1. What is Communism?

Communism is the negation of capitalism. A movement produced by the development and success of the capitalist mode of production, which will culminate with the destruction of the latter and the birth of a new type of society. Where there currently exists a world based on wage labour and the commodity, there must instead be a world where human activity will never take the form of wage labour and where the products of that activity will not be objects of commerce. Our era is the era of this metamorphosis. It displays the conjuncture of the basic elements of the capitalist crisis and all the requisite means for a communist resolution of this crisis. To describe the principles of communism, to examine how they will ensure the future life of humanity, and to show they are currently unfolding right before our eyes—these are the objectives we shall try to achieve in this text.

Science Fiction?

We would like to depict the world of tomorrow, the communist society we desire. This will not take the form of an attempt to rival science fiction or journalism by presenting a report on the life of the peoples and the animals of the future. We do not have a time machine.

Despite the intriguing nature of the question we cannot predict who will win the war between slacks and skirts, or between the sausages of La Garriga and those of Mallorca. Nor can we even guarantee that humanity will have a future. What makes us so sure that we will not be erased by a nuclear war or a cosmic cataclysm?

Nevertheless, prediction is desirable and possible. We want to describe communist society on the basis of its general regulatory principles. It is necessary to show that tomorrow can be more than just an improved or reformed version of today.

In order not to give the impression of taking too much for granted, we shall go into detail and we shall provide examples. You do not have to take this seriously. You can take it or leave it.

The future is not neutral. Capital has a tendency to occupy and subjugate all social space. But it cannot organize the commerce of its commodities and its wage workers between past and future the way the science fiction authors imagine it will be done. Capital takes revenge for this failing on the field of publicity and ideology. It invites us to live in the future now, to buy the clock or the car or the washing machine of the future. Images of a capitalist future fill our present.

To discuss the communist organization of society, despite the risk of error, is to begin to lift the stone slab that is crushing our lives.

The old question of the reactionaries, “But what do you propose as an alternative?”, must be immediately rejected. We are not in the business of selling ideas. We do not have to advertise a society that does away with the market the way one advertises a new brand of soap. Communism is neither an object of commerce nor of politics. It is their radical critique. Communism is not a program that can be submitted to the vote of electors or consumers, not even if it is a democratic vote. It is the hope of the proletarian masses to abandon forever their condition of being mere electors or consumers. Those who put themselves in the position of simple spectators, who believe they can judge without getting involved, are excluded from the debate.

If it is possible to speak of the revolutionary society this is because it is already being born within the society of the present.

Some people will find our propositions insane or naïve. We do not expect to convince everyone. If such a thing were possible, it would be very disturbing. We would rather have readers who have to rub their eyes before granting credence to our positions.

The proletarian revolution will be the victory of simplicity over a servile and sterile science. All of this calls for care around demonstrations. There is a risk that they will take place not in the tranquillity of the laboratory but violently and palpably.

Before saying what communism is, we have to make some things clear right away. It is necessary to denounce the lies surrounding it and to clearly express just what communism is not. Since communism is such a simple reality, so closely linked to everyday life, with which it is identified, the worst counter-truths have not failed to proliferate around communism. This is a paradox only for those who are unaware of the fact that in the “society of the spectacle” it is precisely the meaning of what is quotidian and familiar that must be rejected.

2. Communism or Capitalism?

The prevailing view holds that communism is in principle a doctrine elaborated in the 19th century by the famous Siamese twins named Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and that this doctrine would be perfected a little later by the founder of the Bolshevik State, Lenin. It would be applied with more or less nastiness in a certain number of countries: the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba…. In this context people debate whether Yugoslavia or Algeria are socialist, capitalist, or mixed regimes. The reader will forgive us if we do not sing the praises of the benefits of such socialism or communism. We will not confuse apples with oranges, the grey monotony of the countries of the East or the personality cult of China with humanity’s radiant future.

The Corkscrews

Communism was not founded by Marx, or by Engels, or by the Pharaoh Ramses II. There might be a brilliant inventor behind the origin of the corkscrew or gunpowder or Valencian paella. There is no such inventor at the origin of communism, nor is there one at the beginning of capitalism, either. Social movements are not the affair of brilliant inventors.

After Marx, Engels synthesized a movement that had become conscious of its existence. They never claimed to have invented either the reality or the word. They wrote little about communist society. They helped the Movement and communist theory to dispel the fog of religion, rationalism and utopianism. They encouraged the proletariat not to rely on the plans of reformers or prophets.

Real revolutionaries do not fetishize the ideas of Marx and Engels. They know that they are the fruit of a particular era and that they have their limitations. Both men underwent development and sometimes clashed. One can find “anything” in the works of Marx. It is necessary to exercise discrimination!

We do not claim to be Marxists. But we deny to those who do claim to be Marxists the right to appropriate and falsify the thought of their heroes.

The proof that great men are powerless in the face of historical movements is provided for us by the shameful way that the work of Marx and Engels was distorted in order to be used against communism.

Some individuals are more gifted and perceptive than the mass of their contemporaries. Class society cultivates these differences. Their impact is felt within the communist movement. We are not talking about whether the leaders or the people make history. We are saying that the work of Marx, like that of Fourier, Bordiga or any other spokesperson for communism, transcends the simple point of view of the individual. Communism does not deny differences in ability, it does not reduce its theoreticians to playing the role of simple amplifiers of the will of the masses but to the contrary is the bitter enemy of careerism, the Führer principal and celebrity worship.

Communism is neither an ideology nor a doctrine. Just as there are communist actions there are also communist words, texts, and a communist theory, but action is not the application of an idea. Theory is not the pre-established battle plan or social blueprint that can be most effectively translated into reality. Communism is not an ideal.

The countries that proclaim their adherence to Marxism-Leninism are not just places where the principles of communism have been misapplied for one reason or another. These countries are capitalist countries. Their regimes display some anomalous characteristics but they are just as capitalist as any liberal regime. It could be argued that a country like Poland or East Germany is much more capitalist than many underdeveloped countries in the “free world”. In these countries “communists” are fighting against certain spontaneous tendencies of capital. This is being done for the good of capitalism’s general development and is by no means peculiar.

Mandatory planning, collective ownership of the means of production, proletarian ideology … none of this has anything communist about it. These are aspects of capitalism that have been accentuated in these countries. All the basic characteristics of the system and of the logic of capital accumulation (re-baptized as “socialist accumulation”) are ideally suited for such a regime.

The Capitalist Mode of Production

To see socialism or communism in the Marxist-Leninist regimes is to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the reality of these regimes, and above all it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the nature of capitalism.

This shows that one thinks that capitalism is based upon the power of a particular class (the bourgeoisie), private property in the means of production, and the unbridled quest for profit. None of these features are fundamental.

The bourgeoisie is the heir of the old mercantile class. After having spent many years consolidating an important but strictly delimited position within agrarian societies, the commercial bourgeoisie began, over the course of the Middle Ages in Europe, to no longer control just commodities but also the instruments of production. Among the latter was human labour power, which it transformed, via wage labour, into a commodity. This was the origin of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie was in power from the moment that it became the ruling class thanks to the power of the economic and industrial forces it controlled which rendered the old forms of production obsolete. But the bourgeoisie can only submit to the laws of its economy. As the owner of capital, it must obey this force that drags it along, deranges it and sometimes drives it to bankruptcy.

The individual or the separate enterprise has some room for manoeuvre, but neither can swim against the current for very long.

No historical class has ever been able to satisfy all of its whims by using the power it ostensibly wielded. Even the worst tyrants could only remain in power by acknowledging the strict limits of their real sovereignty. It is a mistake to seek to explain social phenomena in terms of power. Such an explanation is even less applicable to the capitalist system than to its predecessors.

The class of those who direct the course of capital has been subject to constant permutations by the action of capital itself. What do the rich merchant of the Middle Ages and the modern CEO have in common? Their motivations and their tastes are different. This divergence is necessary so that they can perform the same function in two different moments of capitalist development. The class of feudal lords was distinguished by tradition and inheritance. This was no longer the case for a bourgeoisie whose fortunes could rise and fall by virtue of business success, marriage connections and bankruptcy.

The relations that unite master and slave, lord and serf, are personal relations. Now, however, instead of being bound to one boss the modern proletarian is bound to the system. The chains that bind him are not those of a personal alliance or a particular contract, but those of a direct need to survive, the dictatorship of his own needs. The proletarian, uprooted from his ancestral land on his lord’s manorial domain, and separated from the means of production, has no other choice than to prostitute himself. He is free, marvellously free. He can even, should this arouse his enthusiasm, refuse to sell his labour power and starve to death.

A bourgeois or politician could fail as an individual. In Russia and China an entire section of the international bourgeois class was left in the lurch. It was replaced by a bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is not a radically different class with respect to its predecessor! A “communist” banker or industrial director bears more of a resemblance to his capitalist enemy than the latter does to his counterpart from only fifty years ago, not to mention the 15th or the 18th centuries.

