On Socialism and Communism: A Correction

(Letters)

20 January 2016

Dear WV:

The otherwise very good article entitled “Hell Is Not Hell Enough: No to Public Housing Smoking Ban!” (Workers Vanguard No. 1080, 11 December 2015) ends with the following sentence, “Workers rule in the U.S. and internationally—based on a centrally planned, collectivized economy—will provide the building blocks for socialist society, the banner of which will be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.” In fact, as Karl Marx explained, that phrase is not the banner of “socialist society” but of the higher phase of communist society. Marx uses the terms “lower” and “higher” phases of communist society to refer to what revolutionists since Lenin’s time have generally called the “socialist” and “communist” phases, but in no way should socialism be confused with the higher stage, as in the WV article. (And, of course, both of those stages come after the dictatorship of the proletariat, during which a workers state is necessary to expropriate and suppress the exploiting class and to oversee the socialization of production.)

By far the best-known exposition in Marx’s writings on the transition from the overthrow of capitalism to a fully communist society is in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. In it he explains, “What we are dealing with here is a communist society, not as if it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it.”

Lenin, in The State and Revolution, explains that this is encapsulated in the socialist principle (“banner” if you will) of “An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour.” Since no two people are really equal, that is, they don’t have the exact same productive capacity or the same needs, this “equality” (referred to as “bourgeois right”) actually results in the unequal distribution of the wealth of society.

Critique of the Gotha Programme states:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

In getting there, Lenin emphasizes the “protracted nature of this process” because of the fact that the influence of capitalist society—what people often falsely assume is “human nature”—will take time to eradicate. But it is in the interests of the working class to lead society there, once they’ve seized power from the bloody capitalists who’ve already long outlived their historically progressive function. Then, with worldwide economic and social planning, humanity can steer itself to heretofore unimaginable heights.

Comradely,
Elijah B.