A Commoners' Manifesto 1: commons, not communism, part 2

The problem with communism, from a commons perspective

Contents

1. Overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF)

2. Historical materialism

3. Seizing the state

4. Growth and progress

5. The working class as the vehicle for change

6. Central planning

7. Marx’s later writing

8. Conclusion

This is one of a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title: The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate. I want to present commons as a decentralised alternative to both of those systems of centralised power. When I use the words capitalism and communism (unless I state otherwise) I mean what has been manifested in their names, rather than theory.

In the previous article I looked at what Marx got right, from a commons perspective. Commoners and Marxists share many values. Marx saw that capitalism needs to be replaced, not reformed, and he debunked capitalist myths about peasants moving to urban slums and factories voluntarily and the first capitalists becoming wealthy due to their hard work.

Here are the main points I’ll cover in this article:

1. Marx’s idea that the falling rate of profit inherent in capitalism will cause its collapse hasn’t materialised because the state steps in to ensure profits.

2. He saw capitalism (and therefore enclosure of commons) as a necessary historical stage on the way to communism.

3. However great ‘pure’ communism might be, violent overthrow of the state means that a Stalin or Mao will turn up eventually. Dictatorship of the proletariat can never be ‘temporary’.

4. Communism promotes growth and ‘development of productive forces’ that destroy the biosphere.

5. Marx’s vehicle for change was a proletariat that’s disappearing in the West, and has anyway rejected Marxism.

6. In his later years, Marx produced more commons-like work that could provide bridges between commoners and communists.

Overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF)

Marxists describe these two crisis tendencies within capitalism that will weaken it and make revolution more likely and easier to achieve.

TRPF: Competition encourages overinvestment. Firms pour capital into machinery – which is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than human labour – to outcompete rivals. All firms do the same, so the market becomes saturated, and profit per unit of capital tends to decline. Whether the overall rate of profit has fallen over time is debated, and factors such as cheaper inputs from new technology, profits from financial instruments rather than production, and global expansion opening new markets have prevented the collapse of capitalism so far. State intervention has also played a major role (see below).

Overproduction: I think Marx is on more solid ground here. It doesn’t actually mean that there are huge stocks of unsold goods – what it means in the real world is recession and unemployment. Capitalists are constantly trying to a) reduce their wage bill, and b) persuade the public to consume more. These two goals contradict each other. If wages fall, people have less money to buy what’s produced. Wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, and there’s a limit to how many luxury items the super-rich buy (how many private jets do you need?). So it’s invested, resulting in more production, which exacerbates the overproduction problem. Lenin criticised unions for raising wages and thus helping solve the overproduction problem and saving capitalism.

The initial response was to expand markets into poor countries, to help them ‘develop’ (become capitalist). But capitalism is the dominant system now, with few new markets to open.

Capitalists argue that the problem has been overcome in practice – but that’s only because the ‘solutions’ cause even more problems for capitalism.

First, the explosion in credit, along with reduced interest rates to encourage borrowing. Consumption rises, but inflation means that interest rates rise, credit is restricted, there’s a credit crunch, recession, bankruptcies wiping out debt – and the boom and bust merry-go-round continues.

Second, the state steps in to pump money into the economy and save capitalism. As well as benefits, public works, the military and various ‘new deals’, after every ‘bust’ in the boom and bust cycle, the state introduces quantitative easing, bank bailouts and various other corporate welfare programmes that we pay for. TRPF only happens in a truly free market (which we don’t have), which is why it doesn’t apply today.

Historical materialism

Marx’s view of history is often called ‘historical materialism’. Human history progressed from hunter-gatherer bands, through slave societies to feudalism, then capitalism, and will lead to socialism and communism. The transition between each stage is caused by contradictions and conflicts between different groups and forces in society. So for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was due to the conflict between feudal landlords and the growing merchant class. Medieval guilds had already attracted peasants to towns, where they could escape feudal ties, but feudal privileges and obligations still held back capitalist economic development. A struggle played out via the English Civil War, ‘Glorious Revolution’ and French Revolution. Capitalism ultimately outcompeted feudalism because of its superior forces of production, and as capitalists became wealthier and therefore more powerful than feudal lords, they were able to drive change through control of the state.

Marx didn’t say that these transitions were inevitable, but that they require political struggle. His views were formed using dialectics – a way of thinking about change via contradictions and tensions that push systems to transform into something new. Marx was influenced by Hegel, but dialectical thought can be traced back to ancient Greece and China. Reality is dynamic, not static. Simply put, a ‘thesis’ is contradicted by an ‘antithesis’, and the struggle between them results in a ‘synthesis’. So:

Thesis: industrial capitalism.
Antithesis: growth of the proletariat (working class).
Synthesis: socialism.

Marx saw capitalism as a necessary stage in human progress towards communism. Capitalists will develop industry and infrastructure that communists will inherit. ‘Progress’ here doesn’t mean ‘morally better’. It means supercession due to changing circumstances.

Now if capitalism is a necessary stage, and capitalism could only take off after peasants had been driven from common land into the new factories via the enclosures, then from Marx’s perspective it follows logically (doesn’t it?) that the enclosures were also necessary, so that there could be industrial development and the eradication of ‘backwardness’ to pave the way for socialism. With common land, peasants could eke a subsistence living and say ‘no thanks’ to urban slums, factories and cholera. This is the clearest indication for me that the Marxist approach is ultimately anti-commons – although Marx called enclosures ‘ruthless terrorism’ (but necessary ruthless terrorism?).

Worse conclusions can be drawn from historical materialism – that colonialism, slavery and genocide were also necessary steps on the way to communism. It can lead to Marxists writing things like: ‘Slavery, in its day, represented an enormous leap forward over barbarism. It was a necessary stage in the development of productive forces, culture and human society.’ God knows what they mean by ‘barbarism’ – maybe small farms and artisanal production. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that no slave has ever thought that slavery was ‘necessary’ or a ‘leap forward’.

Colonialism was necessary too, because Western countries brought capitalism to ‘backward’ countries like India, and moved them forward from their ‘vegetative state’(!). Never mind that if we consider ‘productive forces’, the Indian economy comprised around 25% of the global economy when the British arrived, and around 2% after they left. His focus on progress via the proletariat meant that he undervalued or left out colonised people, peasants, indigenous culture, unpaid workers (mainly women), the unemployed and nature. I’d say that’s a pretty important list of omissions. Silvia Federici says (in Caliban and the Witch) that Marx would never have suggested that capitalism was a step towards human liberation if he’d been a woman.

Capitalism in the Americas was born via slavery of Africans and genocide of the ‘barbarians’ who were already there. All acceptable though, because capitalism is a necessary stage. To be fair, Marx did criticise genocide and slavery, but stuck to his ‘stages’ narrative. Europeans had a mission to civilise the rest of the world (and to appropriate their resources in the process). Small farmers have to be driven off their land and into sweatshops – otherwise how are we going to reach the socialist promised land?

For me, this is the least impressive aspect of Marx’s writing. If capitalism is a necessary stage, then the whole world has to be subjected to the nightmare of power centralisation, extraction, enclosure and environmental destruction.

Lewis Mumford (in Technics and Civilisation; The City in History; and The Myth of the Machine) showed how we could have developed technologically without a capitalist phase. Early human societies developed agriculture, crafts, metallurgy, windmills, water mills and urban infrastructure without capitalism. There’s no reason that technological development wouldn’t have continued all the way to smartphones and AI. It might have happened more slowly, but surely that would have been a good thing – innovation for human needs in communities could have avoided the social upheaval, wealth concentration, corporate corruption and environmental destruction of capitalist development.

Technology developed the way it did because power became concentrated in the hands of capitalists, whose aim was profit maximisation, not human need. And this was certainly not inevitable. If the state hadn’t formed the first corporations (the Dutch and British East India Companies), and given them huge advantages ever since, the world would have developed in a very different way. Capitalism required a huge amount of state coercion to implement. The state introduced many ‘combination’ laws to punish workers, for example for coming together to demand better conditions, but not employers who came together to blacklist them for doing so. From the early days of capitalism, the state mobilised a strong police force and judiciary to stop workers providing charity for other workers, disseminating information and opinions, or generally getting uppity. It happened in the UK and Europe first, then in the colonies, with the same result. More in future articles, but meanwhile, here’s something to whet your appetite.

