[Translated from Gegenstandpunkt Italiano]
The Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) and its fraternal parties – both those that were in power for 40 years in the Eastern bloc states and most of the communist parties in the free western world that in fact never substantially succeeded – inherited a rich criticism of the customs of class society that they took as the law for the exercise of power here, where they could possibly govern. As communists, they maintain, in the first place, that the bourgeois democracies manage class societies in which private property increases through the exploitation of wage labor, so that wealth is accumulated in the form of capital and its producers remain permanently excluded from it; and that the workers participate in this wealth only to the extent that the maintenance of their ability to work makes their wages necessary. Secondly, socialist criticism turns against the political rule that employs its power completely in the favor of capital, guarantees the dependency of the working class on private property through law and order, and seals the exercise of this power in a democratic way: for alternatives to these arrangements people are summoned to the ballot box, which is to say, the voters elect alternative rulers.
But the supporters of socialism are not content with these judgments. As if they had to attribute an ulterior weight to these fundamental objections other than what they take from Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production; as if the decisive argument of anti-capitalist criticism is not the explanation of the material dependency, the how and why people become for their whole lives, as workers, consumers and taxpayers, as voters and unemployed, as renters and soldiers, etc., maneuverable masses for those who hold capital and political power in their hands; as if those people who suffer the damages of the capitalist system and have to be “conquered for socialism” could never be convinced and never through an analysis that proves why wage labor will never allow them to reach good and secure living conditions; but as if people instead were so full of feeling for the supreme values of freedom, equality and fraternity that only the evocation of these ideals could move them.
These parties of the left arrive at a third point of criticism of the bourgeois order, which says that the exercise of this order, placing itself in the service of rule over the masses of workers and their exploitation, is absolutely unjust and not at all democratic, and therefore does not correspond in some way to the principles established by the constitution: the powerful only use the formal procedures of a government based on popular sovereignty in order to hide the reality, and it is desirable only for assuring themselves of their privilege(s).
However, this criticism, which seems only a slight modification of the materialist accusation of exploitation and the political rule that organizes it, and moreover proves its assertions by referring to the same realities as the materialist accusation, expresses a completely different point of view about the character of bourgeois rule. Anyone who explains the harmful effects of wage-labor and state power on the working class by the absence of rights and democracy has, in the first place, a good opinion of such procedures; in the second place, considers them to be very different things from what they are in immediate reality; and, in the third place, urges their realization as a political outcome, as if the democratic state and rights are not what they are, but something else. In the name of the victims, they demand all this from the political power whose ideology of being so indispensable as well as beneficial for the subjects is taken absolutely seriously. Yet not in a way that refutes this self-representation of the state as a banal idealization of political rule. The socialists of the twenty-first century do not allow themselves to attack the pretension of justice as no more than the morality of class society, which does not concede some advantage to anyone who cannot refer to services and sacrifices on his part. Instead of combating the pretension, already well enough diffused without any help from the left, of fair treatment as the false conscience of capitalist competition and its administration according to rights – it is the point of view that accompanies the practice of submitting to reality, interpreting this same practice as the conscious vindication of the validity of universal interests – the modern socialists celebrate this affirmative dissatisfaction, which does not want to know anything about the purposes and interests that create its victims. They don’t want to understand that the concept of equality – i.e. the equal treatment of quite different types of citizens or, to be precise, the submission of classes who are supplied with anything but equal means under the restrictions of the law – only makes sense in a society based on disparities. They proclaim that rights, equality and freedom as practiced in reality, therefore all those instruments through which the state guarantees with all its force the service of one class for the benefit of the property of another – “to each his own” – are ugly copies in comparison to their idea of what should be the “tasks” of the state. Considered in respect to true and proper state objectives, instead of those really existing, the political rule doesn’t carry out its tasks, and the humiliated and the offended find their advocates in the socialists, who promise the realization of their rights by means of the state.
