“¿What is the Meaning of Communism?”

I replied approximately as follows --

Karl Marx described communism, in “the Grundrisse” -- an 1857+ massive manuscript that became the first of several drafts toward Marx’s “Critique of Political Economy” as a whole, of which “Das Kapital” forms but the first part of six planned parts -- as growing out of the seeds of political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY already present within capitalism, in the form of “share capital”, e.g., in the capital equity stock principle of “one share, one vote”, a principle that, he predicted, would become generalized in the transition from capitalism to its “lawful” higher successor system, of the democratically “associated producers”: “Share capital ... is the most perfect form (assuming the character of communism), together with all its contradictions.”

In “Das Kapital”, volume III, Marx’s describes the transition to communism -- as to how the embryo of communism forms within the womb of capitalism -- in terms of workers-owned capital, e.g., democratically worker-managed producers’ cooperatives, part of the stage that my associates and I call “workers’ capitalism”.

Marx also stated that, in nation-states where representative democracy, with workers’ suffrage [workers having voting rights], had been achieved, the transition to communism could probably be accomplished without violent revolution, via the ballot box.

We see the constitution of a rule-of-law, democratic transition to real communism -- to ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ -- as arising via the popular recognition, and, later, via the constitutional establishment, of three newly-discerned human rights which are fundamental to the protection and flourishing of human individuals, and of humane society as a whole, in advanced modern society. They are --

A. The human right of ‘Citizen Externality Equity’. This right enables citizens to vote for ‘‘‘public directors’’’, forming second boards of directors, or second management committees, INSIDE each of the local operating units of companies which produce and accumulate “externalities” -- e.g., deadly pollution -- in those citizens’ local communities. These ‘boards of public directors’ negotiate with the private directors/managers to reduce the annual operating plan budgets of pollution, etc., “external costs”, with recourse to a popularly elected “Tribunal for Externality Equity” if negotiations deadlock, and with fees imposed for any external cost production still allowed in those annual externalities budgets. This human right, of “grass roots regulation”, supplements external regulatory bureaucracies, typically “captured” and prostituted by the industries that they were supposed to regulate, and also civil court litigation against deadly polluters, where deep-pocketed industries can usually defeat underfunded citizen/worker law suits.

B. The human right of ‘Citizen Birthright Equity’ [‘societal self-investment’]. Every child born under this new, Equitarian constitution and bill of rights, will be a “trust fund baby”, in that each new citizen born will be granted, funded partly by ‘Citizen Externality Equity’ pollution fees, partly by ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity social rents’, a lifetime fund, an ‘absolutely-portable’ individual/social-safety-net -- with legislated restraints on its expenditure, so as to check the “moral hazard” potential of such a trust fund -- to cover the basic necessities of human life-opportunity: health care, college education, first home purchase, business formation funding, and reparations to victims in the event of conviction for a crime, etc. -- so that every child born has a stake in society -- has “skin in the game” -- and so that society has an investment in every child born, regardless of “what side of the tracks” that citizen was born on. Should an individual’s fund be exhausted, e.g., due to serial criminal conviction reparations to victims, then that individual would fall back on more meager external social welfare provisions.

C. The human right of ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’. Lack of access to means of production renders workers victims and playthings of the whims, and of the “lawful” depredations, of the owners of capital. This human right provides workers with the option of ‘collective self-employment’, via a policy of ‘public venture “capital” ’, supporting ‘collective entrepreneurship’. The Office of the popularly elected national Custodian of Social Property grants charters to per-legislation-qualifying citizen collectives, which then become Social Banks, also organized as democratically self-managed ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’ cooperatives of a special kind, each granted an equitable allocation of credits for the procurement of means of production. The ‘Social Banks’ compete for the most perceivably-viable among other citizens’ self-organized collectives, that have per-legislation-qualifying business-plans, including By-Law requirements for internal democratic election/recall of their management teams, which, once their business plans are funded by a Social Bank, become ‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’. The ‘Social Banks’ have “skin in the game”. If they back too many Stewardship Cooperatives that go bankrupt, they lose income, and may even become insolvent themselves as a result. Likewise, to survive, these ‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’ must prove themselves in market competition against other socialized producers’ cooperatives, and against remaining private capitalist firms, etc., that all produce for the same market(s). The ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity socialized producers’ cooperatives’ do not collectively or privately “own” the means of production granted to them for their use by the ‘Social Bank(s)’ that back(s) them. Those means of production are ‘‘‘Social Property’’’. The citizen-members of the Stewardship Cooperatives do have the usufruct of, and stewardship over, those means of production, a fact manifested in the ‘social rents’ that they must pay, monthly, to the Office of the Custodian of Social Property. These ‘social rents’ provide income to the ‘Social Banks’ that backed these co-ops, and also help to fund the ‘Citizen Birthright Equity socialized Trust Funds’, as well as to fund means of production procurement for new ‘Stewardship Cooperatives’, to finance ‘technodepreciation insurance’, etc. Private capitalism is not outlawed, but private-capital-based firms will have to compete for workers against Stewardship Cooperatives wherein the workers themselves decide how workers are to be treated.

There has been a largely-successful ‘conspiracy among opponents’ -- an ‘antagonistic cooperation’ -- between the unelected real rulers of “western” [state-]capitalism, and those of “eastern” STATE-capitalism, to pass off the pure-state-bureaucratic-ruling-class dominated, totalitarian police-state mass-murder regimes of “Soviet” Russia, Stalinist China, etc., as “Communism”. In fact, those dictatorships present nothing at all like the ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ that Marx predicted. They actually represent special, transient forms of Orwellian [proto-]State-CAPITALISM, so that a form of CAPITALISM is being fraudulently passed-off as Marxian communism.

Most people today, when they say “Communism”, actually mean pure-state-bureaucratic-ruling-class State-CAPITALISM [as distinct from FASCISM or NAZIISM, a form of State-Capitalism in which the private-capital-owning ruling class is still either prominent, or still largely in-charge, sharing power with the One-Party-State bureaucracy].

THIS IS THE BIGGEST “BAIT-AND-SWITCH” FRAUD IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY TO-DATE!!!

And it has been co-perpetrated by the “western” capitalist ruling class [e.g., the Rockefeller-eugenics political machine], and the Lenino-Trotskyoid, Lenino-Stalinoid, and Stalino-Maoid “MarxIST” PSEUDO-Marxians!

Toward the end of his life, Marx foresaw -- via his in depth study of capitalist political economy, of Russia in particular, etc. -- e.g., as he wrote in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich, and in the Preface to the latter edition of “Das Kapital”, that social revolution was imminent in Russia [Marx died in 1883. The ‘“first modern Russian revolution’’’ erupted in 1905, 22 years later].

Marx wrote that, if the Russian Revolution was accompanied by a revolution in the capitalist West, e.g., in Germany, and throughout Western Europe, so that the advanced productive forces [‘‘‘industrial productivity’’’] extant there could facilitate accelerated development of the social forces of production in Russia, then Russia could escape the violence and the other horrors of capitalist development -- including of the “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital -- and accede more or less directly from the remnants of primitive communism still then-extant in Russia, to the “higher communism” that would then also co-emerge in Europe, and, later, worldwide.

In this passage, Marx did not explicitly predict what would ensue if the Russian Revolution was isolated in Russia, and surrounded by hostile, still-capitalist European and other powers. But the latter is exactly what did happen, with the eruption of the ‘‘‘second modern Russian revolution’’’ in 1917, and the failure of the 1918 revolutions in Germany and elsewhere.

Thus, Russia could not escape the horrors of the “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital, which were made even more horrendous by the desperation of the Leninist state-bureaucratic ruling class to crash-develop a “military-industrial complex” [cf. Eisenhower], so as to deter further invasions by, and “save its ass” from, the encircling, hostile, private-capitalist military forces, hell-bent on snuffing-out both the Leninist ruling class, and the remnants of the real Soviets [workers’ councils] revolution in Russia.

Lenino-Stalinoid State-CAPITALISM became a new pathway for the horrific “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital in the underdeveloped, imperialized semi-periphery of the core capitalist system in Western Europe and North America, falsely labeled “Communism” by both its Western enemies and its Lenino-Stalinoid ruling class promoters and beneficiaries.

This query also calls to my mind the “dialectical theory of everything” developed by a group that is relentlessly carrying forward Marx’s, unfinished, work [by which I do NOT mean the state-bureaucratic ruling-class, dictatorial perversions of the Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, ..., Castroist, and Unist state-CAPITALIST ideologues, fraudsters, and mass murderers] in the five key domains which Marx and Engels were not able to bring to fruition before their deaths.

Those unfinished domains of Marxian theory and practice include:

(1) that of the detailed nature of the Marxian dialectic method;

(2) that of the dialectic of Nature, and of the Marxian immanent critique of the ideology that pervasively compromises the modern sciences, including, not just the economic and other social sciences, but the natural sciences and mathematics as well;

(3) clarification, including clear and ‘quanto-qualitative’ definition, of the central Marxian concept of “the social forces of production” -- of ‘the human-societal self-force of human-societal self-re-production’ -- in relation to a ‘Meta-Darwinian’ concept of human-species ‘‘‘fitness’’’ in terms of the rate of human-societal self-reproduction, as well as the interrelated clarification of the core Marxian concept of “the social relations of production”, e.g., of the “capital-relation”, of the “money-relation”, of the “commodity-relation”, etc. This ‘Meta-Darwinian’ theory recognizes the role of ‘the human Phenome’ as well as of the ‘the human Genome’ in increasing the ‘self-force’, and thereby the rate, of human society in accelerated expanded social self-reproduction;

(4) that of the detailed nature of the liberatory, Political-ECONOMIC-DEMOCRATIC society -- founded upon the new, unprecedented social relation of production -- which is the “lawful” higher successor system to [State-]Capitalism;

(5) that of the detailed causation-dynamics of the ever-worsening catastrophic global economic depression-crises, wars, and genocides that advise us all of the growing need for us to transcend [state-]capitalism, by creating that successor system, of grass roots Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY.

That group is Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [see www.dialectics.info ].

Regards,

Miguel