Tag: transition to communism

Our report on a pro-revolutionary ‘summer camp’ of last August was critical of a discussion that took place there on the transition to communism. It can be read HERE. The comrades who gave the presentation, A and S of the group IDA, disagreed with our report and wrote a reaction which lead to the following debate.

December 27, 2025

Hi Sanderr and IP,

you write in your blog post:

“Therefore there was no discussion of the State and its nature, no discussion on value production, and no discussion on revolution or the revolutionary subject… only “communist firms”!”
https://internationalistperspective.org/staging/3363/reflections-on-a-summer-camp/

This is a gross misrepresentation of the discussion. If we recall correctly, you and your group missed our presentation and appeared in the middle of the discussion. Probably you should add that relevant information to your post.

Furthermore we just want to add that communism is about a new mode and new relations of production. So we have to discuss about the places where social production and reproduction actually happen. That includes the question of the distribution of the total product, as well as the question of the relation of production and consumption, without falling back into a new form of class domination or bureaucracy. Of course, this is all about the state. You and your group have just some vague ideas of communization, like everything belongs to everybody, and people discuss everything through the whole day in permanent assemblies or whatsoever and then they will ration the total product. For us there is the most danger of a fallback into state economy, because there will always be interested groups who try to secure their privileges. Your communization theory has no concept of social planning and social accounting and therefore no answer to the question how the workers will stay in charge and be the subject of a total social planning process. This is what labor time accounting is about.

Greetings

A and S (IDA)

January 21, 2026

Dear A and S,

sorry for the delayed response and thank you for reaching out. We would like to publish our response to you and to include your letter to us if you agree. Aside from our response, we attach a text on this subject that we would like to discuss with you, the third part of an essay titled “IP and the Tradition of the Communist Left” (2013) (the text is added below).

it is true that we arrived late to the summer camp thus missing your presentation (this because the schedule was altered the day before). But we do not see how we have grossly misrepresented the discussion. And we doubt that there was anything in your presentation that would change our perspective on your position. If you think there was something that we missed that we should respond to, we’d be glad to know.

We agree that it’s useful to think and discuss about how the obstacles on the road to communism could be overcome; how, in the course of revolutionary transformation, problems such as scarcity of consumer goods and the need for planning could be addressed. For one thing, it helps to make the possibility of communism more visible, as well as the pitfalls we may encounter; as such it is an expression of the class imagination at work. But we need to be conscious of the limitations of such inquiries as well, since they are separate from the initiatives taken in the collective struggle of the proletariat. It is in mass action that the collective creativity of the working class will find solutions that will probably surprise all of us who try to predict them. Pro-revolutionaries should not have the illusion that they can plan the future nor consider their thoughts on the subject dogmas.

Regarding the state and its nature we disagree with you. You think that a state will be necessary in a transitional period because there will be a need to coerce people who don’t want to work into working. We think that the state needs to be abolished in the course of revolution because its intrinsically capitalistic nature is fixed, as long as it exists it will represent a defense of or return to capitalist relations of production.

In our opinion, the whole point of revolution (something which did not appear in the discussion that we took part in – maybe it was in your presentation), is not to place workers in a position of power and maintain that power. Rather, revolution should constitute, over a protracted period of struggle, the self-abolition of the working class. To understand what this means we need to grasp how the value-form (or commodity-form) is reproduced. As you can see from the articles that we contributed, we think that a critique of the value-form is crucial to perceive how capitalist social relations could be reproduced during a period of transition. Failure to understand this could prove fatal. This is why we feel justified in lamenting the lack of discussion on value, since it is not at all clear that the GIC’s theory of labor-time accounting does away with the categories of value and wage.

In sum, I think that we have represented accurately (although synthetically) the discussion that took place on the period of transition. And our frustration remains that the discussion was dominated by -and more or less constricted to- theories found in “Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution”.

I hope this clears up our position and we remain open to further dialogue. Below an article that examines these issues in more detail. We would like to discuss it with you.

With comradely greetings,

S.Y. (IP)

February 2

Dear Comrades from IP,

we consent with your proposal to publish and document our little discussion. In this sense, we want to give some short answers to your last reply and carry out some points more precisely.

First of all, we want to stress that the idea of labor time accounting and council communism is opposed to any form of centralized state power. In the best case, the state won’t be necessary anymore during a transition period, because the people have found new political forms of decision-making and organizing the reproduction of society. So we totally agree with you on that point and we said this in our presentation very clearly.

Nonetheless it would be very naive to suppose that the state will suddenly just disappear in a revolutionary process. Quite the opposite, there will be many people with a certain material interest in maintaining state force – not just capitalists, but also petty bourgeois, teachers, academics, officials, etc. Even more so when the economy is in disarray and the provision of the people is in danger, due to missing principles of production and distribution, methods of accounting or rational insights in total social input and output. In such a situation ‚experts‘ (bureaucrats/technocrats) are very willing to take over the state power and monopolize the control over the social reproduction process, appropriating the surplus labor of the workers, like in the soviet union, arguing that they know how to manage everything.

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, because even the Left has no concept of socialism (just some disjointed and often romantic notions…).

This was one of the reasons why we discussed labor time accounting in the transition panel, because hardly anyone seems to have an elaborated concept of a communist mode of production. During the planning process we invited people (via mail) to participate in the organization of the panel – but only one person reacted. Even in the discussion during the summercamp no one mentioned an alternative concept, just the same old objections, like ‚time is abstract‘ or ‚you want force people to work for their consumer goods‘. We’re truly sad – probably more than anyone else – about the fact, that food, clothing and housing just don’t drop from the sky…

In that context we want to add that 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 reducing the necessary labor time drastically, but in that process it is important for the society to have insights into the actual times spent on different products and services. The concept of productivity and the „capitalist clock“ remain useful in that process.

That being said, even if you don’t want to reward individual labor with certificates, you have to find another method of distribution. You just mentioned the procedure of rationing without further explanation. So we get the impression that you are not really interested in these questions, or that you think it will run smoothly if the people just have communized everything (whatever this means). For us, the question of how to ration goods is the core question of a revolutionary period and at the center of the class struggle during this period, because it’s all about the question of new relations of production and distribution.

Secondly, 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 (although people with this opinion often suggest this notion with a certain philosophical depth) and is not a Marxist view. According to Marx, value is a result of private-property relations and wage labor is a specific form of value-based income distribution, resulting from alienated relations of production, which means that people have to produce surplus value for those controlling the production process in order to reproduce themselves. If there are just workers controlling their work process and planing their inputs and outputs as part of the total social labor, publicly and based on the information of actual needs, there will be no commodity form (of goods and labor force) and therefore no value.

Of course this theory is just a theory and in reality everything may develop in totally different ways. But – as we said in our presentation – this theory has the advantage of highlighting certain problems and challenges we surely have to face when it comes to a revolutionary situation. If we have no answers for these questions, other people (and maybe the wrong ones) will give them. Leftists often have a very limited, let’s say a pure political, understanding of a revolution, always looking out for the next fights, protests and struggles. But what is the goal of all these fights? If you can’t tell people what communism is, why should they fight for communism?

With solidarity,

S and A for IDA

April 30

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 the orientation of the production 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, 5), 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-marx.htm

ADDENDUM

IP AND THE TRADITION OF THE COMMUNIST LEFT

Part 3: Understanding Revolution

(appeared originally in Internationalist Perspective 58, Winter 2013)

36. The inability of the historical communist left to grasp the actual trajectory of capitalism since the 1920’s, its failure to focus on the value-form and its contradictions, its inability to provide a theory of the real domination of capital and its implications, must now lead us to address what Internationalist Perspective sees as the failure of the communist left to provide a theory of revolution and a vision of communism consonant with the abolition of the value-form. Despite its defense of internationalism and worker’s democracy, the communist left remained imprisoned within the theoretical edifice of traditional Marxism with respect to its vision of a dictatorship of the proletariat and a period of transition. For both the Italian and the Dutch-German left, the vision of communism was that of a “republic of labor,” of communism as an affirmation of the proletariat as a class, the goal of which was the liberation of labor, not the liberation from labor. And the Russian revolution, with its general strikes, its factory occupations, its Soviets, remained the model for how a future communist revolution would occur.

The Italian left has always defended the first two congresses of the Communist International, including Lenin’s “Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution,” which instantiated the leading role of the party in the revolution, a document consonant with Lenin’s long established view that the mass of the proletariat was only capable of a trade-unionist consciousness. Thus, the “Rome Theses,” largely written by Bordiga, adopted by the Italian Communist Party in 1922, claimed that: “The party’s role is … to organize the material requirements for activity and to lead the proletariat in the development of its struggle,” The theoretical bases for the dictatorship of the single party was already contained in that document at the historical moment that the fate of the proletarian revolution in Europe still hung in the balance. Yet 15 years later, as the Stalinist counter-revolution consolidated its triumph, the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left reiterated that vision of a party dictatorship in its own “Declaration of Principles:” “In order to attain its historic objective — the extinction of classes – the proletariat must establish its own dictatorship under the direction of its class party. As the party is nothing other than the most conscious fraction of the proletariat, its interests cannot be differentiated from those of that class. It expresses the interests of the whole of the class, their final social goal. By definition, and from the point of view of historic reality, there is an absolute identification between the dictatorship of the class and the dictatorship of the party.” That basic vision would guide the Italian left, then constituted as the Internationalist Communist Party, formed in the aftermath of World War Two under Bordiga’s theoretical leadership, a vision that would face a challenge from within, in 1952, led by Onorato Damen, who argued that “… the dictatorship of the proletariat can in no sense be reduced to the dictatorship of the party, even if this is the party of the proletariat, the intelligence and guide of the proletarian state.” Damen’s vision, then, was that of a dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by a Council State, though one in which the single party would nonetheless play the leading role. The Gauche Communiste de France, which also emerged from the pre-war Italian left in exile, and which provided the theoretical bases for the formation of the ICC, added another innovation to the understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat by advancing the idea that there is a distinction between the state in the period of transition to communism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by the Soviets or worker’s councils. In none of these visions did the self-abolition of the proletariat in the very course of a revolutionary upheaval, play a role, though Bordiga had always insisted — against both Lenin and Trotsky — that the continued existence of wages and money would be a mortal threat to proletarian rule, and reproduce capitalist social relations. In all these visions arising from the Italian left, revolution and the period of transition to communism was always envisaged as the moment of the establishment of the rule, the dictatorship, of the proletariat.

No ‘period of transition’

37. The Dutch-German left by contrast firmly rejected a party dictatorship, as well as the vision of the Communist party or parties as the locus of class consciousness. For the KAPD, the AAUD, and the AAUD-E, for Gorter, Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, and Henk Canne Meijer, the mass organs of the class, the workers councils, constituted the proletarian dictatorship, not the party, and class consciousness was not brought to the proletariat from the “outside,” by professional revolutionaries, by a party. However, while the Dutch-German left battled against the idea of the party dictatorship or even the leading role of the party, advancing the idea in the 1930’s that the most class conscious workers and revolutionaries should organize communist “working groups” to advance their vision of revolution and communism in an historic moment of triumphant counter-revolution, its vision of revolution and communism remained that of a dictatorship of the worker’s councils, a council republic, as the concretization of the rule of the proletariat, and the transition to communism.