If capitalism, whether of the western or eastern variety, cannot be explained by the power of the bourgeoisie, it is even less possible to explain communism by the power of the proletariat. The advent of communism means the self-destruction of the proletariat.

Private Property

Private property in the means of production is not a constitutive feature of the capitalist mode of production. It pertains only to the juridical sphere. It subsists in the East in the form of the lands owned by individual peasants. In the West it is being progressively diminished by the encroachments of public ownership.

The State often owns large industrial complexes. Although nationalized, the postal services and the railroads have not lost their capitalist nature. Frederick Engels interpreted this tendency of the State to become the owner of productive forces as a general development that would relegate private capitalism to the museum of antiquities.

The development of modern capitalism is tending increasingly to dissociate private ownership from the management of the productive forces. Not only are the directors of nationalized companies not the owners of the capital they control; even in the big private industries, if they are privately owned, ownership is divided into tiny percentage shares of the total capital. The capitalization requirements of big industry are far larger than any particular personal or family fortune could encompass. These corporations function with the money that is provided to them by a mass of small stockholders and savings account depositors who have practically no power at all over the corporations’ operations.

The situation of the countries of the East must be understood in the context of this general developmental trend of capital.

Profit

The capitalist is supposed to be motivated by the quest for the maximum profit. The expression “maximum profit” does not mean much. A business owner can try for one day, or for a week, or even for a whole month, to drive men and machines at full capacity if he was assured of a market for his products. But he would run the risk of regretting his imprudence soon enough for having exhausted his capital. The failure of an attempt of this kind took place in China with “the great leap forward”. The scale of the expected profits, and consequently, the volume of dividends for the stockholders and the salaries of the managers, and the rate of economic growth are not arbitrarily decided by omnipotent capitalists.

Making money, that is what motivates the capitalist, whether for personal enrichment or for investment. If he does not make money, whether as a result of negligence, virtue or because it is no longer objectively possible, his business will be eliminated. This is also true for the bureaucrat, in the form of fear of administrative sanctions. As for the rest, neither in the USSR nor in China has it been proclaimed that profit has disappeared; to the contrary, profit is sought for the good of the people, to construct communism. It has become an instrument of economic measurement at the service of the planned economy!

In neither the East nor the West, as Marx explained, can capitalist development be explained by the profit motive. The truth is quite the contrary. The ideas of profit or land rent do not explain the laws of motion of the system. They are only categories by means of which the ruling classes become aware of economic necessities and take action.

Unlike the humanists of the left who see or pretend to see profit as their great enemy, revolutionaries do not allow themselves to succumb to this illusion. They do not blame the system for being immoral; we are not mired in an attachment to a few unprofitable archaic sectors.

Profit will disappear with the revolution. And without delay! Until that moment arrives it will to some extent play a protective role for the workers. It imposes limits on the tyranny of the owners; it obliges them to be careful with their human material. If it were possible to abolish profit while preserving capital, the average business would be inclined to welcome the return of the concentration camps and society would unravel and collapse into the most absolute barbarism. Nazism was not a historical accident; it was the unleashing of forces that were lurking in the lowest rungs of capital’s civilization. Profit fixes some limits on the authoritarianism and on the will to dominate and to destroy that are spawned by an inhuman system.

Blame profit! But then you will also have to blame the whole society in which the life of man has become a commodity.

Wage Labour and Industrialization

The capitalist mode of production is constructed on two solid pillars that distinguish it from all modes of production that preceded it.

The first of these pillars is the system of wage labour. There have already been men who rented their charms, their political loyalty, their military ability and even their labour power to other men. But these activities remained marginal in societies composed of small groups among which money and the commodity did not circulate widely. The development of capitalism meant the real introduction of wage labour in the sphere of production, which it would transform into the general form of exploitation.

The second pillar is industrialization, the transformation of man’s relations with nature and with respect to his own activity. Man was no longer content with scratching out a bare subsistence from the soil. With industrialization he would assume the task of systematically transforming nature on a constantly increasing scale. Capitalism is an uninterrupted revolution in the methods of production; it is the progress of “science” and “reason”, as opposed to fatalism and obscurantism. It is the movement that succeeds the stagnation of agrarian societies.

Communism is not a return to the past. The end of the system of wage labour does not mean the return to slavery or serfdom. The overcoming of the process of the “conquest of nature” and of industrial organization does not mean a return to the stagnation of the past. Communism will render the aggressive and disorderly nature of the action of capital a thing of the past. Its purpose is not to destroy, to compartmentalize and subjugate, but to act comprehensively to humanize the world, and to make it habitable. It will transcend our current industrial practices so as to reconcile the useful and the pleasant. The lost sense of belonging that once connected the human being with his environment will be rediscovered on a higher level.

Capitalism did not emerge one fine day because people suddenly noticed how efficient it is. Its advent was not a triumph of the intellect; it was imposed on the workforce by way of social convulsions that were often cruel and irrational. It encountered resistance; it would retreat for a while only to seize more ground. It “harvested” its wage labourers from the masses of peasants who had previously been uprooted from their lands and reduced to mendicancy.

The movement of capital has a two-faced aspect. On the one hand it is the development of the human and material forces of production, and consequently use values and useful things. On the other hand it is the development of exchange value. The commodity thus already presents this double character; capital is still a commodity but it is also value that must be constantly enlarged.

For many years capital took the form of the commodity. The merchant could, thanks to his ingenuity and cunning, possess and set in motion a growing mass of products. The moneylender did likewise, but only with respect to money. These primitive forms of capital, however, could not continue indefinitely; value was still parasitic and did not create the means required for its accumulation. Only by the unceasing appropriation and crystallization of value in the means of production as capital did it become capable of real expansion. It is a vampire that feeds on value, i.e., human labour; in order to fulfil its purposes, it must develop machinery and productivity. For capital the latter are only means to an end; for us, in the last analysis, these factors are of the utmost significance. This technological development often assumes unsavoury forms—unemployment, deadly weapons, devastation of nature—but it will permit the revolutionary transformation of human activity and create the preconditions for leaving the barbarous era of class societies behind us.

Communism will not overthrow capital in order to return to the early days of the commodity. Commodity exchange is a link in the chain of progress, but it is link between antagonistic parts. It will disappear without however occasioning a return to barter, that primitive form of exchange. Humanity will no longer be divided into opposed groups and enterprises. It will organize to plan and utilize its common heritage, and to distribute tasks and enjoyments. The logic of the gift (sharing) will replace the logic of exchange.

Money will disappear. It is not a neutral instrument of measurement. It is the commodity in which all other commodities are reflected.

Gold, silver and diamonds will have no other value than the value that derives from their specific usefulness. Following Lenin’s suggestion we will be able to reserve gold for the construction of public urinals.

The State and Capitalism

In the so-called “communist” countries money continues to circulate undisturbed. The division by international borders, and within these borders, the division of the economy into separate enterprises, works wonders.

The role played by the State in the economy, a role that is legally founded in the public ownership of enterprises, can be explained by the capitalist nature of these countries.

The State and the commodity are old friends. The merchants wanted society to be unified, so that thieves and robbers could be suppressed and the standard of monetary exchange regulated. With the increasing circulation of goods and people, the State and its bureaucracy discovered the means to become free of the dominant power of the agrarian sector.

The modern State, whether monarchy or republic, is the product of the dissolution of feudal structures by capital. The latter set itself in opposition to particular interests as a representative of the general interest. Capital had to do this because this helped it to overcome those contradictions and oppositions that it could not avoid provoking. The monarchy and the bourgeoisie, despite some momentary friction, stuck together against the feudal powers. Political unification was necessary for the development of commercial and industrial enterprises. Large fortunes and accumulated wealth made the State stronger and more independent. The State often intervened directly to allocate or consolidate the capital necessary for one or another industrial sector. It established the legal arsenal necessary for the development of a supply of free labour. It liquidated the old customs and dissolved ancient bonds. When the bourgeoisie made its appearance on the political stage it had already been a dominant force for many years and the monarchy had long been its servant.

In Russia and Japan, countries that made their appearance on the international stage while still barely industrialized, it was the State that initiated and organized the development of capitalism. It did so in order to preserve the basis of its own power, so as to have a supply of modern weapons. By putting capital at its service it only bowed to the superiority of the latter. The monarchy initiated a process that would end with its own destruction. The necessary preconditions for this grafting operation were not present everywhere. If it was successful in Japan this was because the State was already independent and trade was already highly developed. In China the process at first failed to take hold, and the same was true for most of the other pre-capitalist countries.

The State must often intervene in order to constrain a capital that is acting irresponsibly and to invest more in one place than in another. The bureaucratic regimes only accentuate this tendency towards a never achieved goal.

Does the capitalism of the East create the conditions for a more harmonious or more rational expansion of capital than the capitalism of the West? The question does not make much sense. That such a question can arise is the result of the defects of traditional capitalism. If this traditional capitalism is now re-imported to Moscow or Leningrad it is because of the defects of the capitalism of the East.