These socialists are not at all disturbed by the fact that, in their criticism of capitalism, the working class advances to the place of potential sharers of political power. It is in how many people who are destined to fight for the state ideals who then do so that the working class obtains its due. This way, those who are forced to live off and for the job are recognized and confirmed because they act as democrats. The question as to what benefit the working class gets from electoral ballots, memberships in democratic organizations and a free press faithful to the bourgeois state is abruptly refused by comparisons with fascism. The argument, known and esteemed by every bourgeois politician, that even the really existing democracy is better than a dictatorship, and which proclaims submission to be an unavoidable necessity, also serves the left critics of capitalism. These latter add that democracy offers more possibilities for engaging in the struggle for the best form of state. And that these possibilities must be defended rather than used is held right in the middle of the flourishing of exploitation and preparations for wars and military interventions of democracy, which is conceived solely as an anti-fascist struggle. As if the humiliation of the workers as maneuverable masses in the service of their masters is only realizable in a dictatorship, they confer upon the democratic version of bourgeois rule the judgment “invaluable.”
Otherwise, becoming recognized insofar as they are democratic, the people who work obtain lots of praise for their services. The high esteem in which work is held is diffused everywhere, in the East where it was the state doctrine and also in the free world, where communist parties deduce from the sacrifices of the workers the right to demand “the realization of democracy.” In this way, they pay their addressees the same compliment that bourgeois politicians pay them in appreciating the value of work for the economic growth of the nation, and this provokes no irritation among these leftist parties.
They note that their demands demonstrate how those who would reconstruct everything in an altruistic way deserve nothing less than a just treatment from the state, if not really the right to a proletarian state – or at least a constitutional right to ... a job. At no moment are they fazed by the thought that even the honorable, altruistic services of labor, obtainable based on the extortion of those who are dependent on work, reassumes the situation of the working class against which communist criticism is directed. Secondly, the socialists advise the wage laboring class, forced by necessity to produce wealth in the form of capital for their whole lives – if they are useful and as long as they are useful – to conquer the right to a political wage: from a state power that is engaged in opposing them.
In response to the small contradiction that a power exercised over people would be quite superfluous if it benefited people and always carried out their will, the socialist friends of the workers, orthodox and cultured as they are, answer by making reference to revolutionary theory and historical arguments. They maintain that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is also a state and is moreover essential for subjugating the enemies of socialism. That all the activities of the state towards its people – the disciplining of the majority, the compulsion to renounce so many goods, the sophisticated organization of duties and rights – are superfluous if people have made the revolution, so that from that moment on the term “order” means something a far cry from the accommodation of social conflicts in a peaceful way, attained by the violent regulation of the services and the deprivation of an entire class for which employment, “created” by the employer, is the proper role; nor does it convey that for a few hundred entrepreneurs exonerated of their responsibility, thanks to the revolution, it is not necessary to have some force apparatus that exercises its power separate from the workers over them and therefore against them. All of this is not at all obvious to someone who thinks that socialism is the realization of the ideals which bourgeois politics has looked after since its earliest days and who considers it utopian instead of materialism to function according to planning. Usually, however, the socialist friends of the workers do not have to face objections from communists; instead they are in charge of applying their ideas of a just power to capitalist reality. This, according to them, consists of two opposite deployments. On one side, there is the working class, which as producer of the wealth and as productive force par excellence is oriented towards socialism or can become so inasmuch as on the other side there is a bourgeoisie and a state that negates every concern of this class and its people. According to the logic of this socialism, every damage imposed on people is transformed into a test of the morality and shows the real incompetence of the politicians. In the face of the ideal criteria of a politics and an economy that would serve its own servants, every limit imposed against the interests of the people testifies to the failure of the ruling politicians and verifies their impotence.
With utmost confidence this criticism trades the failure of the subjects for that of the ruling politicians, and commits to a politics of success, whose absence is proved by everything that real politicians put into action and demand from their people. Based on this, it can then blame a state, one which guarantees private property and measures economic growth by money accumulated in the hands of businessmen and bankers, of “having failed” to brake the profit greed of the capitalists. They are omissions of the state in exercising the restrictions, very desired in a democracy, which control and limit the mania of the capitalists for profit making, and that causes increasing prices, shrinking wages and unemployment. And for these sins of omission, in respect to the real and proper state obligations, there is also a correct explanation. With their compliance to the rich, the politicians show themselves to be not at all independent; on the contrary, “whores” who are controlled by the monopolies. They are the rule of the rich! So they announce the basic theory of “a capitalist system characterized by an interconnection between monopolies and the bourgeois state” that, in all its versions, is nothing other than the claim that the state is not the instrument of the people because others have occupied it.
