/title> Compiled by E. Kirilskaya © Mark Boykov, 2016 © International Union of writers, 2016
Mark Boykov
Mark Vasilievich Boykov, born in 1938, is a worker by origin. The philosopher-innovator presents «The Manifesto of Innovators» to consolidate the new driving force into a party to make an individual free.
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Why has not the communism worked well?
1. Who is to blame?
The communism is neither Marx's fantasy, nor the dream of poor men and beggars. Being crushed by the need, they simply cannot imagine what it is. The communism is also not the sectarian project of communists, who believed in their emancipating mission. And it is not the dead end, as many think today, following the ideas of the 'liberal reformers' such as Gaidar, Chubais, etc. The communism is the matter of history and all its participants. It is the history itself. Having begun at the time of the primitive communism, it is still developing to transform into more advanced, civilized forms. Namely: the history itself is the progress of the communism.
Judge for oneself: the production grows and with every new epoch, the number of people, who are quite content with their lives, becomes greater and greater. In the primitive society, due to the co-production, we can already find the surplus of products and free time for fun, love, exploration, and learning about the world around.
Still, work is the main thing, and the surplus increases, resulting in random and then in deliberate exchange. Afterwards, however, we can observe the stratification of people on rich and poor as the result of the loss of control over the product. The surplus of products disappears in one place and accumulates in another one – not as the part of common wealth but as the personalized one.
As a matter of fact, the communism is the increasing product of production, permanently alienated by some members of the society to their best advantage. So, the communism is the movement from the public ownership to the communism for the chosen ones. The times of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are only the steps of this constant movement with the further growth of common wealth, seeking at the same time the communism for everybody. In the certain sense, therefore, the communism is the invention of the rich. They live by the principle: everybody works according to his or her abilities and gets according to his or her needs. Regarding insufficient production, it means living at the expense of others. Why is this happening?
It is quite simple. Every person is born with one fundamental contradiction – between the abilities and the needs. The abilities represent the creative part of the person, the needs – the consumer one. While implementing the abilities, we give our energy and ourselves. On the contrary, while satisfying the needs, we receive energy and recover ourselves. In the primitive society, these processes were relatively balanced as in nature. But these processes always went, go and will be going through hidden or explicit, reasonable or severe struggle, in which one of them constantly or to a varying degree of success takes precedence over the other one, and more or less prevails in a person as a psychological and then as a social dominant of behaviour.
That is, being by nature a creator and a consumer at the same time, a person acts more specifically in one or another role. Initially, therefore, all the human community was divided and is divided into creators and consumers to a varying degree of activity. Marx did not manage to reach a materialistic understanding of a person, but by formulating the basic regulatory principle of the future communist society: 'everybody works according to his or her abilities and gets according to his or her needs' – he gave the key to such an understanding. Moreover, now we are aware that in general, given equality in the primitive society the consumers were to develop and to rise in the upper classes of society, becoming all sorts of oppressors and exploiters, while the creators gradually fell to the lower classes, turning into the oppressed ones.
While the worker is working, the consumer lays hands on everything and, eventually, becomes the master. Free time, reclaimed by the people from nature, becomes the property of individuals and, materializing in the form of wealth, leads one to domination, and another one to submission and enslavement. This is also true of family relations.
However, humankind will perish if this tendency continues in the future. Consumers represent a 'black hole' in human society. Despite the growth of productive power of humankind, this will never be enough. The world domination of consumers brings us closer to global disaster. Nature can no longer cope with their appetites. And this is not a forecast. This is already a diagnosis.
Meanwhile, the existing level of production would allow the communism to be introduced by decree worldwide /one only needs the world government for this/. Look, what enormous wealth is concentrated in certain states, in certain classes, in the hands of certain people. What a huge, well-paid army of military men, police officers, and intelligence men with expensive weapons defends them, in essence, uselessly wasting enormous resources. What the army of managerial bureaucracy, the servants of the authorities and the capital, the false guardians of truth in mass media, having safely ensconced on the shoulders of the workers, create more and more fetishes and fictions to justify and to cover their benefits. If one sums up this, one will understand that only through reorganization /at least the general disarmament, the balanced reorientation of production, the redistribution of investment flows and products/ it would be possible to shift everywhere in the world to physiological ensuring of people's needs and to 2–3-hour working day only two or three times per week.
It is not about 'taking everything away and dividing'. Humankind needs much less of what is already produced to live in contentment. Therefore, the communism is not only possible – it is provided! Perhaps, it did not work well for everybody because it was appropriated by the chosen ones again. If before it had been taken away from the masses by the ruling, exploiting classes, in our time this was done by the political and bureaucratic elite, by the nomenclature that used its position for personal purposes. Like the previous rulers, the elite also did not need the communism for everybody as its consumer ambitions meant much more than the public needs. Though, all the privileges, which the elite had, could not be compared to the robbery of the people, which was committed under the pretext of the so-called liberal reforms.
Those, who were responsible for the safety of the public property, appeared to be among the plunderers. They had knowledge, service communications, personal contacts, access to information, official seals, and, most importantly, the time to implement their ideas. At the same time, the workers were supposed to work the shift and to find time for recovery before the next day to repeat everything again. Therefore, Chubais's assurances about equal starting opportunities during the privatization were the hypocritical lie of not only the bad-qualified economist but of the street gambler. While 'reforming' the nomenclature showed its true face hidden behind the endless verbiage, proving that it did not represent the higher moral classes of society.
In a certain sense, everybody was to blame. It is one thing when the ordinary worker produces low-quality products and gets paid in full, thereby steals welfare from society, uselessly burning primary products, materials, and energy, and it is quite another thing when the boss is engaged in such a 'burning'. The worker is often forced to do this, being under the pressure of conditions, orders, and the control system. Here is the example of the former 'order'. It will help to understand who is responsible for our failure.
There are the rate and the work quota. Let's say, the worker, who provides the work quota, is paid 100 rubles per month. The worker is not satisfied with the earnings and tries to over fulfil the task. When this happens more frequently and then becomes the mass /as everybody wants to live better/ phenomenon, the administration of factories, relying on the directives and the growing work plans, raises work quotas and, accordingly, reduces the rates for manufactured products. The worker returns to the same 100 rubles.
However, the worker's needs have rather increased than decreased. The person grows up, matures, gets married. Children are born and also grow up in that marriage. And over time, under the pressure of these circumstances, the worker has to