“The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
“In this sense the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
“Abolition of private property.”
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)¹
Owner, owned. Owner, non-owner. It is impossible to establish a concept without referencing the total constellation of concepts, shifting the significance, the relation, the shape of everything.
The strictly personal characterization of private property is illusory. To insist that what’s mine is mine is to already claim something about the self, about the self’s relationship to the world, and about others. Property today has become a social power, a means of command over others rather than being what it veils itself as — merely an extension of the owner. Rather than to be an owner without relation to non-owners,:
“To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.”²
The myth of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” conceals this situation. Capitalism abolishes personal property — or property as an extension of one’s labor — for most people. Workers can toil for their entire lives and have no share in the product of their labor, which has become capital. In fact, the growing product of their labor — in the form of capital — only serves to exploit its very mother, the workers themselves.³
In this relationship — where labor has become exploited by its own product, acting as if it had come alive — capitalism is the culmination of all class societies. It is the ultimate expression of class, incorporating manifold forms of domination into itself even in abolishing their place as coherent, complete ways of life apart from itself. Everything is subordinated to the general capital, to the general demand of accumulation. This demand of accumulation for accumulation’s sale is the truth of class society, the finality of its mutilation of nature.
The history of hitherto existing class societies is a history of the exploitation of nature. The historical sketches of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should be read with this in mind. For them, the history of our increasing alienation from nature is also a history of freedom.⁴ But such freedom today rests on a gamble: that the manifold manufacture of possibilities opened by capital does not rot and stink before the communist revolution liberates them from its innards. Capital has finally pushed us into an absolute decision, either a free society (communism) or extinction. And yet in this it is only the final, all-or-nothing expression of a thread weaved throughout the history of all class societies.
The construct of ‘primitive communism,’ the beginning of human history in Marx and Engels’s schemas, is not meant to describe a ready-made, all-round communism. It is not even meant to be a coherent, total social mode of production. What it refers to is a communalist ethic to everyday life, the organization of social life around community, community-membership, community-homeland. In other words, a particular, local relationality. Here, the two considered human beings to still be bound by an umbilical cord to Mother Nature, not yet having severed it with a broader development of labor (and thus an alienation from nature).⁵
The possibilities for life were limited to a community scale. In this the seeds of self-negation already existed, namely in the distinction of community-members and outsiders which became the mechanism for raids, warfare, and enslavement. This domination of outside could either lead to the transformation of the community into a dominating class society or be the means for foreign conquerors to integrate the community into a more unified system of domination.
Thus society emerges as what might broadly be described as tributary modes of production, what traditionally were labeled by Marx and Engels as “feudalism” and “Asiatic modes of production.”⁶ The ruling caste, whether developed into a coherent state bureaucracy or not, extracts tribute from the producers, who are not severed from their natural conditions of existence on a mass scale. Such societies, however, tended to practice slavery, though not in the chattel form associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.⁷ Slavery as a social death, as a denial of relationality, here appears as a means for the slave to live as an extension of the Owner — the old model of personal property, rather than capitalist private property as the victims of Atlantic chattel slavery found themselves as.⁸ The states of Ancient Egypt, China, and Byzantium offer prime models of this tributary mode of production.
Characteristic of these forms’ relationship with nature, as distinguished from communalism, is the claim of the state or ruling caste to mediate between the territorial community and nature, or the cosmos. Though ties to nature are not entirely removed from the world around regular, laboring people — nature and ancestor worship historically tended to be just as important, though less so in Western Europe — nature is supposed to center around the sovereign.⁹ This extended to the legal fictions, so important to Marx and Engels, of the sovereign owning entire imperial territories as his property.¹⁰ In such a system, all other property claims were to be derived from the fundamental property claim of the sovereign. Property thus amounted to either a means for extracting tribute, which served as the means of consumption for the nobility, bureaucracy, and sovereigns, or an extension of labor — ‘personal property,’ which the former justified itself as.¹¹
The very gaps in such a universal property claim, however, became the site for the emergence of capital. The weakness of states in Western Europe, the thinness of social bonds, was exactly an opportunity for a density of capital-relations to emerge and become society themselves.¹² The earliest forms of capital tended to be concentrated around port cities and trade routes, sites of world exchange. This was a commercial or merchant capital.¹³ This, however, could not be considered to already be the specifically capitalist mode of production proper, because such capital could not command broad swathes of associated labor as today except in the wealthiest trade-centric cities.
