Kiev Communard
16th March 2011, 17:56
Recently I have stumbled upon the magnificent book that has greatly increased my opinion of anarcho-syndicalists. Sure, some of their organizations exhibit certain "a-political" tendencies that may inhibit the articulation of their positive program and impede their participation in the political class struggle (the Platformist anarchists are much better in this role) but in the essence the idea of economic re-organization of the society envisaged by classic anarcho-syndicalism (and such "Marxist-Syndicalist" currents as De Leonism and Workers' Opposition in Russia) seems far superior to the Orthodox Marxism of the Second International with its statism that was unfortunately uncritically absorbed by Bolsheviks.
As libcom.org (http://libcom.org/) kindly informs, Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (or Maximov, as we the Eastern Slavs spell our names in Latin letters :D) "was born on November 10, 1893, in the Russian village of Mitushino, province of Smolensk. After studying for the priesthood, he realised this was not his vocation and went to St. Petersburg, where he graduated as an agronomist at the Agricultural Academy in 1915. He joined the revolutionary movement, while a student, was an active propagandist and, after the 1917 revolution, joined the Red Army".
Due to his differences with Bolsheviks he was arrested, and even sentenced to death, but released after the intervention by the local workers' organizations. Later he was an editor of Golos Trouda (Voice of Labour) and Novy Golos Trouda (New Voice of Labour), prominent anarcho-syndicalist papers of the Russian Revolution. After his arrest after Kronstadt Rebellion he was eventually exiled from Soviet Russia and settled in Chicago. His most prominent works include Constructive Anarchism (1952), The Political Philosophy of Bakunin - Scientific Anarchism (1953) and, especially in my view, Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism , the book excerpts of which I would like to cite now, for the comrades - both Marxist and Anarchist - to debate.
The whole book can be reached here (http://libcom.org/library/program-anarcho-syndicalism-g-p-maximoff), while the most interesting chapters dealing with the economic organization of the Communist society are quoted in this post.
From Section 1, The Economy: Chapter 1, The Manufacturing Industry
...In accordance with Revolutionary experience in Russia, the organizational apparatus of syndicalized production must rely on the simplest forms of association, which are intimate and intelligible to the workers; associations rooted in the Revolution and ready to leave production to the direct administration of the workers themselves, e.g. factory-management committees charged with organizing the workers' control of, plants in each locality.
In the interests of the successful realization of Communism in industry, arid of the smooth functioning and efficiency of each production process, as well as to prevent the chance of seizure of individual enterprises for the exclusive private use of those who work there, a system of unification will have to be established. This unification, without destroying the freedom of individual sections, will provide the necessary technical, statistical and administrative links to join all industries and production into one organic whole. (Kropotkin, page 23).
This system has the following categories:
1. The Self-Administered Factory -- producers' commune.
2. The Production Associations of factory communes.
3. The Union of Productive Associations.
4. The General Congress of Labor (Council of People's Economy and Culture).
Production, organized along these lines, will be administered on the principles of committee direction, of broad public control through the general utilization of the principle of the right to recall delegates. As to internal order, the principle of self-discipline will remove the need for all manner of disciplinary institutions.
As the experience of Russia has shown, the task of increasing productivity and the scientific organization of production will demand, as long as the working masses lack scientific and technical knowledge, a broadminded and comprehensive utilization of the technical intelligentsia who will remain as a legacy of the Capitalist structure. Even though the majority of this intelligentsia is immersed in bourgeois tendencies, the interests of the Revolution nevertheless demand that their rights should in no way be limited: equality for all is necessary from the first day of the social upheaval.
Since there is no possibility of immediately establishing full Communism in consumption on the principle: "'to each according to his needs," a number of practical steps will be necessary to lead to its realization.
The first of these is the establishment of the principle: "equal shares for all." Equal sharing, in accordance with increasing production in Syndicalist industry must, little by little, become the normal rule, and gradually facilitate the approach to realizing the axiom: to each according to his needs.
