On The Idea Of Communism: Communism Is Dead, Long Live Communism
Posted by onehundredflowers on March 31, 2009
photo: mike allen
As readers of this site know, we have been posting reports and videos from the recent and remarkable London conference “On the Idea of Communism.”
The following was posted on guardian.co.uk.
Communism: a viable alternative?
As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
Bernard Keenan
Let’s get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the “end of history”, the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.
The speedy panic with which our governments agreed to throw billions of pounds away to restore “confidence” suggests that the dream is over and we are awakening to a strange new socialism, in which an increasingly authoritarian government has taken public control of financial capitalism in order to save it from itself. We read today that equal pay reviews no longer matter. Migrants are left to starve on the streets as the government heads off the far right by pandering to it. And so it’s precisely now that the question of an alternative must be re-opened.
Against this backdrop, Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event a genuine sense of urgency. Even the BBC came to hear Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and others speaking on the possibilities and challenges of reinventing the communist ideal today.The conference was happily free of dogmatism. No one on the stage was there to represent a particular party or doctrine. There were disagreements, but at heart was a simple proposition. Communism is an idea that has been with us in different forms for thousands of years, as Terry Eagleton pointed out. The task is now to think what the concepts of egalitarian voluntarism, self-organisation, common ownership of common means of production, abolition of class-structured society, and freedom from state power can mean today.
It’s a bold statement, declaring oneself a communist. The cultural revolutions of 1968 were the beginning of the end of the party-state, when programmatic communism was replaced by a more postmodern, abstract idea of “the left”. Freedom of thought and nomadic thought undid the old certainties of Marxist political knowledge. No one has quite figured out how to replace them, and this perhaps more than anything else can account for the current weakness of the left, even as capitalism is in crisis: what is to be done?
First, the question of the role of the state and the economy remains open. While Judith Balso, Toni Negri and Alain Badiou insist on creating new political movements at a distance from the state, Zizek and Bruno Bosteels point to the experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela as contemporary proof that by taking power, a progressive radical movement can survive even against overwhelming reactionary forces. For Zizek, to reject the idea of a revolutionary state in the absence of a clear alternative is a cop-out.
However, such considerations all seem to beg the question of how to organise. It is difficult to imagine a new Communist party, but without one, the idea of communism remains just that: a quasi-religious article of faith. This was perhaps Eagleton’s point when he observed that it is not so difficult to imagine a communism of scarcity, foisted upon us by disaster rather than rapture.
Perhaps the true question is: why communism? It does no harm to remember that for Marx, communism was not something anachronistic and programmatic. Marx insisted on the simple idea that we and no one else are responsible for remaking the world. Communism can only be enacted from what really exists. The party-states attempted to bend society to match some abstract idea. A true philosophy of communism cannot provide all the answers, because it has not yet encountered the problems.
Separating the promise of communism from the disasters of the 20th century is no easy task. But it feels necessary. Already we know that choices will have to be made and sides taken. Impending ecological disaster suggests that this could be our last chance to do so. If another world is possible, it will happen in action, not abstract theory. The first choice is very simple: to begin.
spritely said
How do we make revolution today? We need to seriously consider our work.
The workers movement has been lost for decades. We have lost our orientation. We need to figure out where we are going.
I have considered myself a communist for over 40 years. I plugged along for a while doing ‘communist work’ in a few organizations and unions before recently realizing that what we were doing wasn’t providing the desired result or even coming close.
I have been struggling with these issues for the last two years. I have learned a lot but run into even more questions than answers.
I am in America so I operate within that framework. But I have traveled the globe and worked with comrades in Latin America and Asia in the past. I look at things internationally. I look at the interests of the proletariat as an international class.
I think we are lost until we confront these questions and figure out the way forward. While we need to think this all out we also need to do this immediately. Capitalism is in its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Only the workers movement can lead the way out of this. The question is how we do so before open savagery breaks out.
I hope everyone will engage in this.
What (if any) organizations in the world today are capable or even trying to lead revolution?
There are countless groups around the world from mass parties to sects. Most carry out the same work today that they did at their founding. Do they expect that all of a sudden workers will come over to them en masse and carry out a revolution? Are they correct?
Are any existing groups capable of leading a revolution in the foreseeable future?
What are revolutionaries supposed to do? Is it all about newspapers, meetings, election contests, protests?
What work should revolutionaries be carrying out? Forget all the abstract stuff about “agitation, organizing, educating.” What concretely are we supposed to do every day?
Does what you do everyday contribute toward bringing about revolution or are you wasting time?
Should we just publish newspapers and sell and distribute them, print leaflets and hand them out at strikes and protests, hold public meetings about current issues, run in elections, organize protests as we have since the days of Marx? Is this what will lead to revolution? How? When?
What else should we be doing or what should we be doing instead?
What did Marx do? Lenin? Castro? What lessons from the past are we ignoring? What innovations do we need to make?
Why newspapers?
Lenin organized his party around a newspaper to keep it together during its underground existence in a time of repression by a Czarist government 100 years ago.
Should we still organize around a newspaper?
Do we need newspapers today, when readership is at an all time low? Why or why not?
If not newspapers than what?
