But it is a possibility of course, and the red-herring towards minority groups used by political parties both left and right suggest this possibility isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. And if the elite is defined as an upper-class, who is to say they can't form a majority?
Well, I can't really disprove a negative- that an exploiter-class can't constitute a majority- I just don't think that we have any reason to believe that this is a viable social order. In all the myriad forms of exploitation through history, there's never been a simple case of majority-exploiting-minority. Even when it appears that way, say the oppression of blacks in the Old South, there's actually a more complex class structure in place, in which the actual exploitation is being conducted by a very small elite mobilising the majority in its defence. (There's a reason that even the exclusively white labour unions were at their very weakest in the Old South!) The closet example I can bring to mind is the democratic state-ownership of slaves in Classical Greece, in which, firstly, the citizenry were still very much a minority of the total population, albeit a sometimes very sizeable one, and, secondly, state-ownership of slaves existed in the context of a much broader system of exploitation (of private slaves, women, peasant tenants, subaltern communities, etc.) by the city state.
So I guess what I'm saying is that while this sort of "herrenvolk communism" is
conceivable, I don't really see how it would come about. It doesn't mean that it couldn't, I'll give you that, but I guess it's not something that I'm going to worry about until I actually see it becoming a possibility. And given the fact that class struggle invariably cuts across ethnic boundaries once it reaches a certain breath, throwing the old hierarchies into disarray, I tend to think that the very process of class struggle would preclude such an eventuality.
On the other hand, having a minority to do all the dirty work may be perhaps not so expedient, economically speaking. Also, human labour may be in fact completely irrelevant if communism is brought about by the mechanisation of labour. What do you say?
I'd say that there's an even more fundamental aspect than mechanisation: organisation. Capitalism has historically maintained its domination over labour by constantly reorganising the process of production, of increasing the structural dependence of labour on capital to actually produce- what Marx called the "real subsumption of labour under capital"- so any process of communisation would involve exploding these forms of organisation so utterly that the old logic of exploitation would cease to make function. The very process by which communism was brought about would make it impossible to herd people into factories at gun-point, because the factories simply wouldn't- couldn't- work that way any more. Perhaps there would be so new logic of exploitation available, something more sustainable than systematic extortion, but I can't think what it would be. (Which, again, doesn't mean it's impossible, but that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
Communism is a synthesis of capitalism and its anti-thesis (socialism?), right? Does that mean there is a free market in communism?
There's a few points I have in response to this.
First, I'm aware that there's disagreement in this, I don't understand the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process going capital-socialism-communism. I think that represents a misapplication of the dialectic. The antithesis is something that exists alongside the thesis, and in fact something which is necessitated in the thesis itself. This isn't so of socialism. Instead, I would suggest that the process goes capital-labour-communism, labour being the necessary companion of capital, and that the synthesis, communism, emerges as the "real movement" of labour against capital, through which it pursues emancipation in the form of self-abolition.
Secondly, I don't think the association of "capitalism" and "free markets" is a sound one. "Free market", to the extent it means anything at all, is a particular set of economic policies orientated towards low intervention, free trade, etc., which have never been the norm of capitalist society. (Only in the last thirty years have "free market" forms predominated internationally, and even then inconsistently.) And even within these terms, the "freedom" of the "free market" masks the routine violence upon which capitalist society is necessarily predicated, upon which the process of commodity exchange
as such is dependent. (
"Come and see the violence inherent in the system!" So whatever freedoms the thesis of capitalism contributes to the synthesis of communism, the "free market" won't be among them.
