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Title: Principles of Libertarian Economics Author: Abraham Guillen Date: 1993 Language: en Topics: libertarianism, economics, Libertarian Labor Review Source: Retrieved on 27th January 2021 from https://syndicalist.us/2020/07/02/principles-of-libertarian-economics-part-i/][syndicalist.us]], [[https://syndicalist.us/2013/10/23/principles-of-libertarian-economics-pt-2/][syndicalist.us]] and [[https://syndicalist.us/2016/11/03/principles-of-libertarian-economics-part-3/ Notes: From Libertarian Labor Review #14, 15 and 16. Translated by Jeff Stein.
As part of our continuing efforts to present anarchist economic theory,
we offer this translation from Abraham Guillenâs book, Economia
Libertaria. The author of over fifty books and essays, Guillen is
probably best known to English readers for his book, Philosophy of the
Urban Guerilla (New York, 1973). A veteran of the Spanish Revolution,
member of the CNT and FAI, Guillen spent most of his life in exile in
South America. He has worked as a journalist and economist in Argentina,
Uruguay and Peru. Presently he lives in Madrid, where he teaches at the
International Institute for Self-Management and Communal Action, which
is part of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.
For U.S. readers some of Guillenâs terms may be confusing. His use of
the term âlibertarianâ should not be confused with the right-wing
laissez faire ideas of the so-called âLibertarian Party.â Although he
does refer to âmarketsâ as part of a revolutionary society, it is clear
from the context that he is speaking of a system of federalist or
collectivist exchange of products at their labor value â not of
capitalist markets.
We do not necessarily agree with everything Guillen has to say,
particularly his assessment of anti-Soviet marxism. We think it is
possible to make an economic critique of marxism without giving in to
the temptation of ascribing its failures to original sin or the fall
from grace. Despite this and other disagreements, we think this a useful
contribution to anarcho-syndicalist economics.
This is the first installment of Guillenâs article. The second part will
run next issue.
The principles of libertarian economy were put into practice â more by
intuition than by design, without grand theories â by the libertarian
collectives in Spain during the revolution of 1936â39. Here the
âpraxis,â more than any âa prioriâ theory, demonstrated that an economy
inspired by federalist principles and self-managed, with a self-managed
market, could work well and avoid the central-planning which always
leads to the totalitarian, bureaucratic State, owner of each and
everything.
In this article, we are not going to introduce all the self-regulating
objective economic laws, although the most important of these, the law
of labor value, self-regulates the exchange of goods and services at
their just value in order to fulfill the others: the law of economic
equity; the law of cooperation, between the distinct integrated
federations of the libertarian economy; the law of exchange equivalence.
In a market liberated from the capitalists and the opprobrious tutelage
of the State, they will self-regulate, almost cybernetically, the
economic processes of production, exchange, distribution and
consumption. I study these laws and social-economic categories more
profoundly in my Economia Autogestionara [Self-managed Economics],
particularly, and to some extent in my three other books.
We are not going to deal, in this chapter, which is really an
introduction to self-managed economics), with the development of
libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialism I define as synonymous with
self-managed socialism.
From a semantic point of view, libertarian socialism is disposed to
unite according to the concept of true socialism (without bureaucracy
and with liberty) all well-intentioned socialists. However, the
adjective libertarian has an anarchist connotation.
On the other hand the adjective self-managed tends to suggest an even
broader front of socialist ideologies, some more bureaucratic than
revolutionary, which might be unified, in thought and deed, into a
self-managed socialism: the broadest alliance of popular and workersâ
struggle, against the technocracies and bureaucracies, both West and
East, and against the bourgeois pseudo-democracies of the West.
I would contend that in spite of light shades of ideological
differences, the anarchist theory of liberty, federalism and socialism
coincides, if not totally then in part, with the best of revolutionary
humanism. In this I would include the Marxism thrown away as scrap by
the State under the form of âthe dictatorship of the proletariat, in the
transition from capitalism to socialism,â which showed itself to be in
the U.S.S.R. the dictatorship of the Party-State bureaucracy, and was
under Stalin just as cruel as nazi-fascist dictators.
So, with the State acting as the revolutionary protagonist, instead of
the people self-organized in self-managed enterprises and in libertarian
collectives, marxist-leninism leads, not to socialism or even less to
communism. Instead it perpetuates, as in the U.S.S.R. and its
âsatellites,â a capitalism of the State, a worse capitalism, closer to
nazi-fascism, than to true socialism.
Marxism, separated from leninism, is a theory of capitalist development,
its economic laws and contradictions. It is thus a continuation of
capitalist economics, since without a self-managed socialism all the
rest is capitalism or neo-capitalism.
Marx, in Capital, his greatest work, does not say what socialism would
be like, only what capitalism is like. This title merits serious study,
without satanizing it like many anarchists have done without recognizing
that Marx was an investigator of capitalism whose contribution to
socialism is very limited. It is for us, those who live in the 20^(th)
century, to explain our prodigious, revolutionary and changing century,
not by the ideologies of the 19^(th) century which explained very well
their own times, but cannot be explanations for us today. And this is
not to say, in any manner, that we want to break with the past, since by
knowing the past we can understand the present and go with certainty to
win a future of peace, prosperity, liberty and equality for all,
liberated from the bureaucracies of capitalism and the technocracies
risen to State power to exploit Society.
The libertarian economy, going beyond the marxist-leninist economic
doctrine of State capitalism, rejects the State in the name of political
and economic liberty. This is because the State protects the
capitalistsâ private property and the state property of the communist
bureaucrats. In this school of thought, Bakunin asserted socialism and
liberty at the same time, since he could not conceive that socialism
could be less free than the bourgeois democracy described by the
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution of
1789â93. Thus denouncing the political bureaucracy of the âsocialists of
the cathedralâ (the ideologues who spoke like workers, but wanted to
govern like bourgeois), Bakunin exclaimed:
âLiberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism
without liberty is slavery and brutality.â (Obras, vol. 1, p. 59)
For the libertarians, blind obedience to the State is an abdication of
Society, since the freedom of each individual must not be limited by a
ruling class, either by a class whose power is based on private
property, as in the bourgeois State, or on State property, as in the
despotic, bureaucratic State-both employer and police at the same time.
According to libertarian thinkers, the biggest error of all revolutions
rests in the absurd politics of demolishing a government in order to put
another in its place which could be worse. Consequently the only true
social revolution would be that which destroys the principle of
authority, replacing it by self-government of the people â without
political parties, without a class of professional politicians, without
those who arbitrarily command and others who passively obey.
For Kropotkin, laws could be grouped in three categories: those that
protect the persons of privilege, those that protect the governments,
and those that protect private property, but that, in reality,
disprotect the impoverished working people.
In the conventional capitalist mode of production, the bourgeois State
is a committee in the service of the capitalists guaranteeing them the
private ownership of the means of production and exchange and the
realization; without the intervention of labor, of the surplus value
usurped from the wage workers, as much in a parliamentary democracy as
in a dictatorship, according to the situation. Under the statist mode of
production, whose real expression is the soviet model, the State, a
monopoly of the totalitarian bureaucracy, imposes state ownership;
dictates wage and price policy; is employer, merchant, banker, police,
making laws according to the convenience and interests of the
totalitarian bureaucracy. In either case, with a conventional capitalist
regime or with State capitalism, whether in the West or in the East, the
worker remains a wage worker, producer of an economic surplus for the
western bourgeoisie or for the eastern bureaucrats. Thus, by changing
only one government for another the workers remain oppressed and
exploited, in reality, by capitalism, whether private or of the State.
The fact is that the soviet regime perpetuates capitalism, but in
another form, with state ownership and bureaucratic State. It should,
according to marxist-leninism, but hasnât, made socialism except
semantically â purely in words, not in reality.
