The following text is our latest contribution to a discussion we’re having with the group IDA about the revolutionary transition to communism, and specifically about the question how productive activity and the distribution of goods could be organized. The complete conversation between us and IDA can be found on a new page on our site, called “Debates”.
Dear S and A,
again, sorry for the delay. Our reply has become longer and took more time than anticipated. We have titled it:
WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?
We take the last sentence of your latest message as our point of departure. You wrote: If you can’t tell people what communism is, why should they fight for communism?
We assume the question is rhetorical, but it is indeed difficult to tell people what communism is. It is not a system of government that exists or existed, nor is it a recipe in the cookbook of the revolution. It is a movement rather than an ideology and thus by definition non-static, hard to pin down. A movement that is a material force resulting from the class struggle and thus conditioned by it. The working class struggle contains communism as an inherent dynamic that pushes for the abolition of classes, itself included, and the abolition of the economyi, an outside force that imposes its law on us, and for replacing it by communal and conscious deciding what we make, how we make it and how we share it, based not on property but on human needs alone.
Communism’s force or weakness is tied up with that of the class struggle in general. So it’s quite weak at the moment. When it strengthens, it is not so much because more people think “they should fight for communism”, rather, the class struggle’s growing strength takes it into a communist direction. The ways in which it is expressed are necessarily conditioned by the horizon that is visible at the times of that expression.
It is difficult to capture communism in a few sentences without sloganeering but it is also difficult to describe it in detail. The latter is what the GIK tried to do and what you try as well. And we share the concerns that motivate you: it makes sense to try to foresee the problems that will come up, the challenges that will need to be addressed, and to think of possible solutions; and also to show that when capitalism is defeated, a human community is a real possibility, and to warn against the pitfalls, especially against a state-based vision of the transitional period. We think it’s useful to think and discuss about these issues like pro-revolutionaries have done in the past. We appreciate our dialogue. We can accept differences of opinion because the question, now, is in its hypothetical stage. However, we cannot accept that a text such as the GIK’s Fundamental Principles becomes some kind of orthodoxy. Like you wrote, “this theory is just a theory and in reality everything may develop in totally different ways”.
The horizon of our imagination
Because we have no existing example of communism, and because the lessons of the aftermath of the 1917 revolution are mostly negative ones (What not to do …), to project what it would mean in daily life, we necessarily need imagination. But the horizon of our class imagination is drawn by the conditions of the times in which we live.
What did Marx and Engels think communism would mean in daily life when, in 1847, they wrote the Communist Manifesto? The first step, according to their view at the time, was “the conquest of democracy” by the proletariat. Then would follow measures such as “a very progressive taxation”, “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”, “centralization of all transportation in the hands of the state”, “increase in the number of national factories”, “equal labor duty for all”, “formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”, “abolition of factory labor by children in its present form”. What strikes us when we read that list today is not only the fact that even these giants of communist anticipation still had illusions about conquering democracy and the state (their outlook would only change after seeing how the revolutionary workers and soldiers of Paris in 1871 did not take over the state but casted it aside) but also how modest the changes are that they foresaw and how little relevance they have today. Most of them don’t require a fundamental break with capitalism. Given the social conditions at that time, the enormous poverty, the shocking disrupting rhythms of the industrial revolution, it is understandable that these measures were seen as steps towards communism, but today, I think we would agree that they are not even that.
A quarter of a century later Marx coined, in his “Critique of the Gotha program” (1875), a great succinct definition of communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. But in the same textii he stated that it was not possible yet. Achieving this goal required more development of the productive forces. After overthrowing capitalism there would have to be a lower phase of communism, in which the rule would not be, to each according to his needs, but to each according to his time-measured labor contribution. It would still be an unequal society. Again, given the relative underdevelopment at the time, it is understandable why he would think so. The GIK based its “Fundamental Principles.” (1930) on Marx’s ideas on the “lower phase” of communism. Here too, the historical context (now the counter-revolution in Russia and the onset of the Great Depression) is the background for the vision they elaborated. No-one is free from the limits of the period he/she happens to live in.
