What is Communism? - Zoe Baker

Introduction

Very few words are as misunderstood as communism. It brings to mind a society in which the state or the collective is everything and the individual is nothing, in which the attempt to make everyone equal only makes the majority equally unfree. It is most closely associated with countries like the USSR or Maoist China. On this model communism refers to a society that is ruled from the top down by a one party dictatorship, in which the means of production are mostly owned by the state and the economy is directed by state central planning. This would have come as a surprise to the rulers of these states. The USSR consistently claimed that it was a socialist society ruled by a communist party, rather than a communist society itself (Stalin 1978, 179, 199-200). Such distinctions were ignored by mainstream western discourse and the result is that communism has become a synonym for people attempting to create paradise on earth, but instead causing unspeakable horrors. It is often said that communism might be a nice idea but, due to the inherent flaws of human nature, any attempt to introduce it will inevitably lead to famines, prison camps, show trials, mass executions, and ethnic cleansing.1

This list of nightmares is then placed at the doorstep of Karl Marx, such that he is held personally responsible for the oppression of millions. This is as ludicrous as arguing that Jesus Christ is responsible for the vast numbers of people that have been killed in the name of Christianity. Authors rarely get to choose their fan club and Marx did not live to see the extent to which people misinterpreted and misused his ideas. His best friend Friedrich Engels once claimed that, “what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist” (MECW 46, 356). One can only imagine how he would have responded to Stalin. Popular notions of what communism is have very little to do with what Marx, and numerous other communists, actually thought. In order to assess the merits of communism, it is necessary to understand what it actually means. Such an understanding is of course only one-side of the topic. Proposals for social change are only valuable if they work on paper and in practice. My hope is that a better understanding of communism on paper, will lead to a more complex understanding of what attempts at communism have been and could be.

The idea of communism was not invented by Marx. Other people had advocated various forms of collective ownership for centuries before he was even born, such as the Christian radical Gerrard Winstanley in 17th century England (Winstanley 1983). The words ‘communist’ and ‘communism’ first appeared during the late eighteenth century, when they were used by French authors like Restif de la Bretonne to refer to an egalitarian society based on the community of goods (Billington 1980, 79-83). The words themselves derived from the French ‘commun’, meaning common. This language did not become an everyday expression until it was adopted by radical European social movements during the 1840s (Bestor 1948, 279-280; Corcoran 1983, 22n16). Influential early communists have since largely been forgotten, such as Étienne Cabet who wrote a novel that described an imaginary society in extreme amounts of detail. This included stipulating such minutia as the location of cemeteries in town planning, the time of day that people eat meals, and the fact that dog drawn carts are used to deliver parcels (Cabet 1971).

In 1844 Marx became a communist and, over the course of his life, developed a version of communism that was distinct from these earliest forms. Marx, in contrast to authors he labelled utopians, chose to focus his energies on producing social science on various topics, especially how capitalism actually functions. Marx once quoted a book reviewer who charged him with engaging in “the critical analysis of the actual facts, instead of writing recipes . . .for the cook-shops of the future” (Marx 1990, 99). His collected works do nonetheless contain a series of scattered remarks that can be pieced together into a coherent vision of a new society. This vision is, in turn, interconnected with his analysis and critique of capitalism since he regarded communism as the fulfilment and extension of possibilities and tendencies that were developed by capitalist society itself. As he wrote in 1843, “we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old” (Marx 1992b, 207). A year later he regarded it as a “real advance” to have gained a “goal”, in the form of “the idea of communism” (ibid, 365). Marx rejected the project of constructing extremely detailed and speculative blueprints, but this did not mean that he was against writing outlines of what life after capitalism could look like.2

Marx used various terms to refer to the future society he advocated, including socialism, communism, the co-operative society, the union of free individuals, the free and equal association of producers (MECW 23, 136), the associated mode of production (Marx 1991, 572, 743) and so on. These different words were all used interchangeable and had the exact same meaning. They, unlike in later Leninist theory, did not refer to distinct modes of production (Chattopadhyay 2016, 216-218; Hudis 2019, 757). For the sake of clarity, I shall consistently use the word communism. The available evidence demonstrates that, for Marx, a communist society has six main components. These are:

1) individuals self-direct their lives and so are free. This self-direction, in turn, enables individuals to fully develop themselves.

2) there are no states or classes.

3) there is collective ownership and control of the means of production and land by the associated producers themselves.

4) there is no money, markets, and commodities. Production and distribution are instead organised via a system of planning that is self-directed by the associated producers themselves. I shall call this participatory planning for short.

5) the economy, especially distribution, is organised according to the principle: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

6) society is not structured according to a rigid and hierarchical division of labour.

Marx, in addition to this, made various proposals that he described in even less detail, such as free education for all children or the bourgeois family being superseded by new kinship systems (Marx and Engels 1996, 16-17, 20; Marx 1990, 614). This vision was not unique to Marx and the same general model, with a few key differences on specific subtopics, was independently developed by anarchist communists like Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero in the 1870s (Baker 2023, 79-92). For the purposes of this essay, I shall mostly focus on Marx’s ideas due to his world fame. To do so I shall explain each of the six main components of communism and provide the evidence for Marx advocating them. It should be kept in mind throughout that this is not my original interpretation and instead draws heavily from the Marx specialists Paresh Chattopadhyay, Peter Hudis, Michael Lebowitz, Bertell Ollman, and Paul Raekstad (Chattopadhyay 2016; Chattopadhyay 2018; Hudis 2012; Hudis 2019; Lebowitz 2010; Lebowitz 2015; Ollman 1977; Raekstad 2022). When it is relevant, I shall also point out that certain ideas were not unique to Marx and can be found in the theorising of other radicals at the time. In future essays I shall turn to an examination of Marx and Engels’ views on authority and the transition to communism. Doing so will help clarify the important differences between Marx and Engels’ ideas and those of both Marxist-Leninists and anarchist communists. Such strategic and organisational differences are not the focus of the present essay, which is only concerned with explaining what communism is.

