Bureaucratic state communism progressively blocked the possibility of another society long before the collapse of the actually existing “socialist systems,” and to a much greater extent than is usually imagined. We have not yet been fully able to process the practical and theoretical consequences of the birth, development, and decline of the communist states, many of which included some of the worst regimes in history, such as those under the cultist control of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Faced with the criminal regimes with which the names of these leaders are now virtually synonymous, and the overwhelming evidence of the near total destruction of the workers’ movement within the various historical forms and projects of state communism, disarray on the left has often prevailed: many leftists defected to the winning side, while others continue to revel in denunciations of the “capitalist conspiracy against socialism.” How many excuses have been invented in order to stave off the “cognitive dissonance” (to borrow Leon Festinger’s formula1) between the ideal of emancipation and the sinister realities of state terror?2 There is, however, another path open to us, but this path requires a lucid examination of what the history of communism teaches us, so we may create a new and different future for emancipatory struggles.
Any genuine politics of the common must confront the doctrines and practices that were the purview of twentieth-century communism. What exactly was the nature of the “common” in the various forms of communism? And, more precisely, what is the relationship the various forms of state communism maintain with what, from time to time, could be understood as a really existing common? Our first clues come from the term’s lexical genesis, which speaks volumes about the connections between the very different historical periods that have contributed to contemporary understandings of communism. We know the word appears in a text written by Victor d’Hupay de Fuveau in 1785. In this text, the term was used to designate a “community of a moral-economic regime” that would be “feasible in small groups” and would be comprised of “a diversity of talents” designed to replace the monks of the then depopulated monasteries.3 As it turns out, the author of this text was a friend of Restif de La Bretonne, who penned the expression “communism of the community” in his autobiography (Monsieur Nicholas) in order to designate one of several new modes of government.4 It can hardly be viewed as a matter of chance that the word acquired its political significance in the 1790s: while the term was already charged with memories of the peasant insurrections of the twelfth century, it would eventually be linked to the revolutionary events of the Paris Commune, to François-Noël Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals,” while simultaneously signifying the survival of rural communities and customs.5 How can we not be intrigued by a term that was first used to designate the officers of the urban communes, the members of rural communities, and various religious communities, and which became, at the end of the eighteenth century, the name for a more general political aspiration that sought “real equality” and the “abolition of property”? The words pronounced by Sylvain Maréchal in his Manifesto of Equals echoes into the ages: “the moment has come to found the Republic of Equals – that grand asylum open to all human kind. The days of general restitution are come. Weeping families, come and seat yourself at the common table provided by nature for all her children.”6 For Babeuf’s community of supporters, it is nature that ultimately makes possible their shared existence, the realization of “collective well-being,” and the community of goods, all of which were considered absolutely synonymous:7 “we aim at something more sublime, and more equitable; we look to common property, or the community of goods! No more individual property in lands. The earth belongs to no one. We claim – we demand – we will the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth: the fruits belong to all.”8 And achieving this “holy enterprise,” in Babeuf’s words, demands nothing less than the sacrifice of a deceitful civilization: “perish, if needs be, all the arts, provided real equality abides us!”9 This statement echoes both Rousseau’s passionate speeches and writings as well as the mid-eighteenth-century codes of nature.
Immediately following this term’s inaugural period, as indicated by historian Jacques Grandjonc, the European states were suffused with a lexical proliferation forged from the Latin root communis – common, commun, gemein – and this proliferating vocabulary soon penetrated the revolutionary vocabulary of the 1830s–1840s. But how, exactly, did the word “communism” – which for Restif was meant to designate the “excellence of the community” – end up denoting a form of state absolutism that became the governing paradigm for the organization of economic and political power across vast swaths of the planet a century later? Today, of course, the main features of bureaucratic communism are well known. In this respect, Victor Serge was one of the first to summarize these features using a lapidary phrase that, at least, has the merit of concision: “the bureaucratic and police – it would be more accurate to say terrorist – monopoly of power.”10
For many, the hopes born of the Russian Revolution, the illusions it spread, the debates it generated, and the divisions it sowed are now behind us. We have definitely moved on to other matters, and there is no need to revisit the past. In China, for instance, state capitalism continually claims the country’s communist and Maoist heritage for itself; many of today’s opponents of capitalism remain strangely silent when it comes to the sordid history of “actually existing socialism”; supporters of Castro are by no means lacking; and we might wonder whether certain intellectuals, who claim to be critical thinkers, are not more or less ashamed of the nostalgia they feel for the happier times of their youth when they could believe, in good conscience, in the virtue of the communist states. A new and curious silence seems to have spread amongst these intellectuals following the “Solzhenitsyn Shock,” the capitalist conversion of the Chinese economy, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.11 In contrast to the din and denunciations of today’s neoliberal partisans, the silence on the left about the failures of bureaucratic communism is a conspicuous black hole within contemporary political thought – and thus it is no coincidence that our present is marked by the paucity of futurity. This is perhaps the major symptom of the disorder that has overtaken the intellectual and political world, and arguably the principle reason why political theory has shied away from the search for alternative politics, and why it has proved so incapable of producing any credible forms.
No genuinely new thought about the future will be possible unless we agree to re-examine the major forms of twentieth-century communism. We must critically assess the entire array of doctrines and practices that adopted the term, laid some claim to this rather old tradition, or modified the term to suit the needs of a radically different doctrinal project. In our view, there have been three great conceptions of communism that have historically succeeded one another. The first conception of communism is associated with the supreme value of the community, and its principle is unity by and through equality. The second major conception of communism, and that most associated with Marx, replaced the notion of “community” with “society,” wherein the latter was understood as a sui generis reality defined by its capacity for self-organization, the dynamism of its immanent forces, and the faculties and energies of its members who insist on democratic coordination as the only way to ensure this mode of life succeeds. And the third major conception of communism corresponds to the birth of the twentieth-century communist states, and it is a form of communism characterized by the power of a single party over the administration of society. This form of communism was only rhetorically related to the communist doctrines that preceded it, for its preferred mode of governance was not the principle of democracy but the principle of terror. But beyond this tripartite periodization, we think it is especially important, for this aspect of our analysis at least, to identify what Max Weber called “ideal types” – i.e., models of intelligibility that can help us distinguish between the mix-forms and hybrids history invariably gives us. To this end, then, our task is to isolate the most significant aspects of these historical forms of communism while disregarding the less pertinent aspects of these admittedly ideal types.
