...

‘Socialism’ or Social Democracy?

21 March 2022

I’d been without the internet a long while ago. Being without ready internet access certainly gives you deeper appreciations of how you use it. Social media is missed at first but eventually you slip back into what I would like to call a normal person’s proclivity to post or scroll. When you live alone especially the absence of noise from a music streaming site or video streaming sites like YouTube or Peer Tube makes itself felt. Since 2010 I’ve been an avid podcast enthusiast. With my short time at places with WiFi I’d scramble to download as many podcast episodes as I could.

While I’d been voraciously downloading horror fiction and audio theater to listen to in the late hours, I also downloaded political commentary (such as The Antifada, Black Autonomy Podcast, It’s Going Down, and Swampside Chats) and reporting (such as Al Jazeera’s The Take and Democracy Now!). Among these is The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, which I understand to be an organ of or at least affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). The podcast produces an impressive volume of episodes—three a week—which puts to shame most other podcasts, especially those linked with a party or faction. Despite the plenty in content, the podcast’s theoretical quality can be found sorely lacking, especially concerning conceptions of communism and, to a lesser degree,revolution.

There’s an episode in particular I’d like to analyze here to highlight what I mean. The episode is “China Turns Left,” an episode of “the real story” segment appearing on Thursdays. From 2 September of last year¹ it featured the guest Kenneth Hammond (who’d apparently appeared before on the program) and focuses on the trajectory of China under Xi Jinping. The discussion naturally also involves several other periods. There are a couple things from this episode that I’d like to examine in this post: first the conception of communism² that Hammond presents and Becker accepts without comment; second and in passing (1) how they treat the failures of the CCP’s party form, what they believe redeems it and solves its crisis and (2) their narrow view of revolution and equality. The primary endeavor is to demonstrate that Becker and Hammond’s conceptions of communism are fundamentally flawed because they do not in the least transcend capitalism. In part I argue that a socialist’s misconceptions of communism arises fundamentally from a misconception of capitalism.

I realize that adding these extraneous discussion items will make this post larger and more meandering than it should be, but I decided against surrendering the opportunity to offer criticism of social democracy when it’s presented. To begin with I’ll respond to their discussion of the party and revolution and follow with the real meat of the post—what communism is.

The Sideshow

The Party

Becker and Hammond lament the cynical and seemingly apolitical turns in China. In the episode they share several interesting anecdotes about the quality of the members who’d joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They admit that when a revolutionary party becomes a ruling party the purpose for joining it changes from the initial ambitions of social change to the ambitions of a career.

Becker shares a particular anecdote where he met and conversed with a CCP member he was working with who, when asked what they thought about Marxism, confessed that they knew little about it, demonstrating their membership of the CCP was simply a part of procuring and advancing their career. In conversation with Becker, this CCP member even remarked that Becker had given them the best explanation of Marxism (one shudders to think what kind of political education was provided in the CCP if Becker’s was considered exceptional). Hammond mentions how shallowly the works of Karl Marx and other socialists are or were studied. Throughout the episode Hammond and Becker refer to Marxists within the CCP—as if the Marxists form simply one small faction within the communist party!³ Throughout the episode it’s repeatedly mentioned how broadly the people—including, crucially, many of those who are members of the CCP—are apolitical or depoliticized⁴ and have been for decades (undoubtedly a sign of a robust, healthy, and legitimate proletarian dictatorship).

