I Am A communist

I am a communist. You might call me a Marxist, a socialist, an eco-socialist, a radical, a revolutionary, a Trotskyist or number of other names, but I prefer ‘communist’. Though I am not a Communist. However, while rejecting utterly the Stalinist aberration, it is not possible to also erase that legacy. Including what might have been inherent in the Bolshevik experience that allowed for the part of the bureaucracy, including Stalin, to emerge from its ranks. It has to be embraced and subjected to context and critique in order that we might understand it with the imperative of avoiding such future cataclysms, so profoundly criminal and obfuscatory.

‘Communism’, nowhere in the entire canon, practice and traditions that armed the working class movement in the decades before the Soviet experiment, those same traditions that helped guide the Russian working class in forging that revolution, could have been taken to mean anything like the Stalinist nightmare that came. Stalinism, in too many ways, became the antithesis to the vision which made the revolution. So I remain a communist without contradiction. It is in Stalinism that contradiction, grotesque contradiction, is held.

The date of the fall, of the degeneration, is entirely secondary for it was a process that began as soon as the Russian revolution found itself starving and alone in the world. And further back, a revolution whose roots were burrowed deep into a base and backward, absolutist feudal past. No one, not one person, with a genuine understanding of the communism of Marx (or indeed of Lenin), could dare describe the Gulag State as communism without first redefining the term until it lost all its emancipatory and historical meaning, all its theoretical and analytical foundation. It is for those very meanings, those foundations that I find it impossible to not embrace the term for myself. I am a communist.

And speaking of losing all meaning, what could it possibly mean to call oneself a ‘socialist’, a term deemed more approachable, when Tony Blair, in a fit of nostalgia or guilt or whatever, might call himself one as well. In deed the entire, disastrous, neo-liberal agenda has been implemented by so-called Socialist parties. Even at these parties’ best (many years ago now) when ‘socialism’ meant the capitalist state taking ownership of capitalist enterprises then not only am I not a socialist, I am, in a sense, an anti-‘socialist’. When a serial rapist like (recent) International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss Kahn; a rapist of women, of resources, of workers, of whole nations is a leading member (and possible Presidential candidate still) of a ‘Socialist Party’ then shouldn’t our movement be as resistant in confusing our vision by calling ourselves socialists as we are resistant in calling ourselves communists because of Stalinist ignominy?

But isn’t this is just as true of words like ‘democracy’ (what, pray tell, does THAT mean anymore?) or ‘feminism’ or ‘environmentalism’ or any other term that I positively use all of the time. It is no accident, however, that each of those words has been positively appropriated by the ruling classes for their own ends (even as we struggle to appropriate them for ours), but the term ‘communism’ (with a good deal of assistance from the Stalinist debacle) has only been vilified and damned. It is because that word, in its essence, cannot belong to them. They cannot appropriate it, for it would stick in their throats and choke them to death. So it is ours, let us treat it so.

We can not escape words, each of which have their own history, any more than we can escape history. Part of our task is to rescue definitions made wrong; to define, in our own terms, the tasks and vision of our project and use the words most fitting to illuminate the goal and the practice. There was a reason, as opposed to other trends in the movement of workers and the oppressed, that the progenitors of our movement, the one that still lives and still breathes despite all, despite everything, called themselves ‘communists’. It is thoroughly modern as it looks to the horizon; it posits the foundations of the future in the capitalist present at the same time it proudly inherits a tradition of the commons, of the egalitarian impulse and the deeply social needs our species have displayed so consistently and in such variety that it might rightly be said to be a part, a core, of our human nature.

‘Communism’ as envisioned and, in the past and in different form, lived, has no need for state or coercion or institutions vested with power standing apart of the whole. It is a ‘free association’ where in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ or it is nothing. It is classless and produces only use values. Its wealth is defined by the satisfaction of needs, and those needs are defined by a people free of commodity, of commodification and in cooperation with, not antagonism to, the natural world of which we are a part and now apart. The natural world which is required for us to live.

