A communist programme: Magical version (part 1)

Before getting into a more realistic programme, I think it's useful to explore what I would propose if I could somehow magically* change modern American society into a communist democracy.

*The naivete of Democratic Socialism is that a fundamentally capitalist country can actually be transformed step-by-step into a socialist or communist society. Reforms are helpful, they can increase the political and social power of the working class, but as the working class gains power they come into increasing conflict with the capitalist class. Every time this conflict has become sharp, the Democratic Socialists have come down on the side of the capitalists. Furthermore, Democratic Socialists seem all to often to early on want to take power away from the hands of the working class to prevent this conflict. As Elena Kagan documents, at the first victory the Democratic Socialists gave away the New York City garment unions' power to strike.

First, what do we want to keep? Nobody is wrong all the time, and republican capitalism has achieved some notable innovations that seem worth keeping, with perhaps some modifications.

The first worthy innovation is the rule of law. (What makes the rule of law a "bourgeois right" is not that it's wrong, it's that it's too limited: we have to consider the content of the law, not just the fact that we have any law at all.) The rule of law means that the government — even a democratic government — has to govern by consistent rules that have to be applied according to objective criteria. The rule of law stands opposite to personal rule, i.e. governance according to the day-to-day opinions of some privileged person or persons.

You cannot have the rule of law unless you institutionally separate the formation of law from its interpretation; otherwise, you just get personal rule in the interpretation. Thus we have to have a more-or-less independent judiciary. We would probably need a wholesale replacement of individual judges, but we can keep the present-day judicial structure largely intact. At the community level we have judges elected directly or appointed by an elected body for a fixed term; at the appellate level we have appointed judges with lifetime tenure. This structure would be advantageous for a magical in-place communist revolution, insulating for a time a communist constitution from the influence of unofficial capitalist-based social and political constructions remaining in society.

The second innovation, related to the rule of law, is establishing constitutional protections for individual and minority rights. There are certain principles we need to strongly insulate from even the majority, most specifically the power of a minority to attempt to become a majority. We can, in fact, keep the existing Bill of Rights virtually intact, tweaking only the Second Amendment to make it less ambiguous* and the Fifth to distinguish between personal property and the ownership of capital. I would additionally incorporate the UN Declaration of Human Rights, again distinguishing personal property from capital in Article 17.

*I'm in favor of the Second Amendment — the armed proletariat is a crucial component of communist theory — although I have some issues with its present interpretation. I read the "well regulated Militia" clause as broadly permitting government regulation of the ownership of firearms, such as registration, mandatory training, and safety and security regulations. I would even go so far as to say that it would be legitimate to require membership in an organization establishing military discipline, so long as membership in that organization was a broadly protected individual right.

Although it's hardly an innovation of republican capitalism, we are compelled, I think, to keep a civil service: every civilization since the invention of writing has had a more-or-less distinct civil service, increasingly operating according to quasi-legal rules established by a policy-making body. Even private organizations of more than a few dozen people include a bureaucracy. Indeed bureaucracy might well be a sine qua non of civilization itself. We need to maintain an institution that knows how to "turn on the lights", and a stable civil service acts as a dialectical counterweight to volatility of popular sentiment. In any event, I'm unable to think of an plausible, practical alternative. I will, however, propose substantial changes to how the civil service should operate.

A communist programme: Preamble

I want to outline a skeleton programme for a "dictatorship of the proletariat". It's important to understand, though, that if there were a communist revolution, and the power and privilege of the capitalist class were decisively broken, at least temporarily, the actual programme immediately following must and should be a matter of politics, i.e. negotiation and compromise (with some propaganda thrown in). What follows is just a collection of ideas, not a system of government I think a successful revolutionary force should impose in toto following a revolution without regard to the specific opinions and preferences of those with some social and political credibility.