In a classical text that seeks to provide a sociological definition of socialism, Émile Durkheim constructs such a definition by opposing socialism to communism. In Durkheim’s view, these two doctrines are confused much too often. Communism is an ahistorical – or at least transhistorical – utopia that aspires toward the creation of a community of equals who share all goods in common. And for Durkheim, communism’s principal, if not founding, source is Plato’s Republic.12 Unlike socialism, which is concerned with a specific mode of economic organization that appears at a precise moment in history, communist utopianism is singularly concerned with the morality (or immorality) of private property in all contexts. Against the reign of private property, which it views as the ultimate source of immorality – “the vicious basis of society” in the words of Restif le Breton13 – communism posits the “excellence of the community” as based on reciprocity. Communism is thus the practical expression of true morality, and the sole source of true, communal happiness. As Durkheim thus writes:
The fundamental communist idea – everywhere the same under scarcely different forms – is that private property is the source of selfishness and that from selfishness springs immorality. But such a proposition does not strike at any social organization in particular. It is true, it applies to all times and to all countries; it fits equally the system of large or of small industry. It does not aim at any economic fact, for the institution of property is a juridical part of it. Finally, communism holds to a common authority of abstract morality, which is of no one time nor of any one country.”14
This type of communism seeks to organize collective existence on the basis of communal goods and communal practices of consumption. It takes the form of a collective asceticism in which personal property is renounced for reasons of moral improvement and/or preparation for salvation. By sharing everything in common, the individual merges into the unity of the community and thereby purifies and perfects itself. Making everything common changes the individual: it leads to moral improvement and spiritual progress. Communism is thus entirely oriented toward the rejection of wealth, to the extent that economic self-interest is posited as a kind of solvent that corrodes the integrity of the group. Conversely, the practice of sharing, especially when it comes to the collective consumption of collectively owned goods, is a means of purgation, a vector of moral health, just as it leads to religious salvation in early Christian theology.
This ideal of community life based on a community of goods undeniably finds its principal source, as Durkheim suggests, in Plato’s Republic. For Plato, the community of goods is primarily a means of saving the city from the mortal danger of dissension and civil war by prohibiting the guardians of the city from owning private property, on the grounds that such possession diverts them from their task of defending the city against its enemies: “if they acquire property in land, houses, or money, they will become farmers and men of business instead of Guardians, and harsh tyrants instead of partners in their dealings with their fellow citizens.”15 In Plato’s city, the leaders are “protectors and defenders,” they refer to each other as “Fellow-Guardians,” while the rest of the population “provide their pay and livelihood.”16 The former thus receive their subsistence from the latter as remuneration for their protection, and it is distributed amongst them communally. We see, then, that the community of goods is thus relatively restricted in that it only applies to the guardians, due to the nature of the official function that is entrusted to them; it does not apply to laborers and artisans, who remain private owners, and the equality between the guardians presupposes, as its essential condition, inequality between the guardians and the producers. What kind of unity is created by this underlying presupposition? The Republic is absolutely saturated with the word “community” (koinônia). Speaking of the guardians, who are forbidden from touching gold or silver or from possessing private houses, Plato writes: “they shall eat together in messes and live together (koinê zên) like soldiers in a camp.”17 But the strongest expression of this mode of unity is without a doubt that of the “community of pleasure and plain” (hedônes te kai lupês koinônia), featured in a passage in which Plato describes the community of women and children as the best form of community. Within such a community, argues Plato, all the citizens collectively rejoice and grieve in the same manner for their gains and losses. Under these conditions, everyone says “this is mine” or “this is not mine” in relation to the same object at the same time. In this way, a unity is realized that effectively transforms the entire city into a unified person: in the same manner that the pain felt from an injury to one’s finger is felt throughout one’s entire body, so too does the entire city suffer when one of its citizens is injured.
The Platonic ideal is therefore based on a structural homology between the political community and the communion of the body and the soul within a single individual. It is this homology that truly makes the unity of the political community a substantial unity. This homological conception of unity is that which separates Plato’s doctrine of “life in common” (koinê zên) from Aristotle’s notion of “living together” (suzên).18 In fact, almost all of Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic communism in Book II, Chapter 2 of the Politics is based on the objection that excessive unity brings ruin to the city precisely by returning it to the state of the family and the individual. Aristotle explicitly targets Plato’s claim that a perfect city is one in which all citizens say “this is mine” and “this is not mine” at the same time about the same thing; for Aristotle, Plato commits a paralogism based on the double meaning of the word “all” (pantes): it can be applied to each individual in particular (its distributive sense) just as much as it can designate all the citizens taken together (its collective sense). But since the term is only used in its second meaning by those who possess women and children in common, they should be saying “this is us” rather than “this is mine.”19 What is at stake in this criticism, for Aristotle, is the irreducibility of the unity of “we” to the unity of the “I”: because the city is necessarily composed of different elements, the city is unable to maintain the same rapport with one of its parts that an individual person maintains with one or another of its parts. But for Plato, however, the inverse is true: the unity possessed by the city is a substantive unity that is indivisible in character, which implies that the relation between the whole and its parts is indeed reducible to the relation between the individual and its parts.
From this perspective, the community of goods is absolutely not inscribed within a comparative typology of different forms of property; it is not a case of “common property” as opposed to “private property,” but rather a condition of communal living that is first and foremost about the creation of a moral community. It is precisely this idea that will exert a profound attraction on the first theorists of communism. However, it would be a mistake to see the early utopian communities proposed by early communist thinkers as mere replicas of Plato’s Republic, as is Durkheim’s view. The origins of the communal ideal, in both the West and the East, are heterogeneous, and the origins of some its iterations are both anterior and external to the Greek heritage of Plato entirely. Religiously inspired communities, which Durkheim strangely ignores, deserve particular attention given the central role religious ideas played in early-nineteenth-century forms of communism.20 The communism of the 1830s–1840s often directly referenced religious texts – the Old Testament just as much as the Acts of the Apostles – to legitimize the suppression of private property, which in their eyes was responsible for all injustice and inequality. The centrality of the theme of sharing, the renunciation of personal property, and the community of goods suggests the first movements claiming to be communist were strongly rooted in a long Judeo-Christian tradition that Durkheim writes about elsewhere.21 The egalitarian revolutions of the future are in many ways modeled on the Christian form of the pre-constituted community.22
Samuel, “the first of the prophets,” was the first Judeo-Christian figure to establish religious communities outside of the cities that were based on the sharing of goods. Indeed, many such communist-like movements appeared before the advent of Christianity, such as the Essenes, for example.23 According to the Acts of the Apostles, the first Christian community, established in Jerusalem around 35–37 CE, was based on the renunciation of private property and the sharing of goods. Indeed, the Acts of the Apostles contains many of communism’s most canonical doctrines, and these doctrines extended well beyond the confines of Christianity:
And they continued steadfastly in the apostle’s doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread and in prayers … And all that believed were together, and had all things in common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need; and they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.24
And further:
And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they all had things in common. And with great power have the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all; neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold; and laid them at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according to as he has need.25
