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Libertarian Labor Review #14
Winter 1992-93, pages 20-25
PRINCIPLES OF LIBERTARIAN ECONOMY: Part I
by Abraham Guillen
(translated by Jeff Stein)
Introduction: As part of our continuing efforts to present
anarchist economic theory, we offer this translation from Abraham
Guillen's book, Economia Libertaria. The author of over fifty books
and essays, Guillen is probably best known to English readers for
his book, Philosophy of the Urban Guerilla (New York, 1973). A
veteran of the Spanish Revolution, member of the CNT and FAI,
Guillen spent most of his life in exile in South America. He has
worked as a journalist and economist in Argentina, Uraguay and
Peru. Presently he lives in Madrid, where he teaches at the
International Institute for Self-Management and Communal Action,
which is part of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.
For U.S. readers some of Guillen's terms may be confusing. His
use of the term "libertarian" should not be confused with the
right-wing laissez faire ideas of the so-called "Libertarian
Party." Although he does refer to "markets" as part of a
revolutionary society, it is clear from the context that he is
speaking of a system of federalist or collectivist exchange of
products at their labor value.
We do not necessarily agree with everything Guillen has to
say, particularly his assessment of anti-Soviet marxism. We think
it is possible to make an economic critique of marxism, without
giving in to the temptation of ascribing its failures to original
sin or the fall from grace. Despite these disagreements, we think
this an interesting contribution to anarcho-syndicalist economics.
This is the first installment in our translation of Guillen's
article. The second part will run in our next issue.
Self-Management, Planning, Federalism
The principles of libertarian economy were put into practice--
more by intuition than by design, without grand theories--by the
libertarian collectives in Spain during the revolution of 1936-39.
Here the "praxis," more than any "a priori" theory, demonstrated
that an economy inspired by federalist principles and self-managed,
with a self-managed market, could work well and avoid the central-
planning which always leads to the totalitarian, bureaucratic
State, owner of each and everything.
In this article, we are not going to introduce all the self-
regulating objective economic laws, although the most important of
these, the law of labor value, self-regulates the exchange of goods
and services at their just value in order to fullfill the others:
the law of economic equity; the law of cooperation, between the
distinct integrated federations of the libertarian economy; the law
of exchange equivalence. In a market liberated from the capitalists
and the opprobrious tutelage of the State, they will self-regulate,
almost cybernetically, the economic processes of production,
exchange, distribution and consumption.
We study these laws and social-economic categories more
profoundly in my Economia Autogestionara [Self-managed Economics],
particularly, and to some extent in my three other books. We are
not going to deal, in this chapter of Libertarian Economics (which
is really an introduction to self-managed economics), with the
development of libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialism, I
define as synonymous with self-managed socialism.
Anarchism and Marxism
From a semantic point of view, libertarian socialism is
disposed to unite according to the concept of true socialism
(without bureaucracy and with liberty) all well-intentioned
socialists. However, the adjective libertarian has an anarchist
connotation. On the other hand the adjective self-managed tends to
suggest an even broader front of socialist ideologies, some more
bureaucratic than revolutionary, which might be unified, in thought
and deed, into a self-managed socialism: the broadest alliance of
popular and workers' struggle, against the technocracies and
bureaucracies, both West and East, and against the bourgeois
pseudo-democracies of the West.
To make libertarian socialism synonymous with self-managed
socialism, I would contend that in spite of light shades of
ideological differences, the anarchist theory of liberty,
federalism and socialism, coincides, if not totally then in part,
with the best of revolutionary humanism. In this I would include
the marxism thrown away as scrap by the State under the form of
"the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the transition from
capitalism to socialism," which showed itself to be in the U.S.S.R.
the dictatorship of the Party-State bureaucracy, and was under
Stalin just as cruel as nazi-fascist dictators.
So, with the State acting as the revolutionary protagonist,
instead of the people self-organized in self-managed enterprises
and in libertarian collectives, marxist-leninism leads, not to
socialism or even less to communism. Instead it perpetuates, as in
the U.S.S.R. and its "satellites," a capitalism of the State, a
worse capitalism, closer to nazi-fascism, than to true socialism.
