The Communist and Their Rolex
Imagine for a moment that you are a communist. One evening you arrive at one of your local communist organisation’s meetings, eager to quote Marx back and forth with your comrades until the sun rises. But then you see something that makes your heart sink; from underneath the cuff of a neatly ironed Brooks Brothers shirt appears what is unmistakably a Rolex watch. You feel your blood pressure rising. Feverishly your mind starts seeking for a quote from Marx, Lenin – hell, even Mao, to put this class traitor you once called comrade in their place for enjoying such bourgeois luxuries. The comrade, seeing you turn red in the face at the sight of their watch, turns to you and asks a simple question: When has Marx ever argued against wearing nice watches?
If you are a communist, or, in fact, if you are slightly to the left of Margaret Thatcher, you will have undoubtably been accused of hypocrisy for enjoying certain luxuries. Although this argument is often made in relation to owning an iPhone or enjoying a Starbucks latte, one would imagine that a self-proclaimed communist wearing a ten-thousand-euro watch would raise some eyebrows. In fact, even many leftists who are otherwise unimpressed by right-wingers’ vague gesturing at imagined hypocrisy would probably be quite puzzled if you showed them your new Submariner or Yacht Master.
However, is this a valid critique?
The first argument levied against someone who wears a Rolex and a hammer and sickle pin at the same time would undoubtedly be that the money they’ve spent on a completely superfluous luxury could have been given to those who had much less money. After all, as a communist one ought to be opposed to the unequal distribution of wealth within the world, so why not share your own wealth? It is simple consistency: if you are for redistribution of wealth, start with redistributing your own. This argument, however, falls flat on its face when communism is critically analysed.
Firstly, there are different forms of wealth. The wealth which a communist is most concerned with redistributing is the private property of the bourgeoisie, contrasted with the personal property of the individual. Private property refers to the means of production, such as factories or machines, whereas personal property is the things which you or I use in our personal lives. In other words, communists are far more concerned with someone’s watch factory than someone’s watch.
Secondly, the argument of the communist is not that everyone distributes their goods and services unethically under capitalism; the argument is that the system by which we distribute goods and services is itself unethical. Yes, it is unethical that there are people who eat caviar and lobster whilst others only have bread and water, but this is not due to some inherent quality of the caviar or the lobster. This inequality comes to be because the money these people spend on the caviar and the lobster does not get divided over the workers who actually made that dinner possible. Instead of going to the fisher, chef, and waiter, the vast majority of this money goes to the man on Wall Street who owns the restaurant. Only after this man has been paid his profits are the wages of the workers considered. Because of this systematic inequality in capitalism, it does not matter whether one orders lobster or bread at a restaurant; there is no way an individual can consume their way out of the inequalities within capitalism. I will go as far as to say that the actions of the individual within the system are completely irrelevant. Even if every single person acted as ethically as possible, due to the mechanisms of capitalism inequality would still persist. It is therefore not on the individual, whether communist or not, to redistribute wealth; instead, the system by which we distribute wealth to begin with ought to be changed.
The second argument for why it would be hypocritical to engage in luxuries as a communist would be that, even if a communist is not primarily interested in redistributing the wealth that individual workers have, it would still be better spent on charity than on luxury. Saving lives must obviously take priority over making one’s life more luxurious if one is to be consistent. I certainly think that any person, regardless of whether they are a communist or not, should weigh the ethics of spending money on their own lives with the reality that money can save or else greatly improve lives of others through charity. This ethical burden is, however, not exclusive to communists. A capitalist would have just as much responsibility in this, but their spending habits are not questioned.