Component One: Self-Direction and Human Development

Marx was committed to universal human emancipation from all systems of domination and exploitation. In 1844 he argued that the proletariat “cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and thereby emancipating – all the other spheres of society” (Marx 1992b, 256). This included a commitment to abolishing racism and patriarchy. He clarified in 1880 that, “the emancipation of the producing class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race” (MECW 24, 340).3 How exactly Marx conceptualised freedom is a controversial topic among Marx specialists. I adhere to Raekstad’s interpretation and hold that Marx thought a person is free in an activity if and only if they self-direct that activity (Raekstad 2022, 57-61). In 1844 Marx was explicit that “conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man” and “only because of that is his activity free activity” (Marx 1992b, 328). By conscious activity Marx meant the power or capacity that humans have to mentally stand apart from their immediate experience and consciously reflect on, direct, or alter their behaviour (Marx 1990, 284). In other words, people are free when they are engaging in what Marx called self-activity and this self-activity consists in exercising our capacities for conscious self-direction. If this is true, then universal human emancipation can only be achieved if society is structured in such a manner that collective activities are self-directed by everyone involved, rather than being directed by a minority of rulers or an impersonal socially generated force that we do not control like the capitalist market.

For Marx, communism is the set of social structures which enables, and is constituted by, freedom as self-direction. In 1846 Marx and Engels declared that only under communism “does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such” (MECW 5, 88). This freedom is inherently social because each individual within an association can only be said to self-direct their lives if they are also self-directing the association with every other member. As Marx and Engels wrote, “in the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association” (MECW 5, 78). Marx continued to advocate these ideas in his mature work. In the Grundrisse he described communism as a society in which “universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control” (Marx 1993, 162). Marx’s commitment to the freedom of the individual explains why one of the main synonyms he used for communism was the free association of producers. Marx borrowed this language from working class social movements at the time (Moss 1980, 31-68; Vincent 1984, 127-140) and it was also used by anarchists (Bakunin 1973, 206; Pellouter 2005, 414).

Marx thought that freedom was valuable for two main reasons. Firstly, it has a positive impact on our ability to develop a large number of other capacities and to fully enjoy the exercise of these capacities. A person will become a more creative and enthusiastic artist when they are self-directing their drawing and doing it purely to express themselves, rather than because they have been ordered to draw by their micro-managing parent who is living vicariously through them. Free activity, in short, makes life worth living. Secondly, one of the main capacities that freedom develops is itself, namely the capacity to consciously self-direct. For Marx this is a uniquely human capacity that distinguishes us from other animals. It is what Marx called our species being. As a result, when we exercise and develop this capacity, we become fully human (Raekstad 2022, 63-66).

These two points explain why Marx repeatedly described a communist society as one in which humanity has the real possibility to develop their powers in numerous directions and thereby achieve a higher stage of human development than was previously possible. These ideas can be seen in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, which described communism as, “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 1996, 20). In the Grundrisse Marx wrote of “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals” (Marx 1993, 158). He thought that a society is truly wealthy when each person has the opportunity to achieve, “the absolute working­ out of his creative potentialities” and “the development of all human powers” as an “end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick” (ibid, 488. Also see Marx 1992b, 354, 356). In Capital Volume One, he described communism as “a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” (Marx 1990, 739).

Marx was not alone in advocating this. Similar ideas permeated 19th century socialist and communist theory. To take one example, the anarchist collectivist Michael Bakunin also endorsed “the fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination” and argued that socialism must be based on “freely associated labour” (Bakunin 1973, 191, 173). This system of free association would, in turn, enable “the full development and full enjoyment of all human faculties and powers in every man, through upbringing, scientific education and material prosperity” (ibid, 149). These ideas were taken up by later anarchist communists who endorsed, to quote Luigi Galleani, “the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association” and “the unsuppressible right of every person to grow, to develop his faculties in every way, to achieve his full and integral development” (Galleani 2012, 61, 43). Communism is, contrary to popular misconceptions, grounded in the freedom of the individual and seeks to create a society that provides everyone with the real possibility to realise their individuality and become the best version of themselves.

Component Two: Stateless Classless Society

Marx’s commitment to freedom led him to advocate the abolition of the state and all class distinctions. He wrote in his 1847 book The Poverty of Philosophy,

Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No.

The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, just as the condition for the emancipation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates* and all orders.

The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society (MECW 6, 212).

Marx generally defined class in terms of a person’s relationship to the means of production and their role in the productive process. Different modes of production are therefore constituted by specific class systems that divide society into “oppressor and oppressed”, such as the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome or the lords and serfs of feudalism (Marx and Engels 1996, 1-2). Capitalism has “established new classes, new conditions of oppression”, namely the division between capitalists, who privately own the means of production, and proletarians, who own personal possessions but do not own means of production. The consequence of this is that proletarians have no choice but to survive by selling their labour power to capitalists in exchange for a wage. Their labour is therefore involuntary and so not free. This lack of freedom is even more apparent during the production process itself. Proletarians do not self-direct their activity and are instead subject to the domination of capitalists and managers who wield the power to order them about (Marx and Engels 1996, 2, 7-8. For how Marx defined the proletariat see Baker 2024. For Marx’s critique of capitalism see Raekstad 2022).

Marx held that this system of oppression is maintained by the violence of the state. Although he never developed a systematic theory of the state, some general points can be gathered from his remarks (Jessop 1982, 1-31; Hunt, 1984, 3-91). He generally described modern states as institutions that (a) possess a set of coercive powers, such as the legal system, police, and army; and (b) exercise these powers to perform the function of reproducing class society in general and serving the interests of the ruling classes in particular, such as by enforcing private property rights or crushing working class uprisings. The state is, to quote Marx and Engels, “the organised power of one class for oppressing another” (Marx and Engels 1996, 20). As a result, “the power of the modern state is merely a device for administering the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class” (ibid, 3). Importantly, the state not only maintains a system of class oppression. It is also inherently oppressive itself. As Marx explained in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, “freedom consists in transforming the state from an agency superior to society into one thoroughly subordinated to it, and today, too, state forms are more or less free to the extent that they limit the ‘freedom of the state’” (Marx 1996, 221).

The achievement of universal human emancipation therefore requires destroying the root out of which class and state oppression grows. Communism achieves this by, as will be explained in more detail shortly, abolishing the private ownership of the means of production and land and replacing it with a system of collective ownership. In such a society there would no longer be any class divisions since everyone now has the same basic relationship to the means of production. To quote Marx there are “no distinctions of class, because everyone is a worker just like everyone else” (Marx 1996, 214. Also see ibid, 187). That is to say, everyone who engages in labour is a producer and there are no other classes who dominate and exploit the producers. The consequence of this is that the state lacks an economic foundation that enables it to persist over time. In a classless society there are no classes a state can rule over or be wielded against. Nor are there any economic relations, such as slavery or capitalism, that require a state to be forcibly maintained. As a result, the state will cease to exist and the rulership of persons will be replaced by the administration of things and the collective self-direction of the production process (Marx and Engels 1996, 20; MECW 25, 267-68; MECW 26, 269-72).

The long term goal of a stateless classless society was also advocated by other socialists and communists that Marx was familiar with, including Blanqui (Spitzer 1957, 173n47), Proudhon (Proudhon 1994, 214-216) and Bakunin (Bakunin 1973, 174-177). This point of agreement was also acknowledged by later anarchists like Luigi Fabbri and Camillo Berneri (Fabbri 2017, 19-20; Berneri 2023, 79-81). Marx and anarchists nonetheless argued with one another about how to achieve this goal. Marx insisted that the working class must establish a workers’ state and collectively wield its power to reorganise society, such as using it to expropriate the capitalist class. Once this has happened and a classless society has been achieved, the state will wither away. Anarchists replied that the working class must simultaneously abolish capitalism and the state and replace it with their own organs of self-management and armed self-defence: workplace and community associations and workers’ militias. The specifics of this debate, including Marx’s views on state ownership during the transition to a communist society, will be discussed in a separate essay (for more information on the anarchist position see Baker 2023).

Component Three: Collective Ownership and Control

Marx’s alternative to the state and classes was, as I have already demonstrated, the free association of producers. He thought this association should be characterised by a specific set of relations of production and distribution. These social relations are what make the association communist. The first of these is the collective ownership and control of the means of production and land by the associated producers themselves, rather than by a separate institution that rules over them. In Capital Volume One he referred to communism as “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force” (Marx 1990, 171). He likewise wrote in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme that under communism “the material conditions for production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves” (Marx 1996, 215. Also see Marx 1991, 568). In Capital Volume Three he explicitly claimed that this also applied to the land. He insisted that, “from the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations” (Marx 1991, 911). He later endorsed, “a conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations” (ibid, 949. Also see Marx 1990, 929; 1992b, 320).

The idea that private property should be abolished is often misunderstood as the claim that no individual should own any possessions at all such that, say, a person’s shoes or toothbrush are owned by the collective. Marx, alongside socialists and communists in general, did not advocate this. He and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that under communism “personal property can no longer be turned into bourgeois property” such that “communism deprives no one of the power to appropriate prod­ucts in society; it merely removes the power to subjugate the labour of others through this appropriation” (Marx and Engels 1996, 15. Also see Berkman 2003, 217). In other words, people can still own possessions like their knitting needles and the blankets they make with this tool, but not means of production that can be used to exploit others like a factory and it’s machinery.

Under communism producers not only own the means of production and land in common, but also collectively self-direct the productive process itself. This is made clear in Capital Volume Three, where Marx wrote:

the cooperative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e. they use the means of production to valorize their own labour . . . coop­erative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one (Marx 1991, 571-572).

This is why Marx rejected the strategy of funding co-operatives with financial aid from the capitalist state. Doing so ignored that “present-day co-operative societies . . . are only of value if they are independent creations of the workers and not creatures of the government or the bourgeoisie” (Marx 1996, 221). Bakunin similarly claimed in 1869 that the main benefit of co-operatives is that “they accustom the workers to organize, pursue, and manage their interests themselves, without any interference either by bourgeois capital or by bourgeois control” and thereby prepare workers for the predominant “form of social organization in the future in every branch of labor” (Bakunin 1985, 153).

Marx’s commitment to collective ownership and control was grounded in his views on freedom as self-direction. Marx and Engels wrote in 1846 that, “things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence . . . in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals, unless it is controlled by all” (MECW 5, 87-88). This position was repeated by Marx in 1880, when he wrote that “the producers cannot be free unless they are in possession of the means of production” (MECW 24, 340).

