30.09.1999

Communism is no utopia

István Mészáros, the noted Marxist thinker, gave this opening to this year’s Communist University

Is Communism a utopia? The answer to the question depends on what we mean by communism and what we mean by utopia. My own attitude is that it is not a utopia. Communism concerns control. It envisages a different way of controlling our social interchanges, our relationship to nature. The moment I speak of control, the question arises: what sort of control? In the past it was assumed that political control would do the trick. Now we know from bitter experience that it did not, that it could not succeed.

If you look around the world today, most of the former communist parties have abandoned the name ‘communist’. The original CPGB now calls itself the ‘Democratic Left’. God knows how long that will stay. And if you think of one of the most important communist parties of the past, the Italian CP, it has disintegrated. It has become reduced to something meaningless, a government party. The prime minister of Italy today is a former communist, but he would run away from any suggestion that he might have anything to do with communism.

That is the reality of what happened in the last 10 years. If we look at the former Soviet Union and the east European countries, there has been a complete change, a complete abandonment of all principles. The former communist leaders of eastern Europe have turned themselves into capitalists, who parasitically profit from former state property, transferring it to themselves or their offspring. It is quite scandalous, but this is what happened.

The problem goes deeper when we think of how Stalin defined communism. For him, communism meant overtaking the United States in coal, pig iron and steel production. How seriously can you take any notion of ‘communism’ which defines the idea in such totally vacuous and utterly fetishistic terms. You can double the United States pig iron production, and you have not moved one inch in the direction of communism. This shows the difficulty. Even if you have a political organisation which calls itself communist, as the former Soviet Communist Party and others did, that does not give you any guarantee that its ideas can be taken seriously.

On the other side - the utopia side - you have serious problems. In one sense I sympathise with the people who say we definitely have to accept that utopia has value. That under the present miserable conditions, we have to envisage a social transformation which shows something beyond it. And if they call us utopian for that reason, so be it. We accept it. One of those who took this position was Marcuse. Some of his writings on the subject are brilliant. But what happened later? Poor Marcuse realised that the kind of strategy he envisaged, and his way of talking about the agency of social transformation which could take us to this idealised state of utopia, were identified with students and outsiders in general. His theorem turned out to be very utopian in another sense - he became an extreme pessimist. Towards the end of his life, in his last works, such as The aesthetic dimension, he embraced a totally pessimistic view of the world, saying that it was not made for man, that it had not become more human, that there are only islands of good in the sea of evil, to which one can escape for only short moments of time.

In the Marxist tradition, from the beginning, utopia was questioned and criticised. The most sustained work was Engels’s long essay on the development of socialism from utopia to science. Engels stressed that the utopian conception of socialism - found in Owen and the French socialists - envisaged a way of establishing a new social order which would be the product of enlightened, far-sighted people capable of persuading others that such a society was good and worth striving for. It was a sort of moral appeal, a set of ideas that would produce a great change in society. Marx asked the question, who is going to educate the educators, what are the circumstances under which the conditions become favourable for this kind of enormous leap from the existing social framework?

There are those who would throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you think of more recent approaches, this idea - from utopia to science - was carried to the extreme by those who dismissed any element of social value. Moral values became labelled as negative and unscientific. A false opposition was made between science and values. Yet there is no way of avoiding the realisation that when we talk about a different kind of society - communist society - that involves values. The realm of freedom is not something that simply falls out of the sky and hits us, and then everything is all right. It is a very complex social transformation, and at the same time involves a certain conception of humanity and its conditions of existence. Take this quotation, where Marx is talking about the realm of freedom:

“The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this field, can consist only in this, that socialised 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” (K Marx Capital Vol 3, London 1981, pp958-9).

Here you have a total contrast to what we experience today. It is value-laden, an aspiration towards which we have to strive. Unless you do that, you remain imprisoned by so many shackles of the realm of necessity. The notion that science by itself can achieve it is fetishistic and technol-istic. Even the greatest achievements of science can be turned to the most negative use. Just think of what is happening to our society today. We have tremendous production powers at our disposal. But they are not at our disposal. They are at the disposal of capital, which manipulates them and regulates our life. Capitalism has become a system of destructive production. So much of what we could have is dissipated and wasted. Unless society is orientated in the direction of overcoming such terrible legacies, such terrible determinations of the system, there is no hope that we can move forward.

