There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement–mors immortalis.

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy

A. Utopias in Marx

Marx refused to describe communism. Where others offered blueprints of ideal societies, Marx insisted that communism was nothing but the “real movement” of living people abolishing the present state of things. Yet this refusal has been repeatedly misread: utopians see it as a failure of imagination, while objectivist Marxists turn it into doctrinal fidelity. Both readings miss the point. For Marx, communism exists only as a social practice, in the middle of struggle—not as an ideal picture of society waiting for us at the end of history. 

The question that comes first for every communist is not what communism means, or why one should be a communist, but what it actually means to be one—that is, what it means to be a living, breathing communist at this current moment. How does a communist think? How does a communist feel? How does a communist see or hear? What does a communist see and hear? The metaphysical question, in Marx’s view, is only a rephrased version of the existential question. In his dissertation on Ancient Greek philosophy, Marx writes:

…when we glance at history, are Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism particular phenomena? Are they not the prototypes of the Roman mind, the shape in which Greece wandered to Rome?

And where is the shape of the mind that wandered from Germany to us? When this mind arrived, did it appear with a briefcase full of documents? With a lecture on economics and social structure? Or did the spirit travel, beard and all, jolly and coarse, chattering all the way? What Marx says about Greek philosophy we should say about Marx:

It seems to me that though the earlier systems are more significant and interesting for the content, the post-Aristotelean ones, and primarily the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic schools, are more significant and interesting for the subjective form, the character of Greek philosophy. But it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favor of their metaphysical characteristics.

‘What is communism?’ is a trivial question: communism is the form of social organization that will overcome capitalist alienation and the historic domination that has otherwise characterized human society. But a picture of communism in terms of economic relations or philosophical concepts proves with its triviality its uselessness. Insofar as communism is conceived as an object, it is identical to the utopias described by religion or philosophy, and social reformers. It stands for an abstract society without detail, free from oppression and characterized by a picturesque social ‘getting along.’ The means of arriving at such a society naturally become expressed as a call to gather and convert, and so on and so forth until the end is achieved.

Marx has a very different attitude towards describing communism: he simply refuses to. He dismisses attempts to describe communism with any specificity as wasting time devising “recipes for the cookshops of the future,” and arrays himself against the Utopians on the basis of Marx’s go-to, the ‘real movement.’ As Marx himself famously puts it:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

While Marx’s conception of communism can be described as a ‘utopia’ on a purely emotive level, it differs from the proper concept of utopia in its negativity. Marx’s concept of communism is almost completely ‘empty’: he takes pains to avoid painting a picture of a society full of joy and free of suffering—a surprising move considering the moral power of the utopian image and the fact that Marx (and communism ever since) has been swamped in utopian literature and attitudes. Nevertheless, he consistently pushes back against this trend, asserting that his “premises” are not logical or rational but "the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live.” 

Even when Marx does get more specific, he stubbornly clings to the register of metaphor and analogy. Shying away from telling us what communism looks like, he tells us what primitive communism looks like (which will be very different from real communism). He compares it to how Robinson Crusoe organizes his personal labor (which will be very different from real communism), and he finally compares the conquering of alienation under communism with the oppression characterizing the feudal class relation (which, of course, definitely will be very different from real communism). Earlier in his life, he even attempted to help us picture this future society by pointing to the injustice of a man receiving a woman's affections solely because of his money, telling us that such a travesty would never occur under communism.

In any case, what is Marx attempting to communicate with his refusal to describe communist society? In simple terms, Marx’s rejection is a rejection of contemporary idealism and a demand to focus on the existing contradictions within capitalism rather than exciting possibilities. In this view, the attempts to devise superior forms of social organization are meaningless in relation to the “real movement,” which is the actual content of history.  A picture of a society free from liberation and oppression may be attractive, but it is worthless in comparison to the actual activity of the social subject that Marx identifies as ‘abolishing’ capitalism. In other words, Marx urges us to leave aside grand plans and grander ideas and turn our attention to the social movements immediately before us.