Component Four: Participatory Planning

Marx described communism as a society without money, markets, and commodities. In the Grundrisse he wrote that there is “nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money (Marx 1993, 158-159). This is because “the private exchange of all products of labour, all activities” leads to “world trade” and “complete dependence on the so-called world market”. Such impersonal domination by market forces “stands in antithesis” to “free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production” (ibid, 159). This point was repeated decades later. Marx insisted in The Critique of the Gotha Programme that “within a co-operatively organised society based on common-ownership in the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products, nor does the labour expended on the products appear any more as the value of these products” (Marx 1993, 213. Also see Marx 1992a, 390, 434).

Marx’s alternative to markets was a system of participatory planning. In Capital Volume One he asked readers to imagine, “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”. This free association will determine what they produce, and so the regulation of labour time, “in accordance with a definite social plan” that “maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the association” (Marx 1990, 171-172). Marx similarly wrote in the Grundrisse that, “the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production” (Marx 1993, 173). In 1872 he advocated, “a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan” (MECW 23, 136). This goal was typically expressed through the distinction between indirectly social labour, which is mediated via market exchange, and directly social labour, which is only mediated via free association within a system of communal production (Marx 1993, 171-72; Marx 1996, 213).

Today the idea of a planned economy brings to mind top down planning by a separate layer of elite bureaucrats who wield power over, and thereby dominate, workers. Marx did not advocate this and is very explicit that planning has to be collectively self-directed by the free producers themselves. In Capital Volume One he claimed that in communism “the process of material production . . . becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control” (Marx 1990, 173). This point is repeated in The Civil War in France. Marx explained at length that,

If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism? (Marx 1996, 188).

The same broad goal was endorsed by anarchists. For example, in 1874 James Guillaume proposed that “a new arrangement will supplant the old: exchange proper will fade away and make room for distribution pure and simple” (Guillaume 2005, 257). In such a society “it will be through the statistics thus collected from all of the communes in a region, that it will be possible to strike a scientific balance between production and consumption: by working to such information, it will be possible to add to the numbers employed in branches where production was inadequate, and to re-deploy in those where productivity is excessive” (ibid, 259. Also see Malatesta 2014, 61; Maximoff 2015, 30-34). In 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist trade union the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) adopted resolutions on libertarian communism. These included a commitment to creating an “economic plan” that will be “directly administered by the producers through their various organs of production, which are to be appointed at general assemblies of all organisations and which will be under their constant supervision” (Quoted in Peirats 2011, 103). This anarchist endorsement of bottom up participatory planning went alongside a critique of state central planning, which was advocated by Marxist parties at the time (Fabbri 2017, 21-25).

Marx’s commitment to a planned economy was interconnected with his views on freedom as self-direction. He thought that individuals can only be free when they self-direct the economy and so are not subject to domination by rulers or market forces. In Capital Volume Three he wrote that,

Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite (Marx 1991, 959. Also see Marx 1993, 172-173, 325; MECW 32, 390-391).

In this passage Marx argued that the collective control of the economy by the associated producers themselves is a necessary but insufficient condition for true freedom. This is because, although producers are no longer subject to domination by rulers or market forces, their self-direction is still thwarted by necessity. By this Marx meant the fact that people are still compelled to labour a certain number of hours a day in order to produce the goods and services necessary for human existence and a good standard of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter.4 This, in turn, limits our ability to fully self-direct our lives because there are certain activities we just have to engage in and doing so uses up time and energy that we might want to spend elsewhere. The utilisation of modern technology within a planned economy enables a sufficient number of goods to be produced with less toil. It also ensures that people are engaging in labour that actually has to be done and so are using their time more efficiently, rather than engaging in ultimately pointless tasks that a person only does under capitalism because it pays the bills, such as corporate public relations and advertising. The result is that communist planning pushes back the realm of necessity and expands the realm of freedom, in which people are truly free to decide how they will spend their finite existence (Raekstad 2022, 59). As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse. “necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though produc­tion is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time” (Marx 1993, 708). Such free time “will be available for ENJOYMENT, for leisure, thus giving scope for free activity and development” (MECW 32, 390. Also see Marx 1993, 711-712).

This is one of the reasons why Marx thought that capitalism makes communism possible. It develops large scale industry and technological innovations that could be used to enable everyone to work less, but instead results in people working the same amount or more due to the compulsion of market forces and production for profit. When producers utilise this machinery under communist relations of production they are able to realise the emancipatory potential that was always inherent within it (Marx 1993, 708-709, 825). It is sometimes assumed that anarchist communists ignored this and wanted to return to an idealised past by creating a society of independent communities that engaged in small-scale production. This is false. Firstly, the majority of anarchist-communists advocated federations, which were formal organisations that united producer associations together at a local, regional, national, and international level and thereby enabled them to form agreements and co-ordinate their economic activities at whatever scale they deemed necessary (Baker 2023, 86-88, 216-24). Secondly, anarchist communists endorsed modern technology and did not want to return to an idealised past. In 1899 Kropotkin claimed that “it would be a great mistake to imagine that industry ought to return to its hand-work stage” (Kropotkin 1902, 177). He instead argued that people should use “the machinery already invented and to be invented” in order to “reduce the time which is necessary for producing wealth to any desired amount, so as to leave to everyone as much leisure as he or she may ask for” (ibid, 219). This could not be achieved by “the work of the isolated individual” or independent “families”. It required “associated labour” and “the planned out and combined action of human groups” (ibid, 123, 214).

