Arguing for Communism: Adding Substance To The Idea

Communism is not about forcing a false equality on people dominated by the kind of centralised state that existed in places such as the USSR.  Those regimes never escaped capitalism.  The main problem with capitalism is that it strips work – our life activity – of its creativity and potentially rewarding character.  It traps the individual into a mundane monotonous rut where work is experienced as degrading, rhythmic, and exploitative.  Producers are reduced to the level of appendages to machines without powers of thought or a myriad of talents to be cultivated and developed for their own betterment, or the enrichment of society.

Clearly however, the impetus of market relations has transformed the world for the better in material terms.  In pre-capitalist societies, work often shares some of the aforementioned characteristics.  One is a ‘carpenter’, a ‘baker’, a ‘butcher’, or whatever, as many surnames that are derived from professions attest.  A fixed role in life was often defining to the individual, as it remains under capitalism.  But the massive expansion of productive powers that has taken place under capitalism through the development of among other things, machinery, provides a potential basis for radical social transformation and the total liberation of the individual.

It is often difficult to see how our globalized economy *could* be stripped of the degrading character of work so that we have our cake and eat it – i.e., to combine high standards of living with a liberated workforce.  But it’s not impossible.  The trick is to understand that commodity production is not the same thing as production-for-others.

Commodity production is production exclusively for a market and your product is owned and sold by capitalists and their chain of command.  You do not know where your product is going, who it will be used by, or see any satisfaction in that relation.  You simply produce blindly, and worse still, your managers will seek to get the maximum out of you in return for a wage that makes the whole process highly coercive.  The level of the wage is itself determined by what you need to reproduce your existence for the next working week, at a rate acceptable to society.  It does not reflect how much you produce or how much effort was expended.  The class relation concealed behind the wage – i.e., that you work for the capitalist class, means the surplus product is appropriated by them.  This surplus value has held steady – bearing in mind ups and downs – at around a third of the total you have produced.  It is as if for every meal you cook, a burglar invades your house and takes a third.

The problem of the lacklustre relation of specifically commodity production to human liberation however, would also hold even if there was no capitalist class and all producers were small businessmen or women.  The same drudgery and tedium of being fixed in a role would persist, only you now pay yourself rather than are technically exploited.  Besides, such a society is impossible to conceive, since in order to grow, a small businessman or woman would need to deploy their capital in employing others, hence class relations would emanate from this.  So how does society escape the rut whilst maintaining (or even improving) the physical standard of living that high-tech capitalism has provided?

Production-for-others need not mean production for the market with all the negative consequences that entails.  In a communally organised economy, the local community agrees through participatory democracy what needs to be done and the conversant individual decides to do it.  This idea is not as far-fetched as might first appear to those whose only experience is within the confines of the market.  Tribal societies that were once the dominant arrangement used this method all the time.  With varying degrees of conscious control, they would sit around the campfire of an evening and work these things out.  You didn’t have production for production’s sake, i.e. a brutalising state of affairs where the individual has no say and therefore experiences his or her life activity as alien to him or herself.  Rather, production just took place to meet the needs of others.  The length of the working day in these situations was usually far shorter since the surplus product was enjoyed by the collective rather than privately expropriated.  And work was rewarding because you knew why you were doing it, knew who it was for, and had strong bonds with these people.  Nevertheless, this is not to glorify tribal societies.  There were usually hierarchies and technology levels were so low that lifespans were shorter and ridden with physical maladies.

