💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › communism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:39:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Communism
Author: David Graeber
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: Communism, gift economy, mutual aid
Source: Chapter 19 (Pp. 199–210) in The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Edited by Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani

David Graeber

Communism

Communism may be divided into two chief varieties, which I will call

‘mythic’ and ‘everyday’ communism. They might as easily be referred to

as ‘ideal’ and ‘empirical’ or even ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’

versions of communism.

Mythic Communism (with a capital C) is a theory of history, of a

classless society that once existed and will, it is hoped, someday

return again. It is notoriously messianic in its form. It also relies on

a certain notion of totality: once upon a time there were tribes, some

day there will be nations, organized entirely on communistic principles:

that is, where ‘society’ — the totality itself — regulates social

production and therefore inequalities of property will not exist.

Everyday communism (with a small c) can only be understood in contrast

by rejecting such totalizing frameworks and examining everyday practice

at every level of human life to see where the classic communistic

principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according

to their needs’ is actually applied. As an expectation of mutual aid,

communism in this sense can be seen as the foundation of all human

sociality anywhere; as a principle of co-operation, it emerges

spontaneously in times of crisis; as solidarity, it underlies almost all

relations of social trust. Everyday communism then is not a larger

regulatory body that co-ordinates all economic activity within a single

‘society,’ but a principle that exists in and to some extent forms the

necessary foundation of any society or human relations of any kind. Even

capitalism can be seen as a system for managing communism (although it

is evidently in many ways a profoundly flawed one). Let me take each of

these in turn.

Mythic Communism

This is an idea of a society that either once existed or might exist at

some time in the future, which is free of all property divisions and

where all things are shared in common. Secondarily, it refers to social

experiments, often religious in inspiration, which try to recreate such

arrangements on a smaller scale in the present day. Finally, the term

has been applied more loosely to mass political movements or regimes

that aim to bring such a society about in the future.

Social movements that aimed to abolish all property divisions are

occasionally attested for the ancient world, from the Chinese ‘School of

the Tillers’ (c. 500 BCE) to Persian Mazdakites (c. 500 CE), as are

smaller sectarian groups (such as certain groups of Essenes) who formed

utopian communities based on communistic principles. Owing to the very

limited nature of our sources, it’s extremely difficult to establish how

common such movements really were, let alone to get an accurate picture

of their aims and ideologies. Most of human history — especially the

history of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas — is simply lost to us.

Yet these are precisely the parts of the world where such movements are

likely to have been most widespread and successful. Many of the

notoriously egalitarian societies of Amazonia and North America, for

example, lived on lands that, centuries earlier, had seen complex urban

civilizations. Are they better seen as refugees from the collapse of

those civilizations or as descendants of the rebels who overthrew them?

If the latter, might this suggest that their ideas and practices with

regard to land, nature, and property (which inspired many early European

conceptions of ‘primitive communism’ in the first place) are themselves

successful revolutionary ideologies of generations past? It seems

likely, but we simply do not know. Even African hunter-gatherers like

the !Kung, Hadza or Pygmies, so often treated as living fossils of the

Paleolithic, or egalitarian pastoralists like the Nuer or Maasai, live

in areas where there have been farmers, states and kingdoms for

thousands of years. It is not at all clear how much their rejection of

individualist property regimes or, for that matter, anything else about

their social organization really resembles what was common in the

Paleolithic or how much they represent a self-conscious rejection of the

values of surrounding populations.

To return to what we still like to call, for no particularly good

reason, the ‘Western tradition,’ the idea that property divisions have

not always existed recurs often in ancient authors and seems to have

been commonly held. It came to be enshrined in Roman Law through certain

passages of Justinian’s Digest which hold that property divisions are

not based on the laws of nature but, like war, government, slavery and

all forms of social inequality, arose only later through the ius gentium

(law of nations) — essentially, the usages of war. These passages were

widely discussed when Roman law was revived in twelfth-century Western

Europe, where attempts were made to square them with biblical accounts

of Eden and with the teachings of Jesus, the practices of the Apostles

and the writings of some of the early Church Fathers (such as Saint

Basil) who opposed the private ownership of wealth. The debate over

‘apostolic poverty’ that raged throughout the thirteenth century, most

famously between the Franciscans and Dominicans, was above all about the

legitimacy of private property itself and the feasibility of creating a

society without it. Such arguments within the Church echoed those of

popular religious movements — now remembered as ‘heresies’ — that became

quite common during the later Middle Ages in Europe, many of which, like

the Taborites, whose armies came to dominate much of Central Europe in

the fifteenth century, were explicitly communist. Similar movements of

religious communism emerged in early modern times, from the Diggers in

England to the Anabaptists in Germany, almost always to be harshly

suppressed by the authorities. One can find similar Christian communism

reflected in movements such as the Taiping rebels who at certain times

controlled substantial portions of nineteenth-century China.