Thirdly, anarchist communists envisioned a society in which small and large scale production co-existed and were integrated with one another. Kropotkin concluded, from his exhaustive analysis of 19th century economic conditions, that communities should combine the agricultural labour of farming with the industrial labour of small workshops and small factories. He wrote, “have the factory and the workshop at the gates of your fields and gardens” and create “the countless variety of workshops and factories which are required to satisfy the infinite diversity of tastes among civilised men” (ibid, 217-218). Kropotkin nonetheless did not think that these small industries, which used modern technology to produce at scale, were sufficient for all purposes. He was aware that certain goods can only be produced by huge groups of people using large means of production. He wrote, “if we analyse the modern industries, we soon discover that for some of them the co-operation of hundreds, or even thousands, of workers gathered at the same spot is really necessary. The great iron works and mining enterprises decidedly belong to that category; oceanic steamers cannot be built in village factories” (ibid, 179). He therefore also understood the necessity of “large establishments”, which he thought should be placed outside of the agricultural-industrial communities “at certain spots indicated by Nature” (ibid, 217).

Similar remarks were made by other anarchist communists. For example, Luigi Fabbri wrote in 1921 that,

When the type of work or service to be performed requires it, when it is possible without greater inconvenience than utility, depending on the environment and circumstances, we too admit large factories, large workshops, large farms. We too think that production should be placed on as wide a foot as possible. Nor do we have any phobia for big industry itself; and where its experiences and methods of production can be used for the good of all, it would be foolish not to do so.

The aberration consists in holding that only the mode of production of large industry is effective, and that small companies are condemned to perish for an alleged crime of incapacity. Everyone knows that there are kinds of work and production that are actually done better in large workshops, others that are better suited to small-scale manufacturing, and still others that are done as well in small as in large (Fabbri 1921).

Component Five: Distribution According to Need

A central component of the communist planned economy is the distribution of the products of collective labour. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx spelled out two systems of distribution, which are both alternatives to money, that would exist during different phases of communism. In the lower phase of communist society, which refers to communism “just as it emerges from capitalist society”, goods are distributed according to the actual amount of time that people labour and/or the intensity of this labour (Marx 1996, 213-214. Also see Marx 1990, 172; MECW 25, 288). Marx wrote that each producer “gets from society a receipt that he has contributed such and such an amount of labour (after a deduction of labour for common reserves) and withdraws from society’s stores of the means of consumption an equal amount costed in labour terms” (Marx 1996, 213). Marx was also aware that not every adult is capable of engaging in labour, such as the elderly and some disabled people. He thought that in “all social modes of production” there is “the amount of labour that those capable of work must always perform for those members of society not yet capable, or no longer capable of working” (Marx 1991, 1016). As a result he proposed that a portion of the products of collective labour should go towards “resources for those incapable of work” (Marx 1996, 212). This would occur in parallel to the creation and expansion of a vast array of free public services “dedicated to the collective satisfaction of needs, like schools, health services etc” (ibid, 212).

This is called a system of labour vouchers and was a common socialist idea at the time. Marx’s version of labour vouchers should not be viewed as a simple rebranding of money. This is because (a) an individual can only receive them from the association in proportion to how much labour they engage in and (b) they cannot be used to buy absolutely anything. This means that an industrious individual could not accumulate labour vouchers through selling items to others. Nor could they save up enough labour vouchers in order to buy a whole factory for themselves and then become a new capitalist. Marx wrote that, “no one can contribute anything except his own labour, and nothing can become a person’s property except the individual means of consumption” (ibid, 213). Elsewhere he explicitly claimed that, “these tokens are not money; they do not circulate” (Marx 1992a, 434). The consequence of this is that the producers are not wage labourers hired by society in exchange for a wage, which plays the role of collective capitalist. They are instead members of a free association who engage in acts of production and the amount of time they labour and/or the intensity of this labour is documented. This is then used to determine their access to the products of collective labour. To quote Marx in Capital Volume One, labour vouchers under “directly socialized labour, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities”, are “no more ‘money’ than a theatre ticket is”. They are “merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product which has been set aside for consumption” (Marx 1990, 188-189n1). This is why Marx is careful to say that producers “get” or “receive” labour vouchers, rather than are ‘paid’ in labour vouchers. As he said in his 1864 inaugural address to the International Workingmen’s Association, “hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart” (MECW 20, 11).

Marx nonetheless did not view labour vouchers as part of his vision of a fully developed communist society. He instead described it as “a bourgeois right” that was “economically, morally, intellectually . . . stamped with the birthmarks of the old society” and would lead to “faults” that “are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society when it has just emerged from capitalist society” (Marx 1996, 213, 214). Distribution according to labour is therefore not a communist principle of distribution, but a bourgeois one that continues to exist in lower phase communism. Crucially, this is caused not only by purely economic factors, such as the scarcity of resources or logistics not being sufficiently well organised, but also by what Marx labelled intellectual and moral factors. Namely: people’s experiences within capitalism have made them internalise ideas like ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ or ‘the grindset’ of hustle culture. As he wrote, “rights can never be higher than the economic form of society and the cultural development which is conditioned by it” (Marx 1996, 214). This is a point Marx had previously made in Capital Volume One, where he noted that how goods are distributed “will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers” (Marx 1990, 172). Distribution via labour vouchers does not describe how Marx thought lower phase communism should operate, but how it will operate given that it necessarily emerges out of capitalist societies and so will be built by people who have been shaped by capitalist social relations since birth (Hudis 2012, 199-202; Raekstad 2022, 168-72).

