The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.1
Karl Marx
The gulf between dream and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his dream, if he observes life attentively, compares his observations with his castles in the air and generally works towards the realisation of his dream-construct conscientiously. There only has to be some point of contact between dream and life for everything to be in the best order.2
Dmitry Pissarev
The socially produced stuff that populates our lives contains an excess of meaning. We use things to enhance agency, allowing capacities that are otherwise unattainable. When I wake I use medicines like progesterone pills to alter the parameters of my body; check messages from distant friends, comrades and lovers on a phone, devices which have become – in my lifetime – pocket computers, and deploy kitchen appliances to prepare my day’s first meal.
As my eyelids part, I see items that contain a host of memories, binding me to people I may or may not meet again. A gas mask painted green with yellow flowers; a desktop I built plastered in the queer techno venue FOLD’s stickers; a Folio Society edition of Rumi’s Selected Poems. Each transport me to unique periods, conjure people I love, or the people I once was.
The accumulated bric-à-brac of my room in North London also holds deliberate aesthetic appeals. I hang jewellery off stick-on cork boards on the wall by my desk, the pastels of a trans flag drapes near an Anti*Capitalist Resistance banner, a mannequin adorned with spectacular, many-coloured flowers sits on the floor by the doorway. These object’s beauty is also inseparable from their social meaning. The people and histories that made them, the reasons they were made.
Communist Stuff
One of the more egregious distortions about communism as Marx envisaged, sometimes even articulated by supposed marxists, suggests that the abolition of private property entails the abolition of the creative, social enjoyment of the sensuous world. That the value of things will be reduced to the sustenance of a monotonous human mass that exists and realises capacities only to dully perpetuate itself.
If communism were about destroying human diversity and pleasure, it would merely be the realisation of some of the worse tendencies of capitalism. Indeed, this misconception raises up and puts on a pedestal the very alienation we experience under the conditions of our current class society, in which the retreat from the pleasure of things is lauded only because it facilitates the accumulation of capital.
Marxism does not wish to universalise the poverty of pleasure unjustly imposed on workers, but realise the universal humanity modernity promised but failed to deliver. Humanity in this world would recognise its individuality through its connectedness to other people and our environments, and this recognition would not be abstract but ecstatic, sumptuous, and playful.
Far from being the watchword of our future, austerity has no place in a world in which the free association of free workers returns to us the enjoyment of our essential ability to reshape ourselves, the places we reside and the things we make. In that situation that we must build, if we decided to decline enjoyments it would be for hedonistic reasons; to better enjoy in the future, to sustain our own and the world’s potential to offer us later enjoyments.
This vision offered in Marx’s writings is profoundly appealing in part because it offers to heal one of the most fundamental relationships human beings can have with the world, the relationship to the stuff into which we pour our creative powers. In this future, “Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.”3 Marx could not be clearer.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.4
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Ecosocialist Stuff
As ecosocialists, to this we would also stress the importance of depriving ourselves of the power to unsustainably plunder our planet. (Marx does make this point, in his idea of the metabolic rift between humans and our ecospheres, but it now needs emphasising with greater depth against the backdrop of the environmental catastrophes capitalism has since given rise to.)
Once we de-alienate our relationship with stuff, it becomes easier to treat ourselves, each other and the planet with care. And care is not an obstacle to taking joy in stuff, but a way in which to best find that quality. Care is entailed by a genuine appreciation of things, a noticing of what constitutes something, why it is perhaps worth preserving, or consuming conscientiously.
Far from being a means by which the enjoyment of stuff is guaranteed, the commodity relationship instead only guarantees the devaluation and even debasement of that relationship. It does so because it obscures our full participation in our produce, and therefore our participation in the world and with each other. For Marx the commodity-form is at root a type of obscuring.
[…]the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race.5
Karl Marx
Utopian Stuff
What will our relationship with the objects in our lives look like when the connection between the products of our labour and their definite physical nature and sensuous, social relations is hereby restored to us? It is impossible to say with precision; those relationships will be made by people who currently do not exist, in a lifeworld we have not yet been able to bring about, and take a great number of guises depending on those involved.