It's also important to remember that the governments immediately following the Russian and Chinese revolutions faced a severe theoretical problem: the actual industrial proletariat in those societies was a minority, overwhelmed numerically by a class seen only in primitive feudal societies: the mostly illiterate agricultural peasant class. Agricultural peasants have a very different economic relation to the feudal landowners than industrial workers have to the owners of capital. Canonical Marxist theory (i.e. the theories that Marx and Engels themselves proposed) depended not just on the industrial proletariat forming a numerical majority, but also on specific features of the industrial proletariat and their relation to the capitalist class. Most of the pre-Lenin communist, socialist and anarchist theoreticians were, after all, living in the rapidly industrializing Western Europe.

Lacking this majority, and starting from the majority with an entirely distinct set of economic relations between peasant and landowners, the Russians and Chinese revolutionaries faced enormous uncharted theoretical ground. And they did so under the enormous pressure of life-and-death expediency faced by rulers of countries not just faced by primitive on-the-verge-of-starvation productive forces but also countries under the pressure of severe international hostility. The nascent Soviet Union started out with a primitive agrarian economy; what little industry they had was mostly colonial-submissive and administered by its foreign owners or those specifically chosen for their submission to those foreign owners. And then this primitive economy and its labor force was shattered by the First Imperialist War. Lenin inherited a country in shambles. And then they had to overcome a civil war and blockade fomented and encouraged by the capitalist West, knew that a Second Imperialist War was in the works (it's arguable that the West's hesitancy in confronting Hitler was in no small part due to Hitler's hostility to the Bolsheviks), and even afterward knew that there was substantial support for a Western invasion of the Soviet Union.

Similarly, forty years later Mao Zedong had to take seriously the profound existential threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union already leaning away from internationalizing socialism and toward its own brand of imperialist hegemony. And of course revolutionary China escaped actual nuclear war with the United States only by the narrowest of margins: MacArthur actually had nuclear weapons (granted to him by the Joint Chiefs of Staff) with the explicit intent of using them on China when Truman successfully faced down what was a de facto military coup. if Dewey had won the election, if Truman didn't have (if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor) balls of steel, if MacArthur hadn't backed down, things might have turned out very differently.

I've had a gun pointed at me, and I know you do whatever you have to do at the moment to survive. I can't really judge the behavior of a government that has nuclear weapons pointed at their country.

Regardless of the specific conditions that might obtain immediately after a communist revolution, we don't face these conditions in the United States. We will not face the predominance of an illiterate peasant class and their economic relations to a feudal land-owning class. We will not start from a barely subsistence-level economic infrastructure. While we might have to deal with some destruction of infrastructure caused by civil conflict, we won't have to face the devastation of an international war against a determined and industrialized enemy. We will probably not face an existential threat from the remaining nuclear powers: China, the European Union, India/Pakistan, and possibly a Brazilian dominated South America. We will have considerably more freedom and luxury to experiment, as well as to tolerate temporary inefficiency.

There are only two conditions that historically have led to an internal revolution. First, some class by virtue of its socially constructed characteristics achieves substantial economic power unavailable to the contemporaneous ruling class, and resists and overthrows the ruling class from a position of strength. These conditions allowed the nascent merchant and industrial-owning "middle" classes to overthrow the feudal ruling class. Second, the ruling class completely self-destructs, and whoever happens to be the most organized at the time has the reins of power thrust into their hands. These conditions placed power in the hands of the Russian Bolsheviks and Mao's Chinese Communist Party. (To a certain extent, the Chinese Revolution was a mixture of the two conditions: Mao had gained at least some economic power before the revolution by organizing and governing areas in China's interior.)

In all probability, the conditions that would obtain for a communist revolution in the United States would, regrettably, be the latter. (Although, like Mao, it is possible for communists to create some sort of economic base before a revolution.) This means that while a communist revolution would not be starting with a fundamentally subsistence-level economy, they probably will be starting with an catastrophic economic conditions that will be causing profound suffering, starvation and disease, and that will require immediate measures to correct. They will inherit quite a few pervasive social and economic conditions favorable to increased production; they will have some luxury for experiment and inefficiency, but the devastation will limit these options. It is with these historical observations and imaginative conditions that I'll be outlining a proposed skeleton programme for a post-revolutionary communist government.

Taxation and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Taxation, where the cost of some activity is spread out proportionally instead of by specific use, is a perfect example of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation.

