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Title: What is communism? Author: Paul Bowman Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: Communism, introductory, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 9th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/extra/communism.html Notes: This article is from Red & Black Revolution (no 10, Winter 2005)
What is communism? Well according to the Concise Oxford dictionary,
communism is
“1 a political theory derived from Marx, advocating class war and
leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each
person is paid and works according to his or her needs and abilities. 2
(usu. Communism) a the communistic form of society established in the
USSR and elsewhere.”
If that was correct then this would be a very short article. However, as
so often, the Concise Oxford is wrong again. In fact the terms socialism
and communism appear in England around the 1820s as terms adopted by
members of the cooperative movement who were sick of hearing their
politics referred to as “Owenism”. Originally the two terms were
undifferentiated but by the 1840s communism was used by revolutionaries
to differentiate themselves from reformists such as J.S.Mill who had
adopted socialism to cover an indigestible mess of reformisms.
By the 1870s the terms had moved from differentiating means to
distinguishing ends. The proper Oxford English Dictionary notes in its
sources:
“Forster Diary 11 May in T. W. Reid Life (1888) .... I learn that the
great distinction between communism and socialism is that the latter
believes in payment according to work done and the former does not”.
It is this meaning of communism as opposed to socialism that evolved in
the late nineteenth century that this article discusses. Of course its
not that important to get hung up on a name, for many people the Concise
definition of communism being something to do with Marx and the USSR is
the one they know. For us the name of the post-capitalist society we aim
to help construct is a detail, what matters is the content of the ideas.
Nonetheless for the purposes of this article we need to choose a name so
we stick with the historical one.
As long as society has been divided into the privileged and the
exploited there has been resistance and that resistance has found voice
and expression in the language of the oppressed seeking to define the
road to their freedom. Communism, however is the product of the rise of
capitalist society and the new conditions of oppression and new
possibilities for freedom it brought. The introduction of capitalism
involved the struggle for power of a new class excluded from the
governance of pre-capitalist agrarian based society and the voice they
found to express and direct that struggle was political economy.
Communism then begins as the other new class, the proletariat or working
class, seeks to find its voice and finding itself in contest with the
emerging capitalist class is forced to take on confront and subvert the
voice of their opponent. Thus communism as a discourse begins as a
response to political economy.
Political economy begins with the work of Adam Smith in the late 17^(th)
century. Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” was a project of leaving behind the
religious discourse of the previous century’s Civil War where political
tendencies couched their class aspirations and ambitions in the language
of theology. To do so he followed the enlightenment push to create a
secular, rational and “scientific” discourse which attempted to avoid
the murderous and indeterminable controversies of religion by reference
to “facts”. The aim was to determine the best course of government
action or policy directed to the end of increasing overall wealth. In
order to do this the challenge was to define a reliable measure of
wealth or “value”. Given the history of inflation, currency alone was
clearly not viable as a direct measure. In the end Smith settled for a
theory of value based on the amount of labour embodied in goods
produced.
This was the basis of what was to be further developed by subsequent
political economists such as James Mill and David Ricardo as the “labour
theory of value” — that is the theory that the underlying value of that
makes a given amount of grain exchangeable for a given amount of wrought
iron or cloth is determined by the average amount of labour time
necessary for the production of each product. The main question
addressed by Smith’s political economy was how changes in the
distribution of wealth affected the rate of growth of the overall wealth
of the nation. The main argument was that those government policies
which, through taxation, re-distributed wealth from the manufacturing
and commerce sectors to the land-owners retarded growth as the latter
group, being unwilling to re-invest the extra income into more
wealth-generating industry, simply frittered it away in excess personal
consumption.
From the outset political economy was a subject with an agenda, namely
that of defending the interests of the rising manufacturing classes
against those of the dominant land-owning gentry and aristocracy who had
a monopoly on governmental power. At the same time, through the
arguments of political economists like Thomas Malthus, they argued
against the effectiveness of the Poor Relief taxes the manufacturing
bosses had to pay for the feeding of the poor and unemployed during
periods of economic slump and high unemployment. This latter aspect came
particularly to the fore in the great economic slump that followed the
ending of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 [?] and the struggle around the
proposed legalisation of unions in 1824.
One of the first people to critically engage with political economy and
attempt to turn it around to defend the improvement of the condition of
the working class and rural poor was the scion of an Anglo- Irish
landowning family from West Cork by the name of William Thompson. Born
in 1775 in Cork, the young Thompson had been an enthusiastic supporter
of the enlightenment, republicanism and the French Revolution. He later
became a leading figure in the Co-operative movement in radical
opposition to Robert Owen.
