1 The private self-ownership of labor power in socialist society is a historical vestige of class society

Within the primitive community governed by a primitive communist form of distribution, human labor power was taken to be part of the organic composition of society’s labor power. It was the common property of the community, just like the means of production were common property at the time. In his Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s “Lehrbuch der politischen Okonomie” (Textbook of Political Economy), Marx says that bourgeois economists do not understand “the primitive community as the common organism of the labour powers belonging together” nor “[the commonality of] their labour, i.e. the expenditure of these powers.”Footnote ¹ Yet the primitive community fostered a system of private property that, over time, caused it to break apart—the consequence of developing its productive forces and the production of surplus goods, as well as its social division of labor and the emergence of commodity exchange. Not only did the means of production become private property, but labor power, the human capacity to labor, was taken to be private property as well. Labor power quickly became the object of looting in wars of aggression, a form of security on debts, and a kind of commodity.

Analysis by authors of Marxist classics finds that historically there have been two types of ownership of labor power: public and private. Public [or common] ownership existed in primitive communist society and will soon appear in communist society. Its historical existence has endured the longest, the private ownership of labor power having only existed now for several thousand years, having begun with the private ownership of the means of production. The private ownership of labor power has had three concrete, historical forms: slavery’s private ownership of labor power by another party [e.g. “unfree” labor]; feudalism’s system of labor power semi-owned privately by another party and semi-owned privately through self-ownership; and, under capitalism, the private self-ownership of labor power. These three forms of private ownership have undergone transformations, supplanting each other over time, adapting to the essential demands of the productive forces during their development. The distinctions in these three different systems for the private ownership of labor power, combined with means of production that are privately owned by nonworkers, together constitute the distinct historical bases for class society’s three modes of production.

Socialist revolution eliminated capitalist ownership of the means of production, terminating its forms of private ownership and achieving the socialist public ownership of the means of production. And yet, did socialist revolution transform the private self-ownership of labor power into a system of public ownership? No. Socialist revolution never sought to transform the remnants of capitalist society remaining in the problem of labor power’s form of ownership. On the contrary, leaders of the proletarian revolution anticipated that in socialist society the private self-ownership of labor power would be inherited as “birthmarks of the old society.”

“Here we are dealing with a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”Footnote ² Following this passage in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, the problem then analyzed is the system for the private self-ownership of labor power. Marx says that “the individual producer receives back from society, after the deductions have been made, exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor … But one person is superior to another physically or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time.”Footnote ³ The worker thus has the right to draw more from society’s resources, demonstrating that socialist society “tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity of the workers, as a natural privilege.”Footnote ⁴ We must ask, what could the general recognition of a “natural privilege” in the capacity for labor or in the laborer’s expenditure of labor power be, apart from the private self-ownership of labor power? Although Marx did not explicitly use the term “private self-ownership of labor power,” he revealed the concept in its essence.

The private self-ownership of labor power is a production relation that serves as the base for “natural privilege.” Marx calls this a kind of right of inequality, as “equal right … [it] is still in principle bourgeois right.”Footnote ⁵ Why does Marx term this kind of privilege “bourgeois”? He does so because capitalist society bequeaths this kind of privilege to socialist society. The private self-ownership of labor power and its reflection in right is “legitimate” within capitalist society, recognized by the bourgeoisie; however, what the bourgeoisie recognizes is the private self-ownership of labor power as predicated upon capitalist private ownership of the means of production and its reflection in right. Socialist society, however, recognizes the private self-ownership of labor power as predicated upon the socialist public ownership of the means of production and its reflection in right. [Citing Lenin’s The State and Revolution, the author argues that] Lenin explains “bourgeois right” as the socialist right according to the principle of distribution according to labor. And the immediate basis for this principle is none other than the private self-ownership of labor power (this point will be examined further below). It is therefore evident that the preservation of “bourgeois right” in socialist society determines social relations, as reflected in right, by using the principle of distribution according to labor. These relations of production are the private self-ownership of labor power that capitalist society has left behind.

2 Expressions of labor power’s private self-ownership in the reality of socialism’s economic life

The private self-ownership of labor power, like the public ownership of the means of production, exercises a determinate function in the reality of China’s socialist economic life and its character is reflected in many of its aspects.

