Marx on Communism
This piece is a transcript I have written for a fantastic video by a anti-stalinist communist youtuber by the name of Red Plateaus. I did not come up with script or originally write these words, it is only a transcript.
Marx on Communism, By Red Plateaus
We live in a society where we go work for dictators every day, where the rich destroy the planet and those who try to stop them are thrown in jail, and where the fluctuations of the so-called ‘free market’ can destroy our lives at any time.
Most of us have never really known anything else. Marx’s goal was to aid the struggle for a truly free and democratic society, against alienation and unfreedom in all their forms. The real movement for all-round human emancipation he calls communism. But what is this communism and what is it moving towards?
A lot of liberal and utopian socialist plans for how they want to fix the world start from some sort of abstract notion of morality or justice, criticise modern society for failing in some way, and set out to give us their personal solutions to all our problems. Marx’s approach is different. Marx instead begins from a diagnosis of real capitalism, an understanding of how it operates, the forces and tendencies it gives birth to, the potentials for greater freedom and human development it carries within itself, and how it prevents these potentials from coming to fruition. For Marx, capitalism has made communism possible. Capitalism, he thinks, has already socialized and collectivized production.
Today, we overwhelmingly work not as individual craftspeople and farmers, but in large-scale agriculture, factories, and office buildings. It also gathers workers together into these collective places of work, unifies them under common interests, and develops the means of communication between them. Capitalism develops the forces of production to a level where the abundance of communism becomes possible and the communist movement can grow.
As workers are gathered together, unified by their interests, and better able to communicate, they begin to organize to pursue their own interests. To fight for better wages and conditions in the short term and for a free future society in the longer term. This is why, Marx thinks, that capitalism inevitably gives rise to workers’ movements and different strands of socialism.
This doesn’t mean that it is simply enough to sit back and wait for capitalism to abolish itself. Rather, it means that capitalism contains its own conditions of transcendence, by generating the social movement that is capable of replacing it. This explains why, for as long as we’ve had capitalism, we’ve had visions of its transcendence — ideas grown, nurtured, and developed by social movements emerging in opposition to it.
For Marx, communism is developed by and within workers’ movements and are the ideas that best reflect reality and both express and and further workers’ real interests as they themselves see them — that is, of universal human emancipation through working-class self-emancipation. Thus, Marx writes that: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. For Marx, communism is the seed that will grow into the future society that is already contained by capitalism. In this sense, capitalism is the mother, not the enemy, of communism. For Marx, communism doesn’t come to the workers’ movements from the outside — as it does according to social democrats like Kautsky. And communists don’t stand outside of and above the process developing working class struggle. Rather, communists are, or at least should be, an organic part of those movements who help to build them in order to grow them to maturity and take us to a new world.
Like a midwife, communists are to help our society to bring forth the new life it’s already pregnant with. Communism, for Marx, is not some ideal to strive for, but a real social movement towards a new society. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t say anything about what communism will look like. It’s well-known that Marx doesn’t provide is with any blueprints for what communism will be like.
He does, however, have some pretty clear ideas about the kind of society the communist movement will have to build to deliver on its promise of human emancipation and all-round human flourishing. This is not the kind of abstract theoretical speculation we find in the utopian socialists or among liberals, they are concrete generalizations based on and rooted in tendencies and movements of the present.
For Marx, “free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man” and communism is “the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being” It will realize “[f]ree individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth”.
This isn’t where human history ends, it’s where truly human history begins. Unlike capitalism, communism will feature “[u]niversally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control”. Thus, under communism, “individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association”.
To Marx, this requires four things. First, bottom-up democratic rule in all areas of society, replacing capitalism and the state. Marx writes that ‘[m]odern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals, unless it is controlled by all’. He writes of communism as a society where ‘class distinctions have disappeared, and all production is concentrated in the hands of associated individuals’. Importantly, it will be based on the ‘free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production’.
Secondly, this requires a form of bottom-up planning, not the top-down planning seen in modern states. This is to prevent not only ruling minorities but also impersonal domination by market forces from having power over or dominating people. Under communism, “society regulates the general production”, and he writes of communism featuring “the planned distribution of labor time among the various branches of production”. Nothing, could be more “absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money” This is “antithetical” to the “free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production”.
In Volume I of Capital, Marx asks us to “imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor-power in full self-awareness as one single social labor force”, regulating labor “in accordance with a definite social plan”. The “social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labor and the products of their labor, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution”
Thirdly, communism will end the hierarchical, capitalist division of labor. This is a society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
This doesn’t mean that activities aren’t organized, that people and institutions don’t get together to decide what does and doesn’t get done. It doesn’t mean end to subdividing tasks or to modern technology. It means that nobody is bound to one kind of activity only, or to an arbitrarily delimited set of productive and reproductive activities.
It means an end to arbitrary divisions between physical and mental labor. An end to excluding lots of workers from planning and managing their own work, and from doing a mix of both physical and mental labor. It means that nobody will be restricted to one kind of activity or profession for the rest of their lives. That people can decide for themselves what they want to do and how they want to contribute to society, subject to what those around them need.
Finally, communism will distribute goods and services according to a truly human criterion, hence the slogan: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” We can see how profoundly different this is from the institutions of countries like the Soviet Union who claimed to reflect Marx’s ideas. The Soviet Union did not feature the kinds of bottom-up democratic rule allowing people to take direct control over their own lives — institutions like these were indeed set up, but they quickly ceased to be organs of effective working-class self-rule. Its system of planning was bureaucratic and top-down, like modern states and large corporations. It kept — in fact often introduced — a highly hierarchical division of labor between managers and officials on the one hand and the mass of workers on the other. And it consistently failed to distribute according to need. These kinds of societies have not been able to replace capitalism, much less give us the communism that Marx talked about.
You may think they had any number of other strengths or weaknesses, and that they did important work in, for instance, resisting imperialism, but they don’t fit what Marx called communism. In fact, we think that it confirms Marx’s most important point: communism will be free or it will be nothing. This tells us a lot about what a free socialist society needs to be like, but not very much about how to reach it. If we want to understand what Marx thinks about this, we have to look at his views on human beings, society, and social change. We need to look at what is often called his theory or praxis, his dialectical method, and his historical materialism.