Hammond even goes so far as to hint at hinting at the farce of a proletarian dictatorship when a party dictatorship lies behind it as he says:

Bureaucratization, the way in which the party operates, this became a big concern in the late 50s … and certainly has remained one since then; … the party has to be an expression of the masses, of the working class. … [I]f the party begins to function as an autonomous institution, if the party becomes alienated from the masses that it is supposed to represent…. The party should embody the interests of the masses, of the working class. And if that slips, if that goes away, if the party starts to think … ‘we know what we're doing, we're the experts; they should just listen to us and do what we say.’ Then you have some very serious problems…

How to prevent serious problems from arising in the party and its relation to the exploited classes is a question to shrink from. It’s never raised in this conversation—it couldn’t be. What saves the party and Marxism in China, according to Becker and Hammond, is Xi Jinping. Xi does this, according to Hammond and Becker, by “emphasizing Marxism” and purging careerists and corrupt members. You can hear Hammond’s smile when he relates how he imagines the ‘Western bourgeois media’s’ distress when they realize that Xi (as opposed to his predecessors since Mao, evident in Hammond’s mind as he expresses this) “is actually a communist!” Hammond and Becker rest assured that the party’s problem has been wiped away because the next head of state happened to be a communist who benevolently deigns to correct the relations of party and masses. Perhaps it need not be said that a party form which relies on the pure chance of a communist administering the communist party is an abject failure.

Hammond affirms that Xi “believes in a political style that is more engaged with the masses; that moves beyond this depoliticized style, … back to one that calls upon the people to play a more active role; calls upon the people to be mobilized, to be engaged—under the leadership of the party.” This condition that working class engagement and activity be ultimately orchestrated by party direction reveals the fault line which divides the party from the exploited classes it claims to represent. Paul Mattick’s criticism of another party remains relevant here: “Stripped of all wrappings, what remains is the old social-democratic conception regarding the path and the goal of socialism, according to which the beginning and end of the struggle for socialism lies in the conquest of political power through the social-democratic party.”⁵

Revolution

Later on in the episode the discussion turns to the hardships involved in changing the material basis of a social republic, that is to say, in carrying out a social revolution. To illustrate the hardships and immensity of the tasks involved and perhaps to excuse the shortcomings of the Chinese revolution by the time of the Cultural Revolution, Becker presents a thought experiment of a revolution occurring in the United States:

If we had a revolution in the United States tomorrow in 17 years I'm quite sure that all the vestiges of what's wrong in American society: inequality, some people have lots of money in the bank and … many people have nothing; some people have had the advantages of going to higher education and other people are forced out of school before they finish high school; there's people who live in urban areas, there's people that live in rural areas. There's all kinds of inequalities and those aren't going to be wiped away because you have a revolution or because you nationalize the means of production. The affluent are still affluent, the poor are still poor. The question of how to overcome inequality is going to be a big issue.

How Becker presents this thought experiment betrays how he conceives the goal of the revolution. The existence of monetary inequality can be shelved for later in this post and we can immediately dismiss any discussion of the abolition of the distinctions between town and country for which Marx and Engels had called.

Allow me to simply say, regarding revolution, that we should consider revolution as more than a struggle between separate actors. Social revolution is a struggle concerning the relations of production. One phase will certainly be the struggle to obtain the power and means to institute the sought after fundamental changes to society—this is the establishment of the supremacy of the working class or the dictatorship of the proletariat. The successful emergence of a proletarian dictatorship, however, is the smallest part of the revolution. This proletarian dictatorship only serves to defend itself from reaction and to conduct the real revolution: instituting the changes which abolish class, market, money, and, consequently, itself.

This is a strictly cerebral, special concern, though. Becker hasn’t contributed to any confusion that everyone else already has. Particularly among Marxist-Leninists and other social democrats revolution is flattened, blunted, and compressed into a particular purely political shape. Throughout the wider literature on revolution it’s extremely rare to find anything that treats a revolution as anything more than a self-contained event in which a bloody game of musical chairs was played.

What’s particularly strange in Becker’s statement are the nebulous inequalities on which he focuses. Inequalities such as monetary figures aren’t actually so hard to solve—a liberal promoting progressive taxation has a solution. That’s the mildest solution but alien to a communist’s real toolbox which should consist of eliminating money and replacing it with the measure of abstract labor (if it’s needed to be replaced); the chaos of the market with the conscious application of labor. Suffice it to say that a proletarian dictatorship has no billionaires.