[Socialist reforms of the early PRC have maintained this practice, such that following the collectivization of the means of production] Cooperative members whose labor power was more productive, with a higher quantity and quality of labor, had the right to demand that the cooperative provide them with a correspondingly exceptional allocation [of goods]. Inequality in the ownership of labor power became the sole basis for inequality in the right to an allocation of goods. Henceforth, whether one possessed labor power and whether one possessed strong labor power became the peasants’ most urgent questions. The advanced cooperatives resembled the previous elementary cooperatives in that their members only gave their labor power’s right of use to the cooperative; they did not, in the transition from elementary to advanced cooperatives, relinquish their labor power’s right of ownership. If they had also forfeited their right of ownership, then labor power would resemble ownership of the means of production in that it could no longer factor into the advanced cooperative’s “divvying of goods.” In that case, ownership of labor power would no longer be a basis for the allocation of goods. To make another comparison with the employment of labor in capitalist society, hired laborers give their labor power’s right of use to the capitalist whilst maintaining the right to private ownership of their labor power; peasants in advanced cooperatives similarly give their labor power’s right of use over to the cooperative whilst keeping the right to privately own their labor power. The employed worker depends on their right to privately own their labor power to demand that the capitalist give them the value of labor power (the difference between the value of labor power and the value that labor power creates being surplus value, which the capitalist freely holds). Meanwhile, the peasant of the advanced cooperative relies on the private ownership of their labor power to demand that the cooperative, after making a deduction for the cooperative’s fund, render the entirety of the value created from their expended labor power back to them. The most important difference between these two is that the employed worker is exploited because they have no means of production, whereas the peasant of the advanced cooperative is not exploited because they [cooperatively] own the means of production. The most significant similarity is that both enjoy the right to privately own their labor power and rely upon this private ownership for the distribution of the means of consumption. Their participation in the distribution process respects the principle of equal exchange, but the value created in expending labor power can only be exchanged for the value of labor power (essentially an unequal exchange). Furthermore, after that portion of value created by the expenditure of labor power has been submitted to a cooperative-fund deduction (an obligation that each member of the cooperative should assume), then the entire remainder is returned to the peasant (only then is the equal exchange formally and substantively completed). It is therefore clear that while the peasant of the advanced cooperative continues to privately possess their labor power, and while this peasant maintains respect, within the labor compensation process, for the principle of equal exchange prevailing in commodity exchange, this peasant’s labor power is still not a commodity. Private property does not necessarily assume the commodity form, even though a commodity is certainly private property (the concept of “commodity” is understood here and below in the terms Marx proposed in Chapter 1 of Capital, Volume 1).

[Ai argues that ownership of labor power functioned similarly in China’s socialist reform of industry. Then he recapitulates his general argument.] The private ownership of the means of production has transformed into public ownership, and hence the character of labor power’s private ownership has undergone a similar degree of transformation. This change has stripped labor power of its commodity character, and laborers have forever freed themselves from an exploitative system’s oppression.

I will now discuss the essential relationship between the private self-ownership of labor power and socialism’s principle of distribution according to labor. [Ai notes several other justifications for why socialism maintains the principle of distribution according to labor, only to reject each one in turn as an inadequate formulation of the key underlying cause.]

Marx said, “At any given time, the distribution of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves.”Footnote ⁶ Production conditions refer to both the means of production and labor power. However, establishing public ownership of the means of production also makes it so that the distribution of the means of production, meaning its form of ownership, can no longer serve as a direct cause for distribution of the means of consumption. Although public ownership of the means of production may be a determinate cause or condition for the distribution of the means of consumption, it is an external rather than an internal cause. Apart from the ownership of the means of production, there only remains the ownership of labor power as a production condition for the form of distribution. In socialist society, labor power’s form of distribution is the private self-ownership of labor power. This is to say that the private self-ownership of labor power serves as the principle for the distribution of the means of consumption in socialist society, being the singular, direct cause for distribution according to labor. In actual fact, since different capacities for labor are a “natural privilege” among the different laborers exercising it, with this privilege being expressed first and foremost through the distribution of the means of consumption, this consequently creates a contradiction between laborers over the problem of distribution. How can this contradiction be resolved? The only solution is to implement a principle of distribution according to labor. It is therefore clear that distribution according to labor is nothing more than a method for resolving the contradiction of the private self-ownership of labor power as reflected in socialism’s relations of distribution.

