Don's Reviews > Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations

Marx’s views on communism have not received anything like the revival of interest in recent years as his analysis of the capitalist system. Scholars and activists have returned to the voluminous writings associated with Capital in the period after the recession of 2008 for the obvious reason that his work still had much to tell us about the contradictions within the workings of a system that, once again, was returning to frequent periodic crises. But the idea that these would lead to its replacement by communism was a notion strictly for the birds.

Even so, there have been theorists working with conceptions of a post-capitalist order which have been prepared to revisit the idea, even if they have preferred sheared it of its Marxian association with the materialist dialectic. Garo’s book examines the work of leading representatives of these currents for the purpose of demonstrating their failure to grasp the nature of capitalist crisis and the character of the social forces which need to be assembled if a transition towards any other form of social order is to be possible. In the course of making her case she also tackles the questions as to why Marx’s consideration of what a communist society would look like was so sparse and elliptical, usually accounted for by the fact that he didn’t have time in the years left to him after drafting all the volumes of his opus.

On the contrary, argues Garo, it was because the central figure in the elaboration of materialist socialism had no fixed idea as with regard to the critical features of the new order other than the fact it would involve the reappropriation of the forces of production by the people, organised as a classless, democratic social force. The business of organising communism should be left to the folk who would get humanity to the point of overthrowing capitalism. Having shown the level of creativity to get to that point they could be trusted to come up with the alternative in much the same way as the Parisian working class improvised its Commune in 1871.

The range of post-Marxian radicals she takes to task extends from Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, Toni Negri and others whose common features are a repudiation of the central role of the working class in fighting for change and a fundamental reconsideration of the state as the focal point of class struggle and parties and unions as modes of organisation. Among these, Badiou’s work is considered as a perspective for an ‘eruptive’ communism which sees change as predicated, not on the condensation of multiple social conflicts into a single point of pressure, but as sets of singular events, each erupting from their own ‘site’. He objects to ‘the idea of an overturning whose origin would be a state of the totality’. The ‘event’ does not sanction the intervention of leftist activists but stands on its own as a predicate of what is possible. He critiques socialism as an attempt to order events into a schema which supports its own, compromised, place within the established order. Socialism is not to be considered, in the manner of the Leninist Third International, as a stage en route to communism but as a relapse into mediations of state power. As an idea it has a primitive universality which exists as a militant tenacity which repeats ‘the egalitarian passion, the idea of justice, the desire to break with the accommodation of the property department, the deposing of egotism, intolerance for forms of oppression, the desire or the cessation of the state.’

The merit in this, according to Garo, is that it provides an account of the enduring appeal of communism that is displaced from parties and the clutter of manifestos and strategies they bring with the mode of organisation and allows it to be told instead as a timeless tale of heroic episodes and inspired individuals, becoming a fable of revolution even when its possibility seems wholly absent.

Laclau is considered as a thinker who places issues of leftist strategy at the heart of his work. The notion of populism has central place across his trajectory. Garo argues that this emphasis leads to an uncoupling from any perspective of ‘determinative transformation’ – ie where the end being sought plays a role in determining the strategic route to that goal. Abandoning the hope of transformation Laclau ends up calling for the integration of his version of radical politics into the institutions of liberal democracy. Drawing on Althusser’s concept of ‘over determination (itself borrowed from Freud) Laclau treats class struggle as a secondary contradiction of the capitalist formation. Because of this, popular democracy has no precise class content even it is “the domain of ideological class struggle par excellence.”

This adds up to the view that classes have no fundamental interests to defend, even if periodically they enter into struggle during periods of episodic tension, such as high unemployment or the inflationary erosion of the value of wages. The strategies which are called into play during these periods are not intrinsically connected to a form of struggle that reveals an alternative which elides with class interests (ie socialism). Rather, the forms of struggle intrude externally and consist of opportunities for traction within the field of democratic action. These do not present themselves spontaneously but can only be constructed by the populist leadership which is able to pick its way through the maze of opportunities and avoid blind alleys. As Garo puts it, Laclau’s populist socialism “depends exclusively on the judicious selection of one demand or ‘interpellation’ among others, depending on its potentially catalytic virtues as regards the set of existing demands.” This avoids any idea that it is liberal democracy itself which is deeply implicated in the crisis of late capitalism, and hence is on crisis itself. As Garo puts it, Laclau aims to ‘circumvent’ the crisis of democracy rather than confront it.