How are parties formed?
Does a group of people come together and proclaim a party and then recruit people to it? Does that work?
Does a group of people circulate a call for a certain type of party until a wider group of people agrees to meet and found such a party, hashing everything out in a founding congress? Does that work?
How did the existing groups come to be?
What is the historical precedent? What’s worked and hasn’t? What did Marx do? Lenin? Bernstein? Luxemburg? Kun? Trotsky? Mao? Castro? Ho Chi Minh? Bishop? Borge? Newton?
How were the unions organized? What can we learn from them?
Where are people right now? How do we get them to where they need to be?
Where are workers right now? Who is ready for revolution? How do they become ready for revolution? What can we do to hasten that process?
What are workers ready to fight for RIGHT NOW? What could they be mobilized around this Saturday? How do we get them from there to where we are?
What do we tell people that agree with us?
When we meet people that agree with us what do tell them to do? Do we say that should join our group, pay dues and distribute our newspapers and leaflets and that eventually enough people will do the same and we can then take over?
If that’s all it takes why do we still live in a capitalist world? Have we just not handed out newspapers and held meeting long enough?
Should parties be monolithic?
The difference between many parties/sects is their stance on certain historic issues. We look at each other as opponents based on what we think of the USSR or Cuba or Trotsky or whatever.
Is this how parties should be organized? Should people have to except the analysis worked out in advance by the party on each and every historical issue? Is this how Marx, Lenin, Castro, Luxemburg and others organized their groups?
If not what should be different? If so why hasn’t this worked so far?
How should we organize?
Are parties the best structure? Are they what we should be aiming for now? If not then what?
What do we need to do right now to group together our sisters and brothers and overthrow capitalism internationally and how do we achieve it?
How did the bourgeoisie organize and carry out the overthrow of feudalism?
What did the capitalists do to usher in capitalism? Are there any lessons for us there?
What did Marx say?
Marx taught us a lot. Did he give us any instructions on how to organize ourselves? Did anyone else? What were we taught that we missed or ignore today?
Why does capitalism still predominate?
What’s the explanation for this?
What’s should we look at and what should we forget?
What models do we have to look at? What’s the closest we’ve come to revolution in an advanced / imperialist country? What’s the closest we’ve come in backward countries? What should we try to emulate? What should we not try to emulate?
What has changed since Marx? Since Spain? Since Lenin? Since Cuba 1959? Since Nicaragua 1979?
What has changed and how should we adjust ourselves?
What else?
What are your other thoughts?
I hope to get some serious and involved replies. For my sake and all of our sakes.
old commie said
I have no idea whether anyone will see a new comment on an old thread, but here goes.
These are some of the questions that should be discussed on kasama, and each one of them should become a permanent thread. Maybe that will happen now with the reorganization of kasama, but I am cynical of “reorganizations”. There is an old business and political saying “When you don’t know what to do, but you have to look like you’re doing something, Reorganize.”
Marq Dyeth said
This may be as good a place as any to ask this question. It’s been bugging me ever since I started reading Kasama.
I was first exposed to Marxism-Leninism by reading copies of the MIM (Maoist Internationalist Movement) Notes newspaper as a teenager in Los Angeles. I found their perspective to be very compelling in some ways but also kind of… paranoid. Intelligent but also out of touch. And not part of a political organization or organizing project that I could tell. The militant presentation of what I later learned is called anti-revisionism eventually lent itself to parody and some people I knew swore (incorrectly it turns out) the whole thing was a complicated practical joke.
Now, years later, I find this webpage called Monkey Smashes Heaven, and also the Leading Light Communist Organization (LLCO.) They seem to be talking a similar line as MIM, commemorate MIM’s founder, and also have inherited some of the tone of that organization’s newspaper. You can look them up on google easily enough if you want to see what I’m talking about.
My question is: does anyone know anything about LLCO as a project? Do we need to have an evaluation of it’s politics of Third Worldism? Or what’s the story?
Mike E said
Old Commie:
I am constantly encouraging people to post comments on old posts. Not only are they seen, but they bring attention to valuable posts that are otherwise buried. I would love to see readers regularly (weekly?) post on important posts to keep those discussions alive.
All our threads are permanent threads. They are all still there. If you want to comment on them, do so.
Marq Dyeth:
I imagine many of our readers and commentators have followed MIM and LLCO over time. I don’t find them particularly interesting or compelling — but there is no reason we could not or should not engage their politics.
My view in short is that their politics is very pessimistic about the possibility of revolution in the U.S. — and their analysis is packed with all kinds of factual and theoretical gymnastics to assert that there is no revolutionary potential here.
On one side, they have a fanciful and romanticized view of revolution in the Third World, and a hostile and bitter disdain for the oppressed within the U.S. (and other imperialist countries).
In short, their politics seem sharply NON-revolutionary to me (in the sense of explicitly thinking that revolution is not possible, and in the sense of thinking that the masses of people are over-paid, bribed corrupt parasites and oppressors).
The fact that these politics are expressed using sorta-marxist jargon and arguments doesn’t make them any less reactionary or untrue.
But again: if someone wants to engage any of these ideas — there is no reason that they cannot be taken up.