Communism is the Double Movement

Communism for Dummies

It took me a long while to understand what communism was. I think it’s okay to be made fun of for this. After all, it seems self-explanatory. It’s a classless society in which the means of production have been seized and directed under central planning. But I could never quite explain what it entailed. I thought I could after reading all three volumes of Capital. But after two-thousand odd pages, I find I could articulate a comprehensive critique of capitalism - and yet couldn’t tell you a thing about communism. The capacity to describe the flaws and contradictions at the heart of capital yet lacking the ability to simply explain the alternative is a familiar dilemma for the self-described (willingly or not) theorycel. 

I think the difficulty of explaining communism has its roots in many communists lacking a historical basis. I don’t mean that explaining communism is difficult because it hasn’t happened yet. Communism is difficult to explain because it gets lost in the abstract. Wrapping your head around communism is immensely difficult when the only world you’ve known is capitalism. This was why it took me reading book after book on the political economy of feudalism to clarify what communism actually means. And it is here I hope to clarify in a few words what exactly it is.

Above all, communism is a double movement. The double movement was first coined by Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation. It originally referred to the uprooting of peasants by market forces and the state’s attempted re-embedding of those peasants by means of modern state mechanisms such as the Speenhamland system and the Poor Laws. For our purposes the double movement merely entails a simultaneous backward and forward-movement: the backwards revival of certain social relations by means of new forward means. 

This is a strange conception of communism on its face. After all, we associate looking backwards with reaction. Reactionary ideologies such as monarchism are invested in reviving the social structures of the past, voiding them of their social context, and retrofitting them onto industrial society. And communism is the last thing we associate with reaction. You’d be right. Communism is fundamentally a social revolution and as far from being conservative as possible. As Marx puts it, communism is the real movement to abolish the present state of affairs. There’s little room in this ideology for old social forms, whether they be monarchies or republics.

But revolutions, like communism, are not political movements occurring in a vacuum. One of Marx’s insights in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that revolutionaries do not decisively step into the great unknown. “Just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”¹ 

Even the most out-there revolutionaries grasp for a semblance of familiarity in which to frame their radical ideas. The Black Panthers borrowed the dress and conduct of their Maoist comrades. The American Revolutionaries fancied themselves Romans, basing the aesthetics of their nation’s capital on the marbled domes, straight lines, and austere designs of classical architecture in reflection of their newfound republican values.

To understand communism, we must look back into history. To understand what communism brings us, we must understand what capital took from us. In order to go forward, we must go backwards. 

Looking Backwards

It would be incorrect to call feudalism an organic society. That implies feudalism was somehow natural rather than social. It was, however, understood by contemporaries like John of Salisbury as an “organic” society in which each class constituted a corresponding organ: the prince and clergy were the soul; the judges, the sense organs; the financiers, the stomach; and the peasants, the feet.² Feudalist society was therefore perceived as a class-hierarchy governed by a complicated set of obligations due to those above and below, governed by overlapping jurisdictions between lord and church.³ Beyond the exceptions, you will generally die in the class you were born into.

Just as the body is disabled without the feet, so too is the polity crippled without the peasant. The peasant can be understood as being embedded in a particular network of social relations. He cannot freely make contracts; he cannot simply sell his land to whomever; he cannot simply move wherever. He constituted a part of a corporate whole from which he could not easily alienate himself.

This state of affairs sounds tremendously oppressive. And yes, it could be. But one would be wrong to call this society irredeemable. Broadly speaking, with the oppressiveness of local community comes with it the upshot of a certain stability of being part of a corporate, indivisible whole. Although you were coerced to work your plot of land, the lord could not easily remove you from the land at-will, which granted you a degree of independence.

Depending on the region and time period, the average peasant household worked in common with the village, individuals tending to their plots and also managing the commons. As Seccombe writes, villages were communities of “cooperative endeavor and practical interdependence” and governed by “assemblies and ancient forms of local government.” Of course, cooperation was conducted on terms of survival rather than filial love: “Poor and even middling households who lacked sufficient draught animals to comprise a plough team had to pool animals and harness a common team, working out equitable arrangements according to their respective contributions to the team’s assembly.”⁴

Peasants could control the pace at which they work, not being harried by a clock or boss. Of course, there were limits to this freedom set by their natural environment. Peasants obviously couldn’t labor in the fields after sunset. And this relative freedom within the labor-process should not hide the naked exploitation between landlord and tenant, as the former constantly attempted to raise rents on his tenants.⁵ But the peasant was governed not by abstract time in the form of rigidly regimented seconds, minutes, and hours, but instead by concrete time in the form of temporally uneven sunrises and sunsets, the time it takes to cook a pot of stew, and even the time it took to take a piss.⁶ Time was less oppressive because it was less abstract and more in rhythm with natural events instead of the tick-tock of the clock.

