In order to guide our day-to-day political activity and medium-term organisational strategies we need a general understanding of what a working class revolution in the 21st century could look like and what the immediate steps of transformation from a capitalist to a communist mode of production are.
In the current moment, the chaos and drift towards destruction of the existing system forces a lot of people to reconsider the question of transformation and alternatives. These theories are closely tied to their practice. People who predict a collapse rather than a social revolution propose ‘leftist prepping’, people who believe that companies like Walmart already contain the basic framework for a socialist planned economy propose the nationalisation under a leftist government.
For comrades who assume that the ‘emancipation of the working class must be the deed of the workers themselves’ there are fewer theoretical elaborations out there. Those that have been circulated recently, such as ‘The Contours of the World Commune’ or ‘Forest and Factory’, are influenced by ‘The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’, written in the early 1930s by the Group of International Communists (GIC). The thorough and systematic argumentation of the text still makes it the main reference point and a theoretical basis for new initiatives.
The text was written as a response to the situation in the Soviet Union, where after a failed chaotic attempt to introduce a money-free economy during war communism, the state re-introduced both money and wage labour. Given that the state had systematically undermined the power of workers’ councils, it lacked input from the immediate sphere of production, which led to a planning system from above that was not only exploitative and oppressive, but also ineffective. Despite all propaganda, the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat had turned into a dictatorship over the proletariat spread political despair amongst worker communists around the globe.
On the other hand, and this might be even more fruitful for the debate within our milieu, the comrades criticise the alternatives to central planning that have been formulated by libertarian communists and anarcho-syndicalists. The GIC criticises the libertarian idea of random take-overs of factories and the idea of localised self-management, which then, somehow, has to form a federal structure of decision-making. The anarcho-syndicalists get the stick for their egomaniacal thinking that the new society will be structured through the industrial unions of their own organisation.
For the comrades the crux of the matter with both the state communist and the libertarian communist economic models is that they hinge on personal decision-making. In the Soviet Union economic planning is done by members of central commissions from the top, which disempowers the producers. In the libertarian communist version the decision-making by local assemblies and factory councils will either not join up to a social whole, or re-create a libertarian version of a federalised bureaucracy.
Instead they propose a de-personalised system of general principles in the form of labour-time accounting. Every individual and every productive enterprise relates to the social production process through a transparent flow, or exchange, of labour-time. This form of open book-keeping can then be the basis for social decision-making, e.g. do we reduce our working hours now or do we work more over the short-term in order to build certain infrastructures that can help us reduce working hours even more in five years time. They claim that this de-personalised system solves the tension between autonomy and individual needs on one side, and the general interest and need for social planning on the other.
I think the text is still the main reference point for our debate for a good reason. It is non-utopian, in the sense that it derives its communist principles from the material conditions that are already given through the process of concentration and socialisation of labour in capitalism. I have two main criticisms of the text:
Firstly, rather than principles of communist production the text describes principles of circulation. It seems that for the GIC a ‘communist mode of production’ is mainly characterised through the absence of the capitalist forms of circulation, namely commodities and money, and a change in the formal ownership. In the text, workers are given an equal amount of labour time vouchers, but they still seem to be attached to either manual or intellectual jobs. It remains unclear whether the comrades think that the material form of production itself has to change, e.g. the various forms of division of labour (intellectual vs. manual, town vs. countryside, production vs. reproduction) or the form of technology. With Marx we can say that these material divisions are the main reason why capital or money, which are products of social labour, can appear as an alien, self-sustaining power. A communist mode of production would have to change the division of labour fundamentally in order to create the material basis for a true participation of everyone in the social process of decision making. If I am reduced to a particular repetitive job, I might have a formally equal ‘right’ to take part in wider decision making processes, but I will always lack the actual insights to do so.
