No Workers Go To Heaven: Theses on Communistic Philosophy
“Communisation is a struggle against capital by communism, that is to say that for it communism appears simultaneously as the means and the end.” [1]
An Affirmation of Our Previous Critiques
Communism itself is something often gestured at and clouded by fragments of the imagination, an obstacle to weave away from as soon as it approaches the horizon; this convenient obfuscation often leaves little concrete understanding of communist activity under capitalism, and the role of communists beyond propagation.
It can also be said that much of our current exists as a trend defining what capitalism is, and what communism is not; We argue this is not pendantic but an integral measure to adequately understand the movement of and for communism. This work seeks to define our image of communism as a negative movement to abolish what exists, as the negation of the negation, and therefore capital and its mediatory reins, i.e. politics, democracy, and class character among others. Only with an understanding of capitalist contradiction and these distinct products of class society, can we adequately elaborate on communist measures and action. Let us define each of these features.
Building from Hegelian thought, Marx professed a history that is both enthralling and limited by his historical site. Be that as it may, we can still find the origin for communism in capital today. Not as a mutually inclusive totality, but of as a negation of the social relationship itself.
“The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” [2]
Thus, for as much as we define communism by what it is not, Communism cannot be defined without its negation of capitalism. In genesis it can most accurately be described as “the negation of the negation”, through “the acquisition of the capitalist era”. As this era produced a social relationship that was and is untenable on the basis that it is in contradiction, it provides conditions by which communism can arrive. These conditions — the foundation of all social activity under capitalism — see unceasing valorization potentially brought to death by the declining rate of profit (and the obscuring of the individual worker in wealth creation) in capital itself.
Communism is of course a stateless, classless, moneyless society. But to further understand action as action, we have to define what is most sacred: Not mere property, but societal products themselves. Under capitalism every aspect of the social relation is under fervent critique and ridicule by all major players: Every bourgeois politician, FinTech spokesman and petit-bourgeois outwardly lambasts the system as much as every proletarian when they launch against abstractions. What is sacred are the mechanisms of our epoch which platform and intensify Spectacle.
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation…The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” [3]
Capital employs mediation to both obscure and intensify its own character in the quest to commodify and valorize every possible molecule of society. In doing so, in its management and governance, it creates weapons specific to its historical site, weapons that appear as they have always existed, that imply they are the great culmination of human history and to do away with them would be cardinal Sin. Thus we as communists often let them slip between the cracks in the embryonic visions of a classless society, while seeking to conquer and tame these beasts of the epoch for our own use. Let us continue.
Politics, at its essence, is the Spectacular mediation employed by capital to manage itself, by which after the intitial social relationship it must reinforce its character amongst its subjects. It is an attempt of those who personify capital as a social relation, the bourgeoisie, to legitimize and entrench this management within the working classes, through negotiation, bargaining, and tedious trial and error. Such that politics is employed as a tool of mediation we are necessarily against it, and thus define our work and outlook as strictly “anti-political”. In our previous works we have elucidated on several of the most common forms of mediation found in our current society, namely those named: “Democracy and Economics”.
