Chapotraphouse

Focusing on ownership is too easily misunderstood. It’s difficult to speak of a transfer of property rights when the concept of property itself is transformed. Otherwise this message is easily misconstrued by anticommunist rhetoric that communism is merely redistribution rather than a restructuring of production relations. The 2nd chapter of the manifesto also makes this point, that abolition of private property is a derived, not fundamental, principle.

Moving from private property, it might be tempting to reduce communism to abolition of wage labor. Yet in the modern super-imperial, financial era, much of the global value flow occurs through means other than direct exploitation of wage labor.

If not wage labor, maybe it’s simply commodities that have to be done away with? But commodities have existed for millennia, so has money. Capitalism clearly cannot be reduced to those either.

If communist revolution is reduced to a single phrase, in my opinion it has to be focused against capital, because capital is the social relation that allows the use of wealth to expand personal wealth and thereby entrench class society. Naturally some might ask, well what is this capital? And it will require some explaining. But it’s accurate at every level of analysis, from intro to advanced theory.