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2021-09-25
After reading a little bit about communization (Theorie Communiste and Kosmoprolet), I've got a few preliminary thoughts. First, it's really interesting that everything seems to take the form of a polemic back and forth between journals. In a certain sense, this is just par for the course when it comes to communist theory. After all, a huge chunk of Marx and Engels is exactly the same thing: polemics against this or that idea they take to be mistaken. But after Marx, and especially among Marxist-Leninists, it becomes polemics that seem different: They're grounded in real-world decisions and activity rather than pure theory. I think this gives the impression to a lot of people that these kinds of writings are somehow more serious, more concrete, and more valid, simply because they seem more tied to the real world, and have immediate consequences that can be judged according to the historical record. But at the end of the day, they are just theoretical polemics, same as the earlier works and the later works on communization I'm reading. Simply being tied to a concrete situation does not, in itself, mean that the works have more value. That's a mistake.
At any rate, there are two things that I think are valuable in communization theory, things I've already been thinking about a lot.
The working class is forever and by definition tied up with the capitalist class. They are mutually created, defined, and interdependent. They are two poles of the same contradiction. And moreover, one of those poles is always subordinated to the other. The working class is always subsumed by the ruling class, at least in terms of the activity that defines it as a class, labor. This means that at the end of the day, its characteristics, values, methods, and "identity" are the result of capitalism. They are part of the expression of the capitalist system as such. This is something we can't forget. For all the valorization of the working class as a liberatory class, it is still a capitalist creation. It's _peculiar_, though, in that it is also a class that can overcome capitalism and capitalist social relations, but this is tricky. The result of overcoming these relations is for the working class to cease to exist. The class abolishes itself.
So there's a contradiction in the methodology of revolution that I think is often overlooked: between affirming the working class as such and transcending the class with tools immanent to it. So much of revolutionary methodology is glorifying working class culture, attitudes, and positions, holding them high and reinforcing them. Certainly this is useful in making the class more powerful in struggles against the capitalist class. But it also ignores the crucial element of class abolition, the fact that the class should be deleted and transformed into something other than what it is. At some point, in some way, the class has to be different, it's values and characteristics and methods changed precisely because capitalism is overcome and defeated.
Another way of asking this question: Is a "working class society" a contradiction in terms? Is a "working class state" a contradiction in terms? Is a "dictatorship of the proletariat" a contradiction in terms? And if so, what way of organizing things _isn't_ a contradiction in terms?
This leads to the question of when and how class transformation/abolition/overcoming takes place. Here again I think communization theorists have something important to say. Just start now. Transform things here and now, in and through every working-class struggle. Just begin the work of making the world communist. The standard thought is that there has to be a conquest of political power and a period of more or less enforced transition to communism. Communization theorists reject this and say that we're already doing this work through struggle right now. I think there's something to that. But I'm also not sure of the concrete way I see that happening. Where and how exactly are capitalist social relations being transformed? Where is wage labor disappearing? Where is money disappearing? Where are commodities disappearing? Certainly there are areas where these things are being challenged, but where are these challenges lasting, becoming set in practice, becoming more or less permanent or lasting. Perhaps I just need to look more and read more. But I still think there's something to it.
I'm still not convinced that taking political power isn't necessary or good. Regardless of the failures of actually existing socialism, the revolutionary history of the 20th century shows just how powerful a tool political power can be. But I've _also_ thought for a long time that one of the great mistakes of revolutions in the 20th century was that building communism, _communism_, was always deferred, always put off to some future time even after political power was obtained. This was a huge mistake. Political power must be used against itself, and once obtained, it should be directed at precisely at capitalist social relations like wage labor, commodity production, and money. Fuck a transitionary period. Or rather, recognize that the the transitionary phase is directly to communism, communization right here and now, and not to some intermediate socialist form in the meantime. Just build the world you want with the tools you have, including political power if you have it.
Another way of putting it is this: You can do two things. It's not unreasonable to communize in the here and now through struggle, and _also_ to fight for political power and, if won, use it to communize as well. Why not do both?
I'll be studying a lot more, but these are my first thoughts.