But the emergence of capital in such a context reveals an association between regional markets and capitalist power — in the modern world, the general capital or capitalist system broadly can only be constituted by the global market.¹⁴ Marx considered the historical uniqueness of the capitalist mode of production to be the penetration of capital into relations of production, rearranging them around itself as their center in a global, general capital. From early on, he identified the emergence of this form of capital with agrarian class struggles in Western Europe and the development of semi-autonomous cities populated by bourgeoisie (town-citizens).¹⁵ In connection with the emergence of a truly global market for the first time, beginning in 1492, these seeds of capital could grow into a mode of production unto themselves by acting through the networks of international exchange, penetrating through and into town and country.¹⁶
With the capitalist mode of production, we see a final split of human beings from nature, and by extension, the alienation of laborers from their own natural conditions of existence. And so:
“For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”¹⁷
The mass of human beings have been severed from their self-relationship to labor as a metabolism with nature. Yet, to Marx and Engels, this very alienation also cultivates broad possibilities for freedom — for labor is developed radically, albeit for the sake of augmenting exchange-values.¹⁸ ‘Humanity’ has been constituted, abstractly, by the world market. We can speak of a common global human society, though it is riven by exploitation. Capitalism cultivates and accumulates a wealth of possibilities, but limits them to the demands of accumulation. It disciplines labor in the name of this production, but leaves labor without an end except for labor itself, repeated until death. Life is for labor, and labor is for accumulation. Thus, the ultimate property: private property which owns labor rather than being a subordinated extension of labor.
Property is present in the very beginnings of domination. Property is the domination of nature, the subordination of the wealth of nature into merely an expression of the Owner. Implicitly or explicitly, it demands the Self-Sameness of property and owner, otherwise the property is no longer the property of the Owner.¹⁹ Domination of nature is the ground of all other forms of domination, as all domination is domination of one part of nature by another part. The capitalist mode of production is the apogee of domination in being domination of life itself, possible only with by means of a dichotomous split between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature.’
Capitalist private property is the colonization of nature, it is a desire to “rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature.”²⁰ The coloniality of capital spares no aspect of nature, especially not other human beings. Capitalist colonization demands the split of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature,’ and thus the expropriation of those who still relate to the land as a relative and as a home. Capitalists colonize these lands to turn them into interchangeable commodities, delineated things which are buyable and sellable. The colonial standardization of property systems in the Americas and beyond demands such a separation of Subject and Object. This fact decolonial struggles have recognized since 1492. Crazy Horse (Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte) inveighed, “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”²¹
Max Horkheimer warned of the consequences of this form of living:
“The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes ‘internalized’ for domination’s sake.”²²
In an existence which is necessarily relational, domination demands a self-mutilation of that relationality. That extends to subjectivity. Every subject must dominate their naturalness in order to construct themselves as subjects of a dominating society. There must be a turn inwards, to the self, to discipline one’s existence into a subjectivity. Michel Foucault noted the importance of the Christian practice of turning inward and denying the self in favor of God for developing that very self.²³ That very form of self-domination is a self-creation, it is a separation of self from the manifold qualities of nature, including one’s inner nature.²⁴ Subjectivity is a principal product of civilization, and the split of subject and object found, for example, in the philosophy of René Descartes is a symptom of it.
The culminating form of this split can be found in that form of private property known as capital, which is a property premised on fundamental, ongoing expropriation. The capitalist mode of production foundationally treats all exchange as that of disembodied owner-subjects who contract, freely and equally, between each other. This contract-exchange conceals the foundational relationship of the exploitation of embodied life, as labor.
The wage laborer appears as a salesperson of a commodity, as the owner of their bodily capacities in the form of commodity labor-power.²⁵ Their exploited labor is treated as something other than them in the form of contract-maker, even if the same person who made the contract is expected to physically show up for work in an agreed upon space. The owner of the commodity labor-power is a disembodied subject, while the laborer is embodied. Commodity labor-power is a product of centuries of violence and discipline in human bodies, cultivating their capacities into interchangeable commodities available on the market for purchase and command by capital.²⁶
The commodification of labor-power is by no means as natural, obvious, and immediate as it appears in capitalist society. This colonization of (natural) bodies and colonization of nature are identical. This appears quite explicit in the colonization of human communities. The colonial disciplining of Indigenous bodies into Anglo-ified labor-power salespersons was the stated aim of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school shed much tears and blood in trying to ‘teach’ Indigenous peoples to no longer treat their bodies as inherently tied by nerves, tendons, flesh, and love with their communities and homes, but to treat them as property which must be kept up in value and disciplined for the sale of labor-power.
Capital is the subject of the capitalist mode of production, the subject which all other subjects look to as the center which they position themselves relative to. The subjectivity of capital is subjectivity, a long-cultivated historical product, unleashed into a mania for transforming the world into repetitions of capital — into chains of valorization and accumulation. Capital’s subjectivity is a borrowed subjectivity, borrowed from the life of laborers. Nevertheless, it is as real as anything in everyday life. It dominates mortal subjects as an objective power standing above and behind them, and reduces them in their everyday lives to the property of empowered objects.
