"A Contribution to the Concrete Imagination of Proletarian Revolution." Author Negation (USA) For Ourselves Submitted by Fozzie on July 31, 2026 Libcom introduction This text argues that a genuine proletarian revolution progresses from strikes to workplace occupations, then to workers' self-management, and finally to the complete transformation of production, technology, cities, and everyday life, replacing a society organized around profit with one organized around collective human needs and self-development. It was originally published by the post-situationist Berkeley based Negation group in November 1972. Some members of the group went on to form "For Ourselves / Council For Generalized Self-Management" in 1973, which reissued the text and is the version below. The new version included several amendments and the addition of the appendix and extensive footnotes.1 (These additions almost the same length as the original text.) The Negation of the Negation: A Contribution to the Concrete Imagination of Proletarian Revolution by For Ourselves, 1973 The revolutionary process can be conceived as a chain of ever-deepening negations of capitalist production, of capital production, of capital itself. (1): The strike or general(ized) strike is the first level of negation of capital production we will deal with. The workers stay home and production grinds to a halt. They have negated capitalist work. But only at a still very superficial level (and therefore also only temporarily). They have negated capitalist production because they have stopped any, all production. This is the abstract negation of capitalist production (abstract relative to the other levels of negation we will be imagining). Capitalist production is replaced only by no production at all; an abstract nothingness of production. This cannot go on (or society will die). This negation must in its turn be negated, either by a return to production under the old conditions and under the old private capitalist or state capitalist management โ€” the non-revolutionary return โ€” or by a return to production under a new management: workers' management โ€” the revolutionary return. But a return to production there must be. (2): The next stage of negation which negates the mere work stoppage but which still carries within it the seed of revolutionary possibility, is the workplace occupation. This is the negation of the first negation: the workers stop staying home. This seizure of the grounds of production is already an attack on State or private property, i.e., on capital. It is already, though still only at the most superficial and rudimentary level, de facto expropriation โ€” an incipient revolutionary socialization of the means of producing society. The workers come back to the place of work, but the work stoppage continues. However, in this action the workers have gone beyond their dispersed, atomized state formerly, of merely staying home. They have concentrated themselves at the point of production, a social place, and have thus constituted on a yet more realized level the society within production and within the production process which they already formed "in-itself" under normal conditions. But still the work stoppage, the strike, continues. The old production has been negated, but not in a way which replaces it with a new production. The determinate negation of capital-production, the negation of capital-production as such has not been produced, but only its abstract negation; non-production. Proletarian revolution, that is, the practice of the critique of political economy; the practical negation of political economy and of its object, capital, would mean the resumption of use-value2 production but freed more and more from the stamp and the determinations of the social relations of exchange-value production, and, in particular of capital-value production. The deeper negation of capital-production requires the negation of its partial and shallower negations. The question of the determinate form of this deeper negation poses itself with increasing vividness as the fallacy of the abstract negation of production manifests itself more and more urgently in the shortage of vital goods and services โ€” food, medical care, etc. There is no alternative. What is required is the negation of the original negation; stoppage of the work stoppage. (3): But it is here that basically two alternative modes of this re-negation present themselves. On the one hand, there is the return to normal production and to the old production-relations and therefore to all the conditions which necessitated the strike in the first place, and so also to the necessity of striking again, and of breaking off the strike again, and again, and again ad infinitum โ€” the lived myth of Sisyphus; the futility of living in a vicious circle. Or, something new. A way of breaking out of the vicious circle: to restart production under their own control; "under new management" โ€” workers' management โ€” the power of workers' councils. The new system of workers' management can propagate itself throughout the whole society, as a self-amplifying, self-organizing system, in the following way: the necessity of restarting production falls sooner upon some areas of social production - electric power, food distribution โ€” than upon others. If these vital sectors of production resume when necessity falls there under workers' council management, then this example is likely to spread to other sectors as the need to restart them in turn becomes necessity. And, as the momentum of the new pattern builds in its own wake, production may be restarted in more and more sectors even ahead of dire necessity, with the new form of management the central point of the action, and not merely a response to immediate necessity. This development would mark the transition into social revolution, the onset of the society-wide process of capital expropriation. The workers have a choice of returning to the old management, or of constituting their own management. The latter alternative demands an act of great courage.3 It will also mean that arms factories must have been occupied and then restarted under workers' management with the specific goal of arming the working class (the entire populace) against whatever violence the state will be able to bring to bear against the new social relations. And this will, in turn, depend upon the degree