Growing the Commons is a team with diverse interests and priorities, including land, food, housing, community, tech, knowledge, governance and finance.
I’ve changed the title of the series / book, from 'The Commoners’ Manifesto: Why Marx Was Wrong', to 'The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism'.
After debating this with several people, I saw that I was being too harsh on old Karl.
The new title does the same job (shows that anti-capitalism doesn’t have to mean communism), without disrespecting Marx.
In his later writings, Marx moved away from the idea that societies have to go through a capitalist phase to achieve socialism. He studied indigenous communities and collective landholding (the mir system) in Russia, and said that Russia didn’t necessarily have to pass through full capitalist development, and that existing communal structures could potentially become a starting point for socialism, if linked to broader revolutionary change.
He saw that societies could use pre-existing communal or collective institutions as a foundation for socialism.
The problem for the West is that there are very few pre-existing communal or collective institutions, and community has been devastated. We have to rebuild it.
Also, Marx never explicitly said that seizing the state was unnecessary. In fact, in most of his canonical works, the seizure of state power is central to the transition from capitalism to socialism. His later writings just opened the possibility that socialism could arise in specific contexts (like Russia) through existing communal structures—but he didn’t negate the revolutionary role of the state entirely.
So his followers, for example Lenin, argued that the proletariat and peasantry could seize state power even in a largely agrarian society like Russia. He claimed that the existing communal and peasant structures (like the mir / village communes) could be used as building blocks for a socialist economy.
But we know where that led – which is what I’m arguing. I might well have agreed with Marx in his later years, but wherever Marxism has been implemented, it’s ended in authoritarianism.
With communism you eventually get Stalin; with capitalism you eventually get Trump. What a choice. In a commons world, people like that can’t get power.
If you’re a true Marxist, then accept that his accumulated wisdom in later years led him to be much more favourable to growing the commons in the cracks in capitalism than to seizing the state.
An economics professor has brought to my attention 3 books that describe the change in Marx’s views in later life:
'Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies' and 'The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads' by Kevin B. Anderson
and
'Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism' by Kohei Saito
and said: ‘I think that in considering mesoamerican, Incan and Indian commons was an abandonment of violence... he clearly did not see the proletarian organization as an organized force to overthrow the state by the end of his life... Anderson's book and Saito's are both references for this’
- So I’m very interested in having a look at what those authors are saying, and will change future articles accordingly. I’d be happy to talk with Marxists about Marx’s later views being much closer to building commons than violent overthrow of the state.
Got this via email (NB please post in the comments rather than email):
‘I'm not sure it would be sensible to use that as your title. The idea 'Marx was wrong' may attract a certain demographic, and not the one you're looking for. I think it would be fair to say Marxism is incomplete, and yes certainly the Bolsheviks kinda screwed over the anarchists there. But why drag up Marx to push him down? Especially as this will alienate a lot of the people we hope to reach and even involve. In the Bristol Commons we are trying to be very mindful of class dynamics, and wanting to involve more working class people. (Working Class with an expanded and revised definition for 21st century contexts) Anyway it would be a shame to put off so many people who could be comrades. There are lots of people who would jump on the Marx was wrong train and may co-opt the commons movement for their own nostalgic interpretation. It's not about going back to a better way of doing things before industrial capitalism, it's about bringing forward those practices that we have lost touch with that bring both meaning and remedy to our modern crisis.’
My response:
This series of articles, and the book, will contain my opinions (not the position of GtC), which I want to put out there, but which I’ll change if presented with persuasive arguments / evidence.
I’ll talk more about this in the next article.
As I said to Tim, above (or below, depending on where this comment lands), Marx wanted to seize the state, and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat (albeit temporarily), which is what the Bolsheviks did, so of course they were acting on the writings of Marx. They called themselves Marxists, and so did Lenin.
I want to dissuade anti-capitalists from going that route. The subtitle could have been something anti-corporate or anti-capitalist, but that’s a given. I’m writing for anti-capitalists. So I want to show that commons is neither capitalist nor communist. I want to present commons as a decentralised alternative to both of those centralised systems.
Why do you associate Marxism with the working-class btw? For every working-class marxist (based on votes for and membership of Marxist parties), there are tens of thousands of Reform supporters.
Imo, there’s as much if not more danger to the commons from Marxists than from capitalists. To build and maintain commons, we need to take power from capitalists and make sure Marxists don’t get it – which would be disastrous for commons.
I’ll present these arguments in more detail in the articles.
I think the biggest risk to commons is that anti-capitalists will go the statist route not the commons route (and they are polar opposites).