You can easily point to the very serious and difficult problems manifested by socioeconomic inequality such as (merely as examples) expensive and cramped apartments that suffer environmental and health hazards or communities suffering an education that prepares young pupils for subordination in employment or ruthless state punishment, an education devoid of any sense of empowerment. These more lasting consequences in socioeconomic inequality will indeed require the most resolute and heavy-handed actions from the proletarian dictatorship. These problems which require the most immediate redress to ensure the exploited peoples’ well-being, however, accompany the very first steps towards or into the communist horizon as vestigial remains of capitalism, the communist society’s birthmarks, as Marx had called them.

Inequality has always been something of a bogeyman for communists. Whenever socialists discuss equality without establishing definitively what they mean by it they provide another opening for liberals to lampoon continuously their own caricature of a classless society: impoverished and oppressive sameness which obliterates individuality—an ironic caricature since it’s more fitting for neoliberal capitalism. As many communists are hopefully aware, Marx wrote against the confusion wrought by socialists writing about social equalization (such as by Bakunin)⁶ and socialists who treated “distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence [presented] socialism as turning principally on distribution.”⁷ In his Critique of the Gotha Program he wrote that “one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity … with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.”⁸ Here he was writing about communist society “just as it emerges from capitalist society.”⁹ Alexander Berkman the anarchist even understood this and put forward a thoroughly communist understanding of equality:

Individual needs and tastes differ, as appetites differ. It is equal opportunity to satisfy them that constitutes true equality.

Far from leveling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development. For human character is diverse, and only the repression of this diversity results in leveling, in uniformity and sameness. Free opportunity of expressing and acting out your individuality means development of natural dissimilarities and variations.¹⁰

To affirm what every communist should already understand: if we speak of equality, we’re speaking of the abolition of class distinctions and class society, the suppression of artificial indignities, the destruction of white supremacy, or to sum it up: we’re speaking of ensuring the conditions allowing the flourishing of individuality and full development, of freedom.

Communism

Finally we come to communism and what really prompted this post (which became much longer than I’d anticipated or should have allowed). I think it’s revealing and important to keep in mind that in the episode Hammond reveals that he taught graduate-level global political economy within a “Marxist framework, a historical materialist framework.” How much those classes actually informed its pupils about what Marx had to say about political economy must be judged by Hammond’s following outrageous statement:

If we take the ideas of the [Chinese] revolution, if we take the ideas of Marxism, if we take the program of wanting to build a socialist society, a socialist economy, an economy within which … people work and produce value and then they share in a socially equitable way in the value that they have produced [my emphasis]…

If we take [all] that seriously, I think we wanna see the communist party, you know, we wanna see Marxism as a living doctrine, as something that is much more dynamic and much more a part of everybody's lives in that process.

Certainly everyone would like to see what claims to be a dictatorship of the exploited classes be dictated by said classes. But now—what is this definition?! Becker gave no push back to this definition, letting it pass without any comment, as if it were a tolerable definition of a communist society. Hammond places an undue emphasis on distribution—that these exploited workers share in the surplus value that had been extracted from them in some equitable way. Hammond can imagine for himself what he means by sharing in this context but any critical reader will know it means nothing more than what a liberal progressive might mean by the same phrase. I’ve already complained of the erroneous focus on equitable distribution and on what shaky ground it rests above.

Before anyone (any Stalinist, that is) complains that I am writing about communism while Hammond was talking about socialism, I can refer them to one of the first notes in this post. By communism I mean a communist mode of production, I mean both the higher and lower phases that Marx spoke of (actually I’m primarily speaking of the lower phase in this post). Socialism and communism for Marx and Engels are the same thing and only for later social democrats in the 2^nd International did the distinction (amounting to socialism as lower-phase communism and communism as the higher phase) arise. That distinction is irrelevant here, though, since either phase describes a society that makes a definitive break with capitalism. The Stalinist ‘socialism’ that Hammond and Becker seem to be referring to is a capitalist economy under an ostensible proletarian dictatorship, complete even with market and the export of capital.