The passage I just quoted is, as I remarked, replete with value: that is, a distinctive moral vision. Marx is talking about our doing things in the realm of freedom in a way which is worthy of our human nature. What does “worthy” mean, if morality does not enter the picture? You cannot run away from it, even though there might indeed be some people for whom the phrase ‘Marxism and morality’ already reeks of a tendency to bourgeois deviation. Morality certainly has an individual dimension, but some vital aspects of it are collective and relate to the question of solidarity. The emancipation of the working class from wage slavery - and with it the emancipation of society as a whole - is central to the Marxist conceptualisation of the problem. Labour cannot simply emancipate itself, and take over the role of the previous ruling classes which subordinated the rest of society. There are too many people involved in the category of ‘labour’ to make that feasible. So emancipation is absolutely vital, and the individual moral dimension is absolutely essential, given that it is social determination through interchange with other human beings that determines the matter. Real emancipation means not just emancipation from wage slavery, but the freedom to be as you are.

The society in which we live compels people not to pay any attention to morality, because the morality in question is pseudo-morality - a morality imposed from outside, from above. The predicament of our life is that we are controlled from outside, and morality in this sense, taking the form of the various creeds - whether religious or other creeds - is an external imposition. 

It would, however, be a very poor form of socialism which would want to disengage from moral value. In this connection, it is, of course, not accidental that Stalin used to lash out against morality as mere ‘moralising’, which then could be condemned as something a priori evil. At the same time, he dictated from outside what your moral values or your aspirations ought to be.

The control I am talking about involves the only possible, the only feasible mode of control which is really sustainable. We have to think in terms of time. Sustainability is a very important category here. We cannot simply say we will solve these problems in 10 or 20 years. The only solution that is feasible is sustainable control - control which can underpin human efforts in the direction in which we want to go. There is no way you can define it other than self-control, the only valid and feasible mode of control. And that is where so many political forces in the past have failed in their efforts: and we have seen the result - the collapses, the transformations which have led to so much tragedy.

In The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx talks about the fundamental difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The whole thing climaxes with reference to what he calls “prodigiousness” of aims. Let me quote this passage:

“Proletarian revolutions, like those of the 19th century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth, and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims.”

Now this is very important, because the prodigiousness of aims is what we mean when we talk about communism. These prodigious aims - and again I must emphasise that this implies an orientation of value - are what we have to try and realise, no matter how unfavourable the circumstances. Yet Marx adds that there comes a point where there is no turning back, where you simply cannot recoil and make compromises - sadly a characteristic of the greater part of the 20th century working class movement. Understandable, but not justifiable.

The defensive determination of the socialist movement - given unfavourable power relations between capital and labour - has meant that taking the line of least resistance has been dominant and still dominates today. We can have no illusions about this, but the prodigiousness of aims remains. At the same time, the system of destructive production ever more strongly dominates and determines the conditions of our existence. No infinity of time is available in which we can evade this phenomenon.

The conditions are presenting themselves in which we must confront the alternative of adopting a different form of social metabolic control. This is what Marx means, when he says that turning back is no longer possible - when destructiveness is accumulating to such a degree that evasion means, in a sense, advocating suicide.

You are all familiar with the Luxemburgist idea of socialism or barbarism, a very important notion. It originated in Marx, even if not in exactly the same words. You find it in The German ideology, where it is clearly indicated that the conditions of development come to a point where the alternative is either destroying yourself or taking a radically new course. The idea of communism is, in that sense, not something suspended in mid-air, but a necessity, a need, a transformation without which the existence of humanity itself is in peril.

The present mode of social control - the way in which our social metabolism is regulated, our relationship among ourselves and with nature - is characterised by the most awful kind of inequality. You could not invent a worse one. Inequality is at the root of it, as are domination and hierarchy. Capital cannot share anything with anybody. Reformism was bound to be a failure, because it worked on the assumption that capital was capable of sharing its resources in the interests of the working class, so that, sooner or later, through small reformist transformations we arrive at the stage when we realise socialism. That is a complete absurdity, because capital either controls, or it has to be eliminated. Decision-making capital is the mode of making decisions for all of us, and we cannot escape from it. This is one aspect of what makes it a system of the most awful kind of inequality.

The second is that it is an adversarial system. It is a system of contradictions, antagonisms, a centrifugal system, whose elements pull in different directions. So in order to keep the system under control, we find the most awful kind of authoritarianism. The adversarial nature of the system means that from the smallest microcosm to the most gigantic transnational corporation, it always remains torn by internal contradictions. All the fantasies about ‘people’s capitalism’ - give the workers a few shares and they will be happy - and about ‘partnership’, of the kind proposed by New Labour, amount to this: the public giving the funds for private robbery, private expropriation, of whatever can be in that way expropriated. It is simply absurd to expect that this kind of nonsense can lead to a happy, harmonious relationship which could overcome the adversarial nature of the capitalist system.