Seizing the state

Marx saw that states are always captured by the most powerful in society, and used to serve their interests. So in capitalism, states serve capitalists – not much to argue with there. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels were the first to identify the proletariat as a revolutionary class with a mission to capture the state.

I’ll look at what actually happened in Russia in 1917 in the next article, but is this a good plan? Even if defeating Western military power were realistic, the idea of violent overthrow alienates almost everyone. It requires violent men to seize power, after which it’s never redistributed. Violent men don’t give up power voluntarily. If a government is overthrown, there’ll be chaos, huge opposition and probably civil war. It’s never possible to get everyone on board, and there’s always the temptation to abandon principles to maintain power.

Talk of overthrowing power makes people feel unsafe – for good reason. In the West, as long as you don’t rock the boat, you’ll get the protection and some of the material benefits of a powerful empire. It’s been the same deal with empires throughout history. You don’t even have to swear loyalty nowadays; and most people aren’t loyal to the empire – it just keeps them safe, in an age when they can see what happens to regimes that don’t comply. These aren’t bad people – they just see compliance as a reasonable price to pay for protection. Most people don’t understand the damage being done to the biosphere, and even if they did, collapse seems a long way off, so not rocking the boat in exchange for bread and circuses seems like a good deal. Having said that, I do agree with Benjamin Franklin, that ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.

Even if successful, though, Marxists can only overthrow one state at a time, after which that country will be instantly competing against global capitalism and its military. But with commons, we start everywhere, and federate. Force may be required at some point to defend gains in communities, but not to seize centralised power. Marxists see economic and political democracy as something for the future, with change towards it led by a vanguard and introduced by a violent event. Commoners don’t see the need to wait for those things. It’s something we can do now – all of us. Marxists understand that reform (or at least enough reform) won’t be possible via a capitalist-captured state. Socialist state reforms are anyway fragile, because they only last until a different party wins power. But commons isn’t about reforming the state; it’s about building new institutions with protection from co-option baked in.

After the revolution, Marx envisioned a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, to consolidate workers’ control, dismantle capitalist institutions and ensure that vested interests – capitalist, aristocratic or external forces – can’t take power from the workers. Lenin makes clear the implications of this, in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (1918): ‘the revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process’.

But means dictate ends. We need participatory, decentralised, autonomous means to achieve those same ends. Hierarchical, uniform, centralised methods lead to a hierarchical, uniform, centralised society and crush spontaneity and innovation, when, really, we can have a plurality of models for the new commons society. A powerful state is not a vehicle for freedom – it’s what we need to be freed from.

Under dictatorships dissidents get locked up (or worse). Usually they’re just writing and spreading ideas – but Marxists are supposed to be materialists, so what’s the problem? Ideas aren’t going to change anything! Capitalism doesn’t usually jail people for their ideas (although that may be changing), because they know they have the economic base. In a commons society, anyone can write what they like, and I hope a commons world doesn’t have (even commons-owned) prisons.

Some influential Marxists rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rosa Luxemburg wrote (in The Russian Revolution, 1918): ‘The whole mass of the people must take part in economic and social life. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals … Corruption becomes inevitable’.

Council communism, which developed after WWI, rejected centralised state control and focused on workers’ councils as agents of change. This influenced the Autonomists (from the 1960s on). Many Marxists left the faith and moved towards anarchist solutions because of Stalin’s authoritarianism – like Murray Bookchin, who was influential in the Rojava experiment. This accelerated after the Soviet Union collapsed, although none of these were mass movements like Marxist-Leninist communism.

However, when Marx used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, he wasn’t thinking of an authoritarian regime. The word ‘dictatorship’ in the 19th century was closer to its older, Roman meaning: who holds power in society. He was thinking of the Paris Commune, where power was held – albeit briefly – by working people, via elected and recallable delegates.

So Lenin’s wasn’t the only interpretation of Marx. And Marx can be interpreted in commons-like ways, so I’m criticising authoritarian interpretations, rather than Marx himself.

