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The Fate of Composition

Part Two | Part Three

Preface

Communism seems a dim prospect today. The concept of surplus humanity has achieved a dreadful clarity in the present assault on Gaza. Yet, despite becoming a flashpoint for unprecedented waves of global solidarity actions, the situation in Gaza reveals not the unification of revolutionary activity, but its necessarily fragmented character. On many other shores, the popular blockade has returned in the form of protests by small farmers who seek to defend their livelihoods (and property) against the diminishing possibilities of social reproduction. This is in part conditioned by realities of climate change, and in part conditioned by state planning for a “green transition.”¹ Ecological crisis is a harbinger of reaction and social disaster, rather than a unifying force of social upheaval.² In the United States, in the long retreat from the George Floyd Rebellion, new ostensible unities present themselves in contestations over the future of humanity, over competing visions of crisis and disaster response that are entirely incompatible. The paradigmatic case remains the struggle to Stop Cop City (SCC) and Defend the Atlanta Forest (DFA). This is not simply because so many continue to constantly assert its paradigmatic status, but because it has become a real representation of strategic possibilities and outcomes in our era of uncertainty and utter bewilderment. This seems an unfair burden, given the rather specific character and conditions from which the initial movement spread. But as plans for “cop cities” are supposedly cropping up everywhere,³ and with them organizational forms that must confront the inheritance of SCC/DFA and its strategic offerings, it seems prescient to review the core elements, concepts, and presuppositions that have percolated through the messiness of struggle, repression, and polemics. To this end, we must abstract from SCC/DFA proper to examine what we believe has become the organizing principle of many “non-movements” today, particularly in periods of general reaction and degeneration: the problem of composition.

As we shall see, in the context of struggle, “composition” has several distinct meanings, which can generally be divided into two overlapping, but not identical usages. One sense of composition is primarily descriptive. The other is primarily prescriptive. While the former has its origins in a materialist accounting of the conditions from which struggle proceeds, today much social antagonism seems to be prosecuted from the latter understanding, sometimes under the heading of a “strategy of composition.” In this usage, composition is something to be done, the bringing together of disparate social forces for common objectives. The riddle of history solved by will and good conscience. Against the one-sidedness of this approach, we argue that the task is to elaborate how, when, and under what conditions such an objective solution can and will present itself. This is the real historical purchase of “composition” as a category of analysis. Our argument is simple: composition is a fate, a condition of constraint and possibility, that gives any strategic intervention its practical reality. Yet it is an uneven fate, which makes generalizing solutions, forms of struggle, and outcomes exceedingly difficult. The paradox of prescriptive composition is that claims to overcome this very unevenness without however proceeding from these limiting conditions. This essay is an effort at parsing out the various meanings of “composition,” paring it down to something more historically coherent, and developing the concept to better account for the crises of capitalist reproduction today and the necessarily ecological and territorial character that the production of communism must take.

As regards class struggle, the concept of “composition” seems to be experiencing a bit of a resurgence. This is true more generally of Marxian concepts and categories of analysis since the crisis and recession of 2007-9. But it is also true more specifically of “class composition,” a term popularized in the writings of Italian operaismo (workerism) and the post-operaist autonomia. The decline in conceptual precision around the composition of class in relation to the composition of capital evinced the turn from the factory to the “social factory” as the object of derision and locus of a new history.⁴ In recent years, a flurry of neo-workerist writings, publications, study groups, and inquiries seem to be forcing a reversal of this trend.⁵ Yet, on the activist left, “composition” had already been re-entering the lexicon in a quite different sense. This usage dates at least to the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Within the framework of this struggle, “composition” began to refer to a particular strategy of organization that reflected problems of territorial defense, including competing claims of interest and class positions of various stakeholders. It would take a few years before this sense of the concept of “composition” would be exported from the Francophone radical world and muddle the already disastrous politics of the US American communist and anarchists scenes. Still, in a practical way, the Anglophone left had been grappling with the problems of coalition building since the heyday of the united or popular front. At the turn of the century, these problems took the painfully tedious forms of the activist campaign, with its coalition building, spokes-councils, affinity groups, clusters, and general assemblies. For territorial struggle, especially in the settler colonies and evacuated hinterlands of capital, the “composition” of efforts to defend space and place was itself a site of struggle. Indigenous struggles to defend or reassert a particular mode of social reproduction and concrete relation to place are, for instance, quite distinct from forest defense campaigns carried out largely by urban settler environmentalists with no real ties to the land beyond ideological affinity, “primitive” skill-sharing, or reactionary preparation for the “collapse of civilization.” It is notable that it was a model developed in England, during the mid-1990s anti-roads movement, which attempted to distinguish itself from this tendency of radical environmental conflicts in the US by circumventing this contradiction between place and subjectivity, territory and class, that should go on to inspire the ZAD. This latter story is the supposed inheritance of the “strategy of composition,” as it is presented to us today, a novel solution to the problems of decomposition and coordination that weds class conflict to territorial defense.⁶

That is a truncated story at best, but one that suffices as a guide to the intellectual trajectories and legacies of struggle that have become entangled in the coarseness of “composition” as it is deployed today. It is little surprise that this popular use of “composition” has also been met by sustained scrutiny over the last year. That is, at least in the northern bloc settler colonies of the United States and Canada. It appears groupuscules from Atlanta to Montreal to Chicago are in a cycle of critique and polemics that once concerned European anarchist and anti-state communist milieus over recent decades, but have quieted in recent years, particularly since the fall of the ZAD. In the fallout of the George Floyd Rebellion, the great collapse of generalized militancy and the tenuous stabilization of the post-pandemic recovery period seems to have led many radicals on a desperate search for threads of possible antagonism on which to hitch their identities. Inevitably, we find the resuscitation of old debates in new forms (e.g., whether and how to engage “liberals” and avoid “cooptation”), but there is also an earnest search for practice in times of great uncertainty and social flux.

In the most insipid of these recent exchanges, the object of concern is less a particular political strategy, and more a vague allegiance to particular theoretical tendencies, proximate moral positions, and political pedigrees. The specter has gone by several names, but readers might be most familiar with the terms appelism or tiqqunism that have graced recent report-backs and communiques, principally those orbiting around the struggle to Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest. While this may be of necessity a conjecture, we would assert that, on the global scale, the journal Tiqqun, the text The Call (L’Appel in the original French, from which the terms appelism and appelists derive), and the various works attributed to Le Comité Invisible/The Invisible Committee, bear little weight on the minds of the living. It is after all the nightmare of daily life under capital and colony that confronts and contours the struggles of the dispossessed, not opaque French and Italian theories of postmodernity, a ‘post-left’ secular theology that finds comfort in the words of Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt. Critiques of this tendency, if it is coherent enough to be called one, are as old as the tendency itself.⁷ No, that is not what interests us here. What has caught our attention, particularly over the last year of struggle over the fate of the Weelaunee forest, is the swiftness with which the strategy of “composition,” its merits and limits, has become entangled with the struggle itself. This hazy mixture of territorial struggle, paradigmatically the ZAD, NoTAV, and now SCC/DFA, with the terms such as “composition,” “logistics,” “infrastructure,” or even “commune” and “blockade” has only added to the confusion about the relation between conditions and strategy, history and subjectivity, limits and generative possibilities. It is in this confounding form that “composition” appears on the lips or fingertips of “radicals,” campaigners, activists, anarchists, dripping wet in anticipation of either its defense or critique. All this, however, without any real investigation into its content.

The real problem of a “strategy of composition” is not its formal association to one philosophical dead-end or another, but that, as fashionable parlance, it has no real historical content. This is as true for the detractors of “composition” as it is for its advocates.⁸ It is perhaps this vacuousness that makes it attractive for the conceptual arsenal in an era of profound suppression, stagnation, and drift amid the chaos and crisis of the economy and all its lurid ornaments. “Composition,” with all its imprecision and sanguine gestures of possibility, acts a structure of feeling when confronted with the everyday banalities of decomposition. This sleight-of-hand seems to provide a resolution to the constraints of history. It suggests action over passivity, autonomy over determination, coordination over disorientation, strategy over disaffection. In short, it offers a verb in place of noun, and becomes something quite tactile in an otherwise alienated world.⁹ It is not that this is merely ideological, utopian, or vulgar. Among other things, the “strategy of composition” names a real practice of confronting and opposing development projects and infrastructure. The limits that these efforts tend to run up against are quite real as well. The problem is that presenting “composition” as a strategy, as a verb, obscures the reality that it is also a noun, a history, a constraint—a limit. This one-sidedness with which the debate around “composition” has unfolded indexes a real problem of our era. In the constant searching for a plan of action, composing struggle out of the ether of inertia, that illusory and addictive feeling of being unfettered comes crashing down in a torrent of familiar waves—repression, recuperation, despair. Sent scrambling back to the drawing board by the next wave of crises, we return with the same tired hopes of “autonomous” proliferation, just dressed in new finery. “Composition” is but the latest in this series of theoretical garments meant to characterize that repeated feeling of banging your head against the wall.

If we remain cautious of the obfuscations surrounding this renewed interest in the “strategy of composition,” must we abandon “composition” as a conceptual category for communist strategy? Does it merely provide a theoretical cover for the “vanguardism” of the “imaginary party,” as the most trenchant anarchist and anti-authoritarian criticisms maintain? Perhaps caught in this subcultural tree-gazing, shall we abandon the forest for the factory, where class composition remains under-investigated, especially in our current era? This is the conceit of the neo-workerists, who, while laudably working to preserve the science of class hatred, have only tenuously established the objective relation between composition and that hatred, and tend to dismiss struggles that do not immediately cohere with abstract working class identity, subjectivity, and unity.¹⁰ It is little wonder how these two seemingly incongruent strategies can continue to circulate on the left. They do so with a kind of polar interaction. The workers movement and land defense struggles have a sordid, complicated history, and both have tended to be siloed, at times antagonistic to the other, such that the work of overcoming this apparent opposition can appear to us now as something novel or unique.¹¹ It is in this conjuncture that “composition” circulates as anti-authoritarian buzzword, on the one hand, and an object of workers’ inquiry, on the other. Little common cause is made between the two. The presumption seems to be that they invoke very different, mutually exclusive problematics, to which they offer distinct, unrelated resolutions. The coincidence of the terminology is merely happenstance. One a verb: something prescriptive, normative even. The other a noun: descriptive, but not without its own practical implications. They appear simply as different parlances, different traditions.

Things are not always as they appear. If there is an inner connection between the descriptive and prescriptive, it needs to be drawn forth and clarified. We believe that the current attempts to do so fall into methodological error, leading to strategic dead-ends. The most sophisticated effort in this area has been Hugh Farrell’s “The Strategy of Composition.” While it is unique in its attempt to outline the shared contours of the different usages of composition, we believe it falls short, and ends up reproducing the one-sidedness that both traditions begin with. Farrell published this essay shortly after the first charges of domestic terrorism associated with SCC/DFA, and shortly before the murder of Tortuguita (Manuel Esteban Paez Terán). In the year that has passed, the SCC/DFA movement has become a flashpoint for discourse on strategy and tactics, repression and counter-repression, and the false antimony of the “mass movement” and the “clandestine” underground.¹² Much is at stake. Lives have been lost. Many have been or are currently incarcerated. In this vortex, the “strategy of composition” or even simply “composition” has become a real focal point of polemics, but it also seems to have increasingly become conscious scaffolding for the public-facing campaigns, from the Block Cop City convergence of late 2023 to the more recent Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City. Farrell’s piece has often been a reference point, good or bad, in sorting out how to move. Farrell also uses SCC/DFA to demonstrate what a strategy of composition looks like in practical terms. For these reasons, his essay will serve as a repeated point of reference as we work our way through the problems of composition and develop a critique and counterproposal. To the extent that Farrell uses SCC/DFA and other apparently similar territorial struggles to ground his argument, we will make reference to those struggles. Lest it be unclear, what follows is not a critique of any particular campaign, effort, or concrete objective, nor is it a critique of any particular tactics deployed to those ends. No real movement or conflict can be subsumed to a given strategy, interpretation, and representation. Real struggle is organic.

Our pursuit is more limited, but we will need to be expansive to advance it. For composition to present a real strategy, it must first be understood as a fate. It is not an even, but a necessarily uneven and combined fate. Composition is always immediately decomposition—fragmentation, disaggregation, and differentiation—as united as it is internally hostile. It is only through this recurrent strife that composition can have any real content. It is an identity of identity and non-identity. The unfolding of this hostility between composition and decomposition is historical, and does not look today as it did in prior periods of crisis and uncertainty. Any investigation into composition must now reconcile with this real world of disintegrated integration into the global circuits of capital, in both its temporal and spatial dimensions, if one is even to attempt coughing up something worthy of being called a strategy. In a banal sense, all real strategies are strategies of composition, in that they are built on the basis of these constraints, and attempt to overcome them precisely by working through them. This therefore is not a dismissal of a strategy of composition, per se, but an effort to appreciate all that such a strategy must account for, as a concrete reconciliation of history and its inheritances.

Our exploration of this problem is broken into three parts, each of which will be published separately. The first part, “The Parlance of Composition,” provides a history of the term and its two meanings—composition as both descriptive and prescriptive, as a limit and a strategy—tracing how these concepts arose out of and attempted to grapple with specific historical moments. The second part, “The Problem of Composition,” provides an account of both contemporary theorizations of composition as a problem and attempts to solve that problem. We focus on two primary strands of strategic thought that attempt to address the problem of composition: the “strategy of composition” grounded in territorial defense as seen in Stop Cop City, and a neo-workerism that attempts to analyze class composition in services and logistics as the basis for a new unified working class strategy. We note the limits of each of these tendencies, while highlighting what both reveal about the problem of composition in the present. In the final part, “The Cacophony of Communism,” we attempt to theorize composition and decomposition in the present, beginning not from the factory floor, but from the common problem of reproduction. In so doing, we demonstrate the necessity of integrating what Marx called the “universal metabolism”—ecological relations—into any analysis of reproduction and therefore composition. We end by noting some implications for political strategy and for communism, which we understand as the struggle for life and its conditions of possibility.