The criterion of the equal share must be the minimum necessary for subsistence, with supplementary allowances for dependents. The size of the ration will grow with the increase in wealth of the national commune. As for handicraft, home industries and small scale industry, the Anarcho-Syndicalists, rejecting the idea of their compulsory integration into large-scale production, will implement the principle of co-operation, granting them full opportunity and freedom of initiative. The Anarcho-Syndicalists strive only for the association of the scattered efforts of individual craftsmen and small enterprises through free cooperatives adapted to their needs, so that they may utilize all the advantages of science and technology....
From Chapter 2. Basic Industry
...The fate of Communism depends to a great extent on agriculture. At the same time, agriculture is the most difficult field for communization. Here the positive aspect of Capitalism, which consists in the mechanization of production and the socialization of labor, is insignificant. For that reason agriculture, in the technical and organizational sense, is the most retarded branch of production. Tens of millions of agricultural units present an unorganized, individualistic, small-ownership element which, apart from its technological backwardness, is an obstacle in the path of Communism which will be difficult to surmount. This fact is tremendously important, since the forms of land ownership and the technique of land cultivation are an indication of the extent and the character of the social reorganization that is possible in a given time.
Capitalism, by uniting individual producers in one enterprise, socializes labor and in this way prepares the ground for the socialization of ownership which inevitably leads to a communization of production. It creates a prototype of the Communist form of organizing labor and ownership -- the factory as the free producer-consumer commune of the future. In manufacturing and in some branches of the primary industries, capitalism has thus already prepared the ground for Communism and the syndicalization of industry by the expropriation of capitalists and the State -- today the imperative and the only feasible solution to the workingman's problem. Socialized labor facilitates this transition to communist 'ownership by way of syndicalization.
The story is far different in agriculture. Here the socializing force of capitalism is insignificant; the small-scale peasant farm is the predominant type of agricultural organization, in which individual ownership and individualized labor are inevitable components. This important fact renders the process of transition of agriculture to communism the opposite to that of industry.
In industry collective labor leads inevitably, through expropriation to collective ownership. In agriculture, collective ownership will lead to collective labor.
Collective ownership in agriculture does not, however, by itself imply collective labor which, in the primitive management conditions of an agricultural economy based on tens of millions of scattered peasant farms, could not to any considerable extent change the conditions necessary for successful production. Collective ownership will lead to collective labor only through a conversion from extensive to intensive agriculture, and a mechanization of farming, replacing the primitive methods of cultivation by those which, by their nature, demand the unification of the working efforts of several members of an agricultural commune. But, since communal habits cannot be altered by decree, and since their transformation depends on the gradual aggregation of insignificant changes, the socialization of labor which would complete the communisation of agriculture will take a considerable period.
...The communization of agriculture, in other words, has two aspects whose emergence does not coincide entirely in terms of time. Hence the Anarcho-Syndicalist program for the communization of agriculture falls into two sections: socialization of land and socialization of labor.
1. Socialization of Land.
1. Complete abolition of ownership in land -- individual, group, co-operative, communal, municipal or State. The land is public property.
2. The fact of socialization will withdraw land from the commodity market; no-one will have the right to buy, sell or rent land or to draw unearned income from it. Everyone will have to work it by personal or co-operative effort.
3. Everyone will have an equal right to an equal area of land and to apply his labor freely to it.
4. The general form of land utilization, and the area to be available for each person's use, will be determined by a National Congress of the Association of Peasant Communes which will form part of the general Confederation of Labor.
5. As in the various branches of industry which will be under the management of the Trade Unions concerned, the land, land management, resettlement and all agricultural matters must be in the hands of the Association of Peasant Communes.
2. Socialization of Labor
1. The socialization of land is an essential precondition for the socialization of labor which would complete the process of communization of agriculture. Only where labor and ownership are both socialized, does die product of labor also become socialized, i.e. full communism becomes a reality.
2. The society that emerges from the Revolution, after it has socialized the manufacturing and in part the basic industries, must seek the methods which will place the agricultural population on an equal, or almost equal, footing with the urban population, since an absence of equilibrium favoring the latter might result in a spontaneous flow of the agricultural population into the cities, which in turn would result in great economic difficulties and the disorganization of the production apparatus.
3. Full harmony of the agricultural regime with the regime of socialized industry is possible only with communism in agriculture. Therefore the organization of farming communes must be on the agenda from the first days of the Revolution.
