CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM
Communism is not a programme one puts into practice or makes others put into practice, but a social movement. Those who develop and defend theoretical communism do not have any advantages over others except a clearer understanding and a more rigorous expression; like all others who are not especially concerned by theory, they feel the practical need for communism. They have no privilege whatsoever; they do not carry the knowledge that will set the revolution in motion; but, on the other hand, they have no fear of becoming "leaders" by explaining their positions. The communist revolution, like every other revolution, is the product of real needs and living conditions. The problem is to shed light on an existing historical movement.
Communism is not an ideal to be realized: it already exists, not as a society, but as an effort, a task to prepare for. It is the movement which tries to abolish the conditions of life determined by wage-labour, and it will abolish them by revolution. The discussion of communism is not academic. It is not a debate about what will be done tomorrow. It is an integral part of a whole series of immediate and distant tasks, among which discussion is only one aspect, an attempt to achieve theoretical understanding. Inversely, the tasks can be carried out more easily and efficiently if one can answer the question: where are we going?
We will not refute the CPs, the various brands of socialists, the extreme-left, etc., whose programmes merely modernize and democratize all existing features of the present world. The point isn't that these programmes are not communist, but that they are capitalist.
The explanations in this text do not originate in a desire to explain. They would not exist in this form, and a number of people would not have gathered to elaborate and publish them, if the contradictions and the practical social struggles which tear contemporary society apart did not show the new society taking form in the womb of the old, forcing people to be conscious of it.
If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their very personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is a commodity like all other goods. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour required violence and was accompanied by social conflicts. The separation of the worker from the means of production, which has become a fact of life, accepted as such, was actually the result of a long evolution, and could only be accomplished by force.
In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the 16th century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. In the 20th century, between 1930 and 1950, Russia had to decree a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organize the passage of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to an enterprise to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around exchange, are the result of a long and violent process.
By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It hides both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears to be the result of a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop, or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon. Yet it causes periodic major and minor disasters: goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are not used, while elementary needs are not fulfilled. The two pillars of modern society, exchange and wage-labour, are not only the source of periodic and constant disasters, but have also created the conditions which make another society possible. Most importantly, they compel a large section of the present world to revolt against them, and to realize this possibility: communism.
By definition, all human activity is social. Human life only exists in groups, through numerous forms of association. The reproduction of living conditions is a collective activity from the start: both the reproduction of the human beings themselves and the reproduction of their means of existence. Indeed, what characterizes human society is the fact that it produces and reproduces the material conditions of its existence. Some animals use tools, but only man makes his tools. Between the individual or group and the fulfilment of needs comes the mediation of production, of work, which continually modifies the ways to act in and transform the environment. Other forms of life - bees, for example - make their own material conditions, but, at least as far as man can study them, their evolution seems at a standstill. Work, by contrast, is a continually changing appropriation and assimilation of man's environment. The relation of men to "nature" is also a relation among men and depends on their relations of production, just as the ideas they produce, the way they conceive the world, depend on their production relations.
The transformation of activity accompanies the transformation of the social context in which it takes place, i.e., the relations among people. Production relations into which people enter are independent of their will: each generation confronts technical and social conditions left by previous generations. But it can alter them, up to the limits allowed by the level of the material productive forces. What people call "history" does not achieve anything: history is made by people, but only to the extent that given possibilities allow. This is not to say that each important change in productive forces is automatically and immediately accompanied by a corresponding change in production relations. If this were true, there would be no revolutions. The new society bred by the old can only appear and triumph through a revolution, by destroying the entire political and ideological structure which until then allowed the survival of obsolete production relations.
Wage-labour was once a form of development, but it no longer is; for a long time it has been nothing but a hindrance, even a threat to the very existence of mankind.
What must be exposed, behind the material objects, the machines, the factories, the labourers who work there every day, the things they produce, is the social relation that regulates them, as well as its necessary and possible evolution.
Mankind first lived in relatively autonomous and scattered groups, in families (in the broadest sense: the family grouping all those of the same blood), in tribes. Production consisted essentially of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Goods were not produced to be consumed after exchange, after being placed on a market. Production was directly social, without the mediation of exchange. The community distributed what it produced according to simple rules, and everyone directly got what it gave him. There was no individual production, i.e., no separation among individuals who are re-united only after production by an intermediate link, exchange, namely by comparing the various goods produced individually. Activities were decided (actually imposed on the group by necessity) and achieved in common, and their results were shared in common.
Many a "primitive" community could have accumulated surpluses and simply did not bother. As M. Sahlins pointed out, the age of scarcity often meant abundance, with lots of idle time - though that "time" has little relevance to ours. Explorers and anthropologists observed that food search and storing took a rather small portion of the day. "Productive" activity was part of a global relationship to the group and its environment.
Most of humankind, as we know, moved from hunting-gathering into agriculture and ended up developing surpluses, which communities started swapping.
This circulation could only be achieved by exchange, i.e., by taking into account, not in the mind, but in reality, what is common to the various goods which are to be transferred from one place to another. The products of human activity have one thing in common: they are all the result of a certain amount of energy, both individual and social. This is the abstract character of labour, which not only produces a useful thing, but also consumes energy, social energy. The value of a product, independently of its use, is the quantity of abstract labour it contains, i.e., the quantity of social energy necessary to reproduce it. Since this quantity can only be measured in terms of time, the value of a product is the time socially necessary to produce it, namely the average for a given society at a given moment in its history.
With the growth of its activities and needs, the community produces not only goods, but also commodities, goods which have a use value as well as an exchange value. Commerce first appears between communities, then penetrates inside communities, giving rise to specialized activities, trades, socially divided labour. The very nature of labour changes. With the exchange relation, labour becomes double labour, producing both use value and exchange value. Work is no longer integrated into the totality of social activity but becomes a specialized field, separated from the rest of the individual's life. What the individual makes for himself and for the group is separate from what he makes for the purpose of exchange with goods from other communities. The second part of his activity means sacrifice, constraint, waste of time. Society becomes diversified, it separates into various members engaged in different trades, and into workers and non-workers. At this stage the community no longer exists.
The community needs the exchange relation to develop and to satisfy its growing needs. But the exchange relation destroys the community. It makes people see each other, and themselves, only as suppliers of goods. The use of the product I make for exchange no longer interests me; I am only interested in the use of the product I will get in exchange. But for the man who sells it to me, this second use does not matter, for he is only interested in the use value of what I produced. What is use value for the one is only exchange value for the other, and vice versa. 1 The community disappeared on the day when its (former) members became interested in each other only to the extent that they had a material interest in each other. Not that altruism was the driving force of the primitive community, or should be the driving force of communism. But in one case the movement of interests drives individuals together and makes them act in common, whereas in the other it individualizes them and forces them to fight against one another. With the birth of exchange in the community, labour is no longer the realization of needs by the collectivity, but the means to obtain from others the satisfaction of one's needs.
While it developed exchange, the community tried to restrain it. It attempted to control or destroy surpluses or to establish strict rules to control the circulation of goods. But exchange triumphed in the end. Wherever it did not, the society ceased to be active, and was eventually crushed by the invasion of merchant society.
As long as goods are not produced separately, as long as there is no division of labour, one cannot compare the respective values of two goods, since they are produced and distributed in common. The moment of exchange, during which the labour times of two products are measured and the products are then exchanged accordingly, does not yet exist. The abstract character of labour appears only when social relations require it. This can only happen when, with technical progress, it becomes necessary for the development of productive forces that men specialize in trades and exchange their products with each other and also with other groups, who have become States. With these two prerequisites value, average labour time, becomes the instrument of measure. At the root of this phenomenon are practical relations among people whose real needs are developing.
Value does not appear because it is a convenient measure. When the social relations of the primitive community are replaced by enlarged and more diversified relations, value appears as an indispensable mediation of human activities. It is not surprising that the average socially necessary labour time should be used as a measure since at this stage labour is the essential element in the production of wealth: it is the one element different tasks have in common: they all have the property of consuming a certain quantity of human labour power, regardless of the particular way in which this power is used. Corresponding to the abstract character of labour, value represents its abstraction, its general and social character, apart from all differences in nature between the objects the labour can produce.
