"In fact, communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” (Marx; German Ideology)
Firstly, I think that the polemic between reform and revolution is now virtually dead. We all know the problems with reform: it doesn't abolish capitalism; it constitutes temporary gains, which are soon rolled back again; it fools the working class into believing that they will ultimately triumph through such gradualist means; etc., etc. But the notion of revolution has turned out to be equally problematic. Sudden, violent ruptures in the social fabric, with the overthrowing of a ruling class as the goal, are part of a notion that did not originate with communism, but rather with capitalism and the bourgeois revolution. Communists of the Leninist persuasion (and admittedly most others too) adopted this notion fairly uncritically. Communists liked to invoke this Jacobin notion of revolution. But it has never brought the world an inch closer to communism, and in fact may have ultimately worked against it.
The idea of a seizure of power followed by a dictatorship of the proletariat which controlled the state and the commanding heights of the economy, to be followed by a progressive transition through socialism to communism, with the withering away of the state along the way, was the dominant view and one that most of us bought, to one extent or another, at some point. Some of us still believe in this. I don't.
It has turned out to be the case that all these revolutions constituted not a path to communism from capitalism, but in fact a path to modern capitalism from semi-feudal capitalism. There are no counter-examples to this pattern. None. Cuba will not and cannot be a counter-example either, even if it is the ageing Leninists' last hope for one. There has never been a successful Leninist-type revolution or even a particularly popular Leninist-type party in any advanced capitalist country, for this reason: It is a political project of capitalist modernisation, a substitute bourgeois revolution. That is why the Jacobin model of revolution is so very appropriate for it. It will not and cannot be a path to communism; this is now apparent to virtually all leftists, even though many will not admit it (yet).
It is in this light that one should see the acute historical dilemmas of communism in the less developed European countries such as Spain, Italy, etc. They were never quite backward enough for the vanguard party to prevail, yet not quite enough advanced for such parties to be completely marginalised. It is still an unpalatable truth to some of us that those countries modernised every bit as adequately and with a comparable amount of repressive violence under fascist regimes as countries under 'communist' regimes did. I challenge anyone to debate this, not because it is merely a provocative point but because I think it is a fairly illustrative one.
So I'm not an enthusiast of 'revolution', at least not in the Jacobin understanding of it. For the very same reasons, I opt not to use the word 'socialism' in an uncritically approving way. Socialism for marxists has always been a kind of transitionary concept. But if the various socialisms that we have known did not constitute any sort of transition to communism - far from it - then what is the point? Marx himself wrestled with the dilemma of transition and did not provide answers for us. For example, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme he even comes out in favour of labour vouchers and the slogan about, 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need'. But the lacunae in his thinking around this question provided the opportunity for a Stalin (or a Trotsky, take your pick) to define socialism in terms of capitalist productivism - tons of concrete and steel produced, five-year plans, etc. - all of which of course says nothing about social relations, but it says a lot about 'catching up' with the (other) capitalist countries. There was no difference that I can tell between Stalin and Trotsky on this point.
Some marxists saw this kind of thing early. Korsch, for example, was already becoming aware in the 1920s that marxism on its own - in other words the marxism of that time - could not provide a way of getting from capitalism to communism. He saw that other ideas had to be brought on board, for example the anarchist critiques of marxist statism. I personally agree with this and believe that anarchism and marxism are two broken halves of the communist movement that need to find a way of coming back together. I don't endorse some aspects of certain anarchisms, such as the extreme glorification of violence and the idea that by smashing virtually everything that exists one will bring a glorious 'new dawn' into being. This is just Jacobinism with extra emotion added, and disastrous. I also think it smuggles in a notion of unspoiled, benevolent human nature, borrowed from Rousseau. But, as one of my favourite philosophers, Gillian Rose, points out, we are never at the beginning, we are always already in the middle, and any notion of a 'new dawn' whether it is promised by anarchists or by Nazis, will lead to extremes of violence and disaster.
But the anarchists do have a point about statism. There is nothing, other than blind faith, that says seizing state power through insurrection and establishing a ‘workers’ state’ is a path to the ending of capitalism. In my view the terms ‘state socialism’ and ‘state capitalism’ are identical in their meaning. They may differ in their sense, but they are identical in their reference, as a semanticist might say. So no, I don’t believe that ‘socialist revolution, unless this term is very heavily qualified, is a progressive path. Nation states are inherently antithetical to communism. Period.
What might the ‘movement’, of which Marx speaks in the above quotation, then be? I believe that it can only be one that is rooted in everyday life. None of us would welcome the intrusion of commodification into every sphere of our lives. In that sense we are all communists. Imagine having to pay every time you asked someone for the time, or for directions to some place. Imagine if every member of a family had to pay for every slice of bread that they used to make a sandwich in the kitchen (to be accounted and settled at the end of the month perhaps!). Imagine if you bought a friend a drink and then immediately hauled out a little notebook in which you recorded its price, to be settled later. This is what it would literally mean if we were capitalist through and through. But we aren’t, and each one of us thus lives two sorts of life, a capitalist one and a communist one. Between these two lives lies an apparently impenetrable wall, built of the bricks of law and the mortar of cynical ideology. What the movement means is the conscious expansion of one’s communist life into all sorts of spheres where it can constitute a movement, an alternative way of living. It seems to me that certain principles follow from this: It is not the task of communists to administer nation states. That is the task of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois revolution.
Thus there is no question of a revolution to seize the state. There is also no question of reforming it; it must just go. Thus reform and revolution cannot be alternatives for the communist movement, between which it must choose. But they do form two sides of a dialectic. Bearing in mind that it is the bourgeois alone that makes reforms, one pressures the bourgeois state into reforms, and this can only happen through a movement, i.e. ever larger groups of people who are defiant and who can show that their (relatively) decommodified way of life, based on custom (not law), is superior and therefore attractive. Such groupings cannot have any sort of national mission or national limitation. They cannot be constrained within the law, nor is there any point of glorifying illegality or violence either. Violence will come from the other side - if there is one thing we know, it is that * thereby creating the need for defence. If the state is ultimately going to wither away, in Marx’s memorable trope, it can only be in this way. That is what genuine revolution would look like, not a cataclysmic, apocalyptic type moment in which somehow everything changes (!).
Something doesn’t wither because it is legislated against or as a result of application of force * that’s not withering * it withers because it is neglected, no longer valued. People have developed new customs, a new way of life, in which it has no place anymore.
“To live outside the law you must be honest” (Bob Dylan)
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