Revolutions, at their very core, are about radical shifts. That’s what the word means, an intentional, drastic change in society through aggressive means. The idea of a revolution is that these changes are for the better, at least for someone. We covered Bourgeois and Proletarian Revolutions in our last episode, so let’s dive deeper into what the goals are of the Communist Revolution.
Communist Revolutions, at their center, are about commodities. I know that sounds strange, but if we look into this further, we can see that this is the case. A Commodity, as we’ve talked about in our Money and Commodities episode, is any good or service made solely to be traded on the market. The Commodity mode of production, then, would be the mode of production that makes commodities as its primary goal.
When commodities are produced as the primary exchange form in society, we tend to misvalue goods and services. This is because of the value-driving aspect of commodities. Since a commodity is created solely for trade, and not for its advertised usage in a theoretical sense, there is no solid connection between the commodity’s value and its usefulness. While this may seem like a small detail that would fix itself, it doesn’t. It opens the door to something called Commodity fetishization.
Commodity Fetishization is a process where people look at an object’s value as what it’s being sold for, and not for what it took to make the object plus how useful the object is. It’s important to know that Marx never said anything about supply and demand not mattering in the value of an object. Marx, to the contrary, states in Capital vol. 1 that only simple supply, labor, and demand should make up the value of an object, not some arbitrary price we place on it at the point of sale.
You might be wondering why this is important. Well, the commodity form, as this mode of production is called, leads to many issues in expressing the true value of an object. This is due to the object’s nature as a commodity. To fix this, we have to change the mode of production from the commodity form to a communist form of production. This would mean that, instead of producing goods and services to make money, they would be produced on a need basis for the betterment of society. This would fix the issue of value, since goods and services would be assigned value based on their usefulness, their use-value, instead of based on their price on the market, their exchange value.
Let’s get back to Revolutions. A communist revolution’s goal is to change society’s mode of production from a commodity form to a communist form. This is done through the abolishment of private property. Private Property itself is a loaded term. Marx, when discussing private property, differentiates it from Personal Property, which is extremely important. Personal Property is what we own and use ourselves, while private property is land, objects, and other things owned by a single person or a small group that is used solely to produce commodities. It’s a common scare tactic to confuse the two of these, since having your personal property taken away is much more threatening than having private businesses turned over to the working class, who already worked there anyway.
Why do we need to shift Production forms? Well, take a look at the wealth disparity in the world. The bourgeois class owns a vast majority of the wealth. That wealth is concentrated in the hands of a class that is acting within its own interests. This would be different in a communist society since, in our current society, the means of production are in the hands of the few, where in communism, everyone, no matter who they are, would collectively own the means of production.
The Working class would be acting in their own interest after this revolution, of course, but after a process where every person is converted into the working class, that would only reinforce equality. This is the process where everyone would be able to own the means of production together, as opposed to the working class taking over and placing those who were once in the bourgeoisie into a position lower than them. It simply means that everyone would have a fair share of what society can provide for them.