 

Part One: The Parlance of Composition

Development and Compulsion

The thematic of “class composition” is often cited as the most significant theoretical and practical contribution of the operaismo tradition.¹³ By speaking through the objective categories of economic rationality, the production process, and the division of labor, “composition” was an attempt to explain class activity that did not, on the surface, avail itself of the psychosocial complexities presented by “consciousness,” “hegemony,” or processes of ideological “interpellation,” which had dogged so-called “Western” Marxism since the spectacular revolutionary failures of the interwar period. “Class composition” appeared as a return to form—in many ways a return to Marx—present informally in Marx’s most sophisticated political analyses. Examples here might paradigmatically include The Class Struggles in France (1850), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and The Civil War in France (1871), but we must also include his articles on the British Chartist movement and the American Civil War, and his letters on the Irish question.¹⁴ More formally, “A Workers’ Inquiry,” published in 1880 in La Revue socialiste, anchors the workerist discourse of class composition. This series of 100 survey questions was intended as a serious and rigorous inquest into the position of the French working class, which, following a period of rapid de-peasantization, industrial development, and sequence of revolutionary crises, was both embryonic and restive. In Marx’s words, this belated development had left France without an “exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs—works and moves.”¹⁵ In England, the Factory Acts, won through protracted class conflict in and against industrialization, had provided the framework for inspectors to conduct the basic inquiries which formed the empirical basis for Marx’s analysis in Capital, seen most clearly in the chapters on the working day and machinery. It would be exegesis of these chapters that provided the mandate for the analytical approach of the workerists, more generally.¹⁶ It was in the analysis of the production process that the transformation of labor-power into wage labor, and more specifically wage labor sorted and attenuated by the commands of capital, was revealed as not only determining the development of capital, but the organization of workers in concrete fashion. This process of labor-power becoming labor was fundamentally organizational, rather than ideological, and thus the basis for a strategy of refusal.¹⁷ This remains the basic way of understanding of class composition.¹⁸

“Workerism” as such is most associated with mid-20th century Italy, particularly in the northern industrial cities. Following the devastations of two world wars, failed communist revolutions, and fascism, Italy, like most of Europe, anticipated a lag in terms of economic development. The post-war economic boom, referred to Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe as the “economic miracle,” was the combined result of Cold War geography, US aid and investment in the form of the Marshall Plan, and the integration of free trade regions, such as the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Common Market, and the European Economic Community.¹⁹ What was really decisive was the availability of cheap labor-power, the product of mass migration from the pools of agrarian surplus populations in the south of Italy.²⁰ The belated, but rapid industrial development that this de-peasantization made possible reflected the general character of global capitalist development and is the real story of the long boom.²¹ The confluence in northern Italy included high investments in new plant, equipment, and fixed capital and a newly proletarianized migrant population. But workers were also faced with the shortcomings of the traditional unions and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in particular their strategy of the united front. In this context, the further slow development of working class consciousness through communist ideology, counter-hegemony, and war of position seemed an utter failure. A generation of young dissidents—including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Romano Alquati—among the parties’ ranks would turn to organization as the fundamental axis of strategy, and in this sense they were almost ultra-orthodox Leninists. Where they distinguished themselves was the basic thesis that the form and capacity for organization was a function of class composition in the immediate process of production.²²

The founders of Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) were not alone in this return of focus. Italy was not unique in undergoing this process of rapid industrialization, de-peasantization, and proletarianization, so it should be no surprise that the operaismo was itself only one grouping that reoriented strategy around workplace antagonism in the mid-20th century. Quanderni Rossi was notably influenced by France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie and the figure of Cornelius Castoriadis, who was himself influence by fellow disenchanted Trotskyists in the Johnson–Forest Tendency and Correspondence: C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee Boggs, and James Boggs. This internationalist character of workerism has been noted extensively before.²³ What is interesting about this turn toward class composition and the return of the workers’ inquiry is that it has as its basis not only rapid industrialization of wage of labor, but a racial and gendered character.²⁴ The gendered character of class composition has noted by Italian and American feminists associated with these tendencies, especially in their internal criticisms, often prompted by the failure of prominent theorists to account for gender or social reproduction in the composition of wage labor.²⁵ The dimension of race has less clearly and consistently graced analyses of composition. Yet the racial character of class composition was central to the workers’ inquiries and critiques of American unionism of James Boggs.²⁶ The development of capitalism in America, had, after all, pursued essentially racial dimensions. This history is what gave a racial, predominantly black character, to the surplus agrarian populations that migrated to industrial cities and formed the basic units of “unskilled labor” in the factories and the substratum of the industrial unions.²⁷ It was arguably the analysis of race and critical explanation of racial domination that revealed the dynamics of class composition in this context, rather than the other way around. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America should be understood as one of the earliest inquiries into American class composition, in this regard, and a seminal work of communist theory.²⁸ Race and gender would continue to provide the proximate coordinates for the analysis of class and reproduction in America, even before the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s most influential publications.²⁹ Domestic work and services, including the illegal and illicit, tend to have a symbiotic interaction with industrial development, so the relationship between housework and unionized labor, racialized domestic slave labor and social reproduction, and the place of gender and race in the supply chain often formed the content of these earliest inquiries.

Prior waves of agrarian depopulation and rapid industrial development had begot similar accounts of revolutionary activity as a technical problem of composition and organization.³⁰ Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the mass strikes of the 1905 Russian Revolution rely heavily on the historical features of Russian depeasantization and late state-directed transition.³¹ She paid particular attention to the relative composition of the respective proletarian milieus of Russia and Germany in her consideration of the possibility of similar mass strikes in Germany.³² We would be remiss not to mention at this juncture Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, a tremendous survey of class formation through Russia’s belated and truncated transition.³³ Though drawing political conclusions quite opposed to Marx’s analysis of Russia’s social composition,³⁴ Lenin’s work is nonetheless a critical analysis of how the uneven transition made possible a particular political strategy.³⁵ Marx’s own treatment of inquiry into the composition of the French proletariat followed a similar cycle of crisis and expansion.³⁶ It is perhaps these “late transitions” that most dramatically reveal the fragmented content of composition,³⁷ in which “unity” has only the form of dispossession. The ratcheting of industrial development is all that practically unifies vast swaths of the species as a species. It is therefore little wonder why then the workerists found solace in the material organization of the factory as the cypher of political strategy.

Still, in the workerists’ own analyses, the concept and category of “class composition” is surprisingly underdeveloped.³⁸ Analytically and methodologically, operaismo as a whole was quite ambiguous on this front. The premier theoretical work, Workers and Capital, contains little overt development of concept, and in Tronti’s hands, “composition,” “recomposition,” and “decomposition” all tend to signal a discussion of subsumption—the valorization process determining the material and technical character of the labor process. Operaismo’s most influential reports that developed the concept in concrete relation to the new cycles of struggle—Romano Alquati’s studies of worker struggles at FIAT and Olivetti—did little to formally advance the terminology of “class composition” itself.³⁹ Still, it was this openness to sociological inquiry⁴⁰ as militant practice, informed by Panzieri, Montaldi, and Alquati, that sought explanation of class activity and worker behavior through the material categories of the labor process and the division of labor. These studies formed the real basis of “class composition” as an analysis and discourse. As a category, it was deployed to explain “the forms of behavior which arise when particular forms of labour-power are inserted in specific processes of production.”⁴¹ In the direct experience of the reproduction of capital, the interaction of what Marx called the objective and subjective factors, unfold in ways that dispose struggle to take on particular forms.⁴² Here, it should be said that in this initial form, which we think the best and most clear, class composition had as much to do with constraint as it did possibilities for class struggle. It is after all capital that does the insertion and division of labor.⁴³ It is a particular composition of capital that determines the character of the labor process and the resulting configuration of class activity. Thus, the first tract on class composition contains no use of the term “class composition,” but instead refers to political composition and subjectivity in reference to the organic composition of capital in a particular industrial sector.⁴⁴ So we can arrive at a first principle that class composition expresses a political dimension of the mute compulsion of political economy and is given its historical accentuation by the character of capitalist transition.

Operaismo itself would of course never assent to a conception that risked ossifying struggle as a category of capital. There was always a latent tension in their work between a desire for class autonomy and an understanding of composition as tendency of capital. In a rudimentary way, the turn to “composition” as an explanation of new forms of struggle was intended both as analytical clarity, and as a political effort to undermine the orthodoxy of the PCI and the mystified notion of class consciousness.⁴⁵ The allegiance to Leninist party structure would present a consistent and confounding contradiction. The notion of class composition returned the question of organization to the factory floor, to the process of production and the forms of subjectivity and self-activity that arise therefrom. Operaismo sought to rescue and differentiate the autonomy of the class from the movement of capital, struggle from the subsumption of labor-power. The class is composed, both within and against capital. Yet, despite influence from the ultra-left and council communism, early workerists, especially Tronti, were in many ways quite conventional in their approach to the question of organization and essentially argued for the reform of the reformist PCI and a strategy of entryism.⁴⁶ Where workerists lauded shop-floor spontaneity, they also failed to decouple organization from the trappings of political organization. These tensions between organization and intervention, composition and autonomy, were often seedbeds for the many splits that proliferated in the lineage of operaismo.⁴⁷ Eventually, with sequence of struggles from Creeping May through the Hot Autumn giving way to the rise of struggles in the sphere of circulation and across university campuses, “composition” became a less central category. This decline appeared concomitant with the shift from operaismo to autonomia. Ultimately, this signaled the failure of the tradition to really make sense of the concept of composition beyond the factory,⁴⁸ despite its growing gestures to the contrary.

Practice and History

In the nadir of communist struggle, the legacies of operaismo and autonomia have been obfuscated by the general crisis and restructuring of capital attended by the decline of the traditional workers’ movement. The spectacular events of the late seventies including Italy’s Years of Lead and anti-terrorism campaign, followed by Negri’s persecution and cause célèbre, and later academic works of post-Marxism associated with autonomia have not clarified matters. The turn away from the factory to the social factory, from capital to “modernity” or “empire,” loosened whatever grip “class composition” was beginning to have on critical communist politics. As a method of analysis, it retreated to the refugia provided by small “libertarian communist” circles that were in the process of critically appraising the legacy of workerism and autonomism in the midst of new cycles of struggles that would come to be associated with “globalization” and “neoliberalism.”⁴⁹ Many of these groups had retained the ethos of a “strategy of refusal,” but began to reorient their analyses of workplace struggle around the newly ascendant services, transport, and logistics sectors, as well struggles in the sphere of circulation, e.g., the “auto-reduction” of prices. It is to their credit that, in search of struggle on less familiar terrains, this milieu helped to clarify “class composition” as an analytic.

Kolinko’s “Paper on Class Composition” is a model in this regard and serves as a reckoning of the concept for the 21st century.⁵⁰ They begin with a general thesis that all notions of revolutionary subjectivity are derived from specific notions of the class relation. Leninism and its “left critics,” specifically the Dutch-German council communists, share a common understanding of the class relation as formal, by which they mean the appropriation of surplus labor in the form of surplus value. Kolinko contends that such a conception of the class relation misses the real content of the relation through the material process of production, which is a process of exploitation. Council communists and Leninists thus arrive at strikingly similar conceptions of organization as a formal matter—either the party or the workers’ own self-activity should cohere around the control of this mass of formally dispossessed. Dispossession, for Kolinko, does not explain worker power, nor does it explain worker behavior through the supply chain.⁵¹ They argue, usefully, that the differing formal approaches to communist organization can be explained historically by the differing material conditions of production that workers and communists confronted.⁵² It is from this content of material production as the process of exploitation that the concept of class composition springs: “​​the core of the notion of class composition is the thesis that there is a close relation between the form of struggle and the form of production.”⁵³

Here, Kolinko advances the notion by discretely expanding it into its two aspects: the “technical class composition” and the “political class composition.”⁵⁴ This distinction was mostly latent in workerist writings, especially those of Sergio Bologna,⁵⁵ though occasionally rather explicit.⁵⁶ Technical composition refers to the ways that capital brings together and divides labor-power in the immediate process of production. This bears a strong resemblance to the notion as advanced by early operaismo and essentially adds terminological clarity. Importantly, Kolinko adds the “form of re-production” here as well. Though they do little to clarify how reproduction attenuates composition, they do insist that it is critical in the formation of revolutionary subjectivity.⁵⁷ We will return to this thematic in greater depth. Political composition refers to the forms of struggle that emerge from and turn the technical composition against capital. This sets the familiar dialectic espoused by Tronti and the subsequent generations he influenced: “Capital reacts to the ‘political class composition’ (the generalization of class struggle) with a ‘technical re-composition’” and so on.⁵⁸ The end result, for Kolinko and other libertarian communists and post-autonomists, seemed to be the growing coherence of proletarian self-organization, as the uneven development of capital’s organic composition would seem to bring about greater proletarianization, technical development, and thus more intense struggles throughout industry. The growing significance of services, transport, and logistics in relation to manufacturing, the rise of East Asian firms, and market liberalization of China and the former USSR and Eastern Bloc, and the American expansion of the 1990s, all seemed to signal that this outcome was not far off. The real unfolding of the 21st century is of course far more grim. They thus arrived at the same limit that confronted the workerists: by locating strategy in the material process of production, they failed to adequately address problems of machinery, rising organic composition, the twin poles of deskilling and increasingly specialized technical expertise, labor-shedding and precarity, and the general decoupling of proletarian reproduction from the production of surplus value.⁵⁹ It was this uneven decomposition of the “mass worker” that plunged workerism and the theory of “class composition” into a crisis from which it never recovered.⁶⁰

Perhaps the greater oversight is not so much the results of an overemphasis on unchanging model of production, but the very core thesis of class composition itself: that technical composition determines political composition in any sort of straightforward way. Indeed, the workerist oeuvre suggests that there is not only a coherence and correlation, but an order of causality at work here. This is the wellspring for accusations of a crude “economic” or “mechanistic” “determinism” that plagues Marxism generally, but class composition in particular, as it seems to necessarily abstract from race, gender, and culture in its persistent focus on the class relation in production.⁶¹ The added difficulty here is that for the most trenchant workerists, the technical composition is itself always a response of political composition. There thus seems to be an invariance to class antagonism that unfolds in concrete ways through the dialectic of technical and political composition. The poles of class composition are reciprocal. “Class composition” was heralded from the earliest days of operaismo as a materialist answer to the “idealist” model of strategy and organization that derives from the muddied concept of “class consciousness.” Both, however, deal with the difficult problem of political subject formation. To some extent, the parlance of “composition” has merely pitched this duality of the objective and subjective in new terms. Solar Mohandesi, for example, has argued that the pairing of “technical” and “political” composition has displaced the more orthodox and ontological pairing of “class in-itself” and “class for-itself.”⁶² Yet, despite the familiar philosophical limitations here, he concedes that “class composition” remains “more fruitful” than “class consciousness” as a model for explaining revolutionary subjectivity and activity.

While Mohandesi fails to stress it, the aspect of “class composition” that gives it an explanatory power that is suppressed or absent from models of “class consciousness” is that the former carries with it a practical dimension.⁶³ Practice is the irreducible element of subject formation and the content of composition. The question that remains is which kinds, forms, or species of practice matter in the churning of the capitalist planetary complex. We will return to this discussion later. For now, it suffices to note that practical activity is the heart and hearth of the metabolic relations that we call the human society.⁶⁴ That this metabolic interaction takes the form of a “irreparable rift” in capitalism does not negate that this ecological chasm and crisis itself is still the reification of an everyday social practice and its reproduction. Social activity is not the buildup of individual consciousness that reaches some critical mass to become hegemonic. It is never separated from concrete practice—at work, at home, at school, at the grocery store, during “leisure,” at a strike, during a riot—practices which are themselves linked, quite differentially, to subsistence and reproduction. It is through practice that something like production and reproduction, technical and political composition, or composition as a noun and composition as a verb, are mediated. The irreducibility of concrete practice makes composition a powerful category of analysis, one that forecloses the confounding problem of looking for a given “revolutionary subject” and simply building up its own consciousness of its historical role.⁶⁵ This repudiation of anachronism is what allows “composition” its explanatory power and historical dimension.⁶⁶ Composition serves as a “skeleton key”—the basis for a communist historiography.⁶⁷

Limits and Opening Moves

If the broader workerist tradition took pains to return organizational strategy to its objective conditions in the form of class composition, it was more ambiguous as to the content of the revolutionary activity would initiate the process of communist negation and construction.⁶⁸ For the American post-Trotskyists of the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Correspondence, the questions of party organization and the spontaneous self-activity of the proletariat led to a number of differing and opposed positions and polemics.⁶⁹ Socialisme ou Barbarie (SoB) and the associated (through Guy Debord) Situationist International retained an adherence to worker self-organization in the form of workers’ councils and worker self-management. Though not workerist in any immediate sense, the SI’s shared influence from SoB had them commit officially to this program through the events of May ’68, though those events would begin to dissolve the very basis for this adherence. And as discussed above, operaismo was internally fractured along lines of organization and program, with many of the early founders returning to the PCI and PSI in an effort to rescue those parties from themselves. While, as Bologna had demonstrated, the concept of “class composition” had allowed communists to explain these particular forms of concrete struggle through an analysis of specific historical conditions, it did little to advance an understanding of what a “communist program” might entail. It was no less available to recuperation and revision by prevailing institutional forces, who often just inserted the same tired dogma in the empty spaces.⁷⁰ In other words, what “class composition” helped to explain were the particular terms and forms of struggle. It did not seem to explain its content.