Economic and social progress improves the efficiency of human organization and its capacity to associate the components of the labour process - first of all labour power. Then appears the difference (and the opposition) between workers and non-workers, between those who organize work and those who work. The first towns and great irrigation projects are born out of this increase of productive efficiency. Commerce appears as a special activity: now there are men who do not make a living by producing, but by mediating between the various activities of the separate units of production. A large proportion of goods is nothing but commodities. To be used, to put into practice their use value, their ability to fulfil a need, they must be bought, they must fulfil their exchange value. Otherwise, although they exist as material and concrete objects, they do not exist from the point of view of society. One has no right to use them. This fact proves that the commodity is not just a thing, but first and foremost a social relation ruled by a definite logic, the logic of exchange, and not of the fulfilment of needs. Use value is now just the support of value. Production becomes a sphere distinct from consumption; work becomes a sphere distinct from non-work. Ownership is the legal framework of the separation between activities, between men, between units of production. The slave is a commodity for his owner, who buys a man to make him work.
The existence of a mediation on the level of the organization of production (exchange) is accompanied by the existence of a mediation on the level of the organization of people: the State is indispensable as a force gathering the elements of society, in the interests of the ruling class. Unification is made necessary by the destruction of the coherence of the primitive community. Society is forced to maintain its cohesion by creating an institution which is nourished by it.
Exchange becomes visible and concrete with the birth of money. The abstraction, value, is materialized in money, becomes a commodity, and shows its tendency to become independent, to detach itself from what it comes from and represents: use values, real goods. Compared to simple exchange: x quantity of product A against y quantity of product B, money permits a universalization, where anything can be obtained for a quantity of abstract labour-time crystallized in money. Money is labour-time abstracted from labour and solidified in a durable, measurable, transportable form. Money is the visible, even tangible, manifestation of the common element in all commodities - not two or several commodities, but all possible commodities. Money allows its owner to command the work of others, at any time and anywhere in the world. With money it is possible to escape from the limits of time and space. A tendency towards a universal economy is at work around some great centres from ancient times to the Middle Ages, but it fails to reach its aim. The retreats of the empires, and their destruction, illustrate this succession of failures. Only capitalism creates, from the 16th century on, but mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries, the necessary basis for a durable universal economy.
Capital is a production relation which establishes a completely new and extremely efficient bond between living labour and past labour (accumulated by previous generations). But as with the birth of exchange, the rise of capital is not the result of a decision or a plan, but a consequence of real social relations which lead to a qualitatively new development in certain Western European countries after the Middle Ages.
Merchants had accumulated large sums of money, in various forms, and perfected systems of banking and credit. It was possible to use these sums: the first machines (textile) were invented, and thousands of poor people (former peasants or craftsmen) had lost their instruments of production and were forced to accept the new production relation: wage-labour. The prerequisite was accumulated, stored-up labour in the form of machines (and later, factories). This past labour was to be set in motion by the living labour of those who had not been able to realize such an accumulation of raw materials and means of production. Until then, exchange was neither the motive nor the regulator of production. Commerce alone, simple commodity production (as opposed to capitalist commodity production) could not provide the stability, the durability required by the socialization and unification of the world. This was accomplished by capitalist commodity production, and the means with which it accomplished this consisted of the production which it took over.
The slave did not sell his labour power: his owner bought the slave himself, and put him to work. In capitalism, living labour is bought by the means of production which it sets into motion. The role of the capitalist is not negligible, but quite secondary: "the capitalist as such is only a function of capital," the leader of social production. What is important is the development of past labour by living labour. To invest, to accumulate - these are the mottos of capital (the priority given to heavy industry in all the so-called socialist countries is nothing other than the sign of the development of capitalism). But the aim of capital is not to accumulate use values. Capital only multiplies factories, railways, etc., to accumulate value. Capital is first of all a sum of value, of abstract labour crystallized in the form of money, finance capital, shares, bonds, etc., which tries to increase. A sum x of value must give x + profit at the end of the cycle. To valorize itself, value buys labour power.
