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The Fate of Composition

Part One | Part Two

Part Three: The Cacophony of Communism

Whither Composition?

Given the rather extensive survey of struggles, traditions, and concepts that we have presented thus far, allow us a moment to be parsimonious. Composition is a both material process and a practical activity—a noun and a verb. It follows that analyses of composition and the composition problem have historically been both descriptive and prescriptive. This is a qualitative distinction, but it exists as a spectrum, and we do not attempt to suggest that any theory or application of composition is firmly in one camp at the exclusion of the other. Despite our doubts and criticisms, we do not wish to caricature any earnest attempt at clarifying or resolving the problem of composition. The balance sheet we have constructed thus far is meant to serve more humble functions. It is an attempt to clarify terms and definitions, identifying distinct lineages and political traditions that can and often are practically at odds with one another. This forces us to pick sides, in the last instance, if we are to continue to use “composition” in service of political theory and strategy, as a term with meaning or explanatory power. So, we find it necessary to re-assert the basic original meaning of the term as it was developed by theorists of operaismo. Understood comprehensively, it names the process of class formation and deformation as a material process and activity. Whatever limits confronted operaismo, autonomia, or post-autonomia in their development of this concept were historical. The basic definition remains invariant; it merely describes the objective and subjective aspects of capitalist development itself.

At present, it falls on communists to better account for what falls in and out of the “material processes and activities” that composition is meant to name, describe, and problematize. On the one hand, this is where we think the workerist tradition reached its impasse. As industrial restructuring unfolded and agrarian labor reserves became increasingly tapped in the second half of the 20th century, the historical basis of the “mass worker” disintegrated, and with it, the social validity of a “class composition” that privileged the factory. Autonomists and feminists identified this problem early on, but the turn towards the sphere of reproduction and the growing service sectors was partial. Today, neo-workerists carry this torch, but their understanding of the “social factory” is pregnant with a workers’ movement and concept of worker identity that has long since been eclipsed. On the other hand, as the tilt of history has opened an “era of riots,” “circulation struggles,” and the “return of the blockade,” we find a growing concern with struggles that manifest over territory, space, and place. Removed as they often appear to be from direct processes of production,¹ such struggles might appear to be removed from the dictates of class composition that have hitherto constrained the activities of the working class. This is all the more the case when working class identity is posed against the interests of territorial struggles. Thus, as these forms of struggle have attained practical significance over the last several decades, they have attracted a concept of composition, in its application as a strategy, that is entirely unfamiliar to the churning movements of history and risks separation from material reality altogether. In place of the dynamic interplay of material processes and activities, “composition” has instead come to mean something purely prescriptive and normative. Its application has become another substitution for autonomy, affinity, or diversity of tactics. Given its origins in a particular kind of post-autonomia (see Part One), this should not be surprising, nor should it be controversial.

These distortions and impasses do not mean that composition should be abandoned by communists. Lest we be misunderstood, let us restate our position clearly: the composition problem remains of the utmost significance. It is not simply a historical problem—the accumulated activities of dead generations, the pile of debris that devours the horizon. The composition problem is fundamentally practical. The activity of composition is fashioned from its constraints, and this is the fate of composition as we have presented it. This is why we believe that the constraints of our present moment need to be clarified. We see this project as one of disenchantment. We are not alone in this endeavor. This was also Farrell’s pursuit, we believe, as he attempted his synthesis of the descriptive and prescriptive. For the reasons we have outlined, we think he falls short, and when the contradictions of his position emerge he is forced to pick the side of prescriptive and normative, echoing earlier theorists of “compositional struggle,” to make sense of the movements that he surveys.

Given our repudiation of these representations of “compositional struggles,” it may seem that the processes and problems of composition are not applicable to territorial struggles. We hope to show that this could not be further from the case. In the final part of this essay series, we aim precisely to return the materialist thrust of composition, both as process and problem, constraint and activity, to the analysis of ecology, territory, and land. We think it is not only possible, but necessary if we are to take the present ecological crisis seriously. If the recent Coordinated Economic Blockade to Free Palestine has revealed anything, it is that the sphere of circulation remains for many the most immediately accessible terrain on which to effectively block the “flow of capital.” The spatial character of such actions conforms to an era of logistical struggles. At a more general level, the spatial extension and geographic spread of these tactics confirms our understanding of what we may call alternatively the “territorial problem,” or perhaps better, the “ecological problem.”

Capitalism is fundamentally a metabolic separation, a breach between social reproduction and its ecological conditions that gives a historical truth to the human species, as the culmination of its practical activities, and nonhuman “nature,” reduced to the common condition as non-labor, as raw materials, objects of production, or energy inputs. It is not this metabolic relation as such, but the breakdown in this relationship that presents itself in our conjuncture and appears uniquely as anthropogenic ecological crises. The ecological problem names the process by which the counteracting tendencies against falling profitability, specifically the cheapening of elements of constant capital and foreign trade, are expressed as the increasing significance of land acquisitions and extractive processes to lower the cost and increase the rate of raw material and energy flows. In the feeble turnover of the total system, the centrifugal character of capitalist reproduction prevails over the centripetal, and these counter-tendencies take on an increased significance.² The significance of human labor-power, given the technical constraints of production, is tendentially reduced vis-à-vis the need for these nonhuman inputs, and those inputs compound in material terms more quickly than their costs. Capitalist reproduction appears increasingly as an ecological crisis and struggle over land and its inhabitants. But precisely because of its anthropological character, it furnishes no given political subject. This is the primary ambiguity of ecology and land defense, and precisely why the analysis of social composition is essential to understand the content and functions of these superficially similar struggles. It is not the characteristic features of territoriality or the form of occupation or blockade that define the social content and function of conflicts as diverse as the Sagebrush Rebellion, the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff or the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Redwood Summer, the Warner Creek blockade, the Unist’ot’en Camp, or the present struggle to Stop Cop City. Mother Nature hails many strange bedfellows.³ Taken as a common element, the problem of the land only tends to mystify. Disenchantment must be practiced. The question of ecological struggle presents itself immediately as a problem of composition.

The ecological problem is the primary focus in the final part of this series. We follow from where we left off in Part Two, from the partial accounts of political composition that take reproduction for granted or leave it under-theorized. We believe that a frequent error of some of our fellow travelers has been to mistake the sphere of circulation with the sphere of reproduction. Circulation is not identical to reproduction, but is only one of the moments that mediates it. Indeed, we think that the noisiness of circulation often informs accounts of the composition problem, partially because the case studies tend to be riots. Instead, we understand reproduction as the aggregate processes and activities through which class is primarily composed— a common problem, but one that gives rise to disaggregated and heterogenous strategies. Here, we extend Bue Rübner Hansen’s criticisms of Endnotes’s conception of the composition problem, but note what we see as deficiencies in Hansen’s own account. We treat social composition and reproduction as fundamentally problems of social metabolism and metabolic separation, reiterating what we have called the ecological problem. We argue, however, that this problem furnishes some potentially critical openings for communist measures, if we can look beyond the ecological or territorial appearance of certain struggles and make sense of their distinct characteristics as struggles over material reproduction. For communists, confronting metabolic separation has historically meant confronting the “Agrarian Question.” We explore this question and the various ways it has been posed and consider its applicability to contemporary struggles over land, contrasting it with both more general concerns over ecology or territory and the more specific case of indigenous defense. The relevance of the agrarian question today involves a more ubiquitous concern with metabolic repair or reconstruction, projects that must be carried out quite differentially as a result of the heterogeneity of reproduction and the land itself. We conclude by reflecting on what that heterogeneity must mean for the character of communist reconstruction of the planetary metabolism as an uneven, discordant process.

The Constraints of Reproduction

If historically it was late and rapid industrial development that socially validated the analytic of class composition, the link between development and composition today suggests that a different problem—decomposition—destabilizes the already precarious footing of working class identity. The coherence of this intractable class of dispossessed in the workers’ movement as such rested on the configuration of unique historical conditions, notably the late and accelerated transition to capitalism secured by state sponsorship, campaigns of de-peasantization, and the corrosion of old regime social structures. If the workers’ movement was constructed through the unrest of this transition, its strategy primarily evolved as a war of attrition against landed elites and the tottering class structures of the countryside, which not only fettered the development of the “productive forces,” but precluded the establishment of liberal democracy. It was this forging of new rights and freedoms, materially supported by rapid gains in productivity and the purchasing power of the wage, that gave to the concept of worker unity any practical relief.⁴ With this material support wrested away, along with the prospects for any foreseeable reversal of those trends, the workers’ movement has recoiled back to the disarray of its constituent parts. To paraphrase Endnotes, the forces of atomization overwhelm the forces unification.⁵ In the presence of materially atomized reproduction, a coherent class subjectivity does not appear readymade, nor is it given by the modes of reproduction themselves. In this, it is distinct from the subjectivity that precipitates in the organization of material production, which we surveyed in our discussion of neo-workerism in Part Two. Subjectivity does indeed crystallize in the spheres of circulation and reproduction, but it does so as the many manifold forms of belonging through which reproduction is secured.

There is perhaps another line of inquiry concealed by such a grim perspective. Why should there be forces of atomization to begin with? It has been the work of Endnotes and those that journey with them to demonstrate that atomization is brought by capitalist development itself. This is true, but is not sufficient for telling the whole story. The one-sidedness of this view is what continues to fuel that hope for a new universalization—the unification of the proletariat in its practical class suicide. This is for others the “true human community.” We are less certain that communism should look something like the practical reproduction of the species as the human species itself, the abstract object of social production. We will explore our reasons below, and how this weighs on the problem of composition. First, however, is the problem of speaking of “atomization” so abstractly. Unlike some neo-workerists, we do not reject that atomization is in fact a problem. On the contrary, it reigns as the problem of the day. But this is not because it is the specific product of a destabilizing capitalism, the unique and determinate consequence of crisis and stagnation. The real problem is that capitalism never completely overcame atomization—or more precisely, the discontinuity of social reproduction. Instead, it has maintained, integrated, and reproduced it on a new basis even during its long expansion and periods of relative prosperity. Worker identity has always had need for abjected forms of non-belonging, made concrete through the inherited histories of race, gender, and colony. Chuang has argued similarly that:

“Historically, proletarianization was always partially incomplete. The term itself designates a transition, by definition spanning both worlds of the ‘new working class’ and those being siphoned into it. The incomplete character of the process has always taken on both racial and gendered characteristics, with the work of immigrants, black people, the colonized, the indigenous and women all deemed to be of less value than the ‘normal’ work of those who were formally acknowledged as wage laborers, and also less likely to be remunerated with a wage at all. Even where more explicit racial, national or gender divides may not exist, the same ‘incomplete’ characteristics are produced by the uneven character of industrialization—as can be observed with the ‘Okies’ in 1930s California or the southern ‘Terroni’ working in the factories of northern Italy in the 1950s.”⁶

Non-belonging and non-existence—forms of life beyond the pale of humanity—have always characterized capitalist history. With the transition to capitalism largely completed only over the last half century, those forms of surplus now appear as malignant growths on struggling industrial centers and diminishing populations of workers employed in productive sectors.

“Such a tension has always marked the historical process of proletarianization, which has seen proletarians forced to combat one another along lines of ethnicity, geography, gender, etc., in order to secure themselves within the realm of the ‘included’ via access to the wage—as well as formal recognition of this inclusion through citizenship, access to education, mortgages and other forms of credit. Similarly, the proletariat has seen relative ‘lumpenisations’ before, through colonization as well as the simple immiseration of migrant workers from the countryside in the early stages of Europe’s industrialization. What has changed, then, is not so much the relations themselves (the relation between capital and labor, and between inclusion and exclusion), but the global context in which these integral antagonisms are playing out.”

The flip side of shrinking rural reserves has been the acute crisis of industrial capital itself, no longer able to tap cheap pools of “proletarianizing” demographics, open new lines of manufacturing, and resolve structural overcapacity and falling profitability.⁷ This crisis of valorization, in which profits are too low to valorize existing fixed capital investments, has untethered the growth of human belonging from the accumulation of capital. Employment growth occurs primarily in services and low productivity sectors. Industrial production everywhere sheds labor, puts the screw to existing workers, and operates with excess capacity. The sphere of non-belonging is absorbing more and more of the proletarianized, who now confront their own reproduction as many forms of dehumanization.

Capitalism did not invent atomization. What appears today as general atomization are diverse and particular forms of survival that were once eclipsed by the momentum of the workers’ movement and the coupling of survival, or even prosperity, to the reproduction of capital. Common working class reproduction has always been something of a fleeting horizon. Now it is simply chasing after a ghost. This arcane, patchy, and erratic sphere of reproduction mediates all of social life outside the immediate process of production. Its long reach does not even leave production untouched. Here, the concept of composition is paramount. It names the attenuation, fragmentation, and atomization of social reproduction. In a very real sense it regulates the possibilities of revolutionary crisis, which requires the stepping away from the mosaic of reproduction without any guarantees of abolishing its separation from material production. It presents the first constraint, even prior the glass floor of production.