Perhaps the most detailed vision of a transition to communism advanced by the historical communist left was produced by the Dutch-German left, the GIC (Groups of Internationalist Communists) in 1930, The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. There the Dutch-German left advanced the idea that communist production and distribution would be strictly based on labor-time accounting, its standard being socially necessary labor time, with the distribution of that part of the products of proletarian labor – now universalized – that cannot yet be based on the principle “to each according to his needs” taking place through a system of “labor vouchers” [Empfangsscheinen] strictly based on the number of hours each proletarian had worked. In contrast, then, to the normal working of the capitalist system, where the market determines socially necessary labor-time through exchange, post festum, in communist production that determination would be made “rationally,” by a system of accounting without the intermediary of exchange. Yet, however democratic a system of labor-time accounting undertaken by the worker’s councils might be, a key factor in determining how much of the social wealth an individual worker could receive (minus, of course, that portion of labor-time needed to produce goods and services not destined for individual consumption, the social fund) would be how much labor-time each proletarian had worked. Again, no matter how democratic the workers councils were in their accounting and in their determination of how much labor-time had to go to the social fund, such a system of labor vouchers assumed that differing needs (the size of a family, its health, etc.) were excluded as a basis for distribution. The labor voucher, then, constitutes a wage under a different name, one which takes no account of the actual needs of its recipients. Moreover, such a system still left the working class subjugated to the clock, to labor-time, one of the bases of capitalism and the value-form, and integral to its social relations.

The theoretical basis for the GIC’s vision of communism, the jewel of the historic communist left, is to be found in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), where in criticizing the newly adopted program of the German Social-Democracy, he articulated a vision of a post-revolutionary world, in which there was first a lower stage of communism, and then as a result of such a period of transition, a higher stage. It is to that vision of Marx’s, a theoretical cornerstone of traditional Marxism, as well as of the communist left, that we must now turn.

38. While many of Marx’s manuscripts for the critique of political economy, texts in which he analyzed the value-form and the real domination of capital, remained unpublished until the twentieth century, his Critique of the Gotha Programme, constituted Marx’s clearest published statement on the transition to communism. For Marx, in the lower stage of communism, “just as it emerges from capitalist society,” still stamped by its structures and social forms, “the individual producer gets back from society … exactly what he has given to it.” (1) In Marx’s vision, then, the worker will receive the full value of his/her labor. And as Marx, acknowledged: “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. … a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for the same amount in another.” (2) For Marx, then, the value-form would still preside over both production and distribution in the lower stage of communism, and only in its higher stage “can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” (3) Communism, then, as the abolition of the value-form in all its modes, would be preceded by a post-capitalist stage in which the law of value and labor-time accounting still regulated production and consumption. However, radical Marx’s prescriptions seemed in 1875, and however they may have shaped the vision of the communist left a half century later, today in a capitalist world in which the reproduction of the collective worker is threatened by the very existence of the value-form and the real subsumption of the collective worker to capital, such a perspective is completely inadequate even as a starting point for a vision of communism. Indeed, that perspective re-produces the very social forms – value, abstract labor, and labor-time accounting – that communism must immediately abolish lest capitalist social relations simply assume new political and administrative forms. If the exchange of equivalents – labor for consumer goods — still prevails, then as Marx acknowledged in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: “…equal right still constantly suffers a bourgeois limitation,” (4) and labor itself remains proletarian labor. Moreover, the universalization of the proletarian condition, and the reduction of all labor to a homogeneous abstract labor, far from striking a blow at the reign of capital and the value-form, can only perpetuate and even perfect it.

The revolutionary subject

39. What, then, are the broad outlines of Internationalist Perspective’s vision of communism, one based on the analysis of the social retrogression wrought by the present phase of the real domination of capital; a vision of communism as the antithesis of the value-form and labor-time accounting? Within the political milieu of communization theory over the past decade there has arisen a wide-ranging discussion of revolution and communism, to which we have already pointed in part one of this text. Communization theory has focused on the link between Marx’s analysis of the value-form, abstract labor, and the historical trajectory of capital in the present epoch, and the tasks of revolution and the understanding of communism.

With respect to revolution, there is a tendency within the communization milieu to question whether the working class today can even be the “subject” of revolution. At a meeting to present the journal SIC in Athens in 2012, Blaumachen pointed to some basic characteristics of the current cycle of struggles: “The first is the decline, to the point of extinction today, of the workers’ identity. There is no longer any prospect on the basis of any workers’ identity. This, however, is the revolutionary dynamic of present struggles, which in several cases brings to the surface the drastic refusal of the proletarian condition (struggles without demands, and struggles with demands that develop into violent conflicts without a prospect of compromise).” (5) Who, then is engaged in the struggles if it is not the collective worker? The objective of the struggle, conscious or not at its outset, is not the perpetuation of the proletarian condition, wage-labor, and the class engaged in struggle has an identity which will become increasingly conscious as struggles broaden and expand, for if it does not, those struggles will be crushed or recuperated by capital. For us, that identity, as a collective worker, however submerged it is by the subjectivation of the worker by capital, as a consumer, a citizen, or on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity, (another facet of capital’s real domination), is not a fait accompli, a definitive triumph of capital, and certainly not cause for celebration by communists. It is true that the social physiognomy of the collective worker in the old industrial heartlands of the “West” has been transformed since the 1970’s, and the beginning of the end of the Fordist epoch there. (6) But in that same social space new industries, new modes for the production of value and its extraction from the collective worker have arisen, and with it new possibilities for proletarian class struggle against the ravages of capitalist crisis. And in that social space too, the diminution of the Fordist mass worker, has also led to the creation of a planet of slums in which a huge mass of those excluded from permanent jobs and now marginalized constitute another segment of the collective worker. At the same time, in the vast social space dominated by a peasant mass only half a century ago (China, Korea, South-East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, Latin America, and parts of Africa) both extractive and manufacturing industries have arisen, and with them the creation of new centers of proletarian labor. It is that very identity as a collective worker on the basis of which a refusal of the continuation of the proletarian condition can emerge.

For Blaumachen, and some others within the communization milieu, though, it seems as if the working class has been liquidated, liquidated by capital economically, politically, and in terms of its very identity. Indeed that view has given rise to a theory of the present epoch as the “era of riots,” with a focus on the urban riots of those excluded from proletarian labor, whose riots often take the form of looting and the destruction of “things;” frequently the destruction of the buildings in which the inadequate state institutions which contain the excluded are located (schools, day care centers, recreational centers, etc.) More recently with the eruption of popular struggles in Turkey, Brazil, Chile, rebellions of youth, and especially students, occupying the streets and public spaces, typically involving democratic demands, have come to the fore, and are being incorporated into the theory of the era of riots. That such riots are expressions of the rage, the anger, the frustration, and revolt of strata of the collective worker; that they are the direct result of the depredations of capital, and of the operation of the law of value, seems clear. However, two fundamental questions arise. First, limited to the excluded and to youth/students, what perspective is there for the transformation of riots or popular struggles into communist revolution? Second, why has the proletariat at the “point of production” seemingly been “banished” from a revolutionary upheaval, in this purported “era of riots,” by some communizers? The riots of the excluded, however violent they are, have been contained (in France, the UK, more recently in Sweden, for example), and have neither posed a threat to capital and its state, nor generalized, or even assumed the temporary form of local communes. The youth/student struggles have been explicitly democratic in their demands, apart from small groups of anarchists (the black blocs), and in that respect resemble traditional demand struggles; indeed in Greece, Turkey, and Brazil they have drawn in the trade union confederations in symbolic (typically one day) “general strikes,” the outcome of which has been their recuperation and incorporation into the democratic structures of the capitalist state – processes through which the power [pouvoir] of capital vastly increases. What is too often missing in these popular struggles, what prevents them from escaping the control of capital, is the absence of that kind of discussion and debate in the occupied spaces in which it is capitalist social relations themselves, and not simply corruption, greed, and authoritarian rule, that is put in question.

Though the point of production today is global, and while it increasingly involves intellectual, and not just manual, labor, it is no less central to capitalism as a social formation than it was a century ago. And the role of the collective worker at the point of production will be decisive in the unfolding of the revolutionary upheavals to come. It is at the key points of production and the communication “circuits” that are vital to it, that decisive blows against capital and its social forms can alone be struck.

Such blows, however, depend on more than just the degradation of existence under modern capitalism. The subjectivation of the collective worker, its production as a subject — indeed of humankind — by capital, its cultural and political subjugation , the difficulties of the collective worker in seeing that the value-form is historical, not “natural,” and that its continued existence entails ever-deepening crises, are all formidable obstacles to the development of its consciousness, and the strongest weapons that capital possesses. So long as the roots of these struggles are seen to be national or racial oppression, or authoritarian and non-democratic political rule, capitalism can, and will, contain and recuperate them. Here the very class lines that the historical communist left so courageously drew with respect to nationalism, the left, and democracy, need to be acknowledged, and drawn upon, by those who espouse communization today. While the “logic” of capital, and its unfolding, raises doubts and questions, those doubts and questions need a clear theoretical response, and its dissemination, if the “theology” of capital is to be shattered. The renaissance of Marxist theory, to which Internationalist Perspective is committed, the analysis of the actual historical trajectory of capitalism in the present period, one unshackled from the dogmas of traditional Marxism, is one element of any challenge to the modes of subjectivation of the collective worker that capitalist social relations have generated.

No Flight Backwards

40. Within this same communization milieu, there have also been tendencies to confuse the immediacy of communism with a vision of its instantaneity, (7) to which must also be added a tendency to claim that communism will not know production. Thus, some communizers (Théorie Communiste, for example) have insisted on a distinction between “production” and “infinite human activity,” with the latter never taking the form of “… ‘products,’ for that would raise the question of their appropriation or their transfer under some given mode.” (8) Is it possible to envisage human existence without some mode for the production of “things” and their distribution? The “Friends of the Classless Society” have seen here “a steady drift towards mysticism, ultimately driven by fear of the concept of production ….” (9) The identification of production with labor and capitalism, and the objection to the materialization of human activity in “products,” seems specious to us. Is a house, clothes, food, clean water, all products, all necessary to human existence, to be rejected in the name of a vague concept of “infinite human activity”? Such a view smacks of the equation of objectivation with alienation. But all human activity, all praxis, all techné, all poïesis, yields objectivations, the “products” of action in which a material or social form is given to one’s human powers of expression. So too, will communist human activity produce objectivations, but those objectivations will not be subsumed by the value-form or subjected to labor-time accounting. It is on that basis that Marx’s “social individual” can and will emerge and flourish.