Martin Luther King: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
In respect of your 5th article on the "growth imperative", it is important to recognise the fallacy of "green growth", which has been adopted by most political organisations. Degrowth is the only way we can proceed, and it will happen whether we plan for it or not.
The European Environmental Bureau has produced a fantastic "Decoupling Debunked" report which contains copious evidence supporting the degrowth position:
Absolutely (although not sure about the 'degrowth' label - I think it might confuse a lot of people, who think it might bring poverty). Commons doesn't have a growth imperative, so the bigger it grows, the less the economy is forced to grow - without having to explain degrowth / steady-state at all. That decoupling debunked report is great.
Exactly - no enclosures (all kinds, all eras), no workers for factories, plantations, distribution or retail, no capitalism.
As an aside, I know that capitalists will try to foist other theories of value on us - ie the value of something is due to its demand. If no-one wants it, it has no value, however many hours of labour went into it. But that doesn't explain where value comes from in the first place. Supply and demand is just a given, not a source of value (it's a bit like saying that thermometers are the source of temperatures). However, if capitalists manage to automate absolutely everything and employ no humans, just robots, driverless vehicles and AI, however long it takes, what happens to LTV then?
Just covering this now in the next article. There was a bit more nuance in later life, and he did write that in some countries revolution might not be necessary. and also that the Russian 'mir' system (community-owned land) and direct worker ownership might be a way to transition to communism. But the 'evolution' thing was an interpretation by Eduard Bernstein, that caused a split between Marxists, with most supporting revolution.
Dave this is a fantastic piece and I look forward to the 24 articles. I wanted to just offer a fact check on one statement that I think will be key to reducing pushback/unproductive arguments in the comments in regards to Marx (from Marxists) (I don't consider myself a Marxist btw):
"The Russian Revolution in 1917 almost produced a decentralised alternative to capitalism, but Bolsheviks implementing the ideas of Karl Marx prevented it."
From Perplexity (an AI search/research engine): This claim is partially true but significantly oversimplified, and the attribution to Marx specifically is contested.
What's Accurate
There genuinely were decentralized, worker-controlled alternatives emerging in Russia in 1917 that the Bolsheviks suppressed:
Factory committees had sprung up across Russian industry in 1917, with workers directly managing production. The Bolsheviks initially tolerated them, then systematically subordinated them to state control after taking power.
The Soviets (workers' councils) were genuinely democratic organs of working-class self-organization — but Lenin progressively drained them of real power after 1917, concentrating authority in the party.
The anarchist and left-SR movements — represented most forcefully by figures like Nestor Makhno in Ukraine — were building genuinely decentralized alternatives before being militarily crushed by the Red Army between 1919–1921.
The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 — a mutiny by the same sailors who had been heroes of the revolution — explicitly demanded re-empowerment of soviets, free speech, and an end to Bolshevik party dictatorship. The Red Army crushed it on Lenin's orders.
Where It Gets More Complicated
The attribution to Marx is where the claim weakens considerably:
Marx's own writings are genuinely ambiguous on centralization vs. decentralization. His analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871 praised it explicitly as a decentralized, self-governing workers' democracy — the opposite of what the Bolsheviks built.
Lenin's model drew more heavily on his own pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (1902) — which argued for a centralized vanguard party of professional revolutionaries — than on Marx directly. Many Marxist scholars argue Leninism was a significant departure from, not an application of, Marx.
Anarchists like Bakunin had warned before Marx died that Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat" would become dictatorship over the proletariat — and that the state would not wither away as Marx predicted.
Rosa Luxemburg — herself a Marxist — wrote her famous critique of Bolshevism in 1918, warning that suppressing democratic soviets would strangle the revolution from within.
The More Accurate Framing
The Bolsheviks suppressing decentralized alternatives is well-documented. But pinning it on "implementing the ideas of Karl Marx" is contested — many Marxists, democratic socialists, council communists, and libertarian socialists would argue the Bolsheviks betrayed Marx's vision rather than fulfilled it. The responsibility lies more specifically with Leninism and Bolshevik party ideology than with Marx's body of work as a whole.
A more defensible version of the sentence would be:
The Russian Revolution in 1917 almost produced a decentralized alternative to capitalism, but the Bolsheviks — implementing Lenin's model of vanguard party dictatorship rather than the self-governing workers' democracy that Marx's analysis of the Paris Commune had envisioned — suppressed the factory committees, soviets, and anarchist movements that were building it from below.
(Not sure if I’m debating with you or AI though :))
I’ll talk more about this in the relevant articles, and I’m more than happy to debate with Marxists. (I’m going to talk more about Bakunin.)