of erosion of authority achieved within the any, the cowardice of the police, and upon all the factors on which these, in turn, depend. The occupation followed by operation of their workplaces by the workers is already the expropriation of capitalist private property, the "expropriation of the expropriators." It already accomplishes the social appropriation or subjective socialization of the means of production. The process up to this point is already "the negation of capital." But this is not at all the deepest level which this negation and this socialization can or must achieve. If workers' management is conceived to be the management by the workers of the same old workplaces and the same old daily lives โ€” of basically the same old society by the same old workers โ€” same cities, same housing styles, same stores, etc. etc. then nothing has been understood! The goal of workers' management is the management of the existing world by the workers just as much as the goal of a prisoners' revolt is "prisoners' management of the prison." The point is to break out of the prison of capital; to tear down the walls of its factories to dissolve the old structure so as to resolve it into a new one.4 (4): The operation of the factories, offices, social services, etc. under workers' and communities' management leads inevitably to their conscious (as well as unconscious) modification. With practice, this becomes a systematic modification in congruence with a new pattern of social relations, that is, in accord with the constantly more generalized and constantly more richly rediscovered coherence of the new social totality. Generalized self-management, as the process-of-negation of capital, has to be a practical critique of the entire layout, of the whole deployment of "capital goods" and of the total physical plant inherited from capital-society. It means the critical reconstruction of all the daily relations of use and appropriation. Most of all, it means the metamorphosis of the entire capitalist form of technology; because technology as capital can only be capital as a technology. The existing factory, the existing organization of machinery, is merely the adequate material form of capital.5 Capitalist technology is the materialization, the objectification, of capitalist social relations of production; of the capital-relation itself (i.e., of the inversion of subject and object, of the producer and her product). The machine dominates the worker; the machine-object controls and appropriates the pacified subject, not the other way around. This is the lived essence of the relation of fetishism, of reification, of alienation between living wo/men and the dead things which they create.6 The machinery of capitalist society embodies in its total design the intentionality of the capital-praxis, which is the subordination of the production of use-value to the production of exchange-value in the form of capital, capital-value (eg., money profit, surplus-value). The hardwares produced by capitalist society bear the stamp and the etchings of capitalist social relations in their deepest substance and structure because these social relations were in fact their shaping and molding milieu, and the social imperatives of the capital-creating praxis were the decisive motives behind their creation. They represent not at all absolute use-value which can simply be "freed" from the hold of purely external exchange-relations, remaining unsullied in that process. They are social use-value as perverted and disfigured within the capital-relation โ€” by exchange-value and commodity-relations. The dominance of exchange-value always means the sacrifice of use-value to exchange-value. Proletarian revolution, as the beginning of the end of exchange-value, can only mean the rite of sacrifice of exchange-value to social use-value: the exorcism of the world of exchange-value in the construction of the world of use-value and the use-value of life. The process of proletarian revolution is that of the ever-deepening negation of capital, which is identical with the ever-deepening self-negation of the proletariat and of proletarianization itself. We have followed in imagination the train of events which make up the coherence of this process and their concrete logic to the point of the conscious modification of the material forms associated with capital-relations and produced out of them. We have seen that proletarian revolution must be the practical critique of the machine, of capitalist technology in general. The design and organization of the work environment by the people who do the work cannot help but be this critique. And the desire which propels it is the desire to enjoy the work-process. The means of production will be designed by them to meet their needs not only as "consumers" but also as "producers". Each "producer" is, while a producer, also identically a consumer, consuming during production raw materials and machinery, as well as him or herself, his or her own lifetime and energy; his or her body. Each "consumer" is, while a consumer, simultaneously a producer; a self-producer, producing him or herself through consuming social wealth produced by him or herself and others. The total process, consumption and production taken together, is the process named social reproduction. The full socialization of the means of production means that the production process must itself become valuable as a social life process. The means must become also the end; an end in themselves as well as a means. The people who live daily within the production process can be expected to demand of themselves that their process produce social use-value for them and not merely for others, or for themselves only as "consumers," i.e. for their lives outside the immediate production process. The production process must do more than yield a use-value concentrated in the product, merely in the result, of the process. The producers can be expected to struggle to make the means of production produce value for them within the production process itself and not merely at its end. That is, they will have demanded that the production process within which they daily live produce a value for them as a daily social life; that it become a process of gratifying social intercourse, self-development, and self-realization. It must "add value" to the use-value of their daily life. It must produce and