Chapter 13: Democracy & CommunismCommunism, elections and guns; Class struggles and the Communist worldview; The Good Communist as a man; The Good Communists as a political party; Earned and Unearned Income; Distribution Socialism; Trade and Guild Communism; Communist Parties and Labour Parties; ‘Not enough to go round’ premise no longer valid; Economic fundamentals of Communist structuralism; Swedish Communists and Labour Parties.
The Communists may be split, from place to place around the world, on the principle of representative democracy, many believing the Maoist slogan that power comes from the barrel of a gun. But, where they contest elections, then they contest elections as if the exercise of vote seeking and parliament-forming is a useful weapon, howbeit perhaps just one in several, for them to deploy in the broader armoury that includes international worker solidarity, the sabotage of international capitalism and the underwriting of freedom fighters.For Communists there are ‘classes’ and ‘The Class Struggle’. The wealth and money holding class, the Capitalists, hold power over those who depend on working for their livelihood, The Workers, through restricting to them and their own the access to money and credit and through controlling the development and the deployment of technologies to those which consolidate or enhance ‘The Money Power’ over ‘The Wage Slave’. This the Capitalists do, in the final analysis, because they believe there is not enough to go round, we live from day to day, and it is either me or them.
The Communist, born into a Capitalist World, observes the cartels organized to maldistribute money and credit; notes that successful capitalists always create scarcity; watches with horror as wages (the price of work) are manipulated down to subsistence levels; and looks on with hate in his heart as ‘rent prices’, the price for using a piece of land or a working tool, ‘the price of goods’ and ‘the price of services’, at least those of the professional tricksters such as the lawyer, the accountant and the banker, rise always out of reach of the wage for a working day. As a man, he says ‘Enough is enough. Get a rope and hang the bastards.’
As a politician, in a party created specifically to crush Capitalism, his target is always to acquire the power to effect structural changes in the distribution of wealth and to shift the distribution of daily rewards from the looter, the moocher and the usurer to the producer. The British Fabian Socialists, at the turn of the century, introduced the idea of ‘Earned’ and ‘Unearned’ income as helpful labels in this regard. Indeed the Shavian wing always insisted that Socialism was Equal Money.
This Distribution Socialism ran into trouble with the collective bargaining ideas of the Trade and Guild Unions and also with much of the intellectual edifice of marxist-leninism constructed upon the ideas of The Class Struggle and the historical theories of the German philosophers underpinning them, and have failed so far to make any headway in either the mainstream Labour Parties or the mainstream Communist Parties.
But history and the real world are moving now in their direction and Shaw’s Economics are the obvious meeting ground for East and West in economic matters now that it is possible to discard the premise of ‘Not enough to go round’.
And so, to summarize, the Communists are Structuralists who want to alter the structure of the economic system. In contrast to Olof Palme’s Swedish Labour Party with its historic compromise with the economic power of private capital and subsequent tolerance of a fundamental dichotomy between their words and their deeds, the Communists are idealists. It has gained them respect but the canny ability of the Swedish Labour Party to fuse idealism and pragmatism has gained them power. For Representative Democracy seldom rewards those who call things as they are.