Wherever the bourgeoisie remained in a state of underdevelopment due to the economy, the bureaucracy conquered political power by relying on the support of certain social forces like the proletariat or the peasantry. But this could not reduce the impact of the disintegrating effects of international capitalism on traditional society. The bureaucracy had no other choice; it could not, as it wished, establish traditional capitalism and make it fertile; this was because of its social base of support and its lack of capital. Learning from experience it found a way that conformed with its nature and which allowed it, at the expense of the peasantry, to accumulate industrial capital.

The bureaucracy is a unifying force that has facilitated the authoritarian transfer of wealth from one sector of society to another. It modifies the spontaneous development of capital in favour of its goal of retaining power. But capital is not a neutral force that can be used for any purpose whatsoever. The bureaucracy plans, it rules. But what does it plan, what does it rule over? The accumulation of capital. It restricts the free market, it fights against the black market that is constantly re-emerging; but this is not the proof of its anti-capitalism but only a sign that the essential basis of capital is still alive and well.

The western States themselves have been led to intervene even more directly in the play of the economic forces. They must have a social policy and they must undertake planning. Bureaucratization is not a phenomenon restricted to the East. It affects the democratic and the fascist States as well as the big private corporations. It is the product of and the bleak remedy for the increasing atomization of society.

In a certain sense it is incorrect to speak of the bureaucratic capitalism or State capitalism of the countries of the East. All modern capitalist forms are bureaucratic and statist.

State ownership of all industry does not, however, signify absolute control; legal power is not the same thing as real power.

In liberal capitalism, the State, relying on the support of popular, military or even bourgeois forces, can confront this or that major corporation; it has the power. This does not, however, allow it to rise above economic laws. It can stand up to the power of the monopolies, but it cannot return to the world of small businesses of the past.

In the capitalism of the East, the bureaucratic State, regardless of the location of its headquarters, cannot abolish commercial categories and competition between enterprises. As long as separate enterprises exist there will be competition even if prices are subject to regulation.

This lack of unity is not limited to the economic sphere. The bureaucracy itself is incessantly rent by factional struggles and conflicts between individuals. Due to a lack of real unity it is the image of unity that must be maintained. The enemy is not a party colleague, but anti-party.

What the bureaucracy gains with regard to economic efficiency, is immediately lost again. The lie and the loss of reality totally suffuse the social body. The silent struggle behind the scenes replaces open competition.

Although it was capable of initiating a burst of economic development in unfavourable conditions, the bureaucracy always trailed behind the technological level attained by the liberal capitalist societies.

Recuperation

Why would capitalists try to pass themselves off as communists? As a general rule capitalists do not like being called capitalists!

The origin of the capitalist claim to the name of communist can be precisely dated to the Russian revolution. The word communist conveys more of the sense that one would bend over backwards for the working class rather than that one recognizes the fact of exploitation. It can give inhuman development of the system a human face: the construction of communism. Or else the masses are presented with some projects called “the new frontier” or the “new society”!

When capital claims to be communist, when it recuperates the thought of Marx in order to denature it in its universities of intellectuals or in order to facilitate the brutalization of the workers in factories, it is only imitating a movement that was completely fulfilled elsewhere. Capital does not create, it recuperates; it feeds on the passion and the initiative of the proletarians, which is to say: it feeds on communism.

You will not be able to understand much about communism if you do not understand the capitalist nature of the countries of the Eastern Bloc. The revolutionary battles of its past must not be allowed to rehabilitate Stalinism, since it is a fundamentally anti-communist system and ideology. The fact that bastions of the working class still exist within its domains must not cause us to become indulgent, but to the contrary, it must incite us to refuse any compromise with it.

One does a great service to Stalinism by not criticizing it as a capitalist system. Some revolutionaries, anarchists in particular, have recognized Stalinism as communism so as to be able to associate the latter term with authoritarianism. Authority—that is the monster! Under the guise of analysis the search for the origin of this authoritarianism goes all the way back to the personality of Karl Marx.

The Trotskyists, following in the footsteps of their leader, the unfortunate enemy of Stalin, have manufactured explanations as elaborate as they are silly. Socialist base and capitalist superstructure coexist, at least, in the USSR; as for the other countries, the jury is still out. In any event, they never understood anything about communism; no more than Trotsky, who thought compulsory labour was a communist principle. They are not revolutionaries; Trotsky was, but he was never anything but a bourgeois revolutionary and then a reluctant bureaucrat. We shall leave this clique with its intellectualism, its Byzantine disputes and its ridiculous organizational fetishism.

The Maoists, those “Stalinist-mystics”, reduce the entire problem to a question of politics and morality. The USSR has become social-imperialist and maybe even capitalist. Fortunately, China and Albania, under the wise proletarian leadership of Mao, Enver Hoxha and Bibi Fricotin, have not been contaminated. Communism is profit and politics put at the service of the people!

As communist ideas spread, even in the USSR and China, to satisfy the needs of a proletariat that will become revolutionary, these sects will become increasingly more incomprehensible! They are trying to keep the process of the revolution on the terrain of politics. They are in the vanguard, it is true, but it is the vanguard of capital; in a revolutionary period all the political puppets will try to assume revolutionary airs so as not to be cast aside. It has become something of a tradition for the revolution to be combated in the name of the revolution. The Stalinist or leftist militants who have gone astray will be incorporated into the real party of communism.

Some, not so blind, have acknowledged the fact that society in the capitalism of the Eastern Bloc is divided into social classes. Unfortunately, they have also thought that this capitalism represents a new and superior mode of production. This is doing too much honour to Stalin and his cohorts.

Primitive Society

We see nothing communist about the regimes that claim to be communist. On the other hand, we see communism where it is usually not discerned. Primitive societies that, rejected by “civilization”, subsist in arid or inaccessible corners of the earth are communist, although their members live from hunting and gathering or from rudimentary agriculture. This is why we can say that the USSR is not communist but the United States of America was communist several centuries ago!

We do not expect to make humanity return to this stage. Such a project would in any case be very difficult because such a condition requires a very low population density. It is important, however, to rehabilitate primitive and prehistoric humanity.

The Indian was happier and, in a certain sense, more civilized, than the modern American citizen. The cave man did not die of hunger. It is in today’s world where hundreds of millions of humans have an empty stomach. Primitive man, as Marshall Sahlins has demonstrated, lived in a state of abundance; he was wealthy, not because he accumulated wealth, but because he lived as he wished. The western traveller who was sometimes paradoxically impressed by his good health before giving him smallpox pities his seeming poverty and his nakedness. Primitive man possessed practically nothing; but for those who live from hunting and gathering this is no disadvantage. His lack of possessions allowed him to move about freely and take advantage of the bounty of nature. His security was not maintained by savings but by his knowledge and his ability to use what his environment provided. He spent less time than a civilized man in earning his livelihood. His “productive” activity had nothing to do with the boredom that characterizes the office or the factory. Fortunate are the Yir-Yiron of Australia, who have the same word for ‘work’ and for ‘play’!

There is a profound difference between the communism of the past and the communism of the future. The former is a society that uses its environment by knowing how to adapt to it, while the latter is a society based on the continuous and profound transformation of that same environment. Between these two communist societies, the period of class societies will appear to be, when viewed in this perspective, a painful but relatively short stage of human history. A small consolation for those who are still immersed in it!

Marx and Engels

Marx and Engels tried to acquire an understanding of the development of capitalist society. They did not spend much time describing the future world that monopolized the attention of the utopian socialists. But one cannot not draw a hard and fast line between the critique of capitalism and the affirmation of communism. The correct understanding of the historical role of money or of the State can only be attained from the point of view of their disappearance.

If Marx and Engels did not have more to say about communist society this is undoubtedly, and paradoxically, not only because this society was not as easily comprehended due to the fact that it was so distant, but also because it was all the more present in the spirits of the revolutionaries of that time. When they spoke of the abolition of wage labour in The Communist Manifesto they were understood by those in whom these words found an echo. Today it is more difficult to envisage a world without the State and without the commodity since both have become ubiquitous. But by becoming so ubiquitous they have also lost their historical necessity. Theoretical effort must take over from spontaneous consciousness, before it renders itself superfluous by virtue of the fact that its conclusions have become simple banalities.

Marx and Engels may not have understood the nature of communism as well as Fourier, in the sense of its liberation and harmonization of the emotions. On the other hand, Fourier did not fully reject the wages system insofar as he envisioned, among other things, that doctors should not be paid for treating the illnesses of their patients but rather in accordance with the general state of health of the community.

Marx and Engels nonetheless expressed themselves clearly enough so that they cannot be held responsible for the bureaucracy and the financial policies of the “communist” countries. According to Marx, money disappears immediately with the advent of communism and the producers no longer exchange their products. Engels spoke of the disappearance of commodity production with the advent of socialism. In order to clarify the fact that these statements were not youthful errors, as is so often claimed by the Marxological rabble, we shall draw upon the “Critique of the Gotha Program” and Anti-Dühring.