Proceeding to the organization of communism in agriculture, Anarcho-Syndicalists see progress neither in the destruction of the small peasant farms nor in the establishment of mammoth economic units, and they consider compulsory general labor service a reactionary phenomenon. Instead, they aim at the co-ordination of the labor efforts of small units on a voluntary basis, compatible with the freedom of both the individual and the collectives.
The economic forms of these units would be: (a) co-operative, as most accessible to the consciousness and level of development of the majority of the agricultural population, which in general will be unable to relinquish economic individualism, or (b) communistic, in the form of free agricultural communes which will form part of the entire communistic economy in the same manner and on the same conditions as do the factories.
4. In the interests of efficient production the agricultural communes must not be too large. A normal-sized example would be an association of ten peasant farms of average productive capacity, not including the households, which should remain separate. Depending on varying local conditions the agricultural communes might, and would, consist also of unified settlements, not broken up into farms, as well as of co-operatives.
5. In this manner agriculture in the Transition Period would be run by three fundamental types of economic organization: la) individual, (b) co-operative, and (c) communistic. The predominant type during the first period would doubtless be the individual unit.
6. To make certain that the individual forms of agricultural economy are removed speedily and successfully, thus transforming the entire country into one producer-consumer commune, methods must be sought which by their nature would propel the individualistic elements logically and inevitably on to the path of communism and thus remove the corrupting influences of the individualistic system of agriculture on the socialized economy. These methods should not only lessen the discord between two i ontrasting economic systems, but also establish the harmony essential to the normal development of the process of socializing labor and agriculture. The objective conditions dictate two types of method: (A) a system of offensive measures and (B) a system of defensive measures.
1. System of offensive measures, i.e. measures of direct action towards hastening the socialization of labor in agriculture, consisting of:
1. Socialization without exception of all agricultural units in which labor is already socialized by the process of production itself, owing to mechanization. The inclusion of these units in the general system of communistic economy on the same conditions as the factories.
2. Socialization of all enterprises engaged in the processing of agricultural products and their inclusion in the system of communistic economy on the same conditions as other processing industries.
3. Socialization and co-operation in those branches of agriculture which are closely bound with processing industries, such as sugar, textile, wine, tobacco, etc. and the incorporation of the agricultural communes concerned into the general system of the communistic economy.
4. Socialization of large-scale flour mills and creameries, with their inclusion into the general system of the communistic economy, and the establishment of co-operatives among small flour mills and creameries.
5. Organization of associations for the common cultivation of land.
6. Establishment of new agricultural settlements on the basis of full communism, with their inclusion into the general system of the communistic economy, as well as the organization of new settlements on the basis of associations for the common cultivation of the land.
7. Industrialization of agriculture, i.e. unification of agriculture with industry, by means of the erection in appropriate agricultural areas of industrial enterprises processing agricultural products -- i.e. textiles, sugar, fruit and vegetable canning, tobacco, beer, wine and spirits, starch and molasses, rope and twine, etc. The establishment of composite agro-industrial units, with the industrial enterprise in the center, which, by virtue oi their organization of labor and the connection of the industrial enterprise with the suppliers of raw materials, will be of the following types:
1. Communistic industrial enterprises of the usual kind cooperating with the surrounding individualistic agricultural units on the basis of commercial book-keeping, like the Russian creamery producer co-operatives.
2. Composite agro-industrial units -- as a link in the general communistic economic chain -- which will work seasonally and whose industrial workers will take part in agriculture during the periods of most intensive field labor and whose farm workers will work in industry during the periods of inactivity on the land.
3. Composite units working continuously, where the fields surrounding the enterprise, together with the enterprise itself, are united and labor is organized in such a way that eath member, taking his turn, works definite hours daily in the field\nd in the factory.
2. System of Defensive Measures, i.e. measures of integrating the millions of individualistic units and their reciprocal activities with the communistic economy of the country, consisting primarily of the comprehensive permeation of the system of individualistic units by various types of co-operatives -- credit co-operatives, producers' and subsidiary co-operatives.
The system of defensive measures will belong to the Transition Period and all institutions established in connection therewith will afterwards gradually disappear or will be converted into institutions of the free producer-consumer communes. Hence the co-operatives of the Transition Period cannot be copies of those developing within the limits of the capitalist structure. The interests of the transition to communism demand internal organizational unity, and the fulfillment of complex functions by local collectivities which will be united in their diversity through the process of federalization.
