Fredo Corvo, who publishes frequently on the council communist website Left Wing Communism, sent us a lengthy reaction to our debate with IDA on the transition to communism. So we added his text to the ongoing debate which you can read HERE. 1 Fredo agrees and disagrees with arguments on both sides of this debate, which was about how production and distribution could/would be organized in a post-capitalist world. His main point however is that a “lower phase communism” would be inevitable and that IP is guilty of idealist moralist utopianism when it thinks otherwise.
Fredo warns against underestimating the formidable difficulties that would accompany the birth pangs of the new social formation. He’s right in doing so: It does no good to look at the historical challenge through rosy glasses and ignore the very real obstacles. The question is whether these obstacles require the so-called lower phase of communism and what the consequences of that would be. Fredo writes that this lower phase “is the name for the fact that communism emerges from capitalism and still bears its marks”. But the term implies more than that. It was used by Marx who defined communism in his “Critique of the Gotha program” as “from each according to ability, to each according to need” but added that this was not yet possible because humankind’s productive forces were not developed enough. So, in his view in 1875, in the short term something less was inevitable after defeating the bourgeoisie and Fredo thinks that is still the case today. Marx was sketchy on what that ‘something less’ would entail beyond a mode of distribution of goods based not on need but on contributed labor time, of which he recognized that it would not do away with the core abstraction of capitalism, value based on labor time, nor with the inequality it implies. Fredo recognizes that as well. In his view the lower phase of communism is a “long transformation” during which “wage labor, value, classes, the state, the opposition between mental and manual labor, and the subordination of individuals to the division of labor” continue to exist, as well as money, banks and monotonous, dirty labor. What makes all this ultimately disappear, what keeps society on a course towards that moment when it “no longer needs capital, wage labor, value, classes, or a state standing above society”, is the control of the workers councils, which for this heir of the German-Dutch Left communist tradition has the same fetish power as the Party has for the heirs of the Italian Left. But isn’t it utopian to think that the form (workers councils) will make it possible to establish communism if the content remains capitalist at its core and the abolition of value, classes, the state etc, is not seen as an immediate necessity but as something to be accomplished in the long run?
We emphasized, with Marx, that the proletarian revolution is not only necessary to overthrow capitalist rule but also to change the proletarians, so that they become fit to transform te world. Through the experience of prolonged collective struggle and being forced to reinvent their social practices to survive, proletarians throw off “the muck of ages” as Marx put it, the weight of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideology and practices. Fredo thinks it is utopian to put that much “faith in revolutionary transformation of attitudes”. But isn’t it utopian to think that the revolution can succeed without attitudes and social practices being thoroughly transformed?
Fredo writes: “The working class makes the revolution while still carrying contradictions produced by capitalism. These contradictions are overcome only through the process of struggle, organization, self-education, and material transformation.” That is true. But isn’t that precisely what the revolution is, a “process of struggle, organization, self-education, and material transformation”?
Not according to Fredo. He sees it as a political process, preceding any material transformation and following a determined set of stages. He reproaches IP “a utopian neglect of the stages through which a revolution must pass: from a proletarian stronghold, through civil war and international extension, toward the global power of workers’ councils, and only then toward more developed communist relations”.
Of course we cannot know what the communist revolution, if it occurs, will really be like but Fredo seems pretty certain that he does. The picture that he paints looks a lot like the revolutionary wave of the early 20th century, but this time successful because led by workers councils instead of the Party. So the first stage is defeating the bourgeois state somewhere and establishing a ‘proletarian bastion’ in an otherwise hostile capitalist world, while confronting a civil war at home. Exactly like Russia 1917. But the world has changed a lot since 1917. Isn’t it utopian to think that a proletarian bastion could survive in today’s world if in the rest of the world capitalist rule remains in place? Wouldn’t it be crushed immediately, economically and militarily? Fredo doesn’t think so. He even foresees trade relations between the proletarian bastion and the surrounding capitalist world, which is why he thinks money would still be used. No problem, in his view, as long as this happens “under strict council control”.
We do not pretend to know how the revolutionary process will unfold, what stages it will go through. We don’t even pretend to know whether or not it will happen. But what seems clear to us is that if it does, the context of that process will be one of capitalism’s economic breakdown on a global scale (not that such a context automatically would lead to revolution) during which the proletariat, also on a global scale, not only will be compelled to wage a political struggle against the capitalist state but also, in order to survive, to begin to transform its productive activity, abolish the existing relations of production and fundamentally alter the content and purpose of work. In other words, the abolition of classes, of value and labor, is not something that will happen after the revolution has gone through all of Fredo’s stages, but it will be an immanent aspect of the revolution throughout its course.
Of course the abolition of labor does not mean the abolition of productive activity nor of the need to economize, even though Fredo seems to ascribe such an opinion to us. Rather than replying to this by repeating ourselves, we refer the reader to the text Fredo criticizes. But we want to reiterate that the abolition of labor is is a crucial aspect of the revolutionary transformation, not only a direct necessity to survive but also a process that will have an indispensable transformative impact on those who participate in it. Isn’t it utopian to think that the proletariat will have a strong enough motivation to engage in and continue its revolutionary struggle if this does not radically change its life and work?
This point is powerfully made by Raoul Victor in his text “Contribution to the discussion on “labor””, which was part of a debate on the same subject in the now defunct “Reseau de Discussion”, a French-language internationalist discussion list which was quite lively from 2007 until 2020 (it had an English-language counterpart called Intsdiscnet, which also was a forum for discussing pro-revolutionary ideas in the same period). We added this text to the debate file, as well as another one that Raoul sent us in reaction to our debate with IDA, also written as part of the discussion in the ‘Reseau’. He sees this text, “On the Necessity of Developing the Productive Forces”, as critical to the position expressed in the IP article, that “Capitalism is forced to grow, but post-capitalist society will have to ‘ungrow’”. Raoul argues that in the post-capitalist society a great development of the productive forces will be necessary. We agree. We think the creative focus on human needs will undoubtedly have that effect. But we also think we will have to ‘ungrow’. Growth is now intrinsically bound with increasing energy consumption, which still means increasing consumption of fossil fuels. It is an illusion to think that thanks to ‘clean energy’ the decoupling would be easy2. So to continue growth would be disastrous, suicidal even. Capitalism produces more waste than it under-produces for needs. There’s lots of room to ungrow.
The challenge will be to grow and to ungrow at the same time. In capitalism, ‘ungrowing’ means economic death, growing is not a choice but an obligation. When that is no longer the case, growing is no longer the central issue. The main issue will be how to transform the technology, the ways of working and of living inherited from and shaped by capitalism. On this, I think Raoul, Fredo, IDA and us could all agree.
IP
6/20/2026
1 Since this reply was written, IDA published another critique of “Internationalist Perspective’s Idealistic View of Communism”, written by Herman Lueer. You can read it HERE. Because Lueer’s arguments are similar to Fredo’s, we don’t address them specifically in this text.
2 See our article on this: Hope or hoax