The private self-ownership of labor power also exercises a certain, determinant function on the character of commodities in socialist society.

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx says that the commodity expresses “the social character of private labor, and … the social relations among private workers” [Volume 1, 52].Footnote ⁷ He says that all labor for “commodity production” is “private labor” [Volume 1, 51]. Some comrades think that the commodity has a character adapted only to a society with private ownership of the means of production and not a socialist society. In fact, this is not the case. I find that the commodity character generally exists in all social formations in which conditions of production (both the means of production and labor power, or only one of these) are privately owned. Of course, this includes socialism, as socialist society maintains the private ownership of labor power. Although socialism implements public ownership of the means of production, the persistence of labor power’s private self-ownership means that, in socialism, labor cannot but contain a certain degree of private character. And labor’s private character cannot but adopt the form of value in realizing its distinct social character. It follows that, to a certain degree, a product with private character cannot but assume the form of commodity in realizing its distinct social character.

Labor power’s private self-ownership exercises a determinate function on commodity character most clearly through the process of commodity exchange. When a laborer goes to a publicly owned store or collective unit (such as a communal canteen) to buy goods (the means of subsistence), some comrades say that these goods are not commodities in the sense in which Marx defines a commodity. But I hold a different view. Is the money that the laborer uses to buy these means of subsistence not labor remuneration issued to them on the principle of distribution according to labor? Apart from any portion of money remaining from the old society, this should be the case. But distribution according to labor is itself a kind of labor-exchange practice in which laborers exchange a certain amount of concrete labor with society (the collectivity of laborers) for a certain amount of money (an abstract representation of labor): labor–money. Then, the laborer makes another exchange of a certain amount of money for society’s goods (the means of subsistence), those goods possessing an equal amount of abstract labor: money–goods. These two instances, linked together, form a complete process of labor exchange. The former part is distribution according to labor, and since it is founded in production relations with the private character of labor power’s private self-ownership, the character of its exchange is also private. In the latter part, the laborer uses money to purchase the means of subsistence. Since this latter part respects the principle of equal exchange, it preserves the former part’s private character, and we therefore say that its character cannot but be private as well. The principle of distribution according to labor and that of equal exchange are both in essence completely the same; they only differ in the scope of their application. And it is for this reason that the private character of labor power’s private self-ownership is not influenced by the process of labor exchange. All the way to the stage of consumption, the inequality prior to exchange (the differences in privately owned labor power) and the inequality that follows (with some being relatively well off and others rather poor) are consistent. And thus the entire exchange process is private in essence and manifests the distinct social character of private labor. The tenet that “private exchange presupposes private production” still obtains here.Footnote ⁸ And so we say that if a laborer now goes to a publicly owned store or collective unit to buy goods (the means of subsistence), then these goods are commodities in the sense in which Marx defines them. Only after achieving a communist society, one that realizes common ownership for all conditions of production, can the commodity character of goods finally be eliminated.