If politics materializes as a formation of managerial expression, then we are against its imposition amidst the movement to abolish that very expression. Thus communism, and actions of communisation, materializes as a negation of the political form. This is where, in our anti-political battle, we depart from the majority of our contemporaries as we are not as willing to throw our time-energy behind political causes, irregardless of their popular support. Primarily among these causes would be the democratic and economic struggles that have been omnipresent in the capitalist epoch. On the topic of the democratic struggle, we have spoken at length in our previous work Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy and Mediation [4] about the root issue of democracy and the issues that movements wanting to expand democracy bring, so while we urge our readers to go back to that specific piece we will briefly provide a synopsis. Democracy, as a system for the management of society, is not just a class collaborationist institution that places the proletariat alongside its oppressor, but that it is also a system designed specifically for capitalism. Universalization of political power, on an individual level, does little to liberate one outside the realm of capitalist social relations, on the contrary all it does is entrench these populations even further. When demographics, such as women or black people, were given access to the right to vote (in the united states) it accounted for little more than state permission for these specific sections of the population to accumulate capital and have a say on the matters of the state. Democracy, such then, becomes an omnicause that rivals the class struggle, and smooths over the class differences of capitalism. Often paired with the struggle for an “increased democracy” are the economistic demands, for example: an increase in wages, workplace protections, cheaper rent, etc. These fights in effect strengthen the place of the worker in society by reducing their emiseration just enough that they are willing to continue to play their part in the production and consumption of commodities, as well as give thanks to the state for handing out these paltry sums. In the same manner that we decry economistic and democratic demands, we would extend out this critique to any other demand that mediates the class struggle, such as (but not limited to): nationalism, racialism, gender and sex isolation, or otherwise any other liberal, egalitarian movements.
Many in our millieu may find common cause and see their heads nod as they read through the non-exhaustive list we have laid out and previously critiqued, but find themselves trapped in their everlasting support for the proletariat, and thus their support for the continuation of class society. All of the previous social movements, strategies, and programs that we have derided has been because of their mediatory position in society, but we simply cannot forget the largest and most prevalent form of mediation: class. Valorization of the class recreates it, we have seen such in the previous experiments of our ideological ancestors. [5] We do not aim to uplift or give authority to the proletariat. We do not aim to create a society for, of, and by the proletariat. It is not enough to liquidate the bourgeoisie; the very idea of the proletariat must also be put to the sword. Communism is not proletarian Heaven.
Communism as a Verb, Not History
All this aside, capitalism is not necessarily destined to negate itself. Those that personify it, while expanding the contradiction, do not seem to hang themselves with succient elasticity. This is because, as Dauvé writes, “There is no tipping point when the wage-labour system would render itself null and void. Let us not expect capitalist contradictions to solve those of the proletariat, because the proletariat alsoisa contradiction…The proletarians’ fight against capital is based on their resistance to what the bourgeois turns them into: an activity bound in and forced into productive time.” [6] Or rather, that the proletariat itself is a capitalist-bound entity, and its supposed extinction might as well mean the end of the world as much as the end of capital.
What the bourgeois turns us into, how they utilize our life-time measure our spirit into allocative practices, mutates and organizes our negative movement as such. This is the fundamental contradiction: That communism as liberation is defined and waged only through momentary reaction to our condition. It is dependent upon capital as an anti-proletarian movement, and to break with capital requires measures which shatter time itself.
Therefore communism is not a world-historical moment, an impending period of time which we await, peering out from our window into an expanse of wageless productive labor (we are joking regarding the latter). It is however, a negating action that manifests as an assault on capital and its social relations. Communist measures are not prescriptions, formulas, or programs to acheive upon the sufficient development of the productive forces (sorry Marx), but the immediate attempt at social dissolution and rebirth.
“The production of communism is nothing but the multiplication and the generalisation of communist measures taken at this or that point in the course of the confrontation with capital; measures whose objective is precisely to make of the enactment of communism a means of struggle. Communism may not be immediate, but within the communist measure it seems to be so.” [7]
As a thought experiment, let us consider a simple building occupation. We have critiqued and still criticize the prospect of “autonomous zones”, and do not posit that communism can coincide with capitalism. The act of grazing on private property like a lost cow does not produce a microcosmic communist bubble; the physical seizure is but seizure itself, property in changing hands. What it provides, however, is an immediate attempt at the dissolution of the landlord-tenant relationship, should the imagination stretch beyond occupation and into all of life. This sole measure is not eternal, but its multiplication, across the street, around the block, stretching beyond the municipality, as a burgeoning wave of measures can rapidly deteriorate capital. Insofar as wage labor becomes general work, the upkeep and socialisation of life at such a site directly posits the abolition of capital. This is communisation in multiplicity.