This question of communist content is what occupied a distinct, slightly younger generation of communist theorists. Particularly influential were their experiences of revolutionary failure in the long arc of 1968. The crucible of revolutionary experience served as the messy testing ground for a range of strategic approaches, but also a range of objectives supposedly carried by those forms of organization, whether the party, the union, or the workers’ council. It is on this basis of limits of these programs that partisans drew attention to the absence of a clear horizon. The earliest and perhaps most influential texts associated with this post-68 milieu were gathered for publication in Le mouvement communiste in the early 1970s, written by Gilles Dauvé (Jean Barrot).⁷¹ Crudely stated, Dauvé sought redress of many problems associated with the limits of ’68 by synthesizing councilism with the tradition of invariance that surrounded Amadeo Bordiga and his protege Jacques Camatte. For Dauvé, this meant taking the form of self-organization (councilism) and the content of Bordigism, which he interpreted as the immediate abolition of value, money, and private property. For Bordiga, the “invariance” of this program cast all reinterpretations of Marxism as revisionist.⁷²

For others in the milieu, “invariance” posed the problem of historical anachronism, unburdening itself of the analytical challenge presented by the concept of class composition. The grouping around the short-lived journal Négation along with participants in the journals Intervention Communiste and Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils that would later go on to publish Théorie Communiste coalesced around this very problematic. In attempting to avail itself of historical specificity without betraying the negative content of communism, these groupings turned to new cycles of struggle and the transformed terrain of composition. Négation’s “LIP and the self-managed counter-revolution” is an analysis of the struggle at the LIP watch factory, which initially emerged on the basis of action committees before erupting into wildcat strikes, hostage taking, factory occupation, and eventual resumption of production under worker self-management. In Négation’s estimation, the struggles at LIP represented a particular expression of contemporary capitalism and the historical limits of the old workers’ movement. Notably, the periodization of formal and real domination is introduced in part to explain this limit.⁷³ More important, however, is the analysis of class composition that is concealed by this abstract characterization. LIP was unique in that its workforce was composed of mainly skilled laborers. French watchmaking had retained an artisanal character to the labor process that readily predisposed workers to self-management.⁷⁴ In Négation’s words, capital had “not yet achieved real domination” in the sector. At the same time, LIP was major firm beset by the global pressures of the period, most crucially competition from Japan and American manufacturers and manufacturing over-capacity. These newer firms set out their lines with higher organic composition of capital and were able to absorb a fall in the rate of profit through an increase in its mass, made possible by higher levels of productivity. LIP was “backwards” in this respect, but nevertheless compelled by the same pressures. Unable to increase productivity by either investment in fixed capital or ratcheting the intensity of a highly skilled labor force, by 1973, the firm had planned for liquidation. The struggle for self-management was thus fundamentally defensive in character. However, rather than defending the character of artisan craft production threatened by the proletarianizing transition a century earlier, the struggle in this period was in content the defense of capital. For Négation, it was precisely the particular class composition of the factory struggle that revealed this contradiction. The character of the labor process at LIP preserved what Négation called a “producer’s consciousness” among workers that might otherwise appear out of sync with the period. While this became the basis for self-management, it also formed the limit of struggle, one that could not be overcome on that basis any longer.⁷⁵ Négation had developed some of these themes in an earlier work, “The Proletariat as Destroyer of Work,” in which they critique workerism as one among a range of new “rackets” that mystifies the new cycles of struggle during the period of “real domination,” or, following Camatte, when the material community of capital has come to constitute all of social life.⁷⁶ What is noteworthy here, and following their analysis of LIP, is the place that “decomposition” of the proletariat begins to occupy in analyses of class composition. This is accompanied by a growing concern over “non-labor” compositions that help to mediate proletarian reproduction and anticipates some of the best re-appraisals of workerism in the 21st century.

In the Anglophone world, Théorie Communiste is likely the most familiar and influential group that trades in this periodization. This is in part due to the translation and popularization of their work by Endnotes, SIC, and others following the 2008 crisis. We will have more to say about these latter approaches to composition and “communization” later. TC has also been quite prolific in its own right, consistently publishing a journal since 1977 that has systematically developed its theory of programmatism. Briefly, programmatism names the forms of struggle in which the proletariat finds a program to be realized. This would include social democracy, the vanguard party, workers’ councils and self-management, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. In each, proletarian identity and class belonging is affirmed through the generalization of a particular program. The concept of composition is submerged here, but we nonetheless find it essential for understanding these claims. Observe, for example, the stress that TC lay on programmatism as a practice.⁷⁷ It is the concrete forms of struggle that emerge when workers are confronted by a particular relation to capital, specifically when lower organic composition is meted out in a rising demand for labor in new sectors and new lines. TC are making a claim as to the subjectivity of the working class to identify as such, and no longer strictly on the basis of kinship relations, local structures, or specific relations to place and culture. Historically, this coincides with a period of stubborn depeasantization and late transitions at the end of the 19th and through the first decades of the 20th centuries, or what TC thinks of (erroneously) as the period of formal subsumption.⁷⁸ This era of the classical workers’ movement, from roughly the 1880s into the 1970s, was to be explained by the relative power of labor in relation to capital. Given the preservation of elements of the pre-capitalist labor process, relative skill of workers, and technical command over the rhythms of production, both the young capitalists and the old regime appeared as fetters, parasites on producer knowledge and social power. In this context, to affirm the figure of the worker against the capitalists was to unravel the whole class relation on which capitalism was predicated. This particular political horizon of communist politics was the historical product of particular composition of capital, and thus class composition. When that composition is gone, so too is the political horizon.

The frequent criticisms of TC tend to orbit around this near fatalist, “deterministic” account of cycles of struggle. In contrast to operaismo, TC certainly appear “structuralist” and have been associated with their fellow countrymen in the regulation school and that premiere anti-humanist Louis Althusser.⁷⁹ Of particular scorn is their explicit identification of capital and labor as the twin poles of the capital-labor relation. In this identity of identity and non-identity, the proletariat can never achieve the abolition of capital—in other words, communism—without the abolition of itself as a class belonging to capital. As Friends of the Classless Society observe, this formulation of “self-abolition” is not especially novel, but TC takes quite seriously this limit of class belonging such that any and all struggles that have a share a whiff of “affirmation” are dismissed.⁸⁰ This would seem to leave no room class autonomy, that pillar of workerist thought that has a close relation to concept of composition. Indeed, the very conception of “within and against” is called into question. Class autonomy, for TC, is the activity of the class adequate to the era of programmatism. The post-crisis restructuring of capitalism, with its de-skilling, labor shedding, precarious employment, growing service sector, and low levels of productivity, has eroded the “old class composition” of which autonomy was an expression.⁸¹ In turning class composition in on itself, by confronting the limits of composition as the impossibility of proletarian affirmation, it would appear that horizons of communism are foreclosed.⁸² The arrival of the material community appears as the end of history.

The riddle would seem to be solved, for many detractors of the traditional workers’ movement and programmatic politics, by the ushering in of the era of riots—the return of the circulation struggle. We will not survey this trend here.⁸³ It is sufficient to note that the decline and suppression of the workers’ movement was paralleled by a concomitant rise in struggles over the terms of social reproduction, or what autonomists called “auto-reduction” struggles. This ebb and flow of cycles of struggle from the factory to the sphere of reproduction, to the neighborhood, to the housing complex, to the supermarket, indexes a particular phase shift in the capital-relation. It was, according to TC, the disintegration of the double moulinet of capitalist reproduction that would see the decomposition of the class in ways that would leave struggles over reproduction increasingly significant.⁸⁴ In such a composition, when the relation to capital decreasingly secures the means of subsistence and continued survival, being proletarian and worker identity as such are demystified and seen for what they are—constraints. Constraints enforced by the state, by invading and occupying militaries, by police, by racially segregated geographies, by gender relations. By making these concrete mediations the objects of antagonism, these forms of struggle present the possibility of negation of the class relation. Only those struggles that produce, through their very activities, “class belonging as an external constraint” have as their horizon the production of communism.⁸⁵ TC, and the “communization current” more generally, thus expand the concept of class composition in a way that makes it constitutive of its decomposition and its internal fragmentations and mediations. The class unity that from the outset tends to inform workerist accounts of composition and struggle is here bristled at, not with contempt, per se, but in acknowledgement that the only practical unity of the class—and therefore the species—is the unity of separation. We can derive at this junction a fundamental truth of capitalism: class composition only exists as disunity and it is from this disunity that particular struggles in the present era can be explained. This immanent tendency may be a necessary condition of the content of revolts today, but it is quite another thing to claim that these revolts therefore constitute a rupture in the material community of capital, one sufficient for communism. We will explore this problem of this leap later on. First, we must turn to a quite different conception of “composition,” one with a distinct parlance and lineage.

Escape

It should by now be clear that “composition” as an analytic in the communist tradition has always had eye towards strategy. In the hands of the most lucid theorists of operaismo, “class composition” was always intended to as a materialist explanation of class behavior and as a basis for strategy. Subsequent generations of communists have preserved this kernel, despite either naively turning away from or fetishizing the factory as the paradigm of the class composition dynamic. This much has remained clear: strategy unfolds from the configuration of political subjectivities, forged in the crucible of social practice, which of course includes the process of production, but has never been limited to it. It must also include reproduction, which we will address below. But it also involves the practical activity of struggle itself. It is this last sense in which we often find “composition” today, referring to a practice of composing struggle, adrift from its former grounding in the material realities of production and reproduction. As the most poignant authors themselves admit, this is a strategy adequate to an era of crisis and stagnation, of “orphaned” insurrections.⁸⁶ While it may be adequate in a certain historical sense, we hold that it is a strategy that is wholly insufficient. The practice of composing is given its own “temporality and logic,” like a kite without a thread.⁸⁷ The “strategy of composition,” then, is one which finds itself far afield from the conditions which are its lot. In order to make full sense of this conceptual reversal, it is worth briefly tracing its distinct genealogy.

It should be little wonder that the breakdown of the workers’ movement and of communist organization has been mired in uncertainty. As the preceding historical account of “class composition” suggests, the period of crisis and stagnation in which we find ourselves today has rendered class relations quite oblique. It is of course the pace and trajectory of development itself that has brought about these transformations—deindustrialization, de-skilling, labor shedding, stagnating productivity and investments in new lines, and the relative growth of services and transport in relation to manufacturing. The character of class composition has changed at a pace with these more general dynamics. What is crucial in this history is the effect of the virtually completed process of agrarian revolution and de-peasantization since the 1970s, combined with low levels of continuous investment in these same geographic regions. New manufacturing lines, where they do emerge, do so with organic compositions of capital that reflect sectoral averages. This is the ratcheting effect of relative surplus value production. A sort of mirror process has taken place outward from industry itself. Stubbornly low rates of profit disincentivize firms from investing in new plant and equipment, so to meet prevailing levels of productivity and to lower costs, managers squeeze more labor out of the existing workforce, often by retaining a constant level of output (since they are often confronted with gluts and over-capacity) but with simply fewer workers. Those workers that are the last hired and commonly the first fired. The historical inheritance of capitalist expansion itself—the racialized character of the newly proletarianized—means that the newly un- and underemployed are disproportionately racialized as well. The result is a constellation of proletarian factions, sorted through race, ethnicity, gender relations, religion, language, citizenship—that increasingly confront misery and subsistence crisis and decreasingly find themselves integrated into labor processes that condition a “producer’s consciousness” or “workers identity.” There is no longer any clear “outside” of capitalist relations of production, but neither is there a clear or homogenous formation of the subsumed and dispossessed.⁸⁸ This is the truth of proletarian identity.⁸⁹ It is invariant, but a truth adequate to our era.⁹⁰ Nihilism and pessimism are not just for the disaffected, they are structuring features of all social antagonism. It is only in such a context that “compositional strategy” appears with any relief, as a solution to the social reflux.

It it in this era that we arrive at the short-lived journal Tiqqun, along with its disproportionate influence on revolutionary discourse. With all of the opacity that surrounds this milieu and its jargon, we are cautious to call it “a tendency” in any coherent, historical way. It nevertheless has repeatedly made its way into debates around the character of some significant contemporary struggles, most recently in Atlanta, and does so with a particular usage of the term “composition.” We thus will focus on it here in only that specific, narrow sense. In the journal itself, “composition” first appears as the problem of decomposition. For Tiqqun, however, “decomposition” is not linked to the capital relation and the internal fragmentation and abjection of the proletariat. Rather, their concern is the decomposition of “commodity society,” the untenability of the “Spectacle,” by which they mean, pace Debord, a “dictatorship of visibility.”⁹¹ This is a metaphysical and ontological; for Tiqqun, commodity relations are pure phenomenality.⁹² From the outset, Tiqqun finds itself among friends in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. It is not the despotism of capital,⁹³ but rather the totality of visibility, surveillance, representation—legibility to the state—that has reduced the species to bare life.⁹⁴ It is in this banality of abjection that we find the stuff of the Terrible Community and the Imaginary Party, whose task is the preservation of “forms of life” that remain free or are freed from domination. This specialized struggle assumes the form of opacity.⁹⁵ This is a communism of withdrawal.⁹⁶ Tiqqun frequently preoccupied itself with “escape” as a form of life, while at the same time it understands this desertion as a hostility, as civil war.⁹⁷ It thus might be more apt to describe its politics as “destituent.”⁹⁸ It is only through this exodus that autonomy exists, not as class, but as forms of life.⁹⁹ This is to be accomplished through “gestures” and the “transmission of techniques,” that allow the imaginary party to inhabit the void left through the process of destitution.¹⁰⁰ We see all of the terminology of the milieu is here, ripe for appropriation and confusion. By the time of Call (L’appel), “the invisible committee” is now explicitly associating this strategy of exit and inhabitation with communism and “communisation.” The separation from material history is quite clear, allowing the authors to declare with romantic immediacy that “communism is possible at every moment.”¹⁰¹

All of these elements of tiqqunism or l’appelism have been explored and critiqued extensively elsewhere, as has their relation to “communization” and the critique of programmatism more generally.¹⁰² This is not the current concern. By the time of the publication of The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee (TIC) had turned to more concrete struggles following the end of the anti-globalization summits. The era of riots seemed to have been ushered in Algeria, France, and Greece. For TIC, the stench of social decomposition among these locales had brought a breath of nihilist fresh air, and with it the possibility of new forms of life. This is where we get an explicit connection between social decomposition, in their Agambenian sense, with composition as a first act, a “resonance” from which new forms of life will spread: “the party of insurgents is the sketching out of a completely other composition, an other side of reality, which… is seeking its consistency…. In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities.”¹⁰³ Principally, this takes the form of “communes” as the basic units of insurrection. Though they invoke the Paris Commune, TIC means something quite different. “Commune” is fact nothing other than what they mean by “composition”—the coming together of partisans with the effect that the partisans are transformed in the process.¹⁰⁴ There is a spatial dimension to “composition” that involves “liberating” and “defending” “territories” as “zones of opacity,” and it is here that “composition” finds its relation to “the blockade.” These threads of territoriality, composition, blockade, ecology, and forms of life become even more matted in To Our Friends and Now.¹⁰⁵ The blockade and “logistics” take on an even greater importance in the process of destitution and the influence of the ZAD and NoTAV appears as praise of “inhabitance against governance.” Crucially, for our purposes, as “forms of life” is intended to describe ecological and territorial relations, “composition” begins to take on a transcendental, posthumanist character. We agree that the time has come to “betray the species,” but that means something far more practical and historical than TIC can possibly allow.¹⁰⁶

That aspect is for later, however. What matters presently is that Tiqqun/TIC has rather obliquely decoupled “composition,” as something that the Imaginary Party does or forms, from its conditions. “Composition” is something external, both temporally and spatially, from the “dictatorship of visibility,” from “governance,” from Spectacle, from the economy. This is why we find preoccupation with desertion, succession, and withdrawal.¹⁰⁷ Destitution is supposed to transcend the limits of alternativism, but exactly how “communes” and “compositions” are supposed to proliferate as autonomous zones, immediately as gestures of attack and exodus, such that they come to “destitute the world” like a coalescence of bubbles that strangle the flows of capital, remains unclear at best and reactionary at worst. Yet it is composition in this sense that informs the “strategy of composition” en vogue today.

