Leo
3rd February 2007, 14:15
Why the Working Class
“All this talk about the working class! But the working class does not exist anymore... with the telecommunication revolution, it disappeared! Possible that you are unaware of it?”
We beg our interlocutor to study better reality before shooting off his mouth, and thus avoid having to parrot and repeat the latest sound byte pronounced by an “expert” in a 40 second news report on last night’s television.
This genuine blast of hot-air discovery about the “disappearance of the working class” or its “integration” into the “middle class” is not of recent vintage. It was circulated and popularized by certain US sociologists in the ‘40s; it was taken up by “thinkers” associated with Herbert Marcuse in the ‘60s; it was “confirmed” and became the daily bread of some ultra-left grouplets in the ‘70s. In fact, one can trace the idea back to the very origins of bourgeois ideology: from the beginning the latter claimed to have eliminated the class division so typical and representative of feudalism. It is no surprise to find anew the theory underfoot today. Let us look at matters as they stand a bit more closely.
If we maintain that the notion of the disappearance of the working class is a fat tale, we do so on the basis both of theory and of actual reality. Theoretically-and laying it out in the most simplistic fashion-the making of profit is at the heart of capitalist production; without profit capitalism would shrivel and fall away. (In fact, it was Marx’s discovery of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall that exposed the Achille’s heel of the system: that which will lead inevitably to its death.)
Now, this profit is created by the extraction of live surplus value; that is to say, making the worker labor for a number of hours but paying him for only a part. (Again, we must caution that the problem is rather complex, and the inquirer seeking to learn more can deepen his/her understanding of the Marxist view by reading some texts-Wage Labor and Capital, Salaries, Price, and Profit, or Capital itself.) This means that capital can never give up the employment of human labor, precisely because it cannot extract surplus value from a machine. Herein lies the great contradiction of capital: it must introduce machines in order to increase production, but it cannot introduce them beyond a certain limit, otherwise it would reduce drastically the source of its profit.
Hence the tendency to mechanization is constant in the history of capital (a propos see Capital, Book I, Section IV, Chapter XIII) but this cannot alter or substitute for the central mechanism that allows the system to function: the extraction of surplus value from living labor that remains essential to capital. And this holds true either for the traditional working class, the so-called blue collar, or for the new technical strata, the white collars, who also contribute to surplus labor through the non-payment of work done. That an individual may work amidst the fiery light and the resounding crash of a steel foundry or in the aseptic brilliance of a laboratory producing chips and fiber optics in no way modifies the rapport between labor and capital. And from its point of need, capital cannot eliminate labor to which it is attached like a hanged man to his noose.
So much for theory. If we then turn to actual reality, we have additional confirmation. It is enough to open one’s eyes to become aware of the enormous growth of the working class in all corners of the world. Media speak of “the globalization of the market,” and what is this globalization if not the penetration and settling of capitalism in every nook and corner of the earth, leading to ultra-exploitation and massive uprooting in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? We are fed a constant stream of news announcing tragic factory fires in China, Taiwan, and Thailand; of the violent suppression of strikes in Korea, Zaire, and South Africa; of the establishing of new sweatshops in Latin America with the factories surrounded by barbed wire, like the military bunkers of old, to keep the trade unions out and underpaid labor in. What is all this, if not the dramatic proof that the working class, far from disappearing, is instead born and multiplying in areas that until a few decades ago were untouched by the presence of goods and modern capital? Finally, what are these huge flows of migratory human streams that cause so many headaches to our good bourgeois and petty bourgeois, again, if not the evidence, on a world scale, of the swelling ranks of a population of pure proletarians, that is, of arms that must count on the work of future children (in Latin, prole) to hope to survive at least less poorly? At this point, we could even open a sideline consideration on “overpopulation,” another nightmare for our good bourgeois and petty bourgeois, but for us further proof at hand of the insuperable contradictions of a capitalism that must stimulate the birth of a labor force destined historically to defeat it.
And again: what is the drama of an increasing unemployment everywhere but the proof of the presence of a very real, very palpable working class in the very metropolis of old capitalism, the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and now Japan, the very nation where until recently bourgeois ideology blared to the four winds the happy tale about the disappearance of the working class?
In reality, in the last half century we have witnessed on the one side to a comprehensive and awing growth of destitute workers and authentic proletarians and on the other to a sharp process of proletarianization particularly in the citadels of advanced capitalism-the ghettoes, the banlieus, the bidonvilles, the favelas. Far from sliming down, the ranks of the world’s working class have multiplied.
“However, you cannot deny that a rapid de-industrialization is in process!” Certainly, but beware: the de-industrialization of certain areas-we stress certain areas!-has nothing to do with the kooky ideas of post-industrialism or post-capitalism. This is a phenomenon that can only be analyzed by grasping the totality; that is to say, by understanding that we are dealing most simply with capital’s imperative to find the most advantageous conditions for the utmost exploitation of manpower, and hence for the extraction of surplus value. Putting it clearly: if factories disappear from Detroit, it is only to reappear along the US border in the maquiladora zone of Mexico; if the “big factory” is dismantled, it is only because dozens of smaller factories or sweatshops arise in some peripheral area... Faced with its economic crisis, capital must restructure in order to 1) avoid scenarios of great conflict due to a concentration of a large, seasoned labor force, 2) have at its disposition a younger labor force, less expert, hungrier, and more amenable. But we always end up with a cyclical phenomenon: the dispersion must end with a new concentration because capital is “genetically” compelled to move in that direction.
There is no question, and in so saying we anticipate the immediate objection of our skeptic, that faced with this macroscopic dispersion of the world’s proletariat there is an absence of understanding amongst its members that they are a class, that they have common interests both immediate and historic. But, nota bene, if Marxism identifies the proletariat as the revolutionary class that will bury capitalism and open the way to a classless society, it does not signify that the proletariat is automatically always and everywhere revolutionary. This is another fat tale that we leave to Stalinists and “workerists,” both being equally demagogic.
The designation of the proletariat as a “revolutionary class” follows from its placement in the center of the process of production. It is at the heart of the extraction of surplus value and below it there are no classes that it can exploit. By rebelling, it puts into question the whole structure of the society based on capital. Liberating itself, it liberates all humanity. In all previous revolutions that have marked the passage from one mode of production to another, against slavery and against feudalism, the leading protagonist class had behind it other classes destined, once the revolutionary change was carried out and the leap to the new productive order completed, to become the oppressed and exploited classes. With the bourgeoisie and the proletariat we come to the end of the long arch across the span of time associated with the division of society into classes. Once victorious, today’s exploited working class has no class over which to exercise its own exploitation. The new society that will be born-that has already reached the maturity of birth, and the very delay of this act induces a travail which so resembles an agony-will not know class divisions and, therefore, will not have exploited classes.
