, c’est la plus simpliste argumentation de lutte de classes qui commence vraiment à sentir le moisi, et il est étrange que ce soit des gens qui prétendent ne pas faire de la politique ou alors faire de la politique autrement qui reprennent cet argumentaire litanique digne de la belle époque du PCF. Enfin on a trouvé le nouveau sujet révolutionnaire.

Venons-en à la deuxième partie du slogan affiché : la finance. Dans une critique tronquée de la société actuelle, c’est la finance qui est assimilé au mal. C’est elle, avec la figure emblématique du banquier, qui serait responsable de la globalisation de l’économie, de la pauvreté dans le monde et des guerres sur la planète. Ah ! que cette vision est bien commode : elle permet de trouver quelques coupables, de renouveler sans cesse les fantasmes de conspiration et surtout de ne pas remettre en question le capitalisme ainsi que ses institutions que sont la politique et l’Etat. Il est clair qu’aujourd’hui les montants des transactions financières dépassent largement la production matérielle, mais la faute à cela n’est pas à chercher du côté de quelques banquiers et spéculateurs certes peu fréquentables. Si l’argent est investi massivement dans la spéculation, c’est que le secteur productif ne garantit plus assez de survaleur pour un système qui se moque de tout sens et ne connaît que la croissance. Dans cette optique, il n’y a pas de retour en arrière possible vers un capitalisme plus raisonnable, mieux géré. C’est la folie et le caractère destructeur de la socialisation capitaliste dans son ensemble qu’il faut dépasser, sans se limiter à son dernier avatar qu’est la bulle spéculative. Pour cela, il est déjà important de critiquer des concepts tels que peuple et nation, en reconnaissant qu’ils font partie du problème et non de la solution.

 

Paul Braun, 2011.

Abundance

In the so-called developed countries, where one noisily claims to have acceded to abundance, evoking this notion immediately leads one to wonder what there is such a profusion of. Less overwhelmed with uncertainties in this regard, some societies have easily defined their abundance in the practices of potlatch, ritualized waste [dilapidation], and festival. And before the simple determinations of the necessary and the superfluous lost themselves in market abstractions, repetitive work and the routine satisfaction of stable needs attained their outcome and their meaning, their consecration, in the idleness or the excess of those who represented the expensive usage of life by manifesting its values for everyone. One had to wait until today for work to annul itself in the indefiniteness of needs -- among the simplest, like breathing -- the satisfaction of which is nothing less than routine, so that one comes to ask oneself what can be desirable in the excess of such misery or the idleness that must still live with all this. Thus, market abundance, which was supposed to satisfy all of the needs that it recognized, and those that it created as a bonus, has finally enriched privation to the point of destroying all kinds of satisfaction. A society without luxury, in which the necessary is lacking: such is the most expeditious definition of what is proposed worldwide as the highest accomplishment of human history.

On 25 August 1686, the Day of Saint-Louis, the pirate Grammont -- having taken Campeche, feasted for two months and fired the cannon in honor of the king of France -- illuminated the last orgy with a blaze in which was consumed all of the wood, at the time reputed to be the most precious in the world, found in the warehouses of the town. And this man, who exceeded the customary irregularity of the pirates who accompanied him and declared themselves to be libertines, that is to say, atheists, exclaimed while contemplating this most useless and expensive of pillages: "What can they attempt at Versailles that is not salad dressing compared to what we have done?" Several weeks later, quite far in advance of another wastrel [dilapidateur], Arthur Cravan, Grammont disappeared off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and so one could not see what decisive continuation of his disastrous career could have added to this superbly launched challenge (made under the pretext of celebration) to a king whom he only recognized so as to surpass him in luxury. In the manner of Blanqui, exclaiming "Crush the romantics!" during the revolution of 1830, one exulted from being able to "Crush the Sun-King!" before the brutal overthrow of the hierarchies established in the access to abundance. Crush the pharoahic pretensions of the king who, assimilating "the regal and useful course of the sun" to the "infinite good that royalty produces," especially achieved the centralization of his court in the decorum of absolutism, which is the preliminary to all subsequent Statist impoverishment; until then ostentatious expenditure had been put in play in the disorder of the aristocratic rivalries of which the Fronde was the last and paroxysmal example.