The popularization of this sense of composition can be traced first and foremost to historical entrance of “the ZAD” (“zone to defend”), specifically the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes and NoTAV. The ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes began initially as a farmer’s struggle to resist eviction for the purposes of developing an international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. When those evictions heightened in 2008, following the crisis, squatting became the central form of struggle.¹⁰⁸ NoTAV was a populist struggle against the construction of a high speed railway (Treno ad Alta Velocità or “TAV”) in the SuSa Valley in northern Italy. The region hosts the headquarters of Fiat, in Turin, once a major flashpoint of workerist militancy. Both the ZAD and NoTAV unfolded as “citizen struggles” against what were understood to be corrupt regional and national political actors who were pushing through unwanted and devastating infrastructural projects to attract commerce and tourism in their respective regions. These development projects, from the perspective of local actors, seemed irrational and unnecessary, as immediate economic gains would seem to pass over those most impacted by the developments, evictions, and transformation of territories. Both projects were long on the “back burner” of priorities, that is, until the financial crisis and recession. This both bolstered the populist character of the opposition, while simultaneously incentivizing stakeholders to actually get the projects off the ground. France responded to the 2008 crisis in part by infrastructure spending and mitigating its deficit through private-public partnerships.¹⁰⁹ A new airport promised alleviation on both of these fronts along with the promise of tourism and the real estate development that would attend such a large transportation project. The TAV offered similar promises. Italy’s industrial sector had long been plagued by low productivity levels, only made worse by the Great Recession, despite Italy’s relative financial insulation from the riskiest investments that triggered the collapse. Industrial regions such as the SuSa valley, mired in stagnant manufacturing output, investment, and capacity utilization, would benefit from developments in the speed of transport.¹¹⁰ The TAV was intended to bring the region into better temporal alignment with speed of commerce and circulation of capital elsewhere in the Eurozone.¹¹¹

These conditions are ripe for populist imagination and mystification.¹¹² There is an important convergence here between these territorial struggles and the broader movement of squares that would come to define the cycle of struggles following the crisis.¹¹³ The narrative of “citizen struggles” that the Mauvaise Troupe Collective (MTC) and Kristin Ross employ in their analysis of this moment is intended as a contrast to the paradigm of “the revolutionary party.” As they argue, there is something “openly fractal” in the character of struggles today. They do not cohere as movements of common political subjectivity or social position. They do not carry homogenous or uniform objectives, intent, or desires. Instead, they are little more than the aggregate and synthetic effect of often conflicting and conflictual “components of struggle,” partisans who bring varied positions, stakes, experiences, interests, and approaches, and who only incidentally and conditionally find common ground in the unfolding of struggle itself. In this, these citizen struggles bear resemblance to what Asef Bayat calls “social non-movements,” composed of fragmented, non-collective actors, who nonetheless come together in incidental collective, common action in pursuit often non-common interests. Bayat links this more explicitly to the “ordinary” and everyday life of the subordinated, subaltern, and generally downwardly mobile.¹¹⁴ The precipitate of this collective action is a general antipathy towards political illegitimacy or corruption. Their limit tends to be expressed in what Bayat calls “refo-lutions,” or struggle that is formally revolutionary but carries a counter-revolutionary content of “reforms” to political systems. While this has most aptly been used to describe the Arab Spring,¹¹⁵ it is a reasonably characterization of the movement of squares globally and the current cycles of struggles more generally.¹¹⁶ This bond with the “composition” struggles of the ZAD and NoTAV is perhaps most clear in the Gezi Park protests, which share features of both a territorial struggle (the defense of a small urban forest) and the movement of squares (the occupation of a park).¹¹⁷ If composition refers to “components of struggle,” MTC and Ross argue that “what composes the components is larger than the sum of their perimeters.”¹¹⁸ This “composition” lays claim to diversity and difference as its strength, its raison d’être, as if such conditions are unique or assumed as historically given, pre-formed but malleable to the process of “composition” in its unfolding.¹¹⁹ Paradoxically, the “components” of struggle, the various communities of diversity that a “composition” or a ZAD seeks to remake and defend are somehow immune from the ravages of a capitalist world, existing as island refugia remote from the material community.

Crusades, Maneuvers, and Other Adventures

If Defend the Atlanta Forest is heralded as the premier example in North America of the “strategy of composition,” it is instructive that the dominant purveyors of anarchist partisanship of the last two decades should treat it as yet another case of radical campaigning.¹²⁰ In many ways, the sequence of events and feedback loop of direct actions, mass protests, corporate campaigns, teach-ins, canvassing efforts, speaking tours, letter writing that cohere under the banner “Defend the Atlanta Forest,” “Stop Cop City,” “Block Cop City,” or “Weelaunee Defense Society” have been treated as a litmus test for the “strategy of composition” as a new species of struggle in the otherwise counterrevolutionary period following the George Floyd Rebellion. Much hope has been hung on this precious scaffolding. It seems unfair to treat SCC/DFA as the decisive moment of our time, with some organizers insisting that it is “not a local struggle,” but one that connects everything from Gaza to policing to deforestation. Yet the convergence of factors—a sickened planetary metabolism and racialized economic decline both increasingly managed by a revanchist police state—leaves little in the way of other horizons.¹²¹ There is no one campaign, no singular organizational approach that can be said to represent all the forms of struggle that have developed out of this small tract of land and its storied histories.¹²² There is a certain futility in attempting to characterize all of this practical messiness as a coherent strategy, as if a certain “orientation” of activity was a normative prerequisite for activity itself. Rather, what matters in the first instance are the objective conditions that give rise to conflict, how it is sustained or reproduced through the objective characteristics of the political subjectivities involved and through the conflict itself. It also matters, much to the chagrin of the romantics often attracted to these flashpoints, what material limits are set by these conditions, which of course include the sequence of conflict, and do not simply precede it. Any critique of a particular strategic iteration must proceed on this basis. The detour here is not intended as a critique of the struggle against Cop City, or to defend the forest.¹²³ Whatever the real limits may be, those will be found across scattered battlegrounds by the partisans themselves—along Intrenchment Creek, within the South River Forest, before an APD vehicle, at the offices of Atlanta Police Foundation funders, door to door throughout Atlanta’s segregated residential neighborhoods, or at the polling station.¹²⁴ What follows is rather is something both more narrow and more broad: less a critique of SCC/DFA itself, but rather a critique of the representation of this struggle in the form of the desperate activist campaign, which has been taken up by the usual players ranging from the DSA to the Movement for Black Lives to the “Earth First!”/Rising Tide North America milieu to Rainforest Action Network to any number of “mainstream” environmental and climate justice NGOs.¹²⁵ We proceed from this initial premise: the representative compositional struggle of the moment has been characterized as a campaign by both its proponents and critics, perhaps unwittingly but no less definitely. We must examine why and how, and discuss the dire consequences of confusing the pursuit of practical, laudable objectives with revolutionary transformation.

As a collective politics that only announces itself in its result, the “strategy of composition” is, in a very real sense, a politics of the least common denominator. Hence, the seemingly endless discourse on conflicting strategies, tact and tactics, the meaning of “diversity of tactics,” and the dead-end debates on “violence and non-violence.” All struggle involves such conflict, but in “composition” the rehearsal of internal strife is constitutive of the strategy itself. These are not the stutterings of an otherwise coherent program. The delicate coordination of components is all that coheres. This is the province of the activist, of the campaign. It moves within these self-imposed commons, as if the commons, the composition, offering room to maneuver, offered either the mandate or the “autonomy” to do so. There, is in fact, a common denominator at work here—capital—and it has enclosed the world. This is the arena in which all activism takes place.

It is sensible that “compositional struggle” should open onto the terrain of “activism,” especially in the form of “the campaign.” As a result of this watering down of precision and clarity, it is quite difficult to cleave “composition” from “campaign strategy” at all. This is possibly why the proponents of composition as strategy must repeatedly assure us that “composition” is qualitatively distinct from “diversity of tactics” or the more quotidian and ubiquitous practice of “coalition building.” It is more about “tact” than tactics, conveying the importance of underling relationships and how they are mediated through the struggle itself. This is, after all, supposed to be a “new political intelligence.” Farrell, following Ross, insists that there is an element of “transvaluation of values” that the territorial struggle coheres through composition, which makes it distinct from either general insurrectionary “rupture” or the more tedious and protracted formal activist campaign. Yet later, as he attempts to distinguish this approach from the “diversity of tactics” or coalitional practice emblematic in the “St. Paul’s Principles,” he falls back into the most unimaginative and unoriginal formulation: composition is a method that doesn’t just tolerate diverse tactics, but links them synthetically for a qualitatively new potential.¹²⁶ He contrasts this to the united front or coalition “in which each group exits the same as it enters,” a description that is nothing but a ideal straw-man intended to present the “strategy of composition” as something entirely new.¹²⁷ “Groups,” “participants,” “spokes,” “partisans,” “affinity groups” or what have you are not pre-formed and static, offering identities that can be separated from their practical activity, either in struggle or (as is often de-emphasized by insurrectionary anarchy and theorists of “communization”) outside of it . Such a figure does not exist beyond the minds of these theorists of compositional strategy. It is material social practice that determines consciousness. However fleeting it may be in the world of the activist, there is never a “coalition” or “campaign,” even at their most generic or uninteresting, that doesn’t involve practice. Thus, we find in “compositional” struggles those same features of activist campaigns that the former attempts to disavow. Perhaps they protest too much. Given our skepticism on the matter, it is worth a brief detour into this tortured sphere to examine some of the limits to which the campaign gives way, in its own right.

There is not the space necessary for an adequate treatment of “activism” as a social phenomena. Interested readers should review the much longer history of grappling with the historical arrival of the “activist,” or, in a slightly different register, the “militant” as an alienated identity adequate to an era of disorientation and fragmentation.¹²⁸ It is notable that these reports on “the activist” or “activism” come from a place of direct experience and are often forms of immanent critique carried out by participants in particular cycles of struggle that held the left’s attention between the 1980s and the onset of the financial crisis and the “era of riots.” Environmental defense, anti-roads movements, anti-globalization summits and summit hoping, the so-called “direct action” and “anti-capitalist” movements—their limits are often treated as coterminous with activism itself. Yet communist skepticism of “activism” is a bit messier and often tangled with its relationship to anarchism, the deed, or the individual act. It thus extends much further back as a general cautioning against the specialization of agitational activity that is divorced from the mundanities of capitalist reproduction and the often nihilist character of proletarian life.¹²⁹ In brief, this criticism amounts to the tautology that “activism” lacks the practical truth, churned out from the wheels of history, that is the general movement of proletarian activity. This is what makes it “activist,” after all, its claim on situational awareness that transcends the “passive” balance of forces and in this way pushes beyond the deficient subjectivity of everyone else.¹³⁰ Marx grappled with similar concerns, though erring more soberly on the side of certain specialized activity—in his case the violent tactics of the Russian peasant-populist secret society Narodnaya Volya (“Peoples’ Will”)—under particular historical conditions. For Narodnaya Volya, those conditions involved the late development of capitalism, the persistence of agrarian regimes and the peasantry, and with them, the mir communal organizational form.¹³¹ Marx’s appraisal of the relation of small sects to broader populations was quite distinct historically and geographically from either Bordiga or Pannekoek, who were confronted with far a greater generalization of capitalist relations of production. If the arc of capitalist development remains the through line, the period under present question—from the 1970s onward, and especially over the last two decades—calls forth an entirely different set of material conditions. “Activism” is thus no longer a question of specialization versus generalization, of secrecy and elitism versus the ordinary motion of social life. It is now inseparable from conditions of complete capitalist domination of the planet and with that total encirclement the gradual erosion of growth and prosperity and a persistent uncertainty of a livable future.

In the United States, the modern era of citizen activism began in earnest in the wake of early postwar de-industrialization, which unfolded first and most severely among black populations that had only recently migrated to industrial zones following the collapse of Reconstruction and the pressures of Jim Crow regimes in the agrarian south.¹³² In other words, citizen activism found its footing amidst racialized panic surrounding a looming “urban crisis.”¹³³ It is in this trajectory that we see the withdrawal of whatever meager forms of public provisioning and social democracy were afforded by the postwar boom. Racked by growing declines in profitability, manufacturing overcapacity, and stagnating productivity, urban industrial centers found themselves mired in fiscal crises as revenue streams were cut off by the re-territorialization of production.¹³⁴ Crudely put, policing, already born of racial and settler animus, replaced social provisions as the most cost effective form of population management. Paradoxical as it may seem, citizen activism emerged in much the same way, as a targeted form of resource distribution and program control.¹³⁵ In the vacuum left by state administration of provisions necessary for social reproduction, this privatization alleviated fiscal burden, despite the fact that most nonprofit operations were government funded.¹³⁶ They also allowed for greater degrees surveillance and population management, which were simultaneously more concentrated and diffuse. It provides a clear disciplinary function cloaked in the form of social independence and civic action.¹³⁷ The modern “activist” era is thus not so much defined by voluntarist detachment from the real workers’ movement, as earlier communists had warned, though it is also that. Rather, it is characterized by community self-reliance, “mutual aid,” and campaigns for greater equality and equity emergent from its historical roots in the civil rights movement. No matter how far this form of civic action might drift from these origins, absorbing the some of the more innocuous “radical” or “revolutionary” jargon along the way,¹³⁸ it must be situated in the regimes of structural austerity that gave it its mandate.