Certainly, there is a subjective problem. In its great majority this class, both the older part to be found in the aging metropolises and still enjoying long-won social guarantees and the newer one undergoing dramatic exploitation in the countries of more recent capitalist development, does not perceive itself as a class and does not move in the direction of its historic tasks. As a matter of fact, we can say that for the most part it does not move at all. It undergoes exploitation without rebellion. This does not disconcert us. We stand before a political problem that has much to do with Stalinism and bourgeois democracy, that is to repeat, with the effects of the most profound counterrevolution in the history of the workers’ and communist movement. It is a political problem that has to do with the destruction on a world level of the revolutionary party: the destruction of those factors of consciousness and will, of theory and action that from the beginning have been identified by Marxism as the indispensable conditions for a revolutionary development and necessarily served as guide to all past revolutionary classes.
Without its revolutionary party, which means without its revolutionary political program and the class’s understanding of itself as a class, the working class is a nothing! It remains a statistical conglomeration of individuals unable in their majority to raise themselves to the heights of their historic mission. The present as history demonstrates this in an unforgettable fashion.
For that reason the path that leads to communism necessarily goes through the fixed course of the reconstruction of the revolutionary party.
What Is Communism?
“Certainly after the experience of the countries in the East, today it’s difficult to talk about communism,” notes our somewhat disconsolate skeptic.
We understand that. To speak of “communism” today is like turning inside out something that had been the object of intense Stalinist propaganda, of abuse by opportunistic social-democratic misrepresentation and bourgeois misconception, all three the work of decades. It means lifting the mask off “socialism in one country,” the total lie of “really existing socialism.” We must restate basic concepts.
Communism did not die with the USSR or elsewhere, if only for the simple reason that economically it was never born. Communism stands for the abolition of wage labor, commodities, money, profit, economic competition, social classes, and finally of the state itself. In the USSR and its derivatives, there existed: wage labor-workers received wages; money-as a means of exchange; profit-industries and cooperatives tried to close with a positive balance sheet; economic competition-there was an internal market and a gradual opening to the world market; distinct social classes; and a well-established state.
If before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing dramatic consequences our skeptic had looked with Marxist eyes at the two “opposite worlds” of capitalism and non-capitalism, she/he would have noted a fundamental similarity between the workings and outcomes of two systems depicted in propaganda as opposites. In both, the urban concentration continued unabated (there comes to mind in particular the megalopolis of the so-called “Third World,” economically and politically connected to the advanced capitalist West) and the misuse of the surrounding countryside, the wasteful overproduction of missiles and armaments at the expense of the social needs of the majority, the competition for work amongst workers and the alienation and despotism of the factory regime, the periodic domestic crises, the gargantuan needs of the state and the wars of plunder and imperialist control abroad, the galloping trend to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few as opposed to the misery of the majority, the immeasurable growth of the power of the state and the concentration of decision making in the hands of a political, corporate, and military elite exclusively responsive to the needs and voices of the ruling class. Any communism there? Let us not be fools!
What was then the USSR? For us Internationalist Communists, the answer was always very clear. Under Stalin and his successors what passed for communism was in large measure a centrally controlled state capitalism, although in some sectors, largely agricultural, there remained forms of small production, even of a pre-capitalist kind. Thus in the USSR there occurred what happens in every budding bourgeois regime: under state aegis, a state-coerced primitive accumulation lay the basis for the subsequent formation of a large-scale capitalist development. To Lenin and us communists, all this was very clear: after the revolution of 1917, the politically victorious proletariat had to undertake the gigantic historical task of raising the country out of economic backwardness to set the basis for communism. This necessarily entailed a fully developed capitalist economy: growth of large industry, a sufficient network of railroads, large-scale cooperative agriculture, electrification, and so on, while awaiting the outburst of the victorious revolution in the economically developed West (Germany in primis). Those were the conditions for a victorious communism on an international basis.
But revolution never came in the West because the parties there - and from a certain point in time, the very Third International itself - proved unable to align themselves on a verily revolutionary front, and the October Revolution crushed between the absence of Western support and the necessary re-emergence of economic capitalism in Russia turned in on itself. The Stalinist counterrevolution, appropriate expression of the young Russian capitalism, destroyed the compelling initial strategic vision, liquidated Lenin’s party both physically and theoretically, proclaimed as “socialism” what was no more than the “capitalist accumulation” referred to above, and theorized the possibility of “socialism in one country.” Such was the enormous and tragic deception which cost the blood of millions of victims, and up to their necks in this deception one could find (still finds!) convinced Stalinists, democrats, and fascists who extended Stalinism their benediction by calling it communism.
“Then, what happened from 1989 to today?” It happened that the form of capitalism that reigned in the USSR and its satellites reached the point in its development when it could not continue in its old form. State ownership had become an obstacle, particularly under the impetus of the crisis that developed in the ‘70s and reached into the USSR by the end of that decade. It was necessary to give vent to the new forces and energies developed in the “hot house” atmosphere of state protection and free it up to autonomous development outside centralized restraints and shackles. Hence the break with the earlier phases-a “break” common to all bourgeois nations at some point in their history: from centralized state controls to the so-called free market, only to return again to state “dirigisme” or reliance when the socio-economic situation deteriorates. To recall this process in action one need only think of the Keynesian policies of the New Deal and the state controls behind European fascism.
Well, then, what do we really intend by communism? Marx did not discover the characteristics of a communist society. Even before his time communism stood for the “the communion of goods,” the placing of all social riches in common and the rational administration in a society that did not know the market,wage labor, capital and social classes. In addition, a whole era of the human experience had unfolded under a form of “primitive communism,” a stage conditioned and circumscribed by a very low level of development of productive means: work in common on land held in common and the consumption in common of the products of this work such as happened at the beginning of human prehistory before the appearance of classes, the division of labor, and private property.
Marxism freed communism from the limitations of utopianism and presented it as an outcome unrelated to the realm of wishes or dreams-the schemes of a Fourier, Saint Simon or Robert Owen-but as a necessary stage, a conquest leading to the actual achievement of real society. Capitalism drives the division of labor to the nth degree and separates the worker from any ownership of the means of production (machines and equipment) and from the means of subsistence (food, housing). Having entered this productive process without reserves-think of the enormous numbers of pauperized Africans, Asians and Latin Americans in the areas which are being drawn into the capitalist vortex-the worker must pass into the market to buy his means of subsistence. He must now sell his labor power to the capitalist who has amassed the means of production, and who may appear in the form of an individual, an anonymous society, or the state. With the finished products of labor in his possession, the owner is entitled to keep the lion’s share of the wealth created by those workers, riches that are legally dispossessed from the workers’ ownership. Moreover, the workers can feed their families only to the degree that their labor is useful to capital, and here one might recall the authentic social sores that accompany the process: under-age labor, exploited immigrant labor, and prostitution.
