Marx wrote about communism as a fulfilment of history. It was to be not so much a complete break with history as a final qualitative leap in its development. While we are rightfully sceptical of this teleological argument (that claims history has an inherent end), we must remember that its merits are not purely metaphysical. The political implication of Marx' eschatology is that the proletariat is to take possession of the means of production at the height of their development. The productive forces will develop to their final stage under capitalism and their socialization will unleash their full potential for human emancipation. The contradiction is between capitalist productive relations and the productive forces that capitalism has unleashed and this contradiction needs to be solved. When the proletariat takes control of the political apparatus it can abolish private ownership of the means of production and after a short period of centrally planned production it will somehow start to harmonize spontaneously. While Marx was always a bit vague about how this spontaneous harmonizing of production, consumption and circulation is to come about, another assumption of his political programme has come to be just as problematic: namely that the state can effectively take control of the means of production.
Marx bases his economic analysis on the assumption that all labour is simple unskilled labour (he is of course aware that skilled labour exists but argues that the difference is merely a quantitative one and makes no difference to his analysis). I would like to argue that this is not the case. By making this assumption Marx ignores the possibility of exploitation not just by the capitalist but by other wage-labourers. Marx claims that the wage-labourer is paid less than he produces and that the difference is appropriated by the owner of the means of production. While this claim is not problematic in the case of unskilled workers it does seem out of place when applied to say top managers. A wage-labourer can also be paid more than he produces (multi million dollar bonuses in a time of recession come to mind), which means that the surplus value some wage-labourers create is not appropriated only by the capitalist but also by other wage-labourers. In this sense the assumption is problematic from the vantage point of economics.
Another problem of the assumption is that it would have us see the means of production as material artefacts. If we analyse all labour as unskilled labour, we must assume that the whole of western rationalization is manifested in material artefacts, not in skills and knowledge. If we demand that the proletarian state takes over the means of production this seems possible if we think of means of production as bricks and mortar and cogs and wheels. If these are developed to the highest degree under capitalism, the state can take control of them without loss of their productive potential (why should machines care whether they are run by a capitalist or by the state?). But if we take into account that skilled labour is also produced and that it and its production (manifested in the form of pedagogical and research institutions) are integral components of the means of production, we encounter some difficulties.
As Ulrich Beck has argued in Risk society a central feature (and problem) of contemporary societies is the inflation of complexity. It is not that the world per se has grown more complex (the basic natural laws are the same as they always were) but that rationalization has begun to demolish its own footing. In the time of the industrial revolution the task seemed simple enough: conquest of nature. Progress meant better protection from the arbitrariness of natural forces. For western societies today nature itself has become socialized (google earth provides a good illustration: it is hard to find a piece of soil that does not bear the mark of human intervention). The risks we face today do not originate from an independent nature but are in part socially produced. This means that the simple logic of means and ends has run amok. Whatever action we take is bound to have important side-effects (what Beck calls risks): if a new factory is built to solve the problem of unemployment it might have detrimental effects on the environment, clearing a forest to grow crops might cause avalanches, higher GDP might increase pollution and crime etc. Any action taken to combat these side-effects is bound to have side-effects of its own: building wind farms can endanger birds and upset the ecosystem, recycling can be even more detrimental effects on the environment than just letting junk accumulate (the famous example of the Shell oil platform comes to mind).
Laymen often complain that scientists are unable to agree on anything, they don't know whether global warming is happening or not and if it is, whether it is caused by humanity or not etc. It seems that disagreement among experts is an indispensable way of dealing with the increase in complexity. If experts were forced to agree it is likely the whole system would collapse in a short while because the low internal complexity of science would be ill-fitted to deal with the high complexity of its object. At this point we are able to return to Marx' initial political programme: the idea that the state can take over the means of production without a significant loss of productivity is essentially flawed. Since central planning would significantly reduce the complexity of the scientific subsystem of society (which, as I have argued, is an integral part of the means of production), the subsystem would be unable to effectively deal with the complexity of its environment. The state would have in its hands not the means of production at the height of their development but in a crippled state.
Where does this leave us in terms of a communist revolution? Since a world in which more than half of the world population is living in poverty while the level of development of the productive forces in western nations would in principle allow poverty to be eliminated almost instantaneously is clearly intolerable, since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision can only be proven after everything in our power has been attempted to bring it about, and since the impossibility of realising an utopian vision - were it possible to prove it - does not diminish its necessity, just coming to terms with the existing is not an option. The struggle against capitalism must be radically rethought.
First of all it seems that taking over the state can not be the final goal of proletarian political organization. The impossibility of achieving a high enough level of democratic support for a radical communist party has become evident during the 20th century. The catastrophic consequences of a communist party taking over the state without mass support, which would also put a check on its power, has equally been demonstrated by Stalin and the like. Furthermore the state itself is withering away: partly it is outsourcing the provision of public goods (transport, healthcare, education etc.) to private bodies, partly it is delegating its decision making to bodies beyond democratic control (it is shocking how little attention the delegation of policy formation - the sine qua non of parliaments - to private think tanks is receiving).
If the state is being emptied of power class struggle must follow. What is needed is a decentralization that would at once attack the new centres of power and by its internal complexity be able to cope with the heightened complexity of social action in the risk society. Surely the diverse "new social movements" springing all around the globe satisfy that criterion. Why then do all protests seem hopelessly futile, affording some amusement to the scavenging media organisations at best? Why has capitalism been steadily entrenching itself during the last 30 years? Why have autocratic global centres of power flourished so vividly? Why does the darkness that covers us seem more impenetrable than ever?
It is because the manifold centres of opposition that are springing up around the globe lack coordination. If the classical model of class struggle via parliamentary parties that aim to finally take over the state and abolish private ownership over the means of production was overly centralized the new model is overly decentralized. What is lacking is a coordinating ideology that would channel all the disparate streams, the trickles of discontent, into a fierce river. The streams flow hot with tears, which show no sign of drying up. The task of criticism today is not to show the people a mirror, which will shock them with their misery. The misery is obvious enough. A lens is needed to channel the rays into one fierce, burning spot. What is needed most of all is a new communist international: a loose association of forces that would coordinate rather than command, that would unify ideologically rather than administratively.
The models for such an organising exist. Whether it is the communards and their very effective ad hoc organisation or the spontaneous growth of the November revolution in Germany, they all have in common a spontaneous outburst, channelled by a coherent ideology. It is because these outbursts were of a local nature that they were easily crushed by brute force. In a globalising world not only the free movement of capital, its freedom to undermine democracy and keep billions in poverty, is expanding, also the possibilities of a global struggle against this tyranny become imaginable.
