What is communism?

What's in a word

What is communism? Well according to the Concise Oxford dictionary, communism is

"1 a political theory derived from Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person is paid and works according to his or her needs and abilities. 2 (usu. Communism) a the communistic form of society established in the USSR and elsewhere."

If that was correct then this would be a very short article. However, as so often, the Concise Oxford is wrong again. In fact the terms socialism and communism appear in England around the 1820s as terms adopted by members of the cooperative movement who were sick of hearing their politics referred to as "Owenism". Originally the two terms were undifferentiated but by the 1840s communism was used by revolutionaries to differentiate themselves from reformists such as J.S.Mill who had adopted socialism to cover an indigestible mess of reformisms.

By the 1870s the terms had moved from differentiating means to distinguishing ends. The proper Oxford English Dictionary notes in its sources:

"Forster Diary 11 May in T. W. Reid Life (1888) .... I learn that the great distinction between communism and socialism is that the latter believes in payment according to work done and the former does not".


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What is communism



Political Economy




William Thompson


In the 1820s, outraged by the use of political economy by a local "eminent speaker" to argue the supposed necessity and benefit of the absolute poverty of the "lower orders" Thompson set about an investigation into political economy which resulted in his "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness" of 1824. As the lengthy title indicates his attention was like the political economists also focused on the effects of the distribution of wealth, however his yardstick for the outcome was the utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number" rather than the overall abstraction of the "wealth of the nation".





In the year Thompson's "Distribution of Wealth" was published he spent much time in London engaging in a series of public debates defending the rights of trade unions against the bourgeois political economists such as J. S. Mill and also on the way forward for the workers with Thomas Hodgskin at the newly formed London Mechanics Institute.

The Thompson vs Hodgskin debate

Thomas Hodgskin was the son of a storekeeper at the naval dockyards at Chatham Kent and had served in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars. Expelled from the navy at the end of the war due to conflict with upper ranks, he became a radical journalist and a fierce critic of authority and the upper classes. He shared with Thompson the view that the upper classes monopoly on land and the means of production allowed them to exploit those compelled by necessity to sell their labour to them. Where he differed with Thompson was that he considered the right to the full product of labour freed from capitalist exploitation to be the ultimate goal of radical reform. In Hodgskin's vision groups of workers organised as unions, could take possession of the means of production and exchange their products amongst each other on a "market" basis. The ensuing debate between Hodgskin and Thompson resulted in the publication of "Labour Defended" and "Labour Rewarded" respectively and in many ways outlined the division between the advocates of socialism and communism that has continued to run through the radical anti-capitalist movement to this day.

Hodgskin's eclipse of Thompson

In the end it was Hodgskin's analysis that won out over Thompson's. Thompson suffered the marginalising effects of his West Cork base, his early death and his association with the strategy of setting up experimental communities. In addition his theoretical writings were too lengthy, challenging and, above all, too expensive for the ordinary worker to afford. In contrast Hodgskin was concise and skilled in making his arguments in a language the ordinary worker could both readily understand and re-use amongst his or her peers. Above all Hodgskin was "good enough" for the purposes of the nascent trades union movement. Radical enough to turn the tables on the political economy of the bosses but avoiding the truly radical total inversion of the existing order that Thompson's proto-communism called for. With Hodgskin the trade union agitators could conjure up the vision of a future society free of the worker's exploitation by the bosses but still retaining the familiarity of money and exchange. The "natural wage" undiminished by the exploitative abstractions by the capitalists and landlords.

Joseph Dejacque - the revolutionary approach

Just as the crushing defeat and savage repression of republican revolution in Ireland and Britain pushed Thompson and Hodgskin, the cooperators and trade unionists to steer their frame of action away from the society-wide or revolutionary scope, so the fact of the revolution in France cast all progressive thought into this framework. However it was also exclusively a statist and authoritarian framework until Proudhon broke the mould by proposing a society-wide and revolutionary solution that did away with the state. Despite his originality in breaking with the statist stranglehold on French radical thought, Proudhon still retained many reactionary elements in his outlook. It was his neanderthal stance on the emancipation of women that provoked a young sympathiser of the new anarchist ideal, Joseph Dejacque, to first openly break with and attack Proudhon's failings. But in addition to taking him to task for his opposition to female emancipation Dejacque also denounced Proudhon's economic critique of capitalism as inadequate and incomplete. Proudhon's position was in fact similar to Hodgskin in aiming for the elimination of the monopolies on land and means of production by the capitalist and landlord classes, but the retention of the wage, money and exchange as the means of organising the transmission of goods between producers. In other words, capitalism without capitalists.