Thus, for example, Marx in his main doctrinal work, Capital, exposed the
laws of development of capitalism, but not those of socialism; since
Capital is a body of economic doctrine mostly about capitalism which
contributes no well-defined socio-economic laws of socialism. On the
other hand, Lenin, in State and Revolution, contributes no materials for
the building of a socialist society, but takes from Marx the idea of the
dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional step between
capitalism and socialism, in order to apply it to the soviet model,
where, in time, this transition in the form of a dictatorial State
becomes the permanent dictatorship of the communist bureaucracy over the
wage workers, who are the producers of State surplus value, for the
totalitarian âNomenklatura.â In sum, then, socialism has not been
realized anywhere, as such and as intended by the utopian and
libertarian socialists of the 19^(th) century, since the soviet model
was a new capitalism of the bureaucratic State. But the fact of having
prestige has enabled marxist-leninism, to a great extent, to present
itself as the economic science, the dialectical philosophy, the
sociology of class struggle and its solution, the materialist
interpretation of history and the State form necessary for the
transition from capitalism to socialism. All this body of doctrine
penetrated the universities capturing the minds of many students and
professors, the âintelligentsiaâ above all, in pre-revolutionary Russia,
where leninism was established as the active political practice of
marxism. In the West, marxism never really reached the workers â neither
in its most simplified form, The Communist Manifesto and less still of
Capital â but many professors, intellectuals, ideologues adopted Marxism
as reformism, âsocialism of the cathedralâ or an ingredient of social
democracy; although in recent times the economic ideal of the
âsocialists of the cathedral,â of the technocracy and of the
bureaucracy, was not Marx but better still Keynes, who contributed the
economic theory of a neo-capitalism, more a monopoly of the
social-democratic political class or of the labor parties than of the
bourgeoisie properly speaking.
The failing welfare-State in the West, squeezed by the abuse of
inflation and of exorbitant taxes, and the State-owner in the East of
the soviet bureaucracy, were established as an alternative to
capitalism, as a âvelvet socialismâ in the West and as totalitarian
communism in the East (which in reality is not communism, but a
capitalism of the State: the most total of all dictatorships, without
precedent in the ancient and modern world, and which has fallen into
chaos from the âperestroikaâ of Gorbachev to the âcatastroikaâ of
Yeltsin).
It is necessary, therefore, to redefine what has semantically called
itself socialism and is nothing more than State capitalism,
investigating and proposing a libertarian economy, whose laws of
development-economic, social, political, cultural, scientific and
technological-are enunciated as a replacement and alternative to western
welfare Statism and to Soviet State-ownership. For this libertarian
socialism needs a little more scientific rigor and a little less
utopianism, although it is necessary to take the adjective âscientificâ
with a grain of salt, as it has been depreciated enough by the soviets.
Utopia is beautiful, but it must bring something of economy, of reality,
of objectivity to the goal of libertarian socialism for it to be an
alternative, at the same time, to western monopoly capitalism and to
State capitalism, according to the soviet model.
In our epoch the exhaustion of statist politics emerges; so it is with
the social-democratic regimes under the control of the parasitical
middle classes (in the west); so it is with the totalitarian
bureaucracies of the one-party and State-employer; whether under the
welfare-State (in the West), or the total State (in the East) and of
failed nazi-fascism, the people have understood that they must organize
themselves into industrial democracy (self-managed enterprises) and into
federated self-government (direct democracy), overthrowing the economic
power of the industrial, mercantile and financial bourgeoisie, and the
political power of the radical, social-democratic, christian democratic,
socialist and neoliberal petty bourgeoisie who, with their various
parties, take turns in Power.
Marxism and Keynesianism have contributed equally to the development of
statist economics; so it is with the marxist-leninists and petty
bourgeois socialists; so it is with the technocrats and bureaucrats of
every type, partisans of managed economies with the goal of controlling
the national economies and the organs of the world economy, imperialist
or hegemonist, like the IMF, the GATT, the U.N. Security Council,
instruments of the ânew world orderâ of ex-president Bush.
But from these techno-bureaucratic experiences, with the proliferation
of well-paid functionaries, of UN-ocrats, eurocrats, comeconorats, of
central planners of every type, we can deduce that when the parasitic
classes are augmented at the expense of productive workers, the poorer
are the working people and consumers.
The moment arrives, then, when it is necessary to vindicate the
restoration of a self-managed economy, debureaucratized and
debourgeoisfied, liberated from both marxist-leninist totalitarianism
and bureaucracy, and from western keynesian planning, which was based on
the extravagant growth of taxes, monetary inflation, government
budgetary deficit and full employment from above for the bureaucrats and
technocrats, and maximum unemployment below for the productive workers
underneath. An aberrant economy of this kind has to lead to the total
failure of the welfare-State as long as it consumes unproductively more
than it produces positively, in actuality in agriculture, industry,
mining and goods production.
One thing is politically and economically evident in our time; the
stronger and richer is the State than the more weak and poor are its
subjects. In consequence, it can be seen on the political horizon and in
immediate society, as much in the West as in the East, there are two
great antagonistic human groups: those that order and those that obey;
those that work and live poorly and those who donât work and live well;
the authoritarians, who seek to maintain their privileges, and the
libertarians, who defend their rights and essential liberties. Thus we
behold from the historical perspective, at the end of the twentieth
century and beginning of the twenty-first, the crisis of the USA and the
ex-USSR.
In regimes of the soviet-type, in which the State possesses all wealth
and all power, it has created two great antagonistic classes, the
totalitarian government bureaucracy and the working people forced to
submit to a savage capitalism of the State. The dialectic of class
struggle in bureaucratic socialist countries, by its essence, is
transformed into a struggle between oppressed Society and the State
oppressor, having thus an anarchist character, since it is the
proletariat, paid by the State-employer, that has to overthrow the power
of the totalitarian bureaucracy in order to build an economy based on
self-management, de-bureaucratized, functioning through federations in
production and social and public services, converging in a National
Economic Council.
Since the quantification and accounting of the economy must be done
federally, by agreement of all and the parts (without central planning
by bureaucrats, according to central and final orders), there comes a
moment in which the libertarian economy makes it scientifically possible
as the best possible administration of economic matters creating thus
the conditions to abolish the State, oppressor and exploiter of men,
converting to decentralized self-government. In this manner an economic
federalism (production of goods and service) and an administrative
federalism â one as the self-management of workplaces; the other as
local, regional and national self-government â creates a self-power of
direct participation of people organized in their own interest; not
requiring, therefore, a political governing class, nor a bourgeoisie nor
techno-bureaucracy, managing industry in order to usurp the economic
surplus produced by the labor of others without paying, usurping by
surplus-value for the bourgeoisie of the State-owner, now failing in
Russia and China, but which they want to perpetuate as capitalism pure
and hard in the ex-COMECON countries.
The libertarian economy has to assume the increased reproduction of
social capital, in such a way that the development of productive forces
will not be inferior to that under private or State capitalism. Only
then will anew economic regime be justified, historically, socially and
politically, if it creates more well-being, a better standard of living,
more production with less manual labor than under the old overthrown
regime. To not do this would produce over time the conditions for a
counter-revolution as long as humanity can not lose productive forces,
without earning them constantly until living labor (human productivity)
has enough capital (accumulated past labor) that enables one hour of
automated labor to produce more than many hours of simple or rudimentary
labor based upon the muscular efforts of man.
Accordingly, as workersâ productivity increases, with everyone working
scientifically, it half productive and half educational, with the goal
of giving everyone equal time for labor and studies, equal scientific,
technical and cultural preparation. In this way, all will be capable of
doing all, and with the help of the computer revolution, to abolish the
traditional division of labor, so that the revolution is not overcome by
classes or social estates from dividing labor into manual or
intellectual.