This commodity is quite special, as its consumption furnishes work, hence new value; whereas means of production yield no more than their own value. Therefore the use of labour power furnishes a supplementary value. The origin of bourgeois wealth is to be found in this surplus value, in this difference between the value created by the wage-labourer in his work, and the value necessary for the reproduction of his labour-power. Wages only cover the expenses of that reproduction (the means of subsistence of the worker and his family).
It is easy to see from this analysis that the essential fact is not the appropriation of surplus-value by the capitalist as an individual. Communism has nothing to do with the idea that workers have to partially or totally recover the surplus value for themselves, for a simple and obvious reason: some of the resources must be used for the renewal of equipment, for new production, etc. The point is not that a handful of people take a disproportionately large share of the surplus-value. If these people were eliminated, while the rest of the system remained the same, part of the surplus-value would be given to the workers and the rest would be invested in collective and social equipment, welfare, etc.: this is in fact the programme of the left, including the official CPs. Actually the logic of the system of value would always result in the development of production for a maximal valorization. As long as the basis of society is a mechanism mingling two processes, a process of real work, and a process of valorization, value dominates society. The change brought about by capital is to have conquered production, and thus to have socialized the world since the 19th century, with industrial plants, means of transportation, storage, and quick transmission of information. But in the capitalist cycle the fulfilment of needs is only a by-product, and not the driving force of the mechanism. Valorization is the aim: fulfilment of needs is at best a means, since what has been produced must be sold.
The enterprise is the location and the centre of capitalist production; each industrial or agricultural enterprise works as a rallying point for a sum of value looking for an increase. The enterprise must make profits. Here again the law of profit has nothing to do with the action of a few "big" capitalists, and communism does not mean getting rid of fat cigar smokers wearing top hats at horse shows. What matters is not the individual profits made by capitalists, but the constraint, the orientation imposed upon production and society by this system which dictates how to work and what to consume. The whole demagogy about the rich and the poor confuses the issue. Communism does not mean taking money from the rich, nor revolutionaries distributing it to the poor.
Competition takes place among the various enterprises: each fights against the others on the market, each fights to corner the market. We have shown how the various aspects of human activity got separated. The exchange relation increases the division of society into trades, which in turn helps the development of the commodity system. However, as can still be seen nowadays, even in advanced countries, in the countryside for instance, there is no real competition among activities which are separate but stably divided among the baker, the shoemaker, etc. Capitalism is not only a division of society into various trades, but above all a permanent struggle between the various components of industry. Each sum of value exists only against the others. What ideology calls selfishness and the struggle of all against all, is the indispensable complement of a world where one has to fight to be able to sell. Thus economic violence, and armed violence as its consequence, are integral parts of the capitalist system.
Competition had positive effects in the past: it broke the limits of feudal regulations and corporative constraints, and allowed capital to invade the world. It has now become a source of waste, leading both to the development of useless or destructive production the valorization of which is quicker, or to hinder important production, if supply and demand conflict with each other.
Competition is the separation of productive systems into autonomous centres which are rival poles (punkte), each seeking to increase its respective sum of value. Neither "organization" nor "planning" nor any sort of control can bring this to an end. State power and "people's power" are equally incapable of solving this problem. The motive force of competition is not the freedom of individuals, nor even of the capitalists, but the freedom of capital. It can only live by devouring itself. The form destroys its content to survive as a form. It destroys its material components (living labour and past labour) to survive as a sum of value valorizing itself.
