COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE

Exploitative economic and social relations, including the systematic domination of women by men and the division of human society into different classes with conflicting interests, have not always existed among human beings. A situation in which a small group monopolizes not only wealth but the very means to live, and thereby forces far greater numbers to slave under their command, in one form or another, while that small group also monopolizes political power and the means of enforcing this exploitation and dominates the intellectual and cultural life of society, condemning the vast majority to ignorance and subservience—this has not always been part of human society. Nor is this destined to remain the way human beings relate to each other, so long as human beings continue to exist. These oppressive divisions arose thousands of years ago, replacing early forms of communal society, which themselves had existed for thousands of years, and which were made up of relatively small groups of people holding in common their most important possessions and working cooperatively to meet their needs and to raise new generations.

The break-up of these early communal societies was not due to some “natural inclination” of people to seek a superior position above others and to “get ahead” at the expense of others, nor to some supposed “genetic predisposition” of men to subjugate women or of one “race” of people to conquer and plunder other “races.” No doubt there were conflicts at times when people in early communal societies encountered each other and were not able to readily reconcile the differences between them, but these societies were not characterized by institutionalized oppressive divisions with which we are all too familiar today. To people in those communal societies the idea of some people within these societies establishing themselves as the masters over others, and seeking to acquire wealth and power by forcing others to work for them, would have seemed strange and outrageous. Rather, the emergence of class divisions and oppressive social relations among people was owing to changes in the ways human beings interacted with the “external” natural environment, and in particular changes in the ways these human beings carried out the production of the material requirements of life and the reproduction and rearing of new generations.

In particular, once the organization of this production and reproduction began to be carried out in such a way that individuals, instead of society as a whole, began to control the surplus produced by society, above and beyond what was necessary for mere survival, and especially once people settled more or less permanently on specific segments of land and began to carry out agricultural production on the land they settled, then the long night was ushered in, in which human beings have been divided into masters and slaves, the powerful and the powerless, those who rule and those who are ruled over, those whose role is decisive in determining the direction of society, and those whose destiny is shaped in this way, even while they have no effective role in determining that destiny.

Throughout these thousands of years of darkness for the great majority of humanity, people have dreamed of a different life—where slavery, rape, wars of plunder, and a lifetime of alienation, agony, and despair would no longer constitute “the human condition.” This yearning for a different world has found expression in different forms of religious fantasy—looking beyond this world to a god or gods who supposedly control human destiny and who supposedly will, in some future existence, if not in this life, finally reward those who have endured endless suffering during their time on earth. But there have also been repeated attempts to actually change things in this world. There have been revolts and uprisings, massive rebellions, armed conflicts, and even revolutions in which societies, and the relations between different societies, were transformed in major ways. Empires have fallen, monarchies have been abolished, slave owners and feudal lords have been overthrown. But for hundreds and thousands of years, while many people’s lives were sacrificed, willingly or unwillingly, in these struggles, the result was always that the rule of one group of exploiters and oppressors was replaced by that of another—in one form or another, a small part of society continued to monopolize wealth, political power, and intellectual and cultural life, dominating and oppressing the great majority and engaging repeatedly in wars with rival states and empires.

All this remained fundamentally unchanged—the light of a new day never appeared for the masses of humanity, despite all their sacrifice and struggle... Until, a little more than 100 years ago, something radically new emerged: people rising up who embodied not only the desire but the potential to put an end to all relations of exploitation and oppression and all destructive antagonistic conflicts among human beings, everywhere in the world. In 1871, amidst a war between “their” government and that of Germany, working people in the capital city of France, long exploited, impoverished, and degraded, rose up to seize power and established a new form of association among people. This was the Paris Commune, which existed only in that one part of France, and which lasted for only two short months, but which represented, in embryonic form, a communist society in which distinctions of class and oppressive divisions among people would be finally abolished. The Commune was crushed by the weight and force of the old order—with thousands slaughtered in a valiant but ultimately vain attempt to keep the Commune alive. But the first steps had been taken toward a new world, the path had been opened, the way shown, if only fleetingly then.