If I and my neighbor are subject to taxation, the "rational" solution for either of us is to have the other pay his taxes and avoid our own; we get the benefit of what the taxes pay for without personally incurring the costs. If my neighbor pays his taxes, I'm better off not paying my own; if he doesn't pay his taxes, I'm still better off not paying my own. On the other hand, we're both better off if we both pay our taxes than if neither of us do. That's a textbook example of a Prisoner's Dilemma in real life.

Hence I talk in Supply-side and demand-side communism about using the coercive power of the state to fulfill people's needs for survival: the government taxes everyone to pay for everyone's basic needs. The coercive power of the state is used not to make an individual do what is not in her best interest, but rather to counteract the Nash equilibrium and ensure for each person that his neighbor is not taking a "free ride" and acting in an exploitative manner. Without coercion to ensure fairness, everyone's "rational" decision would be to not pay taxes, to their mutual detriment.

Supply-side and demand-side communism

I don't believe that "supply-side" communism will work under modern conditions. "Supply-side" communism entails that the workers own — in the contemporary sense of "own" — the means of production, i.e. constant capital: equipment, tools, land*, etc. Under "supply-side" communism, the role of the government is limited to protecting and enforcing the ownership of constant capital by the workers who employ it.

*Marx, IIRC, did not consider land to be capital, because it was not itself produced by human labor. However, land can be bounded in space and time, owned, and is required for the production of some commodities. It therefore functions enough like human-created capital to deserve the designation.

The problem is that if government appropriates some production for any use other than mitigating legitimate externalities (building roads to facilitate trade, cleaning up pollution, etc.), i.e. for the benefit of someone other than the workers, then the government necessarily compromises ownership.

We must, however, appropriate the production of commodities for the benefit of those who do not produce commodities: people who produce services, people who produce for the good of general culture, and people who do not produce at all.

Furthermore, there are large-scale macroeconomic issues. For some issues, there are resolutions that are mutually beneficial, but because of "Prisoner's Dilemma" conditions, independent entities, however rational, cannot achieve these resolutions. It's all the same whether the government makes these decisions directly or makes supposedly "external" decisions to force independent entities to make the right decision. Either way, the government must compromise ownership.

I don't want to bullshit around about what really is and is not "ownership"; it's better to grasp the nettle firmly: the government owns the constant capital. This move will at least decisively end private absentee ownership.

Rather than implement "supply-side" communism, it's better to implement "demand-side" communism: the government is obligated to provide the necessities of survival to every citizen, regardless of his or her productive status. The government will use its ownership of all capital to fulfill this obligation.

The government will directly manage the production of necessities. Every citizen is responsible for providing his or her share of labor to operate this production, either directly or indirectly through taxation. You either sign up for a government job in food production, or you pay the equivalent in taxes. Given that labor costs for survival are a fraction of total available labor power, it's expected that each citizen will need to contribute about 1/4 to 1/8 of the normal high-intensity average individual labor power: In short, anyone can work hard for 10 hours a week or work lazily for 20 hours a week to fulfill his obligations.

To make "demand-side" communism work, the government owns the capital and the people — including but not limited to the workers who use capital to create commodities — own the government. Stalin and Mao did not fail because they did not distribute ownership of capital to the workers; they failed to put the government firmly in the hands of the people and begin this task on day one. By the time Mao clued in and started the Cultural Revolution, the ownership of government by its own members has become too entrenched to reverse.

We need formal, well-defined social, political and legal constructions that ensure that the people control the government, so that the government retains real popular legitimacy. More importantly, we must use these constructions to ensure the government lacks incentive and ability to shape public opinion to the ends and interests of its members. We must begin creating these social constructions immediately; it is disingenuous and too dangerous to defer creating these democratic social constructions until the revolutionary government has "sorted things out." As Heinlein notes, "There's nothing so permanent as a temporary emergency."

We must begin creating direct democracy, where every citizen participates directly in local political and economic decision making. To facilitate more abstract decisions that affect more citizens that can comfortably manage direct democracy, we can implement immediately recallable delegates from local bodies to regional and national bodies.

