💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › subversion-review-anarchist-economics.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:09:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Review: Anarchist Economics
Author: Subversion
Date: 2002
Language: en
Topics: economics, AK Press, Anarcho-Collectivism, Spanish Revolution, book review, Northeastern Anarchist
Source: Retrieved on March 24, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160324224507/http://nefac.net/node/178
Notes: Reviewed by Subversion. Published in The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #4, Spring/Summer 2002.

Subversion

Review: Anarchist Economics

This pamphlet adds another volume to the bulging library of anarchist

publications which regard the setting up of the workers’ and peasants’

collectives at the start of the Spanish civil war in 1936 as “one of the

most, if not the most, extensive and profound revolutions ever seen”.

Abraham Guillen’s argument is that the Spanish collectives can serve as

the model for a revolutionary alternative to both Western-style

capitalism and Eastern-bloc ‘communism’. But Guillen picks out from the

Spanish events some of the most negative features of that experience, so

that in the end his “alternative for a world in crisis” amounts to

nothing more than a variation on the same lousy old capitalist theme.

Basically, Guillen promotes a vision of relatively autonomous and

self-sufficient communes joined together by market relations (i.e.

buying/selling or barter).

On the distribution of goods within each collective he mentions that

some of the Spanish collectives “freely distributed among the

collectivist landworkers that which was abundant but rationed that which

was scarce”.

This seems to us a reasonable way of tackling the problem of material

scarcity which may very well temporarily confront us when capitalism is

being overthrown, so long as any rationing system is based on the

principle, ‘to each according to their needs’.

Guillen however proposes that each person’s consumption would be

regulated “in accordance with quality and quantity of work done”, with

“production cards”, on which “the value of work done by days is

recorded”, being used as a kind of “credit card” or form of money.

The adoption of this principle, ‘to each according to their work’, would

amount to the re-introduction (or rather continuation) of the wage

system. And indeed to the extent that similar schemes were actually put

into operation in Spain (there were numerous variations on the

production card theme and hundreds of different local currencies) the

overall thrust of the collectivization movement was towards the

retention of essentially capitalist relations rather than in the

direction of socialism/communism.

This can be seen even more clearly in the relations between collectives.

As very few collectives were self-sufficient, central warehouses were

set up where collectives exchanged their surplus produce among

themselves for the goods they lacked. Here hard cash was often dispensed

with, but the relative proportions in which the goods were bartered with

were still determined by monetary values — for example how many sacks of

flour a collective could obtain in exchange for a ton of potatoes was

worked out by calculating the value of both in monetary terms — and no

collective was allowed to withdraw a sum of goods worth more than those

it had deposited.

Guillen wholeheartedly supports this system, describing approvingly how

“if local products could not satisfy the consumer, the collective,

through its council or appropriate section, obtained, on an equal

exchange basis, the goods and services needed”, and how “a self-managed

system was thus formed, where goods, products and services were

exchanged according to their real work-value relationship”.

He fails to comprehend how rapidly this system of relations among the

collectives would lead to the main purpose of production becoming (or

remaining) for exchange via the market rather than to directly meet

people’s needs. And, once again, insofar as this is what did actually

happen in Spain, the collectivization movement’s development was driven

basically by capitalist dynamics.

Had the Spanish collectives been moving in a genuinely communist

direction the tendency towards self-sufficiency and autonomy for each

collective (which Guillen elevates to the level of a “biological

principle”) would have been reversed in favor of centralized planning by

delegate bodies. The wealth produced by each collective would not be

regarded as its own private property. Instead, in relations among the

collectives the same attitude would prevail as existed within each

collective: “The concept ‘yours and mine’ will no longer

exist...Everything will belong to everyone.” The role of the central

planning bodies would essentially be simple technical ones, such as

finding out what goods were needed where and arranging their

transportation from one place to another.

In Guillen’s model there is central co-ordination but it is

co-ordination of exchange relationships. Throughout the pamphlet great

stress is laid on forms of organization — direct democracy, federation,

self-management, and so on — but the content of these organizational

forms remains in essence a market economy.

To sum up, the “anarchist economics” Guillen supports is simply the

dead-end of self-managed capitalism, which is every bit as reactionary

as private or state capitalism. The communist society we are fighting

for can only be established by the complete destruction of ALL private

property, money, wages and markets — whatever their form.