Each of the various competing capitals has a particular profit rate. But capitals move from one branch to another, looking for the highest possible rate of profit. They move to the most profitable branch and neglect the others. When this branch is saturated with capital, its profitability decreases and capitals move to another branch (this dynamic is modified, but not abolished, by the establishment of monopolies). This constant process results in the stabilisation of the profit rate around an average rate, in a given society at a definite moment. Each capital tends to be rewarded, not according to the profit rate it realizes in its own enterprise, but according to the average social rate, in proportion to the sum of value invested in the enterprise. So each capital does not exploit its own workers, but the whole capital exploits the whole working class. In the movement of capitals, capital acts and reveals itself as a social power, dominating all society, and thus acquires coherence in spite of the competition which opposes it to itself. It gets unified and becomes a social force. It is a relatively homogeneous totality in its conflicts with the proletariat or with other capitalist (national) units. It organizes the relations and needs of the whole society according to its interests. This mechanism exists in every country: capital constitutes the State and the nation against other national capitals, but also against the proletariat. The opposition of capitalist states turns war into the ultimate means of resolving problems of competition among national capitals.
Nothing changes so long as there are production units trying to increase their respective amounts of value. What happens if the State ("democratic," "workers'," "proletarian," etc.) takes all enterprises under its control, while keeping them as enterprises? Either State enterprises obey the law of profit and value, and nothing changes. Or they do not obey it without destroying it, and then everything goes wrong. 2
Inside the enterprise, organization is rational: capital imposes its despotism on the workers. Outside, on the market, where each enterprise meets the others, order exists only as the permanent and periodical suppression of disorder, accompanied by crises and destruction. Only communism can destroy this organized anarchy, by suppressing the enterprise as a separate entity.
On the one hand capital has socialized the world. All production tends to be the result of the activity of all mankind. On the other hand, the world remains divided into competing enterprises, which try to produce what is profitable, and produce to sell as much as possible. Each enterprise tries to valorize its capital in the best possible conditions. Each tends to produce more than the market can absorb, intends to sell all of it, and hopes that only its competitors will suffer from overproduction. 3
What results is the development of activities devoted to the promotion of sales. Unproductive workers, manual or intellectual, who circulate value, increase in relation to manual or intellectual workers who produce value. The circulation in question is not the physical movement of goods. The transportation industry produces real value, since the simple fact of moving goods from one place to another adds value to them, corresponds to a real change of their use value: the result is that goods are available in a different place from the one where they were manufactured, which of course increases their utility. Circulation refers to value, not to physical displacement. A thing does not actually move, for instance, if its owner changes while it remains in the same warehouse. By this operation, it has been bought and sold, but its use value has not been changed, increased. It is different in the case of transport.
The problems caused by buying and selling, by the realization of the value of the product on the market, create a complex mechanism, including credit, banking, insurance and advertisement. Capital becomes a sort of parasite absorbing a huge and growing part of society's total resources in the costs of the management of value. Bookkeeping, which is a necessary function in any developed social organization, has now become a ruinous and bureaucratic machine overwhelming society and real needs instead of helping to fulfil them. At the same time capital grows more concentrated and centralized: monopolies lessen overproduction problems while further aggravating them. Capital can only get out of this situation through periodic crises, which temporarily solve the problem by re-adjusting supply to demand (only solvent demand, since capitalism only knows one way of circulating products: buying and selling; it does not care if real demand (needs) is not fulfilled; in fact, capital generates underproduction in relation to the real needs it does not fulfil).
Capitalist crises are more than crises of commodities. They are crises which link production to value in such a way that production is governed by value. One can understand this by comparing them with some pre-capitalist crisis, before the 19th century. A decrease of agricultural production resulted from bad harvests. The peasants bought fewer industrial goods such as clothes, and industry, which was still very weak, was in trouble. These crises were based on a natural (climactic) phenomenon. But merchants speculated on corn and kept it in storage to drive its price up. Eventually there were famines here and there. The very existence of commodities and money is the condition for crises: there is a separation (materialized in time) between the two operations of buying and selling. From the standpoint of the merchant and of the money trying to increase its volume, buying and selling corn are two distinct matters: the period of time between them is determined only by the amount and rate of the expected profit. People died during the period that separates production and consumption. But in this case the mercantile system only acted as an aggravating factor in a crisis caused by natural conditions. In such cases, the social context is pre-capitalist, or that of a weak capitalism, as in countries like present-day China and Russia where bad harvests still have a strong influence on the economy.