This social rapport can sink the masses into an ever greater misery. But by greatly increasing the productivity of labor and tying all the sectors of production into a vast concentration raised to a worldwide scale, the means were created -but only the means- to satisfy human needs through the central and international administration of the riches produced. One does not have to “construct” socialism as if it were a Lego toy, but to correspond the (today private) mode of appropriation of wealth to the social (collective, communal) character of its production.
Most important above all, while utopians sought to introduce communism by preaching its goodness in tales of wonderment and appealing to the better side of governments or enlightened entrepreneurs, Marxism demonstrated that capitalism itself produces its own gravediggers. It creates the modern proletariat, a class that capital tends to concentrate, unify, and compel to struggle, if it is to survive. It is the only class that in the history of class formations has no underling class that it might exploit in turn. Liberating itself, this class, the step-creature of capital, liberates all of humanity. It is endowed with the power to assure the birth, painful and traumatic as it may be, of the new society.
To arrive there, the struggle of the modern working class conducted under the guide of the communist party in possession of a doctrine and a worldwide strategy must push itself to the total conquest of political power. The proletariat must impose its own class dictatorship for as long as is necessary to crush with terror any opposition by the dispossessed classes, while concentrating in its own hands control of production and exchange and thereby breaking the old productive relations and abolishing the inertia and attitudes of centuries.
Naturally, the communist transformation of society will occur only after the international power of the working class will have consolidated itself through a decisive victory in the great imperialist fortresses, the actual centers of the world economy and the true gendarmes of the planet. And equally true, time will be needed for a new human generation to arise from the wreckage of the old society now born in the conditions of communism.
This is the goal of the movement that calls itself communism, and it does not base itself on notions of “one of many opinions,” or a “cultural project,” or an “ethical intent.” What is involved is not some philistine banality having to do with “more social justice,” or a “better quality of life, or a “more equitable distribution of wealth”-all rhetorical expressions that leave matters where they are since they do not touch the fundamental nature of capitalism. What is involved is the historical transition from one productive system to another, as happened in the step from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism. With this additive: with the abolition of class division, communism will allow humanity to escape at last from the pre-history of exploitation, oppression, and destruction.
In the society that will emerge from this transformation-a transformation that, we repeat, is radical, total, and not a yellowing photocopy of what came before-any form of dictatorship, any form of state power, will be of no value, since the economic basis underlying differentiation of social classes will be gone. But while the revolutionary crisis, the seizure of power, and the proletarian dictatorship are clear-cut, dramatic events, the socio-economic changes will of necessity take more time, if one is to deal with the a whole number of particular situations, e.g., the disparity in the stages of economic developments. Hence in lower communism, largely referred to as socialism, social constraints will remain in place and are best illustrated by the rule: “To each according to his/her work.” The false “really existing socialism” of the past pretended to have achieved this goal by relying on...wage labor that was in actuality an exchange of goods (commodities) for goods (commodities). Lower communism (socialism) foresees the introduction of a work chit, a script that entitles one to articles of consumption in proportion to one’s contribution, with a deduction to provide for the general social needs of society. The script is not money and, unlike money, cannot circulate and cannot be saved or accumulated.
Only with the achievement of production in abundance will social constraints disappear and society enter into a full communism, illustrated by the precept: “From each according to his/her capacity, to each according to need.” No longer subject to the blind economic laws attendant on the anarchy of the market humanity will have done not only with economic crises, genocidal wars, ethnic and national wars; emancipated from the oppression of producing for profit, competing for resources and markets, and producing for the sake of production, humanity will be able to organize production worldwide in a conscious manner following a rational plan that will regulate the rapports now turned harmonious amongst production, consumption and population, where today there is rampant disequilibrium due to the distended growth of capitalism.
Mankind will have time to dedicate itself effectively to solving the problem of agriculture and food production, and again look to areas that have been scanted by capitalism for the simple reason that the margins of profit are limited. To succeed, the “advanced countries” whose industries and know-how were constructed out of the blood and sweat of generations on all continents will undoubtedly lend themselves to a gratuitous modernization of the agriculture of the “less developed,” something unthinkable under capitalism. This will help mightily in closing the abyss opened by imperialism between races and nationalities and will favor the free formation of an international union, the crucible from which there will emerge a united humanity.
No longer menaced by the external and unfriendly power of capital, now master of its own destiny, the communist society will be able on the one hand to master and apply to human use the formidable new forces found in nature (not turn them into a menace to human survival, as has capitalism with the splitting and fusion of the atom), and on the other put to rest fear, obscurantism, and religiosity.
Rationalizing production will put to an end the contemporary ravaging of nature and the division between city and country through a gradual and more equitable distribution of economic activity across the entire terrestrial surface, that will also begin to end, thanks to these two changes, the menace of pollution. An end will be put to the waste and rape of natural resources: humanity will no longer be in harness to labor for profit, but for the satisfaction of human need. With the end of capital and the wage system, and therefore the end of man’s exploitation of man, not only the dramatic alternative of submitting to brutish labor or of growing unemployed will be crushed. Under communism, all will participate in social labor to the degree of the ability of each, which presupposes a different labor force indexed by age, with the exclusion of children and the disabled. Thanks to the application of the most modern techniques lifted and liberated from the control of monopoly and private property, society will be in a position to eliminate all perilous and useless activities from the manufacture of armaments to the training of police and the use of double accounting, thus radically shortening the hours of work to the baseline of need. Given the state of technology, perhaps a two-hour day would suffice on a worldwide scale.
To the degree that the proletarian dictatorship emphasizes these measures at the center of its program, there will be the elimination of an antithesis between school and production, and an end will be put to the chatter that passes today for the non plus ultra of culture. Domestic work from cleaning to infant training and raising will be socialized, thus freeing women forever from a millenarian slavery and a social inferiority of which they have been victims.
These revolutionary changes of the conditions of work and life will do much to remove the antagonism between the sexes and between the generations, so contentious a point under capitalism. At the same time, they will completely transform the rapport between collective life and “privacy,” (the latter existing today only to be ever abused or to degenerate into a solitudinous and miserable loneliness). Even the relationship between play and work and the very conditions of the environment would undergo massive change. Generations born free from the yoke of capitalism would be able to devote themselves to other important matters having at hand the means to deal with them. The drastic reduction of work time especially would not only free mankind from the labor and the maladies resulting from the frenetic quest for profits, for all the producers would be free now to plunge into intellectual areas; the natural sciences, the complex aspects of social life, literature and the arts-all would reacquire that collective dimension characteristic of those activities at the beginning of the prehistory of man. At last, the material conditions will have been set to overcome finally the divarcation between physical and intellectual labor, earlier so essential to the formation of social classes. No longer will men and women be condemned to brutish and repetitive labor: on the contrary, they would be freed from reliance on an exclusive “specialization,” “craft,” “career,” or vocation so highly lauded in bourgeois thought. Each of society’s members will face the need for some undertaking in the most diverse areas of social activity, obligatory but necessary.