Even before the events of the Paris Commune, the possibility of a radically new world, without exploitation and oppression, had been scientifically established through the work of Karl Marx, together with his contemporary and collaborator, Frederick Engels, the founders of the communist movement. As Marx himself put it, only a few years before the Commune:

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions breaks down before their collapse in practice

The First Stage of Communist Revolution

The Paris Commune was a first great attempt to scale the heights of human emancipation, and it was a harbinger of the future, but it lacked the necessary leadership and was not guided by the necessary scientific understanding to be able to withstand the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaughts of the forces of the old order and then to carry out a thoroughgoing transformation of society, in all spheres: economic, social, political, cultural, and ideological. Some who approach the experience of the Commune with a romanticized, instead of a scientific, outlook and method like to cite the lack of an organized vanguard leadership, unified on the basis of a scientific, Marxist viewpoint, as one of the virtues of the Commune. But the fact is that this was one of its greatest weaknesses and one of the main factors contributing to its defeat, after only a very short period of existence. The lack of such a leadership—and the attempt to immediately implement measures which would essentially eliminate any institutionalized leadership—is one of the main reasons why the Commune did not sufficiently suppress organized forces which were determined to wipe out the Commune and to ensure that the specter of communist revolution—so terrible from the standpoint of exploiters and oppressors—would never rise again. In particular, as Marx pointed out, the Communards failed to march immediately on the stronghold of the counter-revolution, in the nearby city of Versailles; and so the counter-revolution was able to gather its strength, march on Paris, and deliver the death-blow to the Commune, slaughtering thousands of its most determined fighters in the process.

But beyond the immediate consequences that flowed, to a significant degree, from the shortcomings and limitations of the Paris Commune, the reality is this: Had the Commune defeated the attacks of the counter-revolution and survived, it would then have faced the even greater challenge of reorganizing and transforming the whole society, and not just the capital of Paris, where it held power for a brilliant but all too brief period. It would have had to create a radically new and different economy, a socialist economy, in a country still made up largely of small farmers (peasants), and it would have had to overcome profound and tradition-steeped inequality and oppression, in particular the chains that have bound women for thousands of years. And here again the weaknesses and limitations of the Commune stand out: Women played a vital and heroic role in the creation of the Commune and the fight to defend it, but they were nonetheless maintained in a subordinate position within the Commune.

In less than 50 years after the defeat of the Paris Commune, beginning in the midst of the first world war among imperialists, a much more sweeping and deep-going revolutionary transformation was carried out in what had been the Russian empire. This revolution overthrew the Tsar (Russian monarch) who was the hereditary ruler of this empire, and then overthrew the capitalist class which attempted to step into the “vacuum of power” and seize control of society once the Tsar had been toppled. Through this revolution, which was led by V.I. Lenin, the Soviet Union was brought into being as the world’s first socialist state; and although Lenin himself died in 1924, for several decades after that socialist transformation was carried out in the Soviet Union, even as it faced relentless threats and repeated attacks from counter-revolutionary forces, inside and outside the country, including the massive invasion of the Soviet Union by the imperialist Nazi Germany during World War 2, which cost the lives of more than 20 million Soviet citizens and brought great destruction to the country.

In leading the Russian revolution, in its first great step of seizing and consolidating political power and embarking on the road of socialist transformation, Lenin proceeded on the basis of the scientific breakthroughs that Marx had achieved, and he continued to develop that living science of Marxism. He drew important lessons from the Paris Commune, as well as from the historical experience of human society, and the natural world, more broadly. Of great importance, Lenin systematized the understanding that a vanguard communist party was essential in order to enable the masses of people to wage an increasingly conscious struggle to overthrow the rule of the capitalists and then carry out the radical transformation of society toward the ultimate goal of communism, worldwide.

Lenin also applied and developed the understanding forged by Marx, on the basis of summing up the bitter lessons of the Paris Commune, that in carrying out the communist revolution, it is not possible to lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the old state, which served the capitalist system; it is necessary to smash and dismantle that state and replace it with a new state: In place of what is in reality the dictatorship of the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie), it is necessary to establish the political rule of the rising, revolutionary class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a radically different kind of state, which will increasingly involve the masses of people in carrying forward the revolutionary transformation of society. This revolutionary dictatorship is necessary, Lenin emphasized, for two basic reasons:

1) To prevent exploiters—old and new, within the country and in other parts of the world—from defeating and drowning in blood the struggle of masses of people to bring a radically new society, and world, into being, to advance toward the achievement of the “4 Alls.”

2) To guarantee the rights of the people at every point, even with the inequalities that will remain, to varying degrees, between different sections of the people during various phases of the socialist transition to communism, at the same time as the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to continue to uproot and eventually move beyond such social inequalities and to reach the point, throughout the world, where oppressive social divisions can no longer arise, and the state, as an institutionalized instrument of enforcement of laws and of rights, will no longer be necessary, and the state itself will be replaced by the self-administration by the people, without class distinctions and social antagonisms.