But to extract what was positive about tribal societies and square that with our high-tech physically decent standards of living today, is a real possibility now that has become more immanent with the development of communication technologies.  Thanks to things like the internet and smart phones, it would now be possible to have an economy that is consciously planned by those doing the work in direct accordance with the needs of society as agreed by local participatory democracy.  The compensation for your time expended at work would be something like a certificate that guarantees you access to society’s bounty.  Not every certificate would be equal at this point.  In order to incentivise highly skilled work such as brain surgery or work that continues to be dull such as shovelling faeces, the quantity of goods you can get would be greater.  You could be writing articles one week for a lower level of reward than someone who is shovelling faeces, yet alternate those roles or do something entirely different the next week according to the agreements reached by the participatory democracy.  The faeces-shoveller of course would be able to acquire his Ferrari quicker.  So, at this lower phase of communism, individuals are not yet equal in material terms, though they are equal in terms of political power.  Moreover, it is worth noting that in this scenario, society is now totally incentivised to increase its technological level.  In order that it doesn’t have to devote too many resources for both the highly skilled work or the dull work, society becomes obliged to develop smart robotics and other machinery that can annul the drudge.  Insodoing, the new society is adopting a new economic law concerning an ever-increasing amount of liberation of the worker, freeing him or her to develop their creative powers and basically live the life of Riley.  The capitalist law of value has essentially collapsed, providing the ground for the evolution of a post-money system.  This is an entirely different mode of production to capitalism, and a vastly superior one at that.  The starting point for the new society in relation to its emergence from capitalism, is the demand that the means of production become socially rather than privately owned.

 

On ‘Estranged Labour’ and ‘Sustainable Development’

The idea of ‘estranged labour’ simply refers to the character of work undertaken for someone else, under the pressure of coercion or force, and especially when the product of labour is acquired by your enemy.  Labour under such conditions has to take on an ‘estranged’ character because it is not something pleasurable or creative, it is endured as a chore.  With estranged labour, work is just a ‘means to an end’ – physical survival and reproduction of the next generation of labourers, and it is only after the working day is finished that the worker perceives his life begins, yes for those few hours of watching TV then falling asleep.  This is our lives.

Estranged labour has been justified by the ruling class under capitalism in a number of ways.  They’re never honest about it.  The true motive for their imposition of estranged labour on the rest of the population is just to expand capital, the ruling classes’ own alien boss.  If this was made transparent to everyone it is doubtful how long the system could last.  However, they conjure myths about what you are working for, some idea of the ‘greater good’.  In the past this has been ‘for Empire!’ or ‘for the Nation!’  Today, the justification is that we work for the ‘environment!’  Sadly, the only challenges to this symptom of estranged labour comes from people who just want to substitute one excuse for another – their new excuse is we should work for ‘Growth Growth Growth!’  To tackle estranged labour requires a far bolder critique, one which would situate necessary labour in terms of what people need, and reduce necessary labour time to the bare minimum for satisfaction of needs as technology develops (it’s already developed quite a bit, as I’m sure you’re aware!)

So firstly, the justification for estranged labour in terms of the ‘environment!’  Today we are told we are on the verge of environmental apocalypse (a lie), and that people must work to produce wealth that can be used to mitigate climate disasters, stem overpopulation (apparently Africans by virtue of their poverty reproduce too much), to fund expensive green energy projects that would be considered non-cost effective in more rational times, and in other ways to ‘preserve nature’.  This lie for why we produce is bolstered by publicly funded ‘science’ that is open to question, and also structurally reinforced by rules on recycling your waste and monitoring your energy usage, as well as the fact we are bombarded with environmentalist messages all the time in the media.  All of this is loosely banded together under the banner of ‘sustainable development’.  There are critics of this, but as I shall argue later, they are even worse.

This situation, where the ostensible aim of production is for nature, is similar to ancient societies that thought they were working for the gods.  As Karl Marx wrote of this:

“To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods.  However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor.  No more was nature.” (‘Estranged Labour’, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844)

The gods, since they don’t exist, were never really the driving force for these labours, it was man’s own activity itself, just existing in an alienated form.  And this alienated form emanated from the fact that you had divisions in society, e.g. with the Pharaoh on top doling out orders.  When man isn’t free, you get a society of estranged labour.  Society sustains this set up through the conjuring of myths.  Today, with production for nature, the same thing is occurring.  The great chasm between the capitalist with immense power at his disposal versus the atomised worker creates a new estranged labour and is sustained by the conjuring of the myth your work benefits ‘the planet’.