We must begin the transition to direct democracy immediately, but we cannot immediately finalize the transition. There are too many capitalist traditions, social and legal constructions and psychological habits of thought prevalent in the population to make an instantaneous transfer of power feasible; we'd just end up with a capitalist pseudo-democracy like we have now.

It cannot be assumed that a revolution will have the active and informed consent of even a majority of the people. A revolution can occur only when the existing government and social structure retains the consent of a tiny minority of the population, and the revolutionary forces have the consent of a minority only somewhat larger than the existing government, as well as the uninformed toleration of a majority of the population. "I'm not quite sure what these Bolsheviks are all about," many Russians might have said, "But they sure as hell are better than that fucking Tsar!"

The active members of the revolutionary government (arbitrarily designated the Communist Party, explicitly denying any reference to existing political parties) should not directly participate in direct democracy: Communist Party members must be disenfranchised. The Party holds the reins of government by conquest, not by popular legitimacy, and this fact must always be emphasized and never discounted. If a member wants to vote and participate in democracy, she must first resign her membership and whatever political or economic office she holds by virtue of that membership.

Furthermore, there are some "bourgeois" institutions and social constructions that deserve immediate implementation and indefinite perpetuation under a communist society: The rule of law; an independent judiciary to interpret and apply those laws; freedom of speech and peaceable assembly, formal equality and the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex, race, physical ability, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. (We need also need constitutional protection that nonviolent protest — even if the protesters otherwise act illegally — will be met by the bare minimum of force necessary to ensure eventual (and explicitly not speedy) compliance with the law.)

Assuming this disenfranchisement, I can think of three good ways to manage the transition from direct Communist Party rule to direct democracy.

The first is to simply let the Communist Party die of attrition: accept no new members in the party, and as members resign, retire and die, transfer administrative control directly to democratic institutions.

The second is to keep administrative control in the Party on a long-term basis, but place induction of new members and promotion of existing members directly and completely under the control of democratic institutions. In this way, the Communist Party will be "infiltrated" and eventually replaced by the people, but the founders and initial members will leave their stamp on the social constructions inside the party.

The third is to set up the Communist Party as a "civil service" under the high-level control of democratic institutions, much like the UK (and to a lesser extent the US) civil service.

This method creates an interesting dialectic between the people and the civil service. In the initial stages the party (the civil service) will be relatively strong and the democratic institutions relatively weak; the party will influence the democratic institutions. As the people become more confident and competent, they can exercise their formal democratic power more forcefully, eventually subordinating the party to their own ends.

Bottom-up "supply-side" communism sounds like a good idea, and was probably a terrific idea in late 19th and early 20th century Europe, when the vast majority of people were employed making commodities and there were fuew large-scale macroeconomic issues. However, there are too many limitations in today's complicated economy with too few people actually creating commodities. The proletariat in its literal meaning (industrial commodity-producing workers), is too narrow today to exercise political privilege. Capital must be placed in the hands of the people, not just the proletariat, and the only way to place capital in the hands of a people without strong social and psychological constructions to cooperate is to make the government the intermediary of this ownership.

The revolutionary state

As I see it, there are four political stages to the implementation of communism:

The revolutionary state, which takes power from the capitalist state and wrenches social evolution and development away from refining relations of exploitation to building relations of mutual benefit and builds the foundation of literal participatory democracy.

The revolutionary state must quickly give power to the socialist state, which uses state power directly to manage a large portion of the economy using scientific expertise.

The socialist state will evolve over time to the communist state as more and more capitalist commodity relations are socialized and transformed into mutually beneficial relations.

The communist state will evolve over time into anarcho-communism, when social relations and individual psychology have evolved to the point where maintenance of mutually beneficial relations of production become internalized; at this point, coercive state power will no longer be required.

The revolutionary state is, of course, the most problematic and perilous stage of the transition. There are a lot of ways to go wrong, and only a few ways to go right. Indeed, a revolution is so dangerous that only the catastrophic collapse of capitalism gives us sufficient justification for actually implementing a revolution.

Capitalism is, however, beginning to fail catastrophically, and has already become a substantial fetter on human productivity. We don't have a choice about whether or not capitalism will fail; we have a choice only in what will follow capitalism: a regression to feudalism and monarchical tyranny or an advance to socialism.