A clumsy and authoritarian retort to the feast of Fouquet, Versailles -- thanks to the pageantry capable of enchanting generations of petit-bourgeois republicans who laboriously attained a discounted luxury, of which the "Great Century" remains the inaccessible model -- gave one the feeling of the accomplished passage from effervescence to etiquette, from excess to pomp: if it is not certain that this is a factory, the construction of which imposes itself between the chateau and an ornamental pond, it is no less the case that the beautiful disorder of life is inhibited there, like the urban troubles from which it was necessary to distance oneself, through all the heavy harmony of the decor. With respect to repression and pomp, one knows, moreover that Marly's machine,[1] which had water to play with at Versailles, was the most powerful machine of the 17th Century. Nevertheless, even though the technical machinery was still relegated to the wings of power, like an instrument of its hydraulic fantasies, this already tempered -- symbolically, at least -- its ostentation and its pomp according to some notion of public interest, and the equestrian statue constructed on demand by Bernin -- too exuberant in its illustration of an insolubly unproductive glory -- was finally set aside by its sponsor for a more edifying allegory that presented the benefits of his reign to the judgment of history.

However dubious these benefits might have appeared to its contemporaries, it is, on the other hand, certain that the harnessing of what, until then, had expended itself without reserve to the profit of economic accumulation was greatly favored by the constitution at the Court of a model of hierarchical consumption, governed by fashion and ruling over luxury according to a ladder of appearances that each person strove to climb. Parallel to the military excesses of the Fronde, aristocratic prodigality could still illustrate itself as a mundane and already private diversion in the games of the precious men and women, the charming seriousness of which Tallemant des Reaux[2] described well. But henceforth what was free fantasy became an obligation to appear on the stage of absolutism, to hold a rank from which the State drew glory: "The life of the Court becomes the criteria for a beautiful life. The luxurious standards of consumption that were established in it little by little spread throughout society." Lewis Mumford showed in Technics and Civilization how this standardized luxurious consumption, along with the equipment of military slaughter, at the origin of modern industrial production. And the essential is the fact that luxury progressively ceased to be represented in the unproductive feasts of religion and the fantastic games of those who were beyond needs, so as to be consumed, acquired under the form of commodities.

Material production was then no longer limited, as it had been previously, on the side of poverty as well as on the side of wealth: on the former, by the stability of needs, and on the latter, by expenditures of the excess in pure loss. The accumulation of the means of production, the indefinite growth of the economy, began with the creation of new needs that opened an unlimited field of deployment of dissatisfaction: by promising the democratization of luxury, and by actually banalizing it, the commodity simultaneously attacked what was beyond needs, the free play with wealth and the limited satisfaction that, if it was still not attained, was at least accepted as the sole horizon. As Goethe had one of his characters say, in praise of the incessant movement of commercial activity: "Therefore, consider thus natural or manufactured products, from all parts of the world, and dream of the fashion by which the have, by turns, become indispensable objects." And further on: "You will discover the most insignificant commodity in its relations with the ensemble of commerce and from then on you will hold nothing as insignificant since everything increases the circulation on which your own life nourishes itself" (Wilhelm Meister). But this philosophical satisfaction, which wants to save the commodity from insignificance by discovering in it the exuberance of a movement that exceeds it, is no more than an ideological travesty of what is in fact a worrisome investigation of a wealth that each time escapes in the disappointment of possession; pursued abundance retreats, and demands as compensation that the individual identify his own life with "the ensemble of commerce," and find its nourishment in "circulation." Because wealth is not deposited in any particular commodity; it is, rather, what is missing from each particular commodity and what foils it; like excess and luxury, it is the exclusive property of the infinite movement of negation of all particularity that animates the market abstraction. Money itself, when it is possessed, merely represents the negation of rest: it is the infinite quantified. "This contradiction between the always-definite quantity and the quality of the infinite power of money ceaselessly leads the hoarder to the work of Sisyphus. He is like a conqueror whose each new conquest only leads to a new frontier" (Marx).[3]

