Communism and Capitalism Share the Same Problems. Socialism is the Solution
To each according to their contribution v. to each according to their need
I am an anti-capitalist.
But I am also against communism — though, given how often I work with communists, and the degree to which the term has become a euphemism for fascism, I would only ever call myself an anti-communist with a great deal of cautions and clarifications.
The communism that I am against is not merely some feared ghost of the USSR, dead since before my birth. By ‘communism’, I refer to both the famed “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” and to communal ownership of the means of production.
What I am instead for is socialism.
By this, I do not mean socialism as some euphemism for social democracy — a usage that has become unfortunately common, given that social democracy is merely capitalism with some padding placed on the boot.
I mean, by the word socialism, two things.
Firstly, to paraphrase dozens of thinkers ‘to each according to their contribution’ — i.e., an institutional set-up in which someone is accorded the full product of their labor.
Secondly, by “socialism” I also mean a general principle of workers controlling the means of production that they use — and the more direct and unmediated that control, the better.
The rub is that these two uses of socialism are one and the same: workers who truly control the means of production necessarily receive the full product of their own labor, to dispose of as they wish — and so the test of whether a thing truly qualifies as one usage of “socialism” is if it also qualifies as the other.
The anarcho-communist (and, to a large but contrasting extent, my own) criticism of capitalism, at least as it relates to the workplace, generally focuses on two points. These can roughly be termed alienation and exploitation, though the broader uses of both these terms are both more particular and more varied than I will be discussing here — alienation, in particular, has a broader usage: it only takes on this limited usage within the context of the capitalist workplace.
The two points are as such:
- alienation: the worker does not make their own decisions about what they will produce, where and how it will be sold, under what conditions they will work, so on and so on. These decisions are made by the owner(s) of the workplace, who hold it and its means of production as their private property.
- exploitation: the worker does not receive the full value of what they have produced. They receive only a fraction of this, and the owner(s) of the workplace keep the remaining fraction.
In both cases, this occurs because the worker has no ability to leave for a workplace where they are not alienated and exploited, nor do they have much ability to simply over-ride the control of the owners.
This control is maintained by the threat of statist violence — if the workers simply said ‘this is now our factory, we will make the decisions, we will split the profits amongst ourselves, etc’ then there would be a police response.
The material cost of profits minus wages, and the spiritual cost of being disempowered in a significant portion of one’s life, is the revenue that the owner(s) derive from not calling the cops.
Further, the workers have minimal ability to simply purchase their own workplace, or leave for one already purchased — the banking and currency systems are regulated in a way meant to starve the workers of any ability to do so. I have written about the market anarchist alternative to this, elsewhere:
This critique is a very good one — the issue is that communism solves neither the problem of alienation nor the problem of exploitation. Under even idealized communism, the ownership of the means of production lies in the hands of one’s community — and one still does not keep the full product of the value of one’s labor: it is instead distributed on the basis of need.
Communism merely replaces the boss-appointed manager of capitalism with a community-appointed manager. One is still managed, it is simply the case that one now has an imperceptibly small say in the hiring and firing of the manager. As I noted in my primer:
decision-making gets worse as the collective gets larger. Assuming that the collective decision-making process is in some way roughly egalitarian — i.e., that every participant has roughly the same effect on the process as every other participant does — then it is obviously true that, if the number of participants is very large, then the effect of any given participant is very small.
Further, given that the power of one participant amongst N is ~1/N, most of the power is lost fairly ‘early’ on, as more participants are added. The difference between N=1 and N=10 is much greater than the difference between N=10 and N=100, or N=100 and N=1000.
There is very little difference between living under a sufficiently large democracy and an autocracy.
Because of this, one should wish for no more and no fewer people than are involved in an activity to be consulted on it. Communism does not obey this principle, and therefore is only marginally less alienating than capitalism is.
Exploitation, additionally, still continues under communism. If a worker’s ability exceeds their need, they are net exploited. If a worker’s need exceeds their ability, they are a net exploiter.
One must also question who it is who decides what each person’s ability is, and what their need is. One can only imagine that it will be voted upon, or perhaps that someone(s) will be elected (or otherwise selected) to determine the untapped potentials and complete desires of every individual.
Communism, clearly, cannot solve the problems of capitalism.
Socialism, however, can.
Under a regime of ‘to each according to their contribution’, no one is exploiter or exploited — they will receive what they produce, and may use it as they wish; selling it, or consuming it directly.
If the institution(s) of property are set up so that each worker controls the means of production that they use, then no will be alienated from their own labor. They may have to use small-scale democracy in cooperatives, but this would be no worse than is necessary.
There are two common communist objections to socialism, neither of which hold up to scrutiny.
Firstly, there is the disability argument — that the principle of ‘to each according to their contribution’ necessarily impacts those currently classified as disabled.
However, as I have argued in a previous essay:
Disabled/abled isn’t binary — or even a one-dimensional spectrum — and the unalienated conditions of socialism would allow anyone to easily negotiate for whatever accommodations they work best under.
Secondly, there is the anti-market argument — which itself is two-fold. The claims are that:
- markets do not represent human desires, they represent the desires of those humans who happen to have money
- firms competing in markets tend towards consolidation
The first point is easily dismissed: if all humans happen to have roughly equal amounts of money, then the market will represent human desires. And, if the humans who have more money have earned it by producing more value, then don’t they deserve a little more say in what happens?
The second objection is somewhat harder to confront, but not much more so. It is the state that causes monopoly, not markets themselves. It causes this in two ways. Firstly, through defending concentrated property ownership — and secondly, through establishing various regulations and laws that make it more expensive for small firms to be formed and to continue operations.
Socialism — particularly a libertarian socialist and market socialist form, called ‘left-wing market anarchism’ by some or ‘mutualism’ by others— is preferable to both communism and capitalism.
It seems as though the main reason why this is commonly missed is that capitalists frame the conversation, and most communists are dumb enough to let them. Capitalists claim that under capitalism you get what you earn, and communists — though of course acknowledging that this is untrue — take up arms against the concept of earning. Capitalists claim individualism, and communists are all too happy to agree to say that ‘yes, a world in which most people are subordinated to the desires of a privileged few is somehow individualist’. Capitalists claim that capitalism is freedom, and communists respond by claiming that economic freedom is merely the freedom to starve, and so should be abolished.
Communism fails to escape from the limitations of capitalist imagination, and so cannot defeat it.
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