The Acts, written by the author of the Gospel of Luke, transmitted this communal ideal to both Eastern and Western Christendom. For the author of Luke, the communal ideal was a necessary part of the search for God, and it demanded certain doctrines and rites, such as the communal meal (which persists to this day).26 One of the principles that eventually passed into Christian doctrine by way of the Fathers of the Church – Augustine in particular – is the idea that God created the world according to the principle of communal unity, and this means wealth must be shared in common. This is the foundational doctrine of the entire monastic movement, for instance. According to the Rule of Saint Basil (fourth century), the sharing of goods was the norm: “let all things be in common for all, and let no one own anything of their own: not clothing, not shoes, nothing of any bodily use.” Communion is thus both a spiritual and material doctrine, as is symbolized by the common meal. And this notion is also forcefully expressed in the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict (Benedict was greatly inspired by Saint Basil). In Chapter 33, the Rule explicitly states “all things should be the common possession of all [omniaque omnium sint communia], as it is written, so that no one presumes to call anything his own.”27 Indeed, the rule decrees the repression of almost any desire for property whatsoever:
Above all, this evil practice must be uprooted and removed from the monastery. We mean that, without an order from the abbott, no one may presume to give, receive, or retain anything as his own, nothing at all – not a book, writing tablets, or stylus – in short, not a single item, especially since monks may not have the free disposal even of their bodies and wills. For their needs, they are to look to the father of the monastery, and are not allowed anything which the abbot has not given or permitted.28
The difference between Christian communism and the Platonic koinonia (as discussed above) is clear enough. In order to ensure all are but “one heart,” it is no longer sufficient for everyone to say, at the same time and about the same thing, “this is mine” – it is now forbidden for anyone to say “this is mine” at all! This crucial inflection corresponds to Michel Foucault’s distinction, in the Hermeneutics of the Subject, between the Platonic epistrophe and Christian metanoia. While the Platonic conversion consists in turning away from the world of appearances in order to attain true knowledge of being, Christian conversion is all about a rupture in the subject’s mode of being, whereby the latter renounces itself.29 The city in the Republic does not require each guardian – i.e., each leader – to renounce their will; rather, knowledge of the truth is obtained through self-control. The monastic “community of life,” on the other hand, requires that each “sheep” definitively and completely renounce his will through complete submission to one’s personal pastor, akin to the apprentice’s obedience to the master. It is in this sense that pastoral governmentality produces a mode of individualization that involves an annihilation of the self through the mortification of the will.30
This principle of total renunciation, as a means of searching for God, is founded on a major theological principle: God’s gift of creation to man, as stated in a famous passage from St. Ambrose and influentially cited by the French economist and socialist Constantin Pecqueur in the 1840s:
The earth was created in common for all, rich and poor alike. Why then, the rich, do you arrogate for yourselves the right of ownership? Nature does not recognize the rich … The earth was given in common to all men, and no one can claim to be the proprietor of anything except the portion of the whole that suffices his needs, anything more can only have been obtained through violence. Nature furnished all goods to all men in common. God created all things such that their enjoyment might be common to all, and that the earth should be the common possession of all. Nature thus begets the law of community, and it is only usurpation that begets private property.31
Returning your personal property to the community is to repay one’s debt – it is to return those goods that belong to God because God created them in the first place. Sharing one’s goods is to acknowledge one’s debt to the Creator. This is the message of Christ. This ideal of the total community has, therefore, two dimensions: it simultaneously exemplifies and intensifies the constitutive human bond as founded on symbolic debt (a principle that stretches back to the most ancient societies) and, at the same time, salvation through the perfection of life is promised by this type of community. In other words, the absolute unity of the community in which everyone merges together does not in fact exclude individualization, but is actually its means. Put differently, individualization is the paradoxical result of self-renunciation. This voluntary act of personal dispossession detaches one from the world: it breaks old ties and creates a whole new community on the basis of personal salvation. It is not about creating paradise on earth, but about preparing one’s future entry.
A number of more or less heretical movements also claimed this communal ideal (up until very recently, in fact) out of a desire to protest a hierarchical pastoral governmentality in the name of the principle of absolute equality between all members of the community. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault spoke of these egalitarian communities as characterized by various forms of “counter-conduct” – that he includes “asceticism” and “mysticism” as two such forms of counter-conduct suggests these communal movements, for Foucault, were clearly religiously oriented, and were not based on the mere economic renunciation of personal property.32 As Foucault puts it, “each is a pastor, a priest, or a shepherd, which is to say that nobody is.”33 Foucault’s discussion of the Taborites is particularly illuminating in this respect. The Taborites represent the radical wing of the Hussite movement, which recognized the right of every individual, layman or priest, to interpret the Holy Scriptures according to his own lights, and advocated the abolition of private property, taxes, and all forms of human authority in general (“everyone lives together as brothers, and no one is subject to another”). After the defeat of the Taborite army in 1434, the tradition survived in the sect of the Moravian Brethren, the defenders of the rural communes.34 This doctrine of absolute communal equality is also found in the Diggers (led by Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth century), the Christian Communist Republic of the Guaranis in Paraguay, and the Brethren of the Common Life in Holland (which developed the “small schools” in Europe). This ideal permeated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. Morelly, in his Code of Nature, saw Jesus as the personification of the communist ideal, and Cabet called him the “prince of the communists.” A number of nineteenth-century communists believed they were Jesus’s direct successors. Cabet, for instance, doesn’t hesitate whatsoever to assert the “community of goods” was “proclaimed by Jesus, by all his apostles and disciples, by all the Fathers of the Church, and all the Christians of the first centuries.”35 It was even the doctrinal basis of the German communists in the League of the Just (against whom Marx and Engels struggled in the 1840s). In short, this mode of communism, which extols the “community of goods, work, and pleasure,” in the words of Philippe Buonarroti (and we ought to add the community of education to this list), is historically grounded in the model of the moral community. By creating equality and destroying individual property, this moral community is a means of eradicating all the social sources of selfishness and envy. And if this moral imperative isn’t grounded in God, it’s grounded in nature. In the first article of his analysis of Babeuf’s doctrine, Buonarroti states: “nature has given to each individual an equal right to the enjoyment of all the goods of life”; and in Article Three he writes, “nature imposes on each person the obligation to work; nobody could, without committing a crime, evade his share of the common labour.”36
This is not to say, however, that the egalitarian and proletarian communism of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century should be solely viewed as a kind of Christian heresy, despite both its obvious religious character and the hostility of these movements toward the official Church (which these movements accused of having abandoned and betrayed the message of Christ). And while it is certainly true this ancestrally religious form of communism remained highly influential until the nineteenth century (in both France and Germany), authors like Restif, Babeuf, Buonarroti, and even Cabet incorporated new dimensions into these movements that completely escape Durkheim’s attention. There is, firstly, its revolutionary dimension: the community of ownership is to be established by a revolutionary government that settles at last the conflict between the rich and the poor. In other words, this dimension offers a definitive solution to the class conflict. This form of communism is no longer merely conceived as a sharing of goods and property that morally renews humanity, but also as a collective and egalitarian organization of work guided by a concern for social justice and the material well-being of every member of the national community.37 While collective well-being is undoubtedly still based on the morality of sharing and the search for real equality, the communal form now adopts a “materialistic” character insofar as it insists on satisfying the needs of the great mass of the population through the re-organization of social relations – primarily through the abolition of private property, but also through the collectivization of work and the equal distribution of goods. For these early communisms, mass de-privatization of property is the only pathway to equality, and it means the nation will be transformed into a community writ large that will be managed by a state administration. If the “communalists” idealize the community as the means of achieving equality, the revolutionary communists merely alter the vision’s scale. Article 1 of Babeuf’s Fragment of a Draught of an Economic Decree declares, “there shall be established in the Republic a grand national community” whose communal property will be exploited by all its members and whose fruits will be shared by all according to legal rules.38 Work will be regulated by a “supreme administration”; it will organize the members of the community according to class, establish the list and modalities of work to be carried out, and determine the quantities of goods to be consumed.
