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Title: Historical Materialism
Author: Eric Fleischmann
Date: May 26th, 2022
Language: en
Topics: historical materialism, dialectics, Karl Marx, marxism, left-libertarianism, mutualism, libertarian socialism, Soviet Union
Source: Retrieved on 5/26/22 from https://c4ss.org/content/56745.
Notes: This is an edited republication of the study, originally published June 23, 2020.

Eric Fleischmann

Historical Materialism

Introduction

One of the most famous theories forwarded by Karl Marx is that of

historical materialism—although Marx himself apparently never used that

exact term in his work.[1] To put it succinctly, Merriam-Webster defines

historical materialism as “the Marxist theory of history and society

that holds that ideas and social institutions develop only as the

superstructure of a material economic base.”[2] And for about a century

after Marx, this has been the defining basis of historical and social

analysis for many of those on the radical left. However, as David

McNally accounts, in his look back at the work of Edward Palmer Thomas,

historical materialism has fallen somewhat out of fashion; “in the name

of rejecting ‘economism’ and ‘class reductionism’, large numbers of

intellectuals have come to believe the idea that society pivots

principally around the ‘discourses’ which organise the way we see the

world and act within it.”[3] Similarly, in The Utopia of Rules, David

Graeber accounts for the prominence of the ideas of Max Weber and Michel

Foucault in the social sciences of the postwar United States as being in

part because of “the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of

anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form)

as ways of arguing that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the

control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and

unavoidable feature of any social life.”[4] But the goal of the present

piece is not to critique or refute this turn towards discourse theory

and non-Marxist analyses of power—they hold immense merit—but rather to

make an overview of Marx’s conception of historical materialism and its

implications for radical politics and then, through the use of

dialectics—a central component of historical materialism itself—and the

work of various thinkers, to respond to and forward critiques of the

theory in a manner that lends itself toward a left-libertarian

reinterpretation.

A Brief Overview of Historical Materialism

Marx’s concept of historical materialism emerged as a reaction to German

philosophy both historically and during his lifetime. Previously, German

thinking had been dominated by idealists who focused largely on the

spiritual and theological characteristics of society and the

dissemination of ideas and values. This is particularly true of the

followers of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who separated into the

conservative Old Hegelians and more progressive Young Hegelians. As Marx

explains, “Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts,

ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they

attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as

the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is

evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these

illusions of consciousness.”[5] However, Marx—although also a student of

Hegel—raises the question of where these conceptions, thoughts, and

ideas even come from in the first place. Unlike previous German thinkers

he begins his analysis of history not with the emergence of writing,

religion, governance, or other great cultural inventions but rather

delves into what those thinkers called prehistory.

For Marx, the dawn of history begins with the material world and

material needs. He points out that before any semblance of civilization

can emerge, human beings must first consider “eating and drinking, a

habitation, clothing and many other things.”[6] Therefore, the genesis

of the means of producing these necessities of life becomes the primary

differentiation that humans begin to make between themselves and

so-called lower animals—as opposed to distinguishing “by consciousness,

by religion or anything else you like.” But as the basic necessities of

life are satisfied by this production, new needs are themselves produced

and require greater productive forces and therefore greater numbers of

people. So, what starts as simply a relationship to nature also becomes

a social relationship. And this socialized production is not neutral

upon the configuration of society. As Marx further puts it:

This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the

production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a

definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of

expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As

individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore,

coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with

how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material

conditions determining their production.[7]

What this means is that the production of life’s necessities is not

somehow separate from that life, but instead becomes an intrinsic part

of human social existence, so the characteristics of individuals and

their lives within any society are determined largely by the mode of

production. Or, as Marx writes, “The sum total of these relations of

production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real

foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”[8] This leads

to the primary assumption of Marx’s analysis of history: if the mode of

production is what determines the form and content of society—down to

even individual lives—then the progression of history is caused by

changes in the basic elements of the economic system.

Marx outlines this conception of historical development in The German

Ideology through the identification of three types of ownership found in

European history. The first is “tribal [Stammeigentum] ownership,” which

involves the earliest hunting, fishing, raising of animals, and early

agriculture and, because of the latter two activities, often

“presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land.” The

division of labor required to maintain this is very minimal, so it

remains largely within the family and therefore the overall social

structures are extensions of the early familial structure—based around

patriarchal chieftains and maintaining small numbers of slaves. The

second is “ancient communal and State ownership,” which emerges when

several tribes combine together into cities through agreement or force,

pooling their slave populations and uniting into a “spontaneous derived

association over against their slaves.” In this type, the division of

labor is even greater, and the earliest cases of private property begin

to emerge but are “abnormal” and “subordinate to communal ownership.”[9]

Finally, the third type is “feudal or estate property” wherein the

heavily laboring division of society is no longer slaves, but serfs and

peasants. In feudalism, property consists “on the one hand of landed

property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour

of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of

journeymen.”[10]

But there is quite obviously a fourth type that is not from a previous

historical period, and that is the distribution of ownership present in

capitalism, and a key demonstration of historical materialism is the

transition from feudalism to the current system. In Capital (Vol. I),

Marx asserts that the movement towards capitalism was obviously due to

changes regarding the means of production, but more specifically it

necessitated the rending of the feudal peasant populations from their

means of subsistence. He explains:

The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the

labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their

labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not

only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually

extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the

capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away

from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process

that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of

production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage

labourers.[11]

And this separation of immediate producers from the means of production

was accomplished through measures such as “the forcible driving [by

feudal lords] of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had

the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the

common lands.”[12] The identification of this process, known as

primitive accumulation, further reveals the historically false premise

of a free and essentially equal market system that exists today.

It is important to note here that Marx’s co-thinker Friedrich Engels

attempts to step away from the violence of primitive accumulation as the

defining transitional element behind the emergence of capitalism. As

Kevin Carson writes, “Engels, to render the Marxian theory consistent

(and to deflect the strategic threat from the market socialists . . . ),

was forced to retreat on the role of force in primitive accumulation.

(And if we take his word on the importance of Marx’s input and approval

during his writing of Anti-Dühring, Marx himself was guilty of similar

backpedalling). In Anti-Dühring, Engels vehemently denied that force was

necessary at any stage of the process; indeed, that it did little even

to further the process significantly.” And Carson argues instead that

Engels . . . did not show that exploitation was inherent in a given

level of productive forces, without the use of coercion. He needed to

show, not that parasitism depends on the preexistence of a host organism

(duh!), but that it cannot be carried out without force. Every increase

in economic productivity has created opportunities for robbery through a

statist class system; but the same productive technology was always

usable in non-exploitative ways. The fact that a given kind of class

parasitism presupposes a certain form of productive technology, does not

alter the fact that that form of technology has potentially both

libertarian and exploitative applications, depending on the nature of

the society which adopts it.[13]

This point regarding violence having been made, it is important to

emphasize that this historical materialist view is not in arbitrary

combination with Marx’s communist politics, but rather informs and in

some ways justifies those goals. For one, it is an implicit component of

Marx’s work to demonstrate the contingency of any political and economic

arrangement. This is why Marx does not simply speak of a coming

revolution but emphasizes the importance of past social change. His

outline of the different historical forms of property allows him and

Friedrich Engels to make the point that “[a]ll property relations in the

past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon

the change in historical conditions.”[14] And Marx not only demonstrates

the contingency of previous social systems, but also systematically

identifies the mechanism by which that contingency is brought to bear:

the productive forces surpass the relations of production, thereby

necessitating a new social system. This can be seen in his and Engels’s

assessment of the transition from feudalism to capitalism where…

the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the

bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a

certain stage in the development of these means of production and of

exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and

exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing

industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer

compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so

many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

And furthermore, this historical account of the transition to capitalism

as being brought about by increased productive forces and as

necessitating the transformation of the peasantry into a wage-laboring

proletariat itself lays the specific groundwork for the end of

capitalism. As they further write, “The weapons with which the

bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the

bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons

that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men

who are to wield those weapons—the modern working-class—the

proletarians.”[15]

This identification of the mechanism behind the historical contingency

of social institutions and particularly that contingency imminent in the

very basis of capitalism is particularly relevant for the communist

mission because—if this account of historical change is true—it makes

Marxists the first group to be genuinely conscious of how past history

has unfolded and how the current era might come to an end. Although

there was certainly intention involved in certain efforts that moved

feudalism towards capitalism, these were not conceived of as means to

drive history but rather were the various efforts of self-interested

elite groups. In contrast, the essential Marxist claim is that since, as

Marx maintains, people’s “social existence determines their

consciousness” and the order of that social existence springs from the

manner in which the means of production is distributed, seizing the

means of production with this understanding would mean that, to put it

in Engels’s own words, the many “extraneous objective forces that have

hitherto governed history, [will] pass under the control of man himself.

Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make

his own history.”[16][17] If the Marxists are correct in their analysis

of history, they hold the key to reshaping all of society—from the most

complex political structures to the manner in which people live and

think on a daily basis.