Thus, only this "infinite power" that money incarnates, the permanent self-valorization of the world of things, socially represents the true wealth, not as a result but as a process, in which the preceding know-how must each time be thrown into the furnace of production, of economic progress. To the movement that carries society far from all previous stability, the revolutionary bourgeoisie in vain opposed its ideal of Spartan frugality and voluntary egalitarianism; it no longer had time to restore the old bases of satisfaction and historic action. Instead of enjoying itself and periodically exhausting itself in disorders and institutionalized, ritualized destruction [dilapidation], human negativity was at once repressed and captured by the cycle of productive work, in which it turned 'round, thereby making the economic machine turn. Hegel -- more radical than Goethe and anyone else [at that time] because he was less concerned with positive consolations -- could thenceforth praise in technique the "restlessness of the subjective, of the Concept, placed beyond the subject": the Spirit of the World functioned all alone. It has not ceased to do so today, when it manifests itself under the modest signature of Chernobyl,[4] for example, so well placed "beyond the subject" that this subject, the real human being, is no more than the lack of spirit, the source of error. But Hegel also foresaw this: "Finally, the abstraction of production makes work ever more mechanical and, in the end, it is possible that man will be excluded and that the machine will replace him" (Principles of the Philosophy of Right).

The attachment to things, the anguished need for their possession, is the ordinary neurosis through which the desire for abundance seeks to satisfy itself, "curbed" in production and deprived of the ritualized forms of its sublimation: the mania of the collector, the vain search for a useless accomplishment, represents the shrill form of the frustration of the consumer. But, for all that, what announced itself as an ascension to luxury was realized as an extension of necessity. Thus Mumford wrote the following to summarize how the banalization of the conventional signs of luxury contributed to the growth of manufacturing production: "One can remark with irony that it is with the capital amassed in his workshops of junk in Soho that Matthew Boulton helped James Watt during the period in which he was perfecting the steam engine." Junk is, among the savages who aspire to practice luxury in gratuitousness and unproductive expenditure, the fallacious ambassador of efficiency, of the economy that always enslaves them more and more to work. Junk carries the flag [les couleurs] of the commodity, but it must borrow them from the world that the commodity is in the process of abolishing. Its false brilliance reflects for a moment longer the splendor of a disappearing luxury, which the powers in their rivalries dilapidates; and which testifies to the beauty of many Italian towns that are, in the overlapping of ostentatious architectural expenditures, like a petrified potlatch. To the Towers of San Gimignamo, which uselessly fly towards the sky, to play with the wealth that is offered to all as decor, the world of junk replied with the somber and solitary obstinacy of William Beckford, who twice rebuilt the Tower of Fonthill, which he wanted to be always taller and which, due to its repeated collapses, consumed the most important fortune in England. At least Beckford, still enjoying the aristocratic privileges of wealth, could really celebrate -- to the great scandal of his milieu -- the sumptuous festival of which [his novel] Vathek was the literary echo. If the whole life of he who was like Louis II without a kingdom or a Ferdinand Cheval without a wheelbarrow (but who inscribed on his Ideal Palace "The fairies of the East come to fraternize with the West"), if the meditated disaster of his excess -- which wasn't only architectural -- was a violent challenge to what began to unfurl with the industrial revolution, one can say more generally that, beyond aesthetics and his taste for the Gothic and its profusion of vain ornaments, it is fitting to understand that, under the name of Romanticism, he above all expressed a protest against the downfall of luxury, against the poverty of a world in which splendor had to be borrowed from the past and in which art, like junk, is essentially nostalgia. Schiller's famous affirmation, according to which man is only fully man when he is at play, is inscribed upon the threshold of the modern hell of production, in which the principle of efficiency no longer leaves any place for play, in which mutilated man works to produce the consumable substitutes for the faculties that have been amputated from him.

Considered in this way, not in the perspective of necessity but of its contrary, "luxury" -- as was attempted, not without several quite ridiculous blunders concerning modern problems, by Georges Bataille in "The Notion of Expenditure"[5] and The Accursed Share[6] -- the economic and anti-economic history of human societies assuredly acquires different, brilliant colors than those that -- thanks to the people who retroactively impose the stinginess of market calculations -- spoil the beauty of what was accomplished, what was made in the depth of the desire to accede to the free expenditure of life, to the affirmation of human prodigality. Nevertheless, the action that pushes the question of abundance, of the collective access to abundance (and thus the idea that we must own all that has been manifested the luxurious values of life in the past), to be posed lucidly and rationally must not, in its turn, led us to retrospectively consider history by loaning to the recovered epochs the possible freedoms that are ours in this respect. Abundance has always existed, but nowhere has it existed abundantly: either because everyone did not enjoy it or because, when everyone did enjoy it, they did not do so all of the time. No doubt abundance really lived can only be particular to a human group engaged in a collective adventure, when it has its own practical values, its own language, its own rules of the game. Thus, Huizinga wrote the following with respect to the descriptions furnished by Malinowski of the rituals of reciprocal gift-exchange practiced by the Melanesians: "The entire event unfolded in an atmosphere of reciprocal obligation, trust, friendship, free hospitality, noble exploits, generosity, honor and glory. The navigations were often adventurous and full of dangers" (Homo ludens). But today, to recover the particularity of practices of abundance, this diversity and all the rival requirements of which it can be the occasion, it is necessary to attack the general form that has taken dispossession in market wealth, abstract abundance, in which all direct pleasure is denied.

