[Editor’s Note: We publish here a compilation of three articles from issues 2-4 of Intransigence about the dynamic of the proletarian revolution and the difficulties of the period of transition.
Unfortunately, the whole publication and the regrouping initiative behind it, in which members of our political collective participated wholeheartedly from the beginning, were hijacked by other political forces and individuals with their own self-serving agendas before this vital discussion could be continued and ultimately come to a more furtive conclusion.
Nevertheless, we publish these articles for what they have contributed positively to the discussion about this important question for the future of the revolutionary workers’ movement and hope that communists today will be able to glean something useful from them.]
Notes on the Transition to Communism
Communist treatments of the transition between capitalist society and communism are not as numerous as one might perhaps imagine. Despite the importance of the subject, it seems many theoreticians are content to repeat or elaborate on the scarce few lines that Marx or Lenin have devoted to the subject. (Communization theory, in some of its forms at least, stands as an exception to this general trend. Yet, despite our sympathy with their general standpoint, we cannot avoid the impression that the communizers intend to do away with capitalism by shouting slogans at it.) And often, those treatments that exist are quite unconvincing. First of all, because many of them involve a very “thin” conception of communism (or socialism), as in the famous Leninist dictum that socialism is state capitalism made to serve the entire people. (Of course, we are never told how capitalism, of any sort, can serve “the people,” and who “the people” might be.) In general, this thin conception of communism is most readily apparent in Stalinist and Trotskyist texts, but the “ultraleft” is not exempt from it, as witnessed by the GIK conception of communism in its “Fundamental Principles…,” a communism where autonomous workplaces calculate “the labor-time absorbed in each product” so that each worker may have “their” share. Salva nos, Domine!
The other problem, shared by most of the texts in question, is an odd inability to take capitalism seriously. Capitalism is portrayed as impotent and incoherent, a pale shadow which can coexist with incipient socialism and slowly give way to it, and whose parts can be isolated and instrumentalized by the transitional, or even the communist society. The classical expression of this is the belief that statification of the capitalist economy is equal to movement toward communism, and that in the communist society instruments remarkably similar to money — whether called labor notes, certificates, or something else is irrelevant — will operate.
Modern capitalism, however, is unlike prior modes of production in that it comprises a total system: i.e., a whole whose general character and laws of motion imbue every part with nothing accidental or extraneous. From wage labor to parliamentary politics, every aspect of capitalist society is capitalist, and remains such when it is translated into an ambiguous situation. This, as well as the immense pressures of near-universal support for capitalism and the sheer social inertia acting in its favor, means that any ambiguous or transitional situation will eventually be resolved in a capitalist manner. One might without much exaggeration question if it is possible to exit a total system (and let us note that collapse is not a possibility short of the extinction of the species; modes of production do not collapse into nothing, but rather are replaced by other arrangements of productive activity). The only remaining hope for the species is thus that a consciously-inflicted, sufficiently severe and rapid blow struck against exchange society would be capable of doing just that.
If this turns out not to be the case, the best human society can hope for is that some kind reformist might contrive to make euthanasia available on the cheap. For it is important to emphasize, against those who would have the revolution be a remote dream, that industrial society in its current form is nearing an end one way or another. Already it is impossible to stop anthropogenic climate change. Perhaps a communist society would be able to mitigate some of its effects by instituting a rapid slowdown of production, but not capitalism. Until then, capitalist society will continue to overproduce from the standpoint of markets and the planetary environment. Therefore, the choice is socialism (a return to a barbarism of sorts) or extinction.
But the aforementioned blow — the revolution or general insurrection against value and property — must then induce as complete a break as possible with capitalist forms of society. In those territories isolated from the rest of the globe, there can be no question of anything short of immediately imposing communism. Such areas no longer exist, though, apart from North Sentinel Island and a few patches of the Amazon which have as of yet not received the blessings of modern civilization. Everywhere else, crucial production processes, including the ones that are necessary for the provision of food, shelter, medicine, and infrastructure, require inputs that come from outside of the area in question. In all but the most exceptional circumstances, these inputs will have to be traded for.
There are two possibilities for a communist dictatorship trading on the world market. The first we may broadly term an extractive approach and involves the sale of existing objects and more abstract goods. Anticipating the second half of this text slightly, it is clear that the revolution would imply immediate abolition of most forms of property. Yet a certain distinction between the objects and territories under the control of communist dictatorship and any outside this control would remain, as well as certain rules for usufructuary use. A sale, then, would in this case mean the alienation of certain objects in exchange for (foreign) currency. Depending on the area in question, there might well be lots of objects that could be alienated in this manner with little trouble, for example luxury items of the former bourgeoisie and all associated strata (this would also remove objects which have no function other than signaling social status from the community), expensive cultural objects, intellectual property, money, and savings accounts. The communist dictatorship will do things states today cannot dream of doing, because it cannot, and indeed must not, operate as a “legitimate” state.
