Over at the North Star, Matthijs Krul has written an interesting critique of Endnotes.1 We don’t typically bother with individual “responses to critics”, but in this case the entanglement of stimulating thoughts with a series of errors demanded at least an attempt to tease the two apart in a few quick, critical notes. Krul has really written a critique, not of Endnotes, but rather, of what he takes so-called “communisation theory” to be about. On the basis of a rather weak grasp of the textual evidence, Endnotes is treated in this article as a sort of sounding board for Krul’s assumptions about this ersatz conceptual construct.2

So, we’ll start with a word of caution about “communisation theory”: while we’ve spoken at times of “communist theory”, Endnotes has never promoted or claimed to represent a singular “communisation theory”. This coinage of others has perhaps been a useful shorthand; it has also played a role in bundling some sprawling debates into a compact, movable good that can be readily exchanged on the market of theory fads (a sort of indie alternative to the major label Badious and Zizeks). But if one really wants to make a serious critique of so-called communisation theory it is of course necessary to pay close attention to specific texts, to the unfolding of certain debates, and to the ways in which this term cannot ultimately designate a single, unified position at all. As we’ll see, Krul evidently hasn’t paid such attention to his object, and thus the more interesting thoughts that are present in his text suffer from their entwinement with fundamental errors of interpretation. Yet, especially where Krul’s points overlap with those of other critics, they aren’t all reducible to mere subjective mistakes — there are no doubt some real issues flagged here which demand further consideration. On these points, we’re thankful to Krul for raising them in the context of an attempted sympathetic critique.

Krul’s most remarkable error occurs in the opening paragraph, in his first attempt to describe the basic “contributions” of Endnotes and “communisation theory” more broadly. Krul claims that we attribute the historic defeat of the 20th Century workers’ movement to its failure “to understand the abolition of classes required to abolish the value form”. Here Krul attributes to Endnotes something we’ve criticised in others since the beginning of this project: namely, the sort of “standpoint of critique” that is particularly prominent in the thread of value critique that runs from the German New Left. According to this standpoint, the problem of the revolutionary movements of the 20th Century was that — alas — they didn’t understand value theory. “So much the worse for your theory”, would be a legitimate response to such claims. We refer Krul to the introduction to our first issue:

When we address the question of [the failures of these revolutions] we cannot resort to ‘what if’ counterfactuals — blaming the defeat of revolutionary movements on everything (leaders, forms of organisations, wrong ideas, unripe conditions) other than the movements themselves in their determinate content.3

… and to ‘Communisation and Value-Form Theory’, from Endnotes 2:

“communisation” is not what communism and the revolution “always really was or as it always should have been.” [ . . . ] the radical “way out” implied by value-form theory may be determined by the historical evolution of the capital–labour relation itself, rather than being the product of an ahistorically correct consciousness, free-floating scientific point of view or perspective of critique 4

Far from endorsing the anachronism of such a “standpoint of critique”, the debate in which Endnotes was forged — and which is presented in Endnotes 1 — was specifically about the historicity of the horizon of revolution. Is communism some invariant truth of the working class, capitalism or humanity? Or is the way in which the question of the revolutionary overcoming of the capitalist mode of production is posed specific to particular historical moments? On these matters at least, we’ve always sided with Théorie Communiste against what Krul would term the “romanticism” of the ultra-left: the failures of the 20th Century revolutions are not ultimately attributable to bad ideas, lapses of the will, betrayals, mistaken strategies etc. At play in those upheavals were notions of revolution, communism etc entirely appropriate to the moment, which was defined in particular by the ascendence of an industrial working class which could quite plausibly project itself as the future of the human race. The pedantry of value critics and their ilk obviously has little purchase on such things. The very concept of “communisation” as we’ve used it has always been a sort of conceptual marker for new, historically-specific ways in which we can begin thinking about communist revolution on the basis of present conditions, which frees us from the need to incessantly sift through the wrongs and rights of 20th Century communism. Criticising Endnotes — or indeed anyone vaguely sympathetic to Théorie Communiste — for reading the revolutions of the 20th Century anachronistically, as if they merely lacked our ideas, is rather like criticising Nietzsche for his Christian faith.

So much for our supposed “error theory of history”. Krul thinks he has found another sort of error at work in Endnotes: a claim that capitalism involves a “category error” due to its being based on “ontological cleavages”. Krul apparently thinks ontology is all about ideas:

to see capitalism as primarily based on ontological cleavages, and only analytically subsequently mediated by value and the state and all the ‘real abstractions’, is a curious approach — one which indeed suggests capitalism as a category error that has (by accident?) arisen in history

to see the ‘real movement’ as a movement of free will against determination through categories is to see the problem at the level of ontology, of the ‘ontological cleavages’ mentioned — in other words, at the level of ideas

The constitutive separations at the heart of the capitalist mode of production, to which we refer with the term “ontological cleavages”, are in no sense “errors”, nor are they a matter of mere ideas. On the contrary, they are the necessary presuppositions and outcomes of determinate, historically-specific social processes. An ontological cleavage that is fundamental for capitalism is the separation of human beings from the land, and thus from long-established modes of access to means of production and subsistence. This separation was sometimes a literal expropriation of land from peasant smallholders. But it was often a change in social relations that did not require physical eviction; instead new relations came into being via the charging of ground rents. While basic social transformations, such as this one, may have an ideal aspect, they are obviously in no sense a matter of errors, category mistakes or mere ideas.

It seems likely Krul derives this odd reading in part from a careless skim of our account of the evolution of the concept of “subsumption”, in which we note its shift from a purely logical/philosophical category (to which epistemological questions of “error” may well be relevant) to a social one, in its transmission from Kant to Hegel to Marx.5 A certain sense of the perverse marks Marx’s contribution here: there is something perverse about the objective idealities of the capitalist mode of production — about the way capital can present itself as the “truth” of the labour process, exchange-value as the truth of use-value and so on. But these are not merely epistemological matters which might be corrected with greater knowledge; on the contrary, they’re given by the real, socially-objective qualities of the social forms themselves.

Krul slides confusedly between this claim that we see a constitutive “error” at the heart of capitalism (which makes it all about ideas), and the formerly discussed claim that we read the revolutionary movements of the 20th Century in terms of such faulty ideas. Krul’s “error theory” leads him to throw around some distinctly inapposite critical platitudes:

Whether or not Stalin was wrong about value theory, and whether or not Trotsky was a ‘productivist’ and a whip of working class discipline is really neither here nor there. The pattern of the 20th century, however much an ‘age of extremes’, is far too uniform and independent of the will and motives of the individuals concerned to depend on a category mistake or an inadequate understanding of real subsumption. If Stalin had been able to read Dauvé, this would not have mattered.

(Custard pie projectile flies wide of mark and hits unfortunate passer-by. . .)

Krul’s text is structured around this double notion of “error” which, as we’ve seen, is easily refuted in both senses. Onto this creaking structure he bolts various other artefacts of critical inattention. For example: