First, let me start with the obvious: Communism did not
pan out the way Marx and Engels expected it to. Not only that, but the
bourgeoisie are still mostly in power. So, contrary to my title, Marx was
wrong. Right? Not necessarily. Marx made his predictions from a time before
much of the current technology was invented. He had no clue about, for
instance, the internet. He did make one big mistake, however: his prediction
assumes that the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
will go basically the same way as the previous class struggles have gone,
expect that he predicts that they will end with the end of all class struggle. Marx
assumes that the stage in the supposedly final class struggle where the
oppressed rise up and become the rulers will be just like any other. The
problem with that idea is that the conclusion of this class struggle is
supposed to remove class struggle. It is supposed to end in there being only
the one class. Thus, it must end without the oppressed overthrowing the rulers
and taking their place, but by making the rulers obsolete. There can be no
transitionary period where the previously oppressed class legislates communism,
since that would require a further class struggle to remove the new rulers.
Marx’s assumptions here lead to problems later on. He
speaks of centralizing credit, means of communication, and providing free
public education—all centralized around the state. Here, the problem is, again,
that Marx is thinking in terms of classes fighting each other in the open. The
centralizations around a state require a ruling class which provides these
things to a ruled class, which would maintain the division of two classes, and
so retain the possibility of class struggle. Instead, Marx should have expected
the total decentralization of credit, means of communication, and education.
Instead of a centralized bank, direct peer-to-peer financing and investments, like
Gofundme and Kickstarter; instead of centralized communication, universal
access to and power over personal communication, like the internet and
cellphones are becoming; instead of public schooling, highly flexible shared
educational resources, such as co-op groups and online education.
What
Marx should have expected was that the economic forces which would fuel the
final overthrow of the bourgeoisie are not so violent and obvious, but, like
that of the bourgeoisie, arise from “a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and exchange”.[i]
The political advance, then, would likewise be able to take a different form
than Marx expected: not violent, but subtle, almost unnoticeable.
The point of this paper is to argue that, while Marx got
some things wrong, these were primarily errors in filling in what kind of
conflict, political power, communication, or other concrete details, and not
errors in the actual direction things would go: the structural results. I will
argue, in fact, that some of the unexpected innovations around us now are the
baby stages of what Marx was talking about, although they look remarkably
different than one might picture from reading The Communist Manifesto.
The internet is of massive importance in how our world
looks to us from the USA right now. It also did not exist when Marx wrote The
Communist Manifesto. In that manifesto, Marx refers to how the bourgeoisie
required contact with each other, union, in order to succeed in their
revolution, and how “that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle
Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern
proletariat, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years”.[ii] Now,
read “the internet” there in the place of “railways.” This should make sense
without showing how it has actually done the same things, simply based on the
common talk of how the internet allows one to talk to someone on the other side
of the world. Most of the remainder of this paper will rely on examples of
people using the internet to do things which look like the baby stages of
something quite similar to what Marx envisioned as the final stage of
communism.
We have libraries, but we also now have the internet. The
internet is a repository of free information to which anyone may add. The
producers here are largely not paid, but voluntarily produce content for sites
like Wikipedia. This is a, if partial, refutation of the belief that we will
all get lazy if the communist ideal is realized.
In
The Starfish and The Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom describe how
peer-to-peer music sharing (or stealing) services keep cropping up.[iii]
The early ones were sued out of existence, but later ones got clever. There are
some out there without a sue-able entity to shut them down. There are just the
open-source downloadable files going from one person to the next. Basically,
the more of that there is, the less one will be able to speak of private
property, at least in music. As Marx could have expected, the bourgeoisie
sueing the proletariat only made the problem worse: that is why there is no
sue-able entity for some of the peer-to-peer services. The whole book is about
leaderless organizations and how they just get harder to beat the more you
fight them, which sounds like the end point of communism, and yet none of
socialism, communism, or Marx get tagged in the index.
Then
there are those sites which let you rent a room or get a ride from some
stranger, with little sight of a corporation. As these develop, if they can
figure out how to do so, private property will slowly disappear. No fight
involved except from big corporations suing and getting legislation passed—that
is, the fight will be between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, via
legislation, taxes, etc., for at least a long while yet. If there ever is a
violent conflict, which there might not be, it isn’t likely to be anytime soon.
Instead, the proletariat makes itself untouchable, unfindable, by
decentralizing its institutions and making those institutions unrecognizable.
The institutions of communism are leaderless, they lack countable members, and
they therefore cannot be brought down, since there is no one to bring down.