Growth and progress

I’m assuming you know that we can’t have perpetual economic growth on a finite planet without destroying the biosphere – but if you don’t, I’ll cover it in a future article, and you can debate me. But in this article, I’m looking at Marx’s position on growth and the concept of ‘progress’, assuming and understanding that GDP growth can’t be decoupled from material and energy use.

Marx’s historical materialism requires a capitalist phase en route to socialism, but capitalism has a ‘growth imperative’: it has to keep growing, like a cancer, destroying its host – the biosphere of the only planet we know for sure has one. In fact, Marx was the first to see that perpetual growth is systemic and inevitable in capitalism, and not just due to policy decisions.

In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx lays out his General Formula of Capital: M—C—M‘. Money (M) is invested in the production of commodities (C) in order to make more money (M’). The problem is that little ‘ after the second M. Each capitalist has to reinvest profits, increase productivity, adopt labour-saving machinery and expand markets. If they don’t, they’ll be outcompeted. So growth isn’t optional under capitalism – it can’t be stabilised. Ecologists predicted that this would result in extensive damage to the biosphere, which is exactly what’s happening.

Commons doesn’t have this growth imperative, so a commons economy can exist in harmony with nature.

Marx was as fond of the quest for growth as any capitalist. He believed that socialism will come via industrialisation and the growth of the proletariat, and that peasants should be removed from their land to introduce large-scale, mechanised farming, and to bring ‘wastelands’ into production. Communism requires growth to ‘develop productive forces’ and abolish poverty. The contradictions of capitalism will be removed, making growth and industrialisation easier. Industrial development is the goal, not a problem, and communism will accelerate it.

He went further: ‘Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man’ (Capital, Vol. III, Ch. 48), and so did Engels: under communism, ‘man ... for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature’ (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Ch. 3).

We can only lose a wrestling match with nature, even if we think we’re winning. What would ‘winning’ against nature look like? It sounds anachronistic now, but it’s still the aim of many Marxists. Talk of ‘savages’ and ‘conquering nature’ unsurprisingly generates anti-Marxist sentiment in indigenous cultures – ‘Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry –maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways’.

Marx prioritised human emancipation over environmental protection, but he did (a little incoherently) hint that perpetual growth will destroy the metabolism between humans and nature, even in his earlier writing: ‘the forest, the mineral deposits, the sources of water, the very forces of nature, are treated as mere instruments of production … with no concern for their renewal.’ (Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 13), although ecology wasn’t a well-developed science in his day. Modern Marxists don’t have that excuse, and indeed, some (e.g. John Bellamy Foster) have combined Marx and ecology to argue that perpetual growth is incompatible with finite natural systems. Others, (e.g. Aaron Bastani, Fully-automated Luxury Communism) promote techno-optimism and perpetual growth, without addressing the biosphere (or at least not sufficiently). As with Marx, I applaud Bastani’s critique of capitalism, but I’m not sure he’d support commons.

I’m not anti-technology (although I am a Luddite) – I just don’t want capitalist billionaires to own and control it. I want it to be under democratic control –- but under communism, it won’t be under democratic control any more than it is in capitalism, and what we’ll get is nuclear weapons and war in space.

The working class as the vehicle for change

Workers will bring about revolutionary change, according to Marxists. Workers don’t own productive assets (businesses, factories, land, stocks etc.), but have to work for a wage to put food on the table. It’s a bit fuzzy because many doctors and lawyers have to work to eat, but you’d hardly call them working class (I heard recently that a good way to work out if you’re working class is whether you shower before or after work). There are people who make their money a) from profits, dividends, capital gains, interest and rent (who Marx called the bourgeoisie); b) by working for those people (the proletariat); or c) by facilitating the above (the middle class). There are far more of the proletariat than the other two groups globally, and even in wealthier countries, so if they organise, they’re unstoppable, according to Marxists.

Are they right? Well, to organise, they’d have to be in close contact – in factories, mines, foundries, docks, etc. But in the West at least, those institutions are disappearing. Employment in manufacturing in the UK fell from 8.6 million in 1970 to 3 million in 2016, and there are fewer than 300 coal miners, compared to 247,000 in 1976 and 1.2 million in 1920. And revolution only happens when people are desperate, but social safety nets in the West, however flimsy, prevent the kind of extreme situations that we see in many parts of the Global South, where living and working conditions are such that working-class uprisings are more likely, but still fragmented, tied to specific industries or demographic groups, and often including youth movements or urban protest cultures, not just traditional organised labour.