reproduce social life in an expanded sense, immediately as well as mediately, and no longer in the narrower sense confined to the individual reproductive consumption of a finished object, a product-object ("consumer good"). This is the realization of social use-value. The capitalist workplace is an ugly and impoverished environment precisely because the workers have no voice in its design and, moreover, because its design is ruled by the imperatives of exchange-value production maximization, which prescribe cutting costs to maximize returns, i.e., new capital production (profit), through investing as little as possible in fixed capital and capital plant. Workers' self-management means that "efficiency" in quantitative output terms, "cost-effectiveness" within the confines of the old, monetized conception of "economy" and "economizing" will have to be superseded in a new, more generalized conception evaluating production in terms of the social use-value coherence or "efficiency" ("effectiveness;" "efficacy") of a given praxis within the deliberative, qualitatively sensitive, and subjectively referred milieu of the councils. The criterion for the critique and correction of productive praxis can no longer be merely the conception of use-value from the point of view of exchange-value and exchange-value maximization โ€” that is, of use-value to exchange-value โ€” which capitalist efficiency, at the deepest level, represents. The quantitative coherence of this planning process can be conceived in terms of the measurement of the social cost of production as labour-cost, that is, the measurement of production in terms of life-hours, of cost in terms of life-time lost; of the sacrifice or consumption of time. Its economy is an economy of time.7 We have followed the coherence of the self-negation8 process of capital from striking workplaces to occupying workplaces; from occupying workplaces to operating workplaces; and from operating workplaces to modifying workplaces. This process must finally lead, in the case of the factory type of workplace, to the negation of the factory as a whole and to the negation of the factory as such, a process which can only go on in the context of larger changes in the deployment of society โ€” of social objects and of objective wealth โ€” outside the factory. The "negation of the factory" may at first mean its physical destruction, its dismantling and reconstruction elsewhere, and perhaps producing a different or modified product. This would be the case, for example, with factories involved in waste production, such as those of the enormous armaments industries which could not be turned to the arming of the proletariat. It might mean the dismantling of certain factories and the dispersal of their components to various sites where new factories, of a kind that would have never been built under capitalism, are under construction by the council power, for example, as part of the de-urbanization process. Ultimately it must mean the determinate negation of the factory as such; the supersession of the old specialized factory altogether, to be replaced by a new kind of unitary complex at the productive nucleii of the communes, that is, of the new types of settlement-pattern, neither (both) urban nor (and) rural, which are bound to emerge out of the revolutionary process, as the synthesis of city and countryside, that is, as the supersession of their historical antithesis and contradiction.9 But the completion of the process of the self-negation of capital involves more and goes further than any of these. Its thorough imagination can give us a glimpse of what communist society, according to the inner logic of these concepts (and, of course, without this imaginational logic in itself guaranteeing its realization, i.e. that its coherence will become praxis) must look like. The concept of the negation of capital is as "big" as the concept of capital itself. And the concept of capital is "bigger" than any of the negations we have described. "Capital" is the name of the totality of capitalist society.10 Capitalist society is society as capital. The whole terrain, the entire deployment of capital-society is included in its concept, i.e., objectifies capital.11 The whole of capitalist society is the objective body of capital. And the negation of this entire objective structure and layout of the physical plant of capitalist society is included in the negated concept of capital. Proletarian revolution as the practical-critique of "human geography"12 is still just the practical critique of political economy, the critique of capital in acts. The physical plant of capitalist society objectifies the social relation of production of capitalist society โ€” capital, by name. The social revolution which consolidates a new social relation of production โ€” the workers' council and its federation, or simply "association" โ€” and a new mode of production โ€” self-management โ€” must likewise be the process of the objectification of these new social relations, of the bringing of the physical body of society into congruency with its new basis. The theorem of the correspondence of the physical plant, the organized space-time of society with its root social relations, is an historical truth, as well as a conceptual truth based โ€” as it is โ€” on the historical concept of capital. The history of capital, including necessarily its prehistory (of primitive accumulation in the most expanded sense), is the alienated history of man. The discovery of this inversion of subject and objectification is the deepest secret of the Marxian critique, of Marx's revelation of and solution to the riddle of history. Capital is the reality of Hegel's "Weltegeiste;" the rational kernel within the shell of Hegel's mystification is the reflection of its actual historical process. Hegel's mystification was only an insufficiently critical acceptance of real reification at face value. As capitalism, the social world evolves as "the self-deployment of capital", that is, of a pseudo-subjectivity alien to human desires, while human daily life becomes a pseudo-objectivity characterized by an apparently externally imposed routine and boredom; by a blindness of human beings to the economic and social laws which they produce which are the result of their own praxis. And all of this is already contained in the relation of wage-labour, the capital-relation