The universal right to wealth that the commodity instaurates by destroying all privileged and ritualized participation in expenditure: this abstraction realizes itself in the always-increasing distance from the usage of abundance. The ostentation of the rich only realizes itself with the aid of signs of an absent life, in the accumulation of objects that are irremediably deprived of all that their mode of usage does not know how to provide. The consumer of the abundant commodity is the secularized version of the ascetic ideal embodied by the hoarder. He also pursues the appropriation of wealth under its general, abstract form, by renouncing wealth in its material reality, in the particularization and in the manifestations of his life. Because he is ignorant of his real needs, to the profit of the arbitrary forms that they assume in the spectacle, he misrecognizes both deprivation and its reversal. One can see the point at which one can revive the meaning of human abundance at the opposite extreme of the existing counterfeits in this paradoxical luxury, in which the spectacle has taken its completed form and where the ideal of the hoarder's renunciation has attained its best formulation in the motto of Benjamin Franklin, who developed the famous precept time is money[7]: in American society, the truth of wealth -- which flees from all parts of the needy ostentation of the privileged consumers of appearances -- is experienced in the exuberant and desperate life of the most miserable: the Blacks. Faced with the sordid American dream, the Black shave thrown -- as a denial of all that one wants to reduce them to, and of all that one has believed to gain thereby -- the insult of a sovereign scorn, which is dispensed in the most useless of luxuries: music. In hardly more than 50 years, jazz[8] has completed the cycle that leads all art to detach itself from the collective practices of a game with repertory forms and to affirm itself in an individualized production that takes innovation as its rule, and thus sinks into a negative movement in which it only expresses the loss of a common language. But previously, at its point of incandescence -- disengaged from the conventions of folklore,[9] but without losing itself in the cacophony of impossible communication -- it had, as a savage postface to the history of art, prolonged for another instant the ability to represent an authentic luxury, to manifest the gratuitousness of life. Having passed beyond this point, but without betraying the negation that it incarnated in a positive expression, jazz only has the choice between the beaten tracks of formal decomposition, which would reduce it to the sub-dadaism of official American culture, and the difficult road of a supercession of all representation in the insurrection of the Blacks. One knows what has become of jazz, and today it remains something to be collected by the aesthetes of the microgrooves.

Bataille wrote in 1933: "Today, the great and free social forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. However, it is not necessary to conclude from this that the very principle of expenditure has ceased to be situated as the end of economic activity [...] Only generosity and nobility have disappeared and, with them, the spectacular counterpart that the rich would render to the poor" ("The Notion of Expenditure").[10] Since the time that Bataille wrote these lines, the progress of class society has manifestly consisted of endowing itself with the means that allow it, with neither generosity nor nobility, but with the efficacy of cold calculation, to render to contemporary poor people the "spectacular counterpart" from which they were excluded; that is to say, today practically everyone, from the satisfaction of elementary needs to participation in luxurious expenditure. Conforming to the particular logic of the economy, such a counterpart absorbs an always-growing part of the excess productivity that one does not put to emancipatory usage: the spectacular substitute for life consumes the energy that could be devoted to surpass this substitute. But, as this expenditure still does not suffice to maintain the pressure of economic necessity, the unleashing of the artificial and the construction of a pseudo-reality is accompanied by the destruction of all the realities on which survival rests: this is a recoil in which the arbitrary in the usage of technical power negatively expresses possible freedom. And in this indefinite outbreak of the struggle for the satisfaction of need, society disastrously consumes the power that it could joyously waste in surmounting the economy.

