12.06.2025
Socialisms have prevented communism
Peter Kennedy, a member of Talking About Socialism, responds to Mike Macnair. Obviously what he writes represents his own take on the contemporary situation and historic issues
I would like to thank Mike Macnair for taking the time and effort to read and offer commentary on my paper, ‘Differentiating socialism and communism’.1 I enjoyed reading his critical reflections2 and here are my own in reply.
First, on terminology. He states: “… there is no consistency in Marx’s and Engels’ usage of the terms [‘socialism’ and ‘communism’].” This is not correct. Marx was consistent with his view that communism would replace capitalism. There is some argument to suggest that Engels was less consistent. However, he more often conflated socialism with the socialisation of the economy, as he did in his Socialism: utopian and scientific, when making his materialist case for a socialist science of capitalism.
Mike states: “… there are historical shifts in the use of the terminology, and these are important to understanding the present issue”. He cites the conviction of communists in Cologne in 1852, after which “the Eisenachers used the term, ‘social democratic’, to emphasise their insistence on political democracy”.
Democratic limit
This may be one reason, but bear in mind that the ‘social’ in ‘social democratic’ does not limit itself to “political democracy”: it embraces the social and economic moment of democracy. However, the essential point is that the seeds are laid for a tussle between socialism and communism that originates from class struggle. As we know, social democracy was a loose, hold-all category, presenting opportunities for a broad church of ‘socialisms’, some of which were potty-trained reformists, some genuine communists, fighting for communism, while many walked the middle line and subsequently fused within various parties ‘representing’ labour, but gradually as a means of compromising with capital.
Mike then states: “… the ‘people’s front’ turn of Comintern led Trotsky to judge that the communist parties were now to the right of the left elements among the socialist parties ...” This is true and confirms my point that socialism was not so much a mode of production, but a mode of class conflict within capitalism. Moreover, what is equally true is that the Comintern in this period represented ‘socialism in one country’, while those “left elements” of the socialist parties at least represented international socialist aspirations. Nevertheless, the currency is now ‘socialism’, not communism. The latter remained beyond the pale in this period - indeed soon after Marx died.
When Mike addresses the usages of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ in Marxist reflections on the “first [initial] phase” of communism, his overall point gets tangled in jumps between historical periods. Interesting stuff we mostly know, but the point made gets lost, I feel.
His point appears to be that Marx used the term ‘socialism’ as a synonym for the first phase of communism (I would have to say fleetingly, because he more consistently used the term, ‘initial phase of communism’). Later Lenin argued that both terms meant the same - before the slide into the usage of ‘socialism’ as a first phase, which then became caught in the headwind of ‘socialism in one country’ - socialism initiating in one country, but spreading internationally by necessity, if it is to succeed? Good point!
Socialisation
Comrade Macnair and I have different grasps of the meaning of ‘socialisation’ of capital and labour other than by engulfing small household production, peasants and artisans. The latter are middling groups, still very much alive and kicking today, in a capitalism overripe with socialisation. In which case they cannot be solely or even most importantly what Marx meant by ‘socialisation’ - and the socialisation I was referring to in my short paper.
Marx writes at length in Capital Vol 3 how capital transitions into a social power across society (what Hilferding and Lenin would later call ‘finance capital’). The combined effect of concentration of capital into fewer hands and the centralisation of capital in production, distribution and exchange develops a dominant capitalist class that has increasingly less to do with any specific product or industry and much more interest in (a) the running of the capitalist economy and state policy, and (b) monitoring the risks to its rule posed by its arch enemy, the working class.
The working class by the same forces also becomes highly collectivised - a political threat: the labour-power it alienates as value to capital is a social power that requires containing. A point is reached where considerations about maximising profits (surplus value extraction) are joined by considerations about maintaining control over the working class. All of which necessarily embroils the state in effecting class containment and class compromise. Brushing this away as ‘statist’ only confuses what is at stake.
In relation to the above Mike states: “The capitalist class struggles for control of the socialised forces of production, in order to hold the working class in subordination and thereby maintain a flow of surplus value” (by which I think he may mean maintain that flow of surplus value at a mass and rate necessary to maintaining profit rates?).
That is correct, but this in no way diminishes my point that the capitalist class will adapt to class-compromise forms of ‘socialism’ to win this struggle. Nor does this adaptation eliminate the risk it will fail to maintain a “flow of surplus value”. In fact, one of the principal causes for initiating the termination of social democracy from the mid-1970s was the threat to flows of surplus value necessary to maintaining profit rates, posed by the partial suspension of commodity fetishism as a control over the working class, and the consequential politicisation of workers, demanding more use value, rejecting the logic that use values ought first to take the commodity form.
If we agree:
- that capitalism has been ripe for worker revolution and transformation to communism for more than a century;
- that the period up to the mid-1930s was a period of capitalist stagnation;
- that the period between the 1940 and 1970s revived capitalist growth and this period heavily involved Stalinism/social democracy;
- and, finally, agree that the period post-80s to the present has been characterised by capitalist stagnation and financial parasitism ...
then we can agree that ‘socialisms’ have prevented communism; socialisms are inherent to the class struggle against the working class.
Mike claims I argue that ‘municipal socialism’ is “an ingenious capitalist device for preventing communism, rather than becoming able to play that role only after workers’ organisations themselves promoted it as a means of what were then called ‘palliatives’”.
I never wrote this. My point was that ‘municipal socialism’ (the development of public goods, public infrastructure) was necessary for capitalism: as industries, cities and so populations grew, municipality was open to socialisation, which presented opportunities for class compromise and collaboration at local and national level.
Much like the above points, a whole paper would be required to present this case. But my paper was more about drawing together the broader trends and direction of travel, as I see it. Shelton Stromquist wrote an exceptionally good book on the struggle for control over the municipal space, Claiming the city: how local politics had an international impact, in which socialists and existing urban elites struggled to define this space as ‘capitalist’ and/or ‘socialist’.
Party
Mike takes issue with my reading of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) as a top-down bureaucratic party, bent on the evolutionary transformation of capitalism into state socialism. He claims this reading is contradicted by the SPD perspective that capitalism would collapse and that the party held a clear commitment to promoting self-organisation in co-ops, clubs and so on.
It is true that I should have phrased this in less sweeping terms. However, what remains true is that the SPD held contradictory views. The Erfurt programme less than 20 years later extended the range of immediate demands towards reforms that would benefit the working class if enacted. However, we should not forget that the broader context within which the SPD and other ‘Labour Parties’ in Europe operated, the Second International, was one of opportunism. Kautsky was more a puppet of the right than a pope of the Marxist left. Theoretically he won some battles (with Bernstein), but in practice he toed the line. The broader context within capitalist society was the development of monopoly capitalism embroiling the state, which set the scene domestically for class compromise to defeat the working class and internationally for imperialism to transform and extend pre-existing colonial dominance.
Both internal and external contexts established the seeds for elevating the minimum programme into the politics of evolutionary social change and class compromise, and subordinating the maximum programme (the means become all, the end becomes meaningless). We all know this. Just as we all know what occurred later: war credits, ostracising the Bolshevik revolution, suppressing the revolutionary momentum in Europe.
Mike comments: “Comrade Kennedy says of Marx’s Critique [re the Gotha programme]: ‘The strident, venomous, trenchant and blunt tone of Marx’s critique - usually reserved for the inhuman degradation of capitalism and the ruling class - arises here among fellow socialists because he sees in the programme the hallmarks of class treachery’.”
According to Mike, this is part of the “normal sharpness of Marx’s polemics among ‘fellow socialists”’. This is a matter of interpretation and judgement. What is true is that Marx wrote with anger, but also irony and humour, when exposing the limitations of bourgeois economic and political theory and practice, but he reserved his most trenchant criticism for those - both left and right of the class spectrum - whose actions threatened to dilute the power of the working class in their historic mission to overthrow the capitalist class and create a communist society. The tone of writing directed towards the Gotha Programme and what would become the SPD clearly reveals Marx was of the view that this brand of socialism represented this sort of threat.
Transition
I wrote, “… short of the working class taking power, then socialism, as an unstable transitional relation with a missing pole of communism, will inevitably lead the working class back towards a declining capitalism.” Mike asked: “But what does the working class taking power mean in this context?’ The nearest statement I made towards this was:
Socialism becomes the transition from capitalism to communism under the democratic rule of the working class, through communes and through the state. Which is to say, working class power, exercised through its network of communes and the state, will provide the means through which most of the population will be engaged in some form of administration and management and with the building of democratic control over every sphere of life: ‘the state and politics, work and economy’.
Mike is not happy with this. He claims that I leave out the previous overthrow of the capitalist state order.
This is not true. My point is that the transition from capitalism to communism under the democratic rule of the working class, through communes and through the state, overthrows the capitalist state order. It will provide the means for the population to engage in self-administration and management and the building of democratic control over every sphere of life: “the state and politics, work and economy. The latter will overthrow the capitalist economic order.”
There is a whole lot more, which can be discussed in Communist University.3 For now, I look forward to reading and responding to Mike’s “attempt to address the question of transition positively in the light of the negative arguments in last week’s and this article”.