The most basic forms of the “NPIC” are revenue-seeking, and thus participants in the market economy. It is this fact that allows state-funding and grant-making to be supplemented by capitalist firms, however indirectly, reducing the cost of provisioning by exposure to the mechanisms of price signals. Their tax status not only offers them greater leverage in carrying out economic activities, such as fundraising and merchandizing, it also ensures access to discounted goods and services and lower interest rates. In the most advanced capitalist economies, nonprofits are a major feature in the breakdown of economic activity.¹³⁹ This is in a very real sense a form of non-state mediation of social reproduction, one response to the decoupling of the double moulinet of capitalist reproduction. They may not be profit-seeking nor capital-accumulating, but it is a fool’s errand to defend nonprofits as non-capitalist. They form a part of the material community.

It may seem tempting to suggest that these trappings are limited to “activism” such that it is channeled through formal nonprofit organization. Nonprofits, embedded as they are in price signals and economic compulsions, are rightfully abandoned as models of reform or recuperation. They can never be meaningfully “anti-systemic,” being part of the very system that they are purporting to challenge. This objection is often paired with the reminder that there are many other avenues for civic action and solidarity that seem to obviate this political economic mediation. This is often the concealed conceit of many critiques of the “NPIC.” Community organizing, campaigning, and mutual aid need not apply for 501(c)3 status in order to participate in communities of struggle. This is where some of the most ostensible “radical” organizing tends to situate itself. As true as this may be in a definite sense, this merely returns us to the problem of social composition and decomposition, when capital’s abstraction and domestication of humanity is practically complete. The NPIC is “reformist” to the extent that its imperatives are shaped by the compulsions of capital. This is no less true of individual actors, “communities,” or class activity more broadly. All are imbued with the logic of capitalist reproduction. These limits of “activism” apply as well to “voluntarism” more generally: the capacity to act is restricted—determined, even—by the reproduction of daily life in ways that such activism regularly fails to interrogate, offering instead a one-sided analysis of the constellation of wills, care, or, (as is relevant here) strategy, necessary to do something. Yet to declare civic action as hopelessly reformist is a banality. The knee-jerk dismissal of organizations as per se “counterrevolutionary,” “reformist,” or “recuperative” is equally naive and disregards how materially embedded many such groupings and services tend to be in the social reproduction of class, race, and gender belonging.¹⁴⁰ An outright rejection of the types of social formations that desperately congeal around the downward spiral of capitalist reproduction amounts to little more than a rejection of the material conditions that shape subsistence and survival, wishing instead for a ready-made revolutionary subject with no history. The ink spilled on the tepid rise of the activist, the corporate campaign, and the NGO and “nonprofit industrial complex” is extensive enough to constitute a complex of its own. Activism” is often so extensive a part of the reproduction of daily life that it forms initial conditions of political development and conflict, whether we like it or not.

Where this leaves critique is not with “organization” as such, but a particular form that has gained momentum concomitant with the decline of the workers’ movement: the campaign, or, more precisely the “political-economic disruption campaign” (PEDC).¹⁴¹ In the enchanted world of the activist, with its ritual division of strategy and tactics, the model of the PEDC is the prima materia for the alchemy that transforms these components into “victory.” In its most basic framework, the campaign has a spatial dimension and a temporal dimension. In the spatial dimension, the campaign builds relationships horizontally, along a spectrum of “stakeholders” (this is where the concepts of impact and allyship gain purchase). It also escalates tactics vertically, that is, from “low-risk” to “high-risk,” and from non-confrontational to confrontational. “Diversity of tactics” is its bread and butter. There is also an implicit escalation along seams of power, involving whatever the target may be, and so these campaigns tend to involve a “power mapping” analysis that takes on spatial metaphor. This overall strategy unfolds temporally, with pressure building over time, so that movements appear to be gaining power vis-a-vis their targets, with the implicit promise that things will only get worse if the target does not fold. PEDCs are thus sometimes known as “pressure campaigns.”¹⁴² These are the basic contours of the activist campaign.¹⁴³ It is “political-economic” and “disruptive” because it purports to operate through the mechanisms of the capitalist economy, specifically financial markets, turning the pressures of competition in on the intended target. It is critical to note that this particular theorization developed in specific antimony of Marxian critiques of capitalism, the law of value, and the irreducible centrality of surplus value production to the process of accumulation and reproduction. In this account, accumulation is independent of production and merely the effect of financial market valuation. There is thus no “absolute” accumulation of capital; all accumulation is differential, relative only to competing firms in a given sector.¹⁴⁴ Market competition and its mediation through “complex social processes” is all that matters. A more clear reification of our era there could not be. Consciously or not, this analysis of the capitalist economy informs the ins-and-outs of the pressure campaign, which have a tendency to fetishize the power of the market in allocating the social good, as long as citizens provide the pressure necessary.¹⁴⁵

While this form of campaigning in general has a much more storied history, its increasing prominence is quite clearly linked to the decline of traditional forms of proletarian power. Arguably the first iteration of the “corporate campaign” strategy emerged in direct response to these limits in the labor movement during that watershed period spanning 1963-1983, in the unionization drive of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) throughout the southern factories of the major textile firm J.P. Stevens. ACTWU’s campaign against J.P. Stevens was centered on disrupting the economic viability of the company by targeting shareholder institutions, individual corporate executives, and board members. The primary strategists had concluded that traditional labor tactics such as strikes and boycotts had failed and would continue to fail to produce collective bargaining and unionization among the thousands of workers at Stevens’s factories.¹⁴⁶ While this shift in strategy has been hailed as a much needed check on “corporate power” and evolution in the labor movement, little to no attention has been paid to the clear fact that such a strategy is an index of the overall weakness of the workers’ movement and its historical retreat. Little wonder why now, in our recent cycle of “strike waves,” heralded quite dubiously as the return of labor, the “corporate campaign” seems nowhere on the table of strategy. That is, except in those holdouts of non-labor organizing which had themselves flourished under the great decline of labor and the busting of the specter of communism.

The ACTWU campaign style was exported to other union struggles throughout the 1980s, but by the early 1990s it had gained most traction among anti-apartheid activists, environmentalists struggling to defend unprotected land by conventional political campaigning and lobbying,¹⁴⁷ and among the prototypical anti-globalization student movement. In the late 1980s, more militant tactics became regularly employed in the repertoire of the anti-apartheid solidarity and boycott movement with the express purpose of bringing economic and political pressure on the regime and its international scaffolding.¹⁴⁸ Similar international pressure was mobilized in the mid-1990s against Nike, after re-territorialization of its supply chains had publicly implicated it in “sweating” child labor in factories in the manufacturing zones of South and Southeast Asia, including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This re-territorialization was the direct result of rising living standards among the “Asian Tigers” and mainland China, where Nike had previously sourced materials and labor. What emerged was a broad coalition of civic society and student organizations, including United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), that organized a campaign to turn the global market against Nike and undermine its profitability, which in many ways worked.¹⁴⁹ This would crescendo in the 1999 WTO protests and the era of the anti-globalization movement proper.

On the environmental front, the “corporate campaign” was most adequately adopted by Earth First! in Northern California under the influence of Judi Bari. This strategy was possible because of the particular historical configuration of industry in the redwoods, with increasing consolidation of timber companies and financialization of their operations. The main target, Pacific Lumber, was acquired in the late 1980s by Texas financier Charles Hurwitz and his conglomerate Maxxam, Inc. Hurwitz leveraged the acquisition with junk bonds, only to finance the merger and service the debt by rapidly increasing the rate of timber harvest. The best output to input ratio here was of course in the remaining old growth that Pacific Lumber owned. This opened the campaign to a broader strategy of pressure, including the lesser known “Corporate Fall” campaign that followed the more traditional “Redwood Summer” of the Earth First! milieu.¹⁵⁰ Bari is often credited with building coalitions among workers and environmentalists, on the one hand, and disavowing the economic sabotage and property destruction that become associated with Earth First! up to that point, on the other. Both claims are exaggerated. Whatever conciliation existed between rural timber workers and urban environmentalists was quite marginal, fragile, and fleeting, at least as a result of the explicit efforts on the part of radical environmentalists.¹⁵¹ Workers’ relation to conservation is far more complicated and fraught with contradictions, ones only exacerbated by the reconfiguration and re-territorialization of the industry during the long crisis.¹⁵² At best, the legacy of Judi Bari is more rhetorical: by undermining the persistence of anti-proletarian characteristics that were always part of the “environmental movement” among settlers and urbanites and seeking common cause with workers, the “tactics” much vaunted by the milieu could be subordinated to strategies that were situated in how capitalism actually worked. This is where her “disavowal” of tree-spiking comes in, not as a normative critique of the tactic, but a materialist critique of its efficacy when deployed in such turbulent conditions.¹⁵³

This general climate of “anti-capitalist” activism is what characterized the 1990s and 2000s. It has touched anything from the anti-war movement,¹⁵⁴ to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli occupation and apartheid, to any number of Greenpeace corporate campaigns. Even today, the inheritance of this era is felt in the activities of Palestine Action Network or Extinction Rebellion. Strategically and tactically, it perhaps reached a zenith in the late 90s and early 2000s in the animal “rights” or animal liberation movements, in particular in the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Campaign (SHAC).¹⁵⁵ SHAC emerged out of a sequence of smaller campaigns that successfully closed down farms that bred nonhuman animals (rabbits, monkeys, cats) for sale to “research” and often just contract testing of various commodities (household cleaners, cosmetics, etc) to mitigate company liability.¹⁵⁶ SHAC’s main target was one of these contract research organizations (CRO), one the largest in the world—Huntingdon Life Sciences of Suffolk, England and later New Jersey. The “SHAC model” is quite infamous in a certain activist milieu.¹⁵⁷ It combined “aboveground” (ostensibly or technically “legal”) tactics with the support for “underground” (i.e., illegal, clandestine) direct action. The tactical spectrum ran the gamut from phone-banking to property destruction to physical violence. “Diversity of tactics” was the watchword and here attained a practical reality quite apart from its previous employ. These tactics found coordination in a strategy of economic pressure that involved isolating the target—HLS—from its supply chain and financial overlords. This “secondary” or “tertiary” pressure was quite effective, and successfully and repeatedly severed HLS from its equipment suppliers, market-makers, financial service providers, institutional shareholders, insurance providers, and brokers of all sorts. It was even removed from the New York and London Stock Exchanges as its market capitalization was driven below the minimum threshold. Under pressure, the UK government requested the Bank of England provide HLS with banking facilities to prevent bankruptcy and liquidation of assets. Over the course of the campaign, HLS was forced to accept loans on increasingly unfavorable terms.¹⁵⁸ The campaign had successfully inserted itself into the calculation of “risk” that attends the process of valuation.

SHAC did not successfully close Huntingdon Life Sciences. It resulted in two major waves of state repression in the US and UK, including the passing of specific anti-terrorism legislation that treated this form of campaigning as a form of racketeering, along with countless arrests and court-cases that failed to make headlines. The campaign’s history is now inseparable from the wider so-called “Green Scare” that targeted animal liberation and radical ecological movements. To date, its limits have been treated by the usual suspects¹⁵⁹ as an inadequate balance between the “aboveground” and “underground” elements of the campaign, the absence of a critical constellation of tactics, and naive public relations. Even aside from these criticisms, a greater scrutiny into the “strategy” itself is warranted, but has not been undertaken. It is here that the fundamental contradiction of the “anti-capitalist” campaign reveals itself: in its pursuit to target firm by firm, availing the dominoes to fall, it relies on capitalist imperatives.¹⁶⁰ In an ideological move quite appropriate for the times, it separates the market from the firm, circulation from production (or extraction), and believes itself capable of pitting one against another to achieve the desired practices and allocation of resources such that capitalism simply vanishes. This is incrementalism, but with anarchist and anti-capitalist characteristics. It has left an indelible mark on subsequent campaigns, including the #NoDAPL campaign in support of the struggle at Oceti Sakowin,¹⁶¹ the Tar Sands Blockade of the Utah tar sands development, the campaign against Keystone XL and Line 3 pipelines, solidarity actions with Wet’suwet’en land defenders, and any number of Rainforest Action Network or Greenpeace initiatives. Anyone following the activities of Palestine Action Network has witnessed how difficult it has been to shake. Many of the same NPIC actors are mobilized through the Rising Tide and EF! networks and so have advanced strategies that echo SHAC. A lesser known model is quite indicative of this trend. Shortly after the implosion of the SHAC campaign, Root Force emerged as an attempt to pair the PEDC strategy with growing movement against capitalist and colonial infrastructure. It was the best example of an attempt to generalize the PEDC strategy as an antagonism against global capital itself. This was the approach that paralleled the growth of insurrectionary anarchism during this same period, its complement, if not its sponsor. Though it saw support on the ground to effort to stop the expansion of I-69, it did not bear any fruit beyond its expansive vision.¹⁶²

The particular strategy of SHAC was the result of a convergence of factors: the decline in militancy and mainstreaming of animal rights and welfare organizations, the development of “diversity of tactics” and “direct action” movement in the UK anti-roads campaign, Reclaim the Streets, and the UK Earth First! offshoot Do or Die, the general cycle of struggles around anti-globalization and anti-capitalism, and the “new economy” boom of the late 1990s, which was underwritten by depressed interest rates, stock market speculation, and the subsequent growth of valuations of technology and service start-ups.¹⁶³ This asset-price Keynesianism of the tumultuous period of the long crisis, accelerated through the 1990s by the adoption of monetarist “easy-money” polices of central banks, is the necessary background to understand the rise of the “activist campaign” at this conjuncture. This fetish of markets and the circulation of money took on its “anti-capitalist” character in these civic efforts, which did little more than provide checks on the capitalist economy itself. But even this is illusory, as the most egregious practices of a given firm are not the result of the firm’s corrupt managers, but of the capitalist system itself. It will tend to reproduce these practices elsewhere through the supply chain. This is the effect of competition.¹⁶⁴ Those horrors are structural, symptoms of the capitalist imperative to reduce costs of production, an imperative that only worsens as capital’s crisis tendency makes itself known. As even its ardent adherents and advocates maintain, political-economic disruption campaigns, pressure campaigns, or “differential accumulation” campaigns do nothing to undo or overcome capitalist relations themselves. Their inborn tendency, in fact, is to reproduce themselves on that very basis.

The “strategy of composition” finds itself narrowing in on the activist campaign, attempt as it might to veer elsewhere, towards a “rupture” or break with the community of capital. In the emphasis on a diversity of tact and tactics, on complementarity amidst the chaos of decomposition and diffusion, one finds that familiar thread of organization in times of great weakness. It is worth noting that the SHAC model, if we take it as the premier PEDC strategy, was designed to efficiently mobilize sparse and disparate parties.¹⁶⁵ The appearance of this strategy is thus an expression of a period of weakness and retreat, and frequently includes a related voluntary preoccupation with “issues” not immediately linked with the mundane course of reproduction,¹⁶⁶ which has been fragmented and decoupled from class belonging and clear lines of political subjectivity. The limit of these campaigns expresses itself whenever their reproduction becomes identical with the reproduction of capitalist relations. On the one hand, this is the result of the program of the campaign itself, clinging as it does to persistence of capitalist contradictions. On the other hand, this expresses the problem of reproduction that lies at the core of contemporary cycles of struggle.