With the disappearance of the division of labor, the administration of things, already reduced and simplified by the disappearance of capitalism’s market and exchange values, can be divided amongst all members of society. Administrative machinery, the foundation of the modern state, will have lost significance. In such a society, in the absence of the struggle of all against all, individualism will have vanished. Gone will be the basis for the opposition of the individual to society or society against the individual. In a society of the human species, participation in the collective effort will emerge as the underlying basis of vital need, and the free development of each “the condition for the free development of all.”
Whole generations have fought for this future, with millions of anonymous proletarians having given their blood in a struggle that has spread already to all continents. This is communism!
“No, it is utopia!” exclaims our irritated disbeliever. Stop! Utopia is an ideal society imagined without taking into account the material conditions from which it might arise, and without tracing the path of development that these very conditions suggest. It’s trying for the moon with a pedaled airship. Historically speaking, every problem may be raised in a real manner only when the possibilities and conditions for a solution exist. The possibility and the objective conditions for communism already exist within capitalist societies themselves: the high level-even too high!-of production, the globalization of the economic system, and the presence on a world level of a class without reserves. One must work to create the subjective condition for the change: the party that will guide the revolutionary process. But be the conditions objective or subjective, they are already obvious to communists, and we do not mean something inexplicable or an article of faith!
On the other hand, are our views utopian when we indicate the objective and the means to reach them: formation of the revolutionary party, its implantation amongst the masses on a worldwide scale, the continued growth of economic and social contradictions, the reawakening of the class struggle, the outbreak of the revolution led by the party, the seizure of power, the installment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the forcible intervention in the economy to introduce a radically different economic order? Or aren’t truly utopian those who leave unchanged the present system of capital, the market, profits, merchandise, competition, and bewitch themselves with talk of “sustainable economic development” or “equitable and responsible business”; who appeal to the conscience of “men of good will” to end the ever more frequent and bloody wars, donate balm to ease the suffering created by the incessant dramas of want and illness in the far reaches of the planet, and propose the incremental development of underdeveloped countries to eliminate the tragic sore of emigration, when it is precisely the sweeping introduction of capitalism to those countries-the demands it makes on an international level and the recurrent crises that accompany it-that is responsible for this tragic phenomena? That truly is utopian, and of the most painful sort, because it is not innocuous: it deceives millions and in so doing contributes to the strengthening of the system that gave rise to the ills listed above.
“Very well, but this ‘communism’ of which you speak exists nowhere, as you yourself note!” Sad is the mode of thinking that believes possible only that which exists and refuses to fight for what is not yet, though it is possible and even necessary. It’s a bit as if the Wright brothers had not set themselves to create a flying machine given that... no such machine had ever existed earlier. What is to be born does not exist yet; that’s elementary. Even bourgeois society did not exist when the first revolutionary burghers set out to oppose the feudal system. So what? As with the one above, such an observation is tantamount to implying total passivity, the deadening of one’s mental faculties: it is the result from a way of thinking that at all times insists “this is the best of all possible worlds.”
And then, as we have said, it is a false observation. There existed a “primitve communism” that given its low productive forces had to give way to a society based on class-based production. There was the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, that showed how it was possible to reorganize social life and what errors to avoid in so doing. There was the experience of the first years after the October Revolution that indicated the long road to be taken and, again, the errors to avoid in terms of international strategy.
“Yes, OK, still you have behind you one hundred and fifty years of failure!” And so? To establish itself as a world order and defeat feudalism, the bourgeoisie took five hundred years: from the first stirring of the Italian communes in the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution of 1789, and even longer in some regions of the planet. Five hundred years of glorious battles and bloody defeats, long periods of uncertainty and proud advances, and finally total victory. Anyone finding this view objectionable would do best to abandon the notion that all affairs must be concluded in the fretful haste so typical of bourgeois conduct associated with the closing of a deal, remembering that communists work for the future of human kind. There is written in one of our texts from 1965: “S/He is a militant revolutionary and communist who has been able to forget, denounce and tear out of his/her mind and heart the status assigned by this putrefying society, and sees and confounds him/herself with the entire millanerian span that ties the ancestral tribal predecessor in the struggle against the wilderness to the member of the future fraternal community, glorious in its social harmony.” (From: “Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party in a Period when the General Situation is Historically Unfavorable”)
And What Does It Mean To Be Communists?
If dealt with in detail, this would be a subject that would take up a lot of space. In effect, for a reader truly interested in understanding and anxious to find anew the road to revolution, it would entail the summing-up of the communist program and taking the reader back to all our texts, traditions, experiences, and party activities. This cannot be done in this space, but we can try to define the unmistakable stances that distinguish the revolutionary communists.
To be communists means being antidemocratic! Democracy expresses the outcome of the bourgeois revolution and the structure of its power. The claim of equality for all was a powerful weapon in the struggle against the rigidity and closed hierarchy typical of feudal society. Still, the new society that emerged from the bourgeois revolution never knew equality for the simple reason that class divisions remained, now shaped by the imperatives arising from the economic laws of capitalism. Equality was for the bourgeois, leaving to the proletariat dire necessity.
Centuries have gone by, but matters remain the same. Democracy actually continues to be the best cover for exercising bourgeois control-the best means of deluding the individual into believing that s/he is free and master of one’s own destiny, whereas enormous material forces crush people into obedience to laws, rhythms, and push them into the maw of unforeseen and uncontrolled developments. Moreover, from the time world capitalism entered the imperialist phase dominated by financial capital and the power blocs of the great powers, this democracy has become ever more emptied of substance, a rhetorical front that conceals a substantial movement toward centralization, authoritarianism and fascism.
In reality, democracy and fascism do not stand as polar opposites, but enter into a reciprocal relationship that assures the continued dominion of capital in the final analysis. Obviously, communists have no use for democracy, a term which has from its first coining shown to be fundamentally hypocritical. In Greek, democracy stands for “the rule of the people, the rule of all”; yet the democracy of classical Greece excluded from “the rule of all” foreigners, helots, and slaves. Communism has nothing to do with democracy: by abolishing all classes communism will introduce the first true equality, not for a few but for the entire human race.
Communists have no use for democracy not even as a means for internal party practice, nor as a way of increasing the party’s influence, nor as a means of exercising power after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The communist party is a disciplined party, founded on an organic centralism-a process much like that of a living organism by which center and periphery, directing and operating organs are tightly and dialectically connected in order to operate on the basis of an integrated understanding of the party’s program, theory, strategy, and tactics. They have no need for internal democratic measures to establish the order of things or the party’s organization, which are the result of a veritable natural selection arising from comrades working for a common goals without privileges, personal ambitions, formal recognition or material gain.