The conditions of reproduction are the marrow of capitalism. The social relation of capital is an emergent property of the historical separation of life and its conditions. It acts on the subject—the proletarianized—not directly, but through its surroundings, its environment. It is a metabolic separation that allows capital to act through the conditions of reproduction. The separation can take many forms, from the general to the specific: the dispossession from the land and means of subsistence, the enclosures of common lands, property rights and law, policing, poor houses, etc. What is common is the need of subsistence, biological survival and reproduction. That commonality is what gives to capital its power, given the presence of a metabolic gap. This is what makes political economic compulsions “mute,” having the appearance of freedom and choice, which in actual fact is the choice between work or non-reproduction—in other words, death.⁸ So capital begins at the outset from the common problem of reproduction. Common, but not even, not homogenous. Reproduction is one aspect of the planetary metabolic continuum, which contains an endless diversity of life history strategies and ecological relationships. It becomes commonly human only as a result of a historical separation and generalization of the wage relation.⁹ The common reproduction of the species mediated through the wage (directly or indirectly) is nothing other than the metabolic separation cleaving human reproduction from the metabolic continuum of life histories, and subsuming it to the reproduction of capital. The human being is indeed nothing other than “a ritual of capital.”¹⁰

It is this ritual of reproduction than Marx takes as his starting point in Capital. There is a dual character to reproduction, and, like so many things in Marx, this dual character must be grasped in order to make sense of the specifically capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, there is the transhistorical character of reproduction as social intercourse.¹¹ Marx’s treatment in this regard is actually quite similar to his analysis of social metabolism (stoffwechsel)—a process of renewal and transformation—that all forms of society must repeat. There is, on the other hand, the specifically capitalist form, which he was at pains to analyze over the course of his studies, notebooks, and published works. He analyzed this in the immediate process of production and accumulation (Part Seven of Volume I), the total social circuit and the process of circulation (Volume II), and the concrete social forms that crystallize out of this movement (Volume III). What he showed was how capital secures reproduction through the mediation of price signals and the social forces that enforce them. Capitalist reproduction is a silent compulsion, rather than a conscious act of the species. It nevertheless reproduces the species as such on the basis of common dispossession, which gives to human beings the appearance of a unique capacity for labor, and the integration of that capacity into the valorization process. There is other another duality to reproduction that Marx observes. Its social form, whether transhistorical and particular, is always a mediation of a biological imperative. Yet, the capital relation places great stress on the coupling of the social and biological, and the subsumption of biological reproduction attains a new significance.

“Reproduction” is first used by Marx in Capital to characterize not social reproduction—the turnover over the system as a whole—but the socially necessary labor time (SNLT) required to reproduce the value of the commodity. Reproduction inheres in the concept of SNLT, suggesting that social determination in capitalism unfolds temporally. This is not separated from the biological, but in fact is carried out through biological imperatives: “Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.”¹² The theory of surplus value owes its existence to the biological fact that the SNLT required to reproduce the worker is less than that congealed in the form of the commodity product. Reproduction thus captures the essential moment between the biological, the corporeal, and the terrestrial, and the social form that mediates it. Reproduction is the nexus through which capital takes hold of life and its conditions and enchants them with its drives and perversions.

It is through the commodity labor-power that capital achieves the unity of the biological and its topsy-turvy social hell. While labor-power appears a natural capacity, this is in fact its own mysticism. Unveiling this for the reification that it is was the charge of the Marxist and autonomist feminists who did so much to course correct the concept of class composition inherited from operaismo. Labor-power is the commodity product of a historical separation of producers from their conditions of existence and the separation of spheres—production and reproduction, work and home, public and private.¹³ The sphere of reproduction names a diverse range of activities that do not count as labor to capital. They do not produce value, but they do produce labor-power ready for sale at a price. This gap between the price of labor-power and the non-value of the work that went into its reproduction is essential for production of surplus-value. Labor-power appears as the unique quality of the species as an axiom of capital’s logic. This metabolic inversion appears a natural condition, and so naturalizes the social forms that attend to it, most notably gender and sex, but also sexuality, race, citizenship, the family, and kinship.¹⁴ The common problem of reproduction is thus faced with many uncommon solutions, many of which are not even mediated by the great equalizer, human labor-power as such. Reproduction, as mediated by these forms of non-labor, appears as the appropriation of various “natural” resources. From the gendered reproductive circuit to racial subordination to ecological destruction, capital presents these modalities of reproduction as essential and natural. What it seeks, in the final instance, is to be the immediate condition of life itself. Composition faces unique problems on these grounds.

As a material condition of existence, strategies for reproduction are in part historically inherited and in part re-made and repurposed in determinate historical conditions. Given the virtually endless diversity of survival strategies, forms of kinship, ecological relations, and modes of life that capital dissolved in its enclosure of the planet, it would be patently absurd to maintain that these processes of reproduction have been subsumed by the wage and have exited the other side in a homogenous working class formation.¹⁵ Yet this is exactly what neo-workerists maintain in their rejection of “atomization” or the “composition problem” thesis. Even when Notes from Below attempts to overcome this absurdity by admitting that “workers are made into a class before they are employed by a capitalist,” they are still made as the working class subject.¹⁶ They have merely extended the ostensibly homogenizing effects of the labor process outward to the whole of capitalist society. Yet capital assimilates difference into the immediate process of production as well, as lines of differentiation and separation can be subordinated to the reproduction requirements of labor-power. This is in part the result of unevenness in the sphere of circulation. Labor market dynamics reinforce and strengthen pre-existing historical divisions and reproduce new forms of partition, as navigation of the market requires reliance on interpersonal networks that possess gendered, familial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and racial character. The production process inherits these discrete and often segregated compositions and reflects them anew in the social and technical division of labor, a posteriori. These now technical compositions of labor serve as vectors of knowledge, trust, communication that socialize labor, lower its costs of reproduction, and increase productivity and intensity. It is on the basis of this intensive accumulation that the social discontinuity of the labor process is reproduced. The formal equality of the wage is made operational by the real inequality of these “sorting mechanisms.”¹⁷ The uneven and partitioned composition of reproduction is both a premise and result of the reproduction of capital. The construction of worker identity on this basis is identical to the practical unification of the species. Even still, the formal mediation of this humanizing process can never universalize its content. There is always an external shell of the human species, whose social belonging to humanity is conditional on the requirements and dictates of production.¹⁸

This the geography of capital, a dissected plateau of social life in which the apparent relief is that of the worker. What is common here is not the condition of working existence, which takes so many concrete forms, some waged, some unwaged, some legal, others illicit. The only common condition of its existence on this terrain is the condition of separation, of metabolic domination—a sort of “existential wagelessness.”¹⁹ It has become standard to describe this is a unity-in-separation,²⁰ or a unity of dispossession. This has its purposes, but it tells us quite little about how people actually survive and the aggregate effects of those survival strategies on the social composition. Wage-labor constitutes a particular kind of composition that is also real abstraction, which in turn is given even more concrete character as it is sorted through the composition of capital in the production process. The same is not true of reproduction. This is the primary basis of Bue Rübner Hansen’s critique of Endnotes’ conception of mediation and the composition problem: it cannot provide a materialist account of class formation without attending to the common problem of reproduction.²¹

“… proletarians have to reproduce themselves through exchange. However, this gives us nothing but the abstract social form through which labor is reproduced; indeed the ways in which labor takes this form are innumerable. Behind the common problem of the proletarians (dispossession of means of re/production) and their common ‘solution’ (money) lies a manifold of heterogeneous modes of life through which the proletarian condition can and must be lived.”²²

These modes of life may indeed be yoked to money, directly and indirectly through the wage, but their concrete character is not necessarily doubled in its abstract social character, as in the production process. As survival and subsistence activities, modes of reproduction do not therefore express their unification as a practical truth. For the process of class formation/deformation, their effects are more immediate and historically circumscribed. Salar Mohandesi calls this the “constellation of intersecting mediations” involved in class formation.²³ But this is still not quite right. “Mediation” may be strictly accurate, in that these reproductive activities, survival strategies, and modes of life mediate the reproduction the class in the abstract. But class formation—that is, subjectivity—is not identical to this abstract homogeneity. Subjectivity is a process that unfolds on a more immediate plane. It is practical and tangible, formed through the burdens of daily life. Indeed, it is quite possible for abstract class relations to be expressed in the concrete formations of social intercourse that more readily take the form of family, neighborhood, community organization, race, religion, ethnicity, age, etc. Phil Neel has argued that the crisis of class belonging unfolds over time and so takes on a generational character that is far more discernible to the disaffected than the abstract categories of class politics.²⁴ This is also true over the longue durée, in which class belonging becomes legible in the lived histories of race, colony, or gender. Even if these coordinates shift over time, they are the stuff from which modes of life are made.

Subjectivity is wrought from the concrete. In the process of production, as we have seen, the concrete labor process takes difference as its basis and reproduces it fresh through its integration into the division of labor. The abstract character of labor—in the valorization process—of course dominates here and continuously revolutionizes the concrete character of labor as well, deskilling and displacing labor, increasing intensity and productivity, extending the duration of work. Production is able to achieve a concrete unity to a degree. This is the basis for a relatively stable workers’ movement, when production is booming, expanding, and extending its lines. The same is not true of reproduction. Absent the direct discipline of socially necessary labor-time, the abstract character of capitalist domination remains quite abstract. The concrete “mediations” of social reproduction are simply that—the concrete experiences of those caught up in them. This is even more the case in regions where industry and manufacturing retreat, only to be replaced the direct violence of the state, which maintains the borders of social life quite discretely. It is not at all a given that these bubbles of reproduction, no matter how restive, will eventually percolate to the surface in a collective burst. This strategic coalescence remains a chimera, for now. Reproduction is as much a constraint as a possibility.

In considering these problems, we take as instructive Marx’s analysis of the French peasantry and countryside in The Eighteenth Brumaire:

“The small peasant proprietors form an immense mass, the members of which live in the same situation but do not enter into manifold relationships with each other. Their mode of operation isolates them instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse… Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it directly produces the greater part of its own consumption and therefore obtains its means of life more through exchange with nature than through intercourse with society. The smallholding, the peasant and the family; next door, another smallholding, another peasant and another family… potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links or a political organization, they do not form a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name… They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”²⁵

Marx was wary of this representation. In the context of a declining peasantry, which had experienced a relative advance, prosperity, and security under the First Empire, after decades of heavy tax burden and agricultural appropriation at the hands of the Absolutist state,²⁶ Marx argued that the representation of the peasantry found its adequate form in Louis Bonaparte. There is a homology here with the cautioning Neel gives to “oaths of blood,” albeit under quite different historical circumstances and class configuration. Unable to find practical unification as a class, other mediations are able to intervene from above. What can we today say of the “identity” of proletarian interests? Does it too fail to produce a feeling of community or political organization? The total lack of real and sustained cohesion and confusion of organizational strategies would suggest as much. As some more conventional communists remind us, this is indeed the problem of our time.²⁷ Where they may look to organization as such, we think our present concern is of the first order: to what extent is the proletariat a class that can even be composed through its self-organization? Lenin had one answer to this. The council communists another. Each was the product of its moment and place. Today, when the hopes for return to economic growth seem dim at best, the political composition of the class has been eclipsed by its irregular but persistent erosion in the noisy sphere of reproduction.

Marx’s concern with the French peasantry was a concern over their political subjectivity. Their common toil on the land was for him insufficient to produce the structure of feeling necessary for their composition to be practically expressed in organization. This is also the context necessary to understand Marx’s infamous critique of the lumpenproletariat. Unable to secure reproduction through common means, the lumpenproletariat turned to “dubious means of subsistence” which taken in aggregate formed “the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither.”²⁸ Their uneven modes of survival made them peculiar in their susceptibility to coordination from on high. This was how Bonaparte’s Society of December 10 was able to organize the rabble, by offering a common organization of social reproduction through demagoguery, bribes, and charity. Social reproduction is not given, even less so does it amalgamate as an automatic process. Hansen calls this the contingency of reproduction, a mercurial form of existence hemmed in by the reach of the economy, in which social affinities crystallize and “melt away.”²⁹

In the formal networks of capitalist production, extraction and refinement processes, manufacturings lines, supply chains, transport routes, logistics, infrastructure all produce and reproduce vectors of socialization, even if limited and uneven. This combination remains an essential part of the total flow of business and the balancing of ledgers. It is both a compulsion and a plan that aims to “ride” price signals to maximize profitability. The systematic and efficient combinations of sectors and firms, the forecasting of orders, output, and costs of production, the reorganization of material flows to match the dictates of value—these are all technical arrangements that socialize labor as well as discipline it.³⁰ If, in contrast, we take the state of dispossession as the primary social arrangement of capitalist reproduction, all that is solid melts into air. Because capital does not for the most part directly organize social reproduction, it does not conform to standards of price and profitability that begrudgingly necessitate some degree of proletarian socialization. There is nothing technically given in proletarian reproduction other than the availability of greater or lesser pools of labor-power. On the contrary, because labor market segmentation is required for capital to have flexibility in its command of labor, the profit-imperative tends to desocialize labor, despite the indirect pressures it exerts on indirectly-market mediated activities.³¹ Here, wage discipline must contend with the organization of survival activities through patriarchy, the family, state services, residential segregation, or colonial reserves and allotments.³² The organization of kin relations—the primary historical site of social reproduction—has long been within the purview of capital, but it has never been able to subsume it, in the proper sense,³³ because capital does not directly discipline these activities through the wage. It instead forms a large part of the material community of capital, because these activities cannot escape the economy as such, and must be indirectly-market mediated. This peculiar configuration does not ensure any given form of socialization or communication, which are so critical to the process of class formation and subjectivity in the value chains of production.

