You know it, but I'm going to say it anyway. Communism has an image problem. For decades associated with the mind-numbing bureaucracy and grey tyranny of sundry Stalinist regimes, if communism is going to be reclaimed in the spirit of Marx and Engels then we must do more than talk about the "true meaning" of communism. It's not about repackaging it, but restating what communism always was even when Uncle Joe imprisoned millions: a possible, but nevertheless tangible future immanent in and inseparable from the development of capitalism. Let's take FALC's two propositions in turn.
Fully Automated does what it says on the tin. Despite the fancy propaganda posters trumpeting Soviet achievements, the reality of Stalinist dismalism saw the squandering of resources and environmental despoliation that rivalled capitalism for its inefficiencies. The advances the USSR made in ballistic technology and space travel were certainly impressive, and the latter should be celebrated alongside other key technological milestones. But this was only possible because the state's bureaucratic plan was able to concentrate resources. Following the war, reconstruction was able to improve living standards up to a point, but from the 70s economic stagnation set in. The leading edge of Soviet technology was a simulacra of dynamism, a stand-in for deep seated sclerosis in virtually every other area save the military. Yes, fantastic that you can assemble a fully functioning space station for long-term stays in low Earth orbit, not so great that shoddy housing and shortages were the everyday grind for Eastern bloc citizens.
There is another legacy to be overcome here: the anti-technological bent of a chunk of the left. To one extent this was an absorbing of the Green critique of modern civilisation (note, not capitalist civilisation) and to a lesser extent the postmodern anti-science polemic that located technocratic and bureaucratic modes of power in the original sin of Enlightenment mastery over nature. What this meant in practice was the wholesale importation of neo-Malthusian ways of thinking, of identifying the human race and consumption per se as the vector of environmental destruction and climate change over and above the specific character of socio-economic relationships. It's all about commodification and markets, baby. The left wasn't immune to this, and its adoption by large sections of the left was the radical fringe of a complex mess of irrationalism working its way through popular culture. This broad trend has a wide and deep purchase across all the advanced countries and is symptomatic of alienated sensibilities, of a structure of feeling in which the world has run away from us leaving millions at turns fatalistic and pessimistic, with faith being invested in lotteries and quackery over and above our ability to do something about it.
Fully automated then is about taking back control, to coin a phrase. Or, to be more specific, taking conscious charge of the enormous promise of technology, to reassert the fundamental optimism of leftist politics and rethink technology in terms of how socially useful it can and should be. And what greater use is there, when all is said and done, than enhancing the powers of our species and freeing us from drudgery, and laying the basis of a pleasurable and luxurious life? From each according to their ability to each according to their needs, and the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all. These old phrases of Marx are well within realisation. Technology, if put to socially productive uses, can achieve the rapid decarbonisation of economic activity, switch from harmful and unsustainable power sources to renewables, build and rebuild a sustainable infrastructure to bring up the global standard of living, and diffuse technical know how and the very latest in replication technologies. Luxury doesn't mean indolence, though that should be available for those who want it, instead it means an abundance of choices and working toward a world where drudge is reduced to a bear minimum. Who, after all, doesn't want a better life?
And this is inseparable from the c-word. Communism didn't even get a schematic in Marx's writings, and he rightly argued that it's not the job for revolutionaries to create fantastical schemes and try and force the flow of history into its restrictive channels. That is the path to a new tyranny, which brings back all the old crap - as Marx so floridly put it. All Marx observed about communism is that it is only possible on the foundations capitalist development has laid for it. The technical basis for a society without classes is present, and has been since the Manifesto was published 170 years ago. Not only that, a prefiguring, a becoming of the communist future is present in two increasingly important aspects. Despite free market fundamentalism and increasingly threadbare arguments against collectivism, advanced capitalism in all its dynamism and decrepitude is not possible without planning. The giant multinational companies dominating the global economy marshal resources and plan production across oceans and continents, often paying lip service to competition while using their size to swallow up or squeeze out would-be competitors. And/or one titan can come to an accommodation with another and cartelise whole areas of the economy. It's no accident true competition is celebrated so much by capital's ideologists when it is the exception rather than the rule. Underpinning this all is the agency of the state which guarantees class rule, private property, and routinely arranges and plans economic activity. The second strand is the force of production itself: the working class, the proletariat, the multitude. For Marx it was the gravedigger of capital, the subaltern class that made possible the accumulation of capital (and the private acquisition of riches) thanks to their exploitation by their employers. Their labour power is purchased, but ultimately they are not. To use the language of orthodox economics, labour is an input, but unlike other inputs it is thinking, feeling, living. Thanks to experience, it can become aware that its interests and those of their employers are at odds and, crucially, without their cooperation the whole show cannot go on. With the recent mutation in capitalism with a strategic shift toward immaterial labour, that dependence is even more stark and the balance in the long-term is shifting decisively in labour's direction. How long before capitalism is viewed as an unnecessary excrescence?
Communism then is a becoming. It is not only an alternative form of advanced industrial society latent and immanent within capitalism, its partial materialisation in the present makes capitalism possible. Fully automated and luxury are key identifiers of 21st century communism from its forebears, but they are not mere bolts ons. They are fundamental to the kind of society we should be striving to build.