The self-managed economy, libertarian in the greatest sense of the word,
will have to completely master the basic industries-the creation of new
products; the complete utilization of scientific-technological research,
bringing it from the universities to the workplaces and institutes; the
creation of an agro-industry that will erase the differences in
cultural, economic, and technological development between city and
country; the constitution of a libertarian society that will balance
economics, society, ecology, population and harmonize natural resources
and humans, guaranteeing all the right to work, education and leisure;
the integral assimilation of the computer revolution in order to
liberate (painful) manual labor from material production. Since the
automation of labor, plus self-management of social capital at the same
time, will create all the technical, economic, cultural and scientific
conditions to attain a harmonious society, without social conflicts nor
economic contradictions; then self-management plus automation equals
libertarian communism.
But prior to attaining the âgolden ageâ of self-government, of equality
in education and social conditions for all, where each receives
according to their needs and the economic possibilities of society,
transcending social hierarchies and the antagonism between wage labor
and private or State capital. Prior to this, it will be necessary to
transcend political economy as a science of administration of scarce
resources and distribution of goods and services according to quantity
and quality of labor, abolishing at the same time the division of labor
into professions or corporations, by virtue of which some consume more
than others, using money and unequal incomes in order to perpetuate the
inequality among people.
The spontaneous natural riches, the fruits and wild berries, the water
and air to be in reach of all humans, without appropriation, can not be
distributed in the mercantile sense of the realization of the law of
exchange value since they do not pass in the form of money; price and
market-seeking profit, not being the objective of political economy. In
libertarian communism, for humanity to attain an economy of abundance a
high productivity of automated labor will have to go beyond the laws of
exchange value, wages, money, merchandise, unequal incomes, the State
(formed in order to impose a unequal division by classes); the political
parties and the ideologies peculiar to the political alienation of a
competitive society; the division of labor between managers and
subordinates.
These can not be economically, politically, socially or culturally
transcended, however, by bureaucratic socialism â a neo-bourgeois
political economy of usufruct, which is followed by a system of
distribution as unequal as capitalism.
The libertarian economy, initially, as happened in Spain during the
Revolution of1936-39, the âpraxisâ set itself problems that had to be
the resolved, totally or partially, by bypassing political ideology,
creating libertarian collectives, enterprises managed directly by
workers without techno-bureaucratic directors; but having to demonstrate
by means of self-organized labor that the forces of production would not
be wasted. Seeing in practice the human, solidaric and productive labor
advantages of the libertarian collectives, the small private property
owners associated with them voluntarily. On the other hand, Stalin
decreed the forced collectivization of the land into kolkhozes
[co-operatives] and sovkhozes [state farms], repressing those peasants
who did not want to join them except by pressure of the political
police.
The good from the moment it is forced ⊠is converted into evil. Liberty,
morality, human dignity, consists precisely in that man does good, not
because he is ordered to do it, but because he conceived it, desired it,
and loved it. (Bakunin, Obras, Volume 1, p. 280).
In reality, people are neither good nor evil, but products of the
societies where they live, conditioned by their economic, political,
social, and cultural circumstances. Thus in societies where private or
state property holds sway, each individual appears as an enemy of the
other, competing with the other, oppressed by the other, limited by the
other in rights and duties.
The causes of injustice, in the socio-economic sense, do not reside so
much in human conscience as in the inhuman essence of societies of
conflicting classes and in the State which perpetuates them throughout
history, as if humanity was incapable of overcoming the prehistory of
unjust society, with even less equality than primitive society from the
paleolithic to the neolithic.
An economist so little suspected of being an anarchist as Adam Smith,
but a sincere intellectual and friend of the truth concerning social
injustice between people, having as a principal cause the governments of
class, said:
Civil government ⊠is in reality established for the defense of those
who possess something against those others who possess nothing. The
International Workers Association (AIT), in the past century, was more
clear about the emancipation of working people than all the later
internationals where the union bureaucracies, politicians, and
technocrats, allies of each other, had corrupted communist and socialist
ideals; whether this corruption was, by favoring the welfare-State, more
Keynesian than marxist, in the West, or the totalitarian State, the
administrative socialism in the East, which produced plenty of armaments
but failed to produce food.
âThe three great causes of human immorality are: inequality as much
political as economic and social; ignorance, that is the natural result
of the former; and, finally, the necessary consequence of both, that is
slavery.â (Program of the AIT).
The deeds of the political parties, of the so-called left, and the labor
union organizations, with the development of monopoly capitalism (West)
and with administrative socialism, East having fallen into the hands of
political and union bureaucracies and into those of technocrats, with
the words of the left and the deeds of the right â has been to confound,
in our epoch, all the values of the popular revolutionary struggle,
making the communist and socialist parties, and their union
organizations, into transmission belts for the interests of the
petty-bourgeoisie of the left which, by the means of political power,
aspires to become a ânew bourgeoisie.â Thus they adulate the workers,
promoting to them a âsocialist paradise,â in order to sacrifice them to
the capitalist inferno â so it is whether under the laborist or
social-democratic model, or under soviet totalitarianism.
As part of our continuing efforts to present anarchist economic theory,
we offer this translation from Abraham Guillenâs book, Economia
Libertaria. Because of its length, we are publishing it in three parts.
The first part was in LLR #14, the conclusion will be in LLR #16.
The experience of more than half a century of âvelvet socialistâ [ie.
social democrat], Christian democrat and liberal governments practicing
Keynesian economics in the West, as well as the totalitarian communist
governments of the East with centralized planning, has been that the
workers remain wage slaves either way, building up surplus value for the
private or State owner. They are exploited as much on one side of the
world as another, whether under the governments of Olaf Palme, of Kohl
or Honecker, of Thatcher or Reagan, of Gorbachev or Yeltsin.
From this it can be deduced that âstate socialismâ is neither socialism
nor communism, but is instead the collective ownership, usufruct, of the
totalitarian bureaucracy over the surplus value extracted by the State.
This bureaucratic socialism is the formal critic of private capitalism,
but allows it to be transformed in the West into multinational
capitalism, and in the East allows capitalism to be restored.
Consequently, this leaves âlibertarian socialism,â essentially
anarchism, as the rational and necessary critic of both private
capitalism and of state socialism as bourgeois socialism.
But if libertarian socialism wants to be an alternative to the bourgeois
socialism of the West and the social-economic chaos of the East, it must
be able to make the beauty and seduction of anarchist utopia compatible
with a realistic economic, social and scientific vision of the world,
consistent with our time. It must present a social-economic program
which overcomes the crises in economy, society, politics, ecology,
demographics, energy, of moral and intellectual value. It must seek to
harmonize natural resources and human resources in a new social-economic
order in which all people have the right to labor and education, in a
way that overcomes definitively the old division of manual and
intellectual work.
âIs it necessary,â asked Bakunin, âto repeat the irrefutable arguments
of socialism, which no bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in
disproving? What is property, what is capital in their present form? For
the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right,
guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither
property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor,
that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of
someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither
property nor capital and who are thus forced to sell their productive
power to the lucky owners of one or the other.â (Obras. Volume III,
p.191)
But let us again insist that the workers, within a self-managed economy
where the means of production and exchange are socialized, without
either bourgeois owners, or technocrats and bureaucrats of centralized
state economic planning, would be capable of conducting the economy
themselves.
Now then, a libertarian economy of the self-managed type has to be
capable of producing an economic surplus greater than under private or
state capitalism; of converting a large part of this surplus to the
reproduction of social capital, improving the productivity of labor.
Therefore the workers will achieve a higher rate of growth in productive
forces than private or state capitalism. There will be, thus, better and
greater production with less expense of human effort and greater and
better use of automated machinery. This is because only the automation
of labor makes it possible to create the technical basis for libertarian
communism. Socialism or communism can be justified neither economically,
politically nor socially as popular misery. A dominant class backlash
would be justified as necessary if the workers eat all their capital
without replacing it, or without increasing it more than the soviet
bureaucracy or the western bourgeoisie.