Secondly, the text remains opaque about the question of how to come to wider political decisions, e.g. of how to deal with conflicts between particular and general interests. The fact that a political class has taken power over workers in the Soviet Union seems to push them into thinking that you can solve the issue of political power by delegating social decisions to an ‘economic’ system of measurement and circulation, based on a new legal system. Not only does this seem to perpetuate the bourgeois division between the political and the economic sphere, it also seems to reproduce a certain fetish of the independent power of ‘the movement of things’ and laws. This derives, as a consequence, from their lack of clarity concerning the need for actual changes of the form of production. If I can’t explain why workers have actual control over a production process, e.g. because the strict division between manual and intellectual has been abolished, then I have to give them a legal right to do so. If wider society has no actual control over what is happening within an enterprise, e.g. because there is a rotation of workers between various production processes, then I have to resort to the legal right of access. The problem is that these legal rights stand on sandy ground if they are not expressions of actual human activity.
In this sense the text reflects the debates of its time: how can economic planning not only be effective, but also maintain individual freedom? How can you, for example, encourage a large number of people, if that should be necessary after the revolution, to shift from their marketing job in front of flat screens to some hands-on work on tomato plantations? It seems that similar to the bourgeois theoreticians who they quote, prominently amongst them Ludwig von Mises, they hope that a certain ‘invisible hand’ of labour-time accounting can solve the puzzle. Given the two alternatives they see, the dictatorship of the supreme council or anarchist bricolage, this hope is understandable.
I think their model can serve as a general framework for a transitional phase after the destruction of the bourgeois state and the money economy, while the political focus has to be on the subsequent material transformation of the global production system. We will need an accurate system of bookkeeping in order to understand what productive legacy we have inherited and in order to discuss future social priorities. At the same time, the labour time accounting system has some in-built risks of becoming either a draining bureaucratic effort or a low-level economic fetish that might make people believe that they don’t have to take on certain things head-on politically. In the following I want to exemplify some of the arguments, using quotes from the text.
- General concepts
- Autonomy vs. social interest
- Individual labour time and individual consumption
- Accounting problems
- Impact on consciousness
- Revolution and transition
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- General concepts
There is a certain vagueness when it comes to the use of ‘economic’ and ‘political’:
“So, this book can never replace this class struggle. It only wants to express economically what will happen politically.” (p.15)
It seems that the comrades equate ‘political’ with an external force and ‘economic’ with the level of working class influence. While this is true for capitalist relations, it seems that they reproduce this distinction when talking about a post-capitalist social formation:
“Since working time is the measure for the distribution of social products, the entire distribution falls outside any "politics".” (p.216)
In order to defend the ‘economic sphere’ and thereby workers’ autonomy from the possibility of political domination or the necessity of personal intervention, they describe the system of labour time accounting as a kind of self-regulating entity:
“The objective course of operational life decides itself how much product is returned to the production system and how much each employee receives for consumption. It is the self-movement of operational life.” (p.216 - emphasis by GIC)
“We are not "inventing" a "communist system". We only examine the conditions under which the central category - the average working hour in society - can be introduced. If this is not possible, then the exact relationship of producer to total product can no longer be maintained, then the distribution is no longer determined by the objective course of the production apparatus, then we get a distribution by persons to persons, then producers and consumers can no longer determine the course of the operational life, but then this is shifted to the dictatorial power of the "central organs", then the state enters the operational life with "democracy", then state capitalism is inevitable.” (p.83)
“In the association of free and equal producers, the control of production is not carried out by persons or instances, but it is guided by the public registration of the factual course of operational life. That is, production is controlled by reproduction.” (p.253 - emphasis by GIC)
As already mentioned, the GIC does not analyse how the form of production itself creates the domination of capital, nor do they base the control of workers over the communist production process on a material change. This means that the control – either by capital, or by the workers – is primarily explained by a legal right:
“The right of disposal over the means of production, exercised by the ruling class, brings the working class into a relationship of dependence on capital.” (p.22)
“This abolition can only consist in the abolition of the separation of work and the work product, that the right of disposal over the work product and therefore also over the means of production is again given to the workers.” (p.26 - emphasise by GIC)
“The abolition of the market is in the Marxist sense nothing more than the result of the new legal relations.” (p.206)
According to GIC the working class has to impose, through a political act, a new legal order and economic principles that make further political interventions unnecessary. Perhaps in a transitional period, when the production process is still largely determined by its capitalist heritage, such kind of ‘guiding principles’ are necessary for a general orientation and in order to stabilise reproduction. In the long run it will be too weak a foundation to base the control of producers just on a legal declaration and an egalitarian system of distribution.