Marxism, seperated from leninism, is a theory of capitalist
development, its economic laws and contradictions. It is thus a
continuation of capitalist economics, since without a self-managed
socialism all the rest is capitalism or neo-capitalism. Marx, in
Capital, his greatest work, does not say what socialism would be
like, only what capitalism is like. This title merits serious
study, without satanizing it like many anarchists have done without
recognizing that Marx was an investigator of capitalism whose
contribution to socialism is very limited. It is for us, those who
live in the 20th century, to explain our prodiguous, revolutionary
and changing century, not by the ideologies of the 19th century
which explained very well their own times, but cannot be
explanations for us today. And this is not to say, in any manner,
that we want to break with the past, since by knowing the past we
can understand the present and go with certainty to win a future of
peace, prosperity, liberty and equality for all, liberated from the
bureaucracies of capitalism and the technocracies risen to State
power to exploit Society.
The Libertarian Economy
The libertarian economy, going beyond the marxist-leninist
economic doctrine of State capitalism, rejects the State in the
name of political and economic liberty. This is because the State
protects the capitalists' private property and the state property
of the communist bureaucrats. In this school of thought, Bakunin
asserted socialism and liberty at the same time, since he could not
conceive that socialism could be less free than the bourgeois
democracy described by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Man from the French Revolution of 1789-93. Thus denouncing the
political bureaucracy of the "socialists of the cathedral" (the
ideologues who spoke like workers, but wanted to govern like
bourgeois), Bakunin exclaimed: "Liberty without socialism is
privilege and injustice, and socialism without liberty is slavery
and brutality." (Obras, vol. 1, p. 59)
For the libertarians, blind obedience to the State is an
abdication of Society, since the freedom of each individual must
not be limited by a ruling class, either by a class whose power is
based on private property, as in the bourgeois State, or on State
property, as in the despotic, bureaucratic State--both employer and
police at the same time. According to the classical libertarian
thinkers, the biggest error of all revolutions rests in the absurd
politics of demolishing a government in order to put another in its
place which could be worse. Consequently the only true social
revolution would be that which destroys the principle of authority,
replacing it by self-government of the people--without political
parties, without a class of professional politicians, without those
who arbitrarily command and others who passively obey.
For Kropotkin, laws could be grouped in three categories:
those that protect the persons of privilege, those that protect the
governments, and those that protect private property, but that, in
reality, disprotect the impoverished working people.
In the conventional capitalist mode of production, the
bourgeois State is a committee in the service of the capitalists
guaranteeing them the private ownership of the means of production
and exchange and the realization, without the intervention of
labor, of the surplus value usurped from the wage workers, as much
in a parliamentary democracy as in a dictatorship, according to the
situation. Under the statist mode of production, whose real
expression is the soviet model, the State, a monopoly of the
totalitarian bureaucracy, imposes state ownership; dictates wage
and price policy; is employer, merchant, banker, police, making
laws according to the convenience and interests of the totalitarian
bureaucracy. In either case, with a conventional capitalist regime
or with State capitalism, whether in the West or in the East, the
worker remains a wage worker, producer of an economic surplus for
the western bourgeoisie or for the eastern bureaucrats. Thus, by
changing only one government for another the workers remain
oppressed and exploited, in reality, by capitalism, whether private
or of the State.
The fact is that the soviet regime perpetuates capitalism, but
in another form, with state ownership and bureaucratic State. It
should according to marxist-leninism, but hasn't, made socialism
except semantically--purely in words, not in reality. Thus, for
example, Marx in his main doctrinal work, Capital, exposed the laws
of development of capitalism, but not those of socialism; since
Capital is a body of economic doctrine mostly about capitalism
which contributes no well-defined socio-economic laws of socialism.
On the other hand, Lenin, in State and Revolution, contributes no
materials for the building of a socialist society, but takes from
Marx the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a
transitional step between capitalism and socialism, in order to
apply it to the soviet model, where, in time, this transition in
the form of a dictatorial State becomes the permanent dictatorship
of the communist bureaucracy over the wage workers, who are the
producers of State surplus value, for the totalitarian
"Nomenklature." In sum, then, socialism has not been realized
anywhere, as such and as intended by the utopian and libertarian
socialists of the 19th century, since the soviet model was a new
capitalism of the bureaucratic State.