Proudhon, quoted by Guerin, concerning the self-managed economic regime,
said: âThe classesâŠmust merge into one and the same association of
producers.â [Would self-management succeed?] âOn the reply to this
âŠdepends the whole future of the workers. If it is affirmative an entire
new world will open up for humanity; if it is negative the proletarian
can take it as certainâŠ.There is no hope for him in this poor world.â
(Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, p.48)
In sum, there is no need to lament, there is a need to educate, to
become the protagonist of the future; to prepare oneself to improve
things and to make revolutionary changes; to understand the sciences,
sociology, economy, and revolutionary strategy; since without a
successful revolution, there can be no liberation of the workers, an
outcome which cannot delegated to others but must come from the exertion
of their own self-powers.
The planned economy has been praised by the technocrats and bureaucrats
of socialism, East and West, as the rationalization and codification of
national economies, with the goal of giving them a harmonious law of
development, both economic and technological. According to this scheme,
all the sectors of production and services will be coordinated so that
none of them advances ahead or falls behind so much that it causes a
crisis of disproportional development between the branches of industry,
agriculture and services. However this supposed âlaw of harmonious
development of national economiesâ directed by an army of bureaucrats
and technocrats has in reality only introduced alongside private
capitalism the capitalism of the State, leaving the workers, as always,
as dependent wage workers. In both cases the workers are wage slaves
that produce surplus value for the capitalist enterprenuers or the
State-enterprenuer.
Apologizing for the planned economy, as the scientific economy par
excellence which can predict the future with rigorous calculations, able
to conduct national economies according to prior objectives based upon
macroeconomic calculations, to guide the desired economic development
with the help of âcontrol equationsâ for the month, year, four-year,
five-year, all the economic science which was the hallmark of
central-planning, was declared as vulgar economic science. Particularly
has this been the case in the Soviet Union, although now Yeltsin under
the IMF has discovered capitalism, pure and simple, as a new
âdemocraticâ economy, even though it impoverishes the workers.
But after many years of centralized planning the national economies have
revealed a crisis of underproduction, or undersupply of the market and a
crisis of disproportional and unequal development between industry and
agriculture, in the USSR and all the countries of the ruble zone.
Indicative planning, as advocated in the West by the techno-bureaucratic
thought of Keynes, Schumpeter, Galbraith and Burnham, was an economic
doctrine, of center and left and including some of the right, taken up
by the parties of the social-democrats, socialists, christian-democrats
and neo-liberals. These parties mobilize the politicians of the middle
class professionals, who aspire to a State-benefactor where, as the
first enterprise of all, the technocrats are the directors more than the
capitalists properly speaking.
By means of the welfare-State the reformist middle class, from right to
left, comes robbing the usufruct of the government. Thanks to the sector
of nationalized enterprises, of social security insurance, of public
services, and the nationalization of many banks, a
âbureaucratic-technocratic bourgeoisieâ is created, more solid, if
possible, than the old bourgeoisie. Thereafter, if their businesses
register a deficit, there is no one who will cancel it, or even less
keep account of credits and debtsor if things go bad force the
enterprise into bankruptcy. On the contrary, the abundant existence of
nationalized enterprises in the West has created a whole series of
directors, executives and âbusinessmenâ with inflated salaries,
regardless of whether their enterprises can show benefits greater than
losses. This âbourgeoisie of the Stateâ is shoving aside the classic
bourgeoisie, since the former has political parties monopolizing the
State, the nationalized banks, the machinery to print inflated money and
to tax with discretion. The only beneficiary from the growing
productivity of labor, growing like a foam on the waves, is not a
private owning class, but those who indirectly own public property in
the form of State property, as a political class.
Accordingly, indicative planning or centralized planning, which aspires
to impose a balanced national economic development, has distorted the
law of harmonious social division of labor. The welfare State expands
the unproductive sector (middle class functionaries, bureaucrats and
technocrats), while increasing the productivity of labor in industry and
agriculture. This creates an aberrant economy of inflation of the
unproductive population which sterilely devours the wealth of societies
and nations. It can lead to a total economic crisis, of systematic
nature, since in order to resolve it requires more than simply changing
leaders. Instead a corrupt, contradictory and antagonistic
socio-economic regime of multi-national capitalist monopolies opposed to
the general interest must be replaced with universal libertarian
socialism.
The economists and politicians of the middle class parties, including in
their ranks the reformist union bureaucrats, the professional
politicians, the phoney savants (political, economic, and technical),
would submit to a social economy, as much in the East as in the West, of
a dictatorship of the techno-bureaucracy as ânew dominant class.â The
bourgeoisie, due to the centralization of capital in both large and
small enterprises, diminishes in statistical number, according to the
law of mercantile competition, liquidating in the market those
capitalists who are smaller and thus equipped with less productive
machines which produce at a higher cost. But, in contrast, the
bureaucracy, the technocracy, the professional of all types, are
augmented more by the very same thing that diminishes the bourgeoisie
annihilated by economic competition, the centralization of capital in
the multinationals.
In this sense, the State tends to convert itself into the largest of all
business enterprises in the West, and as the only business in the East,
that is to say, the enterprise which owns all the nationalized
enterprises. And thus, under these conditions, the State which owns
everything also is the master of all persons who by virtue of their
political alienation see the State as God- protector, although the State
as sole protector of Society takes from them by taxes, charges or low
salaries more than it gives in return. Meanwhile the poor people are
hoping that the State is a benefactor, and that a middle class political
party will offer to save them in return for their votes. Each day things
go from bad to worse, because the countless bureaucrats consume from
above the capital which is needed below to maintain full employment in
industry and agriculture.
Without debureaucratization and debourgeoisfication there is no way out
of the growing economic and social crisis which is caused by the
excessive economic waste involved in the sterile consumption of the
parasitic classes: the bureaucratic apparatus of the State, the
superfluous institutions filled with supernumerous personnel, the
administrations of enterprises which have begun to have more âwhite
collarsâ than productive workers, and finally, a whole series of
âtertiaryâ and âquaternaryâ services that spend without contributing
much to the social wealth. And we are not saying that this happens only
in the capitalist countries, but that this affects equally badly the
so-called âsocialistâ countries. By means of centralized bureaucratic
planning of their economies, all social capital, labor, national income
and economic power is placed in the hands of a techno-bureaucracy of
planning, for whom workers and their products are only ciphers in
five-year plans.
In this way they create social relations between those who have Power
and those who suffer as wage workers not essentially different than
those existing in the capitalist countries. So it is that the worker
continues as the producer of surplus value, whether for the State or
private businesses. Meanwhile the workers do not have the right to
self-manage their own workplaces, to democratically decide its
organization and the economic surplus produced, nor to elect their own
workplace councils by direct and secret vote. Without these rights,
centralized planning creates a bureaucracy based upon state property
instead of social property, and endeavors to substitute State capitalism
for private capitalism. Thus eventually it ends up by alienating into an
external power outside of the wage workers, whether under the western
capitalist or the soviet model.
The large western capitalist enterprise, national or multi- national,
when it concentrates multi-millions in capital and exploits monopolies
in production and thousands of workers (for example Fiat, Siemens,
I.C.I., General Motors, Unilever, Nestle, Hitachi, or nationalized
industrial complexes like IRI, British Steel and INI) leads to a
bureaucratic and totalitarian condition within the enterprise. The
workers neither know nor elect the administrative councils of these
gigantic corporations, anymore than the workers in the former USSR. The
directors are forced upon them from above, just as in other ages the
mandarins and satraps were designated in the regimes of Asian despotism.