41. Beyond that philosophical issue, however, the “landscape,” physical and human, that a communist revolution will confront will demand an enormous activity of production, born of the need to repair the destructive effects of the social retrogression and ecological destruction wrought by capital. Capital has created a science and technology yoked to the value-form. Its global spread is fast creating a planet of slums. Vast components of the collective worker have become permanently superfluous, expelled from the site of production, their standard of living rapidly declining. To overcome the effects of that social and material devastation, and to assure a decent life for the world’s population, humankind will have to engage in the production that such an undertaking entails. And that communist production will need to take place globally, its spread across the world being a primary goal. That production cannot simply be local; indeed it will require organization, just as the sites of production in each locale will, and the decisions regarding the work to be done will need to be organized by the collective worker. Here the distinction between production and productivity becomes crucial. Production is inseparable from human action, though its different modes and social forms are historically specific. Productivity, in a capitalist society, is a standard for measuring the speed with which production is accomplished. It is this capitalist productivity, with its basis in the extraction of surplus-value from the collective worker, and the real subsumption of labor to capital and the “clock” of socially necessary labor-time, that must be immediately abolished, not the production of the very things without which humankind can neither exist nor survive, or the objectivations that satisfy its communal, intellectual, and creative needs. Capital as a moving contradiction, its very transformation from a mode of production based on the formal domination of capital to one increasingly based on the real domination of capital, articulated in the first two parts of this text, has been predicated on the project of always producing more value in a given period of time by the development of new technologies; increasingly relying on the extraction of relative surplus-value as opposed to a reliance on the extraction of absolute surplus-value. The real domination of capital depends on increasing the productivity of labor. And that entails a constant effort to reduce the time of both production and circulation of commodities. One facet of that effort, as Marx pointed out, is capital’s drive to overcome every spatial barrier or limit: “Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” (10) Capitalist productivity, then, has as its sole aim to increase surplus labor; surplus labor time.

By contrast, communism is predicated on the creation of disposable time for every human being, the creation of “not-labour time” the prospect of which the very trajectory of capitalism has made an objective-real possibility. In contrast to capitalism, where the human being is subsumed under labor, where “[t]he most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools,” (11) and where the development of the productive forces is yoked to the insatiable drive to valorize value, in communism the creation of disposable time means the “… the development of the individual’s full productive forces,” (12) the all-around development of the human being and his/her capacity for life in all its dimensions. Yet communism in not a flight backwards to primitive means of production or conditions of work, let alone a Woodstockian vision of paradise. Nor will communism ignore the need for an “economy of time” The time of productivity as it has historically developed in capitalism is capital-time, a concept of time linked to capitalist social relations of production. Communism, as Marx pointed out in one of his few explicit discussions of what he termed a future “communal production,” by contrast, will know a different concept of time, though its determination will remain essential: “The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle, etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on an economization of time.” (13)

Where exchange and the market make production social under capitalism, production and work will become directly social in communism, and the collective worker will need to fashion and create the actual structures and organs through which decisions will be made. And here, past history, even the history of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917 – given the vast changes in the landscape of capitalism – provides us with no guaranteed blueprint.

42. The abolition of the value-form is the immediate task of the revolution, not the culmination of a period of transition as the historical communist left had maintained. What must be immediately abolished, then, is the reduction of human activity to abstract labor, the social substance of value, and its measurement by socially necessary labor-time, which is the historically specific social form in which labor exists in capitalist society. That also entails the abolition of a mode of the distribution of goods through labor-time accounting. Where shortages exist, as one would expect in a planet devastated by capitalism and its exactions (wars, the marginalization of masses of human beings, ecological catastrophes), the rationing of scarce goods on an equitable basis, taking into account need, would be an alternative more in keeping with the goal of communism than a mode of distribution based on labor-time accounting. The revolution must also entail the self-abolition of the proletariat, a class inseparable from wage-labor and the commodity form, not its enshrinement as a purported ruling class, and the universalization of its condition. It is, then, in the very course of the revolutionary upheaval that communism occurs.

Communism is not some utopian project disconnected from the actual contradictions of capitalism and its inability to provide the material conditions for the reproduction of humankind. The ability of the collective worker to overthrow capitalism and its social relations of production is directly linked to the very structuration of capital, and to the social retrogression that it has produced. The impossibility for capital to reproduce the proletarian condition as it had historically developed, the massive and permanent expulsion of proletarian labor from the economy, even as capitalism spreads to every corner of the globe, the creation of a vast planet of slums in both the ‘first’ and the ‘third’ worlds, and the rapidly expanding ecological catastrophes directly linked to the reign of capital, are all due to the continued existence of the value-form. It is those very real historical and material conditions that have made communism the immediate task of revolution today.

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NOTES

1. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx, The First International and After (Penguin Books), p.346. This would be the basis for the GIC’s vision of communism as well.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. p. 347.

4. Ibid., p.346

5. “Presentation of the Sic journal in Athens”

6. To take a striking example, at Fiat’s main plant, Mirafiori, in Torino, 50 thousand workers were employed in the 1970’s; by contrast before the most recent layoffs, the figure was under 6 thousand.

7. Bruno Astarian, within the communization tendency, has pointed to that confusion in his “Communization as a Way Out of the Crisis,”

8. “Self-organisation is the first act of revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome,” p.39. This text can be read on libcom This is not the place for a detailed examination of the rich content of the discussions within the communization milieu, a task to which IP shall return.

9. “On Communization and Its Theorists”, Kosmoprolet, 3, Fall 2011.

10. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books, p. 524. With the incorporation of the whole globe into a single capitalist system, attendant on the development of the computer and the world-wide web, we now live with the full impact of that annihilation of space by time.

11. Ibid. pp. 708-709. The micro-computer and cell phone connect the worker to his job twenty-four hours a day.

13. Ibid. pp. 172-173.

MORE ON THE TRANSITION TO COMMUNISM

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. ¹Fredo 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 20^th 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.

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

Communist Transition: Debates Between IDA and IP

By Fredocorvo

This bundle was published on the site of the group Internationalist Perspective (IP), and consists of texts by this group and by Initiative Demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung (IDA) . GIK of GIC goes for Internationale Groep(en) van Communisten, and its main publication was Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, 2nd Ed. 1935. (PDF). As a printed book or e-book: Amazon.com.

Introduction

The bundle contains a useful and serious debate. Both sides reject state capitalism, party dictatorship, and the identification of communism with nationalization. Both sides also understand that the Russian experience cannot be repeated as a model. IDA rightly insists that the revolutionary working class must think through production, distribution, social accounting, and the danger of a return to state economy. IP rightly warns that a merely technical or administrative theory of transition can reproduce capitalist categories under another name.

However, the debate also reveals a deeper problem. IP’s critique of labor-time accounting often moves from necessary warnings to an abstract and moralized picture of communism. It tends to present the abolition of labor, value, the state, and restricted access to goods as an immediate qualitative leap. This produces 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.

IDA’s position is not free from weaknesses. It sometimes defends labor-time accounting too broadly and does not always clearly distinguish the proletarian bastion from the later global transition. Still, IDA is stronger when it insists that the proletariat needs practical forms of social accounting and distribution to prevent the return of specialists, bureaucrats, and state managers. IP is stronger when it warns against turning the GIC’s Fundamental Principles into an orthodoxy. The task is not to choose one-sidedly between accounting and immediate communization, but to clarify the stages, dangers, and material conditions of the transition.

1. A Necessary but Limited Starting Point: IDA’s Critique of “Communization”

IDA writes:

“Your communization theory has no concept of social planning and social accounting and therefore no answer to the question how the workers will stay in charge and be the subject of a total social planning process. This is what labor time accounting is about.”

This is a strong objection. A revolution that destroys the bourgeois state but cannot organize production, distribution, and consumption will rapidly face chaos, scarcity, and the reappearance of special bodies claiming to “manage” society. Such bodies may present themselves as experts, emergency committees, revolutionary governments, or technical planners. Their social function would be similar: they would stand above the producers.

From a council-communist standpoint, this danger is real. The Russian Revolution showed that when workers lose control in the workplaces and councils, the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a dictatorship over the proletariat. Labor-time accounting, in the GIC’s sense, is not merely a bookkeeping technique. It is an attempt to place the administration of production in the hands of the associated producers themselves.

But IDA’s formulation also needs qualification. Labor-time accounting is not “the” answer to every problem of transition. It is a possible and necessary communist measure under certain conditions. It requires functioning workplaces, reliable administration, a minimum regularity in production and distribution, and sufficient control by the councils. It cannot be applied mechanically in every region, sector, or emergency situation. The proletarian bastion may still need rationing, receipts, barter, limited money use under strict council control, and free distribution of certain goods and services.

IDA is therefore correct against vague communization rhetoric, but would be wrong if labor-time accounting were treated as an all-purpose solution. The transition is not made with one instrument. It is a process of class power using different instruments according to the concrete conditions of struggle.

2. IP’s Correct Warning Against Orthodoxy

IP writes:

“We cannot accept that a text such as the GIK’s Fundamental Principles becomes some kind of orthodoxy.”

This warning should be accepted. The GIC’s work is a major contribution, but not a sacred text. It developed Marx’s remarks on labor certificates by drawing lessons from the defeats of 1917–1923. It correctly rejected Bolshevik state capitalism and placed the administration of production in the hands of the workers themselves. But it also left important questions underdeveloped: war, isolation, money, rationing, scarcity, uneven development, the world market, and the specific problems of the proletarian stronghold.

The problem is that IP does not merely reject orthodoxy. It often replaces one danger with another. Instead of treating labor-time accounting as a transitional communist measure with limits, IP tends to reject it because it does not already correspond to a higher phase of communism. In doing so, IP risks measuring the first moments of transition by the standards of a much later stage.

Marx’s point in the Critique of the Gotha Program was precisely that a new society emerging from capitalism is still marked by the old society. Equal right, labor certificates, and deductions for social funds are not the final form of communism. They are lower-stage measures. To reject them simply because they still carry traces of bourgeois right is to avoid the problem Marx was trying to address: how the working class begins the transformation before the full material and cultural conditions of higher communism exist.

3. The First Moralistic Leap: “The Human Community Will Take Care of the Human Community”

IP writes:

“The human community will take care of the human community.”

As an aspiration, this sentence expresses the communist goal. As an argument about the transition, it is too abstract. The human community does not yet exist at the beginning of the revolution. It is produced through struggle, council power, transformation of production, and the gradual overcoming of class relations, scarcity, competition, and inherited ideology.

The proletarian bastion will not be a peaceful human community. It will be a territory of class dictatorship, civil war, sabotage, scarcity, and uneven consciousness. It will have to feed the population, defend itself, maintain production, reorganize distribution, integrate unemployed and displaced people, confront petty-bourgeois resistance, and prevent the emergence of a separate state apparatus.

Under such conditions, saying that “the human community will take care of the human community” does not answer the concrete questions:

Which organs decide priorities when food, medicine, housing, transport, and weapons are all scarce?

How is hoarding prevented?

How are bourgeois reserves and hidden stocks seized and distributed?

How are those able to work integrated into production or defense?

How are regions with different levels of development and destruction coordinated?

How is consumption linked to the available social labor without recreating wage labor?

The phrase therefore has a moralistic tendency. It substitutes the ethical image of a future community for the difficult material process through which such a community can arise.

4. The Second Moralistic Leap: Faith in Revolutionary Transformation of Attitudes

IP writes:

“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.”

This statement contains a real insight. Revolutions do change people. They break habits of submission, create solidarity, and open forms of collective initiative that are impossible in normal capitalist life. Marx’s reference to the working class ridding itself of the “muck of ages” is important.

But IP turns this insight into a near-guarantee. Enthusiasm and collective spirit may develop, but they will not develop evenly, everywhere, or immediately. They will also be interrupted by hunger, exhaustion, military pressure, destruction, local egoism, fear, inherited patriarchy, nationalism, religious ideology, bureaucratic habits, and the pressure of specialists.[the muck of ages}

The transition cannot be based on distrust of the workers. But it also cannot be based on an idealized image of the workers as already transformed into fully communist individuals. 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.

This is why labor certificates, rationing, and other transitional measures cannot be dismissed as merely coercive remnants. Their function depends on which class organs control them. Under a state bureaucracy, they become instruments of domination. Under workers’ councils, they can be instruments for preventing exploitation, hoarding, privilege, and bureaucratic monopolization.

5. “We Think the Revolution Would Skip That So-Called Lower Phase”

IP writes:

“We think the revolution would skip that so-called ‘lower phase’ of communism.”

This is one of the most problematic statements in the bundle. It openly collapses the stages of the transition. It assumes that the revolution can pass directly from capitalism to something close to higher communism, because modern productivity, automation, and information technology supposedly make Marx’s lower phase obsolete.

Fred: revolution is pol victory over the state after which econ transition begins. Prol bastion in cap world. Rev short then change nec limited. Still a lot of muck of ages.

But the lower phase is not merely a question of technical productivity. It is also a question of social relations, class power, world scale, uneven development, inherited divisions of labor, destruction caused by war, ecological damage, and the persistence of bourgeois habits and counterrevolutionary forces.

How do these justify lower-stage vouchers system?

Even if today’s productive forces are technically capable of feeding, housing, and caring for humanity, they exist in capitalist forms. They are organized through world-market dependence, imperialist hierarchies, intellectual property, military logistics, finance, corporate control, fragile supply chains, and ecological destruction. A revolution does not inherit neutral productive forces. It inherits capitalist productive forces that must be reorganized, repaired, redirected, and partially dismantled.

True but

This is why the transition cannot simply “skip” the lower phase. It can shorten certain tasks compared with the nineteenth century. It can immediately abolish wage labor where council power and social accounting permit. It can provide many services freely. It can use modern communication and computation. But it cannot abolish scarcity, unevenness, coercion against the bourgeoisie, or the need for social accounting by declaration.

The lower phase is not a dogma. It is the name for the fact that communism emerges from capitalism and still bears its marks. To deny this is not more radical. It is less materialist.

6. The Problem of Basic Needs and “Free Access”

IP writes:

“It would be a dangerous mistake to restrict access to goods to those who have contributed council-approved socially necessary labor time.”

This warning is legitimate if directed against a crude system in which non-workers are left to hunger. No council-communist conception should defend such a system. Children, the sick, elderly people, disabled people, pregnant women, caregivers, displaced people, and others not directly engaged in production must receive from social funds or free distribution. Even in Marx’s lower phase, not all social product is individually distributed according to labor contribution. Deductions are made for common needs.

But IP turns a necessary criticism into a false opposition. The real question is not “labor certificates or starvation.” The real question is how a revolutionary society combines:

individual consumption linked to labor contribution where appropriate;

social funds for those unable to work;

free distribution of certain goods and services;

rationing under conditions of scarcity;

collective decisions on priorities;

gradual expansion of free access where production and consciousness allow it.

Several authors, especially Hermann Lueer, have rightly warned that making “a lot” free too quickly can create indifference toward collective decision-making at workplaces and open space for specialists to take over. This does not mean free distribution is rejected. It means free distribution is not automatically communist. It can also be a form of emergency administration, charity, population control, or bureaucratic power.

IP writes:

“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 answer is that “meeting everyone’s needs” is not a simple distributional act. Needs are socially formed, historically variable, and materially limited. The question is not only what people need, but what society can produce, under what conditions, with which labor, with which resources, and with what ecological consequences. Without a general social measure, these decisions risk falling either into moral appeals or into expert administration.

Labor-time accounting is not perfect. But it gives producers and consumers a transparent way to compare alternatives: more free time or more products; more housing or more transport; more immediate consumption or more ecological repair; more defense production or more consumption goods. A purely needs-based language without a measure of social cost can hide the real choices society must make.

7. Rationing as a Supposed Alternative

IP writes:

“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.”

This sounds humane, but it is incomplete. Rationing is not a general form of communism. It is an emergency form of distribution under scarcity. It may be necessary for food, medicine, housing, energy, transport, or other scarce goods. But rationing requires decisions about categories, quantities, eligibility, priorities, enforcement, and adaptation. These are not automatically less coercive than labor certificates.

A rationing system can also create bureaucracy, black markets, resentment, and personal dependence on distribution officials. It may become more statist than labor-time accounting if the councils do not control it directly. The question is therefore not whether rationing is “equitable” in intention, but how it is controlled, by whom, under what conditions, and for how long.

In a proletarian bastion, rationing may be unavoidable. But it should be recognized as a measure forced by shortage, not as the immediate embodiment of communism. As soon as scarcity of a product is overcome, rationing of that product should end. Where free distribution is possible, it can expand. Where labor-time accounting is possible, it can help social planning. The transition requires a combination of forms, subordinated to council power.

8. “The Revolution Must Abolish Labor Immediately”

IP writes:

“The revolution must abolish it immediately.”

Here IP refers to labor as abstract labor, the capitalist form of work measured by socially necessary labor time. The intention is correct: communism must abolish wage labor, abstract labor as value-producing labor, and the domination of the clock over human life.

But the formulation is too abrupt. Productive activity cannot be abolished. Nor can the need to economize time disappear. Even Marx, in the Grundrisse, noted that communal production must still economize time because less time required for necessary production creates more time for other forms of development. The abolition of capitalist labor does not mean the abolition of all calculation of effort, time, resources, and social priorities.

IP writes:

“Work will be rewarding in itself and leisure will often be creative, productive.”

This may describe a higher communist tendency, but it cannot be presupposed at the beginning. Some work will be dangerous, exhausting, monotonous, dirty, or urgent. Repairing infrastructure, cleaning toxic waste, producing medicine, maintaining transport, caring for the wounded, and defending the revolution may not immediately become self-realizing activity. They may be necessary social tasks.

A revolutionary society should transform work from the beginning: shorten hours, rotate tasks, abolish managerial despotism, unite education and production, reduce the separation between mental and manual labor, and let producers control methods and goals. But to say that work will quickly cease to be labor risks denying the hard material content of the transition.

9. Value, Labor-Time Accounting, and the World Scale

IP writes:

“What Marx proposed in ‘Gotha’, what the GIK elaborated in ‘Fundamental Principles’ amounts to value exchange without money.”

This criticism deserves careful treatment. Marx did say that in the lower phase “the same principle” operates as in commodity exchange insofar as equal labor is exchanged for equal labor. He also called this a bourgeois limitation. IP is right to emphasize that labor certificates are not the higher stage of communism.

However, the conclusion that labor-time accounting equals value production is too quick. Under capitalism, value is not simply labor time. It is labor time expressed through commodity exchange, private production, market validation, wage labor, and competition. Labor becomes socially necessary behind the backs of producers through the market. In GIC-style labor-time accounting, the aim is the opposite: production is directly social, the market is abolished, labor power is not sold, and accounting is controlled by councils.

The remaining bourgeois limitation lies in equal right and individual consumption linked to labor contribution. That limitation is real. But it is not identical with capitalist value production. It is a transitional form that still bears marks of the old society while undermining its foundations.

The distinction becomes clearer when we consider world scale. As long as a proletarian bastion exists beside a capitalist world market, it cannot fully abolish value externally. It may suppress value internally through council accounting and communist measures, but it still confronts the world market, foreign trade, military pressure, scarcity, and unequal development. Only when workers’ councils hold power globally can value begin to disappear decisively as a world relation.

IP tends to skip this distinction. It speaks of immediate abolition of value without adequately distinguishing:

the first revolutionary stronghold;

the spread of council power;

the global defeat of capitalism;

the later withering away of bourgeois right and coercive functions.

This neglect of stages makes the critique formally radical but materially weak.

10. The State and the Semi-State

IP writes:

“The state must die and not be resurrected.”

This is correct as a final aim and as a warning against Bolshevik state capitalism. The bourgeois state cannot be taken over and used for communism. It must be destroyed. Any apparatus standing above the councils is a mortal danger.

But IP then writes:

“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.”

This argument identifies almost every form of collective rule enforcement with the state. But a proletarian dictatorship cannot avoid coercion. It must suppress the bourgeoisie, prevent counterrevolution, stop sabotage, seize stocks, control arms, and defend the revolution. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is which class exercises it, through which organs, and whether those organs remain subordinated to the mass activity of the producers.

What hij opsomt is part of the revol period If revol confronted with ctr rev violence, evidently must defend itself ,

There is a real danger that a semi-state becomes a state over society. But the solution is not to deny the need for transitional coercive functions. The solution is to keep these functions under direct council control, to arm the proletariat, to prevent a separate bureaucracy, and to reduce coercive functions as the material basis for them disappears.

IP’s position risks confusing the necessary destruction of the bourgeois state with the immediate disappearance of all organized coercion. This is not a materialist theory of transition. It is an ethical rejection of coercion before the class conditions that require coercion have disappeared.

11. The Utopian Use of Modern Technology

IP writes:

“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.”

This is plausible. Modern information technology can help planning, communication, stock control, logistics, and democratic access to data. But it cannot replace class power and social accounting. AI and digital systems are not neutral instruments that automatically make labor certificates obsolete or allow society to “skip” the lower phase.

Current technologies are embedded in capitalist infrastructures: data centers, military research, corporate platforms, global supply chains, intellectual property, surveillance systems, rare-earth extraction, energy-intensive computation, and hierarchical technical expertise. They must be transformed, not simply liberated.

A council society may use advanced digital systems. But it will still need to decide what to produce, what to stop producing, how much labor is available, what resources are scarce, what ecological limits exist, and how urgent needs are ranked. Technology can assist these decisions. It cannot abolish the need for them.

12. IP’s Strongest Point: Production Must Change in Content

IP writes:

“Today, we don’t need the productive forces to grow, we need them to change in content and purpose.”

This is one of IP’s strongest arguments. A communist transition today cannot be imagined as the simple expansion of inherited industrial capacity. Much capitalist production must disappear: arms production, advertising, finance, surveillance, planned obsolescence, luxury waste, destructive transport systems, and bureaucratic duplication. Other sectors must expand: housing, healthcare, ecological repair, public infrastructure, education, food production, and care.

This point corrects any crude reading of the GIC that would treat the existing productive apparatus as if it only needed different accounting. The transformation of production must include its content, purpose, organization, technology, and ecological basis.

But this argument does not refute labor-time accounting. On the contrary, such a transformation requires knowledge of labor, resources, time, capacities, and alternatives. A society that wants to reduce destructive production and expand useful production needs a transparent way to compare the social costs of different paths. Labor time cannot be the only parameter. Physical quantities, ecological limits, health effects, skills, urgency, and local needs must also be counted. But labor time remains an important measure, especially in a society trying to consciously reduce necessary labor and expand free human development.

13. IDA’s Weakness: Insufficient Distinction Between Bastion and Developed Communism

IDA writes:

“The concept of productivity and the ‘capitalist clock’ remain useful in that process.”

This formulation is risky. Productivity as capitalist compulsion must be abolished. Time economy remains necessary, but it cannot retain the capitalist form of the clock as domination. A council society should know how much time different activities require, but not subordinate producers to time as an alien power.

IDA also writes:

“For us, the question of how to ration goods is the core question of a revolutionary period and at the center of the class struggle during this period.”

