A 21st Century Perspective in the Spirit of The Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto Project
superseded document. The new version is here
Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and "Marxists" have been disregarding its message ever since. It tells us how communism cannot emerge without capitalism first creating both the pre-conditions and the forces that will bring it to fulfillment. Capitalism is like the caterpillar to the communist butterfly. Communism is a consequence of capitalism and the next step in the progress of humanity
Present-day "Marxists" totally oppose this view. Their anti-capitalism is reactionary. They believe capitalism is destroying much of the past that should be preserved and is leading us down a path from which we must retreat. There are no prospects for their backward looking project and if there were it would be self-defeating because it would revert to conditions that history shows would eventually bring us back to where we are. In their day Marx and Engels had to contend with similar trends and, indeed, a section of The Communist Manifesto is devoted to them.
The message of The Communist Manifesto of course is also ignored by those for whom capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. It gets in the way of their "communism has failed" mantra which they base on abortive revolutions in backward essentially pre-capitalist regions during the 20th century. This experience in fact only confirms the message that communism can only successfully emerge from advanced capitalism.
This pamphlet aims to show how capitalism has been conforming to the historical role that Marx and Engels identified and concludes by looking at what an infant communist movement should do under the present system and the problems to be addressed during a period of revolution.
Capitalism will be remembered for creating and equipping its own grave digger, the proletariat. It assigns most people to that class and then provides them with the modern economic and social conditions they require to begin the struggle to create a new society that conforms to their needs rather than those of the capitalist class. The first major objective of such a struggle is the establishment of a revolutionary government that takes the means of production from their present owners.
The preparation process has reached an advanced stage in the developed countries. Wars and depressions permitting, the middle income countries are a generation or two behind while the least developed regions where half the world's population reside will take until later in the century to catch up.
The proletariat comprises everyone who relies on a wage, salary or welfare payment. It is the overwhelming majority of the population once economic development has eliminated the peasantry and most small scale producers. The big capitalists who own the vast bulk of all productive assets except for public infrastructure are a tiny handful, perhaps 0.01%.
After it dispossesses the capitalists, the proletariat will own the means of production in common. Distributing them to individuals or groups would simply be a reversion to capitalism. With the disappearance of all other classes, the proletariat becomes the entire human race and its ownership comes to be social ownership and society can be appropriately called classless and communist. This form of society can only arise on the foundations of a modern industrial society and not at some earlier stage of human development. This is a message reinforced by the difficult experience of proletarian revolution in the 20th century.
Capitalism's ongoing industrial revolution opens up the prospect of a level of economic development that can provide universal affluence and free work of unavoidable tedium and toil. These conditions eliminate the material necessity for the profit motive. Instead the desire to work and mutual regard can spur our efforts and we will be happy with a shared prosperity. This would be the critical core of social ownership.
Capitalism also creates modern liberal society, and so eliminates or undermines much of the backward culture of pre-capitalist conditions with the supremacy of the tribe, extended family or other groups at the expense of the individual and society, with its subordination of women, with its deference and servility, and acceptance of autocracy and tyranny. A classless society could not possibly emerge directly from such conditions.
While many individuals are corrupted, stunted or crippled to varying degrees by the system, capitalism cannot help but create a proletariat which as a whole is equipped in its abilities and ways of thinking to begin the revolutionary struggle to transform itself and society. They have moved well beyond their peasant forebears. They are far wiser in the ways of the world and a large proportion have university or other training. So they are capable of becoming a ruling class and taking on such revolutionary tasks as breaking down the old oppressive division of labor with its thinkers and doers, and struggling against those who would aspire to be a new bourgeoisie and put the revolution in reverse.
Communism will be an advance on capitalism in all respects. On the economic front, the proletariat will remove the brakes that capitalism places on the economy. This includes eliminating economic crises, vastly increasing support for science and unleashing the worker initiative and enthusiasm that capitalism cannot tap. On the social front, proletarians will transform their life, relationships and personality as they develop a world based on mutual regard rather than the dog eat dog conditions of capitalism where sociopaths are often the biggest winners.
Once revolutionary thinking begins to take hold of the proletariat, the intense struggle to create a mass movement and take political power will ensue. Many will join the fight despite the personal risks.
Once in power there will be further struggles as the proletariat carries out the transition to communism. It will face many challenges and there are bound to be setbacks. The new revolutionary governments will be far less experienced than their opponents. Everyone will have to learn news ways and cast of old ones. There will need to be a struggle against passive, subaltern and weak spirited habits and any trend among the more capable to find the idea of "meritocracy" congenial. There is the possibility that the revolutionary movement will come to power while a significant part of the world is still emerging from backwardness. This will bring a host of additional problems as the revolution is burdened with carrying out capitalism's uncompleted development tasks.
In the advanced capitalists countries, the capitalist class (a.k.a. the bourgeoisie) has managed to monopolize most of the means of production and to make almost everyone else a proletarian who either lives off a wage or salary, or becomes a pauper dependent on government welfare handouts. The process is far less complete in the rest of the world although it varies from one place to another. Regrettably there are large regions where peasants and small-scale producers still comprise a large proportion of the population.
The bourgeoisie is quite small and somewhat smaller than it used to be as a result of the ownership concentration that has accompanied the development of modern industry. They are sometimes referred to as the 0.01 per cent (one in 10,000), and that would seem about right. There is of course also the stratum of highly paid and loyal hirelings. From the proletariat's point of view the smaller their combined numbers the better.
It is common for apologists of the present system to deny the existence of classes. Capitalists can go bankrupt and become proletarians and children can be disinherited. Likewise, proletarians can rise to the rank of capitalist, particularly through cashing in on intellectual property rights. There are no legally recognized classes that you are born into and to which different laws and privileges apply. However, pointing to a certain mobility between classes does not refute their existence.
We are also reminded that many workers hold various financial assets including stocks. However, this is generally savings out of wages for retirement. It is foregoing present for future consumption. Other retirement schemes with no pretense of owning anything would be just as satisfactory for wage earners.
We are also told that the proletariat is vanishing because the word refers to factory workers and their relative importance has declined significantly in the advanced capitalist countries. This is often accompanied by the claim that we are all "middle class" now. It is more the case that the old middle stratum of society has lost its privileged position and the great unwashed now have bathrooms, as well as many other things. So one can understand people, for opposing reasons, saying that we are all middle class now rather than proletarians.
There are a significant number of people who are described as self-employed or contractors and therefore not wage or salary earners. In most cases this a difference in form rather than substance where they have one "client" who is effectively their employer. Besides, many in this category move regularly between employment and "self-employment". The people involved are reliant on their labor power for their livelihood rather than living off income from wealth. Their economic and social position is no different from that of an obvious proletarian, and they would have just as much to gain from the new system.
There is still a small petty bourgeoisie. This includes small employers, farmers who own and operate their own land and small shop keepers. They still control the till and have an ownership stake that they jealously guard. The more that capitalism pushes these people into the proletariat the better. To think otherwise is to look backwards.
The industrial revolution that began over two centuries ago is transforming the material conditions of life and by doing so makes capitalism obsolete. In the most developed regions of the world it is providing a high level of material abundance and removing much of the toil and tedium from work. These conditions make it possible to contemplate social ownership where the motivation is no longer profit, or some reward derived from it, but rather common regard.
The ever growing levels of productivity mean that an equal share of the social product would no longer be shared poverty. In the past the prospect of shared hunger and distress impelled those who were in a position to do so to exploit others through slavery, serfdom, the possession of special skills or the ownership of the means of production. As the average share provides an increasing degree of prosperity, the imperative to fare better than others diminishes.
National income per head in the richest countries is now quite high and a modest rate of growth over another generation or two would bring them well into the realm of abundance. The middle income countries such as China, India and Brazil are not far behind, while the poorer half of the world should catch up later this century or early in the next. The pace of development will depend on a range of factors including the prevalence of wars and economic depressions.
There are many who believe that providing everyone on the planet with the high living standards that communism requires is simply not possible because of "limits to growth" or "planetary carrying capacity". This is just not true. Prosperity for all is not difficult to imagine. Most people will live comfortably in large cities. Precision farming, biotechnology and other innovations will provide far more food while using less land and water, an already established trend that is gathering pace in spite of opposition from greens. There will be limitless supplies of clean energy from a range of resources. Future generations of nuclear power technology will be able to rely on inexhaustible fuel resources. Geothermal and other energy technologies, including storage, will continue to improve. The mineral resources we rely on are more than sufficient, even without considering future access to extraterrestrial resources and our ability to devise ways to substitute one resource for another. We will protect the biosphere with more advanced and better funded waste and conservation management.
Just as we will thrive with possibly 10 billion people by 2100, we will thrive with a lot more by 2200. A mix of currently conceivable and not yet conceivable advances in science will make this manageable. At some stage we can expect our descendants to be well on the way to transforming themselves into a post-human species with totally new needs, and new abilities to harness nature to meet them. And as they head off into the rest of the solar system and beyond, they will no longer be held back by any earthly constraints.
Concerns about the impact on material progress of looming environmental crises, stemming from climate change and poor farming practices, are best addressed by concentrating on placing the greatest possible pressure on governments and capitalist charitable foundations to fund the research and development needed to accelerate the transition to better, cheaper, safer and emission free technologies. The wrong response is the green fixation with renewable energy and organic farming.