But Marx wanted to seize the state, and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat (albeit temporarily), which is what the Bolsheviks did, so of course they were acting on the writings of Marx. They called themselves Marxists.
Marx wanted the state to eventually wither away, but Bakunin told him that wouldn’t happen (which seems obvious to me).
Lenin was also a Marxist, but with his own interpretation. But no Marx, no Lenin.
It’s not about what Marx wanted, but where his ideas, if implemented, would lead. Bakunin was right. I want to dissuade anti-capitalists from going that route.
This is a great reply, and I think your counter is solid. Just wanted to share some of the counter arguments that might arise that could be worth addressing in your next piece (Why Marx was Wrong). Indeed, the counter-arguments were provided by Perplexity (an AI search engine that uses citations for its synthesis).
I'm still getting to grips with how much Stalin and Mao were ever really Marxists. Their histories of brutality, suppression and authoritarianism seem so blatantly anti-communist and anti-socialist (true worker democracy) it's hard to believe they really believed what they preached and weren't just using Marxist ideas as marketing propaganda, similar to how imperial capitalism uses propaganda around freedom and democracy to obscure the violence within actually existing capitalism (coups, sanctions, wars, etc). The Nazis likewise were 'national socialists' but killed actual socialists and communists when taking power.
How much of what Stalin did was cynical appropriation versus real belief? Of course his mindset was also poisoned by nationalism, materialism, imperial competition etc.
Russell Means has a great critique of Marxism on that note:
Great – that’s exactly what I wanted to happen, thanks.
This is my main argument – that however great ‘pure’ communism or socialism might be, if they require violent overthrow of the state, then Stalins or Maos will turn up; or actually, if they require the state at all (run by people who’ve managed to climb to the top of the state greasy pole, and corrupted by people who’ve managed to climb to the top of the corporate greasy pole, then it has no chance of producing a better world (I’m not including libertarian socialism in that – that’s what anarchism is).
I’ve changed the title of the series / book, from 'The Commoners’ Manifesto: Why Marx Was Wrong', to 'The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism'.
After debating this with several people, I saw that I was being too harsh on old Karl.
The new title does the same job (shows that anti-capitalism doesn’t have to mean communism), without disrespecting Marx.
In his later writings, Marx moved away from the idea that societies have to go through a capitalist phase to achieve socialism. He studied indigenous communities and collective landholding (the mir system) in Russia, and said that Russia didn’t necessarily have to pass through full capitalist development, and that existing communal structures could potentially become a starting point for socialism, if linked to broader revolutionary change.
He saw that societies could use pre-existing communal or collective institutions as a foundation for socialism.
The problem for the West is that there are very few pre-existing communal or collective institutions, and community has been devastated. We have to rebuild it.
Also, Marx never explicitly said that seizing the state was unnecessary. In fact, in most of his canonical works, the seizure of state power is central to the transition from capitalism to socialism. His later writings just opened the possibility that socialism could arise in specific contexts (like Russia) through existing communal structures—but he didn’t negate the revolutionary role of the state entirely.
So his followers, for example Lenin, argued that the proletariat and peasantry could seize state power even in a largely agrarian society like Russia. He claimed that the existing communal and peasant structures (like the mir / village communes) could be used as building blocks for a socialist economy.
But we know where that led – which is what I’m arguing. I might well have agreed with Marx in his later years, but wherever Marxism has been implemented, it’s ended in authoritarianism.
With communism you eventually get Stalin; with capitalism you eventually get Trump. What a choice. In a commons world, people like that can’t get power.
If you’re a true Marxist, then accept that his accumulated wisdom in later years led him to be much more favourable to growing the commons in the cracks in capitalism than to seizing the state.
An economics professor has brought to my attention 3 books that describe the change in Marx’s views in later life:
'Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies' and 'The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads' by Kevin B. Anderson
and
'Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism' by Kohei Saito
and said: ‘I think that in considering mesoamerican, Incan and Indian commons was an abandonment of violence... he clearly did not see the proletarian organization as an organized force to overthrow the state by the end of his life... Anderson's book and Saito's are both references for this’
- So I’m very interested in having a look at what those authors are saying, and will change future articles accordingly. I’d be happy to talk with Marxists about Marx’s later views being much closer to building commons than violent overthrow of the state.
Perhaps "The Commoners' Manifesto: An Alternative to Capitalism and Communism"? "Neither Capitalism Nor Communism" feels like in dilemma or got stuck.
thanks - I feel that subtle changes like this can be left to the publisher, but isn't too much of a problem for blog articles.
