MAKING REVOLUTION AND EMANCIPATING HUMANITY-1

PART 1: BEYOND THE NARROW HORIZON OF BOURGEOIS RIGHT

by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

Editors’ Note: The following is the first in a series of excerpts from a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA earlier this year (2007). This has been edited for publication and footnotes have been added (among other things, in preparing this for publication, the author has considerably expanded the section on Karl Popper). These excerpts are being published in two parts. Part 1 is available in its entirety, as one document, online at revcom.us. Part 2 will also be available in the near future, as one document, at revcom.us; the excerpts comprising Part 2 will also be published as a series in Revolution after the conclusion of the present series of excerpts.

I want to begin by returning to a point that we continue to speak to—and for very good reasons—both because of its great importance and because it is still so little grasped and acted upon. This is the whole question of getting beyond the present narrow horizons imposed on society and on people and their thinking. Now, I am aware that in his latest CD, Modern Times, Bob Dylan has a song “Beyond the Horizon.” But what we are talking about is something entirely and radically different—it is the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, and the need for humanity to leap beyond that horizon.

“I Want to Get More”—or We Want Another World?

I was moved, or provoked, to speak to this again in reading some reports recounting the responses of different people, youth in particular, to watching the DVD of my 2003 talk Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About. I want to begin with a comment of one youth (I believe it was a high school student in Oakland) who watched this DVD, and said he really liked it—“I agree with everything in there, and I really liked the vision of the future society”—but, he went on, “if I invent something, I want to get more for it.”

Here we come right up against the question of making (or not making) a leap beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right. What do we mean by “bourgeois right”? This refers to the concept of “right” which essentially corresponds to commodity relations—relations in which people confront each other as owners (or non-owners) of things which are to be exchanged—and more specifically, relations in which the appearance of equality covers over profound inequalities, relations which are grounded in the exploitation and oppression of the many by a relative handful. In its most fundamental terms, this is grounded in a relationship where a small number of people dominate ownership not only of the wealth of society, but more fundamentally the means to produce wealth (land, raw materials, technology of various kinds, and so on), and a large number of people own little or none of these things, and so must sell their ability to work to those who do own them (and, if they are not able to sell their ability to work—if they cannot get a job—they will either starve or be forced into other means, often illegal means, in order to be able to live). Once again, this exchange—of the ability to work (or “labor power”) for a wage (or salary)—appears to be an equal exchange; but in reality it involves and embodies a profoundly unequal relation, in which those without capital are forced into a subordinate position: forced to work for—and, in the process of working, creating more wealth for—those who do own and control capital.

This fundamental relation of inequality, of domination and exploitation, is extended into and embodied in all the relations of capitalist society. Take, for example, the concept of “equality before the law.” This is supposed to mean that the same laws are applied, in the same ways, to everyone, regardless of what their “station” in life is, how much money they have, and so on. Experience shows, however, that this is not how things work out in reality. People with more money have more political influence—and those with a great deal of money have a great deal of political influence and power—while those with less money, and especially those with very little, also have no significant political influence, connections with political power, and so on. And this plays out, repeatedly, in legal proceedings, right down to the way in which those presiding over legal procedures (judges) look—very differently—at different kinds of people who become involved in legal proceedings. But what is even more decisive is the reality that the laws themselves (and the Constitution which sets the basis for the laws) reflect and reinforce the essential relations in society, and most fundamentally the economic (production) relations of capitalism. This, for example, is why it is perfectly legal for capitalists to lay off thousands of people, or to refuse to hire them in the first place, if these capitalists cannot make sufficient profit by employing (and exploiting) them—or if they can make more profit by employing, and exploiting, people in some other place—but it is illegal for people who have been denied employment in this way to take the things they need without paying for them (without giving money in exchange for these things—money which in fact they do not have, money they cannot earn, because they have been prevented from working, by means that are perfectly legal under this system). All this—and the many ways in which this finds expression in society, in the relations between groups and individuals, in the laws and institutions, and in the thinking of people—is what is meant in referring to “bourgeois right.”