The revolutionary state must racially alter the economic foundation of relations of exploitation: the commoditization of labor. Socialize residential housing, thus eliminating rent. Eliminate finance capitalism by becoming the sole source of finance capital. (The current capitalist government is implementing this step even now.) Take over the provision of goods and services necessary for civilized survival: food, shelter, water, sewage, education, ordinary medical treatment, etc. The threat of starvation, homelessness, lack of medical treatment, etc. can no longer serve as an incentive to work. Lacking the threat of starvation, the requirement to work will have to be enforced directly. The revolutionary government will simply make explicit and conscious the de facto conditions under capitalism: everyone has to contribute as a matter of physical necessity.

Politically, the revolutionary state can virtually eliminate the actualization of certain pernicious ideas: sexism, racism, and religious extremism. It's neither necessary nor desirable to censor and suppress speech; it's necessary only to make acts of discrimination illegal and vigorously enforce such laws, enact laws that promote sexual and racial equality (especially sexual equality by giving women absolute, uncompromised control over their own bodies), and use the power of the government to educate people that racism, sexism and religious extremism are wrong. (This means the revolutionary government should actively promote not just secularism, but also atheism.)

Most importantly, the revolutionary government will have to put the success of the revolution and the transition to the socialist state in the hands of the people. The revolution must immediately begin transferring control over the instruments of state power — the police and the army — to the people themselves, and they must complete the transfer before the revolutionary state ossifies into a bureaucratic tyranny — in no more, I think, than ten years at the outside. The people have been kept in ignorance and superstition by millennia of ruling-class and religious propaganda; the revolutionary state must conduct a massive education campaign to prepare people for self-rule, and begin setting up truly democratic institutions.

Coming to Power

Phoesune speculates about The Future Civil War where a revolutionary communist government — implausibly led by yours truly — might come to power.

Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Implementing Communism

Part I: Setting the stage

This series is entirely hypothetical, to explore how one would implement communism under more-or-less realistic circumstances. I place myself as the decision maker not because I have any real ambition to hold such a position, but only to avoid the rhetorical awkwardness of placing my own ideas in the mouth of a puppet.

Let's say that after a period of profound civil unrest and violence (perhaps an actual civil war), I have at least the opportunity of greatness thrust upon me: I inexplicably find myself the head of a revolutionary government that has — at least temporarily — seized power by virtue of having the only remaining disciplined army that can effectively enforce its decisions. There is no democratically elected government for me to hand over the reins of power: I can either exercise the power I have, turn it over to another non-democratically-elected leader, or allow the country to devolve into chaos. For better or worse, I choose to exercise power.

I'm faced with the following material circumstances:

The material productive capacity of the country has been substantially reduced, but still remains in good enough condition that I'm fortunately not faced with the sort of desperate material poverty faced by the Russian and Chinese revolutionary governments.

I'm also not faced with the implacable hostility of a well-organized and prosperous capitalist-imperialist enemy. China and Europe are the only remaining powers that might form an a dedicated enemy, but both are cautiously neutral, preoccupied with their own crises. I do not have to face — as did Stalin and Mao — an imminent invasion or nuclear war. Plus, I still have access to the existing US nuclear arsenal, making the country more-or-less invasion-proof.

I therefore have considerably more latitude in my decision making. I can be reasonably confident that one bad decision won't starve millions, nor must I put everything else on the back burner and whip the population to stave off an imminent war.

Politically, I'm in a much more precarious position. Although my government does have state power, I do not have full democratic legitimacy. The only social advantage I have is the lack of a plausible alternative. I have the enthusiastic support of about a third of the population, the passive acceptance of another third, and the active hostility of a third.

I have internal organizational issues as well: While I have the enthusiastic support of my own organization, it has ipso facto the characteristics necessary to seize state power. Some of these characteristics (including too much enthusiastic support) are not conducive to actually running a government.

The remainder of this series will explore my ideas and conjectures for what I would specifically do organizationally, politically, economically and socially in such a hypothetical situation.