Fragment on higher and lower communism
Someone wrote to me (no really!) asking about lower and higher phases of communism (‘higher and lower’ here meaning both the degree to which the exit from capitalism is completed and the degree of development of the beneficial forms of social evolution that will play out in a genuinely post-capitalist society\) and what Marx had to say about the matter. In case it’s of any interest, and for the sake of my own self-archiving, my reply’s below. (Read it over now I feel like I can see bits of the Raymond Williams I’ve been reading in here, but I dunno for sure.)
To my mind, the works where Marx wrote out those ideas are provisional wors working out his thoughts - much like the Grundrisse - and that was a line of inquiry he never completed, unfortunately. For whatever it's worth I'm inclined to say the following generally, which is influenced by what I take Marx to be saying (and my interpretation of Marx is heavily influenced by Simon Clarke and Tony Smith)
1. Class societies tend to be state societies, so insofar as class remains the state will tend to remain, and as long as the state remains class will tend to remain.
2. Overcoming the existence of class and of the state will likely operate in tandem - abolishing class will mean confrontation with the state, and abolishing the state will be part of abolishing class; furthermore the basic forms of subordination that class consists in will tend to make it harder to abolish the state. While this will be a single process of overcoming class and the state, the process will contradictory and complicated.
3. Any discrete phases and any transitions between phases - like the end of capitalism, the beginning of lower communism, and beginning of higher or full communism - will likely be geographically uneven (making solidarity and efforts to spread struggles and link discrete struggles up with each other very important) and ultimately only really identifiable retroactively. Since those transitions can't be identified in the moment, the most important things will be to focus on what the proletariat or members of the proletariat are doing collectively, supporting those struggles and engaging them in dialog about how to push forward.
4. Related to point 3, the way this will play out in real time will above all be a process of creating new forms of popular power - real processes of democratization, where proletarians gain more collective control over their lives - with those new forms being the social locations where people will develop greater capacity to rule themselves collectively and greater aspiration to do so, as well as locations for deepening values like solidarity, internationalism, egalitarianism, collective self-confidence, and so on. Those new forms will be in tension and, eventually, open conflict with existing states and with capitalists, landlords, and others of their ilk. I suspect that earlier on there will be a tendency for people in one place or one sector to run out far ahead of the rest of the proletariat, with those most advanced sectors then being at a temporary risk of isolation from the rest of the class and attack by the state and capitalists. Furthermore, these processes will be deeply internally conflictual - before, during, and after the creation of new forms of popular power the proletarians involved will have really serious disagreements among themselves. (On this last point I think Anton Pannekoek's essay Party and Class is very instructive, it's up at marxists.org if that's of any interest.)