It was this tendency towards disaggregation and stubborn isolation that lead Marx to his hesitancy regarding the lumpenproletariat and peasantry. As Hansen argues, whatever validity this interpretation may have possessed was historically eclipsed when new forms of communication and transport averted the necessity of representation from above, in the figure of a Bonaparte.³⁴ This may be true to an extent, but on the other hand it is also clear from the history of the workers’ movement itself that the socialization brought with technological modernization was always limited and predicated on the social exclusion of late comers from the colonial periphery and countryside. What Hansen observes then as coherence in the form of social reproduction was in fact the early stages of de-peasantization—its own transient form of socialization—from which self-organization and revolt could flow. This has unfortunately little application for the problem of composition today.

The whole issue of class composition is first of all conjunctural. To retain its social validity, it requires a schema of periodization and with it an understanding of capitalist development. Hansen does not make this clear, and so tends to equivocate when turning to the many ways that the common problem of reproduction is lived and survived. He rightly critiques much communization theory for leaving a materialist gap in strategy, and, we would add, emphasizing the constraints of class belonging without adequately mapping how the differential navigation of reproduction presents a limiting factor before the glass floor of production. When faced with the task of abolishing these separations, Hansen falls back on a maximalist approach: “anything and everything” that is a strategy of survival and reproduction.³⁵ He sees then one aspect of the evolution of Black Panthers,’ its survival programs, from illicit economies to “powerful municipal election campaigns” as a trajectory of reproductive struggle that untethers the grip of the internal colonial, and thus class, separation. While he chides Endnotes and communization theory generally for not taking seriously these racialized and anti-colonial struggles and forms of survival as practices of class formation among surplus populations, he himself fails to recognize the limitations of “community organization” when the economy has inserted itself everywhere in the field of reproduction. In the case of the BPP, Hansen does not account for how the growth of its survival programs shifted into formal electoral politics precisely when the state had introduced organized concessions (e.g., the Philadelphia Plan, Affirmative Action, increased political and educational representation, Baby Boomer GIs benefiting from the GI Bill, federal guarantees on student loans) that undermined the BPP’s capacity to appeal to black communities as the only guaranteer of survival or mobility. The result was a bifurcation of the Party into an increasingly electoralist and centralist wing and an increasingly militant armed faction that would become the Black Liberation Army.³⁶ Without understanding this conjuncture as a period capitalist restructuring and the last gasp of social democratic programs that would be unravelled over the coming decades, Hansen takes the forms of social reproduction out of their context, instrumentalizing them as anti-capitalist without view to their historical content.

Given this wider historical view of capitalist development, it should be no surprise that the disintegration of the workers’ movement would be accompanied by an increase in residential, economic, workplace, and school segregation.³⁷ This is far from a return to the Jim Crow era patterns of migration, urbanization, and containment. This earlier rise in segregation was the result of rapid economic growth combined with a legacy of racial slavery and subsequent racialized de-agrarianization. The combination of urbanization and de-agrarianization was characterized most strongly by mechanisms of racial sorting at the household level, and therefore impacted rural and urban regions relatively evenly through the mid-20th century.³⁸ Today, however, increases in segregation since the late 1970s and especially after 1990 are the driven by patterns of de-industrialization and the re-territorialization of manufacturing, the rise of the FIRE sector, municipal crises and the decline of public housing, and new patterns of migration. Racial sorting persists, but is no longer buoyed by economic growth or a rising capacity for homeownership. Demographic changes now tend to reflect real estate speculation, lending practices and mortgage disparities, rising rents, access to affordable housing, and household debt-burden. 81 percent of metropolitan regions in the US have undergone an increase in segregation over the last 30 years on this basis.³⁹ This pattern is most pronounced in the industrial midwest and mid-Atlantic, whereas in the southern states it relatively less pronounced over the same time period, registering the general re-territorialization of industry from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. Beyond the mid-Atlantic, regions with high concentrations of the “new compositions”—high technology, venture capital, information and services, biotechnology, e-commerce, logistics and transport, and real estate—such as the west coast, also experience high rates of segregation.⁴⁰ This appears to be a global convergence, rather than an American exception, in the collapsing of core and periphery characterized by waves of “early” or “premature” de-industrialization all throughout the capitalist world.⁴¹ As the general downward movement of immiseration unfolds, segregation grows in a paradoxical concert of diversification and polarization. In the United States, racial and ethnic diversity has been on the rise over this period, largely as the result of migration, itself the product of violent capitalist restructuring and de-agrarianization throughout Central America. The implementation of the Fair Housing Act has reduced racial homogeneity, in terms of all-black or all-white regions, but these things are largely a matter of scale and methods of measurement.⁴² In our era, some of the most diverse regions in the country are also the most segregated. The same holds true in the rural hinterlands, though the phenomena is more diffuse and not quite as legible.⁴³ There is a word to describe this polarization amidst diversification, one that some neo-workerists have slandered as mere academicism. On the contrary, we think it accurately describes the real boundaries of social reproduction today: any materialist account of reproduction in the composition of struggle must contend with this fact of atomization.

The atomization of social reproduction is the fate of capitalist reproduction and responds to its increasingly craven impulses. So it remains entirely possible for heterogeneous survival strategies to be integrated into the circuit of capitalist reproduction, thereby remaining separated, while simultaneously being driven by community involvement for well-being, relief, and resilience, all while being organized under anti-capitalist slogans. This is often referred to as “recuperation,” but that characterization feels too conspiratorial and not nearly precise enough. It is more illuminating to view the problem of reproduction from the perspective of economic development. In actual fact, the self-organization of survival has been linked to state provision and state-led social reproduction for some time, largely for the purposes of generating employment in ailing industrial sectors and facilitating the development of infrastructure, predicated on a delicate balance of interests between the state and civil society. As we have already seen, the emergence of civic action and nonprofit organizational capacity during the mid-20the century indexed a shift in this balance. Profitability crisis brought fiscal crisis brought increased privatization of provision. Social reproduction and relief was passed off increasingly to “civil society” for it to handle through privatized and market-mediated provisioning, in the form of “resilience,” “mutual aid,” “community action,” or “community self-defense.” Essential as these forms of struggle may be as both modes of survival and socialization, they by and large operate entirely through the market and buttress the tottering, austere, and debt-ridden state.⁴⁴ These more atomized forms of social reproduction are more targeted and thus far cheaper, despite often having a contradictory posture towards capitalism and the state. Peer Illner characterizes this dynamic in the state response to crisis and disaster:

“Since the 1970s, we are thus confronted with the following double movement, relative to the spheres of the state and civil society. On the state level, a movement of integration, in which formerly specialist authority on disasters is relinquished and the vernacular skills and capacities of the people are drawn on during calamities. On the social level, a moment of exclusion, indexed by cuts to social spending and the exponentially rising unemployment that raised the number of so-called surplus populations, those permanently excluded from wage labour, to staggering dimensions. The inclusion on the level of participatory policies is thus undergirded by a growing and profound exclusion of people from the basic possibility of reproducing themselves. Let me reformulate this development as a hypothesis regarding emergencies today: Since the economic crisis of the 1970s, disasters have served as occasions that absorb the reproductive labour of surplus populations as unwaged inputs, allowing the US state to cut back on social spending. While this development is a disaster for civil society, since it exposes communities to fend for themselves without support by the state, it is also, potentially, a disaster for the state, since austerity at the same time creates the forces that may contest it.”

Today, as social reproduction increasingly finds itself mediated by compounding disasters, the capillarization of discrete “disaster communities” suggest the reach of capital is both total and diffuse.⁴⁵ These conditions have for half a century given rise to new forms of engagement and subversion overdetermined by manufacturing overcapacity, fiscal crisis management, racial regimes of exclusion, and geographic containment, demonstrating that separation is a condition of revolt, whether in its more spectacular or subtle forms, but it is also its result. It is thus entirely possible—even more likely—for social reproduction struggles to open back into the material community of capital, rather than point to a way out of the separations. As Chuang notes of the composition problem: “the path-of-least-resistance for a conflict is rarely communist in character.”⁴⁶ If there is a unifying feature of reproductive strategies and conflicts, it is that they tend to unfold along such paths. Even the most illegible or opaque forms of opposition in daily life are mediated at least indirectly by market dependency—the shinier side of dispossession. In the absence of explicitly communist measures—those with an expropriative character—the fetter remains. Antagonism to the state often expresses this contradiction, as its twinned features of austerity and direct violence tend to foster alternatives mode of life on the basis of the economy, whether formal or illicit.⁴⁷

So it would seem that composition in the sphere of reproduction finds itself pressed against the same limit as “alternativism”: there are no alternatives, only capital, and all that and so on. While there is certainly a similar Robinsonade quality at work in some literary romanticism over reproduction strategies,⁴⁸ applied here this characterization misses the point entirely. It is not that the sphere of reproduction occupies a liminal space, at the boundary of capitalism and its exit. With few exceptions, the totality of strategies that confront the commonality of reproduction belong to capital, they cannot escape from the economy by virtue of their repetition or propagation. What matters is grasping how these necessary contingency measures form the basis of daily life, including consumption, education, socialization, belonging, communication, care, shelter, and support, but also terror, violence, and discipline,⁴⁹ from which subjectivity crystallizes in fragments. With the unevenness of employment and irregularity and decline of average job tenure, the prospects that a counter-socialization of worker or proletarian identity can eclipse this fragmentation remain dim.⁵⁰ Analyses of composition must begin from these constraints. Strategy is designed with an eye to both limitations and the possibilities that they stage. Given the uneven geography of reproduction, those possibilities may take manifold forms.

Ecology, Territory, and the Land Question

A characteristic feature of segregation not necessarily represented in measures of inequality is its spatial extension. Migration, spatial sorting, and geographic isolation are central components and mechanisms of social atomization, the concentration and polarization through which segregation manifests today. These spatial distributions of social species has only increased following the Great Recession and is a feature of both urban and rural regions.⁵¹ Patterns of social fragmentation are also strongly correlated with topology, land use patterns, and geographic barriers.⁵² This especially makes sense when we understand social intercourse and composition to be a form of metabolic exchange with the environment—the human and nonhuman conditions of existence.⁵³ That the course of capitalist development should take hold of social reproduction and universalize it under the conditions of its concrete separation raises questions as to how ecology, place, and territory figure into the common problem. There is a notable homology between these social and historical processes of separation, sorting, and reproductive isolation, and the ecological and evolutionary processes of speciation dependent on reproductive discontinuity, allopatry, and temporal separation. These mechanisms are both “internal” and “external,” with the combined result of speciation. Species are the result of speciating processes, not their cause.⁵⁴ Social kinds of belonging—through race, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc—are likewise the result of forms of reproduction under given historical conditions (for our purposes, capitalism). If these sorting processes both have a geographic extension, it is worth pausing to consider how ecology and territory fit into the fractured processes of composition that we have been examining thus far as purely “social” phenomena. Both “social” and “biological” discontinuity have been essential in the development of capitalism.⁵⁵ Our wager here is that the specific interactions of these discontinuities remains essential for the reproduction of capitalism through the processes of composition. This is the ecological problem. It thus makes little sense to speak of political composition without regards to the spatial, territorial, and ecological. We add to this another thesis: viewing the ecological problem through the problem of composition reveals certain fissures in the capitalist reproduction process, cracks in the glass floor that may precipitate from the sphere of reproduction.

At first glance, this may not come as an unfamiliar observation. Neil Gray has argued for the relevance of a practice of “territorial inquiry” to supplement Notes from Below’s conception of social composition.⁵⁶ He takes a keen interest in the spatial composition of capital, which he borrows from Alberto Toscano, as regards new forms of investment (capital switching) in the “tertiary” sector and its impact on urbanization. His thesis of “territorial inquiry” is presented as a supplementary measure to more traditional workers’ inquiries, and is to be conducted primary through housing struggles in order to grasp how workers are sorted in their reproductive environs and exploited there. Consequentially, we view this as distinct from a concept of territorial composition. It may be a necessary advance on understanding the relationship between class formation and place, but it is quite narrow and insufficient to capture how territoriality differentially composes belonging. This is evidenced through Gray’s case of how territorial inquiry might support political “massification” and base building, conforming to the general objectives of Notes from Below. What he sees in “urbanization” (which is here quite under-theorized and overly-simplified) is a new technical unification of the working class as exploited through rising rents, a more homogenous composition that might overcome the heterogeneity of labor processes after the era of the “mass worker.” This is a fairly traditional workerist account, and as such regards any differentiated reproduction as secondary. But it is precisely here that a more generative conception of territorial composition is to be found.

