A thought on Communism

Communism is an idea developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, born from the desire and the aim of abolishing the very division into social classes.

Marx analysed society across different historical periods and argued that history was characterised by the conflict between social classes. According to Marx, in every age there are classes with opposing interests: in antiquity there were, for example, slaves and owners; in the Middle Ages feudal lords and serfs; in capitalist society, instead, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production, while workers own their own labour-power, which they sell in exchange for a wage. According to Marx, the worker produces a greater value than the one he receives as a wage. The difference between the value produced and the wage paid to the worker is called surplus value, and it is appropriated by the capitalist.

For Marx, the bourgeoisie played an important and not necessarily negative role in history: it contributed to the weakening of many feudal relations, encouraged international trade, created the world market and accelerated the development of science and technology.

However, while recognising these positive aspects, Marx observed that the Industrial Revolution concentrated ever larger masses of workers in factories. Artisans, unable to withstand the competition of large-scale industry, in turn ended up working as wage labourers in the factories, while the bourgeois owned the means of production and kept the profit for himself. According to Marx, this concentration brought with it the possibility of uniting the workers, creating a class consciousness and therefore the possibility of making a revolution, which would have taken the means of production out of private ownership and transformed economic and social relations.

The idea of the revolution was therefore to abolish private ownership of the means of production, turning them into collective property and progressively overcoming class divisions. In this sense, one can also speak of overcoming a society founded mainly on individual economic interest.

After the revolution, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx distinguishes three moments.

The first is a period of revolutionary transformation from capitalist society to communist society. To this period corresponds a transitional State, which Marx calls the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".

The second is the first phase of communist society. Private ownership of the means of production has been abolished, but society still bears the marks of the one from which it was born. Each worker receives a certificate stating how much labour he has performed and, with it, draws from the common stock an equivalent quantity of products: each receives, in essence, in proportion to his own labour. In the USSR this idea would later be summed up in the formula "to each according to his work", which was also written into the Soviet Constitution of 1936.

The third is the higher phase, that of fully developed communism. Here society would have reached such a level of development, and labour would have become so much a natural part of life, as to allow the principle: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

With the overcoming of social classes and of the antagonism between them, the State too would progressively lose its function as an instrument of domination of one class over another, and would therefore tend to wither away over time.

A clarification: this part is not a list of the failures of the various communist countries, but a summary of how they handled the various questions left unresolved by Marx; I will therefore leave aside various aspects unrelated to this topic.

Marx deliberately left some parts of a communist society vague, since these could have been subject to circumstances and to the future development of society. But it is useful to mention them and see how some communist States implemented them.

An important part he leaves out is how the State would be run during the transitional phase. He does not explain precisely: who governs? Who makes the decisions? Who holds power during the transition? How long does this phase last? How do you make sure everything goes as planned?

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx speaks of the need for a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" as a phase of transition from capitalism to communist society. Power should therefore pass to the working class, which would have the task of transforming the existing economic and social relations. However, Marx does not describe in detail how this new political power should concretely work.

Marx explicitly rejects the very idea of drawing up the constitution of the future society on paper: according to him, the question of which functions of the State will remain under communism must be addressed on the basis of the real development of society.

Let us see how some communist States handled the question. Let us start with the best known, the USSR, which initially had Lenin as its main leader.

Lenin initially also drew on the analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx himself had taken as an example of how the proletariat could seize political power.

His idea was interesting: the proletarian State was supposed to be much more democratic than the bourgeois State.

Officials were to be elected by the people, be revocable by the people, not earn much more than other workers and, above all, be controlled by the people. Lenin imagined that in this way, gradually, the people themselves could take part in the administration.

This idea, however, coexisted with another, which Lenin had already developed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?: workers do not automatically become revolutionaries just because they are workers. That is why a vanguard party was needed, whose task was to organise the workers' movement, give it a political direction, lead the revolution and help the proletariat develop its own political consciousness. The two ideas were in tension from the very beginning: on one side the people governing themselves, on the other a party leading them.

