Kevin's Reviews > Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Communism:

I will define communism here as any human relationship that operates on the principles of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” [once again, quoting Marx to critique (certain) Marxists]

I admit that the usage here is a bit provocative. “Communism” is a word that can evoke strong emotional reactions—mainly, of course, because we tend to identify it with “communist” regimes. This is ironic, since the Communist parties that ruled over the USSR and its satellites, and that still rule China and Cuba, never described their own systems as “communist.” They described them as “socialist.” “Communism” was always a distant, somewhat fuzzy utopian ideal, usually to be accompanied by the withering away of the state—to be achieved at some point in the distant future.

Our thinking about communism has been dominated by a myth. Once upon a time, humans held all things in common—whether in the Garden of Eden, during the Golden Age of Saturn, or in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands [critiqued in Graeber's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]. Then came the Fall, as a result of which we are now cursed with divisions of power and private property. The dream was that someday, with the advance of technology and general prosperity, with social revolution or the guidance of the Party, we would finally be in a position to put things back, to restore common ownership and common management of collective resources. Throughout the last two centuries, Communists and anti-Communists argued over how plausible this picture was and whether it would be a blessing or a nightmare. But they all agreed on the basic framework: communism was about collective property, “primitive communism” did once exist in the distant past, and someday it might return.

We might call this “mythic communism”—or even “epic communism”—a story we like to tell ourselves. Since the days of the French Revolution, it has inspired millions; but it has also done enormous damage to humanity. It’s high time, I think, to brush the entire argument aside. In fact, “communism” is not some magical utopia, and neither does it have anything to do with ownership of the means of production [oh Graeber... "anything to do", are you that certain?]. It is something that exists right now—that exists, to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organized in that way, and it would be difficult to imagine how there could be. All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us act like a communist consistently. “Communist society”—in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.

Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them. One might even say that it’s one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don’t tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around military-style top-down chains of command. But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. Inventors have always understood this, start-up capitalists frequently figure it out, and computer engineers have recently rediscovered the principle: not only with things like freeware, which everyone talks about, but even in the organization of their businesses.

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism [I don't think this focus on disasters like A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster proves a sustainable model, compared with Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action]. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not an enemy can be expected to act on the principle of “from each according to their abilities,” at least to an extent [...]

Conversation is a domain particularly disposed to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important—but they derive most of their power from the shared assumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one’s feelings, and it’s impossible to lie to someone who does not assume you would ordinarily tell the truth. When we genuinely wish to break off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.

I will call this “baseline communism”: the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply. Of course, different communities apply very different standards. In large, impersonal urban communities, such a standard may go no further than asking for a light or directions. This might not seem like much, but it founds the possibility of larger social relations. In smaller, less impersonal communities—especially those not divided into social classes [so then we have to unpack this]—the same logic will likely extend much further: for example, it is often effectively impossible to refuse a request not just for tobacco, but for food, sometimes even from a stranger, and certainly from anyone considered to belong to the community. [...]

First, we are not really dealing with reciprocity here—or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense. What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will. The Iroquois example brings home clearly what makes this possible: that such relations are based on a presumption of eternity. Society will always exist. Therefore, there will always be a north and a south side of the village. This is why no accounts need be taken. In a similar way, people tend to treat their mothers and best friends as if they will always exist, however well they know it isn’t true.

Sometimes you know an academic paper has overplayed its hand just from the title. ‘Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and Fascism’– from the current International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare – is one such paper. Even Rik Mayall in The Young Ones might pull back from using the word ‘fascist’ – or derivatives of it – twenty-eight times in six pages.

Initially I thought it might be a spoof. After all, who could forget the Sokal hoax, where a Professor of Physics at NYU submitted ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics’ to Social Text, the leading postmodernist academic journal. This deliberately meaningless joke article – purporting to undermine the entire discipline of physics – was accepted and published, to universal delight.

But this new article is very real. Here’s what the authors put in the ‘objectives’ section of their abstract: ‘The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.’

If I can put my fascist cards on the table, these are not ‘objectives’. Setting details aside, here is a quote from their authority figure, French philosopher Félix Guattari, to illustrate the clarity of his thinking: ‘We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis.’ And from Gilles Deleuze: ‘In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable [Jesus], but rather “metastable”, endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed.’

These characters are being recruited to attack the notion of evidence-based medicine, and the argument of this paper – it’s not an easy read – seems to be that: evidence-based medicine rejects anything that isn’t a randomised control trial (which is untrue); the Cochrane Library, for some reason, is the chief architect of this project; and lastly, that this constitutes fascism, in some meaning of the word the authors enjoy, twenty-eight times.

Here’s a flavour: ‘The classification of scientific evidence as proposed by the Cochrane Group [sic] obeys a fascist logic. This “regime of truth” ostracises those with “deviant” forms of knowledge. When the pluralism of free speech is extinguished, speech as such is no longer meaningful; what follows is terror, a totalitarian violence.’ They make repeated allusions to Newspeak. At one point they seem to identify epidemiologists with George W. Bush.

Now, firstly, they are plain wrong about the Cochrane Library, an organisation which simply produces systematic reviews of the published medical literature: Cochrane doesn’t only use trial data, in fact many Cochrane reviews contain no trials at all. This is pure ignorance.

But there is a more important general issue here. Evidence-based medicine is often portrayed – especially by ageing professors from the dying era of eminence-based medicine – as soulless and algorithmic. But that is a foolish caricature. EBM, in all the key textbooks, from the earliest editorials, is about using quantitative information alongside all other forms of knowledge: taking account of clinical judgement, and patients’ wishes, and boring things like the availability of local services. It does not denigrate other forms of knowledge, like clinical experience or patient preference: it seeks to augment and inform them. EBM is not about being an automaton.

That’s all a bit sensible. How about some more childish attacks, ideally involving fascism? OK, then. I will wear their label of ‘fascist’ with a cheeky grin. But Archie Cochrane, on the other hand – pioneering epidemiologist, and inspiration for the Cochrane Library – might see things a little differently. After the war, and after working on miners’ lung disease, he helped to inspire a democratising culture shift towards evidence-based practice throughout the whole of medicine, and as a consequence, he has probably saved more lives than any single doctor you know. Before that, he was a prisoner of war for four years in Nazi Germany (‘The main reason for my capture was my inability to swim to Egypt’). And before that, in 1936, he dropped out of medical school and travelled to Spain to join the International Brigade, where he fought genuinely violent totalitarian oppression, the fascists of General Franco, with his own two hands.

Now. What did you do in your summer holidays?