As we previously discussed, Hugh Farrell also gestures at something like a territorial composition. It is through a “connection” to and defense of a particular place that the “transvaluation of value” occurs, which is the driving force of his strategy of composition.⁵⁷ He is not quite explicit here, but the suggestion is that the compositional strategy opens up new forms of belonging mediated by new relationships that include the nonhuman. In the Atlanta Forest, for example, he argues that “new traditions emerge specific to the forest, and provide a basis for new forms of connection and kinship.”⁵⁸ He appears to making a similar argument to our own, that relation to place is part of the constellation of forces that shape composition. But, as we noted in Part Two, Farrell is primarily interested in composition as a practice suspended from the material conditions of its reproduction—a kite without a string. These forms of connection and kinship are thus treated quite insubstantially and ahistorically, providing a rather vague picture of how these belongings are integrated into the mesh of metabolic separation. The conceptual obscurity permits Farrell to collate a diverse range of land struggles based purely on a reading of their strategic and tactical form. Indigenous defense of territorial waters is treated interchangeably with “Zadism,” with its conflicts between agrarian artisanal production and urban radicalism, or more generally the “Blockadias” that attract of the likes of Naomi Klein or Bill McKibben.⁵⁹ What appears as a convergence of methods masks a divergence of social practices and material compositions, which is also to say relations of reproduction and with the land. Whatever transvaluation occurs here in the Robinsonades of composition, it may be ethical or metaphysical, but it is not practical.

The possibility of non-capitalist ways of being in relation to the non-human conditions of life has been popularized among certain North American anarchist and communist circles by Tiqqun and its progeny. This usually appears in their works as “forms of life,” an ontological notion borrowed from Giorgio Agamben intended to capture ways of being that escape the law, the biopolitical state, or the state of exception exemplified Agamben’s concept of “bare life.” Tiqqun would frequently gesture at forms of life that escape domination, or are opaque to the modern state. There is nothing new here, as far as utopian visions are concerned. What is of present interest is how Tiqqun’s formulation is intended to preserve relation to place, to land, to other-than-human intercourse. This plays a role in their thesis of destitution. Autonomous forms of life both destroy and create alternatives.⁶⁰ If the commune is the form, these “forms of life” are its ethical content. It is this aspect of their work in particular that has been most influential in some territorial defense campaigns in Europe⁶¹ and later in North America, represented most clearly in the collective Inhabit. Inhabit sees these campaigns as footholds in the establishment of “autonomous zones,” or “ungovernable zones” of “ethical encounter” with other forms of life, that will expand and “exit this untenable way of life.”⁶² This is quite explicitly ecological in its political orientation, as is their invitation to “inhabit the earth.”⁶³ This is not simply an acknowledgement of nonhuman species, but a program of establishing ways of being on the land that preclude domination or “governability.”

That all sounds nice, but unfortunately it does not actually mean anything. Leon de Mattis points out that these vague calls for “making common” have no historical substance because they presume the beings involved to be transhistorical actors, and so also the social relations between them:

“But ‘relations of production’ are no more relations between forms of life or worlds than they are relations between persons. The entities which are linked by ‘relations of production’ are just those which the same relations define: it is the position in the relation of production which determines the entities, and not the contrary. Relations of production are relations between classes.”⁶⁴

We would add the qualification that relations of productions are also relations within classes, with a special eye towards how classes are constituted through division and relations of domination that are not immediately linked to exploitation. Still, this critique rings true because it captures the essential problem with utopian thinking in general: whatever possibilities exist for the production of communism, they are given only by the conditions as they exist today, not by some shared commitment to “ethical truths.”⁶⁵ This is the general problem of the “communist camp” and today it finds definite form in the program of Inhabit, the contemplative asceticism of Dispositions,⁶⁶ or in the strategy of composition. The social actors—be they anarchist, anti-authoritarian, communist—are given a wide berth from the relations of production that determine them, and so given the license and indulgence to carry out new forms of life as a matter of ethical consistency that is immanent to their being. This pure immanence has no history, no class conflict, no colonial legacy, no racial or gendered domination. It is quite easy then to draw the conclusions that this politics amounts to a white-washed, settler apologia for adventurism, escapism, alternativism, or worse, settlement and apartheid itself.⁶⁷

We arrive back at the ecological problem, which raises the spectre of metabolism: how can non-capitalist form of social reproduction and interspecies intercourse emerge from a world totally enclosed by capital? Perhaps a better question would ask, inversely, whether there remain any elements of cultural knowledge, socialization, and practical metabolism with the ecological conditions of life that can serve as a basis for the production of communism, here and now, as historically given conditions, the slag of uneven and combined development.

In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx stressed that the whole movement of capital begins with the separation of producers from the soil. Moreover, he points out to the early Russian social democrat that in the absence of relations of private property, the “historical fatality” of the agrarian capitalist transition and mass expropriation of peasants does not apply.⁶⁸ Yet, the growth of capitalist relations remained an immanent global threat, not because it is endogenous everywhere, but because of the corrosive influence or “solvent effect” of capitalist market forces.⁶⁹ If capitalism is a historical form of social metabolism, this is one of its most potent catabolic tendencies. On a global scale, succumbing to capitalism was less about an autochthonous cast of characters following a template. It was rather the threat of market dependence being imposed from the outside and above under accelerating pressures to match productivity set by leading capitalist firms. This is why the state became more a central mediator in the process, and, as Marx called it, “an enemy to be beaten.”⁷⁰ These were essentially the terms of debate set for the mir and obshchina, the possibility of a “leap” over capitalism to communism by defending particular communal relations of primary production that had not yet been exposed to market dependence. Marx sometimes referred to this as the “natural economy,” but this of course too vague. Toward the latter decades of his life, after the publication of Capital, it seems Marx’s interests turned increasingly towards the questions of metabolic relations, ecology, and noncapitalist modes of life. This period delivered not only his letters to Vera Zasulich, but also the well-known Ethnological Notebooks, and the lesser known notebooks on natural sciences that Kohei Saito has termed “the ecological notebooks.”⁷¹ It seems now irrefutable that Marx understood capitalism to be a particular form of metabolic exchange with the ecological conditions of life, and that he took more of a interest in the possibilities for communist revolution as a defense of non-capitalist relations to place. This is not to say that he thought of communism as identical with the mir, or the “natural” kinship-based economies of the Haudenosaunee.⁷² That would be at best a gross overstatement and simplification.⁷³ At worst, it ignores Marx’s persistent chauvinism towards non-Western peoples.⁷⁴ What it does indicate, however, is that communist prospects are geographically and historically situated, and more specifically grounded by particular kinds of relations to the land. Now, as the planetary complex is thrown out of balance and the whole of the earth has been brought under the heel of capitalist production and extraction, those prospects are quite different, and would be entirely unrecognizable to Marx.⁷⁵ Communism must fundamentally be an agrarian revolution, a restoration of metabolic continuity on a new historical basis.⁷⁶ The problem of composition is a problem of metabolism.

Communists have grappled with this problem historically as “the agrarian question.” Following the revolutionary defeats of 1848, communists fixated on rural populations and agrarian relations as essentially instrumental to the class struggle. While those debates typically focused on rural populations as either reactionary pariahs or keys to revolutionary success, a closer examination of the concrete relations of reproduction in the countryside reveals that the real substance of the “agrarian question” lay in the question of property. Marx observed that capitalist development would “[squander] the the vitality of the soil,” and this concern became something of a signpost for Marxists of the Second International, especially those agitating for revolutionary programs in predominantly agrarian countries. Both Kautsky and Lenin, for example, understood the process of capital concentration and centralization to be rapidly dissolving the peasantry and landed aristocracy in newly industrializing regions (Germany and Russia, respectively) at a rate that far surpassed the protracted agrarian revolution in England around which Marx developed his schema on the genesis of the capitalist farmer. For Kautsky, this signaled the irrelevance of the peasantry to the program of the Social Democratic Party, who could only politically mobilize the proletariat through the march of this historical “progress.” The peasantry for Kautsky were fundamentally reactionary. This is both because he understood industrial production to be replacing primary, agricultural production as the driving force of society, therefore marginalizing the peasantry as a political force, and because he understood peasant struggle as essentially defensive of the old regime, and thus conservative.⁷⁷ Lenin, for his part, began his study of the Russian transition with similar concerns, though drew a different political strategy.⁷⁸ We noted above that Lenin understood the rapid dissolution of the peasantry as a process of unification represented in the external enemy of the state, which wed agrarian populations to the urban social democratic program.

Historical results were of course mixed. Following the Russian Revolution and later the Chinese Revolution and the global process of decolonization, agrarian programs seemed increasingly critical to socialist transition. Given the historical pride of place occupied by processes of de-peasantization through the 20th century, it is to be expected that communist strategy would rest so heavily on the question of peasant organization. Capitalism is an agrarian regime, first and foremost. Yet the contradiction here is not the mere separation of town and country. The spatial character of this social conflict is real, but it masks a deeper issue at the heart of capital: “the antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property.”⁷⁹ The real historical content of this opposition is capitalist private property, of course, though this is only an inversion of the immutable laws of private property itself.⁸⁰ This property relation is both the premise and result of capitalist reproduction, the first historical expropriation of concern to Marx. This delivers the historical conditions for the “death knell” of private property itself, the second expropriation, but it also appears to position communism as against defensive struggles, with the assumption that the latter seek to reinstitute individual possession of means of production, smallholdings in land, or artisanal production. This contention is at the center of debates around the substance of “small farmers protests” around the world today.

As Bordiga forcefully reminded us, communism cannot be the ownership of the earth, no matter how small the parcels. He goes further, arguing that communism does away property as it does away in practice with the individual human person, as society becomes subordinated to the reproduction of the species.⁸¹ It is only this total integration of relations of reproduction into the mesh of society’s productive apparatus that abolishes the distinction between town and country and the division of labor.⁸² So long as ownership of the earth obtains—even in “socialist” form—the development of agrarian productivity carries a bourgeois, and thus transitory, content.⁸³ The only communist relation to the earth is one of usufruct, not for the individual, or even society, but for the “true human community.” We take the injunction against ownership in the earth quite seriously, though we discard the anthropomorphic communism that Bordiga derives from it. The problem is that a total integration into capital seems a prerequisite for either. The panic that sets in among Marxists around decolonization or peasant unrest is imbued with this presumption that only total integration can abolish private property. Any distinction between non-capitalist, “pre-capitalist,” or “petty capitalist” modes of life becomes blurred. All defensive reproduction struggles appear reactionary.⁸⁴ Thus, Bordiga cautioned against “the agrarian reflection of the proletarian revolution as an episode of redistribution or repartition of the land” or the “conquest of the land by the peasants.”⁸⁵ This might be missing the trees for the forest.

“Peasant” is a fraught and nebulous category, so it is difficult to draw forth such general prescriptions and expect them to have an invariant political substance. Modern “peasant studies” has typically characterized the peasantry in both ecological subsistence and class terms. That is, it takes “peasantness” to be a structural phenomenon, continued through particular relations of social reproduction.⁸⁶ Teodor Shanin’s widely influential definition took peasants to be “small agricultural producers who, with the help of simple equipment and the labour of their families, produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power.”⁸⁷ Eric Wolf emphasized the significance of this surplus transfer, arguing that it marked the break between “primitive” rural modes of reproduction and “civilization.”⁸⁸ Still, these definitions tell us little about the kinds of social relations, cultural practices, or belief systems that mediated production and reproduction.⁸⁹ They do not even distinguish between communal usufruct, open-field agriculture, fee simple, land tenure, or sharecropping. It is with the transition to capitalism and market dependence that these different forms of peasant reproduction carry quite different political significance. Marx was neither the first or last to take note of this. In such an uneven and combined process, the defensive appearance of land struggles could take on a communistic character. Marx was aware, for instance, that three-fifths of the tended agricultural lands of the Russian Empire were held in common through the obshchina social institution. He was also aware that there was nothing inherent to this institution that prevented it from increasing productivity by adopting more modern methods and equipment. On the contrary, the tax pressures of the state were the greatest impediment to yields and rural subsistence. He thus adopted his sympathetic attitude towards peasant insurrections and rural populism in this context, influenced also in part by his observations of the failures of the Paris Commune to penetrate the hinterlands.⁹⁰ Marx knew that the appropriation of land would be central to any communist program. He knew also that it would not be carried out by urban intelligentsia, but by those with practical experience on the land itself, even if their immediate interests were the defense of their ways of life. For Marx, there was nothing historically inevitable or progressive about rural expropriation, nor was there anything inevitable about capitalism itself. Capitalism is always the substitution of one form of private property for another. Where communal, egalitarian, and anarchic metabolisms persist, even in truncated forms, communism remains an immanent possibility, a red thread of history, rather than its final stage.

It is in this light that indigenous dispossession and the construction of settler economies of resource extraction and agricultural parcelization, along with what DuBois called the “counter-revolution of property” waged against reconstruction efforts can be seen as the original red scares.⁹¹ Marx’s critique of “systematic colonization” in the final chapter of Capital is nothing if not a critique of settler capitalism—agrarian, patriarchal, even subsistence oriented—as an extension of the capital-dependent state by other means. It is in the last instance a metabolic inversion, the dissolution of many diverse (and often conflictual) forms of reproduction by small scale private property, the first step of the expropriation that births capitalism.⁹² When and where capitalist relations take the form of the racial settler state, the agrarian question is transformed into a question of the land itself and the forms of relationality constitutive of it that capital threatens with annihilation.⁹³ In the United States, for example, the “agrarian question” and agrarian populism have been inseparable from the fate of indigenous peoples and black former slaves, farmers, and sharecroppers, as the Indian Wars, Black Reconstruction, and US industrialization coincided, pressing the fate of yeoman farmer between collapsing agricultural prices from above and restive racialized proletarian from below. Agrarian relations, class-property structures, and ecological relations with the land more generally possess racial and cultural histories, which are essential to grasp in order to make sense of rural compositions and their varying trajectories.

Without grasping capitalism as not only an agrarian, but an ecological revolution, one with profound practical and epistemic consequences, the uneven geography of struggle is easily missed. This is what the ecological problem is meant to capture. Capital is a social relation, but with ecological and geographic extension.⁹⁴ It spreads globally and geometrically, but in the face of local subsistence struggles tied to proximate land bases and ecosystems. Capitalist reproduction is mediated by the destruction, subordination, and assimilation of these modes of reproduction. It gives rise to particular compositions and political subjectivities differentially mediated by ancestral ties to the land and territory, cultural practices of reproduction, and ecological relations. Black agrarian traditions thus formed distinct political compositions and trajectories, not easily assimilable into either agrarian populism or the workers’ movement, as the history of Black Belt communism demonstrates.⁹⁵ This observation has a contemporary salience for indigenous struggle in particular, as “indigeneity,” while in many ways a fraught category in and of itself, is consistently articulated by indigenous peoples themselves in relation to kinship and place.⁹⁶ Dine communist Glen Coulthard calls this “grounded normativity,” or those “modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.”⁹⁷ It is “grounded” because it is practical, shaped by relations of reproduction and traditions that persist beneath the colonial imposition of capitalist production.

The “grounded normativity” described by Coulthard is quite apart from the “normativity” on offer in a “strategy of composition” or the “commune” or “forms of life” of Tiqqun. Those are largely ethical commitments, and as a result find refuge among activist formations and remain a step removed from daily life. What is more, they continue to subsist via a capitalist relation to land. The differing stakes are quite clear. Any concept of composition that neglects the ecological particularities of social reproduction—the relation to land—is incomplete. Any theory or strategy that takes political subjectivity to be given only in relation to the social configurations of capital—whether inside or outside the factory—is as misguided as it is naive. The communist impulse is far more ancient than any composition of capital, even if, today, it can only be realized on a particular technical basis. While some may raise the concern that political subjectivity today is primarily the product of patterns of capital concentration and re-territorialization, ever trapped by the phantasm of worker self-activity, it is worth bearing in mind that despite being only 5% of the global population, indigenous peoples make up a disproportionate percentage of the global poor (15%), and steward 80% of the earth’s remaining biodiversity.⁹⁸ They occupy a crucial nexus between proletarianization and territorial or ecological composition. The extent of global proletarianization is a different metric than subsumption into the workforce, and a different metric still than market dependence. Indigenous peoples experience these processes unevenly, but given their widespread and disproportionate levels of poverty—especially extreme rural poverty—dispossession in the absence of employment prospects and mobility seems a common factor.⁹⁹ This follows the general pattern of de-agrarianization, in which the dispossessed become yoked to the market without passing the membrane into formal economic activities. If indigenous peoples remain a minority in the global proletariat, they are overrepresented in it. On the other hand, their remaining links with their traditional territories preserve the vast majority of the planet’s species. They are thus overrepresented in ecological conflict all over the world. In the first decade of its existence, the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, the largest inventory of environmental struggles in the world, has found that indigenous territorial defense makes up almost half of all global ecological conflict. If this is broadened to include other place-based “environmentalisms of the poor” (e.g. peasants, farmers, fisherman, pastoralists), then ecological struggle is quite irrefutably and overwhelmingly proletarian.¹⁰⁰

That is, if by proletarian we mean generally dispossessed of the means of subsistence, requiring some mediation by the wage and the market in order to secure reproduction. This, however, raises concerns of its own. Recently, Neel and Chavez have argued against what they perceive as the popularity of “local autarky” on the left, especially among more ecologically realist communists, from Søren Mau to Kohei Saito to Aaron Benanav. In their criticisms of these reversions to a “communism in living,” Neel and Chavez argue that local subsistence ecologies are no longer possible, given the demographic transformations brought about by capitalism and the complex mesh of global integration that is the economy. As purely technical matter, today communism must be global or not all. Indeed, they caution that the “not at all” may be a likely scenario. They offer their skepticism on the communist prospect, arguing instead that the growing metabolic disaster means that the conditions for constructing communism on the scale necessary for its realization appear as an ever fleeting horizon. We find this all to be a fair assessment and welcome technicist intervention, but we also find here analytical foundations for a veiled skepticism of territorial struggles more generally, a position that conflates defense of grounded forms of reproduction with “localism” or “local autarky” per se. While Neel and Chavez insulate themselves from this charge, arguing basically for a communist version of the Zapatismo “world in which many worlds fit,”¹⁰¹ others are likely to find in the critique of localism and bioregionalism a basis for rejection of indigenous struggle as anachronistic, at best, or a threadbare false equivalence between indigenous self-determination and blood and soil nationalism, at worst. Either characterization is baseless, if we simply understand indigenous struggle as an integral part of the global cycle of rebellion on commodity frontiers, or give even a cursory look to the history of internationalism within anti-colonial and indigenous movements.¹⁰² What characterizes indigenous struggle in practice is the peculiar place it occupies in global cycles of accumulation in the hinterlands of capital, where differing modes of reproduction enter into protracted and punctuated conflict. Secwepemc leader George Manuel called this “the fourth world,” where land as commodity and land as relationship come into conflict and where, according to Coulthard, struggle realizes itself in the “purposeful revitalization of those relational, land-informed Indigenous practices and modes of life that settler colonization sought to destroy in its drive to transform Indigenous peoples’ lands into the settler-state and capital.”¹⁰³

To what extent indigenous political subjectivities, place-based struggles, and territorial compositions can carry out the negative movement of communism is less a question of the “local” versus “global,” but a matter of material capacity. By this we mean the capacity to draw from these practices of struggle and revitalization something like a communist immanence, nurtured in the womb of communist measures. As we argued in Part Two, in the context of “territorial” struggle, communist measures can emerge from the constraint of reproduction to the extent that modalities of survival remain partially tethered to the land and place and thus remain within practical reach. It is market mediation that tends to severs this relationship. This returns us to the problems of global economic integration and market dependence. Most of the world’s population has been integrated into the market, but measures of this integration are difficult, and even more difficult to parse in ways relevant to an analysis of composition. Among contemporary economists, economic integration typically describes the processes that lead to convergence of global value chains and is often treated as synonymous with “globalization.” There are no direct measures, but instead proxy indicators, typically grouped into preconditions and results. Preconditions involve the removal of barriers to capital flows, including import and export tariffs, non-tariff barriers, capital controls, barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI), technology transfer, and real estate transactions. Results are outcome-based indicators generally agreed to represent degree of inclusion into the global economy, such as the ratio of foreign trade to GDP or the ratio of FDI to GDP. Other methods involve measuring the cross-border integration of factors of production (e.g., labor, land, fixed capital, technology) to reflect the microeconomic scale.¹⁰⁴ Both macro (goods, services, investments, interest rates) and micro (factors of production) flows measures are only operative at the level of the nation-state. Indeed, these measures were developed following the experience of European Common Market with the intention of assessing policy implications for future integration of “underdeveloped” regions of the global south.¹⁰⁵

Neither macro or micro indicators of economic integration are comprehensive enough to capture fragmented processes of social composition. They are especially inadequate when applied to rural zones, subsistence agriculturalists, or heterogenous so-called “traditional communities” or indigenous peoples, whose governance structures are subordinate to nation-states and whose populations are marginalized as economically insignificant. More to the point, however, they do not get at what is the heart of capitalism: money, or more precisely value.¹⁰⁶ Perhaps the greatest proxy for capitalist domination itself is the extent to which populations are rendered dependent on the market, directly or indirectly, by their dependence on money for survival. Because this is dependence on money is both formal (wage, revenue, pension, debt, etc) and informal (borrowing, solicitation, black and grey markets, etc), its extent at the demographic level cannot be directly measured. Rather, it is presumed at the outset if money has penetrated everyday life. This has been the standard assumption since the massive increase in urbanization—itself a proxy for capitalist industrial development—since the 1950s.¹⁰⁷ But, as Aaron Benanav has noted, urbanization was not achieved by a symmetrical process of population transfer from rural regions. In other words, urbanization has not meant commensurate de-ruralization.¹⁰⁸ Rather, the urbanization of the earth is the aggregate result of “demographic proletarianization,” or rapid population growth among urban populations relative to rural populations. Through much of the 20th century, market dependence was achieved quite unevenly, especially in rural and agrarian regions. Despite the appeal of outright expropriation, the process of de-peasantization was fragmented and incomplete, as labor-power was not itself the primary objective in bringing colonized lands and the far-flung hinterlands into capital’s orbit. Rather, manufacturers and states were interested in resource extraction and agricultural exports. Most of rural dwellers in fact remained tied to the land, while becoming increasingly dependent on the market for survival. This passive process of dissolving traditional forms of reproduction without integration into formal labor markets has bequeathed us a surplus humanity.¹⁰⁹ This was the process of general proletarianization on the world scale, and in truth it unfolded only over the last handful of decades. That means that non-capitalist forms of reproduction and survival strategies remain in living memory for much of the global population, even if the ecological and territorial access required to actually achieve those modes of social reproduction remain structurally out of reach.

This is the qualitative significance of “revitalization” in the context of indigenous struggles to defend and reclaim territoriality. Market integration of indigenous peoples is perhaps more complex and uneven than that of non-indigenous rural producers, and includes anything from rent sharing to wage labor to commercial agriculture to credit use to illegal timber harvests or wildlife hunting. In general, practical ecological knowledge tends to decrease with these forms of market integration, accompanied by changed patterns of land use, but the process is far from straightforward or absolute.¹¹⁰ These transformations are both protracted and very recent, as indigenous reserves have found themselves increasingly blocking the commodity chains of extractive capital over the last few decades. Despite the penetration of money, by maintaining access to land bases and the general continuity of cultural practices, many indigenous peoples have stubbornly refused the process of real subsumption and the total dissolution of their modes of life. Here, non-capitalist forms of existence are much more practically within reach, as a social and technical matter, than in “territorial struggle” in the abstract. The process of communist construction must pass through these indigenous ecological revitalizations, defend and fortify them, if it is to maintain the social heterogeneity necessary to keep within ecological limits.¹¹¹

Of course, “revitalization” does not paint an adequate picture of competing claims on the land. Though the term has become a meme in recent years, the real history of “land back” extends as deep in the historical record as colonial occupation itself.¹¹² Still, territorial forms of struggle for land reclamation do have a modern tenor, in the Anglophone settler states at least, as capital seeks to maintain its profitability increasingly through the sphere of circulation. This is why Coulthard sees resurgent internationalism and grounded normativity as an explicitly anti-capitalist pursuit.¹¹³ Yet it is not always so clear in the struggles themselves. Struggles against particular forms of development or infrastructure are not against development per se, nor are they necessarily against economic integration or a reversion to indigenous “natural economies.”¹¹⁴ Market integration and “economic development” remain on the agenda for supranational institutions and native political leaders alike.¹¹⁵ There is thus a tendency towards conflict between traditional governance and land use, on the one hand, and state-appointed local authorities who have an interest in development projects and revenue sharing, on the other. This is an observable pattern in recent years: at Standing Rock, among Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan opposition to pipeline projects, on Secwepemcul’ecw regarding the Trans Mountain Pipeline System, at the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek Blockade in Pacheedaht territory.

Metabolic separation remains the order of the day. The conflicts over territory and the contending approaches to land use and integration are, when practically grounded, essentially struggles over social and biological reproduction. This is what distinguishes the concept of territorial composition from the “autonomous zone” or the “strategy of composition.” It is also distinct from the project of territorial inquiry, the primary object of which remains working class subjectivity. Broadly speaking, the “territorial campaigns” associated with the environmental movement are, by the capitalist order of things, at some distance from the reproduction of daily life. In these cases, they must be mediated by specialists with access to institutional resources, and find their limit expressed in this very mediation (see Parts One and Two). The cases of territorial struggle in which this distance is removed or nonexistent may appear limited and isolated, from the vantage of the most developed regions of the global economy, but on the world scale, they form the majority of land conflicts.¹¹⁶ Whether and how these present as major significance to the economy, or whether and how they are integrated into the supply chain in crucial ways is a matter of some concern.¹¹⁷ Isolation and atomization of territorial compositions may presently inhibit their general coordination. This is nothing other than the problem of composition applied to the ecological problem. There is no reason to presume this will remain the case through the chaos of revolutionary unmaking. The truth that crystallizes from the secular tendencies of capitalist reproduction is not a homogenous revolutionary composition that arrives at the moment of rupture pre-formed, given by historical convergence of production. It is heterogeneity in the making in the process of revolution itself, formed from the historical conditions inherited by uneven geographic development and ecological integration. These fissures only increase with every wave of economic and ecological crisis that crashes up on this eroding social edifice. If social reproduction struggles remain only partial, their completion through communist construction—penetrating the glass floor—does not negate their character as particular, place-based forms of reproduction. This is in fact what gives them an objective independence. It is in the movement of communism that such assorted modes of life and ecological relations can flourish.

Conclusion

Composition is mirrored in decomposition, but each also carries a double meaning. Recent analyses, following the Mauvaise Troupe Collective’s popularization of the term of art that developed in the ZAD, refer to composition as something like “components of the struggle” or a synthetic effect of coalitional practices in which the “the composition” is larger than the sum of its part. The “strategy” of composition has been taken up in other, more recent territorial struggles, from the George Floyd Rebellion to the climate crisis,¹¹⁸ but nowhere has gained as much purchase and generated as much controversy as in some segments of the North American anarchist milieu, particularly among those globed around and invested in the struggle to Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City. This is, at least in part, because “the strategy of composition” has received renewed interest among Anglophones following the publication of the essay of the same name by Hugh Farrell.¹¹⁹ Farrell’s contribution represents the most sophisticated analysis in this tradition, in no small part because he attempts to marry the ZADist sense of “composition”—as strategy, as method, as autonomy—with the material problem of composition, sensu Endnotes. Despite his best efforts, Farrell does not succeed in overcoming this problem of material constraint, instead presenting composition as a strategy and mode of organization suspended by oath. Composition is an abstraction, a heuristic for thinking through the complexities of identity formation and mediation beyond simply hailing “diversity of tactics.” But it is not a strategy, it is does not offer a concrete analysis. Composing becomes a matter of will; it pre-supposes a certain degree of developed autonomy from compulsion and, importantly, the very violent mediation of the state in the organization of capitalist reproduction.¹²⁰ As has been learned in Weelaunee and elsewhere, the strategy of composition raises the problem of defense via formal mediations in the state, civil, and economic sphere. While these may prolong the struggle as far as its immediate objectives as a campaign, it forecloses the possibility of generalization. At this moment, via the strategy of composition, the reproduction of the struggle and its ‘forms of life’ are mediated by the state or directly through capitalist reproduction. It is by way of this foreclosure that ‘campaigns’ can be won or lost and their attendant strategies can achieve victory. There is a tension then between a strategy of will and the generality of insurrection. This is the problematic that emerges in every coalitional or compositional struggle, whether territorial or not. The strategy of composition, as a solution posed to the problem of composition and coordination, poses a new problem—the mediation of fragmentation and differentiated reproduction—which appears first to be solved by the state. It is only through the production of communism that this problem is truly solved, but this can only be realized if the functioning of the state as mediator is likewise obviated and abolished in practice. The fate of composition, as a strategy, is that it poses this problem and is blocked by its own development: in seeking to compose from the actually existing differences on the ground, it does not offer a clear path forward to differentiate between those political mediations that reproduce the capital-labor relation and those that might overcome them. It offers instead a vague unity-in-difference as an open-ended strategy, the unfolding of which is supposed to hold the promise of its resolution in a revolutionary manner, but which could just as easily find resolution through state institutions.¹²¹

“Composition,” as employed here, is not necessarily incorrect, but it is one-sided. What “composes” a movement is also what sets its concomitant limits: the often dull and sometimes frenetic compulsions of political economy. This is the second sense of the term of art, “composition,” and the one with a rich history in communist struggle and analysis. “Composition” here names the set of real material restraints upon and expressions of class formation. It is what constitutes the “problem,” as so named by Endnotes, of revolutionary struggle and organization. Composition in this sense is inseparable from the uneven histories of transition, development, and decline. “Class composition” emerged as a category of analysis partially as a result of the poverty of “class consciousness” to explain the failures of communist revolutions of the interwar years, or in the immediate fallout of WWII, in which communist parties had become largely toothless and integrated into the apparatus of social democracy. In the workerist literature, “class composition” was variously referred to as labor-power becoming labor, as the concrete expression of the class struggle, and as the technical division of labor. The core thesis of “class composition” analysis is that there is a relation and necessary correspondence between the form of struggle and the form of production. It distinguishes itself from a theory and critique of “class consciousness” by being the only real material analysis of class activity. The technical and social organization of production, the division of labor, the level of productivity, the racial and gendered segmentation of the labor process—these are concrete forms through which the double moulinet turns. They constitute the conditions and limits of class struggle and organization. This class composition is identical to the composition of capital. Historical material composition is thus expressed as a political composition of the class. It is an organic form of struggle, adequate to the churning wheel of history.¹²² Composition is a skeleton key, used to explain and periodize forms of communist struggle.

This thesis of composition comports with our own advanced here, but we extend two major caveats. First, in the absence of an analysis of reproduction, the analysis of class composition is a one-sided abstraction. We are far from the first to argue this; critiques of the shop-floor (and masculine) bias of class composition are as old as workerism itself. Social reproduction is historical, not abstractly “natural.” It must play a role in class formation. The totality of spheres of capitalist reproduction become unevenly integrated through class composition. This particular analysis of composition and class formation can be traced back to Marx, in his concrete analysis of the French peasantry and countryside in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Composition is mediated by reproduction, which in the case of peasantry was strongly atomized. Throughout its history, the workers’ movement operated as if this mediation was or soon would be displaced entirely by the factory, by the dignified work of man. The problem of composition today suggests that this atomization has not disappeared, but has found heterogenous forms, each of which is mediated by some combination of circulation and the direct violence of the state. The composition problem cannot provide a materialist account of class formation without attending to the common problem of reproduction, in which the abstraction of class itself is in practice inadequate. The glass floor is preceded by the cash nexus and the partition of social belonging. This formality of dispossession is the only content of composition in our current era. This is for us the decomposition problem. It is dispossession that maintains this heterogenous relationship to capitalist reproduction and to its humanization process. It is lived in the concrete by the mediation of dehumanizing processes, modes of life that attend to or are secondarily or tertiarily dependent upon but do not directly reproduce surplus value.¹²³ These forms are historical inheritances, the result of the uneven but global spread of the capital relation.

The second caveat is that reproduction is necessarily an ecological exchange, a metabolism. Even the concepts of “social composition,” broad as they are, do not adequately capture the various ways that land and ecological knowledge is integrated into the process of social reproduction. All relations to the land are practical, even if alienated. Survival and subsistence are attenuated by these practical activities, including ethnobiological classification schemas, cultural and spiritual practices, and interspecific interactions, cooperation, competition, and communication. We thus extent what is sure to be the most controversial hypothesis in this piece: composition may indeed be an interspecies affair. This is the logical conclusion if we practically apply the ecological problem to the problem of composition. If these motley material compositions are the bases of practice, and thus subject formation, then communism cannot take the human being as a given, as a social ontology, which constitutes the transhistorical sine qua non of social reproduction.

Decomposition is therefore a generative process. It is the real condition and limit of partisanship. This is the problem of the glass floor, revisited: not the failure to penetrate into immediate production, which is increasingly far away, diffuse, and nebulous—but the failure to penetrate into the immediacy of social reproduction in ways that sustain the initial outbreaks of revolt. To do so would be the beginning steps of abolishing the separation of production and reproduction. It would signal the real construction of communism. Given the partitioning of everyday life, partisanship to the revolutionary crisis requires a partisanship to social reproduction, and this will unfold differently in different places, across uncommon geographies, and diffuse by mediations of gender, race, and class far before it can hope to abolish them. The prospects seem bleak, to be sure. But we can draw from these denuded conditions some political conclusions that should better place any talk of strategy.

First, a necessary synthesis. The foregoing analysis reiterates the need for communist measures: those acts of immediate decommodification of life and its conditions, the initial precipitates of communist production.¹²⁴ This characterization is necessary, but insufficient. Capitalism is not only market dependence; this is too partial a characterization. It is at its core a metabolic separation, or better, a metabolic inversion in which human reproduction is achieved by the mediation of the economy and at the direct expense of all life on earth and its biogeochemical cycles.¹²⁵ Capital seeks to be the immediate condition of life itself. Communism mends this shorn metabolic mesh. So, a better formulation: communist measures are those that repair metabolic continuity through expropriation. They are nutritive, metabolic, and basic, general and particular, local and ecological, and planetary and biospheric. The social compositions that give form to these measures are not given by a uniform process, but the general compulsion of metabolic domination and the many diverse ways that it is mediated.

For composition to present a real strategy, it must first be grasped as a fate. The activity of composition is the confrontation of this fate. It cannot be another name for coalition or united front. It must more closely attend to the real relations of production and reproduction in their technical, social, territorial, and ecological aspects. It does not look like winning campaigns, domino strategies, or diversity of tactics, or whimsical appeals to personal and collective transformation within the community of capital—however necessary all of these activities may be in a given time and place. None of the analysis that we have presented should be interpreted as an injunction against these activities or forms of struggle. Partisans must confront the world from where they are, with their conditions given, and make do. We wish more simply to caution how the possibilities, limits, or failures of these approaches—indexed by the histories of the ZAD, Sanrizuka, or DFA/SCC, or the range of communist United Fronts—are the real movement of composition itself. A preoccupation with formalisms may meet the fate of composition, in another sense, if it is treated as a strategy suspended from the earth below. To grasp the problem of composition as decomposition is perhaps far bleaker, but far more tangible, and thus a foundation for a real political strategy when the contradictions generalize, and the possibility of insurrection gives way to communist measures, and eventually, the repair of the metabolic fabric—in which territorial defense will take on an entirely transformed significance in the reproduction of communist relations.

We wish to conclude on this final note: if it is the sphere of production that practically unifies, disciplines, and (de)forms humanity, then the significance of reproduction in the problem of composition suggestions that struggle need not—indeed, must not—be subsumed by specter of human dignity.¹²⁶ In struggles in the sphere of reproduction, if and when capitalist reproduction is suspended, there will be openings—fundamentally distinct non-capitalist mediations that do not presuppose humanity as a formal mediation. They in fact proliferate variegated relationships among life and its conditions that undermine the human as a practical mediation. In these cycles of struggle, the defense of non-capitalist modes of reproduction and modes of life entails confronting both the circulation of capital and the mediation of state violence. It realizes direct concrete relations among human and non-human life in which differentiation, atomization, and decomposition become political horizons, conditions of possibility for the generalization of communism, but not necessarily articulated as an ambient unification.¹²⁷ After all, potatoes can tear through the sack. What matters when these insurgent forms of composition, reproduction, or kin-making¹²⁸ negate or abolish the reproduction of capital, is not their common relation to abstract human labor-power, let alone something like rational planning, creative flourishing, or the reproduction of the species, sine qua non. It is something more ordinary, and more essential. It is precisely this crisis activity that reveals that the content of communist struggle is more basic, more indispensable, more all consuming than “human dignity;” it is rather the struggle over life and its conditions of possibility. The historical actors here need not belong exclusively to the human species. In “Tragic Theses,” we argued that:

“Our current era of long economic stagnation and punctuated volatility is a period of dehumanization accompanied by a swarm of ‘natural’ compensations that disintegrate any clear break between human and nonhuman, production and consumption, industry and its extractive hinterlands. This peculiar ‘holism’ only seems to take the shape of catastrophe, the aggregate effect of climate chaos, mass extinction, social unrest, and economic instability. If nature has indeed taken back the reigns of history, it would seem to have done so only to end it. It is not a triumphant humanism that resolves this crisis, but the abolition of the racialized regime of the human through the production of communism.”

It is from this consideration of metabolic reconstruction and ecological limits that the collective Artifices argues that communism would fundamentally be a disaster, a sequence of disasters—a complete break with the world as we know it.¹²⁹ To this, we would only add that the disasters would carry a necessary dissonance, a cacophony of perspectives and practices that refuse any unification in a single harmonious signature or melody. The noisy sphere of reproduction gives to communism its cacophonous features. In the production of communism, conflicts must discard their anthropocentric and anthropomorphic character and grasp for the fathomless depths of a more ubiquitous metabolism, but one that takes on peculiar and particular configurations. Communist partisanship is ecological, embedded, or not at all.¹³⁰

Notes

1. This is not strictly true, both because, globally, many riots and mass protests erupt precisely as a means of seeking redress for industrial grievances when other alternative paths are foreclosed, and because any easy distinction between “production,” “circulation,” and “extraction” is conceptually abstract, especially as production is increasingly carried out through circulation.↩︎

2. See Part Two for an elaboration of this dynamic.↩︎

3. Antithesi, “The Ecological Crisis and the Rise of Post-Fascism,” https://illwill.com/antithesi↩︎

4. Endnotes, “A History of Separation.” On the relationship of liberal democracy and workers’ movements, see also Timothy Mitchell. 2023. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso Books, and Geoff Eley. 2000. Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000. Oxford University Press.↩︎

5. “A History of Separation”↩︎

6. Chuang. 2016. “No Way Forward, No Way Back: China in the Era of Riots.” Chuang 1: Dead Generations. https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/no-way-forward-no-way-back/↩︎

7. This relationship between de-peasantization, proletarian reproduction, overcapacity, and a falling profit rate is laid out by Makoto Itoh, though we find his general account of crisis to be misguided and at times self-contradictory. Itoh, The World Economic Crisis and Japanese Capitalism.↩︎

8. Mau’s formulations here remain the best. Mau, Mute Compulsion.↩︎

9. See “Tragic Theses”↩︎

10. Jacques Camatte. 1973. Against Domestication. https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/agdom.htm↩︎

11. “Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction. The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction.” Marx, Capital, 711.↩︎

12. Ibid, 274.↩︎

13. For the best accounts, see Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction and Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender”↩︎

14. See Viewpoint, Issue 5: Reproduction.↩︎

15. See Shanin, Late Marx; Andrew Liu. 2020. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Yale University Press; Harry Harootunian. 2015. Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. Columbia University Press.↩︎

16. Notes from Below, “The Workers’ Inquiry”↩︎

17. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is perhaps the most famous study in this regard. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. See also Liu, Tea War; Fields and Fields, Racecraft; Allen,The Invention of the White Race; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Théorie Communiste. 2016. “Class/Segmentation/Racialization.” Libcom. https://libcom.org/article/classsegmentationracialization-notes-theorie-communiste↩︎

18. “Tragic Theses”↩︎

19. “When we assume the perspective of social reproduction, we see that our basic state, so to speak, is not defined by a waged job, but rather existential wagelessness. On the terrain of social reproduction it becomes abundantly clear that unemployment precedes employment, the informal economy precedes the formal, and proletarian does not mean wage worker.” Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi. 2015. “Making a Living.” Viewpoint, Issue 5: Social Reproduction. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/28/making-a-living/↩︎

20. See Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation↩︎

21. Bue Rübner Hansen. 2015. “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation.” Viewpoint, Issue 5: Social Reproduction. https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/surplus-population-social-reproduction-and-the-problem-of-class-formation/↩︎

22. Ibid.↩︎

23. Mohandesi, “Class Consciousness or Class Composition” 81.↩︎

24. Neel, Hinterlands, 188.↩︎

25. Karl Marx. 2019. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Political Writings. Verso. 573.↩︎

26. See Xavier Lafrance. 2020. The Making of Capitalism in France: Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750-1914. Haymarket Books; Ellen Meiksins Wood. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. Verso.; Robert Brenner. 1976. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe.” Past & Present 70(1): 30-75.↩︎

27. Communist Caucus, “Proletarian Disorganization”↩︎

28. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 531.↩︎

29. Hansen, “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation.”↩︎

30. This is why Angry Workers has placed so much political emphasis on this process of recombination.↩︎

31. This phenomenon is characterized by Endnotes in “The Logic of Gender”↩︎

32. These alternative forms of reproduction are explored well in M.E. O’Brien. 2023. Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. Pluto Books.↩︎

33. See Endnotes, “A History of Subsumption”↩︎

34. “…a movement which develops the technical means and organizational forms through which peasants can communicate and link up is one that will abolish the need for a representative and enable the peasantry to represent itself. And indeed most of the successful revolutions and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century – in China most paradigmatically – were to a large extent successful due to the central involvement of peasant, party due to a communist re-appreciation of the peasantry, and due in part to the increased capacity of transportation and communication and thus coordination due to telegraphs, telephones, railways, cars, etc.” Hansen, “Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation.”↩︎

35. “Our task cannot be to search for the equation that will give us the result we want, but to explore the maximal possibilities of abolitions of separations here and now, between us and between us and our means of reproduction – be it through riots and affinity groups, mutual aid and autonomous zones or through taking municipal or state power.”↩︎

36. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin. 2016. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press↩︎

37. Stephen Menendian,, Arthur Gailes, and Samir Gambhir. 2021. “The Roots of Structural Racism: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States.” Berkeley: University of California, Othering and Belonging Institute.;Gary Orfield and Danielle Jarvie. 2020. “Black Segregation Matters: School Resegregation and Black Educational Opportunity.” Civil Rights Project-Proyecto Derechos Civiles.↩︎

38. Racial sorting is descriptive, but does not explain the mechanism itself. They were generally the combined effects of white flight, citizen’s councils, restrictive covenants, redlining, and public-private partnerships in real estate and public housing. See Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman. 2017. “The National Rise in Residential Segregation.” The Journal of Economic History 77(1): 127-170.; Allison Shertzer, and Randall P. Walsh. 2019. “Racial Sorting and the Emergence of Segregation in American Cities.” Review of Economics and Statistics 101(3): 415-427.; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. 2018. “How Real Estate Segregated America.” Dissent 65(4): 23-32.↩︎

39. Menendian, Gailes, and Gambhir, “The Roots of Structural Racism”↩︎

40. Ibid.↩︎

41. Maarten Van Ham, Tiit Tammaru, Rūta Ubarevičienė, and Heleen Janssen, eds. 2021. Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality: A Global Perspective. Springer Nature.; See also Phil Neel. 2022. “Broken Circle: Premature Deindustrialization, Chinese Capital Exports, and the Stumbling Development of New Territorial Industrial Complexes.” International Labor and Working-Class History 102: 94-123.; and Benavav, Automation and the Future of Work.↩︎

42. Menendian, Gailes, and Gambhir, “The Roots of Structural Racism”↩︎

43. Neel, Hinterlands, 70-74.↩︎

44. The essential study here is Peer Illner. 2021. Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State and Community. Pluto Books.↩︎

45. We import this term from Out of the Woods Collective. Out of the Woods Collective. 2020. HOPE AGAINST HOPE: WRITINGS ON ECOLOGICAL CRISIS. Common Notions.↩︎

46. Chuang, “No Way Forward, No Way Back”↩︎

47. Kirin Agustin Rajagopalan provides an excellent conjunctural and geo-historical analysis of the East Oakland Flatlands in this regard, which in many ways serves as a template for “compositional inquiry” that takes seriously the problems of social disintegration and containment of social reproduction. Kirin Agustin Rajagopalan. 2023. “From Below and to the East: Notes on Crisis, Dispossession, and Containment in East Oakland’s Flatlands.” Ampersand: An American Studies Journal II(2). https://sites.bu.edu/ampersandjournal/2023/09/06/kirin-agustin-rajagopalan/↩︎

48. Per Henriksson. 2011. “Marcel Crusoe’s ex-communists in Intermundia. Notes on the discussion about communisation.” Riff-Raff 9: Kommunisering. https://www.riff-raff.se/texts/en/marcel-crusoe-s-ex-communists-in-intermundia↩︎

49. This is a crucial point emphasized by O’Brien. See Family Abolition.↩︎

50. Henry Farber. 2010. “Job Loss and the Decline in Job Security in the United States.” In Labor in the New Economy, Katharine G. Abraham, James R. Spletzer, and Michael Harper, eds. University of Chicago Press: 223-62.;↩︎

51. Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino. 2012. “The Geography of Exclusion: Race, Segregation, and Concentrated Poverty.” Social Problems 59(3): 364-388.↩︎

52. Gergő, Tóth, Johannes Wachs, Riccardo Di Clemente, Ákos Jakobi, Bence Ságvári, János Kertész, and Balázs Lengyel. 2021. “Inequality is Rising Where Social Network Segregation Interacts with Urban Topology.” Nature Communications 12(1): 1143.↩︎

53. Though we have our issues, the most developed accounts come from Kohei Saito and Søren Mau. Kohei Saito. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. NYU Press.; Man, Mute Compulsion.↩︎

54. There is more to be said on the species debates. For those interested, see by John Wilkins. 2009. Species: A History of the Idea. University of California Press.; Quentin D. Wheeler and Rudolf Meier. 2000. Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate. Columbia University Press.↩︎

55. Barbara Noske. 1997. Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. University of Chicago Press.↩︎

56. Gray, “Notes Towards a Practice of Territorial Inquiry”↩︎

57. Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition.” For a more extensive critique of Farrell, see above.↩︎

58. Ibid.↩︎

59. Gilles Dauvé does not hold back his sharp tongue for Blockadia or the ZAD: “The multiplication of ZADs will no more block the “global” than the positions formerly acquired by organized labor (mutual funds, associations, cooperatives, unions and parties) have dismantled capitalism. As much as the ZADs are often a place of positive confrontations, so much the zadisme spreads the illusion that the ecological questions would offer a privileged ground for a “united front” in an arm wrestling with the State, as long as one choose the right methods of combat. This is to forget that no emergency has in itself a unifying power and vector of change.” Gilles Dauvé. 2020. “Pommes de terre contre gratte-ciel.” DDT21. https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=3056↩︎

60. For examples, see Tiqqun, “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” “Introduction to Civil War,” or “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” The Call, and The Invisible Committee, Now↩︎

61. See the work of Mauvaise Troupe Collective.↩︎

62. Inhabit. Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy, 28-29. https://inhabit.global/tools/inhabit-instructions-for-autonomy↩︎

63. “We are becoming ungovernable—unbeholden to their merciless law, their crumbling infrastructure, their vile economy, and their spiritually broken culture. We violently stake a claim in happiness—that life resides in our material power, in our refusal to be managed, in our ability to inhabit the earth, in our care for each other, and in our encounters with all forms of life that share these ethical truths.” Ibid., 69↩︎

64. Leon de Mattis, “Reflections on ‘The Call’”↩︎

65. “Being ‘alternative’ consists in the belief that we can, with limited numbers of people, establish relations within the world of capital which would be already a prefiguration of communism (even if one doesn’t use this term). The inverse position holds that, as long capital as a social relation is not abolished, nothing which can resemble communism can be lived…. Communism, rather than being produced collectively and universally by the proletariat destroying capital in forms that we cannot determine in advance, is predefined by the configurations that one can give it today, in the very heart of the world of capital.” Ibid.↩︎

66. Dispositions. 2020. Re-Attachments: Towards An Ecology Of Presence. https://illwill.com/re-attachments ↩︎

67. These points and others have all been made well in “Another Word for Settle.”↩︎

68. Shanin, Late Marx↩︎

69. Marx, Capital Volume III, 451↩︎

70. Karl Marx. 1881. “The Marx-Zasulich Correspondence.” https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol08/no10/marx-zas.htm↩︎

71. Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism↩︎

72. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman. 2020. “Marx and the Indigenous.” Monthly Review. https://monthlyreview.org/2020/02/01/marx-and-the-indigenous/; Franklin Rosemont. 1989. “Karl Marx and the Iroquois.” https://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-iroquois-franklin-rosemont↩︎

73. For an archive of materials relating Marxism to indigenous struggle, see “Marxism & Indigenous Peoples,” https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/marxism-indigenous-peoples/↩︎

74. Much has been made over Marx’s inheritance of Lewis Henry Morgan’s racialized anthropology. See, e.g., Fredy Perlman. 1983. Against His-story, Against Leviathan. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1983/against-his-story/chapter-2.html; To what extent this aspect of Morgan’s work influenced Marx is speculative, but it is notable that he turned to an anthropological outlook at precisely the moment that he most forcefully articulated his rejection of the so-called “stage-ism” of social evolution, which he saw as fundamentally ahistorical and non-materialist.↩︎

75. There is a good discussion of this in “Forest and Factory.”↩︎

76. John Clegg and Rob Lucas. 2020. “Three Agricultural Revolutions.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119(1): 95-111; Endnotes. 2019. “Error.” Endnotes 5: The Passions and the Interests. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/error.pdf; ​​Jasper Berns. 2018. “​The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism.” In Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, eds. Materialism and the Critique of Energy: Mediations 31(2): 331-375.↩︎

77. Karl Kautsky. 1988. The Agrarian Question. Pluto Press.↩︎

78. Lenin, The Development of Capitalist in Russia.↩︎

79. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 1845. The German Ideology. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01c.htm↩︎

80. “It is quite evident from this that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, is now turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange, since, firstly, the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others which has been appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange between capitalist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to the content of the transaction itself, and merely mystifies it. The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others. Originally the rights of property seemed to us to be grounded in a man’s own labour. Some such assumption was at least necessary, since only commodity-owners with equal rights confronted each other, and the sole means of appropriating the commodities of others was the alienation of a man’s own commodities, commodities which, however, could only be produced by labour. Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour thus becomes the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. ​​Therefore,* however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation of these laws but, on the contrary, from their application.” Marx, Capital, 729-730.↩︎