Many people seem to think that we can make a significant switch to renewable energy over the next few decades with just a little bit of extra political will. However, the reality is that heavy reliance on intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind will remain far too costly and unreliable until there are major breakthroughs in storage technology. The developing countries that are now the main and increasing source of CO2 emissions have made it clear they will only reduce them if heavily compensated. Only the development of cheaper new energy technologies will make a difference. This is likely to include a new generation of nuclear reactors and major improvements to enhanced geothermal energy. Indeed, these could perhaps go hand in hand wind and solar.
Problems with soil degradation, water depletion and nutrient pollution are not solved by refusing to use synthetic fertilizer or pesticide or genetically modified plants. While some places, particularly China, use too much fertilizer, others, particularly Africa, use far too little. Getting nutrients by plowing back fallow crops of nitrogen fixing legumes would mean far more land for a given net crop. Failure to use pesticide means sharing the crop with bugs. Taking the funding and regulatory brakes off agricultural biotechnology would vastly increase effective yields of both plants and livestock. The ultimate in "industrial agriculture", precision farming, will use modern technologies such as drones, GPS and sensors to provide plants with individual care and optimize the amount of water, fertilizer and pesticide.
Then we have those who not only think that abundance is impossible but relish the idea of going back to a more primitive economy. They seek a steady state economy based on small scale local production. They have the delusional idea that such a mode of production would provide more rewarding and less alienating work than under the present system. This is based on a romanticized picture of pre-industrial society full of happy artisans and self-sufficient peasants, and silly chatter about how people in poor countries are happier than people in the rich ones.
They claim that for production to be sustainable it should be kept to what is possible on the basis of renewable and reusable resources and we should forego large-scale use of depletable metals and minerals. They believe that such an economy would deliver wholesome "sufficiency", but in fact it would deliver abject poverty just as it did in the past.
Making industry small scale and local would rule out many technologies and products. Virtually the only source of energy would be firewood as solar panels and wind turbines would be impossible or too expensive to produce. An electric light bulb would have the same problem. Computers, telecommunications and anything electronic would be impossible. The primary source of locomotion would be draft animals and their numbers would be limited by the fact that their calorie consumption per head is many times that of a human. Productivity would plummet with the reversion to more labor intensive technologies with most time devoted to producing food, clothing and other basics. There would be no ability to deal with natural disasters, including those resulting from climate change, nor move large quantities of grain in the case of a local crop failure.
Of course such a society, at least in the more developed regions would be able to cannibalize from the old society for a while. The housing stock would take a generation to badly deteriorate. There would be plenty of scrap metal and other materials. However, the uses that could be made of this would be limited by the simple technology available. For example, a bicycle, assuming it could still be produced, would be very expensive. As the material conditions reverted to those before capitalism so would the social and political, with local thugs exacting tribute and fighting each other over the spoils. From these backward economic and political conditions, humanity would then, just as we did in the past, eventually take the painful path back to capitalism and modernity.
Even the environment would not benefit from this madness. Reverting to firewood and pre-industrial agriculture is no way to preserve the environment with our population levels. Some exponents understand this and put their hopes in a massive "die back" where the population is reduced to a mere fraction of its present level. Without a tiny global population that made a modern advanced economy impossible, there is no level of "sufficiency" or low consumption at which you could say that the environmentally best way of producing is to confine yourself to local small scale methods. For any given level of final consumption, large scale advanced technology would provide many ways of reducing the use of resources and impacts on the environment.
Mechanization and automation has done much to reduce the odious or toilsome nature of work. In developed countries pick and shovel work and carrying heavy loads are things of the past and much of the remaining menial and routine work in the manufacturing and service sectors will be automated in the next generation. The work remaining will be primarily intellectual in nature and inherently interesting and challenging. In poorer countries this process will of course take longer.
The level of training of workers is historically high and will increase over time. In developed countries about a quarter of young proletarians graduate from university and a similar proportion have other forms of training.
We can also expect improved ability to perform complex tasks in a future communist society as many of the conditions that cause stunted development are eliminated. These include lack of family support, peer pressure to under-perform and a dysfunctional education system. Social ownership will end the isolation of education from production and other activities, so uniting learning and doing. We will also benefit from an increasing understanding of human development and what causes learning difficulties. And over the longer term we can expect to see artificial improvements through mind-enhancing drugs, genetic engineering (induced evolution) and brain link ups to computers.
The dominance of capitalist market relations brings a social as well as an industrial revolution. This revolution casts off many ancient shackles while creating weaker capitalist ones.