Anyone familiar with Marx and Marxism will no doubt have realized that

there has so far been no explicit mention of dialectics beyond the

introduction. The dialectical method, which Marx derived largely from

Hegel, plays a central role in all of his work—including the formulation

of his theory of history—with the most explicit being ‘dialectical

materialism:’ an extensive theory of nature and science positing the

primacy of a constantly changing material reality independent of the

mind.[18] Although historical materialism is distinct from dialectical

materialism, the former can be seen as a specifically social and

historical application of the latter. But dialectics generally, as Chris

Matthew Sciabarra describes,

is the art of context-keeping. It counsels us to study the object of our

inquiry from a variety of perspectives and levels of generality so as to

gain a more comprehensive picture of it. That study often requires that

we grasp the object in terms of the larger system within which it is

situated, as well as its development across time.[19]

And instead of delving into dialectical materialism specifically, this

broader definition will be used alongside the work of several authors to

examine various critiques of historical materialism in order to move

towards a left-libertarian reinterpretation of the theory.

Subjectivity Versus Determinism in Historical Materialism

A common criticism of historical materialism is that it is materially

reductionist and/or economically deterministic—related claims positing

that Marxists give too much import to material economic conditions to

the point of subsuming all other social factors and disregarding human

agency and subjectivity as a whole. An instance of this on the

libertarian left comes from Noam Chomsky who, in a clip apparently

featured on television in Greece, testifies that “it’s a tragedy and a

catastrophe that the left has accepted the idea of humans as historical

products, simply reflections of their environment, because what follows

from that, of course, is that there’s no moral barrier to molding them

anyway you like. If humans have no inner nature, they don’t have an

inner instinct for freedom.”[20] He does not specifically name Marx as

the originator of this perceived trend, but it seems obvious that this

is the case. There is also Murray Rothbard on the libertarian right who,

in the second volume of An Austrian Perspective on the History of

Economic Thought, asserts, “How, then, do historical changes take place

in the Marxian schema? They can only take place in technological

methods, since everything else in society is determined by the state of

technology at any one time.” In Rothbard’s assessment, if T is the

“state of technology,” S is “the determined superstructure,” and n is

“any point of time” then the formula of society is deterministically

“T_(n) → S_(n)” with historical change only possible through change in

technology as represented by “T_(n)+1 → S_(n)+1” and by no other

means.[21]

If it were true that the Marxist analysis of history was only concerned

with strictly material factors and dismissed all other factors including

human agency and subjectivity, such a theory would be extremely

undialectical, as it would utilize no variance in perspective. However,

when delved into, Marx’s view reveals itself not as an oversimplifying

and deterministic materialism, but rather as a genuinely dialectical

integration of both objective and subjective considerations. Firstly,

Marx was not only reacting against the German idealists, but also

attempting to overcome previous materialist philosophies as well. As he

discusses in the first and third of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” “The

chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach

included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in

the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous

activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active

side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but

only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous

activity as such” and “[t]he materialist doctrine that men are products

of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are

products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it

is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the

educator himself.”[22] It is clear from these statements that Marx does

not disregard human subjectivity or agency—and such an accusation would

be hard to square with his belief in the power of human beings to

consciously take control of social forces through the seizure of the

means of production—but rather attempts to integrate those very

components from idealism into a materialistic understanding of the

world.

Furthermore, Marx establishes in Theories of Surplus Value that,

[m]an himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other

production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which

affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his

functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities

as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it

can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and

in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have

a more or less decisive influence on it.[23]

This illustrates that historical materialism does not discount other

factors in the formulation and development of society, but rather

attempts to take into consideration all potential influences. The

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci can be seen as bolstering this expanded

dialectical view as he describes “a necessary reciprocity between

structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than

the real dialectical process.”[24] This thinking leads him to elaborate

upon the concept of superstructure, eventually arguing that revolution

is impossible solely through a “frontal attack”—direct assault upon the

state and the seizure of the means of production—and that there exists a

necessity for a “war of position” whereby revolutionaries either

infiltrate cultural institutions and/or create new alternative ones to

subvert the bourgeois hegemony that reinforces the state and

capitalism.[25]

But this dialectical consistency in the theoretical realm does not

necessarily mean that the criticism of historical materialism as

materially reductionist and economically deterministic is completely

without merit. In “The Crisis of Dialectical Materialism and Libertarian

Socialism,” Mario Cutajar recognizes that when it comes to the Marxist

analysis of society and history—and reality in general—the word

“materialism” is actually rather misleading, and that Marx attempts “to

go beyond idealism and materialism” to recognize simultaneously “the

creativity of the human subject and . . . the power of circumstances.”

However, he argues that,

starting with the later Engels (and to a smaller extent with Marx

himself) the fine balance between idealism and materialism, subjectivity

and objectivity, was upset. The original synthesis, delicate because it

was a purely theoretical concept, disintegrated when the attempt was

made to turn it into a practical, revolutionary doctrine. Whereas the

original balance meant that a distinction was made between economic

conditions and the meaning assigned to them by the human agent, the new

ideology reduced all human acts to their economic foundation.[26]

Cutajar asserts that this dialectical (or rather undialectical)

unbalancing can be best understood by applying a contextual—and

therefore itself dialectical—understanding to Marx and Marxists

themselves. In previous eras, many hierarchies and authorities were

justified through the religious appeal to a divinely ordained social

order. But “[t]he new ruling class however had no place for a deity so

it replaced Him with nature, a secular God. The laws that govern

billiard balls were thus extended to cover relations between human

beings proving once again that things could not be other than they

were.” This bourgeois form of materialism is identified by both Edmund

Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre as “naturalism,” a worldview defined in the

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “the thesis that everything

belongs to the world of nature and can be studied by the methods

appropriate to studying that world (that is, the methods of the hard

sciences).”[27][28]This was an effective underpinning to the overthrow

of pre-capitalist regimes in Europe, and therefore Marxists believed

that through slight modification it could in turn be used against the

bourgeoisie themselves. The central issue is that this seed of bourgeois

ideology “led to the belief that human behaviour could be reduced to the

rigid and ‘exact’ laws of nature” and “replaced the ‘life-world’ (the

world of actual, human experience) with a lifeless, abstract world

composed of mathematical relationships.”[29]

Cutajar points to German Social Democracy and Leninism as illustrative

of the practical consequences of this naturalist tendency within

Marxism. In Western Europe, where capitalism was already broadly

developed, the former of these two movements “eventually reconciled

itself with the very society it had vowed to overthrow” because “this

Marxism had been nothing more than the most radical form of bourgeois

ideology.” Specifically, this entailed Social Democrats demanding only

piecemeal reforms—such as higher wages—which, though beneficial to the

daily lives of workers, merely led to a greater equilibrium and

stability to the capitalist system. In Russia, where capitalism was

extremely underdeveloped, the Leninists—following the naturalist Marxist

fixation purely on economic conditions—deemed it necessary to attempt to

create the historical conditions from which socialism/communism is

supposed to emerge. This necessitated a kind of primitive accumulation

in its own right and both the “[s]uperexploitation of Russian labour and

autarchic economic development” which ultimately ended in the creation

of “a distorted form [of] the Western milieu on which [Marxism] had been

originally reared.”[30]

But Cutajar maintains that just as these failures can be traced back to

the context in which Marxism originally emerged, so too can these

failures themselves provide the context to surpass them. A new and more

properly dialectical approach must start with Marx’s original

dialectical synthesis that attempted “to overcome the one-sidedness of

materialism while at the same time avoiding the perils of romantic

idealism” and therefore does away with the naturalist tendencies within

classical Marxism. He points to libertarian socialism as the model this

should take as it “is defined first and foremost by the negation of

political authoritarianism and theoretical determinism” that can be

found in Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach. In this particular piece,

Cutajar provides no specific programmatic formulation—particularly in

regard to alterations of the material base of society—of what he sees

libertarian socialism as entailing, beyond the transcendence of the

overly materialistic tendencies in Marxism—and, as he briefly outlines,

the overly idealistic tendencies in anarchism.[31] Perhaps a libertarian

socialist approach to altering the economic base in a non-deterministic

manner that takes into account subjective factors would be some

combination of two distinctions drawn by opponents of private property:

private property versus possession (utilized largely by individualistic

libertarian socialists) and private property versus personal property

(utilized often by communistic libertarian socialists as well as many if

not most non-libertarian socialists and communists).

The former distinction—derived largely from the work of Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon—is one most commonly associated with mutualists and North

American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Josiah

Warren, who argue against the absolute ownership of private property in

favor of the principle of occupancy and use. As Clarence Lee Swartz

clarifies, mutualists…

propose to recognize conditional titles to land, based on occupancy and

use by the owner; and they engage to defend such titles against all

comers, so long as the owner complies with those sole conditions of

occupying and using the land of which he claims the ownership. Under

these terms there can be no monopoly of land, and no one who desires

land for occupancy and use may go landless. Since no vacant land may

then be held out of use if anybody desires it, each person may, in the

order of the priority of his selection and according to his requirements

and occupation, have equality of opportunity in the selection of

land.[32]

Or as George Crowder—expanding upon this principle beyond just

land-tenure—explains,

The ownership [opposed] is basically that which is unearned . . .

including such things as interest on loans and income from rent. This is

contrasted with ownership rights in those goods either produced by the

work of the owner or necessary for that work, for example his

dwelling-house, land and tools. Proudhon initially refers to legitimate

rights of ownership of these goods as ‘possession,’ and although [in his

later work] he calls this ‘property,’ the conceptual distinction remains

the same.[33]

In comparison, as Shawn P. Wilbur asserts, “the distinction so

frequently made [by communists] between ‘personal’ and ‘private

property’ is not, as is so often claimed, the same as Proudhon’s

distinction between “simple property” and “simple possession.”[34] In

most theories of communism, private property consists of capital and the

means of production (productive property) and personal property consists

of consumer and non-capital goods and services and the former is

rejected as exploitative in favor of social ownership of the means of

production. Carl Gustav Rosberg assesses the matter of inheritance in

the Soviet Union as such: “It is true that accumulation of material

possessions from one generation to the next is somewhat minimized, since

it is difficult to accumulate personal property that is productive.