I recognize that anything we say about ourselves and what we propose requires explanation, requires us to wash away the muck our enemies, and ourselves, have covered our project and our ideas with over these many years of struggle. That we have to choose our words carefully and that we must be creative in responding to the subjectivity of folks, we must meet them where they are now; we can’t use words that confuse rather than make clear and for that reason I do not walk around talking about ‘communism’ as part of my real-world political practice.

If, however, we allow the ruling class to invest the language we use with their fears and prejudices, with their hollow truths, then they have won already. Language is the greatest of all social institutions; it is the medium in which ideas travel and action organized, it is not neutral and our role in the waging of the class war is, in part, to wage a war to (re)appropriate language that elucidates and to expropriate the words that have been made obscure, an obscurity which hides their true history, as they are spoken through the ruling class. In doing so our history is lost, through the words used to understand it, to the whims of the enemy. If we are ever to win the battle, or even effectively engage it, we must win the words we use to define our struggle. It is an essential component in that most precious, for the survival of our species, of processes; that process by which the working class is transformed from a class ‘of itself’ into a class ‘for itself’.

To pose an alternative that might capture the imagination of masses of folks it is necessary to name that alternative and to place its realization in the transformation of the present and not in the faith of an idealized future. However, that transformation, both its beginnings and its outcomes, is only made real by a vision; a goal worthy of the terrible cost liberation entails. And for this we revolutionaries, as communists, ‘disdain to conceal [our] views and aims. [We] openly declare that [our] ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.’

To win that world the working class must also win on the field of language, which is essential if we are to win on the field of ideas and of ideology. With clarity and the legitimate audacity history, when deeply absorbed and understood by the best of working class combatants and the communities of struggle they lead, affords us we can remake words into weapons and refound ideas as the power to wield those weapons. We must do so without jargon or dogmatism or sentimental fealty to moribund traditions, but we must do so. In so doing we take power into our own hands, the power of ideas and the power to communicate those ideas. And, in my opinion, that is one giant step on the path to communism, or at least to a revolution which might make communism a possibility many years after all of us are gone. And yes I am, proudly, a communist.

Ernest Mandel: Communism

As a companion to the rant above, I offer the great Belgian Marxist, Ernest Mandel giving a too brief explanation of the term ‘communism’. Written when Stalinism still lived, barely, and claimed the mantle, I imagine Ernie, in his wisdom, would have said this or that differently today, added or deleted as the case might be. After all, as each generation gets its own Shakespeare, so each it gets its own Marx. Its own communism. Mandel did more than most to help define the communism needed by his generation. That we might do the same for ours.

Communism

Ernest Mandel

The term ’communism’ was first used in modern times to designate a specific economic doctrine (or regime), and a political creed intending to introduce such a regime, by the French lawyer Etiénne Cabet in the late 1830s; his works, especially the utopia L’Icarie, were influential among the Paris working class before the revolution of 1848.

In 1840 the first ’communist banquet’ was held in Paris – banquets and banquet speeches were a common form of political protest under the July monarchy.

The term spread rapidly, so that Karl Marx could entitle one of his first political articles of 16 October 1842 ’Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung’. He noted that ’communism’ was already an international movement, manifesting itself in Britain and Germany besides France, and traced its origin to Plato. He could have mentioned ancient Jewish sects and early Christian monasteries too.

In fact, some of the so-called ’utopian socialists’, in the first place the German Weitling, called themselves communists and spread the influence of the new doctrine among German itinerant handicraftsmen all over Europe, as well as among the more settled industrial workers of the Rhineland. Under the influence of Marx and Engels, the League of the Just (Bund des Gerechten) they had created, changed is name to the Communist League in 1846. The League requested the two young German authors to draft a declaration of principle for their organisation. This declaration would appear in February 1848 under the title Communist Manifesto, which would make the words ’communism’ and ’communists’ famous the world over.

Communism, from then on, would designate both a classes society without property, without ownership – either private or nationalised – of the means of production, without commodity production, money or a state apparatus separate and apart from the members of the community, and the social-political movement to arrive at that society. After the victory of the Russian October revolution in 1917, that movement would tend to be identified by and large with Communist parties and a Communist International (or at least an ’international communist movement’), though there exists a tiny minority of communists, inspired by the Dutch astronomer Pannekoek- who are hostile to a party organisation of any kind (the so-called ’council communists’, Rätekommunisten).

The first attempts to arrive at a communist society (leaving aside early, medieval and more modern christian communities) were made in the United States in the 19th century, through the establishment of small agrarian settlements band upon collective property, communally organised labour and the total absence of money inside their boundaries. From that point of view, they differed radically from the production co-operatives promoted for example by the English industrialist and philanthropist Robert Owen. Weitling himself created such a community, significantly called Communia. Although they were generally established by a selected group of followers who shared common convictions and interests, these agrarian communities did not survive long in a hostile environment. The nearest contemporary extension of these early communist settlements are the kibbutzim in Israel.

Rather rapidly, and certainly after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, communism came to be associated less with small communities set up by morally or intellectually selected elites, but with the general movement of emancipation of the modern working class, if not in its totality at least in its majority, encompassing furthermore the main countries (wealth-wise and population-wise) of the world. In the major theoretical treatise of their younger years, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels stated emphatically:

“Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of dominant peoples ’all at once’ and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. . . . The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a ’world-historical’ existence.”

And, earlier in the same passage:

“This development of productive forces (which at the same time implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it privation is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored . . . (1845-6, p. 49).”

That line of argument is today repeated by most orthodox Marxists (communists), who find in it an explanation of what ’went wrong’ in Soviet Russia, once it was isolated in a capital environment as a result of the defeat of revolution in other European countries in the 1918-23 period. But many ’official’ Communist Parties still stick to Stalin’s particular version of communism, according to which it is possible to successfully complete the building of socialism and communism in a single country, or in a small number of countries.

The radical and international definition of a communist society given by Marx and Engels inevitably leads to the perspective of a transition (transition period) between capitalism and communism. Marx and Engels first, notably in their writings about the Paris Commune – The Civil War in France – and in their Critique of the Gotha Programme (of the German social-democratic party), Lenin later – especially in his book State and Revolution – tried to give at least a general sketch of what that transition would be like. It centres around the following ideas:

1) The proletariat, as the only social class radically opposed to private ownership of the means of production, and likewise as the only class which has potentially the power to paralyse and overthrow bourgeois society, as well as the inclination to collective co-operation and solidarity which are the motive forces of the building of communism, conquers political (state) power. It uses that power (’the dictatorship of the proletariat’) to make more and more ’despotic inroads’ into the realm of private property and private production, substituting for them collectively and consciously (planned) organised output, increasingly turned towards direct satisfaction of needs. This implies a gradual withering away of market economy.

2) The dictatorship of the proletariat, however, being the instrument of the majority to hold down a minority, does not need a heavy apparatus of full-time functionaries, and certainly no heavy apparatus of repression. It is a state sui generis, a state which starts to wither away from its inception, i.e. it starts to devolve more and more of the traditional state functions to self-administrating bodies of citizens, to society in its totality. This withering away of the state goes hand in hand with the indicated withering away of commodity production and of money, accompanying a general withering away of social classes and social stratification, i.e. of the division of society between administrators and administrated, between ’bosses’ and ’bossed over’ people.

That vision of transition towards communism as an essentially evolutionary process obviously has preconditions: that the countries engaged on that road already enjoy a relatively high level of development (industrialisation, modernisation, material wealth, stock of infrastructure, level of skill and culture of the people, etc.), created by capitalism itself; that the building of the new society is supported by the majority of the population (i.e. that the wage-earners already represent the great majority of the producers and that they have passed the threshold of a necessary level of socialist political class consciousness); that the process encompasses the major countries of the world.