So we have to ask the question: what is the communist alternative? Some people claim that communism cannot be realised, but it is a value worth striving for. But if it can never be realised, how can you persuade people to adopt it and struggle for it? Communism must constitute a new kind of social framework, in which society can function in a radically different and sustainable way. It must embody a well defined, tangible and practicable set of regulating principles.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the communist system has to be an advanced communal system. Such systems existed in the past, but they were constrained by the conditions of production and development under which they had to operate rather miserably. A few years ago I remember seeing a documentary about a tribe living in the Sahara Desert. Completely communal, but in the greatest possible misery, where the hardship of their conditions of life would be for us completely unimaginable. There is, of course, nothing to be valued in such a model. Marx also referred to this situation in The German ideology, when he said that unless productive forces develop to the highest degree, all that we can do is share out misery, and that would mean inevitably that the old “filth” - as it is politely translated into English - would start all over again.

So it has to be an advanced communal system - advanced in terms of the way in which it produces its livelihood. It must be able to set aside enough free time for the members of society. But then the question immediately arises, what do you do with the rest of your time? Unless time is meaningfully employed, it becomes social dynamite. The advanced communal system has to be capable of both satisfying the basic needs of its people, and doing it with the least expenditure of energy so as to leave time for other, “worthy”, pursuits.

Equality is the other fundamental condition - substantive equality. There is so much talk in our society about equality, freedom, justice and all that, but it is laughable, it is scandalous. This kind of ‘equality’ is hammered home, and mystifies people’s minds, because, if we have ‘equality’, there is nothing we can object to. But in reality we have the most abject form of inequality, coupled with some rather flimsy shades of formal equality, like being able to go once in five years and vote either Tony Blair or - shall I say - William Hague into 10 Downing Street. And you can do it with equality. So substantive equality is the only thing we can take seriously.

Needless to say, the ‘equality’ of bourgeois right must be unequal, because people are not equal in such a sense: they are individuals, they are all different. But from their differences, it does not follow that they have to be structurally subordinate to one another in a social framework. The originator of the idea of equality according to need was Babeuf, the great French thinker and political activist, who was actually killed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, because he set out and argued for the society of equals. He put it beautifully - real equality, substantive equality in that sense, is when the differences of people, in relation to their needs, are satisfied: if one person can lift up a heavy weight, and another one, a smaller person, can only lift up a third of it, so long as they are doing what they can, they are equal, and from society’s point of view they are of equal merit. And then he adds to it another image, a comparison: namely that the man or woman whose thirst is satisfied only with a pitcher of water should have it, and the other one, for whom a cupful or a glassful is enough to satisfy them, should have that too, and that is equality. Now if you compare a pitcher with a glassful, you see inequality, but in relation to the need there is no inequality, because the appropriate measure is applied.

Next, planning. Again, a society which wants to be sustainable cannot function without genuine planning. The planning which we experienced in Soviet-type societies was absolutely farcical. It was a planning superimposed from the top down, by the state bureaucracy, upon the rest of the population. There are some people who say that the capitalist system has now adopted planning. One of the most prominent proponents of this theory - if you can call it a theory - is professor Kenneth Galbraith, who was recently in the Ritz, celebrating his notion of equality, and launching the 40th anniversary edition of The affluent society. To speak of ‘planning’ in connection with the capitalist system is a complete absurdity: partial planning processes, no matter how gigantic an enterprise may be, still remain a mere fraction of the totality of society. Moreover this ‘planning’ is imposed from above. Another feature that is completely farcical is the fact that it is a post facto process, carried out in the light of greater or smaller disasters.

Real, substantive planning is not feasible on such a basis, precisely because it can only operate on the basis of substantive equality, when the participants in the process can really present their views, their aspirations and determinations, and accept responsibility for them. Unless it is carried out by the people, planning is utterly meaningless.

Questions of time and sustainability are central. We plan in order to consider problems which may arise on the horizon, and because we want to attain the prodigious aims Marx was talking about. So long-term sustainability and planning are inseparable from one another. A further important question concerns the complex of problems referred to by scarcity and abundance. Scarcity dominates us and is something which has to be overcome. It cannot simply be dismissed. Remember what I set out in the first quotation, when Marx was saying that necessity is always with us, that necessity increases as we advance. We are not only producing goods for the satisfaction of human needs and wants, but also producing new wants and needs with every advance in production. Our aspirations and characteristics change, become enlarged. So unless there is a rational policy of production, you could go on ad infinitum, merely producing waste in a variety of forms.

The key to resolving the problem of scarcity, which is crucial to the idea of communism, is economising. We have forgotten the meaning of economy, the rational process which relates the objectives of production - human needs - to the human and material resources available for their satisfaction.

