Every attempt to go beyond capitalism has ended in failure. But are capitalism's present problems putting anti-capitalist revolution back on the agenda?
To answer this question, this article looks at past revolutions, with emphasis on aspects rarely considered by the left. These include humanity's origins, gender and military history and the revolutionary transcendence of work and democracy.
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'We will take over!' Women march to Versailles during the French Revolution.
When you wrote this did you intend to class kids as products?
I really don't get it at all, and I have felt scared by reading this!!
Do we have some options available to make happy parenting??
A radical shift towards more liberal and compassionate child care has been happening for centuries. However capitalist society still makes it impossible to recreate the levels of indulgence and freedom for children that some hunter-gatherer communities find easy to provide (see B.Hewlett, Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods). Jean Liedloff tried to adapt hunter-gatherer child-rearing to a capitalist world (see The Continuum Concept). But we need a social revolution to make this really practical.
An earlier version of this article attracted understandable comments that it was too 'utopian' (the letters can be found here and here). This was my reply:
In last week’s paper, Dave Douglass described my recent article as “abstract utopianism”. This is a bit disappointing, considering that Dave is a committed revolutionary and that the whole intention of the article, ‘Putting revolution back on the agenda’ (July 14), was to show that communist revolution is a very real, not a utopian, prospect.
The fact that humans lived without property, hierarchy or alienated work for over 80% of their time on Earth in itself shows that there is nothing utopian about communism. And the fact that, since the decline of this hunter-gatherer communism, people have never stopped rebelling against hierarchical authority, shows that people will always be dissatisfied with class society.
In the past, scarcity always prevented such rebellions from recreating communist relations. But, now that we have the technology to end all significant scarcity, Marx’s prediction of a “return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type” is a real possibility in the 21st century (MECW Vol 24, p357).
Unfortunately, the militarism of the 20th century produced horrific wars and Stalinist dead ends that have delayed any return to communism. This militarism and war was particularly effective at diverting popular discontent from the 1900s to the 1950s - a time when masculinity was very much about military values and a fear of feminine ‘weakness’.
In answer to Dave’s question about whether Maggie Thatcher suffered from this “masculinist militarism”: Of course - rightwing women could promote it, just as leftwing men could oppose it. However, it required the huge social changes since the 1960s, combined with the failure to revive the cold war as the ‘war on terror’, to fatally weaken masculinist militarism. One recent result of this has been that the US was reluctant to repress the uprising against Mubarak. Another result has been that, without cold war-style discipline, governments are reluctant to risk the levels of state investment necessary to revive industry and end the present economic crisis.
The overall result is a capitalist system that can neither fulfil workers’ expectations nor rediscipline them through scarcity and war. This situation puts anti-capitalist revolution firmly back on the agenda. Whether such a revolution will occur in five or in 50 years time is unpredictable. But the moment that working class struggles show that a practical alternative to capitalism is possible, this anti-capitalist alternative will spread like wildfire - spreading even faster and wider than the recent uprisings in the Middle East.
In the extreme poverty of the revolutions of the 20th century, the only practical anti-capitalist alternative seemed to be some sort of democratic management of alienated work. For example, in State and revolution, Lenin argued that workers’ democracy should control everyone in society, including any “workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism ... [and that any] escape from this popular accounting and control ... will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment [by] the armed workers ... that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit. Then the door will be thrown wide open for ... the complete withering away of the state.”
In other words, Lenin believed that by democratically imposing work-discipline, workers could create a genuine stateless communism. Anarchist activists in the Spanish civil war had similar beliefs. Yet the experience in Russia and Spain, and in the Israeli kibbutzim, shows that such self-managed work-discipline tends, instead, to lead to even more repressive social relations than those of capitalism.
Workers in the 21st century will never risk the upheavals of revolution just to create a more restrictive society than capitalism. Workers will only be attracted to revolution if it enables them to create a freer society than capitalism, a society without any alienated work - a genuine communist society. In other words, communism is now the only practical alternative to capitalism and we communists should not be shy about saying it.
Of course, this does not mean we should not also get involved in struggles over wages and jobs. But we should be honest with people and say that it is utopian to hope that British capitalism would ever recreate the secure, and therefore rebellious, industrial proletariat of the 1970s. Or, at least, it would only do so in order to hold back a future revolution - and, at such a time, it would be far better to abolish the miseries of wage labour than to try to consolidate them.