B. Killing the Real Movement

If we accept the fact that any textual interpretation is necessarily ‘social’—that is, defined primarily by the social context in which it is read and its arguments are comprehended rather than a metaphysical concept of textual ‘truth’ existing outside the reading—then each particular social interpretation becomes placed within the context of a political conflict and defined by it. And so, the same statement and the same theoretical point figures in two dueling roles at the same time, each opposed in principle to the other but maintaining the claim that their identity is equal.

The ‘dueling position’ is the subtle reinterpretation of the above statement, which sees Marx’s turn on the ‘real’ movement as corresponding to the metaphysical distinction between the “real” and the false, ideal, illusory, etc. Marx’s distinction between social practice and Utopian idealism is redefined as a distinction between believing in ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ claims about the world. Take the following ‘explanation’ of Marx’s criticism of Utopianism by 20th century British Marxist Edgar Hardcastle as characteristic:

What Marx meant by "movements" we find in what he set out in his introduction to Capital. This "movement" was the economic laws of motion of modern society and he explained that his purpose in writing Capital was to discover these economic laws. So the only worthwhile ideas you can have about socialist society have got to be related to what Marx insisted was the existing state of society. You cannot just pluck these ideas out of the air.

In this passage, Hardcastle directly identifies “movement” with the “economic laws” of capitalism rather than any sort of social movement or change. Specifically, Hardcastle identifies “movement” with the economic laws elaborated by Marx in Capital: this theoretical document is equivalent for him to the “existing state of society.” Rather than a revolutionary theorist, under this view, Marx figures as a doctrinaire calling for us to reject ‘false’ theories of societies in favor of his own, ‘true’ one. 

This farcical conception of dialectical materialism may seem like a caricature, but it is only an explicit expression of a ubiquitous and simple pattern in modern communist thinking. In a less critical context, statements exactly like the above are not only bandied about like truisms but are received as insightful statements about Marxism and ‘Marx’s scientific method’. This is further because this ‘objectivist’ way of thinking does not just characterize vulgarizations of Marxism, but in the modern day is also the scientific and social ‘common sense’ of Western liberalism.

Hardcastle’s gloss is not an accident or a quirk of interpretation but a type of thinking that has become characteristic of what we might call objectivist Marxism. In this view, “the real movement” is redefined as a formal set of intellectual propositions about the structure of the economy under capitalist laws that are uncovered and catalogued by the theorist. Marxism is merely the possession of this intellectual doctrine, and communism is reduced to a deduction rather than a practice. Why be a communist? What does it mean to be a communist? It means to recognize that these laws are true and to merely align our subjectivities with what is deemed inevitable in any case. 

Emphasis on this metaphysical distinction is at the heart of ‘communist chauvinism.’ The blinders, overconfidence, and tendency to view social change purely through the lens of the activity of activists or the sects all result from the confidence engendered by the feeling of surety in Marxist doctrine. Even if reality stumbles and falters on the path to socialism, beneath the distraction of bourgeois politics and the noise of anti-Communist propaganda we can rest assured that the truth of our doctrine will inevitably penetrate and clear aside the accumulated ideological rubble. The changes in the structure of the economy or the lives of people or the culture of societies are irrelevant epiphenomena compared to the “real” which is identified intellectually. 

A whole series of absurd consequences for the content of Marxist theory follows. The materialist critique of ideology, which attempts to understand subjectivity and thought through the lens of social practice, instead becomes an arbitrary claim that certain propositions are ‘true’ whereas others are simply ‘false.’ When Marx calls communism “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” he is not declaring that there is some hidden essence of capitalism that the theorist alone can grasp. He is pointing instead to the practical activity of living people, to their strikes, insurrections, and crises—to their beliefs, habits, and social practices—as the substance of history. By translating “movement” into “law,” Hardcastle reproduces the same gesture as the utopians: he substitutes a schema for struggle.

Communists need to understand that the touch-point of their analysis cannot be theory in any form, but a critical engagement with the unique features of social practice in the modern-day United States. Utopianism replaces struggle with dreams; objectivism replaces it with doctrine. Both kill the real movement. Marx’s lesson is the opposite: communism is not an inevitability but an activity, not a law but a practice. The question is not whether history will deliver communism, but whether we will.