Finally, let us briefly examine the relationship between the private self-ownership of labor power and the economic organization of the family in socialist society. Although it has endured the assault and corrosion of the private ownership of conditions of production for thousands of years, the family still retains to a certain degree many of the simple economic relations of primitive communism. Taking the individual peasant family as an example, regarded in terms of extra-familial relations, the means of production are privately owned; but in terms of intra-familial relations, the means of production are under common ownership. This is also the case for labor power. In extra-familial relations, labor power is privately owned; for intra-familial relations, each family member’s individual labor power is under all the family members’ common ownership. Speaking of an individual peasant family member, Marx said, “if the labor power each individual expends is measured in terms of time, here the use of this standard appears by nature as labor’s own social characteristic, because by nature these individual bearers of labor power function only as organs of the family’s common labor power” [Volume 1, 54]. Given that all family members hold common ownership of the means of production and labor power, the principle for distributing the means of subsistence within the family cannot be distribution according to “means” (means of production), nor can it be distribution according to labor, nor can it be distribution according to a combination of “means” (means of production) and labor. Within the family, they must practice a principle of distribution according to need, because the reproduction of the entire family is the ultimate goal of each family member’s work, it is their singular aim. Because the conditions for production are the common possession of all family members, labor does not have private character within familial relations. Labor always expresses a social character, and thus the commodity form also does not exist within familial relations as the commodity is constituted by the distinct social character of private labor. After the socialist revolution, the character of public ownership of the means of production expanded enormously, crossing the threshold of the peasant family. The means of production became publicly owned by all members of the advanced cooperative (at present it is the three-tiered ownership system of the people’s commune, organized in brigades). The public character of labor power’s ownership is still limited within the family; outside that, labor power is still privately owned. Labor power, privately owned outside the family and publicly held within it, is an economic relation with a character expressed differently inside and outside the family—namely through relations of distribution and relations of exchange. Its character is also expressed through labor power’s reproduction process. The role of reproducing the labor power of socialist society is still, in economic terms, principally assumed by the family. If laborers lose the ability to labor, then it is their other family members who assume the duty of caring for them. When future laborers have not yet developed the ability to labor, the most significant costs for raising them come from their other family members’ income. Facilities for elder care, orphanages, and other forms of social assistance can only be seen as supplementary measures. This is the case for peasant families as well as for families of workers and peasants. And so, if “one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth,” this cannot but produce an outcome in which “with equal labor productivity and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, etc.”Footnote ⁹ And so the “bachelor lives like a lord, happy and content with his eight or twelve marks a day, while the widower with eight minor children finds it very difficult to manage on this sum.”Footnote ¹⁰ How, then, should we understand Engels in the following passage: “In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families pay the costs of training the qualified worker; hence the higher price paid for qualified labour-power accrues first of all to private individuals … in a socialistically organised society, these costs are borne by society, and to it therefore belong the fruits, the greater values produced by compound labour.”Footnote ¹¹ Actual experience tells us that if we understand a “society of private producers” as “a society in which a system of private ownership of production conditions (as a whole or in part) still exists” or “a society in which the private character of labor has not yet been fully eliminated” and we take what Engels above indicated as “socialistic” to mean “communist,” then its principles still obtain for our socialist society.

3 The transformation of labor power’s private ownership into public ownership is the central question for the transition from socialism into communism

The question of the transition of socialism into communism is often understood as changing distribution according to want into distribution according to need. I insist that this a mistake. Marx took issue with this perspective in his Critique of the Gotha Program, saying that “it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress upon it.”Footnote ¹² He further argued that “vulgar socialism … has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.”Footnote ¹³ Marx’s ideas here do not exclusively concern the question of transition from capitalism into socialism; they also obtain for the transition from socialism to communism.

The essence of transitioning from socialism to communism is changing a socialist mode of production to a communist mode of production. It is essentially the same as the transformation of a capitalist mode of production into a socialist one: it is a transition from capitalist society into socialist society. “[T]he distribution of the conditions of production … is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the material conditions of production being in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of their personal prerequisites of production, of labor power.”Footnote ¹⁴ The character of the socialist mode of production is expressed through society’s form of distribution of its production conditions, meaning their form of ownership. The base for the socialist mode of production is therefore the socialist public ownership of the means of production (material production conditions) and the private self-ownership of labor power (one’s own body as a condition of production). The character of the communist mode of production is also expressed by society’s form of distribution of production conditions, e.g. the form of ownership. The basis for the communist mode of production is a system of communal ownership over both the means of production and labor power, meaning that the entirety of production conditions is under the ownership of all people. In Capital, Marx says, “Finally, let’s imagine, for variety’s sake, an association of free people using communal means of production and who self-consciously expend their many individual instances of labor power as one social labor power.”Footnote ¹⁵

Here I find that Marx addresses the character of the communist mode of production, or the basis for this mode of production. Can there be any doubt that the conscious application of different individuals’ labor power into a single expenditure of society’s labor power is the expression of production relations in which labor power is under the ownership of all people?

[Reiterating the above, Ai concludes that] the key obligation in the transformation from socialism to communism should be nothing other than transforming labor power’s system of private ownership into public ownership.

When a mode of production’s base changes, then its character changes; furthermore, a transformation in character means that relations of distribution and exchange also inevitably change. In the future, when the socialist mode of production transforms into the communist mode of production, then the socialist principle of distribution according to labor will necessarily become communism’s distribution according to need. The relations of commodity exchange that Marx defined, still existing under socialism, will also necessarily turn into exchange relations of a communist character. Once the economic base for socialism becomes the economic base of communism, then the superstructure’s socialist character will necessarily transform into one with communist character. This entails the disappearance of the “bourgeois right” that continues to exist in socialism.

