22.09.2010

The phases of communism

Jack Conrad concludes his discussion of the CPGB's Draft programme by looking at socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat

Nick Rogers is to be congratulated for producing two double page articles outlining his criticisms of the CPGB’s Draft programme.^[1] On balance, I think the second is the better. His first contribution contains not a few annoying misreadings which show a surprising failure to grasp what I consider to be standard Marxist concepts: eg, capitalist decline, surplus working population and subsistence.^[2] Then there is his nitpicking complaint that we do not call for a people’s militia in the minimum programme. True, we do not use that exact phrase comrade - but, we unmistakably encourage workers to develop their “own militia”, we also uphold that great democratic principle of the American revolution: “the people have the right to bear arms and defend themselves” (section 3.10).

Sticking to the Goldilocks formula of keeping things as long as necessary and short as possible, I would not favour changing this or any other passages in the Draft programme in the futile attempt to assuage every pedant, every quibbler, every factional blockhead.

Words

As I have just said above, though, the comrade’s second contribution is much more interesting, much more challenging. In essence it concerns the phases of communism and their relationship to what we call socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In terms of this discussion it ought to be appreciated that while the CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee has agreed the text of the Draft programme, there exist differences, albeit those of nuance, over the use of particular words and phrases. Certainly that is the case with ‘socialism’.

This writer experiences no problem with the expression ‘socialism’ - if we show what is meant by it (and we do exactly that in the Draft programme). On the other hand, Mike Macnair thinks CPGBers should more or less expunge ‘socialism’ from their vocabulary because using the word just thickens the fog of confusion. Instead comrade Macnair proposes the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “transitional period of working class rule” as a substitute. He considers, such terminology “scientifically superior”.^[3] In my turn, I think abandoning ‘socialism’ as a term is unnecessary (especially given his proposed alternatives). Such formulations do nothing whatsoever to lessen confusion. Nothing to bring about clarity.

As comrade Rogers points out, in the attempt to establish moral distance from Stalinism, sections of the left, eg, the Socialist Workers Party, retreated from using ‘communism’ because the word had accumulated so many negative connotations: being associated with Stalin, the purges, the gulag, censorship and poverty in the popular mind.

Without doubt reactionaries of every stripe used ‘communism’ pejoratively - eg, “get back to Russia you commie bastards.” To avoid such unkind attacks the SWP, or I should say its antecedents, repackaged their traditions, principles and aims as ‘socialism’. In Britain this had the surely intended effect of blurring the distinctions separating Marxism from Labourism. Not that this makeover stopped press hacks, rightwing bureaucrats and religious bigots from haranguing the comrades and telling all and sundry that Trotskyism was the same as Stalinism and that all attempts to tamper with the natural order inevitably leads to a denial of freedom, forced labour and minority rule.

Predictably then, this defensive stance had the unintended effect of generating considerable bewilderment. After all, Marx and Engels called themselves communists, authored the Communist manifesto for the Communist League and wrote in this world famous programmatic document of the “spectre of communism” haunting Europe, and about how the “communists” want to abolish private property and usher in a “communist” society.^[4]

Though SWP tops habitually write of ‘socialism’ in those terms, so-called ordinary people do come across the Communist manifesto and other such examples of Marxist literature - sold and frequently quoted by SWPers and other such comrades. And, needless to say, although the Soviet Union associated itself with ‘communism’ through its massive propaganda machine, the same can be said of ‘socialism’. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics should be a give away. Not surprisingly then, substituting ‘socialism’ for ‘communism’ did not defog matters.

Our approach is altogether different: engage in an unremitting fight over ideas, including the fight over language (and thus meaning). Communists should certainly reappropriate what is ours. The vocabulary of Marxism, stolen, misused, fouled and discredited by Stalinism, must be taken back and cleansed. Examples of reverse discourse can usefully be cited here from the politics of sex, race and religion: ‘dyke’, ‘queer’, ‘nigga’, ‘Teague’, ‘Mormon’ and ‘Quaker’.