It remains to be seen whether my article was right to suggest that a future revolution will be centred more on the transformation of personal and gender relations than on workplace relations. But history has always progressed through unexpected social transformations and revolutions. And, whatever happens, future revolutionary movements will have to develop new ideas and tactics that are radically different from those of the 20th century.
I suppose such an ambitious project in such a short text was bound to involve a good deal of oversimplification but it does pick up on a number of the big historical ruptures which failed to result in people breaking free from class society and identifies at least some of the reasons for that failure. Although it perhaps underplays the more 'objective' factors in the developing economic crisis of capitalism, it was good to see the revolutionary potential of womens struggles (beyond social democratic reformism) and the importance of transforming interpersonal relationships re-emphasised.
It struck me that the underlying theme was similar in some ways to the old 'Radical Chains' magazine's 'prevention of communism' which readers can locate in the library here.
Abolishing wage slavery is a nice idea because wage slavery means theft. Wages tie the worker down to authoritarian systems of discipline which exploit as capital to make a profit. This is a principle means by which Capitalism trades identity. The UKBA engenders a difficult and solitary process to get asylum seekers into the economy to find work, while its raids occur often in migrant communities when they have settled already. Sometimes it involves children, as in the case of Dale Farm, and the mothers, in particular, are treated like animals, but many have nowhere to look and that is why No Borders exist. From wage slavery we get material privation - your boss depends on this to be happy. The problem of consolidating is that unions waste a lot of energy making happy workers, that is, under Capitalism we find ourselves co-opted by them. One way of this would be climbing the Capitalist ladder of power, deriving material satisfaction. If in doing this it becomes possible to create a more equal society by opposing the Capitalist forms of domination like patriarchy then society has achieved liberation for women, but to speak of reforming parenting in a multicultural world built around ethnic diversity would be a drop in the ocean.
Thanks for the article, which does cover some ground. I like how you correctly put quotes around the “communist” regimes in Russia and China. But then you use the term democracy uncritically as the same thing as the representative democracy of the liberal-democratic state. (E.G. “Consequently, faith in democracy has hindered workers’ ability to defend themselves after numerous election victories, whether of reactionaries like Hitler or progressives like Nelson Mandela. Indeed, workers’ faith in democratic parties was probably a more important reason for the failure of past revolutions than any lack of a genuinely revolutionary party. So, hopefully, today’s lack of faith in democracy will lead to a growth in revolutionary groups and movements that emphasise community and individuality more than formal democracy – just as hunter-gatherers do.”) We must also put the quotes around “democracy” when referring to capitalist nation-states, since these are properly oligarchies, as so many have realized. In fact, democracy, properly understood, is precisely the kind of society you point toward. You would say communist, perhaps, but it could also be called democracy, a society in which people manage their affairs for themselves, collectively, a society in which labor is free rather than alienated. Let’s not give up on the idea of democracy, letting it degenerate into the same thing as its impoverished liberal-democratic form. Let’s reclaim it as our own.
Personally I prefer to use the term 'communism' as relating to the content of human relations, rather than 'democracy' which I see as relating primarily to forms of organisation or management. Working class struggle and it's theorisation by both marxist and anarchist influenced political groups has too often, in the past especially, reduced the socialist and communist objective to a different organisation of the 'economy'. 'production' or 'society' on more democratic or 'self-managed' lines as in 'social democracy', 'workers democracy' 'direct democracy' etc rather than the creation of a new human community throught the self-abolition of the working class and generalised commodity production. Communism in practice would doubtless utilise a whole variety of different forms of organisation as needs required.
From Mark Kosman:
I guess the most important thing is to avoid fetishising the concept 'democracy' - as if a bit more democracy would have avoided all the disasters of the left in the 20th Century. A future society may well use democratic methods - but communism will be about much more than elections!
Readers may also be interested in another critique of the article from David of The Commune. It's followed by my reply:
"While the article has some interesting insights, I broadly disagree with the way it presents history.
Its essential argument is revolution is pretty much always on the agenda, but the ruling class employs various means to ward it off, but this is no longer possible as capitalism is in crisis.
