Given this is a time where the socialists are advancing with reformist aims, many are alleging they are Communists. There is a lot of confusion between the two.
It is thus important for us, the Communists, to elaborate who we are, what we want, and our distinctions with the socialists.
I will be iterating several common questions which have been asked of me and others, and elaborate our answers to each.
What is Communism?
Communism is the abolition of the present state of things, which is capitalism.
We therefore advance Communism as the abolition of capitalism, the present society.
Our claims: capitalism has created a class of wage-labourers who have nothing to sell but their labour power. These workers, the proletariat, are divided not just against their employers, the bourgeoisie, but their own status as workers.
We differ from the socialists therefore because we do not advance our claims to advance the workers’ power in themselves, but the workers’ power for themselves. What this means is very simple: we do not want workers to be victorious within capitalism, but against it.
The socialists consider the present state of affairs to be modifiable to the interests of the workers. We argue that the workers’ interests are the abolition of the present state of affairs, and thus the abolition of private property, the state, the family, and of all present social forms.
How does society work without private property?
What is called private property is not the fact that certain people use some things and other people use others. Private property is the legal status of ownership over certain things. Something only belongs to you if, under certain legal terms, you are its owner. On these terms, then, it can be stripped of you.
Under capitalism, the proletariat’s possessions therefore do not belong to the proletarians. They are in fact transient things that, given an economic crisis, can be stripped from them. We feel how fleeting our things are. Even our money, which we gain by working for the bourgeoisie, is taken again by them again through rent and food. As such, we are not earning for ourselves under present conditions. We are transferring wealth from our bosses to our landlords. The product, our labour, and the value thereof, is the reward of both.
By consolidating a reserve of money, select few proletarians can advance to a state of being a big or small capitalist. But this is not true for the vast majority of the class. We are not business-owners, but workers.
Every development in history tells us that this institution is not an essential human condition. In past societies, human beings have lived without it. As such, it is not ‘human nature’ to hoard as the bourgeoisie do. It is simply a law of capitalist society, divided against history.
Capitalism itself proves it, by, as established, abolishing private property for most of the population.
You do not need private property to use certain things yourself. In fact, in most households, disputes over who uses what are handled easily without the intervention of law or the state.
We simply believe that, with Communism, the resources of labour and nature are used to regulate and develop human existence, rather than accumulate property.
Private property is therefore not a prerequisite for human existence, but a product of human practice, which human practice might abolish.
We differ from the socialists, who believe in redistributing existing property, because we believe the existence of private property itself brings its centralised and uneven accumulation.
How does society work without the state?
It is claimed that we need a state to ensure the stability of a given society. But this means we must define the state.
What is the state? For the Communists, we say: the state is the existence of a police force, a bureaucracy, and a standing army. These are the real mechanisms by which legislative, executive, and judicial bodies exercise power.
What is the law of the state? Private property, the family, its own existence. Whether or not it claims legitimacy from democracy is irrelevant. The bourgeois state does not, and never will, permit the abolition of any of these things. If it is brought to the brink of such developments, as has happened in many countries, in every case it fights to assert itself.
Who does this power represent? We Communists modestly assume the institution dedicated to defending private property serves and is influenced by the class that benefits from the existence of private property: the bourgeoisie.
What does the state regulate? We contend that the basic premise of human existence is human production. We produce, and make history off of what we produce.
As such, the allegation that humans need a ‘state’ is actually the assertion that we need a police force, a bureaucracy, and a standing army to produce.
We do not need a police force or standing army to produce. The former is for policing the civility of bourgeois society, the latter is for purposes of international competition. Both are acts of production for the bourgeoisie, to whom we oppose.
The main contention is therefore that we need a bureaucracy to produce. This is self-evidently false to us who produce. In fact, usually the workers know when there are problems, and it is the bureaucrats who mess it up. The bureaucrats amount power for themselves and rarely help people, and when they do it comes only so they can expand their own power.