When it began to reformulate itself upon the refusal of work, including the artistic work that represented for subservient society an activity that was emancipated from necessity -- a luxurious game -- , the revolutionary programme of communist abundance could still, with the grain of Marxist reasoning, consider that capitalism had accomplished its historical task by creating a productive apparatus that could permit an egalitarian satisfaction of needs, and that this very development, with the material powers thus accumulated, thenceforth posed to humanity the problem of a free expenditure of life that, generalized, was at the same time the supercession of art and the economy. Against the retrograde claims of reformism -- which only gave as its objective to the workers' struggles the ascension to a minimum of survival, condemned them to indefinitely pursue the satisfaction of needs under the arbitrary forms and the always-increased artificial necessities of this society -- it [the revolutionary programme] affirmed: "Life is to be lived beyond" (Potlatch, #4, July 1954).[11] It seems established that, on the basis of technical development, with the possibility of an automation that would discharge men from all the constraints of non-creative activity, the content of the modern revolution thenceforth becomes the employment of the time and energies thus liberated: to give it a programme that really responds to the principal problem of the era -- overdevelopment without wealth -- , which could pass for the definition of a new wealth, in total opposition to the inept lie of the so-called "society of consumption." Beyond the socialization of vital goods, it would be a question of indicating my means of appropriate propaganda the excessive liberty of a possible game, which alone would give a passionate meaning to the fact that the question of subsistence can be rationally dominated: "Revolutionary thought must make the critique of everyday life in bourgeois society; [it must] spread another idea of happiness. The Left and the Right are in accord on the image of poverty, which is a matter of having no food [privation alimentaire]. The Left and the Right are also in accord on the image of the good life [...] Beefsteak will be replaced as the sign of the masses' right to live" (Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958).[12]

Thirty years later, it is not deceptive to summarize the situation by saying that we have gained nothing beyond beefsteak, and that we have lost beefsteak itself. That is to say, by acceding to abundant consumption, we have seen beefsteak effectively "replaced" by something in which there is a lot of merchandise and very little meat. Not only has the dominant society (in its own way, that is, by gradually and partially automating production) succeeded in surmounting technical development by neutralizing human energy, which is thereby rendered vacant, but also by creating "jobs" [[13]emplois] in this sector (thus preventing the creation of a new use [emploi] of life), but this society has also ceaselessly lengthened the detour by which we reach vital goods, diligently unburdening at each stage of sophistication a part of its content (to the profit of costly synthetic substitutes). And the end of the day, what everyone accedes to (if everyone indeed accedes to it, because it is still necessary to pay for these aliments[14] of death) literally no longer exists. The threshold of abundance has thus paradoxically been freed from both the costs of the satisfaction of elementary needs, with the result that beefsteak -- if one has the least interest in quality or even merely the non-noxious -- once again becomes a revolutionary demand. In a world turned upside-down, the most absurd excesses are the rule where proportion [la mesure] and exact knowledge obviously impose themselves (in the appropriation of nature); and in those places where the free effervescence of human freedom can manifest itself completely at its leisure, there reigns the most sordid parsimony, passivity and repetition.

Nevertheless, unproductive activity suppressed by the anti-historical maintenance of market profitability returns as an irrationality that is socially supportable by the compulsive absurdity of individual behaviors. Thus, as if to justify the idea that the automobile should principally be an idiotic plaything, and secondarily a means of transportation, we see the young generations, unable to construct a way of life [savoir-vivre], devote themselves to an expedited way of death [savoir-mourir], by employing the means of permitted circulation in a superabundantly aberrant fashion. This destructive excess -- excessive with respect to the normally programmed rate of usury (concerning the vehicles as much as their users) -- evokes the operations of snipers who act on the margins of the great campaigns of destruction in which this society catastrophically expends its power. There obviously are not a lack of humanists to be indignant about the irresponsibility of all those who throw themselves down the roads, after making themselves suitably intoxicated, but these protectors of survival want to ignore the fact that it is not drunkenness that is absurd, nor the will to play with machines, but the constraints that weigh down upon the deployment of all this, determining a usage that is so poor that its only excess is auto-destruction (if one dares to say so). The modern poor people who give the end of work such a rivalry of risks and waste use the commodity that best summarizes the cost of this work, what it costs and what it allows; it is all this that they put into play in the sole goal of recovering the real prestige that attaches itself to the scorn of riches. It is for this prestigious sacrifice that alcohol prepares people: alcohol would only be an obstacle if it was a question of circulating efficiently, and it is precisely this that is not a concern.