If my scathing tone hadn’t yet indicated it, this conception of communism is fundamentally flawed. It isn’t even a conception of communism—indeed, it’s a conception of capitalist social democracy; it stinks of Proudhonian mutualism. Naturally we may all remember that communism will be a stateless society—it’s a society which had wrested administrative functions from government, from the “super-naturalist abortion of society.”¹¹

Next there may be a semantic quibble about whether one works in communism. André Gorz wrote that work "means an activity carried out: for someone else; in return for a wage; according to forms and time schedules laid down by the person paying the wage; and for a purpose not chosen by the worker."¹² In that sense it should be obvious that work is impossible in communism since it consists of associated free and equal producers. The only force that would ordinate labor is that bane of the anarchists—steam-power (or the necessity of completing certain tasks at certain occasions)—“the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary linking and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds … [and which] envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements, thoughts and acts.”¹³ No artificial social power, however, nor any form of governmental power can put anyone to work in communism.

The real transgression for a self-avowed Marxist who teaches political economy within a “Marxist framework” is the mention of value in communism. Communism is without the law of value. You’d expect that perhaps such a person might remember that Marx had written several times about just this: “Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour.”¹⁴ Friedrich Engels wrote a perhaps deeper expression in Anti-Duhring: “Direct social production and direct distribution preclude all exchange of commodities, therefore also the transformation of the products into commodities (at any rate within the community) and consequently also their transformation into values. … It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time.”¹⁵ To put it another way with the plain concision of Anton Pannekoek: “In a society where the goods are produced directly for consumption there is no market to exchange them; and no value, as expression of the labor contained in them establishes itself automatically out of the processes of buying and selling.”¹⁶ The law of value does not operate without commodity production and exchange say the namesakes of Marxism.

In the early ‘collectivist’ phase of communism it’s held that there must be some kind of regulating force. The Group of International Communists in Holland had also established this in 1930 in asserting that this young communist society “has nothing in the least to do with the vague concepts of 'mutual aid' which are currently circulating, but has a very material basis. That basis is the computation of the labour-time which is necessary in order to produce use-values.”¹⁷ The average social hour of labor—a social measure of abstract labor—forms the the measure to regulate consumption and production. In this state of society the over-riding maxim is not “from each by ability; to each by need” but “to each by contribution.” An individual receives a receipt of so many hours they’ve contributed to the aggregate social product with which to redeem from society’s stores what they desire and need to consume. The receipt might be expiratory, but it cannot circulate. People have before mistaken the use of abstract labor as the measure as value since “the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption.”¹⁸

That said, there is plenty of speculation as to what would be included in this regulated system or whether the entire system would even be necessary in a society where abundance can be easily produced. An example is when Pannekoek speculates on whether foodstuffs would be included in the system: “It is quite possible that the habit, imposed by war and famine, of having the indispensable foodstuffs distributed without distinction is simply continued.” Naturally, these questions would involve the historical contingencies and particularities of when, where, and/or if the communist revolution arises.

“But isn’t the receipt an exchange?! An exchange of labor yet an exchange nonetheless!” claims the man sprouting from the well. Before reminding us that Marx had written in Capital that “Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value”¹⁹ Tsushima Tadayuki wrote of labor receipts that:

Here there is the exchange of equal quantities of labor but the exchange of equivalent products is not carried out. There is the distribution of products but not exchange. This is because products are directly social products and no products of individual labor exist. And lacking these elements, social labor is not objectified, and therefore value does not arise.²⁰

To briefly summarize this section with the emphasis it deserves: THE LAW OF VALUE IS ERADICATED IN COMMUNISM.