We need to remember the famous sentence in the Critique of the Gotha programme, where Marx compares the two phases of socialism or communism. The earlier phase, which is the phase inherited from the existing system, is characterised by the principle, “From each according to their ability; to each according to their contribution to the total social product”. The more advanced phase - the communal system - is characterised by the principle, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. It is the second phase that is crucial to us.

Scarcity is a relative conception. Without education, without a rational insight into what we consume, how we consume it, the whole thing is meaningless, and becomes a vicious circle. You can go on ad infinitum, multiplying wants and capricious needs, and therefore multiplying scarcity. Because in our society so much is wasted, not only in the way in which things are thrown away, but also in the way we consume. Needs are not something that you can determine from outside, because your needs can only be determined by yourself. But you do not live on an island of your own. So when you determine your needs, your own needs, you determine them in relation to the social setting in which you operate, which also implies the elimination of all that waste on which our social reproduction nowadays hinges. So, the need-orientated system has to get rid of the tyranny of, the domination of, use value by exchange value, which is characteristic of our present conditions.

There is another feature which is of crucial importance in characterising the kind of communist society which is feasible and practical: the coordination of the production processes. What we have in capitalist society is the division of labour - both a technological division, let us say a lateral division of labour, and a hierarchical, structural division of labour, whereby capital always commands and labour always obeys. That is its only function. In place of this division of labour, the new type of society, the new type of regulating social metabolic control, is concerned not simply with the division of labour. Division in a lateral, technological sense is a necessity obviously: it is part of the advancing process. But it is not enough. First of all it has to be made impossible that it should turn into a hierarchical social division. That is to say, certain characteristics, certain types of activity become equivalent to a certain level of social status.

Marx describes the capitalist enterprise as a military operation, where you have the officers, sergeants, and corporals - hierarchies of decision-making on the authority of capital - and then the mass, who simply execute the orders given to them. All that has to be blown away, and the lateral division of labour has to be complemented by the coordination of labour, the conscious coordination of labour from the local to the global. It is a very difficult question, but it becomes an impossible question if you do not eliminate from the picture the adversarial nature of the whole process.

The last point I want to mention is the nature of exchange. Exchange cannot be eliminated from our life. If we had a little smallholding, a garden in which we could produce everything, then there would be no need for exchange. But that is not the world in which we live. Exchange is absolutely vital, in the sense of how it orients social activity and the determination of our own life processes. But what sort of exchange? In capitalist society, exchange is the exchange of commodities, exchange of products, the exchange from which everything already falls in an authoritarian fashion. If exchange dominates our lives, as it does in so-called market society, it does so in the sense that what is brought to the market will have its feedback to the production process and so on - it is a vicious circle.

Marx insists that in a socialist society, you cannot have the exchange of goods: you can only have the exchange of activities. Of course, we cannot envisage a society in which everybody does everything, where everybody can do everything. Activities can be most varied, provided they are treated equally. It means treating activities as not being superior one to another. The division today between manual workers - the overwhelming majority - and so-called ‘brain workers’ in whatever capacity is again a violation of the principle of substantive equality.

 The exchange of activities remains a vital criterion, and a vital activity in a socialist society, but it is not an exchange of commodities or even products. The total social product is regulated on the basis of exchange of activities, and the individuals directly participate in this total social product, both through their activities and through the share they acquire in accordance with their needs. These are roughly the criteria which you find in various contexts in Marx’s writings. As is that prodigious aim which designates the society of communists, the new society which is also a society that we cannot avoid. We cannot avoid it, not in the sense that it will come without our doing, without our participation in achieving it, but in the sense that unless we do achieve it we are in deep trouble.

When Marx wrote - for example the Critique of the Gotha programme, where he speaks most explicitly about this communist society, or in parts of Capital and Grundrisse - he uses the expression “when” this and that comes or happens. Now, we have here to make a qualification. We cannot in the light of our experience, and the dangers immediately on our horizon simply use “when”. We can use ‘if … then’. If such and such conditions are satisfied, then we can achieve our aspirations. But I would say the ‘if … then’ qualification does not turn the idea of communism into what is dismissed as hopeless. Because the qualification is strengthened by the reality of our situation. Trouble is accumulating everywhere: you cannot find in the world today any part which is not deeply laden with problems. And unless these problems are faced, then the conditions can only be downhill towards catastrophe. Today we have the means by which humanity can totally destroy itself.

Now obviously Marx could not envisage these things. There was nothing like this on the horizon. But we do not have to envisage it. We can see it. We cannot ignore the militarism which dominates, which is on the horizons of our lives, with events constantly erupting and leading potentially towards the most devastating of conflicts.

These are part of our reality. And the strategies aiming towards the establishment of this radically new mode of social metabolic reproduction are tangible enough to be rationally adopted by the society of producers.