Such an approach can only last a definite amount of time, to be sure. Yet, even if it just endures for a very short period, it provides the society in transition with a highly beneficial discontinuity in production for sale. And because this is the sole alternative, a transitional society will sooner or later have to resort to it. To most this is of course old news, since it is one of the simplest (and therefore most cogent) arguments against “socialism in one country.” That said, we acknowledge that this line of argument is often taken much too far. It follows from the interdependence of various areas of the globe via a world market that, even in the revolutionary area under communist dictatorship, some production for sale must exist. It does not at all follow from this, however, that one hundred percent of production must be for sale, or that internal markets still need to exist.
In fact, apart from this production for sale, there is no reason why production and distribution should not, immediately, be organized so that a scientific social plan based on human need regulates both. Then, instead of a mostly exchange economy giving way, through some ill-defined process, to the planned system of provisioning that characterizes communism, the general structure of the communist system of provisioning will already be in place, albeit deformed by the necessity of participating in the world market. Needless to say, these distortions will not be insignificant. But as the revolutionary zone expands and brings more resources under its direct administrative control, they will become less significant, until they cease to exist altogether with the fall of the last holdouts of capitalism.
Now, let us change track here slightly and consider the experience of the individual member of the society in transition — a person who perhaps labors but is no longer a worker or proletarian. One of two things will be true: either the choice of whether to labor and, if so, in what capacity, will be a personal prerogative, or else individuals will have to fulfill a labor obligation, imposed as much as possible on all available members of society equally. In the latter case, compulsion will be open and direct. We know that, even in communist circles, there is a tendency to prefer the indirect compulsion of the market — the vaunted “incentives” of bourgeois economics. Yet this indicative of nothing but the continued influence of market ideology. Direct, open compulsion is of course far from pleasant, but it is a sharp pain that disappears quickly. Market compulsion and competition on the other hand represent constant psychological and organic stress. It stands to reason that the only incentives during the transitional phase will be incentives for market fetishists to emigrate.
Members of the society in transition will have access to goods regardless of whether or how much they labor. The suggestions in the Gothakritik must be rejected. First of all because a system of labor vouchers, where goods are received in proportion to the time spent laboring, would not lead to any development of the productive forces, only Stakhanovism. Second, because there is no need to further develop the productive forces, at least in the metropolitan regions where revolution will be most likely to break out. For the principle of distribution, we see nothing else as adequate except the classic “to each according to his needs.”
Of course, the society in transition will not be able to fulfill every errant desire on the part of its members (neither will communist society), and at first it will not be possible to fulfill every genuine need either, particularly when the necessity of winding down production is taken into account. But it will be possible, at any rate, to prioritize the most pressing needs first, and to organize a system of rationing which would allocate to everyone necessary goods, based on culture or circumstances of life (as such, it will not allocate cow’s milk to the Chinese, or casu marzu to the sane), so that the elderly and those with compromised immune systems will receive priority treatment when it comes to the administration of flu vaccines, the physical laborer will receive priority in the allocation of calories (compared with the clerical laborer), and so on. These goods would of course be given out for personal use but would not become the possessions of those who are using them. Nor would it be possible to accumulate them.
Basing distribution on need will, we think, also help solve the problem of the social position of technicians, specialists, and whatnot. In the immediate aftermath of revolution, not everyone will be able to perform tasks associated with management and planning. After a time, this may be remedied by an extensive and sustained skill transfer program. Yet the immediate danger remains of a stratum of specialists setting itself up as a privileged caste. But that possibility is considerably less likely if this new caste bases its privilege not on the premise that it deserves more (since the nexus between allocation and compensation is broken), but that it needs more.
At first, it will be possible to meet some of these needs from the preexisting mass of goods under the direct control of the communist dictatorship. Following the insurrection, redistribution will undoubtedly be an important mechanism. In time, however, it will become necessary to produce more vital goods. Production will be planned, in mostly material terms — the production of so many tons of wheat necessitates the production of so many tons of fertilizer, water, and so on — by a “central” organ of society, that is, one whose full range of competence coincides with the entire territory under the communist dictatorship. (In the case that there are several disconnected territories under this dictatorship, such that communication and movement of goods between them are difficult, there would then presumably be multiple dictatorships and multiple organs that carry out directive planning, though these would not take the antiquated form of the nation-states and would strive to merge as soon as circumstances permit.) Organs of lesser scope, whether sectoral or local, could not take into account the interdependence of modern industrial production, and their separate existence would lead to forms of exchange and enterprise independence reappearing. There would of course be other organs of the dictatorship, as well as less permanent groups, but this exceeds the scope of the current text.
Labor-time, to the extent that it would figure at all into planning calculations, would simply be one of many inputs considered, and administrative organs would not aim to minimize labor-time expenditure, as is so often proposed, because the resulting laws of motion would then be essentially the same as the laws of motion that govern capitalism. Besides, it is not probable that labor will be scarce, even in the period of transition, since not only would many jobs become superfluous, from maids and nannies to cashiers and finance ministers, but with the end of market discipline, labor will itself become an expression of the human personality, the prime “need” for the new man.
