Revolution #223, January 23, 2011
PART 1: REVOLUTION AND THE STATE
The Fundamental Difference Between Communism and Anarchism
This also touches on the differences, which are fundamental and profound, between communism and anarchism. Anarchism is ultimately—and often not so ultimately but rather directly and explicitly and sometimes even crudely—an expression of the outlook of the petite bourgeoisie. Our differences with anarchism have to do with the necessity, and the nature, of the transition to a radically different society, but they also have to do, even beyond that, with the very nature of the final goal: what kind of society we're striving for and how that society would actually operate, how human beings would interrelate in that society, what is materially possible and viable on that basis, and how you would deal in such a society, not with some sort of abstract absolute freedom, but with the continuing contradictory dynamic between necessity and freedom. In communist society too that contradiction, between necessity and freedom, and the need to transform necessity into freedom through struggle, would continue to assert itself, would continue to confront human beings—and they would struggle over the means for doing that.
Here we see once more the profound importance of the understanding that freedom does not lie in the absence of necessity and constraint—nor of coercion of one kind or another. Nature coerces us all the time, in case anybody hasn't noticed. But even social coercion is not something that we're going to move entirely beyond: the essential question is whether or not that takes place in the form of social antagonism rooted in fundamental relations of exploitation and oppression. But, to put it in general terms, necessity will always confront human beings; there will always be both constraint from nature in the larger sense and social constraint on individuals and on members of society collectively, and there will always be struggle over how to deal with those contradictions. Freedom will always lie not in the evasion or the absolute absence of these things, and of necessity as a general phenomenon but, once again, in the transformation of necessity into freedom through struggle.
So a dialectical materialist, a scientific communist, approach to all this is in fundamental contrast and opposition to utopian socialism as well as anarchism. It is, for example, in fundamental opposition to the kind of utopian socialism (if one wants to be charitable and give it that designation) of someone like Alain Badiou, who seeks to avoid the need for revolution and for a revolutionary state in order to bring about some kind of equality, which is really, once again—as we pointed out in our polemic in Demarcations*—an expression, and explicitly so, of the Rousseauian ideal with all of its limitations, all of its idealist and fundamentally incorrect understanding.
In opposition to the Badious of the world, and to all those who come forward with utopian schemes that would objectively at least—and sometimes consciously and explicitly—leave the fundamental relations in the world unchanged and unchallenged, the essential point is that the world cannot remain fundamentally unchanged: as that polemic in Demarcations against Alain Badiou's political philosophy puts it, we cannot allow the system of imperialism to keep "humming in the 'background,' destroying lives and crushing spirits." And that is exactly what it does. One only need look at the world with an open eye and a scintilla of scientific approach to see that this is what it does—and to see that this is no longer necessary, that the world not only must not remain fundamentally unchanged, in a moral sense, but does not have to remain fundamentally unchanged in a materialist sense. For a fundamental change to occur, however, requires not a utopian and idealist approach, but in opposition to that a systematically scientific approach—and in particular the most systematic, consistent, and thoroughgoing scientific viewpoint and method, communism.
All this further illustrates that, if you are unwilling to embrace, and refuse to embrace and contribute to, the revolutionary change that is necessary and that is actually possible—if you try to avoid, or even oppose, the revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat as a revolutionary, socialist state, as a radically new economic system, and as a transition to a communist world—you will end up living with and, at least objectively and in certain important aspects helping to support and perpetuate the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—which presently exists, whether you recognize it or not—enforcing the capitalist-imperialist system that now dominates the world, with such terrible, and now completely unnecessary, consequences for the great majority of the world's people, and fundamentally for humanity as a whole.
This gets back to another one of those incisive statements by Marx: "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." Which is another way of saying that so long as we have the fundamental relations and dynamics of capitalism, you cannot fundamentally change society, you cannot make qualitative changes in the superstructure, in the political system and the ideology and culture and morality, and you will be drawn back once again within the confines—and, yes, the crushing dynamics—of the capitalist-imperialist system, and its accumulation process, which will set the terms in society as a whole. Unless you do become part of rupturing with and contributing to the struggle to abolish that whole system, you will have no choice—whether you like it or not and whether you recognize it or not, you will have no choice but to live under an institutionalized political rule which exercises dictatorship in order to enforce and reinforce this exploitative economic system with its crushing dynamics.
* See "Alain Badiou's 'Politics of Emancipation': A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World," by Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K.J.A., in Demarcations, a Journal of Communist Theory and Polemic, online, Issue Number 1, Summer-Fall 2009. (This essay is available as both text and PDF at www.demarcations-journal.org.) [back]