The role of theory is not to reveal to struggles what they ‘are’ in their heart of hearts. The point is not to go about trying to ‘raise consciousness’. Thinking revolution and communism is not a magic formula which would transform the current struggles into something they are not. The task is to manage, to link theoretically, current struggles with the possible production of communism, while understanding that this is something that is at stake within struggles, and not a matter only for the future. Without the thinking of revolution, the horizon of struggles is necessarily that of capital. In the course of an ambivalent class struggle, which is at the same time the renewal and the putting into question of the class relation, the absence of a revolutionary horizon obviously contributes to the first pole, to the renewal of the class relation. This is reflected, in the struggle, in the persistence of mediations which express this renewal (union hierarchies, the media, spokespeople and negotiations, amongst others) or, when those mediations have given way in the face of the intensity of the struggle, by their decisive re-emergence at the moment of the return to normality. Working out a theory of revolution and of communism is therefore an activity carried out on the basis of struggles and for the sake of those struggles. The success of such an activity is obviously not in any degree guaranteed. The generalisation of a contemporary theory of revolution—that is to say its existence beyond a restricted circle of theoreticians and militants—will not take place unless it is adequate enough to what, within struggles, might express the breakdown of the class relation. To the extent that this theory involves taking a stand within the matters at hand, it is necessarily a wager. A rational one, since it involves the production of a certain understanding of struggles by the struggles themselves; but a wager, nevertheless.
Communist Measures, by Leon de Mattis, SIC Journal, Issue #2.