The Socialist Program’s predictable poverty in its conceptions of communism (and consequently capitalism) could be attributed to its Marxist-Leninist²¹ ideological basis. This is no doubt true on its own, but it’s not the only reason.

What I believe is at fault in this misunderstanding of communism (besides the Stalinist deviation and the ‘state socialist’ deviations before it) is actually a misunderstanding of capitalism. The socialist movement broadly, into which we may include Hammond, mutualists, the Marxist-Leninists, the social democrats and the democratic socialists, etc, is generally a movement against capitalism, in one way or another. Often enough the particular socialist movement may find its strategies useless (or even counter-productive) and its theory to be an incomplete rejection of capitalism due to an inaccurate, partial appraisal of the system. Such a movement is incapable of transcending capitalism. Communism can be thought of as a definitive anti-capitalism. This is actually how several communist theorists wanted it to be considered.

Marx and Engels in 1845 “call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”²² Engels called it in the following year “the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.”²³ More than 100 years later the ‘Friends of 4 Million Young Workers’ will affirm that “communism is the negation of capitalism.”²⁴

To know what communism is, one would need to know what it overthrows, what capitalism is. Not recognizing the law of value to be intrinsic in capitalism; not recognizing the commodity to be the kernel of capitalism society; not appraising wage work or the circulation of money as a characteristic of capitalism; from these principal fatal errors the procession to nonsense Stalinist/social democratic concepts of ‘communism’ like Hammond’s are not surprising. Recognizing that a capitalist society's fundamental principle is the circulation of money and commodities and thus the operation of the law of value, it follows that its overthrow, communist revolution, will consist in their elimination and their replacement by a worldwide association of free and equal producers stewarding the planet and directly disposing the means of production by conscious and continuous self-management. To root out this confusion about what the historic task of the working class even is we have to always maintain precision and accuracy when we describe capitalism and communism.

---

References

Bakunin, Michael. What Is Authority? 1871, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm. Marxists Internet Archive.

Becker, Brian. “China Turns Left.” The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, MP3, 125, 2 Sept. 2021, https://anchor.fm/thesocialistprogram/episodes/China-Turns-Left-e16qbhm.

Berkman, Alexander. What Is Communist Anarchism? Vanguard Press, 1929. The Anarchist Library.

Blanc, Dominique. A World Without Money: Communism. 1976. LibCom.Org. Available as an ebook.

Cutler, Robert M. “Introduction.” The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869-1871, Prometheus Books, 1992.

Engels, Friedrich. “Anti-Duhring.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 25, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, pp. 1–309. Also on Marxists Internet Archive.

---. “Principles of Communism.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, pp. 341–57. Also on Marxists Internet Archive.

Gorz, André. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. Translated by Michael Sonenscher, Pluto Press, 1982. Check Library Genesis.

Group of International Communists. Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. Translated by Mike Baker, Movement for Workers’ Councils, 1990, https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm. Marxists Internet Archive. Available as an ebook.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin Books, 1990. Check Library Genesis.

---. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C Tucker, 2nd ed., W. W. Norton and Company, 1978, pp. 525–41. Link to PDF.

---. “Drafts of The Civil War in France.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 22, Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, pp. 435–551.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology: Part I.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C Tucker, 2nd ed., 1978, pp. 146–200. Link to PDF.

Mattick, Paul. “Workers’ Councils and Communist Organization of Economy.” International Council Correspondence, vol. 1, no. 7, Apr. 1935, pp. 7–18. Marxists Internet Archive.

Pannekoek, Anton. Workers’ Councils. Edited by Robert F Barsky, AK Press, 2003, http://libcom.org/library/workers-councils-book-pannekoek. The Anarchist Library.

Tsushima, Tadayuki. “Understanding ‘Labor Certificates’ on the Basis of the Theory of Value―The Law of Value and Socialism.” Myths of the Kremlin, translated by Michael Schauerte, 1956, https://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/tsushima/labor-certificates.htm. Marxists Internet Archive.