Without the question you can’t think at all. “If you had an island to work with, how would you create a communist society?” This question and twenty others like it were asked by a young immigrant worker in our study group. Of course it made all the comrades think furiously. We’re so caught up in the daily political work that it takes a fresh eye sometimes to make us see anew our own political vision. 

This worker was convinced, for example, that socialism in East Germany was inferior in productivity and drive to capitalism in West Germany, that the capitalist West had to rescue the backward East when they reunited the country. How could we explain that, as communists? He agreed that capitalist society did NOT work. But didn’t the German example mean that for a communist society to work we had to take some of the things capitalism is good at and use them to build communism? Such as motivating people by letting them get ahead or by technological innovation? We went at that one for a while. 

We got tangled up about socialism because when we criticized socialism as practiced in the USSR, China and Cuba, and advocated moving directly to communism, he was confused. He had to ask us several times, what was the difference? Socialism, communism, which was which? Could we show him an example of communism the way we meant it? 

We realized that socialism, in the sense of the USSR, China, and Cuba, is communism to most people because it is what communists built. They were communists, the only ones who ever won state power, and as communists they built socialism with unequal wages and commodities and markets held over from capitalism. On our theoretical communist island we would have none of those things. Communists made great steps forward, before it all got reversed. 

So part of our discussion was in fact DEFENDING what our communist predecessors had built, before we could move on to a criticism of how their best efforts fell short, how their very advances revealed gaps in the communist theory they used. If we start with the criticisms and not the defense we confuse everybody. Our criticisms make more sense after we have showed the value of the steps socialist societies took to abolish capitalism. We realized that this is what had angered a Caribbean member of the study group, who loved the Cuban revolution and thought our criticisms slighted it, so much so that he left.

Another productive question was, “If I have a plot of land to feed my family, and the communist state comes along and says, ‘We have to take your land to make a collective farm which will be better for everyone,’ why would I accept that? I have to feed my own family first.” One thing we realized in answering is that the question comes from the fact that capitalist society forces every one of us into this kind of defensive individualism — it’s true that under capitalism you have to feed your own family or they starve. But collective, egalitarian communist society means that no one starves, no one is left to themselves to fight off everyone else as competitors for scarce resources. 

And so it went. The new worker had a lot to think about and veteran comrades went home buzzing with fresh thought about some of the most difficult and most valuable questions humanity has ever asked itself. Without the question, you can’t think at all. He’ll probably have twenty more for us on May Day. 

A lover of study groups