An Evaluation of Communism

The labour theory of value has not survived. Modern economics explains prices by scarcity and demand as well as by cost, and the theory cannot account for goods whose value bears no relation to the labour in them.

The predictions failed. Marx expected the immiseration of the working class, the disappearance of the middle class, and revolution in the most industrialised societies. Living standards of workers in industrial societies rose, the middle class expanded, and revolutions occurred in agrarian countries instead.

As politics

The dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of a party. The transitional stage did not end, and in no state was it succeeded by the withering of the state. Chapter 120's comparison is the theoretical explanation: Michels predicted that any organisation, including one dedicated to ending domination, produces an oligarchy, and Luxemburg made the same warning at the time, saying that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

The state grew rather than withered. This is the single largest failure of prediction, because the withering of the state is not a detail but the promised end.

There was no mechanism for correction. Having abolished opposition parties, an independent press and independent courts as instruments of class rule, the system had no way of discovering its own errors or of removing those who made them. Whatever one thinks of elections, they change governments without violence, and nothing replaced them.

And the human cost was enormous. Famine, forced collectivisation, mass imprisonment and executions occurred on a very large scale, and an evaluation which does not say so is not an evaluation.

As theory

Economic determinism is too strong. Caste, religion, language, nationalism and gender have organised politics powerfully and are not reducible to ownership. In India this objection is decisive rather than academic.

It cannot be falsified. Popper's objection: a theory that explains a revolution as confirmation and its absence as false consciousness or as a delay caused by imperialism cannot be tested, and its capacity to explain everything is a weakness rather than a strength.

The transition is unexplained. How a classless society is to be reached, administered and kept classless, without the state whose disappearance is promised, is not worked out, and the absence of a design is part of why the transitional stage became permanent.

The evaluation an answer should reach

Three propositions, and they are consistent with each other.

As a critique it is indispensable and has been absorbed. The analysis of how economic structure shapes law and politics is now used by people who reject every other part of the doctrine, which is the strongest thing that can be said of any theory.

As a programme it failed, and the failure is decisive. Not because its opponents said so but because the states built on it could not solve the economic problem and destroyed the liberty they promised, and because their own populations dismantled them.

And the correct response is not to discard the questions. The concentration of economic power, the influence of wealth on legislation, the position of those who own nothing but their labour, and the gap between formal and substantive equality are real problems whether or not the communist answer to them was right. That is why the module places communism beside liberalism and socialism rather than treating it as a curiosity.

A worked example

A country in 1950 has an agrarian economy, most land held by a small number of families, ninety per cent of the population illiterate and poor, and a state controlled by the landholding families.

The communist analysis is accurate. Political power follows land ownership; the law of tenancy and debt operates to preserve it; the state will not redistribute because it is composed of those who would lose; and reform through that state is unlikely.

The communist prescription is revolution, expropriation of the landholders, collectivisation of agriculture and central planning.

Test it against the record. Where this was done, the landholders were dispossessed, which achieved the redistribution; collectivisation produced catastrophic falls in agricultural output and, in several countries, famine; and the party that carried it out did not relinquish power.

Test the alternative against the record too, because an honest evaluation compares like with like. Where land reform was attempted by legislation within a constitutional system, it was slow, was evaded through ceilings and benami transfers, and in most Indian states achieved much less than was intended. Except where it did not: Kerala and West Bengal, under communist State governments working through legislation and elections.

That last observation is the most useful thing in the chapter. The most successful communist achievement in India was made by the parliamentary route, which is chapter 740's argument settled by evidence rather than by assertion.

Distinctions that carry marks

What this evaluation is NOT

It is not the claim that Marx was wrong about everything. The analysis is used daily by people who reject the programme entirely.

It is not the claim that capitalism answered the criticism. Concentration of ownership, the influence of money on politics, and the position of those who own nothing but their labour remain, which is why the questions survive the answers.

"Communism failed" is about the states that called themselves communist, and their failure was decisive; it does not by itself refute a proposition about surplus value or about ideology.

The Indian communist record is not the Soviet record. Communist parties in India have contested elections for over seventy years, held office in States, and carried out their most substantial achievement through legislation.

Quick revision

1. Right: the relation of economic structure to law and politics; formal equality with substantive domination; class as a real determinant; alienation; ideology, and Gramsci's hegemony; it compelled the reform of its opponent; and land reform in Kerala and West Bengal.
2. Wrong, as economics: the calculation problem; the labour theory of value; and the failed predictions of immiseration, the disappearance of the middle class, and revolution in the most industrialised countries.
3. Wrong, as politics: the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of a party; the state grew rather than withered; there was no mechanism for correction once opposition, press and courts were abolished; and the human cost was enormous.
4. Wrong, as theory: economic determinism is too strong, decisively so in India where caste is not reducible to class; Popper's objection that it cannot be falsified; and the transition is unexplained.
5. Michels and Luxemburg both predicted the political outcome, from inside and at the time.
6. The evaluation: indispensable and absorbed as a critique, failed as a programme, and the questions survive the answers.
7. The Indian observation: the most successful communist achievement in India was made by the parliamentary route.

Test yourself

1. What are communism's permanent contributions? The demonstration that economic structure shapes law, politics and prevailing ideas, which is now used by people who reject everything else in the doctrine. The insight that formal equality can coexist with substantive domination, which underlies the socialist criticism of liberalism and the structural analysis of criminal justice. The recognition of class as a real determinant of interests and opportunities. The account of alienation, which describes something no other tradition described. And the concept of ideology, in Gramsci's form of hegemony, as a standard tool of analysis.

2. Why did the programme fail as economics? Principally because of the calculation problem: abolishing markets in the means of production destroys the price mechanism that aggregates dispersed, local and tacit knowledge about scarcity, want and cost, and no planner can collect that information because it does not exist in collectible form. In addition the labour theory of value has not survived, since prices depend on scarcity and demand as well as on labour cost; and the central predictions failed, living standards of industrial workers rising, the middle class expanding, and revolutions occurring in agrarian rather than in industrialised countries.

3. Why did the programme fail as politics, and who predicted it? Because the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of a party and never ended; because the state grew rather than withering, which is the failure of the promised end and not of a detail; because abolishing opposition parties, independent courts and an independent press removed every mechanism by which the system could discover its errors or remove those who made them; and because the human cost in famine, forced collectivisation, imprisonment and execution was enormous. Michels predicted the outcome from the general logic of organisation, and Rosa Luxemburg warned of it at the time, insisting that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

4. Is economic determinism sustainable? Answer with reference to India. No, in its strong form. Caste has organised Indian politics for decades and is a status hierarchy operating on birth groups rather than a relation to the means of production; religion, language and region have similarly organised political conflict and are not reducible to ownership. Engels himself conceded in later letters that the economic factor is determining only in the last instance, which is an admission that it is not determining in the first. The defensible position is that economic structure is one powerful determinant among several, which is a much weaker claim than the theory makes.

5. What conclusion should an evaluation reach? That communism is indispensable as a critique and failed as a programme. The analysis of how economic structure shapes law and politics has been absorbed and is used by those who reject every other part of the doctrine. The programme failed on the economics, through the calculation problem, and on the politics, through a transitional dictatorship that never ended and a state that grew rather than withered. And the questions survive the answers: the concentration of economic power, the influence of wealth on legislation and the gap between formal and substantive equality are real whether or not the communist remedy was right, which is why the ideology is studied rather than dismissed.