In Dejacque's view this is too conservative. Taking Proudhon's slogan of "property is theft" to its, as he saw it, logical conclusions Dejacque denounced as property claims any claim by producers on that part of what they had produced that was not for their own consumption or use. In this context he distinguishes between possessions - those goods you have reasonable exclusive claim over for your own use - and property claims - where you seek to deny others the use of goods that you have no use for yourself. Dejacque uses the example of a shoemaker who can make shoes of his or her own size and to their personal taste and claim them as their own possessions to use. The same shoemaker can also make for different sizes of feet and different tastes or fashions. These latter shoes are not possessions as the shoemaker is not intending to use them personally. Instead in claiming them as property he or she is denying their use to others, in effect holding them hostage until they can be exchanged for other goods the maker judges to be of enough value to satisfy them.

Dejacque's critique of exchange is couched very much in the language of justice and injustice coming out of the enlightenment discourse of the French Revolution. It lacks the fullness of Thompson's more laboured and wide-ranging critique of capitalist political economy, yet it integrates the aim of communism into the whole of a revolutionary and explicitly anti-state and anarchist goal. As such Dejacque is the first libertarian or anarchist communist. Though Dejacque identified himself as an anarchist and, through the title of his periodical, introduced the term libertarian as a synonym for the same, he did not attach the label communism to his economic ideas.

Marx - a failed synthesis

This label was at the time being used by proponents of the authoritarian and statist conspiracies Proudhon had struck out against. Specifically the Communist League which includes at that time the German radicals Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. The latter producing the "Communist Manifesto" for the league.

In his studies in the 1840s, Marx had come across the work of both Thompson and Hodgskin and from their common ground critique of capitalist exploitation he takes the broad outline of his critique of the same in "Capital" and other works. However on the issue of the main contention dividing the two Marx ended up choosing neither one nor the other. Concentrating most of his effort on elaborating the critique of capitalist political economy already outline by Thompson and Hodgskin in the 1820s, Marx wrote remarkably little on the principles governing post-capitalist society. What little he wrote in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" seems an attempt to reconcile the two opposing principles. On the one hand Marx argues that as society emerges from capitalism with the expropriation of the land and means of production from the landowning and capitalist classes, it must retain the forms of money, the wage and exchange. This, Marx's "lower phase of communism" (which n.b. is not communist in the way this term is used in this article) corresponds to Hodgskin's vision of capitalism without capitalists. Yet on the other hand, Marx sees this first stage not as an end in itself but only as a transitional stage towards the "higher phase of communism" corresponding to Thompson's vision of a society from which wage, money and exchange have been abolished. Marx's attempt at a synthesis of the two positions is undeveloped and fails to answer basic questions. Namely why the first stage is not a sufficient goal in itself, how exactly does the first stage create the (unspecified) conditions for the second stage and how and when does the transition from one to the other actually take place?

These failings in Marx's work are in many ways the flipside about strengths and originality of the other aspects of his contribution. Whereas Thompson, Hodgskin and Dejacque approached the problem of social liberation from the ahistorical starting points of utilitarianism, radical and enlightenment revolutionary analysis respectively, Marx brings the perspective of historical development from his Hegelian background. Whereas the previous three were all acutely aware of the clashing interests of the labouring and owning classes and the extent to which the bosses ideologies suited their class interests, it is Marx that puts forward the theory of the class struggle as the motor of history. What is original in Marx's "Capital" is not the theory of exploitation and surplus value which he inherits from Thompson, but the role of class struggle in limiting the working day and shaping the introduction of productivity-enhancing technology as a response to working class resistance to exploitation. This focus on the historical and contestational dynamics of the process is what gives Marx's work continuing relevance to theorists today, yet it is accompanied by a lack of attention to specifics of the goal of a post-capitalist society. Despite his many contributions, Marx's work on its own represents a backwards step in comparison to Thompson's work when it comes to investigating the social relations of a post-capitalist society.