We are as time-bound as Marx and Engels and the GIK were but today the horizon of our imagination is quite different and so are the challenges we’re facing. The main challenge is no longer to expand industrial capacity to make to each according to his needs possible at some point in the future. Capitalism is forced to grow, but post-capitalist society will have to ‘ungrow’. Not expanding but radically changing production is in order. Huge chunks of the capitalist economy will cease to exist. This is not only an urgent necessity because of the climate crisis inherited from capitalism, but it will also be the result of the changed purpose and content of production. According to the 2026 data of the International Labour Organisation more than 2 billion people are currently unemployed or experience some form of labour underutilization (underemployed, discouraged, or trapped in low‑quality informal work). Add to that figure the workers in industries that will disappear (such as arms production, to name but the most obvious one) and the hundreds of millions that now work in administrative jobs that will disappear (bureaucracies, finances, insurances, politics, etc.), the many other jobs that must disappear (surveillance and control, crime and crime fighting, military personnel and police, etc.) and the many that can disappear when automation, including AI, are used not for profit but to serve human needs… add all that up and there can be no doubt that the majority of all the jobs that exist today will be gone, either during or shortly after the revolution that overthrows capitalism.
Of course, the focus on human needs would give rise to many new occupations, would expand some existing ones such as in construction of housing and infrastructure, and would vastly increase the number of people who work in health and other care giving. The need to restore the health of the natural environment and de-poison agriculture would also be a gigantic undertaking requiring the efforts of a great number of people (whose contribution would be hard to measure in labor time). We can name other activities that will likely expand or be invented, but the point here is, it is not realistic to assume that they will be able to absorb the billions of people displaced during the collapse of the old world order. The idea that the revolution would result in a world in which everyone is a worker who receives the equivalent of the labor time he has given, is already absurd for this fact alone: it would be impossible to make everyone, maybe even the majority of the population, a worker.
Nor would it be needed. You may recall the famous “fragment on Machines” in Grundrisse (1857-58) in which Marx writes that “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth”. Marx noted that capitalism, “On the one side calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created”. He observed how, as a result of capitalism’s inner dynamic, the source of real wealth creation was shifting from living labor to social knowledge, to what he called “the general intellect.” “In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.” He was probably thinking more about our times than on his own when he wrote “Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself… He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.” It was clear to him that the production process would require (relatively) less and less living labor. Today’s automated reality makes it easy to see he was right. The production of goods necessary for the reproduction of society could not and would not need to absorb a large part, maybe not even the majority, of the fit to work population.
So what would happen? Since we both abhor the nightmare scenario of a “proletarian state” (whether or not controlled by workers councils) that would assign everybody his or her place in the global production chain, we can imagine, on the one hand, that the dislocated masses, especially at first, would consume goods without contributing themselves much or any labor time to the production of goods, and further that most would, probably rather quickly, find meaningful activities to do, whether or not those are deemed to be socially necessary (and who would determine that anyway). We can expect an explosion of creativity but that doesn’t mean that we can imagine it. Nor that we can imagine how it will fit in with the need for global planning, or how communication and decision making will take place. But what seems clear is that it would be a dangerous mistake to restrict access to goods to those who have contributed council-approved socially necessary labor time. The human community will take care of the human community.
The human community does not exist today, although the term “the international community” is often used in the media. It is used to paint a picture of a world in which nations are truly concerned about “our shared planet”. A world with a conscience that does not exist, an illusion that stands in stark contrast to the real world in which the need to win the competitive game overrides all good intentions and all attempts to address global problems, in which all real communities are destroyed by capitalism which is dragging the real world to war and other catastrophies. But in the working class’s struggle for survival, which more and more will be forced to confront the destructive logic of capitalism, a real human community can emerge. Indeed that it is the purpose of the revolution which cannot succeed otherwise. We reject the voucher system not just because it is complicated and impractical but because the kind of restrictions it implies are antithetical to what communism means.