But here another risk arose that Marx and Lenin did not resolve: instead of the State gradually disappearing, giving more and more power to the people, the State could become ever more powerful and the party ever more indispensable.

This became reality as early as 1918, when the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, in which they did not have a majority. The Cheka, the political police, had already been created, and the other parties were progressively outlawed. In 1921 the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, who demanded soviets free from Bolshevik control, was put down militarily. In the same year the Tenth Congress banned factions within the party. When Lenin died, in 1924, the one-party State already existed.

This risk was fuelled above all by the fact that the Russia of those years was not in the condition Marx foresaw for a communist revolution. Russia was still predominantly agricultural, economically backward compared to the main industrial powers and, above all, weakened by the First World War. So Lenin had to face a question: "How do you build socialism in a country that does not yet possess the economic conditions Marx considered necessary for communism?"

During the civil war, from 1918 to 1921, the Bolsheviks had applied war communism, which consisted of the nationalisation of almost all industry, the abolition of private trade and the forced requisition of grain. The result was the collapse of production, famine and peasant revolts. So, in 1921, Lenin decided to reintroduce some forms of market through the NEP, making it possible to set up small private businesses and allowing peasants to sell part of their produce.

When Stalin came to power, he decided to adopt an approach different from Lenin's. At the end of the 1920s he abandoned the NEP and gave the State almost total control of the economy, with the five-year plans for forced industrialisation. He then imposed collectivisation in the countryside: the land was gathered into collective farms (kolkhozes) and the State requisitioned fixed quotas of grain, even when the harvest was not enough. What followed was the famine of 1932-33, with between 5 and 7 million dead, above all in Ukraine (the Holodomor) and in Kazakhstan. This pattern would be repeated almost identically in China with the Great Leap Forward. Afterwards he repressed the political opposition, launched the Great Purges (1936-38), created a strong bureaucratic apparatus and, above all, concentrated power.

This seems to go against Marx's idea according to which class divisions should have diminished and, with them, the need for the State as well. All this also took place in a context marked by various internal and external problems that Stalin used to justify his own policy: economic backwardness, fear of foreign intervention, the need to industrialise rapidly and, above all, the failure of the European revolution.

So the party ended up replacing the class. Marx imagines the proletariat as the subject of the revolution, while in the Soviet world the worker did not govern the State directly, raising questions such as: If the party represents the proletariat, who controls the party? If the State represents the proletariat, who controls the State? If there is no political pluralism, how can the proletariat democratically replace its own representatives?

Finally, it can be argued that the USSR ended up moving significantly away from Marx's original concept.

Now let us look at another country, China. Here in 1921 the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was born, which Mao joined, and of which he would later become the head. In 1927 the CCP clashed with the nationalists of the Kuomintang, and this turned into a civil war. The two temporarily cooperated against the Japanese invasion. During this period the CCP enormously expanded its base in the countryside, strengthening its army. After the Second World War, the communists led by Mao progressively conquered the territory. Finally, in 1949, Mao proclaimed in Beijing the birth of the People's Republic of China.

When the Republic was founded, China was still very far behind in industrialisation, much more than Russia, and the majority of the population was made up of peasants. So Mao turned the peasant from a mere ally into the main protagonist. Another difference is that Mao founded the People's Republic of China not with a single revolution, as had happened in Russia, but after years of wars and fighting, already having a larger territorial and political base.

Mao adopted an approach similar to Lenin's, strengthening the State, above all because there were still internal opponents and external threats. To the question "Who governs?" Mao answered by creating a coalition government, in which other political forces and organisations took part, which however operated under the leadership of the Communist Party led by Mao.

Who makes the decisions? The principle was that of democratic centralism, inherited from Lenin: decisions were discussed within the political bodies, but once the line had been established, it had to be applied by everyone in a disciplined and centralised way, without further dissent. In practice, however, the Communist Party kept the political direction of the system, while the State bodies carried out the decisions.

Mao called his State a people's democratic dictatorship, in which democracy applied to the classes considered part of the people, such as workers and peasants. It was instead a dictatorship against the classes considered enemies of the revolution, such as former landowners, counter-revolutionaries and opponents of the socialist transformation. Mao was very explicit: the State was to use the army, the police and the courts to repress those who tried to obstruct the revolution.