Many workers presently slack off when they are not disciplined. This is because they understand they are not working for themselves, but their employers. We believe the workers will work and produce for themselves when they are working for their own good.
All study of social history only proves this claim.
How does society work without the family?
The notion that we ought abolish the family appears perhaps the most ludicrous demand of the Communists. Even self-proclaimed radicals turn their nose up at it.
“You will take our children away from us!” Says the parent.
Our response: do you abuse your children?
If you abuse your children, they are or should be taken away from you. If you do not, then of course we do not think you should be forbidden from seeing with and living with your children.
But we believe children belong to themselves, not their parents. We do not believe, of course, that a child is realistically capable of making their own life choices. We just do not believe two parents, selected by genetic lottery, should be able to determine that child’s fate.
History teaches us in past societies, children have been raised transparently by the community. Mothers and fathers have been happy to acknowledge this social convention for thousands of years. Only with the rise of ancient tribal families, and developing out of them class society and private property, do we see the regulation of children as property of definite individuals.
Those adults who would not be happy with this are admitting that they believe they ought be tyrants over their children, that they ought be the sole determinants of control over the lives of their young.
There are many adults who possess sinister motives indeed for insisting that children remain unaccountably bound to them in private life, behind closed doors.
Under capitalism, families are frayed, destroyed, uprooted, and rendered unstable by its habitual crises of production. The bourgeoisie, as evidenced by the Epstein scandal, do not value the sanctity of marriage or the family, and instead take advantage of a free market in the world’s youth.
The Communists are accused of wanting to abolish the family by the present society’s defenders. We say: yes, and you too work to destroy the family. We just continue this work, for the benefit of adults, no longer belaboured by an isolated and difficult childrearing, and children, no longer held to sole account of potentially tyrannical wills.
It is for bourgeois society that we are contained, against the development of history, in these indivisible economic units, so ripe for exploitation.
We argue for the abolition of the family, not just a moral proposal, but as an institution now bound up with private property, that will disappear with it.
What is the Communist position on religion?
We support the abolition of religion. We do not believe religions exist as individual belief systems, but may exist as individual social forces. These social forces, bound up in both clericalism and secularised political participation, enforce standpoints of present civil society. They do not survive the advance of Communism, and where possible are abolished.
But what of persecuted religious minorities?
Wherever a religious minority is persecuted by a majoritarian faith, we of course support those who are persecuted and will support any and all measures to end that persecution–just as we support the women and children in this community oppressed by their husbands and fathers.
Where religious oppression is explicitly racialised oppression (as is the lot of Muslims in many countries), we of course are against racism. Racism, religious oppression, et cetera, will be done away with through Communism, which is brought about with the abolition of race and religion.
Those oppressed on the basis of their religion are oppressed because of the material framework of interreligious competition. The oppression no longer exists without these frameworks.
So religious people can’t be Communists?
People with religious faith can be Communists. We, as materialists, do not hold that someone’s role in history is suddenly negated because they simply believe something. We will happily elaborate our positions to religious people, and accept them if they believe in our cause. We are not thought-cops.
What we will not do is subordinate Communism to a fundamentally religious programme, and we firmly oppose movements that aim to achieve this.
Abolishing capitalism surely doesn’t solve other problems, like racism and sexism?
Perhaps, if we take a limited understanding of capitalism. But if we view racism and sexism not as transhistorical truth, but instead as the elaboration of inter- and intrafamilial oppression and hierarchies, we then see the struggle of race and gender not as isolated struggles, but class struggles. The Communists, through seeing this as class struggle, do not tell the victims of racialised and gendered oppression to stop struggling, but instead propose the advance of their struggle beyond simply reconciliation within capitalism; to go further, and win the world as workers too.
Class, at first, appears to share the same boundaries as race and gender. It is the sum of these struggles, which, becoming conscious of this oppression’s source, which constitutes the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.
Isn’t Marxism white and Eurocentric?
Of course it is. It was first developed by white Europeans, Marx and Engels, who were racists themselves. But the standpoint of capitalism is that of globalisation led by white Europe. As such, Marxism is white and Eurocentric as a consequence of existing in a white and Eurocentric world.
