Agony of the Socialist Mode of Production

What is to be done after the successful revolution?

Illustration via Dansk Jävlarna.

How exactly does one build a communist society? What is to be done after a successful revolution?

Well, I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I can summarize what Marxists after Marx and Lenin said and propose some hypotheses based on that.

In a previous essay I examined the typical historiography around transitions and modes of production a little, but I can summarize my findings here: The socialist mode of production was a specific way of conceptualizing transition between capitalism and communism, it doesn’t entirely line up with the conception of classic marxism and transitions require a fairly complex series of processes (summarized in a long series of class struggle).

How the Socialist Mode of Production was Born, How it Lived and How it Died

To try to shine more light on this topic, let us examine the matter of productive forces and then some post-Lenin authors.

The content of transition

Should transition mostly depend on developing the productive forces, up until we can distribute to everyone, or on the organization of people?

Marxism is often accused of being tautological, of placing material conditions above human will. There is some truth in this, and fanatics of the productive forces practically interpret Marxism this way, but I don’t think it’s the only way to interpret Marxism. There are passages where Marx and Engels emphasize the productive forces, and others where they don’t.

After all, in “Poverty of Philosophy” Marx says:

An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.

The great innovation of historical materialism is that it explains not only how people are chained (by social relations and material conditions) but also how they can free themselves from these chains (by uniting to change their material conditions).

Take the example of the French Revolution: this revolution was not led by professional revolutionaries; it was led by poorly trained intellectuals. It was a spontaneous revolution; as in most of human history, people reacted to their material conditions. This revolution initially failed and caused much death, but centuries later, all human beings live under the kind of system it inaugurated. Lenin’s great innovation in the field of organization was his emphasis on transformative consciousness in “What Is To Be Done?”, thereby indicating how humans can liberate themselves through their unity and organization. As Lenin said in “The State and Revolution,” in a revolution, first the majority of the population takes control of society, then the whole does.

For this reason, we cannot conceptualize communism as a higher stage that produces better and more efficiently than capitalism: Communism is its own era. It is a transcendence, yes, but not in the sense that it is better than capitalism on its own terms (of producing more and more); that is an evolutionary and mechanistic conception.

Communism is not just a mode of production, in fact, it should probably be seen as a usurpation of the idea of mode of production, where people are no longer bound by their conditions of production.

The importance of theory for Marxism is that it allows individuals to develop their consciousness about how to transform society, and that is why we communists must combat any anti-intellectual attitude, any attempt to separate the masses from knowledge. While it’s true that we can’t see into the future and prove that communism is possible, it’s human beings who create society; society isn’t generated by divine command. If enough human beings decide that something about society is possible, perhaps then this will make it possible. Many of those who accomplished the most incredible feats did so because they didn’t know they weren’t possible.

And while it’s true that it’s difficult to believe in a society where the leadership voluntarily relinquishes command, if we conceptualize that after the revolution, the struggle never ends until we reach communism, then we will have opportunities to rebel against authority and achieve the withering away of the state ourselves.

Revolutions after the revolution

Che Guevara and Mao Zedong were two well known revolutionaries who had to contend with advancing the revolution. Che Guevara criticized the developmentalist approach adopted by actually existing socialist countries and expressed that after the revolution, transformations should constantly continue instead of simply wanting to outproduce the capitalists.¹

Mao recognized that the class struggle continued after the seizure of power, and did the largest experiment on solving this by way of the Cultural Revolution, recognizing that a revolution that stopped moving died. This concept was described in Chinese Marxism as 继续革命论 or “Continuous Revolution theory” or the theory of the continuation of class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

However, there was an over reliance on cultural-ideological struggle, leading to the tragic situation of Red Guards following “Mao Zedong Thought” murdering other Red Guards who also followed “Mao Zedong Thought”. However, a full investigation on why the Cultural Revolution failed lies beyond this essay.

I will not write more extensively on the debate around the phases of the revolution, and I will instead let this Jose Carlos Mariátegui quote speak:²

The Latin American revolution will be nothing more than a phase of the World Revolution. It will be simply and purely the socialist revolution. Add any adjective you want to this word: “antiimperialist”, “agrarist”, “nacionalist-revolutionary”. Socialism supposes them, precedes them, engulfs them all.

Arghiri Emmanuel, the unequal exchange theorist, said about the transition to communism: ³

If the period between the assumption of political power by the proletariat and the latter’s own disappearance were a true transition, such as was visualized by the founders and classics of Marxism—i.e. neither an autonomous mode of production, nor a political system organized for its own sake, but a complex of transformation processes: in other words, an aggregate of acts destroying the old social relations—there would be no break in continuity involved. This period should not be seen as having its own dialectic, but as forming an integral part of the general dialectics of the clash between capitalism and communism. It would represent not a stage in which we settle down, but a thoroughfare that has to be traversed.

If socialism doesn’t have its own dialectic, that means we can’t rest on our victories in advancing the cause of the proletariat. In other words, seizing state power cannot be an end in itself. In our modern age, this is a truism, as we have ample examples of how state power can be lost, but in the 20th century, this was difficult to see. We must have an ethos where capitalism is the norm and socialism is the exception.

In other words, after conquering state power, the proletariat still has the same tasks of advancing the revolution not only nationally but also globally.

Immanuel Wallerstein, by way of World-systems analysis, wished to put the emphasis on transition on totalities:⁴

If we are to talk of stages, then-and we should talk of stages-it must be stages of social systems, that is, of totalities. And the only totalities that exist or have historically existed are mini-systems and world-systems, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been only one world-system in existence, the capitalist world-economy.

Which is to say, we can’t talk of changes in modes of production if it does not represent a change in totalities.⁵

This quote is rather long, but I will reproduce it in full because here Althusser touches on exactly the same thing I have been trying to get at: During the controversy Louis Althusser had with the leadership of the Communist Party of France over the removal of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the goal from its programme (this was the moment Althusser became more explicitly critical of his lifelong party), he explicitly stated my point on the concept of socialist mode of production:⁶

Socialism was not presented as what it is: a contradictory period of transition between capitalism and communism. It was presented as a goal to be reached, and at the same time as the end of a process. Let us say, to be clear: as a stable mode of production, and one which, like every other mode of production, finds its stability in relations of production of its own which resolve, in the classic formula, the contradiction between the ‘developed’ forces of production (and here one can appeal to ‘the scientific and technological revolution’ as a back-up) and the old, out-dated relations of production.

Now, this conception of socialism is foreign to the ideas of Marx and Lenin and, it must be said, if we are really prepared to understand them in their difficulties, to the concrete historical experience that we have of the socialist countries. For Marx and Lenin, there is no socialist mode of production, there are no socialist relations of production, no socialist law, etc. Socialism is one with the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. with a new class rule, in which the working class fulfils the leading role over its allies in the broadest possible mass democracy, in order to put paid to the bourgeoisie — ejected from state power but still powerful. Socialism is the ‘transition period’ (the only one discussed by Marx and Lenin) between capitalism and communism, a contradictory period’ during which capitalist elements (e.g wage labour) and Communist elements (e.g. new mass organizations) co-exist in a conflictual way. It is a period that is unstable in essence, during which the class struggle survives in ‘transformed forms’, forms which are unrecognizable for our own class struggle, hard to decipher and which may, according to the balance of forces and the ‘line’ followed, either regress towards capitalism or mark time in fixed forms, or advance towards communism. Everything we know about socialism from historical experience (and we should be very wrong if we judged the socialist countries from on high just for what, to save having to look further, are called ‘shortcomings of democracy’ and so clearly ‘to be condemned’) also proves that this historical period, far from being a society in which problems are resolved automatically (under the rule of ‘needs’), is probably one of the most difficult periods in world history, because of the contradictions which have to be unmasked and dealt with at every step in it — as if, in order at last to give birth to communism, mankind had still, even after priceless social conquests, to pay very dear in struggles, intelligence and initiative for the right to reach it.