Finally, we can briefly sketch how trade between a communist dictatorship and a world market will occur. Production of trade goods would proceed along roughly the same lines as production of other goods, even if these are only necessary because of the realities of the world market. Since the revolutionary zone presumably would have no currency of its own, either because such currency was never necessary to begin with, or because the short time in which currency is issued will be hyperinflationary to pay whatever debts might hinder access to the world market, it would set its prices in whichever “foreign” currency proves most convenient. And to an extent it could set those prices at will, administratively, since there would be no costs of production. We are talking, then, of goods which have a price, but not value in the full sense since no abstract labor is embodied in them. This will enable the revolutionary dictatorship to consistently undercut other sellers. Contracts drawn up will not be for single purchases, we imagine, since these are more affected by the anarchy of the market. Rather, the revolutionary dictatorship and the buyers or sellers with whom it engages with would conclude a contract for continuing provision of goods at fixed prices, for at least one planning cycle. Then it will be possible for the planning organs to take the quantity of the trade goods to be produced as fixed and proceed with calculating the total quantity of producer goods, raw materials, and necessary labor accordingly. Nonetheless, all these plans will at least in part be monetary and, in that regard, will not be communist.
But this production of trade goods — and here we apologize if we are belaboring the point — no matter how significant its impact on the overall system, will be a minor sector of a much broader communal, planned network of provisioning, an irritant of sorts, even if it is necessary in the short term. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, the organism will expel the irritant. The revolutionary zone thus expands strategically, targeting crucial resources. Elsewhere other uprisings over time will break out. New areas can then join the communist dictatorship. Whatever trade-good production remains will be purposefully wound down as the dictatorship, in an increasingly better negotiating position, thus imposes harsher and harsher terms of exchange. Finally, with the end of the last vestiges of the world market, the need for any production for exchange passes, and the first directive plan is drawn up in exclusively material terms. After a short period of transition, human society enters integral communism.
Kontra Klasa (Croatia) – Intransigence issue #2, July 2018
A Reply to Kontra Klasa on the Transition to Communism
Capitalist Society as a Total System
Kontra Klasa’s article begins very well, criticizing a quite unconvincing “thin conception of communism,” exemplified by the Leninist and councilist conceptions (“state capitalism made to serve the entire people” and “a communism where autonomous workplaces calculate ‘the labor-time absorbed in each product’ so each worker may have ‘their’ share,” respectively).
It then shows how most tendencies overlook capitalism as a total system — “i.e., a whole whose general character and laws of motion imbue every part with nothing accidental or extraneous.” This underestimation implies that:
“Capitalism is portrayed as impotent and incoherent, a pale shadow which can coexist alongside incipient socialism and slowly give way to it, and whose parts can be isolated and instrumentalized by the transitional, or even the communist society.”
But, since capitalism is a total system, it therefore follows that:
“From wage labor to parliamentary politics, every aspect of capitalist society is capitalist, and remains such when it is translated into an ambiguous situation. This, as well as the immense pressures of near-universal support for capitalism and the sheer social inertia acting in its favor, means that any ambiguous or transitional situation will eventually be resolved in a capitalist manner.”
And the argument concludes very well, posing the crucial question of revolution:
“The only remaining hope for the species is thus that a consciously-inflicted, sufficiently severe, and rapid blow struck against exchange society would be capable of [exiting a total system].”
But… a Territory?
The crucial question is clearly stated. Nevertheless, from this point on, the article inexplicably seems to forget its basic implications and assumes the strange presupposition that the world revolution will be a process of territorial conquests:
“In those territories isolated from the rest of the globe, there can be no question of anything short of immediately imposing communism. Such areas no longer exist, though, apart from North Sentinel Island and a few patches of the Amazon which have as of yet not received the blessings of modern civilization. Everywhere else, crucial production processes, including the ones necessary for the provision of food, shelter, medicine, and infrastructure, require inputs that come from outside of the area in question. In all but the most exceptional circumstances, these inputs will have to be traded for.”
Thus, the revolution is seen as territorial conquest, and a territory is compelled to exchange commodities with the outside. This is because such territory is deprived of the necessary materials that are in the rest of the world. But, in fact, this deprivation defines it exactly as a new private property.
What the article seems to overlook is that every private property is necessarily a interested party in the universal competition (military, commercial, industrial…) because it is obliged to be able to advantageously exchange commodities against other private properties (enterprises or states), otherwise it will not even be able to trade and thus not even be able to survive due to the lack of necessary materials (thus subjugating the population to a paranoid and lethal rule). This competition for trying to impose that others buy from the territory as expensive as possible and that others sell to territory as cheaply as possible can only be realized as competition for imposing on the proletariat the maximum domination and exploitation, directly or indirectly, both inside and outside the territory.1 It is a material dynamic that imposes itself independently of will, ideas, consciousness, plans or organizational forms (all these are fated to become simply new ideologies to mask and justify exploitation).
But the article continues in the mistaken premise of territorial private property as the founding basis of the revolution and suggests the possibility of a short period when this exchange of goods with the outside takes place without production for sale, through an “extractive approach” (“the sale of existing objects and more abstract goods,” e.g. luxury items, expensive cultural objects, intellectual property, money, and savings accounts). And it points out that sooner or later it will be necessary to produce commodities to trade with the foreign territories.