Garo returns to Marx’ critique of political economy to get a perspective as to whether class consciousness has a material basis, as opposed to being a hangover from its roots in Hegelian idealistic philosophy. The critical sections here are in the sub-section of chapter two headed ‘Capitalism disassembled’ and ‘Is Labour Power a Commodity?’ Laclau answers the last question in the negative, on the grounds that labour power is not constituted by purchase, but by being set to work – which he sees as a process external to its constitution as capitalist labour power. Garo’s retort is that this ignores the sections in Capital which analyse the labour contract as “the legal form of class domination that combines equal right, violence and resistance by wage earners to the transformation of this power into a simple capitalist commodity.” Yet despite this apparent commodification being forced on the worker it can never be completed because it is aligned with other areas of social life – life the reproduction of human life - which resist commodification.

The Laclauian desire to commit to a free flow of radical democratic possibility has its attractions because it increases the range of possibilities that belong to the territory of political strategy. Freed from the sense that transformation has to follow a route predetermined by class interests that are hardwired into society, radical left populism seems to prise open terrains of activity that do not exist for more orthodox forms of Marxism. But for Garo this expansive realm is an illusion because it leads directly back into liberal capitalism democratic forms. In the event that the contradictions of the class-state are not confronted then the logic of exploitation will prevail and the interests of the working class, understood even as only secondary contradictions, will be stifled, and pushed back.

Onto the work of Toni Negri. Garo sees his work and that of his co-thinkers, as hinging on the view that capitalism has undergone a radical mutation which has rendered Marxian labour value theory obsolete. “It is no longer conceived as the contradictory site of capitalist exploitation and resistance to alienation that must construct its political path; it is instead a vital, gushing, fundamentally inalienable power.” (pp 96-7) It has already exceeded the confines of capital and is now defined by cooperation and network intelligence. The term ‘multitude’ defines this collective power, working to transform the conditions of social production. Negri sees the idea of communism as centring on opposition to the state and therefore is equally against public authority as well as that of private capital. What rises against both these is the power of the ‘commons’. However, no mass mobilisation is required to forge a break with capitalism since labour has already transcended its bounds. What is now required is ‘democratic governance and a decent administration’, plus a universal basic income.

All of this, for Garo, represents a “wildly optimistic presentation of the new forms of cooperation [and] obscures practices of domination, both traditional and novel, the managerial instrumentalization of competitive relations between wage earners and the unparalleled global expansion of capitalist commodification.” (pp 103-4) In the place of a revolutionary break Negri opts for “autonomy wrested from institutions, paving the way for a communist ethic that involves generating the values of love and poverty.”

In a fourth chapter Garo tackles ideas about communism in Marx’s work. Her major point is that Marx never dealt with it as a schema for a finished, alternative society, but rather as the process of emergence from the contradictions of capitalist society. Though he clearly had the view that a communist society would be one without economic classes and exploitation, private ownership of the means of production, a state structure and it would increase democratic self-organisation in all aspects of social life, it would develop in this direction as a consequence of a protracted, antagonistic class struggle to overcome the contradictions of the system it was superseding. The book traces the evolution of Marx’s thought on these themes from his earliest days as a young Hegelian through to the work of his mature period. Communism became for Marx and his intimate collaborator Engels, a radical choice which signified a break with their own hesitations over the dynamics of revolutionary social change. Garo describes a “complex duality” that combined a social project that remained to be constructed and a “modality of militant commitment”, but without conflating the two (p.138)

In later work Marx abandoned the idea that there could be a strict correlation between class relations and “partisan logics.” He is also devoted more time to considering the colonial situation and the global expansion of capitalism, producing a strategic thinking which aimed at guiding class struggle at points which exceeded the conquest of state power. (p. 169). For Garo, this capacity to reflect on the “mediations of radical emancipation going beyond the logics of organisation and the seizure of power” that is lacking in the politics of the left today. Communism is the strategy for ending the domination of capital. As such it is proscribed in the process of transformation and not in preconceived dogma. They key moment is the process of capitalist exploitation, which takes hold of previously existing forms of domination and makes them a part of the reproduction of capitalism itself. In making all forms of social activity subject to the valorisation of capital the worker experiences alienation from her own social being. But whilst capital struggles to make labour a commodity it cannot accomplish this final state, with the resistance on the part of the worker collectively generating the force for communism.