For the Soviet regime to have qualified as socialist, not just
semantically but in reality, it would have had as its economic basis the
social ownership of the means of production and exchange, the direct
democracy of the people instead of the bureaucratic dictatorship of the
single Party, the decentralization of power (economic, political and
administrative) by the means of a federalism which would have assured
the popular participation at all levels of decision-making, political,
economic, social, cultural, informational and self-defense. In this way
a self- managed, libertarian, self-organized society, would have
replaced the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, in which society was
regimented and watched-over by the State-employer, all-powerful
permanent leaders and the political police of the KGB.
It could be argued that a vision of such nature is utopian or too good
to be true, but historical experience shows that centralism cannot
create more productive forces than can decentralization and federalism.
Centralism is always bureaucratism and consequently consumes
unproductively in the salaries of supernumerous personnel. In our epoch
computer networksâif they are well programmed, if their memory is
updated and constantly renewed, if they register all the fundamental
data of a country, a society, an enterprise, a locality, district and
regionâare more efficient and cheaper for the management of the
enterprise or society than the professional politicians or technocrats
and bureaucrats of all types.
If the State is given too much power, as under the Soviet model or under
the western welfare-State, it will tend towards state control over
capital, labor, technology, science, information, industry, of social
security and public services. Therefore this absolute power will create
a totalitarian State, even though disguised as a parliamentary regime,
symbolically under the Soviet model and rhetorically but not in practice
in the West. In either case, the totalitarian bureaucracy or the pseudo-
democratic political class collectively controls the business of the
State as its business, but parasitically as a cancer on Society.
In our school of thought, economic growth, the right of work for all,
economic, cultural and technological progress, are developed with fewer
obstacles in a libertarian society than in a society under the
totalitarian dictatorship of large capitalist monopolies or the
capitalism of the State. In both cases, given the great progress
realized by our society, the dictatorships of private capital or State
capital can be overcome. A self-managed society can be established with
social ownership of the means of production and exchange, uniting
capital, labor and technology without antagonism over classes or forms
of property. This would create an egalitarian society in culture,
economics and technology, thanks to an economy of abundance.
It is possible to the give power of self-government to the local
communities, districts, provinces and regions, by means of an economic
federalism and self-administration which would be integrated into a
Supreme Economic Council. This would not be a Gosplan as in the former
USSR, but a co-government of things by means of federations of
production and services. These federations would function democratically
and be self-managed, with the goal of the total process having a law of
harmony of development without economic crises of disproportionality
between all the branches of production and services. In other words,
they would function without relative crises of underproduction or
overproduction as occurs, respectively, under State capitalism or
private capitalism.
For this to happen, it is necessary to have democracy and economic
growth, with an increased productivity of labor. This would also require
the full employment of the active population, along with the full
participation of all in the decisions and the knowledge for this within
reach of everyone. It is necessary to create a libertarian society, in
which the elites of power and knowledge and social estates of every
type, would be transcended in work, science, capital and technology, by
means of effective self- management, the real participation of the
people. Thus it would be possible to abolish all class domination,
whether that of the bourgeois State and its capitalist economy or that
of the bureaucratic, totalitarian State and its centrally planned
economy. It is necessary, therefore, to liberate oneself ideologically
from parliamentary socialism, from totalitarian communism, from
bourgeois democracy which is economic dictatorship, from corporatism of
every typeâand establishing in their place a democracy of association,
self-managed and libertarian, where everyone would be equal in rights
and responsibilities, with privileges for no one. Only this type of
self-government is government of the people, by the people and for the
people.
The planning of economic, cultural and technological development must
arise from the putting of social wealth in common and not under the
domination of the State and its techno- bureaucracy. The first case
involves a program of harmonizing the proportion of growth of the
branches of production and services with full participation from bottom
to top, based on a libertarian and federative socialism. The second, the
concentration of all power in the hands of the State, leads to
centralized planning from top to bottom, without popular participation,
so that the workers are more objects than subjects, so many ciphers in
the Gosplan, according to the soviet model.
If the worker remains separated from worker by means of private property
or State property, there must be between capital and labor a power of
domination over those who labor for a wage. The working people can never
be emancipated within this mode. Emancipation can not be won
individually but only collectively, although each may have free will.
The realization of full liberty and personality for the worker requires
a self-organized society without the need for State oppression, whether
it is called right or left, bourgeois or bureaucratic, conservative or
revolutionary. Without self-managed socialism, social property and self-
government, all systems are the same.
The salvation of humanity is collective and not individual, because the
human is a social being, solidaric, with the aim of self-defense from
other species since the paleolithic period. It is the class division of
humanity, in the wake of private property and the State, which makes
possible the exploitation of man by man, of the proletarian by the
proprietor. Along these lines, Bakunin said to his friend Reichel:
âAll our philosophy starts from a false premise. This is that it begins
by always considering man as an individual and not, as it must, as a
being who belongs to a collective.â (Oeuvres, Volume II, p.60)
On this sentiment, Proudhon agreed with Bakunin to the extent that man
is a social being, needing community and solidarity:
âAll that reason knows and affirmsâleads us to sayâthat the human being,
just the same as an idea, is part of a group⊠All that exists is in
groups; all that form the group are one, and consequently, what is
âŠOutside the group are no more than abstractions, phantasms. By this
concept, the human being in generalâŠis from that which I am able to
prove positive reality.â (Philosophie du progress, Obras, Volume XX, pp.
36â38)
The human being, in reality, does not exist outside the society from
which he/she has appeared as a free subject; but at the same time
solidarity with others in daily life, at work, in education, in
self-defense, particularly at the beginning of humanity, âmutual aidâ
was the basis of existence of man associated to man, even though under
capitalism man is possessed by an appetite for wealth and the cult of
the money-god.
Developing the doctrine of âmutual aid,â Kropotkin, who studied the
behavior of many animal species, predicted that this would evolve in a
future society:
Society would be composed of a multitude of associations united among
themselves for everything which would require their common effort:
federations of producers in all branches of production, agricultural,
industrial, intellectual, artistic; communities for consumption,
entrusted to provide to all everything related to housing, lighting,
heating, nutrition, sanitation, etc.; federations of communities between
themselves; federations of communities of production groups; groupings
even wider still, which would encompass a whole country or including
various countries; groupings of people dedicated to work in common for
the satisfaction of their economic, intellectual, artistic needs, which
are not limited by territorial boundaries. All these associated groups
would combine freely their efforts by means of a reciprocal alliance
(âŠ); and a complete liberty would preside over the unfolding of new
forms of production, of research and of self- organization; individual
initiative, not withstanding, would be encouraged and all tendencies
towards uniformity and centralization, combatted. (Alrededor de una
vida, p. 140)
By means of this federalism based upon libertarian socialism, the
economy, the natural and human resources, the balance of natural
ecosystems, the full employment of available labor, the leisure and
education time at all levels of knowledge, the social- economic and
cultural life of locality, district, province, region, nation or the
world, can be programmed with the participation of everyone in
everything, without creating a great deal of confusion. On the contrary,
the local and the universal, the individual and the society, the
particular and the general, would be understood perfectly by reason of
complete information from computer networks which would register all the
important data to accomplish at the end a perfect database. By virtue of
this, everyone would know all, avoiding thus a condition in which those
with knowledge have the power, as occurs in the totalitarian,
bureaucratic, centrally planned countries, where the people are ignored.
The federations of production and services, dividing into natural
associations, from the bottom to the top, create the democratic
conditions for a planning with liberty. Unlike what happened in soviet
Russia, the economic planning would not be entrusted to a dictatorship
of technocrats who want to substitute themselves for the old
bourgeoisie. To be employed by the total State instead of by an
individual boss does not change the condition of dependency and
alienation for the worker, except to make the situation worse; since
this makes the law into a fraud, a law that does not limit the absolute
powers of the State, which corrupts absolutely the few who govern
absolutely, the few oppressors and exploiters written in the lists of
the âNomenclature.â To change, therefore, private capitalism for State
capitalism from a western pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie to a
totalitarian bureaucracy is a poor trade for the wage workers since they
do not cease to be what they are, the producers of surplus value for the
bourgeoisie or bureaucracy, for the private boss or for the State.