This is partly correct under conditions of scarcity, but too narrow if generalized. The core question is not rationing as such. The core question is proletarian power over production and distribution. Rationing is one possible instrument. Labor-time accounting is another. Free distribution is another. Receipts, unpaid transfers, and limited money under council control may also appear in particular conditions.

IDA’s best arguments would become stronger if they explicitly distinguished:

the proletarian bastion under civil war and world-market pressure;

the spread of council power internationally;

the global victory of the councils;

the gradual disappearance of value, classes, coercion, and bourgeois right;

the higher phase of communism.

Without this distinction, labor-time accounting can appear as a timeless model. With this distinction, it appears as a transitional weapon of council power.

14. IP’s Weakness: Substituting the Higher Phase for the Transition

IP writes:

“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.”

This is the clearest expression of IP’s utopian neglect of stages. It is polite in tone, but theoretically weak. “Because we must” expresses urgency, not possibility. “Because we can” asserts what must be demonstrated.

The need for communism is indeed more urgent than ever. But urgency does not abolish mediation. Climate destruction, war, supply-chain fragility, mass displacement, and social decay make communism necessary. They also make the transition more difficult. These same conditions increase the likelihood of shortages, local fragmentation, emergency measures, and attempts by specialists or armed groups to monopolize power.

To “go straight for the real thing” may sound radical, but it can leave the workers unprepared for the concrete tasks of holding power. If the councils do not answer questions of food, energy, housing, defense, healthcare, transport, and coordination, others will answer them. Those others may be state remnants, technical managers, military organs, populist leaders, or black-market forces.

The transition must aim at the higher phase from the beginning. But aiming at it is not the same as already living in it.

15. A More Adequate Position

A more adequate council-communist position can be stated as follows.

The revolution begins where the working class destroys the bourgeois state and exercises power through its councils. In the first phase, this may occur only in one region or several regions: the proletarian bastion. The bastion must defend itself, prevent the regrouping of bourgeois forces, and reorganize production and distribution under council control.

In this phase, communist measures are necessary. Labor-time accounting should be introduced as soon as its preconditions exist: functioning administration, council control of workplaces, reliable production and distribution, and the ability to replace money as the general regulator. It abolishes wage labor only if the workers themselves control production and distribution. Otherwise it can become another form of domination.

Rationing may be necessary under scarcity, but it is not communism. Free distribution may be necessary and desirable for certain goods and services, but it is not automatically communism either. Money may still be used in restricted situations, especially in relation to areas outside the bastion, but only under strict council control. The central bank and money creation must not become the base of a new government over society.

The global victory of workers’ councils marks a decisive turning point. Since value is constituted on the world market, its full disappearance becomes possible only when capitalist world relations are destroyed. But even then, classes, counterrevolutionary tendencies, uneven development, and inherited social forms do not vanish overnight. The proletarian dictatorship withers away only as its material basis disappears.

The higher phase of communism is not a moral promise but the result of a long transformation: the overcoming of wage labor, value, classes, the state, the opposition between mental and manual labor, and the subordination of individuals to the division of labor. Only then can the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need” become the normal form of social life.

Conclusion

The bundle is valuable because it clarifies real divisions inside the communist left. IDA insists on social accounting, planning, and the danger of a return to state economy. IP insists on the abolition of value, wage forms, and state power. Both concerns are necessary. But neither is sufficient in a one-sided form.

IDA’s weakness is the risk of presenting labor-time accounting too generally, without always locating it within the stages of the transition. IP’s weakness is more serious in this bundle: it often criticizes transitional measures from the standpoint of a higher communist stage, then presents that higher stage as immediately reachable. This leads to moralistic statements about the “human community,” revolutionary enthusiasm, and the immediate abolition of labor, while underestimating scarcity, civil war, uneven consciousness, world-market pressure, and the danger of specialists or state remnants taking control.

A polite but firm criticism must therefore say: IP’s critique usefully warns against turning labor-time accounting into an orthodoxy, but it does not solve the problems it raises. Rationing, free access, liberated technology, and collective enthusiasm are not enough. Without a concrete theory of the proletarian bastion, council dictatorship, social accounting, and the global stages of transition, the call to “go straight for the real thing” remains an aspiration rather than a strategy.

The transition from capitalism to communism begins not with an ethical declaration of human community, but with the dictatorship of the councils in a part of the world. It advances by extending that power internationally, transforming production and distribution, suppressing the bourgeoisie, preventing the rise of a new state power, and developing communist relations step by step. It reaches a decisive turning point with the worldwide power of the councils. It culminates only in the higher stage of communism, where the association of free and equal producers no longer needs capital, wage labor, value, classes, or a state standing above society.

Fredo Corvo, 13-5-2026

Contribution to the discussion on “labor”

By Raoul Victor

“Which labor [travail] do we want to put an end to ?” The question posed by Maxime, touches on a fundamental aspect of the revolutionary project: the organization of the production of the means of subsistence in a post-capitalist, a communist society.

Maxime wrote: “In our recent exchange of ideas, we have often come back to the distinction between “liberating labor” and the “ liberation of human beings from labor”; put somewhat differently, is the correct revolutionary slogan: “the abolition of wage-labor” (capitalist in its ultimate form) or this other one: “the abolition of labor as a whole”?”

As I have already pointed out, this question can get lost in sterile misunderstandings if we do not agree on the meaning of “labor”, if we do not specify at every opportunity in what sense this term is being used. For example, one finds in Marx, on the one hand, the idea of the necessity for “the abolition of labor” in a fully communist society and, on the other hand, the idea that “labor” will become “the first need of life”. If one does not understand the word “labor” in its different senses in each formulation, one is in the presence of a gross contradiction. At another level, the slogan (which Maxime recalled), “No more labor!” written on the walls of Paris in May 1968 by the Situationists, for the “uninitiated”, could mean “don’t produce enough to meet your needs or those of society” or even “do not do anything that requires a sustained effort”.

The word “labor” is particularly ambiguous, it has a huge number of meanings and this makes it essential not to get lost. This is not to reduce a complex problem to a simple question of semantics, but to get rid of semantic ambiguities to better address this issue. For purposes of the issue that concerns us here, I believe it essential to distinguish three principal meanings of the word “labor” [le travail].

Labor as diligent [assidu] effort

The first is very general, not necessarily economic: “Activity involving mental or physical exertion in order to accomplish/achieve a result.” (Oxford Dictionary).

The emphasis is on the fact that it is a sustained effort for a purpose, irrespective of the type of effort and whatever the objective pursued. When the poet takes up his pen, when the child begins his homework, or when the farmer gets on his tractor to plow, one says they are starting to “work” [travail].

Maxime repeatedly alludes to “effort”, “diligent effort” suggesting – it seems to me — that it is in this sense that Marx uses the word “labor” when he wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts that “universal history is nothing but the generation of man by human labor” (PL, II, p. 89) (*). For Marx, — Maxime writes — “the exercise of freedom and creation requires diligent effort and can, therefore, contain less pleasant moments where you have to fight the urge to relax. This effort, compelled only by our humanity (as distinct from Nature), is its origin.” (Maxime 7feb15)

Labor as “vital activity”, “productive life”

The second meaning is more restrictive, more “economic”, but still very general. It refers to productive activity of the means necessary for the subsistence of the human being. Marx, in the 1844 Manuscripts, spoke of “vital activity, productive life.” (PL II, p. 63) It focuses on the differences with other activities such as artistic activities, “leisure” in general, which are not, at least directly, necessary to the production of means of subsistence. With this meaning the concept of “labor” refers to a type of activity that exists, even if in very different forms in every human society, since no one can live without means of subsistence. It is in this sense that it is used, for example, for the hunter-gatherers in the debate around the theses of Marshall Sahlins (emphasizing the very minor part played by “labor”, the time dedicated to hunting and gathering in the life of primitive communities). I think it is in this sense too that Marx employs it when he writes, describing “a higher phase of communist society“: “when labor has become not only a way to live, but the first need of life.” “Labor” which for Marx has become “the first need of life“, is, indeed, the productive activity of subsistence in general (“a means of living”), but freed from the alienating scourges of the past and integrated, unified, with other forms of human activity. Agricultural production will become an artistic activity at the same time as the arts become as indispensable as food. It is the same for William Morris when he describes “labor” in a post-capitalist society as “a joy”. We will return to this.

Labor as alienated activity

The third meaning of the word “labor” is even more restrictive and means productive activity of the means of subsistence, such as it has been practiced in an alienated way in class divided societies. Labor is then associated with the reality of the systems based on exploitation where it is almost exclusively carried out by the “lower” classes. Therefore, the concept of labor is likened to that of suffering. In the Bible, when they are driven out of Eden, Eve was condemned to give birth in pain (also in French and English, the word “work” or “labor” describes the process of childbirth) and Adam had to “labor” to “earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.” The word “labor” (trabajo in Spanish, trabalho in Portugese)comes from the word tripalium which means an instrument of torture for slaves (1). The word “Arbeit” in German comes from the Indo-European root orbho, and in the Slavic languages, robu, which means serf or slave. For the Roman patricians or feudal aristocrats work is ignominious. It was not until capitalism that the concept of work is “valorized” and elevated to an ideal and moral foundation of society. In its time, Protestantism did much in this direction. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Stakhanovism, just like the motto “Labor, Family, Fatherland” of the Vichy government, or the cynical “Arbeit macht frei” inscribed at the entrance of Auschwitz and Dachau, expressed the same ideology. In capitalism the dehumanization of labor is raised to its highest degree, as evidenced by today’s “anti-suicide” nets hanging on the outside walls of some factories in China.

If one understands “labor” as subsistence production under these forms of exploitation, of alienation, it is obvious that it will disappear in a post-capitalist, communist society. It is in this sense that Marx in using the word “labor” wrote in 1845: “Labor is by nature the subjugated, inhuman, antisocial, activity, determined and created by private property. Therefore, the abolition of property becomes a reality only if one conceives it as the abolition of labor.” (“The National System of Political Economy” of Friedrich List, quoted by Maxime).

The word “labor” is too saturated with what it has been for millennia of exploitation, for it to be utilized to mean the productive activity of the means of subsistence in a society freed from private property and from exploitation.

It is surprising that Marx did not feel the need to be more attentive to the ambiguity of the concept in some of his formulations. However, he addresses the issue in a note at the beginning of the first book of Capital, related to the meaning of work in Adam Smith:

“On the other hand, he [Adam Smith] insists, it is true, that all labor is only an expenditure of human labor power, as it is represented in the value of goods, but he understands this expense solely as sacrifice, a sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness, and not at the same time as a normal affirmation of life. It is true he has in view the modern wage-worker. “(PL I, p. 575.)

That recalls the reproach made by Marx to Proudhon’s “seeing in poverty only poverty.” Here, Marx criticizes Smith for not seeing in labor its aspect of a “normal affirmation of life.” Certainly he agrees with him that “he has in view the modern wage-worker” and that he is therefore at least partially right. But in doing so he affirms this idea that labor can be a vital affirmation.

In the 4th German edition of the first volume of Capital, Engels adds at that point a semantic note:

“The English language has the advantage of having two different terms for these two different aspects of labor. The labor that creates use values ​​and defines itself qualitatively is called work, in opposition to labor; the labor which creates values and is only measured quantitatively is called labor, as opposed to work.” (Engels, PL I, p. 1637).