It is not that the concern for morality suddenly disappears – it is, in fact, always a central preoccupation – but rather the challenge now facing those claiming the term “communism” has decisively shifted toward questions of production, consumption, efficiency, and economic well-being at a national level. And work, importantly, is now used as an argument against private property. Everything comes from labor: everyone works just as much as everyone else, all property is communal, everything belongs to all, and all the pleasure of consumption must be equally distributed: “and as each, in entering society carries with him an equal stake and contribution (the totality of his strength and means), it follows that the burdens, the productions, and the advantages, ought to be equally divided.”39 Work is organized according to a division of labor, public stores distribute goods, public transportation moves goods, and the community now functions at the level of a nation, if not the world. The communists of the first half of the nineteenth century may well still be imbued with the older model of moral community, but they combine this vision with the organizational rationality of an emergent industrial society. And even if they seek to effectively apply the traditional model of the community of goods at the national level – through the use of a “supreme authority” charged with administering the entire economy and society by means of ascetic and severe police powers – it would be a mistake to call these communists “archaic” or “retrograde.”
Like many socialists of this era, these early theorists tried to conjoin two singular concerns: they wanted to adhere to a long-standing religious and moral tradition but, at the same time, they wanted to respond to the social and economic disruption they were all experiencing. During the 1830s and 1840s they begin to break with the moral and religious model by making the “happiness of a regenerated humanity” (Cabet) depend on egalitarian social organization and economic prosperity. This exigency was based on a new model that links social volunteerism (“associationism”), and its associated economic efficiencies, with its beneficial aspects for worker morality. The eternal inspiration of the “community of goods” can be achieved much more easily by the effects of “industrial progress” than by the mere sacrifice of personal wealth, as was the case for the ancient forms of communism.40 For the Icarians,41 the workshops are strictly disciplined, and everything is ordered in the interest of efficiency, exactitude, and punctuality. In the first model – the moral community – the superior administrator regulates both daily life and economic production without any separation between the two. But it is difficult to reconcile the requirement for absolute equality with the functional distribution of individuals by a superior administration.42
In contrast to the moral community, the second model of communism we have enumerated in this chapter inherits most of its traits from modern socialism. We observed above how Durkheim opposes “communism” and “socialism.” Socialism, for Durkheim, is a uniquely modern phenomenon: its goal is the collective organization of economic production. Unlike utopian communism, socialism, for Durkheim, is entirely contemporaneous with industrial capitalism: its raison d’être is to repair and re-constitute a social fabric that has been torn apart by the market order. And its means of reparation is a mode of production based on a division of tasks and a hierarchy of “capacities.” Socialism should not therefore be viewed as an extension of the “communist ideal” as found in the Bible or in Plato. Its fundamental feature, for the majority of its representatives, is neither the sharing of goods nor collective consumption, but the re-organization of industrial labor according to the model of “association.”43 Instead of the old moral model of the “community of goods,” what we now have is a new “association of individuals.”44 If the older mode of communism was ultimately a derivation of the most ancient expression of the “community of goods” – i.e., the logic of symbolic debt – modern socialism is, contrastingly, a society of individuals: it is a doctrine of immanent social energy to be organized, social forces to be coordinated, and an inherent power that its members must reclaim from the clutches of private property.45 In this sense, the difference between the two models stems from the fact that socialism, like sociology, views modern society as a sui generis reality: it is a site of autonomous interactions or “motion” that calls for a specific, original, and rational form of organization. Socialism is a doctrine that strives to arrange immanent social forces by giving them an associational form adequate to their nature. Socialism and sociology are thus the heirs of the inventors of “civil society.” But the “society” of the socialists eschews the political management of the economy, which seems too much like government by “experts” or “lawyers.” Rather, the artificial separation of political powers from society (from its socio-economic core) is dissolved in socialism’s “association of producers,” such that politics itself is doomed to outright extinction.46 The best definition of socialism in this respect is given by Pierre Ansart:
For Saint-Simon, as for Marx and Proudhon, the task of the revolution is to liberate previously oppressed social forces, destroy the powers of alienation and objectification, and make the free development of social activity possible. But it’s not only a question of increasing the possibilities of social realization for all individuals and enhancing the development of the productive forces. The socialist revolution will also restore, to all members of society, total mastery over their activity, thus making possible a society that is freed from all internal obstacles, a society “en acte” in the words of Saint-Simon or Proudhon. The revolution will ensure the transition from a society governed by relations of political obedience to a society entirely devoted to administrative activity, activity directed toward objects devoid of relations of domination. The class of industrial workers, or proletarians, who were previously dominated by political power or by capital, will undertake a movement of re-appropriation that will give them complete control over themselves and their actions. It will substitute the empowerment of institutions with the dynamism of its own forces and the immediacy of its needs.47
In their own way, Marx and Engels participate in this socialist and associationist turn by re-defining communism as a “free association of producers.” From this perspective, Durkheim’s opposition between socialism and communism loses its relevance: for Marx and Engels, communism is not at all “archaic” but fundamentally modern. For them, the relevant opposition is not between socialism and communism, but is rather internal to communism itself, between “utopian communism” and “scientific communism.” In this respect, Marx and Engels endow communism with an additional and completely original dimension. They want to replace the older moral and religious aspects of communism, which are still very active in the socialism of Owens and Saint-Simon, with a new understanding of historical development that is entirely scientific. Of course, the idea that science should replace politics is certainly not new – indeed, the very notion of “scientific socialism” came first from Proudhon, not Marx. For the latter, however, this new communism is scientific because it is based on knowledge of the evolutionary laws of societies. More specifically, it is based on objective knowledge of the end goal of all historical development as such, a goal that must be consciously attained by the masses through the experience of struggle. Communism thus no longer designates the project of an ideal city, but the “real movement that will abolish the present state of things” or, as Marx writes in the 1844 Manuscripts, “the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future.”48 Yet unlike Cabet, Marx and Engels are not merely content to say that the community of goods has never been easier to create because industry enables unlimited abundance. Rather, they more ambitiously attempt to deduce the necessity of communism from the development of capitalism itself, and to make class struggle the means by which capitalism will give birth to a superior social form. For Marx, it is the very motion of private property and capital, as based on “a wholly empirical analysis,”49 that is the basis of communism. Communism is therefore both a scientific theory (a theory of motion) and a form of revolutionary practice geared toward the conscious transformation of the conditions of life that have been imposed upon man. This is precisely Marx’s meaning in another definition found in The German Ideology:
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of individuals united.50
Communism is depicted as a harmonious accord between history’s “objective tendencies” and its “subjective dimension,” as if the consciousness of historical necessity, inscribed in its real movement, inevitably gives rise to economic contradictions and class conflicts, thus rendering the utopian project itself meaningless.51
From this perspective, it is the critique of political economy that will show how the development of capitalism’s contradictions itself engenders the historical conditions through which communism becomes a necessity. This is the theoretical logic that allows Marx to scientifically establish the law of historical transformation that will abolish capitalism. This is the explicit meaning of numerous passages in Marx’s various works and correspondence, one of the most well known of which appears at the end of Chapter 25 of Capital (vol. 1) – the chapter on the so-called “primitive accumulation.” If capitalism destroys the small, individual, and independent producers, as Marx explains in this chapter, capitalism will in turn be destroyed by the same mechanisms of its own development, “with the inexorability of a natural process.”52 Marx and Engels ground their logic on a simple historical pattern. Capital expropriates workers as a condition of its expansion. The workers that are organized by capital become, one day, stronger and more numerous and they in turn expropriate capital. History’s denouement is thus the “expropriation of the expropriators.”53 The question that Marx poses is ultimately this: how does capitalism itself create the conditions for communism or, put differently, how does capital generate the common out of itself – i.e., from the internal logic of its own processes? Such, for Marx, is the famous logic of the “negation of the negation”: the most thoroughgoing integration of the workforce into the great, mechanized industries of capitalism produces a socialization of labor and the concentration of capital. This in turn constitutes the conditions for passage into another regime of ownership based on new relations of production. Capitalist socialization is thus posited as the condition for the association of workers. Through a strange act of faith, that which made worker control over the production process impossible now becomes its “presupposition.”