itself. Capital becomes the pseudo-subject of history because we collectively alienate โ€” that is, we sell โ€” our subjectivity to capital. Wage-labour is sold labour, that is, alienated labour. Capital is accumulated alienated labour in the process of accumulating more of itself. Capital appears to have subjective powers because we alienate (sell) our subjective powers โ€” in the form of labour-power โ€” to capital. The pseudo-subjectivity of capital is the alienated subjectivity of the proletariat. We, as proletarians, produce an alien world โ€” the world of capital โ€” by selling our daily lives, our energies, our self-powers to capital for uses which we do not decide; for the uses and purposes of capital, or rather, of the human representatives bound to its imperatives โ€” capitalists, managers, state-bureaucrats. It is they who directly enforce the imperatives of exchange-value over those of use-value. However, the reproduction of capitalist daily life as a whole by the whole proletariat enforces those imperatives indirectly, and reproduces the enforcers and their power to enforce. The negation of capital means the dis-alienation of the producers and the accumulated means of production; our re-owning of capital; the return of subjectivity to the real subjects. It means people collectively deciding how they shall use their energies; the democratic planning of the production of their world by the associated producers; the federated councils, and later, the federated communes. The negation of capital will thus be the beginning of human history, of the history according to desire. The phrase "self-deployment of capital" becomes transparent through certain examples. For instance, it is obvious that the geographical distribution of population must follow the geographical distribution of capital โ€” of money, markets, jobs โ€” insofar as the "population" is principally the proletariat, while at the same time it reacts back on the distribution of capital, together with certain natural factors as well as, initially, the historical inheritance of pre-capitalist demography. But capital's spatial organization becomes more and more its own effect the longer capital develops on its own basis, transforming both nature and inherited social conditions into congruency with its own imperatives. The central thing to remember is that, as hired labourers, the population produces not for itself, on behalf of its own desires and intentions, but on behalf of capital โ€” acting, in fact โ€” as capital deploying itself. The concentration of population is a part of the concentration of capital, for the proletariat is a part of capital ("variable capital").13 The capitalist city is an accumulation of capital; it is the organization of fixed capital, the very form of its "geographical distribution." It is the material body and embodiment of capital; capital as a city and the city as capital. It is the city of capital. This is all the more true in the planned city of unified state-capital, even though the absolute concentration of capital in the state and the attempt in bureaucratic planning to negate and surmount the spontaneous movement of the economy (the law of value) contains the unfinished beginning of the negation of capital. The negation of capital as state-capital is only the negation of capitalism within capitalism. Thus, the concept of the negation of capital, includes the negation of the capitalist city[8] as a form of the centralization and accumulation of capital. We have seen that "the negation of capital" and the "total transformation of society'' are inseparable concepts. Thus, when the situationists speak of proletarian revolution as "the total transformation of the world," this is no mere phrase, but is meant seriously and literally, and emerges out of the conceptual and historical logic of the theory of praxis itself. The complete negation of capital can mean nothing less. Appendix: Concrete Imagination "We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will." โ€” Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, New World, p. 178 The above is true of human production-processes in general, individual and collective. But of no production-process is it so true as of the process of the collective and conscious production of a social revolution; the collective and conscious production of a new society. This insight has been almost totally ignored in the history of revolutionary theory and practice up until now as can be seen in the threadbare and cloudy conceptions most revolutionaries have had regarding what they wanted and what they were working on. The situation has been exacerbated by the necessity of bureaucratic groups to actively conceal their real intentions in this regard, namely, their own dictatorial domination. Let's dispense with the anti-fetish about "blueprints" once and for all. We've got to know what we want and what we are trying to produce in advance and as concretely as possible every step of the way, or we simply don't know what we're doing. We can't even know that we can't get what we want, and will have to revise our intentions, until we can imagine and formulate what we want concretely. We've got to imagine in advance what the process of social revolution must look like; to imagine in advance what communist society must lock like, based on the images of our social experience and its laws which we already have in our heads, and then submit these coherent imaginations to constant improving criticism, including especially the practical criticism provided by new outbreaks of and advances in revolutionary practice created by other sections of the world proletariat, as well as by our own praxis. We must then use these concrete imaginations, tempered and forged with the hammer of practical criticism, to inform and guide our praxis. The main special difficulty involved in the kind of pre-imagination requisite to revolutionary production is, that since the direction of the collective praxis cannot be authoritarian โ€” in which case, only one person, the Leader, or a few, would have to possess the mental template - all of the individuals associated in the collective production project must share the same basic picture, the same image or imagination of the result intended, and of the process. And telepathy is not today a normal self-power of the average social individual. Hence, the need for the consciou