Hard environmentalists have criticised this situation because they think we are producing too much and still raping Goddess Gaia.  But because no-one wants to regress to the stone age, their ideas aren’t taken seriously.  A far more significant critique of sustainable development is that it is not progressive enough, with ‘progress’ here defined as mankind dominating nature even more, producing more.  This attack on sustainable development that comes from both right and left political quarters holds that deifying nature comes at the expense of expanding the market and stifles growth.  There is nothing humanist about this critique and do not be deceived by the occasions in which human needs are sometimes employed in the discourse to disguise the truth.  The fact is you will still be suffering from estranged labour (because you work for the alien power capital), it is just that the justification for your hard work replaces ‘nature’ with ‘growth for growth’s sake’.

Marx continues: “And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor [whilst simultaneously deifying her] and the more miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.”

Here we have a clear indictment against the 21^st century.  Through estranged labour, we do not enjoy work in the slightest because it is not undertaken as part of a communal project, furthermore we cannot fully enjoy the products of labour.  Witness today’s frenzies for calorie counting all foodstuffs, paying a penance to Gaia through recycling as if we have to apologise for consuming the products of our own labour, and the whole hoohar that we must reduce our carbon footprint – i.e. consume less, in an age where we have achieved a great plenty of goods to consume.  From estranged labour flows estranged consumption – at no stage of life do we actually fully enjoy any of it.

There is a solution to all this which doesn’t fit the environmentalist critique (produce less) or the bourgeois-deviant critique (produce more).  We need to change the social relations of production so that we all become equal partners in the production process.  With equality, we can freely associate as autonomous beings, uncoercively producing as and when necessary (which doesn’t mean producing more), developing technology to make our lot even easier, and fully, sensuously enjoy what we produce with no estranged-based guilt trips.

Two Examples of Enlightenment Misunderstanding: ‘Progress’ and ‘Free Speech’

This blog looks at two cherished Enlightenment ideals – progress, and free speech – and shows why the narrow understanding of these and poor justification for these ideals as perpetuated by the old Enlightenment thinkers (e.g. Bacon and JS Mill) and new Enlightenment thinkers grouped around the radical bourgeois-deviant website spiked-online is not just wrong, but potentially dangerous to society.

Progress

In the origins of the Enlightenment, old and new, the conception of ‘progress’ only entails that progress occurs when mankind increases his domination of nature.  There is no mention of human progress, no discussion of how such progress benefits mankind, it is taken as given.  In fact, as has occurred, the drive for progress has been a mixed blessing for mankind.  Life expectancy, living standards, and efficiency in many spheres increase with progress, but it also extracts a heavy penalty in terms of making work more monotonous and dulling to the senses to the extent that workers become mere appendages of the machine.  It is not that the aspiration to dominate nature is wrong, not at all, the problem is that this progress occurs within the context of exploitative and alienated social relations, those relations of the market.

Progress is really a drive to extract more surplus value from the worker, and therefore impoverishes him in relation to the alien power that is dominating him – capital.  Progress never shortens the working day, indeed it sometimes extends it in the case of white collar workers who now have smartphones and therefore do extra work on the train to work and at home.  The worker’s resistance to that is met brutally with coercion both in the factory and outside.  This concept of progress is therefore narrow, what we want is a society where increasing the domination over nature is truly of benefit to mankind straightforwardly, and that cannot happen until the social relations that underpin the capitalist mode of production are entirely changed.  It is only when labour is emancipated from capital, when people associate freely with one another in production, that progress can be experienced as a good thing, and therefore that mankind’s material progress at last exists in tandem with his human progress.

Tragically spiked-online that emerged out of an ex-Marxist publication, only defends the narrow definition of progress, not this Marxist version, so are making a bad problem worse.  For example, in an article entitled “Britain’s Runway Fiasco: The New Fear of Progress”, Blair Spowart begins by articulating his Enlightenment view of progress, says we need loads more airports, loads more roads, more trains, more everything, before concluding “Right now, much of Asia is living in the future – let’s join them.”  What Spowart neglects to mention is that China, I assume he is thinking primarily of China, is a One-Party state totalitarian police state.  No doubt Spowart doesn’t like those aspects of Chinese society, but what he cannot see from his narrow idea of progress is that the form of the state is necessitated by that mode of production.  If you have the hyper capitalist exploitation that drives “the future”, you have alienated labour, and you just have to have a highly repressive state regime.  The two go hand in hand.  You can’t have market growth without direct repression because workers rebel too much.  So it’s no good spiked-online saying they believe in “liberty” and “progress” – they have to choose one or the other.  I hope they choose the former, and reconceptualise progress in terms of what it does for liberty, not that it is in-itself unproblematically good.