This moral question is, nonetheless, not the topic I want to discuss here. The point I want to make in this essay, instead, is this: if we are to apply this criterion of abstaining from luxury and do this consistently we would be creating a standard that no person could reasonably be expected to reach. If we state that the only way in which someone can be a communist and not be labelled a hypocrite (and have all their critiques of capitalism rendered moot along with that) is to completely abstain from engaging in whatever one might label ‘luxury’, then this would apply not just to Rolexes or Starbucks lattes, but to everything that isn’t bread, water, and shelter. This is because ‘luxury’ is a completely nebulous term. Ask a hundred people what constitutes luxury and you’ll receive two hundred different answers. One could see luxury as a state of great opulence and comfort, but that only begs the question what we compare this to. If we were to compare the standard of living of the average person in a western country today with the standard of living of that of a typical medieval citizen, we would rightfully have to conclude that we live in a state of great opulence. Even compared to many people alive today in the global south, we undoubtably live among many luxuries. Does an average western home not provide comforts that most people in human history could scarcely dream of? Is a communist a hypocrite for having central heating, electricity, and indoor plumbing? Must we check the contents of one’s fridge when they start talking about unionising, in case it contains more than the bare minimum needed to stay alive?
Furthermore, communism never argues that people should only have the bare minimum. There have been plenty of communist theorists who have written on the need for luxury in people’s lives. As anarchist Peter Kropotkin states: “Would life, with all its inevitable sorrows, be worth living, if besides daily work man could never obtain a single pleasure according to his individual tastes?” (1906, 134). We find here an often misunderstood, whether willfully or otherwise, component of communist thought. The point of communism is to feed the starving, not take away food from those who have it in the name of equality. A communist is not a hypocrite if they enjoy luxuries that others can’t have under capitalism, even if they oppose this inequality. Their argument, after all, is that everyone should have these luxuries, not that no one should have them.
Surely though, one cannot reasonably claim that every person can own a Rolex. Did the Marxist revolutionary Thomas Sankara not say: “We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all” (Skinner 1988, 444)? How can I say that it is perfectly fine for a communist to be indulging themselves in all manner of bourgeois luxuries when, in the same breath, I would argue that the rich of the world must surrender their wealth for the sake of the rest of the world? This thinking, however, is too individualistic. Yes, we must choose between champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all; and yes, the safe drinking water for all is the only ethical and just choice. This does not mean that it is unethical or even hypocritical for me to drink champagne. As I have stated before, it is not the actions of individuals which communists take issue with, it is the system itself. The world for which I fight will come no closer whether I drink a bottle of champagne or if I were to donate the price of the bottle to charity. What would this standard for being a ‘sincere’ communist even be? That there is some magical threshold of wealth – conveniently placed above our own, of course – which turns an otherwise sincere and devout communist into a hypocritical petit bourgeois traitor of the working class? I do not believe so. What ultimately differentiates the working class from the bourgeoisie is not how much money one has but rather their relationship to the means of production. It is the class interests gained through this relationship that determines one’s place within capitalism. If a worker chooses to spend the money they acquired through their own labour on a nice watch, it would not make them one bit less of a communist than if they had spent it drinking on the weekend with friends, buying a new car, or donating it to charity. What matters is that they are dedicated to a future beyond capitalism.
Ultimately the allegation of hypocrisy levied against communists is not unique. I imagine most climate activists have, at some point, had it pointed out to them that their existence also produces CO₂. It is easy to see why this argument is so seductive to make; once someone has been identified as a hypocrite, their arguments are no longer that threatening. Whether consciously or not, it is employed as a thought terminating cliché by those who do not want to critically analyse the assumptions they make about the world or those who do not want to have to defend the political positions they hold. That these allegations are not genuine critique becomes all too clear when we recognise the fact that there is no way to be a proper communist to people levying these allegations. If you are rich and a communist, you are called a hypocrite; if you are poor and a communist, you are called jealous. Any argument that can be levied against owning a Rolex can equally be applied to many other commodities which we consider normal for people to own. If we were to apply these arguments consistently, we would be creating a standard to which no person could reasonably be expected to adhere. Furthermore, the allegation of hypocrisy is, in and of itself, invalid considering there is no communist principle against owning any kind of luxury, not even that of a Rolex. What makes someone a communist is not the watch they wear; it is their revolutionary spirit, their hunger for justice, their belief that a better world is possible, their yearning for a life beyond capitalism. All of which can be held just as fervently by a communist wearing a Rolex.
Bibliography
Kropotkin, Peter. 1906. The Conquest of Bread. London: Chapman and Hall.
Skinner, Elliott P. 1988. “Sankara and the Burkinabé Revolution: Charisma and Power, Local and External Dimensions.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 26, no. 3 (September): 437–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/160892.