In the 1820s, outraged by the use of political economy by a local
“eminent speaker” to argue the supposed necessity and benefit of the
absolute poverty of the “lower orders” Thompson set about an
investigation into political economy which resulted in his “An Inquiry
into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to
Human Happiness” of 1824. As the lengthy title indicates his attention
was like the political economists also focused on the effects of the
distribution of wealth, however his yardstick for the outcome was the
utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” rather than the
overall abstraction of the “wealth of the nation”.
He addressed Bentham’s three principles governing distribution — the
right to security, the right to the produce of labour and the right to
subsistence. The right to subsistence was the principle of distribution
by need which, in Bentham’s reasoning, had to be subordinate to the
right to the produce of labour which recognised the priority of the
producers claim to the product of his or her own labour. Bentham
over-ranked both with the right to security i.e. that the individual’s
right to his or her existing property had to be defended from arbitrary
abstraction by society or all medium to long term incentives to economic
activity would be nullified by the possibility of having any gains taken
away in the future.
Thompson’s first point of attack was to recognise that under the guise
of the right to security Bentham and the utilitarians were in fact
defending the existing property status quo without any interest into the
legitimacy of how this division of ownership had come about. In
Thompson’s native West Cork it was easy to recognise that the monopoly
of land by the Anglo-Irish protestant ascendancy had been brought about
not through thrift, hard work and parsimonious virtue but by military
main force. Further Thompson exposed that exchanges between the
dispossessed and property-monopolising classes could not be seen as free
or equal in any way as the propertyless had to accept unfair wages for
the sale of their labour under duress of starvation as the alternative.
Thompson went on to analyse the process of exploitation of the wage
labourer by their employers and how the lion’s share of the product was
appropriated by the latter as surplus value in an account later adopted
by Marx.
From here Thompson moved to posit a system of “free exchange” where
equal access to land and the means of production was guaranteed to all,
but distribution was governed by the right to the produce of labour
taking precedence over the right to subsistence. As the anarchist
historian Max Nettlau noted “[Thompson’s] book, however, discloses his
own evolution; having started with a demand for the full product of
labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with his
own conversion to communism, that is to unlimited distribution”.
That is, having proposed a system based on the right to the full product
of labour he re-examined it compared to a system of equal distribution
by the same utilitarian yardstick that he had used to dismiss the status
quo and found, to his initial surprise that the system of “free
exchange” was inferior to that of unlimited equal distribution. In
examining the hypothetical system of “free exchange” he discovered its
competitive nature — the term “competitive” in fact was first applied to
describe capitalist exchange by him. The evils Thompson ascribed to the
competitive system were not simply ethical or moral — that the system
made each look upon his or her peers as rivals and means to an end — but
also in terms of efficiency — that competition would encourage people to
hide their innovations and discoveries and that market intelligence
would also be kept secret thus causing waste and inefficiency.
In the year Thompson’s “Distribution of Wealth” was published he spent
much time in London engaging in a series of public debates defending the
rights of trade unions against the bourgeois political economists such
as J. S. Mill and also on the way forward for the workers with Thomas
Hodgskin at the newly formed London Mechanics Institute.
Thomas Hodgskin was the son of a storekeeper at the naval dockyards at
Chatham Kent and had served in the British navy during the Napoleonic
wars. Expelled from the navy at the end of the war due to conflict with
upper ranks, he became a radical journalist and a fierce critic of
authority and the upper classes. He shared with Thompson the view that
the upper classes monopoly on land and the means of production allowed
them to exploit those compelled by necessity to sell their labour to
them. Where he differed with Thompson was that he considered the right
to the full product of labour freed from capitalist exploitation to be
the ultimate goal of radical reform. In Hodgskin’s vision groups of
workers organised as unions, could take possession of the means of
production and exchange their products amongst each other on a “market”
basis. The ensuing debate between Hodgskin and Thompson resulted in the
publication of “Labour Defended” and “Labour Rewarded” respectively and
in many ways outlined the division between the advocates of socialism
and communism that has continued to run through the radical
anti-capitalist movement to this day.
In the end it was Hodgskin’s analysis that won out over Thompson’s.
Thompson suffered the marginalising effects of his West Cork base, his
early death and his association with the strategy of setting up
experimental communities. In addition his theoretical writings were too
lengthy, challenging and, above all, too expensive for the ordinary
worker to afford. In contrast Hodgskin was concise and skilled in making
his arguments in a language the ordinary worker could both readily
understand and re-use amongst his or her peers. Above all Hodgskin was
“good enough” for the purposes of the nascent trades union movement.
Radical enough to turn the tables on the political economy of the bosses
but avoiding the truly radical total inversion of the existing order
that Thompson’s proto-communism called for. With Hodgskin the trade
union agitators could conjure up the vision of a future society free of
the worker’s exploitation by the bosses but still retaining the
familiarity of money and exchange. The “natural wage” undiminished by
the exploitative abstractions by the capitalists and landlords.