It is a notorious feature of popular insurrections in traditional

societies that they tend to appeal either to a utopian view of a past

social order or to a messianic view of a future society shown by divine

revelation or sometimes, both. The idea that there was once a time when

social divisions did not exist (‘when Adam delved and Eva span, who then

was the gentleman?’) and that such a time will come again follows

naturally from this messianic vision.

It is not surprising then that a similar historical vision often came to

be invoked within the workers’ movements of the nineteenth century. It

was in this context that the word ‘Communism’ first came to be employed

in its present sense, somewhere between 1835 and 1845. For Marx,

Communism was the final end of revolutionary struggle, to be fully

achieved only after an indeterminate political conflict, and while he

argued that in one sense communism was already immanent in workers’

present-day self-organization against capitalism, he saw that struggle

as an ongoing process whose end simply could not be imagined using the

bourgeois categories that existed in his day. Hence his notorious

refusal to describe what communism might be like. In the one, famous

instance where he even came close to such a description, in The German

Ideology, he did not even attempt a science fiction vision but preferred

to fall back on images clearly inspired by ‘primitive communism’ once

As soon as the division of labour begins, each man has a particular,

exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he

cannot escape. He is a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or a critic and he

must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood;

whereas in communist 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 a hunter,

fisherman, shepherd, or critic.

Obviously all this is in a manner of speaking; Marx was not suggesting

that after the revolution most people would actually spend their time

occupied mainly in hunting and fishing — although he might have used

those examples in order to suggest that, under communism, the artificial

division we make between (painful) work and (pleasurable) leisure would

no longer make much sense. His real point here is that what we call

‘private property,’ ‘the division of labour’ and ‘social inequality’ are

all ultimately the same thing; and a free society, therefore, could only

be one that abolishes all three of them. This is why he insisted that

under Communism we would become, as he put it, a Species Being, defined

only by our common humanity, rather than being split into different

sorts of person who do different things. A practical manifestation of

this would have to be one where we are all free to move back and forth

between roles — even, apparently, gender roles, since Marx begins his

discussion of the division of labour with the division between men and

women — but, by appealing to an obviously fanciful primitive vision,

Marx intentionally avoids even speculating about how this might actually

work out.

Above all, for Marx, Communism meant overcoming the alienation produced

by property regimes, whereby our own deeds return to us in strange

unrecognizable forms, making it impossible for human beings to create

together a world that we might actually wish to live in:

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human

self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human

essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of

man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being — a return accomplished

consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.

This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as

fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution

of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man — the

true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between

objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity,

between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of

history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

After the release of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party

in 1848, the word came to be almost indelibly identified with their

specific political project, and the equally specific theoretical

analysis of class, capitalism, labour and exploitation on which it was

built. Nonetheless, it took some time before ‘communist’ simply became a

word for a kind of Marxist. For instance, the term ‘libertarian

communist’ was often used as a synonym for ‘anarchist.’ During much of

the nineteenth century, references to ‘communists’ in mainstream

literature most probably referred neither to Marxists nor to anarchists

but simply to proponents and creators of communes or similar utopian

experiments — ‘intentional communities’ as they would be called today —

a form of political action almost uniformly disdained by Marxists. A

good example of this usage is Charles Nordhoff’s famous study, The

Communistic Societies of the United States, published in 1875. This

usage of ‘communism’ never completely went away, and has returned in

essays like Call and The Coming Insurrection by the ‘Invisible

Committee’ today, where ‘communism’ is used to refer simply to the

internal organization of communes.

With the success of the Russian revolution this emphasis did largely

change, and over the course of the twentieth century ‘Communism’ has

been used more and more to refer to the ideology of Communist Parties

and then, by extension, to what came to be known by their opponents in

the Cold War as ‘Communist regimes.’ As a result, for many, if not most

of the world’s population, ‘Communism’ has come to mean ‘that economic

system that prevailed under the command economies of the former Soviet

Union and its allies, Maoist China, and other Marxist regimes.’ There is

a profound historical irony here, since none of those regimes ever

claimed to have actually achieved Communism as they themselves defined

it. They referred to their own systems rather as ‘socialist’ — embodying

a transitional period of the dictatorship of proletariat that would only

be transformed into actual Communism at some unspecified point in the

future, when technological advance, greater education and prosperity

would eventually lead to the withering away of the state.

Everyday communism

The phrase ‘actually existing socialism’ was coined as a term of

critique: socialist revolutionaries talked incessantly about regimes

they wished to create, but in almost no case wished their visions to be

judged by the actual achievements of regimes that referred to themselves

as ‘socialist.’ This raises the question: is it possible to speak of

‘actually existing’ communism? If we view things within a statist

framework and look for some unit which can be designated a ‘society’

organized on communistic principles, then clearly the answer would have

to be no. However this is not the only possible approach. I prefer to

identify a principle that, in combination with others, can be found in

all human societies to a variable degree. Because of its mundane

character, making it almost invisible to the normal gaze, I call it

‘everyday communism.’