But the political defeat of capitalism will not happen suddenly. More likely, there will be a long period in which the proletariat fights the capitalist state and starts constructing a new world at the same time. And even when defeated politically, capitalism will probably continue to survive in pockets here and there. In the midst of the chaos some of the dislocated may start up production on a capitalist basis. Even if there is no official money, they might invent one and start to exchange and accumulate. Furthermore, we don’t know in which conditions a victorious proletariat would find this world. It may be that capitalism’s destruction of the environment and the damage left by its wars are so severe that they seriously slow down what can be achieved in the short term. During the period of collapsing production of capital and expanding production for needs there will be shortages. We can discuss how the scarcity should be managed but this is certain: present day conditions are not the same as in the times of Marx or of the GIK. They emphasized that a development of the productive forces was necessary to overcome scarcity, to make “to each according to his needs” possible. But today, we don’t need the productive forces to grow, we need them to change in content and purpose. The fact that there is so much unmet need is not because society lacks the capacity of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and so on. It’s not a technical problem; the social knowledge, resources and technology are there but they’re in the service of capital. If they would be focused on meeting all the basic needs of all humankind, that purpose could be achieved fairly quickly. Once liberated, the development of the information and communication technology, including AI, which now is moulded for competitive advantage and profit, will surely accelerate the transition.
Or maybe meeting all the basic needs could not be done that quickly. It is impossible to foresee all the social disruptions, all the technical problems that will occur and even less to know how quickly they could be overcome. We should not underestimate the difficulty of reconfiguring global production logistics and the hardships that this could bring along. The disruptions could create local shortages of needed goods. But such problems would only be exacerbated by gating consumption on the base of contributed labor time. And what sort of body would enforce this gating, and would it be subject to local political differences… this becomes grim quickly.
Getting rid of the ‘muck of ages’
You wrote: We’re truly sad – probably more than anyone else – about the fact, that food, clothing and housing just don’t drop from the sky…
Indeed they don’t. So does a distribution system that makes basic consumer goods freely accessible for everybody not risk to collapse from abuse? Would it not mean that some would prefer to be lazy, to contribute nothing and live off the work of others? And that some would indulge in mindless greedy consumption of free goods, just because they can?
Yes, probably. But they would be a minority which likely would not represent a heavy burden on the community. We cannot believe that a revolutionary post-capitalist society would condemn people who don’t participate in production to starve. Not even if the distribution of goods would be based on labor vouchers, as you think it would be. The basic needs of the non-working population would be met through a general fund, the part of the social product not distributed through the vouchers system. Then the question is why not meet everyone’s needs that way, instead of making the complicated and maybe unworkable detour of the voucher system? The standard of living of those receiving free goods or rations would have to be considerably lower than that of the voucher receiving workers, otherwise the vouchers would no longer be the incentive to work they’re meant to be. So the labor accounting system would create a two-tier society instead of a human community.
We think the revolution would skip that so-called “lower phase” of communism. Lazy workers and greedy consumers would not pose a serious problem, not only because of the communist society’s productiveness but also because people would not be the same as today and neither would work. Producing would not remain labor.
People would not be the same because being part of the revolution would change them. That is what the revolution is for, according to Marx: “this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” [The German Ideology, 1848]
Let’s not underestimate the change in attitudes when production is oriented directly to human needs and this orientation is collectively agreed upon. Even in capitalist society, most people don’t like to do nothing for an extended period, they want to do something meaningful with their life. Rid of ‘all the muck of ages’, the proletariat that has overthrown capitalism and that is no longer a proletariat will feel this desire to participate in meaningful activities a hundred times stronger. There will be no need to force them to be productive. The social atmosphere created by the fact that the means of production have become common goods, will generate an enthusiasm and a collective spirit which are the most powerful motivation to participate in production, without a need for individual economic coercion.
As Raoul Victor wrote on the voucher system:
“Measuring the contributions of individual producers is deemed to create (or maintain) a motivation to participate in social production. But as such, this “motivation” is based on the old bourgeois principle: if you don’t work, you don’t eat; if you don’t work enough, you won’t have enough, and this independently of the existing social possibilities. Yet to learn how to participate in social production in another way than under the whip of the blackmail of hunger seems an urgent priority as soon as the collectivity will possess the main means of production.”
The communist revolution, if it arrives in the nick of time to prevent humankind’s suicide, is a seismic event that changes everything. It is difficult to imagine it but it will leave nothing untouched. People will change. In the heath of the struggle for survival, proletarians will come together and become the self-conscious collective worker, which he/she already was but didn’t know it. All human relationships (between producers, family members, men-women, young-old, teachers-students and more) change in the process. The entire way in which society reproduces itself changes. Work changes. It is no longer means labor.
The end of labor
You wrote: We don’t think it’s possible to “abolish labor“ as such, as you seem to demand. Instead, we want to “abolish wage labor”. Our understanding of labour is inspired by Marx, who described it as the metabolism between humans and nature. Labor in this fundamental sense can of course never be abolished, as long as human beings are also natural beings. What indeed can and should be done is different products and services.”
When Marx argued that “the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity” and “does away with labour” (German Ideology, Part I, D), or when he wrote that “the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of labour” ( On Friedrich List’s Book Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie), he certainly did not mean that the metabolism between humans and nature should be abolished. He wanted to point out that this metabolism is not something static but qualitatively changing over the course of history. “Labour” had a very specific content for him, different from “work”. According to Engels he complained that the German language did not make that distinction. iii It’s true that even in English people often use the words interchangeably but the dictionary says “work” is a more general term, referring to any purposeful activity, mental or physical, paid or unpaid; whereas “labor” is more specific, referring to the production of goods and services, paid or part of an economic exchange. ‘Work’ is a concrete productive activity, but ‘labor’, as the historically specific mode of work in capitalist society, is abstract, yoked to labor time accounting, measured by socially necessary labor time, subject to the diktat of the clock. The revolution must abolish it immediately.
The concrete process of production can and must be organized by the producers themselves. They will organize it not only to make things for others (including the different products and services you look forward to), but also with their own wellbeing in mind. To transform productive activity so that it becomes satisfying will be their priority from the beginning. That’s why they will like work, why it will not be labor anymore, why people will neither need nor accept to be coerced to work. It will be satisfying, because of its new purpose (real needs instead of profit), because of the new relationships between freely associated producers, because of the control that they now have over their means of production, their methods and their product. Maybe not every task can become fun that way, or maybe it can. That too is a revolution we can expect and hope for but that remains beyond the horizon of our imagination.
It is telling that the only change you foresee in regard to labor is : “What indeed can and should be done is different products and services.” New products for the consumers, but nothing worth mentioning on how they are made. And indeed, the voucher system does not change the content of work nor its measure (labor time). Yet it is precisely that content that must be transformed.
You seem to accept as a given ( and it’s true that Marx did as well) that it would be a hallmark of communist society that the working hours would be reduced as much as possible in order to increase free, disposable time for everyone. But that implies that work time will still be unfree time, time in which people are forced to do something while they’d rather be doing something else. A dreadful but necessary activity which they do because they must, because they have to eat, because they need their vouchers. In other words, as long as the division between work and the rest of life remains, work is still alienated labor. In contrast, we think it will be a hallmark of communist society that the distinction work – leisure will disappear. Work will be rewarding in itself and leisure will often be creative, productive. And since it would become impossible to distinguish the activity “work”, which alone would give one the right to obtain consumer vouchers, from other activities, it also would become impossible to measure labor time proper, as the voucher system requires. So this system would be a real obstacle to communist transformation, as it would perpetuate a reality which must be overcome as quickly as possible.
The end of Value
You wrote: we want to emphasize that labor time accounting is not value-production. To see it as a form of value because measuring of labor time takes place and people get paid for their work is a quite primitive understanding of value theory (…) and is not a Marxist view.
That confirms that Marx was not a Marxist, as indeed he once sarcastically stated. On the subject of labor time accounting he wrote in his Gotha Critique: “Clearly, the same principle is at work here as that which regulates the exchange of commodities as far as this is an exchange of equal values.” He recognized “… a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for the same amount in another.” The substance of value remains the same: labor time. As before, the labor time he/she performed determines the worker’s share of the social wealth.