The capitalist crisis, on the other hand, is the product of the forced union of value and production. Take a car maker. Competition forces him to raise productivity and get a maximum value output through a minimal input. A crisis arises when accumulation does not go with a sufficient decrease in the costs of production. Thousands of cars may come off the assembly lines every day, and even find buyers, but manufacturing and selling them does not valorize this capital enough compared to others. So the company streamlines production, invests more, makes up profit loss with the number of cars sold, resorts to credit, mergers, government intervention, etc., eventually produces as if demand was to expand for ever, and loses more and more. Crises lie neither in the exhaustion of markets, nor in overgenerous pay rises, but in falling profits (to which workers' militancy contribute): as a sum of value, capital finds it increasingly hard to valorize itself at the average rate.
Crises do not only show how the link between use value and exchange value, between the utility and the exchangeability of a product, bursts into pieces. They do not only prove that the logic of this world is the need of enterprises to increase the amount of value, and not the fulfilment of people's needs - nor the enrichment of capitalists, as the vulgar critics of capitalism say. The important thing is the difference with pre-capitalist crises. These originated from an unavoidable necessity (a bad harvest, for instance) which mercantile relations only aggravated. Modern crises show that they have no unavoidable rational basis. Their cause is no longer natural; it is social. All the elements of industrial activity are present: raw materials, machines, workers, but they are not used - or only partially used. They are not just things, material objects, but a social relationship. Actually they only exist in this society if value unites them. This phenomenon is not "industrial"; it does not come from the technical requirements of production. It is a social relation, through which the whole productive complex, and in fact the entire social structure (in so far as production has conquered society) are ruled by mercantile logic. Communism's only goal is to destroy this commodity relation, and thus to reorganize and transform the entire society (see below).
The network of enterprises - as centres and instruments of value - becomes a power above society. People's needs of all kinds (lodging, food, "culture") only exist after being subjected to this system, and even shaped by it. 4 Production is not determined by needs, but needs are determined by production - for valorization. Offices are built more readily than needed lodgings. And many houses as well as thousands of flats remain empty for 10 months out of 12 because the owners or tenants who bought the dwelling or paid the rent are the only ones who can occupy them. Agriculture is largely neglected by capital, on a worldwide scale, and only developed where it allows valorization, while hundreds of millions of people starve. The automobile industry is a branch developed beyond people's needs in advanced countries, because its profitability keeps it growing in spite of all its incoherence. Poorly developed countries can only build factories which will yield an average rate of profit. The tendency to over-production requires a permanent war economy in nearly all advanced countries; these destructive forces are made operative when necessary, as wars are still another means of counteracting the tendency to crisis.
Wage-labour itself has been an absurdity for several decades. It forces one part of the workers to engage in exhausting factory work; another part, which is very numerous in countries like the US, works in the unproductive sector; the function of this sector is to make sales easier, and to absorb workers rejected by mechanisation and automation, thus providing a mass of consumers, and being another aspect of "crisis management". Capital takes possession of all the sciences and techniques: in the productive field, it orients research toward the study of what will bring a maximum profit; in the unproductive field, it develops management and marketing. Thus mankind tends to be divided into three groups:
-productive workers, often physically destroyed by their work;
-unproductive workers, the vast majority of whom are only a source of waste;
-and the mass of non-wage earners, some of them in the developed countries, but most of them in poor countries: capital cannot integrate them in any way, and hundreds of thousands of them are periodically destroyed in wars directly or indirectly caused by the capitalist-imperialist organization of the world economy.
The development of some backward countries, like Brazil, is quite real, but can only be achieved through the partial or total destruction of former ways of life. The introduction of the commodity economy deprives poor peasants of their means of subsistence and drives them to the misery of the overcrowded towns. Only a minority of the population is "lucky" enough to be able to work in factories and offices; the rest is under-employed or unemployed.