Capitalism is a system where everyone appears to be a property owner, where even the propertyless are supposed to own their labor-power as their own ‘property.’ In this, everyone appears to commonly colonize ‘Nature’ as ‘Humanity.’ But this is a relationship of capital’s subjectivity to ‘Nature,’ and thus the responsibility of colonization is concentrated where there is an accumulation of capital. Capitalists as the personification of capital are thus embodiments of the colonizing function, and must be treated as such. To speak of common ‘human’ responsibility for the present global ecological catastrophe is to reproduce the illusion of free, equal exchange between owners. This is to say nothing of the overwhelming burden of the consequences on indigenous peoples, who civilizations cast in a common lot with nature as ‘natural peoples.’²⁷
The illusion of classless society, so often touted at the end of the 20th century, is in reality derived from this function. Classless society is class society without a politically autonomous, confrontational proletariat.²⁸ The propertyless exist just as much now as ever, but labor, consumption, and everyday life have been restructured and standardized to promote the illusion of classlessness.²⁹ The individuals of this ‘classless’ society appear as only different in quantity, i.e. income inequality. Even with such immiseration, thought leaders insist that this is the case of a ‘declining middle class’ and not the demand of a new regime for the exploitation of labor.
The old institutions of mass politics, in particular labor unions, were gutted as part of a global counterrevolution from the 1960s onward.³⁰ Instead of mass politics, what we have today are gaggles of citizens. Whether in the form of digital citizens or political citizens, such interchangeability and strict individuation is the rule of the day. Thus the impotence of every attempt at constituting political autonomy through this form.³¹ The citizen-owner is in fact a counterrevolutionary form, it is a veil of capitalist subjectivity. Capital’s subjectivity is borrowed once over, and the citizen-owner borrows their subjectivity twice over from this borrowed subjectivity.
Within the boundaries of each citizen, we find the illusory inwardness of the self. Each citizen is fenced off from others, it is supposedly left up to them to decide what to fill the interior of their property with. The junk that is to make up their self is their choice, though they inherit plenty from their ancestors. They can hoard as much as they like, or they can raze the citizen-plot completely flat. Whatever is to their liking, as long as it does not fundamentally disrupt the system of separate citizen-plots. And so, many people find a natural solution to the hectic modern world in a retreat into the self. But this is far from inwardness — it is only navel-gazing. This retreat is not a meditation on the wealth of experience, even if it makes use of meditation for the utilitarian purpose of ‘self-help.’ True inwardness cannot be complacency with the plot-system. True inwardness demands a dissolution of the self into the infinite uniqueness of the world.³² A natural expression of this truth is embodied community action, struggle, revolution — those activities which Uniquely affirm the Unique.
And so we come to the decision of revolution. But revolution has been encrusted with the muck of the ages. What often passes for revolution cannot be allowed to stand in any revolution of Uniqueness. The limit of ‘radicalism’ in the United States tends to be some program of nationalization, or the extension of said logic into such proposals as a single-payer healthcare system. But nationalization is not as radical as what the situation demands of us. In normal conditions (that is, nationalization carried out by the bourgeois state) it is merely the national state taking on management of capital in a particular industry.
To nationalize something is to declare it the property of the nation. But the nation is no more neutral and no less discriminating than any other property-owner. It can just as well rent the use of its property out to the highest bidder, or can find itself in desperation to sell the product of labor exercised by the medium of its property. This is the neocolonial dependency so many nations find themselves in, even those with nationalized property. The nationalization campaigns of the 20th century did not prevent this — import-substitute industrialization was a failure of an attempt at decolonization.
In the United States, such nationalization goes hand in hand with settler ‘socialism.’ This would make colonized lands, carved up into settler exploitations, into the property of the general settler, the state. Indigenous peoples do not relate to their homelands as private property, whether property of individuals or property of nation-states. The framework of the nation-state with its security, territory, and population limits any such indigenous relational nexus.
Nationalization is not the same as socialization. Socialization does not signify private property, not even the private property of the nation, but the abolition of private property. As Karl Korsch said:
“The structure of the capitalist society which socialism struggles against is determined by the fact that in a capitalist economic order the social processes of production are essentially viewed as the private affair of individual persons. In contrast socialization aims at the creation of a socialist communal economy; that is, an economic order in which the social process of production is considered a public affair of the producing and consuming whole.”³³
This is a revolutionary break, an active struggle against the old society of capitalist private property. Socialization is a self-conscious relationality. It is a reclamation of relationality, the flesh of life, acting through the dense sociality created by capitalism.
But socialization brings us to something important — how will the new society arrange its relations? What are the new society’s ethics? Following from this question, I believe we must rethink labor as the traditional, positive central category of communism. Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme is substantially relevant on this score, rather than being an obscure political intervention. Against the slogan “labour is the source of all wealth,” Marx reminded his fellow revolutionaries that “Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power.”³⁴ The split between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ is illusory, laboring ‘Man’ cannot escape the ground of his naturalness. He represses it, trying to act as only a subject in the form of capital, but needs it anyways. For capital must take its form as wealth, as use-values, and thus is nature.