This completely original conception of socialism, to be found in Marx and Lenin, has one crucial consequence. Unlike modes of production that are defined by their own relations of production, socialism cannot be defined by itself, by its own relations of production, because it does not have any of its own, but only by the contradiction between the capitalism it emerged from and the communism of which it is the first phase: hence as a function of its position vis-à-vis the capitalism from which it is gradually emerging and the communism which is its future. Very concretely this recalls Marx’s slogan: communism is not an ideal but ‘the real movement unfolding beneath our eyes’. Very concretely this means: the strategy of the workers’ movement must take this dialectic into account: it cannot be merely the strategy of socialism, it is necessarily the strategy of communism, or else the whole process is in danger of marking time and getting bogged down at one moment or another (and this must be foreseen). Only on the basis of the strategy of communism can socialism be conceived as a transitory and contradictory phase, and a strategy and forms of struggle be established from this moment that do not foster any illusions about socialism (such as ‘We’ve arrived: everybody out’ — Lenin’s ironic comment) but treat socialism as it is, without getting bogged down in the first ‘transition’ that happens to come along.

Since all these approaches are separate in time, space, and thought, I decided to write this article to put everything in order and in a single context.

So what?

The reader, if they’ve made it this far, may be asking themself a question.

“So what?”

Why does this matter? Admittedly, out of context debating so much about whether after revolution there is a separate mode of production or not may sound almost theological, but in the previous paragraphs I have implicitly stated my reasons for why I think it matters, and now I will fully argue them.

Basically, I think this matters because it has implications for communist strategy.

First, if socialism is not a mode of production, then what is it? My argument is that if socialism is anything, it is the period in which capitalism transforms into communism, with a combination and struggle of old and new elements until the final goal is reached. That is, socialism is a series of revolutionary transformations rather than an entity in itself, it is a historical process.

Now I will discuss some of the implications of taking this approach.

First, linking the concept of socialism to specific states has some theoretical risks. There is the obvious reality that communism, being an ideology that seeks the end of class based society, is in contradiction with states, which are mechanisms of class domination.

All states formed by a communist revolution had to take the perspective that they had the socialist mode of production or were at least on the path to it; this was a vital source of legitimacy. This leads to ignoring capitalist aspects of these societies (which definitely exist, as they remain framed within the capitalist world-system) and the adoption of aspects of market society inside the conceptualization of socialism.

Adopting this framework means that yes, the USSR, China, Cuba, etc., etc., represent forms of capitalism, albeit with various “non-capitalist” elements due to their revolutions. But unlike others, I don’t say this in a moralistic way; I simply acknowledge the fact that these were states that lived and died within a capitalist world-system and had to adapt to it. Historical movements cannot be judged by the flaws of their position in history, wanting to skip historical processes entirely is utopianism.

We might classify these states as “state capitalism”, or alternatively “transitional states”,⁷ concepts which had an equivalent in the “worker’s states with bureaucratic deformations”⁸ of orthodox Trotskyism, it does not really matter as long as we can acknowledge that it’s not possible to build an entire mode of production in one country. Which doesn´t mean we need to fall into a binary of Socialism in One Country or Permanent Revolution, we need to think of new strategies.

Leaving behind the exhausting debate about whether these states represent a higher mode of production or not, I say, we can now judge these experiments on their own merits, rather than comparing them to a list of nonexistent characteristics.

If we can say that there is such a thing as a “socialist country,” it would have to be a state led by a revolutionary movement working toward revolutionary transformations and towards communism in an anti-systemic manner. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether any current country fits this description.

This also means that communism cannot have a Vatican, a country (even one governed by a revolutionary movement) on which it relies morally and ideologically. There cannot be a single basis for the communist movement if we want to create something that transcends the world-system. Although, of course, we shouldn’t have an anti-Vatican either, or we might end up replicating the “three worlds theory” of Maoist China, which led to siding with yankee imperialism against the USSR.

A possible criticism of this article would be that I empty socialism of its character (the famous polemic about “socialism is nothing, the movement is everything”), allowing any revisionism to declare itself Marxist. This is fair, but it’s nothing new: In the 20th century, we had Soviet socialism, Chinese socialism, Albanian socialism, Yugoslavian socialism (all of which self described as Marxist-Leninist!), etc.