Just as the crushing defeat and savage repression of republican
revolution in Ireland and Britain pushed Thompson and Hodgskin, the
cooperators and trade unionists to steer their frame of action away from
the society-wide or revolutionary scope, so the fact of the revolution
in France cast all progressive thought into this framework. However it
was also exclusively a statist and authoritarian framework until
Proudhon broke the mould by proposing a society-wide and revolutionary
solution that did away with the state. Despite his originality in
breaking with the statist stranglehold on French radical thought,
Proudhon still retained many reactionary elements in his outlook. It was
his neanderthal stance on the emancipation of women that provoked a
young sympathiser of the new anarchist ideal, Joseph Dejacque, to first
openly break with and attack Proudhon’s failings. But in addition to
taking him to task for his opposition to female emancipation Dejacque
also denounced Proudhon’s economic critique of capitalism as inadequate
and incomplete. Proudhon’s position was in fact similar to Hodgskin in
aiming for the elimination of the monopolies on land and means of
production by the capitalist and landlord classes, but the retention of
the wage, money and exchange as the means of organising the transmission
of goods between producers. In other words, capitalism without
capitalists.
In Dejacque’s view this is too conservative. Taking Proudhon’s slogan of
“property is theft” to its, as he saw it, logical conclusions Dejacque
denounced as property claims any claim by producers on that part of what
they had produced that was not for their own consumption or use. In this
context he distinguishes between possessions — those goods you have
reasonable exclusive claim over for your own use — and property claims —
where you seek to deny others the use of goods that you have no use for
yourself. Dejacque uses the example of a shoemaker who can make shoes of
his or her own size and to their personal taste and claim them as their
own possessions to use. The same shoemaker can also make for different
sizes of feet and different tastes or fashions. These latter shoes are
not possessions as the shoemaker is not intending to use them
personally. Instead in claiming them as property he or she is denying
their use to others, in effect holding them hostage until they can be
exchanged for other goods the maker judges to be of enough value to
satisfy them.
Dejacque’s critique of exchange is couched very much in the language of
justice and injustice coming out of the enlightenment discourse of the
French Revolution. It lacks the fullness of Thompson’s more laboured and
wide-ranging critique of capitalist political economy, yet it integrates
the aim of communism into the whole of a revolutionary and explicitly
anti-state and anarchist goal. As such Dejacque is the first libertarian
or anarchist communist. Though Dejacque identified himself as an
anarchist and, through the title of his periodical, introduced the term
libertarian as a synonym for the same, he did not attach the label
communism to his economic ideas.
This label was at the time being used by proponents of the authoritarian
and statist conspiracies Proudhon had struck out against. Specifically
the Communist League which includes at that time the German radicals
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. The latter producing the “Communist
Manifesto” for the league.
In his studies in the 1840s, Marx had come across the work of both
Thompson and Hodgskin and from their common ground critique of
capitalist exploitation he takes the broad outline of his critique of
the same in “Capital” and other works. However on the issue of the main
contention dividing the two Marx ended up choosing neither one nor the
other. Concentrating most of his effort on elaborating the critique of
capitalist political economy already outline by Thompson and Hodgskin in
the 1820s, Marx wrote remarkably little on the principles governing
post-capitalist society. What little he wrote in the “Critique of the
Gotha Programme” seems an attempt to reconcile the two opposing
principles. On the one hand Marx argues that as society emerges from
capitalism with the expropriation of the land and means of production
from the landowning and capitalist classes, it must retain the forms of
money, the wage and exchange. This, Marx’s “lower phase of communism”
(which n.b. is not communist in the way this term is used in this
article) corresponds to Hodgskin’s vision of capitalism without
capitalists. Yet on the other hand, Marx sees this first stage not as an
end in itself but only as a transitional stage towards the “higher phase
of communism” corresponding to Thompson’s vision of a society from which
wage, money and exchange have been abolished. Marx’s attempt at a
synthesis of the two positions is undeveloped and fails to answer basic
questions. Namely why the first stage is not a sufficient goal in
itself, how exactly does the first stage create the (unspecified)
conditions for the second stage and how and when does the transition
from one to the other actually take place?
These failings in Marx’s work are in many ways the flipside about
strengths and originality of the other aspects of his contribution.
Whereas Thompson, Hodgskin and Dejacque approached the problem of social
liberation from the ahistorical starting points of utilitarianism,
radical and enlightenment revolutionary analysis respectively, Marx
brings the perspective of historical development from his Hegelian
background. Whereas the previous three were all acutely aware of the
clashing interests of the labouring and owning classes and the extent to
which the bosses ideologies suited their class interests, it is Marx
that puts forward the theory of the class struggle as the motor of
history. What is original in Marx’s “Capital” is not the theory of
exploitation and surplus value which he inherits from Thompson, but the
role of class struggle in limiting the working day and shaping the
introduction of productivity-enhancing technology as a response to
working class resistance to exploitation. This focus on the historical
and contestational dynamics of the process is what gives Marx’s work
continuing relevance to theorists today, yet it is accompanied by a lack
of attention to specifics of the goal of a post-capitalist society.