In consequence, as the founders of the IWA put it, âthe emancipation of
the workers is the task of the workers themselves.â From this point of
view, working people can only emancipate themselves by the means of a
libertarian socialism of self- management where âthe chaos of production
would not reign,â but instead there would prevail a planning with
liberty, with the participation of workers and citizens at all levels of
political and economic decision-making; of information, culture, science
and technology; of information processing, gathering, classification,
and computerization of data, economic, demographic, political, social,
scientific, technical, natural resources, etc.
A social-economic program, with continual popular participation (not
indirectly through municipal, regional or national elections), must be
by the means of federations in industry, agriculture, and services,
integrated into a Federative Council of the Economy, in which all the
federations producing goods and services must be represented. By way of
example, this âFederative Council of the Economyâ would have to
integrate, among others, the following federations: Fruits and
horticultural products; Cereals; Feed for livestock; Food industry,
including imports; Hostelry and Tourism; Wine, beer, and alcoholic
beverages; Oils and greases from vegetable and animals; Fishing: boats
and canning; Textiles; Furs and leather; Timber and cork; Paper and
graphic arts; Chemicals; Construction; Glass and ceramics; Metal
machining; Steel; Non-ferrous minerals: metals and alloys; Energy:
petroleum, coal, gas, electricity, and atomic energy; Information and
the construction of computers, integrated micro-circuits, and
semi-conductors; Electronics: numerical controlled machines;
Biotechnology; Aero-space; Research and Development, uniting technology
with work.
This list of industrial federations does not include all the social and
public services, which would be too tedious to number but would have to
be represented in the Federative Council of the Economy as well. By
example, commerce, banking, sanitation, security and social security,
which are enormous, would have to be reorganized, since these entail
much unproductive work that would have to be reduced. The goal must be
that concrete production is not exceeded by unproductive work, since
this would restrain or slow real economic growth. In other words, there
must be no false increase in the Gross Internal Product, which occurs
when it is incremented solely by services and not in the branches of
industry, in either the primary sector (agriculture, fishing, livestock,
lumber, minerals, etc.) or the secondary sector (industry of diverse
types).
This is the final installment in this three-part series. Part I ran in
LLR #14, Part II in LLR #15.
A self-managed economy will have to rationally organize the branches of
industry and, within each one, integrate the small and medium
enterprises with the big enterprises to constitute a unified whole. For
example, in the branch of industry of domestic electronics, which seems
to have no relationship with the construction industry, it may be
suitable to control home heating and cooling not with individual
refrigeration and individual furnaces but centrally, with the goal of
saving energy. In this sense, the construction industry, to construct
new housings, would build them to work in the manner of hotels, with all
included services, so the worker would live similar to a present day
bourgeois in a great hotel. For this to happen it would be necessary to
increase the productivity of labor in the primary and secondary sectors,
so that each worker in agriculture and in industry would be capable of
producing for many people so that, in compensation, they would
proportion him the necessary services of a sort of social hotel, as we
have indicated. But for this to happen will require a great revolution
in culture and technology, investing much in Research and Development.
The self-managed economy will have to invest a good portion of the
national income in the production of both consumer and capital goods,
particularly in its first years of operation, so that the productivity
of the labor is increased to unprecedented levels. In this order of
ideas, economic growth, with libertarian socialism, would be greater
than with private capitalism or State capitalism, since the
surplus-value wasted on the parasitic classes under capitalism would be
invested instead. Consequently, it wouldnât be necessary to harshly
tighten the belts of the workers, as did Stalin; instead the gross
national or social income would increase annually in greater proportion
than under industrialized capitalism or bureaucratic socialism (which
wastes too much in armaments, in salaries of unproductive officials, and
slows economic growth to no greater a pace than that of the developing
capitalist countries).
By means of the application of information and of computer networks,
well supplied with all types of data, the Federative Council of the
Economy would have the actual information for each branch of production
or of services. Therefore, the economic integration of branches of
production and of service would be a positive science, which would know
everything necessary in order to avoid crisis of disproportional of
growth in those branches, without the production of excesses of
personal, of goods not sold, or of raw materials, since it would be
known, at each moment, the amount necessary to produce, to distribute or
invest so that the social economy has a law of harmonious development.
For example, the central computers of the Federative Council of Economy,
with informative contributions of the computer terminals in local
factories, provincial and regional, would make known what was everyoneâs
production, reserves and shipments to the self-managed market. In the
case of the industry for manufacturing of paper containers, the central
computer would register the number of establishments, the personnel
employed in each one of them, total of work-hours, cost of the personnel
in stable monetary units, electric power consumed in the process of
production, value of the fuels and gas used, value of the consumed raw
materials, general expenses, taxes, value of the total production, value
of the employed labor, amounts destined to pay debts and for new
investments. In sum: programming the economy would be simple, without
need of bureaucrats, of capitalist managers or of technocrats.
When we speak of taxes we donât refer to the tribute of the western
capitalist type nor to the business taxes (mainly figured as a business
expense usurped from the enterprises by the State in the USSR and in the
âpopular republics that made up the COMECON), but to the delivery of a
pre-determined quota of the economic surplus, extracted by the
self-managed enterprises, transferred to the self-governments,
responsible for returning those transfers to society in social and
public services according to their ability: sanitation, hygiene, paving
of streets, highways, roads, ports, railroads, education, public health
and other responsibilities of the self-governments which would be too
great to enumerate.
In this case we would attempt to strengthen the economy of the free
self-managed municipality, not in the traditionally Roman
[state-citizen] nor modern bureaucratic sense, but as the social and
public enterprise of the citizens; as well as the industrial,
agricultural, of research enterprise or certain global services which
would constitute the task of the associated workers with their means of
production, self-organized into Worker Councils of Self-Management and
in Basic Units of Associated Labor, where the economic accounting should
be automated by means of computers and take as their unit of
calculation, the labor-hour (LH). It would have thus a monetary
equivalence of the same value, if the money is intended to remain
stable. The LH would circulate monetarily in the form of ticket which
would give the right to consume reasonably, always leaving an important
portion in order to invest more capital than wornout during a year, so
that libertarian socialism would enlarge the social capital, with the
goal of progressing more with self-management than under the dominance
of capitalists or of bureaucrats.
The LH, as labor-money, wouldnât lead to monetary inflation like
capitalist money or like the soviet ruble, which conceal by being the
money of cass, the parasitical incomes of the western bourgeoisie, or of
the eastern bureaucracy, inflating the growth of the gross national
product (GNP), with salaries of officials or unproductive technocrats,
or with dividends, interests, rents and surplus values received by the
capitalists, according to the western economic model, where each day
there exist a growing parasitical class at the expense of productive
workers. Every project of investment would be calculated in hours of
labor (LH), as well as in terms of personal and public consumption
required. It would be monitored that neither would be excessive in the
carrying on of a libertarian, self-managed society, of direct
associative democracy, so that a part of the global economic surplus
would be invested in achieving a greater automation of industrial
production and of agricultural production. It would thus be possible to
continue reducing the working day to a range which would allow a more
leisure time, so that all the citizens could occupy their time in more
relaxation and, above all, in better scientific, cultural and
technological preparation.
The LH, as labor-money and as a quantification of the economy, having a
stable monetary value would program the economy: to account it; to
establish the costs of the goods and services; programming the
integrated branches of the division of the labor and correct
disharmonies between them; quantifying in the products the cost of raw,
energy, amortization of the capital, value of the work, economic
contributions to the local self-governments and to the national
co-government, etc. All of this would function within a libertarian
socialism of a self-managed market, without speculators, hoarders or
merchants, in order that competition benefit the workers and the
consumers, the cooperative groups and self-managed enterprises, in the
manner similar to the way the market functioned in the Spanish
libertarian collectives during the Spanish Revolution of 1936â39. The
goal would be to avoid the bureaucracy of a centrally planned economy,
such as occurred in the USSR and China, where the officials decided
everything and the people participated in nothing. As if that were
socialism, however much they try to introduce it thus by means of a
totalitarian propaganda, as if lies could be converted into truths by
force of repeating them as the only truth, thanks to the state monopoly
of the radio, the press, the television, the universities, the schools,
so that Power regulates knowledge according to their political
convenience.