- Autonomy vs. social interest
The main social agents in terms of decision-making that the text refers to are the ‘operational organisations’, something like company councils, and ‘consumer cooperatives’. The GIC says that not the formal ownership of the means of production is decisive for the question of the emancipation of the producers, but who decides about the product of labour.
“It is not some Supreme Economic Council, but the producers themselves, who must have the disposal of the work product through their operational organizations.” (p.55)
“After this preliminary orientation on our topic, in which we have identified as characteristics of communist operational life the self-management by the operational organizations with an exact relationship from producer to product based on working time accounting…” (p.73, emphasis by GIC)
At the same time GIC is aware of the problem of self-management in the classical sense, meaning that workers ‘own’ their company and their product and ‘trade’ it on the market.
“The type of syndicalism that seeks "free" disposal of operation must, therefore, be seriously combated.” (p.81)
They are adamant that the operational organisations don’t own their company, but that they produce for society and that the labour accounting system forces them to balance the books: they have to show wider society how much they have consumed in terms of social labour time (raw material, machines, living labour) and how much they have produced. Although there is no buying and selling there are transparent ‘exchanges’ of labour time.
“Thus, as a compelling demand of the proletarian revolution, it turns out that all operational organizations are obliged to calculate for the products produced by them how much socially average working time they have taken up in production, and at the same time to pass on their product according to this "price" to the other operations or to the consumers. (...) ‘They are given the right’ (corrected translation) to receive the same amount of social work in the form of other products in order to be able to continue the production process in the same way.” (p.57)
In the Marxist sense, however, the new legal relationship is that the operations belong to the community. Machines and raw materials are social goods controlled by the workers and entrusted to the workers responsible for production management. This directly means that the community must also have control over the proper management of its products. However, libertarian communism firmly rejects such control, since the workers are then again "no bosses in their own house". (p.86)
“In the association of free and equal producers based on the calculation of working hours, control is of a completely different nature, because we are dealing with different legal relationships here. The workers receive the buildings, machines, and raw materials from the community to produce new goods for the community. Each operational unit thus forms a collective legal entity which is responsible to the community for its management." (p.252 - emphasis by GIC)
As seen earlier, the mere referral to ‘new legal relationships’ when it comes to the relationship of the community to the operational organisations is weak – the community and the productive sphere will have to merge in much more material forms, e.g. rotation of jobs, in order to guarantee control.
This leaves at least two questions open: what does the autonomy of these main organisations of the working class actually consist of and how does society decide about wider social aims, such as the expansion of production.
The first question of the degree of autonomy is difficult to answer, and the comrades of GIC do not help us much. For example, they don’t even mention an ‘ideal size’ for the operational organisations, despite the fact that this is decisive. In terms of transparency and social control, operational organisations could clearly be too big. If a single organisation would include various production steps, for example like old car plants did (from steel rolling to rubber production) then we only see one large number of labour time going in and one coming out. In a way capitalism has a similar issue, for example with companies like the NHS with 1.4 million employees. For managers to have more control over effectiveness and productivity they introduced an ‘internal market’ in the early 1990s. Now every department had to ‘buy’ services from other departments. This increased the control of managers, but it also bloated the bureaucracy – allegedly 10% of labour within the NHS is just due to the additional tasks of organising intra-company transactions. It is not that communism according to the GIC’s principles would be free from this problem. The smaller the units, the more transactions have to be recorded and the larger the social ‘expenditure’ on unproductive accounting labour. The issue is that the work process actually remains exactly the same, it’s just a question where you draw an ‘accounting boundary’. But these are not ‘economic’ questions, in the end they are a question of political control – and it seems that GIC wants to hide this question behind a seemingly impersonal system, similar to the seemingly impersonal force of the market.
“It is certainly a bitter irony that bourgeois economists, in particular, have made good progress in the science of communism, unless unintentionally. When it appeared that the downfall of capitalism had come within reach and communism seemed to conquer the world by storm, Max Weber and Ludwig Mises began their criticism of this communism, whereby of course first and foremost Hilferding’s "General Cartel", that is Russian communism, had to suffer.” (p.78)
We can later on see how this ‘non-capitalist market’ impacts on the consciousness even of the authors of the text.
The second question on who makes the wider social decisions is kind of fudged in the text. In general, the ‘system of book-keeping’ seems to be self-regulatory, with the occasional nudge from the operational organisations, a kind of cybernetic entity. As a side note, I don’t think it is by chance that the council communist tendency had a fair share of astronomers in the past and software programmers in the present, people who appreciate closed systems. But the comrades are aware that somehow wider decisions have to be made. So they finally introduce on page 220 a kind of social authority, the ‘general congress of works councils’ – pretty much out of the blue, without further explanation or mentioning:
“However, the expansion of the operational unit can not take place arbitrarily, as in this case there can be no question of a social production system. The general congress of works councils will, therefore, have to set a certain general standard within which the expansion must take place. For example, congress can stipulate that the operational unit may not be expanded by more than 10% of the means of production and raw materials. This simple decision will then regulate the entire economic life as far as the expansion of the operational units is concerned… without the producers becoming dependent on a central economic authority.” (p.220 - emphasis by GIC)
This council also has the say when it comes to wider decisions, such as the construction of railways:
“This kind of expansion of production absorbs a significant proportion of the social product, from which it follows that an important part of the discussions at the economic congresses of the worker's counsels (sic) must deal with the questions to what extent these works should be initiated and which ones are the most urgent.” (p.225)
Fair enough, it is not surprising that the GIC assumes that it will need some more centralised institutions in order to come to wider social decisions, but at the same time their idea that a combination of cybernetic book-keeping and rank-and-file organisations can form an alternative to Soviet Union style planning relied on their absence:
“In our considerations, we have consistently adhered to the economic laws. As far as the organizational structure was concerned, we only referred to the operational organizations and cooperatives.” (p.284)
After having taken the ‘general councils’ out of the picture again, they introduce a ‘centre’ a couple of pages later:
“From general social accounting, however, economic life is an uninterrupted whole, and we have a center from which production, although not controlled and managed, can undoubtedly be monitored.” (p.288)
This means that the relation between ‘general council’ and ‘centre’ on one hand and the autonomy of operational organisations remains undefined. They seem to see the problem, too, and use ‘legal rights’ to guarantee, or fudge, that autonomy:
“In any case, it is essential that the operational organizations ensure that they have the right to extend if this is necessary to meet demand.” (p.222 - emphasis by GIC)
- Individual labour time and individual consumption
In other left-communist criticisms of the ‘Principles’ one main focus has been the fact that they link individual labour time to individual consumption levels. The criticism has been that this would sustain a ‘coercion to work’ or value production. I don’t think it would sustain value production in any exploitative or alienating sense and I don’t think that it is wrong to encourage everyone to do their share of work. My problem with the text’s strong focus on individual consumption is that it seems to take the previously mentioned bourgeois economists at face value, who tell us that individual consumption and needs are society’s main driving force. The GIC comrades transfer this onto the communist society:
“The process of growth from "taking according to needs", moves within fixed limits and is a conscious action of society. In contrast, the speed of growth is mainly determined by the "level of development" of consumers. The faster they learn to economize with the social product, i.e., not to consume it unnecessarily, the faster the distribution will be socialized.” (p.180)
This means that social ‘effectiveness’ is determined by consumption, rather than by an increase in social productivity, e.g. through an explosion of creativity and new forms of collaboration.
“The needs are, therefore, the driving force and the guideline of communist production. Or, as we can also say, production is geared to "demand".” (p.211 - emphasis by GIC)
While communism, unlike capitalism, is not ‘production for production’s sake’, we can still expect that new needs and dynamics will primarily emerge from a new creative cooperation amongst people, rather than their changed consumption patterns. Their focus on consumption matches their neglect of the question how production must change in concrete terms in order to become a communist mode of production.
