About this post: My small contribution to communist literature by writing a short introduction to the movement and its ideas. Intended as an update to Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”. Pictured are demonstrators from the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon alliance during the 2009 French Caribbean strikes (accessed from The Wall Street Journal behind a paywall).

1992 marked a watershed, the end of a long period. Like dominoes, the fall of one socialist state enforced the descent of yet another, and a wave of conservatism filling the void threatened to undo the progressive movements of the era. That second world, with its merits and faults, looked onto as a collective force for social change, appeared to vanish and decay. Workers’ parties, trade unions, post-colonial and indigenous regimes, feminist and queer struggles, and anti-racist networks all challenged capital, subverting it for the purpose of gains for those oppressed the world over, linked together as a heterogeneous yet combined project aptly called communism. Using Marxism or anarchism for theoretical advantage, most goals were met, but the movement achieving them departed, leaving nothing but its shadow. Only in such an absurd world can a ruling communist party enact privatisation measures to continue its development.

Such a contradiction may indicate the natural impossibility of communism. Both Camatte and Fukuyama assert such, only differing on the political tasks, what to do next. The dilemma was no longer between socialism and barbarism, but capitalism and collapse. Yet, there’s no reason to believe we are stuck, helpless to do anything. Humans are consciously social beings; though natural limitations are important, it is our consciousness which makes us capable of reflection on and practical alteration of our world. However, as social beings, we are acculturated by the environment we find ourselves in, the product of the contributions of our ancestors. The ideas in our heads, above all, come from this environment. Therefore, if a society has systematic strife and contradiction, the material forces which undo that contradiction must come from within. As a consequence, if we seek to radically change the world around us, we can’t wish it away – we have to revolutionise it.

Clearly, there is no way back; regardless of whether the socialist transition was completed, there currently is no outside-of-capital, no permanent refuge from racism and patriarchy. However, all this means is that communists would have to directly overcome the totality, struggle their way forward. The continued existence of such struggle is self-evident.

Zapatistas. Piqueteros. Alter-globalisationists from the Genoa demonstrators to the founders of the World Social Forum. Feminists agitating for reproductive rights and to scrap sexist and transphobic laws off the books. Strikers and rioters from Guadeloupe to Guangdong. Arab Springers, Occupiers and students the world over against austerity. Their struggles come from different sources but are common. They immediately have international consequences and interests. They yearn to unify and intersect with other movements and groups, not just out of solidarity, but acceptance of the bare fact that the battles of the old era won the marginalised and oppressed a larger stake at the political roundtable. In short, these struggles run up against the capitalist totality. That totality, and the struggles against it, impact who and how we love, who goes to school and where, motivates decisions between profit and the environment, and when we fight and why.

Capital is not exclusively a matter of profits and wages. At the same time, that is its essence, in the sense that without profiteering and without wage labour, capital ceases to be. The lack of class perspective dooms any broad coalition acting towards social change, no matter how intersectional. A leader of the movement to close the wage gap may turn around to start a women-only business not only out of support, but because she knows the overall demand for her sisters’ labour is lower, so she can profit even more than if she hired men. (This is especially true if there are racial or citizenship distinctions.) Likewise, recently assimilated workers, though they generally benefit from a struggle against nationalism, may vote to close the borders out of a fear of being laid off, sacked or otherwise becoming superfluous to the very thing which keeps them from abject misery – their salaries.

Two sides to capital, two modes of being. Though not as distinguished externally nor as homogeneous internally as they were in his time, Marx is still correct: there exists a bourgeoisie exploiting an existing proletariat. In other words, there exists one class whose main way of reproducing their livelihood is the perpetual accumulation of profit as money and/or means of production, and another class counter to it which lives, for the most part, by producing commodities (either as marketable goods or services). So long as the bourgeois gains more profits, the proletarian loses out on wages, and vice versa. Bourgeois have always and everywhere represented a minority of humanity. Proletarians, however, needed time to grow themselves, but in this era represent the majority of the population. Conceptions like a grand network of “buyers” and “sellers” or the precariat either ignore the different class experiences or treat a new mode of capital accumulation – acutely expressed as the diminished need for labour – as a new mode of production. Additionally, these perspectives express the fact that the very things which proletarians have in common with each other, or what individual bourgeois share, are what pit human against human within and between their classes.

Nevertheless, new language is necessary. Bourgeois and proletarian classes should not be understood as fixed categories, but groups implicated by processes of embourgeoisiement and proletarianisation. Individual vendors (i.e. self-exploiters), service workers and labourers in illicit markets still belong to the proletariat. Young startup engineers may have working class friends, but they are still bourgeois.

For most of modern history, from mercantile to industrial capitalism, up to the end of the colonial era, the old pre-capitalist powers, a nascent bourgeoisie, emerging proletariat, latent peasantry and slaves all existed, competing to live. Either to match the early capitalist states in Western Europe and America or just to keep afloat, revolutionary action on the part of all latter four classes brought to the world the hundreds of nations we know today. Which class took centre stage depended on which was most interested and capable of development and change at the given time. Whenever these revolutions came, the proletariat, fledgling as it was and itself a product of capitalism, would either lead the way or gain whatever concessions possible.

Now, communism has always meant the process of undoing capitalism (and, therefore, class), but it is historically sensitive. If capitalism means an alliance between the aristocrat and the bourgeois (who, often, were just parent and child), communists must totally expropriate the former and keep the latter from exploiting anyone until they too can be abolished as a class. It does mean taking some stake in capitalist relations, as the proletariat needed mechanised agriculture, liberal rights and advancements in productive technology. In the core and the rest of the “capitalist” world, these goals were worked towards via hegemony within liberal states and workers uprisings. However, there were more workers’ states in the global periphery due to their working classes being the most poised to set up developmentalist regimes. This is a time when most of the world lived in colonies, and the proletariat was a minority. Moreover, the combination of a lack of automated production, the need for growing labour forces, and higher profit rates for capitalists made this much more possible in the past.

However, for better or worse, the social basis for these kinds of movements is gone. In the present, the proletariat is the largest class and contains the vast majority of the world’s oppressed. Agriculture is either mechanised or turned into industrial-scale production of cash crops; consequently, hundreds of millions of farmers are most likely agricultural proletarians, not peasants. Fully-fledged markets and established bourgeoisies are found in all nations. Most devastatingly, in an era of overproduction, shrinking profit rates make both the liberal compromise and the socialist developmentalist regime prohibitive to maintain. The crisis in this movement shocked the liberal capitalist world first from the 1968-1977 struggles, but swept over the socialist countries even faster and more fiercely from 1989-1992. It was clear by then that proletarians are not tasked with their self-liberation, but their self-abolition as a class within the capitalist mode of production.

So, in a way, because the old tactics are not fit for this new world, we are at the beginning again, restructuring the communist project. But this is not turning back time, for history unfolded. Capitalist production, and its contending classes, did grow and spread worldwide. The lot of the oppressed did improve, however unevenly. Still there remains a struggle yet to be waged. The movements of the new era are teaching us how to fight unprecedented battles, establish fresh connections, and even expose a glimpse of the world incumbent on us to create. Communists know now that their movement can do nothing but obliterate all capitalist, and therefore class relations. It must rid society of gender distinctions, make racialisation impossible, undo alienation and competition, and settle the score between human needs and environmental pressures. It must do so not just as ends but as means. Communism is a challenge, but a welcome one. So come, workers and oppressed of the world, let us unite once more and win again!