Revolutionary Movements in a Post-Marxian Era: Towards an actionable agenda – Part II: Outline of The Communist Hypothesis: Collectively Owned Firms & Collective Households

Prologue

What I have posted below is a first draft and I notice it requires editing at quite a few points. I will try to do this editing over the next few days. In the meantime, I invite reader comments so that I can address them or include them in the final edited version. While editing I may add more material either to further clarify some points or to plug obvious and glaring gaps. In any case, this is an outline version rather than a fully worked out version. There are many very important issues such as how technological progress drives change in the nature of ROP and RORP or the other innumerable dynamics involved that drive change in the structure of ASOS that I have not touched upon at all so as to spill out first a basic vision of the future structural scenario rather than get stuck with explaining history. The Marxist assertion that “All history is the history of class struggles” is again a juvenile oversimplification that is at the root of the misleading thought that a political movement is a sine qua non for any revolutionary transformation of society. The drivers of social change are many and class struggle is only a very important aspect but not the only aspect. It is only after these drivers of social change working in tandem bring about new ASOs within the womb of old society that new political forces can arise and bring about a final political thrust to establish the dominance of the new ASOs. In a dialectical world, how things change from being less dominant to more dominant or how state change takes place needs to be understood from a dialectical point of view. I will try to address some of these very important aspects as I edit. In the meantime, I have to request readers to bear with me and pardon me for presenting what is still very much a work in progress. But I had to start somewhere and I think I have done that to present at least the bare outlines of a coherent answer to what is to be done to bring about a new post capitalist social order free from the ills of capitalism.

Introduction

This post is in response to comments and queries on my views on collectively owned business units and how establishing such units can be the first step towards creating a new post-capitalist social order free from the ills of capitalism.

Apart from a few comments and questions on the subject in the past to which I had not responded to, perhaps more out of laziness than anything else, there have been a few very thoughtful comments and queries from M. Ganguly very recently (see the recent comments section on the right of this page). This post is inspired by her comments – yes, I do happen to now know that she is a dear old friend who chose to adopt a pseudonym while making her comments. Well, you see we had a little fight and she didn’t want to let me know that she was still reading my rantings. Many many thanks to her for choosing to forgive and forget, remain friends and continue to read this blog for whatever it is worth.

I have been writing on the broad subject of collective ownership for quite some time now. This blog is strewn with many attempts to put my views across as clearly as possible. I have, however, found it extremely difficult to express myself as clearly as I think I am able to think. Here is another attempt.

I am, however, taking this opportunity to seek help from all those who read this blog. I am astounded by the fact that this blog has as many as 260-odd followers. This may seem a small number to most writers but for me I am grateful beyond words. That as many as 260 plus people around the world are willing to read or at least keep track of my rantings – the trash that I write – is, as far as I am concerned, unbelievable. I am really grateful. I now seek help. Is there someone out there who is willing to take the trouble of compiling, organising and editing my views on this, IMHO, extremely difficult subject of a post-capitalist social order?

Apart from my rantings here, I have also made a few comments now and then on Facebook, especially in a group that I belong to – BITS Class of 74-75. I would be grateful if this editor, if there is one out there willing to take up this tedious and unenviable task, is also willing to make the effort to collect those pieces of writing and collate it with the rest of the stuff here. Such a collation will, I think, make things easier for interested readers.

I somehow get the feeling that today I am in a slightly better position to put down on paper and share with others views that have been developing in my head since as long as 1989, since a little after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this blog, I have always tried to write about what my vision of the future is and have refrained from writing a critique of Socialism and what I call the “Socialist Hypothesis”. But I think the time has come to document that as well. I am adding a page on this issue in this blog, the first part of an article that I have been trying to write, where I end with a definition of my conception of “Firms” and “Households” which I call structural atomic social organisations (ASOs).

By using these definitions, I hope to show primarily that it is a mistake to think that the Marxist notions of relations of production (ROP) or relations of reproduction (RORP) somehow obtain on a macroeconomic society-wide scale. The ROP and RORP actually manifest themselves empirically at the micro-level and in such Firms and Households respectively and consequently, the other Marxist notion of “Mode of Production” is a poorly defined category, a result of juvenile oversimplification of how such ROP and RORP appear in the real empirically verifiable world. This oversimplification is one of the most important reasons for the current theoretical bankruptcy of Marxism. Once we realise that the structural nature of any society depends on the kind of ROP and RORP that dominate in that society – in short the kind of Firms and Households that dominate in that society – it becomes much easier to see and understand what needs to be done to structurally change any society from one type of society to another.