Children can inherit nonproductive personal property (money, houses) but

not productive property, the ‘means of production’ (factories,

machines).”[35] But the mention of “personal property that is

productive” should raise some confusion considering the previously

established definition. This complication would seem to emerge from the

subjective uses of any kind of property and therefore the difficulty in

defining what is productive and what is nonproductive property. Caspar

Oldenburg argues…

[o]ne could . . . think of goods commonly seen as consumer goods

(personal property) that, to some clever person, would also be a factor

of production (private property). While many socialists consider a motor

vehicle to be personal property, to an entrepreneurial car-owner it may

be a production good, as he can use it to deliver pizzas to those who

value extra time spent on their couch or with their family over driving

to the pizzeria. If the entrepreneur bakes fabulous cakes that all the

neighbors love and are willing to trade some wealth to consume, his oven

is a factor of production to him, even if it is the same model found in

every other house in town. Even something as lowly and seemingly

insignificant as a broom is a production good to someone who can sweep

with twice the efficiency of the other members of society.[36]

And as William Gillis puts it (using the term “possession” in place of

what is generally termed personal property): “There’s a history of

semantic baggage around the term ‘property’ and many communists prefer

to re-label things like personal toothbrushes ‘possessions’ instead. But

‘possession’ is always a matter of degree and 1800s era distinctions

between for example things and things that help make other [things]

(commodities versus capital) seem very silly and arbitrary, a highly

contextual framework that is rapidly dissolving with modern

technological developments.”[37]

In practice too, specifically in the Soviet Union, this personal versus

private distinction proved extremely hard to draw and enforce. For

example, Hiroshi Kimura outlines how “every collective farm [kolkhoz]

household . . . in addition to its basic income from the

collective-farm, is allowed to run a personal subsidiary enterprise, in

the form of a ‘private garden plot’” and “in order to farm the garden

plot[,] . . . the kolkhoz household needs to own such articles of

personal property as may be necessary to this purpose, including certain

of the means of production, such as agricultural implements, productive

livestock, etc.” Similarly, “[i]nhabitants of city peripheries are also

allowed to run a personal subsidiary enterprise on their private garden

plot and, consequently, to own the means of production necessary to farm

it.”[38] This proved deeply problematic to the distinction between

personal and private property, as the farm households and those on the

periphery of cities own productive property individually or familially.

A resolution of sorts can be found in the conclusion that the Soviet

definition of personal property being “social or socialist, and,

consumptive or non-exploitative” was derived…

from a “Marxist-oriented” principle, namely, the abolition of sources of

unearned income. And this criterion of ‘unearned income’ seems to be

even more important than the distinction between the means of production

and the means of consumption. In the first place, the latter distinction

is only a relative criterion for the classification of property, in the

sense that one and the same item can be both a means of production and a

means of consumption, according to the given circumstances (recall the

example of the automobile) Furthermore, if the ultimate Marxist goal is

the elimination of the “exploitation of man by man,” then the question

of whether or not a certain item is used as a source of unearned income

is more important than the question whether it is a means of production

or a means of consumption.”[39]

What begins to appear in this analysis is that possession and personal

property are shown to be extremely similar in their opposition to the

social relation of private property whereby owners are able to extract

profit from that which they do not directly occupy or contribute toward.

And a fusion of these two theories opposing private property might be

ownership based on occupancy and use with a more quantitative instead of

qualitative distinction between personal and private property. That is:

individuals would be capable of occupying and using the initially

paradoxical personal property that is productive mentioned earlier until

that production reaches a certain scale where an ‘absentee’ owner begins

extracting rent, collecting interest, and/or accumulating surplus value

from the labor of those actually occupying and using that productive

property. This is a standard trifecta of unacceptable mechanisms of

wealth acquisition identified by individualist anarchists such as

Laurence Labadie and Dyer Lum who argue, respectively, that they are the

“three main forms of usury” and “the triple heads of the monster against

which modern civilization is waging war.”[40][41] Thus, when these

parasitic relationships emerge, the property around which they are based

would, from a left-libertarian moral perspective, become forfeit to the

conceptualization of collective property rights. Roderick Long describes

this attitude from a Lockean perspective of labor-mixing homesteading

through the example of a village’s path to a lake:

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk

down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s

hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in

the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not

through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all

the individuals walking that way day after day. The cleared path is the

product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but all of them together.

If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by

setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the

collective property right that the villagers together have earned.[42]

A non-Lockean variation on this logic can be drawn out as a collective

form of occupancy and use of productive property, resulting in something

akin to the ‘formalizing’ of the practice of ‘occupying and recovering’

factories—where workers seize and place factories under workers’

democratic control—and the broadening of this strategy to all productive

property of a contextually appropriate upward scale. A real-world

example of this practice is the Zanon tile factory in the Neuquén

province of Argentina, now known as FaSinPat—short for Fábrica Sin

Patrones (Factory Without Bosses). As an interviewer from the German

communist group Wildcat accounts:

In 2000 the workers went on strike. The employer implemented a lock out

and the workers responded by occupying the factory. In October 2001, the

workers officially declared the factory to be ‘under worker control’. By

March 2002, the factory fully returned to production. In April 2003, the

courts ordered the police to forcibly take the factory out of the hands

of the workers. In response the workers developed a broad based campaign

and as the police began to move in over 3000 citizens of Neuquén formed

a picket in front of the factory. During the period of worker control,

the number of employees has increased from 300 to 470, and wages have

risen by 100 pesos a month, and the level of production has increased.

And although the interviewer explains that at the time the “the workers

of Zanon are currently demanding that the provincial and national

governments officially recognize the factory as a workers cooperative

under state ownership,” this appears to be largely a tactic of

necessity, as…

occupiers are supposed to give themselves a legal framework, to act

according to the logic of economy and to recognize private property.

Because at the end of the day they are supposed to buy the company from

the owner once they [manage] to get it running. A lot of occupiers rely

on this form of legalisation, because thereby at least they can avoid

the pressure of eviction.[43]

Imagine the scale at which and varieties whereby this could be

accomplished without the intertwined forces of state regulation, police

authority, and the regime of private property. And this process even

follows natural resolution of thought problems left behind by mutualist

thinkers regarding land tenure rules. In response to Tucker’s version of

land tenure, an anonymous writer going by Egoist asks, “...if production

is carried on in groups, as it now is, who is the legal occupier of the

land? The employer, the manager, or the ensemble of those engaged in the

co-operative work?” The answer from this perspective, as it is for

Egoist, is that “the latter” appears as “the only rational answer.”[44]

This standardization of worker-owned enterprises within a market system

would, according to Phillip O’Hara, constitute a form of social

ownership of the means of production. He writes in Vol. 2 of the

Encyclopedia of Political Economy: “In order of increasing

decentralisation (at least) three forms of socialised ownership can be

distinguished: state-owned firms, employee-owned (or socially) owned

firms, and citizen ownership of equity.”[45] And so, essentially, by

taking into account the subjective elements of the material base, it

becomes possible to glimpse a libertarian socialism with a

polycentric—and therefore deeply non-deterministic—variation on the

historical materialist opposition to private property and advocacy for

the social ownership of the means of production. And an approach such as

this is not without precedent in the Marxist canon. Marxian economist

Richard Wolff argues, through “surplus analysis,” that the key element

of capitalism or any other economic system is “not primarily how

productive resources are owned nor how resources and products are

distributed. Rather, the key definitional dimension is the organization

of production.” He therefore argues for worker-owned enterprises to

replace…

the current capitalist organization of production inside offices,

factories, stores, and other workplaces in modern societies. In short,

exploitation—the production of a surplus appropriated and distributed by

those other than its producers—would stop. Much as earlier forms of

class structure (lords exploiting serfs in feudalism and masters

exploiting slaves in slavery) have been abolished, the capitalist class

structure (employers exploiting wage laborers would have to be

abolished, as well.[46]

Marx himself, at least at certain points in his life, did speak

favorably of producer cooperatives. In “The Civil War in France,” he

says, in reference to the Paris Commune of 1871, that “[i]f co-operative

production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede

the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate

national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own

control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical

convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else

. . . would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism?”[47] And in

“Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The

Different Questions,” he acknowledges “the co-operative movement as one

of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class

antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present

pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to

capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the

association of free and equal producers.”[48]

But, admittedly, the question then arises, what is to ensure such social

standards regarding property? In light of this question, Carson argues

that “[a]ny decentralized, post-state society, following the collapse of

central power, is likely to be panarchy characterized by a wide variety

of local property systems.”[49] And, in such a situation, Bill Orton

explains how...

for [a] dispute [between syndicalist workers and a dispossessed

capitalist], the property theories of the disputants are different, so

"who is the aggressor" is at issue. By the [occupancy and use] theory,

the returning capitalist is the aggressor; by the sticky theory the

syndicalist workers are the aggressors. There can be no internal

theoretical resolution.