The tasks of the peasant co-operatives in the Transition Period will be to provide the sole liaison between the communistic economy of the country in general and the individualistic agricultural units which it surrounds, to organize for these two divergent economic systems the true and natural financial exchange process, and to convert themselves gradually into the distributing agencies of a unified labor commune.
From Chapter 3. Public Service Industries
VIII. Accountancy -- Banks and Finances.
Accountancy and statistics are very important functions in the proper regulation of relations between production and consumption. Only with the help of statistical data is it possible to determine their necessary equilibrium, and to institute a suitable distribution and exchange organization. Indeed, without statistical data an economic order is impossible. Statistics, therefore, form a vital public service, whose technical discharge will be entrusted to the Central Statistical Bureau at the Bank for Cash-and-Goods Credit, consisting of the directly concerned public services and particularly the services for distribution and exchange.
All existing banks will be socialized and will merge with the Bank for Cash-and-Goods Credit. This, in addition to its statistical functions, will perform all the usual banking operations which, of course, will change in accordance with the new economic structure of the country. The Bank will be the organic liaison between the communistic economy and the individualistic units, particularly the agricultural units, as well as with the individualist world abroad. In the latter case, it will act as the bank for foreign trade.
In the sphere of internal exchange, the bank will be one of the most powerful weapons of communism, influencing individualistic units in the desired direction by means of material and financial credit without interest for the improvement of each unit and the mechanization of farming, which will result in the socialization of rural labor -- the necessary prerequisite for the socialization of agriculture.
The socialization of banks and accountancy must be achieved by their syndicalization, i.e. these public services will be transferred to the management of the workers who operate them, and will be incorporated into the general communistic economic system. With the strengthening of communism, labor will be industrialized and ruralized as in other public services, i.e. it will gradually be organized on the principle of integration.
Money, as a concrete symbol of expended labor, the greatest part of which is now concentrated by means of exploitation in the hands of a few capitalists and States, must be socialized. The socialization of money, i.e. the return to society of the fruits of expended labor, will be possible only in the form of its abolition, without any compensation. The abolition of the monetary token of the old regime is one of the first tasks of the social revolution.
It will be impossible, however, to abolish money entirely in the Transition Period, since some functions, which are dependent on money now, will still continue to operate, even though their dangerous aspects will be removed. Money will vanish of itself during the gradual approach to a system of fully matured Communism which will replace exchange by distribution. But in the Transition Period, owing to the co-existence of communism with individualism, the exchange of goods cannot be eliminated entirely. And since the main function of money is that of a medium of exchange -- the most convenient medium of exchange -- it will not be possible to do without it during this phase.
In the beginning, because of the practical impossibility of introducing labor money (whose value is based on the working day) the communistic economy will have to recognize gold coins, and will have to be guided in their exchange by the values inherited from capitalism. This will apply particularly to foreign trade. In internal exchange, owing to the socialization of a large part of industry, which will provide the opportunity of determining the scale of production, it will be possible to set prices and to assure their stability in a scientific manner.
During the Transition Period, money cannot become a threat of the establishment of inequality and exploitation because -- in view of the socialization of all means of production and transportation and the socialization of labor and its products in all branches of industry except agriculture -- it will lose the power it had in capitalist society, namely, the power to become capital. Cash could not be lent on interest, hence there will be no room for financial capital. All tools and means of production, being socialized, will not be subject either to sale or purchase; hence there will be no room for industrial capital. The discontinuance of hired labor will remove the possibility of hoarding capital by the appropriation of surplus values; the replacement of the private tradesman by the co-operatives and the establishment of direct exchange on the mixed material-financial principle between the communistic and the individualistic economy will remove the possibility of money turning into trading capital. Thus during the Transition Period, in which everything will be socialized, but all will not be communized, money will exist only as a standard of value and a means of simplifying the process of natural exchange between the different systems of economic equality.
Depending on the stabilization of society after the social upheaval, greater preference will be given to natural exchange in the principle of barter values, and thus the usefulness of money as a standard will decline. The gradual transition of agriculture to communism will further decrease the role of money, and the supercession of exchange by distribution will finally eliminate it in a perfectly natural manner.