In a libertarian economy, labor-money wouldnât be money in the
capitalist sense such as we understand it and need it today, since it
wouldnât allow the individual accumulation of capital in order to
exploit the labor of other people and obtain a surplus value. Rather it
would be intended to facilitate the exchange of goods and service, in a
self-managed market, where these exchange at their true labor value, so
that it fulfill economically the law of equal exchange in equality of
condition for all the integrated branches of the social division of the
labor and the law of the cooperation of those same branches or
federations of production and of service. If, on the other hand, there
were no free operation of the self-managed market, things would fall
into economic chaos, by trying to centrally plan everything. Prices and
their economic calculation, as well as the market that really forms them
(without maintaining bureaucratic costs) are only possible within an
indicative global programming, but which leave the day-to-day market
free, so that all the enterprises are able to produce the best and most
economically, about which the consumers must ultimately decide. From
this method, there is an invisible hand which self-regulates the social
economy, better than thousands of officials and technocrats equipped
with thousands of computers who without liberty, order disorganization
by being poorly informed or because of the self-interests of the
totalitarian bureaucracy, who manage more like inquisitors or cruel
police (as happened in the USSR and China).
If the LH, the unit of labor-money, would have, for example, an
purchasing power of 1 hour of average social-labor and this were
equivalent, roughly speaking, to one dollar, one could establish, among
others, the following calculation of economic-accounts:
Dividing the total number of LH, spent in the process of production, and
the total of units produced in that time of work which could be daily,
monthly, or yearly, we would have an average of labor value for unit
produced of 1.010 of LH or of labor-money.
Now then, as no money could be absolutely stable, since if the
productivity of the labor increases, due to improvements in machines,
education of the workers and more efficient methods, it would result
that the LH will end up having less value of exchange, increasing its
value of use, driving this economic process toward an economy of
abundance where, overcoming venal value, the value of use would only
remain. Consequently, having reached this stage in the economy and
technology, with most of the work automated, the value of the produced
goods wouldnât be based much on living labor, but almost everything
would be labor of the past (accumulated capital), which would determine
thereby a self-regulated production of abundance. Then the wonderful
time will have arrived of overcoming finally both money and the
commodity, each man receiving according to his necessity, although he
only contributes according to his unequal capacity, or in other words,
that it would make possible the economic equality between the men:
libertarian communism, rationally and scientifically, economically
possible, without which it must considered as a beautiful utopia.
Only a self-managed economy, rational and objective, based on scientific
laws, from the commencement of the establishment of libertarian
socialism, avoiding the fall into one phase or another, into either the
socialism of group property, into forms of corporatism or of narrow
syndicalism, but towards a condition of always placing the general
interest above the particular interest of the professional or work
groups.
On the subject of the future of a libertarian and self-managed society,
Kropotkin warned and advised:
We are convinced that the mitigated individualism of the collectivist
system will not exist alongside the partial communism of possession of
all of the soil and of the instruments of labor. A new form of
production will not maintain the old form of redistribution. A new form
of production will not maintain the old form of consumption, just as it
will not accommodate the old forms of political organization.
In this order of ideas, explains Kropotkin, the private ownership the
capital and of the earth are attributes of capitalism. Those conditions
were consistent with the bourgeoisie as a dominant class, although the
public [state] ownership of capital and of the earth is consistent with
the capitalism of the soviet-State, which elevates the totalitarian
bureaucracy as a new dominant class.
The private ownership of the means of production and of exchange created
capitalism as a mode of production and the bourgeoisie as dominant
class.
âThey wereâ, says Kropotkin, âthe necessary condition for the
development of the capitalist production; it will die with her, although
some may try disguising it under form of a âlabor bonusâ. The common
possession of the instruments of labor will bring necessarily the common
enjoyment of the fruits of the common labor.â (The Conquest of Bread,
p.28)
If upon changing the mode of production and of distribution, daily life
doesnât change, including distribution, consumption, education, the
political system, the legal and social, in the sense that one dominant
classes are not substituted by other, then, really, nothing essentially
has changed. Thus it happened in the Soviet Union, where the economic
categories and the economic laws of the capitalism were hardly modified,
with the result that the economic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was
replaced with the political and economic dictatorship of the bureaucracy
and, in consequence, private or anonymous capitalism for the capitalism
of State. A revolution like this, although it is called socialist,
constitutes a great swindle to the detriment of working people, for whom
in the majority of cases, it has not meant more than a change of master
or of a saddle, to the unfortunate beast of burden. So instead of being
the proletarian of the bourgeois, they have a new Patron, that is to
say, the technocrat and the bureaucrat. In our way of thinking, the
alternative to capitalism is not Marxism Leninism, but libertarian
socialism.
For a revolution to be true, in the sense of emancipating working people
from the oppression and exploitation of the dominant classes, it has to
establish a new mode of production, exchange, distribution and
consumption and create new social relationships; new and more powerful
productive forces; new political forms of popular direct participation;
new legal institutions having as their basis the popular jury, new
universities and technical schools integrated with industries,
agriculture, mining, energy, fishing, the forests and other sectors; new
philosophic, political,social, artistic, and cultural doctrines; new
conceptions of national and social defense based more on the people in
arms (than on a bureaucratic professional army, expensive and wasteful)
in order to defend the society, as much inside as outside of it. It is
necessary to affirm the system of popular self-defense, since without
which there couldnât be a guarantee that self-management will be
accepted by a professional army, the latter always having tendencies to
stage a âcoupâ in order to take Power.
On the other hand, in order to avoid the coming to power of a
one-Party-state, which is the worst and greatest single political wrong,
as happened in the USSR, there will need to be created a participatory
socialism. This would entail a respect for the free personality within
the collective, the self-determination of the local governments within a
federalism which coherently maintains a unified market, the social and
national self-defense, diplomatic relations with the exterior, the
socio-economic system as a relatively homogeneous regime. A federalism
which keeps a national and social accounting system in order to estimate
and program the authentic valuation of the national or social global
income, making it possible to know where we have been and toward where
we are going economically, socially, politically, scientifically and
technologically.
But a new economic system, based on self-managed socialism, will have to
have another way of estimating the annual economic growth on the basis
of short, medium and long term plans, constructing a macro-economic
picture of the national and social economy, departing from the known
figures and projecting toward figures to be attained in the next
trimesters, semesters, years. Thus the future, in certain manner, will
be anticipated by having a Federative Council of the Economy, where each
federation of production or of services knows that which it has and that
which it wants, in accordance with the effective demand of the
self-managed market. Libertarian socialism, if it wants to distinguish
itself from authoritarian soviet communism, must respect the law of the
supply and demand, without falling into bourgeois liberalism, since in
the self-managed market the federations of production and of social and
public services act competitively. Because if the market is suppressed,
and with it the law of labor-value, the law of economic competition, the
law of formation of just prices in the market, it would not be possible
establish a rational economy of costs and prices, necessary investments
and appropriate consumption. In its place would be a centralized and
bureaucratic planning which places the total-State above the oppressed,
exploited Society, as happened in the USSR under a planning of economic
decrees, without respect for objective economic laws.
On the other hand, libertarian socialism has to respect the pluralism of
ideas, although it wouldnât provide a space for byzantine struggles.