To avoid violence, some kind of moderation or arbitration is almost

certainly necessary. The disputants could agree upon a wise arbiter, one

without bias for or against either type of property system, to settle

the issue. E.g. Wolf De Voon, who has made it clear that he thinks

property amounts more or less to what the neighbors will allow. He would

probably judge based on local custom and expectations of the parties

involved. E.g. If the factory were located in an area where [private]

property dominates, where the capitalist had reasonable expectation of

sticky ownership, where the local people expect the same, and the

syndicalist workers came in from a 'foreign' culture expecting to pull a

fast one, then he'd probably judge in favor of the capitalist. OTOH If

the factory were located in an area where [occupancy and use] dominates,

and virtually all the locals expect and act in accordance with

[occupancy and use], and the capitalist, representing the 'foreign'

culture, was trying to pull a [private] property coup, then he would

probably rule in favor of the syndicalist workers.[50]

However, there are extenuating circumstances in a non-statist market

system that will encourage cooperatives and other non-capitalist

enterprises. Anna Morgenstern makes the points that “due to the rising

cost of protecting property [without state intervention via policing and

military], there comes a threshold level, where accumulating more

capital becomes economically inefficient, simply in terms of guarding

the property” and “without a state-protected banking/financial system,

accumulating endless high profits is well nigh impossible.” And

“[w]ithout concentration of capital, wage slavery is impossible.”[51]

According to Carson, Graeber holds a similar “skepticism that anything

like anarcho-capitalism could exist for very long on a significant

scale, with a large number of people willingly working as wage laborers

for a minority, so long as access to the means of production is

relatively easy and there are no cops to exclude people from vacant

land. After all, Robinson Crusoe’s ‘master’ relationship over Friday

depended on him having already ‘appropriated’ the entire island and

having a gun.”[52] And, as Gary Elkin explains, without the

aforementioned monopolistic banking/financial system...

so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers'

control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit

were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that

[Tucker] claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get

workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies

collectively. This would eliminate the top-down structure of the firm

and the ability of owners to pay themselves unfairly large salaries.[53]

And of course, a page can be taken from Gramsci in setting out on a

widespread counter-cultural and counter-institutional project to build

worker solidarity and ingrain the primacy of workers over capitalists in

contests of ownership; a movement helped along by the likelihood Carson

writes of where, “[i]n an economy of distributive property ownership[,]

. . . all consumption, present or future, would be beyond question the

result of labor.”[54]

Contextuality Versus Acontextuality in Historical Materialism

Dialectics can also be used to scrutinize, to a briefer extent, another

issue in the Marxist formulation of historical materialism:

acontextuality. One form this problem takes is “utopianism” which, in

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, Sciabarra identifies—through the work of

Friedrich Hayek—as entailing “proposals for a new society [that] are

constructed in an abstract manner, external to the sociohistorical

process. In attempting to bridge the gap between theory and practice, it

demands that all human actors adhere to a non-contextual, ahistorical

model.”[55] Marx and Engels are highly critical of utopianism among

socialists—such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles

Fourier—who, according to Engels, sought “to discover a new and more

perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from

without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of

model experiments.”[56] This is a wholeheartedly undialectical project

as it attempts firstly to remove thinkers themselves from their context

like omniscient deities in order to reshape society and secondly because

it divorces all potential social change from any genuinely historical

process. Thus, historical materialism is so essential to Marxism because

it dialectically critiques the idea that human beings can be separated

from their historical circumstances and demonstrates the historical

trends and mechanisms from which a new society can emerge. For Marx,

[c]ommunism is . . . not a state of affairs which is to be established,

an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call

communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in

existence.[57]

However, he himself falls into an undialectical utopian trap in his

conception of how historical materialism can be consciously utilized in

the formulation of a new society.

Sciabarra acknowledges that “Marx’s vision does not pose as a

constructivist design” and that he “views communism as a spontaneous,

emergent product of historical development, immanent to the capitalist

system itself.”[58] But, in spite of this, “Marx argues that once people

have reached the highest stage of communism, the social process is

neither spontaneous nor the product of unintended consequences. It is

consciously directed by a highly efficacious collective humanity.”[59]

Sciabarra believes that this itself is a utopian failure within Marx’s

own work as it is an attempt to step outside of one’s own context in

order to influence society. He contrasts this with what he sees as

Friedrich Hayek’s “more general, dialectical approach,” which

“recognizes the organic unity of an evolving, spontaneous order” but

“objects to the illusory notion that people can rise above their society

to judge and control it.”[60] For Hayek, because individuals are bound

to the limited knowledge of their specific contexts, they are unable to

grasp the totality of the overarching order. This therefore necessitates

competition within a market system to generate price information that is

then dispersed and “utilised by many different individuals unknown to

one another, in a way that allows the different knowledge of millions to

form an exosomatic or material pattern. Every individual becomes a link

in many chains of transmission through which he receives signals

enabling him to adapt his plans to circumstances he does not know.”[61]

Markets and consequently prices are generally argued from a Marxist

point of view as being fundamentally alienating, conducive toward

monopoly, and drawn toward crisis. To attempt to respond to all of the

complex critiques of markets would go far beyond the scope of this

piece. There are, however, perspectives on markets using or responding

to a Marxist lens to conceptualize a situation that presents a very

different breed of market than what Marxists tend to critique. The

Soviet economists Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky

differentiate between markets and capitalism as such:

The mere existence of a commodity economy does not alone suffice to

constitute capitalism. A commodity economy can exist although there are

no capitalists; for instance, the economy in which the only producers

are independent artisans. They produce for the market, they sell their

products; thus these products are undoubtedly commodities, and the whole

production is commodity production. Nevertheless, this is not capitalist

production; it is nothing more than simple commodity production. In

order that a simple commodity economy can be transformed into capitalist

production, it is necessary, on the one hand, that the means of

production (tools, machinery, buildings, land, etc.) should become the

private property of a comparatively limited class of wealthy

capitalists; and, on the other, that there should ensue the ruin of most

of the independent artisans and peasants and their conversion into wage

workers.[62]

Not only is a situation such as this highly unlikely in a stateless

system for all the reasons in the above section, but, in response to

Marxist critiques of “a form of socialism centered on cooperatives and

non-capitalist markets,” Carson writes that…

in the flexible production model, is that there’s no reason to have any

permanent losers. First of all, the overhead costs are so low that it’s

possible to ride out a slow period indefinitely. Second, in low-overhead

flexible production, in which the basic machinery for production is

widely affordable and can be easily reallocated to new products, there’s

really no such thing as a “business” to go out of. The lower the

capitalization required for entering the market, and the lower the

overhead to be borne in periods of slow business, the more the labor

market takes on a networked, project-oriented character—like, e.g., peer

production of software. In free software, and in any other industry

where the average producer owns a full set of tools and production

centers mainly on self-managed projects, the situation is likely to be

characterized not so much by the entrance and exit of discrete “firms”

as by a constantly shifting balance of projects, merging and forking,

and with free agents constantly shifting from one to another.[63]

More must be said about the establishment of such a type of economic

situation, but, having loosely established the basis of non-capitalist

markets, the topic can now change to empirical evidence of the

undialectical utopianism within Marxism. Sciabarra grants that “Marx

would have probably dismissed contemporary Communism as historically

premature” and goes on to use Hayek’s dialectical insights to critique

the theoretical plans for non-premature communism.[64] However, it is

important to—and Sciabarra does—point out how this critical insight

applies to real-world attempts at implementing Marx’s ideas—in

particular the Soviet Union as the grandest failure of these. Consider

that, in Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin claims

that “an instance in which the relations of production completely

correspond to the character of the productive forces is the socialist

national economy of the U.S.S.R., where the social ownership of the

means of production fully corresponds to the social character of the

process of production, and where, because of this, economic crises and

the destruction of productive forces are unknown.”[65] Stalin at least

rhetorically utilizes historical materialism—although it could perhaps

be argued this is disingenuous propaganda—to argue that the Soviet Union

had a greater conscious control over the forces that previously shaped

humans from without. But the historical falsehood of this claim must be

obvious, and Sciabarra points out that, due to a “static and arbitrary

price policy,” Soviet planners could not properly coordinate the economy

and instead “generated grotesque misallocations, inefficiencies, and

bureaucratization.” The very survival of the Soviet economy in this view

rested largely upon “a de facto market process of bribery, corruption,

under-the-counter-sales, hoarding, and black-market

entrepreneurship.”[66]

Another critique of acontextual Soviet planning can be found in James C.

Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Scott does not formulate his critique as

explicitly dialectical or necessarily pro-market—he is actually rather

skeptical of Hayek’s notion of the modern market as genuinely

spontaneous—but instead focuses on an ideological tendency he calls

“high modernism.”[67] He defines this as “a strong, one might even say

muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and

technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing

satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human

nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order

commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”[68] For

Scott, the Soviet Union’s approach to rural agriculture is a profound

case of its application. In the early 1930s—arguably as part of the

Soviet style of primitive accumulation—Stalin worked to forcibly

collectivize Russian agriculture into sovkhoz (state farms) and kolkhoz

in order to maximize the production of grain and foodstuffs in general

for the industrializing workforce in urban centers. But Scott points out

that the Soviet officials “were operating in relative ignorance of the

ecological, social, and economic arrangements that underwrote the rural

economy.” This lack of contextual knowledge led to the immense failure

of the entire project. The conscious alteration of the productive forces

and relations of production did not totally recreate social

organization—specifically the abolition of “cultural difference between

the country and the city”—nor did it create fundamentally “new men and

women.” Instead, “[f]or the next half-century, the yields per hectare of

many crops were stagnant or actually inferior to the levels recorded in

the 1920s or the levels reached before the Revolution.” Thus, the

practical usage of the historical materialist analysis led to

catastrophe because it ignored the existing social, natural, and

economic context. In fact, Scott argues that the only great victory of

the Soviet agricultural project “was to take a social and economic

terrain singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to

create institutional forms and production units better adapted to

monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above.”[69]

Whether it is the utopian problems inherent in Marx’s theories or the

command economy and high modernist tendencies of the Soviet Union, what

these examples demonstrate is that it might be necessary to abandon the

notion that a conscious understanding of reality through historical

materialism can lead to a totalizing control over history and society,

and that one should emphasize—in a dialectical fashion—the important

limitations of context. A good place to start might be in Scott’s

contrasting between Vladimir Lenin’s authoritarian, high modernist

socialism—the same project that eventually led to the failure of Russian

agriculture—and Rosa Luxembourg’s more bottom-up and open-ended

socialism, particularly as they envision the practice of revolution.[70]

According to Scott, “Lenin proceeded as if the road to socialism was

already mapped out in detail and the task of the party [was] to use the

iron discipline of the party apparatus to make sure that the

revolutionary movement kept to that road.” This is perhaps an

unsurprising interpretation considering the manner in which dialectical

and historical materialism are often propagated as exact sciences. An

alternative vision is presented by Luxembourg, who recognizes the

importance of spontaneity, creativity, improvisation, and the direct

influence of the working class. As Scott accounts, for her, “[t]he

openness that characterized a socialist future was not a shortcoming but

rather a sign of its superiority, as a dialectical process, over the

cut-and-dried formulas of utopian socialism” and therefore such a future

could not be administered wholly from above by a vanguard or small group

of intellectuals.[71] A distilled version of this Luxembourgian insight,

when applied specifically to historical materialism, might take the form

of a particular application of Alfred Korzybski’s famous dictum, from

his book Science and Sanity, that “[a] map is not the territory it

represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the

territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”[72] In practice, this

means realizing that the insights of historical materialism are

incredibly relevant to an understanding of the progress of history and

the shape of society and, even more pertinently, how one might influence

those things, but that it is at its core a model and not the actual

reality of the situation and should never be mistaken as such.

This would seem to be the attitude taken by Graeber regarding the

concept of revolution—the sort of events that Marx would attribute to

the productive forces surpassing the relations of production thereby

necessitating the end of a particular social system. For Graeber, the

concept of revolution, as it is usually formulated, assumes that all

radical change must take on the same form as scientific revolutions,

like the shift from a Newtonian universe to an Einsteinian one, where

there is a “clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social

reality after which everything works differently, and previous

categories no longer apply.” But through this view “[h]uman history thus

becomes a series of revolutions: the Neolithic revolution, the

Industrial revolution, the Information revolution, etc., and the

political dream becomes to somehow take control of the process; to get

to the point where we can cause a rupture of this sort, a momentous

breakthrough that will not just happen but result directly from some

kind of collective will.”[73] From the assessment given earlier in this

piece, this would seem to apply quite well to Marx’s vision of

historical materialism as applied to European history and as it pertains

to the fate of the current era.[74] The problem with this vision though,

according to Graeber, is that these totalities are fundamentally

products of the human mind and the actual reality of things is

substantially messier and more complicated. This is not an argument that

one should abandon these imaginary totalities “even assuming this were

possible, which it probably isn’t, since they are probably a necessary

tool of human thought. It is an appeal to always bear in mind that they

are just that: tools of thought.”[75] If one applies Graeber’s insights

to historical materialism—much like when one does so with

Luxembourg’s—perhaps the conclusion is that, once again, it is

incredibly helpful for understanding social change, but should not be

mistaken for the actual reality of the world and do not therefore lead

to totalizing control, understanding, or a break in terms of history and

society.

Similar observations to these are not lost on Marxist thinkers, as is

demonstrated by the earlier assessment of Luxembourg. In On Practice,

Mao Zedong outlines a dialectical materialist concept of knowledge

gathering that emphasizes the primacy of reality over theoretical

formulations.[76] Although this expresses an extremely dialectical

re-emphasis on context and reality, the history of Mao’s revolution in

China must make obvious that this is not the same point that Graeber is

making. Instead, he points towards not thinking of a single revolution

but more generally of revolutionary action—any collective effort that

rejects power or domination.[77] This approach aligns with Graeber’s

criticism of the concise Marxist outline of historical progression as

elucidated in Debt in which he critiques what he refers to as “mythic

communism” or “epic communism” which holds that…

[o]nce upon a time, humans held all things in common—[whether] in the

Garden of Eden, during the Golden Age of Saturn, or in Paleolithic

hunter-gatherer bands. Then came the Fall, as a result of which we are

now cursed with divisions of power and private property. The dream was

that someday, with the advance of technology and general prosperity,

with social revolution or the guidance of the Party, we would finally be

in a position to put things back, to restore common ownership and common

management of collective resources.

And while his argument that this means thinking of communism as not

having “anything to do with ownership of the means of production” is

obviously not the conclusion this piece is attempting to reach, a

left-libertarian perspective would agree that this vision “has inspired

millions; but it has also done enormous damage to humanity” and that it

should therefore be abandoned.[78]

This non-epochal vision of history can lead to looking at economic

aspects of large-scale initiatives like that of the Autonomous

Administration of North and East Syria (better known as Rojava) which,

among many other major social and economic accomplishments, has rejected

the Syrian regime’s policies. The regime, Maksim Lebsky writes,

“deliberately took steps to keep the local industry from developing”

and, according to A Small Key Can Open a Large Door, the now autonomous

region is working to establish a “People’s Economy” based on the three

major concepts of “commons, private property based on use, and

worker-administered businesses.”[79][80] These efforts are also deeply

contextual as Rojava’s system emerged from pre-autonomy councils,

neighborhood assemblies, and meetings, in addition to numerous

pre-existing cultural practices.[81] And the Rojavan conceptualization

of “social economy,” as described by Ahmed Yousef, “is not a centrally

planned economy” and “the market is a main part of social economy, but

the use-value must be greater than the exchange-value, and there is no

stock market.”[82]

But this also means focusing on smaller-scale (at least currently)

economic restructurings like the incredible work of Cooperation Jackson,

which focuses on the long-term goal of developing a cooperative network

centered in Jackson, Mississippi. Their “basic theory of change is

centered on the position that organizing and empowering the structurally

under and unemployed sectors of the working class, particularly from

Black and Latino communities, to build worker organized and owned

cooperatives will be a catalyst for the democratization of our economy

and society overall.”[83] Of particular interest from a historical

materialist perspective is their Community Production Initiative which

seeks “to turn Jackson into an innovative hub of sustainable

manufacturing and fabrication” through “community production.” They

define this as “industrial manufacturing and fabrication based on a

combination of 3rd and 4th generation industrial technology, namely the

combination of digital technology and automated production with 3-D

printing and quantum computing, that is collectively owned and

democratically operated by members of geographically and/or

intentionally defined communities.”[84] Like Rojava, Cooperation

Jackson’s efforts are acutely contextual, as they work to specially

address the unique socio-economic issues of communities in Mississippi

and draw from historical efforts in that region like the Freedom Farm

Cooperative and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance

Fund.[85][86] And obviously all of this is contained within the larger

(but generally unfree and overtly capitalist) market economy of the

United States. Although, as Alex Aragona argues, “[u]ltimately, we live

within systems of state-capitalism with small pockets of free market

activity, rather than the reverse.”[87]

Both Rojava and Cooperation Jackson, being socialistic projects within

larger structures of state structures, constitute dual power projects—a

concept originating in Marxist-Leninism. As Lenin describes the

situation in pre- to mid-revolutionary Russia, “Alongside the

Provisional Government, the government of bourgeoisie, another

government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a

government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers’

and Soldiers’ Deputies.” But this “is an entirely different kind of

power from the one that generally exists in the parliamentary

bourgeois-democratic republics . . .

The fundamental characteristics of this [government] are: (1) the source

of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament,

but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local

areas—direct “seizure”, to use a current expression; (2) the replacement

of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the

people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole

people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed

workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves; (3)

officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the

direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special

control.[88]

This process of establishing a bottom-up and popular alternatives to the

existing state has in turn been adopted by anarchists and other

libertarian socialists. As the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the

Democratic Socialists of America describe, “Dual power is a strategy

that builds liberated spaces and creates institutions grounded in direct

democracy. Together these spaces and institutions expand into the ever

widening formation of a new world ‘in the shell of the old.”

