The question of whether communism is purely economic is a tricky one. On one hand, the theory is mainly economic and as communists we understand that the root of all politics is economics, because we need to know how the people are going to eat and also how resources are going to be distributed in our society. However, there is something strange going on where unsavory characters are advocating communist economic systems while also upholding rightist and first-worldist ideas that are used to reinforce inequality and the continuation of capitalism. At best they completely misunderstand how such a system would affect society, and at worst they want to create a form of socialism only for the people who are already relatively privileged in society and exclude those who they are prejudiced against.
While communism is technically purely economic, the ideas of socialism create an environment that makes oppression of people by the bourgeoisie impossible. If we understand the United States to be a plutocracy and playground for the world’s bourgeoisie and also a settler-colonial nation that continues to exist at the expense of the indigenous people, then we cannot justify a socialist project that continues the existence of America in its current form or even a recognizable form. There is a reason that those who seek to overthrow capitalism are those who have the most to gain from its destruction. These are ethnic minorities, discriminated people, or those who are not allowed to live peacefully or make a living under the current organization of society. Those who are homeless or those who struggle are the ones who will truly want to dismantle the system and create something equal. The relatively privileged classes of society such as White Americans do have a lot to gain by overthrowing the bourgeois regime and establishing democratic control of the economy, but this would require allowing minorities to have a voice as well which requires them to see beyond the short-term comforts granted to them by colonial privilege and white supremacy.
So while communism on paper is purely economic, the philosophy is anti-imperialist which would make it incompatible with any pro-America sentiment and would require decolonization in Turtle Island and an end to the imperialist wars that liberal politicians continue to call for. It is also dialectical and would require the people to look deeper than blaming the oppressed peoples for their own problems, instead looking to the material conditions which drive human behavior and the circumstances that lead to society becoming the way it is. For people who have spent life under capitalist oppression and developed survivorship biases, just world fallacies and other ideas to help them cope with the brutality they lived through, this takes some mental effort. Even that is assuming they don’t participate in even more overtly reactionary politics that we see in The US, where politicians openly advocate cutting welfare and taking food and housing away from working class families and the media actively cultivates prejudices against ethnic minorities.
Communism may be based in economics, but it is a theory that makes current systems of oppression substantially more difficult if not impossible to maintain, at least on an economic level. It is not an ideology that is meant to appease reactionaries based on their conspiracies of ethnic replacement or their desire to force religion onto oppressed peoples. Communism is a system by and for the working class, and the working class includes those who are discriminated against and often looked down upon by society. Any form of socialism that seeks to exclude any segment of the working class or grant extra privilege to a white working class is reactionary, revisionist and non-dialectical.
Marxism defines “the economy” as a social relation that ties to all others and the capitalist social relation in particular as the dominant economic order that produces and maintains both the most relevant oppressor and oppressed classes and the other relations. Marx and Engels wrote quite a lot about various ways (sometimes speculatively and sometimes out-of-date) in which capitalism produced and maintains certain communities relationships, the very core of social organization, the family, the individual).
So it’s exactly the opposite. Rather than a vulgar economism, the core of Marxism is to define the economic as a social relation rather than what capitalists try to teach us it is: some kind of default natural state of being separate from all those other things. And as a social relation, Marxism via dialectical materialism teaches us that it has dual natures that involve causitive material forces on one hand and our ability to socially organize against this system on the other.
There has never been a real separation between Marxist organizing and the addressing of “non-economic” (they are still inextricable from economic) marginalizations and liberation struggles. The most knowledgeable and effective Marxist movements were at the forefront of liberation movements, in fact, and fully incorporated them into their wider analysis. Marxist feminism, Marxist anti-racism and abolitionism, Marxist anti-chauvinism and anti-vulgar class consciousness (e.g. imperialist trade unions), Marxist analysis of the family, the community, the city, the state, Marxist analysis of immigration, Marxist analysis of homosexuality and then the wider spectrum of sexuality, Marxist analysis of gender identity and its wider spectrum, Marxist analysis of ableism and the construction of normative spaces, etc etc.
It is notable that every successful communist revolution has been highly progressive in its pursuit of varies simultaneous liberations. Specifically, they were all tied very closely to national liberation struggles and the liberation of (and heavy inclusion and support of) women. These are both topics with broad mass impacts, both were and are fights against broad forms of oppression tied to capitalism.
Well said, this is in line with what I remember learning in the past too, though I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. The phenomenon of capitalist realism, for example, I don’t think would be possible if economic systems were separate from the rest of social stuff. People who defend capitalism while not benefiting from it meaningfully are not just “brainwashed” in the sense of being convinced it’s a good system, their way of life and thinking is tangled up in the capitalist process. For example, the way I see some people in the US act about new products, it seems that it does not even occur to them to consider the idea of “new product” as a bad thing, only whether it is “good product” or “bad product.” Something that might be seen by a different kind of society as excess and waste is widely viewed as a form of progress and advancement under capitalism. This kind of thing, I would argue, is not just incidental, but necessary for the system to function with any longevity.
“In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of the material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society. The real foundation on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life”
~ Karl Marx
As for yourself, I think you answered your own question in the third paragraph.
This is the answer I came to give. Communism is an economic mode of production, but how the economy operates is also what defines almost every other aspect of society.
On the other hand, Dialectical Materialism is a tool we can use to analyze history, current events, societal structures and make predictions. It’s through this tool that we recognize the relations between economic production and society at large, as well as the flaws of capitalism.
Marxism is firstly a critique of capitalism, and secondly (but equally important) the solution to capitalism.
From my point of view, the theory of communism is purely economic. Historical materialism thesis is that production is the driving force of the development of society, the law which history conforms to.
The thing is that all these conservative and reactionary views like racism, private property, patriarchy, etc… all hinder the development of productive forces. Our struggles are intrinsically linked.
Not that I have any reading to back this up but is it even a correct premise to say that the Economic and Politics are two completely separate spheres of influence? Just from looking around local life, it seems like these two realms have no daylight between them.
The reason people think economics and politics are separate is because of capitalist realism which makes modern liberals default to private ownership of everything, meaning politics is nothing but social issues and other relatively small and specific things.
Maybe a clearer explanation would be its a self defense mechanism of capital that frames it as impossible to use political action to regulate the economy to curb its excesses.
