Note: This piece was originally written as an essay for PHIL 593/GERM 365: Marxism and Critical Theory, a course at KU. It has since been further edited and refined.
Socialism is when the government does stuff, and it's more socialism the more stuff it does, and if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism!
-Dr. Richard Wolff, 2015
In a 2015 lecture, Dr. Richard Wolff, professor of economics at The New School, examined what socialism is not. Later in this talk, as he describes what he argues was the framing of Soviet socialism by Stalin following the Second World War, Wolff jokingly remarks that “socialism is when the government does stuff, and it's more socialism the more stuff it does, and if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism!”1 This, of course, is not what socialism nor communism are, as was the point Wolff was arguing.
As for answers to what communism actually is, one may instead turn towards the works of Karl Marx.2 Specifically, in Marx’s “Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844” and “The Communist Manifesto”, co-written with Engels, communism is described in a number of ways – positively, negatively, tangentially, and otherwise – which can be synthesized into an understanding of Marx’s socialist vision of a post-capitalist world.
One of the most frequent and direct ways communism is defined is the abolition of private property.3 In the section of the Manuscripts titled “Private Property and Communism”, Marx frames “communism [as] the positive expression of annulled private property.”4 He elaborates on how this process would look, starting at what he describes as “crude communism”. In this system, the community would become the universal capitalist, though like bourgeois inter-sex relations, there would still be rampant exploitation and alienation under this system, and while it would be in collective hands, private property would remain.5 In a later stage, communism, “democratic or despotic,” would approach transcending private property, but would only have done so in a limited capacity.6 In its final stage, communism would be the “positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man.” Here, naturalism, humanism, and transcending estrangement are all one, embodied completely by the most advanced stage of communism.7 The Manifesto would later put this argument in more succinct terms, stating that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”8 The ideas about communism as the product of the forces of history and as man returning to himself are supported through Marx’s regular focus on the evolution of society and the people within it. This historical process is one Marx understands as the movement of social and material forces in and around production, and as such, the current mode of production – one which is centered around private property – is incompatible with communism and a free contribution to the common good.9
In a more indirect way, Marx also conceptualizes communism as the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. In the Manifesto, he notes what would be unique about a society run by and for proletarians – “all previous historical movements were movements of minorities,” but “the proletarian movement is the… movement of the immense majority.”10 In this sense, when Marx describes “the victory of the proletariat” as “inevitable,” he is at once arguing that communism requires the total victory of the proletarians and that both are destined to happen. Indeed, in the following section, titled “Proletarians and Communists,” Marx frames the two as of the same mind, with the “aim of the communists” being the “conquest of political power by the proletariat.”11 The class struggle, then, inevitably creates the conditions in which the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie through revolution. This dictatorship of the proletariat also constitutes communism.
The Manifesto also outlines ten “pretty generally applicable” points which could begin to revolutionize the modes of production. The points include abolition of land property, graduated income tax, abolition of inheritance, confiscation of bourgeois rebel property, state centralization of economic power, infrastructure, and instruments of production, an industrial labor army, abolition of rural-urban divide, and free education.12 This is the closest the Manifesto, or any other text by Marx or Engels for that matter, gets to clearly outlining what a communist society, even one early in its development, might entail. These changes would, as the Manifesto argues, effectively constitute a first step towards communism in a far less advanced stage of the process, one which has yet to do away with bourgeois society entirely, let alone class society.
The Manifesto also defines communism against other forms of socialism. Communism is not a reactionary socialism like feudal, petty bourgeois, or German socialism, as it does not seek a return to a previous form of society; rather, it seeks to embrace its development. Unlike a more conservative, reactionary socialism, communism seeks to totally abolish bourgeois rule and later class society altogether, not capitulate to it. It is also not a utopian socialism, as it recognizes the historical necessity of revolution by and for the proletariat as a class.13
Even from this short and non-exhaustive list of what communism is and is not, one can better understand what communism is.
First, communism is decidedly proletarian in character. The proletariat, or the working-class who is forced to sell its labor, is in a constant struggle against the bourgeoisie, or the ruling class who exploits and expropriates labor. Without its explicitly proletarian predisposition and class focus, communism would cease to exist in any meaningful, novel form. To speak of Marxism as a “science” is to recognize that Marx did not invent or conjure up communism. Instead, Marx discovered it as the logical conclusion of the evolution of class society, that is to say, human history. The abolition of private property is the articulation of this idea at its very core, with the relations of production under capitalism structured by the worker’s alienation from their labor, their species-being, and themselves. Communism, as a stage of society which does away with this contradiction through empirically supported processes like revolution, must then be necessarily of the character of that alienated worker, lest it be one of the socialisms it is specifically contrasted against in the manifesto.
Second, communism is a whole new thing. While its earlier stages will inevitably retain some clear vestiges of the society it emerged from, in its highest, most advanced form, communism may be unrecognizable from the perspective of an alienated worker living under capitalism. The Manifesto says as much, explaining that “the Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations” and “its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”14 This rupture, over the course of the revolution and the development of communism, would render a new society entirely, one in which private property and alienation from labor are not only done away with, but entirely transcended beyond.15
Third, communism is adaptable to material conditions and thus does not look one singular way. Part of the reason “communism” is never really defined in terms of a platform in Marx and Engels’ works is that what communism looks like will differ greatly; what it looks like in its earlier stages will vary dramatically across nations and places, each with their own distinct material conditions and thus unique challenges, and what it looks like in its later stages is beyond the horizons of what we can see now in bourgeois capitalist society. The Manifesto explicitly notes that “all property relations… have been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions,”16, hence why the platform laid out later in the Manifesto, tailored for industrial Europe, explicitly notes its adaptability. A difference in material conditions between countries means that the proletariat of different countries must organize under their own respective conditions, such that these distinctions can vanish.17
Or perhaps Wolff had it right. Maybe it is when the government does stuff.
Works Cited
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. *W. W. Norton & Company, New York City, NY, 1978) p. 66–125.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (International Publishers, 2018)
Wolff, Richard D. “Socialism for Dummies.” YouTube, Charlie Marks, 17 May 2015, youtu.be/ysZC0JOYYWw?si=SMImWMF-PVDUYz9X\&t=2494 (41:34).
Endnotes
- Wolff, Richard D. “Socialism for Dummies.” YouTube, Charlie Marks, 17 May 2015 (41:34).
- For the purposes of this essay, the terms “socialism” and “communism” are interchangeable. Henceforth, “communism” will be used to refer to situations to which Marx may have used both terms to refer.
- Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (W. W. Norton & Company, New York City, NY, 1978) p. 82; Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (International Publishers, 2018) p. 23
- “Manuscripts”, p. 82
- “Manuscripts”, p. 82-84
- “Manuscripts”, p. 84
- “Manuscripts”, p. 84
- “Manifesto”, p. 23
- “Manuscripts”, p. 85-93; “Manifesto”, p. 9-15, 31
- “Manifesto”, p. 20
- “Manifesto”, p. 22
- “Manifesto”, p. 30-31
- “Manifesto”, p. 32-42
- “Manifesto”, p. 29
- “Manuscripts”, p. 82, 84
- “Manifesto”, p. 23, 30-31
- “Manifesto”, p. 28
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