A new system of distribution will therefore arise over time as people’s ideas, capacities, and psychological drives are transformed by the five other components of communist society. Marx is clear that,

In a higher phase of communist society, after the subjection of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has disappeared; after labour has become not merely a means to live but the foremost need in life; after the multifarious development of individuals has grown along with their productive powers, and all the springs of co­-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the limited horizon of bourgeois right be wholly transcended, and society can inscribe on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs (Marx 1996, 214-215).

Crucially, these are the only differences that Marx stipulates between the relations of production in lower and higher phase communism. As a result, both phases of communism are characterised by: (a) the absence of money, markets and commodities; and (b) the collective ownership and control of the means of production and land by the associated producers themselves, which includes a system of participatory planning that they self-direct.

It should also be noted that Marx referred to ‘a higher phase’ of communist society, rather than ‘the highest phase’ or ‘the only higher phase’. He assumed that society would continue to evolve in new directions and was not committed to the view that the achievement of higher phase communism represented the end goal of human history. In 1844 he referred to communism as “a real phase, necessary for the next period of historical development, in the emancipation and recovery of mankind. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development – the form of human society” (Marx 1992b, 358). He later claimed in the Grundrisse that people living under communism will engage in a never ending process of self-transformation. Or, as he put it using philosophical jargon, “he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality” and “strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming” (Marx 1993, 488). If people are continuously transforming themselves, then it can be assumed that they are also changing the society they live in. For Marx, communism would be the beginning of truly human history. This is because it would be the first time ever that the entire globe is able to properly develop their species unique powers of conscious self-direction. As he declared in 1858, when capitalism is abolished “the pre-history of human society draws to a close” (Marx 1996, 161. Also see Marx 1992b, 348).

People unfamiliar with Marx tend to misunderstand what distribution according to need means because of how the word is used in everyday language. For Marx, and also anarchists, ‘needs’ refer to any psychological drive a person might have. Wanting to play Path of Exile or live next to the sea are just as much of a need as having to drink water (Raekstad 2022, 29-36; Baker 2023, 50-54). Communists are of course aware that not all needs are equally important. A person cannot play Path of Exile if they die of starvation. As a result, they distinguished between necessary needs, which are requirements for survival and basic functioning, and needs in general. To quote Marx, “luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary” (Marx 1993, 528). What needs are considered necessary varies according to different contexts. Electricity was a luxury when it was first invented, but is now necessary for day-to-day tasks like cooking and transportation. Or as Marx wrote, it is a “tendency of capital” to transform “what was previously superfluous into what is necessary, as a historically created necessity” (ibid). The first task of communist production and distribution is the universal satisfaction of necessary needs and so ensuring that, unlike under capitalism, nobody is without food, water, shelter, healthcare, heating during winter and so on. But once, as Kropotkin noted, “material wants are satisfied, other needs, of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward the more ardently” (Kropotkin 2007, 137). What goods are collectively produced, and so which specific needs are satisfied by the communal economy, will be established by the associated producers and consumers themselves through various planning procedures. As Malatesta explained, “a communist society . . . is not, obviously, about an absolute right to satisfy all of one’s needs, because needs are infinite” and “their satisfaction is always limited by productive capacity; nor would it be useful or just that the community in order to satisfy excessive needs, otherwise called caprices, of a few individuals, should undertake work, out of proportion to the utility being produced” (Malatesta 2005, 60-61). Given this, “it would be an absurd waste of energy to produce blindly to provide for all possible needs, rather than calculating the actual needs and organising to satisfy them with as little effort as possible” (ibid, 62).

The slogan ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ is not just a proposal about economic distribution. It is also a more general claim about society at large. Firstly, it means that the economy will be geared towards the direct satisfaction of human need, rather than the maximisation of profit. This would fundamentally alter both what is produced and how it is produced. To paraphrase Marx, imagine a free association of video game developers producing under communist relations of production. They would decide what games they made based on their technical abilities and artistic needs to create and imagine, rather than market forces compelling them to make another sequel or a live service game. They would self-direct the development process and, as a result, not have a boss that could order them to crunch long hours at the office and thereby sacrifice their needs for relaxation and a social life in order to make shareholders more money. The finished game would not contain mechanics that exist just to generate profit, like loot boxes and battle passes. It would instead be something that the developers made only in order to fulfil their needs as creators and those of other people for entertainment.

Secondly, under a need orientated economy consequences of production that are not reflected in market prices, such as the impact on the natural environment or the mental and physical health of both the producers and the general population, will be incorporated into planning procedures as key considerations. In the modern world this could take the form of an end to fossil fuel production or the abolition of planned obsolescence and electronics instead being built to last and be easily repairable. Thirdly, it entails that numerous parts of daily life, which are today mediated through market relations, will instead be organised through people freely associating with one another in accordance with their abilities in order to satisfy their own needs and those of others. Communism would, to quote Kropotkin, contain an “interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national, and international” that were formed “for all possible purposes”, including not only “production” and “consumption” but also “the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs” (Kropotkin 2014, 163). For example, people could form an association in order to exercise. Within this association people with certain abilities and needs, such as knowledge of sports science and the desire to help others, would teach people how to lift weights and thereby enable them to develop their capacities and satisfy their needs for exercise. This same behaviour occurs under capitalism but is mediated through market relations, such as gym memberships or hiring a personal trainer. Within communism, by contrast, it is only mediated by people deciding to associate with one another in pursuit of their shared goals. In such a world the exchange of commodities and the drive for profit has been replaced by what Marx called the free exchange of activities and the drive for enjoyment (Marx 1992a, 199; Marx 1993, 159, 171).