The base of the socialist mode of production is an ensemble of contradictions, with the most primary contradiction being that between the socialist public ownership of the means of production and the private ownership of labor power. The public ownership of the means of production demands coordination in production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, requiring a high level of planning for various economic activities. Labor power’s private self-ownership, on the other hand, demands satisfying the unequal rights for possessors of unequal labor power in production as well as distribution, exchange, consumption, and so on. And thus contradictions arise between these two in many areas of socialism’s economy. Only by consistently and appropriately regulating their contradictory relations can we advance the development of the forces of production unimpeded. But once society’s forces of production have been adequately developed, this contradiction must be completely resolved. This is the only way in which forces of production could continue to rapidly yield new possibilities. And the only way to thoroughly resolve this contradiction is to transform labor power’s ownership from a private to a public system, investing it with the same character as ownership of the means of production. [Ai briefly examines other contradictions in socialism that this transformation in labor power’s ownership will resolve. Yet he also stresses that China’s productive forces at present are “not ripe” for launching this transformation.] So, whoever seeks to supplant privately owned labor power with public ownership will inevitably run into dead ends and commit errors.

Will a system of public ownership for labor power, in replacing private ownership, still require those objective material conditions? Marx said, “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime desire and necessity; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly, only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be completely transcended and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”Footnote ¹⁶ The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee’s resolution on the question of rural society establishing people’s communes has indicated that

The above are all necessary objective conditions for the elimination of labor power’s private ownership and the realization of its public ownership. Among the three conditions, however, I believe that the most important is that “relations of production absolutely must correspond to the character of the forces of production; only when the forces of production develop to a certain point can they incite a transformation in relations of production.” This is because the character of any object is determined by the character of its internal contradiction, and the private self-ownership of labor power is no exception. Only with a general advance in the understanding of communism at a high level of consciousness, as well as in the level of culture, science, and technology, only once having eliminated the character of disparity between people’s ability to labor, only after eliminating the contradiction reflected in the production relation of labor power’s private self-ownership—then, at last, the enduring foundation for labor power’s private self-ownership will disappear. This is because consciousness, although determined by existence, also acts upon it. If people understand communism at a high level of consciousness, then they will feel the hardship of ongoing confinement under labor power’s private self-ownership. Then they will “self-consciously expend their many individual instances of labor power as one social labor power,” making full use of “organs” for the total labor power of society.Footnote ¹⁸ Only then can the private self-ownership of labor power finally transform into common ownership; only then will we achieve the most ideal and beautiful society of communism.

Commentary. The future of historical remnants: Ai Siqi on the private ownership of labor power

Harlan D. Chambers

Revolutionaries have long held that the abolition of private property is an essential precondition for achieving communism. In the People’s Republic of China’s project for socialist transition, this meant bringing the privately owned means of production under the control of either the state or the commune, a process that was well under way for several years prior to the 1962 publication of this essay. In it, Ai Siqi (1910–66) challenges fellow socialist thinkers to reconsider their understanding of private ownership. He argues that one particular form of private ownership has not only been maintained in socialism but is a constitutive element of socialist distribution and exchange. Ai formulates this as “the private self-ownership of labor power,” a remnant from the capitalist past that conditions the socialist present.

Ai’s argument contradicts revolutionary thinkers who held that socialism’s progressive economic development would eventually usher in an era of communism. No: Ai insisted that socialism’s transitional economy continued to be structured through this form of capitalist ownership. Society must therefore undergo the conscious self-transformation of its social relations, namely changing how relations are structured through the ownership of labor power. To articulate this transformation, Ai turns to another kind of historical remnant: social reproduction within remnants of the “primitive communist” family form. Yet what Ai’s argument actually proposes is that social reproduction functions in socialism as it does in capitalism. Ai’s vision for a communist future is thus bound to premises posed in the historical remnants that he sought to overcome. Consequently, the essay performatively enacts an impasse in Ai’s broader intellectual project to realize, in theory, the revolutionary remaking of everyday life.

