Capitalism Sets the Stage for Communism

Good old historical materialism

[This is the introduction to a draft booklet of about 9500 words that I will publish fairly soon. Its tentative title is "Some Forgotten Marxism: how capitalism sets the stage for communism"]

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It is remarkable how there are quite a few people who describe themselves as Marxist, and yet one of the primary political messages of Marx has been buried and forgotten. It can be summed up in this way:

Capitalism is creating the necessary conditions for its successor, a classless society. So, while capitalism places severe constraints on human thriving, it is at the same time providing us with what we need to escape its clutches.

Capitalism achieves this by eliminating much of the backwardness of past ages. We see massive economic advances and the considerable erosion of traditional cultures with their conservatism and systems of subordination. And at the same time we see the transformation of the broad mass of people from peasants into proletarians.

As a consequence capitalism removes the only insurmountable barriers to a classless communist society. Classless equality would no longer mean shared poverty and toil which history tells us does not work. Radical social change is no longer an impossible wrench from existing thinking and behaving. And the average person no longer has a vested interest in a system based on private property.

The mainspring of such a society will be mutual regard and its result will be the all-round development of the individual. In the past such a society was just a utopian pipe dream. Now it becomes something made possible by historically created conditions.

While these conditions make a future society possible, it does not of course come about automatically. It is up to us to take advantage of this opportunity and make it happen by overcoming resistance from people with an interest in the present system and then transforming ourselves and society. So we need subjective as well as objective conditions. We need not only advanced capitalism but also a revolutionary movement able to overcome all obstacles.

Key to the transformation is the elimination of the old division of labor where most people are simply the instrument of others. Under the present system a minority of people do most of the thinking and deciding while everyone else mainly just follows instructions. It is the basis of the life-limiting nature of capitalism. Workers will have to acquire skills and faculties they do not yet have, start thinking like masters rather than subordinates, and act on the basis that their own thriving depends on the thriving of others.

In the 20th century we had the sobering and very instructive experience of the Soviet Union and derived regimes where both the objective and subjective conditions were poorly developed. The result was revolutionary regimes turning into reactionary ones.

In the early 21st century, much of the world is still economically and socially backward. So, capitalism still has a very big job ahead of it. Only on its completion will there be a firm basis for proletarian revolution.

From all this we can see that revolutionaries will need to be champions of political freedom and economic development under the present system and at the same time advocates of proletarian revolution, with the experience of 20th century revolution showing what needs to be done to bare better fruit next time.