Communism and Marx

Quotation from the article

Within the modernist paradigm, the idea of communism has become a form of State politics. We think that this is the major stoppage that the revolutionary left in Turkey experience and the only way of going beyond it is political organization based on self-valorization of the real labour through immanent constitution of communism. As immanent constitution of communism, we adopt the notion of communalism. In Turkey, there is a need to make up-to-date rereading and rethinking Marx in the light of contemporary demands of practice. Since within their own experiences autonomous -marxist movement liberated such a rereading, we give importance to this movement, we share our commonness within the extension of these kinds of movements. We are invested within the discussions and clashes peculiar to Turkey, that are nevertheless carved out by general problems of revolutionary world left. In Turkey reading of Marx by revolutionary movements could not be emanated from modernist paradigm, it has been conferred with general ideological closures but also within its specific condition such a reading reproduced and deepened these closures. Here in Turkey Leninism comes first with respect to Marx. Thus, this way of comprehension constricted Marx into Leninism. Here in Turkey, we try to contribute to these rereading efforts and emancipative political experiences and we can not avoid saying that our job could be considered harder than our comrades’ jobs in the west, if we consider Turkey’s problematic and complicated articulation within modernization and the close effects of Stalinism and orthodox Marxism.

Communism and Marx

The effort to open up channels from which contemporary revolutionary thought would be nourished makes indispensable the evaluation of all theoretical material up to now that has been interweaved by defeats as well as wins. This evaluation could only be realized, not through ideological closures but by a genealogical method integrating the present with the past and the future. The way of reflection on history should be inherent of the foundation of the movement; it should start out from the actual needs of contemporary class struggle, hence from definitions of spaces in which capitalist domination operates and condenses itself. Ideological closures, on the other hand, fades the theoretical production, reduces thought to a pattern. Then, the spokesperson becomes the fictive historiographies; the voice of history is lowered. Abstract and static categories substitute what is real, material and dynamic and these categories begin to acquire the truth in itself. Then instead of reflecting on history, settling with these categories, in the end we lost the dynamics of the formation of our own movement. That is, we lost not only the past but also the future. We make much of genealogical method to ensure that the history unveils itself and experiences liberate and talk with us as themselves and on their own. We want to establish a dialog with our own past, not to settle accounts with it by categorizing it.
We read Marx, within, through and beyond him from this axis. On the one hand exaltation without inquiry and on the other hand denial full of pure negation is the same thing. Both of them are transcendent and exterior to experience. The contemporariness of Marx as a moment in the line of revolutionary thought can only be seen within the today’s movement, with an immanent evaluation. Hence, the first step of such experience is to consider these closures. What is the ideological closure that Marx is subjected to? For us, the answer of this question is modernism. This modernist paradigm has closured Marx within a Marxism that assumes the developmentalism and industrialization in economical terms, and representation and central party in political terms. Moreover, some opponents of Marx, being oblivious to the difference between Marx and modern Marxism, content themselves with a reductive critique. We can go beyond Marx only from within Marx because Marx is not an abstract name but represents a historical and material moment within the class struggle of his own epoch. However Marx has been forgotten and the attributions to him have taken his place. Ideological reading of Marx presents to us a Marx figure that is isolated from the determinations of political struggle. Earmarking as “Young Marx” and “Mature Marx”, the expressions such as “Marx before becoming a Marxist” are all production of such ideological approaches. The continuities, fractures and ruptures in all writings of Marx have not been taken into consideration in terms of his epoch’s political struggle, and then Marx, losing the dynamics of his own becoming, has happened to be a doctrine that will be refused or accepted. It is said that Marx’s maturity and scientific approach start in 1848-1850. As Engels explains , after the defeat of June 1848, during his years of exile in London, Marx began his work on political economy in order to “lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society”. Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse and Capital are the products of this period. As a common expression, these are the Marxist Marx’s writings. However, behind the fog of this maturity discourse, we cannot see anymore the rupture and conceptual transformation in Marx through its connection with a political defeat. Accordingly, Marx’s writings are not read politically but through development of scientificality of economical categories.
In our view there is no Young Marx or Mature Marx but a revolutionary Marx as a whole and also a Marx who shifted the reason of a political defeat from the political plane to economical plane and assumed the labour as an element of dialectical running of capital. This is the Marx who belongs to Capital. In the early writings that are disdained due to their “ideological deviations”, none of the conceptualizations –neither productive forces nor proletariat- are economically reduced yet. Objective and structural scientificality discourse does not yet block the subjectivity horizon in Marx.
1844 Manuscripts and German Ideology
The worth of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts comes from the fact that, in this writings Marx denotes the form of capitalist domination as classification and expropriation of labour:
It goes without saying that the proletarian, i.e., the man who, being without capital and rent, lives purely by labour, and by a one-sided, abstract labour, is considered by political economy only as a worker. Political economy can therefore advance the proposition that the proletarian, the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work. It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics and to the poor-house overseer.
Capital as a form of social relation incarnates in capitalist who subjugates the labour as private property and in worker as wage. The characteristic of capitalism that distinguishes it from the former forms of domination is the fact that capitalism adopts waged labour as the source of value creation. While in feudalism the source of value is land, in the capitalist mode of production based on commodity, this source is recognized as labour. This is the point of departure of political economy as “science”, the primary question of it is to measure this value. Hence, as we know from Marx’s analysis in Capital, the labour becomes to be measured as an abstract human labour, which is congealed in a commodity, consequently a qualitative entity of determining the price of a commodity in the market. Political economy, showing the change-value as the objective and natural quality of a product, represents the social quality of labour that changes through waged exploitation as the objective quality of a product itself. The capitalist way of negation of the control of productive subjects over their life and their production, the reversed control of object over subject germinates from the transformed quality of labour due to exchange-value. Capitalism operates by reducing labour to waged-labour, turning the social relations between real individuals into a form of relation between commodities. In Capital, Marx names this situation (the deformation of social relations in the form of commodity) commodity fetishism; this conception is the deepening of the concept of alienation in 1844 Manuscripts in the political economy field. In 1844 Manuscripts Marx shows that the bourgeois form of domination is set into operation through employment (waged-exploitation), and the fact that the only subject that can resist against this domination is the proletariat himself. Wage is a form of domination over the body. There is a reciprocal cause-effect relation between private property and wage and they both have been the core of capitalist domination as well as commodity production founded on the division of labour, and the domain of resistance against it. This is why “wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker.”
For us, after Marx, the fact that in 1844 Manuscrpits he saw the waged labour as the form of capitalist domination and the real, liberated human labour as the core of communism has not been sufficiently emphasized. Moreover, the evident political distinction between these two is discharged within the modernist ideology of work, and the real and creative human labour is reduced to waged-labour. In Marx who sunk below the epithet of “semi-utopian”, there is an insight of subjectivity and communism that still holds its contemporariness and waits to be politically worked out.
Communism: The real social power of labour
Within the modernist paradigm, the idea of communism has become a form of State politics. We think that this is the major stoppage that the revolutionary left in Turkey experience and the only way of going beyond it is political organization based on self-valorization of the real labour through immanent constitution of communism. As immanent constitution of communism, we adopt the notion of communalism. In Turkey, there is a need to make up-to-date rereading and rethinking Marx in the light of contemporary demands of practice. Since with their own experiences autonomous-marxist movement liberated such a rereading, we give importance to this movement, we share our commonness within the extension of these kinds of movements. We are invested within the discussions and clashes peculiar to Turkey, that are nevertheless carved out by general problems of revolutionary world left. In Turkey the reading of Marx by revolutionary movements could not be emanated from modernist paradigm, it has been conferred with general ideological closures but also within its specific condition such a reading has reproduced and deepened these closures. Here in Turkey Leninism comes first with respect to Marx. Thus, this way of comprehension constricted Marx into Leninism. Here in Turkey, we try to contribute to these rereading efforts and emancipative political experiences and we can not avoid saying that our job could be considered harder than our comrades’ jobs in the west, if we consider Turkey’s problematic and complicated articulation within modernization and the close effects of Stalinism and orthodox Marxism. Here, reading of Marx has been done not through the affirmation of communism but through the affirmation of capital in fact (in crisis discussions etc). This withholds us from the field of counter-constitution to destroy capitalism and instead drive us into the dialectics of objective conditions within which capitalism will abolish with its own contradictions. Between capital and waged-labour that are the two modalities of the same substance, there is no revolutionary antagonism. Only between capital and the labour which has the potentiality of rejecting capitalist domination, which cannot be waged and cannot be measured, there could be a revolutionary antagonism. This antagonistic space is determined by the subjective counter-constitutive power of labour, rejection of every kind of classification relations. The perspective of counter-constitution does not see communism as a problem of phase, a gradual passage; the only political route of constitutive labour against classification is declassification, which means the rejection of capitalism now and everywhere.
the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.