However, it says that although there is production of goods to sell abroad, within the territory “there is no reason why production and distribution should not, immediately, be organized so that a scientific social plan based on human need regulates both.” This “planned system of provisioning” is then presented as if it were synonymous with communism, “albeit deformed by the necessity of participating in the world market.”
The fact that there is no exchange of commodities within this territorial property does not mean anything intrinsically communist, since every private property and every company works in this way in its interior. It is by a “planned system of provisioning” that the administrative bureaucracy and the bosses manage the internal functioning of each company. Even if the official stated intention is to satisfy human needs — and there is no shortage of companies and states which advertise that their goal is not profit, but to satisfy needs — the only way to satisfy those needs in a territorial private property is to submit to competition for exchanging advantageously in the world market, as we have seen.
Territorial Consolidation and Counterrevolution
The article does not seem to grasp that if a revolution establishes itself as a consolidated particular territory and tries to reproduce itself, as the stocks of goods run out and consequently the exchange of commodities with exterior territories becomes obligatory for its reproduction, it surrenders immediately to the counter-revolution. The new power established in the territory is materially forced to resort to repression, domination and exploitation of the proletariat so that the commodities it produces place it at least on the same level as the competitors, i.e., to compete, as others do, to absorb and accumulate the maximum value, the maximum direct or indirect imposition of surplus labor on workers, both of the rest of the world and within the territorial property.
The article hopes that this will be circumvented as this territorial administrative private property expands to more territories:
“Needless to say, these distortions will not be insignificant. But as the revolutionary zone expands and brings more resources under its direct administrative control, they will become less significant, until they cease to exist altogether with the fall of the last holdouts of capitalism.”
But since the territory is reproduced from the outset by repression and exploitation because of the need to exchange advantageously with the outside, it is difficult to imagine any way in which the administrators of the territory can be disinterested in the material dynamic of the private property that had already started to form their interests as personifications of capital. Only if we were idealists, only if we had some faith in a superhuman power of willpower (or in the sacred force of ideas and doctrines…) we could believe that this expansion of territory could be revolutionary or communist.
Labor?
Necessarily, labor will not even have been abolished in this territory:
“One of two things will be true: either the choice [for each individual] of whether to labor and, if so, in what capacity, will be a personal prerogative, or else individuals will have to fulfill a labor obligation, imposed as much as possible on all available members of society equally. In the latter case, the compulsion will be open and direct.”
According to the article, a direct, open compulsion to work would be preferable to indirect market compulsion because, as if by some miracle (and contrary to all known history), “it is a sharp pain, which disappears quickly.” As if the private property within that territory could change, deciding at will not to “represent constant psychological and organic stress” (which is attributed by article exclusively to the competition and market compulsion within a territory).
Administration
After this, the article again confuses communism (i.e., “members of the society in transition access to goods regardless of whether or how much they labor”) with a form of administration of the distribution of goods and management of the labor in that territory:
“Production will be planned, in mostly material terms — the production of so many tons of wheat necessitates the production of so many tons of fertilizer, water, etc. — by a ‘central’ organ of society, that is, one whose full range of competence coincides with the entire territory under the communist dictatorship.”
This is not necessarily communism since it is not impossible for a private territory to be so far ahead in global competition (e.g., exporting “high-value-added products”) that it is able to outsource the exploitation of workers to the other territories as well as the costs of controlling/repressing them (even if it solves within the territory the problem of the “stratum of specialists setting itself up as a privileged caste”). Taking this hypothesis to the extreme, the territory becomes an Icarian walled community while the rest of the world is an immense slum that works for it.
It is much more likely that the coercion to produce sufficiently competitive commodities to exchange for goods of other territories will not allow even this sad Icarian administrative communism. Like every company (and like every state), the managers of this territory are materially powerless to do without a system of rewards and punishments, i.e., they are powerful only to reproduce class society within that territory. In fact, the idea of administering society as such does not make sense without some system of rewards and punishments on society — a class society.
Commodities with Prices but Not Value?
The sketch on “how trade between a communist dictatorship and a world market will occur” corroborates that the article underestimates the degree of socialization of the world’s productive forces, i.e., the degree of interconnection and interdependence of the global productive process:
“The revolutionary zone… could set those prices at will, administratively, since there would be no costs of production. We are talking, then, of goods which have a price, but not value in the full sense since no abstract labor is embodied in them. This will enable the revolutionary dictatorship to consistently undercut other sellers.”
But we know that the only commodities that have no production costs are the raw materials (if we abstract the cost of the machinery needed for their extraction), and the only commodities whose prices can be set at will, administratively, are those that are monopolized in the market world.
This raw material monopoly is not only improbable but also shows that the territory is already fully engaged in exactly what all the other private properties (as well as states) in the world are competing for: undercutting other sellers, zeroing costs in order to maximize profits. And in fact, if these monopolized commodities are sold on the world market it is because they have value, they serve to absorb value: they have the power to impose on the proletarians of the world the intensification of abstract labor equivalent to those goods which the outer capitalist territories need to acquire. Simply put, this global surplus labor is the surplus value absorbed and accumulated as capital within the so-called “communist” territory:
“But this production of trade goods, no matter how significant its impact on the overall system, will be a minor sector of a much broader communal, planned network of provisioning, an irritant of sorts, even if it is necessary in the short term.”