From early in his career amongst progressive thinkers of 1930s Shanghai, Ai Siqi engaged philosophy as a project of social transformation. Ai’s landmark Mass Philosophy (大眾哲學, 1936), among his early writings on philosophy and mass culture, endeavored to think theoretical and philosophical paradigms as deriving from and providing a hermeneutic for remaking everyday life.Footnote ¹⁹ In Mass Philosophy, Ai established that no philosophical system is immediately apprehensible at the level of everyday experience; yet it is only through the everyday that “traces of philosophy” (哲学踪迹) can be discerned.Footnote ²⁰ For the broad masses, however, there remained a veil of “mystery” (神秘) between their experience and the formulation of systematic philosophical understanding. Ai argued that the masses’ experience of “mystery” served to reproduce social inequality, keeping them “intoxicated” and divorcing them from understandings that could challenge the vested interests of those in authority.Footnote ²¹ The project of Mass Philosophy to expose relations between everyday experience and philosophical thought was therefore a political proposition that the masses acquire philosophy as a tool for social transformation.

This also entailed self-transformation, a project that Ai advanced in theory and practice through his participation in the communist revolution, joining China’s Communist Party base at Yan’an in the autumn of 1937.Footnote ²² There, Ai assumed leadership positions in education and cultural politics, promoting the mass study of philosophy as well as developing a conceptual basis for the political rectification of individual revolutionaries.Footnote ²³ Following the revolution’s political victory with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the 1950s Ai turned to increasingly theoretical dimensions of socialism’s transformative capacity, critiquing limitations imposed by orthodox Soviet thought and its adoption for the PRC’s own socialist project.

During the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), Ai joined many thinkers in questioning the continued existence of capitalist forms within a socialist political economy, including the value form, the commodity form, and bourgeois right. Such theoretical engagements were bound to practical experiments of the Great Leap, notably its people’s communes.Footnote ²⁴ Yet the Great Leap’s radical ambitions to propel socialist transformation resulted in catastrophic famine and political retreat. Critics of the Leap subsequently affirmed a more moderate approach to socialist reform.Footnote ²⁵ It was in this passage of political reaction that Ai Siqi reasserted the demand that socialism radically transform itself. He published the present article in the June 1962 issue of New Construction (新建設), advancing his ideas under the cover of the pen name Yu Wu. Ai’s intervention departs from previous debates on socialism by interrogating the rarely examined question of labor power’s form of ownership, as presented in the title: “On the Form of Labor Power’s Ownership in Socialist Society” (hereafter “Labor Power’s Ownership”).

“Labor Power’s Ownership” emerges from broader PRC critiques, launched in the late 1950s, of Soviet economic determinism and its stagist conception of history.Footnote ²⁶ Orthodox historical materialism posited socialist revolution as the progressive elimination of private property and the gradual development of productive forces, leading to the realization of a communist society where goods are distributed according to need rather than according to labor. Ai Siqi had previously served as a key popularizer of this position in China, initially following Soviet orthodoxy in taking economic development as the driving force of history. This was clearly exhibited in the 1939 text Historical Materialism that he coedited with Wu Liping (1908–56) in ways that I detail below.Footnote ²⁷

Yet, over the 1950s, Ai critiqued the orthodox position that economic development would drive the transformation from socialism into communism. Instead, Ai argued that socialism was caught in structural contradictions, requiring that human consciousness and economic practices must reconstitute each other. In September 1956, Ai had already targeted the late Stalin’s formulation of historical stages in a series of lectures at the Central Party School, published with the title “Economic Base and Superstructure.”Footnote ²⁸ Ai argued that Stalin’s understanding was a simplification of Marx because it presumed that a given mode of production’s economic base mechanistically determined its superstructural forms.Footnote ²⁹ Ai opposed Stalin’s model by arguing that any social superstructure was composed of multiple temporal forms that were not immediately determined by their economic base. In the present essay, Ai ultimately concludes that transformations in the economic base and in superstructural consciousness must unfold in tandem, such that communism is the realization of their co-transformation.