Concerned with the just distribution of wealth and rights by the state, the modern socialist declares, without creating any ideological problems for himself, that he is in favor of an alternative nationalism. He does not share the analysis according to which the services that make the economy grow already make the distribution of wealth a fact, a distribution that is then completed by the nationalization of a share of wages according to the opinion of the class state. This socialism thinks that this criticism of the services that the workers perform for the wealth of the nation, which are fastened to the wage laborers for their whole lives but which by no means guarantees them a secure existence for their whole lives, is an offense to the workers, and gives them a lot of honor for these performances of theirs. In their name and because they deserve it so much, this socialism demands that nothing be subtracted any longer from the workers' fair share of progress. All the burdens and costs imposed on them, they mark down, in relation to the yardstick of a “social” rule, as deficiencies of the system.
Also, in order to support this diagnosis, such people of the left draw from the proven bourgeois ideologies, namely from the ideologies that report a crisis that can affect the whole nation for various reasons. Nevertheless, while allusions to the “danger” of crisis serves the custodians of the market economy and their freedom to justify all their activities and declare them to be material constraints, “matters of necessity” – “restructuring”, i,e, lay-offs, cuts in “social benefits”, etc. – the critics of the left intuit them to be the declaration of bankruptcy of the capitalist system, that is to say, the admission of its impotence to guarantee employment and livelihoods to the population. In the name of social progress, they complain of the waste and destruction of the “means of production” due to the “relations of production,” as if the enormous wealth produced in the capitalist version of the utilization of humans and nature escaped them. And with all this, they also no longer criticize the exclusion of a class from wealth, but transform the means of production into a moral category, believing themselves faithful followers of Marx.
When all is said and done, they all become impressed by the “crisis of the system” and its consequences. The “dominant” have to suffer the criticism of “not having any solutions.” Every sign of dissatisfaction and, in particular, everything that the socialists declare to be a “movement” can enjoy their unreserved sympathy, thinking the condemnation of the people on the part of the “dominant” is the cause of the catastrophe from which only they can save the nation. “National solidarity,” that is, a pact of all interests, is not a slogan that is disgusting to these supporters of the class struggle. On the contrary, a solidarity springing from the base “marginalizes” the enemies of the people, unites the people and gives the faithful representatives of progress the assurance of being the embodiment of humanity's desire to see the dawn of socialism.
This sort of communist also declares that there are extreme historical situations in which political subversion is necessary and without which the disempowerment of the wealthy class as desired by them can indeed never be realized. Nevertheless, their whole program is only one revocation of the communist project of eliminating the violent guarantees and abolishing all procedures in order to initiate a planned economy beyond all economic constraints and laws. Their project of supplying the state and the proletariat, its existence remaining unchanged, with means that until now have “only” been in the hands of the rich, which is why justice and a true homeland have not yet been realized until this moment, is then not very revolutionary.
If it depended on them, real democracy would be precisely the place where they create that true democracy that they desire. [1] And beginning with the Russian revolution, all communists adhered to this, even if the existing bourgeois state continually clarified that it does not offer any space for their popular democracies. Where the red army did not bring them to power (but also where it did) they put up “popular fronts” (as if it had not been their party that conquered power!), enhancing (if they were not banned) the competition of parliamentarians with their ever more moderate radicalism.
[1] This contradiction can be called a revision of Marxist criticism, and it is in this sense, when we refer to the type of socialism criticized above, that we speak every now and then about “revisionism.” Deviating from Marx is by itself not a criticism – except for those who, like those people of the left we have criticized above, refer to Marx as an authority. But they also do not defend their theory of a fair distribution in favor of the masses because they have interpreted Marx badly. The justification of their politics puts them at odds with Marx’s support for the class struggle in capitalism as a consequence of their point of view, that with their calculated love for the “masses” and their fanaticism for rights they reproach the bourgeois state for withholding from the exploited what they are due.