“Communes
in Socialist Construction”– Monthly Review Double Issue, July-August
2025 (Part 1)
This is a mostly excellent discussion of the role of
communes in the transition to socialism, barring Bukharinite slips and off-the-topic contributions. The ‘commune’ – to me sometimes taking the form of a Soviet, council,
cooperative, collective or assembly – is the most democratic and proletarian political
and economic form. They can lead to a
classless society if actually pursued.
It is the replacement for the travesty of bourgeois ‘democracy’ in all
its twisted forms and private ownership of the means of production. The
bourgeoisie waved ‘parliaments’ in the face of the royalists; the commune-ists
wave the ‘commune’ in their face as a higher form of democracy.
This is a collection of essays on the issue, which are
relevant when people ask ‘what’s really
next?’ It is no pipe dream, as early
communes existed throughout the world, along with their persistence into Marx’s
time. The Paris Commune, Soviets in the
USSR and central Europe, revolutionary councils in Germany, Hungary, Austria
and Italy, communes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, workers’ councils
in the 1960s in Europe and the present widespread communes in Venezuela tell us
they are not revolutionary mirages but have been born before and still exist
today.
This thick issue of MR
consists of 8 pieces and two interviews.
I’ll focus on issues of theoretical or factual interest. The present communes in Venezuela seem to be
the modern inspiration.
Interview
with Venezuela’s Minister of Communes, Angel Prado: A factual look at the status of communes in
Venezuela. They are not in the Constitution yet, and have no regular financial
dispensation from the government unlike local governments. However $10K was recently awarded by the
government to each commune with a project.
The communes “legislate,
administer resources and manage their own means of production” according to
Prado. There are communal councils at the base of the commune, with a communal
bank, parliament and various committees on different issues like sports or the
economy. Property in the commune varies
from communal, public, family and private. The investment or reinvestment of
the surplus is a key issue. They are also armed.
Prado compares Chavismo to Peronism in its ‘diversity.’ The Communard Union which he heads brings
together 80 communes and is in ‘every
barrio’ in the country. The immediate goal is to bring communes up to equal
status with other branches of the government, in financial and political
power. They are trying to reform the
Venezuelan Constitution this year to give communes that power. Prado points out
that other ‘anti-imperialist’ and nationalist movements, absent communes, ended
up “…becoming another reformist state,
with a so-called progressive government that fails to transform existing state
structures.” Any look at Latin or
Central American history will confirm this observation. To my mind, all this reflects Venezuela as a
‘transitional’ state, still dominated by capital, but with organized structures
of proletarian and peasant power existing.
“Socialist
Communes and Anti-Imperialism,” Chris Gilbert – This
article concentrates on the communes in Venezuela and secondarily,
Bolivia. It notes that anti-imperialism
is not separate from anti-capitalism. This
should be news to the legions of anti-socialist geo-political analysts found on
progressive websites. The Venezuelan and
Bolivian communes both came into being in the context of anti-imperialist
struggle. In Bolivia the MAS, (which just lost an election after 20 years) was
relying on indigenous cooperative ‘allyus’
to use as a base for socialism. In Brazil the peasant-based
MST pushes for ‘peoples agrarian reform’
when it occupies under-utilized or unused land. Gilbert makes no claim as to
the construction of communes in Brazil, only of collective management of land
after occupations.
 |
| Russian peasant Mir commune |
Gilbert, like many others in this magazine, brings up
Marx’s research into the communal peasant Russian mir, Arab and Berber communal property relations, Peruvian allyus, Indian peasant communities,
Mexican collective settlements, the Iroquois Confederation and more. Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich and his Ethnographic Notebooks bear out the
contention that these older forms could be used to advance modern socialism. Marx made this explicit regarding a Russian
revolution. He made it clear that the collective obchshina still had to use modern technology and be linked together. Marx was not calling for pure
‘self-management,’ isolated agrarian outposts or some anarcho-romantic
throwback not linked to a national and even international plan. Chavez also
called for the unity of communes in some sort of ‘communal state.’
Gilbert clearly counters people like degrowth’s Kohei Saito
who contends Marx only came to this understanding of early communal forms much later. Gilbert links Marx’s later insights to
earlier works like the Grundrisse and
Capital. Oddly, Gilbert also gives
credit for this communal understanding to 1980s-‘90s Bolivian Marxist Alyaro
Linera and not to Jose Carlos Mariatequi.
