Spontaneity and organisation (five)

The problem of revolution does not lie at the level of the class consciousness of those workers not yet recruited into the organisation. And it is absurd to ask those whose in-itself subjectivity has advanced beyond the demands which militant organisationalists are capable of formulating in for-itself terms, and to seek to collapse the complexity of the struggle for their individual needs back into such massified formations. 


Nor is the problem of revolution to be found in the  absence of an organisation for the expression of needs – as such an organisation, if it  is not ‘spontaneously’ constituted, is likely to have a regressive effect on actual needs and re-present them in the obsolete forms which are preferred by the militant minority. 

The real problem of revolution, if it is such, is the for-itself  (conscious/integrated) connection of actual needs with a critique of existing conditions – the distinct modal phases of whinging and what is it that you really want must cohere. However, it is likely again, that needs cannot conduct a critique of conditions, and that conditions must first conduct its critique of needs... that is, first the productive relation must enter a critical phase where it becomes disconnected from the production of needs, where it abandons the question of needs, in order to preserve the relation as an abstraction. In other words, an objective crisis within the productive process (which draws its energy away from the question of needs and towards the question of the social relation) tends to provoke a subjective reevaluation of the nature and priorities of needs independently of the capitalist relation and possibly in terms of a new relation. Where the capitalist social relation is forced to sever its life supporting function (the integration of human needs within value production) and populations, thus deprived, are forced into direct production for their needs, a new  social relation becomes possible. 

The extent that we spontaneously exist as pro-communists within present conditions is the rate at which needs are being re-evaluated as a communist critique of those conditions, and it is also the extent to which capitalism is already in crisis. The higher the incidence of the spontaneous appearance of needs expressed in for-itself terms within the mass of proletarianised humanity, the greater is the depth of the productive crisis, and correspondingly the more conducive environmental conditions become for communist ideas.