Activist efforts have a tendency to separate from the messiness and turmoil of day to day life, even when they have their basis in it, for reasons discussed above. Compositional struggles must constantly disavow activists campaigns because they share this historical identity. Both arose from the historical conditions of proletarian retreat from the workplace as a site of power, shifting to the more diffuse sphere of circulation. Both consequentially share a preoccupation with the power of the market in general and finance in particular, seeing in commercial capital and money capital the forms of capital par excellence, which stand in the way of the social good or “forms of life” worth preserving. Both tend towards strategies and tactics whose efficacy can only be brought into being by the mediation of competition. Both are reproduced only on this basis, and this forms their ultimate limit. Their trajectory is to replace concrete struggles over the terms of reproduction with strategies in the sphere of circulation, and thus increasingly attract the professional strategists and tacticians, the parachuting allies, the experts, and other familiar casts of characters.¹⁶⁷ This has already been observed in the Stop Cop City movement, particularly in the Stop Reeves Young and Stop the Atlanta Police Foundation campaigns, the Weelaunee Defense Society and Block Cop City speaking tour, and the Block Cop City action itself. Each of these iterations has represented a move toward a consolidated strategy of action in the tradition of the PEDC. Early in the campaign, Crimethinc advocated the adoption of the “SHAC model” and associates it with the history of “compositional struggles” in one of the most widely circulated pieces of the movement.¹⁶⁸ It might be said, generously, that “composition” in this sense is an abstraction, a heuristic for thinking through the complexities of identity formation and mediation beyond simply hailing a “diversity of tactics.” But this does not a strategy make. To touch ground, it must survey the concrete conditions and the key players that provoke the participation of the broad coalition that composes the composition. In doing so, however, it falls back onto “diversity of tactics” to make a strategy, but presents the approach as something novel.¹⁶⁹

The fundamental limit is this: the “composition” in question is already part of capital’s world and its actions, conflicts, strategies, and tactics are defined by the imperatives of that world. We can thus see a campaign achieving “victory” without moving the dial toward the production of communism.¹⁷⁰ This could have been and may indeed be the outcome of any number of contemporary struggles: the blockade at Standing Rock, Stop Cop City/Defend the Atlanta Forest, the defense of Lützerath, the occupation at Saint-Soline, or the struggle of the Wet’suwet’en. The differing potential for each of these struggles to move from campaign victory to the negation of capitalist relations of production is not found in whatever commonality they have in the use of particular tactics, or their superficially “territorial” character.¹⁷¹ Nor is it found in the “composition” of that tactical repertoire or the constellation of wills emergent from it. It must be found elsewhere, in the material relations of production and reproduction. That is to say, it indeed must be found in composition, but in a quite different sense.

Notes

1. On the class composition of the farmer’s protests, see Artifices. 2024. “CHACUN Sa PLACE À L’OMBRE.” https://artifices.blog/2024/02/07/chacun-sa-place-a-lombre/#_ftnref1; for English translation, see Artifices. 2024. “No Man’s Land.” Endnotes. https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/artifices-no-mans-land↩︎

2. Antithesi. 2024. “The Ecological Crisis and the Rise of Post-Fascism.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/antithesi↩︎

3. Anonymous. 2024. “Stopping the Cop Cities Countrywide.” Crimethinc. https://crimethinc.com/2024/02/07/stopping-the-cop-cities-countrywide-with-a-report-from-lacey-washington↩︎

4. We will have more to say about operaismo and “class composition” below.↩︎

5. Paramount here would the work of Angry Workers of the World, Viewpoint, and Notes from Below.↩︎

6. See Hugh Farrell. 2023. “The Strategy of Composition.” Ill Will Editions. We discuss at length below.↩︎

7. For the interested, we think the best include ​​Leon de Mattis. 2012. “Reflections on the Call.” https://libcom.org/library/reflections-call-l%C3%A9-de-mattis; and Anonymous. 2020. “Another Word for Settle: A Response to Reattachments/another-word-for-settle-a-response-to-rattachements-and-inhabit/↩︎

8. Spend an afternoon skimming the last year of tit-for-tat criticisms published on the Scenes from the Atlanta Forest blog, and this should become quite clear.↩︎

9. This will remain an important theme.↩︎

10. As an example, see Angry Workers’ dismal appraisal of the May 2021 wave of Palestinian riots and general strikes in response to police raids of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. Angry Workers. 2021. “Editorial #3: Palestine – Israel.” Angry Workers of the World. https://www.angryworkers.org/2021/05/25/editorial-3-palestine-israel/. For a critique of Angry Workers on this issue, and race and the problem of class unity more generally, see Gus Breslauer. 2021. “Race, Class, and the Zionist State.” Cosmonaut Magazine. https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/06/race-class-and-the-zionist-state/↩︎

11. Erik Loomis has helped to undermine the overly simplistic narrative of workers as opposed to environmental protection, in the context of forest defense in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Still, Loomis’ account does not periodize the decline of workers’ movement and the transition to largely defensive forms of worker struggle and identity. As a result, his critique of the opposition between environmentalists and extractive industry workers from the 1980s to the present day is primarily moralistic and is itself quite reductive. It cannot help to explain the limits of workplace strategies in this current context, especially as regards struggles for indigenous preservation of territory, e.g., union support for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines. See Erik Loomis. 2016. Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests. Cambridge University Press.↩︎

12. As of this writing, the most recent example is an anonymous statement published on Ill Will Editions. See Anonymous. 2024. “States of Siege.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/states-of-siege↩︎

13. See, e.g., the “Introduction” to Wright’s Storming Heaven. Steven Wright. 2017. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. Pluto Press. ↩︎

14. For a collection, see Karl Marx. 2019. The Political Writings. Verso.↩︎

15. Karl Marx. 1880. “A Workers’ Inquiry.” La Revue socialiste. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/04/20.htm↩︎

16. E.g., Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital or Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically. Mario Tronti. 2019. Workers and Capital. Verso; Harry Cleaver. 2000. Reading Capital Politically. AK Press.↩︎

17. See Tronti, 2019.↩︎

18. See Wright, 2017, 70-78.↩︎

19. The best account of the long boom is given by Brenner. See Robert Brenner. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005. Verso.↩︎

20. This de-peasantization was the trend globally from the mid-20th century, accelerated after 1973. See Endnotes. 2015. “A History of Separation: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ Movement, 1883-1982.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation; Mike Davis. 2017. Planet of Slums. Verso.; Farshad Araghi. 1995. “Global Depeasantization, 1945-1990.” The Sociological Quarterly, 36(2): 337–368.↩︎

21. See Endnotes. 2015. “A History of Separation: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ Movement, 1883-1982.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation↩︎

22. This history is detailed by Wright, 2017.↩︎

23. See, e.g., Wright, 2017, and ​​Viewpoint. 2013. Viewpoint Issue 3: Workers’ Inquiry.↩︎

24. Endnotes reminds us that it is a fallacy to maintain that “the development of capitalism tends to unify the workers. The labour market may be singular, but the workers who enter it to sell their labour power are not. They are divided by language, religion, nation, race, gender, skill, etc. Some of these differences were preserved and transformed by the rise of capitalism, while others were newly created.” Endnotes, “A History of Separation”↩︎

25. See Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. 1972. “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” and Leopoldina Fortunati. 1996. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Autonomedia. See also Viewpoint. 2015. Viewpoint Issue 5: Social Reproduction↩︎

26. See James Boggs. 1963. The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. Monthly Review Press; Jason Smith. 2020. Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. Reaktion Books; Wright, 2017; Viewpoint, 2013.↩︎

27. See Boggs, 1963. See also Endnotes. 2015. “Brown v Ferguson.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation.↩︎

28. W. E. B. Du Bois. 2014. Black Reconstruction in America. Oxford University Press. See also Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso.; Theodore W. Allen. 2012. The Invention of the White Race. Verso.; Noel Ignatiev. 2009. How the Irish Became White. Routledge.↩︎

29. Viewpoint traces these lineages well. See Viewpoint. 2015. Viewpoint Issue 5: Social Reproduction.↩︎

30. Loren Goldner makes the argument, following Marx, that agrarian revolutions were fundamental to the formation of home markets for labor-power and means of subsistence. In historical context where this process was incomplete, communist organization tended to accelerate it, whether wittingly or not. According to Goldner, these revolutions are fundamentally bourgeois in content, but take various political forms—political absolutism, enlightened despotism, liberal democracy, social democracy, or Bolshevism. See Loren Goldner. “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today.” https://libcom.org/article/communism-material-human-community-amadeo-bordiga-today-loren-goldner↩︎

31. Rosa Luxemburg. 1906. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/. See also Teodor Shanin’s similar appraisal of the composition of forces in the development and limits of the Russian Revolution of 1905, with particular attention to the role of internalized differentiation and racialization, and the contradiction between the limited industrial core and the vast hinterlands. Teodor Shanin. 1986. Russia, 1905-07: Revolution as a Moment of Truth. Palgrave Macmillan.↩︎

32. Sergio Bologna made this point in considering Luxemburg and important predecessor in the analysis of class composition. See Sergio Bologna. 1972. “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers’ Council Movement.” https://libcom.org/article/class-composition-and-theory-party-origins-workers-council-movement↩︎

33. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 1899. The Development of Capitalism in Russia. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/↩︎

34. See Teodor Shanin. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. Monthly Review Press.↩︎

35. Ed Emery. 1995. “No Politics Without Inquiry!: A Proposal for a Class Composition Inquiry Project 1996-7.” https://libcom.org/library/no-politics-without-inquiry↩︎

36. Marx, 1880.↩︎

37. We are not the first to draw attention to the relation between “uneven and combined development” and “class composition.” See Angry Workers of the World. 2020. “Reflections on ‘uneven and combined development’ and ‘class composition’.” https://libcom.org/article/reflections-uneven-and-combined-development-and-class-composition↩︎

38. This point has been made by Steve Wright in his foreword to Tronti’s Workers and Capital.↩︎

39. Romano Alquati. 1961. “Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti.” Quaderni Rossi and Romano Alquati. 1964. “Struggle at FIAT.” Classe Operaia, no. 1. See Viewpoint’s issue on workers’ inquiry: https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/30/issue-3-workers-inquiry/↩︎

40. Alquati, for instance, was a practicing sociologist and influential in early Italian sociology. See Wright for a broader discussion on the relationship between operaismo and sociology.↩︎

41. Wright, 2017, 45.↩︎

42. “…within or without the factory (this is a false problem: today the factory does not exist as a moment that can be separated, etc.), are nonetheless in the midst [nel vivo] of the class struggle – where political recomposition, the circulation of experiences, critique and discussion, the elaboration of new forms and contents, have reached the highest moment, where problems attain an increasingly deeper and more generalized significance alongside the unfolding of the struggle itself.” Alquati, 1961.↩︎

43. As Alquati noted, “The group did not choose Olivetti, Olivetti chose it.” Alquati, 1961.↩︎

44. See Alquati, 1961. This is despite the equivocation on the tendencies of capitalist development present in Alquati’s work. See Wright, 47.↩︎

45. Salar Mohandesi. 2013. “Class Consciousness or Class Composition?” Science & Society 77(1): 72–97.↩︎

46. Wright, 64-70.↩︎

47. As Sergio Bologna observed, “…the hoary old questions started coming out: should the organisation, with its programme and its plans, march over the corpse of the movement; should the programme be external to and counterposed to the class composition?” Sergio ​​Bologna. 1977. “The Tribe of Moles.” https://libcom.org/article/tribe-moles-sergio-bologna↩︎

48. The exception here is of course the Marxist-feminist tradition of critique that grew out of and in opposition to Italian operaismo and autonomia around groupings such as Wages for Housework and Lotta Feminista. See the Viewpoint dossier on social reproduction: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/11/02/issue-5-social-reproduction/. Maya Gonzalez offers an excellent gloss of the significance of this contribution to understanding the process of class formation: Gonzalez. 2013. “The Gendered Circuit: Reading The Arcane of Reproduction.” Viewpoint. https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/28/the-gendered-circuit-reading-the-arcane-of-reproduction/. See also Maya Gonzalez. 2023. Feminist Autonomy and the Concept of Social Reproduction: The Italian Workerist-Feminist Tradition of Lotta Feminista. UC Santa Cruz. ↩︎

49. Groups and journals such as Wildcat, Subversion, Aufheben, Midnight Notes, Kolinko, and Kämpa tillsammans! are illustrative of this trend.↩︎

50. Kolinko. 2001. “Paper on Class Composition.” https://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/engl/e_klazu.htm↩︎

51. Notice that this anticipates the key problem of composition today: the formality of dispossession is all that coheres proletarian experience, as the relation to production is far more contingent and precarious. The formality of dispossession is the only content composition in our current era. This is the composition problem that we explore below.↩︎

52. Sergio Bologna made a similar point regarding the technical organization and expertise of the German councilist movement. See Bologna, 1972.↩︎

53. Kolinko, 2001.↩︎

54. “In the analysis of the coherence of the mode of production and workers’ struggle we distinguish between two different notions of class composition:
    
    – the “technical class composition” describes how capital brings together the work-force; that means the conditions in the immediate process of production (for instance division of labour in different departments, detachment from “administration” and production, use of special machinery) and the form of re-production (living-community, family-structure etc.)
    