Got this via email (NB please post in the comments rather than email):
‘I'm not sure it would be sensible to use that as your title. The idea 'Marx was wrong' may attract a certain demographic, and not the one you're looking for. I think it would be fair to say Marxism is incomplete, and yes certainly the Bolsheviks kinda screwed over the anarchists there. But why drag up Marx to push him down? Especially as this will alienate a lot of the people we hope to reach and even involve. In the Bristol Commons we are trying to be very mindful of class dynamics, and wanting to involve more working class people. (Working Class with an expanded and revised definition for 21st century contexts) Anyway it would be a shame to put off so many people who could be comrades. There are lots of people who would jump on the Marx was wrong train and may co-opt the commons movement for their own nostalgic interpretation. It's not about going back to a better way of doing things before industrial capitalism, it's about bringing forward those practices that we have lost touch with that bring both meaning and remedy to our modern crisis.’
My response:
This series of articles, and the book, will contain my opinions (not the position of GtC), which I want to put out there, but which I’ll change if presented with persuasive arguments / evidence.
I’ll talk more about this in the next article.
As I said to Tim, above (or below, depending on where this comment lands), Marx wanted to seize the state, and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat (albeit temporarily), which is what the Bolsheviks did, so of course they were acting on the writings of Marx. They called themselves Marxists, and so did Lenin.
I want to dissuade anti-capitalists from going that route. The subtitle could have been something anti-corporate or anti-capitalist, but that’s a given. I’m writing for anti-capitalists. So I want to show that commons is neither capitalist nor communist. I want to present commons as a decentralised alternative to both of those centralised systems.
Why do you associate Marxism with the working-class btw? For every working-class marxist (based on votes for and membership of Marxist parties), there are tens of thousands of Reform supporters.
Imo, there’s as much if not more danger to the commons from Marxists than from capitalists. To build and maintain commons, we need to take power from capitalists and make sure Marxists don’t get it – which would be disastrous for commons.
I’ll present these arguments in more detail in the articles.
I think the biggest risk to commons is that anti-capitalists will go the statist route not the commons route (and they are polar opposites).
Martin Luther King: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
Massive respect Dave, this is so well put together. A powerhouse of a document, a beautiful foundation for the work to come. You really nailed it!
In respect of your 5th article on the "growth imperative", it is important to recognise the fallacy of "green growth", which has been adopted by most political organisations. Degrowth is the only way we can proceed, and it will happen whether we plan for it or not.
The European Environmental Bureau has produced a fantastic "Decoupling Debunked" report which contains copious evidence supporting the degrowth position:
https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf
Absolutely (although not sure about the 'degrowth' label - I think it might confuse a lot of people, who think it might bring poverty). Commons doesn't have a growth imperative, so the bigger it grows, the less the economy is forced to grow - without having to explain degrowth / steady-state at all. That decoupling debunked report is great.
Thank you for this!
About what Marx left out... you might enjoy this comic.
https://futurenatures.org/comic-little-elle-in-slumberland/
Exactly - no enclosures (all kinds, all eras), no workers for factories, plantations, distribution or retail, no capitalism.
As an aside, I know that capitalists will try to foist other theories of value on us - ie the value of something is due to its demand. If no-one wants it, it has no value, however many hours of labour went into it. But that doesn't explain where value comes from in the first place. Supply and demand is just a given, not a source of value (it's a bit like saying that thermometers are the source of temperatures). However, if capitalists manage to automate absolutely everything and employ no humans, just robots, driverless vehicles and AI, however long it takes, what happens to LTV then?
I have never read Marx, but was told by my history teacher that late Marx did not promote revolution (as done by Bolsheviks) but evolution.
Just covering this now in the next article. There was a bit more nuance in later life, and he did write that in some countries revolution might not be necessary. and also that the Russian 'mir' system (community-owned land) and direct worker ownership might be a way to transition to communism. But the 'evolution' thing was an interpretation by Eduard Bernstein, that caused a split between Marxists, with most supporting revolution.
Dave this is a fantastic piece and I look forward to the 24 articles. I wanted to just offer a fact check on one statement that I think will be key to reducing pushback/unproductive arguments in the comments in regards to Marx (from Marxists) (I don't consider myself a Marxist btw):
"The Russian Revolution in 1917 almost produced a decentralised alternative to capitalism, but Bolsheviks implementing the ideas of Karl Marx prevented it."
From Perplexity (an AI search/research engine): This claim is partially true but significantly oversimplified, and the attribution to Marx specifically is contested.