“…capitalism, despite all its efforts, cannot reduce labour-power to a commodity and manufacture its own docile, anesthetised foot soldiers. For the labour-power connected by the logic of value is, and remains, in all modes of production the means o self-development, the site of formations capacities for self-development but also aspirations to a different life. While capitalist exploitation and domination are indeed exercised at the level of labour-power, resistance to domination that cannot be total is also manifested there. On condition that it is developed into a collective force and a project, the resistance is forever reviving and nurturing the desire for radical social change.” (p179)

Garo summarises this by saying that the “spring of resistance” to capitalism lies not in the opposition of living labour to anonymous accumulated dead labour (Negri’s thesis) but in the “ever more acute contradiction between the purchase and sale of labour power, on the one hand, and its formation as concrete individuality on the other.” (p180) The challenge for communist strategy lies in structuring this contradiction to enable this transcendence to another mode of production via the destruction of class domination. Communism aims for “an integral social reappropriation in the course of a decisive confrontation with bourgeois power in all its dimensions – economic, political, social and cultural.” (188)

The idea of ‘socialism’ emerges from this engagement with bourgeois power. Adapted from mid-19th century social democracy, Marx saw it as a political victory that would win time for ‘collective, autonomous decision-making’. The conquest political power opens the way for the intensification of class struggle for reforms to which capitalism – still extant but subdued within the socialist state - will not submit without a fight. In a section dealing with the Gotha programme, Garo argues that Marx was hostile to the idea of detailed manifestos and felt that instead what was required as a ‘minimum programme’ which would outline ‘a project for abolishing capitalist relations of production, the division of labour inseparable from the, and a democratic supersession of the juridical viewpoint, which contaminates even the most political socialist traditions.’ (p198) The key to moving beyond the conquest of political power towards a revolutionary process of transformation was mass mobilisation and the invention of ‘original institutional forms’, of the kind seen during the Paris Commune.

In the final chapter Garo explains the structure of her book, which she describes as ‘anti-chronological’ in that it begins by reviewing the work of relatively recent critical works and then goes on to consider communism as intimated in Marx’s writings. Whilst the contemporary work registers the crisis of late capitalist society it also reasons from a standpoint that sees the failure of the working class to rise to the level of a revolutionary challenge to its existence. She sees them as having three essential features in common: one, the explore classical points of alternative to capitalism, but isolate one from another making their respective hypotheses incompatible: two, they distance themselves from the inherited forms of the class struggle, thus making their work critiques of Marx and Marxism: three, they attempt to ‘repoliticise theory on its own terrain, though this fails to overcome the uncoupling of critical elaboration, political intervention and social reality.’ (p220) For Garo, the construction of an alternative requires not just concrete proposals, ‘but the ability to conjoin them with a programme of radical transformation and individual aspirations as they exist today, for the purpose of creating the political force and unitary momentum they lack.’ (p221)

Her reassertion of a critique of revisionism – its rejection of a central role for the working class, value theory, dialectical materialism, etc – is very familiar. The effect of this has, she argues, been to sever politics from activism which aims at achieving social transformation. The post-Marx communist seems to have catapulted itself into a whirl of exciting ideas that hinge around the notion of liberation, but which also coincide with the moods that have been incubated within post-modernism and globalisation. With so much on offer in this dazzling marketplace there is no need for a social movement working to transform the conditions of life. Communist practise looks different from one revisionist thinker to the other but what they have in common is the sense that it will emerge from deep-thinking individuals making the correct combination of choices that are offered up in the modern world which will tend towards more freedom.

Garo brings her line o reasoning to a close with a return to the communism of Marx, with a line through Lenin and Gramsci, in which the ‘mediation’ of the communist ideal was constantly reconsidered in the light of a practice that aimed to bring an awareness of their nascent power to working class and its allies. In all, a thorough engagement with some of the most influential ideas on the post-Marxist left in recent years, though not always an easy one!