"With the recent mutation in capitalism with a strategic shift toward immaterial labour, that dependence is even more stark and the balance in the long-term is shifting decisively in labour's direction."
ReplyDeleteIn a labour aristocracy's direction. There is no reason to assume that an automated society still won't be driven by the profit motive and be yet an engine of the Market and the shareholder culture. A relatively thin layer of super qualified and skilled workers will drive it and these, combined with a comfortable rentier class, will compose the upper echelons of society (around 25%?). The bulk of people will be largely unneeded, lead a fairly dismal life and will exist of welfare and/or the proceeds of crime.
No wonder some on the Right are already seeing which way the wind is blowing in supporting a Universal Basic Income. A form of authoritarian fascism, not communism, is more likely to evolve from AI.
"Thanks to experience, it can become aware that its interests and those of their employers are at odds and, crucially, without their cooperation the whole show cannot go on. With the recent mutation in capitalism with a strategic shift toward immaterial labour, that dependence is even more stark and the balance in the long-term is shifting decisively in labour's direction. How long before capitalism is viewed as an unnecessary excrescence?"
ReplyDeleteIn actual fact, by the latter part of the 19th century, as Engels points out, the dominant form of capital was socialised industrial capital, in the shape of the joint stock company, corporation or co-operative. The private ownership of productive-capital was becoming an anachronism, with the private capitalists restricted to either the plethora of precarious small firms, or else the growing number of increasingly wealthy money-lending capitalists, coupon clippers who lived off their dividends from shares and interest on bonds.
In other words, for this most powerful section of the ruling class, they had already become a sybaritic excrescence, on capital, and on society,as the landlords had been before them. In the now dominant socialised capital, that Marx describes in Capital as the transitional form to the co-operative commonwealth, the reality is that "economically", and juridically speaking, the workers are their own employers, their own capitalist. That fact is obvious in the worker owned co-operative, but it is equally true in the joint stock company.
The anachronism in the latter, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, is that although the money-lending capitalists do not own the company - they own either shares or bonds - one section of these money lenders (shareholders, but not bondholders, and not even all shareholders) continue to have a legal right assigned to them to exercise control over the capital they do not own, and to appoint Boards of Directors to act on their behalf rather than the interest of the company itself.
That fact was recognised by Engels in his critique of the Erfurt Programme, and taken on board by Kautsky, who elaborated on it in The Road To Power. Germany already recognises it to an extent in its co-determination laws, and the EU in the 1970's was on the way to changing company law to extend that principle across the EU. Its time the labour movement, waged a struggle to remove the unjustified privileges that shareholders exercise over capital they do not own.
"Technology, if put to socially productive uses, can achieve the rapid decarbonisation of economic activity, switch from harmful and unsustainable power sources to renewables..."
ReplyDeleteI'm sceptical that renewables will ever replace fossil fuels – didn't David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" claim that the only way Europe could rely entirely on renewable energy were if it imported solar power from Africa? (Which would create similar nasty geopolitical issues to those currently resulting from dependence on oil imports.)
I'm more of a nuclear energy fan myself, and believe that it has primarily been held back by corruption funded by fossil fuel money: both corruption of elected politicians (such as Ed Markey from Massachusetts, former Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi, and former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder) and corruption of the environmentalist movement itself.
The Sierra Club became the leading US environmental organization primarily because Californian oil interests bankrolled it to fight against hydroelectric dams (which the Sierra Club originally opposed for aesthetic reasons, comparable to the reasoning of grassroots anti-wind-turbine activists today). And Friends of the Earth – the first environmental organization to oppose nuclear energy from the outset – was founded with $200,000 (nearly $1.4m in today's money) from oil tycoon Robert Anderson.
Communism then is a becoming. It is not only an alternative form of advanced industrial society latent and immanent within capitalism, its partial materialisation in the present makes capitalism possible.
ReplyDeleteThis, this is to perfect. You say capitalism needs communism yes you are right. Like when you say
Communism didn't even get a schematic in Marx's writings, and he rightly argued that it's not the job for revolutionaries to create fantastical schemes and try and force the flow of history into its restrictive channels.
Exactly! No, is better to make it not defined so we all dream off perfect future that delivers our rewards, whatever we dream off. From each according to their ability to each according to their need. Is perfect, right? We good workers keep working paying the unions, the organisations, the parties to plan for revolution. But you know what bitches? It never comes! Only that same day the meek going to inherit the world! You right. Captilism need communinism like feudals need Catholic. Keep us dreaming. Donot ask us how but the revolution make it all better. We gone inherit the world, each according to their needs.
You got me thinking that when you say The left wasn't immune to this, and its adoption by large sections of the left was the radical fringe of a complex mess of irrationalism Yes, yes! Today we are living there still whils we sit on Papa karl's lap. And one day bambino is all going to be whatever you need..Really Papa Karl? All with wide eyes. Is something from Freud maybe like your Uncle Joe (maybe i miss a idiom but is imprisoned meaning killed? I don't know if I'd want people like that in my family)
Look, maybe I want the same as you. A good future world for all of us. But I know I aint going to get there in the future when i got one foot still standing in the past. Maybe one day you realise Greens do talk about the capitalism, maybe have vision of future that is concrete and not the hot air of capitalism's conscience. Maybe I see you there comrade.