Free Speech

This is spiked’s most famed demand, and it is a good one.  “Free speech, no ifs or buts.”  But rather than justify it in the narrow terms of JS Mill, it is far better to justify it in terms of majority interest.  The principle of majority interest clarifies when free speech is necessary to uphold and when censorship is justified.  Yes, I said it, sometimes censorship is justified.  The principle of majority interest is not the same woolly idea of “public interest” that is bandied about by Lord Justice Leveson in his demands to restrict press freedom, it is the opposite of that.  Public interest as defined by a committee or a judge is not the real interest of the public who are now being denied the choice to read or see what they want ‘in their own interest’.  The idea of ‘majority interest’ by contrast, is exercised by the majority themselves.  It is something they vote on.  Thus in 1985, print workers at The Sun censored the front page that was due to go out.  It depicted striking miners’ leader Arthur Scargill with his arm raised, with the headline “Sieg Heil.”  This was a debased attempt by the bourgeois press to portray Scargill as a fascist, when really he was just a state-socialist.  The workers decided not to allow that to go to print, and the next morning, that issue of The Sun had a blank front page.  This was a case of the majority interest prevailing although it was an act of censorship.

Another example would be the publications suppressed by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.  They banned some bourgeois publications and banned some rival Socialist groups from publishing because to allow that would be to allow counter-revolutionary forces to organise against an already vulnerable fledgling worker’s state.  This censorship was justified because it was in the majority interest.  This wasn’t dreamt up by the likes of Leveson, we know this was what the majority wanted because they voted on it.

By contrast to these examples of justified censorship, it is usually necessary to fight for free speech under capitalism because it is a weapon of ours against the ruling class.  This Marxist view of the importance of free speech is different to the Enlightenment idea that tries to justify it in relation to some abstract principle because we are talking about what humans need in the here and now to help them have better lives.  Thus all the student union bans in relation to speech are unjustified because they harm the majority.  At university, the majority need to be open to all ideas to expand their minds and hopefully contribute to the future.  And all the government laws against speech crime need to be repealed because they express a desire to cripple worker’s development as people.

The principle of majority interest stems from a recognition of human history as that of a species striving to be free, yet constantly caught up in antagonistic social relations.  The principle of majority interest is a way of uniting in theory when free speech works and when it hampers that overall process of liberation.  Of course, when labour is fully self-emancipated, you can have total free speech forever more.  But a realistic attempt to realise the Enlightenment ideal has to acknowledge there are occasions in the run up when sometimes censorship is the right thing to do.  And that can only be justified with a Marxist view of history.

 

After Cecil: What Africa And Its Lions Need Is Economic Progress, Not A Green Moral Panic

Cecil, just lion around. Source: Wiki Commons/Daughter#3

Economic progress is vital for the third world so that the human population can live longer lives than the current paltry life expectancy in mainland Africa of 46 in Sierra Leone up to 65 in Botswana. Economic progress would also deliver better services, better housing, better electricity supply, and better jobs, leading to a superior quality of life than the suffering and back-breaking conditions currently endured by Africans. However this ‘humanist’ case for economic progress is likely to fall on deaf ears in the West today. Humanism has been hunted down over the years by green ideology. Now, as the international outrage over Cecil the lion attests, all that seems to morally matter is individual members of wildlife. Therefore in this degraded ethical context, I will argue in this blog post for economic progress as a way of saving the lion population of Africa.