Here again, the article underestimates how even the most basic needs, such as medicines, food, equipment, means of production… depend inextricably, each of them, on a highly socialized global network that combines countless materials involving all continents. This fact is presented as a distorting impediment, an obstacle to be overcome by the expansion of the “communist” territory imagined as external to this network (so much so that at the beginning of the article it is said that “territories isolated from the rest of the globe” are the ideal, but nonexistent, situation for the undistorted establishment of communism).
Universally Interconnected Existential Conditions
In reality, from a materialist viewpoint, the conscious need for communism, and cultivation of the practical capacity and desire to do so, cannot even exist outside this inextricable global productive network. Any attempt to leave or remain outside this global interconnection is bound to create and consolidate another private property, another capital in the military, commercial, and industrial universal competition. Trying to put oneself outside implies putting oneself on the same level as the outside and thus introducing oneself vertically into the same network from which one seeks to separate, reproducing class society.
The only material dynamic capable of abolishing and overcoming capital is one that traverses the totality of world capitalist society horizontally, at the same time it is systematically produced as its universal negative. The proletariat alone exists as a class at this world-historical level. It is precisely within the ubiquitous unity of productive forces that communism — the world human community — can be brought to light by fulminating the capitalist outer shell and freeing the universalist material condition of the human capacities and needs to express their immanent forms.2
Thus the class struggle — i.e., the total fraternization of proletarians which destroys all sources of separation (reifications such as identity, nation, employment/ unemployment, borders, profession, rank, merit, territory, race, administration, familial bonds, segregation…) which compels them, against themselves, to compete for submission to “their own” ruling classes in exchange for survival — is the sole basis and foundation for the universal emergence of communism. The main error of the article is the way it unties the unity between world class struggle and communism.
Elsewhere we have already set out our positions on the immediate practical measures and objectives which world revolution would need to implement in order to any chance of success:
“The specifically communist material dynamic is triggered by the overcoming of the strike by a tactic to continue production, but as a free production (gratis) for and by the people, suppressing the division employment/unemployment at this time (abolition of enterprise). Starting in a city, the diffusion of this experience will be just as passionate (unstoppable), which quickly, in a day or two, will spread over the major cities of the world. Mapping the interconnection of stocks and flows of world production, ever more complete, will allow people to figure out what production is not inappropriate, disabling some and modifying others.
Governments and other repressive forces will no time to study and coordinate an attack and no longer exist conditions for that, since the production that sustains these conditions is in the hands of the population. The soldiers, fraternizing, give weapons to the population and join them… Those who resist have their conditions of existence halted until surrender. In less than a week, then, the whole world will be under the associated mode of production, communism. Otherwise, the more the global diffusion is delayed, reaching only part of the world, the more the stock is turning over, the more unsustainable (materially speaking and in terms of repression) becomes the communist mode of production. Since, moreover, we are deprived of the material that the other part of the world not yet transformed has as private property (state or individual), being forced to exchange (buy/sell) with it to replenish stocks. In other words, the more it is forced, in order to buy from them, to labor for them — being forced internally to reproduce the same capitalist mode of production, with the risk of communism becoming mere ideological cover of a new variety of capitalist exploitation.” (“Against the Metaphysics of Scarcity, and for Practical Copiousness”).3
Moreover:
“As opposed to the ideology of strategy, proletarians can only rely on their own autonomous capacity to act and think, boosted by the rapid spread of their struggle worldwide. In a single act they communicate with each other worldwide the knowledge of how their simultaneous daily activities interconnect (e.g., according where each person is, the supply chains, the relationship between industry, agriculture, and material pathways for the free expression of needs, desires, thoughts and capabilities of the residents and travellers of world, etc.), a knowledge that is simultaneous with the active suppression of the material (molecular) conditions of existence of private property, capital, and the state and with the creation of a new society where the means of life and production, become freely (gratis) accessible to anyone who wants to meet his needs, desires, thoughts, projects, passions, and develop freely their skills, abilities, and potentials.
An event like this, which disables the basis of the power of the ruling class (businessmen, bureaucrats, the state), has from the start an incomprehensible and non-negotiable language vis-à-vis the ruling class and the state, which is in fact a dictatorship against them — i.e., the true dictatorship of the proletariat. The ruling class will not even have the time to begin to understand what it is undergoing and will not be able to devise a strategy before the proletariat has abolished itself, and thereby abolished the ruling class, class society.” (“Against Strategy”)4
We often hear that all this is impossible. But the category “possibility” has nothing to do with with the revolution, which by definition transforms the conditions of possibility in which it unfolds, necessarily giving rise to the “impossible.” However, the singular contents of this “impossible in action” are unpredictable. The only “impossibility” we have today for action is the understanding of the objectively indispensable practical needs that the conditions put by capitalist society itself allow us to infer theoretically if we seek the destruction and overcoming of this society. These are the objectively inescapable minimum tasks that the worldwide irruption of the “impossible in action” will have to accomplish in order to actually overcome capitalist society and which, if it does not, it will fatally let itself drown in the counterrevolution.
