To continue the debate on the transition to communism, we refer our readers to an essay with the above title, written by Anwar Najmadin, a pro-revolutionary Marxist active in the Kurdish region of Iraq. It recently was published on the website of the Marxist Humanist Initiative (MHI).

Early on, Najmadin explains his intent: “In much of twentieth-century Marxism—Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, and social-democratic alike—this transition is theorized as requiring a distinct socialist stage, characterized by the political rule of the proletariat through a transitional state, often presented as a direct continuation of Marx’s own position.

This article re-examines this assumption through Marx’s mature writings on class abolition and the state. It argues that Marx’s analysis increasingly points toward the destruction of the existing state machine and the self-organization of production by the associated producers, raising questions about whether later Marxist formulations of the transitional state truly align with Marx’s historical materialist conception of the transition to communism.”

The question of the state is inseparable from the transformation of production itself, Najmadin argues,

and in that transformation the central issue is whether value relations persist or are abolished. He criticizes the idea that they must persist as long as scarcity exists and asks: “is scarcity truly a material limit, or an ideological category reproduced by political economy?” Money, the exchange of value, are not an eternal necessity of social organization. They are a necessity under capitalism, where distribution appears as wages, profits, rent, and interest. Under communism, where wage labor itself is abolished, distribution no longer appears through the categories of capital. Distribution becomes a consciously organized social process. The directly social organisation of production would abolish the social relation constituted by the exchange of equal values.

The exchange of equal values (of socially necessary labor time) would still be a necessity in the‘lower phase of communism’, so Marx claimed in his Critique of the Gotha Program. Distribution of goods would still be based on the principle “to each according to his labor contribution” rather than the communist “to each according his needs”. According to Najmadin this contradicts Marx’s broader critique of value production developed throughout Capital. He writes: “Wherever production remains organized through value relations, social labor continues to confront individuals through the principle of ‘equal right’. Yet equal right does not signify the transcendence of bourgeois society; rather, it expresses the persistence of bourgeois social relations within both production and distribution.”

On the persistence or abolition of the state in the transition to communism, he sees a similar contradiction, which in his view reveals a crucial theoretical divergence between Marx and Engels: “While Engels envisioned the state gradually dissolving as class antagonisms disappeared, Marx maintained that genuine emancipation required the destruction of the state apparatus itself.” Engels, who in Najmadin’s view was the main architect of the communist Manifesto and its list of state-centered “communist” measures, summarized his perspective in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “The state is not ‘abolished.’ It withers away.” Marx on the other hand believed that the state, as an expression of class society, needed to be destroyed, since the proletariat would only be victorious when it abolished all classes, itself included.

His critique of Engels may seem harsh. IP too has been accused of attempting “ to dissociate Engels from Marx, and to make the former the father of productivist Marxism”. ¹ Surely it would be wrong to dismiss the many contributions Engels made to revolutionary theory and his invaluable support of, and collaboration with Marx. But we don’t approach Marxist theory as holy writ. It is a work in progress and it progresses only when the results of the investigations of those who came before us are criticly re-examined and expanded upon. That is what Najmadin does in this essay. Read it here. Some may find his take of the transition to communism too abstract or unfinished but we were told a second part is in preparation.

1See Internationalist Perspective 35 (1999), p.12, in which Mac Intosh wrote: “After Marx’s death, however, Engels succumbed to the determinist and positivist elements, which while they were always present in both his and Marx’s thinking did not exhaust it, elements which would quickly come to shape the ideology of the Second International, and were enshrined in the Marxist orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky. It is in that sense that I link Engels to the beginning of a “productivist Marxism.”