Proletarians are employees not slaves or serfs. As wage workers they only have a contractual arrangement for part of the day with their capitalist master and are free to move from one job to another. Their boss unlike the peasants' lord is probably not the local political chief or magistrate.
Their position in the labor market also frees them from subordination to the extended family, tribe or local community. It provides economic independence and the opportunity to physically escape from these sources of oppression and conservatism.
The new market based class relations also raise women from their age old subordinate position. The nuclear family replaces the extended family as the economic unit so that women only have to deal with their freely chosen husband and not his relatives. Then comes the independence of employment for a wage. The changing conditions plus struggle by women lead to the removal of legal discrimination, new divorce laws and various forms government child support. This cuts away much although not all of the legacies of women's oppression and creates the conditions where men and women can begin to understand their differences and similarities, and better meet their mutual needs.
The political system undergoes a dramatic change. Capitalist dominance is quite in keeping with equality before the law, freedom of speech and assembly, due process and constitutional rule. People now expect these political conditions and feel aggrieved by their absence. They could not imagine being ruled by bejeweled thugs. This provides space for the proletariat to organize itself and a for revolutionary movement to emerge and develop. Although once the capitalists feel sufficiently threatened they may dispense with these arrangements. This could involve the employment of extra legal means such as goons and death squads, a state of emergency, a military coup or the coming to power of a fascist tyrant. However, such drastic measures could not permanently put the genie back in the bottle.
Overcoming both submissive and oppressive behavior will be at the core of the struggle for communism. Individuals will require the boldness to stand up to people who act in a harmful manner either to them or to others, while expecting other people to submit to you is completely at odds with a culture of mutual regard. Overcoming the submissive and oppressive behaviors found under capitalism will prove difficult enough. Having to overcome their far more extreme pre-capitalist forms would be unimaginably difficult.
The experience of constant flux experienced under capitalism is also important for communism. Earlier societies are static. The way of life in your old age was the same as that in your youth. In keeping with this there are set and unchanging ways of thinking and general acceptance of how things are. Under capitalism there is constant change and increasing uncertainty in the conditions of life and the prevailing ways of thinking. Under these freed up conditions, it is possible for people to look at where we are and where we are going. The Communist Manifesto expresses this well.
All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.
Communism will remove the shackles that capitalism places on society's productive ability and on humanity's potential generally. We will create a more dynamic economy that better meets our needs both as consumers and workers. We will create a society where the individual is no longer an alien.
Communism will be free of the economic slumps that cause mass unemployment under capitalism. There will no longer be capital markets with their stock market crashes and debt crises. Society as the owner of all productive assets and the recipient of all revenue will not have to seek funds from investors. If an enterprise receives investment funding as a loan and is unable to repay it, this may represent a misallocation of resources but has no financial impact because the lending authority, not being an intermediary, did not borrow the funds it lost. There will still be a modest role for financial intermediaries because enterprises will still need overdraft facilities given that revenue and payments do no coincide, and consumers will still have savings accounts and borrow for big ticket items. However, these should not be a source of serious difficulties as long as aggregate demand is assured, and it would be, given that all revenue is received by socially controlled organizations. There could be no failure to spend.
Mutual regard will prove far superior to the profit motive. The latter works indirectly, with owners of capital having to apply various rewards and penalties to get their employees to do their bidding. If a job is in any way complex it becomes difficult to assess performance and it cannot come close to matching what would be achieved if workers simply wanted to do the job to the best of their ability.
The mutual regard motive is based on the fact that because of our joint ownership of the means of production we and our fellows benefit fully from their use. There are no rich capitalists taking their slice. We or other workers are not thrown on the economic scrap heap if we are more productive and innovative. Our development makes us more adaptable and there is all the retraining and financial support we need. We do our best knowing that the vast majority are doing the same, and so we all win from the collective effort. Doing our best becomes a question of morality and honor. There are three aspect of this changed behavior that will totally transform work.
Firstly, we do what we can to make other people's work more productive and rewarding. These relations with our fellows are what make it possible for work to become a need rather than simply a necessity, adding greatly to motivation. We are benefiting fully as workers as well as consumers.
Secondly, we stand up to the minority of people who behave badly. This requires moral courage because such people are often bullying schemers. Bad behavior includes harmful interpersonal conduct and succumbing to various moral hazards. The latter includes: having one's judgments or decisions skewed because one has a lot personally invested in a particular project or technology; resisting the introduction of a new technology or product mix that does not match one's skill set; undermining the efforts of rivals or enemies; misappropriating resources for one's own material benefit, through either direct personal use or illicit sale; and engaging in careerist behavior such as undermining others, making oneself indispensable, taking credit and deflecting blame, and using recruitment and promotion to create a system of patronage.