Marx’s views on distribution are important, but it must be stressed that they were not his original invention. He borrowed the slogan ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ from the earliest communist movements. During the late 1820s and 1830s followers of Saint-Simon spread the idea: “to each according to his ability, to each capacity according to his works” (Quoted in Bovens and Lutz 2018, 4). By this they did not just mean remuneration according to labour, but also general contributions to the social good like the investment of capital (ibid, 23-24, 28). A decade later the front cover of the 1845 edition of the communist Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria featured the epigraph: “First Right: To Live – To each following his needs” and “First Duty: To Work – From each following his strengths” (Quoted in ibid, 3-4). This was then reformulated into the well known slogan by Louise Blanc in 1849. The various early socialist and communist slogans about remuneration were themselves cobbled together from biblical passages (ibid, 3, 8-12).

This is not the only area where Marx was not original. A similar proposal to his distinction between lower and higher phase communism had previously been made by the anarchist collectivist James Guillaume in 1874. He suggested that communities could initially distribute goods via labour vouchers but should then, once the post-revolutionary society had stabilised and abundance had been achieved, switch to what he called a system of pure distribution. In so doing they would establish the principle, “FROM EACH ACCORD­ING TO ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO NEEDS” (Guillaume 2005, 251. Also see ibid, 255-257). Later anarchist communists like Cafiero and Alexander Berkman dispensed with labour vouchers entirely and advocated a system of rationing during the revolutionary transformation of society, which would provide everyone, irrespective of how much they laboured, with a set number of coupons that could be used to acquire communally owned goods. This went alongside the caveat that special consideration would be given to certain groups, such as children, the elderly, and pregnant people. This limited form of communist distribution would ultimately give way to full communism and free assess to the products of collective labour and true distribution according to need (Berkman 2003, 215-219; Cafiero 2012, 51, 54-56, 61-62).

Component Six: The Division of Labour

One of Marx’s main critiques of class societies is that they are based on a rigid and hierarchical division of labour. This can be seen in his critique of capitalism. In Capital Volume One Marx claimed that the “division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, who are merely the members of a total mechanism which belongs to him” (Marx 1990, 476-477. Also see Marx 1991, 1021). The consequence of this is that “the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose” (Marx 1990, 450). He explicitly labelled this direction by capitalists as “purely despotic” (ibid 450) and argued that it was based on a “relationship of domination and servitude” that stemmed from class divisions, rather than just the practical need to supervise and manage collective labour processes (Marx 1991, 507-510). He noted that as capitalist workplaces increase in complexity and scale,

this despotism develops the forms that are peculiar to it. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour as soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production, properly speaking, first begins, so now he hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, over-seers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function (Marx 1990, 450. Also see Marx and Engels 1996, 8).

In other words, capitalism’s division of labour creates “a hierarchical structure amongst the workers themselves” by dividing the workforce into labourers and a layer of managers who dominate them (Marx 1990, 481). The capitalist division of labour, in addition to this, restricts people’s lives to a narrow range of activities and thereby limits their ability to develop themselves in multiple directions. For Marx this was most notable in factory assembly lines. Such work “does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content” (ibid, 548).

The achievement of universal human emancipation and the establishment of a classless society therefore required, to quote Marx and Engels, “abolishing the division of labour” (MECW 5, 78). By this Marx did not mean that people should cease to specialise in certain activities or divide up tasks. Time spent painting is time not spent learning other skills, like marine biology or how to drive a train. There are only so many hours in the day and so people will develop different skill sets just from how they choose to spend their time. It must be recalled that Marx endorsed a “planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production” (Marx 1993, 173). It is not possible for such a distribution to occur if there is no division of labour in the literal sense of tasks being divided up. What Marx rejected was the rigid and “hierarchic division of labour” that exists within class societies (Marx 1996, 181). As Raekstad neatly summarises, Marx thought that communism “must (i) eliminate people’s confinement to particular occupations, (ii) eliminate the split between a ruling elite who do all the planning, managing, and overseeing of labour and those who are subject to their power, and (iii) allow people’s labouring activities to consist, in principle, of any combination they individually and collectively determine, subject to their abilities and society’s needs. This in turn will result in (iv) occupational identities falling away as meaningful social categories altogether” (Raekstad 2022, 166).5

This perspective ca be clearly seen in a number of passages. Marx and Engels wrote in 1846 that,

as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic (MECW 5, 47. Also see ibid, 394).

Decades later Marx claimed in Capital Volume One that,

This possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn (Marx 1990, 618).

Similar remarks were made by anarchist communists. To take one example, Kropotkin thought that “the greatest sum total of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually-varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only” (Kropotkin 1902, iv-v). Although “a temporary division of functions remains the surest guarantee of success in each separate undertaking, the permanent division is doomed to disappear” (ibid, 4).

Conclusion

The picture of communism that has emerged in this essay is very different from how it is typically described. Marx was not the advocate of totalitarianism that he is sometimes assumed to be. He instead wanted to help create a society that was built on a foundation of freedom, understood as individual and collective self-direction, individuality, and human development. This led him to envision a world without rulers and ruled, masters and subjects; a world in which all the systems of domination he witnessed, including classes, states, patriarchy, racism, and markets, had been abolished. He thought that universal human emancipation could be achieved by a revolution that established a system of free association, in which producers collectively own the means of production and land themselves, and self-direct both the labour process and the planning of the economy. Under such communist relations of production the goal of economic activity would be the direct satisfaction of human needs, rather than making a line on the stock exchange go up. This society would regard real wealth not as the jewels and palaces of the opulent, but instead how much free time everyone has to relax and develop their human capacities as an end in itself. These values would be reflected in the division of labour, such that specialisation and the necessary dividing up of tasks would no longer result in people being riveted to one profession for the majority of their lives or being forced to engage in the same mind numbing repetitive actions over and over again. Most importantly of all, there would no longer be hierarchical divisions within the labour force between a separate layer of power wielding managers and the workers they dominate.