But the fact of having prestige has enabled marxist-leninism,
to a great extent, to present itself as the economic science, the
dialectical philosophy, the sociology of class struggle and its
solution, the materialist interpretation of history and the State
form necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism. All
this body of doctrine penetrated the universities capturing the
minds of many students and professors, the "intelligentsia" above
all, in pre-revolutionary Russia, where leninism was established as
the active political practice of marxism. In the West, marxism
never really reached the workers, neither in its most simplified
form, The Communist Manifesto and less still of Capital; but many
professors, intellectuals, ideologues adopted marxism as reformism,
"socialism of the cathedral" or an ingredient of social democracy;
although in recent times the economic ideal of the "socialists of
the cathedral," of the technocracy and of the bureaucracy, was not
Marx but better still Keynes, who contributed the economic theory
of a neo-capitalism, more a monopoly of the social-democratic
political class or of the labor parties than of the bourgeoisie
properly speaking.
The failing welfare-State in the West, squeezed by the abuse
of inflation and of exorbitant taxes, and the State-owner in the
East of the soviet bureaucracy, were established as an alternative
to capitalism, as a "velvet socialism" in the West and as
totalitarian communism in the East (which in reality is not
communism, but a capitalism of the State: the most total of all
dictatorships, without precedent in the ancient and modern world,
and which has fallen into chaos from the "perestroika" of Gorbachev
to the "catastroika" of Yeltsin).
It is necessary, therefore, to redefine what has semantically
called itself socialism and is nothing more than State capitalism,
investigating and proposing a libertarian economy, whose laws of
development--economic, social, political, cultural, scientific and
technological--are enunciated as a replacement and alternative to
western welfare-Statism and to Soviet State-ownership. For this
libertarian socialism needs a little more scientific rigor and a
little less utopianism, although it is necessary to take the
adjective "scientific" with a grain of salt, as it has been
depreciated enough by the soviets. Utopia is beautiful, but it must
bring something of economy, of reality, of objectivity to the goal
of libertarian socialism for it to be an alternative, at the same
time, to western monopoly capitalism and to State capitalism,
according to the soviet model.
False Democracy
In our epoch the exhaustion of statist politics emerges; so it
is with the social-semocratic regimes under the control of the
parasitical middle classes (in the west); so it is with the
totalitarian bureaucracies of the one-Party and State-employer;
whether under the parliamentary welfare-State (in the West), or the
total State (in the East) and of failed nazi-fascism, the people
have understood that they must organize themselves into industrial
democracy (self-managed enterprises) and into federated self-
government (direct democracy), overthrowing the economic power of
the industrial, mercantile and financial bourgeoisie, and the
political power of the radical, social-democratic, christian
democratic, socialist and neo-liberal petty bourgeoisie who, with
their various parties, take turns in Power.
Marxism and keynesianism have contributed equally to the
development of statist economics; so it is with the marxist-
leninists and petty-bourgeois socialists; so it is with the
technocrats and bureaucrats of every type, partisans of managed
economies with the goal of controlling the national economies and
the organs of the world economy, imperialist or hegemonist, like
the IMF, the BIRF, the GATT, the U.N. Security Council, instruments
of the "new world order" of ex-president Bush.
But from these techno-bureaucratic experiences, with the
proliferation of well-paid functionaries, of UN-ocrats, eurocrats,
comeconorats, of central planners of every type, we can deduce that
when the parasitic classes are augmented at the expense of
productive workers, the poorer are the working people and
consumers.
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autocratic and continuing rule of the bourgeoisie and the small
bourgeoisie of the west, and the bureaucracies of the east.
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The moment arrives, then, when it is necessary to vindicate
the restoration of self-managed economy, debureaucratized and
debourgeoisfied, liberated from both marxist-leninist
totalitarianism and bureaucracy, and from western keynesian
planning, which was based on the extravagant growth of taxes,
monetary inflation, government budgetary deficit and full
employment from above for the bureaucrats and technocrats, and
maximum unemployment below for the productive workers underneath.