How to create the propitious conditions? How can we to make converge and combine in the time and space the innumerable singular circumstances and determinations (already in full action but still disparate) in such a way as to spark the “impossible” capacities of the world proletariat to carry out these minimal tasks?5 For us, this is the decisive question.
Another thing we often hear is that our position depends on unreasonable optimism or naïve hope. In reality, the question of pessimism or optimism, despair or hope, is of no importance, and is insignificant for us as materialist communists. What matters is that communists clearly state their goals, as well as the objective basis (verifiable by anyone) of their practical necessity. If the goal is mistaken, it will lead praxis only to waste energy and time on a project which will fatally fuel the counterrevolution.
Humanaesfera (Brazil) – Intransigence issue #3, November 2018
World Revolution or “Building Socialism”: Critical remarks on Kontra Klasa’s ‘Notes on the Transition to Communism’
“We leave to others, to the “technicians” and to the recipe makers, or to the “orthodox” of Marxism, the pleasure of engaging in anticipations, of wandering the paths of utopianism or of throwing into the face of proletarians of formulas emptied of their class substance.” – Mitchell, Bilan6
Issue #2 of Intransigence features a text by Kontra Klasa7 outlining their conception of the transition to communism. The starting point of this text is the existence of a “communist dictatorship” established over some territory, and it explores what options this “communist dictatorship” would have in a capitalist world.
In the language of Kontra Klasa’s article, the revolution is “against value and property,” the revolution, we are told, “would imply immediate abolition of most forms of property,” the aim of the revolution is thus the destruction of capitalist social relations and the implementation of measures for the production of communism. The “revolutionary zone” simply “expands” and “brings more resources under its control”, and in this “revolutionary zone,” “the general structure of the communist system of provisioning will already be in place” as production and distribution are regulated according to a “scientific social plan based on human need.” Having read this text, what is striking is the absence of political considerations in it, their view of the revolution and the transition to communism denies the primacy of political factors in favour of technical and administrative ones, all of which runs contrary to the Left Communist understanding of the revolution.
In the fifth of his series of articles on the period of transiton for Bilan, the journal of the Italian communist left in exile in France and Belgium, Mitchell8 wrote:
“…the essentially international problem of the building of socialism – the preface to communism – cannot be resolved in the framework of one proletarian state, but only on the basis of the political defeat of the world bourgeoisie, at least in the vital centres of its rule, the most advanced countries.”
While it is undeniable that a national proletariat can only undertake certain economic tasks after installing its own rule, the construction of socialism can only get going after the destruction of the most powerful capitalist states, even though the victory of a “poor” proletariat can take on a huge significance if it is integrated into the process of development of the world revolution. In other words, the tasks of a victorious proletariat with regard to its own economy are subordinated to the necessities of the international class struggle.9
And in his critique of the ideas of both the Dutch Left, as outlined in Jan Appel’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, and Adhémar Hennaut, leading figure in the Left Opposition in Belgium and the [then] quasi-Trotskyist Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, Vercesi wrote:
“The mistake made in our opinion by the Dutch left communists and with them the Cde Hennaut is to put themselves in a fundamentally sterile direction, because the foundation of Marxism is precisely to recognize that the foundations of a Communist economy can only occur on the world stage, and never can they be realized within the borders of a proletarian state. The latter may intervene in the economic field to change the process of production, but in no way to permanently establish this process on communist bases because on this subject the conditions to make possible such an economy can be achieved only on the international basis. To break the Marxist theory in its very essence is to believe that it is possible to carry out the economic tasks of the proletariat within a single country. We are not moving towards the fulfillment of this supreme goal by making the workers believe that after the victory over the bourgeoisie they will be able to directly direct and manage the economy in one country. Until the world victory these conditions do not exist and to get in the direction that will allow the maturation of these conditions we must begin by recognizing that within a single country it is impossible to obtain definitive results; it must first be recognized that the very institution of direct control of the workers over the economy is not possible. Apart from its economic objectives, of enormous importance, as we shall see later, the victorious proletariat finds its main task in the open proclamation that it is impossible for it to establish the very foundations of communism, but that to arrive at this result, which is by no means peculiar to it, it must put the State at the service of the world revolution, from which only the real conditions for the emancipation of workers can spring up from the national as well as the international point of view.”10
For the Communist Left, the revolution is primarily a political event, its aim is the establishment of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, not the “abolition of value” within the geographic constraints of some “revolutionary zone”. Society can only begin to embark upon wholesale social transformation after the victory of the world revolution, and any economic measures taken by an isolated “communist dictatorship” function as palliatives in the face of the hardships of the revolutionary period, they are nothing more than half-measures, until after the revolution succeeds on a world scale.
The period of transition is not limited to any “revolutionary territory,” but necessarily a global process, for the overcoming of a global mode of production, and the social classes and capitalist social relations will persist, but gradually disappear in the course of this process. All this is contradicted by Kontra Klasa’s claim that “the individual member of the society in transition” is “a person who perhaps labors but is no longer a worker or proletarian,” because this implies that the working-class, and hence all the classes of captalist society, can be abolished within the borders of the “communist dictatorship,” even before the victory of the world revolution and the beginning of the worldwide transition to communism. Therefore, the transition does not, according to Kontra Klasa, have to be a worldwide process.