Of course, history has not confirmed the ineluctable character of the “expropriation of the expropriators.” History has not shown us how capital’s planned and organized association of workers creates the conditions for the collective management of production and trade. Marx, it seems, remains a prisoner of the false symmetry he established between the transition from feudal society to bourgeois society, on the one hand, and the passage from bourgeois society to communism on the other. For Marx, revolution is like a kind of “birth,” according to the metaphor he continually employs, wherein the superior form of society is always contained in the form that precedes it, and capitalism, accordingly, itself creates the material conditions for its own transcendence. Yet the conditions of communism, which Marx thinks are produced by capitalism, do not in fact at all resemble the conditions that permitted the consolidation of the economic power of the bourgeoisie. As Cornelieus Castoriadis observed in 1955, while reflecting on his increasing distance from Marx’s thought, if capitalism is defined by the production of factories, mass proletarianization, the concentration of capital, and the application of modern science to production, these features really have very little to do with the underlying condition of the bourgeois revolution:
But where can we find already realized in this society socialist relations of production as bourgeois relations of production were in “feudal” society?’ Now, it is obvious that these new relations of production cannot be merely those realized in the “socialization of the labor process,” the cooperation of thousands of individuals within the great industrial units of production. For these are the relations of production typical of a highly developed form of capitalism.54
For Castoriadis, capitalist “socialization” should in no way be confused with the association of workers: it is characterized, as Castoriadis points out, by the antagonism between the “mass of executants” and a “stratum of directors.” Thus, whereas the bourgeois revolution was essentially “negative” for Castoriadis, in the sense that it “limit[ed] itself to erecting into law a state of fact by abolishing a superstructure that in itself already is unreal,”55 the socialist revolution is “essentially positive” because “it has to construct its regime – constructing not only factories but new relations of production for which the development of capitalism furnishes merely the presuppositions.”56 Castoriadis’s critique can thus be summarized by the following formula: “the capitalist transformation of society ends with the bourgeois revolution; the socialist transformation of society begins with the proletarian revolution.”57 In other words, Marx did not think of the construction of socialism as the establishment of new relations of production because of his confusion between “socialization” and “association.”58 For Castoriadis, this confusion was not a matter of chance, but strictly corresponds to Marx’s notion of a quasi-natural law of evolution leading societies toward communism. Put differently, Marx’s thesis – which has been adopted by all manner of Marxisms right up to the present day – is that there is a kind of objective production of the common by capital, which itself is the material condition of the conscious production of the common by the association of workers.
Yet this ostensibly scientific communism is everywhere in crisis. Its faith is exhausted, and only a few old believers still swing the censer that blesses the glorious march of its history. How can we still believe that the development of capitalism is a necessary, if somewhat painful, phase in the ultimate appearance of a new mode of production? The fact is we have moved on from our faith in objective human progress. We no longer believe in the narrative of the inexorable emancipation of humanity, which presupposes and even justifies all manner of slow births and difficult deliveries. The exhaustion of this old belief is especially apparent in the recent transformation of communism, by some of its heralds, into a Kantian “regulative idea,” which of course completely breaks with the Marxian theses of a “real movement that dissolves the current state of things.” Communism, in this register, seems to have acquired the strange status of a “moral belief,” not unlike the famous “postulates of practical reason” in terms of the effects the latter produces on the will:59 in the same way that “I want to believe” in God because I need this presupposition in order to work toward the realization of sovereign good, I now “want to believe” in communism because I need this presupposition in order to act in the here and now for the cause of emancipation. Suffice it to say that this latter version of belief, unlike the former, means one has effectively renounced the idea of historical necessity and is, in a sense, but one more manifestation of this older narrative’s demise and the futility of trying to resurrect it. There’s no need to deplore or rejoice in its demise: it is simply a fact.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that communism has been reduced, in the words of François Furet, to “the passing of an illusion.” Rather it means that a certain moment has ended and, perhaps, a new era of emancipation is opening up, one that has little to do with its previous historical forms. But creating new historical forms demands an examination of each of communism’s historical instantiations, especially that form dominated by the figure of the party-state. And no clever subterfuge – especially not the specious analogy that renders communism a kind of mathematical “hypothesis” in need of demonstrable proofs – must distract us from this task.60 For it should be understood that the attempt to test a political hypothesis is itself part of the hypothesis, just as the attempt to demonstrate a mathematical hypothesis is part of that hypothesis as well. The only goal of this deplorable paradox is its ability to cancel out the hypothesis’s empirical failure as a criterion of invalidation – which is just a way of making its failure only an “apparent failure”61 – such that even the hypothesis’ failure is paradoxically its validation. But what is most worrisome is the revolting conclusion drawn from this self-justifying rationality: can we reduce the terror of the Stalinist or Maoist state to a mere “demonstration” of the communist hypothesis, thus passing off millions of victims in the name of “justifying” this hypothesis?
Despite the last redoubts of China or North Korea, the cycle of state communism that began in 1917 has effectively drawn to a close. While we have already discussed certain aspects of Marxism and social democracy, we must, above all, be completely frank about the nature of state communism: the communist states of the twentieth century were, by and large, terrorist states that not only monopolized arbitrary violence but also insisted on a discursive monopoly over the social world, thought, art, culture, and the very future of human societies. The circumstances out of which these states emerged has usually been used to justify a whole series of infamous crimes, including the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, the concentration camps and the trials, and – right up until the collapse of these states – arbitrary police espionage and the highly conservative nature of the state bureaucracies. Trotsky, for instance, who was a firm believer in state terror, justified its use to Karl Kautsky in the following manner: “the degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who have been overthrown, the more inevitable does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.”62
This is not to say, of course, that historical circumstances did not play an important role in the emergence of justifications of this kind: civil war, military encirclement, the famine, and industrial disorganization seem to have forced a number of decisions onto leaders that very quickly led to the establishment of the dictatorship of the Party, and foreclosed the type of society that both Lenin and Trotsky wanted to build before the revolution (which was something closer to the Paris Commune writ large).63 However these “internal and international conditions,” as Trotsky puts it, do not explain everything. Most decisions were undertaken according to a widely shared premise (including those who were subsequently dispatched by Stalinism): the party that builds, controls, and governs the new state is always right because it alone is enlightened by the “science of communism.” In the case of the Soviet Union, the democratic ideal of the free association of producers was ultimately supplanted by forms of domination and servitude that had absolutely no relation to the culture of critique, the objective analysis of facts, and the refusal of dogma that was the fundamental basis of Marx’s intellectual ethic.64
Early on, the complete nationalization of industry and trade, the weakening of institutions of workers’ control, co-optation of unions within the apparatus of production and government, the creation of the Cheka, the establishment of a single-party monopoly and the refusal to tolerate any dissident tendencies sowed the seeds that allowed Stalin, after the defeat of the European revolutions and the rise of fascism, to ascend within the Party, eliminate all opponents and possible rivals, and implement forced collectivization of agriculture and bureaucratic planning. The great Stalinist turning point thus occurred when, as the despotic head of the state administration, Stalin implemented a terrorist policy of “primitive socialist accumulation” that was based on a double logic of excessive exploitation of manual labor placed under state control, alongside the threats of the firing squad or deportation to forced labor camps.