What's Accurate
There genuinely were decentralized, worker-controlled alternatives emerging in Russia in 1917 that the Bolsheviks suppressed:
Factory committees had sprung up across Russian industry in 1917, with workers directly managing production. The Bolsheviks initially tolerated them, then systematically subordinated them to state control after taking power.
The Soviets (workers' councils) were genuinely democratic organs of working-class self-organization — but Lenin progressively drained them of real power after 1917, concentrating authority in the party.
The anarchist and left-SR movements — represented most forcefully by figures like Nestor Makhno in Ukraine — were building genuinely decentralized alternatives before being militarily crushed by the Red Army between 1919–1921.
The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 — a mutiny by the same sailors who had been heroes of the revolution — explicitly demanded re-empowerment of soviets, free speech, and an end to Bolshevik party dictatorship. The Red Army crushed it on Lenin's orders.
Where It Gets More Complicated
The attribution to Marx is where the claim weakens considerably:
Marx's own writings are genuinely ambiguous on centralization vs. decentralization. His analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871 praised it explicitly as a decentralized, self-governing workers' democracy — the opposite of what the Bolsheviks built.
Lenin's model drew more heavily on his own pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (1902) — which argued for a centralized vanguard party of professional revolutionaries — than on Marx directly. Many Marxist scholars argue Leninism was a significant departure from, not an application of, Marx.
Anarchists like Bakunin had warned before Marx died that Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat" would become dictatorship over the proletariat — and that the state would not wither away as Marx predicted.
Rosa Luxemburg — herself a Marxist — wrote her famous critique of Bolshevism in 1918, warning that suppressing democratic soviets would strangle the revolution from within.
The More Accurate Framing
The Bolsheviks suppressing decentralized alternatives is well-documented. But pinning it on "implementing the ideas of Karl Marx" is contested — many Marxists, democratic socialists, council communists, and libertarian socialists would argue the Bolsheviks betrayed Marx's vision rather than fulfilled it. The responsibility lies more specifically with Leninism and Bolshevik party ideology than with Marx's body of work as a whole.
A more defensible version of the sentence would be:
The Russian Revolution in 1917 almost produced a decentralized alternative to capitalism, but the Bolsheviks — implementing Lenin's model of vanguard party dictatorship rather than the self-governing workers' democracy that Marx's analysis of the Paris Commune had envisioned — suppressed the factory committees, soviets, and anarchist movements that were building it from below.
Tim, thanks.
(Not sure if I’m debating with you or AI though :))
I’ll talk more about this in the relevant articles, and I’m more than happy to debate with Marxists. (I’m going to talk more about Bakunin.)
But Marx wanted to seize the state, and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat (albeit temporarily), which is what the Bolsheviks did, so of course they were acting on the writings of Marx. They called themselves Marxists.
Marx wanted the state to eventually wither away, but Bakunin told him that wouldn’t happen (which seems obvious to me).
Lenin was also a Marxist, but with his own interpretation. But no Marx, no Lenin.
It’s not about what Marx wanted, but where his ideas, if implemented, would lead. Bakunin was right. I want to dissuade anti-capitalists from going that route.
This is a great reply, and I think your counter is solid. Just wanted to share some of the counter arguments that might arise that could be worth addressing in your next piece (Why Marx was Wrong). Indeed, the counter-arguments were provided by Perplexity (an AI search engine that uses citations for its synthesis).
I'm still getting to grips with how much Stalin and Mao were ever really Marxists. Their histories of brutality, suppression and authoritarianism seem so blatantly anti-communist and anti-socialist (true worker democracy) it's hard to believe they really believed what they preached and weren't just using Marxist ideas as marketing propaganda, similar to how imperial capitalism uses propaganda around freedom and democracy to obscure the violence within actually existing capitalism (coups, sanctions, wars, etc). The Nazis likewise were 'national socialists' but killed actual socialists and communists when taking power.
How much of what Stalin did was cynical appropriation versus real belief? Of course his mindset was also poisoned by nationalism, materialism, imperial competition etc.
Russell Means has a great critique of Marxism on that note:
https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/
Great – that’s exactly what I wanted to happen, thanks.
This is my main argument – that however great ‘pure’ communism or socialism might be, if they require violent overthrow of the state, then Stalins or Maos will turn up; or actually, if they require the state at all (run by people who’ve managed to climb to the top of the state greasy pole, and corrupted by people who’ve managed to climb to the top of the corporate greasy pole, then it has no chance of producing a better world (I’m not including libertarian socialism in that – that’s what anarchism is).
Thanks for the link - I'll have a look