Thirdly, we go out of our way when necessary. This would include extra time or effort at critical moments at work. We may, for example, be tired or missing out on a planned gathering with friends and family. The reward is the successful completion of an important task.
Communism could still have its own forms of competition. Funding could be sourced from a multitude of investment bodies with varied opinions on what is a good project; other enterprises and new start-ups could enter an industry; and the performance of similar enterprises in different regions could be compared.
Apologists argue that all this well-intentioned motivation would come to very little because an economy based on social ownership has an inherent economic calculation problem because it could not have a properly functioning price system.
The prevailing view is that communism could not have a properly functioning price system because it cannot have market transactions between enterprises. It is certainly true that the transfers between enterprises are not changes in ownership but simply of custody over socially owned property. However, this does not mean that they cannot use prices to choose least cost inputs or to limit their purchases to expected revenue, or offer their output at prices that reflect cost and ensure that products go to the highest bidders in the case of excess demand. The fact that transfers between enterprises were simply ones of custody rather than ownership would be seen in the fact that no individuals involved with an enterprise would receive any net revenue nor incur any loss from the transaction.
Communism could also have an interest rate charge to ration investment funds to what is expected to be their most valued uses. Those making investment decisions would base their expectations of future costs and prices on the best available information.
Not only could communism have a price system, it could have one that is superior to the one found under capitalism. One can mention here the greater honesty, the better flow of information due to the removal of property barriers between enterprises, the inclusion of what are presently external costs and benefits, the end to government imposed distortions for the benefit of vested interests, and the fact that income equality would remove the equity concerns currently associated with reliance on pricing.
To the extent that the individual's consumption is obtained regardless of work performed, they do not engage in a market exchange. Labor power is no longer exchanged for consumption products. Some think that this would mean people being allocated specific rations. Given that everyone's tastes, needs and circumstances are different it is difficult to see how this would operate. Others see people simply taking what they want. This might make sense if production could provide consumption of all goods to satiation levels. However, the reality is that even with increasing affluence there will still be scarcity. For example, there is no end to the resources we can devoted to scientific research, and new and better products take time to become readily available. So an allowance received by each individual would need to play a role. It would not have an exclusive role. There would also be the free provision of undesired needs such as medical treatment that compensates for a disadvantage and could be seen as a society-wide 'compulsory' insurance scheme. Various fixed and public good costs may well be covered by means other than through prices paid for from the allowance.
Even where work is given freely, enterprises would still have to pay for labor power. Instead of being paid to its workers, it would go into a fund to cover allowances, collective consumption and possibly net investment.
One can imagine a number of reasons for market elements lingering here for some time, even if of diminishing importance.
Because of people's preferences, there may be an inadequate supply of people willing to do certain jobs with the result that financial inducements may be required. In other cases where there is an excess supply of people wanting to do a job, they may have to bid for the privilege and pay a financial penalty.
There are bound to be cases of insurmountable labor supply constraints. Examples include those who are the best in their field and limited numbers with the right training. Here it is not a matter of attracting workers away from other activities but rationing an existing supply to the most valued uses. In this case, enterprises would bid for workers. However, the payment would not go to them but be an ongoing tax on the successful organization.
If the level of output being shared is determined by what people are willing to produce without payment, many people may feel that they would like the opportunity to work more in return for more consumption. They have expensive hobbies perhaps and are willing to forego some of their free time to pay for them. They want to exchange free time for products and this would leave them better off.
In the early phase there will be no question of a guaranteed income. It will take time to transform work relations, to reduce the uncongenial aspects of work to the minimum, to ensure that all workers are skilled for interesting work. Also for some time there will be people who are unwilling to take an active interest in work. This would include those who would rather spend their time taking drugs, watching videos or playing computer games.
Where markets remain for labor and consumption, they would not be markets in the full capitalist sense. While workers would be exchanging their labor power for consumer products, there would be a difference to the extent that they are not mere employees but co-owners of the means of production and that when purchasing consumer products they are not transacting with private owners with opposing interests. So these are not inherently antagonistic relations as are normal market ones.
A guaranteed income would benefit both the individual and society. Individuals would not have to explain their activities to anyone and could, for example, freely choose when to take time out to study or have children. Society would benefit from giving more imaginative individuals leeway in defining their own jobs, unconstrained by those with more entrenched ideas. This would be particularly important in doing research or preparing investment proposals, with people acting individually or in teams. The guaranteed proportion of income would increase in stages as communist conditions progressed.
People who are more productive than average would be happy with a normal share knowing that they are engaged in their preferred job and occupation and that other people generally are contributing to the best of their abilities.