The conclusion to “Labor Power’s Ownership” contradictorily asserts the formative importance of the economic base whilst arguing for the necessity of consciousness to reshape the private ownership of labor power that conditions it, “because consciousness, although determined by existence, also acts upon it.” Eschewing a primacy of base or superstructure, Ai opens a space of indeterminacy in conceiving how the ultimate transition to communism can or should unfold. In doing so, Ai reintroduces consciousness of economic form and practice as a crucial dimension of revolutionary change, whilst resisting a mechanistic understanding of how base determines superstructure or vice versa. The project of “Labor Power’s Ownership” thus echoes Ai’s earliest work for Mass Philosophy, in that it argues for a transformative relation between consciousness of the everyday and (political-economic) formal abstraction. The question for politics, as for philosophy, is how to set the everyday and the abstract into motion, not as an intellectual exercise but as emancipatory praxis.

To this end, Ai’s task in the first two sections of this essay is to expose how political-economic form structures the everyday of socialism. The text seeks to show why, at a level of theoretical abstraction, social relations within a socialist system are constituted through capitalist remnants, following Karl Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program’s understanding of “bourgeois right.”Footnote ³⁰ Ai holds that socialism thus maintains the commodity form of capitalism, in which an exchange of labor for goods proceeds on what Ai calls a “principle of equal exchange.” Capitalist remnants endure as a systemic feature of socialism, preventing the totalizing break with capitalism that a transition to communism would require.

To think a future beyond capitalist logic, Ai makes a leap—to another form from the past: the family organization of “primitive communism.” He argues that labor power, while privately held in socialism, is still commonly owned within the family in a manner consistent with primitive communism. At a superficial level, Ai’s interpretive maneuver resembles that of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who investigated the early history of the family and conjured a future “revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality, and fraternity” of its ancient clans.Footnote ³¹ In 1939, Ai had written a popular introduction to Morgan’s vision of the past as it was interpreted in Frederick Engels’s pamphlet The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.Footnote ³² Unlike Morgan, who saw a hope for the future in the ancient past, Ai’s “Labor Power’s Ownership” argues for the political valence of the past in breaking with the socialist present. Ai follows Marx’s metaphorical treatment of the family as a corporeal totality, in which “individual bearers of labor power function only as organs of the family’s common labor power.” Ai’s vision of a communist future at the essay’s close reframes this formulation, arguing that individual labor power in communism will be expended as “‘organs’ for the total labor power of society.” The family form is thus invoked for a total reimagining of society.

Ai’s turn to “primitive communism” also offers a new role for the historical importance of the social as a driving force in history, challenging historical materialism’s orthodox formulation of economic development as the key to realizing communism. Ai had previously posited such a stagist view of the family and progressive development in his 1939 chapter introducing Engels’s pamphlet on the family as part of the coedited volume Historical Materialism. In addition to summarizing Engels’s argument, Ai’s chapter featured an appraisal of the family’s historical transformation in the USSR. Taking the Soviet family as a model for China’s own development, Ai asserted that the Soviet Union had fundamentally transformed the family by socializing child care so that men and women alike could participate in labor as a form of universal liberation.Footnote ³³ Critiquing capitalism’s equality as “bourgeois privilege” exclusively available to the wealthy, Ai took the Soviet family as an expression of historical advance.Footnote ³⁴ The 1939 work Historical Materialism argued that, ultimately, the development of the forces of production would drive this Soviet society and its progressive family form through an epochal passage from socialism to communism.Footnote ³⁵ In 1939, Ai thus took economic development as instigating the advent of communism, in which capitalism’s “bourgeois privileges” would be expanded into a general, social plentitude.

In 1962’s “Labor Power’s Ownership,” Ai’s fundamental argument is not that economic development will expand bourgeois privilege, but rather that a particular social form offers resources to smash bourgeois right. The foundation of Ai’s argument is that breaking with bourgeois right’s logic of formal equivalence cannot be achieved simply by continuing to develop the “productive forces,” as such economic growth requires fostering capitalist remnants within its political economy.Footnote ³⁶ Instead, Ai’s argument seeks a decisive break with the enduring forms from capitalism endemic to socialism by drawing from resources distinct from capitalism’s structuring order of bourgeois right. He therefore turns to the “primitive communist” ordering of the family as a basis for reconfiguring all of society. The family bears the kernel of an alternative logic of distribution in which capitalism’s order of formal equivalence does not prevail.

