Commons, not communism, part 1: what Marx got right, from a commons perspective

This is the first in 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. I encourage comments, including disagreement and debate. I’ll change my mind if presented with good arguments. It can only make the book better.

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My aim overall is to persuade anti-capitalists (and in this and future articles, when I use the word capitalism, I mean the actually existing system) that commons is the way to replace it, and my aim in this series is to dissuade the undecided from taking the Marxist route. I want to show that commons is neither capitalist nor communist, and to present it as a decentralised alternative to both of those centralised systems.

A movement that calls itself somebody’s name with an ‘-ism’ added usually means semi-religious devotion (‘it’s true because it says so in this book’), dogma and division. Commons rejects unjustified authority, has thousands of approaches and hundreds of influential writers, not one guru (although Proudhon and Kropotkin come close, and more recently, Elinor Ostrom, David Graeber, David Bollier, and for me personally, Kevin Carson). Marx’s closest colleague Engels, quoted Marx as saying “I myself am not a Marxist”, in opposition to those misrepresenting him and turning his work into fixed doctrine. It’s less about Marx himself than it is about the implementation of his ideas. He didn’t argue for a one-party state, secret police or gulags – although I would argue that wherever his ideas have been implemented at the state level, it consistently delivered a centralised and authoritarian system.

Marxism captured most of the anti-capitalist left in the 20^th century, squeezing out alternatives that could actually have been successful, and now here we are with capitalism stronger than ever (although causing ecological collapse, so it won’t last).

He certainly did something right to have such a loyal following so long after his death. He told a compelling story about how capitalism developed, how it enriches a few on the backs of most of us, and gives power to a tiny, ruthless elite, but also about how it contains the seeds of its own destruction, if we roll up our sleeves and make it happen.

Marx’s mature vision of communism, after a (temporary) ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is that the state will wither away because it’s not required any more – communities can organise themselves to provide everything they need, including governance. Production, via a ‘free association of producers’, is for use rather than profit. Commons, in other words. So you might think that commoners and Marxists would be natural allies. But ‘temporary’ dictatorship is of course never temporary. More on that in the next article (and also more on Marx’s shift to a more commons-like approach in his later years), but first, let’s praise Marx where it’s due.

Values

Commoners and Marxists share many values – around what success looks like, what constitutes a good life, what’s admirable and what’s shameful. Capitalists may believe that success and a good life involve lots of money, luxury goods, several homes etc. They respect and admire billionaires. Marxists and commoners agree that it’s shameful to be a billionaire, not admirable, because to become a billionaire involves exploiting hundreds of thousands if not millions of people (profiting from their work rather than your own), draining wealth from communities and driving environmental destruction, as their influence ensures states and markets prioritise perpetual growth over ecological limits. Philanthropy doesn’t work for either Marxists or commoners, because it’s a tax-efficient PR exercise that involves using a small fraction of their wealth to mitigate harm caused by the system that created it.

Values shape societies. Ancient Sparta valued courage and honour, which produced a warrior society. Capitalism values profit and accumulation over everything else, which produces a money-oriented society, with all its associated problems. Billionaires have the wealth and power to make their values seem like common sense, via their ownership and control of media, think tanks, academia, advertising and the state. The message is: turn up on time, work hard, do as you’re told, save your money, invest it wisely, start businesses, and you too can be a boss, shareholder, moneylender or landlord, and have lots of money and possessions, which is the point of life.

So because of their values, capitalists see things like global warming as first and foremost a problem because it affects growth and profits, not because it destroys nature and kills millions of people – which is callous and inhumane. Commoners and Marxists push back against these values, although they have very different strategies.

The need for a new system, not reform

Marx was the first to combine a rejection of capitalism with the argument that it can’t be reformed – it’s intrinsically exploitative of people and damaging to communities (he also made some comments indicating that he understood how damaging it is to nature, although ecology wasn’t a well-developed discipline in his day). Tiny elites have existed since ancient times, but the global concentration of wealth and power under capitalism is unprecedented – true democracy and meaningful power-sharing are impossible under such conditions.

Before Marx, economics was dominated by David Ricardo, who claimed that workers’ wages were only ever going to be just enough to keep them alive and able to breed more workers. Profits hugely enrich the owners of production, so there will be conflict between wages and profits – but profits must be sufficiently high to ensure continued economic development (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter 6). It was brutal, but not everyone agreed. Marx was writing around the same time as John Stuart Mill, in the middle of the 19^th century. Both witnessed the horrors of early capitalism, and wanted to improve conditions for workers, but had very different ideas as to how to do it. Both were influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s recognition that accumulation of property allowed some people to dominate others (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”).