On the other hand, communists openly declare their intents. They don’t hide from anyone that once in power they will exercise authority in a dictatorial fashion because it is the only way to carry out that surgical cut if one is to put an end once and for all to the old society-an operation that will be long, painful, and complex: the heritage of centuries and centuries of class rule will not disappear in the blinking of an eye. Ferocious will be the resistance of the beaten class, and the very habits and mentalities, the whole tradition of bourgeois individualism and ways of doing things, the heredity of capital’s competition and oppression will exercise an enormous inertia. Only with a party based on a sound program, one closely connected with the working masses and the most deprived proletarians, who for the first time will have been awakened to the real significance of politics found in the dictatorship of the proletariat-the historical transitory phase to a new history for the human species, sans privileged or exploiting groups-would communism be victorious.
The discussion on the significance of democracy raises unavoidable conclusions. To be communist is to be antiparliamentarian. For an entire early phase of bourgeois society, the parliament was a place for communists to wage political battles. To be sure, it was not the most important forum. From the very beginning it was clear to communists-consult the “These on Parliamentarism” prepared by the Third International in 1920-that the parliament was above all a theatre of democratic illusions, whereas the commanding decisions affecting social and economic life were made outside parliament. And to believe that the ruling class, which is ever ready to suppress with force any workingclass manifestation, is so naive as to trust its survival to a ballot box outcome is both ingenuous and a case of accepting voluntary political suicide.
This does not take away the fact that in the early years communists used the parliament, although exclusively as a tribune from which to have their message heard, emphasizing the antithesis between class struggle and the nature of bourgeois power, however democratic. It was a useful tactic, but only if it was kept in mind that the real sites of struggle between the worker and the bourgeois are in the factory, on the street, and in the public areas.
It was of great usefulness in the young democracies and in those countries moving out of feudalism and into capitalism, but the tactic turned useless and harmful in the countries of old democracy where the representative bodies had become a powerful drug by which to drain from the masses the will to fight. The arrival of modern imperialism completed the process: the real decisions concerning economic and social matter were taken from the representatives and moved elsewhere-to the banks, the organizations of industrialists, the International Monetary Fund, etc. These are the true organs of bourgeois domination, representing the general and international interests of capital, capable of extending control over nations, governments, national parliaments, local representative bodies, and so on.
Most emphatically at this point, the pass word for communists can only be against the parliamentary system and against the electoral system! And then, the very modality of elections-their obsessive frequency, the enormous costs, the debauchery of television, the play-acting of candidates ever hungry for dollars from corporate interests, and the paralysis of any other social and political activity that they imply-is the best proof that their function is to dissipate workingclass demands, move them away from the class struggle and delude them into thinking they can sometimes count. Instead, we call for an end to these illusions and a return to a meaningful vision of political struggle, away with these frustrating rituals useless to workers and very useful to the ruling class!
To be communist is to be against federalism and local controls. Federalism and “localism” are two exquisitely bourgeois concepts, even pre-bourgeois or feudal. They go back to a bypassed historical period when, given the limited nature of economic development, economies might be thought of as islands of development in which goods circulated limitedly. But when capitalism moved into large-scale production, and especially when it undertook to enter the “street of no return” known as imperialism, that phase became passé. Localism and federalism became further influential illusions, stultifying myths.
In economy and in politics the world scene is dominated by the economic giants whose tendency is to swallow the small and penetrate every nook of the planet. Capital has entered everywhere and globalization is by now a decades-old reality. The belief in a return to economic autonomy belongs to the delusions of the small businessman who is terrified by what he sees, does not understand or does not want to understand, preferring the illusion of holding on to his small shop and run his own affairs behind a zealously guarded autonomy. It means believing in the possibility of turning back the clock of history and assuming passivity on the part of those monstrously powerful global forces that lunge toward greater globalization and concentrationtion. For example, it’s like expecting that the underdeveloped world can become fiscally and economically “free” and able to escape from fiscal and economic dependence on the industrially advanced nations. It means accepting as possible and viable that “small is beautiful,” whereas movement and continuous development characterize capital whose fundamental drive is constantly to expand, not remain small. Such are the elements of a total utopia.
To be communist is to be anti-nationalist. The rise of the nation state has been the historical form marking the advent to power of the bourgeoisie. Within boundaries set by a complex process of history, a dominant national class could carry on its economic and political interaction with other dominant national classes, at times with commerce and at times through war. Using the myth that “the nation is indivisible,” the ruling class nourished the deception that the historic duty of the working class was to identify with the nation-the state and its economy-and defend it with arms against all threats.
have no need for internal democratic measures to establish the order of things or the party’s organization, which are the result of a veritable natural selection arising from comrades working for a common goals without privileges, personal ambitions, formal recognition or material gain.
On the other hand, communists openly declare their intents. They don’t hide from anyone that once in power they will exercise authority in a dictatorial fashion because it is the only way to carry out that surgical cut if one is to put an end once and for all to the old society-an operation that will be long, painful, and complex: the heritage of centuries and centuries of class rule will not disappear in the blinking of an eye. Ferocious will be the resistance of the beaten class, and the very habits and mentalities, the whole tradition of bourgeois individualism and ways of doing things, the heredity of capital’s competition and oppression will exercise an enormous inertia. Only with a party based on a sound program, one closely connected with the working masses and the most deprived proletarians, who for the first time will have been awakened to the real significance of politics found in the dictatorship of the proletariat-the historical transitory phase to a new history for the human species, sans privileged or exploiting groups-would communism be victorious.
The discussion on the significance of democracy raises unavoidable conclusions. To be communist is to be antiparliamentarian. For an entire early phase of bourgeois society, the parliament was a place for communists to wage political battles. To be sure, it was not the most important forum. From the very beginning it was clear to communists-consult the “These on Parliamentarism” prepared by the Third International in 1920-that the parliament was above all a theatre of democratic illusions, whereas the commanding decisions affecting social and economic life were made outside parliament. And to believe that the ruling class, which is ever ready to suppress with force any workingclass manifestation, is so naive as to trust its survival to a ballot box outcome is both ingenuous and a case of accepting voluntary political suicide.
This does not take away the fact that in the early years communists used the parliament, although exclusively as a tribune from which to have their message heard, emphasizing the antithesis between class struggle and the nature of bourgeois power, however democratic. It was a useful tactic, but only if it was kept in mind that the real sites of struggle between the worker and the bourgeois are in the factory, on the street, and in the public areas.
It was of great usefulness in the young democracies and in those countries moving out of feudalism and into capitalism, but the tactic turned useless and harmful in the countries of old democracy where the representative bodies had become a powerful drug by which to drain from the masses the will to fight. The arrival of modern imperialism completed the process: the real decisions concerning economic and social matter were taken from the representatives and moved elsewhere-to the banks, the organizations of industrialists, the International Monetary Fund, etc. These are the true organs of bourgeois domination, representing the general and international interests of capital, capable of extending control over nations, governments, national parliaments, local representative bodies, and so on.
Most emphatically at this point, the pass word for communists can only be against the parliamentary system and against the electoral system! And then, the very modality of elections-their obsessive frequency, the enormous costs, the debauchery of television, the play-acting of candidates ever hungry for dollars from corporate interests, and the paralysis of any other social and political activity that they imply-is the best proof that their function is to dissipate workingclass demands, move them away from the class struggle and delude them into thinking they can sometimes count. Instead, we call for an end to these illusions and a return to a meaningful vision of political struggle, away with these frustrating rituals useless to workers and very useful to the ruling class!
To be communist is to be against federalism and local controls. Federalism and “localism” are two exquisitely bourgeois concepts, even pre-bourgeois or feudal. They go back to a bypassed historical period when, given the limited nature of economic development, economies might be thought of as islands of development in which goods circulated limitedly. But when capitalism moved into large-scale production, and especially when it undertook to enter the “street of no return” known as imperialism, that phase became passé. Localism and federalism became further influential illusions, stultifying myths.
In economy and in politics the world scene is dominated by the economic giants whose tendency is to swallow the small and penetrate every nook of the planet. Capital has entered everywhere and globalization is by now a decades-old reality. The belief in a return to economic autonomy belongs to the delusions of the small businessman who is terrified by what he sees, does not understand or does not want to understand, preferring the illusion of holding on to his small shop and run his own affairs behind a zealously guarded autonomy. It means believing in the possibility of turning back the clock of history and assuming passivity on the part of those monstrously powerful global forces that lunge toward greater globalization and concentrationtion. For example, it’s like expecting that the underdeveloped world can become fiscally and economically “free” and able to escape from fiscal and economic dependence on the industrially advanced nations. It means accepting as possible and viable that “small is beautiful,” whereas movement and continuous development characterize capital whose fundamental drive is constantly to expand, not remain small. Such are the elements of a total utopia.
To be communist is to be anti-nationalist. The rise of the nation state has been the historical form marking the advent to power of the bourgeoisie. Within boundaries set by a complex process of history, a dominant national class could carry on its economic and political interaction with other dominant national classes, at times with commerce and at times through war. Using the myth that “the nation is indivisible,” the ruling class nourished the deception that the historic duty of the working class was to identify with the nation-the state and its economy-and defend it with arms against all threats.
What Is To Be Done?
The question needs be raised today with even more dramatic urgency than in the time of Lenin in 1903 when he wrote that homonymous work. That was a period of great and hard-fought strikes. If the political party was still absent, there existed a generation of militant workers with great experience from which to pick and recruit into a fighting political organization. Today, the working class lives under numerous handicaps: the mortal danger of reformist illusions, the bastardized theories of “post-industrialism,” the computer and automation hailed as representing a new phase of history (“new economy”!), talk of the disappearance of the working class, and more generally, the after-effects of the Stalinist counterrevolution. To internationalist communists, it is only too evident that one must start anew: starting from the basis of an enormous patrimony of strategic theory and a mountain of practical experience.
Isn’t it clear that for us the central point, the focus around which everything turns, is the reorganization of the party on an international level? If one does not work for that goal, whatever the struggle, however courageous the action may be, even on occasion heroic, it is destined to fail. And the world’s working class will thus emerge from decades of tragic failure only to embark on another road guaranteed to fail as well.
Reaffirming and diffusing the revolutionary program of Marxism is our primary duty: this can be done only within the ambit of a larger and more general activity that is, unavoidably, the praxis of the party. There does not exist on this matter any kind of division of labor (“We will see that Marxist theory is well known, and you...”), nor successive stages (“First let’s set the correct Marxist theory, then...”). To reason in that fashion is to reason in a manner utterly non materialistic, which means to be out of Marxism, for Marxism is not a philosophy or an opinion but a battle weapon, the instrument thanks to which it is possible to lead the attack on an outdated mode of production and by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat bring humanity at last into a society without classes.
This organization does not exist today on a worldwide plane. We must direct our efforts so that the small militant nucleus that we are today will become truly international and operate internationally as a party. Whoever befriends us will come to understand well how this need for internationalism cannot remain rhetorical or a sentimental aspiration. It must come to life and possess a heart and brain, legs and arms, if it is to materialize into reality.
For that reason, the idea and the practice of internationalism are the center of all our theory and action, propaganda and proselytism. In recent past decades the world’s working class has suffered the sharpest defeats on this very terrain: from the bastardized theory of “socialism in one country” to the proclamation of “national roads to socialism,” and to the many episodes of “internecine wars mongst the poor” leading to factions fighting each other or to the artificial pitting of sectors of the same class against one another, when to be victorious the class must be united.
It is manifestly obvious that this international diffusion can only be done on the basis of a rigorous acceptance of Marxism and of our classical texts. The party is not made by clobbering together disparate groups, but by the selection of vanguard elements who understand the uselessness of other roads and the inevitability of ours. Therefore, no shotgun marriages or other buffoonery, no “rainbow movements” or such things, especially in a period of very low revolutionary potential. Entrance into the party will be on the basis of individual acceptance of our party’s program.
The defense of theory will be always and again our primary task, be it in the organization of the party on a world level, be it in daily activity of participation in struggles, propaganda, and proselytism. Without this defense-in actuality representing the return to the ABC of Marxism in all aspects big or small of social life - we would fall into a sterile activism, a kaleidoscope of actions without goals; we would drown in a “let’s do something today” empty of any revolutionary perspective. And we would render a disservice to a working class that has been martyred enough by the effects of a “concretism” and pragmatism minus any principle, which deceives itself - and what is worse, deceives workers - that the revolutionary road is nothing but a raw cumulation of actions, interventions, and leafleting.
To us, a defense of theory means: an analysis of reality in the light of Marxism, a criticism of the dominant ideology, the demystification of all those who declare themselves to be communist but are nowhere near it; further, it is the political education of militant members through a collective action in the party; active participation (where possible) in workingclass action, with the aim of directing it; and the strengthening, the implanting, and the spreading of the party organization.
From this point of view, our press must always stand for that collective organizer of which Lenin spoke in What Is to Be Done? The communist press must be at one and the same time an instrument to educate militant followers, a point of reference for the class in its daily battles, and a mirror of the life of the party. And even for these reasons our papers carry no names of authors: the views expressed are not personal opinions but a collective patrimony, and the reader must perceive and identify with it as such. This stands in contrast to the petty individualistic personalism that characterizes the contrary world of the bourgeois media.
This defense of theory is necessarily accompanied by a serious and constant endeavor to work in tight contact with the working class, to the degree that our forces allow it. This work with the class is far from being simple and cannot be discussed lightly and superficially. One has to take into account the disastrous effect on the proletariat of the twin influences of Stalinism and democracy, of the changes imposed on the economy and industry by the pressures of the last twenty-five years of crisis, of the sense of disillusionment and isolation felt by entire generations of workers, of the periodic inclination to spontaneous and individualistic outbursts induced by dejection and bewilderment.