I do not know enough about the nuances of the English language to fully determine what is at stake. The Oxford dictionary is content to define “labour” thusly: “Work, especially physical work.“

But Engels is right– if I interpret his thought correctly — to associate the aspect of labor as creator of use value to what Marx considers “normal life affirming” and to link its aspect as a creator of exchange value to that which Marx calls “abnegation … sacrifice of rest, freedom and happiness”.

But these remarks of Marx and Engels are not enough to correct the ambiguity that sometimes surrounds the use of the word labor.

Maxime agrees and proposes the following solution:

“I think, for discussion and intervention, it is advantageous to simplify things by using two non-synonymous terms: we would keep “labor” to refer to tasks related directly or indirectly to production, circulation and provision of the means of subsistence, activities undoubtedly biologically essential but not enhancing the worthiness of the human being; inhuman, then, in Marx’s sense, uninteresting, thus, to be reduced to the minimum in communism; we could adopt something like “oeuvre” — following, why not, the example of Hannah Arendt — to describe in general the activity — distinct from the previous activity – that is interesting, human, because creative, communicative, not constrained and routine, etc. No matter the choice of words, in the end, it is sufficient that they cover indisputably distinct content. ” (8feb15)

Maxime also says:

“Real human activity is creating for the pleasure of creating and to communicate with others, to flourish individually in a collectivity, to enjoy life so jubilantly with one’s companions, just in itself, without any other necessity than that. It is to affirm one’s humanity, including against nature. It is also, therefore, freedom. Freedom is the opposite of necessity which does not derive from the will of man, while necessity dictated to man by natural needs is external to him. It is extra-human in his expression of Gloses, Marx would have done better to write: “When work [oeuvre] which is no longer labor, since it’s humanly free activity, will become the first vital need”.

These lines merit more comment. The first concerns the alternative freedom/ necessity.

The alternative freedom/necessity

What Maxime considers an activity “not enhancing the worthiness of the human being, inhuman in Marx’s sense, uninteresting” is not only exploited, alienated, labor, but the production of the means of subsistence in itself, (generic labor) even in a communist society. He bases this idea – which I do not share – on the antagonistic opposition between necessity and freedom, as Marx describes it in the famous conclusion of volume III of Capital.

“In truth, the realm of freedom only starts where labor ceases to be dictated by necessity and external purposes. (…) Freedom in this domain can only consist in this: the associated producers – social human beings — rationally regulate their interchanges with Nature, bringing them under their common control, instead of being ruled by the blind forces of these exchanges; and they achieve this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that expansion of human powers which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.” (PL II, pp. 1487-1488).

The word “labor” is used here in the sense of producing sustenance in general, and not of alienated labor, as Marx describes what may be this activity when it is no longer dominated “by the blind forces of these exchanges “. However it is considered that it can not belong to the “true realm of freedom” because it is subject to “the realm of necessity.” The whole of his reasoning is based on the antinomy between freedom and necessity. But the importance, the reality of this antinomy, is largely dependent on the conditions in which it arises. Necessity is opposed to freedom insofar as it appears as a constraint from which there is no escape. This constraint is even more real than its satisfaction that involves a painful unpleasant action that we would not want to undertake if we had freedom. But if the required output is achieved under conditions where it can be fulfilling, rewarding, pleasant, “in keeping with human nature” it can become a desirable activity, chosen and freely desired.

Maxime has cited interesting extracts from the Critique of Economic Reason (Métamorphoses du travail), where André Gorz relativizes the pertinence of putting at the very heart of the problematic of labor precisely what he terms “the freedom/necessity couplet.”

“In Greek philosophy – Gorz writes — freedom and necessity were opposites. The individual became free when he was relieved of the burden of daily necessities. In so far as the extent of these necessities grew as his needs grew, self-limitation and frugality were indispensable virtues for a free man. These virtues were not, however, enough. To free the individual from the grip of necessities, these had to be assumed for free men by a group of people who, by definition, were not free: slaves and women. (…)

The only important difference from Aristotle, is that the unfolding of freedom in Marx — or in other words, in communist society, where the forces of production are fully developed – no longer presupposes that the burden of necessity should be shouldered by unfree social strata. The machine has taken the place of the slaves and the ‘associated producers’ organize themselves so as to reduce the necessary labor time ‘to a minimum,’ so that everyone can work, though only a little, and that everyone, alongside their work, can engage in activities which are themselves their own end. (…)

If, in Marx’s day, the chief opposite of freedom was necessity, this was because labor [travail] for economic ends and labor for oneself in the domestic sphere both served essentially to produce what was necessary and allowed practically no time for anything else. (…)

Now the sphere of necessity today is neither so extensive as it was in Marx’s day, nor does it have the same characteristics. Almost all of the production and jobs necessary for life are industrialized; the principal part of our needs is supplied by heteronomous labor, that is, by labor that is subject to a social division of labor, specialized and professionalized and performed with a view to commodity exchange; and neither the exchange-value of which, nor its length, nature, goal or meaning can be determined by us as sovereign individuals. …. We are therefore less in thrall to the ‘necessities’ of existence than to the external determination of our lives and our activity by the imperatives of a social apparatus of production and organization which provides willy-nilly both the essential and the superfluous, the productive and the destructive.

Therefore, in our daily experience, it is not so much the freedom/necessity distinction that is decisive, but the autonomy/heteronomy opposition. Freedom consists less (or rather consists less and less) in freeing ourselves from the labor necessary to live, and more in freeing ourselves from heteronomy, that is, in re-conquering spaces of autonomy in which we can will what we are doing.

I refer to those activities which are their own end as autonomous activities (…) because the action which realizes the goal is as much a source of satisfaction as the achievement of the goal itself. The end is reflected in the means and vice versa. There is no difference between them: I can will the goal by virtue of the intrinsic worth of the activity that realizes it, and that activity by virtue of the goal sought.”

My second comment is in relation to the idea expressed by Maxime according to which “production, circulation … and means of subsistence” is always “in Marx’s sense inhuman”, concerns the “generic” [species being] dimension of this activity.

The “generic” dimension of the production of the means of subsistence

When Marx develops in the 1844 Manuscripts the different consequences of “alienated”, “dispossessed”, labor, he highlights four effects:

“1 The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object that holds him in thrall.” His product becomes for him “contrary and hostile.”

“2. The relationship between labor and the act of production within labor; this is the relation of the worker to his own activity as alien, which is not his “own” (…) It is the self-alienation coming after the alienation of the object.“ (…)

“3. It transforms the human species being, its nature as well as its intellectual faculties, into a being alien to him, into an instrument of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.“

“4. Having been rendered foreign to the product of his labor, his life activity, his species-being, man becomes foreign to himself.” (Marx’s emphasizing).

Here, it is first the third effect of alienated labor that interests us. (We will return later to the fourth). In general, the first two aspects of alienation, relative to the product and in relation to the act of production are known and cited. This is less the case for the third, with respect to the “human species being”, “the human essence. Yet it is fundamental, and stems from the first two effects. It consists, as I understand it, in this. The true specificity of the human being, his “species” being, in relation to other animals is his ability to transform the world and consequently to transform himself, consciously, freely. It is through productive life that the human being can achieve this capability. But in alienated labor, this activity is experienced only as a way to earn his immediate living, a simple livelihood, with virtually no control over the purpose and manner of his activity. That – one’s “livelihood” — has nothing to do with the free and conscious will to achieve one’s most powerful and specific capacity: to transform the world and him/herself. His most genuine need, the most in line with one’s potential is denied, annihilated, in favor of the expedient of physical survival.

Marx wrote “productive life is the life of the species; it is life creative of life . The mode of vital activity shapes the whole character of a species, its species being …”

“It is precisely by shaping the world of objects that man begins to assert himself as a species-being. This production is his creative species life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is the realization of man’s species being. Man not only recreates himself in an intellectual way, in his consciousness, but actively, actually, and he contemplates himself in a world of his creation. By taking from man the object of his production, alienated labor steals his species-being, his true general objectivity and in stealing his inorganic body, his nature, it turns into a disadvantage the human beings advantage over the animal.

Similarly, by degrading free, creative, activity, to the rank of a means, alienated labor makes his species being into an instrument of his physical existence.

In short, because of alienation, the awareness that man has of his species being is changing to the extent that it becomes just an instrument.” (PL II, p.64)

“His labor [for the worker] is not voluntary, but forced. Forced labor is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means to satisfy needs outside of work.” (PL II, p.61)

The “need” that is not satisfied, it is the need for humans to act voluntarily by creating a “world” and themselves, through their productive activity. It is this need which Marx said, over 30 years later, that in a communist society, it will become “the first need of life“, and not just a means to live.

But to return to the original question of whether, as Maxime says, any activity that produces goods needed for subsistence is “inhuman within Marx’s meaning“,we do not see how “creative species life” could exclude all the concerns of the production of the means of subsistence merely because it corresponds to an immediate need. Production in a free society cannot deny this necessity; it integrates the effort for its satisfaction into a unified activity, across the universality of the human being.

In fact, Maxime, apparently in contradiction with what he has expressed elsewhere, also recognizes and clearly states the need for this unification:

 “Labor —writes Maxime– was an artificially separate activity (during certain developments of societies) from the rest of the activities of men, this separation having been extended by capitalism on the largest scale ever known. In this context, that separation of labor is a violent evil and the revolutionary resolution of the problem, in communism, can only return to the suppression of that separation; to its reintegration: the ‘fabrication’ at the same time at the same level, ‘objects’ of subsistence and of biological reproduction and the products of art in the broadest sense (including crafts), culture, leisure, political discussion, love, friendliness, etc. ” (“What labor do we want to put an end to ?”)

—

William Morris, who wrote about productive activity in the future society, often insisted that the upheaval of what he still calls “labor” is the change that makes “all the others possible.” (2) It is an idea that accords with what Marx wrote about the fourth effect of alienated labor, and that we have cited above:

“4. Being rendered alien to the product of his labor, his life activity, his species being, man becomes alien to man.”

Marx continues. “When face to face with himself, it is the other who is present before him. What is true of the relation of man to his labor and to himself, is true to his relation with others, and the labor and purpose of the others labor. In a general way, the proposition that man is estranged from his species-being means that men are rendered strangers to each other, and that each is rendered a stranger to the human essence.”

There can be no conscious revolution as long as men remain “strangers to each other”. On the overcoming of this atomization induced by alienated labor, of this fundamental change, depends, as Morris says, all the other changes.

This is a central, paramount question that must set the agenda from the first moments that the means of production are seized by the population. Unlike Stalinist ideologies that make the sacrifice by labor the cement of the construction of socialism, it is at the outset that the question of de-alienated productive activity must be an absolute priority.

At one point, Lenin was led to proclaim that he who does not labor should be shot on the spot. It is just the exact opposite: voluntary, free, productive activity is a prerequisite for the construction of an emancipated society.

With respect to what concerns us, thinking about what will be the future society, on what can be the revolutionary project today, it would be dangerous to confine ourselves to yet another exegesis of Marx’s texts. This focus on a future society can only be fertile in actualizing, feeding on, the abundant material productive practices developed in the present movement of industrial revolution.

