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The subtitle of Karl Marx's central work, Capital, reads: “Critique Of Political Economy.” Based on the observations of the Anglo-Saxon economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, this work poses the following of many possible questions: If capital could speak, how would it explain itself? Can capital say “I”?

Europe is coming together. This is a historic project; for the first time in modern history, will and consciousness are used for bringing political, social and cultural unity to the European continent. In this process lifelong learning and hence adult education are gaining in importance. The European project takes place in an age characterised by radical changes and crises in work, civil society and the human existence as such. In this situation citizens need new key skills to cope. Also, identities need to be strengthened and reshaped and new types of solidarity need to be developed. Learning must not be restricted to the acquisition of technical and vocational skills, but will increasingly become learning to cope with the world and to establish new hierarchies of values which enable individuals to create a democratic Europe. To achieve this goal adult education must cease to be the responsibility of the individual and rather become an institutionalised and shared responsibility.

If I believed that our present bourgeoisie were going to live another hundred years, then I would be certain that it would continue to babble on for hundreds of years about the tremendous "possibilities" that the radio, for example, contains. ... I really wish that this bourgeoisie would invent something else in addition to the radio an invention that would make it possible to preserve everything the radio is capable of communicating for all time. Future generations would then have the opportunity to be astounded by the way a caste made it possible to say what it had to say to the entire planet earth and at the same time enabled the planet earth to see that it had nothing to say. A man who has something to say and finds no listeners is bad off. Even worse off are listeners who can't find anyone with something to say to them.

In the second volume of his Gulag epic, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "When our people heard the news on the BBC that, according to Mikhailo Mikhailov, there had already been concentration camps in our country as early as 1921, many of us (as well as many in the West) were quite shocked. Could it be true? 1921 ... so early? But, of course, they had existed even before this. Mikhailov had been mistaken in 1921 the camps were already long since underway. It would be more correct to say that the shots which were fired from the Aurora heralded the birth of the Gulag Archipelago." But, according to the young generation of French philosophers the nouveaux philosophes even this statement does not go far enough. For them, the problem goes back further, to Marx and Rabelais as well as to other master thinkers who used their powers of reason to lay the groundwork for systems of oppression. For them, the entire wretched history of thought and, above all, the work of these master thinkers, must be decoded in order to discover a clue to the actual origins of prison systems. The major themes of this extreme form of radical social criticism are domination and power and the ways in which their finely tuned mechanisms are concealed by intellectual production; texts which can be interpreted, the results of intellectual production, are seen as the "bone marrow" of all bureaucracies. The motivation behind their social criticism is their uncom

The following considerations, which I presented in October, 1972, at the central working conference of the "Socialist Bureau" (Sozialistisches Bfiro) make no claim to provide a thorough analysis of all the issues raised. This inconclusiveness stems from the problems inherent in the subject matter itself. A major deficiency is the lack of a political-economic analysis of the capitalist power structure, and it is in this context that the question of organization must be discussed. In fact, a definitive Marxist theory of advanced capitalism to which one could refer for the solution of organizational problems is not yet available. While various attempts have been made to develop such a theory, considerable work remains to be done. Even the theory of state monopoly capitalism is only a minor contribution to the resolution of current organizational questions. To be sure, this lack of clarity about trends in the development of the power structure of advanced capitalism must not lead us to the false assumption that urgent questions of organizational praxis, i.e., socialist politics, ought to be tabled, pending the development of a mature theory. The principle of "first clarity, then unity" is false. And the fear of error, as Hegel says, is error itself. The specific historical relationship between theory and praxis of organization should not be weighted at the expense of one side of this dialectical relationship; for the definition of this relationship is itself a product of political experience. The following discussion on organization should be understood as a possible program or as the direction within which a viable theoretical conception of organization should be formulated.