The CPGB is determined to restore the liberatory, thoroughly rational, democratic and inspiring meaning given to the term ‘communism’ by classical Marxism. And, albeit with rather less identification, I would, on balance, continue to use the term ‘socialism’. We have every interest in re-establishing the Marxist content of both words. Until we have convincingly won that battle in the popular mind, not least through the formation of a mass Communist Party, there can be little doubt: confusion will remain.

Transition

However, myself and comrade Macnair are agreed. We envisage the uninterrupted growing of the successful workers’ revolution, the main salient being Europe, into full communism. Beginning with working class rule over capitalism, the class struggle continues, albeit under altered circumstances, till classes and the hierarchical division of labour wither away with the realisation of general freedom.

Here is how section five of the Draft programme, dealing with the “transition to communism” reads:

“Socialism is not a mode of production. It is the transition from capitalism to communism. Socialism is communism which emerges from capitalist society. It begins as capitalism with a workers’ state. Socialism therefore bears the moral, economic and intellectual imprint of capitalism.

“In general socialism is defined as the rule of the working class.

“The division of labour cannot be abolished overnight. It manifests itself under socialism in the contradictions between mental and manual labour, town and country, men and women, as well as social, regional and national differences.

“Classes and social strata exist under socialism because of different positions occupied in relation to the means of production, the roles played in society and the way they receive their income.

“Class and social contradictions necessitate the continuation of the class struggle. However, this struggle is reshaped by the overthrow of the capitalist state and the transition towards communism.

“The class struggle can, in the last analysis, go in two directions depending on the global balance of forces. It can go backwards or it can advance towards communism.

“While socialism creates the objective basis for solving social contradictions, these contradictions need to be solved with a correct political line and the development of mass, active democracy. This is essential, as communism is not a spontaneous development.

“Social strata will only finally disappear with full communism.”

Comrade Rogers raises the stock objection to this passage. Placing an “equals sign between workers’ political power and socialism” is “not correct”, he emphatically states. “Otherwise”, he continues, “we are left with the nonsense of suggesting that the two months of the Paris commune were socialism. Or that socialism began in Russia in October 1917.”

Instead of treating socialism as the transitionary phase, spanning the entire period from where working class rule first begins to the realisation of full communism, comrade Rogers proposes three phases. The first is the dictatorship of the proletariat; only after this comes socialism, or the first phase of communism, and then, full communism.

The comrade worries that our formulation carries the danger of “spreading a degree of confusion in the ranks of the Marxist left.” But as I have already amply illustrated, there is enormous confusion already. Nonetheless, in an implicit defence of existing confusion, the comrade is concerned that our Draft programme “differs substantively from the conceptual framework most Marxists will bring to any discussion of these issues.” Absolutely right. Where there is darkness, we in the CPGB seek to bring light.

Naturally, comrade Rogers cites not only Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme (1875), but Lenin’s State and revolution (1917). In these landmark, though very quickly written, works, one certainly finds the perspective of an evolution of “communist society” from a “first” to a “higher” phase.

And, let me add, whatever exact words we finally adopt, it is obligatory for present-day Marxists to treat the writings of classical Marxism, above all those of Marx and Engels, with the greatest respect. Of course, no one is obliged to agree, let alone blindly copy - but where there is a change it needs to be honestly accounted for.

Comrade Rogers confidently maintains that both Marx and Lenin “clearly distinguish” all the phases of communism from the dictatorship of the proletariat and that this is what the “majority of Marxists have understood by ‘socialism’ ever since.” In my opinion, this is to erroneously dress up the “majority of Marxists” as if they were orthodox in their Marxism. Unfortunately, they are not. For at least a century the authentic Marxist tradition has been obscured, buried under a mountain of adaptations, deceptions and out and out claptrap. Only with the greatest effort can the authentic Marxist tradition be rediscovered - and doubtless, as I would readily admit, there is still some way for us to go in the CPGB as a body of Marxist partisans.

Nonetheless, comrade Rogers is right in the sense that many who call themselves Marxists today consider it axiomatic that there must be an entirely separate phase before the lower phase of communism commences. A phase which they call the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Overwhelmingly, this so-called first of three phases is understood in the anti-Marxist sense of violent methods, oppression, repudiating democracy, one party rule, etc.