Stalinists of every stripe will speak of the dross in the works of the masters. They will perform a song and dance that proves they are Marxists rather than dogmatists. According to them, money, capital and the State have shed their bourgeois character in order to become proletarian. The boldest will even say that once communism is constructed it might be possible to leave such trinkets behind. According to others communism will be simply a society in which the standard of living will be very, very high. In any event, communism, lost in heaven and the stairway that leads to it, is composed of a multitude of additional modules that form so many transitional stages.

It is true that communism is being constructed in the Eastern Bloc, but its construction is neither better nor more conscientiously undertaken there than it is anywhere else. A revolution will be required for it to be exposed.

The concept of building communism by means of economic and social instrumentalities is a typically bourgeois idea. Communism is represented in the same way as the production of a manufactured object. Society is seen as an immense factory; it is thought that the whole functions just like the part. Therefore it is a question of will, of planning, of the correct political line….

The error into which these Stalinists fall with respect to the road to follow affects the result. It is no longer a question of making the private enterprise economy disappear, but of transforming the economy into one big enterprise. The conundrum represented by the existence of a police force will disappear; the augmentation of the moral sense by “communist” education will be enough to cause theft and subversion to disappear!

The best solution is of course the one proposed by Joseph Stalin himself. When we cannot change reality, we will change the words. The little father of the people tells us: you want the employees to receive a wage and, through the agency of the State, they are the owners of the enterprises that hire them. You cannot be your own employee! So the wages system is abolished in the Soviet Union. If you are under the impression that you receive a wage, if you are afraid of being fired from your job, this is because you are delusional. Fortunately, our socialist fatherland possesses re-education centres and psychiatric hospitals!

Stalin admitted that commodity production and the division of the economy into separate enterprises still existed, but this was not capitalism because in capitalism the means of production are the property of individuals. Everything boils down, in practice, to questions concerning the legal definition of terms. It is enough for a State to proclaim that it is communist for it to be so.

Since Stalin explained all of this in The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, those who have studied this question have had nothing new to contribute to our understanding of the issue.

One can see Mao Tse Tung or Fidel Castro as brave guerrillas and capable politicians. One could maintain that the Chinese suffer less hunger than the Indians and have fewer political freedoms than the Japanese. But regardless of these details, it is still just capitalism.

3. The End of Property

Communism is the end of property. Everyone knows this and it arouses a great deal of discomfort; some of it totally justified. The owners of large estates, of numerous sumptuous homes … will be obliged to moderate their lifestyle. Industrial and commercial fortunes will disappear. Those who will be expropriated, although today they possess a large part of society’s wealth, are a small and well-defined caste. On the other hand, we shall not as a general rule attack individuals; we shall act with reference to the nature of the goods in question. We shall seize the castles but will leave the houses alone, whether they belong to the poor or the rich! The concerns that have penetrated the consciousness of the proletarians and, above all, that of the peasants, are not justified. Communism is not the seizure from the oppressed of the little they possess.

What Is Property?

This question is not so easy to answer. For proof of this, we call the reader’s attention to the polemic that pitted Marx against Proudhon. The latter had asserted, “property is theft”. Proudhon understood quite well that the origin of property was not nature, but that it was the product of a society in which relations of force, violence and the appropriation of the labour of others prevailed. But if one says that property is theft, and since theft can only be defined in relation to property, we find ourselves in a vicious circle.

The problem only becomes more complicated when one proceeds from the question of property to the question of its abolition. Is it necessary to abolish all property, whether in the means of production or personal possessions? Is it necessary to act selectively? Should we replace private property with collective or State property? Or is it a matter of the radical abolition of all property?

Communism opts for the latter proposal. It is not about the transfer of titles of ownership, but precisely the disappearance of property, plain and simple. In the revolutionary society you will not be able to “use and abuse” something just because you own it. There will be no exceptions to this rule. A building, a pin, a parcel of land: none of these things will belong to anyone, or, if you prefer, they will belong to everyone. The very idea of property will soon be considered to be an absurdity.

In that case, will everything belong equally to everybody? Will the first person who comes along be able to evict me from my house, strip me of my clothing, and take the bread from my mouth because I no longer own my house, or my clothing, or my food? Of course not; the material and personal security of each person will, to the contrary, be reinforced. Simply stated, it will no longer be the right of ownership that will be invoked for protection but the interest of the person in question will be the direct criterion. Each person must be able to feed himself in proportion to his hunger and seek lodgings and clothing at his convenience. Each person must be able to enjoy peace of mind. Certain ideologues want to see property as merely the extension of the animal’s territoriality into human society; in this way property would no longer be a fact pertaining to a specific era or even of a specific species, but as belonging to all animals. However, no one has ever seen a fox or a bear rent the territory that he owns, or inhabit a territory where he is only a tenant! Such things are nonetheless frequent in our society. It is precisely property which permits the use and the possession of something to be dissociated.

The fact that a good is not property provides no indication regarding the use to which it will be put; all that is certain is that it will be put to some use. A bicycle will be used to travel, and not only so that Mr. Martin, its legitimate owner, may travel. The question regarding whether or not human beings, for sentimental or personal reasons, need a fixed territory and objects with which they identify is not a question that can be answered with reference to the concept of property. So, the dental hygienists can rest assured: we are not proposing to make toothbrushes into common property.

To oppose individualism to collectivism, personal use to social use, in order to make this opposition the crux of a “choice between forms of society” is bourgeois cretinism. From this perspective it would be absolutely necessary to support rail transport against the personal automobile; in this way the communists would be in favour of the collective orgy and the bourgeois would be in favour of masturbation! We laugh at these kinds of disputes, they make no sense outside the context of practical circumstances. What is clear, however, is that we are not the ones who are responsible for the depersonalization and atomization of our existence.

Under current conditions the rights of property constitute a barrier against the destruction of personal life. It is in every possible way a derisory guarantee. It does not stop noise from penetrating the walls of poorly insulated apartments, it is of little avail against eviction; the peasant might be the owner of his land, but his title deed poses no obstacle to the advancing depopulation of the countryside.

Today there are fallow fields, uninhabited houses, wealth of every kind lies unused, and all of this is accepted as necessary; unfortunately the owners do not want, or, what is worse, are incapable, of either using or giving away these goods.

The idea of ownership does have some relationship to reality; it is also, however, a mystification: one can own something without having any power of control over it. It is a double lie: social and economic; and it also affects the relations between man and nature.

Property rights are necessary in capitalism. Exchange requires that everything be clearly defined. When it is a question of business dealings it is necessary to know who really owns a particular commodity and who does not. In the past, local custom could provide a framework for deciding how to use things and arrange matters; but when things acquired a degree of independence from men and could pass from hand to hand, custom was no longer enough. Only faint traces of it remain in the countryside: easement rights, the right to access springs and other sources of water, the right to glean after the harvest…. The commodity and capital need a discreet body of rules that are applicable regardless of the particular circumstances.

In the Middle Ages landed property in the modern sense did not exist. With regard to any particular parcel of land, the rights of the serfs, the local lord, the king, and the church could be exercised…. Until the 19th century a certain number of rules continued to restrict the power of the landowner by restricting him to taking no more than the harvest of the first mowing of a meadow, forbidding him from fencing off his land, forcing him to allow gleaning rights and pasturage of animals on fallow land.

In the world of bourgeois equality everybody is a free proprietor. The peasant owns his land, the industrialist owns his factory and the worker owns his labour power. There is no theft, but there are people who become wealthy and accumulate riches completely out of proportion to what their own labour would make possible. Property conceals relations of exploitation.

If the peasant has become an agricultural landowner and possesses the parcel of land he cultivates, he is no less subject to certain price fluctuations that are completely outside his power. Working constantly, he is nonetheless unable to become rich.

Property does not explain the power of the capitalist enterprise. The enterprise is the owner of fixed capital: buildings, machines, etc. But this does not take into account the wealth that passes through its owner’s hands and which constitutes his turnover.

The complex interconnections of the economy lead to a restriction of the rights of property. What you do in your house can have a negative impact on your neighbour. You cannot throw your wastes in a river with impunity just because you own part of the shoreline.

The absolute character of the right of property—it is “sacred and inviolable” according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man—is insignificant in relation to the forces and the unpredictable events of nature. The most intransigent landowner will be powerless if an erupting volcano were to bury his land; he can call the police, but he will not be able to evict the intruder. As a general rule, natural objects and phenomena do not punctually obey us.

As the nephew of the great chief Cochise noted, the white men spend their whole lives fighting over land. It is not men, however, who can possess the land, but, to the contrary, it is the land that possesses and feeds men. We all end up buried in it sooner or later.

