“To the working-class, therefore, the fruits belonged too. To Owen the newly created gigantic productive forces, which had hitherto served only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of society and were destined, as the common property of all, solely to work for the common good of all.” (p 338)
Although, today, social-democrats and reformists (Menshevists) emphasise Owen's role as the creator of the cooperative movement, Marx and Engels had no hesitation in calling him what he was – a communist.
“Owenite communism arose in this purely business way, as the outcome, so to speak, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of initial costs, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. Similarly, in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge [plan, elevation and bird's-eye view all included -] that once the Owenite method of social reform is accepted, there is little to be said against the actual arrangement of details even from specialist's point of view.” (p 338)
Today's social-democratic and reformist co-operators are a million miles from the likes of Owen, and are horrified at the idea of any connection between cooperation and communism. Yet, for Marx and Engels, their vision of communism is inseparable from the idea of cooperation and cooperatives. They frequently describe communist society as being “The Cooperative Commonwealth”.
It is, of course, also, not what the statists desire to hear, as their view of socialism/communism is not one of a bottom-up, self-emancipation of the working-class, asserting its rightful, democratic control over its collective property, but is of the state exercising that control from above, which, also, involves, here and now, denying the reality that this socialised capital is, already, the collective property of the associated producers, and, instead, clinging to the idea that we are still in the conditions of the early 19th century, of the monopoly of private industrial capital that must be expropriated from the capitalist owners.
The position of the statists is the same as that of the Lassalleans attacked by Marx in The Critique of The Gotha Programme.
Lenin, in State and Revolution, noted that Marx's position, in relation to the state, was far closer to that of Bakunin than that of Kautsky. It emphasised that, prior to the revolution, the working-class could place no faith, have no reliance on the state, because that state is a class state, the state of the bourgeoisie, and, as such, represents the concentrated power of the ruling-class, mobilised against them. It is their greatest enemy, not their saviour. As Marx sets out in The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France, and elsewhere, the workers seek not to appeal to that state, not to engage in a Quixotic endeavour to capture it, by means of bourgeois-democratic assemblies, but to smash it. In order to smash it, they must build their own, alternative, organs of democracy and state power, themselves corresponding to the new, socialised cooperative forms of property that capitalism itself has created as transitional forms of property, be they the cooperatives themselves, or the joint-stock companies (corporations).
The social revolution, the transformation of the old bourgeois forms of property, based on the monopoly of private capital, and free market competition, is now, in the rear view mirror. It is the political revolution that the working-class must now accomplish, just as did the bourgeoisie, in the past. The bourgeoisie, over a long period, did that by concentrating their political offensive where they dominated, in the urban boroughs, until such time that they could confront the political power of the landed aristocracy. The workers have to do the same, to build organs of direct democracy in their strongholds, in the workplaces, and workers communities.
Those organs cannot simply be talking shops, continually being overridden by the bourgeois state, but must be both legislative and executive in nature. In short, the form that arose, in embryo, with the Paris Commune, in 1871, and took shape with the soviets/workers' councils, of 1905, and matured in the soviets of 1917.
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