To dig further into what this means, let’s return to the example of someone “wanting more” if they invent something. This is hardly an uncommon view. It is “spontaneous” thinking that is very common when living in a society like this, where everything is ultimately—and very often not so ultimately—measured in the very narrow, constricting terms of the cash nexus and gets expressed crudely in “what’s in it for me?” So this youth could see the sweep of all that is presented in that “Revolution” talk, and agree with it—but, then, there was one little sticking point: “If I do something special, I want something in exchange for it, I want the chance to get something more for me.”

Well, we have to examine: How do things actually work when and where people “get more”? And, for that matter, how do things actually work when and where people invent something in the first place? What is it that happens most of the time when someone invents something, and then someone ends up “getting more out of it”? Usually, it’s not the person who does the inventing who “gets more”—or gets most of the profit—from this, but instead the people who have control of capital and who can turn the invention into a commodity and into capital. Because that’s what has to happen in order for someone to get more out of something that is invented: there have to be the social relations, and ultimately and fundamentally the production relations, which enable that, which make it possible to turn that invention into “intellectual property”—into a commodity and into capital.

Well, in order for that to happen, there must be a whole network of capitalist relations. Otherwise, on what basis are you going to get anything—and, specifically, get more than others—if there is not a whole network of commodity relations and of capital which is undergirding and is the basis on which the whole society is functioning? And this whole network of commodity relations, and of capital, is in reality a network of exploitation. That is what has to be in operation in order for someone—and most likely not the inventor, but a class of people, a class of capitalists (and particular capitalists in particular instances)—to get more out of it. It is those who already control large amounts of capital, and who have a dominant position in the capitalist economy, who are most likely to benefit the most—to get more than others.

And what happens if we have a whole network of capitalist relations? What kind of world do we then have? We have the same world that’s being dissected and indicted in the “Revolution” talk on the DVD—the same world that drove this person to say, in the first place, “I really liked what is said in that talk.” You don’t like this world. But if you don’t want this world, then you cannot want the things that define this world and that are the underlying and driving forces in this world. You cannot want a network of commodity relations and of capital, because then you have everything that goes along with that, not only immediately around you, but throughout the world, and all the horrors that we know about and could catalog almost endlessly.

To paraphrase Lenin, capitalism puts into the hands of individuals, as individual wealth and capital, that which has been produced by all of society. Production under capitalism—and the turning of an invention into something which not only has use value but exchange value, which can summon money back and even “surplus value,” more money than at the start of the process—requires a social production process which ends up with the surplus value (the wealth that’s produced as capital) going into the hands of individuals—and a relative handful of individuals, at that. This is the point Lenin was making when he said that capitalism puts into the hands of individuals, as individual wealth and capital, that which has been produced by all of society—and today, more than ever, this takes place on a worldwide scale. After all, capital is not something neutral, and it is not wealth in some abstract sense—divorced and abstracted from the social production relations through which that wealth is produced—capital is a social relation in which some have command over the labor power (the ability to work) of others and accumulate wealth for themselves by utilizing that labor power of others.

Lenin added that capitalism forces people to calculate, with the stinginess of a miser, how much more they’re getting than somebody else. Put that—and everything that’s bound up with that, all the horrors that go along with that—up against what it would mean to move beyond all that, to get beyond these production relations, and the corresponding social relations, and all the conditions that are bound up with them and intertwined with them. And, further, in the situation where humanity had finally managed to throw off all this, and all the horrors that go along with it, the orientation of “wanting more for myself” would very quickly move things backward, in the direction of the capitalist system, with all its very real horrors. There is no other way in which ultimately and fundamentally certain individuals can “get more”—no way other than to have a whole network of relations that makes that possible, with everything that goes along with that.

Does this mean—as is often claimed by people attacking and slandering communism—that in communist society everybody will have exactly the same amount of things, regardless of their particular situation and their particular needs? No, the slogan of communism—the principle that will be applied in communist society—is precisely from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. In other words, people will contribute what they can to society and will get back what they need to meet the requirements of a decent and fulfilling life, intellectually and culturally, as well as materially, on an ever expanding basis. This will involve and require a whole different outlook and morality, along with radically different economic, social, and political relations, in which it will no longer be the case that a relatively small group dominates and exploits masses of people and in which it is presented as “right and natural” for some people to have a superior position over others.