First part:
https://umanitanova.org/allarrembaggio-del-futuro-necessita-e-problemi-del-superamento-del-capitalismo/---- Second part:
https://umanitanova.org/allarrembaggio-del-futuro-2-parte/ ---- Third
part: https://umanitanova.org/allarrembaggio-del-futuro-3-parte/
I resume my reflections on the transition once again starting from
Ernest Mandel. In his text the author raises the problem of the
relationship between the growth of production in the producer goods
sector and the growth of production in the consumer goods sector. Mandel
criticizes the choice of the Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Union,
which set itself the goal of a more rapid development of the means of
production sector compared to that of consumer goods and even went so
far as to make it a scientific law of the economy of the transition
phase in the Khrushchev era. In this regard, Mandel quotes a passage by
Charles Bettelheim, taken from his work "Problemes du developpement
economique":
«These transformations can take place with the desired speed, despite
the interests that oppose them, only if the action of the State really
operates in this direction and if this action is powerfully supported by
the social forces that will have to benefit from economic development.
And this support will be given with the necessary vigor only if those
who will have to benefit from economic development note from the
beginning that the economic policy that is practiced brings real
advantages for them».
Mandel continues, linking the choice of Stalin's accelerated
industrialization to the affirmation of the bureaucratic caste in the
USSR, to the growing authoritarianism of the state and to the worsening
of the living conditions of the producers. Every increase in the
accumulation fund - he states - constitutes a relative renunciation in
terms of consumption by the working classes: the resources used for the
construction of machines could have been used to produce consumer goods.
In a bureaucratically and centrally planned economy, it is the
government that arbitrarily determines the rate of investment on which
the volume of real consumption of the masses depends. In this way,
sacrifices are imposed on the masses without them having been consulted,
without obtaining their consent beforehand, as in capitalism. A
management system of this type is contrary to the aims of socialism and
leads, I would add, inevitably to the rebirth of capitalism. It invests
the power of control over the social surplus only in the central
administration, political, economic and military. Consequently, it
ensures that this administration has the power to control and
subordinate the whole of society to itself. The cult of personality was
only the final outcome of such arbitrary power of the bureaucracy over
the economy and over the entire society.
It is inevitable that in a situation of still accentuated scarcity, such
a concentration of the social surplus in the hands of a central
administration entails the granting of considerable privileges to its
members.
Stalinist Maurice Dobb argues: "If the decision regarding the division
of the surplus value obtained between consumption and investment is the
crucial decision for determining the rate of development of an economy,
it follows that whoever makes this decision finds himself in a condition
of privileged consumer, in whatever sense he makes his decision. This
condition of privileged consumer derives directly from the strategic
function that the people who make these decisions have in an economy".
Revolutionizing the economic and social structure translates into the
possibility, for those directly involved, to make decisions regarding
the destination of the resources available for potential consumption;
this is what the anarchist movement means by socialism. Entrusting these
decisions to a central domination structure and the bureaucracy that
comes from it is completely contrary to socialism.
These reflections show even more their inadequacy with respect to the
current moment: they are based on a productivist conception that
currently appears to generate many more problems than it solves. This
conception is shared by some classical authors of anarchism.
The enormous development of the productive forces that has taken place
within the capitalist relations of production poses problems of survival
for the productive forces themselves. The problem is not only to
guarantee the satisfaction of humanity's needs, but also to guarantee
its survival and the maintenance of the presuppositions of humanity's
existence. The ecological crisis threatens the sources of the productive
forces, humanity, from which the labor force emerges, and nature, from
which those goods involved in the organic exchange between humanity and
nature emerge. This ecological crisis is the result of production relations.
The concept according to which the transition phase is the phase in
which the productive forces are developed for the subsequent passage to
communism, to the society of abundance, derives directly from the
cornerstone of the materialist conception of history according to which
"in the social production of their existence, people enter into
determined, necessary relationships, independent of their will, in
production relationships that correspond to a determined degree of
development of their material productive forces. The set of these
production relationships constitutes the economic structure of society,
that is, the real basis on which a legal and political superstructure
rises and to which correspond determined forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life generally conditions the social,
political and spiritual process of life. It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social
being that determines their consciousness. At a certain point in their
development, the material productive forces of society come into
conflict with the existing relations of production, that is, with the
property relations (which are only their legal expression) within which
these forces have previously operated. These relations, from forms of
development of the productive forces, are converted into their chains.