While I will try to write a more detailed version and perhaps with some mathematical proof in the unfinished article mentioned above, let me put down here a brief summary of some of the major theoretical conclusions one can reach once freed from the Marxian oversimplification of “Mode of Production”.

1. Firms and Households are the structural atomic social organisations (ASOs)  – the building blocks of any living, actually existing, empirically verifiable and discretely definable human society. Just as we can differentiate chemical elements on the basis of the structure of their atoms, so can such discretely definable societies be differentiated on the basis of the structure of the ASOs that make up that society. But unlike in a chemical element which is made up of only one type of atom (isotopes are isotopes and that’s why they are called as such), in society there can be different types of ASOs existing simultaneously side by side. However, except for periods of revolutionary transformations of one type of society to another type of society, at any given point in time, in any relatively stable society not undergoing any revolutionary upheaval, usually one type of Firms with a “corresponding” type of Households dominate and although at present I have not yet been able to theoretically define domination as it would require a mathematical definition, the concept, for the time being at least, can be understood intuitively from such statements as:

A. A predominantly slave society is one where most Firms in that society are based on the ROP of slavery, where within each firm there is one or more owners and several slaves and the ROP primarily defines the formula by which the production carried out by the Firm is distributed between the class of owners and the class of slaves – slaves get a small share of total social production, the share being entirely determined by the class of slave masters, enough of a share to ensure the subsistence of the slaves. Thus there were and still are Slave Firms within predominantly Feudal or Capitalist societies.

B. A feudal society is one where most Firms in that society are based on the ROP of feudalism, where within each Firm there is one or more landlords and several serfs and the ROP defines the formula by which the total production of the Firm is distributed between the class of landlords and the class of serfs – serfs get a small share of the production of each feudal firm in return for their labour, a percentage determined by each feudal landlord or group of landlords who “own” that Feudal Firm. Thus even within modern capitalism you can have feudal firms existing – Firms where share cropping is the ROP for example.

C. A capitalist society is one where most Firms in that society are based on the ROP of capitalism, where within each firm there are one or more capitalist owners and several workers where ROP defines the market-determined formula by which the total production of the firm in value terms is distributed between the capitalist owners and the workers – a formula based on surplus value or part of the total value addition usurped by the capitalists owners although all value addition is created by workers. (Of course all this has to be stated in more rigorous terms but this is the basic conceptual framework).

2. In the case of Households, the structural nature of households is determined by the RORP – that is, the nature of the relations between the reproductive adults (the type of marriage) in the Household – you can have different types of relationships – promiscuity, consanguine, punaluan, pairing and modern monogamic – or variations of these five basic types – and how children, the product of reproduction, get shared between men and women in these households giving rise to matrilineal and patrilineal types of households.  A little more on this in the next point.

2. There have been basically two types of Firms and Households in human social history – Collective Firms and Households and Private Firms and Households. Collective Firms are those Firms where the class of owners are also the same class that provides labour – so primitive communist Firms were Collective Firms that have already appeared on the human historical proscenium. Collective Firms are now appearing once again within the womb of Modern Capitalism as the early structural ASOs of Modern Communism. Similarly, Collective Households are those Households where the two “classes” that carry out reproduction – men and women are collectively married to each other irrespective of the particular marriage formula prevalent – for example, all types of Households based on promiscuity, consanguine and punaluan forms of marriage are essentially Collective Households and the pairing and modern monogamic forms of marriage are essentially Private Households. Collective Households in turn are essentially or predominantly matrilineal while Private Households are essentially or predominantly patrilineal for reasons already well documented by Lewis H. Morgan and Frederick Engles in their books Ancient Society and Origins of the Family, Private Property and State respectively (a whole lot of subsequent work has provided more evidence and further corroborated the main contentions of these two seminal works).