No matter what the drug, only the construction of superior games could put an end to the pathology of substitute expenditures that, in their repetitive fixations, reproduce the world of constraints that these expenditures want to repudiate. How could this society -- which only knows how to organize the muddles of material and human resources on a grand scale -- really judge the muddles that so many desperate people make of their own lives and demand that each person subscribe to this madness as a necessity? All the successes of domination over the last thirty years have consisted of planning a regularized destruction of goods, which replaces the old economic function of war. Without difficulty, market abundance has been, at the simple level of consumed objects and supposed satisfactions, the contrary of what it said it was: the subservience to an indefinitely renewed productive labor, integrated usury supporting the methods of advertising so as to impose the change of what remains fundamentally identical, and the ephemera of the necessary thus began to annul the material conditions of luxury. But the perpetuation of what can define as the monstrous paradox of this society, which makes people work to maintain work, obliged one to carry the destruction further, quite beyond the sphere of the usual objects. The current disaster -- from ordinary waste to regularized catastrophes -- is like a frightening potlatch of destruction by which humanity searches to recover, in the ruins of its illusions, the truth of its needs as well as its true wealth. The fact that the costs of its own devastations today become properly incalculable by the existing society: in its way, this fact expresses how accumulated power can come forth from the economy without, for all that, surmounting it: by prolonging beyond all proportion the enslavement of men and the destruction of life.

In the light of this overturning of abundant production by its contrary, one can re-read what the situationists wrote in 1960 concerning the supercession of "the old division between imposed work and passive diversions" that must allow "the automatization of production and the socialization of vital goods": "Thus liberated from all economic responsibility, liberated from all debts to the past and others, man will dispose of a new use-value, incalculable in money because it is impossible to reduce it to the measurements of salaried work: the value of play, of life freely constructed" ("Manifesto of 17 May 1960," Internationale Situationniste #4).[15] The surplus-value that has been expropriated from us henceforth shows itself in the monstrous excess of Statist arbitrariness, of which it can certainly be said that it is "liberated from all debts to the past and others" and even all economic responsibility. Material power, accumulated in the hierarchical framework of the past, instead of being reoriented by an emancipatory project, can no longer be distinguished from the powers of the owners of monopolized survival. In 1776, bringing Boswell to the workshops in which he manufactured Watt's steam engine in serial fashion, Boulton is said to have said: "Here, sir, I sell what everyone desires to have: power." The crux of the matter being that the English word power signifies both ability and power (in the sense of energy). What everyone wants to have -- the material ability to emancipate oneself from immediate needs -- is thus returned to and against us by socially taking the form of a power that undertakes to definitively keep us in the "system of needs" that already convinced Hegel to conclude upon the necessity of a State bureaucracy: a "system of mutual physical dependency" as constraining and coherent as the surveillance of the stockpiles of nuclear waste.

Thus the project of revolutionary reappropriation cannot today hold anything as historically established: satisfaction and excess must be reconstructed together, and only a society that can rationally organize this can devote itself freely to reinventing them. It will be a question -- in the autonomy of individuals and groups, as a moving frontier in dynamic contradiction -- of recovering the opposition of needs and luxuries, of which the alienating forms -- in the division between work and leisure -- have finally ruined all aptitude to produce and enjoy, to measure and play, to accumulate and squander. But from now on, in this decomposition -- which we defined in the "Prospectus" that announced the publication of this Encyclopedia as "one of the paradoxes of our situation" -- "it is necessary for us to develop a critique that leads beyond this state of affairs and, at the same time, re-takes for our account certain qualities and values (made precise and deepened) that bureaucratization annihilates and that, previously, it seemed possible to directly supercede in the abundance of a free construction of life." And this is why, we, who are so little disposed to have a sense of proportion, must also acquire it.

http://www.notbored.org

(Published anonymously in Encyclopedia of Nuisances, #11, 1986. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! June 2007. All footnotes by the translator.)

[1] Completed in 1684, Marly's machine was a series of 14 gigantic water-wheels installed along the Seine.