But idealising speculations about the future are not in-themselves bad, as Dmitry Pissarev quoted at the start of this essay explained. Such visions can be part of our consciousness as exploited and oppressed workers and emerge out of the struggles that lead to non-alienated ways of organising ourselves. There is room to imagine some of what that future could be, however falteringly and therefore humbly.
When Marx and Engels chastise utopianism they mean the inclination of bourgeois socialists to speculate outside of the class forces in struggle, imposing ideas on top of the people who would have to make these fancies a reality. They were not even wholly dismissive of this type of socialism, but saw it as a flawed step in the development towards the class socialism they advocated.
Many marxists, to various degrees of success, imagined a post-capitalist world: William Morris, Alexander Bogdanov, Étienne Cabet. Other utopians outside of or adjacent to marxism also sketched relevant fictions of worlds that are less alienated; noteworthy is Ursula K. Le Guin, who pulls from both left anthropological and class anarchist traditions in her fantastical novels.
Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR) has never shied from participating in such speculations. Our Ecosocialist Manifesto6 is one of our organisation’s most important publications and boldly goes into identifying the implications of the types of liberation we advocate; to fail to do this would be to demand struggle without offering any motivation for it, making suffering its own horrible end.
A*CR’s Simon Hannah has gone to even more lengths to outline what we could achieve in his book Reclaiming the Future: A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy.7 From a shallow perspective the socialist planning debate can seem dry, but by framing it in such utopian terms the stakes and deeply exciting scope of that debate are made apparent.
Possessions Without Possessiveness
It is almost certainly possible to say of this new world that without the necessary fear of lacking the requirements of essential needs, the constant threat of a poverty that could deprive any person of shelter, food, healthcare or friendship, we will have better conditions for possessions without possessiveness. The need to own everything we desire is not an essential feature of life, but a maladaptive coping strategy to handle devastating material insecurities. It is a consequence of trauma, unmet needs, not stuff itself.
This fact gives rise to a greater scope for expanding and finding a non-anxious pleasure in public goods, which because they are held in common allow more social goods with less impact on our environment. A potential powerful strategy towards the decommodifying of our society and the anticipation of a different one is to argue for universal public services: free transport, museums and galleries, libraries, clubs and banquets.
Why should I require exclusive access to a well-crafted book, a piece of nature such as a beach or forest, a magnificent work of architecture, a boat in which to sail the river Thames or a wonderfully conceived and expertly executed painting? It is only because of the thought of being deprived of access to these things that I should want to hoard them.
Imagine if when you are hungry you pick up an item of food to enjoy, when idle you merely freely walk into a space to reflect on sculptures, dance to music, or break bread with someone you have never met but will fast get to know. How can that not hold more appeal than the growing tendency to place dusty boxes into rented storage facilities like Safestore, Vanguard Self Storage, Urban Locker, and so on?
Far from being opposed to the love of stuff, communism as it ought to be realised is the fruition of that love. Stuff not as repositories for abstract value, but as valuable in themselves, as useful, beautiful connections that deserve or even demand our veneration and careful attention.
Note
A*CR’s publishing arm Resistance Book will soon release an edition of The Communist Manifesto introduced in an extensive essay by Twilight O’Hara, which covers many of the different popular distortions and misunderstandings about Marx’s marxism. Watch this space.
References
- Karl Marx, 1844, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
- Dmitry Pissarev, quoted in Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope vol. I, 1954
- Karl Marx, Notes on Mill, 1844
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
- Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
- Ecosocialist Manifesto, 2024
- Simon Hannah, Reclaiming the Future: A Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Economy, 2024
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this is really interesting and compelling. One question I’d have is about the ‘stuff’ of memories — I love the commons of books and art and eating together, but am also aware that the ‘things’ I most value as ‘mine’ are often about memories — a time and place with someone, gifts that take me back, ceramics that are not just beautiful and tactile but conjure a whole week or place… Fascinated by how such ‘stuff’ would function.