3. The nature of Households primarily determine the nature of Firms in any society. If Households are Collective, Firms have to be, perforce collective in nature, any other type is not compatible. Similarly, if Households are private in character, the nature of Firms also has to be perforce private in character. A little thought experiment, that being the fancy term used these days for simply thought or contemplation, it will become clear that you cannot have any forms of private property and, therefore, private Firms in a society that has Collective forms of marriage and, therefore, Collective Households. A little thought together with a close reading of Engels’ above mentioned work would show that private property could arise only after the collective nature of reproductive relations broke down (most probably through the working of evolutionary forces with societies, read human communities – clans, tribes what have you, that made marriages less consanguine having better chances of survival because of genetic reasons than those permitting more consanguine marriages) giving way to private reproductive relations (pairing and monogamic marriage) and would have been impossible in societies where the Households were collective in character.

4. This rule is, however, reversed once the basic character of Households changed from being Collective to Private and vice versa. Once their character changed from Collective to Private it is the nature of Firms that primarily determine changes in the RORP of Households and vice versa. In short there is a dialectical relationship between Firms and Households in any society. And in history, while the Households were the primary aspect of this relationship as long as they were Collective in character and drove changes in the character of Firms, once they became private in character, it was the character of Firms that became the primary aspect that drove changes in the character of Households. From this rule that governs the relationship between Firms and Households in human societies it follows that in Modern Communism, the structural change toward collective Firms will be sustainable only when the character of Households change to Collective character based on freeing of the monogamic restrictions that now govern marriage. Collective Firms with Private Households are incompatible and is one of the main reasons why Kibbutz in Israel and other attempts at collectivisation as in China have not proved to be as successful as they should have been. If such collectivisation were done with changes in the nature of Households from Private to Collective, Collective Firms will begin to prove that they are far more productive and efficient at utilising resources than Capitalist Firms and Households. It can be predicted given our knowledge of the dialectical relationship between Firms and Households that in the initial stages, Collective Households will be based on the pairing sort of marriage that was prevalent immediately preceding the emergence of modern monogamic marriage. In pairing marriage, pairs are free to make or break marriages easily as the children are taken care of society and gradually a completely free situation would ultimately emerge within Households comprising several male and female adults where whether a particular pair should produce children or not would be entirely a matter of medical advice rather than of “love” or “marriage”. In other words the task of procreation would become a medically determined affair to be carried out by adults within the community based on who were medically most competent as pairs to produce children while things like “love” and sex between adults (for non-reproductive purposes) would be entirely a matter of individual choice and would be completely separated from the task of procreation. Children would be owned by the entire Household and would be cared for by all adults although biological parents would naturally play a more predominant role with regard to bringing up and caring for their own respective children.

5. Given these few basic conceptual thumb rules (and perhaps a few more less important ones) it is possible to understand and explain the entire history of human social change.

The Communist Hypothesis

Using these few theoretical and conceptual advances and throwing away the oversimplications that are the basis of the “Socialist Hypothesis”, I shall try to discuss in a little more detail, what would be the basic character of Firms and Households in a post-capitalist social order that would be free from the ills of capitalism. This may be called the Communist Hypothesis for revolutionary social change as opposed to the failed “Socialist Hypothesis” that I have already discussed earlier.

Collectively Owned Firms & Households

Collectively Owned Firms owned by a Collective Households comprising all the people involved in working in the Collectively Owned Firm have to be the structural ASOs that would comprise the future post-capitalist collective or communist social order. That means a situation where the set of people related to each other through a Collective Farm would be the same set of people who will be members of the Collective Household not only owning the firm but also providing all the human labour power needed to carry out hard-core production by the Firm.

The Collective Household, of course, will comprise not only these owner-workers but also their children and other dependants who cannot provide human labour power towards hard-core production to be carried out by the Collective Firm. Such children and dependants will still be contributing to social production on the basis of their ability to carry out other social tasks that maybe called soft production – caring for each other, helping hard-core workers in certain tasks as per their ability and so on. Thus, ultimately, as far as social production is concerned, all members of Collective Households except infants and completely infirm and bed-ridden adults, will be contributing labour power from each according to his/her ability.

Since the Collective Firm is owned by the Collective Household, the total production carried out by the Collective Firm-Household combine would be the total social production of that combine – such production would cover not only hard-core production of goods and services that are consumed by the members of the Household but also soft production such as nursing, caring for babies and smaller or easier tasks associated with hard-core production. Here it is very difficult to lay down purely on a theoretical basis how such social production will be carried out and how each member of the Collective Household will contribute – the conceptual principle involved is important, how it will be concretely applied will have to be determined concretely on a case to case basis.

