This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.
Marx observed that revolution occurs when “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.”1 Over the territories of the Soviet sphere, this happened first when breaking out from autocratic feudalism in 1917 and again in 1991 when a lethargic party apparatus was absorbed by global capital. The Marxist-Leninist states of the Soviet Union and its offshoots were successful in negating their feudal and colonial circumstances. But on the conditions necessary for socialism, Marx says it is “bourgeois industry and commerce that create the material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.”2 It isn’t the feudal aristocracy or foreign colonizer that must be negated, it is the late capitalism of the present. Only then may we reach the conscious, abundant and individual-affirming free association that Marx had contemplated.
In the West today the capitalist oligarchy flaunts its power more than ever against a backdrop of digital connectivity, modern monetary theory, artificial intelligence and the ruination of mental and natural spaces. Our political institutions and regulatory bodies—devised by the pre-internet industrial society—have been rendered moribund against the rapidity of technological development and monopolistic economic power. The luxury doomsday bunkers constructed by billionaires is an admission from the ruling class that the centre will not hold indefinitely. That the people are not satisfied with the wealth they’ve appropriated. That there are more of us than there are of them.
But the people—us—we don’t have bunkers for solitude. The world will be ours to fix, regardless if we want it. Will these presently grinding contradictions produce the friction needed for revolution? Marx answers: “The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”3 What shape this will take is not predetermined. There are some who suggest that we are entering a techno-feudalism, with Big Tech rentiers harvesting our data and content creations across digital spaces in a quest for global domination. It is difficult to imagine a rosy outcome if our primary economic function were reduced to online activity, feeding only from the scraps of corporate largesse through some kind of universal income scheme.
The situation is not hopeless. These new technologies contain within them the potential to enslave us but also carry, dialectically, the potential to set us free. Even from the Victorian Era, Marx predicted that global connectivity could advance prosperity and liberate the entire species instead of the current set-up whereby one country or class progresses only at the expense of another. Right wing populism will have its moments to try and return the world to a simpler order of things. But they should know that these attempts will always be feeble in a world where no man will step in the same river twice.
Affecting an axial shift, Marx likens political action to learning a new language: “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”4 To that end, any movement predicated on “Great, Again” cannot articulate solutions to the problems posed by the current paradigm. If it seems that right wing “solutions” only cause greater problems after the fact, it is because all of its referents are embedded within the problem’s cause—namely, the capitalist system. A revolutionary programme must create something dynamic, a system which does not dominate the masses but the opposite: the masses dominate the system.
To end the spell of corrupt elections, special interest groups and outdated constitutions, power needs to flow directly from the people via combinations of online voting, citizens’ assemblies chosen by lot and direct referenda. It is radical structural change, not policy change, that opens the doors to freedom. The post-revolutionary abolition of all political parties and elected representatives. The nationalization and subordination of banks, tech, pharmaceutical and telecom companies to the democratically planned production goals of the people. The decontamination of the environment and protection of biodiversity, wild spaces and hunting grounds for their own sake. The promotion of worker-owned enterprises, community associations and consumer cooperatives to service local needs. The dissolution of innovation-destroying “intellectual property.” The erasure of the Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy in favour of courts of ethicists and philosophers. The suppression of central bank financiers, the billionaire ownership class and the Davos-style decision making of the global elite.
Aristotle imagined that communally owned automata—robots—could free humanity from toil by making necessary human labour redundant. It is an idea that the classically-trained Marx grasped during his lifetime in the age of early mechanization. An economy where automation was not a blind tool for profit, but rather, was put into the service of humanity to create use-values that individuals would harness. It is only in the post-capitalist sphere that a mass-unchaining of people from the compulsion to labour can be realized. This economy must be dynamic, premised on the maximization of free time and fully developing the talents latent in each individual. The individual, in turn, “reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive force.”5 The potential of our species becomes realized only when the full potential of each individual is expressed.
It is in this vein that Marx and Friedrich Engels argued for a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”6 Free development is not a matter of social justice or moral righteousness. The more victims of poverty, prejudice, preventable death and compelled labour that fall in the world, the fewer people we have contributing to our collective well-being and individual material life. The objective is therefore not equality but classlessness. Both class division and social equality bring limitations to individual compensation and the expression of talent. The cessation of class conflict is requisite to eliminating depravations, cultivating virtue and maximizing the self-directed activity of society’s members. It is only the universal development of human power which may form the basis of a productive and limitless civilization, harmonious with nature and spiritually rich.
The capitalist ruling class, with its trail of biological contaminations and enslaving techno-feudalist designs, will try to safeguard their misanthropic commercial interests and hypnotize us with dead-end notions of “building back,” “great resets” and conservative “golden ages.” But, in the words of the great philosopher, Slavoj Žižek: “It is not that Communism is one of the possible choices; it is the only choice. Once we choose it, we see it’s the only way out.”7
Further reading:
Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism.
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Karl Marx, “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
Marx, “Preface,” Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Chapter One,” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005), 711. ↩︎
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (OR Books, 2021), 221. ↩︎