Countries like the USSR and Maoist China obviously do not align with Marx’s vision of a communist or socialist society, which are two terms that Marx used interchangeably to refer to the same mode of production. Their many failings do not demonstrate that communism will never work since they never established a communist society to begin with. They were, at best, attempts at creating a state socialist society ruled by a workers’ state, that would, in theory, be the transitional phase between capitalism and communism. A significant number of communists disagree and argue that they were actually state capitalist societies, in the sense that the state functioned as the national capitalist, and the rule of the proletariat was really the dictatorship of the communist party leadership over the working classes. The debate over whether or not societies like the USSR were genuinely socialist or not is, to a significant extent, a semantic debate about the definition of words. Irrespective of how socialism is defined, it is clear that Marxist one party states failed to lay the foundations from which communism in both it’s lower and higher phases could possibly emerge. They instead ultimately functioned as the transitional phase between capitalism and capitalism. This occurred via collapse in the case of the USSR and reform in the case of China. The various forms of Leninism have, by the standards set by Marx, been a dismal failure. From the 1860s onwards anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists had predicted that certain means – creating a centralised hierarchical state that is wielded by a ruling minority who govern society from the top down – will never achieve, or even build towards, emancipatory ends – the free association of producers (Baker 2023, 154-67). The horrifying fulfilment of this prediction in the 20th century represents not the failure of communism, but the confirmation of anarchist communist theory and the failure of one possible method of achieving communism. Another world is still possible. We need only find the means to build it.

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• 1Exactly how many people were repressed or killed by communist party dictatorships is a controversial topic among historians. In the case of the USSR, the general public often relies on outdated research produced during the cold war prior to the opening up of the Soviet archives, such as the books of Robert Conquest. During the 1990s a wave of revisionist historians used new archival sources to challenge the old estimates. Yet even these revisionist historians thought that the death toll of Stalin’s policies was extremely high. Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov concluded that, “if we add the figure we have for executions up to 1940 to the number of persons who died in GULAG camps and the few figures we have found so far on mortality in prisons and labor colonies, then add to this the number of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach the figure of 1,473,424. . . But even if we put at hundreds of thousands the casualties of the most chaotic period of collectivization (deaths in exile, rather than from starvation in the 1932 famine), plus later victims of different categories for which we have no data, it is unlikely that ‘custodial mortality’ figures of the 1930s would reach 2 million: a huge number of ‘excess deaths’ but far below most prevailing estimates” (Getty et al 1993, 1024). Wheatcroft similarly found that “mass purposive killing in terms of executions were probably in the order of one million and probably as large as the total number of recorded deaths in the Gulag” (Wheatcroft 1996, 1348).
• 2People often respond to this interpretation by quoting a famous passage in the German Ideology where Marx and Engels wrote, “communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise” (MECW 5, 49). This quote is often cited, but rarely understood. In other passages, including within the German Ideology itself, Marx makes various claims about the characteristics of a communist society. This appears to be self-contradictory but is not. The tension between these passages disappears once it is kept in mind that Marx thinks in terms of processes. Communism refers to a process that begins with the formation of a real movement for the self-emancipation of the proletariat. This movement, which emerges within and is generated by capitalism, will go on to replace capitalism with a society that will have a number of institutional features, such as distribution according to need. Communist social movements under capitalism and the communist society they create, during and after a revolution, are different descriptions of the same process at different phases of its development. In this essay I am only concerned with explaining one phase of the process of communism, namely a communist society. Thanks to Paul Raekstad for explaining this to me.
• 3This commitment to abolishing racism also coincided with some racist views and behaviour. For more information see Paul 1981.
• 4On a few occasions Marx appeared to say that communism is a society in which people do not do any labour whatsoever. Most famously in The German Ideology Marx and Engels wrote, “communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves” (MECW 5, 52. Also see ibid, 80, 205). By this Marx meant alienated labour or labour as an economic class. This is for the obvious reason that humanity would become extinct if they did not do literally any labour whatsoever. In Capital Volume One he is clear that “the labour process . . . is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live” (Marx 1990, 290). In the Grundrisse he explicitly rejected the idea of all labour becoming a form of play under communism (Marx 1993, 712).
• 5This appears to contradict Marx and Engel’s claim that collective labour processes, like a factory, require what they call a “governing will” or “directing authority” to co-ordinate activity (Marx 1990, 448-449; Marx 1991, 507; MECW 23, 422-24; MECW 24, 519-20). It should be kept in mind that Marx also holds that: (a) necessary supervisory and managerial labour is distinct from the despotic relations within capitalist workplaces; (b) managers should be elected by the producers, who instruct the manager on their functions and have the right to instantly recall the manager at any time (MECW 3, 123; Marx 1996, 184-85); (c) these elections determine “the distribution of general functions”, which “entails no domination” (MECW 24, 519); and (d) these managers do not form a separate distinct layer within a hierarchical division of labour since “the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn” (Marx 1990, 618). Managerial labour would therefore be regularly rotated among the producers. This is a complex topic that will be discussed at length in a separate essay.