Such Collectively Owned Firms (COFs) can and will initially operate within the present market system in much the same way that any public limited company does, namely, run by a board of directors elected/appointed by the shareholders and operating in the existing capitalist market.

But there would be significant differences between modern day public limited companies and the type of Collectively Owned Firms or companies that I am suggesting should be set up as a first step towards moving towards a post-capitalist social order. These differences can be discussed under different rubrics.

Ownership

First, a present day public limited company is owned by shareholders while all the work is done by employees although some of these employees may also be shareholders.

Collectively Owned firms (COFs) will be owned in an equal and undivided manner by all the employees of the firms as well as their household members. This is crucial and needs repetition for emphasis. The COFs will be owned in an equal and undivided manner by all employees and their household members. The concept of equal, undivided ownership is already well-established legally at least in India and as far as I know in most other countries. It means each of the shareholders will have an equal shareholding but this shareholding is not discrete and cannot be bought or sold separately. Also there will be a system by which new members can be added and individual shareholdings will automatically get adjusted to remain equal. Same thing will happen if a member voluntarily quits or dies. As I hope to show as we go on – the conceptual equality will become so much more important than actual cardinal equality that actual shareholding percentages will become irrelevant. For example, I own an apartment in the Naktala area of Kolkata. It is on a 7-katha-odd piece of land. There are two buildings on this land – one building has eight apartments while the other has 14 apartments. The land is owned equally and undivided by all the 22 flat owners and the two buildings were built by a promoter and then through a partition deed each flat owner now owns a flat. Flat owners and all others can sell or buy individual flats but the land still remains owned by all 22 flat owners, whoever they may be at any particular point in time, in an equal and undivided manner. So how much of the land each flat owner owns has become irrelevant.

Management

All these shareholders will elect/select a board of management (BOM) which will operate under certain democratic checks and balances to ensure that this BOM always protects and promotes the interests of all shareholders just as any Board of Directors of a publicly-held company is supposed to do in extant capitalism. In other words, these COFs will have only owner-employees on its payroll.

 Distribution of earnings

The earnings of these COFs would be distributed among all shareholders on the basis of “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” where both ability (that is duties of individual shareholders) and needs (that is requirement of individual shareholders or consumption to be allowed for each individual shareholder) will be determined collectively either by the BOM or by all owner-employees through general meetings or some online voting/decision making system – I am not going into the question of detailed operational rules here – I am only trying to give a taste of the conceptual framework. Detailed operational rules will always emerge concretely in specific firms and often on a case-by-case basis but based on some common general principles – here I am only trying to outline these general principles.

 Short-term & Long-term goals of CFOs

These collectively-owned firms will walk on two legs to use a Mao Ze Dong phrase. On the one hand, they will operate in the capitalist market by producing and marketing whatever they can produce and market competitively vis-a-vis the global market, just as any other firm does, while, on the other hand, they will continuously plough back part of their profits to create a fund that they can invest in a way that would help them to become self-sufficient from a basic needs point of view in an ecologically sustainable way. Already various experiments around the world has established the concept of eco-farms – farms that produce foodgrains, vegetables and livestock products, timber, solar and other renewable energy, cotton/jute or other fibres – almost all that humans need to exist – and all this is done in an organic, ecologically and environmentally sustainable way (an example in India being Ecofarms – http://www.ecofarmsindia.in/about_us.htm ).

While operating in the capitalist market to generate profits just as any other existing firm does, these Firms will also try to build linkages with other such collectively-owned Firms in a bottom-up fashion – first forming a local cluster comprising several Firms linked to each other in a certain locality – then regional clusters comprising several local clusters – then national clusters comprising several regional clusters – then international clusters comprising several national clusters and then finally a single global cluster comprising all the international clusters. The point to note here is that individual collectively-owned Firms remain as they are although they gradually become individual members of a vast, all-encompassing global network.

Thus, what will ultimately emerge is a vast global eco-system of thousands of Collectively Owned Farms owned by Collective Households each connected to each other through a bottom-up network for sharing of both resources as inputs as outputs for consumption completely replacing the money and currency based market system. Exchange values will disappear and be replaced by accounting on the basis of use values and systemic material costs.

This is the basic conceptual framework that perhaps would require further fleshing out to address  all the questions that I am sure will be raised by readers.