Despite his many contributions, Marx’s work on its own represents a
backwards step in comparison to Thompson’s work when it comes to
investigating the social relations of a post-capitalist society.
Economy
By the late nineteenth century, the legal proponents of capitalist
political economy realised they faced huge challenges which necessitated
a major change of direction. Continuing the line of development of
classical political economy was no longer a viable option for them. Some
of the reasons were technical — classical political economy saw only the
production of physical goods as wealth-producing and had no account of
the economics of the service industry. Other reasons were more
historical — in international terms the classical political economists
had been fierce critics of colonialism and the war in America as
policies that taxed the wealth-producing manufacturing industry but
benefited only the then dominant landowning and aristocratic class.
Historically classical political economy had been the agitational
propaganda of a capitalist class excluded from power. Now, in the late
nineteenth century that same class had now been brought into the
governing class through political reform, and many of them now had an
interest and share in the profits of the “New Imperialism” of the late
Victorian era. Most importantly the capitalist class had never
considered that the discourse of political economy could be taken from
them and used to enable the real wealth-producing class — the working
class — to articulate its own interests and critique of power. To
address all these issues a new generation of apologists of power stepped
forward to take the political out of economics and re-make this “social
science” (1) as a technical tool for market analysis for capitalists.
So anxious was William Jevons, one of the first of these post-classical
economists, to undo the damage of the labour theory of value, that he
claimed that the price of goods and services were set by demand alone,
with no link to the amount of labour involved in their production.
Naturally this extreme position was completely unsustainable in practice
so Jevon’s theories were eclipsed by those of Alfred Marshall who
grudgingly admitted labour cost as one of cost factors involved in
determining price. Lest anybody think this position made him any less of
an enemy of socialism than Jevons, Marshall was quick to make his
political perspective clear from the outset, stating his opposition to
the “socialist programme” on the grounds that “the collective ownership
of the means of production would deaden the energies of mankind and
arrest economic progress”. It was Marshall who eventually produced the
theory of marginal utility and the supply and demand price curve diagram
that today graces the front of all conventional economics text books.
The neo-classical economists ditching of the labour theory of value was
only achieved by abandoning the central aim of political economy — that
of finding a measure of value with which to gauge the rate of growth of
the national economy and the impact of government policy on this growth.
Consequently by abandoning the measure of value to focus on the
determination of price alone, the neo-classicists threw out the baby
with the bathwater. Their resulting framework was indeed useful as a
technical tool for capitalists for calculating prices and investment
opportunities, but for overall policy their “marginalist revolution” was
itself of marginal utility.
The need for a theory that addressed “the big picture” led to the
evolution of “macroeconomics” which in turn relegated the
neo-classicists efforts to microeconomics. The problem for
macro-economists remained the same as for the original political
economists, how to get a stable measure of wealth undistorted by
monetary inflation. In the end the measure they have chosen is the
Retail Price Index (in the UK — similar indexes exist by different names
in different countries). This is an index based on a basket of gods to
reflect the consumption of an “average” worker which additions to
reflect utility and housing costs, etc. In other words a measure of the
cost of labour. The RPI is thus the re-introduction of the labour theory
of value as a base measurement of the value of money. In this and other
areas such as development economics honest commentators have had to
admit the practical need to re-introduce a measure of the value of
labour as a base unit of analysis.
It is worth taking a parenthesis to examine why the valuing of products
by the labour time necessary for their production has lasting appeal to
the extent that our everyday existence in capitalist society continually
reinforces it as a seemingly “natural” measure. Partly this is because
there is a biological basis — any living organism must ensure that the
calories it gains from its activity must at least balance the calories
it burns up in staying alive and active for that same time period or
else it will perish. For a large part of human history, until relatively
recently fro most of us, human economic activity has not moved that far
away from that biological basis. While most economic activity was in the
agricultural production of basic food subsistence and most of that work
measured in physical effort over time, care had to be taken that the
exchange of goods produced in the marginal time surplus to the
production of basic subsistence had to be exchanged for a similar amount
of time value otherwise the eventual outcome would be lack of food.
Although today we live in a world revolutionised productivity-wise by
capitalism where less than 5% of societies labour goes into basic food
production and we have been in a global food surplus for half a century,
it is no surprise that we have not yet adjusted to a post
calorifically-limited world. Yet the basis of estimating the “going
rate” of time necessary for production of a given good or service is
that the process of production is such that most people are capable of a
similar rate of production. As we will see below, that assumption
becomes less and less tenable as the division of labour increases and
production moves more and more away from basic physical effort and more
towards intellectual problem solving or creative work.
Although Dejacque had died penniless and isolated in the 1860s,
despairing of any real progress towards libertarian communism being
achieved for centuries, yet by the 1870s the ideas of libertarian
communism were taking root amongst some of the followers of Bakunin in
the First International. Through the French anarchist brothers Elie and
Elisee Reclus, the Swiss militants of the Jura Federation like James
Guillaume and the Italian section of the International, including Errico
Malatesta, Andrea Costa and Carlo Cafiero — a one time secretary to Marx
sent by the latter to Italy to convert the Italian International to
Marxism, he ended instead being converted to anarchism. During the
period of the struggle in the International between Marx and Bakunin
these militants preferred not to challenge Bakunin over the issue of
collectivism. Bakunin’s collectivism defended the right to the full
product of labour like Hodgskin, along with the consequent distribution
of products by hours worked — i.e. the wage — and exchange.
In the wake of the definitive split in the International and Bakunin’s
subsequent death, these restraints were lifted. The term “anarchist
communism” first appeared in print in publications of the Swiss
anarchists in 1876 and in the Summer of that year the Florence Congress
of the Italian International resolved to abandon collectivism and adopt
communism as their aim, stating: “We believe that the necessary
complement to the common ownership of the means of production is the
common ownership of the products of labour”. Through the work of the
Italian, Swiss, French and individual militants like the Russian
Kropotkin, libertarian communism became not simply an idea but the aim
and goal of European-wide revolutionary movement.
Yet that movement’s clarity of vision in relation to its goal suffered a
weakness of analysis of the progress of the class struggle and the
dynamic that could lead from capitalism to its overthrow. Consequently
the actions of the libertarian communist minority’s militants tended
towards voluntarist attempts at insurrection such as the failed
Benevento uprising by the Italians or clandestine armed action or
assassination attempts against representatives of the bosses or ruling
aristocracy. The failure of this “propaganda by the deed” era of the
movement led towards the turn to syndicalism as a way of re-engaging
with the practical class struggles of the mass of workers. However,
despite its many positive effects, this form of re-engagement with the
living process and dynamic of the class struggle brought with it
problems.
Syndicalism as a theory proposed a seductive confusion of means and ends
at once distinct from and yet in other ways analogous to that offered by
Marxist and statist currents of socialism. On the one hand syndicalism
opposed the use of state power to introduce post-capitalist society.
Syndicalism proposed the direct exercises of power by the democratically
federated trades unions themselves. As the productive organisations of
the working class, this held out the prospect of the direct management
of society by the producers themselves without the intermediary of the
state. But on the other hand, just as the Marxist reduction of the
question of social emancipation to the task of the Marxist party seizing
state power, so syndicalism too reduced the question of social
transformation to the question of power, albeit power to the
organisations of the workers rather than the state under “revolutionary”
dictatorship. Just as the Marxist tendencies concentration on the
question of power had led them to neglect the question of the shape of
the future relations of post-revolutionary society, so the syndicalist
focus on power, albeit in a different form, similarly led to a tendency
of at best agnosticism and at worst indifference to the question of
whether post-capitalist society should be socialist or communist.
Inevitably there was a tendency within syndicalism to consider the
question an irrelevancy and drift, by default, towards the old
Hodgskinian utopia of capitalism without capitalists.
The tendency was aggravated in Spain which, isolated from the rest of
Western European anarchism, had not followed the break with Bakuninist
collectivism and adopted the compromise position of the choice between
collectivism/socialism and communism to be left for individual
communities to decide for themselves in the post-revolutionary period.
In fact the effects, if not necessarily the cause, of this political
agnosticising tendency within syndicalism came to be recognised as a
threat by the Spanish anarchist movement to the extent that they found
it necessary to form a specifically anarchist political organisation —
the AIT — to combat reformist tendencies within the CNT.
But in the end it was the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany followed
by the defeat in Spain which ended the “classical” phase of libertarian
communism as a movement in the 1930s (2), caught in a pincer movement
between fascism and stalinism.
It is time to pause the narrative of the historical emergences, eclipses
and re-emergences of libertarian communism to examine, in the abstract,
what it is. A libertarian communist society is not a pre- but a
post-capitalist society. That is it is a society that is economically
dominated by social or cooperative production — i.e. there is an
advanced division of labour with only a small minority of labour being
engaged in basic food production and most labour is engaged in producing
goods or services that are mostly consumed by others. As a corollary
there is a high level of communication and general scientific and
technological development. What distinguished libertarian communism from
capitalism is that the delivery or transmission of goods and services to
their consumers is done on the basis to the satisfaction of their needs
and desires not linked or restricted in any way to their contribution to
the production process. That is there is no money or wages and products
are not exchanged either for money or for other products judged to be of
equal value — whether that value be measured in labour time necessary
for its production or some other hitherto undreamt of measure.
