State
and Revolution, Part 10a
Corporate image of a collaborative project
Living Communism
Bourgeois propaganda would have everyone believe that
communism is an impossible utopia, and that class relations as we know them now
are all-pervasive in human society, to the exclusion of every other kind of
social behaviour.
But, on the contrary, the development of class relations and
the State (which as Lenin says, is not only the inevitable product of such
relations, but also the proof of their irreconcilability) did not expunge all
previous forms of human relation.
Humans already had language, and language is a powerful,
stateless system. It has no fixed centre.
There are many other examples of communistic human relations
which, like language, have survived, and remain as the bulk of our social
fabric. There are even apparently new kinds of communistic social structures
appearing, such as the Internet.
What Andy Blunden has done in the writing that we have
sampled, for the sake of illuminating the questions raised by Lenin’s “The
State and Revolution”, is to begin to theorise the communistic patterns of
social activity, mediated by artefacts, that characterise human social
existence in general.
This is the on-going body of humanity upon the back of which
the class struggle is carried, for the time being, like the cross of Christ.
Andy Blunden’s book (from which these excerpts, downloadable
via the link below, are taken) is called “A Critique of Activity Theory”. It is
concerned in part with Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, or “CHAT”, but we
can pass over the specifics of “CHAT”, and look at what Andy means by
“collaborative projects” in these chapters.
Collaborative
Projects and Artefacts
Collaborative Projects are how people do stuff. Even
capitalist companies are collaborative projects.
One characteristic that Andy Blunden identifies is that
collaborative projects are always mediated by an artefact, or artefacts. Artefacts
are things made by people (but words are also artefacts, by the way).
What Andy therefore begins to theorise is the social place
of things, or goods, made by people. This is different from the understanding
of such goods as commodities, which is all that capitalism can manage to see
them as.
Another insight of Andy’s is the way that collective agency
is both expressed, and also formed, within collaborative projects. We may say
that we are humanists, believing in the rational free will of social beings.
But how does this actually proceed? Andy provides a description, rooted in politics,
philosophy and educational theory.
Our own method, following Paulo Freire, is to have dialogue involving
two or more people, centred on a “codification’, which is an artefact (text or
image), conforms to the structure of a “Collaborative Project”.
But the aim in this course on “The State and Revolution” is
not necessarily to follow Andy into educational theory. The aim within this
particular course is to consider what may already exist under the shell of the
class-divided bourgeois State, so that what will remain if and when that State
withers away can be apparent to us now, today.
What is the living communism of today? This is the question
that is being answered, intentionally or otherwise, by Andy Blunden’s writings
quoted here.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Collaborative Projects, 2011, Andy Blunden.