But then we get the problem that for long periods most people have not consciously wanted or planned revolution, so Mark writes that every revolution has failed due to material scarcity. The answer, then, is technological development which frees us from this scarcity and allows for revolution… hardly an affirmation of human subjectivity.
Similarly, it misrepresents certain events like the class struggle in World War II, the Spanish Civil War (and most particularly May ’68) in that it just sweeps over the actual course of events, the actual bitter-fought ideological, political and industrial struggle, as if these were all doomed to failure in advance. Thus the article gives centre-stage not to people trying to imagine and fulfil a communist society, but the economic forces holding them back.
I’ll take the example I know most about. In his discussion of World War II Mark quotes a Tory MP to the effect that without reform, revolution will ensue in Britain. This is true in degrees, but then again, had Labour not fulfilled so much of its manifesto in 1945, this would only potentially have created space to its left. After all, in some countries where there was mass class struggle in WWII, most notably France and Italy, the Communist Parties dominated the resistance movements… and when they turned to national unity coalitions, mild reformism etc., the effect was not to encourage revolutionary elements, but to confuse them and drive them into apathy and disappointment.
Similarly, it presents things like nationalism (in Germany in WWI) and the ideology of parliamentary democracy as just ruling-class ruses to stave off revolution, but actually these ideas are much more complex and deep-rooted. If workers were really up for revolution, would they have let this propaganda distract them?
Indeed, if as this article suggests, the workers are constantly ripe for revolution, but the ruling-class are constantly able to trick and deceive them, this places the onus not on working-class people thinking through their political goals and desires and organising around them, but on the failure of those trying to stop them, as if revolution were prevented merely by some external force.
This is why the conclusion is basically wrong, seeing the current crisis as a total failure of the ruling class putting revolution back on the agenda. Now, if you think all previous revolutions were stopped by capitalist manipulation, and capitalism is now too weak to do this, then it kind of makes sense. But actually, where today are the subjective, organised revolutionary forces? Nowhere. Precisely the problem is that capitalism has a huge crisis but working-class people have no confidence in an alternative, and the collapse of state-socialism in Russia etc. have given social change a bad name.
The failure of revolutions comes from within, not just external repression and intervention. The one which did last, in Russia, ate itself. To that extent I agree with Mark. But you can’t deduce from that, that it is impossible to try and start in one country or democratise workplaces etc., because otherwise, where else do you start? Economic collapse chucking people on the scrapheap does not as such give them a great feeling of solidarity.
I don’t accept there could be some ‘chemical reaction’ response to the crisis, abolishing all money everywhere all at once, in some eruption of revolutionary ardour: where’s the building of working-class confidence, where’s the organisation? Without this, the revolution cannot succeed, because without a priority on subjectivity and patient, conscious and collective organisation, it will be easy for leaders and new hierarchies to emerge."
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Reply :
Thanks for your thought-provoking comments. I agree with much of your criticism. For example, my attempt to summarise huge historical events in a few sentences certainly does misrepresent their complexity.
I also agree that revolutions involve, not only objective, but subjective factors. Both are crucial and both constantly influence each other. Indeed, my article refers to objective conditions, such as scarcity, precisely in terms of how they influenced workers’ subjective desires for, or against, revolution.
Furthermore, I agree that workers are not ‘constantly ripe for revolution’ and that they need to organise themselves and build confidence through a series of pre-revolutionary struggles. I am merely arguing that this process has been held back, first by real scarcity, then by wage and welfare improvements – and now by a ‘fake scarcity’, recently relaunched as the ‘age of austerity’.
Keynesian economists argue that this approach will make the crisis worse and that the only solution is for governments to launch a major program of industrial investment. This would require international coordination and strict regulation of finance capital. But, if such a policy was possible in a Europe devastated by World War Two, it is surely possible in today’s far easier conditions. Yet, despite this, most of the ruling class refuse to even contemplate any state-led investment in productive industry.
Remembering the 1960s and 1970s, the ruling class know that such a policy would lead to less unemployment and a stronger, more secure working class. As Hillel Ticktin argues, they also know that this would be the first step to losing control of the working class.[1] The ruling class may not understand how that could happen. They may not understand that once the system offers people job security and guaranteed living standards, then people start asking why the system cannot also offer them real control of their lives. But they do understand that they must delay any return to Keynesianism for as long as possible.