As you can see, this book provides a lot of interesting insights in the possible ways of making of the economy of Communist society, and though the author belongs to the historical Anarcho-Syndicalism (being one of its most important militants, by the way), it would be undoubtedly useful to revolutionary and libertarian Marxists as well.
As libcom.org (http://libcom.org/) kindly informs, Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (or Maximov, as we the Eastern Slavs spell our names in Latin letters :D) "was born on November 10, 1893, in the Russian village of Mitushino, province of Smolensk. After studying for the priesthood, he realised this was not his vocation and went to St. Petersburg, where he graduated as an agronomist at the Agricultural Academy in 1915. He joined the revolutionary movement, while a student, was an active propagandist and, after the 1917 revolution, joined the Red Army".
Due to his differences with Bolsheviks he was arrested, and even sentenced to death, but released after the intervention by the local workers' organizations. Later he was an editor of Golos Trouda (Voice of Labour) and Novy Golos Trouda (New Voice of Labour), prominent anarcho-syndicalist papers of the Russian Revolution. After his arrest after Kronstadt Rebellion he was eventually exiled from Soviet Russia and settled in Chicago. His most prominent works include Constructive Anarchism (1952), The Political Philosophy of Bakunin - Scientific Anarchism (1953) and, especially in my view, Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism , the book excerpts of which I would like to cite now, for the comrades - both Marxist and Anarchist - to debate.
The whole book can be reached here (http://libcom.org/library/program-anarcho-syndicalism-g-p-maximoff), while the most interesting chapters dealing with the economic organization of the Communist society are quoted in this post.
From Section 1, The Economy: Chapter 1, The Manufacturing Industry
...In accordance with Revolutionary experience in Russia, the organizational apparatus of syndicalized production must rely on the simplest forms of association, which are intimate and intelligible to the workers; associations rooted in the Revolution and ready to leave production to the direct administration of the workers themselves, e.g. factory-management committees charged with organizing the workers' control of, plants in each locality.
In the interests of the successful realization of Communism in industry, arid of the smooth functioning and efficiency of each production process, as well as to prevent the chance of seizure of individual enterprises for the exclusive private use of those who work there, a system of unification will have to be established. This unification, without destroying the freedom of individual sections, will provide the necessary technical, statistical and administrative links to join all industries and production into one organic whole. (Kropotkin, page 23).
This system has the following categories:
1. The Self-Administered Factory -- producers' commune.
2. The Production Associations of factory communes.
3. The Union of Productive Associations.
4. The General Congress of Labor (Council of People's Economy and Culture).
Production, organized along these lines, will be administered on the principles of committee direction, of broad public control through the general utilization of the principle of the right to recall delegates. As to internal order, the principle of self-discipline will remove the need for all manner of disciplinary institutions.
As the experience of Russia has shown, the task of increasing productivity and the scientific organization of production will demand, as long as the working masses lack scientific and technical knowledge, a broadminded and comprehensive utilization of the technical intelligentsia who will remain as a legacy of the Capitalist structure. Even though the majority of this intelligentsia is immersed in bourgeois tendencies, the interests of the Revolution nevertheless demand that their rights should in no way be limited: equality for all is necessary from the first day of the social upheaval.
Since there is no possibility of immediately establishing full Communism in consumption on the principle: "'to each according to his needs," a number of practical steps will be necessary to lead to its realization.
The first of these is the establishment of the principle: "equal shares for all." Equal sharing, in accordance with increasing production in Syndicalist industry must, little by little, become the normal rule, and gradually facilitate the approach to realizing the axiom: to each according to his needs.
The criterion of the equal share must be the minimum necessary for subsistence, with supplementary allowances for dependents. The size of the ration will grow with the increase in wealth of the national commune. As for handicraft, home industries and small scale industry, the Anarcho-Syndicalists, rejecting the idea of their compulsory integration into large-scale production, will implement the principle of co-operation, granting them full opportunity and freedom of initiative. The Anarcho-Syndicalists strive only for the association of the scattered efforts of individual craftsmen and small enterprises through free cooperatives adapted to their needs, so that they may utilize all the advantages of science and technology....
From Chapter 2. Basic Industry
...The fate of Communism depends to a great extent on agriculture. At the same time, agriculture is the most difficult field for communization. Here the positive aspect of Capitalism, which consists in the mechanization of production and the socialization of labor, is insignificant. For that reason agriculture, in the technical and organizational sense, is the most retarded branch of production. Tens of millions of agricultural units present an unorganized, individualistic, small-ownership element which, apart from its technological backwardness, is an obstacle in the path of Communism which will be difficult to surmount. This fact is tremendously important, since the forms of land ownership and the technique of land cultivation are an indication of the extent and the character of the social reorganization that is possible in a given time.
Capitalism, by uniting individual producers in one enterprise, socializes labor and in this way prepares the ground for the socialization of ownership which inevitably leads to a communization of production. It creates a prototype of the Communist form of organizing labor and ownership -- the factory as the free producer-consumer commune of the future. In manufacturing and in some branches of the primary industries, capitalism has thus already prepared the ground for Communism and the syndicalization of industry by the expropriation of capitalists and the State -- today the imperative and the only feasible solution to the workingman's problem. Socialized labor facilitates this transition to communist 'ownership by way of syndicalization.
The story is far different in agriculture. Here the socializing force of capitalism is insignificant; the small-scale peasant farm is the predominant type of agricultural organization, in which individual ownership and individualized labor are inevitable components. This important fact renders the process of transition of agriculture to communism the opposite to that of industry.
In industry collective labor leads inevitably, through expropriation to collective ownership. In agriculture, collective ownership will lead to collective labor.
Collective ownership in agriculture does not, however, by itself imply collective labor which, in the primitive management conditions of an agricultural economy based on tens of millions of scattered peasant farms, could not to any considerable extent change the conditions necessary for successful production. Collective ownership will lead to collective labor only through a conversion from extensive to intensive agriculture, and a mechanization of farming, replacing the primitive methods of cultivation by those which, by their nature, demand the unification of the working efforts of several members of an agricultural commune. But, since communal habits cannot be altered by decree, and since their transformation depends on the gradual aggregation of insignificant changes, the socialization of labor which would complete the communisation of agriculture will take a considerable period.
...The communization of agriculture, in other words, has two aspects whose emergence does not coincide entirely in terms of time. Hence the Anarcho-Syndicalist program for the communization of agriculture falls into two sections: socialization of land and socialization of labor.
1. Socialization of Land.
1. Complete abolition of ownership in land -- individual, group, co-operative, communal, municipal or State. The land is public property.
2. The fact of socialization will withdraw land from the commodity market; no-one will have the right to buy, sell or rent land or to draw unearned income from it. Everyone will have to work it by personal or co-operative effort.
3. Everyone will have an equal right to an equal area of land and to apply his labor freely to it.
4. The general form of land utilization, and the area to be available for each person's use, will be determined by a National Congress of the Association of Peasant Communes which will form part of the general Confederation of Labor.
5. As in the various branches of industry which will be under the management of the Trade Unions concerned, the land, land management, resettlement and all agricultural matters must be in the hands of the Association of Peasant Communes.
2. Socialization of Labor
1. The socialization of land is an essential precondition for the socialization of labor which would complete the process of communization of agriculture. Only where labor and ownership are both socialized, does die product of labor also become socialized, i.e. full communism becomes a reality.
2. The society that emerges from the Revolution, after it has socialized the manufacturing and in part the basic industries, must seek the methods which will place the agricultural population on an equal, or almost equal, footing with the urban population, since an absence of equilibrium favoring the latter might result in a spontaneous flow of the agricultural population into the cities, which in turn would result in great economic difficulties and the disorganization of the production apparatus.
3. Full harmony of the agricultural regime with the regime of socialized industry is possible only with communism in agriculture. Therefore the organization of farming communes must be on the agenda from the first days of the Revolution.
Proceeding to the organization of communism in agriculture, Anarcho-Syndicalists see progress neither in the destruction of the small peasant farms nor in the establishment of mammoth economic units, and they consider compulsory general labor service a reactionary phenomenon. Instead, they aim at the co-ordination of the labor efforts of small units on a voluntary basis, compatible with the freedom of both the individual and the collectives.