[2] Tallemant des Reaux (1619-1692), the author of Historiettes, a collection of short biographies.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Part 1, Chapter III, Section 3: Money.

[4] The phrase "the modest signature of Chernobyl" occurs in a letter from Guy Debord to Jaime Semprun dated 12 June 1986.

[5] "The Notion of Expenditure" was first published in French in 1933. A translation into English appears in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (University of Minnesota, 1985).

[6] The Accursed Share was first published in 1949. A translation into English was published by Zone Books in 1989. In our review of this book, we denounced Bataille for his cynical justifications for Stalinism.

[7] English in original. Note: we think that the rest of this paragraph is total bullshit.

[8] English in original. For similar bullshit, see Theodor Adorno's awful essay "On Jazz" (1936).

[9] English in original.

[10] See "The Notion of Expenditure," Visions of Excess, p. 124.

[11] "In the Minimum of Life." Note that in Reuban Keehan's translation of this text, which appears on the Situationist International Online, this entire sentence -- intended ironically -- is missing.

[12] "The Collapse of the Revolutionary Intellectuals." Note that in Reuban Keehan's translation of this text, which appears on the Situationist International Online, privation alimentaire is rendered as "basic privation," which loses the flavor of the pun on food ("beefsteak"), and the entire sentence "The Left and the Right are also in accord on the image of the good life" is missing.

[13] See Guy Debord's essay Abat-Faim, which was also published by Encyclopedia of Nuisances.

[14] This word can mean both "food" and "necessities."

[15] Note that in Fabian Thompsett's translation of this text, which appears on the Situationist International Online, l'homme disposera d'une nouvelle plus-valueEncyclopedia of Nuisances project and the pronounced "pro-situ" or, if you will, sub-situ tone of articles such as this one, see Guy Debord's letter to Jean-Pierre Baudet and Jean-Francois Martos dated 9 September 1987.) is rendered as "humankind will exude [sic] a new surplus value." (For an incisive critique of the entire

LE VOL DU TEMPS DE TRAVAIL

Mais peut on faire confiance aux saloperies staliniennes des Éditions Sociales (PCF) ?

Extrait des Manuscrits de 1857/1858 "Grundrisse", tome 2, Éditions Sociales, 1980, pp. 220-226.

Dès que le travail, sous sa forme immédiate, a cessé d’être la source principale de la richesse, le temps de travail cesse et doit cesser d’être sa mesure, et la valeur d’échange cesse donc aussi d’être la mesure de la valeur d’usage. [...]

A mesure que la grande industrie se développe, la création de richesses en vient à dépendre moins du temps de travail et de la quantité de travail utilisée, que de la puissance des agents qui sont mis en mouvement pendant la durée du travail. L’énorme efficience de ces agents est, à son tour, sans rapport aucun avec le temps de travail immédiat que coûte leur production. Elle dépend bien plutôt du niveau général de la science et du progrès de la technologie ou de l’application de cette science à la production. [...]

