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