The commons-based peer production as we have seen it developing for over two decades, is a real germ of what can be productive activity in a communist society. We are speaking of the voluntary, non-commodity, “non-hierarchical”, self-fulfilling production, that is at the center of the “hackers” logic; its “collaborative” practices. The concrete development of these new practices clashes with a thousand obstacles that the market and the oppressive context of the dominant system wields in order to confine them, while profiting from them. It confronts the difficulties of moving forward on issues of new organization (volunteer hierarchies, reconciling individual aspirations and collective efficiency, managing more menial tasks, etc.) with as a compass only some general principles and as a method collective experimentation, sharing without secrets, with the willingness to learn from mistakes. To pretend to address issues of “labor” in the future society, without reference to the experiences of these new practices in progress, is to deprive oneself of an indispensable source of lessons. (3)

Raoul Victor, June 2, 2015

——–

Notes

* PL II : Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Éditions Gallimard, Karl Marx, Œuvres, Tome II.

1. http://www.qualiblog.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/tripalium.png

2. See News from Nowhere, chap. XV.

3. Sebastien Brocca’s book, Utopie du logiciel libre – Du bricolage informatique à la réinvention sociale, (Éditions Le passager clandestin, 2013) is particularly profound and interesting on these issues.

On the Necessity of Developing the Productive Forces

The words “paradox” and “paradoxical” are all the rage in the media: in interviews with artists or journalists’ commentary, they are used at every turn. “A paradox is a statement that appears to be true but contains, or seems to contain, a logical contradiction, or at least a situation that contradicts common intuition.” (1) This can be seen as an expression of the fact that reality seems particularly full of “paradoxes”—contradictions (logical or intuitive)—more so than usual. In the background lies the contradiction between, on the one hand, a vague sense that the world is sinking into widespread disaster and, on the other, the observation that the technological means of production and communication that would make it possible to control and reverse the situation are developing as never before, yet nothing seems to be improving—quite the contrary.

From a Marxist perspective, this is merely a particularly striking expression of the intensification of the fundamental contradiction between the social and political relations that govern social life, on the one hand, and the development of the productive forces, on the other. The persistence of the old capitalist relations hinders and distorts the development of the forces that produce society’s means of subsistence.

I will not go against the trend by finding it particularly “paradoxical” that it is in such a situation that old “Marxists” choose to abandon such a perspective, as is the case with several of the critics of my text “Visibility of the Revolutionary Project and New Technologies.”

In that text I asserted: “The contradiction between the development of the productive forces and social relations becomes even more glaring when it confronts the reality of freely reproducible goods [as is the case with digitized goods] with the laws of capitalist property. Contrary to what JW asserts in his latest book, namely that ‘the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production is no longer operative,’ (2) this contradiction is more real than ever and is powerfully undermining the foundations of capitalist market ideology.” (3)

Maxime, in his text: “Immediate Response to Raoul’s ‘Visibility’ Text” (4), responds:

“In any case, I see in this view the trace of the old tenet of Marxist (not Marxian) doxa (5) regarding the primacy of the productive forces over the social relations of production. According to this view, the productive forces are certainly shaped by the relations of production but nevertheless develop, in the final analysis, for their own sake, so that their growth eventually comes up against the constraints of social relations and requires the establishment of new relations corresponding to the degree of development of the productive forces. I long thought in these terms but am now inclined to believe that revolution is not to be sought in the liberation of the productive forces but in the “invention” of other social relations of human activity.”

In his critical essay, Jacques Wajnsztejn (JW) takes a similar line and ventures a “psychoanalytic” interpretation of my positions:

“More generally, it seems to me that this position, like all those advocating the growth of the productive forces (whether capitalist or ‘communist’), continues to think in terms of a contradiction between the infinite development of these forces and the overly narrow nature of relations of production based on private property. We have already explained elsewhere why this contradiction seems obsolete to us.” (p. 2)

“… the idea that since the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production has not yet caused capitalism to implode in its classical, industrial form—and thus with a predominance of material goods production, fixed capital accumulation, etc.—it is in the immaterial sphere that this will happen. Obviously, I am paraphrasing, as these are not the exact terms used by Raoul, especially since I am engaging in a sort of psychoanalytic descent into his theoretical unconscious.” (p. 3) (6)

Finally, Christian, in his text with the ironic yet prophetic title: “Workers of the world, get online!”, joins the core of the critics by adding the voice of the journal Aufheben, which he quotes:

“The perspective of the productive forces is that of capital, not that of the proletariat. The proletarian perspective is that of a conscious rupture” (…) “to view history in terms of the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and existing social relations is to adopt the standpoint of capital.” (7)

Before addressing the substantive issue, I would like to make a few remarks regarding some of the assertions made in the preceding quotations.

Maxime seems to oppose “the ‘invention’ of other social relations of human activity” with “the liberation of the productive forces.” But can one “invent” post-capitalist social relations without taking into account the forces that produce the material conditions of society’s subsistence? It is not some fleeting gimmick that needs to be “invented,” but new social relations, involving all human beings for a new historical period. What chance would such an “invention” have of becoming a lasting reality if it is not capable of first resolving the problem of humanity’s material subsistence, which under capitalism is subjected to the most destructive form of economic management? The invention of new social relations and the liberation of the productive forces are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent, and it is impossible to speak of one without speaking of the other.

Jacques W., thanks to a “psychoanalytic descent into [my] theoretical unconscious,” claims that I am convinced that it is “in the immaterial” that the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production will cause “capitalism to explode,” since it “has not yet caused capitalism to explode in its classical form.” JW, like unfortunately other critics of my text, has the unfortunate habit of not citing the documents he criticizes. He prefers to engage in “psychoanalytic descents into the thought” of their author. Perhaps it amuses him and is easier, but it does not facilitate the possibility of a rigorous and fruitful debate. When I state that “The contradiction… becomes even more glaring when it confronts the reality of freely reproducible goods with the laws of capitalist property,” I am not saying that it is ONLY in this area that the contradiction exists and undermines the foundations of the system. It simply appears more clearly there. The system’s inability to prevent the closure of industrial factories while three-quarters of the planet lacks the goods they produce is enough to illustrate the impact of this contradiction at the heart of the most “classical” capitalism.

But let us return to the main question: the validity of viewing history—the past as the overcoming of capitalism—in terms of the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the social relations of production. What is at stake here? I believe, as Sander writes, that “Any position that ignores the conflict between productive forces and relations of production is not materialist” (8), even if, as we shall see, we do not ascribe exactly the same meaning to these words.

The “utopian,” pre-Marxist socialists based the idea of the necessity and possibility of overcoming capitalism on “idealistic” grounds, on ideas such as the inevitable triumph of a sense of justice or progress, or even on the persuasive power of socialist ideas peddled by a few determined propagandists or conspirators. Marx’s contribution in this area consisted in grounding the communist project on a materialist analysis of history and the dynamics inherent to capitalism. History is neither the work of divine providence, nor the embodiment of the Idea of History, nor a succession of disparate accidents. Marx discovers a common thread in it: the development of the productive forces. The various social forms appear as adaptations to the imperatives of this evolution.

“Social relations are intimately linked to the forces of production. By acquiring new forces of production, people change their mode of production, and by changing the mode of production—the way they earn their living—they change all their social relations. The hand mill gives you a society with a feudal lord; the steam mill, a society with industrial capitalism.” (The Poverty of Philosophy). “Reduced to their broad outlines, the Asian, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production appear as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.” (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

From this perspective, communist society appears as both a continuation and a break, as a new stage—qualitatively different—that will mark the end of the economy, the end of the struggle against scarcity under the constraint of necessity, to usher in an era of abundance, the “reign of freedom.” This advent is neither inevitable nor inescapable, if only because its realization also depends on the evolution of the class struggle and because, in the event of failure or excessive delay, the outcome may be widespread barbarism and self-destruction. But, unlike the struggles of the exploited in the past, under ancient slavery or feudalism, this time the chances of achieving a society without exploitation are real because, on the one hand, under capitalism the productive forces have reached a sufficient level of development to envision the creation of a society of abundance, and, on the other hand, because the overcoming of capitalism implies the elimination of the relations that underpin exploitation, in particular commodity exchange and private property.

Awareness of the need to move beyond capitalism rests, as with past systemic upheavals, on the perception of the growing mismatch between the dominant social relations and society’s subsistence needs. This realization is a long, uneven process that proceeds through multiple channels and concerns virtually all human activities, even the most ethereal. But it is ultimately the product of the very material contradiction between relations of production and the development of the productive forces.

Why do Maxime, Jacques W, Christian, and Aufheben reject or abandon the idea of the reality and significance of this contradiction?

I do not believe I am distorting their thinking by saying that one of the reasons is that they consider not only that capitalism does not constitute a brake on the development of the productive forces, but that it is capitalism itself that is the main engine of this development—a development that must precisely be curbed, lest it lead the planet to self-destruction. “The perspective of the productive forces is that of capital…,” writes Aufheben.

This kind of idea, which expresses a sort of creeping neo-Malthusianism, is quite widespread today. Thus, the idea of a necessary “degrowth” is gaining ground: “Degrowth is on the rise in environmentalist and anti-globalization circles. An Attac activist who came to attend the conference remarks: ‘Degrowth is the intuition that the laws of the economy cannot be radically different from the laws of nature. After the collapse of Marxism, the bioeconomy may be the comprehensive economic theory that today’s new left-wing activists are lacking.’ ” Matthieu Auzanneau, “‘Degrowth’: The Rebirth of a Revolutionary Concept.” (9)

I believe these arguments rest on two mistaken assumptions. The first is that the capitalist system is a mode of production whose goal is production for production’s sake, growth for growth’s sake. The second is that the planet’s ecological balance is in danger because there is too much production, too much consumption.

Capitalism does not produce for the sake of producing. If that were the case, the only explanation for the fact that, for example, at the beginning of the 21st century, a child dies of malnutrition every four seconds on the planet while the governments of the most developed countries pay billions in subsidies to keep some land uncultivated Such a reality would be produced by the pure and treacherous malice of the ruling classes. But it is not because capitalists are cruelly greedy that their economic system breeds misery; it is because the capitalist system is based on misery that its managers are inevitably cruel and greedy. Capitalists would love nothing more than to sell to all of humanity… if humanity had the capacity to pay, and they would gladly do without paying farmers not to farm. If they cannot do so, it is because their system is based on profit. It is the possibility of selling and making a profit that determines and directs capitalist production, not some absurd, maniacal obsession with producing for the sake of producing.

The impression that this is not the case—that capital produces for the sake of producing—is the result of a misperception regarding two essential characteristics of capitalism. Faced with solvent markets, a capitalist is ready to produce virtually anything. He cares little, then, about the use-value content of these products—whether medicines, food, weapons, or hard drugs—as long as there is a profit in hard cash at the end of the operation. This immediate indifference to use-value may suggest that he produces for the sake of producing. But this is true only within the very specific context of a solvent and profitable market. It is the very nature of capitalism that this is true only under such conditions. The other characteristic of capitalism that can give rise to this false impression is competition among capitalists and the race for productivity that it entails. In this war, the main economic weapon is low commodity prices, and the primary means of lowering these prices is increasing labor productivity through the introduction of new technologies. The history of capitalism thus appears as a blind and frenzied race toward technological development. It is not uncommon for investments to become obsolete before they have even been amortized. But, as mad as this race may seem, its object is never production for its own sake, growth for growth’s sake, but profit and the war for profit. An investment as obvious from the standpoint of developing the productive forces as, for example, irrigating land undergoing desertification, will only be carried out if it holds the promise of market share and profits. Otherwise, it will remain as a project in the drawers of ministers or bankers.

When one lives in a developed country, subjected to an omnipresent barrage of commercial advertising for thousands of products—whether one is rich or poor, whether one can afford these products or not—it can give the impression of overproduction, or even overconsumption—even if, as an immigrant worker, one lives with ten people in an apartment meant for two. It is not the same when you live in Tanzania, like the character in the famous film/documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare,” a warehouse night watchman earning a pittance, who considers himself very lucky to have found a job and speaks nostalgically of the time when there was a war, because people earned more then, while his relatives feed on the rotten scraps from the carp-processing plant that exports to developed countries.

Equally mistaken is the idea that it is due to excessive growth of the productive forces that the planet faces the risk of irreversible ecological imbalance. What has led to the current disaster and the threats to the environment is not the growth of the productive forces IN ITSELF, but the CAPITALIST form of this development. The widespread use of oil combustion as an energy source, for example, has been a disaster not only because this combustion (especially when carried out under conditions of capitalist profitability) poisons the atmosphere, not only because oil is a complex material from which countless useful products can be derived in just as many fields and it is absurd to use it by burning it, but also because for nearly a century its expansion has come at the expense of other energy sources, particularly renewables, of which the earth is abundant. If all the alternative energy sources, known for a long time, have not been seriously developed, it is because they were not (or not yet) “profitable,” not from a human perspective but according to capitalist economic criteria. To this must be added the power dynamics between capitalist sectors and the influence of the large corporations and powers that control the production and distribution of black gold.

To conclude from the catastrophic nature of capitalist growth that the solution lies in reducing or eliminating growth is as sensible as concluding from the existence of cancer cells that cell reproduction must be stopped.

That the ideologues of ATTAC, for whom the slogan “Another world is possible” means “Another capitalism is possible,” advocate the idea of “degrowth” in order to have a less polluted capitalist world is perhaps understandable. But for “radical” anti-capitalist revolutionaries fear the development of the productive forces under communism is to express a very poor conception of what human mastery over their social life and means of production would then entail, as if the age-old alienation from the material means of subsistence were insurmountable, as if the development of these means could only be achieved at the expense of those who wield them.

Following this logic, which equates the development of the productive forces with “the perspective of capital,” my neo-Malthusian critics naturally consider that asserting the necessity of developing the productive forces to build a communist society amounts to advocating the extreme of capitalist tendencies, as in the most pessimistic science fiction films: a society drowned in industrial fumes, poisoned by adulterated food, with people subjugated to their own robots, and so on. This is why Christian can write provocatively:

“Communism will certainly be a step backward. Communism will not take over the productive forces of capitalism in order to liberate and develop them. IT WILL MAKE A CLEAN SWEEP OF THEM.” (7) I am willing to believe that this is an exaggeration and that JW is right when he writes: “Raoul knows very well that neither Christian, nor Maxime, nor I support a ‘primitivist’ critique of technology, à la Zerzan.” But Christian’s argument, which more or less sums up those of the other critics, is nonetheless untenable. “Raoul,” he says, “forgets in passing that it is this ‘social system’—the social relations of exploitation—that creates machines and new technologies with the aim of increasing exploitation and dispossession.” With such an argument, we would have to do away with all existing productive forces, for if those produced under capitalist exploitation are condemned, why should not those created under feudal, ancient slave-owning, or Eastern despotic systems of exploitation be condemned as well? Would we have the right to use writing in a society without exploitation or a market, since it was also invented for the needs of commerce and exploitation? It is with this kind of argument that the ideologues of the “Cultural Revolution” in China or those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s justified their insane scorched-earth policies. I know this isn’t what Christian really means, but why resort to such absurd statements?

Maxime takes a similar line to Christian’s, though in a less abrupt manner. He writes: “So, I ask the question: what kind of development of the productive forces do we envision in a society where the satisfaction of basic human needs is a given? … Why should the hypothesis of a deceleration or even a reversal in the course of the productive forces be considered scandalous?” (Response to Adam on the productive forces, 08/28/05). Maxime at least acknowledges that in the early stages of a new society, it will be necessary to “satisfy the essential needs that are not yet enjoyed by the entire global population today.” But he immediately “puts this into perspective” by saying that “the means to satisfy essential needs already exist on a global scale.”

To respond, let’s start by recalling what is meant, in Marxist terms, by “productive forces.”

All too often, like Christian or Maxime, we understand “productive forces” to mean the exclusively material means of production—machines, factories, means of transportation, and so on. However, the concept encompasses a broader reality. Machines, without people, their knowledge, and their social organization, are nothing. In addition to the material means of production, the productive forces also consist of

– the labor force, the people who work (10),

– the relationships they maintain with the means of production as well as with nature (science, technology),

– and finally, “the general productive force arising from the social organization of production as a whole,” to borrow Marx’s phrase. (11)

The development of the productive forces can therefore take on as many dimensions as they possess.

One need only consider with a modicum of seriousness the state of these forces under capitalism to realize the emptiness of the idea that, at the dawn of the new society, there will be no need to develop the productive forces because, as Maxime claims, “the means to satisfy essential needs already exist on a global scale.”

What is the state of the primary productive force, “labor power,” today? Hundreds of millions of human beings languish in utter destitution, without work, marginalized, living by their wits, without access to either education or healthcare, suffering from malnutrition. The mere fact of their integration into the global productive process, just like that of the unemployed in developed countries, constitutes in itself a development of the productive forces. The same is true of any improvement in the living conditions of producers.

What is the state of the productive force “arising from the social organization of production”? To survive, the capitalist organization of production has had to develop gigantic administrative, financial, and repressive sectors, which have become burdens and sources of irrationality for the development of productive capacities. It will be essential to reorganize this entire process from top to bottom, and this will require and represent yet another development of the productive forces.

The same applies to the productive forces constituted by science and the knowledge related to production. Their mere liberation from the laws of property, copyright, and other capitalist constraints will qualitatively increase their productive power.

Finally, what is the status of the only productive force that Maxime seems to take into consideration: the material instruments and means of production? There is something profoundly contradictory in insisting, on the one hand, on the capitalist nature of current means of production and, on the other, in asserting that these means, in their current state, would suffice to transition to a society where “basic human needs would be met.” While it is absurd to speak of making a clean sweep of the material means of production created by capitalism in order to move toward communism, it is no less absurd to believe that it would suffice to simply take over these means as they are. In three essential areas, the need for a new and powerful quantitative and qualitative development of the material means of production to move beyond capitalism is glaringly apparent: the radical shift in the orientation of production; the struggle against “work”; and the search for ecological balance.

The orientation of production under capitalism is, as we have seen, determined by the laws of profit and competition. The subsistence of the majority of the population is, in economic terms, a cost, an expense to be reduced as much as possible. As a result, there is not enough land made fertile to properly feed the world’s population; there are not enough centers for the production of medicines and hospitals to care for it; there are not enough material resources to house it. On the other hand, there is a gigantic arms industry, the military-industrial complexes of the major and middle powers that have spread means of destruction across the planet which remain a living threat. One must be blind not to understand that orienting production exclusively toward human needs, just as destroying the deadly remnants of capitalism, will require an enormous development of the material means of production.

The second area where the need for such development is clearly evident is that of “work” and its elimination as a separate, alienated, and unpleasant activity. At the end of capitalism, the material conditions for such a reality obviously do not exist. The instruments and means of production were not designed so that producers could flourish and find a source of pleasure in productive activity, but to extract as much living labor as possible at the lowest cost. In 2005, it was estimated that nearly 10,000 Chinese people die each year in coal mines. The radical transformation of the conditions of production is a task that must be undertaken from the very outset. Unlike the Stalinist regimes, which glorified labor, made it compulsory—sometimes under penalty of death—and called for workers’ sacrifices in the name of a bright but never-realized future, this transformation must be undertaken from the start, as soon as the instruments of production are in the hands of the producers. However, this cannot be done without an enormous qualitative and quantitative development of the means of production. For “work” not to be compulsory, the first condition to be met is that, under the guidance and direction of the producers themselves, productive activity be made as pleasant and attractive as possible, and where this is not immediately feasible, that the time spent on it be reduced to the strict minimum. This will not be achieved by a “return to the past,” as Christian advocates, but rather through the use of the most advanced technologies and the invention of new means of production such as automation, which increases human productive capacity while reducing the time required for this activity. We will not solve the problem of mining by returning to pre-capitalist techniques but, for example, by replacing humans with robots.

Finally, the third area where the futility of the idea that current means of production are sufficient to move beyond capitalism is clearly evident is that of humanity’s relationship with nature—ecological balance. Capitalism has turned the planet into a garbage dump, and its mad rush for profit threatens to render it permanently uninhabitable. Even if governments take measures to try to limit the damage, even if capitalist companies can find sources of profit in developing means to mitigate the most harmful effects, the legacy capitalism will leave in this area will be disastrous. To make the atmosphere breathable again, to restore the clarity of rivers and streams, to transform arid or ruined lands into fertile fields or gardens—once again, we will not achieve this by turning back the clock. Replacing the burning of oil or coal with clean and renewable energy sources (hydroelectricity, biomass, wind power, solar power, geothermal energy, tidal power, and all those yet to be invented) will require the use of the most advanced technologies and the production of numerous new and powerful material resources.

That covers the first steps toward a new society aimed at achieving, at the very least, “the satisfaction of basic human needs.” But Maxime also asks, “What kind of development of the productive forces do we envision… beyond this general satisfaction?” It is difficult not to fall into speculation when trying to envision what social life might look like in a world freed from the constraints of basic necessity. But we know that one of the foundations of human happiness lies in the realization and fulfillment of individual and collective capacities, in all fields and dimensions. This can only be achieved through the development of human productive forces in the broadest sense of the term.

We also know that this development will have nothing to do with the absurd, self-destructive frenzy that characterizes such development under capitalism. It is in this sense that Marx spoke of “a new mode of production which (…) will lead to a free, unimpeded, progressive, and universal development of the productive forces and will find in itself the raison d’être of society and, consequently, that of its reproduction.”(12)

Raoul Victor

November 29, 2005

Notes:

1. Wikipedia, French version, http://fr.wikipedia.org.

2. L’évanescence de la valeur, Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn, ed. L’Harmattan, p.134

3. http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/050511RVrt.htm

4. “Rebound in sight on Raoul’s ‘visibility’ text,”

http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/050525MAXrt.html.

5. “Doxa is the more or less homogeneous set of popular prejudices and generally accepted presuppositions—evaluated positively or negatively—upon which all forms of communication are based.” (French Wikipedia)

6. http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/050629JWrt.htm.

7. http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/050531CHRrt.htm.

8. “About the Debate on Technology and Consciousness,”

http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/050809SANrt.htm.

9. http://www.transfert.net/a9387.

10. I fully share Sander’s concern when he writes: “I speak of class, for it is the essential element of the productive forces. One cannot speak of the productive forces without speaking of the working class, nor of the working class apart from the productive forces.” (8)

11. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse), ed. La Pléiade, Karl Marx, Works, vol. II, p. 301.

12. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse) , ed. La Pléiade, Karl Marx, Works, vol. II, p. 251.