But then we in the CPGB do not agree with the ‘majority of Marxists’. Our Draft programme stands four square with Marx and Engels themselves - not the epigones. For good reason, comrade Rogers mentions Hal Draper. His painstaking and stunningly illuminating intellectual labours comprehensively proved that by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ the Marx-Engels team wanted to denote winning the battle for democracy, the democratic republic and majoritarian rule by the working class. Nothing autocratic here. Nothing sinister. Nothing underhand. Nothing elitist.^[5]

Since the death of Marx and Engels, the “majority” of Marxists have spectacularly got the dictatorship of the proletariat wrong. Plekhanov, Martov, Kautsky, Trotsky and Lenin too. Amongst the greats, Rosa Luxemburg provides the only consistent exception, at least to my knowledge.

Critique

Okay, now we must turn to Marx himself and see what he has to say about communism. For me that means examining his Critique of the Gotha programme. After all, here Marx gave his fullest, though far too brief, exposition on the subject. Readers will probably know this celebrated little passage backwards:

“What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state.”

Marx goes on: “between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”^[6]

I take the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the state form that corresponds to the “transition period”. Self-evidently, this is a period which begins with the working class assuming state power and ends when the working class state, the division of labour, the compulsion to work, and other capitalist hangovers, give way to freedom and the real beginning of human history (ie, full communism).

Note, in the above passage Marx is writing about the state. To repeat, he says this state, ie, the dictatorship of the proletariat, corresponds to the “political transition period” - two distinct though related categories.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is, for Marxists, a specific form of the state. To employ a well established metaphor, the workers’ state constitutes part of society’s superstructure, as does the slave owning state, the feudal state, the bourgeois state. Each form corresponds to a particular society, ie, the ancient, slave, mode of production, the feudal mode of production, the capitalist mode of production, etc.

Methodologically it would be an elementary mistake to conflate state and society. The dictatorship of the proletariat is distinguished, of course, from other forms of the state for two main reasons. Firstly, this (semi) state is the oppressive apparatus in the hands of the majority of the population. Secondly, this majority positively seeks to wind down, to minimise, state functions. It really is the ideal ‘cheap state’. Nevertheless, though itself a carryover from the past and slowly withering away in the first phase of communism, the workers’ state is a necessary feature of the transitionary society.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is needed in order to resist and overcome capitalist power nationally and internationally. Simultaneously the workers’ state persists so as to keep the petty bourgeoisie and middle classes in line. Though slowly being absorbed into the working class, these intermediate classes must not be allowed to rebel. Nor should we forget the role of the workers’ state in maintaining discipline over the working class itself. In other words even once capitalism has been superseded globally and the petty bourgeoisie and middle classes entirely absorbed into the working class, the workers’ state, though much diminished, remains an unavoidable necessity.

Need

For the benefit of his German comrades, who had been sprinkling their draft programme with empty Lassallian catchphrases about equality, Marx explains how the “bourgeois” form of inequality continues under the “first phase of communism”; ie, you receive back from society according to what labour you contribute. Such “defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth-pangs from capitalist society”, admits Marx. Only in the “higher phase of communist society”, after the “enslaving” subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with that also the “antithesis between mental and physical labour”, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the cultural level of the population has been qualitatively raised - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”^[7].

Till then, when it comes to consumption, while there exists the principle of need, it is constantly checked by the “bourgeois” principle of work done. Marx once again remarks that what he is “dealing with here” is a “communist society”, but, and this needs to be emphasised, “not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

He goes on to discuss labour certificates (which I agree with once we have the global rule of the working class and the absorption the middle classes into the working class). But that is not the subject I wish to pursue here. From the above quotations one thing is, or should be, perfectly clear, however. Marx considers that “communist society” emerges not from the dictatorship of the proletariat (a form of the state) - but from capitalist society itself. He specifically writes of “communist society” as it “emerges from capitalist society”, and of “the first phase of communist society” as it has “just emerged” “after prolonged birth-pangs from capitalist society”.

So, albeit with due qualification, I would, yes, describe both the Paris Commune and the October Revolution as aborted instances of communism. Not nonsense, but surely an inescapable conclusion from the formulations provided by Marx. In and of themselves both revolutions were dreadfully premature. Neither in France nor in Russia was the working class anywhere near a majority; and in 1871 that was true across the whole of Europe - Britain alone excepted.