    – the “political class composition” describes how workers turn the “technical composition” against capital. They take their coherence as a collective work-force as the starting-point of their self-organization and use the means of production as means of struggle. We are still discussing the question of at which particular point in the process of workers’ struggle we can describe it in terms of “political class composition”. One position uses the term as soon as workers of a single company or branch organize their struggle out of the conditions of production. The other position takes as a pre-condition for a new “political class composition” a wave of workers’ struggles that are unified into a class movement by struggles in central parts of the social production process (for example in the 60s/70s the focus for the class movement were mainly the struggles in automobile factories).” Ibid.↩︎

55. See especially Sergio Bologna. 1993. “Nazism and the Working Class.” https://libcom.org/article/nazism-and-working-class-sergio-bologna, Sergio Bologna. 1977. “Eight Theses on Militant Historiography.” https://libcom.org/article/eight-theses-militant-historiography, and Bologna, 1977, “Tribe of Moles” and Bologna, 1972.↩︎

56. “The technical class composition specifies that section of the working class on which capital bases its accumulation, while the political class composition specifies the materially determined characteristics of class antagonism.” Alberto Battaggia. 1981. “Mass worker and social worker: reflections on the ‘new class composition’.” Primo Maggio. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/mass-worker-and-social-worker↩︎

57. “It was criticised that the notion of class composition is used to identify a central subject within class struggle (thereby filtering out the rest). In contrary, we have to see the importance of every “proletarian experience” not just at the work-place, but also in the sphere of reproduction, the special experience as (work-)immigrants etc. The analysis of class composition can only help us to understand specific situations we are confronted with, e.g. why particular divisions between workers exist on a special shop-floor.” Ibid. See also Jamie Woodcock. 2019. “Interview with Kolinko Collective.” Notes from Below. https://notesfrombelow.org/article/interview-kolinko-collective↩︎

58. Kolinko, 2001.↩︎

59. James Boggs, an early influence of workerists, had anticipated these problems as early as 1963. See Boggs, 1963.↩︎

60. There were important efforts to address this problem in the early days of the crisis. Negri and the autonomists had turned away from the “mass worker” to the “social worker,” a figure that, with all of its problems and confusions, attempted to adequately capture the trend as it was unfolding. These attempts anticipated the growing problems of composition and decomposition as both social and spatial in ways not immediately or directly linked to the process of production. As Battaggia observed, the “current class figure is therefore ‘social’ because, in the first place, it is tied to the decomposition of the class across the territory.” Battaggia, 1981.↩︎

61. We shall have occasion to address this below.↩︎

62. Mohandesi, 2013.↩︎

63. “The class composition model illustrates how proletarians work through a broad set of strategies, making do with what they find at hand, improvising, testing, and learning from their practical experiences.” Ibid., 91.↩︎

64. See “Tragic Theses” for a critical discussion of this concept.↩︎

65. “The churning of the productive forces does not automatically stir up a revolutionary subject adequate to the era. There is instead the question of political subjectivity (or more specifically, what communist philosophers call ‘subjectivation’), which is the practical process of composition through which a revolutionary subject can be constructed in action. (All these forms of ‘subjectivity’ are inherently collective and inherently practical, by the way; we’re not just talking about building ‘political consciousness’ in the minds of individuals.)” Phil Neel. 2023. “​​Hostile Brothers: New Territories of Value and Violence.” https://haters.noblogs.org/files/2023/11/Hostile-Brothers.pdf↩︎

66. “The model of class composition, therefore, avoids the perils of anachronism by emphatically insisting on the historical specificity of all struggles: just as capitalist exploitation varies from historical conjuncture to historical conjuncture so too must the corresponding form and content of the struggle to abolish this exploitation.” Mohandesi, 2013, 87.↩︎

67. “It is only when the category of class composition is defined, or, rather, applied, that militant historiography emerges from its infantile disorders, and succeeds in regaining the terrain of ‘social history’ on the one hand, and on the other the terrain of political-institutional history. The concept of class composition, while it is functional, it is at the same time all-embracing and therefore ambiguous. It is a skeleton key which opens all doors.” Bologna, 1977, “Eight Theses on Militant Historiography”↩︎

68. We borrow from Phil Neal and Nick Chavez their formulation “communist construction,” which usefully avoids the pitfalls of debates around the transition from capitalist to “socialism” to communism and the confusions associated with the umbrella of “communization.” Communism is in a very real sense always in transition, always becoming: “communist construction—the gestation and emergence of communism from a non-communist body—is continually giving way to communism, plain and simple.” Neel and Chavez, 2023. It is also immediately destruction—of value, money, and the market, of private property, of the state—and so we add “negation” here only to emphasize that communism is first and foremost a negative content, carried out through the form of communist measures.↩︎

69. C.L.R. James famously became increasingly skeptical of the role of “vanguard” party in relation to working class struggle, and in particular black proletarian self-organization, while Raya Dunayevskaya was more equivocating. Grace Lee and James Boggs, developing a critical understanding of transformations in racial class composition brought on by de-industrialization, arrived at the conclusion that the party organization was even more critical for black proletarians. The variation in positions here was also reflected in the organizational history and practice of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in Detroit. See Kimathi Mohammed. 1974. “Organization and Spontaneity: The Theory of the Vanguard Party and its Application to the Black Movement in the U.S. Today.” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kimathi-mohammed-organization-and-spontaneity#fn_back7↩︎

70. It is interesting that the earliest studies of operaismo were critical in the development of Italian academic sociology.↩︎

71. Later translated, edited, and published in English by Fredy Perlman as Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement. Perlman had drawn his own conclusions on the limits of the “ultra-left” from his experiences during May 68. Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman. 1969. Worker-Student Action Committees. France May ’68. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/roger-gregoire-fredy-perlman-worker-student-action-committees-france-may-68↩︎

72. See Amadeo Bordiga. 1958. “The Original Content of the Communist Program.”; Il programma comunista. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1958/marxism-property.htm; Amadeo Bordiga. 1957. “The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism.” Il programma comunista https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1957/fundamentals.htm; Amadeo Bordiga. 1957. “The Revolutionary Program of Communist Society Eliminates All Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production and the Products of Labor.” Partito Comunista Internazionale. https://libcom.org/article/revolutionary-program-communist-society-eliminates-all-forms-ownership-land-instruments; Amadeo Bordiga. 1953. “The Immediate Program of the Revolution.” Sul filo del tempo. https://libcom.org/library/immediate-program-revolution-amadeo-bordiga↩︎

73. This is one of the earliest works to use this distinction as a historical periodization, following Jacques Camatte, and its usage here predates Théorie Communiste, the group with whom the framework would become most associated.↩︎

74. Notice the echoes with Bologna’s argument about the council movement in Germany. Bologna, 1972.↩︎

75. Whether it ever could is a separate question. Neel and Chavez offer an interesting discussion of this.↩︎

76. Négation. 1972. “The Proletariat as Destroyer of Work.” https://libcom.org/article/proletariat-destroyer-work↩︎

77. Théorie Communiste. 2008. “Much Ado About Nothing.” Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the 20th Century. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/much-ado-about-nothing↩︎

78. There are a number of historiographic and theoretical problems here. TC’s periodization of subsumption do not clearly align with their own periodization of programmatism. Notably, the real thrust of depeasantization, globally, occurred after the middle of the 20th century, so it remains to be explained by the period of formal subsumption would not be extended until at least the 1970s. These problems are best explored in Endnotes. 2015. “A History of Separation: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ Movement, 1883-1982.” Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation and Endnotes. 2010. “A History of Subsumption.” Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value-form.↩︎

79. See Endnotes 1 and the exchange between TC and the journal Aufheben. See Riff-Raff No. 8: Communist Theory Beyond the Ultra-Left.↩︎

80. While we share some of these concerns, we think that Friends of the Classless Society overstates the case, and underestimates TC’s return to the problem of production and reproduction. Friends of the Classless Society. 2016. “On Communization and its Theorists.” https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/friends-of-the-classless-society-on-communisation-and-its-theorists↩︎

81. Théorie Communiste. 2005. “Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.” https://libcom.org/article/self-organisation-first-act-revolution-it-then-becomes-obstacle-which-revolution-has↩︎

82. Brassier summarizes this as the “politics of the rift.” Brassier, 2023.↩︎

83. For such surveys,, see Joshua Clover. 2018. Riot. Strike. Riot.: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso; Phil Neel. 2018. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. Reaktion Books.; Alain Badiou. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Verso. ↩︎

84. The term double moulinet comes from the French edition of Capital. It is a translation of the German Zwickmühle, referring in this context both to a mill and being caught within or trapped, to be in a bind, to use an English idiom. It is doubled in the sense that the reproduction of labor-power is a precondition for the reproduction of capital, and also its result: two mill stones grinding together. On the double moulinet, see Théorie Communiste. 1997. “An Introduction to Théorie Communiste.” TC 14. Libcom.org: https://libcom.org/library/theorie-communiste-0; Théorie Communiste. 2009. “The Glass Floor.” Libcom.org: https://libcom.org/article/glass-floor-theo-cosmevhttps://endnotes.org.uk/articles/crisis-in-the-class-relation; Endnotes. 2010. “Crisis in the Class Relation.” Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value-form. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/crisis-in-the-class-relation; Riff Raff. 2006. “Introduction to Riff Raff.” Riff Raff: Communist theory beyond the ultra-left. http://www.riff-raff.se/wiki/en/riff-raff/introduction_to_riff-raff8#the_double_mill_and_the_reproduction_of_capital_and_labour.↩︎

85. This is the well-known formulation. See Théorie Communiste. 2011. “The Present Moment.” https://libcom.org/article/present-moment-theorie-communiste. It is necessary to note that, even from TC’s perspective, those very struggles find themselves confronted by the problem of material production. See, e.g., Théorie Communiste. 2009. “The Glass Floor.” Libcom.org: https://libcom.org/article/glass-floor-theo-cosmevhttps://endnotes.org.uk/articles/crisis-in-the-class-relation. This is the root of the pessimism associated with TC, or the “communization current” more broadly. Ray Brassier calls this “the rift between two impossibilities.” Ray Brassier. 2023. “Politics of the Rift: On Théorie Communiste.” e-flux Notes. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/550201/politics-of-the-rift-on-thorie-communiste↩︎

86. See Farrell, 2023.↩︎

87. See Farrell, 2023.↩︎

88. Endnotes’ account of these trends remains instructive. See Endnotes, “A History of Separation.” See also Davis, 2017 and Araghi, 1995. Nathan Eisenberg provides an excellent account of the uneven geography of agrarian revolution, immiseration, and hunger. See Nathan Eisenberg. 2022. “Hunger Regime.” Cosmonaut. https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/01/hunger-regime/↩︎

89. A New Institute for Social Research. 2018. “Class Composition and the Organization of Pessimism: Reflections on Class Theory in 2018.” https://isr.press/Pessimism/index.html↩︎

90. Ultra. 2015. “Dead Reckoning.” http://www.ultra-com.org/project/dead-reckoning/↩︎

91. We already see the influence of Agamben’s The Coming Community. See Tiqqun. 1999. “Theses on the Imaginary Party.” Tiqqun 1, Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party: Exercises in Critical Metaphysics, and Tiqqun, 2001. “Theses on the Terrible Community.” Tiqqun 2, Liaison Body within the Imaginary Party: Zone of Offensive Opacity.↩︎

92. Tiqqun. 1999. “On the Economy Considered as Black Magic.” Tiqqun 1, Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party: Exercises in Critical Metaphysics.↩︎

93. Jacques Camatte. 1973. The Wandering of Humanity. https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/wanhum/index.htm↩︎

94. Tiqqun. 1999. “The Theory of Bloom.” Tiqqun 1, Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party: Exercises in Critical Metaphysics.↩︎

95. Tiqqun. 2001. Tiqqun 2, Liaison Body within the Imaginary Party: Zone of Offensive Opacity.↩︎

96. Marcel. 2005. “Communism of Attack and Communism of Withdrawal.” Riff-Raff 7: Critique of Political Organisation.↩︎

97. Tiqqun. 2001. “Introduction to Civil War.” Tiqqun 2, Liaison Body within the Imaginary Party: Zone of Offensive Opacity.↩︎

98. This is more clear in The Invisible Committee’s To Our Friends and Now. For developments of this concept, see Kiersten Solt, V.I. 2021. “Seven Theses on Destitution (After Endnotes).” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/seven-theses-on-destitution, and Kieran Aarons and Idris Robinson, eds. 2023. Destituent Power. South Atlantic Quarterly 122(1).↩︎

99. Tiqqun. 2001. “This Is Not a Program.” Tiqqun 2, Liaison Body within the Imaginary Party: Zone of Offensive Opacity.↩︎

100. Tiqqun. 2001. “How it is to be Done.” Tiqqun 2, Liaison Body within the Imaginary Party: Zone of Offensive Opacity.↩︎

101. “Communism is possible at every moment. What we call “History” is to date nothing but a set of roundabout means invented by humans to avert it. The fact that this “History” has for a good century now come down to nothing but a varied accumulation of disasters shows how the communist question can no longer be suspended. It is this suspension that we need, in turn, to suspend.”Anonymous. 2004. Call. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-call↩︎

102. See Marcel, 2005 and the subsequent debate in Riff-Raff No. 8: Communist Theory Beyond the Ultra-Left. See also Leon de Mattis, “Reflections on the Call” and Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic. 2004. “Communization: a ‘Call’ and an ‘invite’,” Troploin 4. https://troploin.fr/node/23↩︎

103. The Invisible Committee. 2007. The Coming Insurrection. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection↩︎

104. “A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977.” Ibid.↩︎

105. The Invisible Committee. 2014. To Our Friends. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends; The Invisible Committee. 2018. Now. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-now↩︎

106. See “Tragic Theses” for an elaboration.↩︎

107. Marcel makes a similar case for communism as an externality that must be produced and secured. See Marcel, 2005.↩︎

108. Fo readers interested in histories and experiences of the ZAD, see Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross. 2018. The Zad and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence. Verso.; Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. 2021. We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones. Pluto Press.; S.G. and G.K. 2018. “ZAD: the State of Play.” Field Notes. https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/ZAD-The-State-of-Play; Alèssi Dell’Umbria. 2018. “Being in the Zone: Concerning Conflicts Within the Zad.” Ill Will Editions. https://illwill.com/being-in-the-zone; ​​CMDO. 2018. “The ZAD Will Survive.” https://illwill.com/the-zad-will-survive; Crimethinc. 2019. “Reflections on the ZAD: Another History: Looking Back a Year after the Evictions.” https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/23/reflections-on-the-zad-looking-back-a-year-after-the-evictions; Crimethinc. 2018.“One but Many Movements: Two Translations from the ZAD on Isolation, Division, and Pacification.”↩︎

109. Vivien A. Schmidt. 2012. “What Happened to the State-Influenced Market Economies (SMEs)? France, Italy, and Spain Confront the Crisis as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in Wyn Grant, and Graham K. Wilson, eds, The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis: The Rhetoric of Reform and Regulation. Oxford.↩︎

110. On these trends, see Silvia Sgherri and Hanan Morsy. 2010. “After the Crisis: Assessing the Damage in Italy.” International Monetary Fund.↩︎

111. Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross, 2018↩︎

112. This is described well in Aaron Benanav and John Clegg. 2018. “Crisis and immiseration: Critical theory today.” The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory: 1629-1648.↩︎

113. See Endnotes. 2013. “The Holding Pattern: The Ongoing Crisis and the Class Struggles of 2011-2013” Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Other Misfortunes. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-holding-pattern↩︎

114. Asef Bayat. 2013. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford University Press.↩︎

115. Asef Bayat. 2017. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford University Press.↩︎

116. Endnotes’ claim is more precise here. In an era of stagnation and a crisis of representation, what characterizes struggle is the absence of “social movements” as such that can represent disparate and fragmented forms of reproduction. For Bayet, these are “revolutions without revolutionaries” in the sense that they are mass upheavals that topple entrenched political orders. For Endnotes, and we would agree here, these are not revolutions precisely because they do not achieve the great anthropological undoing of overcoming capitalism. Endnotes. 2020. “Onward Barbarians.” https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/endnotes-onward-barbarians↩︎

117. Crimethinc. 2022. ““Addicted to Tear Gas”: The Gezi Resistance, June 2013: Looking Back on a High Point of Resistance in Turkey.” https://crimethinc.com/2022/06/20/addicted-to-tear-gas-the-gezi-resistance-june-2013-looking-back-on-a-high-point-of-resistance-in-turkey; n.a. 2013. “This is Only the Beginning: On the Gezi Park Resistance of June 2013.” https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/03/03/18751818.php↩︎