81. We do not entirely agree with this point, but that is for future writings.↩︎

82. Bordiga, “The Revolutionary Program of Communist Society”↩︎

83. Bordiga, “The Revolutionary Program of Communist Society,” Goldner, “Communism is the Material Human Community,” and Loren Golder. 1995. “Amadeo Bordiga, the Agrarian Question and the International Revolutionary Movement.” Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 23(1): 73-100.↩︎

84. It was, uncannily enough, precisely these traditions that gave the workers’ movement its content. See Endnotes, “A History of Separation” and Chuang, “No Way Forward, No Way Back”↩︎

85. Amadeo Bordiga. 1947. “The Revolutionary Workers Movement and the Agrarian Question.” https://libcom.org/article/revolutionary-workers-movement-and-agrarian-question-amadeo-bordiga. At the same time, Bordiga praised the communal relations of the Purépecha, contrasting their inheritance of “ancient communism” with “insipid modern individualism,” noting the features that would be carried over in modern communism. Amadeo Bordiga. 1961. “In Janitzio Death is not Scary.” Il Programma Comunista 23. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1961/janitzio.htm↩︎

86. See, e.g., Teodor Shanin. 1990. Defining Peasants: Essays Concerning Rural Societies, Expolary Economies, and Learning from them in the Contemporary World. Basil Blackwell.; Eric Wolf. 1966. Peasants. Prentice-Hall.↩︎

87. Shanin, Defining Peasants.↩︎

88. Wolf, Peasants↩︎

89. Shanin thus characterized a very broad range of marginalized subsistence activities that fit the general definition.↩︎

90. Shanin, Late Marx; Ross, Communal Luxury↩︎

91. “Red Scare” in this context has typically been used to describe political repression of Red Power during the 1960s and more recently anti-terrorism following protests of Idle No More and Standing Rock. See Joanne Barker. 2021. Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist. University of California Press; Scott Rutherford. 2020. Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters During the Global Sixties. McGill-Queen’s Press. We use it here in the sense advanced more generally by Nick Estes, but extended to include the history of racial slavery and Black Reconstruction.↩︎

92. Hence, the centrality of legal forms that ensure the privatization of the land throughout the history of North American colonization. See Estes, Our History is the Future; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 2023. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press.; Brenna Bhandar. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Duke University Press.; Michael Perelman. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press.↩︎

93. “Value in its form as capital (value valorizing itself) is driven to accumulation, but also annihilation of non-capitalist social forms of relationality with the land. The abstraction of value (as capital) takes a concrete form in each particular industrial development project. When Indigenous people stand in the way, the state and its police step in to make sure capitalist accumulation continues.” Mike Gouldhawke. 2021. “Head Hits Concrete.” Midnight Sun. https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/head-hits-concrete/↩︎

94. Jason Moore. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso Books.; William Cronon. 2003. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang; Virginia DeJohn Anderson. 2004. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford University Press.; Alfred W Crosby. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press.↩︎

95. See Robin D.G. Kelly. 2015. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. UNC Press Books.↩︎

96. Sheryl Lightfoot. 2016. Global Indigenous Politics: A subtle revolution. Routledge.↩︎

97. Glen Sean Coulthard. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press: 13. See also Mike Gouldhawke., 2020. “Land as a Social Relationship.” Briarpatch. https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/land-as-a-social-relationship; Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2016. “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity.” American Quarterly 68(2): 249-255; Audra Simpson. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Duke University Press.↩︎

98. Anna Fleck. 2022. “Indigenous Communities Protect 80% Of All Biodiversity.” https://www.statista.com/chart/27805/indigenous-communities-protect-biodiversity/↩︎

99. GILLETTE HALL and Ariel GANDOLFO. 2016. “Poverty and Exclusion Among Indigenous Peoples: The Global Evidence.” World Bank Blogs. https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/poverty-and-exclusion-among-indigenous-peoples-global-evidence↩︎

100. Leah Temper, Federico Demaria, Arnim Scheidel, Daniela Del Bene, and Joan Martinez-Alier. 2018. “The Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas): Ecological Distribution Conflicts as Forces for Sustainability.” Sustainability Science 13(3): 573-584.; Joan Martinez-Alier, Leah Temper, Daniela Del Bene & Arnim Scheidel. 2016. “Is there a Global Environmental Justice Movement?” The Journal of Peasant Studies 43(3): 731-755.↩︎

101. “…communism is not a social monoculture. Just as old forms of local agroecological subsistence provided a foundation for a wide diversity of social practices, so too would the new planetary productive foundation of a communist society induce a diverse efflorescence of new life-ways. The protracted process of overthrowing capitalism and constructing a communist world would itself produce a mosaic of new social forms through the chaos of the transition.” Neel and Chavez, “Forest and Factory”↩︎

102. Mike Gouldhawke’s archives again provide a useful starting place: https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/. See also Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics.↩︎

103. George Manuel and Michael Posluns. 2019. The Fourth World: An Indian Reality. University of Minnesota Press, xi.↩︎

104. Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A. Hart. 2000. “”Indicators of Economic Integration.” Global Governance 6(1): 95-114.↩︎

105. Bela Balassa. 1962. The Theory of Economic Integration. Routledge.; Kui-Wai Li. 2017. Redefining Capitalism in Global Economic Development. Elsevier Science.↩︎

106. Indeed, be these measures, economic integration is actually declining, belying the fact that capitalist penetration of the biosphere is at the same time the diffusion of crisis and disarray.↩︎

107. Riccardo Di Clemente, Emanuele Strano, and Michael Batty. 2021. “Urbanization and Economic Complexity.” Scientific Reports 11(1): 3952.; United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2019. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). New York: United Nations.↩︎

108. Benanav, A Global History of Unemployment↩︎

109. See “Tragic Theses.” See also Davis, Planet of Slums↩︎

110. Katherine Milton. 1992. “Civilization and its Discontents.” Natural History 101(3): 36-42.; Flora Lu. 2007. “Integration into the Market among Indigenous Peoples: A Cross‐Cultural Perspective from the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Current Anthropology 48(4): 593–602.↩︎

111. See the discussion of limits in Neel and Chavez, “Forest and Factory”↩︎

112. Mike Gouldhawke has a great survey of the term and its matrilineal descent. Mike Gouldhawke. 2020. “Land Back: The matrilineal descent of modern Indigenous land reclamation.” https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2019/12/29/land-back-the-matrilineal-descent-of-modern-indigenous-land-reclamation/↩︎

113. Glen Coulthard. 2013. “For Our Nations to Live, Capitalism Must Die.” Nations Rising. https://www.nationsrising.org/for-our-nations-to-live-capitalism-must-die/↩︎

114. See, for instance, the range of perspectives in Shiri Pasternak and Dayna Nadine Scott. 2020. Getting Back the Land: Anticolonial and Indigenous Strategies of Reclamation. South Atlantic Quartley 199(2). See also Jacob Vakkayil. 2017. “Resistance and Integration: Working with Capitalism at its Fringes.” M@n@gement 20(4): 394-417.↩︎

115. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. “Linking Indigenous communities with regional development.” https://www.oecd.org/regional/indigenous-communities.htm; Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson. 2017. The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy. James Lorimer & Company.↩︎

116. See the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice.↩︎

117. The economic impact of the indigenous blockades across Canada in the winter of 2020 seem to suggest that this integration can be turned on its head, to disastrous effect on economic growth.↩︎

118. See, e.g., Anonymous. “Rhythm and Ritual: Composing Movement in Portland’s 2020,” Les Soulèvements de la Terre, “To Those Who Marched at Sainte-Soline,” and Nicolò Molinari. 2023. “Breaking the Waves.” Ill Will Editions.↩︎

119. Hugh Farrell, “The Strategy of Composition”↩︎

120. See TC, “The Glass Floor”↩︎

121. The mistake appears to be in thinking that particular victories advance the general movement against capital—a form of incrementalism. Rather, it is entirely possible that specific victories are not only compatible with the reproduction of capitalist relations, but that the formalism of campaigning and compositional strategy necessarily exclude communist measures, in the absence of generalized antagonism. That is because, during a period of such absence, the strategy of composition is mediated by capitalist relations, primarily indirectly through state institutions.↩︎

122. Ibid. This analysis has historical echoes in Bordiga’s analysis of the organic synthesis of the communist party: when the historical party—the generalization of a restive proletarian composition—finds expression in formal organization. He attributes this distinction to Marx, but it is most associated with Bordigists. See Amadeo Bordiga. 1965. “Considerations on the Party’s Organic Activity When the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable.” Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1965/consider.htm; Jacques Camatte. 1961. “Origin and Function of the Party Form.” ‘Il programma comunista. https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/origin.htm; Marx’s own writings on the concept of the party are scattered, mostly in his correspondences. In a letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, he speaks of “a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society” and “party in the broad historical sense.” See Karl Marx. 1860. “Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860.” https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Ferdinand_Freiligrath,_February_29,_1860. For a thorough account, see Theory & Event 16(4): https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/29013. See also A New Institute for Social Research. “This Party Sucks.” https://isr.press/This_Party_Sucks/index.html↩︎

123. See “Tragic Theses.” A more developed elaboration of the mechanisms of “humanization” and “dehumanization” is forthcoming.↩︎

124. Leon de Mattis. 2014. “Communist Measures: thinking a Communist Horizon.” SIC: International Journal for Communisation. https://www.sicjournal.org/communist-measures-2/index.html↩︎

125. See “Tragic Theses” for our schema.↩︎

126. As Hansen notes in his critique of Andreas Malm: “individuals are bearers of class relations and interests, and the creatures rather than creators of economic processes. Posing the problem this way shifts attention from agency and will to more structural questions of how the reproduction of human societies can be disentangled from the reproduction of capital. Such a transformation cannot simply be willed, and natural history cannot simply be disrupted, only rearticulated. How was social reproduction disentangled from non-human life – and how may it be re-entangled? Or rather, how was the entanglement of social with natural ecologies pushed to the edges of social ecologies, so that a core was insulated from damage and afforded carelessness?” Bue Rübner Hansen. 2021. “The Kaleidoscope of Catastrophe – On the Clarities and Blind Spots of Andreas Malm,” Viewpoint. https://viewpointmag.com/2021/04/14/the-kaleidoscope-of-catastrophe-on-the-clarities-and-blind-spots-of-andreas-malm/↩︎

127. On this distinction, see Rust Bunny Collective. 2014. “Under the Riot Gear: on the Oakland Commune.” SIC: International Journal for Communisation.↩︎

128. O’Brien, Family Abolition, 206.↩︎

129. “…against any sort of ecological planning which can only be a restructuring of capital, we want to raise the spectre of disaster, of communist disaster. Not disaster communism but communism as a disaster. Let’s take for example the latest media reports on the farmers’ promise to ‘siege Paris’ which pointed out that ‘in the event of a supply disruption, Paris would only have 3 days of food autonomy’. If we think that communist insurrection would involve, at the very least, the interruption of logistical chains on a regional scale, there would be no revolutionary scenario without an urban flight of several million people. We thus understand communism as a disaster when we look reality straight in the eyes, when we recognise the full severity of the revolutionary perspective and the fundamental break that it would bring about. Yet communism, as a movement that [abolishes] the present state of things, is the only perspective capable of breaking free the human species and thereby achieving an anthropological shift in its relationship to the living.” Artifices, “No Man’s Land.” https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/artifices-no-mans-land↩︎

130. Hansen seems privy to this: “beyond and beneath any abstract universality, we must elaborate on the question of an interest of breathing which is at once partisan and ecological… The relation is not specular, but a matter of inhalation and exhalation. It is a matter both of spirit and matter, whose unity is life.” See Bue Rübner Hansen. 2020. “The Interest of Breathing: Towards a Theory of Ecological Interest Formation.” Crisis & Critique 7(3): 110, 116; and, again, in his critique of Malm: “Despite such admitted ignorance, Malm treats humanity as the answer rather than the question. Or, put differently, he takes humanity for granted, and ignores the problem of anthropogenesis. That problem concerns the question of how humanity emerged as an infinitely variable species (think of the multitude of social, climatic, and ecological adaptations and inventions), and the more narrow question of how the idea of humanity as separate from nature arose. Had Malm posed the question of anthropogenesis, he would have been more hesitant to affirm the idea of humanity as separate from nature. He would, importantly, have been more sensitive to the blindspots of the idea of humanity-as-separate: what fails to be counted in this notion is those modes of cognition and activity, often cast as “indigenous” or “female”, which refuse to see themselves or act as separate from what, in a gesture of grand abstraction, is called “nature”. Put crudely, the definition of humanity as opposed to Nature, while loosely rooted in monotheistic cosmology, has only become established through the material and ideological separations produced by capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, we may ask whether the human capacity for abstraction is originary, or a mental reflection of the socio-ecological practices of abstraction inherent in commodity exchange? Certainly, Malm is sensitive to the geographic universalization of capitalist history, its imposition of uniform space-time, and treatment of all human activity as potentially abstract labour, etc. Yet the teleological drift of his description of capitalist history and strategies for transformation neglect the actual and necessary incompleteness of these processes, and the reliance of capitalism upon commons that are human – and more than that,” Hansen, “The Kaleidoscope of Catastrophe.”↩︎