Mao tried to accelerate economic development with the "Great Leap Forward", a programme launched in 1958. The goal was to rapidly transform China from an agricultural country into an industrial power. Enormous agricultural communes were created and an attempt was made to accelerate both agriculture and industrialisation at the same time. But several problems emerged. Beijing asked the provinces to increase production with unrealistic targets. Local officials, however, understood that admitting they had not reached the targets could be politically dangerous: careers depended on demonstrating loyalty to Mao's line and on the success of the Party's policies. The economists James Kung and Shuo Chen (The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura, 2011) have in fact shown that the provinces led by alternate members of the Central Committee, that is, officials who had more to gain by showing themselves loyal to the line, requisitioned more grain and recorded higher mortality during the famine. So the local authorities often reported results higher than actual production.

The Chinese State needed to collect grain from the countryside to feed the cities, support industrialisation and maintain reserves. But if the government believed that a province had produced 10 million tonnes when in reality it had produced, for example, 7, the quota of grain to be requisitioned was set on the basis of the 10 million, not the 7.

At the same time, the Great Leap shifted enormous amounts of labour away from agricultural activities towards other projects. This meant that fewer people worked normally in the fields, and part of the harvest was lost or not gathered at all.

Here the problem with Mao's approach emerges. If telling the truth to the centre was risky, while reporting positive results was rewarded, the bureaucracy systematically produced distorted information. And when someone tried to criticise the policy, they could be accused of being a "rightist", of opposing the revolutionary line or of not having faith in the project.

The most famous case is that of Peng Dehuai, who in 1959 criticised the excesses of the Great Leap during the Lushan Conference. Mao interpreted the criticism as a political threat: Peng was removed from office and a new campaign against "right opportunists" followed, which made it even harder to correct the policy.

The problem was that Mao had built a system in which it was extremely difficult for the top to know that the policy was failing.

All this led to the Great Famine. Production fell drastically and the famine took on catastrophic proportions. Recent literature often cites between 30 and 45 million dead.

Mao tried to tackle another problem. He was afraid that the Party itself could create a new elite separated from the people. For this reason, in 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution. Mao's solution was: "If the problem is that the Party apparatus has become separated from the masses, the masses must be allowed to attack the apparatus directly." So he politically mobilised the population against a part of the Party itself, trying to strike what he considered a bureaucracy that had grown too distant from the masses.

The protagonists were above all young students, organised in the Red Guards. Mao encouraged the young to question the authorities considered bourgeois or counter-revolutionary. This produced a completely new situation. A teacher could be accused by his own students. A manager could be denounced by his own subordinates. A Party official could be accused of being a counter-revolutionary.

The problem, however, was that there was no longer a clear limit. The revolution provoked internal conflicts. Officials, politicians, artists, professors, intellectuals and ordinary people were attacked. Many officials were removed, humiliated and persecuted. For several years higher education was severely compromised. The political struggle also took on a violent dimension: various factions of the Red Guards and other revolutionary groups came into conflict with one another, while the army was progressively drawn in to restore order.

The Cultural Revolution thus ended up becoming not simply a campaign against the bureaucracy, but a gigantic struggle for power within the communist system itself.

After Mao's death, in 1976, Hua Guofeng came to power and held the top position for a few years. Deng Xiaoping progressively emerged between the end of the 1970s and the 1980s. Deng began to introduce market incentives. His reasoning was: "If the market makes it possible to use resources better and increase production, why should it necessarily be incompatible with socialism?" So enterprises were given greater autonomy, prices were increasingly determined by the market, and there appeared economic incentives, foreign trade, collective and private enterprises and, above all, private property in certain sectors. In 1980 the first Special Economic Zones were created, such as Shenzhen: areas in which foreign investment and market rules were allowed, and which served as a laboratory for the reforms.

For peasant families he introduced the household responsibility system. In essence, whereas before the commune decided how much to produce, organised the work and distributed, from then on the family received a production target and kept the rest, being able to sell it as well. This created a strong incentive for individual production.