The reaction to the death of Cecil the lion makes economic matters in Africa worse than they were. This will have a deleterious effect on lion populations, something that is tragically ironic given how the international community has been so keen on advertising its moral credentials by chest-thumping over poor Cecil. As has been explained by scientists writing in the National Geographic magazine, myself on spiked, and in a radio debate here (available to listen to until late August 2015, and commences at 01:13:40), lion hunting generates millions and millions of dollars that is desperately needed in Africa, revenue which does go back into broader conservation projects and supports 88,000 human families. An EU and US ban on the import of trophies, coupled with pressure from charities and NGOs to place lions on the ‘endangered species list’, will effectively ban hunting, depriving Africa of this money. This will disincentivize Africans from having policies that lead to sustainable lion populations, including removing the motivation for communities to combat illegal poaching. Add to this, a dominant view in the West that African governance is corrupt and that there should be closer UN oversight (which is apparently morally pure), and we are inviting a scenario where there is no socio-economic compulsion to protect any lions, only ineffective coercion from on high. The way the international community has reacted to Cecil’s case is therefore really bad news for lions in general.

Since the 1980s, the lion population of Africa has roughly halved, with between 32,000 and 35,000 on the continent today. Although this doesn’t mean the lion, as a species, is ‘endangered’, the downward trend does need some explaining. Amid the hysteria over Cecil, greens claim the decline is all due to legal hunting. This claim does not stand up to objective scrutiny. A far more believable explanation is that lion populations have dwindled because of habitat loss and illegal poaching. It is the shrinking of the areas in which lions can breed and roam that is the main cause of the decline. Illegal poaching is also important, and African governments have taken steps to combat this. So what causes habitat loss?

Once again greens contribute very little to the debate over habitat loss. They argue it is ‘overpopulation’ (of humans) that causes habitat loss. However the term ‘overpopulation’ has no clear meaning. It is simply not clear what an ‘optimum’ population would be, given available land. Africa’s total population is just over 1bn, whereas China and India each exceed this, yet don’t seem to have the same problems with sustaining biodiversity. ‘Overpopulation’ is actually a morally loaded term that leads to draconian birth control policies. It has no scientific merit in explaining anything, and is essentially anti-human.

Another implausible green idea is that habitat loss is caused by climate change. Whilst it is true that certain weather phenomena can temporarily disrupt an ecosystem, the general climate trends are no more life-threatening than they ever have been. Even if some studies have shown temperature increases of 1 degree celsius since the 1980s, it is difficult to see how this would directly cause habitat loss for lions. In Australia, it is often as hot as Africa, and it is drier too, yet Australian wildlife habitats are thriving.

The real cause of habitat loss is poor agricultural technique. Lacking much industry, African countries rely on agriculture to sustain themselves. Whilst this doesn’t generate enough wealth to extend life expectancy or the standard of living, it would not inherently be a cause of habitat loss if modern technology was used in agriculture. Yet thanks to the ‘fairtrade’ scam that is promoted in the West as a form of ‘ethical consumerism’, African farmers are deprived of the latest technology, including use of GM crops, that would allow for increased agricultural output from the use of less land. Therefore the agricultural use of land has to expand to meet human needs, and this impinges on lion habitats. Furthermore, with the absence of reliable energy sources caused by the green belittling of power stations (‘we have to cut carbon emissions!’), some African countryside dwellers are forced to burn wood for fuel. Again, this impinges on lion habitats. So once again, green ideas have made a bad problem worse. The most immediate concern for economic progress in Africa then is that agriculture should become high-tech rather than low-tech, and that energy supply needs to be increased. Both these things will involve less hectoring from the green international community. These progressive humanist policies will also be of benefit to lions.

Removing the political fetters imposed on Africa by the green international community will firstly lead to increased agricultural output. What next? After the ball has started to roll, increased agricultural output will lead to an accumulation of capital rather than the meagre sustaining of an impoverished population. This increased capital will want to be invested, and expect to be rewarded. Naturally then, it would lead to an industrial revolution in Africa, as has been experienced in the countries of the Western world, China, and elsewhere. This economic progress will lift millions of people out of poverty, increase life expectancy, and the overall quality of life. Furthermore, being less reliant on the agricultural sector for economic sustenance, and with the moving of more people to cities that accompanies industrialisation, lion habitats would grow back. In addition, the newfound wealth would disincentivize illegal poaching. Therefore, in a few years, the lion population would return to 1980s levels, without ever having ignorantly to clamp down on permitted hunting. So if one cares about the plight of lions, it is far more effective to focus on improving the real world rather than be engulfed in a post-Cecil moral panic, demanding bans, and more crippling green policing.