The ‘system’ cannot replace direct social engagement
The discussion whether the individual labour time accounting enforces an ‘individual coercion to work’ does not seem so interesting to me, the question is rather, if they are not avoiding the issue of coercion by transferring it onto an economic dynamic! “I won’t get involved if the other guy is a slacker, the voucher system will do it.” I am not sure what is more communist, if a collective tells individual members to get their act together or to leave this task to an apparatus. And the apparatus will only register the time worked, but if your comrade pisses about for an hour and wants to have it counted, you will still have to tell them. We could also argue the other way around. Do we want to encourage that particular people can work loads of ‘overtime’ in order to be able to ‘afford’ a particularly luxurious diet to which they invite selected members of the collective in order to improve their social status? Again, I think this is a secondary matter. More important is the fact that through the individual form of consumption, a possible lack of social productivity is not mainly experienced as a collective issue, but as a lack of individual purchasing power.
Workforces have no interest in productivity increases
But perhaps more interesting than thinking about individual behaviour would be to discuss what impact the system might have on an entire workforce. The system of ‘payment by labour time’ means that a workforce, if it would continue to exist as a separate entity, has no interest in increasing productivity: they are paid by the hour, not by output. The only way that the GIC comrades address this issue is by ‘comparison’ (competition) – using the example of three different workplaces that all produce shoes, unit 1 and 3 producing more productively than unit 2:
“If the shoes are charged with 3.18 hours in consumption, then the operational units 1 and 3 have hours "over" in the accounting, which correspond to the "deficit" in the accounts of unit 2.” (p.136)
The question here is if it will be mainly social pressure that will force the workers of unit 2 to produce within the average productivity range or whether the ‘deficit’ in the account will exert the pressure – it is unclear what that ‘deficit’ means exactly. The next question would obviously be whether productivity can be compared like that and what would happen if there are no comparable units.
The division between simple and complex labour persists
As mentioned, when it comes to individual labour the main issue is not necessarily that it is paid differently, but that some people are supposed to sweep roads all day, while others develop machinery. The comrades criticise sharply that workers receive different amounts of money or working time vouchers for the work they are doing, but otherwise they mainly appeal that skilled workers should not look down on unskilled workers – instead of demanding that communism does away with this division:
“We are familiar with this ideology, which makes the skilled look contemptuously at the unskilled (...) a doctor is not a garbage collector. The extent to which the workers change this ideology in the course of the revolution remains to be seen.” (p.152)
“The working class must fight with the greatest energy against such a view and demand the same share of social wealth for all.” (p.117)
It also ignores the issue of how to counter the tendency of intellectual workers to blackmail post-revolutionary society to pay them more, due to dependency on their ‘expertise’ (for example surgeons in Russia or Cuba etc.). If I don’t want to bribe them with extra-vouchers I need a different plan to collectivise their knowledge.
- Accounting problems
The claim of the GIC is that for the labour time accounting system to be transparent and allow everyone to take part in the planning of production it must ‘add up’, meaning, every transaction of labour time, either within production chains or of final consumption, has to be recorded. I wonder whether a) the aim of ‘balancing the books’ can get in the way of social needs and b) whether the recording of transactions is actually possible given the complexity of social interactions.
“And since it is one of the "lay idea" of capitalism as well as of communism, when one believes that goods can be transferred without charging, the receiving operational unit must "charge" the incoming goods against the supplying operational unit.” (p.185)
Perhaps, in order to guarantee social reproduction, a particular enterprise (perhaps agriculture, perhaps mining) requires an enormous input of social labour time, but cannot ‘balance the books’, meaning that it will always have the exact amount of ‘hours in the bank’ in order to continue production. For the GIC this is the main form of social control: you have to produce within your means, because the system has an inbuilt justice of ‘equal exchange’ – but does that actually work out? Again, it is good to have a transparent public accounting system that manages to allocate labour and resources – but the main issue will still be the political debate: Should we ‘substitute’ this or that enterprise, because it is socially necessary? Should we confront the guys who work in the shoe factory, because they have been wasting resources?
“Each company reproduces itself. And thus, the entire social economic life is reproduced.” (p.113 - emphasis by GIC)
This is of course a quite compelling logic, not too different from a market logic. But does it not also have potentially similar consequences in terms of the consciousness of workers who beaver away within the companies: “As long as our books look alright and we won’t get a bollocking in the general council, things are cool. Why bother about the wider social production cycle?”.