Unions are stronger in the Global South too (union membership is less than 20% of the population in most Western countries), but unions are generally more concerned with claiming a bigger slice of the capitalist pie than with baking a new pie. But even if workers’ uprisings happen in the Global South, they’re still faced with the same problems around seizing the state and authoritarianism.

My father was a working-class Tory who I’m guessing would be a Reform supporter now if he were alive. He hated Marxism – which is why I was drawn to it (read into that what you like). I read everything I could, but slowly (and unwillingly) came to believe exactly what he said about Marx – that his critique of capitalism was valid, but his proposed solutions were disastrous.

The proletariat Marx described was mainly in Europe and North America, and is now shrinking in size and influence due to the loss of traditional working-class employment, and the rise of the gig economy, precariat, AI, driverless vehicles, robots and self-service checkouts. The UK economy is now largely a casino, and hardly about production at all. And it’s difficult to generate working-class solidarity when many in the working-class don’t even want to be in it. If they see ways out (education and starting a business are the most likely), they take them. Whose childhood ambition is working in a factory all day, every day? Not yours, and not most people’s.

Anyone who thinks the working class in the West are going to rise up and throw off their chains doesn’t know the working class. This article in The Communist, for example, covers a pop-culture exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery exploring the importance of revolutionary ideas, as if that will get the working-class fired up. In the West, the working-class is generally turned off by Marxist ideas. For every working-class Marxist (based on membership of Marxist parties), there are hundreds if not thousands of Reform supporters. They’re much more likely to be divided by football than united by socialism. Talk of communist revolution is more likely to divide the working class than unite it against capitalism.

Academics’ claims that Marx was writing for workers don’t wash with me. His ideas are very difficult to grasp for non-academics. Driving or laying bricks all day, then reading Marx all evening only really exists in the fantasies of Marxists. Marxist critiques could make a comeback and replace empty, dishonest right-wing faux opposition to ‘the establishment’ – the working-class still believe that wages are too low, prices are too high, the system is rigged in favour of the rich, and corporations are corrupt. But I don’t see any fertile ground for Marxist solutions.

The commons has to work for working people of course, and we’re going to need working-class franchisees, employees and customers – but we’ll get them by being useful, not lecturing. The class of activists to get us to that point is irrelevant. It’s not just the proletariat who are the vehicle for change. There’s a role for the unemployed, homemakers, small farmers, small business owners, sole traders, co-op members, students, retired people, artists, hippies and the middle class. Everyone can be an active member of the commons, as a customer, employee or investor.

Overthrow of the plutocracy isn’t possible, not just because they’re too strong, but also because the working class are wannabee middle class, the middle class are wannabee plutocrats, and ‘radical’ students are headed for careers in ESG. No, the only way to challenge plutocracy is to prevent extraction, and therefore the source of their power. And the only way I can see to do that is by building the commons.

Marxists label anti-capitalists who don’t see workers’ revolution as the route to change ‘pessimists’. But it’s not pessimism. It’s realism.

Central planning

One more criticism of the Marxist approach – that a planned economy just doesn’t work. Information about the economy – preferences, local conditions, needs, skills etc.– is spread across millions of people. Planners can never gather or process all of it. Some information, such as practical know-how, can’t be collected at all. And things are always changing – central planners can’t keep up. A five-year plan may be completely out of date in a couple of years, especially in a digital world.

This argument comes from both the right (Hayek, Mises), left (E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich) and (most) anarchists. It’s a huge topic, that I’ll cover in a later chapter, about commons and markets.

Marx’s later writing

There was a big difference between the ideas in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s later work, after 1870 until his death in 1883, in which he comes across (to me at least) as more of a commoner than a communist. Three books were brought to my attention that looked at Marx’s later writings: 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.

Anderson looks at his previously unpublished works, about India, Indonesia, China, Algeria, and other regions, in which he was less Eurocentric and more critical of colonialism, rather than seeing it as removing ‘backwardness’. He also moved away from a single development path, from feudalism to socialism via capitalism, and focused on different social formations, including communal ownership and indigenous communities, without violent overthrow of the state.