Marx, Engels, Lenin and their main disciples and co-thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Bukharin et al. – incidentally also Stalin until 1928 – distinguished successive stages of the communist society: the lower stage, generally called ’socialism’, in which there would be neither commodity production nor classes, but in which the individual’s access to the consumption fund would still be strictly measured by his quantitative labour input, evaluated in hours of labour; and a higher stage, generally called ’communism’, in which the principle of satisfaction of needs for everyone would apply, independently of any exact measurement of work performed.

Marx established that basic difference between the two stages of communism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, together with so much else. It was also elaborated at length in Lenin’s State and Revolution.

In the light of these principles, it is clear that no socialist or communist society exists anywhere in the world today. It is only possible to speak about ’really existing socialism’ at present, if one introduces a new, ’reductionist’ definition of a socialist society, as being only identical with predominantly nationalised property of the means of production and central economic planning. This is obviously different from the definition of socialism in the classical Marxist scriptures. Whether such a new definition is legitimate or not in the light of historical experience is a matter of political and philosophical judgement. It is in any case another matter altogether than ascertaining whether the radical emancipators goals projected by the founders of contemporary communism have been realised in these really existing societies or not. This is obviously not the case.

2011 and the Distant Shore

Readers will forgive some of the abstractions and pretenses of this post; sometime the only possibility I have of making even a limited sense of the world, especially one in tumult, is to stand as far back as possible, finding a vantage point where the world can be seen painted in broad, thick strokes. Though, from a proper distance and a sufficient squinting of the eye, those broad, thick strokes can seem, and are, as supple as the most lithe calligraphy. The simplicity elegant rather than rude, even if the story it tells is incomplete.

Half the way into this momentous 2011 and already the year is surely to be placed alongside other dates down the centuries that have come to signify rebellion, transformation and, above all, the open possibility (even if it is only the promise of possibilities) to change, utterly, the conditions in which we find ourselves. I’ll leave to others to detail how we might have gotten here; what currents bubbled along, what old moles were burrowing, what new forces emerged, what spent forces faded and what the economic crises and political impasse of liberal, capitalist ‘democracy’ have placed on the formation and elaboration of these events. In the end, all are rooted not in the new or the novel, but in the decrepit and the rotten. The past is made modern as the modern is made past. If we seek to escape from this intolerable present it is only by (re)appropriating our past in that process that we have a chance.

As we are in the midst of great events, observation is often cursory, the outlook clouded by a myriad of variables and accidents. The mighty motive forces of collective and individual interest, of class and social reproduction, the conflict they engender and the environment in which they operate are the canvas on which contingency paints. In the world of revolution the outcome of certain moments are as determined by trade union resolutions and party organization, by the subjectivity of the masses and the objectivity of the situation, as they are by an unintentional stubbing of a toe or a missed bus or a mistranslated metaphor.

The forces of history can be contingent in their realization on the most mundane, the most unforeseeable of events; yet history moves with its laws and within certain parameters. In short, history [in its future tense] is not only unwritten, it is largely unwriteable, even if trends and certain of their consequences are clearly discernible and probability circumscribed by the material; subjective and objective. History is made by us, by our will and by our actions; as iron as this or that law of history may be a powerful collective and conscious agency can forge that iron in a furnace of our own making. We might, with the hammer of solidarity and the anvil of reaction, make a weapon to wield sharp enough to cut the throat of humanity’s common enemy. It would be an act of sublime mercy, it is the hope of the ages.