There are further tendencies and factors which make an accurate accounting more and more difficult, some of which have been mentioned in other critiques, e.g. the question how to account time spent on innovations that impact on millions of products, such as the introduction of industrial norms. Another example is the inbuilt potential of re-creating regional unevenness in income and development:
“For example, if the workers in one district want to set up several public reading rooms, they can do so without further ado. New institutions are then added, which have a more local significance so that the necessary costs must also be borne by the district concerned. For this district, the payout factor will be changed, which has the effect of a "local tax".” (p.180)
In addition to the operational organisations and the places of final consumption here they introduce another accounting unit, the ‘district’. These districts might have their own ‘reading rooms’ but they still depend on wider social production, which will make the calculations enormously complex. But this is more than just a technical challenge, it is a political one: would workers who live in a different district, where their ‘payout factor’ is higher, not be allowed to use the reading room? What about long-term consequences, e.g. some districts or regions invested loads in education, for example reading rooms, other districts or regions just ‘spend’ all labour time on good food. Won’t that recreate social imbalances?
In response to the political decisions in the early Soviet Union to nationalise only those companies that are ‘ripe’ for socialism they say:
“In the Marxist sense, there are no "ripe" or "not ripe" enterprises, but society as a whole is ripe for communism.” (p.34)
Are they not avoiding a thorny issue that sneaks into their own model? What about the question, which enterprises produce a ‘free’ good and which ones (still) have to produce in exchange for labour time vouchers? Is that not also a question of ‘being ripe’ for a different level of social production, meaning, some companies are ‘ripe’ for a production of ‘everyone according to their needs’, while others have to stick to production in return for vouchers?
“With the growth of communism, this type of operation [enterprise] will probably be expanded more and more, so that also food supply, personal transport (this is also individual consumption!), housing service, etc., in short: the satisfaction of general needs, will come to stand on this ground.” (p.178)
- Impact on the consciousness
At various points in the text the authors say that there is no value produced in communism, but that the measure of labour-time embodied in products has similarities to value. In order not to use the word they call it ‘production time’.
“In fact, this is a transformation of concepts, as we have seen previously in terms of value, income, and expenditure, etc. And just as language will preserve all these old names for the time being, it will also preserve the name "market". (...) The abolition of the market can, therefore, be understood to mean that it continues to exist under communism, according to its external appearance.” (p.208 - emphasis by GIC)
That all this is not only about semantics – whether to call things ‘exchange’ or flow – or appearances can be seen in the following examples, where it seems that the capitalist logic still rules the minds of the authors. About whether a company hands out their products in exchange for vouchers or without vouchers they say:
“Of course, it must always be considered in advance whether such a distribution for a particular sector does not involve too great a sacrifice for society.” (p.178)
It is interesting that they call it ‘sacrifice’, as the goods and services that are handed out without exchange of labour vouchers are as much based on social labour as those who aren’t. In this sense society doesn’t have to ‘sacrifice’ anything, e.g. people don’t have to work more or tighten their belts, society has only less of a control over consumption. Meaning, the ideology or consciousness of “oh, this is given for free, but someone surely has to pay for this” also remains in the heads of the authors. This seems also to be the case when they write about ‘hardship funds’ for emergencies, such as natural catastrophes:
“Under communism, this type of hardship will have to be borne by the whole of society, so it is natural that a "general fund" should be set up with the help of the payout factor. The speed with which this stockpiling is carried out is in the hands of the councils, which must determine the amount of this fund at the congresses.” (p.227)
How would this ‘stock-piling’ actually work? Do they talk about producing additional rescue vehicles? Do they say that each district should calculate a margin that in case of an emergency a certain amount of labour can be withdrawn from general production? Both would not really constitute a ‘fund’. So it seems that they think that a kind of accumulated ‘fund’ of labour-time could sit somewhere that could be tapped into in times of an emergency – again, this is a capitalist logic of money accumulation.
To give another example of how an external ‘accounting system’ can negatively change the consciousness of workers, I will talk about our hospital. From the Emergency Department (ED), where patients are admitted, to the discharge process on the wards, there is a constant bombardment with ‘targets’: patients should not stay in ED longer than a certain amount of time; they should be ‘treated’ according to certain ‘evidence based’ standards, e.g. official sepsis screening time-frames; they should be discharged once certain criteria are met. All this is not mediated through value, money or profits, although ‘saving money’ is a compulsion in the background. Workers, in particular workers in ‘responsible’ positions, sometimes focus more on these figures, the ‘patient flow’, than the concrete conditions of patients. The internal ‘accounting system’ of the NHS creates its own alienation.
