The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (49 page)

Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS)

The CIS was formed by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) in Minsk on 8 December 1991. With the exception of Georgia and the Baltic states, other former Soviet republics joined in Alma-Ata on 21 December. Georgia has since become a member. The creation of the CIS precipitated the final demise of the Soviet Union.
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In its older and neutral senses, the lowest unit of local government in a number of countries, especially France. Two ideologically charged meanings have emerged for historical reasons:

(1) The (politicians who controlled the) Paris Commune of 1870–1 included radical socialists who tried to run the government on revolutionary principles until their military defeat. Their use of the title echoed its use by the similarly revolutionary Commune which controlled Paris (and could often coerce the National Convention) between 1792 and 1794. The Commune of 1870–1 was idealized by
Marx
.
(2) Any group of people living together and sharing possessions; but used usually with the implication that the people in question hold radical or revolutionary views.

 
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In its usually acknowledged form, a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle, resulting in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a classless, socialist society in which private ownership has been abolished and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community.
The notion of communism has a long history. Writers such as
Babeuf
and
Owen
are sometimes regarded as communists ( See also
primitive communism
), but ‘communist’ first appeared in English in 1841 and ‘communism’ in 1843. It is now mainly understood to mean either the end of history predicted by Marxist thinkers, or the reality of life in conditions of Communist Party rule. Though one can still hear advocates insist that communism is possible despite the experience of Eastern Europe, the utopian element has been largely discredited by the political practice.
The Marxist argument for communism has both normative and positive components. The main characteristic of human life is
alienation
. Communism ought to be desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as the absence of constraints but as action having moral content. Not only does communism allow people to do what they want but it puts humans in such conditions and in such relations with one another that they would not wish or have need for wrong-doing or evil. Whereas for Hegel, the unfolding of this ethical life (
sittlichkeit
) in history is mainly cognitively motivated—hence the importance of philosophers—for Marx, communism emerged from material, especially productive, development. Thus, he jibes that philosophers had hitherto only sought to interpret the world, when the point was to change it.
Marx himself says little about the non-alienated world of communism. It is clear that it entails superabundance in which there is no limit to the projects that humans may choose; one could be a painter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, a writer in the evening, and a lover at night. In the slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which ‘each gave according to his abilities, and received according to his needs’. Since morality had been abolished along with want, the main criteria governing the choice of life projects were aesthetic or scientific; communist society was not expected to be consumerist.
As a normative enterprise, therefore, communism appealed to many circles, uniting not only the poor person struggling under want, but also the high-minded intellectual who saw transcendental virtue in his work. Marx's achievement and lasting significance, however, was to add to this utopia a positive scientific theory of how society was moving in a law-governed way towards communism and, with some tension, a political theory that explained why human agency—revolutionary activity—was required to bring it about. These latter aspects, particularly as developed by Lenin , provided the underpinning for both the dogmatic and mobilizing features of twentieth-century Communist Parties.
In
Capital
and other ‘scientific’ works, Marx claims to have uncovered the laws of capitalist development. All societies must solve the problem of reproducing human life, but at each historical stage, the level of development of the productive forces shapes the pattern of human organization. The combination of productive forces and human relations comprises a ‘mode of production’, and each mode has its own distinctive laws arising from the manner in which production is accomplished and the relationship among its social elements—historically these have mainly been classes. Capitalism is characterized by commodity production or production of goods with exchange value. Profit results from the ability of those controlling the means of production to treat labour as a commodity like any other, which they can employ to produce goods with value greater than that paid in wages. There is constant competition among capitalists to extract the greatest amount of surplus value. A number of laws are deduced from these premisses: constant overproduction and underconsumption which leads to periodic economic crises in which the productive potential of capital and labour is wasted; ever greater mechanization and a diminution in the share of labour in the production process; a long-run tendency for the rate of profit to decline; the relative impoverishment of the working class in comparison to the amount of surplus value it produces; and the rise of an absolutely impoverished lumpenproletariat.
At this point, the normative and positive elements meet. The massive productive potential of capitalism, undreamt of in human history, to free people from want to pursue their own projects, increasingly comes into conflict with the reality of increased alienation. At the same time, the character of production tends to increase social interaction and homogeneity among those exploited, and on a global scale. Capitalism, therefore, creates its own ‘gravediggers’ in a working class who have ‘no country’ and ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. The overthrow of capitalism is possible because the process of production has already been socialized. However, with the expropriation of capitalists, the international, homogenous working class has neither reason nor interest to introduce another exploitative social order. Thus the productive potential of advanced machinery may be harnessed with non-exploitative social relations—in a word, communism.