Waves do not cease. We are condemned to contend with wave after wave after wave, each one altering the shore, the ground we wish to, at least for a moment, plant our feet upon and build something solid. Here, on an alien(ated) and brutal shore, we might gather with comrades and look out to an immutable ocean made utterly mutable by the ever-changing swells and surges and declare ‘this is now, we are here, we are alive’ and again set out to the horizon, where a whole continent can be seen, and, with whatever confidence, knowledge and skills the experiences of the past have given us, embark to make a home there.

If we are lucky as well as skilled enough we might, surfer like, ride the waves of history, whose ebb and flow is as sure as its form is unpredictable, with our feet still on the board, controlling our response to the roil we ride that we might not drown, that we might reach the shore, that land where we might make ‘conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, [our] human nature…’ That we might carry others with us, though too many are destined to drown along the way.

This year, 2011, is a year of rebellion. A year where the masses of people, those whom ‘democratic’ institutions are supposed to be accountable to, have risen in a dozen countries and more to demand a new accountability in its most timid voice. But there are other voices rising far less timid, far less circumspect in their vision. These voices wish to extend democracy well beyond the limits and bourgeois ‘right’ and the entrepreneurial definition of the ‘franchise’. What we are seeing around the world, ignited in the Maghreb, but whose kindling has been gathering everywhere has a true universality; the underbrush which fuels the inferno has innumerable local and specific origins, but conflagrations merge; firestorms jump across valleys and meet on the ridges of history.

If this year marks a turning point, and I think it does, it is now up to us, to those who seek not be firefighters but erectors of funeral pyres around which a ‘carnival of the oppressed’ will dance and sings hymns in celebration, throwing into the flames those ‘tradition[s] of all the dead generations [which] weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ to act and act with all of the fearlessness, energy, radicalness apropos the moment, this very moment. In the process creating new traditions; in part continuous elaboration of the old and in part the creations of the utterly contemporary and the entirely present.

I think we are too experienced in the chorus of reversal to now sing such optimistic hymns, but we are fully justified in the humming of them, one hundred Tahrirs have have made it so. A faith in the future? A decisive break from the fetters of the ‘end of history’? Already the reaction and counter-revolution is consuming thousands of lives, attempting to cut off the hands grasping at their future in towns and villages across the landscape of revolt. Movements will be diverted and subsumed, the hope now made manifest, made real, may well be met by an assassin who, holding a cudgel over the broken skulls of rebellion proclaims for all of history to hear; ‘here I am, here is the future in which you placed your hopes.’ To which we have every right, no, duty to those who come after, to proclaim with the Old Man (then a very young man) in the years that opened the last blood-soaked century:

– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.

– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’

– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.

Dum spiro spero

Mark Twain, Cats and Communism

One of my summer reads is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.  The story is quintessential late Twain; brutally ironic social critique.  This is Clemens’ coming fully and finally to terms with the slave system he was born into.  It has been on my list for a while and it’s a thrill to finally get to it.  In the opening pages Twain has this wonderful description of the homes in the story’s fictional Missouri town of Dawson’s Landing:

When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissfull, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.  Then the house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.  A home without a cat- and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat- may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

I grew up with cats and know where of Twain speaks.  The furry companions in my life have been amongst the best relationships I’ve had.  Lovers may come and go, but cats keep purring.  When I walk the street and meet a cat I almost always stop for a chat.  With very few exceptions, I’ve never met a cat that I didn’t have a rapport with.  I regard them as damned near perfect creatures.  As Twain’s Dawson’s Landing cat proves the peace of the home, Twain’s love of cats proves his own abundant humanity in my eyes.  Not that it needed much further proof, but as per Twain, this evidence is infallible.

My appreciation, really awe, of the feline  has led to my own particular theories about cats; who likes them and who doesn’t and what that might mean.  There is something about a cat’s make-up that refuses the role of Master.  We talk of a dog’s master, but I’ve never heard one speak of a cat’s master.  They have no master and would resist the imposition of one to their last tuna-tinged breathe.  Twain again (from “The Refuge of the Derelicts”):

That’s the way with a cat, you know — any cat; they don’t give a damn for discipline. And they can’t help it, they’re made so. But it ain’t really insubordination, when you come to look at it right and fair — it’s a word that don’t apply to a cat. A cat ain’t ever anybody’s slave or serf or servant, and can’t be — it ain’t in him to be. And so, he don’t have to obey anybody. He is the only creature in heaven or earth or anywhere that don’t have to obey somebody or other, including the angels. It sets him above the whole ruck, it puts him in a class by himself. He is independent. You understand the size of it? He is the only independent person there is. In heaven or anywhere else. There’s always somebody a king has to obey — a trollop, or a priest, or a ring, or a nation, or a deity or what not — but it ain’t so with a cat. A cat ain’t servant nor slave to anybody at all. He’s got all the independence there is, in Heaven or anywhere else, there ain’t any left over for anybody else. He’s your friend, if you like, but that’s the limit — equal terms, too, be you king or be you cobbler; you can’t play any I’m-better-than-you on a cat — no, sir! Yes, he’s your friend, if you like, but you got to treat him like a gentleman, there ain’t any other terms. The minute you don’t, he pulls freight.

Which brings me to my theory that in the world of Marxism and pets there exists a rift as wide as that separating the Permanent Revolution and Socialism in One Country.  Now this theory is admittedly anecdotal and without a shred of materialism to back it up, but it is my firm belief, after years of observation, that Trotskyists like cats and Maoists like dogs.

This divergence is rooted in the Trot’s insistence on the independence of the class and the Maoist’s advocacy of the cross-class alliance.  A dog’s whole life exists in a cross-class alliance and a dog in its natural state exists in a pack with Alphas, Betas, etc.  It is tantamount to Mao’s 1949  advocacy of a People’s Democratic Dictatorship while a feline knows only the Dictatorship of the Pussycatiat.  Dogs are their Master’s best friend because they are their charge.  If it is love, it is the love of a benefactor.  When you go for a walk you put a dog on a chain.  Try putting a chain on a cat and you’ll assuredly need a band-aid or two.  No, a cat “ain’t servant nor slave to anybody at all”.

Most Trotskyists I know have cats and many of them are named for one fallen hero of the class war or another; Rosa and Karl being amongst the most popular.  Maoists name their dogs after their own heroes.  I remember one member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade had a dog named Chen Boda. Now don’t get me wrong, I like dogs.  Though on  individual rather than class terms.  It takes time for me to warm to a dog while with a cat it comes naturally and quick.

Yes, there are huge holes in my theory and this is why I have never brought it up at a branch meeting for a vote. For example,  Trotsky had big, scary dogs in Coyoacán and I have never heard word of Trotsky’s cats (though I understand that a number of cats now roam the grounds of Trotsky’s final home).  For a while I confused LT’s guard dogs’ names for the dogs of Robin Masters in Magnum PI;  Zeus and Apollo.  Now I have forgotten their names altogether.  I also knew a professor with a dog named Trotsky, but he was no Trotskyist.  Mao and meow is an alliteration, which though it proves nothing, points to possible problems as well.

What is indisputable is that Lenin was a fan of the pussy cat and both Trotskyists and Maoists claim Lenin as their own.  It is also indisputable that Lenin rejected the Democratic Dictatorship for the Proletarian one.  His appreciation of cats, while this is not proven, may have helped him to this conclusion.  During his final convalescence a little purr ball was often curled up on his lap, giving him great comfort, we are sure, even as both his life and the Proletarian Dictatorship slipped away (Stalin, I am confident, was a dog man).

As with Twain, Lenin’s love of cats is testimony, despite the image of Lenin as an unfeeling, granite-chiseled caricature of a statue, of his immense humanity.  Holes and all I stand by my theory.  A revolutionary without a cat is a sop to the Popular Front.  The working class must, like cats, demand its independence.  Vivè la Felidae!