However, I will propose some basic principles for considering what transformations should be made in the direction of communism. Obviously, this is not a comprehensive guide, but rather a basic outline.

1. The socialization of the means of production.

Everyone knows this; however, we must make a distinction between merely nationalizing the means of production and socializing them. As Lenin said, the means of production are socialized when they are placed under the direct control of the workers.⁹ This means democratization and raising the cultural level of the workers to be able to manage these means of production.

The need to socialize the means of production is linked to the next point.

2. The abolition of the division of labour.

The abolition of the division of labour is often eclipsed by the slogan of socializing the means of production, but it is of utmost importance.

The division of labour predates classes and is responsible for the contradiction between manual and mental labor, between leaders and followers. The sexual division of labor places women as domestic servants, jobs are traditionally segregated among ethnic groups, and the disabled are discarded from society as they are of little use to the division of labour.

This is why it is so despicable when a communist party sees a militant with some initiative and decides to purge them under accusations of being a factionalist-undisciplined-Trotskyist. They are revindicating a division of labor within the party, where ordinary militants must be servile automatons and only the leadership can think and take initiative. (Which is particularly delusional considering that any member of the party is inherently part of the vanguard, that is, the leadership of the proletariat.)

The way to solve the division of labour is to elevate everyone to the vanguard, to a position of leadership. We must seek an organization of labour that is not based on division.

3. The political domination of the proletariat.

Traditionally, the political form of proletarian domination was the one-party system. Marxist theory preaches the need for the proletariat to destroy the state in order to advance toward communism, but 20th-century states governed by communist parties often ended up operating as bourgeois states but without bourgeois democracy.

Lenin advocated a pseudo-transitional state: the commune-state. This state would not have its own autonomy, as its functions would be carried out by ordinary people, and it would eventually disappear.

However, we cannot fetishize “non-authoritarian” political forms; that would be as bad as fetishizing the state. Centralisation and decentralisation can aid either the bureaucrats or the workers, it is not a simple binary.

Obviously, all these measures are not completely separate from each other. What I propose is to rethink the revolutionary tasks of communism, to be able to clarify what we are fighting for.

In conclusion, I hope this consideration will allow for a reconsideration of communist strategy and how to think of our duties. The reward for being a communist is getting to be a communist, there are no higher rewards. We must learn to love the struggle.

1. El pensamiento económico del Che, Carlos Tablada

2. Aniversario y balance, Jose Carlos Mariátegui. Translation of my own.

3. The State and the Transition to Socialism, Arghiri Emmanuel.

4. The Rise and Future Demise of the World-capitalist system, Immanuel Wallerstein.

5. As a side note, while my approach sided with the Trotskyist tradition against the dogmatic and pseudo-nationalist version of Socialism in One Country that became codified in Marxism-Leninism, I do disagree with the strategy of Permanent Revolution as described by Leon Trotsky on the grounds that it still over emphasises the productive forces (but in a most leftist and voluntaristic manner) by framing workers of imperialist workers as needed for the third world proletariat to do a revolution. Plus, socialist revolution cannot be imposed by invasion (as most likely would happen in the socialist Napoleonic Wars that would be the material consequence of the strategy), as the experience of the Eastern Bloc shows. The duty of communists in a revolution is to radicalize as much as it is possible: in the case of the historical democratic bourgeois revolutions the goal was to expand it as much as possible (se Lenin´s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution), if there is a spontaneous democratic uprising it must be radicalized into a socialist revolution, and if there is a socialist revolution it must be spread to other countries as much as possible.

While it is fair to question whether it is possible for a single national unit to delink on the current world economy, I have a strategic disagreement with the fractions of the Fourth International. A more in depth polemic is beyond the scope of this article.

6. On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party, Louis Althusser.

7. The socialist transitional state and the contradictions of the multipolar world-system, Torkil Lauesen.

8. Theses on revolution and counter-revolution, Leon Trotsky.

9. El concepto de comunismo en Lenin, A.Casta.