Deng created new and stronger economic incentives, removing the old perverse incentives of the Mao era. The worker, the peasant and the enterprise had to have a reason to produce more, innovate and reduce waste, increasing productivity.

As for the bureaucracy, he did not try to take up Marx's ideas again, but created a new system. Analysing Mao's experience, Deng recognised that the leader had had too much power and could make changes that were too radical. He therefore sought a more institutionalised system. State bodies, procedures and rules were strengthened. Systems of retirement for officials and of generational turnover were also introduced, to move beyond the system of leadership for life. He also introduced a more stable electoral system: citizens directly elected the representatives of the people's congresses at county level and below, while at the higher levels the election was indirect, that is, it was the local congresses that elected the higher ones. Naturally everything remained under the monopoly of the CCP. As early as 1979 Deng had laid down the Four Cardinal Principles: the socialist road, the people's democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought could not be called into question. The economic reforms, therefore, were not to become political reforms. This was seen in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests, which among other things demanded more freedom and the fight against corruption, were crushed by the army. To the question "who controls the Party?", Deng's answer therefore remained: the Party itself.

Here the question arises: is this still communism? Marx had associated the overcoming of capitalism with the overcoming of capitalist relations of production. Deng instead said, in essence: "We can use capitalist tools without thereby necessarily turning the political and social system into capitalism".

So Deng, at bottom, did something very important: he moved the question onto another level, namely: does this policy work? If a policy increases production, productivity and the standard of living, it can be kept even if it uses tools previously considered "capitalist". This is the logic of his most famous phrase: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, what matters is that it catches mice."

The Party, however, justified this choice precisely with Marx. In 1987 the Thirteenth Congress established that China was in the "primary stage of socialism": being a still backward country, it did not possess the productive forces that Marx considered necessary for communism, and therefore had first to develop them, even by using the market. It was, at bottom, the same problem that Lenin had faced with the NEP.

In the following years came first Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao, who essentially continued Deng's pattern. Jiang, however, took a step of strong symbolic value. With the theory of the "Three Represents" (2000), the Party no longer represented only workers and peasants, but also the "advanced productive forces", and between 2001 and 2002 private entrepreneurs were admitted into the Communist Party. From Marx's point of view it was an enormous turning point: the owners of the means of production, that is, the class that the revolution was supposed to overcome, entered the party that was supposed to represent the proletariat. Hu, on the other hand, focused on the "harmonious society", trying to reduce the inequalities and imbalances produced by growth.

The real change came with Xi Jinping, who became general secretary of the CCP in 2012 and president of the Republic in 2013. Xi did not abolish the institutions created by Deng, but he changed the relationship between the institutions and the Party. The concept became: "The Party must be present in and lead every fundamental sector of the State and of society." Deng had tried to prevent the Party, the State and the leader from becoming the same thing. Xi instead decided that the Party's leadership had to be strengthened. So, in 2018, amendments to the Constitution were approved that removed the limit of two consecutive terms for the president and vice-president of the Republic. But above all the following sentence was written into the Constitution: "the leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics."

In essence, communism has never really been applied as Marx meant it. But that is not the real flaw: the modification of a system is often its natural evolution, especially if the system leaves open questions such as the theory of the State. As we have seen, Lenin, Mao and Deng all had to invent answers that Marx had not given, and each did so according to the situation of his own country.

But here I ask myself a question: is communism by now an old system? Capitalism and communism are often spoken of in too generic a way. To answer, one must first distinguish two things: Marx as an analysis of capitalism and communism as a solution. Many of Marx's observations on capitalism are still useful today. What needs to be understood is whether the mechanism that, according to him, would have led to the revolution still works, and whether a communist society would be manageable in today's world.

Let us start with some of Marx's "predictions" that later proved false. There are several, such as the one about the final collapse of capitalism, but the main ones are two: the growing impoverishment of the proletariat and the polarisation of society into just two classes. Both are important because, as we saw in the first part, for Marx the revolution is not a random event: it arises from the very conditions of capitalism.