It should be mentioned in passing that there are some who believe that communism would not need prices or economic calculation. They accept the prevailing view that prices are inseparable from markets but see no problem because in the absence of 'consumerism' there would be no need to economize in the use of labor. Workers find work rewarding and the hours required to meet our modest needs are sufficiently low to not conflict with other activities. At worst there would be a few hours of wasted but still enjoyable work. In other words, labor power would have no "opportunity cost" to use the economist's jargon. This is fairyland.
Human progress depends more than anything on scientific research and breakthrough innovations. However, under capitalism they are in many cases grossly under funded and their application impeded. In most areas major breakthroughs are rare. All the fields of engineering - nuclear, chemical, mechanical, aerospace, electrical - have seen little change in recent decades. Cheaper energy alternatives to fossil fuel are still not in view. There are a number of reasons why capitalism falls down in this area and they are detailed here.
Industry incumbents often spend heavily on long lived investments and have little desire to devote resources to breakthroughs that would devalue these. Rather, they concentrate their research and development on efforts to increase or preserve their value. Incremental improvements in computers and electronics are the prime example. Indeed, in current parlance "new technology" is synonymous with the steady, plodding developments in these areas.
The market for science and innovation is limited by the public good problem. This is most extreme in the case of pure research but also applies in a lot of applied research. It is difficult to make money from many forms of knowledge and where you can it is because you have been able to exclude others, or restrict access to those with deep pockets or the most pressing need for it.
Firms can keep knowledge secret for their own use or they can often receive patent or copyright protection from government which turns their knowledge into intellectual property for a given period. The most egregious effect of these property rights is to restrict access to new technologies and knowledge that are needed for further research and innovation. James Watt for a considerable period was able to prevent others from making far better steam engines while the Wright brothers had a similar effect on aircraft development. In the current period seed patents are impeding the development of genetic engineering. We have also seen computer software held back by the use of copyright.
Even being able to capture the benefits will not be enough to induce capitalists to spend on research and development if they consider them too uncertain or too far in the future.
Philanthropy can play a role. The Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation that plans to spend the accumulated wealth of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet is a prominent example. There is also the rich leaving money to their alma mater. However, this in itself if far from adequate.
We have had to rely heavily on government to fund much of the research and development that has occurred. Indeed some of the most important innovations of the present era are the result of this. Examples are computers, the Internet, jet engines, satellite communications, fracking technology, nuclear power and gas turbines. Also all the important features of the Apple iPhone were the result of U.S. Department of Defense funded research. However, much of the spending has been prompted by some major emergency like hot and cold wars. Otherwise, there is not much of a constituency under normal times and it is inclined to be the first thing to be cut when governments endeavor to rein in the budget.
Over recent decades an anti-technology and anti-science mentality has gained considerable support and is mainly associated with the green movement. This trend can justly be called a product of capitalism. It is a backward looking response to the brutal and alienating way that industrialization has occurred under the present system. A section of the ruling class pander to green thinking. Academia is riddled with it. Green organizations are the beneficiaries of a number of charitable funds set up by now dead capitalists. Their thinking is part of the Zeitgeist and as The Communist Manifesto points out "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class". It has certainly proven over an extended period that it does not pose a threat to it.
The green movement has held back development in a range of areas including genetically modified crops and nuclear power and it has had considerable success in selling the idea that new technologies as a rule have unintended consequences on our health or the environment that cancel out any benefit.
The way that work is performed under capitalism places another constraint on science and technology. There is gaming among researchers as they scramble to get their slice of the funding cake, and personal prestige and career can take precedence over outcomes.
The need for advances in science and technology are all too plain to see. We need cures for illnesses such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease and malaria. We need better farm plants and animals. We need harder, stronger and lighter materials. Developing energy options that can compete with fossil fuels is a primary concern at the moment. Renewable energy will cost far too much until the cost of energy storage can be brought down drastically. Nuclear power technology has been stagnant for 40 years and carbon capture and storage is in its infancy.
You can only have mutual regard, well-being and full personal development in production if they are also present in other aspects of life. And indeed they would reinforce each other. We would expect to see far more developed emotional intelligence and far more diverse and complex social relations.
Life generally will benefit from economic security, and work arrangements will be more in tune with our non-work needs. Over time we will gain ever increasing understanding of behavioral and emotional disorders and how to remedy them, while communism will provide better conditions for effective treatment.
The underclass living on welfare or theft and sunk in a debased sub-culture will disappear as work is provided for all and no one is left behind with respect to training and work experience or culture.
