204

many other similar conflicts, then such an event could become a
pre-revolutionary situation, that is, a crisis of capital. The role of
the pro-revolutionary communist, so some say, is to 'understand'
the supposed inter-connections of proletarian struggle and thereby
bring them to the surface and make them explicit. This
understanding, they argue, is possible because the pro-
revolutionary communist lives the unfragmented life, the
communist embodies a central task of 'the living historical
movement' and thus has the necessary categories of
understanding in place so as to make the strategic maneuver of
'understanding', as intervention. We do not think this real
movement exists, except in a negative form, and we do not see
any reason for not thinking that communism really is something
that appears at the end of capitalism and is dependent on a social
base of workers control of production; we see communism as
something that exists after the revolution, the revolution is an
event, something that happens concretely at a certain moment in
time, it is not a tendency or movement, not at all inevitable and
containing its truth, now and in the past, wrapped up inside its
events like a parcel left on a shelf of the unconscious to be
interpreted and realized as revolution.

The revolution as an event is dependent on many factors, the first
in importance of these is the control of production by the working
class, this control does not exist in the present except as an
ideological sense of reified labor, that is, as a capitalist reification
upon the role of labor and the threat of the proletariat. All
formulations of communism that refer to the present day are
reflections that have passed through many ideological filters of
present, general and social conditions, they must always re-
establish what determines them from the base. Communism really
is a utopia, a utopia dependent on the transformation of the
organization of basic human activity. Communism is a utopia set
in the future, after capitalism, but we are not moving towards it, we
are revolving in cycles of events set by conditions of those few
possible events. Today we are still living at about 1860. For a
new event to establish itself, there must be new conditions, or at
least the failure and end of present conditions, a new ground.
There is no movement towards this new event because, strangely,
the event of revolution is the only undetermined event, it must
ground itself, it must break away from current determinations and