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 do.
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). This 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.
Somebody on “Counterpunch”
recently wrote that “People are more able to imagine the end of the world than
the end of capitalism.” Revolutionaries need to change that situation.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Collaborative Projects,
2011, Andy Blunden.