The proletariat is not revolutionary in the positive virtue of labor as an ethic in itself. Labor as we have known it, across the history of civilization, is a curse. The proletariat, rather, is radical in embodying the negativity, the waste, the wrong of this civilization, that negativity bound up inseparably from its relationship to its labor itself. This is a class “with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, an estate that is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it[…]”³⁵
The production of surplus-value becomes the material for the whole of society across classes, distributed by means of profit, interest, rent, and taxes. The very source of these in surplus-value is obscured by their distribution, but where the proletariat disrupts and refuses value-production, as in a revolution, it becomes a conscious object of defense for the forces of reaction. The proletariat’s revolutionary, universalist potential lies in the nature of its domination itself, because it “cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”³⁷
This is exactly why capital has struggled so hard to disperse cooperative labor since the 20th century, even if it can never do away with it entirely. The rearrangement of the global division of labor, the precariousness of labor, the emergence of the gig economy, and the streamlining of labor-tasks are all weapons in the class struggle to fragment the self-composition of the revolutionary proletariat. But the density of sociality, so necessary for capitalism, remains. Capital can never escape labor, because capital is labor. It can struggle to reduce the role of living labor in the production process, but by this it only contributes to the suffocation of its own regimes of accumulation by reducing the fuel of surplus-values relative to capital as a whole.³⁸
Proletarian revolution today can no longer rely so immediately on the old ‘collective worker,’ the subject of socialist mass politics in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. But the “radical chains” of the proletariat have not disappeared. The proletariat today must re-compose itself by re-building, through an agonizing struggle, the ground of mass politics. This cannot be done through labor as a positive virtue, particularly not in an age of such structural unemployment, but through their self-assertion as the propertyless, the dispossessed. Their collectivity cannot be a collectivity of positive labor, but of dispossession.
The character of a revolutionary movement is articulated more through conscious relationality than positive labor, though we must labor hard to constitute an autonomous political bloc. The revolutionary proletariat must understand itself not as the true carrier of bourgeois civilization, that rapist of nature, but the revenge of nature on civilization. They must reclaim their embodied experience of life through revolutionary action, refusing the orderly routines of everyday bourgeois life in favor of autonomous, self-conscious forms of relating to each other.
They must fight to defend life against capital accumulation, building the means for us to survive the global ecological catastrophe. The revolutionaries “have a world to win,” and they must build a new civilization premised on free, universal kinship with all of life. This demands working through labor as a metabolism of human beings and nature, but it also demands the abolition of labor as we have known it. A communist society cannot practice labor as an instrumentalization of life’s wealth, as it has been up to now, but must instead practice a form of social usufruct — to manage the product of labor, our collective metabolism with nature, in an open fashion without claiming it as the property of any one in particular. To treat labor as an open relationship of producer and consumer, subject and object, care and cared for. Not to exclusively claim and separate, but to tighten our ties for another by the care of labor for the good of each and all, enjoying the wealth of developed, rationally exercised forms of labor as a security for the creativeness of living activity.³⁹ What we have known labor as is an instrumentalization of life, but communist labor must be an expression of the broad wealth of life:
“In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.”⁴⁰
To reconcile ourselves with the rest of nature, we must also reconcile ourselves with our own naturalness. We need to cultivate a healthy relationship with our own labor. This is the substance of Marx’s apparently baffling defense of child labor, in which he said “an early combination of productive labor with instruction is one of the most powerful means for transforming present-day society.”⁴¹ This is not the exploitation of children, but accommodating children to their own embodiment. It is experiential education, education which refuses the separation of mental and manual labor and promotes a healthy relationship with labor as a metabolism with nature.
Pedagogy produces, reproduces, and reveals a society’s sense of its relationship to the world.⁴² Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi) noted that her nation considered pedagogy as key to humanization of children, bringing them into their own place in the matrix of relationships that makes up the world. Reconciliation with nature would be the key aspect of the new labor promoted by such pedagogy. This task is inseparable from the abolition of property and the emancipation of labor. For the new generations, those to be born after the constitution of proletarian rule over society, will be those who live communist civilization. They will be those who will not bear the marks of capital. The importance of decolonial pedagogy extends to our self-decolonization from the vampiric capitalist colonization of nature.
Communism is above all the abolition of private property and the liberation of our dialogic relationship with nature on the very universal scale blasted open by capital. Instead of nature being dead, external property, nature will once again become a wealth of relatives — but this time, on a beloved universal scale. Communist civilization can only be born by embracing the openness of human relationality.⁴³ It is that openness which enables us to articulate ourselves, and to articulate the wealth of nature in our labor. Humanity can only be universal by being free to be radically empty, open to the universal that lives in everything.