Specifically, this…

is comprised of two component parts: (1.) building counter-institutions

that serve as alternatives to the institutions currently governing

production, investment, and social life under capitalism, and (2.)

organizing through and confederating these institutions to build up a

base of grassroots counter-power which can eventually challenge the

existing power of capitalists and the State head-on. In the short term,

such a strategy helps win victories that improve working people’s

standard of living, helps us meet our needs that are currently left

unaddressed under capitalism, and gives us more of a say over our

day-to-day lives. But more excitingly, in the long run these methods

provide models for new ways of organizing our society based on

libertarian socialist principles. They create a path toward a

revolutionary transition from a capitalist mode of production.[89]

This—as with Rojavan economy and Cooperation Jackson—often takes the

form of attempting, as Wesley Morgan describes, “to create ‘dual power’

through the creation of cooperatives.” Morgan disapprovingly terms this

“market syndicalism” and critiques it for simply creating “units in a

market economy” and still relying “upon access to the market.”[90]

However, this opinion does not take into account the unification of this

praxis within broader pushes for anti-statist autonomy such as

large-scale community self-defense that, like in Rojava, are creating

space for non-capitalist markets.[91] Such a method would not be

dissimilar to the call by Samuel Edward Konkin III for “agorist

protection and arbitration agencies” and “protection company syndicates”

to defend market growing outside of the state capitalist economy and

contain “the State by defending those who have signed up for

protection-insurance.”[92]

And the role of those examining these efforts from outside their

specific context should not be that of an authoritarian planner

dictating how they should work. Instead, an alternative can be found in

Graeber’s formulation of an anarchist social theory which rejects

vanguardism in favor of an approach that more resembles ethnography—the

practice defined by The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology as such:

Anthropology is an academic discipline that constructs its intellectual

imaginings upon empirical-based knowledge about human worlds.

Ethnography is the practice developed in order to bring about that

knowledge according to certain methodological principles, the most

important of which is participant-observation ethnographic

fieldwork.[93][94]

He therefore proposes that “radical intellectuals” should “look at those

who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be

the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer

those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions,

possibilities—as gifts.”[95][96] In this manner, the insights of

historical materialism in shaping society can be shared, but always with

an overt premise of context-keeping—a respect for the evolution of local

practices, market or market-like spontaneity, and overall unintended

consequences. This all may seem like an extremely watered-down version

of historical materialism which reduces the more absolutist implications

of Marx’s original formulation. But this shift should be appealing to

left-libertarians because a respect for local practices and a denial of

the possibility of totalizing control would seem to preclude the ability

for the method to be used in an authoritarian manner as it was in the

Soviet Union.

Conclusion and Additional Thoughts

As must be obvious, this piece is only a cursory attempt at a

left-libertarian formulation of historical materialism, and the

critiques outlined are also certainly not exhaustive. From opposite

sides of the anti-statist spectrum, Graeber makes the point that the

very concept of modes of production is under-formulated, and Rothbard,

in a similar claim, holds that both the ideas of productive forces and

relations of production—the elements that make up the mode of

production—are overly vague.[97] Bas Umali, an anarchist activist in

Manila, argues that the Marxist dialectical analysis of history is

fundamentally hierarchical, Eurocentric, and inapplicable to the types

of stateless communities of the Indigenous archipelago (today called the

Philippines).[98] These and many more insights must be taken into

account in formulating any, but in particular a left-libertarian,

reinterpretation of historical materialism. But the main point to keep

in mind is the rejection of (at least the hindering excesses of)

naturalism, utopianism, and high modernism, in favor of a historical

materialism that is truly dialectical in its balancing of objective and

subjective factors (particularly revolving around property), its

non-deterministic view of both individuals and societies as a whole, and

its commitment to recognizing the crucial limitations of context.

Finally, this piece would seem incomplete without some mention of two

well-known figures in the history of anarchism and libertarian

socialism: Mikhail Bakunin and Murray Bookchin—the latter of which is a

significant influence on many of the efforts in Rojava, largely through

Abdullah Öcalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (or

PKK).[99] Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx, is also a firm materialist,

writing in God and the State, “Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the

ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the

material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity,

intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its

economic history.”[100]But, again much like Marx, he is not a

reductionist by any means and is rather an eminently dialectical

thinker. Brian Morris attests, in Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom,

that despite his “stress on social and natural determinism” he places

“an important emphasis on the individual as a creative agent, both

determining as well as being determined by natural and social

conditions.” Additionally, “[i]n Hegelian fashion, Bakunin sees human

history as a world process, as the progressive move towards greater

freedom, first with the development of life, then, with human culture

and consciousness, humans establish a degree of autonomy from the world

of nature, finally, with the potential establishment of a truly human

society, the freedom of the individual. Human freedom for Bakunin can

only be in nature and society, not something independent from the

world.”[101] Interestingly as well to this left-libertarian

reinterpretation is that Bakunin served as an inspiration to Tucker—the

grandfather of left-libertarianism.[102]

Bookchin—a more contemporary dialectician—is, in his piece Listen,

Marxist!, contextually critical of the “historically limited, indeed

paralyzing, shackles” of Marx’s theories, but acknowledges the

importance of many of his ideas like “[t]he Marxian dialectic,” “the

many seminal insights provided by historical materialism,” and “above

all the notion that freedom has material preconditions.” But in his

assessment, “Marx was occupied above all with the preconditions of

freedom (technological development, national unification, material

abundance) rather than with the conditions of freedom (decentralization,

the formation of communities, the human scale, direct democracy).”[103]

He also articulates an ecological and anti-hierarchical philosophy of

“dialectical naturalism,” which seeks to overcome both “Hegel’s

empyrean, basically antinaturalistic dialectical idealism and the

wooden, often scientistic dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxists”

and “does not terminate in a Hegelian Absolute at the end of a cosmic

developmental path, but rather advances the vision of an ever-increasing

wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and

subjectivity.”[104] And just as Bakunin inspired Tucker, so too does

Bookchin inspire Carson—one of the fountainheads of contemporary

left-libertarianism.[105] With all this in mind, perhaps Bakunin and

Bookchin can serve as counterposing figures to Marx in the elaboration

on and expansion of a left-libertarian version of historical

materialism.

[1] In Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,

2005), Kojin Karatani explains that apparently the Japanese philosopher

Wataru Hiromatsu, in his edited translation of The German Ideology,

“conducted an elaborate text critique . . . and showed that the text on

Feuerbach was mostly written by Engels; Marx’s participation was limited

to some crucial revisions here and there; and furthermore, comparing the

earlier writings of both, he proved that Engels had conceptualized

historical materialism first” (p. 323, 139). I cannot find an English

version of this nor can I read Japanese, so I cannot attest to this

claim, but it seems relevant to mention primarily for the possibility of

a more accurate identification of authorship and the origins of

historical materialism, but also because it does help lead Karatani to

the assertion that “[i]n order to take the capitalist economy into

account, one has to, once and for all, discard historical materialism’s

framework of infra/superstructures” (p. 140). However, that claim will

not be addressed in this piece.

[2] “Historical materialism,” Merriam-Webster, accessed April 17, 2020,

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/historical%20materialism.

[3] David McNally, “E P Thompson: class struggle and historical

materialism,” International Socialism, no. 61 (Winter 1993), accessed

April 17, 2020,

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj61/mcnally.htm.

[4] David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and

the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing,

2015), 30, accessed May 13, 2020,

https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf.

[5] Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1846, in The Marx-Engels Reader, by

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York,

NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 149.

[6] Marx, The German, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 156.

[7] Ibid., 150.

[8] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

trans. N.L. Stone (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 11,

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.167007/mode/2up.

[9] Marx, The German, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 151.

[10] Ibid., 153.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, 1867, in The Marx-Engels Reader,

432. Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, contests the

interpretation of Capital as being centrally a study of historical and

social reality and posits that it is rather a demonstration “that even

if we do start from the economists’ utopian vision, so long as we also

allow some people to control productive capital and . . . leave others

with nothing to sell but their brains and bodies, the result will be in

many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will

eventually destroy itself.” He holds that “Marx was well aware that

there were far more bootblacks, prostitutes, butlers, soldiers,

peddlers, chimneysweeps, flower girls, street musicians, convicts,

nannies, and cab drivers in the London of his day than there were

factory workers. He was never suggesting that that’s what the world was

actually like” (p. 354). He argues that the image of “workers who

dutifully punch the clock at 8:00 a.m. and receive regular remuneration

every Friday on the basis of a temporary contract that either party is

free to break off at any time” was actually, as said before, a “utopian

vision” that “was only gradually put into effect even in England and

North America, and has never, at any point, been the main way of

organizing production for the market, ever, anywhere” (p. 353). On top

of this, he asserts that “all elements of financial apparatus that we’ve

come to associate with capitalism—central banks, bond markets, short

selling, brokerage houses, speculative bubbles, [securitization],

annuities—came into being not only before the science of economics . . .

but also before the rise of factories, and wage labor itself.” If

accurate, this all certainly complicates the historical materialist

analysis because, as Graeber writes, “We like to think of the factories

and workshops as the ‘real economy,’ and the rest as superstructure,

constructed on top of it. But if this were really so, then how can it be

that the superstructure came first? Can the dreams of the system create

its body?” (p. 345).

[12] Marx, Capital, Volume, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 434.

