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Title: Anarchist Economics Author: Jon Bekken Date: 1990 Language: en Topics: Libertarian Labor Review, book review, economics Source: Retrieved on 27th January 2021 from https://syndicalist.us/2017/07/16/anarchist-economics-2/ Notes: From Libertarian Labor Review #8, Winter 1990
The Decline of the American Economy, by Bertrand Bellon and Jorge Niosi.
Black Rose Books, 1988. $16.95
Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, by Peter Kropotkin (edited by
Colin Ward). Freedom Press, 1985.
“The Wage System” by Peter Kropotkin; in Vernon Richards, ed., Why Work?
Arguments for the Leisure Society. Freedom Press, 1983.
A casual observer of the anarchist movement, restricted to contemporary
writings, could be forgiven for concluding that anarchists have no
conception of economics. A serious debate recently was carried out in
the pages of the British anarchist monthly, Freedom, arguing that all
wealth comes from agriculture – that the working class is merely a
burden the peasants and other agricultural workers are compelled to
shoulder. The only possible conclusion from this line of reasoning is
that we should dismantle the cities and factories and all return to
agrarian pursuits. One suspects that farmers – suddenly deprived of
tractors, books and other useful manufactured items and confronted with
thousands of starving city dwellers cluttering up perfectly good
farmland that could otherwise be growing crops-might take a somewhat
different point of view.
Bertrand Bellon and Jorge Niosi – who nowhere claim to be anarchists,
despite the fact that their book is published by the foremost North
American anarchist publisher – provide a better-argued, academic
analysis that, in the end, is no less absurd. In the course of arguing
that the U.S. economy has irretrievably lost its dominant position (and
arguing for a new world economic order based upon tight-knit, highly
integrated blocs characterized by heavy state intervention in capitalist
economies), they make it quite clear that for them the primary economic
actors are not classes or corporations but nation-states! Questions like
unionization and wage levels are reduced to economic factors influencing
the relative economic competitiveness of countries and regions. Indeed,
for them the working class would appear to be increasingly irrelevant as
we move into a post-industrial age. (Though they are critical of U.S.
corporate management for their short-sighted and inept policies, and of
the military build-up which is consuming our resources.)
Nor are class struggles permitted to intrude into this tidy economic
picture. Bellon and Niosi blithely inform us, on page 70, that
industrial relocation is a negligible factor in the economic decline
confronting the U.S.’s northern industrial region. Instead, they assure
us, the problem is the decline of certain manufacturing industries on
which this area has depended. Yet the world has not stopped building or
consuming cars, steel, clothing or shoes. Rather, the employing class
has chosen to relocate production to regions and countries where workers
can be compelled to work harder for less, and to automate and speed up
production in order to reduce payroll. These are not natural phenomena,
nor are these developments inevitable. They could be changed by an
organized working class determined to wield its economic power in its
own behalf.
Notions of power, social transformation, or the impact of the policies
they advocate on workers in the real world never occur to Bellon and
Niosi. Theirs is the highly abstract world of government policy, which
in practice rapidly boils down to capitulation to the demands of
capital, and to massive giveaways to our corporate masters.
An anarchist economics would look very different indeed. Although
anarchists are of necessity interested in the workings of the capitalist
economies, our attention is focussed on the class struggle, not on the
battle between nations (in any event a sideshow, as the bosses have no
country). An anarchist economics might study the theft of our labor by
the bosses, the squandering of social resources by the state, and the
channels through which the bosses manipulate markets, finance and
production to increase their profits and to pit workers in different
parts of the world against each other. Similarly, an anarchist economics
would address itself to the problems of maintaining economic life in a
revolutionary situation, and to the sort of economic arrangements which
might function in a free society.
These are the questions Kropotkin addresses in the two works cited
above, and which our Spanish comrades addressed in practice during the
Spanish Revolution (efforts which are chronicled in Sam Dolgoff’s The
Anarchist Collectives and Gaston Leval’s Collectives in the Spanish
Revolution). In Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin addresses
himself to the practical problems of making a revolution – how we are to
maintain production and distribution of necessary goods and services in
the heat of, and following, a social revolution. In the process he
established that, even in his day, a decentralized, self-managed economy
could easily meet the needs of the population, and with much greater
efficiency than under the prevailing capitalist (mis)organization. Those
who believe that we will somehow be able to eliminate the need for work
following the revolution will have little use for Kropotkin’s invaluable
study, for he (like nearly all of our fellow workers) had no time to
waste on such nonsense. Those interested in a genuine process of social
transformation, however, will find much of value here. The Freedom Press
edition is condensed from the original, with notes by Colin Ward that
help to bring the original up to date.
Kropotkin’s essay on the wage system conclusively demonstrates that a
free society must necessarily abolish the wage system and money if it is
to remain true to its principles.
Yet while Freedom Press has performed an invaluable service in keeping
these works in print (and in affordable editions), our movement stands
sorely in need of a more contemporary look at these issues.