So if you work long hours, you’ll get more vouchers and you can consume more. If you work less, you must consume less. Unless you cheat and pretend that you worked more but then you might get caught by the department of labor time control and get a sanction. Sounds fair? Marx conceded such a system isn’t fair, that it would cause inequality because it ignores the qualitative differences between the skills of producers and between the needs of consumers. However, “right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
So, like in the Communist Manifesto, he settled for something that seemed reachable, something still resembling capitalism in many ways. But today, it sounds like a recipe from a by-gone era (from a man who famously wrote that he didn’t want to give “recipes for the cook-shops of the future”). At least workers would no longer be exploited, no surplus value would be stolen from them, as they would receive the full equivalent of the value that their direct labor produced. Except, of course, for the part that must be deducted for investment and for meeting the needs of people who can’t work.
State capitalist regimes also claimed that in their system workers are no longer exploited because the means of production supposedly are no longer privately owned but belong to the workers’ own socialist state, so that all the surplus labor that workers perform for the state, they perform for themselves. The three main differences with the system proposed by the GIK is that the latter would be under the control of the workers councils, which presumably would prevent the emergence of a state-based privileged ruling class, that the value of goods would be determined neither by the market nor by the state, but by an ‘exact, objective’ calculation, and that no money would be used in the exchange of goods and labor time.
But it would still be processes of exchange that regulate production and consumption. Exchanges that are possible because of what makes work comparable to other work and its products comparable to other products. Obviously, there are many ways in which all kinds of work are different from each other. They differ in intensity, in difficulty, in talent and skill, in the degree in which the effort is individual or collective, to name but a few characteristics. The only thing that they have in common is that they can be measured in time. The same is true for the products of labor. These might be shoddy or perfect but what they have in common, what makes them comparable, is that a measurable quantity of labor time went into their making. Consumers too are reduced to what they have in common. They all possess a quantity of value (a quantity of labor time, expressed in vouchers), regardless of the differences in their needs and circumstances.
That invalidates the claim that the vouchers system makes an exact calculation possible. Given these qualitative differences, it wouldn’t really be possible to measure the average social labor contained in each product or the labor time provided by each individual producer. Also because, as Marx wrote in Grundrisse, “the product ceases to be the product of isolated direct labour, and the combination of social activity appears, rather, as the producer.” The product is social, made by ‘the collective worker’, and it has become impossible to determine what each individual worker has contributed to it. In today’s production processes, computer chips and digital software are everywhere and are essential at all stages of production. Calculating how much of the labor time that they contain is transferred each time they are used, would not be very practical. Marx thought it is untenable to continue to use labor time as a measuring rod when living labor is no longer the main source of real wealth. In Grundrisse, he situated the roots of capitalism’s systemic crisis in that contradiction. According to him, it becomes an absurdity which triggers historical change. So we wonder: If the measure of wealth by direct labor time is already such a problem in capitalism, why continue to organize production and distribution on this basis after capitalism is defeated?
Labor time accounting would take away the producers’ control over the process and means of production in various ways. One such way would be that it would promote standardization. The need to measure the individual labor times that went into the products of combined social activities would require to break up the work processes into uniform standardized tasks whose duration could be determined. This is where the cleavage between the collective worker and their product takes place. The producers would be under pressure, not only to accomplish the tasks in the allotted socially average time but also, in order to stay within the time limit, to accomplish the task in a given, standardized way. They would remain subjected to the clock and have no agency over how they use their means of production.
The transitioning society may encounter serious scarcity problems but labor time accounting is not the only possible way to address them. A dynamic rationing system that is based on an equitable distribution of goods according to need and that can quickly be adapted to changing circumstances seems a much better solution than a system that continues to treat everyone and everything as a quantity of labor time. What Marx proposed in “Gotha”, what the GIK elaborated in “Fundamental Principles” amounts to value exchange without money.