The primary distinction between a communist measure and proletarian social reproduction is the reinforcement of mediation. Just as the socialisation of life breaths communism, under capitalist relations social work is but unpaid wage labor, striving to maintain the proletariat’s existence for another day. Consider abstract mutual aid, such as a soup kitchen or lumpen refuge. These projects are admirable and life-time consuming, yet their site within class society is plain to see: As the entrenching of wage labor keeping the proletariat, and say, the reserve army of labor, alive another day to mutate under capital. To continuously circulate amidst a sea of dead time. To mediate the class forever, proletarian Heaven in vertigo.
This is not to say that the production of foodstuffs is not necessary for our species, but that a communist measure is not physical: It is definitively social. A riot sees looting to be made and commodities to be had, providing a midway string as the bourgeois is expropriated. If the shops can be completely repurposed socially, a series of measures can tumble far beyond a city block. As a sole measure: The single bourgeois’ dispossession of mere commodities, this must be multiplied with the expropriation-and therefore abolition-of time, only possible by complete expropriation of their means to mutate the proletariat, their means of production.
The ability of communists to exist under capitalism, or rather the question of what is the nature of our anti-political acts, is still one that weighs heavy on the shoulders of many a communist. While we cannot definitively give any proscriptive measures or templates on what one should do, such as the programmatism and historical progression of “escalation” found in tradtional Leninist organizations, what we can provide is the essence and goal of what any potential action should be. If we return to our previous thought experiment of the building occupation, we reiterate that it is simply not enough to merely occupy the property, however we also recognize the limitations imposed upon us (those being the State and its forces). When occupying private property it may not bepossible to fully break down the capitalistic social relations while they exist just next door, to this we say then the goal shifts to exercising to the those around you what is possible and what can exist. If we are to admit that permanent occupation is not feasible, then we would put up temporary expropriations of property as our next course of action. Any number of social activity can occupy this space: an underground rave, an illegal art exhibit, a communal space to cook and eat, etc. This social activity may not burn down the existing social relations as we might want, but it can plant the spark in one so that they may begin to deconstruct the society in front of them. Property, which was once thought to be material, is understood to be an abstraction enforced by the State. Consciousness rises. Through the expropriation of private and public property, we can show the wayward proletariat that a different world is possible, even if for one night only.
Conclusion
Communism is not an impending historical site to be had, but a negation of the means through which the bourgeoisie continuously re-establish wage labor and time. Therefore as a negative movement, we must collectively revoke our subscriptions to bourgeois tedium, including the sweeping hills of politics, economics, and democratic regimen. Our future, if only through a recurring immediacy over immediation, is dependent upon the complete negation of the bourgeois world.
Communist measures allow us to poke at the social relation until even forces produce a stabbing bleed. For once we must consider communism as the means by which we escape Hell.
References
de Mattis, L. (2014). Communist Measures. SIC Volume II. libcom.org. https://libcom.org/article/communist-measures-leon-de-mattis
Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume I. marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf
Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy & Mediation. Avant Journal. (2025, August 12). https://avantjournal.noblogs.org/2025/08/12/critique-of-the-florence-program-on-democracy-mediation/
Debord, G. (1971). The Society of the Spectacle. libcom.org. https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf
Dauvé, G. (1972). Value, Time and Communism: Re-reading Marx. libcom.org. https://libcom.org/library/value-time-communism-gilles-dauv%C3%A9
[1] de Mattis, L. Communist Measures (SIC, Vol. II.)
[2] Marx, K. Capital Volume I, Chapter 32, p. 538
[3] Debord, G. The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 p. 11
[4] Critique of the Florence Program: On Democracy & Mediation. Avant Journal.
[5] Even in the most “noble” and libertine of the the Communists in the early 20th century could not imagine a world without the existence of value, more can be read in section 5 of Dauve’s Value, Time and Communism.
[6] Dauve, G. Value, Time, and Communism: Re-reading Marx, Section 7
[7] de Mattis, L. Communist Measures (SIC, Vol. II.)
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