118. Mauvaise Troupe Collective and Kristin Ross, 2018, 89.↩︎

119. “Composition is really nothing more than the fruits of an unexpected meeting between separate worlds, and the promise contained in the becoming-Commune of that meeting. It is thus a space or process where even antagonisms create an attachment. “Composition” could be said to be the way that autonomous forces unite and associate with each other, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes contradicting each other, but always, in the end, dependent on each other. When it works, these different elements strive to recognize each other and work together to pursue common desires that surpass each of them, rather than trying to resolve their differences. Rather than trying, that is, to convince each other or convert the other to the superiority of one’s ways, whether this be sabotage, filing legal briefs, cataloguing endangered species, or frontal violence with the police. This is especially important in a movement whose enemies try ceaselessly to divide and conquer by setting one group up against another. The strength of the movement derives precisely from its diverse makeup, which in the case of the zad has allowed it to express itself through various kinds of actions, from highway blockages using tractors to legal maneuvering to violent demonstrations.” Kristin Ross. 2018. “The Long 1960s and ‘The Wind From The West’” Crisis & Critique 5(2).↩︎

120. We speak here of Crimethinc and its analysis of the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. See especially Crimethinc. 2023. “Don’t Stop: Continuing the Fight against Cop City.” https://crimethinc.com/2023/12/12/dont-stop-continuing-the-fight-against-cop-city-six-more-months-in-the-movement-to-defend-the-forest; Crimethinc. 2023. “Balance Sheet: Two Years Against Cop City.” https://crimethinc.com/zines/balance-sheet; Crimethinc. 2023. “The Forest in the City.” https://crimethinc.com/zines/the-forest-in-the-city; Crimethinc. 2022. “The City in the Forest.” https://crimethinc.com/zines/city-in-the-forest↩︎

121. Jenny Jarvie. 2023. “The latest epicenter for anti-police protests: ‘Cop City’ in Atlanta.” March 15, 2023. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-03-15/stop-cop-city-forest-camp-atlanta↩︎

122. For the best and most encompassing accounts, see Darien Acero. 2023. “The Angel and the Mole: On the Struggle for the Atlanta Forest.” Brooklyn Rail. https://brooklynrail.org/2023/06/field-notes/The-Angel-and-the-Mole-On-the-Struggle-for-the-Atlanta-Forest; Micah Herskind. 2023. “This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City.” Scalawag Magazine. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/05/cop-city-atlanta-history-timeline/;
     
     ​​Micah Herskind. 2023. “A Constellation of Tactics.” Inquest. https://inquest.org/a-constellation-of-tactics/; Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko. 2023. “Not One Tree: Stopping Cop City.” n+1 Issue 46: Agitation. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-46/essays/not-one-tree/; Miliaku Nwabueze. 2023. “How to Build the End of the World: In Defense of the Chaotic Protester.” Scalawag Magazine. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/05/black-radical-tradition-cop-city/↩︎

123. The two are not synonymous and the false equivalence often drawn here tends to reduce the core of black rebellion that gave rise to the “movement” that came to known as “Stop Cop City.” See Anonymous. “The War in Front of Us” https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/06/10/the-war-in-front-of-us/↩︎

124. Scenes from the Atlanta Forest provides good examples of the sort of action report backs and reflections necessary for such a material critique. It clearly also does not reflect the wider composition of participants, limited as it is by anarchist affinity.↩︎

125. This list includes 350, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. A fuller picture is painted by looking any number of “letters of support” associated with these campaigns. See, e.g.: https://www.copcityvote.com/sign-on-letter↩︎

126. “The movement’s open approach to political methods stresses not just a diversity of tactics, but their potential interlinking. This allows lawsuits to coexist with regular clashes with police at the edge of the forest, and for participants from a dizzying range of American subcultures (birdwatchers, ravers, academics, activists, history buffs, punks, tenderqueers, carpenters, etc.) to enter the movement and define their own participation within it based on their own resources and desires.” Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

127. Jasper Bernes. 2023. “Deeds and Propaganda.” Field Notes. https://brooklynrail.org/2023/06/field-notes/Deeds-and-Propaganda↩︎

128. Amadeo Bordiga. 1952. “Activism.” https://libcom.org/article/activism-amadeo-bordiga; Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs Révolutionnaires. 1972. “Militancy: highest stage of alienation”https://libcom.org/article/militancy-highest-stage-alienation-organisation-des-jeunes-travailleurs-revolutionnaires; S.T. 2013. “The Issues are not the Issue: A Letter to Earth First! from a Too-Distant Friend.” https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/various-authors-black-seed-issue-4#toc4; Aufheben. 2001. “Anti-capitalism as an ideology… and as a movement?” https://libcom.org/article/anti-capitalism-ideology-and-movement; Undercurrent. n.d. “Practice and ideology in the direct action movement.” https://libcom.org/article/practice-and-ideology-direct-action-movement; Gilles Dauvé. 2003. “On the globalisation movement.” https://libcom.org/article/globalisation-movement-gilles-dauve; Alasdair. 2012. “Do something! A critique of activism.” https://libcom.org/article/do-something-critique-activism; Bernard Lyon. 2005. “We are not ‘anti’.” https://libcom.org/article/we-are-not-anti-bernard-lyon; Do or Die. “Give Up Activism.” Do or Die 9. https://libcom.org/article/give-activism↩︎

129. See, e.g., Anton Pannekoek. 1933. “The Personal Act.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1933/person.htm, Bordiga, 1952, “Activism”.↩︎

130. This was for Bordiga the “illness of the workers’ movement.” Bordiga, “Activism.”↩︎

131. See Shanin, 1983.↩︎

132. A lucid account is given by James Boggs, The American Revolution. See also DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America. James Boggs. 2020. Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook. Monthly Review Press. A more general history of dynamics of economic development in the US is offered in Jonathan Levy. 2021. Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States. Random House.↩︎

133. The classic accounts are found in Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, and Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 2017. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Bloomsbury Publishing. More recently, Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti provide an excellent analysis and critique in relation to the George Floyd Rebellion. Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti 2022. States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System. Reaktion Books.↩︎

134. This geographic reconfiguration of production complexes is critical to understanding the response to capitalist crisis as spatial, as well as temporal (e.g., logistics, JIT production). See Michael Storper and Richard Walker. 1991. The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth. Wiley-Blackwell. Phil Neel applies this in his analysis of China’s simultaneous industrialization/de-industrialization and the tendencies of “development” in relation to the “long crisis.” Phillip Neel. 2021. Global China, Global Crisis: Falling Profitability, Rising Capital Exports and the Formation of New Territorial Industrial Complexes. University of Washington.↩︎

135. Claire Dunning,. 2022. Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State. University of Chicago Press.↩︎

136. This is not to say that nonprofit activity experiences growth in periods of acute downturn or crisis. Rather, this is a general tendency over the longer arc of capitalist development that has shifted from manufacturing growth and investment to services and the FIRE sector. This explains the emergence of the “nonprofit sector” proper in response to the secular crisis of capitalist profitability. Cyclically, nonprofits respond much like businesses. Dependent on revenues from both taxes (state-funding) and profit, wages, and rent (donors), nonprofits are pro-cyclical—their activities and services expand during boom periods and contract during acute economic downturns. Christine L. Exley, Nils H. Lehr, and Stephen J. Terry. 2023. “Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad Times.” Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics 1(1): 42-79.↩︎

137. See, most famously, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. 2020. The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Duke University Press.↩︎

138. E.g., “direct action,” “nonviolent civil disobedience,” “anti-capitalism,” “horizontalism,” “allyship,” “mass action”↩︎

139. National Council of Nonprofits. n.d. “Economic Impact of Nonprofits.” https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/about-americas-nonprofits/economic-impact-nonprofits↩︎

140. A survey of Ill Will Editions from 2020 onward should provide a glimpse into such posturing. Shanahan and Kurt offer a sobering critique.↩︎

141. As far as we know, this terminology originates with the work of heterodox political economist D.T. Cochrane. See D. T. Cochrane and Jeff Monaghan. 2012. “Fight to Win! Tools for Confronting Capital.” In Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella III. and John Asimakopoulos, eds. The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. AK Press: 95-116.; D. T. Cochrane. 2011. “Castoriadis, Veblen, and the ‘Power Theory of Capital.’” In I. S. Straume and J.F. Humphreys, eds. Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism. Aarhus University Press: 89-123.↩︎

142. Anonymous. 2016. “#NoDAPL Indigenous Land Defense & Strategic Solidarity: Pressuring Power And Capital.” https://itsgoingdown.org/nodapl-indigenous-land-defense-strategic-solidarity-pressuring-power-capital/↩︎

143. A basic example is offered by Ruckus Society in their “Action Strategy” guide: https://ruckus-org.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/production/app/uploads/2017/11/RuckusActionStrategyGuide.pdf↩︎

144. See Cochrane and Monaghan, 2012, and the “Power Theory of Capital” school of thought, of which Cochrane is a disciple: Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. 2009. Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder. Routledge.↩︎

145. “For those involved in PEDCs, this dependence of capital upon complex social processes means disruption of production is not strictly necessary to disrupt accumulation.” Cochrane and Monaghan, 2012, 101.↩︎

146. n.a. n.d. “ACTWU vs. J.P Stevens: 1976-1980: Birth of the Corporate Campaign.” Corporate Campaign, Inc. http://www.corporatecampaign.org/history_actwu_jp_stevens_1978.php; “U.S. textile workers win campaign in South (J.P. Stevens Boycott) 1963-1983.” n.a. n.d. Global Nonviolent Action Database. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/us-textile-workers-win-campaign-south-jp-stevens-boycott-1963-1983; James A. Hodges. 1994 “JP Stevens and the Union: Struggle for the South..” Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History. Eds. Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed. University of Alabama Press.; Timothy J. Minchin. 2005. Don’t Sleep with Stevens: The J.P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South, 1963-1980. University Press of Florida.↩︎

147. For this history, see Keith Makoto Woodhouse. 2018. The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism. Columbia University Press.↩︎

148. Gavin Brown. 2011. “A brief history of the Non-Stop Picket.” Non-Stop Against Apartheid. https://nonstopagainstapartheid.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/a-brief-history-of-the-non-stop-picket/↩︎

149. Cochrane and Monaghan, 2012; Jeff Ballinger. n.d. “Chronology of the Nike Sweatshop Labor Campaign.” Center for Communication and Civid Engagement. https://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/Nike.htm; Bette Jean Bullert. 2000. “Strategic Public Relations, Sweatshops, and the Making of a Global Movement.” Shorenstein Center Working Paper Series.↩︎

150. Greg King. 2023. The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. Public Affairs. Keith Makoto Woodhouse. 2018. The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism. Columbia University Press.; Richard Widick. 2009. Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars. University of Minnesota Press.; Judi Bari. 1994. Timber Wars. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.; Rik Scarce. 2016. Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement. Routledge.↩︎

151. Loomis, Empire of Timber↩︎

152. Ibid.; See also Steven Beda. 2022. Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country. University of Illinois Press.↩︎

153. See Bari, Timber Wars.↩︎

154. See the Take Down SNC-Lavalin! campaign against ammunition provider SNC-Lavalin. Cochrane and Monaghan, 2012↩︎

155. The only comprehensive history is offered in Tom Harris. 2024. You Neighbor Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement. Pluto Press. The best accounts of SHAC in particular and animal liberation in general are found in the archives of the Talon Conspiracy. https://thetalonconspiracy.com/tag/hls-campaign/↩︎

156. Harris, You Neighbor Kills Puppies and Talon Conspiracy: https://thetalonconspiracy.com/?s=campaign; See also SHAC Made History: https://shacmadehistory.noblogs.org/la-campagna-shac-the-shac-campaign/↩︎

157. Today, it directly informs the strategies of Palestine Action Network.↩︎

158. For an overview, see Talon Conspiracy and ​​Crimethinc. 2008. “The SHAC Model: A Critical Assessment.” https://crimethinc.com/2008/09/01/the-shac-model-a-critical-assessment↩︎

159. See Crimethinc, “The SHAC Model”↩︎

160. Crimethinc acknowledges this, but concludes from it little more than a shrug: “the SHAC model relies on the rest of the capitalist market to offer better options. In this regard, while it is not reformist, neither does it provide a strategy for taking on capitalism itself.” Ibid.↩︎

161. Ill Will Editions. ““Dispatches from Standing Rock: Against the Dakota Access Pipeline and its World.” https://illwill.com/print/dispatches-from-standing-rock; Shiri Pasternak, Katie Mazer, and D. T. Cochrane. 2019. “The Financing Problem Of Colonialism: How Indigenous Jurisdiction Is Valued In Pipeline Politics.” In Nick Estes. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement: 222-234.↩︎

162. ​​Root Force. 2006. “Root Force: Demolishing Colonialism at its Foundations.” Earth First! Journal 26(2); Root Force. 2008. “The System is Still a House of Cards: A Revised Strategy.” ​​Earth First! Journal 28(2). ↩︎

163. See Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence.↩︎

164. “This highlights one of the consequences of PEDCs: they may benefit others… as long as capitalism remains, there will necessarily be those who benefit from one corporation’s differential decline. As with the particular tactics of political economic disruption, PEDCs themselves are not inherently anti-capitalist. Rather, their purpose is to insert us into the accumulatory process, to become risk factors that must be accounted for.” Cochrane and Monaghan, 2012, 105.↩︎

165. “​​the SHAC model is efficient: SHAC USA has never had more than a few hundred active participants at any given time.” Crimethinc, “The SHAC Model”↩︎

166. S.T., “The Issues Are Not the Issue”↩︎

167. Klee Benally outlines some of this well in his critique of settler allyship. “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, An Indigenous Perspective.” Indigenous Action Media. https://www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex/↩︎

168. Crimethinc. 2022. “The City in the Forest.” https://crimethinc.com/zines/city-in-the-forest ↩︎

169. Note the similarity between the “strategy of composition” and Crimethinc’s analysis of SHAC: “Rather than pitting exponents of different tactics against each other, SHAC integrated all possible tactics into one campaign, in which each approach complemented the others. This meant that participants could choose from a practically limitless array of options, which opened the campaign to a wide range of people and averted needless conflicts.” Crimethinc, “The SHAC Model”↩︎

170. It should be noted that such victories are not necessarily “reformist,” unless one adopts a definition of reformism that is so broad as to be absurd and hollow. “This in turn calls forth a maximalist critique that defames as reformism everything that does not immediately aim for revolution. But there is a massive difference between limited struggles for this or that reform to improve one’s own life, and even struggles to avert its deterioration, and reformism as such. Reformism is a political tendency that either has the direct intention of maintaining capitalism, by ameliorating its worst excesses or by steering inevitable demands into institutional channels, or it actually adheres to the illusion that one can transform this society into socialism by means of a long chain of gradual improvements. But in both cases, the state is charged with the task. Reformism is representation; it must keep all activity of the ranks within the prescribed channels. Against this, it is precisely in those struggles that the class’s own interests are championed in the first place. Only within those struggles does the possibility emerge of stepping out of existence as a bourgeois legal subject, as a seller of labor-power; in these struggles, those fighting must discuss their common aims and transcend their otherwise necessary egoism. Solidarity ceases to be a social democratic Sunday school sermon. Every struggle in the here and now for the improvement of one’s own life that resists representation, and in which self-activity occurs, is the experimental ground for the future society, whose forms of interaction do not suddenly emerge with the revolution.” Friends of the Classless Society. 2010. “28 Theses on Class Society.” Kosmoprolet. https://kosmoprolet.org/en/28-theses-class-society ↩︎

171. We must reiterate the dissection between territorial occupation as such and land defense as a defense of modes of reproduction, ways of life, and concrete relations to place, e.g., indigenous territorial defense.↩︎