People would be self-organized in their own interest in self-managed
enterprises, mutual cooperatives, local self-governments and all types
of socio-economic and political forms of direct participation. Politics
would be deprofessionalized, abolishing the political class and the
political parties as expression of antagonistic interests, since each
citizen or worker will participate in their enterprise, local
self-government, federation, daily, without falling into the trap of
electoralism, where they only participate for a day to elect a
government worse than another.
Libertarian socialism will have to create a new economic doctrine and a
new system of estimating the national or social income. Actually, the
concept of gross national product (GNP), of which there is so much talk
and is so little understood, counts in unstable monetary units, the
total of the goods and services obtained by economic activity:
agriculture, industry, services, as large integrated sectors of the
national economy.
If the GNP, the way it is constituted in the bourgeois economy, were
estimated in monetary units of constant purchasing power, thus deflating
the official figures, it is possible that it actually diminishes instead
of increasing. On the other hand, the GNP, in its bourgeois form,
includes the economic participation of the unproductive âtertiaryâ and
âquaternaryâ sectors, in the sense not that this should be concealed,
but that the GNP shows âgrowthâ when it may have diminished materially,
in effective production. Thus, for example, in many countries which are
diminishing their industrial and agricultural production during some
years, but if salaries increase and the number of tertiaries in the
state bureaucracy, commerce, the banks, and in social and public
services grow, it is said that the GNP has grown, for example, an annual
3%, when the reality is that this macro-economic figure only represents
salaries, incomes without effective work, surplus values taken,
parasitic income , etc.
Libertarian socialism, creating a social economy based on truthful
figures, would have to estimate the GNP in a different manner than the
capitalists. It is necessary to give to the concept of social income,
units which are measured or concrete and in constant money based on
material output: agriculture, cattle raising, forests, fishing, energy,
mining, industry, or whatever is actual production. As for the
âservicesâ, only transportation, railroads, trucking, marine and air
would be included in the concrete estimate of the effective or material
income, since although transportation doesnât add production, it
transports it from one side to another and, in consequence, it should be
included in the concrete income of one year to another.
Adding the concrete income alongside gross income (administrative
âservicesâ, commerce, banks and other social and public services), it
would be seen if these take too great a percentage in the total income
by having too many unproductive personal who, in order to not drain the
social economy, would have to be recycled as productive personnel. Now
then, in the âservicesâ which could be considered as productive, would
be included the personnel destined for Research and Development (R &D),
without whose presence an economy will stagnate for lack of economic and
technological progress; but the personnel of R&D should be, besides in
the Institutes or Centers (which tend to be bureaucratic and
technocratic), directly in the industrial enterprises, agricultural,
energy, forests, mining, fishing, etc., since science and technique
should be united directly to labor as immediate factors of production
and not as though the ostentation of an academic title should make one a
technocrat.
In sum, the net income of a country would have to be estimated, in a
libertarian socialism, at costs determined in relatively stable physical
and monetary units which donât mislead, deducting the necessary
investments of social capital in order to enlarge production and not
simple reproduction as happens to the bourgeois economy in a crisis.
The estimate of the national and social income must be transparent: from
the total of the wealth created in a year must be deducted the material
consumption of people and that of self-administration (where there
should not be much bureaucracy, by reason of better information) and to
deduct, set aside or remove the social or national saving destined for
investment in order to increase the reproduction of effective wealth,
create new enterprises, design improved and more productive machines,
carry on scientific investigation, automate industrial production and
public services, and mechanize and electrify agriculture.
In sum, the libertarian economy should liberate the worker from their
old employers, either private managers or from the State as Manager, to
end that the workers, by means of their Self-Management Enterprise
Councils, direct the economy which they create with their labor upon the
means of production associated, from the bottom up, by means of the
federations of production and of social services composed in a
Federative Council of the Economy; only thus could there be planning and
liberty, an associative democracy of full participation of the working
people, a self-managed socialist society, avoiding any form of
totalitarian communism (which, as a matter of fact, is capitalism of the
State).
Without economic liberty there canât be political liberty; since with
capitalism there is an economic dictatorship of a plutocratic minority
over the majority of working people; and with capitalism of the State,
in the soviet manner, the State exploits and oppresses Society by means
of the one-Party which is a bad one for the majority and a good one for
the bureaucratic, oppressive and exploitive minority. The solution is:
neither totalitarian communism nor capitalism but self-management,
direct democracy, federalism and socialism.
by Jeff Stein
Abraham Guillen has given us some useful concepts for analyzing the
economic systems of state-socialist and corporate capitalist countries.
Although these economies are no longer dominated by individual
capitalist owner-managers, they remain exploitive, class systems.
According to Guillen, ownership of the means of production is now
collective, spread across a stratum of âtechno-bureaucrats.â These
techno-bureaucrats are just as much concerned with accumulating capital
through exploitation of workers, as the old ârobber baronâ capitalists.
However, the surplus of the system is shared (although not on an equal
basis) within the techno-bureaucratic class. Under these systems, legal
ownership means less than oneâs position in the state or corporate
hierarchy. Only a system of worker self-management of their own
workplaces, can eliminate this exploitation by the techno-bureaucracy.
This does not mean Guillenâs theory is without problems. His proposals
for a âmarket without capitalistsâ and the establishment of
âlabor-moneyâ are built open the assumption that the labor theory of
value can provide the basis for a libertarian socialist economy. The
labor theory of value provides a powerful argument for the elimination
of capitalists and bureaucrats, since their incomes represent an
unnecessary drag on the economy. However, in a self-managed economy
inequalities having nothing to do with labor productivity would arise
between self-managed enterprises, giving some a competitive advantage
over others. For instance, the size of the enterprise, the availability
of scarce raw materials, the presence or absence of strict environmental
regulation by the local municipality, etc., would all come into play,
and these are not always factors which are easily calculated in
labor-hours.
Augustin Souchy, another anarcho-syndicalist who made extensive studies
of various attempts at establishing workers self- management, observed
that:
working hours as the only value determinant is unrealistic. Experience
shows that the lack of raw material, rarity of quality, differences of
consumer goods, highly qualified services, etc. are equally vague
determinants. These factors will not change in a socialist economy.â
(Beware! Anarchist!, Chicago, 1992. p.42)
One factor which is becoming increasingly important in determining
production costs is energy. As the amount of labor decreases due to
automation, the amount of energy in terms of fossil fuels, electricity
required, etc., increases. This means that while the labor value of many
products is going down, their energy value is going up. As long as
energy is cheap and abundant, this does not necessarily present a
problem. However, in the future, as the southern hemisphere becomes
increasingly industrialized and there is a greater demand for energy,
and as fossil fuel supplies dwindle, a purely labor-based system of
economic accounting would collapse. Energy would either have to be
rationed, or some sort of global federation would have to set a tax on
energy. Either way, the labor-exchange economy would be forced away from
an unregulated market system. On the other hand, the sort of energy
accounting based system proposed by some âgreenâ economists is not
adequate either, since the energy theory of value does not take into
account the qualitative difference between human energy (labor) and
non-human energy.
There is no such thing as a perfectly, objective theory of economic
value. Each theory has its own hidden biases which will tend to skew the
results of any accounting system (this includes the bourgeois
scarcity-value system, which favors those who own capital and scarce
resources). The best a labor theory of value can do is identify that
part of a thingâs (a good or service) value, which is the result of
social production. The rest of a thingâs value is contributed by energy,
nature, the social infrastructure, and a host of other variables. In a
libertarian, self-managed economy, the accounting of these non-labor
costs and the distribution of these benefits, therefore needs to go
beyond the individual workplaces and their labor accounts. An economic
role must be played by the free municipalities (communes), who must set
democratic controls over energy, environmental standards, and scarce
resources, in order to make sure that those exchanges which take place
do not undermine social equality or the capacity of the earth to sustain
itself. Therefore, contrary to Guillen, we should insist that whatever
exchange or currency system exists in the future, it provide for greater
community control and allow all citizens a voice as to how value should
be determined.