In order to do so, it seems best to start from the classical definition

of communism — ‘from each according to their abilities, to each

according to their needs’ — and then examine those forms of organization

or human relationships that are organized according to that principle,

wherever one happens to find them. The origin of this phrase,

incidentally, is interesting. It is widely, but incorrectly attributed

to Karl Marx. It appears to have been a slogan current in the French

workers’ movement in the first decades of the nineteenth century; and it

first appears in print in a book called L’Organisation du travail by the

socialist agitator Louis Blanc in 1839. Blanc used it to describe the

organizational principles of the ‘social workshops’ he wished the

government to set up as a new basis for industry.

Marx only took up the phrase much later, in his Critique of the Gotha

Programme in 1875, and he used it in his own idiosyncratic way: for the

situation that he imagined would take hold in society as a whole once

technology had reached the point of guaranteeing absolute material

abundance, thereby making genuine human freedom possible. The idea that

communism in Louis Blanc’s sense, as a certain way of coordinating

labour or human activity, might exist in any human society however is

not entirely new. Peter Kropotkin, for instance, who is often referred

to as the founder of ‘anarchist communism,’ in Mutual Aid (1902) implies

something very much like the following analysis when he writes that

communism could best be seen simply as human co-operation, and

co-operation was the ultimate basis of all human achievement and indeed

of human life. However, what I am suggesting is even broader in scope.

1. Communism as co-operation

This is the way almost everyone behaves if they are collaborating on

some common project. At least they do unless there is some specific

reason not to — for instance, a hierarchical division of labour that

says some people get coffee and others will not. If someone fixing a

broken water pipe says ‘hand me the wrench,’ their co-worker will not

generally say ‘and what do I get for it?’ even if they are working for

Exxon-Mobil, Burger King or Goldman Sachs. The reason — ironically,

given the conventional wisdom that ‘communism just doesn’t work’– is

simple efficiency: if you really care to get something done, allocating

tasks by ability and giving people whatever they need to do the job is

obviously the most efficient way to go about it. What this means of

course is that command economies — putting government bureaucracies in

charge of co-ordinating every aspect of the production and distribution

of goods and services within a given national territory — tend to be

much less efficient than other available alternatives. In view of this,

it is hard to imagine how states like the Soviet Union could have

existed, let alone maintain themselves as world powers. The answer is

that even the most totalitarian bureaucracies can only function through

informal interpretation of the rules and co-operation between people who

work in them (see Informal Economy).

One might even say that it’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most

firms operate internally on communistic principles. True, they tend not

to operate particularly democratically. Most often they are organized by

military-style top-down chains of command. But still, there is often an

interesting tension here, because actually, top-down chains of command

are not really very efficient (they tend to promote stupidity among

those on top, resentment among those on the bottom). The more one has to

improvise, the greater the need for democratic co-operation. Inventors

have always known this and start-up capitalists and computer engineers

have recently rediscovered the principle: not only with things like

freeware, which everyone talks about, but even in the organization of

their businesses. Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by

(mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon

Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to

forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters — a

flood, blackout, revolution or economic collapse — people tend to behave

the same way, reverting to a kind of rough-and-ready communism.

Suddenly, if only for a short time, hierarchies, markets and the like

become luxuries that no one can really afford

2. Communism as baseline sociality

Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to its peculiar

qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human

society itself seems to be reborn. This is important because we are not

simply talking about co-operation. In fact, communism is the foundation

of all human sociability. This is what makes society possible. There is

always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be

expected to act on the principle of ‘from each according to their

abilities ...’ at least to a limited extent: for example, if you need to

work out how to get somewhere and a person has the ability to give you

directions, then they will.

Conversation is a domain particularly disposed to communism. This is not

to deny the importance of lies, insults, put-downs and other sorts of

verbal aggression — but most of them are built on a presumption of

communism, in the sense that an insult does not sting unless you assume

that people normally take others’ feelings into consideration; and it’s

impossible to lie to someone who does not expect you normally to tell

the truth. It is surely significant that, when we truly wish to break

off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.

The same goes for small courtesies

like asking for a light or even a cigarette. In such cases the costs of

providing are clearly considered to be so minimal that we comply without

even thinking about it. The same is true if another person’s need — even

a stranger’s — is spectacular and extreme: if they are drowning, for

example. If a child has fallen into the subway tracks, we assume anyone

who is capable of helping them up will do so.

I call this ‘baseline communism,’ the understanding that, unless people

consider themselves so completely inimical to one another and if the

need is considered great enough or the cost reasonable enough, the

principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according

to their needs’ will apply. Of course, different communities apply very

different standards to the question of what is a reasonable need: in an

impersonal urban environment it might be limited to lights and

directions; in many human societies, a direct request for food or some

other item of common consumption may be impossible to refuse. This is

especially true of the most ordinary, everyday sorts of food, which in

many societies, for this very reason, become ways of maintaining social

boundaries: as for instance in many European and Middle Eastern

societies where blood-feuds prevailed, men would hesitate to eat bread

and salt with a potential rivals because, if they did, it would no

longer be permissible to harm such a person.

Sharing food is indeed still considered to be the foundation of

morality, but of course it’s also one of the chief forms of pleasure

(who would really want to eat a delicious meal by themselves?). Feasts

are in most places seen as the apex of sociability. The elaborate games,

contests, pageants and performances that mark a popular festival, are,

like the structures of exchange that characterize society itself, built

on top of a kind of communistic base. In this case the experience of

shared conviviality is not only the moral basis of society but also its

most fundamental source of pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always

exist no doubt, but for most human beings, even now, the most

pleasurable activities almost usually involve sharing something: music,

food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, bed. There is thus a certain

communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.

Conclusions

The sociology of everyday communism is a potentially enormous field, but

one which, owing to our peculiar ideological blinkers, we have been

unable to write because we have been largely unable to see the object.

Marcel Mauss for instance spoke of ‘individualistic communism,’ such as

exists between close kin such as mothers and their children, usually

siblings, but also between close friends or blood brothers. In this

sense any ‘society’ might be imagined as threaded by endless communistic

networks. In such relationships, everything might be shared if the need

arises. In other relations between individuals, each is limited to only

a certain kind of claim on the other: to help them repair their

fishnets, aid them in war, or provide cattle for a wedding feast. Still

these can be considered communistic if the claim can be exercised

whenever there is a need. Similarly, there are groups within which all

members can make certain unlimited claims of this sort when in need:

mutual aid societies, mutual insurance associations, and the like.

Modern insurance firms are, ironically, commercial transformations of an

essentially communist principle. Finally any self-organized social

group, from a corporation to a football club to a religious

confraternity, will have particular rules about which sorts of things

must be shared, and about collective access to their common resources.

This of course shades into the literature on the collective management

of the commons, but it’s important to note that often, social groups

(starting with clans, villages, or the like) will make entirely

artificial rules to create mutual communistic dependence.

Anthropologists for example are familiar with the existence of moiety

structures, where a community divides itself into two arbitrary

divisions, each of which must rely on the other to build their houses,

provide ritual services, or bury each other’s dead, purely whenever the

other has a need.

Communistic relations exist in endless variety, but two common

characteristics always leap to the fore. The first is that they are not

based on calculation. It would never occur to one side of an Iroquois

village, for example, to complain that they had buried six of the other

side’s dead this year and the other side had only buried two of theirs.

This would be insane. When keeping accounts seems insane in this way, we

are in the presence of communism. The reason it seems so is because

everyone must die and the two sides of the village will always

presumably be there to bury one another’s dead, so keeping accounts is

obviously pointless. This brings out the second point: unlike exchange,

where debts can be cancelled out immediately, or in the relatively short

term, communism is based on the presumption of eternity. One can act

communistically with those one treats as if they will always exist, just

as society will always exist, even if (as with, say, our mothers) we

know at a more cerebral level that this is not really true.

We might thus analyse human relations as tending to take one of three

forms: communistic relations, hierarchical relations, or relations of

exchange. Exchange is based on principles of reciprocity, but this means

that either relations are cancelled out immediately (as in the market,

when there is immediate payment), or eventually, when a gift is returned

or a debt repaid. Human relations based on exchange are inherently

temporary, but egalitarian at least in the sense that when the payment

is made, the two parties return to equal status. Hierarchy is not based

on a principle of reciprocal exchange but rather of precedent: if one

gives a gift to a superior or inferior, one is likely to be expected to

do it again under similar circumstances. Hierarchy resembles communism

in that it is assumed to be permanent, and therefore tends not to

involve the calculation of accounts; except that communism, of course,

tends to be resolutely egalitarian in its basis.

Several radical implications follow. I will end with one. If we accept

this definition, it gives us a new perspective on capitalism. It is one

way of organizing communism. Any widely distributed economic principle

must be a way of organizing communism, since co-operation and the trust

intrinsic to baseline sociality will always be the foundations of human

economy and society. The question for those of us who feel capitalism is

a bad way of organizing communism or even an ultimately unsustainable

one is what would a more just way of organizing communism look like? One

specifically that would discourage the tendency of communistic relations

to slide into forms of hierarchy. There are grounds for believing that

the more creative the form of labour, the more egalitarian the forms of

co-operation will tend to be. So perhaps the key question is: how might

we contrive more egalitarian and creative forms of human co-operation

that are less hierarchical and stultifying than those we currently know?