Labor vouchers are not money because it would not be possible to accumulate them or to use them to mediate exchanges of goods. At least not in theory. How that would be enforced in practice is another matter. The question is whether, in an economy organized on the base of exchanges of equivalents, money could be absent. If indeed labor vouchers would not be allowed to take on these essential functions of money (circulating goods, saving, accumulating…) they might be functioning as imperfect money and the functions it can’t fulfill would be taken over by something else. In other words, the market would survive, informally and perniciously as black market.
You make the argument that labor time accounting would be necessary to plan production. Indeed it will be useful to take data on labor time into account for planning, but only as one of several parameters. It would make more sense to calculate the parameters of production and distribution on the basis of concrete physical quanta. As Raoul Victor wrote: “The measure of human needs, on the one hand, and of the actual possibilities of production, on the other, in physical terms (e.g., the quantity of gallons of milk per child, on the one hand, and the number of dairy cows on the other), are far more simple to make than any assessments based on average social labor time.” And he emphasizes that the development of the information technology can make such planning a lot easier, precise, flexible and efficient.
Whatever advantages labor time accounting might have for planning, they pale against the backdraw that the proletarians’ would still be ruled by the clock, the very thing that made them resist capital in the first place. As Gilles Dauvé wrote: “If the regulator is labour time, this entails the imperative of being productive, and productivity is no servant : it rules over production. The shopfloor would soon lose control over its elected supervisors, and democratically designated co-organizers would act as bosses. The system of councils would survive as an illusion, and workers’ management result in capitalism, or rather… capitalism would never have disappeared. We can’t have it both ways: either we keep the foundation of value, or we dispense with it. The circle can’t be squared.”
The end of the state
You wrote: “it would be very naive to suppose that the state will suddenly just disappear in a revolutionary process.”
What makes this sentence correct is the word “suddenly”. A sudden collapse of the state is indeed unlikely. But take that word away and we say: yes! The state will disappear in the revolutionary process, because that’s what this process is all about.
The capitalist state has continuously grown, regardless of ideological shifts, regardless whether the regime was democratic or authoritarian, liberal or (pseudo)communist. The reason is that capitalism, under the pressure of its own contradictions and of class resistance, has ever more need for coercion and control. That’s what the state is for and that’s what the proletariat fights against.
You wrote: “Labor time accounting theory tries to find solutions for these problems, to prevent a fallback into state economy – which seems at the moment, in fact, the most probable scenario during a revolutionary situation”.
Not having a crystal ball, we don’t know if that’s true but we share your fear. If the revolution leads to nothing more than a political takeover of the state, it will have failed. It will have dug its own grave. Maybe then the scenario will be what you call “state economy”. The GIK wanted to show that that was not inevitable, that communism did not have to be like Stalin’s USSR. They defended revolutionary positions in a very dark period. Their struggle is ours. But that doesn’t mean that the solutions they proposed “to prevent a fallback into state economy” would accomplish that purpose. If you start from the premise that people must be forced to work to consume, you already implicitly say they must be monitored. Labor time accounting is still based on coercion and requires control to make it work. Coercion and control require an apparatus to enforce them, to impose the laws and regulations of the economy on society, to punish cheating, abuse and other infractions. That is the state, even if there is a structure of workers councils standing above it.
Would such a state “wither away”? Or would it be the locus from which the capitalist mode of production would reassert itself? The fact that the value form would survive, that the reproduction of society would still be based on labor whose pace and modalities escape the direct control of those who perform it, suggest that the latter possibility would be the more probable one. Alienated labor would still stand at the core of society, and because it is alienated labor it would have to be managed. It would require a division of labor from which a ruling class could emerge, whose managing responsibilities would expand over time, from supervision of the labor time accounting system to imposing rules and practices which the economy requires. It might focus on the expansion of surplus labor even to the detriment of necessary labor (work to meet the needs of the producers themselves). Its expansion might include extra-economic social functions like repressing private capitalists, integrating the disconnected, containing society’s centrifugal tendencies and other tasks that should not be entrusted to state or proto-state specialists.
The state must die and not be resurrected. The persistence of the value form in labor time accounting could allow its return. It would lead to the emergence of a separate class to manage the value system and would create new pathways to accumulation. Even if the form of a state is based on the dictatorship of the workers councils, with delegates elected and revocable by the workers who elected them, that could not fundamentally change the content of its practice.
This does not negate that the workers councils, or a comparable structure that would involve the whole of society in setting global priorities and making other decisions of global impact, would be essential. The revolutionary transition would not be disorganized. On the contrary, organized life will likely flourish as never before. As the collective worker opens the door to the human community, communal consciousness will sprout countless organizations. Whether based on proximity, shared activity or shared opinions or interests, they will have agency. And the information technology, when liberated, will provide them with means of communication Marx and the GIK could not even dream of.
Among all this spontaneous organization the need for mass organization during the revolutionary insurrection and afterwards stands out. In the past it manifested itself in the formation of workers assemblies, soviets, workers councils. It seems reasonable to assume that a revolutionary mass organization of tomorrow would bear similarities to those. How they were organized and how they should be organized has been much debated but what is clear is they can only be a mass organization if the mass is fighting. And the mass is only fighting if it has agency. Workers (or when the classes are abolished, producers) must feel they have choices, that, together, they have power over their life. If that goes away, the best organized council structure becomes an empty shell. So since the labor time accounting system impairs the agency of the producers, it weakens the base on which the council structure rests.
A global council-like structure would be indispensable, given the global challenges facing us. We have to be able to decide collectively what to do. But it would be a mistake to imagine a hierarchy of organized power with the global council on top, like a proletarian version of parliamentary democracy. The ways in which communication and decision making happen will likely be more horizontal than hierarchical, communal rather than one side imposing its will on the other. It’s beyond the horizon of our imagination to see and describe how precisely that will be organized. But we know we will not get there if we replace wages by semi-wages, money by semi-money and the state by a semi-state. The argument that we will need those because of the underdevelopment of the productive forces no longer counts. We can skip the “lower phase of communism” which isn’t communism at all and go straight for the real thing. Because we must and because we can. It is more possible and more urgent than ever.
S.Y. and Sanderr
NOTES
iNaturally the communist society would have to be ‘economic’ with its resources. But it would abolish “the economy” as a separate sphere, an autonomous machine that society must obey. As Gilles Dauvé wrote: “Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it”.
Economy, as a field, came into existence in the 18th century. It accompanied the rise of capitalism, adopted its world view, became its ‘scientific’ apologist. Marx’s Capital has as its subtitle “a critique of political economy”. In communism there would be neither politics nor economy, since Politics implies that political power is something that exists over and against the community; likewise Economy implies that the fruits of the community’s labor exists quite apart from them. In communism, there certainly will be ‘things’ but these things will not be “congealed activity”, that is, activity which has come to a halt in a production process thereby gaining its own “ontological status” (i.e. a commodity). Eventually, in a post capitalist society production and consumption will not be separate spheres of account but organic moments in a continuous human creative activity. This will be especially so once all basic human needs are met.
ii which was in the first place an attack on reformism and its view of the state as a class-neutral instrument that could be conquered by the working class.
iii “One of the finest researches of Marx is that revealing the duplex character of labour. Labour, considered as a producer of use-value, is of a different character, has different qualifications from the same labour, when considered as a producer of value. The one is labour of a specified kind, spinning, weaving, ploughing, etc.; the other is the general character of human productive activity, common to spinning, weaving, ploughing, etc., which comprises them all under the one common term, labour. The one is labour in the concrete, the other is labour in the abstract. The one is technical labour, the other is economical labour. In short—for the English language has terms for both—the one is work, as distinct from labour; the other is labour, as distinct from work. After this analysis, Marx continues: “Originally a commodity presented itself to us as something duplex: Use-value and Exchange-value. Further on we saw that labour, too, as far as it is expressed in value, does no longer possess the same characteristics which belong to it in its capacity as a creator of use-value.” Friedrich Engels: How not to translate Marx https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885/11/translation-m