Mariategui discussed the value of the allyu back in the 1920s.
“The
Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today,” P Patnaik &
U Patnaik – This article focuses on India, which still
has a large peasant population, unlike the U.S., Europe and other
countries. They site Engels and Lenin in
an ‘uninterrupted revolution’ – not stagist – going from a democratic
revolution led by proletarian elements involving the peasantry and
petit-bourgeoisie to a socialist one.
Patnaiks argue that, unlike Stalin’s practice in the USSR, upper-bracket
rich peasants (kulaks) must not be purged.
Nor should cooperatives or collective farms be forced on farmers. They contend that the key re ‘kulaks’ is that
they ‘will not bring back capital in the countryside’ because mere partial involvement
in the market is not commodity production, nor is trading labor or goods with
others, nor is ‘personal’ trading or sales.
When there is a conflict between different peasant strata, they theorize
that the revolutionary state should intervene on behalf of poorer peasants in ‘mediations.’ I imagine a rich farmer might go beyond these
parameters after awhile.
They recognize that the national bourgeoisie in India is
integrated with capitalists in other nations, including the top
imperialists. They contend that all ‘third world’ nations have a peasantry
which is ‘the most sizeable force’
against neo-liberal capital or dictatorship.
They have no statistics on this assertion. The caste system in India creates divisions
among farmers. The farmers still led a
year-long struggle against 3 farm laws that would remove support pricing, along
with opposing international firms getting involved in contract farming with
Indian farmers.
 |
| Cooperative farm in India |
The authors stand up for individual rights, as without
them, ‘outcasts’ cannot actually join a collective. So a real community requires individual
rights too. They have an excellent
section on the 6 benefits of cooperative farming as opposed to individual
farming: 1, no boundary waste; 2, pooled
resources; 3, better land use due to more land being available; 4, crops needing
minimal cultivation allow work on other plots; 5, machinery collectively owned;
6, de-centralized decision-making.
On that last one, #6, the authors again come up to the
conundrum in a number of these articles that de-link agrarian work from the
rest of a socialized economy, hinting at an isolated village commune instead. This
problem also revolves around the phrase ‘self-management’ used by others.
“Marx
and Communal Society,” J.B. Foster – Foster goes deeply into
Marx’s research into early communal forms, and his embrace of the Paris Commune
as an example of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ when the majority of plebeians
and workers held power, not the rich, the nobles or the capitalists. These included
common tillage in India; the Mark
system of common tenure and collective production in Germany; the clan communes
in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador called allyus;
Greek communal property alongside private and the Iroquois Confederacy
(Haudenosaunee) use of long-houses holding multiple families. Marx studied Morgan, Phear, Maine and Lubbock
to understand these early communistic traditions. Engels collected his insights and used them
in writing “Origins of the Family,
Private Property and the State.” Rosa Luxemburg later followed this same
line of investigation in her studies of colonialism.
Marx himself started his journalistic career defending
peasants’ right to collect dead wood from the forests. Of most interest is Foster’s points that Marx
didn’t use the term ‘primitive’ communism, or theorize Greece and Rome as a ‘slave
societies,’ or use ‘Asiatic’ mode of production other than to mean village
communities in India and Java. This contradicts
what was theorized or generalized by later Marxists. Italian urban communes were run by guilds of
merchants, forming the seed of the bourgeoisie, but they had to overcome their
original collective nature. To this day the formal name of most Italian towns
is ‘Communa di…’
The 1789 French Revolution was known as the “Paris Commune”
too. According to Foster the second 1871
Paris Commune “abolished the death
penalty, child labor, and conscription while eliminating debts. The workers were organized into cooperative
societies to run the factories, with plans to organize the cooperatives into
one big union. A women’s union was
created, as well as a system of universal secular education.” Instant recall, universal male suffrage and
wages for officials at a workers’ wage were also instituted. All of this was groundbreaking.
End of
Part 1
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search
box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: "Monthly Review,"“Paris
Commune,” “allyu,” “Mariategui,” "Meszaros," “workers’
councils,” “Saito,” “commune,” ‘council,’ ‘obchshina,’ ‘mir,’ “Foster.”
And I bought it at May Day’s periodicals section!
Red Frog / August 26, 2025
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