Communism for Children – The New Inquiry
▻https://thenewinquiry.com/advance-fragments-communism-for-children
Après une première lecture je crois que je préfère Le Capital version bande dessinée. J’ai ma propre histoire du communisme à raconter aux gamins. Ce livre me rappelle qu’il faut y aller autrement ils n’entendront jamais parler ni de ce monde d’idées qu’on essaye de faire disparaître ni des histoires de nos héros.
What is Crisis?
The next time our protagonist factory goes to market, it brings twice as many steam irons, because it reckons to itself: “The other factory is bankrupt: fantastic! Now, all the people who used to buy their irons there will come to me instead. I’ll have twice as many customers, so I’ll need twice as many irons.” But what should our factory discover on arrival at the “irons-and-MORE!” marketplace? That almost nobody wants to buy irons anymore—at all. Because what happened on our street, between our factory and the other factory, also happened everywhere. In the world there are countless factories: not just those that produce irons, but also those that produce pistols. And now that many people can only go to the movies once a week, or even not at all, they don’t feel like buying irons. Instead, they buy TVs and DVD-players so they can watch movies at home. It’s not the same, but the people tell themselves “better than nothing, eh.”
Still, some of them aren’t simply unable to go to the movies anymore—they don’t have enough to eat. And so they buy tomatoes and eggs to throw at the factory walls, because that seems like a priority. The factory, though, has no use for tomatoes, since it’s an iron factory and not so much in the business of manufacturing tomato sauce. It’s stuck with making and selling irons. As we know, it has brought twice as many irons to market as usual. Today, however, it can’t sell twice as many irons, and can only get itself into twice as much debt. Sure enough, our factory goes bankrupt as well. And it fires all the iron-making people.
Now there’s nothing left. No factories, no machines, no sheet-metal or nails, and no iron-making people at all. But there are vast piles of irons that nobody needs. Although no terrible disaster has occurred—no earthquake, no war, no visit from the pope—all of a sudden, everyone is sitting around, bored stiff and hungry to boot. Some try to turn the irons into marmalade, but this proves mostly fruitless. “We’re in a real mess now,” the people say. “If only we hadn’t listened to that factory!” And one person adds: “You know what? It’s all these things! We make them in the first place in order for them to serve us, but then, they start getting uppity and we have to serve them. Now we’re stuck hanging out with all these damn irons!” And another one, someone really angry, adds: “I knew it! I knew it! It’s these stupid objects, it’s this god-damned ob- … ob-… objectification! I knew it!”
So everybody sits down around the irons to have a good long think about capitalism. They conclude that the mess really is all capitalism’s fault. “Well! That certainly didn’t work out well,” they reflect. “Not only did capitalism make us all unhappy, it was, in fact, constantly going wrong.” “And another thing,” someone comments loudly, “we’ve had capitalism far too long a time—about 200-500 years—surely we’ve had enough now. It’s time for some relief. What we want is something new.” “Yes! Something new, but what?” asks somebody else. At this point there is a long silence, as the people turn it over in their minds. Each one of them would love to know the answer to this question.
Suddenly, it comes to them. “COMMUNISM!” they exclaim. “Obviously! Since communism is the society that does away with all the evils people suffer under capitalism. Let’s go for communism!” “Oh gosh,” the people groan, “of course!” And they all slap their foreheads, as it seems so obvious now that somebody has said it. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
The people are sure of two things. First, they know that capitalism doesn’t make them happy, and second, they know that communism does. So they decide to try communism. Alas, it’s not so simple. Since true communism has never existed in the entire history of humankind, no one has any clue what communism looks like. What the people do have is various ideas of what the communist society should look like. If communism is the society that does away with all the evils people suffer under capitalism, then the best idea of communism ought to be the one that does away with the greatest number of evils. In order to figure out the best idea of communism, the people discuss which of their ideas could do away with all the evils of capitalism—not just one-third or half of them. If we don’t try them out, after all, well then, they definitely won’t work. “We’d better all try out these ideas one by one,” the people resolve. “Then, we’ll see.” And so things proceed.