The revolutionary process can be conceived as a chain of ever-deepening negations of capitalist production, of capital production, of capital itself.
The strike or general(ized) strike is the first level of negation of capital production we will deal with. … 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 — the non-revolutionary return — or by a return to production under a new management: workers’ management — the revolutionary return. But a return to production there must be.
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. … 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.
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 — 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” — workers’ management — the power of workers’ councils.
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.