Therefore, no more illusions, no more quick fixes. It must be amply clear that any possible reprise by the class must pass by way of the repossession of fundamental class-struggle concepts. And that this repossession will be the one and only possible axis around which will develop-even if not in the immediate future-the rebirth of organs that will defend the living and working conditions, and thanks to them, the ability of the class to fend off the attacks of capital.
These are the fundamental concepts:
a. Reject all conditional qualifications attached to settlements of workers’ demands. As already indicated, the national economy is not a common good. To impose on the workers a do-or-die defense of that economy, as was done in Italy with the tripartite (trade union-industrialists-government) wage contracts during the years ‘92-’95-the most recent examples of a practice with a long history-leads to more exploitation, a worsening of life standards, an intensification of working strains, more job insecurity and less certainty of steady employment, an increase in work accidents, a decrease in real wages, a worsening of the environment, and a growth in the number of inter-imperialist rivalries destined to lead to a new world war sooner or later.
b. Reject all efforts to limit the workers’ struggles. For decades the practice of trade unions has been to bridle the workers’ power by wasting them in micro-conflicts, department strikes, strikes limited to a factory, area, region or sector; by placing time and other confinments on strikes; by calling diversionary strikes to defend the national economy, democracy, legality, and so forth. They have weakened the capability to struggle by calling for “worker self-discipline,” making the trade union less susceptible to the voices of the grass roots, and isolating and throwing out militant individuals. These trends and developments must be fought not in the name of deluding “trade-union democracy,” an empty expression given the irreversibly anti-worker orientation taken by trade unions in the past fifty years or so, but in the name of a real and true return to the widest and most vigorous class struggle possible. The strike, the picket line, the cessation of production, and so on are the arms of the proletariat. They must not be taken away, turned against the workers themselves , or rendered less effective.
c. Reject any internal division within the class. Amongst the devastating results of counterrevolution and the practices of opportunistic parties and trade unions there is the shattering of the unity of the class, and from that the spreading of localist and federalist ideologies-the placing of “our” group, area, or trade union above others; the growth of hostility, diffidence and competition amongst workers, and the emergence of an exasperated or conceited individualism. Rather than provide a way out for individuals or groups, all these lead simply to ever greater disasters for the class. The working class can hope to stand up to the attacks made against it by capital today and pass to the offensive tomorrow only by finding its internal unity around the methods and goals of class struggle-by recognizing itself and acting not like a mass of individuals but as a united class against every attempt to divide and fragmentize it. As a class, it must turn against wage limits, firings, the precariousness of employment, the discrimination by age and sex, the myths of professionalism, federalism, localism, racism, and all that turn one worker against another, men against women, young against old, and the native against the immigrant.
d. Beat back every attack against living standards and work. When capital enters crisis, it must fall upon the working class-and even against large strata of the middle class who until then illuded themselves with the comfort of being safe from any ugly surprises. The class must resist this attack and defeat it, and can only do so by returning to a recognition of itself as a class and finding its unity. Other attacks will follow, other attempts to dump on the working class the effects of a crisis that is not the result of bad leadership, of private dishonesty, or personal egoism. Of necessity, these attempts will take different forms, some mild and deceitful, others hard and explicit. Workers will have to prepare themselves for a battle whose results are not always certain, whose victories may be immediately challenged, and whose conquests may not be final. The class must carry on a daily resistance without falling into the illusion of a return to a pre-existing idyl of “good times and peace.” These were no more than limited illusions for most: the good times and good wages of some were paid for by great masses of other workers, along with the pitiless exploitation of resources in vast areas of the planet, and the accelerated destruction of the environment.
Workers must not let themselves be detracted by false goals. They must fight for physical survival and demand:
Strong wage increases, larger for the poorly paid. Low wages do not maintain the family, especially since steady employment tends to be precarious for those categories of labor. For them, medical coverage has grown skimpier at the same time as many are not covered at all. Workers in these vulnerable conditions find the burden of rent, heat, light and gas ever more onerous.
Big reductions in the hours of work. The suffering from labor grows heavier with the widespread disappearing of steady jobs and the growing use of overtime, which is paralleled by the dramatic rise of on-the-job accidents resulting from demand for increased productivity and the cuts in accident-prevention and worker safety. Reducing the hours of work will not absorb the unemployed (this is a pure delusion), but will ease the burden of work and lessen the tension under which many millions labor, and permit the rehabilitation of a psychological and physical condition that has been drained today for the sole reason of adding profits to capital. What all this comes down to is: Get the working class to reconstruct its class self-identity!
From what has been said we derive two fundamental considerations. Whoever affirms that the economic struggle-the defense of life and work-is passé is outside the pale, and is a disseminator of pseudo-extremist demagogy. We know-and all workers should know-that any gain made today through struggle is destined to have to be refought for tomorrow, until the day when that regime is overturned forever. But Lenin himself in What Is to Be Done? well demonstrated how the immediate economic struggle is the first necessary step towards leading the class to grasp the inevitability of the supreme battle. Without that first step-and here it is the party’s responsibility to make known that significance to the entire class, at the same time making clear the need to mount in time all the other steps-there is no future. The economic struggle is the war college of the proletariat, Lenin used to say: it must return so again.
From this, other considerations derive: the necessity to create new organisms to defend immediate interests, which should have the widest possible extent and be open to all, in order to check the tendency for the class to drift into disunity and fragmentation, into drawing into itself and retreating, which places a winning hand in the possession of capital. These organisms will become the instruments of class struggle, the structures that will organize and centralize the class, and the vital intermediate sinews between the class and the revolutionary political party...
Leo
3rd February 2007, 14:19
What is communism and how do we get there?
Communism is not a ‘nice idea’; it’s a material necessity. Not a nice idea? Actually, for most of the past century we have been told that it’s a very bad idea, because it means a totalitarian state, poverty wages, superpower politics, labour camps, etc. But despite the vast lie that communism=Stalinism, the idea still persisted that Stalinism wasn’t really communism at all, certainly not the communism envisaged by Marx. But there’s another line of defence: what happened in Russia proves it’s no more than a ‘nice idea’, unworkable in practice because of human nature or the complexities of the modern world. In fact, the very attempt to put it into practice is bound to end in something horrible. So better put up with what we’ve got…
Our point of departure – that of Marxism – is that communism isn’t a ‘nice idea’ because it’s not some scheme invented by well-meaning reformers, but corresponds to a necessity and a possibility provided by the dynamic of history. It’s a necessity because the present organisation of human society – capitalism – has reached a point where it is the system that can’t work for humanity. It has developed man’s powers of production to an unprecedented degree, but in such a manner that these very powers are turning against mankind and threatening to overwhelm him. This is evident when we look at the way technology and science are being used not to free mankind from useless toil and satisfy the basic material needs of the human species, but to create vast arsenals of extermination, to despoil the natural environment, and to serve the needs of a tiny exploiting minority. The very continuation of capitalism, in fact, has become a danger to humanity’s survival, whether through war, ecological collapse, or a combination of both. So getting rid of the present system is not just a nice idea, it’s a historic necessity that is imposed on mankind. It’s possible because the system has set in motion forces that can overcome it: the productive capacity to create abundance and thus end exploitation, and a social class which has a material interest in making a revolution against capitalism, in abolishing capitalist social relations. But note that necessity does not equal inevitability: communism is possible, but so too is the other alternative: the collapse into total barbarism.
When we answer the question ‘what is communism’, it is often necessary to begin with negatives. Certainly by saying ‘it’s not the USSR, China or Cuba’. But more generally by showing what features of the present system have to be got rid of. We could, for example, say:
a) Communism is a society without classes. It’s a basic axiom of the dominant ideology that society always has one bunch of people at the top and the rest at the bottom, with a few in the middle. In other words, that class divisions have always existed and will always exist. In fact, class society is quite a recent invention historically speaking. For tens of thousands of years human beings lived in a ‘primitive’ form of communism, also imposed by necessity. Class divisions emerged over a long period but finally gave rise to the first ‘civilisations’. So communism does set itself a pretty ambitious task is saying it’s going to get rid of thousands of years of class exploitation, which took various forms before capitalism arrived on the scene (despotism, slavery, serfdom…). But at the same time the existence of primitive communism disproves the argument that there’s something ‘natural’ about class divisions. They arose at a certain stage of history because of the old egalitarian social relations became a barrier to the development of the productive forces; but the present social relations have themselves become a barrier to further progress; what is now needed is to get rid of class divisions and private property and create a true community, where all wealth is controlled by the community for its own needs, not for the needs of a privileged minority;
b) Because it’s a society without classes, it’s a society without a state. The state has not been there for all time but arose as society split into contending classes, with the function of preserving social cohesion in the interests of the dominant class. Get rid of class divisions and you get rid of the state. This is already an answer to all those who argue that the more the state controls the economy, the closer we get to socialism or communism;
c) Communism is a society without money. In other words: unlike in capitalism where everything is produced for sale and to make a profit, in communism the motive of production is to meet human needs. Money will become unnecessary because production and consumption are no longer mediated by exchange. Again, this is possible because it has finally become feasible to produce enough for everybody’s needs, so goods can be freely distributed, even if, as with the problem of the state, this can’t be solved overnight. And it’s a necessity because producing for profit is the source of all the contradictions of the capitalist economy – the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit and the crisis of overproduction. These contradictions once spurred capitalism to become a world wide system, and in this sense laid the foundations for communism, but at a certain point they became the source of growing catastrophes which demand a fundamental reorganisation of the whole system of production;
d) Communism is also a society without national frontiers. Capitalism developed the nation state as its ‘highest’ form of unity, but again, the very form of the nation state has become a fundamental obstacle, a danger for humanity, because capitalist competition has essentially become economic and military warfare between armed powers for the control of the globe. But despite this ‘war of each against all’, the system still functions as whole and it is impossible to escape its laws inside one region or country. The revolution has to be worldwide, and the new social organisation has to use all the earth’s resources in common. This is evident, for example, when it comes to dealing with the ecological crisis.
These are all negative definitions. Which doesn’t mean that communism is just negation. Marxists have always avoided ‘recipes’ but from the young Marx onwards there have been attempts to describe in positive terms what communism, especially in its more advanced phases, will be like: labour as a source of pleasure not torture; the fusion of work, science and art; man’s harmony with nature ‘without and within’ and thus the overcoming of the conflict between consciousness and instinct….
For us, these attempts by Marxists to describe the distant communist future are not ‘utopian’ because they are based on real human capacities: as Trotsky put it, the average human being will one day be as creative as Goethe or Shakespeare, but Goethe and Shakespeare are also only human, products of real human life. But they are also not utopian because communism is, as Marx put it, is “the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs”. In one sense, this movement is the movement of all the exploited and oppressed classes in history, but more specifically, it is the movement of the proletariat, the working class. From the beginning Marx based his understanding of communism on the recognition that there was a class in society whose struggle had an implicitly communist dynamic - a class which could only emancipate itself by emancipating the whole of society from thousands of years of exploitation.
The proletarian struggle contains a dynamic towards communism because this is a class that can only defend itself in an associated manner, through the widest possible solidarity – and the society of the future is a society founded on solidarity. It contains a dynamic towards communism because communism is the first society in history where mankind will have a conscious mastery of its own productive powers – and the class struggle of the proletariat cannot advance without becoming increasingly conscious of its methods and its goals. From the beginning therefore, these fundamental needs of the class movement, the need for solidarity and the need to become conscious of its goals, gave rise to organised forms – trade unions, mutual aid societies, cooperatives on the one hand; and political organisations or parties on the other. Constantly subject to the pressure of the dominant class and its ideology, these forms often disappeared or were captured by the enemy class, but the class struggle constantly gave rise to new forms more suited to its own evolution.
Thus, as capitalism reached the end of its ascendant course, as it entered its epoch of decline, the proletarian movement was no longer simply confronted with the need to define and defend itself within the existing order, but to turn defence into attack and mount a challenge to the very foundations of that order. Marx had deduced that the class struggle would lead to revolution from the first defensive skirmishes of proletarians hardly evolved from their artisan roots. But even in his lifetime the capacity of the working class to storm the heavens was demonstrated in practice by the Paris Commune, the first “workingman’s government”, the first indication of the capacity of the working class to overturn the existing state power and set up its own form of power. The capacity of the proletariat to organise itself as a force antagonistic to capital was further demonstrated by the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, and on an even higher level by the revolutionary wave that arose in response to the First World War, the highest point of all being the seizure of power by the soviets or workers’ councils in Russia. The workers’ councils, as Lenin observed, were the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A form which allowed the whole working class to regroup, to control its struggles through mass assemblies and revocable delegates, to fuse the economic and the political dimension of the struggle, to arm itself and destroy the bourgeois state. A form, finally, which allowed the consciousness of the working class to progress by leaps and bounds, influenced decisively by the intervention of the most advanced fraction of the class, the communist party.
The revolutionary wave that followed the war was defeated. In Russia, where the working class for the first time took power at the level of an entire country, the revolution was strangled by isolation and the very instruments that had served it at one stage turned against it at another. But from this tragic experience, vital lessons were learned, in particular: the necessity for the workers’ councils to maintain their autonomy from all other political institutions that may arise after the destruction of the old apparatus of power; the impossibility of the communist party taking on tasks that belong to the class as a whole, above all the exercising of political power; the understanding that the nationalisation of the economy does not mean a break with capitalist social relations.
Despite the historic defeat suffered by the working class at that time, despite all the horrors that followed in its wake - Stalinist and Nazi terror, a second imperialist world war – we do not therefore conclude that the communist revolution is an impossible dream, but remain determined to preserve and develop these lessons so that they can feed into the revolution of the future.
-International Communist Current
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2020 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.