[13] Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (BookSurge

Publishing, 2007), 83, 86, accessed November 27, 2021,

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-studies-in-mutualist-political-economy.pdf.

[14] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,

1848, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 484.

[15] Ibid., 477-78.

[16] Marx, A Contribution, 11-12.

[17] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1876, in The

Marx-Engels Reader, 715-16.

[18] For a more extended outline of dialectical materialism see the

Marxist Student Federation’s “An Introduction to Dialectical

Materialism”.

[19] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Dialectics and Liberty,” Foundation for

Economic Education, last modified September 1, 2005, accessed April 17,

2020, https://fee.org/articles/dialectics-and-liberty/. For an extensive

definition and history of dialectics see “Part One: Dialectics: History

and Meaning” in Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical

Libertarianism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press,

2000). For a defense of this definition of dialectics see Roger E.

Bissell’s response to critiques of Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian

Radical in Volume 17, Number 2 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies from

The Pennsylvania State University Press.

[20] “Noam Chomsky – Bakunin’s Predictions,” video, 6:14, YouTube,

posted by Chomsky’s Philosophy, November 18, 2017, accessed April 17,

2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gS6g41m_NU.

[21] Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics, 2006 ed., vol. 2, An

Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Edward Elgar

Publishing, 1995), 373, accessed April 17, 2020,

https://mises.org/library/austrian-perspective-history-economic-thought.

[22] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 1845, in The Marx-Engels Reader,

143-44.

[23] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, trans. Emile Burns, ed. S.

Ryazanskaya (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1963), 288, accessed

April 17, 2020, http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/TSV-Part%201.pdf.

[24] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin

Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, UK: The Electronic Book

Company, 1999), 690-91, accessed April 17, 2020,

http://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf.

[25] Ibid., 495-96.

[26] Mario Cutajar, “The Crisis of Dialectical Materialism and

Libertarian Socialism,” Red Menace 2, no. 1 (Summer 1977), accessed

April 17, 2020,

https://libcom.org/library/crisis-dialectical-materialism-libertarian-socialism.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Marianne Sawicki, “Edmund Husserl (1859—1938),” Internet

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 18, 2020,

https://www.iep.utm.edu/husserl/.

[29] Cutajar, “The Crisis.”

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid. It should be noted that, elsewhere in the same issue of Red

Menace that Cutajar’s piece appears in, Ulli Diemer and Tom McLaughlin

do further outline the concept of libertarian socialism in their

respective pieces "What is Libertarian Socialism?" and "Libertarian

Socialism."

[32] Clarence Lee Swartz and The Mutualist Associates, “What Is

Mutualism?,” (1927), The Anarchist Library, last modified January 24,

2019, accessed March 25, 2021,

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/clarence-lee-swartz-in-collaboration-with-the-mutualist-associates-what-is-mutualism.

For more information and thought on the principle of occupancy and use

see Center for a Stateless Society’s November 2015 Mutual Exchange

Symposium Discourse on Occupancy and Use: Potential Applications and

Possible Shortcomings.

[33] George Crowder, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of

Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (Oxford, UK: Oxford University

Press, 1992), 85-86.

[34] Shawn P. Wilbur, “Limiting Conditions and Local Desires,” Center

for a Stateless Society, last modified November 10, 2015,

https://c4ss.org/content/41502.

[35] Carl Gustav Rosberg, African Socialism, ed. William H. Friedland

(Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 25, accessed March

26, 2021, https://archive.org/details/africansocialism00frie.

[36] Caspar Oldenburg, “On Socialist Distinctions Between Private and

Personal Property,” Mises Christ!, last modified April 18, 2014,

accessed March 26, 2021,

https://miseschrist.com/2014/04/18/socialist-distinctions-private-personal-property/.

[37] William Gillis, “The Organic Emergence of Property From

Reputation,” Center for a Stateless Society, last modified November 29,

2015, accessed March 26, 2021, https://c4ss.org/content/41653.

[38] Hiroshi Kimura, “Personal Property in the Soviet Union, with

Particular Emphasis on the Khrushchev Era : An Ideological, Political

and Economic Dilemma (II),” スラヴ研究 (Slavic Studies) 14 (1970): 70,

accessed March 26, 2021,

https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5004/1/KJ00000112923.pdf.

[39] Ibid. 81.

[40] Laurance Labadie, “Anarchism Applied to Economics,” The Anarchist

Library, last modified September 22, 2019, accessed November 27, 2021,

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/laurence-labadie-anarchism-applied-to-economics.

[41] Kevin Carson, “May Day Thoughts: Individualist Anarchism and the

Labor Movement,” Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, last

modified April 29, 2005, accessed November 27, 2021,

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/may-day-thoughts-individualist.html.

I cannot find the original source of this quote.

[42] Roderick T. Long, “In Defense of Public Space,” (1996), Panarchy,

accessed March 26, 2021,

https://www.panarchy.org/rodericklong/publicspace.html. In his piece

“Are We All Mutualists?,” Kevin Carson points out that “in practice, the

fact that standards for constructive abandonment would be to a large

extent a matter of local convention, with a wide range of possible

thresholds for abandonment from the most liberal to the most stringent,

means that Lockeanism and occupancy-and-use really differ only in degree

rather than in kind. Or to put it another way, Lockeanism is

occupancy-and-use, but with somewhat more lenient occupancy requirements

for maintaining ownership than most explicit occupancy-and-use advocates

call for.” Thus, Lockean homesteading based on labor-mixing and

mutualist possession based on occupancy and use are different almost

entirely in the “stickiness” of their theories of land-tenure. However,

a note in favor of the primary logic of the latter theory is Proudhon’s

comment from What is Property?: An Inquiry into the Principle of Right

and of Government that “[n]early all the modern writers on

jurisprudence, taking their cue from the economists, have abandoned the

theory of first occupancy as a too dangerous one, and have adopted that

which regards property as born of labor. In this they are deluded; they

reason in a circle. To labor it is necessary to occupy, says M. Cousin”

(p. 65).

[43] Steven, “Zanon factory occupation – interview with workers,”

Libcom, last modified November 10, 2006, accessed March 26, 2021,

https://libcom.org/library/zanon-factory-occupation-interview-with-workers.

It should be noted, as the folks at Libcom have, that although this

piece is “a bit old, it still contains unique insights into the

situation, hopes, difficulties and dynamics of the occupation process

and many personal interviews.”

[44] Benjamin Tucker, “The Distribution of Rent.,” Instead Of A Book, By

A Man Too Busy To Write One (1893/1897), accessed November 27, 2021,

http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/the-distribution-of-rent.

[45] Phillip O'Hara, *Encyclopedia of Political Economy( (London, UK:

Routledge, 1999), 2:71, accessed November 27, 2021,

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofpo02ohar.

[46] Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago,

IL: Haymarket Books, 2012), 90, 12.

[47] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France” (1871), 27, accessed November

27, 2021,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/civil_war_france.pdf.

(from Marxist Internet Archive). See David L. Prychitko’s Marxism and

Workers’ Self-Management (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991) for an

in-depth consideration of Marxism and cooperatives.

[48] The International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx,

“Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The

Different Questions.,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 28,

2021,

https://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1866/instructions.htm.

[49] Carson, Studies in Mutualist, 182.

[50] Bill Orton, “Re: On the Question of Private Property,”

Anti-State.Com Forum, August 30, 2003. anti-state.com Captured April 30,

2004. Reproduced in Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (p.

151-52). The original quote used the terms “usufruct” and “property”

instead of “occupancy and use” and “private property” but have been

changed for clarity.

[51] Anna Morgenstern, "Anarcho-'Capitalism' is Impossible," Center for

a Stateless Society, last modified September 19, 2010, accessed November

27, 2021, https://c4ss.org/content/4043.

[52] Kevin Carson, “Anarchism Without Adjectives,” Center for a

Stateless Society, last modified February 2, 2015, accessed November 27,

2021, https://c4ss.org/content/35425.

[53] Gary Elkin, “Benjamin Tucker — Anarchist or capitalist?,” The

Anarchist Library, accessed November 27, 2021,

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gary-elkin-benjamin-tucker-anarchist-or-capitalist.

[54] Carson, Studies in Mutualist, 74.

[55] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, SUNY Series in

the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Albany, NY: State University of

New York Press, 1995), 48.

[56] Engels, Socialism: Utopian, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 687.

[57] Marx, Capital, Volume, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 434.

[58] Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, 89, 85.

[59] Ibid., 90.

[60] Ibid., 96.

[61] Friedrich August Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism,

ed. W. W. Bartlry, III, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek 1 (London,

UK: Routledge, 1988), 84, accessed April 19, 2020,

https://mises.at/static/literatur/Buch/hayek-the-fatal-conceit.pdf. See

also: Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, 93.

[62] Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism

(London, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), 27-8, accessed December 15, 2021,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/ABC-of-Communism.pdf.

[63] Kevin Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead

Manifesto (BookSurge Publishing, 2010), 202-03, accessed December 15,

2021,

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-the-homebrew-industrial-revolution.pdf.

[64] Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, 96.

[65] Joseph V. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, transcr.

M. (1938), accessed April 19, 2020,

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm

(from Marxist Internet Archive).

[66] Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, 95.

