(continued from a previous issue)

3. Communism

Once the proletariat has seized political power thanks to its Party, now becoming the Party-State, it will proceed to, with the gradual transformation of the capitalist economy, definitively eliminate social classes and will gradually “deflate” the state, in addition to carrying out its own revolutionary political tasks (this being repression of the counterrevolution, exportation of the revolution to other countries, etc). We do not know how long the transition phase will last, but we can predict its developments on the basis of the study of historical trends.

With regards to the family unit and private property, we can safely say that the nuclear family, in its role as the productive-reproductive cell of capitalism, will dissolve into society itself, while the important role of the couple will remain, as it’s the highest evolutionary form of the family, it will no longer be bound by capitalism’s need to reproduce itself, but rather, determined by a high degree of development in the emotional and sexual sphere. The nuclear family’s reproductive function will certainly persist, but now on the basis of a new awareness of a higher “Species Plan”. The upbringing of children will no longer be the responsibility of the individual parents, and even more so, of the individual woman, but rather, will be taken on by society itself, so that every new child will be cared for by the older generations in the same way that biological children are care for in the modern family unit.

With regards to private property, we must further discuss the relationship between it and personal property…

Private property versus personal property

Let’s start with a quote from Marx’s Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844,

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labor and conversion into capital. In the place of all physical and spiritual senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”

This section of the text summarizes how private ownership of the means of production revolutionizes and alters the perception of personal property, leading to, on one hand, alienation (the estrangement of human beings from what they do to the point where they no longer recognize themselves), and on the other hand, to a sensory misconception of the nature of the goods they themselves produce. To clarify, let us consider an example:

1. In every class-based society, be it slave-based, feudal, capitalist, there is a division between those who work and those who own the means of production.
2. Direct producers, i.e. the slaves, serfs, and proletarians, are deprived of control over their work and its results, while the ruling class, i.e. the slaver owners, feudal lords, capitalists, appropriate the surplus production.
3. This separation is the fundamental element of alienation: workers do not recognize themselves in the product of their labour because it does not belong to them.

Since consumer goods are themselves product of general production, they will also be perceived as something alien or foreign, as if they were separate entities that can only be obtained through monetar exchange and no longer as a fair distribution of the product based on the specific needs of each individual. In primitive communism, personal property was limited to what today could be defined as the usufruct of a good, useful for the reproduction of the individual within a community, and there was no clear separation between personal and collective property, because the former was part of the latter. When class divided societies formed, personal property became true private property separate from that of the means of production, which in bourgeois society is protected and defended legally.

What will happen under communism?

By recomposing the individual in relation to society, now no longer divided into classes and fully in control of its productive forces, each individual as part of the community will appropriate the consumer goods such as food, clothing, housing, etc, that is necessary for their sustenance, within the framework of a centralized and rigorous “Species Plan”. We can be sure that no one will snatch food from under someone else’s teeth, not only because there will be abundance, but also because, as we have seen above, greed and avarice are in fact a historical product and not innate in human traits, as bourgeois morality propagates. It is therefore legitimate to think that everyone will care for both collective and personal property with the same carefulness, it being understood that the very word “property” will be relegated to the dusty dictionaries of what will be considered the “classist” phase of humanity.

We would also like to focus on another frequently debated topic, namely housing, which in a communist society cannot be separated from a more general urban plan aimed at bridging the gap between city and countryside and achieving a perfect balance between natural and social metabolism. From this perspective, housing will be distributed according to individual needs, although we cannot know at this stage exactly how residential areas will be divided up. What is certain is that everyone will have a roof over their head, with respect for their privacy and needs.

Finally, turning to the issue of transportation, it is reasonable to assume that the automobile, as a means of individual transportation, will be abolished or will be only used marginally, through the production and use of vehicles available to the entire community. Transportation, currently called ‘public transportation’, will connect the world in a dense network, and because production will be harmoniously regulated within the limits of human biological cycles, there will no longer be any rush to get to work within tight time frames. We will therefore achieve a fusion of personal time and work time, because every human activity, including what is now trivially called ‘hobbies’, will be functional to the organic activity of the species, eliminating the brutality of work as we know it under capitalism and recomposing intellectual and manual labour.