The Agrarian Question

The agrarian question is intimately linked to the solution of the problem of property. It is a vital question for the revolution. In the past, peasant armies suppressed the workers’ insurrections. The opposite also took place, as in Mexico. The small peasant has always been easily mobilized by the counterrevolution in the name of the defence of his sacred right to property.

In the industrialized countries, capital has done what it has accused the “reds” of wanting to do. It has expelled the majority of the peasants from their land. It can therefore no longer rely on the frightened masses of peasants to form the ranks of the counterrevolutionary armies. The supply of subsistence goods to the cities is still provided by the countryside, however. The party of order will always be happy to use this situation as a weapon against the revolution.

Where the agricultural workers do not own the land they cultivate, but are tenant farmers or wage labourers working for large estates, they will organize to carry on production. They will not have to answer to their old landlord or boss: the land will go to those who work it! If their former landlord or boss wants to join them in order to contribute his knowledge and labour, this would be of some help, but he will only be able to do so on the basis of equality.

Where ownership and cultivation of the soil coincide, where the peasant employs few or no wage labourers, the problem must be apprehended in a different manner: we must take into account, on the one hand, the interest of society as a whole, which cannot be supplied with food by discontented farmers; on the other hand, we must also take into account the proletarianized peasant, who depends on the capitalist system for his inputs and markets and who should understand that he has everything to gain from the communist revolution.

Capitalist development has taken place at the expense of agriculture. It has absorbed manpower and resources for industry. Communism will reverse this trend. Agriculture is its particular concern because of its role in food production as well as environmental protection. These are two areas where capitalism has demonstrated a distinct lack of prudence.

The institution of property, whether or not it is based on the family, will disappear along with the State and the legal system that legitimizes it. The use and habit of cultivating a particular parcel of land will continue and will even be organized by the revolutionary authorities. The peasants may organize upon this basis or, if they prefer, they may continue to occupy their parcel in isolation. It is likely that, at least for a certain period, both methods will be combined, each peasant being ensconced on his parcel but practicing more mutual aid than is presently the case for certain kinds of work and for the shipment of their products. Inheritance in the strict sense of the word will disappear—but who is more likely to possess the qualifications and the interest to succeed a farmer than his son!

The general rule will be to allow the peasants to organize agricultural production as they see fit. Coercion would be the worst and the most expensive solution of all.

The agricultural collectivization implemented by East Bloc capitalism has nothing to do with communism. It was not for ideological but for economic and class reasons that these programs were put into effect. It was necessary to combat the resurgence of the bourgeoisie in the countryside. The rich peasants were getting rich at the expense of the poor peasants by lending money at usurious rates of interest. They thus created a pole of accumulation for this interest capital that competed with the industrial pole of accumulation upon which the bureaucracy was based. This is why it was necessary to impose and to pay the price of agricultural collectivization.

And a heavy price was paid. In the early stages of collectivization in the Soviet Union, peasant resistance was so strong that the sharecroppers sector was decimated. The long-term consequence was the stagnation of agricultural productivity due to the lack of incentive on the part of the members of the Kolkhozes. This led to frequent policy changes with regard to family-owned farm parcels. Collectivization helped keep the peasants in the countryside by insulating them from the effects of direct economic pressure. This resulted in lower pressure and less competition in the labour market. The USSR preserved an exceptionally large number of peasants considering its level of industrial development. These peasants were dragged in the wake of industrial development like a prison chain gang.

By rejecting collectivization, do we therefore reject the task of revolutionizing and communizing the countryside? Absolutely not! To the contrary! The communist revolution is the liquidation of the commodity economy. This also holds true for the countryside.

The farmer will not make money in exchange for his labours if he is a wage labourer, nor from his commodities if he is an independent producer. He will gratuitously deliver his surplus production to society; in compensation, he will not have to pay for the goods required for his personal needs or his farm operations. He will no longer be motivated by the desire or the need for money. His motivation will be directly rooted in his interest in the work, by his love for his chosen way of life or by the desire to be useful.

The peasant will not have to work as hard as before. He will be able to request assistance from labour power made available by society. This will be made possible by the closure of a plethora of more or less parasitic enterprises and a reduction in the labour power utilized for the purposes of industry and the tertiary sector. It will be possible to provisionally shut down some productive enterprises in the era of giant agriculture in order to free up labour power. This would be unimaginable today.

Distribution, as well as production, will be transformed. The road that leads from the farmer to the consumer will be shortened by as much as possible. Products will be transported directly from a particular agricultural region to a particular city and this process will be organized by those directly involved. When one considers the difference between the price of production and the price paid by the consumer one will understand the significance of such a process of simplification.

The peasants will conduct the labour of cultivation and raising livestock either alone or with assistance from others. They will not work in isolation from the rest of society. We do not promise them absolute freedom. Agriculture depends today, and will continue to depend in the future, on other sectors of the economy. The most prominent such sectors are those that provide fertilizers and agricultural equipment; the independence of the peasants is thus necessarily restricted as a result of this condition. Furthermore, agriculture plays such an essential role that all those who depend on it cannot afford to ignore it.

Let us imagine an extreme case: if some farmers allow land to go uncultivated and herds to go untended because they no longer need to make money, it would be naïve to think that some people will quietly accept their fate and die of hunger. In such a situation it would be possible to cut off supplies to the lazy farmers as a countermeasure. The farmers are responsible for conserving their farmlands and must be able to live a comfortable life, but they must not be allowed to become parasites and, above all, they must not be allowed to hoard certain goods that others could use immediately.

Overcoming the separation of town and countryside is one of the goals of the revolution. This can only be accomplished very slowly since this separation is inscribed in stone and concrete. One cannot wave a magic wand and move skyscrapers here and forests there. It will be possible, however, to rapidly implement measures that will lead in this direction. For example, the provisional or permanent resettlement of urban populations in the countryside where small industrial centres can be established to complement the new population centres and, where this is possible, as adjuncts to local agricultural activities. Many people who were forced to leave the countryside or who find city life unsuitable will be happy to return to the country. Individual and collective gardens will multiply and will beautify these rural settlements and even the urban centres. This will be facilitated by tearing up the pavement of streets that will no longer be necessary due to reduced traffic. This will make it easier to recycle household wastes, reduce transport expenses and provide fresh vegetables to the population. One of the defects of capitalist agriculture is that it has become so separated from the consumer and the latter’s wastes and has had to compensate for these deficiencies by means of chemical or biological inputs that have to be constantly increased. In these gardens, children, the elderly and the handicapped who are today refused a role in production and are often destined to lives of boredom, can have something to do and make themselves useful. This will be a magnificent terrain for teaching a de-schooled young generation. Finally, this will help clean up our polluted air!

From Scarcity to Abundance

The legal right and the mental attachment to property will die out in communist society because scarcity will become a thing of the past. It will no longer be necessary to hold on tightly to an object in fear of never being able to enjoy it if you turn your back on it for even a single instant.

What kind of magic do you intend to use in order to give birth to this fabulous era of abundance? This is the question that will be sarcastically asked by the bourgeois. There is nothing magical about it: we can make abundance arise because it is already here right in front of our noses. Nothing needs to be done to give birth to abundance except to free it from its bonds. It is capital which, by squeezing humanity and nature for the last two or three centuries, has made abundance possible: it is not communism which, all of a sudden, will produce abundance, but capitalism which has artificially maintained scarcity.

The formidable increase in the productivity of labour has not, or not yet at any rate, changed much with regard to the fate of the proletariat; it has even had negative effects. The power of capital has destroyed the traditional societies of the Third World without allowing its population access to the industrialized world. This factor, together with an enormous demographic expansion has plunged a large part of humanity into profound misery. Under these conditions, wage slavery is a veritable improvement compared to living as a beggar or a pauper.

The impact of nuclear energy and electronics has so far been experienced with respect to their military uses. Scientific progress has fortunately delivered us from those barbarous times when one had to see those one killed and sometimes was even splashed with their blood. Disgusting!!!

Even those inhabitants of the “rich” countries who have benefited from this increase in productivity are exploited. Wage increases and the progressive growth of consumption hardly compensate for the deterioration of their living conditions. Having more or better objects than were available in a previous era does not mean that one lives better. The worker has the car his father did not have, but his workplace and the countryside that he visits on weekends have become more distant. He loses in traffic jams the time he won with the shortening of the working day, and he has traded his physical for nervous exhaustion. With regard to its conditions of development, what industrialization gives with one hand it takes back with the other. It boasts of its remedies but it omits to mention that it was the origin of the illness in the first place. Nor is this accidental: the logic of commodity production requires that conditions of dissatisfaction be maintained. The doctor needs illness. As Fourier pointed out: in civilization scarcity is born from abundance and society moves in a vicious circle.

The human being has been gradually reduced to the passive role of consumer. His moribund state is reanimated with the artificial life of commodities. His misery becomes the technicolour reflection of commodities displayed in all the store windows and on sale for low prices.

In communist society goods will be freely available and free of charge. Social organization will be thoroughly disencumbered of money.

