#neocommunism

[hegemonicpolitics-blog]

An Introductory Rant

Part 1

"All I know is that I am not a Marxist." So allegedly said Marx on the topic of a particular French self-proclaimed Marxist party. My own self-application of this idea has come at a mild sense of disappointment, but I think is fundamentally reasonable.

I've attempted to move by thought towards the neo-communism of writers like Alain Baidou and Slavoj Žižek. In understanding Marx I still wish to hold to the idea of the historical dialectic, at this current stage with its worker/capitalist antitheses, is only resolved in communism, that is, the complete abolition of wage labour and private property. However, the 'human nature' argument that I've desired so long to ignore has continued to resurface.

In a situation where the wealth of society is held in common, we understand from game theory and the 'tragedy of the commons' concept, that self-interest threatens a collective-interest when it comes to the commons. As soon as self-interest triumphs, all self-interest becomes necessary because the collective-interest is diminished in its returns.

The necessity then is to impose collective-interest, which fundamentally is what we do in democratic societies a lot of the time. While neoliberalism and the right has continually said that unbridled capitalism shall eventually, through the 'invisible hand' or 'trickle down economics', distribute wealth in a fair fashion, this is simply not the case, and we have observed the impacts of decreasing regulation and control on people and the environment.

Social democracy naturally mediates between pure liberalism and pure communism; we place regulation, restriction, taxation and the other thing upon society in order to reign in the worst excesses. Naturally this is not perfect; if democratic it exists in conflict with power interests, and thus cannot survive indefinitely unlike communism, and on the other hand it keeps intact capitalism as a system, only emulating or simulating a more egalitarian approach artificially. Wage labour relations and the relations of production still exist, they are simply softened.

However communism, in the forms we have witnesses develop in the world, has the same problems. Fundamentally capitalism still exists, simply in another form: state capitalism. The state exploits surplus value and converts workers' output into exchange-value, continuing the same alienation as under capitalism.

The key differences are two-fold: it removes the progressive tendencies of wealth distribution of capitalism (in creating new wealth through investment), thus rendering it considerably less prosperous, and it requires significant energies to enforce. In this way it is less efficient, less free and continues the same fundamental capitalist functions.

In order to de-commodify the labour of humans, it abolishes market mechanism and gives birth to economic planning. In this sense, it becomes even worse, because it replaces liberal democracy with bureaucracy.

It has its advantages. The exploited surplus value can be redistributed or put into building the commons for the collective-interest. But once again this relies on the new bureaucracy to hold as its class-interests the interests of the proletariat.

So this is my opposition to neocommunism. It is utopian in a sense, in that it fits in with an old fashioned Hegelian concept; that of the ideal, which is somehow achieved through the resolution of the dialectic. It is fundamentally unscientific, and also seems to rely too heavily on the Hegelian concept of the Geist.

Even in Marxism's anti-humanist materialism, there is fundamentally some sort of Geist at conflict with itself who discovers its alienated parts are in fact part of its whole. It is obfuscated by cries of 'materialism!' and 'science!', but the former doesn't resolve the inherent idealism in Marxism Hegelian roots, and the latter only works in the context of the 19th century German notion of 'science', which is thoroughly rejected by scientists today who adhere to genuine rigour and genuine physical phenomena.

Neo-communism understands the Soviet experience, but it shrinks back into its shell and proclaims the vaguest of all possible concepts of communism in order to justify its righteousness. It proclaims that we cannot allow ourselves to throw in the towel to capitalism and accept wage labour as necessary. But it provides absolutely nothing except a fetishisation of the word that indicates not political, economic and philosophic thoroughness, but the sad musings of ex-communists pining for the Soviet era with their own petty devolved Leninism.

Žižek is a sad old curmudgeon who can't quite accept being called a social democrat, and so gives into to old fashioned Leninism hidden behind a 21st century democratic mask. Communism is dead, wake up.

PS: Communism can survive, so long as it asserts itself as fundamentally utopian, rather than making claims to scientific truth.

Part 2

Hegemony is the perfect launchpad for those departing Marxism for social democracy, or, as Laclau and Mouffe refer to it, radical democracy. While the two terms are not the same, they are similar in philosophy if not in modern application. I would attach myself to the socialist strains of social democracy, not those deliberative and technocratic ones that have developed since the 1990s.

But why hegemony? For this we must return to Marx. Many aspects of Marx have been rejected by an array of thinkers. His economics requires serious refinement and tries to distill it down the fundamental scientific laws that do not necessarily materialise. Aspects of his critique are certainly useful; his explanation of the labour theory of value and how that gives way to surplus-value are innovative concepts that need to be integrated into any critique of capitalism. But the tendency for profits to fall, for wages to fall, and crises of overproduction have not surfaced to the degree that he believed they would.

His dialectics have been problematic as well, due to the issue of the collective-interest that is supposedly completed by the synthesis of the capitalist/workers antitheses. I discuss this in my rant on neo-communism in more detail.

But his conception of capitalism in the sense of the base-superstructural relationship, integral to the creation of sociology, is important. While the crude economic determinist explanation of this phenomena has been discounted, that of the Second International, we can nonetheless understand it as a great model for interpreting society.

We cannot, as will be demonstrated by putting even the slightest amount of thought to it, assert the 'primacy of the base'. The base-superstructural relationship is the totality of human experience; neither part spontaneously generates new conditions or relations, they solely feed into each other. Thus, the only distinction between the two is perhaps which exists first. There can be no primary role that is anything but a human distinction.

Alternatively a distinction can be made; the base is the only 'real' element, while the superstructure is fundamentally unreal. But this ten effectively becomes a reductionist philosophy, which undermines sexual, gender, racial and environmental struggles down to anti-capitalism. This we cannot do once again, as the economic determinism of old fashioned Marxism does not provide any ability to make scientific predictions, and is thus we cannot assert this reductionism as truth. If we could determine in which ways scientifically that capitalism enshrines the gendered, sexual, racial and environmental issues that we come up against, certainly those could be integrated, but understanding them as coming solely from the base is disingenuous and beyond what we can prove, and in the end undermines many aspects of these struggles.

But a nuanced, reciprocal base-superstructural relationship does help us understand one thing: hegemony.

To be continued...

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Как так вышло, что даже самая успешная экономика мира страдает от кошмаров капитализма и чем это грозит России?