An aberrant economy of this kind has to lead to the total failure
of the welfare-State as long as it consumes unproductively more
than it produces positively, in actuality in agriculture, industry,
mining and goods production.
One thing is politically and economically evident in our time;
that the stronger and richer is the State then the more weak and
poor are its subjects. In consequence, it can be seen on the
political horizon and in immediate society, as much in the West as
in the East, there are two great antagonistic human groups: those
that order and those that obey; those that work and live poorly and
those who don't work and live well; the authoritarians, who seek to
maintain their privileges, and the libertarians, who defend their
rights and essential liberties. Thus we behold from the historical
perspective, at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of
the twenty-first, the crisis of the USA and the ex-USSR.
In regimes of the soviet-type, in which the State possesses
all wealth and all power, it has created two great antagonistic
classes, the totalitarian government bureaucracy and the working
people forced to submit to a savage capitalism of the State. The
dialectic of class struggle, in bureaucratic socialist countries,
by its essence is transformed into a struggle between oppressed
Society and the State oppressor, having thus an anarchist
character, since it is the proletariat, paid by the State-employer,
that has to overthrow the Power of the totalitarian bureaucracy in
order to build an economy based on self-management,
debureaucratized, organized to function through federations in
production and social and public services, converging in a National
Economic Council. Since the quantification and accounting of the
economy must be done federally, by agreement of all and the parts
(without central planning by bureaucrats, according to central and
final orders), there comes a moment in which the libertarian
economy makes it scientifically possible as the best possible
administration of economic matters creating thus the conditions to
abolish the State, oppressor and exploiter of men, converting to
decentralized self-government. In this manner an economic
federalism (production of goods and service) and an administrative
federalism: one, as the self-management of workplaces; the other,
as local, regional and national self-government, creates a Self-
power of direct participation of people organized in their own
interest; not requiring, therefore, a political governing class,
nor a bourgeoisie nor techno-bureaucracy, managing industry in
order to usurp the economic surplus produced by the labor of others
without paying, usurping by surplus-value for the bourgeoisie of
the State-owner, now failing in Russia and China, but which they
want to perpetuate as capitalism pure and hard in the ex-COMECON
countries.
The Management of Social Capital
The libertarian economy has to assume the increased
reproduction of social capital, in such a way that the development
of productive forces will not be inferior to that under private or
State capitalism. Only then will a new economic regime be justified
historically, socially and politically, if it creates more well-
being, a better standard of living, more production with less
manual labor than the old overthrown regime. To not do this would
produce over time the conditions for a counter-revolution as long
as humanity can not lose productive forces, without earning them
constantly until living labor (human productivity) has enough
capital (accumulated past labor) that enables one hour of automated
labor to produce more than many hours of simple or rudimentary
labor based upon the muscular efforts of man. Accordingly as worker
productivity increases, everyone working scientifically, it will be
possible to attain very soon, a working day, half productive and
half educational, with the goal of giving everyone equal time for
labor and studies, equal scientific, technical and cultural
preparation. In this way, all will be capable of doing all, and
with the help of the computer revolution, to abolish the
traditional division of labor, so that the revolution is not
overcome by classes or social estates from dividing labor into
manual or intellectual.
The self-managed economy, libertarian in the greatest sense of
the word, will have to completely master the basic industries; the
creation of new products; the complete utilization of scientific-
technological research, bringing it from the universities to the
workplaces and institutes; the creation of an agro-industry that
will erase the differences in cultural, economic, and technological
development between city and country; the constitution of a
libertarian society that will balance economics, society, ecology,
population and harmonize natural resources and humans, guaranteeing
all the right to work, education, and leisure; the integral
assimilation of the computer revolution in order to liberate
(painful) manual labor from material production; since the
automation of labor, plus self-management of social capital at the
same time, will create all the technical, economic, cultural and
scientific conditions to attain a harmonious society, without
social conflicts nor economioc contradictions; then self-management
plus automation equals libertarian communism.
