Two Communisms

Since October 9 is the anniversary of Che Guevara's execution/martyrdom (the word changes depending on what you think of him), I thought now would be a good time to share my opinion of communism.

Communism is the belief that all goods and services should be produced "by each according to his abilities" and distributed "to each according to his needs." Basically, it's the idea that your lot in life shouldn't depend on what others can get from you.

Now, I'm not a communist, though I could have made a good one. I do believe that your right to be left to enjoy your own life doesn't depend on what others can get from you - but this belief is individualism, not communism per se. There is a kind of communism that can be compatible with individualism, and there's another kind which isn't compatible with it at all. But before I go into these, let me further describe what communism is by saying what it is not.

Communism is not equal work, equal pay, nor equal work with equal pay. Some people can work longer and harder than others. Some have disabilities or obligations that make them unable to work as long, fast, or productively as others. Making everyone work the same amount of time is just not equitable.

Paying everyone equally isn't equitable either. Some people have greater needs than others. Some families have more kids. Some families have disabled members who require more attention. Paying every bread winner their "fair share" is really unfair to those with special needs.

In fact, payment has no place in communism. If your lot in life shouldn't depend on what you do for others, then your comfort shouldn't have to be earned. A communist would put it this way: if you can't make a living without selling your time and energy to someone else, then that isn't much different from slavery. In communism, there is no buying or selling of labor - or much of anything else, for that matter. And so, there's no place for money.

In communism there's no room for barter, either (or at least, the ways people meet their most basic needs can't include barter). Again, your life shouldn't depend on what you do for others. What you need for you to live should be available to you without condition. If you can't get those things without doing something for somebody else - without, so to speak, running after the carrot on the stick - then you're basically owned.

"To each according to his needs," then, has a very particular meaning: those things people need for a decent life should be available to everyone without condition - without buying, selling, renting, or any other market exchange.

Those of you on my end of the political spectrum are by now bouncing in your seats to strike down any hope of such a system "working." But rather than sneer that no such system could ever stay afloat, let's try to imagine how people would strive to meet each other's needs without market exchanges. (We wouldn't be productive thinkers without some imagination.) Anyway, whether a system "can work" is nowhere near as important to me as whether it can work morally. Whether communism can work morally is what I'll look at here.

Human life requires human labor. "To each according to his needs" can never happen without the things we ned being transformed from a crude state to a useful state (that is, produced) and taken to a place where we can use them. In other words, somebody has to make the stuff we need. The communist ideal is "from each according to his abilities." But how this phrase is interpretted matters a lot, and there are two very different ways to interpret it.

One kind of communism allows and encourages people to work on the things that they themselves judge useful to the community. "From each according to his ability" here also means "from each according to his own discretion." This system can be called voluntary communism.

It can also be called a Gift Economy, since the most important transactions in it would be freewill gifts and favors. People wouldn't be working for any reward in particular - if they do work for a reward that they've grown dependent on (for example, wages), then it's hard to tell that kind of obligation to work from all-out compulsion to work.

This kind of communism celebrates voluntarism in all its forms and eschews compulsion in all its forms. People would work, not for wages, or out of compulsion, or from any kind of "have to", but simply and completely out of love for their work.

Sound far out? Well, before brushing it off as a system that necessarily would devolve into diseased, starved druggies running naked through the tall grass, just look around and see all the other things people do for the mere love of it. People develop their skills at all sorts of tasks, just for the satisfaction that those tasks bring them. To think that a man can't similarly be motivated to do a task that's useful to other people is to have a view of humanity that's not just unfair to humans, but also inaccurate given the evidence.

I gawked when I heard that a family friend charged his daughter rent for living in the house she grew up in. I think most people would gawk too (until they learn she was an adult). Most people in our society look down on a parent charging his kids for the things he provides them. And when it comes to the basics - food, clothing, and shelter - most parents provide their kids these things for free, regardless of how low the kids scored on their tests or how crabby they've been. Just about every family in America, then, is a little commune (this is overlooking, of course, the grave power disparity between parent and child).

The power of gift extends beyond the bounds of love, and into anonymous, semi-anonymous, and very distant relationships. You all know by now that I love Wikipedia. It's democracy at its best - everyone has their say, and no one gets hurt. It's also a gift economy of information. In the few years that it's existed it has exploded into a loud bazaar where contributors share information out of the mere pleasure of making something that interests them more accessible to other people who would find it useful. No one pays a penny to use Wikipedia. And the vast majority of people who contribute to it aren't paid a penny, either. And yet, it thrives. The very fact that university professors forbid their students from citing it reveals how central it has become.