Marx and Engels certainly believed that by offering a scientific explanation of the possibility, indeed necessity, of communism they were distinguishing themselves from lesser ‘utopian’ socialists. However, although periodic economic crises have taken place with enormous waste of human and other capital, there has not occurred either a tendency for the rate of profit to decline or for an inexorable fall in the share of labour as opposed to machinery across all sectors of industry. Indeed, capitalism has proved extraordinarily revolutionary and able to revitalize itself, even by Marx's own very high estimates of its capacity. Moreover the impoverishment of the working class did not take place, at least in the advanced capitalist world where Marx predicted revolution would take place, and evidence suggests that the size of the underclass is a function of political and institutional factors rather than an inevitable consequence of capitalism itself.
Perhaps the biggest problems in Marx's own theory were identified by Lenin . First, he argued, workers did not go beyond their narrow economic demands for higher pay and conditions to make explicitly political demands for the overthrow of capitalism. Only intellectuals could properly understand the emancipatory potential of communism, which was beyond workers' experience, however much production may have been socialized. A steadfast, resolute, and organized party of intellectuals, acting as the workers' vanguard, and armed with the knowledge given by Marxist theory, was therefore required if the transition to the freedom of communism was to be achieved. Secondly, not only did workers orient their demands on economic improvements, but capitalism, at least in some circumstances, was quite capable of granting concessions. Thus, the impoverishment and, more importantly for Lenin, the homogeneity of workers was not a spontaneous result of capitalist production. Imperialism allowed capitalists particular opportunities to reward workers in the metropolis with money derived from the super-exploited in the colonies. Moreover, the alliance of a ‘labour aristocracy’ with sections of
imperialist
capital resulted in working-class nationalism which, in Lenin's view, led to the break-up of the international socialist movement at the outbreak of the First World War. The road to communism, therefore, would take a different path in which the ‘weak links in the imperialist chain’ would be the first to break with capitalism, with Russia the first to fall in 1917 after defeat in the war.
The effort to build communism in Russia, however, raised significant further theoretical and practical problems. The theory had presumed that revolution would occur where the socialization of production, potential for abundance, and a large working class were already in place. Russia was the poorest country in Europe with an enormous, illiterate peasantry and little industry. In these circumstances, it was not only necessary for the party to educate workers beyond narrow economism, but to create the working class itself. For this reason, the socialist
Mensheviks
had opposed the communist
Bolsheviks
in their demand for socialist revolution before capitalism had been established. In seizing power, the Bolsheviks found themselves without a programme beyond their pragmatic and politically successful slogans, ‘peace, bread, and land’, which had tapped the massive public desire for an end to the war and privation, and the peasants' demand for land redistribution. As Lenin himself was fond of saying, there was no blueprint for socialism on the road to communism. Indeed, there could not have been since, to use Marx's metaphor, communism should have matured within the womb of capitalist society, ready to emerge, if not fully formed, then requiring only a short period of transition before being up and running.
Like the early Christians, the Bolsheviks acted almost immediately, as if the millennium was upon them. In the years of War Communism 1918–20, in the middle of a civil war, all property was nationalized and money for a period abolished. When mutiny and peasant unrest resulted, Lenin declared a short breathing space in 1921 (the
NEP
) before ‘the heavens’ of communism could once again be assaulted. However, in the last three years of his life, Lenin also showed a growing awareness of the difficulties of building communism in Russia, which necessitated a prolonged transition period in which both antagonistic social classes and commodity relations would be maintained under the watchful and guiding eyes of the Party.
Political and institutional factors conspired to foreshorten this transitional phase. While the Communist Party and industrial institutions such as the Supreme Council for the National Economy had been operationally responsible for running the country under War Communism, NEP was controlled largely by experts frequently of bourgeois origin and of Menshevik or right-wing political persuasion. When NEP ran into difficulties, it was difficult for the Party and other bodies to resist the claim that the abolition of market relations and the liquidation of ‘exploiting’ classes such as the
kulaks
or the small traders (NEPmen) was a better strategy. Since political power continued to rest with the Party, which was hardly content to kick its heels while capitalist relations were given time to develop, NEP was unlikely to survive. These political and institutional obstacles to NEP were magnified by personal competition in the leadership which saw Stalin using his control over personnel to shift policy to the left in 1929.
The Stalinist version of socialism, with some important modifications, ruled the Soviet Union for the next fifty-six years. It began in a spirit of enormous optimism about the possibilities of building communism via a massive industrialization and collectivization programme. The rapid development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, maintained this optimism even into the
Khrushchev
period, 1953–64 when the Party adopted a programme in which it promised the establishment of communism within thirty years.
However, more evidence emerged which in the end dented faith in the possibility and desirability of communism irrevocably. First, Khrushchev himself revealed the enormity of repression that had taken place. Second, industrial development had been organized by state institutions which began to act as a dead, conservative hand on further progress. As growth declined, so
rent-seeking
and corruption by state officials increased, which dented the legitimacy of the system. Third, the allies which the Soviet Union had won by war in Eastern Europe, and as a result of the collapse of imperialism in Africa and Asia, became a financial and military burden. Finally, while Soviet development slowed, that of the capitalist West accelerated, and introduced new technological developments that the Soviet economy could not match. No communist revolutions had occurred in the capitalist centres of the West. By the 1980s, therefore, faith in the capacity of the Soviet Union to make the transition to communism had evaporated.
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