This was a period of so-called “socialism in one country,” which had almost nothing to do with the hopes of revolutionary Marxism, as noted by Victor Serge in his assessment of the revolutionary experience: “the essential fact is that in 1927–1928, following a coup carried out within the party, the revolutionary State-party becomes a reactionary bureaucratic police State on the social structures created by the Revolution.”65 It bears mentioning, given Marc Ferro’s remarkable analysis of the 1917 Revolution, that the Party, in the first years of the regime, was sociologically very dissimilar from the revolutionary organization in 1917. The Party integrated hundreds of thousands of plebeian youths who made up a social group with specific interests and a unique mentality that rendered them an easily manageable political instrument.66
Yet the ultimate destiny of the communist revolutions of the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion. While there were decisive bifurcations and specific conditions that led to a degree of bureaucratization that caused even Lenin himself to begin to worry (though much too late of course), these conditions were not insurmountable. And while it is both stupid and vain to blame Marx for the Gulag, it is nonetheless important to identify exactly what aspects of the socialist and communist movement, even before the October Revolution, promoted the development of these administrative practices in the Party and, ultimately, in the state.
The ideal of obedient militants and soldiers, the creation of ruling oligarchies, and the dogmatism of party officials all play an important role in the constitution of bureaucratic organizations. But we fundamentally misunderstand the tragic history of “Soviet” bureaucratization if we do not grasp the institutional logic that, even before October, made the Party the central apparatus for attributing legitimacy upon the “political direction of the masses” and for assigning the plurality of organizations representing the working class (the soviets, trade unions, cooperatives, etc.) only fictive place.67 After lending initial tactical support to the autonomous organs representing the working class and the Russian population at large that developed between February and October of 1917 – the factory committees, neighborhood committees, militias, etc. – the Bolsheviks very quickly eliminated them. Marc Ferro’s extensive archival research has shown how the Party “bureaus” (or cells), as early as February 1917, controlled the Petrograd Soviet, how Party delegates replaced the representatives of various factory committees and neighborhood committees (whose composition was genuinely popular), how a new stratum of Party apparatchiks took control of decisive positions of power in the new administration in a matter of months, and how, finally, all remaining proletarian institutions were bolshevized, or progressively taken over by the state.68 Democratic activity was thus rapidly eroded by two forms of bureaucratization: from the top, the Party colonized what were hitherto autonomous popular workers organizations, and from below, the Party developed an apparatus designed to replace the general assemblies. This double “bureaucratic capture” of the democratic committees and the soviets at the very beginning of the revolution triggered a monopolization of the revolution by the Party that was effectively irreversible.69
As we can see, the imposition of certain practices, under specific historical conditions, can lead to the statist capture of democratic energies and the confiscation of real power by a party destined to become the singular ruling institution of the state.70 This leads to an impressive inversion of the socialist project, and it is not difficult to understand how it led to the collapse of the workers’ movement. Instead of recuperating the forces of society that had been appropriated by the state and by capital, the revolution led to the creation of a party-controlled state – or, rather, a “state-party” that tried to direct all social forces and interactions from above. The role of the working class in this situation, then, is merely to blindly obey and work. As Trotsky crudely pointed out in Terrorism and Communism: “the worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet State: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet State, under its orders in every direction – for it is his State.”71 In this conception, the common is purely and simply identified with state property itself.
The most current term for his type of regime is “totalitarianism.” According to Hannah Arendt, the essence of this type of regime is the denial of individual rights and the “rule of law,” insofar as the latter is the only way to truly protect the former. For Arendt, then, liberalism is the only philosophy capable of blocking this modern pathology that absorbs all aspects of social, economic, and cultural life into the state apparatus. For us, however, this characterization of totalitarianism as the negation of the individual, or as the rejection of plurality within society, is insufficient.72 It misses the historical singularity of the phenomenon, which is not merely the statist appropriation of the means of production, but also the creation of various instruments for controlling the population in the name of the “leadership of the society by the Party.” In other words, in this type of regime, state organs exercise terrorist powers over the population to the extent that they are the eyes and ears of a party enlightened by the science of history, a party that pretends to be the source and the wellspring of all collective and individual life but which in fact reduces the life of the worker to a programmable economic function.
In order to properly account for this larger process, we need to return to the Marxian illusion of the objective production of the common by capital. This idea, which is linked to definite evolutionist tendencies in Marx’s thought, led many Marxists to think that socialism in economically backwards countries must first wait for the development of bourgeois forces of production before these countries could proceed toward their socialist future. But, of course, the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century broke out in almost entirely economically backwards countries. As Castoriadis put it, “the wicked irony of history was that the first victorious revolution took place in a country where the population had been anything but ‘disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.’ And the task of unifying and homogenizing Russian society had to be accomplished by the Bolshevik party and Stalin’s totalitarian terror.”73 Under these conditions, the state-party thus became the principle agent of industrialization and the apparatus that imposed discipline upon the population. It was this apparatus that laid the groundwork for forced collectivization and exploited the collective workforce it directly organized. In other words, where the production process itself was not able to “organize, unify and discipline” the working class according to the mechanisms of its internal logic, the state-party was forced to take it upon itself to “organize, unify and discipline” the working class by violently subjecting workers to the worst forms of productivism. “Proletarianization” was thus accomplished through the iron rule of a state that used the forced march to produce its own form of “primitive accumulation.”
Yves Cohen has very effectively articulated the nature of this bureaucratic mode of production and the original characteristics of the social relations it entailed. Simply put, the state apparatus stifled any possibility of genuine politics: “the state provided everything; it was the voice of the proletariat and the people. The Party is the site of truth and law, and the latter is always subordinated to the state.” In other words, politics is eliminated because it is monopolized by a party that brooks no dissent or discord: “everyone has a ‘formal’ voice – every proletarian, every worker, any part of the people, in fact all the people, because the Party speaks for them all.” Thus, as Cohen puts it, the “disqualification of politics leaves only administration.”74 We can in fact see something of an unexpected and paradoxical realization of the old Saint-Simonian prophecy in this form of administrative rationality, in the sense that the monolithic party violently realizes Saint-Simon’s substitution of the “administration of people” for the “administration of things,” insofar as state communism did in fact administer people as if they were things. This administration thus becomes the site of potentially unlimited power when, for one reason or another, personal or oligarchical authority is able to impose its will upon the party and upon the larger administrative state.