Stated baldly like that to those used to the workings and logics of
capitalist society — and that is all of us these days — it seems at
first sight an absurdity or at the very least an unworkable pipe-dream.
To explain the existence of libertarian communists then, it is necessary
to add the following proviso: Libertarian communists believe that
private property (in the means of production), class society, money and
the wage relation are all interrelated aspects of capitalist society and
the attempt to change society to abolish some of those aspects while
retaining others — e.g. abolishing class society and private property
while retaining money and the wage as socialism proposes — will only
result in an unstable and violently contradictory mess that can only end
in collapsing back into the relative stability of the capitalist dynamic
unless it is taken forward to full communism. In other words libertarian
communists believe that attempts to make a post-capitalist society by
halves, such as socialism proposes, are doomed to end up being
transitional stages not to communism but to capitalism — as in fact the
historical experience of the 20^(th) century has born out, at least as
far as the project of Marxian state socialism is concerned. The
libertarian communist critique of Leninism and all its unpalatable 57
different varieties is not that it is not libertarian, but that it is
not communist.
On that point we must emphasise that by using the term libertarian or
anarchist communism we are signalling our opposition to the abuse of the
word communism by the state socialists, not that we have chosen an
alternative to authoritarian or state socialism because these latter
phrases are contradictions in terms. The state relies on the wage
relation to exercise any authority, indeed to even exist. Without paid
enforcers the state cannot exercise power as the Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic discovered when he stopped paying the wages of the
Serbian riot police who were supposed to be repressing the
demonstrations of other unpaid public sector workers on the streets of
Belgrade.
In this sense communism is always libertarian or anarchist as the
abolition of the wage brings about the abolition of the relation of
command which structures the organs of state power such as the police,
army and bureaucracy.
Though the failings of state socialism have been amply exposed by recent
history, we do need to re-examine the case of proposed libertarian
socialism — a society where land and the means of production have been
taken into common ownership but the products of labour are owned by
their producers and exchanged for the products of others on the basis of
equal value measured by labour time embodied in them. It is the
contention of libertarian communists that such a system would make all
producers into competitors with each other. The system of exchange
valued by labour time introduces the “productivity paradox” — the longer
you take to produce a given output the more of another’s output you can
exchange it for. Conversely the more efficient you are in producing your
output, the less you get in exchange for it. The productivity paradox is
that labour value incentivizes inefficiency and disincentivizes
efficiency. This is why capitalism necessitates that the promotion of
efficiency is specialised off as a management function over and against
the interests of the productive workforce. The roots of class conflict
in production are to be found in the productivity paradox arising
directly out of exchange by labour time value itself.
The system of competition of individual interests also produces the
negative effects of people seeing each other as potential rivals rather
than as allies and promoting their narrow sectional interests rather
than the general good. Thus we have doctors who are paid to treat
disease and unsurprisingly they have little interest in disease
prevention.
But by far the greatest evil resulting from the system of individual
competition — bellum omni contra omnes, the war of all against all — is
the outcome that our most important social product, the society we live
in, becomes an alien impersonal “other” that none of us control yet we
are all controlled by. By competing all against all to maximise our
little individual share of the social product to own, we lose the
ownership of the society we live in. Libertarian communists believe that
trading in the measly shares of the social product we own under
capitalist relations and in return gaining the ownership and control
over the direction of the whole society we make will result in a net
gain for all both materially and in terms of freedom.
Fine words indeed, but it logically follows that if the trading in of
individual ownership rights over the product of ones own labour in
return for the common ownership of a post-capitalist society were to
result in a net loss for all or most of humanity then libertarian
communists would be shown to be mistaken and those who preach the
capitalist gospel that the end of history has come and that the
capitalist world is truly the best of all possible worlds would be
proved right.
Up until recently this was seen by all sides as a question that could
not be settled this side of a revolution — without making the
experiment. However in the last few years new developments taking place
even within current capitalist society have thrown this pre-conception
into doubt.
Before we re-engage with a historical narrative to examine these recent
developments we need to examine some other aspects of the productive
process, both as it has developed under capitalism and how it can be
expected to further develop under post-capitalist relations.
The first tendency is the increasing de-territorialisation of
production. By that we mean the increase of the number of fields of
production that are not tied to a specific place. Food production via
agriculture is territorial or tied to a specific place. The bit of land
from which you harvest must also be the same bit of land you previously
prepared and sowed. Consequently for those people and those periods of
history where agricultural subsistence was the dominant mode of
production, settled living in or by the territory of production was the
norm for the greatest number. Those settled agricultural communities
unified the spheres of production, consumption, reproduction and nearly
all social interaction within a single space. This largely
self-sufficient and potentially self-governing community is a social
form that has existed for centuries throughout nearly all human cultures
around the globe up until the last century or tow of capitalist
upheaval. As such it still had a powerful hold over the political
imaginations of anarchists no less than the rest of the different
progressive tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The Russian “Mir” influenced Kropotkin’s vision of
libertarian communism just as the Spanish, particularly Andalusian
“pueblo” influenced the vision of the CNT’s Isaac Puentes.