Political
power is also revolutionized. It is more likely to be achieved via tools like
Youtube, Twitter, and blogs than via violence. These are tools which allow
anybody to get their name and agenda out there. They are tools which people
running for president in the past election realized they needed to use—even the
pope is on Twitter now. Soon, I suspect, the only way to get elected will be by
an ad campaign with viral media, rather than TV advertising. This will reduce
the amount of sway that large organizations have over politics, since money is
much less valuable when working with viral media than when buying air time. It
also increases the power of the common person over politics, since it is up to
the individual whether to share something with others or not.
Note
how in each of these examples the value of money is reduced and profit is not
the aim. The point of Wikipedia is that it is free, it relies on fundraising
from the users. Peer-to-peer file sharing is motivated by the desire to get
music and other files without having to pay for them, largely removing money
from the equation. Renting rooms and seats in cars makes the supply of housing
go up, reducing the cost. Indeed, since there is little or no cost for the one
whose home or car it is, the cost to the renter can be very low without removing
the incentive to lease. The political example shows how money loses much of its
influence in power struggles, which is very helpful, if not required, if the
outcome is to be a society where power is diffused, where society is leveled.
I
mentioned that Marx kept thinking of the proletariat as a class, and that this
is problematic insofar as its conclusion is the end of classes. This thinking
results in his expected centralization to occur around the proletariat. Since
this is wrong, as accentuated by the fact that spider organizations, i.e.,
organizations without centralization, are what is leading the communist
revolution, so, too, is the centralization which Marx speaks of. I suspect that
this centralization is also much of the what causes the problems which
communist governments have encountered.
This
means that where Marx says “centralize in the hands of the proletariat” or “…in
the hands of the state” where the state is run by the proletariat, we should
think “decentralize.” Thus, when he speaks of centralized banking, we should
think quite the opposite. Education, too, should be decentralized—and this is
happening with sites like eduPOW, where anyone can create a lecture-style
course, upload it, and then anyone can download it for $5. There is a sense in
which I don’t expect these sites to get much traction, however, since one can
find much of the same material covered on Youtube. Nevertheless, whether by
eduPOW or Youtube, educational materials are out there which allow anyone to
cobble together courses to reach through at least highschool. Eventually, I
expect this to broaden out through college, and thus, eventually, our whole
education system will be restructured. This means that degrees of various sorts
will no longer be necessary, because no one will have them. I do not know how
such a revolution will prove to be possible, but insofar as one does not need a
degree to start something up, it will likely be possible for a growing number
of people. The ability to self-publish books, sell crafty things, and whatever
else, means that anyone can generate income by selling their own products.
This
also helps with Marx’s alienation problem. This alienation, according to Marx,
is due to the fact that the worker does not get to enjoy the fruits of his
labors. If the problem is that people are alienated from what they produce, the
solution is not to alienate them further, by making them work for some greater
good—this is, in fact, a classic argument against communism. The solution is,
instead, to enable them to sell their products directly themselves.
The
only question to be asked is, “what will become of factories and farming?”
These are necessary for our life as we now know it, but it is hard to see how,
say, an automotive assembly line, could be crowdsourced. As these become more
and more automated, though, who knows? We might not need too many workers, and
we might be able to make some viable start up auto companies. It all depends on
what kinds of new technology come along.
One
prediction of Marx’s that I have not shown evidence for is his prediction that
women would be shared. However, this is not out of the question, given the
current state of marriage and attitude toward sex. This is the point which
makes me most wary of these developments, and which should remind us that not
all the results of such a revolution are likely to be good. Indeed, in this
fallen world, shifting from one society to another is often merely trading one
set of acceptable sins for another.
Note,
finally, how all of this is the result of capitalistic tendencies. This, too,
should have been expected by Marx. As an economic determinist, Marx believe
that the sociocultural and religious environment of a society was a result of
the economic substructure. He believed that what happened was determined by
economic forces. If we construe “economic forces” as the forces of supply and
demand: the force of greed, then this supports the usual capitalist contention
that people cannot be forced to live the communist life because they are greedy.
However, they may slip into a communist life on account of their greed.
It
should go without saying that, if I am right about these things, then the
Church needs to figure out how to speak to the world which I am describing. We
must figure out where such people will feel their need for a savior, and how
the Church must be both careful to be distinctive and open to adaptation. What is
good in this development and what is bad? What will the transition be like, and
how do we navigate it? What are the values of such a society, and how do they
relate to Christian values. How do they either oppose or support what
Christians have always claimed?