Not only do they claim that “the individual member” is “no longer a worker or proletarian,” but Kontra Klasa also suggest that this individual might, “have to fulfill a labor obligation, imposed as much as possible on all available members of society equally. In the latter case, compulsion will be open and direct […] Direct, open compulsion is of course far from pleasant, but it is a sharp pain that disappears quickly.” It was always understood by Marx that the abolition of classes and capitalism entailed the reclamation of productive activity as a free and conscious pursuit for the direct satisfaction of life’s needs and wants by communist humanity, since what we know and experience as ‘work’ today is simply the form taken by productive activity (useful labour) in the specific social and historical context of a society dominated by relations of exchange and value. The abolition of classes, the association of ‘free and equal producers’, is incompatible with the existence of forced labour, if only because along with the disappearance of classes and capitalist social categories, coercive institutions also disappear.
Kontra Klasa recognise that the “communist dictatorship” cannot avoid trading on the world-market in order to obtain goods. They write: “production of trade goods would proceed along roughly the same lines as production of other goods”, that “the revolutionary zone” would “have no currency of its own, either because such currency was never necessary to begin with, or because the short time in which currency is issued will be hyperinflationary to pay whatever debts might hinder access to the world market,” and would “set its prices in whichever “foreign” currency proves most convenient”. It “could set those prices at will, administratively, since there would be no costs of production.” These are “goods which have a price, but not value in the full sense since no abstract labor is embodied in them. This will enable the revolutionary dictatorship to consistently undercut other sellers.” What makes all of this absurd is that it is based on the rather naive supposition that a “communist dictatorship” which:
- has “no currency of its own”;
- or a worthless currency because of hyperinflation;
- which sets “prices at will, administratively […] in whichever “foreign” currency proves most convenient”;
- and “consistently undercut[s] other sellers”.
will even be allowed to trade on the world market to begin with…. The reality is that such a revolutionary territory would face severe embargos, sanctions, or blockades and be cut-off from the foreign trade. No country on Earth would tolerate a “revolutionary dictatorship” which “consistently undercut other sellers.” If it is to escape death by isolation, the policy of a territory where the proletariat take power has to be geared towards the goal of a successful, global extension of the revolution. As such, the success of the world revolution will depend less on the internal factors of the revolutionary territory, such as effective technical administration, the development of a system of “scientific” planning, or its rapid social transformation, than on the external factors, such as the international balance of class forces and the political situation of the world revolutionary wave, of which the political victory of the proletariat in one region is simply an episode. All this depends on effective organisation, winning the support of masses around the world, and preparing for the possibility of class confrontation acquiring the form of military struggles and carrying these out effectively, among other things.
Kontra Klasa’s perspective is based on the delusion that communists can avoid the messy world of political struggle, in their article the world revolution and transition to communism will simply be smooth, rational, and orderely processes, achieved through through planning and trading, and the problems that will arise from this process will primarily be of a technical nature. Eventually the “communist” dictatorship will impose “harsher and harsher terms of exchange,” thereby destroying the world-market, until finally the good news: “human society enters integral communism.” And all this without the agency of the world proletariat, and without worldwide political organisation (a world communist party), action, or world revolution(!)
It is also unclear how Kontra Klasa imagine their policies will actually be implemented. Their “communist dictatorship” appears to stand above the masses, the struggle, and the society. They conveniently avoid dealing with the internal structure of the “communist dictatorship”, so it is not clear where the decision-making power rests in their “communist dictatorship”. Do Kontra Klasa believe that the working-class will make the decisions, or do they imagine a collective of planners, or technocrats will engineer the perfect society from above, and on behalf of the masses? The most intellectually-brilliant, rational schemes for transition are worthless without the enthusiastic support of the working-class, and any attempt to impose an agenda that includes rationing and forced labour upon the working-class will inevitably be met with resistance.
And finally, Kontra Klasa took as their starting point the existence of a “communist dictatorship trading on the world market,” without ever explaining how this came to be. In reality, it is likely that such a “communist dictatorship” would emerge in the course of a world revolutionary wave. Since the communist party of the future will be a single, worldwide organisation, without any regional or national character, it will avoid fusing into any nation-state, or adopting as its cause the interests of any single “revolutionary territory”. Communists will not have any interest in taking power for themselves, decisions will be taken by the class, and the party will participate in this without attempting to substitute itself for the class. In reality, communists are only a part of the class, in Onorato Damen’s words, “the relationship between the party and class is dialectically linked, with both on the same level, i.e., placing special emphasis on neither the party nor on the class. We see the party as a part of the whole (the class).”11 The revolutionary organisation, according to Damen, “would have to avoid becoming the instrument of the workers state and it would have to defend the interests of the revolution.”12
Against Kontra Klasa, we maintain that the fate of the great social explosions of the future, which will demand “all things for all men,”13 those future attempts of the wage-slaves and unemployed to “leap from the realm of objective necessity to the realm of objective freedom,”14 depend above all on the political victory of the world revolutionary wave. In contrast to the left-capitalists of Kontra Klasa, the communist left defends the view that the primary objective of the world communist party, and proletarians in the revolutionary territory must be political, not economic – world revolution, not “building socialism”.
Anonymous Communist – Intransigence issue #4, March 2019
Notes
1 We address the precise implications of this in the article “Universally Interconnected/Interdependent Conditions of Existence.”
2 This means that, contrary to what the article on transition says (with its fixation on centralization, administration, central planning), no specific form of organization defines the existence of communism, but rather the material universalism arising from the subversion of this global interconnection of the productive forces (which today is already a concrete, practical unity of the species). It is the material community in which human needs and capacities are produced as ends in themselves, fulfilling and potentiating each other. In this way, labor is abolished and the manifold activities are manifested on their terms, freed from the coercion of the general equivalent, of comparison. The material multiplicity of needs and faculties entails a multiplicity of immanent forms of organization for the satisfaction of those needs and faculties. The form of organization (centralization or decentralization) has no virtue by itself, it have no autonomous power, and it can not put itself from itself. This is an optical illusion that stems from the inverted top-down view of society which is that of a ruling class.
3 That part about “less than a week” might sound funny. We have rigorously come to this number by taking worldwide just-in-time production (and “pull production”) into account. Hence the absolute importance of the simultaneity of class struggle on a world scale. Note: this article (“Against the Metaphysics of Scarcity, for Practical Copiousness”) also presents a basic hypothesis on how world communist society will promptly work, and on how to treat scarcity in a society whose criterion is no longer its expanded reproduction (i.e., private property, commodity, capital, etc.). As for the details on the first and most immediate communist practical measure, see the article “Strike and Free Production.” Another hypothesis is that the material dynamic of communism starts in the service sector (since this is the sector closest to the satisfaction of the needs of the proletarians in their daily life) and diffuses rapidly to the logistic, industrial, and agricultural sectors (where work and products are more abstract, less directly comprehensible in relation to the satisfaction of needs). The worldwide exponential extension is the condition for this communist intensive metamorphose of the productive chain (and vice versa).
4 Regarding the problem of repression: “Obviously, the weapons of the ruling class, the state, the death squads, etc. are infinitely more powerful and refined than any ‘strategic opposition movement,’ which consequently is merely spectacle — only useful to the ruling class rehearse their watchdogs and control methods, which, staging, legitimizes the status quo itself as “democratic”. And when it is not staging, the ‘strategic opposition movement’ is only the reproduction of the structure to which seeks to oppose […]. As opposed to the staging of the ‘strategic opposition,’ the only way to suppress the repressive force of the status quo is by an emergency so rapid and widespread of the autonomous proletariat (hence of communism) that the ruling class cannot even find where to start repressing, so that their repressive watchdogs will no longer see any point in continuing obedience, ceasing to be watchdogs, turning their weapons against the generals and distributing weapons to the population, for the simple reason they start to be uncontainably and irrepressibly attracted, like the rest of the exploited, to the enthralling emergence of generalized luxurious communism, the worldwide human community.” (“Against Strategy”).
5 Undoubtedly, the concept of class composition is indispensable: with the (material, geographical, productive, educational, subjective) interconnections placed by capital, the proletariat creates its own connections in which it produces and develops new needs and capacities by which it affirms its class autonomy against capital. On this, see Romano Alquati, “The Network of Struggles in Italy,” and Kolinko, “Discussion Paper on Class Composition”
6 Problems of the Period of Transition (Part 1), Bilan no.28: http://www.collectif-smolny.org/article.php3?id_article=826
7 A communist group in Croatia, quotes are from their article: https://intransigence.org/2018/07/09/notes-on-the-transition-to-communism/
8 Bilan – published from November 1933 to February 1938 (46 issues in total), was established as the successor to the Bulletin d‘information de la Fraction de Gauche Italienne (the last issue of which was published in February 1933). In the pages of Bilan, we find internationalist reflections on everything from the rise of fascism, the theory of the ‘decadence’ of capitalism, the Spanish Civil War, ant-fascism and the Popular Front, Hitler and Nazism, Stalinism and the Great Terror, Trotsky and the Fourth International, and the international build-up to the Second World War. Among the most important names behind Bilan were Ottorino Perrone (‘Vercesi’) and Virgilio Verdaro (‘Gatto Mammone’) – the co-editors, and Jehan van den Hoven (‘Mitchell’).
9 Italian Left 1936: Problems of the period of transition, ICC: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/bilan1936
10 Party – International – State / VII – 3rd Part: The Soviet State, Bilan no.21 http://www.collectif-smolny.org/article.php3?id_article=299
11 ‘Axioms of Revolutionary Theory and Practice’, Bordiga Beyond the Myth, Prometheus Publications.
12 Damen, quoted from The Bordigist Current (1912-1952)
13 ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity’, C.L.R. James: https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/diamat/diamat47.htm
14 Ibid.
League of Internationalist Communists 