Mill’s approach was to reform social structures and institutions. Education, universal suffrage and liberal institutions would improve the moral and intellectual capacities of the population, and remove oppression, but still within a capitalist economy and a liberal state. Marx saw that the state isn’t neutral, but is controlled by the most powerful in society (capitalists), for their own ends – that the state’s primary function is to manage and protect the interests of the capitalist class. Domination, oppression, wealth concentration and poverty are due to social structures and institutions themselves, not caused by moral failings. Capitalism is designed to pay workers as little as possible and shareholders as much as possible. That isn’t a flaw in capitalism, it’s its purpose. Reform isn’t enough – it just prolongs the agony, keeps capitalism alive and makes replacement more difficult. We need a new system.

He couldn’t have foreseen modern levels of environmental destruction, mass migration, disinformation, surveillance and wealth concentration. Capitalism has ramped up the insanity since his day. Corporations own stakes in each other, and pledge each other money they don’t have for services that don’t exist. OpenAI pledged $300 billion they didn’t have for Oracle services that don’t exist (cloud services that require huge data centres). OpenAI needs the data centres to make their money, and Oracle needs OpenAI’s money to build the datacentres (none of which have been built as I write). Corporate media celebrate these deals, and their share prices rise because people are excited about how much money they might make – it’s a bit like selling shovels to prospectors during the gold rush. There’s no guarantee of delivering any value, but they make loads of money anyway because so many people are excited by getting rich quickly, and hope the bubble doesn’t burst until after they’ve made their fortune. See the excellent Ed Zitron for more on this.

Marx’s focus on the means of production is a bit off nowadays (although not completely). In the 21^st century power resides more in ownership of the means of exchange, media, platforms and algorithms.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism

Marx debunked some capitalist fairy tales – for example, that the first capitalists got rich through their hard work and putting money aside, and that workers move to cities to work in their factories voluntarily. He recognised that a) the transition to capitalism required violence (via the enclosures) to keep peasants off common land, so that they couldn’t provide a subsistence livelihood for themselves, and were forced into slums and factories; and b) the first capitalists didn’t become wealthy because of their hard work. Most of them were previously (and often still were) wealthy landowners. Capitalism in its birthplace was built with ‘old money’, from land that was stolen by Norman mercenaries.

Peasants were driven from the land and replaced with sheep to provide wool for the growing textile industry. In the new cities that they fled to, conditions were terrible for workers, at a time when the upper classes were fabulously wealthy, from ownership of factories at home and colonisation and theft of resources abroad.

Marx saw what others didn’t – that ordinary people had been separated from the means of production by the massive enclosures of common land, and forced into factories that they didn’t own, to sell their labour to capitalists, who make huge profits on their backs. Wealth concentrates, as capitalists make more money by having money. Whether you’re rich or poor still depended mainly on which family you were born into.

Capitalists will respond that workers had small incomes whereas they used to have none, which means they’re better off. This argument has been repeated for poor countries in the Global South, where enclosure and urbanisation continue. But previously they had access to land, produced their own food, built their own homes without insurance or mortgages, and had strong communities where childcare and social/leisure activities were free. Having more money (or money at all) doesn’t mean an increase in ‘wealth’ and wellbeing.

Exploitation

Marx saw that capitalists can’t pay their workers the full value that their work brings in, after fixed costs have been paid, because if they did, there wouldn’t be any profit (not just surplus, but money extracted for owners and shareholders). This underpins the Labour Theory of Value (LTV), a concept that predates Marx and was developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

It’s now possible to envisage a world without human labour at all, or at least without human labour for capitalists – a world in which all work for corporations is done by robots, driverless vehicles and AI (including building the robots and AI). Labour for humans would only involve work that they want to do, paid or not. This causes big problems for the LTV, but whether it’s ultimately true or not, currently, without workers, there are no profits for capitalists – and workers know this. The rewards they get for exhausting, boring and possibly dangerous work is nowhere near the rewards that capitalists get just for having money, without doing any work at all.

Sole traders and co-op workers receive the full value of their work once expenses are covered, since there are no private owners or shareholders extracting profits – making co-operatives and self-employment particularly well-suited to the commons. But even if players in the market are small, local businesses, and a growing commons is shrinking the corporate sector, employing other people to work ‘for’ you (rather than with you) is still exploitative. Small business owners still can’t pay their employees the full value of what they’ve produced, or they won’t make any profit.

But small businesses don’t cause the problems for democracy that big corporations do. If your independent sandwich shop, hair salon or bakery isn’t a corporate chain, it doesn’t concentrate wealth to the extent that it can corrupt politics. However, the problem is that small businesses often don’t stay small. Tesco actually started as a market stall. I don’t know the answer to this, but building commons is a first step, after which we can devise strategies for capping the size of businesses and developing an economy of sole traders and co-ops of various descriptions. But first we have to break the power of corporations, and Marx was right that there’s no chance of doing that within capitalism.