There is a thoroughly entrenched view that the experience of revolutions during the 20th century shows that communism has failed. There was indeed a failure. However, it was not of communism, but of an attempt to sustain a path towards it when its preconditions were absent. Russia in 1917 and China in 1949 were essentially backward pre-capitalist societies. Most people were peasants rather than proletarians, and they were more interested in land for the tiller than social ownership. There was little modern industry and thinking was medieval. They had not passed through the capitalist stage, which is required for a successful communist revolution. As the experience of other backward countries shows, even getting capitalism off the ground under these circumstances is hard enough, let alone a society that is supposed to supersede it.
This peculiar state of affairs arose because the bourgeoisie was too weak, cowardly or treacherous to carry out its own tasks. Instead, communists found themselves at the head of both anti-feudal modernist revolutions and patriotic resistance to fascist aggression and occupation. The Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was joined after World War II by a host of other countries in what became 'the socialist camp'. It included China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia that had taken power with their own revolutionary forces, and eastern and central Europe and northern Korea where regimes were established by virtue of Soviet military occupation in the aftermath of the defeat of Germany and Japan. So, by historical accident communists found themselves burdened with the task of raising their societies out of social and economic backwardness. They had to perform the work of capitalism. They had to create an industrial base and trained work force virtually from scratch. The "failure of communism" was a consequence of the failure of capitalism.
Under these conditions the move in a communist direction could only be quite limited and proved unsustainable. They took important preliminary measures but did not achieve the real substance. Industry was placed under state ownership which meant that capitalist industry was expropriated and the new accumulation of private wealth prevented. At the same time there was a degree of economic security for workers. The system was described as socialism, the first stage on the road to communism. However, the weakness of the proletariat placed severe limits on what could be achieved. With some minor exceptions in Europe, it only began to become a significant section of society with the industrialization that followed the revolution. Proletarians were former peasants engaged mainly in the low paid toil that you would expect at this stage of development. They were simply not ready to be a ruling class. There was not the basis for a society based on mutual regard. Enthusiasm and unprompted initiative was limited in the harsh conditions and so there was a heavy reliance on material incentives and top down command with all kinds of perverse results. The freedom and democracy required for the full development of the proletariat was not possible given the intensity of external and internal opposition and the weakness of the revolutionary forces. Conditions also dictated a heavy reliance on a "revolutionary vanguard".
Because most work was arduous and repetitive manual labor, and the education level and background of typical workers left them ill-equipped for involvement in the mental aspects of production, there was a minority who did the thinking and deciding. These were the managers, engineers and officials - generally referred to as ‘cadres’. Members of this elite had a vested interest in entrenching their privileged position and were unlikely to encourage an invasion of their domain as workers became more skilled and educated, and industry more mechanized, nor to willingly start to take upon themselves a share of the more routine forms of labor.
Once career, income and position are the primary impulse, economic results take a second place to empire building, undermining rivals, promoting loyal followers, scamming the system and concealing one’s poor performance from superiors. The opportunity for workers to resist these developments was limited by the lack of freedom and the culture of subordination which drains away confidence and the courage to act. This can be very strong even in the absence of political tyranny as we can see in any liberal capitalist society. At the same time, one can imagine that any rank and file worker with special abilities or talents would tend to be more interested in escaping the workers’ lot by becoming one of the privileged rather than struggling against them.
Mao Zedong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party until his death in 1976, referred to this process, once fully entrenched and endorsed at the top, as capitalist restoration and those encouraging it as revisionists and capitalist roaders. The Chinese Cultural Revolution that he led in the late 1960s is the only attempt to beat back this trend. However, that revolution was sabotaged and defeated, and the capitalist roaders were able to seize supreme power in China after his death.
The Soviet Union and like regimes in Eastern Europe represented a distinctive type of dead-end economically, politically and socially, and their demise in 1989-90 is one of the celebrated events of the late 20th centuries. By discarding much of the empty and dysfunctional formal shell of socialism and operating more like normal capitalist economies both China and Vietnam have managed to achieve considerable economic development in recent decades. Cuba is now beginning to take this route. The monstrosity in North Korea relies on mass terror and the support of the Chinese. All these regimes are an affront to freedom and democracy, and must be overthrown.
Notwithstanding this grim picture, there were still some significant achievements. In a large part of the world landlords and feudal relations were swept from the countryside. Industrialization was raised from a very low base and generally outperformed the backward countries in the capitalist camp. Most importantly, after a crash industrialization in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was able to defeat Nazi Germany. This is something for which the world should be eternally grateful.
The dilemma faced by 20th century communists was anticipated by Engels in the following passage from chapter 6 of The Peasant War in Germany, published in 1850:
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realization of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.
At the moment when inquiring minds seek to learn about communism they will encounter a range of appalling nonsense from various tiny groups claiming to be communist or Marxist. Some support the regimes in Cuba and China, and there are even the occasional North Korea supporters. The absurd regime in Venezuela inspires many of them. They all cling onto the once true but now outdated view that US imperialism is the main problem in the world today, and for this reason some even see a good side to Daesh, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They all share the mainstream view that regime change in Iraq has been a disaster and the fascist Baath Party should have been left in power. These groups never talk about how capitalism is creating the conditions for communism but simply whine about how terrible the system is, and often do this in a reactionary way particularly in their opposition to "globalization" and acceptance of green views on virtually everything. They rarely talk about and scarcely understand communism, and they simply see it as something in never-never land rather than their real purpose.
It will be up to the now very young or yet to be born to rediscover communism. For older people it would require too much of a break from their entrenched ways of thinking. Only then can we expect to see the beginnings of a communist movement.
As well as understanding and conveying the ultimate aims of communism and social ownership, with its elimination of market relations and the full development of the individual, they will also need to come to grips with how we get there. This has a number of phases. Listing them in reverse chronological order they are: the period of revolutionary transition when we shake off all the "muck of the ages"; the initial phase of the revolution, day one so to speak; and the here and now.
On the transition phase it will be particularly important to understand the tenacity of the bourgeoisie and old bad habits and thinking, and the need for the proletariat to transforms itself in the struggle. The new society cannot be created overnight. A vigorous mass movement will be critical for the transition because a passive population means certain defeat at the hands of a new bourgeoisie. In this context there would need to be a firm rebuttal to any idea of 'socialism' that is not seen as a revolutionary transition stage on the road to communism. There has to be a fundamental change in human behavior and the way society operates. It is that or capitalism. Any halfway stage has to proceed to communism or revert to capitalism.
During the initial phase, one of the first tasks of the revolution will be the neutralization of the bourgeoisie by expropriating their assets. This could be done fairly quickly and would not have to await more fundamental changes in economic arrangements. It could be achieved with a 100 per cent wealth tax on all wealth over a certain level. All the company stock, bonds, bank deposits and other income earning assets belonging to the bourgeoisie would become the property of the state. This would in an instant drastically reduce their economic and political power. People in executive positions would simply be instructed to keep doing their job under threat of dismissal. Some capable executives are indeed capitalists so some concessions may need to be made to them if they are prepared to cooperate.
During the pre-revolutionary period there are many matters that the communist movement will need to deal with. It is important to connect with those resisting the various symptoms of the existing order because they would be among the more amenable to communist ideas and there is much to be achieved in the here and now that is necessary for communism.
There is a lot to be done on the democratic front. This includes: supporting freedom of speech and assembly, government transparency, right to due process and freedom from government harassment and surveillance; helping neutralize any emerging fascists trends; struggling for a democratic political culture within the communist movement that effectively deals with controlling personalities, sycophants and attempts to close down critical thinking; being better than others at exposing the folly of professional politicians; proposing changes to the constitution and system of representation that would open up politics to greater scrutiny and participation; and showing how vested economic interests under capitalism have a corrupting effect on government.
People are seeking remedies to the various ills of the present system. They seek the alleviation of poverty, better healthcare and education. While helping to pursue improvements in the here and now communists would be there explaining the limitations of what can be achieved under the system. They would not simply be demanding the same things but in a more militant in tone. Their central focus would not be on denouncing governments for under-spending in these areas or for pursuing this policy or that. Rather, they would stress that only communism can ensure jobs and economic security and explain how it would lead to better healthcare and education through the fundamental changes in human behavior.
Communists must advocate rapid scientific advance and denounce capitalism for its tardiness in this area. It is critical to both our ability to thrive on this planet and to create the material conditions for communism. In the process they will have to lock horns with the green opponents of "technofix" who think that science just creates new problems. For the greens, the "solution" is less consumption and a population collapse.
Communists will need to be vocally demanding that the international bourgeoisie do far more to further what Marx called the bourgeois democratic revolution. Their tardiness in this area is legendary. For example, if a communist movement existed at this very moment it would be vigorously demanding that the powers that be quickly sort out the appalling situation in Syria and Iraq. Their failure to give effective assistance to the legitimate rebel forces in Syria meant that Daesh was able to thrive with appalling results. US President Barak Obama's inaction in the early phase of the Syrian civil war should be condemned as should that country's ongoing underwriting of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Generally we should be demanding that our rulers do everything possible to re-spark the Arab Spring.
Part of the problem is a prevailing pacifism both within the ruling class and society at large. A communist movement would be particularly concerned that the liberal democracies retain their military supremacy and stay well ahead of Russia and China. A large defense reserve should play a role, and would ensure that professionals are not the only ones with military training.