- Revolution and transition
Their ‘economistic’ understanding of workers’ power also influences the way in which they describe the revolutionary period:
“The economic dictatorship of the Proletariat - Finally, we must say a few words about the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship is self-evident to us and does not really need special treatment, because the introduction of communist economic life is nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (p.273 - emphasis by GIC)
“It is also a dictatorship which is not carried out by bayonet, but by the economic laws of the movement of communism. It is not "the state" that carries out this economic dictatorship, but something more powerful than the state: the laws of economic movement.” (p.276)
We can agree that a working class revolution is not primarily a civil war which is won militarily. It is true that the main weapon of the working class is the social production process itself, although this is different from ‘the laws of economic movement’. Still, there seem to be certain white spots when it comes to the necessity of concerted political intervention even after the revolution has succeeded. Here the main challenge won’t be transparent book-keeping, that might be the easiest part.
For any revolutionary strategy we need to know which social and material changes can be achieved during a class movement and revolutionary process itself and which changes can only take place when the working class has taken power. We have to know what can be done within the first 100 days of proletarian dictatorship and what needs a longer period.
A revolution in terms of active struggle with the class enemy is necessarily a temporary affair, there is a certain time-window within which the question of power has to be solved. It is true that the revolutionary process itself will dismantle a lot of capitalist divisions within the production process, e.g. in terms of socialisation of knowledge or changes from small-scale domestic reproduction to collective forms. We can call this ‘communisation’, but it is limited in terms of scope.
Other changes will necessarily need much longer than the immediate period of revolutionary upheaval, due to their material nature. This means that we will deal with the material legacy of capitalism – and the potential that these material structures, which still form part of our social reproduction, re-impose social hierarchies. To name a few:
a) The division between town and countryside. It will probably need a generation or more in order to dismantle the large urban concentrations and to re-populate the countryside – in a way which does not reproduce rural poverty and idiocy. Even more so if this process is not supposed to have a character like the Great Leap Forward etc.
b) The division between different regional stages of development. Capitalist hierarchy produces and sustains itself by regional disparity in the development of the forces of production. This also includes regions that are naturally blessed by good climate or fertile soil.
c) The reparation of nature that has been exhausted by the capitalist mode of production and the extra labour due to the move away from fossil fuels.
In the actual moment of revolutionary upheaval there is a lot of enthusiasm for social change, but it is not guaranteed that this enthusiasm will be generalised and expanded forever. To change the material conditions mentioned above will require an extra-amount of social labour during a period of transition.
Looking at historical examples it is not unlikely that, e.g. regions that are privileged in terms of their inherited productive structure or land fertility will be less inclined to make an extra-effort to even-out global disparity; or that in order to guarantee a better living standard short-term, necessary reparations of nature are postponed and future generations left to deal with it. It is not absurd to assume that it will need a strong internationalist communist force and perspective, that galvanised during the time of revolution, to ‘encourage’ that these necessary material changes are undertaken, with the aim to create the basis for a global human community.
The open question is what form this communist force takes and how it relates to wider society. I don’t imagine a Communist Party in the old sense nor a workers’ state. I assume that the challenge will be to instill a communist core in those industries that are primarily concerned when it comes to the material transition: large scale manufacturing, transport, energy, agriculture etc.. It will be this central working class that will have to pull the rest of society through this period of transition – not because workers in these industries are by and in themselves prone to have a higher degree of consciousness, but because these industries are structurally the most socialised and global. If the communist project has a material base, it is there – though it will also always need external proletarian pressure to socialise.
The text by the GIC does not really prepare us for these political tasks. It is a valuable framework to stabilise social reproduction, but it runs the risk to make workers believe that with the establishment of an equal system of distribution the ‘deed is done’ and no persistent political struggle for an internationalist, feminist and sustainable construction of communism is necessary even years after the revolution. Our task would be to debate and update the text and integrate it into a wider political strategy.
