Article Title : Theoretical economic systems Subject : Anarchist economics Criticism of marxism and relationship with other anarchist classical currents The collectivist anarchists at first used the term collectivism to distinguish themselves from the mutualism of the followers of Proudhon and the state socialists associated with Karl Marx. Bakunin wrote, we shall always protest against anything that may in any way resemble communism or state socialism, which Bakunin regarded as fundamentally authoritarian (Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism, 1867). The dispute between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx highlighted the differences between anarchism and Marxism. Bakunin argued—against certain ideas of a number of Marxists—that not all revolutions need be violent. He also strongly rejected Marxs concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a concept that vanguardist socialism including Marxism-Leninism would use to justify one-party rule from above by a party representing the proletariat. Bakunin insisted that revolutions must be led by the people directly while any enlightened elite must only exert influence by remaining invisible...not imposed on anyone...[and] deprived of all official rights and significance.[48] He held that the state should be immediately abolished because all forms of government eventually lead to oppression. Bakunin has sometimes been called the first theorist of the new class, meaning that a class of intellectuals and bureaucrats running the state in the name of the people or the proletariat—but in reality in their own interests alone. Bakunin argued that the State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls—or, if you will, rises—to the position of a machine.[49] Also Bakunin had a different view as compared to Marxs on the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. As such Both agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion. Bakunin considers workers integration in capital as destructive of more primary revolutionary forces. For Bakunin, the revolutionary archetype is found in a peasant milieu (which is presented as having longstanding insurrectionary traditions, as well as a communist archetype in its current social form—the peasant commune) and amongst educated unemployed youth, assorted marginals from all classes, brigands, robbers, the impoverished masses, and those on the margins of society who have escaped, been excluded from, or not yet subsumed in the discipline of emerging industrial work...in short, all those whom Marx sought to include in the category of the lumpenproletariat. The anti-authoritarian sections of the First International proclaimed at the St. Imier Congress (1872) that the aspirations of the proletariat can have no purpose other than the establishment of an absolutely free economic organization and federation, founded upon the labour and equality of all and absolutely independent of all political government, in which each worker will have the right to the enjoyment of the gross product of his labours and thereby the means of developing his full intellectual, material and moral powers in a collective setting. This revolutionary transformation could only be the outcome of the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, its trades bodies and the autonomous communes. A similar position was adopted by the Workers Federation of the Spanish Region in 1882, as articulated by an anarchist veteran of the First International, Jose Llunas Pujols, in his essay, Collectivism. The difference between Collectivist Anarchism and Anarcho-Communism is that collectivist anarchism stresses collective ownership of productive, subsistence and distributary property, while communist anarchism negates the concept of ownership in favor of usage or possession with productive means being a possession not owned by any individual or particular group. Communist Anarchists believe that subsistence, productive and distributive property should be common or social possessions while personal property should be private possessions. Collectivist anarchists agree with this, but disagree on the subject of remuneration; some collectivist anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin, believe in the remuneration of labor, while communist-anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, believe that such remuneration would lead to the recreation of currency and that this would need a State Thus, it could be said that collectivist anarchists believe in freedom through collective ownership of production and a communal market of sorts to distribute goods and services and compensate workers in the form of remuneration. Thus, collectivist anarchism could be seen as a combination of communism and mutualism. The Anarchist FAQ compares and contrasts collectivist anarchism with communist anarchism this way: The major difference between collectivists and communists is over the question of money after a revolution. Anarcho-communists consider the abolition of money to be essential, while anarcho-collectivists consider the end of private ownership of the means of production to be the key. As Kropotkin noted, [collectivist anarchism] express[es] a state of things in which all necessaries for production are owned in common by the labour groups and the free communes, while the ways of retribution [i.e. distribution] of labour, communist or otherwise, would be settled by each group for itself. Thus, while communism and collectivism both organise production in common via producers associations, they differ in how the goods produced will be distributed. Communism is based on free consumption of all while collectivism is more likely to be based on the distribution of goods according to the labour contributed. However, most anarcho-collectivists think that, over time, as productivity increases and the sense of community becomes stronger, money will disappear.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 09:59:12 +0000
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