Though under a patriarchal society, women possessed some autonomy owing to their base of economic leverage grounded in spinning, farmwork, cooking, and child-rearing.⁷ Because the household was the primary unit of production, the productive and reproductive spheres were essentially synonymous, meaning women were not burdened with being both mothers and wage-laborers in the way they would under capitalism. The spheres of domestic and productive labor were synonymous under feudalism. The task of rocking a baby to sleep is more compatible with tending to a hearth, weaving, and tending to the garden than working an unremitting assembly line. While women still of course suffered under oppressive conditions, their contributions to the household were recognized and not relegated solely to the task of domestic labor as would occur under capitalism with the social and spatial separation between the spheres of production and reproduction.⁸

On the flip side, peasant life was generally hard. These peasant communities were first and foremost cooperative and took on a corporate character not out of love, but survival. Peasants may have technically worked fewer hours, but what hours they worked were backbreaking labor. Although peasants controlled their means of production and subsistence, they generally had little left over after paying rent and feeding their household, meaning one or two bad harvests were all it took to send a peasant family into dire straits. 

The degree of simplification I’m employing should be highlighted.⁹ The class category of peasant even in the heyday of feudalism had a great deal of variability, ranging from small, destitute households to generally well-off households that could even hire a laborer or two. This category is made even more complex when accounting for regional and temporal differences. Importantly, however, the peasant’s relationship to the land and his lord may tentatively be characterized in the above terms, with necessary qualifications.

Looking Forwards

In peculiar ways, capitalist society inverts this. In the first lines of Capital, Marx writes that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.” The immense wealth presented in the form of commodities is the first quality associated with capitalist societies. As Polanyi observes, whereas under feudalism the market is embedded in social relations, under capitalism social relations are embedded in the market. 

Capitalist society can produce so much wealth because its north star is not use-value, as it was for the peasant, but value. Use-value is a concrete, material thing. It has limits. One only needs so much food in their pantry before it becomes superfluous to them. But value, in the form of money, has no limit. As Lewis Mumford writes, “The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury?”¹⁰ Money is a peculiar commodity in that it’s both limited and unlimited: limited in the sense that $100 is only $100; but unlimited in the sense that this $100 may be translated into an uncountable number of goods.

In Marx’s words, “This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation.”¹¹ The drive to accumulate endlessly is inherent within money at a mature stage of capitalist development. 

This drive for wealth finds its historical handmaiden in liberalism. Liberalism is as difficult to define as communism; but for our purposes, I find the most digestible definition of liberalism is one of uprooting. Peasants make for poor employees; after all, if you can work for yourself, why would you work for somebody else? If you can produce your own food, why work more than you need to? Liberalism thus understood is the ideological justification of the continual process of proletarianization i.e. the alienation of peasants from the land and their transformation as “free-floating” monads in space.

The corporate community of the peasant commune is ripped asunder and streaming out of its ruins are atomized proletarians, possessing nothing to sell for survival but their labor-power i.e. capacity to work. Having little choice, the ex-peasant sells their labor-power to the capitalist and slaves away in the workshops and later the “dark satanic mills” of the textile factories. 

Many peasants still held onto their plots of land. But as David McNally observes, these individuals could no longer be meaningfully called tenants. Larger numbers of them, those who did not outright lose their land, were semi-proletarianized, forced to sell their labor-power to supplement the produce from their small patches of land.¹²

As Marx observes in the Jewish Question, liberalism is founded upon the “separation of man from man.”¹³ This is why natural rights as framed within the United States, the first nation on earth founded upon exclusively bourgeois values, are fundamentally negative: the state protects your right to be left alone, and nothing more. You have the right to own property, but not free from its domination. It is an ideology only possible when the corporate peasant community is dissected, uprooted, and parcelized for sale; until all are made into atomized individuals whose right to make contracts, buy and sell property, and freely associate is fully protected. The state’s role is to protect your personal autonomy and right to freely sell your labor-power, but is not obligated to free you from the compulsion of wage-labor. Liberalism under capitalism is freedom in form, not content.

During the nineteenth century, society under the domination of capital had produced incredible wonders. Capitalist society’s technological development and its achievements rival the Pyramids and the Great Wall. Strangely though, while liberalism was premised off of man’s political separation from man, the reality was quite different within the sphere of production.

Under feudalism, every step of the production process was united in the solitary craftsman; under capitalism, many thousands of men are united into one production process. The blacksmith could argue the armor he crafted was his to sell by virtue of the sweat of his brow. This is not the case under mass production. A worker cannot simply take full credit for the assembly-line car just because he put the rubber on the wheels; the car owes its existence not to him alone, but to the many hundreds on the assembly line. Production becomes an increasingly social process.14 But in spite of production becoming more socialized, its fruits continue to accumulate in the hands of a private few.15 Just as liberalism is founded off the separation of man from man, capitalism is founded on the expropriation of the many by the few.

The Synthesis

Communism is thus nothing more than the recognition of not the potential, but actual reality we find ourselves in: that production has brought us together in a state of collective interdependence. Capitalist society in its mature form is the corporate peasant community made mutant. The production process unites thousands of individuals for collective ends, but these individuals are still free-floating monads politically alienated from both their labor and each other despite materially depending on one another to make the production process succeed. 

While production becomes more social, and an absolutely larger number of people are forced to sell their labor-power for survival, profit becomes increasingly private, in the hands of a relatively decreasing number of shareholders. As aggregate profit rates tend to decrease, capital becomes more desperate to protect its profits through the prying open of areas hitherto undisturbed by the market, the cutting of wages, and the off-loading of even more commodities.¹⁴

More wealth contradictorily yields more desperation. Capital becomes analogous to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”¹⁵ The problem is not lack of wealth, but too much. Capital does not produce for use, like the old peasant community, but for value. As the productive forces become more refined and can produce more commodities, more commodities must be sold to realize a profit; but the capital investment in means of production means profit decreases relatively in the long-term even if it increases absolutely. This desperation produces waste, inefficiencies, and further immiseration.¹⁶

This desperation has terrible consequences, not only for the worker. But also the earth. Encoded within capital is ceaseless accumulation of profit; but the earth is not limitless. Without control over production, the material foundation of society will be destroyed. This can only be checked by control over the advanced forces of production — developed now to such a degree that we can provide for the vital needs of every person on earth — through the revival of the old forms of collectivity embodied in the old peasant community.¹⁷ 

Herein is the soul of communism: the double movement. Communism is the backwards revitalization of the corporate and collective character of the peasant community, but founded upon the forward means of the advanced productive forces. Communism does not go backwards to revive the forms of the peasant community; those forms cannot exist beyond their time and place. Communism revives the character of the peasant community — its cooperative planning, control over the labor process, and socialization of property in the form of the commons — on new terms. 

This is why market “socialism,” wherein all that’s changed is the collective-ownership of factories and restaurants, is insufficient. A socialized factory is still a site of alienation whether privately or publicly-owned because the very process of production is still oriented towards profit. The capitalist division of labor which undergirds not only the factory, but also service work narrows man’s labor to one task. This is encoded in the very machinery and social organization of most profit-seeking firms, from the factory to the fast food chain.¹⁸

Communism seeks to smash the oppressive division of labor and reestablish production on grounds that unleashes rather than inhibits man’s creativity.¹⁹ Communism seeks to revive the spirit of the peasant workday — in which workers can vary their efforts according to need, dedicate their time to this task and that task, take breaks, involve neighbors — without the associated drudgery and hard labor.

Marx even utilizes the metaphor of the peasant commune in some of his writings. While discussing the Russian peasant commune in one of his first draft letters to Vera Zasulich, Marx writes that “the [capitalist] crisis will come to an end with the elimination of capitalist production and the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type - collective production and appropriation.”²⁰ Communism is the return of collective ownership and social planning characteristic of the peasant community but established along a fundamentally different, more advanced productive base which will allow for freedom from want and freedom to experiment, to craft, and reflect. 