[67] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve

the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 388. In the endnotes of Seeing

Like a State, Scott accounts that “Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown”

that “the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with ‘spontaneous

social order,’ but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the

nineteenth century” (p. 388). The general premise of the market being

originally a product of the state does not, however, overtly preclude

the goals of the anti-statist pro-market left who primarily distinguish

their ideal version of markets from capitalism by the respective absence

and presence of interference by the state. As Graeber writes in Debt,

“States require markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue

without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would

recognize today [emphasis added]” and “markets, when allowed to drift

free from their violent origins, invariably grow into something

different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness” (pp.

71, 386). These comments would seem to open up the possibility for

understandings of markets wholly divorced from their formulation in

relation to the state. The beginnings of such an idea might be found in

his descriptions of the “free-market ideology” of medieval Islamic

society in which, summarizing the views of the Persian thinker Tusi, the

market “is simply one manifestation of this more general principle of

mutual aid, of the matching of abilities (supply) and needs (demand)”

and “is itself an extension of the kind of baseline communism on which

any society must ultimately rest” (pp. 278, 280). A more modern

conception can be seen in Charles W. Johnson’s essay “Markets Freed from

Capitalism” from the anthology Markets Not Capitalism in which he argues

that “a fully freed market” should not be understood solely as a cash

nexus or even fundamentally as a sphere of exchange but rather as “the

space of maximal consensually-sustained social experimentation” (pp.

61-62). Such considerations are obviously beyond the scope of this piece

but are worth mentioning because the history of markets is essential to

understanding their context and the relationship between—and possibility

of separation of—market and state is itself an issue of dialectical

consideration, as it is treated in Johnson’s essay “Liberty, Equality,

Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism” and “Part Two: Libertarian

Crossroads: The Case of Murray Rothbard” from Sciabarra’s Total Freedom.

[68] Scott, Seeing Like, 4.

[69] Ibid., 202-03.

[70] Ibid., 204.

[71] Ibid., 175.

[72] Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to

Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 5th ed. (Brooklyn, NY:

Institute of General Semantics, 1994), 58, accessed April 22, 2020,

https://ilam3d.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/alfred-korzybksi-science-and-sanity.pdf.

[73] David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Paradigm 14

(Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 43-4.

[74] This piece foregoes discussion of the underdeveloped Marxist

concept of the ‘Asiatic mode of production.’

[75] Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist, 44.

[76] Mao Zedong, On Practice, On the Relation Between Knowledge and

Practice, Between Knowing and Doing (1937), accessed April 25, 2020,

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm.

[77] Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist, 45.

[78] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville

House Publishing, 2012), 92, accessed December 15, 2021,

https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf.

[79] Maksim Lebsky, “The Economy of Rojava,” Co-operation in

Mesopotamia, last modified March 17, 2016, accessed April 25, 2020,

https://mesopotamia.coop/the-economy-of-rojava/.

[80] Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, A Small Key Can Open A Large

Door: The Rojava Revolution (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, 2016),

25.

[81] Lebsky, “The Economy,” Co-operation in Mesopotamia.

[82] Ahmed Yousef, “The Social Economy in Rojava,” Co-operation in

Mesopotamia, last modified May 26, 2016, accessed May 14, 2020,

https://mesopotamia.coop/the-social-economy-in-rojava/. Perhaps an

anti-statist and non-capitalist stock market system could be conceived

of through a libertarian interpretation of the coupon-based market

socialism found in John E. Roemer’s A Future for Socialism (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[83] “Who We Are,” Cooperation Jackson, accessed April 25, 2020,

https://cooperationjackson.org/intro.

[84] “The Community Production Initiative,” Cooperation Jackson,

accessed May 10, 2020,

https://cooperationjackson.org/the-community-production-initiative.

[85] “Overview: Why Cooperatives? Why Jackson, Mississippi?,”

Cooperation Jackson, accessed April 28, 2020,

https://cooperationjackson.org/overview.

[86] “The Story of Cooperation Jackson,” Cooperation Jackson, accessed

April 28, 2020, https://cooperationjackson.org/story.

[87] Alex Aragona, “Imagining State-Capitalism,” Center for a Stateless

Society, last modified June 21, 2021, accessed November 29, 2021,

https://c4ss.org/content/54977.

[88] Vladimir Lenin, "The Dual Power," trans. Isaacs Bernard, 1917, in

Lenin Collected Works (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1917), 24.

accessed December 12, 2021,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm (from

Marxist Internet Archive).

[89] "Dual Power: A Strategy To Build Socialism In Our Time," DSA

Libertarian Socialist Caucus, last modified December 21, 2018, accessed

December 14, 2021,

https://dsa-lsc.org/2018/12/31/dual-power-a-strategy-to-build-socialism-in-our-time/.

[90] Wesley Morgan, "Building Dual Power: Where They Retreat, We Must

Advance," Black Rose Anarchist Federation, last modified May 10, 2018,

accessed December 14, 2021,

https://blackrosefed.org/retreat-advance-dual-power/.

[91] For more information on large-scale community self-defense in

Rojava see Nazan Üstündağ’s “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in

Rojava, or How to Unmake the State.

[92] Samuel Edward Konkin, III, New Libertarian Manifesto, 4th ed.

(Huntington Beach, CA: KoPubCo, 2006), 30, 18, accessed February 14,

2022,

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/samuel-edward-konkin-iii-new-libertarian-manifesto#toc10.

[93] Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist, 12.

[94] Signe Howell, “Ethnography,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of

Anthropology, last modified February 18, 2018, accessed March 27, 2021,

https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ethnography. It feels important

to at the very least briefly note the deeply rooted problems in

ethnography and the field of anthropology as a whole, especially

stemming from their entanglement with imperialism and colonialism. As

Joseph G. Jorgensen and Eric R. Wolf write in their 1970 piece “A

Special Supplement: Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” the issue

that “has dogged anthropologists from the inception of the discipline”

is that “European conquest and colonialism . . . provided the field for

anthropology’s operations and, especially in the nineteenth century, its

intellectual ethic of ‘scientific objectivity.’ But ‘scientific

objectivity,’. . . implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from

the people among whom he works.” But they recognize that anthropology is

still a “revolutionary discipline” as it “radically [questions] the

pretensions to superiority of Western civilization, while seeking

alternative visions of man.” They ultimately believe that it must

disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims or it will

become intellectually trivial. The future of anthropology, its

credibility, depends upon sustaining the dialectic between knowledge and

experience. Anthropologists must be willing to testify [on] behalf of

the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom we

professionally define as primitives and peasants.” But even this is

deeply problematic as such things as ‘testifying on behalf of others’

and ‘professionally’ defining anyone as ‘primitive’ still present

immense barriers in making anthropology a genuinely liberatory

discipline. Two areas to look toward with this goal in mind are

Indigenous archaeology (see Fiona Cohen’s article “The Ins and Outs of

Indigenous Archaeology”) and activist ethnography (see the California

Institute for Integral Studies’ program in Anthropology and Social

Change).

[95] Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist, 12.

[96] David Graeber, “Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why

Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery,” Critique of Anthropology 26,

no. 1 (March 2006): 62-64, accessed April 28, 2020,

http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/dcrawford/graeber_2006a.pdf.

[97] Rothbard, Classical Economics, 372, 375.

[98] Bas Umali, “Dialectical Historical Materialism: An Effective Tool

for Authoritarian Politics, Dominance and Control in the Archipelago,”

Etniko Bandido Infoshop, last modified January 22, 2018, accessed April

28, 2020,

https://etnikobandidoinfoshop.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dialectical-historical-materialism-an-effective-tool-for-authoritarian-politics-dominance-and-control-in-the-archipelago/.

[99] Joris Leverink, “Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish resistance,” ROAR,

last modified August 9, 2015, accessed May 13, 2020,

https://roarmag.org/essays/bookchin-kurdish-struggle-ocalan-rojava/.

[100] Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (New York, NY: Dover

Publications, 1970), 9, accessed April 28, 2020,

https://libcom.org/files/Bakunin%20-%20God%20and%20the%20State.pdf.

[101] Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (Montréal,

Quebec: Black Rose Books, 1993), 80-82.

[102] Shawn P. Wilbur, ed., "Benjamin R. Tucker on Bakunin (1881)," The

Libertarian Labyrinth, last modified April 11, 2015, accessed February

16, 2022,

https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/benjamin-r-tucker-on-bakunin-1881/.

Tucker also helped translate Bakunin’s God and the State into English.

[103] Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist!, transcr. Jonas Holmgren

(Anarchos, 1969), accessed May 13, 2020,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist.htm (from

Marxist Internet Archive).

[104] Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on

Dialectical Naturalism, 2nd ed. (Montréal, Quebec: Black Rose Books,

1996), 15, 20, accessed May 13, 2020,

https://libcom.org/files/ThePhilosophyofSocialEcology.pdf. A critical

examination of Bookchin’s thought in relation to markets—a thoroughly

dialectical matter as it has been presented in this piece—can be found

in Prychitkos’s “Expanding the Anarchist Range: a critical reappraisal

of Rothbard’s contribution to the contemporary theory of anarchism.”

[105] Kevin Carson, "Libertarian Municipalism: Networked Cities as

Resilient Platforms for Post-Capitalist Transition," Center for a

Stateless Society, last modified January 20, 2018, accessed February 16,

2022, https://c4ss.org/content/50407.