It's only a very small leap of faith (shall we call it a skip of faith?) to see how gift and mutual interest can work in producing and distributing tangible goods and services. Since February I've been volunteering at a nonprofit law office. Job experience and bragging rights aside, I really do think I can say that I do this for my own stimulation and for the satisfaction of knowing that I bettered someone's life.

An economy where people grow and give food for free and build and repair each others' houses and do other favors completely for free doesn't seem that distant in the future. The farmers, mechanics, grocers, handymen, scientists, and teachers can all survive and thrive on gift, so long as they're all paying it forward.

Let's suppose, now, that not enough people are paying it forward, or that not enough is being paid forward in the things that are most needed. According to voluntary communism, people are free to organize communal networks where needs are discussed and volunteers signed up. If not enough people volunteer for harvest, or if not enough people volunteer to reinforce the levees, then everybody's just going to have to make do.

There is another kind of communism which can take care of problems like these. Involuntary communism is what most people think of when they hear the C-word used perjoratively. It's the communism that makes red-blooded Americans wet their pants.

In this other kind of communism, if not enough people volunteer for harvest or to reinforce the levees, then people will be conscripted to do the task whether they want to or not. Here, "from each according to his ability" means "from each according to what he can be made to do."

There can be a variety of negative incentives to "encourage" people to work - they can be beaten into submission, they can be assigned a menial and brain-rotting job, or they can see the priviledges they enjoy equally with the others suspended by order of the authorities - whatever the "incentive", it's an offer you can't refuse, and looks more like a threat than a mere enticement.

This is the big red line between the two communisms. One relies on voluntary, unconditional gift and voluntary, unconditional favor; the other relies on compulsory gift and compulsory favor.

If voluntary cooperation isn't enough to meet the basic needs of every individual, then involuntary cooperation is needed. For involuntary cooperation to succeed, there needs to be some kind of master-slave relationship. If the master-slave relationship is unnecessary, then every goal of communal organization can be met through completely voluntary cooperation, and central planning and political authority would be unnecessary.

If the master-slave relationship is inherently immoral, as I tend to think it is, then any kind of social organization there is - be it capitalist, mutualist, syndicalist, or communist - cannot depend on it as a mode of production and still be moral.

Of course, different people have different definitions of slavery. But surely, someone who believes capitalism to be slavery must recognize that giving people offers they can't refuse in order to get them to do things they don't want to do is - well, pretty coercive.

If the goal is to eradicate all political and economic coercion, then there's a problem here. Involuntary communism proposes to eradicate political and economic coercion through some coercive political and economic relations. Maybe the involuntary communists envision a world where the severity and frequency of coercion is significantly less than it is right now. But a little slavery is still slavery, and to use it to bring about some less evil world is violently utilitarian.

I'm not going to put words into involuntary communists' mouths and speculate that their answer would be "well, it's not really coercive if you're free to leave the country." I respect them too much to think they're that nationalist. "You have the freedom to leave the country" sounds awfully close to "you have the freedom to get another job," and if they think that corporate structures and economic conditions are coercive, then they have to accept that political structures are too. Involuntary communists accept coercion as a legitimate way to get things done. Imagining otherwise is beating around the bush.

As I said, I am not a communist. I do dabble in communist theory, and some day I might indulge in a gift economy. I am sympathetic to voluntary (that is, anarchist) communism, because it condemns forcing people into things. I find that to be fully within the spirit of individualism, and I think voluntary communist arrangements can be totally legal in a libertarian society. Anarchist communism is even refreshing in the way it interprets freedom. If you haven't yet read Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work" that I linked quite a few paragraphs up, you really should. Yes, I linked the same webpage twice in the same blog post, because I think it's that fun to read.

Next time someone tells you they're a communist, ask them this one question: "Would you ever force me to work?" If they answer no, then you can predict that they're anarchist, and that they advocate a gift economy. If they answer yes, then you can predict that they're Marxist-Leninists or some other kind of authoritarian who advocate a slave economy without using the word "slave". If your predictions are wrong, then either they're confused about what they believe or they're in transition.