Before capital, man was joined with man under conditions of subsistence. Under capital, man is separated from man, and suffers immiseration and alienation in a land of wealth. With communism, man is once again reconciled with man, but this time on new terms: terms which will actualize the potential of the universal character of man’s labor. Communism is not merely the guarantee of high standards-of-living for all. Rather, it’s the return of control of society to the people. It’s the capacity to live well with our fellow man needing fewer goods and with control over what is produced being dictated by social deliberation rather than the impersonal and abstract whip of the Market.

Liberalism is not irredeemable, only insufficient. Communism is the redemption of liberalism. While liberalism is the promise, communism is the follow-through. The liberal of the nineteenth century fought for the right to own property, while the communist of the twenty-first fights to be free from the tyranny of property. Liberalism is the shape, communism is the fill. Liberalism is the negative right, communism the positive. 

Communism can be difficult to explain or grasp without a strong grounding in history and engagement with the world around you. Even if one is convinced of the unsustainability of capitalism and the necessity of an alternative, communism is incomprehensible without understanding what life is like beyond and before the market. Communist theory requires a double movement in study: To understand what comes next, we must know what came before. Just as theory and praxis must be united, so too must communists unite the past with the future. After all, communism is nothing more than the abolition of time itself.

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in the Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition, 595.

2. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 70.

3. For a longer work that goes into detail on how the Church and State shared power, see Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State.

4. Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change 79-81.

5. These efforts, compounded by other historical processes, led to the general crisis of feudalism during the fourteenth century. For an extended commentary on intensive feudal exploitation and its contribution to the breakdown of the feudal system, see Immanuel Wallerstein’s Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, specifically Chapter 1.

6. See E.P. Thompson’s essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Lewis Mumford’s Technics & Civilization also has an excellent commentary on the transition from concrete to abstract time, from being governed by the rhythms of nature to the regimented, standardized rule of seconds, minutes, and hours, and its psychological effects on peasant and proletarian.

7. Seccombe, 83-87.

8. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 74-75.

9. A friend who specializes in the field recommends the following works: B.R. Roberts, Peasants and Proletarians; and Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History.

10. Lewis Mumford, Technics & Civilization, 24.

11. Marx, Capital: Volume 1, 231.

12. David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism, and the Marxist Critique, 11.

13. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question in The Mark-Engels Reader 2nd ed., 42-43.

14. This desperation is clear once one follows the lifecycle of one industry through time. The clearest example is the automotive industry. Meszaros writes on page 182 in Beyond Capital: 

“For in order to maintain the senseless multiplication of motor cars—and the corresponding neglect or even willful destruction of public transport services—the system had to devise the absurd marketing strategy of the two or even ‘three car family’. The continued ‘healthy expansion’ of capital’s productive order needs such practices despite the immense amount of material and labour resources wastefully locked up in every single motor car, and despite the devastating impact of this grotesquely inefficient form of transport (promoted by a system which takes pride in its own claimed ‘efficiency’) both in using up unrenewable energy and chemical resources and in poisoning on a mind-boggling scale the natural environment.” 

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy elaborate on the irrationality of the automobile industry and its wastefulness in their 1966 essay Monopoly Capital, specifically in Chapter 4. This irrationality - the desperation to offload more and more commodities - reaches its apotheosis in financialization and the off-loading of production. Matt Stoller in his book Goliath touches on this decades-long process as the executives of General Motors and Chrysler come pleading for a bailout during the financial crisis once the bottom falls out.

15. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

16. For an interesting case study of how an industry tends towards self-cannibalization once profit rates begin to trend downward as a by-product of capital’s desperation to cheapen costs to preserve profits, see Walter Johnson’s excellent study of the Mississippi riverboat industry in River of Dark Dreams, specifically Chapter 5.

17. For further discussions on how the remedying of the global climate crisis is incompatible with the imperatives of capital, I found the following works immensely useful: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming; John Bellamy Foster, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; Fred Magdoff, Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Crisis, Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City; and Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist.

18. For a good discussion of how the fast food restaurant mirrors the alienating division of labor characteristic of the factory, see this essay: https://libcom.org/article/abolish-restaurants-workers-critique-food-service-industry

19. The classic work on how the capitalist division of labor doesn’t just define the social but also technical organization of production is Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. He makes this point explicit in the following footnote: “The demands for "workers 'participation" and "workers' control," from this point of view fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism — election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc.— upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor-without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production--balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon "experts," and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them.”

20. Karl Marx, The ‘First’ Draft, Marx-Zasulich Correspondence February/March 1881: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm