Foundations of an anarcho-communist economy

By A. Dauphin-Meunier

Foreword

All political and social movements, even the most radical and advanced ones, have reactionary and conservative aspects. But while the conservatism of ultramontane sectors that turn their backs on the future and worship the past and its ideas and institutions is logical and understandable, the conservatism of ideological groups that have set their sights on a future order that is completely incompatible with the present reality is not.

Let us say bluntly that anarchism, not as a social doctrine with broad perspectives, but as an organic and active movement, also carries in its core a good dose of conservative sentiment. For those who want to perpetuate institutions are just as conservative as those who seek to perpetuate dogmas.

Social theories are not preserved intellectual products, but living bodies that wrinkle and fade in museums and need the ozonated air of the street for their development and enrichment. None of the great anarchist theorists, from Proudhon to Malatesta, including Bakunin, Reclus, and Kropotkin, thought, when formulating their ideas, of turning them into a kind of intangible decalogue insensitive to life experiences. Anarchists who interpret anarchism with the inflexibility of believers in the Bible are fanatics of yet another sect, but not true revolutionaries. It is not possible to revolutionize, that is, to transform and transform oneself, by clinging to modified things and principles, however venerable they may be. Anarchism must be a movement that is always youthful, agile, current, and timely (not opportunistic) in its manifestations. It must be nourished, vitalized, and invigorated by the experiences of everyday life, which is living history. It must be theoretically and practically activist and creative.

The doctrinal legacy of our great masters is rich; but, apart from the fact that, as a product of other times and circumstances, it cannot fully respond to the theoretical and tactical demands of the present, is it not also humiliating to live servilely and exclusively off that legacy, like the lazy and incapable young master who lives off his inherited fortune?

Fortunately, there is no shortage of anarchist militants today who understand the creative and renewing needs of the libertarian movement in each era. Our friend A. Dauphin-Meunier, author of this pamphlet, is one of those modern and dynamic militants who, with great zeal and preparation, have undertaken the task of uprooting the backward prejudices that flourish in our field. Let those who like ineffable nebulosities and golden abstractions continue to intoxicate themselves with them. We young militants do not want metaphysics. Convinced that we are living in an essentially positive historical moment, we believe it is essential to give solid foundations and well-defined forms to our practical aspirations, and above all, we believe that we must not leave to chance or to a chaotic “do whatever you want!” the social structuring of a future that must be ours and that could be ruined by incompetence and lack of foresight.

Dauphin-Meunier is right to point out the importance of technical and administrative preparation for a movement such as ours, which aims to radically transform the legal foundations of society. He is right to talk about the organizations necessary for the revolutionary proletariat to control and direct the production process. He is right to highlight the revolutionary-constructive importance of cooperatives, unions, industry federations, and factory councils. And the militants and organizations of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement will do well to take advantage of, expand upon, and apply these councils and guidelines to reality.

V. Orobón Fernández

I

Principles and their consequences

It seems significant to us that, for a long time, most of the propagandists of Anarchy have been poets, writers, and artists, rather than engineers or specialized technicians. This fact is perhaps due to the exaggerated importance that some of our theorists have given to acts of individual rebellion, which are very likely to enthuse such nervous and emotional beings as writers or painters;
and it is to the frequency of such acts of rebellion, too hastily christened with the name of “propaganda by deed,” that we attribute the sympathy shown toward the libertarian agitation of 1880 to 1900 by the world of letters and the arts. Unfortunately, the propagandists recruited from their ranks have developed, with varying degrees of tact depending on their own temperament, the abstract and metaphysical aspects of our doctrines, and often, in their passion for originality and their disinterested worship of new ideas, they have lost sight of the guiding principles of anarchism, causing deviations. The result, particularly in Italy and France, has been disastrous. Some have forgotten that anarchism is primarily a social movement and an essentially lib, revolutionary doctrine. Others, under the pretext of individual emancipation, have defended class domination.

If there had been a greater number of anarchists accustomed to studying and solving practical questions and economic problems; if, instead of launching into philosophical investigations, which are inaccessible to the majority, the militants had examined the reorganization of wage labor in each major category of enterprises; if they had prepared, within their sphere, for workers to gain access to the technical management of factories, our movement would not be in its current state of stagnation. It would be progressing instead of stagnating, as is currently the case. The difficulties of the present moment, which could not have been foreseen in programs dating back forty or even eighty years, such as those of Proudhon and Kropotkin, would have been given adequate, effective solutions, increasing our influence within working-class circles and enhancing our prestige among the general public.

The man in the street, the average man, in 1930, no longer asks: Who are you fighting against?

Having initiated, after the war, the process of a regime that has reneged on all its promises and overwhelms him with payments in kind and taxes, he now demands of those who present themselves as his defenders: "What do you propose? The house is uninhabitable and the owner is hated; once he has been thrown out and the old building demolished, how will the new house be arranged?"

It is a futile task to constantly assert oneself against the bourgeoisie and the state, when both are condemned without remission even by their own supporters. On the contrary, it is essential to specify how their shortcomings will be remedied and what form of collective organization, production, and consumption will replace the capitalist system. Now, this is essentially a technical matter; in no way does it belong to the realm of utopia and imagination. The old Italian militant Enrico Malatesta pointed this out very rightly when he recently wrote that it should no longer be a question for anarchists aware of their historical role to condemn the current functioning of the postal and telegraph service as defective, but rather to seek the means to reorganize it in accordance with libertarian principles.

What constitutes, in our view, the superiority of anarcho-syndicalists over other militant workers is that, despite the lack of general culture of most of them, by the very force of circumstances they are technicians. Certain unionized metalworkers know perfectly well that affinity groups, with variable capital and personnel, without cohesive discipline, would be incapable of producing castings or iron bars in a manner that would satisfy the needs of the market; something that a theorist like Grave, who has lost all contact with the living world for twenty years, will never understand.
When Bernard, Rocker, and Santillán deal with the difficulties that concern them, they may not always come up with the ideal solution, but their solution is almost always the best because it comes from thoughtful men, from technicians who know from experience what they are dealing with. It is for the same reason that in England most experts in industrial or mining matters are chosen, in most cases—and by the employers themselves—from among the officials of the trade unions.

In investigating the foundations of an anarcho-communist economy, we will not make any statement of principles. Anarchist principles are known to all; they are amply expounded in the works of Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin. They have even been subjected to the wise philosophical and legal criticism of the late German professor Eltzbacher, a criticism that we gladly recommend to our readers. We will study here only the practical consequences, rather than the adaptation to the demands of modern life.

And here a difficulty arises.

We will inevitably be accused of revisionism in this regard.

Because the consequences we draw from the principles in 1930 are, in certain respects, different from those that could have been deduced in 1890 or 1852, this will be used as a pretext to consider us heretics.

Such an accusation is completely unfounded. There is never a solution that is valid for all times and all countries. Different civilizations and new situations require different means. Who cannot see, for example, that the tactics of the Gandhists in British India, which seem to us to be particularly appropriate to the case that motivates them, could not be followed against their rulers by English miners or by the dockworkers of the port of Barcelona? Who is unaware that the facts of international politics in 1913 are no longer to be found today, where even problems as seemingly old as those of national minorities (Catalonia, Hungary, Macedonia) have been reversed or transformed?

The practical consequences of anarchist doctrines are therefore only relative and essentially subject to revision. This is, moreover, what the Congress of Belgian anarchists in Charleroi had already stated very clearly in 1904: "Scientifically, anarchism is a direct consequence of the demonstration of biological transformism... It is closely related to the contemporary scientific movement. It is certainly the most accurate sociological expression of the truth appropriate to our era (in all fields: scientific, economic, political, and moral), of which, in the final analysis, anarchists are merely the popularizers."

II

Is anarchism a liberal or socialist doctrine?

One of our most immediate tasks, in our opinion, is to definitively situate anarchism among economic and social doctrines, clarifying certain aspects and revising others in light of postwar phenomena.

However, in order to carry out this revision, it is not necessary to eliminate any of the essential ideas of our precursors, but rather to organize and classify them.

We must know who we are and where we are going. We must remind others, as well as ourselves, of the principles that inspire us and for which we fight. And in the social struggle, in the fight against the bourgeoisie, whether conservative or socialist, we have an urgent duty to keep our eyes fixed on our banner.

First of all, is anarchism a socialist doctrine?

Socialism is generally opposed to liberalism.
The latter is supposed to defend capitalism, favor individual property, and the hoarding by a minority of the wealth produced by all, while socialism has the historical mission of taking up the defense of the oppressed, criticizing private property, and spreading among the masses the hope of an emancipatory revolution, a prelude to communism. Because certain socialists, moved by the misdeeds of the current property regime, denounced that regime and called for its disappearance, it came to be believed that all socialists were hostile to the bourgeoisie and that opponents of private property had to be socialists. For this reason, no doubt, anarchism, a communist doctrine, has been classified among socialist theories.

However, nothing could be more erroneous. One can be a socialist and extol private property; one can be a socialist and consciously favor despotism. Was it not Rodbertus, the father of socialism, who inspired Bismarck to take measures to contain proletarian demands and consolidate Prussian hegemony? Was it not he who said that property should not be abolished, because “there is so much right mixed in with what is contrary to right that true property would rebel if false property were immediately seized upon”? And was it not Lasalle, founder of the General German Workers' Association, who declared to the workers of Berlin: “No worker should forget that all legally acquired property is absolutely just and intangible”?

Liberalism, for its part, defends itself against being an invariably reactionary doctrine. Bastiad himself, the optimistic representative of bourgeois economics, demonstrates that communism will be realized by progress when science has given free labor all its strength. In his Harmonies he exclaims: "Communists! Do you dream of community? You have it! The social order makes all common utilities free, provided that the exchange of appropriate values is free." The adoption or non-acceptance of private property is therefore not the criterion of liberalism or socialism. What forever separates these two doctrines is their conception of the functions of the state.

Liberalism seeks to limit as much as possible the intervention of the state in social agreements and relations; it seeks to develop personal initiative and ensure the well-being of all through the natural play of economic forces. Socialism, on the contrary, wants the state to concentrate all political power in its agencies; it distrusts the spontaneous activity of individuals; it is skeptical of the creative and organizing power of the working masses, and therefore demands that only the state assume responsibility for satisfying the needs of all.

Anarchism is not socialist because it rejects the state, rejects monopolies, accepts the harmony of economic forces, and exalts individual initiative. It is a liberal doctrine; but because it arose from the people, whose faith it upholds, it is also revolutionary: that is why those who call it a libertarian (liberal-revolutionary) doctrine are right, to distinguish it less from bourgeois liberalism than from socialism, in its different aspects.

The efforts of a Rist to establish that anarchism is a curious fusion of liberalism and socialism, or those of an E. Holevy to prove that it is a reaction against bourgeois liberalism, only show that these authors have not discovered the criterion that allows us to separate the two doctrinal currents that for two centuries have condemned or supported the state.

This is further proven by the epic struggles of our precursors against socialism. Stirner and Proudhon engage in combat, and the latter declares: “Socialism is nothing, has been nothing, and will never be anything.”

For thirty years, Bakunin engaged Marx in a terrible hand-to-hand combat. No one rejoiced as much as Kropotkin at the failures of socialism. And in 1919, our Gustavo Landaür fell under the bullets of the socialist Hoffman.

III

We have said that it is necessary to organize the elements of anarchism. But this task is impossible if we are inspired by authoritarian and materialistic state socialism, since doing so would confuse the very basis of this organization. If, on the contrary, we evoke the mother ideas of liberalism, all our principles are linked and unified.

First: Bakunin's faith in natural laws, his respect for science, his vigorous optimism, vividly recall the confidence of the physiocrats, the founders of liberalism, in the immanent justice and goodness of nature.

The revolutionaries of the 19th century, like the economists of the 18th century, believe in the evidence of rules that are superior and prior to man. “In the face of natural laws,” says Bakunin, “the only freedom possible for man is to recognize them and apply them more and more.” Dupont de Nemours wrote 150 years earlier: “There is a natural and irrefutable judge of the sovereign's orders themselves: it is the evidence of their conformity or opposition to natural laws.”

Second: The law of solidarity, so masterfully expounded by Kropotkin in Mutual Aid, was discovered by Bastiat. “Everyone benefits from the progress of each individual, and each individual benefits from the progress of all,” he said.

Third: The idea of the subordination of the producer to the consumer, which clearly differentiates our doctrine from syndicalism, likening it to cooperativism, has also been taken from liberalism.

Fourth: The principle of free association comes, in short, not only from the law of solidarity, but also from the observation of the natural play of economic forces.

Presenting an excellent concise summary of revolutionary liberalism, Proudhon wrote in General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century: "The division of labor, collective strength, competition, exchange, credit, property itself², and freedom these are the true economic forces, the immaterial principles of all wealth, which, without chaining man to man, leave the producer complete freedom, lighten his work, double his product, create among men a solidarity that is entirely impersonal, and unite them with bonds stronger than all sympathetic combinations and all contracts."

Although liberals have often adopted the epithet individualists to express their opposition to socialists, and although these two terms are therefore synonymous, we cannot say that anarchism is individualistic. Of course, as a liberal doctrine, it is, both from an economic and a philosophical point of view. Does it not consider man as having his own end in himself and as unique? If the word “individualist” has retained its full meaning in philosophical language, on the other hand it has acquired a meaning that is too vague; it even sometimes serves to indicate the opposite of what it means. When individualism is understood as the pursuit of selfish happiness as the motive for economic policy, it can be admitted that a socialist is an individualist, and we fall back into the confusion we wish to avoid.

Furthermore, if theorists such as Kropotkin and Cornelissen fought against individualism around 1890, it was because a certain category of people who were unconcerned with true individualism were then designated as individualists, claiming for themselves the freedom to deny it to others, systematically destroying workers' organizations in the name of the worker's so-called right to allow his comrades to be exploited, renouncing his class in order to better abuse it.

In order to unmask these perfidious adversaries, our precursors had to reconcile themselves with public opinion, hiding their own individualist nature and leaving their enemies with a name they did not deserve. Because there are not two schools of anarchism: one liberal (individualist) and the other socialist.

When libertarians call themselves socialists, they use this term in the general, improper sense of “enemies of private property” in order to make themselves better understood by the masses. In fact, they are as little socialist as the Bolsheviks are communist. But no one is unaware that the labels given by some ignorant people and accepted by all are misleading. However, the meaning of words changes over time, and in less than a century anarchists (revolutionary liberals), while retaining an unchanging doctrine, have been successively called mutualists, collectivists, communists, libertarians, while their socialist adversaries called themselves communists, social democrats, collectivists, Bolsheviks, communists, without really being so. Only the German and French libertarian communists have the honor of having officially earned their title of communists.

Every doctrine needs precise terminology. It is time to give the words we use in our propaganda an exact meaning and scope.

***

Revolutionary liberalism, anarchism, leads to communism. But this communism differs from that advocated by socialists in that it is pragmatic, scientific, and alive. Anarcho-communism cannot, of course, be a negative and purely destructive theory. Since capitalism and its accessories (state, homeland, religion) are discredited and fading away, anarchism must now be a doctrine of scientific organization.

After the world crisis, the mentality of young anarchists must be the same as that of the Saint-Simonians in the aftermath of imperial catastrophes. Its characteristics: realism, observation, and intuition of economic trends; fruitful participation in industrial enterprises; incessant activity within proletarian organizations to make them factors of material and moral progress. Technicians, agitators, practitioners. No dreamers or poets. Above all, no poets!

IV

Consumer cooperatives and anarchists

The war and the postwar period have presented anarchists with new problems that they must solve as best they can, in a concrete way, if they want to retain the sympathy of the working class. They need to be more builders than destroyers, and to do this they must modify not so much their doctrine as a certain way of approaching and practicing it.

The revolutionary experiences of recent years have shown them that when social upheavals occur, it is as essential to use as it is to create, and that a communist regime cannot develop if it did not already have deep roots within capitalist society.

Hence the need for anarchists to examine, starting today, economic trends and to clearly define the attitude to be adopted towards organizations whose ideology is close to their own.

The anarchist economy is essentially a consumer economy, but one of consumers who are aware of their rights and responsibilities, of mutualist consumers. On the other hand, cooperators declare that through mutual aid and free contract, needs can be equitably satisfied.

Furthermore, the 1912 statutes, established by the delegates of the Cooperative Union of French Consumer Societies, state that “the aim of cooperation is to replace the current cooperative and capitalist system with a system in which production is organized with a view to the consumer community and not for profit.” This reveals a fairly close relationship between anarchism and cooperation.

Consumer cooperatives, which play a key role in the daily struggle waged by consumers against producers and intermediaries, have become formidable rivals for the retail trade. In France, where their importance is growing every day, especially in densely populated areas, they have forced certain retailers, cornered by them, to declare bankruptcy and beg for support from the Chambers of Commerce. in other countries, such as England and Hungary, they have in many cases forced small commercial enterprises to abandon working-class areas and take refuge in distant neighborhoods with a variable clientele.

Their purpose is twofold: first, to increase the well-being of consumers by focusing on the quality, nature, and proper weight of the products sold, and by reserving for them a portion of the profits that would otherwise go to opportunistic middlemen. Second, it is to promote the social emancipation of manual and intellectual workers, to abolish capitalist patronage, and to eliminate commercial profit by returning the excess perceived in the form of more or less direct refunds.

There is no country today where anarchists, applying the precepts of their theorists and the decisions of their congresses, do not effectively contribute to consumer cooperatives. Unfortunately, the principle of collective responsibility is not universally recognized by them; hence, their contribution to cooperation is often more individual than collective, more sporadic than widespread.

We will try to outline the broad lines of their conduct and promote the foundations of their common tactics.

Contrary to the way capitalist enterprises operate, the internal organization of consumer cooperatives is frankly democratic. The cooperators meet in general assemblies, where they discuss the general progress of affairs and financial results. In this way, they are led to learn about the technical, commercial, and financial management of a company and to acquire knowledge that will be indispensable in a communist society. In this way, they can realize a fact that we are only pointing out now and to which we will have the opportunity to return more extensively: namely, that under current conditions of modern technology, an anarcho-communist regime will not be able to immediately implement in its entirety the well-known principle of “to each according to his needs,” and that only the most pressing and urgent needs (housing, milk, bread, work clothes) can be met free of charge and for all categories of the population.

This democratization of cooperatives, precisely to the extent that their economic importance and success increase, is opposed by what has sometimes been called “the personnel problem.” On the one hand, the administrators of a cooperative, and especially those of a federation of cooperatives, a cooperative bank, or a cooperative wholesale store, are inclined to abuse the authority entrusted to them and to act, both towards their subordinate employees and towards shareholders, as if they were true capitalist employers.
on the other hand, the members of the junior staff (managers, salespeople, clerks, and bookkeepers), by forming unions, block each other, constitute a parasitic organization within the cooperative, and deliberately sacrifice the interests of the cooperators to their own demands. For this reason, the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives of Germany and the Dutch cooperative Valharding have had to ask themselves on several occasions whether it would not be advisable to take measures to ensure that there is always a sufficient number of independent members at general meetings, rather than “workers” from the staff, and that the latter are deprived of the right to be members of the cooperative.

In light of these facts, anarchists have an immediate task: they must, within the cooperatives, educate themselves technically so that they are in a position to manage, either now or in the aftermath of a victorious revolution, the commercial organizations responsible for supplying the population, in order to prevent the latter from falling prey to profiteers and counterrevolutionary saboteurs; they must also work to ensure that the democratization of cooperatives continues to expand and that the difficulties raised by managers and minor staff are smoothed out, without resorting to draconian measures against either group.

V

Consumer cooperatives and joint purchasing groups

In many regions of Europe, particularly those where economic progress is slow and consumers have not yet become sufficiently aware of their

strength and interests, there are, so to speak, no consumer cooperatives.

Wherever possible, anarchists have founded and continue to found joint purchasing groups, eliminating intermediaries and thus entering into direct contact with producers and certain consumer circles, with variable capital and unpaid, benevolent staff. This is a laudable undertaking, but it cannot yield interesting results unless these purchasing groups are transformed into cooperatives, that is, into organizations with sufficient financial resources, good technical management, and regional and international relations that allow them to compete seriously with retail and wholesale trade.

When, on the other hand, anarchists form joint purchasing groups in a locality where a cooperative already exists, they do harm, since their activity can only weaken and restrict that of the cooperative. In this way, they work against the goal they are pursuing.

We are certainly not unaware of the arguments that may be raised against us in this regard. Certain anarchists claim that by forming purchasing groups under their direct and exclusive control, even if this is in competition with a prosperous cooperative, they are creating revolutionary economic institutions capable of demonstrating that our doctrine can be put into practice immediately and also providing subsidies for our propaganda. They add that most consumer cooperatives are today run by petty bourgeois and socialists, and serve only to consolidate the positions of the middle classes; and, consequently, the place of true revolutionaries is not there.

They are mistaken. It is not by deliberately abandoning cooperatives to reformists and petty bourgeois that the political and social ideal of cooperators will be transformed, nor is it in this way that cooperatives will become instruments of revolution;
it is not by founding ephemeral groups, incapable of resisting retail and wholesale trade for long and victoriously, that anarchists will establish their understanding of modern economic needs and requirements. In addition, alongside each cooperative, there are circles of cooperators whose purpose is precisely to provide social education for their members. These circles are open to everyone, as long as they are members of a cooperative, whatever their political convictions may be. It is there that anarchists must act to unmask political reformism and combat the customs and habits of the petty bourgeoisie. There is no need to destroy what exists if it is not replaced by something superior.

But by creating where the need is felt, and by strengthening a local cooperative organization elsewhere, anarchists help consumers, workers, and peasants to combat the rising cost of goods sold by retailers. Furthermore, as this organization expands, it will be compelled to join with others, to merge into a federation large enough to compete with wholesalers and extend, often beyond expectations, the scope of its beneficial action. This is how cooperation establishes wholesale stores that purchase goods directly by their own means, no longer on the local or national market, but on the world market, to resell them to member cooperatives at cost price and, thus, can diminish the power, even ruin, the “mammoths” of international trade.

When these “mammoths” try to hinder the progress of cooperative wholesale stores (Cooperative Wholesale Society), they come out of it so badly that they end up giving up their attempts. This is what happened to the German specialty food “cartel” when it came into conflict with the German wholesale warehouse in Hamburg; to the Finnish warehouse trust when it confronted the one in Helsingfors; the English soap trust, when it clashed with the Manchester trust; the Danish cement trust, when it came up against the Copenhagen trust; the footwear, chocolate, flour and bakers' trusts, when they tried to stand in the way of the Swiss Cooperative Union of Basel. (A. Daudé Bancel.)

The activity of consumer cooperatives during the world war clearly indicates the path they will take to achieve their goal in the aftermath of the revolution.

They must completely replace private trade, both wholesale and retail, and methodically supply the rebellious populations. Experience alone will undoubtedly indicate the different tasks they will have to perform and the appropriate measures to be taken for their proper functioning. The methods of distributing goods, the ways of expropriating merchants, and the manner of fulfilling their role in economic life will be established according to circumstances, locations, and customs.

A single condition will be indispensable for the development of this new activity of the cooperatives: it will be necessary that, from the day after the Revolution, the immediate appetites of the populations be satisfied and that a certain improvement in well-being be spread if public sympathy for the communist regime is to be maintained.

This will be the first revolutionary task of the cooperatives and, in truth, it is a crucial task. The cooperatives will also establish direct relations with the producers' unions, which are necessary for supplying the population. Experience will indicate the modalities of these relations, but they must be as close as possible so that nothing hinders the satisfaction of needs.
Organized producers must understand that, in the words of Kropotkin, “the most advantageous use of all products is that which satisfies the most pressing needs.”

VI

Cooperative production associations

Production cooperatives were originally formed to combat the Siveating-System that prevailed in certain branches of industry in order to provide steady employment for workers who were victims of a lockout or dismissed as a result of an unsuccessful strike. Thus, for example, from 1870 to 1874, British trade unions devoted more than £60,000 to the establishment of cooperative workshops, intended to employ dismissed workers and persecuted propagandists.

The advantages of workers' production associations have been expounded countless times, even if they have been expounded more by theorists than by men with practical experience of industry.

It has been argued that by being their own masters in the workshops, participating in technical discussions and the general conduct of business, and electing their own managing directors, cooperative workers became their own employers and learned to perform the functions of technical directors or small capitalist business owners.

On the other hand, the constant progress made by consumer cooperatives has prompted certain cooperators, especially those who have been designated as Members of the School of Nimes and whose theorist is Charles Gide, professor at the Collège de France, to consider the growing connection between production and consumer cooperatives. They have estimated that on the day when consumers were both owners of the distribution and production of goods, profit and interest, that is, the tithes extracted by contractors and capitalists, would disappear.

But...

But despite these theoretical advantages, what are the disadvantages of production cooperatives?

Allow us to recall a personal memory. We participated, as legal advisor, in the founding of a metalworkers' cooperative in the Paris region. This cooperative was made up of selected workers, each specialized in their own field, who had demonstrated unprecedented dedication in other organizations and who possessed a small amount of capital that allowed them to avoid, at least in the beginning, the tutelage of banks or creditors. They had appointed as their advisor one of Hungary's most renowned engineers, who, among other things, was the inventor of a semi-diesel engine currently in use in French aviation and had been one of the most brilliant defenders of the Hungarian Commune in 1919. This cooperative therefore possessed factors for success to a degree rarely achieved. However, after a few months, in order to avoid complete failure, it was necessary to transform it first into a limited partnership, then into a joint-stock company. The fact is that the associated producers encountered, as they always have, difficulties that were not easy to overcome, both psychological and economic.

A business of this kind requires workers to impose on themselves a much stricter and more rigid discipline than that which exists in similar capitalist establishments. There is no longer any place here for the eight-hour day and regular Sunday rest, because it is necessary by all means to make up for the absence of fixed and circulating capital (money, machinery, raw materials, and semi-finished products).
On the other hand, wages, which are the same for everyone, cannot exceed the average level of wages on the labor market, lest the enterprise be ruined from the outset by an increase in overhead costs.

Furthermore, since the transition from wage labor to free labor does not take place without friction, this gives rise to arguments among the associates; and it happens that the enterprise ultimately rests on a single man of superior abilities, who sacrifices himself entirely for his companions without any material reward or moral satisfaction. The other partners, in fact, do not fully appreciate the efforts of that man, since manual workers never appreciate the true value of management work, which is entirely cerebral and does not produce symptoms that are easily observable by simple people.

Let us add, on the other hand, that in most branches of production, those that require heavy machinery, a useful development of production cooperatives cannot be foreseen. It would be foolish, in fact, to imagine that a railway workers' cooperative would be able to compete effectively with the Orient Express Company or the Spanish General Railway Company.

This is why the production cooperatives that have managed to survive and develop are either confined to small-scale industry, which requires modest capital and skills (bakeries, clothing manufacturers, chocolate makers, carpenters), or are forced to resort to practices that run counter to the initial objective of the enterprise.

Thus, we see that the French cooperative of the Au Bon Marché stores employs salaried staff, paid by the month, week, or hour, who do not participate in any way in the profits made by the company; it also buys most of the products it sells from women who are shamefully exploited by the Siveating-System, that is, by a procedure condemned by both economists and philanthropists.

For this reason, we can only consider production cooperatives as a secondary experiment, which is not destined to become widespread and is incapable in all cases of promoting free labor on a large scale.

Production cooperatives are not condemned by anarchists from a doctrinal and utopian point of view, but because they are contrary to the fundamental data of the modern economy.

VII

Public services and state-owned enterprises

As autonomous feudal institutions disappear in a nation and the wheels of central public administration turn, there is a corresponding increase in state interference in enterprises. The authority and interests of the oligarchs and local administrators are gradually, and apparently definitively, replaced by the powers and interests of the central government and its officials. Soon, the latter are no longer content to remain confined to the political sphere: they take on an economic role and exert their influence over production and trade. Private industrial companies came under the control of the state, which thus changed from being a policeman to being an employer. Alongside private capitalist companies, there are now state-owned companies, whose aims are undoubtedly fiscal, but most of which are officially intended to meet the fundamental needs of the community (rail and maritime transport, postal and telegraph services, road administration).

It is well known that bourgeois economists and captains of industry have not spared their criticism of state-owned enterprises.
They have argued in particular that the administration of public services by the state was more costly than private administration and even reduced profits to nothing; that government officials lacked initiative and, having no direct interest in reducing overheads or making any improvements, were responsible for a certain reprehensible neglect that is indeed often evident in state-owned enterprises. To these complaints, it can be replied that the state buys its employees in the same labor market as capitalist enterprises and that, consequently, the reproaches directed at its agents can also be logically attributed to other workers; that in most cases, the state must be considerate of the users of these services, on the one hand, of its personnel, on the other hand, satisfying as fully as possible the legitimate demands of the former and the economic claims of the latter, which certainly increases its obligations, but is the expression of a social duty from which it cannot escape, following the example of private capitalists. Finally, let us add that when the latter oppose the state monopoly with the supposed freedom of industries subject to the rules of competition, they are knowingly making an antithesis, since in most cases the branches of production in which the state intervenes are those in which capitalist coalitions (trusts, cartels) are most developed, so that they have no choice but to choose between a state monopoly and a private monopoly. On the other hand, when industrialists and financiers have absolute control of a nation, they concentrate both political and economic power in their hands, retaining for themselves or taking back from the state the administration of public services and monopolies, as in fascist Hungary, where the Dutch company Batoafsche Tabak has a monopoly on tobacco, and in Turkey, where the American Turkish Investment Corporation has the exclusive right to manufacture, sell, import, and export matches, to the obvious detriment of the respective states.

Under the influence of statist socialists, for some thirty years now, certain sections of the working population in the main European countries seem to have been in favor of extending state monopolies. In Russia, after the NEP, an economic system based on the preponderance of the state has developed, with the tacit consent of the well-to-do peasants and the effective collaboration of government and union officials, bordering on true state capitalism, in which it is vainly attempted to identify the government with the governed as a whole, the dictatorship of the proletariat with the subjugated proletariat. Anti-statists, liberals, revolutionaries, supporters of industrial democracy, anarcho-communists have always risen up with all their might against this omnipotence of the state and its monopolies. They have observed, for example, with good reason, that from the moment the state takes over multiple industries and monopolizes trade, under control, as in Bolshevik Russia, it is not only the countless multitude of unorganized consumers, but also all the working and peasant producers who fall under the absolute dependence of the central power and suffer the most unbearable tyranny. The discontented, the subversives, the workers suspected of opposition to the regime at the mercy of the employer state, are excluded from their nationalized organizations, thrown out of factories and worksites, and left to misery and hunger.
The employees of state-owned companies are not their owners; they remain excluded from the technical management of the establishments, as when they were in the service of private individuals, and are exploited by the state with the same harshness as by the latter. This explains why a large number of public services have seen offensive and defensive strikes over the last few decades. The strikes by postal workers and railway workers in France, Austria, and Germany have even had international repercussions.

The monopolization of industry and the administration of public services by the state has nothing in common with the communalization of establishments and their exploitation by organized workers of each category, which will take place under an anarcho-communist regime. It is clear that in modern society, public services cannot be normally and regularly administered by groups of benevolent volunteers. Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, based on certain episodes of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Paris Commune, declares that on the day after a possible proletarian insurrection, the victorious rebels ensure, with the help of volunteers, the services of the post office, the inspection of roads and canals, and public transportation. From this, some militants have concluded that in a libertarian regime, affinity groups could, under public control, direct the running of public services. We find this deduction unacceptable. There are enterprises, such as transport, which, by their very nature, can only be national and even international; and it would be tantamount to going against the upward march of progress to entrust to private initiatives those enterprises which have long since ceased to be administered by private individuals for their exclusive benefit, and have been placed under the public control of the residents for the greater good of the community. On the other hand, eager to reject private enterprises in the only categories where the community of unionized workers could not yet assume the risks, anarchists want to increasingly expand the domain of public services, perfecting them through a fundamental transformation of the state from an economic point of view. State-owned enterprises must become community-owned enterprises; and to this end, it is essential that the workers of these enterprises have close ties to them and a strong say in their management. The participation of staff representatives in the management of public enterprises, moreover, must be extended to all categories of staff, from senior employees and engineers to unskilled assistants, in order to be effective.

On the other hand, in order to avoid a slackening of work discipline, which would inevitably arise and could seriously harm users of public services, the management of community-owned companies by unionized staff must be placed under the strict and constant control of the beneficiaries of the service themselves. It would be intolerable, in fact, if the whims of a locomotive engineer, refusing to apply railway regulations and follow the scheduled timetable in the name of his individual freedom, were to result in accidents, the death of passengers, or disruption to commercial operations. This was well understood by the revolutionaries of Central Europe in the aftermath of the war. In Austria in particular, revolutionary socialists have founded community-based companies, such as the huge Vienna Arsenal, where the boards of directors include representatives of the trade unions, company staff, and consumers in cooperatives.

In our view, it is in this latter and excellent form that community enterprises, succeeding state-owned enterprises, will have a future, to the extent that the economic power, intellectual development, and rational and libertarian organization of producers and consumers manage to exert a preponderant influence on the solution of the difficulties raised by the exploitation of public services.

VIII

Anarchism and trade unions

Anarchism presents itself as a general conception of society based on the latest data from economic science. It is a practical as well as an ideological system, since it aims to ensure the happiness of individuals through the methodical application of the latest human inventions. As such, it encompasses all movements that propose a similar goal by appropriate means and that appear to have real experimental value. In the current state of our knowledge, anarchists therefore believe that under the communist regime, cooperatives will be responsible

for distributing wealth, while industrial and agricultural unions will independently manage production. These forms of economic activity will certainly not be eternal; undoubtedly, when progress has surpassed the present stage, they will gradually give way to groups of cultural affinity or cooperatives. But the spirit that will animate these societies will remain the same as today; the libertarian spirit will give ideological unity to those elements of diverse interests.

There are notable similarities between anarchism and syndicalism. Both doctrines claim to be revolutionary, federalist, and hostile to the bourgeoisie and the state; both recognize the existence of class struggles and seek to concentrate workers' activity in order to destroy the capitalist world and establish libertarian communism. The history of the proletarian movement explains the origin of these relationships. The father of anarchism, Proudhon, foresaw the power of trade unions in his General Idea of the Revolution and contributed to the intellectual formation of the founders of workers' organizations. In France, the first secretary of the Bourse du Travail (Federation of Labor Exchanges), Pelloutier, was an anarchist. And in the constitution of the General Confederation of Labor, through the union of the Exchanges and the Federation of Trade Unions, our comrades Yvetot and Pouget, editors of Temps Nouveaux and Le Père Peinard, worked actively. Pelloutier in Organisation Corporative et l'Anarchie, Desalle in L'Action Sindicale et les Anarchistes, demonstrated the identity of certain libertarian and syndicalist aspirations and encouraged their comrades to join the unions. The same thing happened in Spain, where the founders of the CNT were Bakuninists.

Then, as now, anarchists were active revolutionary militants and propagated syndicalist doctrines and postulates. But they did not forget that syndicalism is only one aspect. They did not, therefore, admit that this doctrine could suffice on its own and ensure the total emancipation of workers by its own means. They remained communists. They sought to preserve their independence from the trade union movement and, for these reasons, were able to freely criticize the methods of the unions that they considered incompatible with their own ideology.

Anarchists view trade unions from two perspectives. They believe that they should currently be instruments of proletarian defense and attack, but that after the revolution they will have to be transformed into production organizations. Their present role is to bring together wage earners by industry to enable them to gain knowledge of themselves and their strength and to fight against the employers.

In a libertarian society, unions will bring together workers by profession, endowed with freedom of choice and movement, and thus ensure the manufacture or extraction of wealth.

In industrial unions, anarchists will fight against reformism and the tutelage of political parties.

They understand that unions must strive to improve the conditions of workers within the capitalist system itself. But they do not want this improvement to be achieved by methods that are opposed to the revolutionary goal they are pursuing. A. L. Constandse, editor of the Dutch libertarian newspaper Alarm, has clearly stated that “any improvement in the lot of the exploited makes them anti-revolutionary” and that when the exploited demand partial reforms from their employers, “the aim of the unions is to ensure that all their members work (are exploited) under certain conditions that do not harm capitalism in any way, leaving the workers with the illusion of victory, while these reforms allow them to bear all the burdens and consolidate capitalism.” However, we must not allow workers to become the clients of a demagogic party under the pretext of avoiding reformism. Anarchists staunchly defend trade union autonomy from political parties. And by “political” they mean parties that seek to subordinate economic activity to politics, collaborate openly or not with government authorities, penetrate parliamentary institutions, and win representative positions in the civil institutions of the bourgeoisie, whatever their origins, ideology, and tendencies. They therefore combat socialist or Bolshevik procedures that tend to turn unions into agents of electoral propaganda.

Furthermore, the mission of unions is to destroy, together with the employers, the very apparatus of the state. However, the various political parties proclaim themselves to be supporters of the state, meaning that they want to increase its power or expand its operations and oppressive machinery. In doing so, they divert proletarian associations from their economic role and turn them into appendages of the state, as can be seen in Russia and Italy, where subjugated unions have become mere government services. Anarchists therefore defend union autonomy, but maintaining this autonomy does not require anarchists to cease playing an active role within workers' associations. That is why anarchists try to steer these groups in an increasingly libertarian direction. This explains why they have guided the revolutionary activity of the Spanish National Confederation of Labor and the Italian Unione Sindicale Italiana; why they still exert a preponderant influence on the CGT in Latin America, on the Freie Allgemeine Arbeiter Union Deutschlands, on the Portuguese CGT, and on the Scandinavian unions.

In 1921, moreover, the International Anarchist Congress in Berlin recommended that comrades join the unions en masse in order to turn them into centers of insurrection and libertarian communism.

The anarchist conception of trade union autonomy helps to understand the importance of the tactic of nucleation. It is sometimes claimed that anarchists reproach the Bolsheviks for forming nuclei in the trade unions, when in fact they themselves apply the same procedures. This is a misguided assertion.
Bolshevik nuclei have a purpose contrary to that of libertarian nuclei. The former bring together within workers' associations all those who support the tutelage of political parties over trade unions; when they are powerful enough, they do everything they can to force the unions to surrender to the party; and if they cannot achieve their goal, they prefer to split the union into rival factions or make it disappear. These practices have led to the breakdown of proletarian unity and the development of fascism. On the contrary, anarchist nuclei aim to intensify federalist, anti-political propaganda within the unions; to maintain ideological and tactical unity; and to improve the economic education of workers. They are essentially factors of unity.