In German Ideology Marx and Engels point out the proletariat is the power that comprehends everyone who is rendered without property. The capitalist domination is founded not only on the alienation of the worker in the factory but also on the total alienation of all social relations of labour in life. In bourgeois society, the productive individual, slipping of being the subject of its own activity, becomes the carrier of the representation of class identity. Liberalism substitutes this alienation with a false category of individual. Marx denotes that in bourgeois society, the freedom of individual is in fact the freedom of private property and the real and material liberation of labour could only be possible with communism. The direct objective of the struggle of ones that are rendered without property for freedom is state because the state represents the mystification of interest struggles that arise from private property and the division of labour within a fictive discourse of general interest and unity, and in that sense the state is the expression of the highest alienation. Thus the struggle of proletariat is essentially against the state.
Yet the modernist Marxism has effaced the notion of communism. However Marx and Engels defined communism with these words: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence.” For us, for Autonomy in Turkey such a notion of communism is still the point of departure. As long as communism is conceived as the final phase that is realized after capturing the state power with a bourgeois type of politics, as long as relations of classification sustain, the politicality cannot be a liberation activity. It would be Hegel’s abstract spirit. This kind of political practice would be reformist in its essence, it would not matter how leftist its discourse. For us there is an irreconcilable opposition between the instrumental reason and communism. We reject the instrumentalisation of political activity by way of reducing communism to an ideal, the instrumentalisation of resistance spaces, social relations and of people themselves. For us the instrumentalisation that creates gulfs between the discourse and the practice is a bourgeois kind of politics. Modernism is the highest point of this instrumentalisation.
Communism and Autonomy
We voice on every occasion that the most important agenda of the left in Turkey is to face with its own modernism. The left should detach the notion of communism from being an ideal, the final phase of finalism, to actualize it as the immanent constitution of revolutionary movement, departing from self-valorization of the labour itself. As long as the relation that determines the social characteristic of labour does not change, the capitalist logic of production does not change either. Capitalism has commercialized the social characteristics of labour on the world scale by turning the commodity into the power that operates all social relations. Thus social relations, being dehumanized, turn out to be relations between commodities. The commodity is the basic unit, the nucleus of capitalism; but the abstract sociality of capitalism is not a commodity fetishism that starts and ends in the first moment of production. As Holloway points out it is a fetishisation to which we are subjected in all daily life. So, what is the basic unit, the form of production of social relations in communism? This question is inherent to the construction of the real sociality of labour. With the real liberation of labour, individuals do not turn into the carries of class identities but become the real individuals, they valorize their own auto-activities, their own labour, their individual appropriation and this is communism. “While with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again.” This control does not mean we must wait for the formation of material conditions of communism by capitalism. Communism is not state-property either. Today, the form of organization of real sociability of labour, the political organization of communism is autonomy. Autonomy is the political rejection of waged-labour, the construction of the real labour as the subversive power against the domination of capital. We read this control from this perspective. We don not try to reach communism by departing form Marx, instead we try to rethink Marx departing from the actual possibilities of constitution of communism, from communalism. In this sense autonomy is the general name of the political movement in which real labour constructs its own subjectivity not to fall under the capitalist domination. Today orthodox Marxism in Turkey constricted within the paradigm of ideological reading of modernism has lagged behind Marx himself. It cannot grasp anymore how capital actually works; consequently, it cannot denote effective strategies of struggle. Capital takes all its power from subjugation of productive power of labour. It uses labour as its own power and in exchange, it pays wage to labour. The wage is the means of domination on body excluding it from all creative and free openings; in fact it is the ensuring of reproduction of labour force. The creation of political conditions of communism is only possible by reappropriation of the productive activity of labour. The revolutionary practice with all its subversiveness should attack classification. We should leave the determinations of the dialectics of capital and instead affirm our own power. Today revolutionary practice, with a finalistic reason should not immobilize communism as an ideal; instead revolutionary practice should be the subjective constitution of communism now and everywhere.
Otonom no.12, March-May 2006.
1 Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850.
2 Capital, the preface to first German edition (1867)
3 “First Manuscript: Wages of Labour”
4 “First Manuscript: Wages of Labour”
5 German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook D. Proletarians and Communism: Individuals, Class, and Community
6 German Ideology
7 John Holloway, “Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour”, Ana. C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary ed. The Labour Debate: An Investigation into Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002
8 German Ideology, I, Private Property and Communism.