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The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution
146 pages, Unknown Binding
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 12, 2022
Standing on its own, this is a fantastic work. It puts forth mathematical proofs in its elaboration of how a communist society would actually work and evolve towards communism from a basic starting point. It describes the the transition from the value form and commodity production to a system revolved around calculating for every thing needed and wanted by society the amount of labor hours. It’s genuinely convincing.
The problem is, it starts from a point of the Revolution having already completed. As in, it ONLY makes sense if you’re assuming that the entire planet has now had a successful socialist Revolution, and are on the same page as to the movement going ahead.
Ultra leftists of the councillist and leftcom variations like to point to this book as their favorite “gotcha” to Stalin-and-USSR-defenders. “See, USSR was capitalist!” Actually, the book (written in 1930) refers to the USSR as state communist, as opposed to the vision that they elucidate in this work, quoting Marx, “the free association of producers and consumers”.
Much like any other “ultra” left work that derides the USSR and China as capitalist projects, it has a significant lack of understanding of what exactly will or does entail the transition phase. From world socialism to world communism, this is basically the best blueprint you could have. But what about world capitalism to world socialism? This book does not have the answers.
Frankly, some of the answers were discovered throughout the experiments of socialist construction in the 20th century (and for that matter the 21st), though it hurts some of the planet’s Marxists, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries, to face these answers.
Anyway, the book also does raise fair criticisms of the path the USSR was taking, but without genuinely contextualizing their path in the face of a failed global revolutionary moment, an acceptance of the besieged strategies these successful revolutions are forced to take, it’s certainly no gotcha.
The problem is, it starts from a point of the Revolution having already completed. As in, it ONLY makes sense if you’re assuming that the entire planet has now had a successful socialist Revolution, and are on the same page as to the movement going ahead.
Ultra leftists of the councillist and leftcom variations like to point to this book as their favorite “gotcha” to Stalin-and-USSR-defenders. “See, USSR was capitalist!” Actually, the book (written in 1930) refers to the USSR as state communist, as opposed to the vision that they elucidate in this work, quoting Marx, “the free association of producers and consumers”.
Much like any other “ultra” left work that derides the USSR and China as capitalist projects, it has a significant lack of understanding of what exactly will or does entail the transition phase. From world socialism to world communism, this is basically the best blueprint you could have. But what about world capitalism to world socialism? This book does not have the answers.
Frankly, some of the answers were discovered throughout the experiments of socialist construction in the 20th century (and for that matter the 21st), though it hurts some of the planet’s Marxists, communists, anarchists, revolutionaries, to face these answers.
Anyway, the book also does raise fair criticisms of the path the USSR was taking, but without genuinely contextualizing their path in the face of a failed global revolutionary moment, an acceptance of the besieged strategies these successful revolutions are forced to take, it’s certainly no gotcha.
October 26, 2024
Communists as well as anarchists would do well to read this book cover to cover many times over. Drop everything else you might be reading at the moment & read this book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews