Lower and Higher Phase of Communism

A Distinction Reached at the End of an Argument About Distribution

The two phases are not offered as a blueprint. They come out of pressing the reply to the Gotha Programme's demand for 'fair distribution' and 'undiminished proceeds of labour'. To ask what distribution is fair, you first have to say in what society, which forced a split between a society just out of capitalism and one standing on its own foundations.

The Lower Phase: Labour Certificates and Bourgeois Right

The lower phase emerges 'in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society'. The producer receives, after the deductions, a certificate for the labour he has furnished, and draws from the social stock means of consumption costing the same amount of labour. Exchange between individuals is gone; the principle is not. The same quantity of labour returns in another form, so the rule that governed commodity exchange still governs.

Marx calls this 'bourgeois right'. It recognises no class differences, yet tacitly accepts unequal individual endowment as a natural privilege, and takes no account of whether one worker is married or has more children than another. 'This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour.' Nor is it a fault that can simply be corrected: 'Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.'

The Higher Phase: Past the Narrow Horizon

The condition for the higher phase is stated as a change in labour itself, not in the method of distribution: after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour has vanished, after the antithesis between mental and physical labour has gone, after labour has become not merely a means of life but life's prime want, and after the productive forces have grown with the all-round development of the individual so that the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly. Only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety.

Lenin's Naming

In chapter 5 of The State and Revolution Lenin sets it down: 'What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the "first", or lower, phase of communist society.' Socialism and communism become two degrees of maturity of one society rather than two doctrines. In the same chapter he pushes the lower phase one step further: so long as the only rules for distribution are those of bourgeois right, something must enforce them, and therefore 'under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!'

The Lower Phase Written Into a Constitution

Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution set down the principle of socialism as 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his work'. According to work, not to needs: precisely the formula Marx had identified as the limit of the lower phase, now the supreme norm of a state. The article is not in itself a contradiction; it is an admission of which phase the country was in. In practice, though, that admission was often read in the USSR as a deferral of the goal, and the survival of bourgeois right was managed more than it was explained.

How to Read It

The two phases are not a timetable. Marx named no dates, and Lenin insisted that when the higher phase arrives 'we do not and cannot know'. What the distinction actually does is diagnostic rather than prophetic: a society still distributing according to work is still in the lower phase, and the inequality left in it is a condition of that phase's economy rather than a failure of morals.