Let us begin with the first. Marx claimed that, as time went on, in a capitalist society the proletariat would become ever poorer. But this has not happened: in many capitalist countries the quality of life of the average worker has risen, often allowing him indulgences, travel and savings.

A Marxist might reply that Marx was not necessarily speaking of an absolute impoverishment, but a relative one: the worker may even be better off than before, but the share of wealth he receives decreases compared to the share that goes to capital. And indeed inequalities have increased over the last decades, as Piketty, for example, has shown. This objection is partly true, but it does not solve the problem. Class consciousness arises from the discomfort people feel, not from a statistic. A worker who lives better than his father hardly feels impoverished, even if in the meantime the billionaire has grown much richer than him.

Then there is another aspect. The proletariat described by Marx, that of the great factories, of gruelling shifts and minimum wages, actually still exists. It is just that it is no longer found in Manchester, but in Bangladesh, in Vietnam or in Shenzhen. A large part of production has moved to the countries where labour costs less. And here there is an irony: many of those factories today work under the guidance of a Communist Party, the Chinese one, which as we have seen has even admitted entrepreneurs among its members.

This is important, because the revolution itself requires class consciousness; but this consciousness, which was already weak in poor countries, hardly forms in average capitalist countries, because collective discomfort and the coming together of people are missing.

Another substantial difference is that the polarisation of society into just two classes does not happen. According to Marx, with the development of capitalism the intermediate strata would disappear: small artisans, shopkeepers and peasants would end up among the proletarians, as had happened to artisans during the Industrial Revolution. Today, instead, there is a very strong middle class, made up of professionals, technicians, qualified employees and small entrepreneurs.

Here too a Marxist might object that this middle class is an illusion. A hospital doctor, an engineer or a programmer do not own the means of production: they sell their own labour-power in exchange for a wage, exactly like the factory worker. According to Marx's definition, therefore, they would be proletarians in every respect.

The objection is correct on the theoretical level, but it ignores a distinction that Marx himself made, the one between a class "in itself" and a class "for itself". A class in itself is a group of people who share the same economic position. A class for itself is a group that recognises itself as such, is aware of its own common interests and acts accordingly. Only the second can make the revolution. And the programmer who earns three thousand euros a month hardly feels part of the same class as the warehouse worker, even if objectively he is.

What is more, today many workers are also, in a small way, owners of capital. Whoever has a pension fund, an ETF savings plan or a few shares owns a small part of the companies in which someone else works, and receives a share of the profit produced by that labour. These are tiny stakes, but they are enough to make the line between those who own the means of production and those who do not less sharp. A worker who sees his pension fund grow when the stock market rises has, at least in part, the same interests as the capitalist. So not only has society not become polarised, but it has produced figures who stand on both sides at the same time.

This brings us to another point. In the first part we saw that, according to Marx, the Industrial Revolution concentrated ever larger masses of workers in factories, and precisely this concentration made it possible to unite them and create a class consciousness. Today almost the opposite happens: work has become dispersed. Many work remotely, as freelancers, as riders with an app in place of a boss, or with different contracts even within the same company. Two people who do the same job often never meet.

The same goes for free time. We are no longer in the days when the rich had experiences, travel and other luxuries, while the poor went to the bar where everyone gathered. Now poor and rich have such means of entertainment that this difference in the quality of life is not felt so much: just think of films, video games and all the other kinds of media. This is not a new idea, and curiously it was developed precisely by Marxists: Gramsci spoke of cultural hegemony, and the Frankfurt School of the "culture industry", that is, a mass entertainment that makes people passive and makes them adapt to the system.

But today there is something more, which I think is often underestimated: the gratification that is now obtained from social media. Television made people passive, social media instead give the illusion of acting. Before, frequenting a communist circle meant being in a bar where one pushed the other on, even if this could hardly lead to a revolution. Now instead everyone can complain online, and this often produces the opposite of the expected effect. People already feel gratified by comments and venting videos: a level of gratification that before required a direct confrontation with the opponent, a confrontation that by now no longer takes place because of the polarising algorithms of social networks. What is more, the bar was a common experience, while on social media everyone has their own personalised feed. So it is not only unity that is missing: what is missing is the very shared experience from which unity could arise.

In essence, Marx saw in capitalism the conditions that would unite the workers. Today's capitalism has dismantled almost all of them.

But beyond the problems tied to the start of a supposed revolution, there is the problem of applying communism itself.

The case of the Great Leap shows a problem that goes beyond Mao: in a centralised system, whoever decides often does not have the information necessary to decide well. This problem had already been raised by two Austrian economists. Ludwig von Mises in 1920 argued that without a market, and therefore without prices, it is impossible to calculate how much resources are really worth and how to use them. Friedrich Hayek in 1945 added that the information needed to run an economy is scattered among millions of people, and no central office can gather all of it.

Today some reply that with computers this problem could be solved. There was already an attempt in Allende's Chile, the Cybersyn project, and some point out that companies like Amazon and Walmart internally plan economies as large as those of entire countries. But the Great Leap shows that the problem was not computing power. As we saw with Kung and Chen's study, the data were false because the officials had an interest in falsifying them. A computer that receives false data does nothing but get things wrong faster.

In the modern economy this problem becomes even more evident. Marx was born into an economically simpler society than the modern one, in which thinking of a collective management of the economy was, at least in theory, simpler. Today, instead, the economy is much more complex: a person can create a digital product in very little time and make money from it, or create an open source application and live thanks to donations and contributors. But in a communist society how is all this managed? Who decides whom an open source project belongs to and how it will have to develop? Will the maintainer have to do another job, or will the State allow him to work only as the maintainer of that project? And by what criteria does the State decide which project is worth funding and which is not?

Someone might say that open source itself is an example of communism already realised: people working for free on a common good, without private property, almost a "from each according to his abilities". In part this is true. But open source works precisely because it is voluntary and decentralised: nobody decides from above what to develop, who works on it and how much. Everyone contributes to the project they consider useful, and the projects that are not needed simply die. What is more, many important projects live thanks to private companies that pay the maintainers or fund the development. So open source shows that cooperation without a market is possible, but not that central planning is possible: indeed, it is almost the opposite of it.

In a capitalist society it is simple: the individual can decide to take out a loan and hire, to make an open source app and live on donations, to open a Kickstarter or something else. In a communist society, instead, all this has to be judged and managed by other people, who have to make important decisions about a project created by someone else and about how to fund it. And as we saw with Peng Dehuai, in a system in which contradicting those who decide is risky, mistakes are hardly ever corrected. This is especially true in the world of technology, where many programs and experimental projects, or ones that seemed doomed to fail, turned out to be great successes. In a centralised system, probably, many of these projects would never have been funded.

All this to say that, in my opinion, talking about classical communism today is fairly pointless. Not because Marx's questions were wrong, but because the world in which he had posed them no longer exists. The classes are no longer two, workers are no longer concentrated in factories, and the economy has become too complex to be managed from a centre.

Today, moreover, there are technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, that open up a completely new discussion. Marx himself had imagined a future in which machines would do a large part of the work. But if human labour becomes less and less necessary, what happens to a theory that is based precisely on labour, on surplus value and on the worker who produces more than he receives? These are questions classical communism cannot answer, simply because it could not imagine them.

I agree with many of the foundations of socialism: the idea that wealth should not be concentrated in the hands of a few, that nobody should be left behind and that the conditions of workers are a political question and not only an economic one. But I do not believe that communism is its true successor. As we have seen, every time someone tried to apply it, power ended up in the hands of the Party and not of the proletariat.

I think instead that we should focus on improving the conditions of the poorest, allowing the proletariat itself to set up on its own and in turn become ever richer. In a certain sense, instead of taking the means of production away from those who own them, it is a matter of allowing more and more people to own them. As we saw with pension funds, in a small way this already happens. One can talk about taxing large fortunes, access to education and to credit, public healthcare and many other socialist tools.

But we need to talk about this, instead of waging an ideological war between communism and capitalism. Deng too, after years of ideological struggles, came in the end to the same conclusion: it doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, what matters is that it catches mice.