Working class rule in Paris lasted a mere matter of months. Politically it was dominated by the forces of utopian socialism and therefore suffered from severe drawbacks when it came to consistent democracy and aggressively pursuing the revolution nationally. Nevertheless we all know the radical measures agreed: suppression of the standing army and the police, arming of the people, election and limitation of the pay of all officials to that of a skilled worker, removal of religion from public education, clerical estates declared public property, recallability of delegates, etc. The logic of the revolution, had it been allowed to continue, was unmistakable: expropriation of the expropriators and social ownership of the means of production.

The Russian Revolution carried on the tradition of the Commune, but took it to a higher, national, level. However, the Soviet regime suffered defeat too. Not through counterrevolutionary armies and mass butchery by bloodthirsty generals. Rather the Russian Revolution, having been quarantined by imperialism, having failed to spread to Europe, crucially to Germany, having being forced to concede the Brest Litovsk treaty and the New Economic Policy, turned in on itself. Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country was a nationalist adaptation to isolation. His first five year plan unmistakably marked the horrendous counterrevolution within the revolution. After that reform, even a political revolution became an impossibility.

Socialism

I believe it was the Second International, most likely following the lead of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, which was responsible for relabeling the first phase of communism” as socialism. Maybe this was linked to Marxists adopting the social democratic moniker and thus leaving the word ‘communism’ to the anarchists (something not to the liking of Marx and Engels - in private correspondence they agreed, social democracy was a “pig of a name”).

Frankly, I have very little idea of the ins and outs of this linguistic shift. Though extensively asking around, that includes consulting an encyclopaedic Lars Lih, I have not received anything approaching a satisfactory answer.

Suffice to say, when Lenin came to write his State and revolution he considered it entirely unproblematic to describe the “first phase of communism”, albeit in parenthesis, as “usually called socialism” (though there are a few examples of inconsistent usage - but that need not concern us here).^[8] Obviously, the die had been cast.

Given the famished reality of Soviet Russia, the overwhelming peasant majority, the extraordinarily low level of general culture, the growth of bureaucracy, the hollowing out of the soviets, etc, it should not surprise us that communists in Russia found justification for some of the highly dubious things they subsequently did through their (mis)understanding of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Nor should we be surprised that their leaders wrote of aspiring to achieve socialism. The Bolsheviks inherited primitive material conditions compared to western Europe and the United States. That is an undeniable fact. So although the official description of October 1917 was of a “socialist” revolution and the Soviet republics were given the grand title Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, the ‘socialism’ was never thought of as an established reality (well not till 1936 - but that is another story).

Hence, perhaps, here, in Russian backwardness, isolation, civil war and famine, we find the source of the three phases that are now considered axiomatic by  the “majority” of contemporary Marxists: the dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism, communism.

In the CPGB’s Draft programme we have, following Lenin and the Second International, used the word ‘socialism’ to signify the first phase of communism. We have also, following Marx, used the dictatorship, or rule, of the working class, to name the state form that corresponds to the transitionary society that emerges out of capitalism and finally withers away with the higher phase of communism.

I would not particularly object to changing ‘socialism’ to the ‘lower phase of communism’ in our Draft programme. But I would object to programmatically enshrining a separate phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat (a form of the state) before the transition to socialism or the lower phase of communism begins. To me, such a construction is indeed nonsense.

Notes

1. Weekly Worker April 8 and August 26 2010.
2. Eg, subsistence, a question I left out of my first two responses. Comrade Rogers takes our formulation as a equating to a poverty wage. We consider subsistence to be culturally determined and equating to what is required to culturally reproduce an average unskilled worker (and one replacement child). Under present conditions that would surely amount in money terms to something like a wage of £600-700 per week. This is the sort of level we would envisage setting unemployment, sickness and other such benefits.
3. Weekly Worker June 24 2010.
4. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, New York 1976, pp477-517.
5. See H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 3, New York 1986, and The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ from Marx and Engels New York 1987.
6. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p95.
7. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, pp85-87.
8. VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p472.