So, wary of reviving productive industry, instead, our hapless rulers have decided to maintain a strategy of austerity – even though it is doomed to fail.
This strategy has already provoked the most significant strikes, riots, student demonstrations and direct action protests for many years. Unlike previous strategies, such as wartime nationalism or post-war parliamentary democracy, this approach offers little hope of improvement in jobs or welfare for anyone. It is therefore bound to create opposition and, hopefully, the beginnings of a new revolutionary movement – or what David calls a ‘subjective, organised revolutionary force’.
Such a ‘revolutionary force’ will develop from many different struggles, including those that start in just one country, such as struggles against national oppression. But genuine revolutionary forces can only come out of the failures of any projects of ‘national liberation’. Fortunately, despite their obvious limitations, both the Arab spring and the occupy movement show how easily struggles will spread internationally in the coming decades. In the meantime, it is vital that The Commune and other genuine revolutionaries continue to make clear that communism has nothing at all to do with the miseries of nationalist socialism in the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela etc …
David’s ‘revolutionary force’ may also develop from attempts to ‘democratise workplaces’. But, as with nationalist struggles, genuine tendencies to communism can only come out of the failures of such attempts.
Fortunately, every attempt to democratically self-manage wage labour has, indeed, failed, whether in Russia, Spain or Algeria – showing that once workers have the freedom to reject alienated labour they, understandably, avoid it like the plague.[2]
In Marx’s words, ‘the communist revolution … does away with labour’.[3] It also does away with, in David’s words, ‘all money everywhere all at once’. This seems impossibly utopian until we recall that vast amounts of music, films, software and books, things that used to cost significant amounts of money, are now available free on the internet. We communists should not shy away from arguing that if these things are free today, why not food, housing and transport tomorrow? If artists, hobbyists, activists and many web content providers can be productive today, without the motivation of wage labour, why cannot all production be based on unalienated labour tomorrow?
Of course, for people to accept the practicality of communism, they will need to lose their illusions in capitalist democracy in the process of various protracted struggles. But that is precisely the pre-revolutionary scenario that capitalism is offering us over the coming years.
More secure, unionised workers will be major participants in these struggles but so, too, will the millions chucked onto the scrapheap of economic stagnation. As Marx says: once capitalism is ‘no longer productive … a class is called forth [the proletariat] … which, ousted from society, is forced into the most elemental antagonism with all other classes, a class which forms the majority of all members of society, from which emanates … communist consciousness.’ He then goes on to insist that ‘the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness … can only take place in … a revolution.’[4]
Indeed, we should never forget that revolutions transform people far more radically than most pre-revolutionary commentators expect.[5] In 1789 and 1917, inexperienced, illiterate people went from subservience to a semi-divine monarch to participation as citizens in Parisian sections and Petrograd soviets. They would have gone much further if hunger and scarcity had not worn them down. But in the potential abundance of the 21st century, future revolutions will radicalise people in ways that none of us, in the present pre-revolutionary situation, can predict.
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1. Hillel Ticktin, ‘Marx’s Spectre Haunts the Wealthy and Powerful’. See also other Ticktin articles via his Wikipedia page.
2. Another example is Yugoslavia, where workers took the opportunity to avoid their ‘self-managed’ jobs by, reportedly, spending less than four hours a day at work. Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis, p118.
3. The German Ideology, Part 1d, ‘Proletarians and Communists’.
4. Ibid. Even George Magnus, the senior economic adviser at UBS, has written that Marx’s predictions bear ‘uncanny resemblances’ to the present situation. Despite his Keynesian conclusions, he recently said that the crisis is ‘bigger than 2008′ and that it ‘may go on for decade, it may go on for longer … [but when it] begins to sink into people’s consciousness that things seem relatively hopeless and we don’t have solutions I think people start to look for different kinds of answers.’ George Magnus, ‘Give Marx a Chance to Save the Wrld Economy’; BBC’s Newsnight interview, 13/12/2011.
5. Working class organisation is important but we should not forget that a lack of such organisation has repeatedly misled revolutionaries into imagining that revolution was a long way off. For example, a year before May 1968, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group dissolved themselves claiming that people were too depoliticised and, only a month before the February Revolution, Lenin said that he ‘may not live to see the … coming revolution’. Socialisme ou Barbarie dissolution statement; LCW Vol.32 p252-3.