Because the family internally arranges distribution according to need, rather than according to the exercise of labor power, it can facilitate labor power’s social reproduction. In a passage that anticipates later social-reproduction theorists’ critiques of capitalism, Ai presents the family in socialism as a crucial form for absorbing burdens of care work, education, and labor essential to socialism’s reproduction of labor power. Ai’s particular deployment of “social reproduction” (再生产) in these term is distinct from that of his contemporaries within the PRC, who generally invoked it only in the general sense of the expanded reproduction of the accumulation process. Yet Ai’s analysis of said social reproduction also implicated radically different conclusions than today’s theorists of social reproduction do. Today’s thinkers critique capitalism’s systemic organization of the family, in the words of Sophie Lewis, as “a method for cheaply arranging the reproduction of the nation’s labor power and securing debt repayments.”Footnote ³⁷ Ai Siqi, by contrast, wrestles with the family form in socialism as a mode of social organization with communist potentiality. He reasons that, within the family’s own internal logic of distribution, all labor is conducted for “distribution according to need, because the reproduction of the entire family is the ultimate goal of each family member’s work, it is their singular aim.” While certain strains of social-reproduction theory have focused on unremunerated labor as a parasitic feature of capitalism, Ai maintains that the move from socialism to communism must be established according to this unremunerated labor’s logic. Social reproduction provides a model for all labor as a necessary endeavor to facilitate the reproduction of society in its entirety. As such, the “family” becomes a surrogate form for the social totality, and Ai proposes that the laborer must become conscious of their labor as a contribution to its provisioning. It is this reorientation of consciousness, and not simply the formal reordering of distribution, that preconditions the abolition of the wage and the break with bourgeois right.

Yet there is a double movement in Ai Siqi’s reasoning: while arguing for social reproduction as containing elements to break with bourgeois right, he demonstrates that the familial organization of social reproduction is in fact essential to bourgeois right’s continued existence. The political economy of socialism establishes no clear theoretical distinction from capitalism: both organize the family as a shock absorber for the social-reproductive labor that bourgeois right’s particular disposition of inequality cannot satisfy. Bourgeois right and social reproduction through the family form constitute each other, and Ai Siqi’s call for a transformation in consciousness offers no theoretical means to resolve their structural embedding. An additional problem in Ai’s treatment of the family, and particularly its function of social reproduction, is that his formulation ignores the gendered character of much family-based social-reproductive labor. Ironically, Ai’s essay derives its theoretical formulation of distribution within the peasant family from a passage in Marx that alludes to its gendered structure, calling it the “patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family.”Footnote ³⁸ And given that Ai Siqi had previously treated questions of women’s liberation and patriarchy in the family, it is all the more troubling that he chose to excise these conceptual dimensions from his intervention.Footnote ³⁹ How could Ai derive from the family form a truly emancipatory model for distribution without addressing structures of patriarchal, gendered oppression that historically conditioned it?

These conceptual limitations suggest that the problems Ai approaches here “in theory” remain divorced from historical practice, articulating the kind of fissure that his entire intellectual project sought to overcome. In the years following the publication of Ai Siqi’s essay, experiments of the Cultural Revolution would similarly seek to break theoretical impasses thrown up in the course of China’s socialist experiment, particularly that of bourgeois right.Footnote ⁴⁰ Alessandro Russo has argued that, amidst fraught years of struggle, participants in the Cultural Revolution experimented with new forms of social practice to confront these long-standing problems, including mass study of bourgeois right in “workers’ universities” and “workers’ theoretical contingents.”Footnote ⁴¹ While I cannot address the historical complexities of such experiments here, suffice it to say that they reintroduced bourgeois right as not only demanding theoretical exploration of the past, but also requiring practical innovation from the present. What new forms of practice could address the impasse that Ai’s analysis expresses?

Cultural Revolution polemics not only wrestled with remnants of the past but articulated an acute fear that China’s socialist project could too readily discard its radical aspirations for the transformation of consciousness, opting instead for a developmentalist program focused on raising the forces of production that would effectively amount to capitalist restoration. And following the Cultural Revolution’s defeat, the PRC administration of the late 1970s indeed initiated the restoration of a “free” labor market that filled with laborers, “freed” up as the means of production were increasingly wrested from public ownership. Ai Siqi had already passed by this time, dying from natural causes in 1966 at the age of fifty-six. And although history bore out the most reactionary implications of his analytic impasse, his project to remake theory for everyday practice still marks our present, if only as a historical remnant for a once possible future.