Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned?

My beginning will be a provocative conviction: concerning the becoming of Humanity, communism is the right hypothesis. In fact, there is no other; in any case, I know no other. Whoever abandons this hypothesis must immediately be resigned to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy (which is the form of State appropriate to capitalism), and to the inevitable, 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.

What does 'communism' mean? As Marx argues in the Manuscripts of 1844, communism is an idea related to the destiny of generic humanity. We must absolutely distinguish this use of the word, from the sense of the adjective 'communist' in expressions such as communist parties,' 'the communist world,' the communist camp and so on. Even if, as we shall see, these uses of the word are part of the step by step historical development of the hypothesis.

In its generic sense, 'communist' first signifies negatively, as we can see in the canonic text, Manifesto of the Communist Party. It signifies that the logic of classes, of the fundamental subordination of real workers to a dominating class, can be surmounted. This structure, which is that of History since Antiquity, is not inevitable. Consequently, the oligarchic power, crystallized in the power of States, of those who detain the wealth and organize its circulation, is not ineluctable. The communist hypothesis is that another collective organization can work, which will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of work: each and every one will be a "polyvalent worker." In particular, people will circulate between manual work and intellectual work, as well as between the city and the country. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission within families by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive State apparatus protected by the military and the police, separate from civil society, will no longer appear to be an obvious necessity. There will be, Marx tells us, considering this point as his major contribution, after a brief sequence of a "proletarian dictatorship," charged with destroying what remains of the old world, a long sequence of reorganization on the basis of the "free association" of producers and creators, which will support a "decline of the State."

'Communism' only designates this very general set of intellectual representations. This set is the horizon for any initiative, as local and limited in time as it may be, which, breaking with the order of established opinions (or the necessity of inequalities and a state instrument for their protection), composes a fragment of a politics of emancipation. It is, in short, an Idea whose function is regulatory and not a program. It is absurd to qualify the communist principles (in the sense I have just given) as a utopia, as is often done. They are intellectual schemes, always practiced in different ways. They serve to produce, between different politics, lines of demarcation. Overall, for a given political sequence, it is either compatible with these principles, and is emancipating in the wide sense, or else it is opposed to them and it is reactionary. 'Communism' is, in this sense, a heuristic hypothesis frequently used in polemics, even if the word does not appear.

Maybe you know this violent sentence of Sartre, in the fifties of the last century: "any anticommunist is a dog." If we correctly read this sentence, it's true. For any political sequence that, in its principles or its absence of any principle, appears formally contradictory with the communist hypothesis in its generic sense, must be judged as opposed to the emancipation of the whole of humanity. And so it's opposed to the properly human destiny of humanity. Whoever does not enlighten the development of humanity by the communist hypothesis reduces it, for what concerns its collective development, to animality. As we know, the contemporary, that is to say, capitalist, name of this animality, is 'competition.' That is to say, it's the war of interests and nothing else. But the war of interests is the infra-human part of Humanity.

As pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has existed in practice probably since the...