Rather than explain everything by the long history of the Russian state, we should ask instead if this process of bureaucratization is not just as much – if not more so – the logical outcome of a party rationale that was imposed upon the workers’ movement and which has largely escaped critical interrogation. These so-called bureaucratic “distortions” or “degenerations” have often been explained and sometimes even justified by historical “circumstances,” as in Domenico Losurdo’s highly symptomatic project of relativizing Stalin’s crimes and rehabilitating his personality. But the first signs of bureaucratization appeared before the civil war and foreign intervention. The fact is that these signs point to very old organizational practices of the social democratic parties that were merely taken to extremes in the case of the Bolsheviks. If Lenin, as far back as 1902, became the central theoretician of the ruling party, it was because he considered this kind of party necessary to make successful revolution in a country where capitalist social relations were undeveloped (if not entirely absent). Lenin’s iron discipline was firstly justified by the need to produce proletarian unity by imposing class consciousness on the proletariat from the outside, since it could not be internally generated by the mechanisms of capitalist production itself. By framing itself as the underlying condition and guarantor of the consciousness and unity of the working class, the Party also claimed exclusive representation of proletarian interests since, after the revolution, the “socialist state” would itself be the representative of the working class and would ensure the unity of the entire population as a means of legitimizing the state’s absolute monopoly of bureaucratic power.75 By claiming to both possess and embody historical knowledge, the Party and the state granted itself the right to impose historical truth upon society by force. In other words, the logic of the Party re-introduced the old representative relation between the sovereign and the people, wherein the unity of the people is a function of the monolithic nature of its singular representative (i.e., the state). In this sense, Hannah Arendt was right to see the dictatorship of the Party as the “last stage of government in the nation-state.”76 Yet this was not a question of just any party, but a very particular form of the Party that sought to produce the unity of the proletariat through the capture of state power. And once this objective was achieved, the Party continued to produce this unity through the ongoing organization of labor and production.
The logic of the Party quickly imposed its unique institutional dynamic. As mentioned above, the monolithic Party acted as the sole instrument for creating a commons of production given the underdevelopment of capital. These conditions in particular explain why the uprisings that tried to disrupt the state monopoly of the common have been based on the claim to create a democratic common, in its most direct form, within the sphere of production, which is to say the terrain upon which this monopoly exercised its greatest violence in the ordinary lives of millions of people.
This was particularly true of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. In his 1976 essay “The Hungarian Source,” Castoriadis underscored the radical character of this revolution:
The purest, total, most extreme form of bureaucratic capitalism has been achieved in Russia, China, and the other countries masquerading as ‘socialist.’ The Hungarian revolution of 1956 has been the first and, until now, the only total revolution against total bureaucratic capitalism – foreshadowing the content and orientation of the future revolutions in Russia, China, etc.77
Why precisely, was the Hungarian Revolution a “total revolution”? Its total character was based in its intent to destroy the division between a circumscribed “political” sphere reserved for government, and the rest of social life devoted to production and work. In other words, the Hungarian Revolution aimed at a “de-professionalization of politics,” or the abolition of the political as a special sphere of competence, in favor of the “universal politicization of society.”78 The workers’ councils were thus especially important for three reasons: (a) the establishment of “direct democracy” – i.e., “true political equality” or “equality as to power”; (b) their “rootedness in existing concrete collectivities” that were not limited to the factories; and (c) “their demands relative to self-management and the abolition of work norms.”79 Just as the watchword of the emergent bourgeoisie was “no taxation without representation,” the emergent principle of the Hungarian workers’ councils was: “no execution of decisions without an equal part played by all in the making of decisions.”80 What we see in this slogan is, in fact, the principle of the common in the purest form: only co-participation in decision-making produces co-obligation in the execution of decisions. The demand to abolish all work norms should thus be viewed in especially positive terms. It means, in effect, that “people charged with the implementation of a task are the ones entitled to make decisions concerning the rhythm of the work,”81 and the only body authorized to make rules in this regard is the collective of those that will have to follow these rules. This demand, in itself, breaks with the belief in a purely technical organization of production, and at the same time overturns the habitually recognized primacy of specialists in favor of the primacy of the operators of the instruments of production themselves.82
Maoist China offers another striking example of popular resistance to capitalist-productivist norms imposed by the state-party. In a short but illuminating essay, sinologist Jean François Billeter suggests, “the famine that Stalin organized in Ukraine from 1933 to 1934, which caused the deaths of millions (8 million in 1933, according to one estimate) was not just a step toward industrialization. It was an exercise in the ‘class struggle’ that Mao Tse-Tung directly inspired.”83 Billeter distinguishes between four great moments within the “chain reaction” that led to the gradual acceptance of a market rationality in China: the first period extends from 1920 to 1949, the second from 1949 to 1957, the third from 1957 to 1979, and the fourth from 1979 to today. Lingering on the third period, Billeter shows how the “Great Leap Forward” was driven by the objective to create an industrial power capable of rivaling the countries of the West “at any cost and as quickly as possible.” This merciless logic, that prevailed in capitalist countries in a different form, requires all social relations and all human existence itself become subject to the imperatives of production.” Referencing historian Jasper Becker, who estimates that 30 million people died during the 1959–1961 famine,84 Billeter argues that it was “the largest famine not only in the history of China, but in the history of the world as such.” Furthermore, Billeter adds that these victims did not die from fatigue or illness, “but solely of hunger, in silence, under the supervision of a regime in complete control of the entire situation.” Far from seeing the Great Leap as merely the temporary irruption of governmental irrationality, Billeter forcefully shows how Chinese leaders
were determined to break productivity records in order to make China an industrialized nation. To this end, the peasantry was subject to brutal and irreversible proletarianization. Even family life had to be abolished, since it acted as a brake on the pace of transformation. Like the Nazi camps, the Great Leap is extremely revealing, and it should be placed at the very heart of contemporary history, not its margins.85
What we have here is another exemplary instance of the way in which state communism made up for the absence of a spontaneous process of the production of the common by capital with unprecedented levels of state coercion: the state took it upon itself to create a “common of production” from scratch by internalizing a hyper-productivist logic that could produce a “new man” capable of beating capitalism at its own game.
After being sidelined in the wake of the catastrophic Great Leap, Mao did everything he could to regain power between 1962 and 1966. To this end, Mao experimented with a number of methods between 1966 and 1968. “In 1966,” writes Billeter, “Mao failed to achieve his ends by regular means, so he opted for others.” Aware of the frustration of the youth, and of the student youth in particular, Mao mobilized the youth against those who resisted him within the party apparatus. Having previously secured the support of the army through Lin Piao (Lin Biao), Mao intervened every time the student rebellions deviated from his desired course or exceeded the objectives he had implicitly assigned to the students. And when the military tried to impose its will upon Mao, he revived the uprisings and directed them against the military itself when necessary. There is no question Mao was playing with fire: he took the great risk that these rebellions might mutate, then and there, into a genuine movement for social and political emancipation, especially once the students became involved; Mao would then have to violently crush the beginnings of a true revolution that he himself had started. And this, of course, is what he would finally have to do with the help of the army in 1968.86 Billeter’s analysis does a remarkable job of condensing the lesson of Hua Linshan’s insightful book Les Années rouges (The Red Years).87 As a schoolboy in Guilin when the Cultural Revolution erupted, Linshan recounts how he found himself caught in an incredibly violent civil war, and he speaks of the doubts that plagued him at the height of the fray, as well as his general state of mind. Beginning in January 1969, when the Central Committee started attacking the “leftist ideological tendencies” in the rebels, which was when the first massacres began, Linshan was increasingly tormented about the real reasons for the Cultural Revolution.88
What becomes increasingly apparent is that the student and working-class youth took the democratic principles invoked by the leadership at face value, especially its claim to model itself on the Paris Commune. We know that, for Mao, implementing the popular “right to elect and dismiss managers” was completely out of the question. Yet nowhere was Mao’s cynicism more apparent than in his original proposal for a “Shanghai Commune” in March 1967. This creation of a Shanghai Commune was originally intended to create a power structure that could centralize, in a single organization, the functions that were previously divided between the Party and the government. However, Mao’s decision to change its name was ultimately based on his view that a “commune” was an insufficiently strong form of organization to ensure effective control of power.89 However, from the perspective of the actors involved in the rebellion, the principles of control over leaders (especially their recall), which were at first brandished in the name of Chairman Mao himself, now appeared to many to be incompatible with the very nature of the regime. As Jean François Billeter observes (and as we have mentioned above), Linshan shows that “Chairman Mao risked triggering a genuine revolution in order to achieve his ends.” But Linshan also shows that “the students, the workers, and others seized this occasion to act according to their own objectives, which they discovered through the course of their activity, and the more they became autonomous, the more their efforts portended the negation of the regime.”90 Linshan was subsequently sent to the countryside for re-education after the crackdown, and he informs us in the final pages of his moving testimony of the conclusion he finally reached:
I now understand why Chairman Mao triggered the Cultural Revolution. He wanted to implement measures he considered necessary but which ran counter to the will of the population. In order to implement these measures, he had to wield absolute power. This is where we come in. He used us to launch an attack against the organizational basis of the Party. It was an immense deception. Mao had no intention of ever applying these principles.91
If the Cultural Revolution was thus a contradictory phenomenon, it was not because of a “political experience that saturates the form of the party-state.”92 It was rather because the students and workers clashed with the state on behalf of the political nature of the kind of common the Cultural Revolution would produce: for the students and the workers, the goal was to extend the communal logic of the Paris Commune to the sphere of economic production. The name “Mao,” therefore, does not designate the invention, “in the space of the party-state,” of a “third recourse” of “mass political mobilization” that is beyond “formalism” and “terror”;93 rather, the name “Mao” signifies a combination of cynical manipulation, deception, and terror that scarcely has any equivalent. In this sense, Mao is nothing other than the name of one of the greatest political criminals of the twentieth century, alongside Stalin and Hitler.
We can now take better stock of the strange inversion of the original socialist project. “Socialism” or “scientific communism” was not merely an imperative to rationalize and coordinate economic activities through a central organ, as in Durkheim’s reductive definition. Taken in this restricted sense, there is no doubt the socialist project inspired productivist policies designed to promote industrial centralization. But communism has also been the bearer of democratic ambitions: specifically, the project was an attempt to extend democracy into the economic and professional world; it is an affirmation that democracy does not stop at the doors of the workshop, factory, or farm. For many of its advocates, communism was not a project to re-establish a “community” in which the individual submitted to a whole embodied in a leader or a party, but a project that re-organized society according to managerial and legislative principles that gave real power, remuneration, and recognition to all those who participated in communal work. This form of associationist, economic democracy refuses to be coordinated by the market, but it also does not entrust all its command functions to the state-form either – unlike the babouvistes’s (followers of Babeuf) preference for a “supreme administration.” And insofar as socialism is all about democratically organizing cooperative workers who perform different functions, it is not a negation of social diversity or professional differentiation. Indeed, many of its principle theoreticians viewed economic and social democracy as the solution to the very problem posed by this emergent industrial diversity. Jaurès, in this respect, speaks of a “communism of energies.” In other words, socialism’s defining problem or challenge is the creation of institutions for economic and social cooperation, and its preferred solution to this problem is a consensual association that is collectively managed by workers – even to the point of thinking, like Proudhon, that the “workshop will dissolve the government.” The experiments in collective management, self-governance, and workers’ councils that have occurred since the nineteenth century all bear the stamp of this aspiration for economic democracy.
We’ve also attained a better understanding of the distinctive logics animating the three dominant forms of communism: the community of goods, the association of producers, and the bureaucratic state. The first model presupposes an originary unity that it seeks to re-discover through perfect equality and the outright refusal of property. The second model – what Durkheim calls “socialism” and Marx calls “scientific communism” – inversely presupposes a state of social and economic differentiation that must be coordinated according to principles of justice and merit that only some form of economic democracy can realize. The Marxian variant of this second model is thought to develop almost automatically out of capitalism itself, what we have called the objective development of the common by capital. The third mode of communism tries to organize a society conceived as a passive material to be informed, distributed into classes and categories, and completely directed by “scientific knowledge” that belongs to, and is embodied in, a superior organization. Distinguishing between these three forms or “ideal types,” over and above the empirical hybridizations that history actually produces, seems essential to us for theorizing a contemporary alternative to capitalism that does not condemn us to repeat the past.
Of all three models, the first and the second are the most incongruent: the concept of a free association of individuals violently clashes with the authoritarian distribution of individuals within the community whose functions are determined in advance.94 Some articulation is possible between the second and the third models, due to their shared notion of a communal sphere in matters of production, but only to a certain extent: while the second model views the common as emerging from the process of production itself, the third makes it the job of the state to create the common by force. And, finally, there is a certain proximity between the first and third models by virtue of the role each entrusts to a “supreme administrator” for coordinating the distribution of individuals within their respective functions. This is what ultimately explains the plural meanings of Alain Badiou’s notion of the communist hypothesis, even if these various meanings are difficult to reconcile with each other. We have already seen how this notion can refer to both a Kantian moral precept – communism “as if” – and a mathematical theorem – communism as “verified by its failures.” But we must not forget the third meaning of the term: communism as the eternal idea that determines the actions of the philosopher-kings in the Republic: this is communism as “sub specie aeternitati.” These philosopher-kings described by Plato are artists who work according to a “divine pattern” in order to trace the outline of the political constitution. The individual and city are their subject matter: they must “wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean,” and then draw again, “until [they] have made human nature as acceptable to God as may be.”95 Legislators of this kind endeavor to relate the human to the divine by means of a “cleansing of the soul.” We can now see the importance of this exercise: Badiou is drawn to both the Platonic community of goods and the model of state communism, but completely bypasses the second model, the free association of producers. It is in this respect that Badiou’s criticism of the “party-form”96 is entirely superficial. It misses that which is most essential: the use of coercion and terror to change the human soul. And it is also in this sense that Badiou’s Platonism makes perfect sense: it rescues the hard core of state communism while denying everything in this model that speaks of a material common within the sphere of production.
Why, one might ask, is the construction of these models, these “ideal types,” a necessary pre-condition for theorizing what we will refer to in the rest of the book as the “common”? Its principle benefit is its ability to help us distinguish the true common from its false pretenses: the common, in the sense of a co-obligation that we all impose on ourselves, cannot be thought of as an original state to be restored, nor something that spontaneously emerges out of the process of production, nor something that is imposed from the outside, from above. The last part of this conclusion is worth repeating: the so-called “realization” of the common in the form of state ownership can only lead to the destruction of the common by the state. And if some aspects of the common may have survived, in subterranean forms, within societies dominated by this form of state property, it is only through active resistance to this suffocating form of state control. 97