Preamble

My parents were farmers, migrated into the city after WWII.
They thought, supported by scores of popular stories and beliefs,
that foxes were very smart animals. A way of thinking the
question of the “theory of contemporary capitalism for the anticapitalist
movement” must be thought of like the problem of
chicken for the fox: for the fox, the problem is how to outsmart
the owner of the chicken; for anti-capitalists, it is how to
outsmart the owners of capital and the politicians who, with their
policies, try to enforce and reproduce capital vis-à-vis struggles.
In other words, the question of theory is a question of how we
problematise and conceptually frame strategy. Here I offer eight
general principles that can help us to do so in the shaping of our
theoretical understanding. I have no claim these principles are
exhaustive, just a quite important starting point.

1. The first principle we have to keep in mind therefore is that
any category, and concept we have in front of us and that we
use for such a theory, is a category of struggle. This does not
mean that struggle is a consequence of our theory, of our
thinking, that is that action follows thought, as it is generally
understood. But that struggle must somehow be everywhere
in the understanding of the terms and categories we use to
describe the world we are in. And if we do not yet understand
the terms of this struggle, there is where our study and
research must lead us to uncover. Terms such as labour,
wage, food, profit, unemployment, crisis, environment,
money, energy, gender, commons, and a million of other
have a political meaning. This means that a frontline passes
through them, a frontline of value struggle, of completely
different understanding to give to our doing in the world. One
predicated on the values of capital and the strategic need for
their self-preservation and development, the other predicated
on the values of the doers, the “commoners”, and their
strategic need for self-preservation and reproduction of their
communities. So for example, wages are costs to capital, and
to us are means of livelihoods. The doing is the process of our
creativity put in common, and the source of profit for capital
through boundless work. Global warming and environmental
crisis is a business opportunity to capital, and a tragedy for
us. The question of gender is an opportunity for “empowering
women to compete”  as the World Bank recently put it  or
a ground for recognizing that competition is a crazy way to
reproduce the lives which were delivered into this world and
nurtured and cared for by women, and for which women have
been historically forced into a subordinate role. It is on this
terrain that, despite all the contradictions and proviso, we are
determined to reconstruct in thought the fact that on one side
there is “us” (anti/alter capitalists), and on the other there is
“them”!

2. The second principle is to be open minded in the
understanding of this struggle: it takes many forms, it
operates at different scales, it gives rise to many and often
contradictory understanding of itself. This is unavoidable,
since the “us” is divided, and these divisions are real, not
simply ideological, not a question of false consciousness.
These divisions are not simply cultural divisions that
necessitate translation unto one another, although they
certainly do. They are divisions in power, in accessing social
wealth, in the social wage; they are divisions generated and
reproduced by the very workings of the system that link our
lives, through enclosures and dispossessions that are
necessary for capitalist economic growth; they are divisions
generated in the very process of competition, which pits
livelihoods against one another; they are divisions that make
use of patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, and reproduce these
anew for our own times.

3. The third principle of fox-like theory is that capitalism is not
all pervasive; that there is an outside to it, and that many
outsides are continuously generated within through struggle.
To say that capitalism is not all pervasive and all including,
implies that the whole of social relations constituting social
reproduction is far larger than capitalism. Capitalism is a sub
set of the set of social relations constituting social
reproduction. What a liberatory statement this is! We are
participating in this meeting, and engage in a multitude of
exchanges and of productions . . . well, I do not know what it
is, but this is not capitalism, yet it is real. I am engaging with
friends, reproducing livelihoods, taking care of each other
children, cooking each other meals, playing music,
philosophising, building kitchen walls and cupboards, and
exchanging gifts of the “surplus” of our gardens . . . well I do
not know what this is but it is not capitalism, yet it is real.
The planetary networks of solidarity among migrants and
their home communities, among people in struggles, or
among people on the run . . . I do not know what all this is,
but it is note capitalism, yet it is real.

4. If it is true that capitalism is not all pervasive, and our lives
are reproduced through different types of social relations and
practices of value, it is also true that the non-capitalisms of
our lives are under continuous pressure by a social force that
strives to be pervasive, that strives to turn every moment of
our lives into work and every particle of nature into a
commodity. Hence for us the fourth principle is to recognise
that what we are up against is capital, a social force that
encloses, disciplines, seduces and co-opts. How it does all this
vis-à-vis struggles in given historical and geographical
contexts is the subject matter of our common research work.

5. The fifth principle is that to be against capital is to be against
a particular mode of valuing and producing in common, and,
therefore, of constitution of the subject. In the first case, a
quite disgraceful mode of producing in common, since it
implies that to the extent that social reproduction is
dominated by what capital values and practices, there is no
end to the rat race through which we reproduce our
livelihoods, there is no end to the production of scarcity in the
midst of plenty. As Ishikawa Takabotu, the Japanese
revolutionary poet, puts it, Hatarakédo, hatarakédo waga
kurashi rakuni narazari (work, work, and more work, yet I am
no happier). Also, there is no high points of development
without low points of development, there is no generalisation
of “middle classness” without generalisation of gated
communities and poverty and its criminalisation; there is no
“women empowerment to compete” without women
enslavement to reproduce the lives of those who do not have
time because they must compete. However, once we
recognise this and on the basis of this we start to dig deeper,
we begin to understand that capital is a social force that is not
only out there, but also passes through us in different
degrees, urging us to conform to its ways of doing and
depositing in us the seed of schizophrenia, of a value struggle
that we internalise. Hence to recognise what we are up
against, is not only to recognise what, say, the G8 will be
plotting next week to deal with the current impasse of
neoliberalism, or how capitalist market inner workings pit
livelihoods against one another. It is also to recognise that we
are up against ourselves in so far as we are subjectified by
capital’s values, to the extent we are variable capital.

6. The sixth principle is that to be against capital modes of
valuing and producing in common is to constitute a social
force that not only sets a limit to its endless thirst for life
energies, but that also posit other modes of valuing and
producing in common.

7. The seventh principle is that this others valuing and producing
in common are both already there and need to be created
anew for our own times. We do not want to romanticise the
past and its forms of production in common, but we also do
not want to denigrate it. We do not want to delude ourselves
with futures of hope, but we also do not want to fool
ourselves that we have reached the end of history.

8. The eighth principle of this anti-capitalist theory is that theory
is just theory, and the "beginning of history", of another world
of dignity, must be lived.