He studied collective landholding (the mir system) in Russia, and said (in a letter to Vera Zasulich) that Russia did not 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. The 1882 preface to The Communist Manifesto explicitly states: ‘If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.’ This is where commoners might build bridges with Marxists.

In his Notes on the Critique of Political Economy and Ethnological Notebooks (studying soil, agriculture, and non-Western societies), he developed ideas on the ‘metabolic rift’ – capitalism’s disruption of natural cycles. He emphasises environmental limits, sustainability, and a critique of growth/productivism.

Marx was heavily influenced by the Paris Commune, and his ultimate vision was of a society without central government and professional politicians, where decisions are made democratically in communities, in workplace assemblies (factories and farms) and local councils, which send delegates to councils covering wider areas. Again, no argument from me – that’s exactly what I’d like to see the commons movement achieve.

Some Marx-inspired movements developed in the Global South that fit well with commons thinking – like the Zapatista movement in Mexico, or the Ujamaa system in Tanzania (later destroyed by the state).

But however much I agree with Marx in his later years, in reality, actual communist revolutions have involved seizure of state power, centralised party control, rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation. His later writing was less well-known, and contradicted the ‘scientific socialism’ narrative, so was often sidelined.

In China and Vietnam after their revolutions, there were strong peasant bases, village-level organisation and local autonomy, but that was soon overridden by state control. With communism you eventually get a Stalin; with capitalism you eventually get a Trump. In a commons world, those kinds of people would be kept well away from power.

Conclusion

I’m arguing against communism as it’s been implemented in the real world, based on Marx’s earlier work, rather than against Marx himself. Blaming Marx for Stalinism is like blaming Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition. Capitalism suppresses commons via extraction, communism via forced collectivisation and crushing civil society. Let’s not do it again. Communists arguing that the Soviet Union ‘wasn’t real communism’ makes no more sense than capitalists arguing that the current system isn’t real capitalism. It’s what happens in the real world that matters, rather than theory.

Marx’s accumulated wisdom in later years led him to be much more favourable to growing the commons in the cracks in capitalism than to rousing the working-class to seize the state. Libertarian Marxism was a strand of Marxism that developed during Marx’s life and split Marxists after his death. Instead of state ownership, workplaces would be run by workers themselves, and local decisions made democratically in assemblies. There would be no political elite ruling on behalf of workers. This tension led to 20^th century developments like council communism and later, autonomism. There seems to be a blurred line between these libertarian threads of Marxism and anarchism / commons (more in the next article).

Conditions might change soon to increase desperation and make communist revolution more likely – especially in the Global South, but even in wealthier countries as temperature rises accelerate and wars spread, causing resource shortages, price increases, civil unrest and mass migration. I’m hoping that commons are in place and spreading by that time, staving off violent uprisings that could make the situation worse, not better.

My aim with these articles is not to persuade diehard Marxists (if you’ve ever debated one, you’ll know why). I’m writing for anti-capitalists who recognise the impotence of the electoral system, and might be dabbling with communism. I’d like to steer that revolutionary energy towards the commons.

Marxists have a programme. Commons isn’t part of it, and tends to get closed down by Marxists in power. I’ve been advised to not alienate Marxists, and I don’t think I will alienate libertarian Marxists. But serious, traditional Marxists won’t help build commons. They want working-class revolt, and my message to them is, ultimately: ‘are you kidding?’.

Centralised power itself is the problem, and has been throughout history. As real-world communism doesn’t decentralise power, we end up with just another form of authoritarianism – as the 20^th century demonstrated so clearly. The vanguard party becomes the new elite, and elites don’t give up their power. A centralised, hierarchical route to a decentralised, non-hierarchical society isn’t going to work. We have to build a system in which those who desire power most are least likely to get it. That system is commons.

In the next article, I’ll look at how the Bolsheviks won by the skin of their teeth, and how things could have gone very differently in the 20^th century if they hadn’t.

And by the way, if you are one of those anti-capitalists trying to work out the best way to contribute to replacing it, do contact to discuss how you might help do it via the commons.