How would it be possible to prevent some people from hoarding wealth to the detriment of others? After a period of euphoria during which we will help ourselves to the existing stock of goods, won’t our society risk collapsing into chaos and inequality before totally succumbing to disorder and terror?

These concerns are not restricted to a small handful of privileged elements with a direct interest in maintaining the present system; they also express the point of view of those among the oppressed who are paralyzed by the fear that a social upheaval will make their situation worse. In the storm the big fish will be better armed for killing the little fish!

In the fully developed communist society the productive forces will be sufficient to provide for all needs. The feverish and neurotic desire to consume and to hoard will disappear. It will be absurd to want to accumulate goods: there will no longer be any money to pocket or wage workers to hire. Why accumulate cans of beans or false teeth that you will never use? In this stage of society, if some form of imposition still exists it will not be a restriction on the distribution of products but rather on the nature of the products, in the conditions that are imposed by the various specific use values of the products; there will necessarily be a selection of some possibilities and a rejection of others at the level of their manufacture.

When revolutionary society has first emerged from the fetters of the old world, the situation will be different. The revolutionary authorities, the workers’ councils, will have to formulate and guarantee the observation of a certain number of rules to prevent the resurgence of the habits and procedures of commodity society. Perhaps it will then be necessary to limit the number of cans of beans or pounds of sugar each person may possess in his home. It is not possible to predict just how long this stage will last; it will vary according to the greater or lesser poverty of the regions in question and will depend on the power and the resolve of the revolutionary party. A war provoked by the party of capital, which would cause setbacks for production and transport, would only prolong this transitional phase. If we base our estimate solely on the time required for the communist reconversion of the productive forces, the transitional period could be very brief; we saw how quickly the American economy was able to be transformed into a war economy during the Second World War!

With communism, the nature of production as a whole and the nature of the objects produced will undergo a radical transformation. The disappearance of exchange value will have a major impact on use value.

The Transformation of Products

The commodities offered for sale on the market comprise an extremely hierarchical set of objects. There are not just one or even several commodities for each particular need; there is a multitude of commodities from the same enterprise or from the competition. Of course, this is all about satisfying the public and responding to the variety of its needs. The customer must have a choice! In practice his choice is restricted by his financial means and his social function. Numerous commodities respond to the same need but each one is distinguished by its quality and price; this is true of cookware, for instance. On the other hand, different products correspond to different uses; but these different uses are not available to the same individuals. For example, some people conduct their affairs by means of supersonic jets and other people by means of bicycles.

This hierarchy and differentiation of commodities is the reflection of competition between groups, extreme wage inequality, and the living conditions of the capitalist world. It leaves its mark on industrial development. The needs of the rich play the role of bellwether. Goods like the automobile lose a large part of their quality as articles of use when they cease to be the privilege of a minority and come within the reach of just anybody.

Communism does not propose to make everyone wear the same uniform and eat the same soup; but it will put an end to this disastrous diversification and hierarchy of products. New goods that are still scarce will be put to use first for collective purposes or else on a first-come, first-served basis.

With regard to clothing we can imagine that a reduced number of high quality articles of clothing will be produced, but in sufficient quantity to provide for all sizes and customary uses. They will be produced on a massive scale and by means of as much automation and machinery as possible. At the margins, workshops can be opened where machines and fabrics will be available for those who want to make different clothes for themselves or their friends.

4. Beyond Work

Capitalism has continuously revolutionized the means of production but it has been incapable of really liberating and transforming productive activity. Industrial labour signifies the most extreme form of alienation. The proletarian in blue overalls or white shirt is chained to his machine or to his work routine. He has lost the freedom to give his labour a personal touch or to carry it out in his own way that was the prerogative of the artisan or even the slave and the serf. The impersonal character of this contemporary form of domination makes it unendurable.

Work has been separated from the rest of life. Life is dominated by the fatigue and the brutalization that it engenders and by the wage that it provides.

With the control exercised by modern capital over social life in its entirety, our whole existence has ended up monopolized by the principles of work. The logic of efficiency and productivity dominate our “free” time. Everything must be rational and profitable, including pleasure and “affairs”! Everyone is cordially invited to take over from the system by transforming it.

Communism is first and foremost a radical transformation of human activity. In this respect one can speak of the abolition of work.

Work and Torture

If there is a word that is safely neutral it certainly is not the word for work.

In French and Spanish one of the words for “work” or “labour” (in Spanish, “trabajo”, in French, “travail”, and with a slightly modified meaning, the English “travail”) originated from the Latin word, “trepalium”, which denotes an instrument of torture similar to the “rack”. Before assuming its modern meaning, this word designated mine labour and then certain kinds of especially hard work. Today its meaning has been considerably extended but its boundaries are still unclear. There is a constant tendency to provide it with a natural justification, however.

In English the word originated in a particular form of activity of the peasant. What characterizes the word for work or labour is precisely its abstract quality. It no longer designates this or that special activity but activity and effort as such. One no longer plants cabbages, or weaves, or herds cattle; one works. All work is basically the same. What counts is the time spent working and the wage earned. As Marx said: “Time is everything, and man is nothing; at most he is the carcass of time.”

It is not the word for work that has such an impact as the hateful reality that it represents. It does not even matter if the word disappears. If the word survives it will have to undergo a profound change of meaning. Maybe it will end up as a synonym for the greatest of pleasures!

In communist society productive activity will lose its strictly productive character. The obsession regarding efficiency and punctuality will disappear. Labour will be based on a life transformed in its entirety.

Such a change implies the end of hierarchy, of the division between order-givers and order-takers, of the separation of decision and execution, of the opposition between mental and manual labour. Man will no longer be ruled by the products of his activity and by his tools. The subjugation of nature to the productive process and its monopolization by groups or individuals will come to an end.

This revolution will be accompanied by a technological transformation. The very nature of industrial development will be called into question.

The parasitic nature of capitalism is expressed in the fact that it is possible to provide a secure foundation for social life even when most businesses are closed. A test regarding the resources contained by a highly developed country was provided by the strike of May 1968 in France. All industry can be shut down for a whole month without any significant consequences for social life.

Maybe there will be a shortage of bread in a revolutionary period. But this shortage cannot be attributed to a lack of productive capacity. It would be due to special causes. This will not prevent us from closing parasitic industries. To the contrary, it would be all the more necessary in order to be able to redirect existing resources towards vital sectors.

One cannot say in advance and in detail what will be eliminated and what will be retained. We are convinced of the despicable role played by war industries. They will have no reason to exist once communist society has been fully established. In the meantime one cannot rule out its further development in communism’s early stages!

Such decisions, in all cases, will not be taken by a committee of technocrats but directly by the workers affected by the decisions. The threat of a loss of wages will no longer play a role in their deliberations!

If some workers, due to corporativism or for less respectable reasons, cling to useless or even harmful enterprises, they will have to answer to the entire communist proletariat. The right to property or self-determination will be no excuse for police or financial workers to seek to perpetuate the routine of their usual work!

Everything that serves finance and the state machine will be eliminated or at least profoundly transformed, as these sectors require onerous labours to satisfy secondary needs. Products or “services” like the telephone, and the electricity that is currently being used for the most part by businesses, will be largely redirected to individual consumption. Buildings and machines can be put to different uses. Numerous needs will be satisfied with a minimum expenditure of social labour. Transportation, for example, will be based upon a more rational use of individual or collective vehicles. The “demand” for punctuality will be greatly relaxed. The need to travel will arise much less frequently.

Many activities will not simply be completely abandoned but will instead be profoundly transformed. Education will escape to the greatest degree possible all capitalist influence. The press will cease to be the tool of the big newspapers in order to be made available to a multitude of publishers of small newsletters.

The essence of the new society will no longer consist in producing and competing in order to preserve market share, but in reducing arduous and boring industrial labour as much as possible.

The closure of useless sectors will allow for the variation and amelioration of those productive tasks that will still be necessary. The social forces thus liberated will be able to engage in new activities.

Children, students, the elderly and housewives will be able to participate according to their abilities in social activities; this participation will no longer take the form of competition on the “labour market”.

These transformations are not luxurious baits the revolution will use to attract doubters. They are immediately necessary for combat and to concentrate forces against that portion of capital that poses the threat of temporary resurgence.

Science and Automation

All of these measures only give us a vague idea of what is to come. Communism will use the material basis bequeathed from the old world. It will above all develop the technological and scientific achievements of the latter. And it will do so more rapidly and better.

It is fashionable to express surprise at the technological progress achieved after the last world war. In fact, one would be more justified to express surprise at the slowness with which scientific discoveries have penetrated industry. The latter is characterized, in principle, by its inertia. It advances when historical “accidents” force it to change its suppliers and markets, and when it modifies its technical basis when interest rates fall, in order to try to escape from economic stagnation.

Contemporary industry functions by finding new uses for inventions and discoveries made decades ago. For example, vehicles based on the combustion engine and petroleum-based fuels, such as our state of the art automobiles, are veritable fossils compared with the scientific possibilities. Industry has not really been able to make much progress with regard to either the automobile or new sources of energy. Nor can it do so unless such an effort is profitable from its narrow point of view.

Communism will allow for the construction of machines or industrial facilities that would be unprofitable from the point of view of the single enterprise or even of a capitalist state. Communism will judge that the achievement of progress is worth the effort even if it does not confer any immediate advantages. It will often perceive such advantages where capitalism was blind to them: increasing the quality of products, spurring interest in research, and improving working conditions, for instance.

From the capitalist point of view it would not be profitable to manufacture a silent jackhammer since the price of such an invention would not be less than or equal to that of a noisy jackhammer. It is of little importance to the capitalist that an economy of this kind has to be paid for with such obvious inconveniences. The fact that some day the production of a silent jackhammer could be perfected in such a manner as to become less expensive than the noisy jackhammer. This does not enter into the projections made when the product is offered for sale. Why should a business risk bankruptcy or any kind of sacrifice in the name of technical progress or the betterment of humanity? Communism will not be content to just take over from capitalism and carry on with business as usual. It will transform science and technology. From conscious or unconscious servants of the industrial hell, it will transform them (science and technology) into instruments of human liberation.

Science will never again be a sector separate from production.

Capital has a vital need for innovation. It cannot cause it to arise directly from the productive sector. The latter must proceed smoothly and the imagination must by no means be given free reign. Science is carried on elsewhere.

For many years science was marginal; it was the work of dedicated amateurs. Capital had a great need for their services and took them under its wing. Under the tutelage of the State and industry, science became an investment. It became bureaucratized, and came under the control of mandarins and managers. The freedom of creation was corralled.

In the eyes of scientific opinion, this can be good or bad. The man of knowledge is the sorcerer transformed into a wage worker. What is actually the result of the spirit of critical inquiry appears to popular opinion as magic.

The ideology of production recuperates what it had to concede to the experimental impulse. Science appears as the sector where a special commodity is produced: Knowledge. Knowledge ceases to be the delicate result of specialized research in order to be transformed into a sacralised product offered up for the contemplation of a mass of mental defectives.

For us it is a question of liberating the impulse of initiative and experimentation so that these qualities will come within the reach of all. Science will no longer be the exclusive possession of a caste of specialists and will instead once again be the taste for risk and play, the pleasure of discovery.

The “conquest” of space has illustrated the possibilities of automation and electronics. All that is necessary is to apply all this technology to everyday life, to the transformation of our daily life. Automation will allow humans to be disencumbered of boring jobs, which will be mechanized.

The first steps of automated systems—systems that, once set in motion, can function and operate without human intervention—were taken during the times of the Pharaohs. They were used to regulate the floodwaters of the Nile. With the passage of time such systems began to flourish. The first automated “factories” appeared. There was, for example, the mill invented and displayed near Philadelphia which in 1784 received wheat and turned it into flour without human intervention. Along with automated machines for production, calculating machines were also developed. In 1881 the telephone was invented.

Automation in this sense has existed for a long time. It is nothing but an extreme form of machine production. Electronics will allow such automation to become more widespread and even an ordinary form of machine production.

The electronics associated with the control of important sources of energy will allow action to be conducted at a distance and the centralization of a great number of operations.

Automation not only represents the promise of transferring painful or distasteful tasks to machines. It also, and perhaps most importantly, represents the possibility of doing things that would have otherwise remained impossible. It makes possible operations that require very fast reactions and very complicated calculations that surpass human abilities. Machines can operate in conditions that are hostile to life. Without automation the development of nuclear energy or space travel would have been impossible.

Those who want revolution but reject the accursed science and technology are in a dead-end. The massive destruction of our natural environment is certainly not unconnected with technological possibilities but one cannot blame them for it either.

Nuclear energy or computer science can present very dangerous characteristics. This is the reflection of their power. But these aspects are prejudicial to society only insofar as they are used carelessly or are employed for the purpose of reinforcing social control.

Up until now capitalism has only applied automation to this or that detail of the system. This does not imply that it can stop here. Its logic, the need to bolster or to find an appropriate rate of profit, commits it to continual advance. By this we do not mean to suggest that the generalization of automation is compatible with the preservation of the current system. Automation’s very principles are contrary to the survival of class society: it renders the proletariat useless.

“Automated machinery … represents the exact economic equivalent of slave labour” (Norbert Wiener). The logical result of the development of automated production would make the human machines superfluous.

The solution is therefore either the communist revolution or the annihilation of the proletariat, who would be reduced to a layer of refugees or else totally eliminated. The prophets of doom have predicted the latter outcome. Our optimism is not based on the humanity of our masters: history has shown us that those who carry out genocide have absolutely no hesitation to do so. We believe that they are simply incapable of exercising control over the situation and implementing a consistent policy. For good or for ill we are not governed by supermen but simply by veritable cretins, skilled at manipulation but incapable of viewing events from a historical perspective. They are themselves in part separated from the productive process. The really decisive point with regard to this question is that the proletariat must not prove to be too weak.

The proletarians dispose of an immense force. Their degree of consciousness of this force is extremely slight. The working class always possesses its force in the place it occupies in the productive apparatus. The first stirrings of automation have only strengthened this force. Small teams of workers and technicians hold enormous power in their hands. Economic upheavals can instil them with the inclination to use it.

The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy cannot negate the proletariat without also negating themselves. They are chained to value, which is to say that they are chained to the human labour power that forms the basis of value. They do not seek progress for the sake of progress but only for the sake of money. If they develop machine production this is only because they want to free themselves of workers who are too unruly. The proletariat is not just a simple tool of the ruling class but also the latter’s reason for existence. Capital (or labour) relegates man to the level of the machine but cannot cease to be a social relation between classes.

Class Society and Robotics

All class society tends to turn man into a robot, to reduce him to an object whose body and mind are used. When part of society does not work for itself but toils to feed another part of society, this implies that it must perform supplementary labour but also, and even more importantly, that the nature of its activity has changed. What is of interest to the master is not the pleasure or the pain, the happiness or the punishment of the slave, but his productive output. Class society is based on the human possibility of creating goods that can be separated from their producers in order to be used by others. The human being is no longer a human being but a tool. The innately human capacity to make tools and decide in advance what is to be produced is turned against man in order to transform him into a tool.

The exploiter can be kind or cruel to the exploited. The former does not have to be totally without any feelings. Rather, feelings are necessary to grease the wheels of the system. But they are limited and secondary products of the system. The exploiter can be “good” but he cannot cease to exploit. He can be a sadist but he cannot destroy his human material. Where capitalism does reach such a condition, however, it is under great economic pressure.

The ruling classes of the past preyed upon the agrarian communities. These communities were destroyed in order to bring a mutilated and atomized human material under their rule. One commodity among others, the proletariat came face to face in the market of “factors of production” with its mechanical competitors. In this war the machine won one battle after another and conquered space in the productive process from the proletariat.

Communism will transform the nature of this development. Man will not compete with the machine because he will no longer be a “factor of production”.

The communist use of machine technology signifies the possibility of applying automation to a great number of activities. This is not to say that generalized automation will be the key to the “social question”, however.

The abolition of wage labour does not mean the replacement of man by machine but the transformation of human activity in a human sense by means of machines. It is not merely a question of the gradual or sudden reduction of the working week from forty hours to zero. A world in which an entirely automated industry working on an inexhaustible raw material supplies him with everything desirable and imaginable would lead man to a vegetative condition. It would be a frozen world and without a sense of adventure since all that happens would be programmed in advance.

Regardless of the faith put in science, this myth is deeply capitalist. It considers as natural a complete separation between work time and leisure time. It wants to reserve the hell of production machinery and the paradise of consumption for humans. Depending on how strictly the limits to such a process were set, it would lead to either a permanent Club Med or the generalization of the condition of a foetus.

Communism is the end of the separation between labour time and free time, between production and consumption, between life and experience.

Remuneration

The disappearance of the wages system is sufficient to shake the foundations of the old society. The compulsion to work in order to survive will disappear. Labour will no longer be a means of earning a livelihood. It will no longer be an intermediate term between man and his needs. It will be the direct satisfaction of a need. In this sense it will no longer be labour. What impels a person to action will cease to appear as a necessity that is external to the individual in order to become instead an internal necessity: the desire to do something, the will to be useful. This dissociation of activity and remuneration, if by remuneration one does not mean the pleasure that such activity can concretely provide, must proceed hand in hand with a profound transformation of man: it asks individuals to take responsibility for what they do, it requires that they develop intelligence and initiative and that egoism and mean-spiritedness should disappear.

It is customary to explain all the evils of humanity by the incorrigibility of human nature. Everyone knows that man is a wolf to man. This explains nothing but demonstrates the kind of contempt that human beings have for themselves. It is the reflection of the fatalism that capitalism engenders by reducing the human being to the role of a spectator to his own development.

The idea that we should preserve some kind of remuneration for a transitional period, as Marx proposed, in the form of a distribution of coupons reflecting hours worked, is not desirable. If it is the development of the productive forces that makes the communist revolution possible, and today it certainly does, then the revolution cannot delay the full application of its principles. A system of coupons for remuneration and therefore to compel men to work would be a contradiction of the spontaneous revolt of the oppressed, of all those who participated in the insurrection without any expectation of power, or money, or compensation of any kind. A system of coupons would only have the sympathy of bureaucrats, leaders, and of all those who would like to exercise control and power over others. Such a system would only have the effect of dampening the ardour of the active elements and would not attract the opponents of action. If it becomes necessary in a particular case to make someone do something we would prefer the method of the kick in the ass. It is more straightforward and more effective.

We are not totally opposed in principle to the use of coupons. It would be absurd to allow diamonds to be subject to free distribution! In such cases the relevant authorized committees will allocate the coupons. When the goods in question are production goods, a factory council will allocate the coupons. When the coupons are for rare or dangerous medicines the hospitals or doctors will allocate them … these coupons will not serve the purpose of remuneration. They will fulfil the role that is currently fulfilled by a medical prescription. More generally, the coupons’ use will be determined by the nature or by the scarcity of the goods for which they will be “exchanged”.

Most of the goods subject to distribution, especially food, must be distributed at no cost and with no restrictions under the auspices of the revolutionary committees and councils in the revolutionary zones or by means of expropriations in the non-liberated zones. This is the simplest, the least costly and the most pleasant method of distribution. It is the most suitable method for popularizing communism. It is advisable to apply this as a general rule, with the exception of rigorous action against abuses resulting from petty enforcement of complicated rules and from dissatisfaction with distribution norms.

Laziness

Won’t such a program be an invitation to mass laziness? If it were possible to abolish the principle of remuneration for labour while simultaneously preserving the world as it is today, this would most assuredly be true. Communism, however, transforms the conditions of life and work in their entirety.

The revolutionary spirit is not a spirit of sacrifice: each individual forgetting himself in order to serve the collectivity. This is not communism—it is Maoism! Communism presupposes a certain degree of altruism but it also presupposes a certain degree of egoism. Above all, it does not oppose love for one’s neighbour to love for one’s self, asking each individual to serve his neighbour. We don’t love either the priests or the scroungers. It is capitalism that causes the interest of the individual and that of the collectivity to be constantly opposed to each other: to give is to renounce.

Communist man will be neither the man of self-abnegation nor the man who submits to fate. The spiritual transformation that accompanies communism will not be a mere substitute for education. There will be no ideal image to which one must conform. There will be no separation between the transformation of social structures, on the one hand, and the transformation of individuals, on the other. It is capitalism that separates things like that. The proletariat will dis-alienate itself and can only do so by changing the world and its conditions of existence. A few weeks of revolution will shatter decades of conditioning. Cowardice, greed and weakness of character are the results of a certain kind of social condition. Deception, the truncheon, or education will only be capable of making people reject such base characteristics if the situation that engendered them and made them seem useful does not disappear. With communism these kinds of approaches will disappear because their corresponding objects have disappeared.

If there are egoists, incurable slackers and irremediable incompetents they will not necessarily pose a serious threat. The greatest enemy of such people is not repression but boredom. The least avid of them will surrender. Men are social animals. They lack the courage to be useless in a collectivity where they live. Even today the parasite and the egoist have to dissimulate. Once the system of wage labour is abolished it will be hard to nourish illusions about one’s activity. Each person will be judged not by the time spent on some task but by what they really accomplish.

Communism does not exclude disagreements between individuals and groups. Slackers risk being asked to account for themselves. If they are supported and allowed to fatten themselves at the expense of the community that is because the community wants it that way.

Communists have nothing against a healthy laziness. The revolutionary society was not created so that we can work ourselves to the bone. We have no problem with the lazy person who does not demand from others what he rejects for himself. We don’t mind if some high-spirited individuals play their practical jokes, as long as they don’t try to impose their personal tastes on everybody!

By replacing compulsory labour with passionate activity the majority of the causes of systematic laziness will disappear. Gone too will be the irritation that the workaholic feels when he sees someone goofing off, which is often nothing but disguised envy.

Those who are lazy today are not necessarily those who will be lazy in the world of tomorrow. Among the latter will be those who now exert themselves to exhaustion in the pursuit of profits; they will need to be watched carefully.

In an established communist society, machinery will grant man great power. Each person will be able to choose his work rhythm. One person will devote great efforts to costly adventures and will spend more in terms of resources than he produces for society. Another will not do much and society will be in debt to him. Such debts shall not be subject to accounting.

Once the financial incentive has disappeared will the spirit of free inquiry and invention disappear as well? No one will be satisfied doing his job in a routine manner! It is a mistake to think that the desire for profit and the spirit of free inquiry go hand in hand. The merchant negotiates using the lie and illusion. The scientist must always reject both. Science makes its contribution and the invention makes money but there is often a discrepancy between those who discover and those who profit. Even in the capitalist world the motor of scientific passion is not money. Creativity and imagination are recuperated for the purpose of making money.

Allocation of Tasks

By allowing laziness doesn’t our society run the risk of collapsing into chaos? Even if good will generally prevails, will it be enough to regulate the coordination of all necessary activities? Won’t everybody rush to try to get an easy job and abandon the hard jobs before machinery is developed to perform the latter? In short, each person, by doing what he wants, will lead the whole world to catastrophe!

The view that modern society is very complicated and that this complexity is inevitable is very common. This is not just an illusion. The individual feels lost in the capitalist jungle. He does not identify with it, much less understand how it functions as a whole. It is a mistake, however, to think that this impression would apply to any modern society. This idea is not necessarily due to the multitude of operations and relations that constitute society as a whole. It originated in the separation of the function of decision and coordination, on the one hand, and execution, on the other.

This impression of complexity and permanent disorientation that capitalist society produces has influenced some depictions of the socialist world of the future. It is widely believed that the main problem that has to be solved in the society of the future is that of planning and coordination. A “Plan Factory” has been imagined, an enterprise that is responsible for evaluating the state of the economy and determining the technical coefficients that express the relative inputs of one product in the production of another product: the quantity of coal needed to produce one ton of steel, for example. This “Factory” will propose attainable goals and assume responsibility for the necessary revisions as the plan is implemented. The problems of the future society are thus understood primarily as problems of management. (Chaulieu (Castoriadis), Socialisme ou Barbarie No. 22)

The communist society will also have complex problems to solve. The resolution of these questions will not be the purview of any particular committee or group. There is nothing to be gained from an attempt to predict the forms that human activity will take, but only in the determination of its content. It will no longer be necessary to unite or to manage something that will no longer be separate and scattered. The free producer will address himself to both his own activity and his connections with the totality of general needs and possibilities.

In the revolutionary society relations between men will be clear and transparent. The fear of competition that renders the trade secret compulsory will disappear. What is essential is not that every person should attain competence in universal science and that every brain should be a “Plan Factory” in miniature. What good does it do me to know where the minerals came from that were used to manufacture my fork! What matters is that the necessary information should circulate freely and should be available.

In a fluid society where the spirit of individualism and enterprise patriotism will have disappeared, where each person will have many useful skills, individuals and groups will be oriented towards the fulfilment of the needs of society.

Social needs will not be imposed from the outside by means of a centralized office: whether a democratic assembly or a dictatorial committee. The individual or the group will no longer have to submit to their consciousness of the situation if we imagine this consciousness as a simple reflection of external imperatives. We shall act safely in recognition of our consciousness of social needs and possibilities but not independently of our own tastes and inclinations. Often, no compromises will be necessary. We shall perceive in social needs our own aspirations. We shall be more inclined to apply a remedy where we perceive a deficiency. If I lack wine it will not be necessary for me to acquire information regarding the details of production on a computer in order to deduce that perhaps the vines need to be tended!

The communist man of the future will not separate the fulfilment of his tastes from its social impact. He will not throw himself into tasks that someone else has already attended to. In any event it would be stupid to think that the whole world should be standardized and that those who work the same jobs should follow the same fashion trends.

There will be a more acute awareness of what society needs than is now the case. The whole world will be able to be informed about and will be capable of understanding what works and what does not work, even if it does not have a direct effect on everybody. Computers will be essential tools for the circulation and interpretation of information.

Society’s general organization has absolutely no need for either one or several central planning offices. Perhaps there will be certain individuals who will be responsible for gathering data, and drawing up projections for the future, but they will not have to elaborate a “plan” in the compulsory sense of the word. Such planning would amount to a desire to chain the future to the present!

Coordination will not be the permanent job of a particular caste. It will be carried out continuously at all levels of society. Because men will not be separated by a thousand barriers, they will spontaneously associate.

This is not to say that everything will go smoothly. Conflicts will be inevitable. But the task of the revolution is not to liberate society from all kinds of conflict a