And then an epoch of social revolution sets in. With the change in the
economic basis, the entire gigantic superstructure is more or less
rapidly overturned. In studying such upheavals, it is always
indispensable to distinguish between the material upheaval of the
economic conditions of production, which can be ascertained with the
precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,
artistic or philosophical forms, that is, the ideological forms, which
enable men to conceive this conflict and to combat it" (Karl Marx,
Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy").
This tendency can be traced back to the great upheavals of civilization,
but authoritarian socialists have given this conception the status of an
objective, scientific law, on which they have based their scientific
"socialism" and which they have tried to apply every time they have
gained power: if the old capitalist relations of production were chains
to the development of productive forces, the new relations of production
should have given rise to a prodigious development of productive forces
that would have led in a short time, within one or two generations, to
the age of abundance, to communism. And this was not only Stalin's
vision, but was also shared by Lenin and Trotsky, from the Second
International to the First World War, and is shared, albeit with some
attenuation, by our Ernest Mandel.
Now, thinking of the transition phase as a phase of development of
production would have as a consequence the continuation of the
plundering of backward areas by advanced areas, as well as the worsening
of the climate crisis and the worsening of the living conditions of the
great masses. As I noted above, capitalist production relations threaten
the very existence of productive forces, undermining their sources, with
the expansion of production for production's sake. It is this process
that must be interrupted, bringing production under control, allocating
it to the satisfaction of social needs and not to private profit.
Current problems highlight the double error of Marx and Marxism. First
of all, having given a tendency the force of a law of nature, to be
applied at all times and in all places without taking into account
objective conditions and without taking into account relations of
domination extraneous to the economic sphere, such as the political
relations of domination that give rise to government and the State, and
which played such an important role in the suffocation of the Russian
Revolution and in the military defeat of the Spanish Revolution.
Secondly, the wording of the quotation is ambiguous: Marx states that
production relations are identical to property relations and at the same
time that property relations are only the legal form of production
relations - "...the existing production relations, that is, with
property relations (which are only their legal expression)" -. If we
think about today's society, we see that the capitalist production
relation informs not only property relations but also the productive
forces themselves: the organization of the work process, technology, the
division of labor and its monetary mediation masks relationships between
people with value relations, with relationships between things. The
credit system and the debt relationships that derive from it are the
taboo of current production relationships, reducing the exploited part
of humanity to work in slavery conditions for the benefit of the
privileged minority. Not only legal relationships, not only ideology,
but also interpersonal relationships, feelings and emotions are
conditioned by production relationships, by the totem of productivity
and gross domestic product, by the race towards accumulation.
Marxism had to wait until the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution, the
questioning of experts, the battle against Confucianism and the
traditional conceptions of the Chinese bureaucracy to understand that
technology is not neutral but, like science, is an integral part of the
dominant ideology.
Classical anarchism also shared with Marxism the identification of
production relationships with property relationships but, unlike the
latter, did not make it an absolute law. Furthermore, anarchism does not
postpone to the future the abolition of the State, of the authoritarian
organization of the work process, of monetary relations and of the
division of labor, even that on a gender basis; it poses to the
revolutionary forces the problem of immediately building alternative
social relations to the capitalist ones, creating the conditions, also
through the free experimentation of forms of production, distribution
and consumption and forms of organization of society, for the
elimination of social and interpersonal relations based on oppression,
in the various forms in which it presents itself, even the patriarchal one.
As long as production dominates society, the division of labor on the
basis of gender and the patriarchy that is its expression will continue
to exist, the social bases of machismo will continue to exist; as long
as the development of the productive forces is at the center, the binary
relationship that allows the reproduction of those who provide the
working capacity will also be at the center. The liberation of
non-binary and fluid subjectivities can only occur in a society that
places consumption and not production at the center, that allows the
satisfaction of social needs, childhood education, education,
healthcare, assistance within the community and not within the family,
undermining its foundations.
If this does not happen, if we limit ourselves to the socialization of
the large means of production and exchange, we risk having a society of
producers that reproduces the models of the authoritarian and capitalist
society at a social level. The emancipation of the working class will
not be accompanied by the emancipation of all humanity.
The self-management of the work process by producers must therefore be
accompanied by collective management, that is, by the entire society, by
the network of collectives and territorial, functional, productive
organisms that will form in the days immediately preceding and following
the victorious insurrection. On the basis of the formation and expansion
of organisms based on free and supportive social relationships, it is
possible to reduce the weight of violence and appropriation in the minds
of individuals, in a process of continuous experimentation and
horizontal discussion. A process that must begin immediately and develop
with the revolution, without waiting for a mythical age of abundance, to
be successful. This for me is communism, this for me is anarchy.
Tiziano Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/transizione-libertaria-o-dittatura-allarrembaggio-del-futuro-parte-4/
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