Anarchists are indeed the most active supporters of the reconstitution of trade union unity. But they want it to be established as it was before: on revolutionary and anti-authoritarian bases. They cannot, therefore, accept the formation of trade union unity for the benefit of Amsterdam or Moscow, as they know that it would only serve to develop the power of parliamentary socialism or Russian neo-capitalism. On the one hand, anarchists have reestablished the International Workers' Association (IWA), which brings together all the national trade union federations; on the other hand, in the unions still subject to statist politicians, they intensify their federative, anti-political, libertarian propaganda; they denounce the betrayals of union officials; they create a movement favorable to their aspirations; they constantly provoke congresses where unity is focused on, thus favoring the united front of the workers.

Within the unions, anarchists strive to develop the revolutionary culture of the workers.

To this end, they support all methods indicated by the circumstances to ensure the success of workers' demands and to instill a consciously subversive mentality in organized proletarians. That is why they advocate propaganda by deed, collective terrorism, sabotage on an equal footing with collective violence, armed insurrection, passive resistance, and boycotts on an equal footing with strikes. However, they believe that these different means must be used with tact and prudence. Indeed, it is necessary to hinder and obstruct the employers and the state without alienating public sympathy, diminishing the initiative and enthusiasm of the proletariat, or ruining the trade unions.

Any method, however excellent in theory, that leads to these latter results is reprehensible.

Anarchists also want to educate workers in tactics. It must not be the case that, the day after the revolution, workers find themselves unable to manage production and are forced, in order to survive, to reinstate the oppressors of yesterday. To this end, they must acquire knowledge. The establishment of factory and workshop committees, free from employers, and attendance at technical courses offered by trade unions are powerful factors in the economic education of the proletariat.

IX

Industry federations and trade federations

It was the members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who, some thirty years ago, first had the idea of organizing workers by industry rather than by trade, and of forming industry unions instead of corporate unions.
In this way, they positioned themselves against the Federation of Labor, which then, as now, was imbued with a sordidly reformist and reactionary spirit. The Federation mainly brought together managers and skilled workers. It assured them high wages in exchange for their narrow-mindedness and cordiality toward the capitalists of the trusts and the potentates of big industry, and in particular for their unspeakable maneuvers against foreign or colored workers. It also prohibited blacks and young people from joining its unions or even forming independent associations among themselves, and it demanded and obtained from the U.S. federal government emergency laws against immigrants. It opposed solidarity strikes that could reduce its cash reserves and denounced the leaders of the movement to the courts. Finally, it was inspired by the most petty corporatism, not trade unionism.

The reaction of the IWW was not only political, but above all economic. Undoubtedly, the IWW recruited most of its members from among unskilled laborers and assistants: Jews, Blacks, Italians, and Chinese who rejected, despised, and fought against the leaders of the Federation of Labor. But by forming industry unions rather than craft unions like the Federation, they recognized the economic transformations of industry in its various branches and adapted skillfully. They opposed the growing concentration of industrial employer forces with the concentration of worker forces.

This is how the International Workers' Association (IWA) in Berlin, to which our Spanish CNT belongs, operates. It has proposed as fundamental principles the transformation of existing trade federations into industry federations and the creation of single industry unions in places where they do not yet exist. In Sweden, where trade union ideas find the most lively sympathy, under its impetus the concentration of workers within industry federations is perfect and no local or corporate unions are allowed to survive. This is not entirely the case in Spain and Latin American countries, where, for highly debatable economic and social reasons, industry federations still include autonomous trade unions that have their own treasuries.

Today, factories no longer bring together workers of the same category who use the same procedures and do the same kind of work, as was the case in the artisan workshops and manufacturing plants of yesteryear. Indeed, if we look at what happens in a car factory, for example, we find laminators, millers, winders, electricians, and blacksmiths alongside painters, bodywork specialists, and repairers. Some are specialized in working with steel, others with wood, etc. They all work toward the same goal, the manufacture of automobiles, but through different means, procedures, and jobs. They belong to the same company, but not to the same categories. However, dominated by the same management and subject to the same regulations, these workers are also united by the same community of immediate and long-term interests.

A reduction in wages or a layoff affecting one category of workers will have obvious repercussions on all the other categories. The standard of living of one category determines that of the others. Moreover, in isolation, one category cannot defend itself for long and successfully against possible maneuvers by management. For this reason, defensive or offensive strikes should no longer be localized to a particular branch, but generalized to the entire company. And therefore, workers no longer have to unionize by trade (painters, decorators, electricians, etc.), but by industry (construction, metallurgy, etc.).

Such a development must consequently modify certain workers' demands which, moreover, presented real dangers to public freedoms. For a long time, certain proletarian unions and political parties that claim to be progressive have demanded, for example, “the mine for the miners, the railroad for the railroad workers, etc., etc.”; that is, the appropriation and administration by the workers of the instruments of their labor, under their sole control and for their exclusive benefit. Such demands, if they could ever have been satisfied, would have led to the formation of new privileged castes, classes monopolizing interests necessarily contrary to those of the rest of the population. The concentration of various trades in the same enterprise greatly counteracts these pretensions. Monopoly is essentially opposed to collaboration and mutual aid. However, even under the current greedy and selfish regime, large-scale industry relies on mutual support, which is the basis for the interpretation and connection of trades. That is why one of the demands of modern trade unions and anarchist-communists is no longer the appropriation of companies by their workers, etc., but their administration by all the different categories of workers who contribute to their operation. Anarchists do not demand that workers be absolute owners within their particular field, but rather that, grouped by industry, they form factory committees responsible for administering them under the control of organized producers and consumers, with the national community being the sole legal owner of the factories and workshops. They thus replace corporate objectives with the formula that has now become universally known: All economic power to the factory councils!