[La production s’automatise, la force de travail du producteur n’est plus exploitée] Mais lui-même trouve place à côté du procès de production, au lieu d’en être l’agent principal. Avec ce bouleversement, ce n’est ni le temps de travail utilisé, ni le travail immédiat effectué par l’homme qui apparaissent comme le fondement principal de la production et de la richesse ; c’est l’appropriation de sa force productive générale, son intelligence de la nature et sa faculté de la dominer, dès lors qu’il s’est constitué en un corps social ; en un mot le développement de l’individu social représente le fondement essentiel de la production et de la richesse. Le vol du temps de travail sur lequel repose la richesse actuelle apparaît comme une base misérable par rapport à la base nouvelle, créée et développée par la grande industrie elle-même. Dés que le travail, sous sa forme immédiate, a cessé d’être la source principale de la richesse, le temps de travail cesse et doit cesser d’être sa mesure, et la valeur d’échange cesse donc aussi d’être la mesure de la valeur d’usage. Le surtravail des grandes masses a cessé d’être la condition du développement de la richesse générale, tout comme le non-travail de quelques-uns a cessé d’être la condition du développement des forces générales du cerveau humain. La production basée sur la valeur d’échange s’effondre de ce fait et le procès de production matériel immédiat se voit lui-même dépouillé de sa forme mesquine, misérable et antagonique. C’est alors le libre développement des individualités. Il ne s’agit plus dès lors de réduire le temps de travail nécessaire en vue de développer le surtravail, mais de réduire en général le travail nécessaire de la société à un minimum. Cette réduction permet ensuite que les individus reçoivent une formation artistique et scientifique, etc., grâce au temps libéré et aux moyens créés au bénéfice de tous. _Le capital crée une contradiction en procès : d’une part il pousse à la réduction du temps de travail à un minimum et d’autre part il pose le temps de travail comme la seule source et la seule mesure de la richesse. Il diminue donc le temps de travail sous sa forme nécessaire pour l’accroître sous sa forme de travail superflu. Dans une proportion croissante, il pose donc le travail superflu comme la condition -question de vie ou de mort- du travail nécessaire . D’une part, il éveille toutes les forces de la science et de la nature ainsi que celles de la coopération et de la circulation sociales, afin de rendre la création de la richesse indépendante (relativement) du temps de travail utilisé pour elle. D’autre part, il prétend mesurer les gigantesques forces sociales ainsi créées d’après l’étalon du temps de travail, et les enserrer dans des limites étroites, nécessaires au maintien, en tant que valeur, de la valeur déjà produite. Les forces productives et les rapports sociaux - simples faces différentes du développement de l’individu social -apparaissent uniquement au capital seulement comme des moyens, et des moyens pour produire sur une base limitée-. Mais en fait ce sont les conditions matérielles capables de faire éclater cette base. [...]

Le développement du capital fixe indique jusqu’à quel degré le savoir social général, la connaissance, est devenue force productive immédiate, et, par suite, jusqu’à quel point les conditions du processus vital de la société sont elles-mêmes passées sous le contrôle de l’intellect général , et sont organisées conformément à lui. [...]

Quoi qu’il en soit, le capital crée une grande quantité de temps disponible , en dehors du temps de travail nécessaire à la société en général et à chacun de ses membres en particulier, autrement dit, une marge d’espace pour le développement de toutes les forces productives de chaque individu, et donc aussi de la société. Cette création de temps de non-travail apparaît, pour le capital et les systèmes antérieurs, comme un simple temps de non-travail, du temps libre pour quelques-uns. Mais en ce qui concerne le capital, celui-ci augmente le temps de surtravail de la masse par tous les moyens de la science et de l’art, parce que sa richesse est directement fonction de l’appropriation du temps de surtravail, son but étant directement la valeur, et non la valeur d’usage. Il est ainsi, malgré lui, l’instrument qui crée les moyens du temps sociaI disponible, qui réduit sans cesse à un minimum le temps de travail pour toute la société et libère donc le temps de tous en vue du développement propre de chacun. Cependant, il tend toujours lui-même a créer du temps disponible d’un côté, pour le transformer en surtravail de l’autre. S’il réussit trop bien à créer du temps disponible, il souffrira de surproduction, et le travail nécessaire sera interrompu, parce que le capital ne peut plus mettre en valeur aucun surtravail. Plus cette contradiction se développe, plus il se révèle que la croissance des forces productives ne saurait être freinée davantage par l’appropriation du surtravail d’autrui. Les masses ouvrières doivent donc s’approprier elles-mêmes leur surtravail. De ce fait le temps disponible cesse d’avoir une existence contradictoire. Le temps de travail nécessaire se mesure dès lors aux besoins de l’individu social, et le développement de la force productive sociale croit avec une rapidité si grande que, même si la production est calculée en fonction de la richesse de tous, le temps disponible croît pour tous. La Richesse véritable signifie, en effet, le développement de la force productive de tous les individus. Dès lors, ce n’est plus le temps de travail, mais le temps disponible qui mesure la richesse. _Si le temps de travail est la mesure de la richesse, c’est que la richesse est fondée sur la pauvreté, et que le temps libre résulte de la base contradictoire du surtravail ; en d’autres termes cela suppose que tout le temps de l’ouvrier soit posé comme du temps de travail et que lui-même soit ravalé au rang de simple travailleur et subordonné au travail. C’est pourquoi la machinerie la plus développée contraint aujourd’hui l’ouvrier à travailler plus longtemps que ne le faisaient le sauvage ou lui-même, lorsqu’il disposait d’outils plus rudimentaires et primitifs.

Karl Marx

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