Marxism is not transhistorical either. It too will go away, with the abolition of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Europe’. We Communists, too, hate ‘whiteness’ and ‘Europe’, which are stupid categories used by silly nationalists who must couch themselves in the achievements of ‘their country’ in lieu of any achievements of their own.
Marxism, alike the proletariat itself, advances its own abolition. The proletariat does not struggle on its own terms, but the terms provided by capitalism. The same is for ‘whiteness’, ‘Europe’, etc., which are mere ideas that too will disappear with Communism.
Under Communism, won’t lazy slackers live off everyone else’s labour?
Yes, as with every other society, there will presumably be the existence of layabouts who contribute nothing. But as with every other society in history, including those which have not had a profit motive, the vast majority will contribute. In fact, there will be far more productive labour than beneath capitalism, because people will be working for themselves and their peers, rather than a corporate boss they may not even see.
In fact, with Communism, many people with certain physical and mental disabilities, who physically cannot work now, will be seen not as dead weight of no economic value, but capable of performing definite social roles in accordance to their ability. With the abolition of ‘work’ as producing things for mere exchange, many more elements of human life can be appreciated as productive in their own right.
Marx may have been right about class in the 19th Century, but haven’t things changed?
Things have changed, with financialisation and professionalisation of certain industries. But Marx’s greatest contribution was demonstrating crises of capitalist production are intrinsic to capitalism, and not external shocks.
As such, we know capitalism produces general crises, like the one we are presently experiencing in the wake of yet another global breakdown. And behold, economies have crumbled, many professionals are losing their jobs, and even those with professional degrees have found themselves once more performing menial wage-labour. And behold again, people now speak more of socialism.
Capitalism may change things from moment to moment. But come a crisis, as it must, the truth is laid bare, that it is the workers against their bosses.
What is the relationship between the Communists and the Socialists?
When the socialists advance the working class, we offer our support in advancing the working class, so long as the working class is struggling on its own terms. But when the socialists ask the working class to subordinate themselves to a bureaucratic organ or even union bureaucracy, we will aim ourselves against them, and maintain our line.
When the socialists tell the working class to halt its advance, our call is: “onward!”
History proves that when the workers rest on their laurels their concessions are lost. Countries once with very strong union movements have had these unions hollowed out over time.
We must, at all points, advance, until the abolition of capitalism, or else the workers will not be victorious.
Communism, in the past, has failed.
Correct! As did the first attempts at establishing liberal democracy. But nevertheless, liberal democracy won in the end.
We therefore see Communist failures as lessons. Rather than waxing poetic about the cruelty of this or that dictator, our question is: Where did the proletariat fail? And how do we prevent these failures?
This is all very well, but how do the Communists aim to advance this in practice?
The specific immediate demands of the Communists will vary from place to place, but in general the basic demands will always include:
- Dissolution of Parliaments, Congressional bodies, et cetera.
- Creation of a new government elected directly by workers. The Communist Party must retain independence from this government, though, and continue to advance the workers on their own terms.
- Creation of an armed workers’ militia.
- Abolition of the police force, court system, and rents.
- Self-administration of workers and their wages.
- Expropriation of major industries for public use.
We do not believe demands such as these will be adopted by the present bourgeois state, they are just simply the minimum programme for the conquest of state power by the proletariat–which necessarily involves its reconstitution.
We do not believe the proletariat is led by the state, and as such these proposals have no concern for its health or governance, just the ability of the workers to advance within it.
Communism, following its victory across the world, does away with the state entirely.
These are nice ideas, I just don’t see them working.
Likewise, it was unimaginable, during the early 19th Century, that in one hundred years Europe would be full of republics and constitutional monarchies.
Yet this became true regardless.
All evidence of history suggests that capitalism is not a permanent form of organisation and that new forms of social organisation are possible. We do not place our biases above scientific evidence; that, of course, is the domain of the capitalists.
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