The bourgeoisie strikes back - taking the politics out of Political Economy

By the late nineteenth century, the legal proponents of capitalist political economy realised they faced huge challenges which necessitated a major change of direction. Continuing the line of development of classical political economy was no longer a viable option for them. Some of the reasons were technical - classical political economy saw only the production of physical goods as wealth-producing and had no account of the economics of the service industry. Other reasons were more historical - in international terms the classical political economists had been fierce critics of colonialism and the war in America as policies that taxed the wealth-producing manufacturing industry but benefited only the then dominant landowning and aristocratic class. Historically classical political economy had been the agitational propaganda of a capitalist class excluded from power. Now, in the late nineteenth century that same class had now been brought into the governing class through political reform, and many of them now had an interest and share in the profits of the "New Imperialism" of the late Victorian era. Most importantly the capitalist class had never considered that the discourse of political economy could be taken from them and used to enable the real wealth-producing class - the working class - to articulate its own interests and critique of power. To address all these issues a new generation of apologists of power stepped forward to take the political out of economics and re-make this "social science" (1) as a technical tool for market analysis for capitalists.

So anxious was William Jevons, one of the first of these post-classical economists, to undo the damage of the labour theory of value, that he claimed that the price of goods and services were set by demand alone, with no link to the amount of labour involved in their production. Naturally this extreme position was completely unsustainable in practice so Jevon's theories were eclipsed by those of Alfred Marshall who grudgingly admitted labour cost as one of cost factors involved in determining price. Lest anybody think this position made him any less of an enemy of socialism than Jevons, Marshall was quick to make his political perspective clear from the outset, stating his opposition to the "socialist programme" on the grounds that "the collective ownership of the means of production would deaden the energies of mankind and arrest economic progress". It was Marshall who eventually produced the theory of marginal utility and the supply and demand price curve diagram that today graces the front of all conventional economics text books.

The neo-classical economists ditching of the labour theory of value was only achieved by abandoning the central aim of political economy - that of finding a measure of value with which to gauge the rate of growth of the national economy and the impact of government policy on this growth. Consequently by abandoning the measure of value to focus on the determination of price alone, the neo-classicists threw out the baby with the bathwater. Their resulting framework was indeed useful as a technical tool for capitalists for calculating prices and investment opportunities, but for overall policy their "marginalist revolution" was itself of marginal utility.

The need for a theory that addressed "the big picture" led to the evolution of "macroeconomics" which in turn relegated the neo-classicists efforts to microeconomics. The problem for macro-economists remained the same as for the original political economists, how to get a stable measure of wealth undistorted by monetary inflation. In the end the measure they have chosen is the Retail Price Index (in the UK - similar indexes exist by different names in different countries). This is an index based on a basket of gods to reflect the consumption of an "average" worker which additions to reflect utility and housing costs, etc. In other words a measure of the cost of labour. The RPI is thus the re-introduction of the labour theory of value as a base measurement of the value of money. In this and other areas such as development economics honest commentators have had to admit the practical need to re-introduce a measure of the value of labour as a base unit of analysis.

The continuing appeal of the labour theory of value

It is worth taking a parenthesis to examine why the valuing of products by the labour time necessary for their production has lasting appeal to the extent that our everyday existence in capitalist society continually reinforces it as a seemingly "natural" measure. Partly this is because there is a biological basis - any living organism must ensure that the calories it gains from its activity must at least balance the calories it burns up in staying alive and active for that same time period or else it will perish. For a large part of human history, until relatively recently fro most of us, human economic activity has not moved that far away from that biological basis. While most economic activity was in the agricultural production of basic food subsistence and most of that work measured in physical effort over time, care had to be taken that the exchange of goods produced in the marginal time surplus to the production of basic subsistence had to be exchanged for a similar amount of time value otherwise the eventual outcome would be lack of food.

Although today we live in a world revolutionised productivity-wise by capitalism where less than 5% of societies labour goes into basic food production and we have been in a global food surplus for half a century, it is no surprise that we have not yet adjusted to a post calorifically-limited world. Yet the basis of estimating the "going rate" of time necessary for production of a given good or service is that the process of production is such that most people are capable of a similar rate of production. As we will see below, that assumption becomes less and less tenable as the division of labour increases and production moves more and more away from basic physical effort and more towards intellectual problem solving or creative work.

From visionaries to a movement

Although Dejacque had died penniless and isolated in the 1860s, despairing of any real progress towards libertarian communism being achieved for centuries, yet by the 1870s the ideas of libertarian communism were taking root amongst some of the followers of Bakunin in the First International. Through the French anarchist brothers Elie and Elisee Reclus, the Swiss militants of the Jura Federation like James Guillaume and the Italian section of the International, including Errico Malatesta, Andrea Costa and Carlo Cafiero - a one time secretary to Marx sent by the latter to Italy to convert the Italian International to Marxism, he ended instead being converted to anarchism. During the period of the struggle in the International between Marx and Bakunin these militants preferred not to challenge Bakunin over the issue of collectivism. Bakunin's collectivism defended the right to the full product of labour like Hodgskin, along with the consequent distribution of products by hours worked - i.e. the wage - and exchange.

In the wake of the definitive split in the International and Bakunin's subsequent death, these restraints were lifted. The term "anarchist communism" first appeared in print in publications of the Swiss anarchists in 1876 and in the Summer of that year the Florence Congress of the Italian International resolved to abandon collectivism and adopt communism as their aim, stating: "We believe that the necessary complement to the common ownership of the means of production is the common ownership of the products of labour". Through the work of the Italian, Swiss, French and individual militants like the Russian Kropotkin, libertarian communism became not simply an idea but the aim and goal of European-wide revolutionary movement.

Yet that movement's clarity of vision in relation to its goal suffered a weakness of analysis of the progress of the class struggle and the dynamic that could lead from capitalism to its overthrow. Consequently the actions of the libertarian communist minority's militants tended towards voluntarist attempts at insurrection such as the failed Benevento uprising by the Italians or clandestine armed action or assassination attempts against representatives of the bosses or ruling aristocracy. The failure of this "propaganda by the deed" era of the movement led towards the turn to syndicalism as a way of re-engaging with the practical class struggles of the mass of workers. However, despite its many positive effects, this form of re-engagement with the living process and dynamic of the class struggle brought with it problems.

The Syndicalist Ambiguity

Syndicalism as a theory proposed a seductive confusion of means and ends at once distinct from and yet in other ways analogous to that offered by Marxist and statist currents of socialism. On the one hand syndicalism opposed the use of state power to introduce post-capitalist society. Syndicalism proposed the direct exercises of power by the democratically federated trades unions themselves. As the productive organisations of the working class, this held out the prospect of the direct management of society by the producers themselves without the intermediary of the state. But on the other hand, just as the Marxist reduction of the question of social emancipation to the task of the Marxist party seizing state power, so syndicalism too reduced the question of social transformation to the question of power, albeit power to the organisations of the workers rather than the state under "revolutionary" dictatorship. Just as the Marxist tendencies concentration on the question of power had led them to neglect the question of the shape of the future relations of post-revolutionary society, so the syndicalist focus on power, albeit in a different form, similarly led to a tendency of at best agnosticism and at worst indifference to the question of whether post-capitalist society should be socialist or communist. Inevitably there was a tendency within syndicalism to consider the question an irrelevancy and drift, by default, towards the old Hodgskinian utopia of capitalism without capitalists.

The tendency was aggravated in Spain which, isolated from the rest of Western European anarchism, had not followed the break with Bakuninist collectivism and adopted the compromise position of the choice between collectivism/socialism and communism to be left for individual communities to decide for themselves in the post-revolutionary period. In fact the effects, if not necessarily the cause, of this political agnosticising tendency within syndicalism came to be recognised as a threat by the Spanish anarchist movement to the extent that they found it necessary to form a specifically anarchist political organisation - the AIT - to combat reformist tendencies within the CNT.

But in the end it was the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany followed by the defeat in Spain which ended the "classical" phase of libertarian communism as a movement in the 1930s (2), caught in a pincer movement between fascism and stalinism.

What is Libertarian Communism?










Beyond the commune - de-centred anarchy







Free Software and Intellectual Property










Paul Bowman

This article is from Red & Black Revolution
(no 10, Winter 2005)

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