The economic forms of these units would be: (a) co-operative, as most accessible to the consciousness and level of development of the majority of the agricultural population, which in general will be unable to relinquish economic individualism, or (b) communistic, in the form of free agricultural communes which will form part of the entire communistic economy in the same manner and on the same conditions as do the factories.
4. In the interests of efficient production the agricultural communes must not be too large. A normal-sized example would be an association of ten peasant farms of average productive capacity, not including the households, which should remain separate. Depending on varying local conditions the agricultural communes might, and would, consist also of unified settlements, not broken up into farms, as well as of co-operatives.
5. In this manner agriculture in the Transition Period would be run by three fundamental types of economic organization: la) individual, (b) co-operative, and (c) communistic. The predominant type during the first period would doubtless be the individual unit.
6. To make certain that the individual forms of agricultural economy are removed speedily and successfully, thus transforming the entire country into one producer-consumer commune, methods must be sought which by their nature would propel the individualistic elements logically and inevitably on to the path of communism and thus remove the corrupting influences of the individualistic system of agriculture on the socialized economy. These methods should not only lessen the discord between two i ontrasting economic systems, but also establish the harmony essential to the normal development of the process of socializing labor and agriculture. The objective conditions dictate two types of method: (A) a system of offensive measures and (B) a system of defensive measures.
1. System of offensive measures, i.e. measures of direct action towards hastening the socialization of labor in agriculture, consisting of:
1. Socialization without exception of all agricultural units in which labor is already socialized by the process of production itself, owing to mechanization. The inclusion of these units in the general system of communistic economy on the same conditions as the factories.
2. Socialization of all enterprises engaged in the processing of agricultural products and their inclusion in the system of communistic economy on the same conditions as other processing industries.
3. Socialization and co-operation in those branches of agriculture which are closely bound with processing industries, such as sugar, textile, wine, tobacco, etc. and the incorporation of the agricultural communes concerned into the general system of the communistic economy.
4. Socialization of large-scale flour mills and creameries, with their inclusion into the general system of the communistic economy, and the establishment of co-operatives among small flour mills and creameries.
5. Organization of associations for the common cultivation of land.
6. Establishment of new agricultural settlements on the basis of full communism, with their inclusion into the general system of the communistic economy, as well as the organization of new settlements on the basis of associations for the common cultivation of the land.
7. Industrialization of agriculture, i.e. unification of agriculture with industry, by means of the erection in appropriate agricultural areas of industrial enterprises processing agricultural products -- i.e. textiles, sugar, fruit and vegetable canning, tobacco, beer, wine and spirits, starch and molasses, rope and twine, etc. The establishment of composite agro-industrial units, with the industrial enterprise in the center, which, by virtue oi their organization of labor and the connection of the industrial enterprise with the suppliers of raw materials, will be of the following types:
1. Communistic industrial enterprises of the usual kind cooperating with the surrounding individualistic agricultural units on the basis of commercial book-keeping, like the Russian creamery producer co-operatives.
2. Composite agro-industrial units -- as a link in the general communistic economic chain -- which will work seasonally and whose industrial workers will take part in agriculture during the periods of most intensive field labor and whose farm workers will work in industry during the periods of inactivity on the land.
3. Composite units working continuously, where the fields surrounding the enterprise, together with the enterprise itself, are united and labor is organized in such a way that eath member, taking his turn, works definite hours daily in the field\nd in the factory.
2. System of Defensive Measures, i.e. measures of integrating the millions of individualistic units and their reciprocal activities with the communistic economy of the country, consisting primarily of the comprehensive permeation of the system of individualistic units by various types of co-operatives -- credit co-operatives, producers' and subsidiary co-operatives.
The system of defensive measures will belong to the Transition Period and all institutions established in connection therewith will afterwards gradually disappear or will be converted into institutions of the free producer-consumer communes. Hence the co-operatives of the Transition Period cannot be copies of those developing within the limits of the capitalist structure. The interests of the transition to communism demand internal organizational unity, and the fulfillment of complex functions by local collectivities which will be united in their diversity through the process of federalization.
The tasks of the peasant co-operatives in the Transition Period will be to provide the sole liaison between the communistic economy of the country in general and the individualistic agricultural units which it surrounds, to organize for these two divergent economic systems the true and natural financial exchange process, and to convert themselves gradually into the distributing agencies of a unified labor commune.
From Chapter 3. Public Service Industries
VIII. Accountancy -- Banks and Finances.
Accountancy and statistics are very important functions in the proper regulation of relations between production and consumption. Only with the help of statistical data is it possible to determine their necessary equilibrium, and to institute a suitable distribution and exchange organization. Indeed, without statistical data an economic order is impossible. Statistics, therefore, form a vital public service, whose technical discharge will be entrusted to the Central Statistical Bureau at the Bank for Cash-and-Goods Credit, consisting of the directly concerned public services and particularly the services for distribution and exchange.
All existing banks will be socialized and will merge with the Bank for Cash-and-Goods Credit. This, in addition to its statistical functions, will perform all the usual banking operations which, of course, will change in accordance with the new economic structure of the country. The Bank will be the organic liaison between the communistic economy and the individualistic units, particularly the agricultural units, as well as with the individualist world abroad. In the latter case, it will act as the bank for foreign trade.
In the sphere of internal exchange, the bank will be one of the most powerful weapons of communism, influencing individualistic units in the desired direction by means of material and financial credit without interest for the improvement of each unit and the mechanization of farming, which will result in the socialization of rural labor -- the necessary prerequisite for the socialization of agriculture.
The socialization of banks and accountancy must be achieved by their syndicalization, i.e. these public services will be transferred to the management of the workers who operate them, and will be incorporated into the general communistic economic system. With the strengthening of communism, labor will be industrialized and ruralized as in other public services, i.e. it will gradually be organized on the principle of integration.
Money, as a concrete symbol of expended labor, the greatest part of which is now concentrated by means of exploitation in the hands of a few capitalists and States, must be socialized. The socialization of money, i.e. the return to society of the fruits of expended labor, will be possible only in the form of its abolition, without any compensation. The abolition of the monetary token of the old regime is one of the first tasks of the social revolution.
It will be impossible, however, to abolish money entirely in the Transition Period, since some functions, which are dependent on money now, will still continue to operate, even though their dangerous aspects will be removed. Money will vanish of itself during the gradual approach to a system of fully matured Communism which will replace exchange by distribution. But in the Transition Period, owing to the co-existence of communism with individualism, the exchange of goods cannot be eliminated entirely. And since the main function of money is that of a medium of exchange -- the most convenient medium of exchange -- it will not be possible to do without it during this phase.
In the beginning, because of the practical impossibility of introducing labor money (whose value is based on the working day) the communistic economy will have to recognize gold coins, and will have to be guided in their exchange by the values inherited from capitalism. This will apply particularly to foreign trade. In internal exchange, owing to the socialization of a large part of industry, which will provide the opportunity of determining the scale of production, it will be possible to set prices and to assure their stability in a scientific manner.
During the Transition Period, money cannot become a threat of the establishment of inequality and exploitation because -- in view of the socialization of all means of production and transportation and the socialization of labor and its products in all branches of industry except agriculture -- it will lose the power it had in capitalist society, namely, the power to become capital. Cash could not be lent on interest, hence there will be no room for financial capital. All tools and means of production, being socialized, will not be subject either to sale or purchase; hence there will be no room for industrial capital. The discontinuance of hired labor will remove the possibility of hoarding capital by the appropriation of surplus values; the replacement of the private tradesman by the co-operatives and the establishment of direct exchange on the mixed material-financial principle between the communistic and the individualistic economy will remove the possibility of money turning into trading capital. Thus during the Transition Period, in which everything will be socialized, but all will not be communized, money will exist only as a standard of value and a means of simplifying the process of natural exchange between the different systems of economic equality.
Depending on the stabilization of society after the social upheaval, greater preference will be given to natural exchange in the principle of barter values, and thus the usefulness of money as a standard will decline. The gradual transition of agriculture to communism will further decrease the role of money, and the supercession of exchange by distribution will finally eliminate it in a perfectly natural manner.
As you can see, this book provides a lot of interesting insights in the possible ways of making of the economy of Communist society, and though the author belongs to the historical Anarcho-Syndicalism (being one of its most important militants, by the way), it would be undoubtedly useful to revolutionary and libertarian Marxists as well.