Difference between revisions of "FAQAnar:I.4 - Comment une Ã©conomie anarchiste fonctionnerait-elle ?"

CatÃ©gorie:Ã€ quoi une sociÃ©tÃ© anarchiste ressemblerait-elle ? This is an important question facing all opponents of a given system -- what will you replace it with? We can say, of course, that it is pointless to make blueprints of how a future anarchist society will work as the future will be created by everyone, not just the few anarchists and libertarian socialists who write books and FAQs. This is very true, we cannot predict what a free society will actually be like or develop and we have no intention to do so here. However, this reply (whatever its other merits) ignores a key point, people need to have some idea of what anarchism aims for before they decide to spend their lives trying to create it.

So, how would an anarchist system function? That depends on the economic ideas people have. A mutualist economy will function differently than a communist one, for example, but they will have similar features. As Rudolf Rocker put it:

"Common to all Anarchists is the desire to free society of all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of a free humanity. In this sense, Mutualism, Collectivism, and Communism are not to be regarded as closed systems permitting no further development, but merely assumptions as to the means of safeguarding a free community. There will even probably be in the society of the future different forms of economic co-operation existing side-by-side, since any social progress must be associated with that free experimentation and practical testing-out for which in a society of free communities there will be afforded every opportunity." [Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 16] So, given the common aims of anarchists, its unsurprising that the economic systems they suggest will have common features such as workers' self-management, federation, free agreement and so on. For all anarchists, the "economy" is seen as a "voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities" and this "is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful." [Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, p. 1183] For example, the machine "will supersede hand-work in the manufacture of plain goods. But at the same time, hand-work very probably will extend its domain in the artistic finishing of many things which are made entirely in the factory." [Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workplaces Tomorrow, p. 152] Murray Bookchin, decades later, argued for the same idea: "the machine will remove the toil from the productive process, leaving its artistic completion to man." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 134]

This "organisation of labour touches only such labours as others can do for us. . . the rest remain egoistic, because no one can in your stead elaborate your musical compositions, carry out your projects of painting, etc.; nobody can replace Raphael's labours. The latter are labours of a unique person, which only he is competent to achieve." [Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 268] Stirner goes on to ask "for whom is time to be gained [by association]? For what does man require more time than is necessary to refresh his wearied powers of labour? Here Communism is slient." He then answers his own question by arguing it is gained for the individual "[t]o take comfort in himself as unique, after he has done his part as man!" [Op. Cit., p. 269] Which is exactly what Kropotkin also argued:

"He [sic!] will discharge his task in the field, the factory, and so on, which he owes to society as his contribution to the general production. And he will employ the second half of his day, his week, or his year, to satisfy his artistic or scientific needs, or his hobbies." [Conquest of Bread, p. 111] Thus, while authoritarian Communism ignores the unique individual (and that was the only kind of Communism existing when Stirner wrote his classic book) libertarian communists agree with Stirner and are not silent. Like him, they consider the whole point of organising labour as the means of providing the individual the time and resources required to express their individuality. In other words, to pursue "labours of a unique person." Thus all anarchists base their arguments for a free society on how it will benefit actual individuals, rather than abstracts or amorphous collectives (such as "society"). Hence chapter 9 of The Conquest of Bread, "The Need for Luxury" and, for that matter, chapter 10, "Agreeable Work."

Or, to bring this ideal up to day, as Chomsky put it, "[t]he task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realisable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all." [quoted by Albert and Hahnel in Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century, p. 62]

In other words, anarchists desire to organise voluntary workers associations which will try to ensure a minimisation of mindless labour in order to maximise the time available for creative activity both inside and outside "work." This is to be achieved by free co-operation between equals, for while competition may be the "law of the jungle", co-operation is the law of civilisation.

This co-operation is not based on "altruism," but self-interest. As Proudhon argued, "[m]utuality, reciprocity exists when all the workers in an industry instead of working for an entrepreneur who pays them and keeps their products, work for one another and thus collaborate in the making of a common product whose profits they share amongst themselves. Extend the principle of reciprocity as uniting the work of every group, to the Workers' Societies as units, and you have created a form of civilisation which from all points of view - political, economic and aesthetic - is radically different from all earlier civilisations." [quoted by Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, pp. 29-30] In other words, solidarity and co-operation allows us time to enjoy life and to gain the benefits of our labour ourselves - Mutual Aid results in a better life than mutual struggle and so "the association for struggle will be a much more effective support for civilisation, progress, and evolution than is the struggle for existence with its savage daily competitions." [Luigi Geallani, The End of Anarchism, p. 26]

In the place of the rat race of capitalism, economic activity in an anarchist society would be one of the means to humanise and individualise ourselves and society, to move from surviving to living. Productive activity should become a means of self-expression, of joy, of art, rather than something we have to do to survive. Ultimately, "work" should become more akin to play or a hobby than the current alienated activity. The priorities of life should be towards individual self-fulfilment and humanising society rather than "running society as an adjunct to the market," to use Polanyi's expression, and turning ourselves into commodities on the labour market. Thus anarchists agree with John Stuart Mill when he wrote:

"I confess I am not charmed with an ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress." [Collected Works, vol. III, p. 754] The aim of anarchism is far more than the end of poverty. Hence Proudhon's comment that socialism's "underlying dogma" is that the "objective of socialism is the emancipation of the proletariat and the eradication of poverty." This emancipation would be achieved by ending "wage slavery" via "democratically organised workers' associations." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 57 and p.62] Or, in Kropotkin's words, "well-being for all" -- physical, mental and moral! Indeed, by concentrating on just poverty and ignoring the emancipation of the proletariat, the real aims of socialism are obscured. As Kropotkin argued:

"The 'right to well-being' means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the 'right to work' only means the right to be a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter into possession of it." [The Conquest of Bread, p. 44] Combined with this desire for free co-operation is a desire to end centralised systems. The opposition to centralisation is often framed in a distinctly false manner. This can be seen when Alex Nove, a leading market socialist, argues that "there are horizontal links (market), there are vertical links (hierarchy). What other dimension is there?" [Alex Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, p. 226] In other words, Nove states that to oppose central planning means to embrace the market. This, however, is not true. Horizontal links need not be market based any more than vertical links need be hierarchical. But the core point in his argument is very true, an anarchist society must be based essentially on horizontal links between individuals and associations, freely co-operating together as they (not a central body) sees fit. This co-operation will be source of any "vertical" links in an anarchist economy. When a group of individuals or associations meet together and discuss common interests and make common decisions they will be bound by their own decisions. This is radically different from a a central body giving out orders because those affected will determine the content of these decisions. In other words, instead of decisions being handed down from the top, they will be created from the bottom up.

So, while refusing to define exactly how an anarchist system will work, we will explore the implications of how the anarchist principles and ideals outlined above could be put into practice. Bear in mind that this is just a possible framework for a system which has few historical examples to draw upon as evidence. This means that we can only indicate the general outlines of what an anarchist society could be like. Those seeking "recipes" and exactness should look elsewhere. In all likelihood, the framework we present will be modified and changed (even ignored) in light of the real experiences and problems people will face when creating a new society.

Lastly we should point out that there may be a tendency for some to compare this framework with the theory of capitalism (i.e. perfectly functioning "free" markets or quasi-perfect ones) as opposed to its reality. A perfectly working capitalist system only exists in text books and in the heads of ideologues who take the theory as reality. No system is perfect, particularly capitalism, and to compare "perfect" capitalism with any system is a pointless task. In addition, there will be those who seek to apply the "scientific" principles of the neo-classical economics to our ideas. By so doing they make what Proudhon called "the radical vice of political economy", namely "affirming as a definitive state a transitory condition -- namely, the division of society intto patricians and proletares." [System of Economical Contradictions, p. 67] Thus any attempt to apply the "laws" developed from theorising about capitalism to anarchism will fail to capture the dynamics of a non-capitalist system (given that neo-classical economics fails to understand the dynamics of capitalism, what hope does it have of understanding non-capitalist systems which reject the proprietary despotism and inequalities of capitalism?).

John Crump stresses this point in his discussion of Japanese anarchism:

"When considering the feasibility of the social system advocated by the pure anarchists, we need to be clear about the criteria against which it should be measured. It would, for example, be unreasonable to demand that it be assessed against such yardsticks of a capitalist economy as annual rate of growth, balance of trade and so forth . . . evaluating anarchist communism by means of the criteria which have been devised to measure capitalism's performance does not make sense . . . capitalism would be . . . baffled if it were demanded that it assess its operations against the performance indicators to which pure anarchists attached most importance, such as personal liberty, communal solidarity and the individual's unconditional right to free consumption. Faced with such demands, capitalism would either admit that these were not yardsticks against which it could sensibly measure itself or it would have to resort to the type of grotesque ideological subterfuges which it often employs, such as identifying human liberty with the market and therefore with wag slavery. . . The pure anarchists' confidence in the alternative society they advocated derived not from an expectation that it would quantitatively outperform capitalism in terms of GNP, productivity or similar capitalist criteria. On the contrary, their enthusiasm for anarchist communism flowed from their understanding that it would be qualitatively different from capitalism. Of course, this is not to say that the pure anarchists were indifferent to questions of production and distribution . . . they certainly believed that anarchist communism would provide economic well-being for all. But neither were they prepared to give priority to narrowly conceived economic expansion, to neglect individual liberty and communal solidarity, as capitalism regularly does." [Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan, pp. 191-3] As Kropotkin argued, "academic political economy has been only an enumeration of what happens under the . . . conditions [of capitalism] -- without distinctly stating the conditions themselves. And then, having described the facts [academic neo-classical economics usually does not even do that, we must stress, but Kropotkin had in mind the likes of Adam Smith and Ricardo, not modern neo-classical economics] which arise in our societies under these conditions, they represent to use these facts as rigid, inevitable economic laws." [Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 179] So, by changing the conditions we change the "economic laws" of a society and so capitalist economics is not applicable to post (or pre) capitalist society (nor are its justifications for existing inequalities in wealth and power).

Notes et references

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Difference between revisions of "FAQAnar:I.4 - Comment une Ã©conomie anarchiste fonctionnerait-elle ?"

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