2.3 The Problem with “Communism”

The term “communism” is no less misleading than the term “capitalism.” Derived from the root “common,” communism suggests the abolition of private property and the creation of a common shared by all. But in really-existing communist regimes, there has never been such a “common,” instead a centralized state- or party- driven allocation of possessory interests. Here too, the nomenclature is entirely deceiving.

The term “communism” itself also traces to the same period, the early nineteenth century. Understood as the political and economic system that abolishes private property, the term “communism” started to be used in English in 1840, with an entry in the New York Spectator from August 1840. The term “Communism” with a capital “C” associated with Marx and the proletarian overthrow of the bourgeois class, began to be used in English in 1850.²¹⁹ Regarding its French usage, the OED notes:

The coinage of the French term has been variously attributed to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), French poet, novelist, and critic (in a letter of 3rd August 1840: see C. A. Sainte-Beuve Correspondance génerale III. 332), Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), French philosopher (E. Cabet Histoire populaire de la révolution française IV. (1840) 331), and Théophile Thoré (1807–69), French art critic (T. Thoré La verité sur le parti démocratique (1840) 27). All three seem to have arrived at the term ind ependently in 1840. Compare also quot. 1848 and quot. 1840 at sense 1. For a full discussion of the origins and development of French communisme (and related terms), see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe III. at Kommunismus.²²⁰

The term “communist” in English, with a “t” at the end, has a similar time stamp, around 1840, with or without a capital “C.” Here, the term was used previously in the late eighteenth century in French with different connotations, but essentially traces to the mid-nineteenth for its current usage:

French communiste was used earlier (1769) with reference to participants in the collective possession of land (mortmain). The French term was also used for other kinds of collective ownership in the late 18th cent., e.g. with reference to the right of pasturing animals on common land (1789). It was also used from at least the 1830s to refer to adherents of François-Noël Babeuf (1760–97), militant French revolutionary. Coinage of the term in the sense ‘advocate or adherent of the theory of communism’ has been variously attributed to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), French editor, politician, and social theorist (P.-J. Proudhon Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840) 326) and Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), French philosopher (É. Cabet Comment je suis communiste (1840)). Both seem to have arrived at the term independently in 1840. For a full discussion of the origins and development of French communiste (and related terms) see Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe III. at Kommunismus.²²¹

But this animating ideal of collective or communal ownership of property—of the abolition of private property in favor of the “common”—has never been realized at a national level, other than through state nationalization of the modes of production. The laudable ideal of living together in common can work well for a commune, but does not scale up to the level of a large economy like the United States, the State of New York, or even New York City.

The problem is principally one of scaling. As soon as the communal body grows beyond the size of the commune, the governing mechanisms get crystalized into an elite party or centralized state apparatus that inevitably becomes autocratic. The abolition of private property and creation of the common inevitably requires a governing mechanism and institutions of dispute resolution. Proponents of the common often speak of the need for democratic governance of the common by the people; but that is nothing more than an abstract ideal that has to be concretized in legal form. In practice, that legal form takes the shape of a decision-making body (such as a communist party leadership) and juridical rules.

That is why the dream of a common has never truly existed at a national level, historically. Every really-existing experiment has rapidly devolved into another form of state dirigisme: an autocracy of an elite party or a centralized state apparatus. Instead of referring to “communism,” we should call it something like “party dirigisme.”

The same problems plague the term “socialism,” which, in its full form, is simply the state ownership of the means of production as trustee for the citizens of a country. Naturally, I am being reductionist here. Other philosophers, such as Étienne Balibar, trace genealogies of socialism to other forms, such as “autogestion,” that have far more in common with coöperation. Balibar makes the astute observation in his analytics of socialism that the socialist project has always included “two violently opposed tendencies: one statist and the other autogestionnaire.”²²² But as he himself acknowledges there, it is the statist side of socialism that is the dominant thread and has been, in history and in the perception of socialism. For purposes here, then, I will set aside the autogestionnaire variant of socialism, which is indeed closer to coöperation. That will have to wait for further development. I have only the statist version in mind here, and dismiss it.

At bottom, the fundamental problem is that the concept of “the common” is far too blunt an instrument to describe accurately how material goods and things are distributed and used in society.

Naturally, this calls for a much longer discussion, and a more sustained debate with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri on the one hand, and with Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval on the other—all of whom have reimagined the concept of “the common” for today.²²³

For the latter at least, but certainly not for the former, the argument for the common similarly rejects the traditional notion of communism. Dardot and Laval work hard to distinguish themselves from the type of state communism that, they believe, has plagued the term “common.” They refer to “the communist burden” – the way in which the actually-existing communist experiments have distorted the concept of the common. Their main effort is to liberate the concept of the common from the state. Dardot and Laval are adamantly anti-state communism. They write:

In other words, it [the common] is a term that helps us turn our back on the strategy of state communism once and for all. By appropriating and operating the means of production in its entirety, the communist state methodically destroyed the prospects for real socialism, which “has always been conceived of as a deepening – not a rejection – of political democracy.” For those dissatisfied with the neoliberal version of “freedom,” the common is thus a means of opening up a new path. It is precisely this context that explains the thematic emergence of the common in the 1990s. It was a shared political demand that could be found in the most local and concrete struggles, as well as within the largest national and international political mobilizations.²²⁴

In fact, at practically every juncture, Dardot and Laval try to distinguish their concept of “the common” from what has come before, so that it has a genuine novelty to it. They even distinguish theirs from the notion of the commons tied to the anti-globalization struggles of the 1990s. These struggles constructed the world in terms of a second “enclosure”: not the early enclosure of lands in the 17th and 18th centuries, but rather a renewed global enclosure of property, associated with privatization and neoliberalism, which took away common space from the people. The struggle in the 1990s was to reclaim “the commons,” in the plural, consisting of water and land that are being privatized. However, by contrast to those anti-globalist movements, which they associate with trying to develop the commons outside of capitalism as small isolated pockets, Dardot and Laval want to take a different path.²²⁵ They reject this approach to changing the world without taking power. They also simultaneously reject the Marxist logic of getting beyond capitalism from within.

What Dardot and Laval call for is a revolutionary concept of “the common” as a new way forward—one that will replace and, in the process, destroy neoliberalism.²²⁶ They do not believe that piecemeal reform will do any good, or even that the creation of pockets of common goods will save us from ecological peril. Instead, they call for a radical transformation, a revolution in their words: They call for “profoundly transforming the economy and the society by overthrowing the system of norms that now directly threatens nature and humanity itself.”²²⁷

Dardot and Laval emphasize and are careful to attribute the introduction of the concept of “the common,” in the singular, to Hardt and Negri. They argue that this is a decisive and radical achievement and probably the most important step forward: not to think of the commons which effectively preceded capitalism, but the concept of the common as a new development to get past capitalism.²²⁸ They write:

For us, the common is the philosophical principle that makes it possible to conceive of a future beyond neoliberalism, and for Hardt and Negri the common is the only possible path toward a non-capitalist future. The common is also a category tasked with undermining any residual nostalgia for state socialism, particularly in terms of the state’s monopolization of a bureaucratized public service. In other words, the common is a category that transcends public and private.²²⁹

Dardot and Laval place their concept of the common in the lineage of the environmental and ecological movements and the alter-globalization movements in the 1990s—though, as we saw earlier, they seek to distinguish it from those earlier experiments. Dardot and Laval trace the intellectual lineage directly back to the writings of Hardt and Negri, to the empirical work done by and in the wake of Elinor Ostrom, and to the emergence of what they referred to as the field of “common studies.”²³⁰ They emphasize the shift from the plural to the singular, from “the commons” to “the common,” reflecting the more abstract and substantial concept of the common as opposed to the traditional or historical examples of commons. “In short, we are living in a moment in which the”common" is a term that designates a regime of practices, struggles, institutions, and research all dedicated to realizing a non-capitalist future."²³¹

This calls for a longer treatment, of course. But as I hope to have made clear by this point and in the following chapters, the idea of getting rid of proprietary interests that involve personal exclusive possession—including the opportunity to improve and receive the benefits of those improvements—may work in a small community or commune, but does not scale up to a national economy.

And therein lies the problem.

We need to design a coöperationist economy that can thrive alongside dirigiste ones. Otherwise, too many will abscond with their wealth.