But prior to attaining the "golden age" of self-government, of
eqaulity in education and social conditions for all, where each
receives according to their needs and the economic possiblities of
society, transcending social heirarchies and the antagonism between
wage labor and private or State capital, it will be necessary to
transcend political economy as a science of administration of
scarce resources and distribution of goods and services according
to quantity and quality of labor, abolishing at the same time the
division of labor into professions or corporations, by virtue of
which some consume more than others, using money and unequal
incomes in order to perpetuate the inequality among people.
The spontaneous natural riches, the fruits and wild berries,
the water and air to be in reach of all humans, without
appropriation nor mercantilization, can not be distributed in the
mercantile sense of the realization of the law of exchange value
since to not pass in the form of money, price and market seeking
profit, not being the objective of political economy. In this order
of ideas, libertarian communism, for humanity to attain an economy
of abundance, a high productivity of automated labor will have to
go beyond the law of exchange value, wages, money, merchandise,
unequal incomes, the State in order to impose a unequal division by
classes; the political parties and the ideologies peculiar to the
political alienation of a competitive society, the division of
labor between managers and subordinates. All this can not be
economically, politically, socially or culturally transcended,
however, by bureaucratic socialism, a neo-bourgeois political
economy of usufruct, which is followed by a system of distribution
as much unequal as capitalism.
The libertarian economy, initially, as happened in Spain
during the Revolution of 1936-39, the "praxis" set itself problems
that had to be the resolved, totally or partially, by bypassing
political ideology, creating libertarian collectives, enterprises
managed directly by workers without techno-bureaucratic directors;
but having to demonstrate by means of self-organized labor that the
forces of production would not be wasted. Seeing in practice the
human, solidaric and productive labor advantages of the the
libertarian collectives, the small private property owners
associated with them voluntarily. On the other hand, Stalin decreed
the forced collectivization of the land into kolkhozes
["co-operatives"] and sovkhozes [state farms], repressing those
peasants who did not want to join them except by pressure of the
political police.
"The good from the moment it is forced (...) is converted into
evil. Liberty, morality, human dignity, consists precisely in that
man does good, not because he is ordered to do it, but because he
conceived it, desired it, and loved it." (Bakunin, Obras, Volume 1,
p. 280).
In reality, people are neither good nor evil, but products of
the societies where they live, conditioned by their economic,
political, social, and cultural circumstances. Thus in societies
where private or state property holds sway, each individual appears
as an enemy of the other, competing with the other, oppressed by
the other, limited by the other in rights and duties.
The causes of injustice, in the socio-economic sense, do not
reside so much in human conscience as in the inhuman essence of
societies of conflicting classes and in the State which perpetuates
them throughout history, as if humanity was incapable of overcoming
the prehistory of unjust society, with even less equality than
primitive society from the paleolithic to the neolithic.
An economist so little suspected of being an anarchist as Adam
Smith, but a sincere intellectual and friend of the truth
concerning social injustice between people, having as a principal
cause the governments of class, said:
"Civil government (...) is in reality established for the
defense of those who possess something against those others who
possess nothing."
The International Workers Association (AIT), in the past
century, was more clear about the emancipation of working people
than all the later internationals where the union bureaucracies,
politicians, and technocrats, allies of each other, had corrupted
communist and socialist ideals; whether this corruption was by
favoring the welfare-State, more keynesian than marxist, in the
West, or the totalitarian State, the administrative socialism, in
the East, which produced plenty of armaments but failed to produce
food.
"The three great causes of human immorality are: inequality as
much political as economic and social; ignorance, that is the
natural result of the former; and, finally, the necessary
consequence of both, that is slavery." (Program of the AIT).
The deed of the political parties, of the so-called left, and
the labor union organizations, with the development of monopoly
capitalism (West) and with administrative socialism, East, having
fallen into the hands of political and union bureaucracies and into
those of technocrats, with the words of the left and the deeds of
the right; has been to confound, in our epoch, all the values of
the popular revolutionary struggle, making the communist and
socialist parties, as much as their union organizations, into
transmission belts for the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie of
the left which, by the means of political Power, aspires to become
a "new bourgeoisie." Thus they adulate the workers, promoting to
them a "socialist paradise," in order to sacrifice them to the
capitalist inferno, so it is under the laborist or social-
democratic model, or under soviet totalitarianism.