Materialism

In scientific terms, personally, I’m a materialist, in that I don’t believe (as Descartes did), that mind and matter are different ‘substances’. I agree with Daniel Dennett that consciousness is what the brain does. Thoughts, ideas, feelings and awareness are caused by neurons, which are physical. Remove your leg, or any other body part except your brain (some will need an artificial replacement), and you still have consciousness; but no brain, no consciousness.

But Marx wasn’t talking about physics. He was a materialist in that he believed that developments in (material) social and economic conditions change human thinking, in contrast to idealists like Hegel, who believed the opposite – that developments in human thinking change social and economic conditions; or like Plato (the ideal world of forms is more real than the material world). Was Marx right? Well, do you think that the (capitalist) French Revolution happened because enough people were inspired by the ideas developed during the Enlightenment or because ordinary French people were fed up with paying high taxes, working too hard, being told what to do and never having enough of the basic necessities of life? If the former, you’re probably an idealist; if the latter, a materialist.

Marx rejected the religious idealism that maintained order in feudalism. Feudalism (and religion) had to be de-fanged. Marx was pro-capitalist in regard to feudalism, which had to be replaced by capitalism to unleash the massive productive capacity that would eventually and inevitably be usurped by socialism.

My instincts are towards materialism in the social sciences too. Wholesale change doesn’t really come about until people are hungry and desperate, regardless of people’s thinking or new ideas. You may ask what I’m doing writing articles like this then, to influence people’s thinking. Well, I do want you to support the commons, and I’m trying to attract potential activists – but I think commons will grow to become mainstream mainly because it provides material benefit to people, not because it’s the best idea (although it is!). Talking with working people about class consciousness or rebellion can be counter-productive (try it, and see what response you get).

What I’m absolutely not saying is that the sense of wonder that I feel when I’m in nature (for example) is less important than material possessions. Just that the route to replacing capitalism with commons is largely a material one. However, without the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution could just have been food riots.

Edmund Husserl’s ideas seem to combine idealist and materialist approaches, in their emphasis on lived experience rather than theory. People’s ideas and thoughts are important, but they’re always directed towards something in the real world. In other words, consciousness and material conditions aren’t separate – they meet in what people actually live through. People act, co-operate, and make decisions not just because of abstract ideals, but because of concrete needs, opportunities, and challenges. Commons, for example, grow and endure not merely because someone explains their value, but because they’re experienced as useful, practical, and sustaining in everyday life.

Marx saw that power in capitalism is economic. The economy was his ‘base’, and the rest is ‘superstructure’ (politics, institutions, culture) – which is why we have to build the commons economy before we have a hope of real political power.

Commons isn’t primarily about changing ideas, at least not for the majority. It’s a vehicle for building trusting relationships in communities through providing useful, affordable things, including jobs, mainly to the working class, and community-based, non-evil, pension-level return investments, mainly to the middle class. It’s ultimately a materialist approach to change.

Conclusion

Another positive aspect of the Marxist approach, from a commons perspective, is that conditions for building commons may actually be better in communist China than in the West, although we can’t be sure. I’ll explain why in a later chapter. But it will be fragile - a centralised communist party can take back decentralised infrastructure at any moment, especially if threatened by the West – which is looking more and more likely. We need a commons that doesn’t depend on centralised power to build, and isn’t threatened by the potential for centralised power to close it down.

So this article highlights the positive aspects of Marxism, at least from a commons perspective. But it was the need for “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (the Communist Manifesto) and a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (see next article) that has caused so many problems and divides Marxists and Commoners.

Commoners and Marxists could potentially be allies because of the anti-capitalist potential of commons, and of course being a customer, employee or investor in the commons is not dependent on political beliefs. Many people calling themselves Marxists do so because they agree with his materialist critique of capitalism, not because they want to seize the state. But in the real world, when Marxists gain power, decentralised solutions really aren’t their thing, and they tend to close them down.

I’m not trying to alienate anyone, and I’m happy to debate. I’m especially trying to influence anti-capitalists who are sick of the electoral system and looking for alternatives, and may be dabbling with Marx. In coming articles, I want to explain why Bakunin was right, and the best path is a decentralised one, not trying to control the state.

In the next article, I’ll look at what Marx got wrong from a commons perspective, including: a) because capitalism was historically necessary for communism, enclosure of commons was therefore also necessary; b) the necessity of seizing the state; c) the imperative to maximise growth; and d) the role of the proletariat as a vehicle for change – even though it’s disappearing in the West and has largely rejected Marxism anyway.