But as the productivity levels and related division of labour increase a
larger and larger percentage of the working population are pushed out of
agriculture, out of the rural setting and into urban spaces. In the
beginning some of these non-agricultural settlements were themselves
based around territorially-specific sites of production — whether mines,
fishing harbours or river crossing points. This last case points us
towards an important feature — non-agricultural settlements necessarily
imply the existence of flows of goods and people, if only in bringing to
the urban spaces the food they cannot produce. In fact even prior to the
development of urban spaces, agricultural settlements required
interaction with marginal but indispensable itinerant populations to
bring them goods impossible to produce locally and be the medium of
communication of news and culture from afar. Despite the often deep
divides of incomprehension and mutual suspicion between settled and
itinerant communities and the tendency of the numerically superior
former to discount or “forget” the latter from inclusion in the notion
of “productive society”, the two bodies are both mutually interdependent
elements of the social whole despite the de-territorialised nature of
the itinerant minorities contribution.
As industrialisation proceeded, the creation of large centralised mass
workspaces with large immovable plant continued the appearance of
territorially-specific production. At this stage the workforces of large
mills or factories lived in their shadow and the workforce walked to
work. Industrial disputes were neighbourhood affairs.
However as the continuing specialisation, sub-division and proliferation
of the different strands of social production has progressed it has
become more and more evident that an increasing amount of production is
not territorially specific. That is, many workplaces can be moved more
or less arbitrarily from one place to another. [globalisation & class
struggle?] This de-territorialisation of production is particularly
pronounced for those engaged in non-material production — i.e. the
production of information and communicative work, an increasingly
significant sector of social production. Communication is a necessary
part of any social production process and as long as face-to-face
communication was unrivalled, in terms of cost and effectiveness, the
workplace had the irreplaceable role of the physical assembly point for
that communication. Recently, with advances in telecommunications we
have seen the emergence of the ultimately de-territorialised social
production process — one that no longer has any “work-place” at all
where the participants need to assemble.
One social sphere remains territorially specific for the majority
settled population however — the domestic sphere, i.e. where we live.
What has changed is that this domestic and reproductive sphere no longer
maps directly onto a productive sphere. In a given urban neighbourhood
the residents will typically be engaged in many diverse productive
roles, attending many different workplaces or no static workplace at
all. Similarly in the static workplaces the workers will be from many
different neighbourhoods. Unlike the rural commune there is no longer a
single unifying point of assembly where all matters affecting
production, consumption and reproduction can be made directly by those
directly affected by them. For people to take part in making the
decisions that they are affected by they must enter into a number of
different communicative assemblies, each with different sets of
associates. This element of de-centring finally bids goodbye to the
ideal of the “commune” as the basic social form with which to
reconstruct society. The old federalist vision of an ordered tree-like
structure of decision-making from the local to the global — albeit
governed democratically from the bottom up, rather than autocratically
from the top down — must now be replaced with a multiplicity of
interconnected but distinct networks with no dominant centre. The
commune is dead, long live the commune!
We should now move away from the abstract back to the real-world
historical developments that we mentioned earlier that have overturned
assumptions about the possibility of making any practical tests of the
effectiveness of production free of capitalist constraints this side of
a revolution. In fact such a practical experience has already been
underway for some years, not at the instigation of any pre-meditated
anti-capitalist or revolutionary movement, but as a reaction to the
actions of capitalist businesses in the field of software development.
The rise of the free software and open source movements is a story in
itself and one that is still very much in the process of being written.
Indeed a number of books have already been turned out by media and
academic commentators struggling to explain the phenomena and
particularly to get to grips with the aspects of it that have most
perplexed and disturbed the received truths of capitalist economics. In
short the free software movement is the product of thousands of software
writers or hackers working collaboratively without pay to create whole
systems of software that are owned not by the producers but the common
property of all.
In the space of little more than 10 years an entirely voluntary and
unwaged network of producer consumers have collectively produced an
operating system — GNU/Linux — that is not only comparable to, but in
many aspects, superior to the flagship commercial product of global
capitalism’s most successful hi-tech company — Microsoft. Given the
short space of the time the free software movement has taken for this
achievement compared to the decades Microsoft has invested in its
product and the fact that the unwaged hackers have done this work in
their spare time, the case for the relative efficiency of unwaged,
property-claim free production has already made a strong opening
argument.
As you might expect the explanation for these novel results are related
to specific characteristics of the object of production, i.e. computer
software. To see what is different lets take a counter-example say a
motor car. Conceptually we can divide the production of a car into two
different production processes. The first is the production of a design
for the car the second is the production of a car from that design. In
the world of mass production such as that of car production, the
physical product — the actual car — dominates the design for that model
of car. That is the cost of manufacturing the physical parts for each
individual car is far more significant than the cost of the whole of the
designers wages. To the extent that it makes economic sense for a car
company to hire an engineer to work for two years on shaving 5 pence of
the production cost of a plastic moulding for a car sidelight (genuine
example).
In complete contrast, with computer software the cost of creating an
individual copy of a software product and distributing it to the user is
so negligible in relation to the effort to produce the original design
that we can say that the design or prototype is the product. This is
important because it means the labour cost of producing software is
basically unchanged whether the end product is distributed to 10, 1000
or 1,000,000 users. This has an important implication — it is impossible
to exchange software for product of equal labour value. Consider a
single hacker spends 30 days producing a given software utility, he then
distributes it to 30 end users for the equivalent of an average days
wage apiece. This has the appearance of exchange but consider what
happens when the hacker then distributes the same software to another 30
users for the same terms, and then another 300, then to a further
300,000?
There is a further difference between the car and the piece of software.
If a fault is found on a car and it is fixed all the other existing cars
of that model would need to be fixed individually. With a piece of
software however, any user who detects and or fixes a fault in their
copy of that software can then share that fix or improvement with the
entire community of users and developers of that software at virtually
no cost. It is this multiplier effect that helps make the collaborative
process of free software so productive. Every additional user is a
potential adder of value (in the sense of utility) to the product and
the communicative feedback between developers and users is an important
part of the productive process.
There is a second barrier to incorporating software production into a
scheme of labour valuation. That is the uncommodifiability of original
or creative labour. By commodifiability we mean the ability to reduce a
given buyable item to a level of interchangeability where a given volume
is equal to any other given volume of the same thing. Potatoes are
commodifiable, roughly speaking one five kilo bag of spuds can be
swapped for another without any appreciable change in the outcome. The
logic of much capitalist production is to reduce labour to
commodifiability where the output of a given number of workers is
comparable to that of the same number of another group of workers.
However this process breaks down when the output relies centrally on
individual original creativity. It is recognised that the productivity
of the most gifted hackers is enough orders of magnitude beyond that of
that of mediocre or averagely competent hackers that one gifted hacker
can achieve in a few weeks what a large team of merely average coders
would be unable to produce in months.
It is this possibility of excelling which forms part of the motivation
for the core productive participants of the free software movement to
participate. No less than climbing mountains or running marathons the
acheivement of doing something well is a motivation in itself,
particularly in a society where our waged-work conditions often force us
to do things in ways well below what we are capable of. There is a
saying within the free software community that “people will do the jobs
they are interested in”. But by the same token the jobs people find
interesting are often the ones that mobilise their individual strengths.
Freed from the constraints of exchange, people are free to seek out the
particularly lines of activity in which they can out-perform the
“average socially necessary labour time” to the extent that such an
estimate can even be made. Naturally if enough participants in a
collective labour process manage to do this successfully, the whole
process will be significantly more performant than any waged process.
If all the above features emerging from the relatively new field of
software production and the even more recent phenomena of the free
software movement were limited to that sphere alone then they would be
an intriguing case but little more. However many of the special features
of software — i.e. the relation between the single design or pattern and
potentially unlimited replication and distribution at little or no cost
— also apply to many other “intellectual” products such as cultural
artifacts like books, music and films and the results of scientific and
academic research now that computers and the internet have liberated
them from the material media of paper, vinyl and celluloid. Indeed the
whole area of products covered by so-called “Intellectual Property
Rights” are equally problematic to reduce to a “just” exchange value.
Further the proportion of overall economic activity involved in the
production of these non-material products is ever growing to the extent
of becoming the majority sector in the metropolitan hubs of the
capitalist world. This tendency will of course not automatically bring
in its wake radical social change, but its counter-tendencies — the
growth of exchange-free productive networks and the increasing direct
appropriation of consumer intellectual products like music, films,
software and texts through free online sharing networks — will continue
to make the struggle to defend capitalist Intellectual Property (IP)
rights a contested battleground. In the struggle to extend and defend IP
rights, both legally and practically, the champions of capitalism will
be undermining the core justificatory ideology of exchange — that of
labour value. The role of libertarian communists is in many ways
unchanged — to participate in the present dynamic of class struggles
while advocating a future beyond capitalist relations. Today however, we
have the advantage that post-capitalist exchange-free collaborative
production processes are no longer hypotheses but reality. In contrast
it is the theories of the orthodox “a-political” economist defenders of
capitalist that people will never produce socially useful goods without
the incentive of money that is shown to be an empty hypothesis — a false
god.