Social Relations of Production Are Key
“I’m a bit of a fan of anarchism,” said a friend. “I am always interested in hearing arguments for or against a state apparatus. Is it a requirement (if temporary) for organizing? Or a structure to be co-opted by capitalist counter-revolutionary forces? Both?”
This series has addressed these questions based on revolutionary practice.
Communists and anarchists have agreed that the capitalist state must be destroyed. Its “bureaucratic machinery” smashed. And disagreed about whether to replace it with a workers’ state.
Both have sided with “the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class.” But what should replace that exploitation? The social organization of production is inseparable from questions about “the state.”
The anarchist Kropotkin proposed “social organization from the simple to the complex by means of the free federation of popular groups of producers and consumers.”
Marx expected “co-operative production” [communism] “to supersede the capitalist system.” He concluded from the 1871 Paris Commune that “a working-class government” would “serve as a lever” for destroying the economic basis of class society, “and therefore of class rule.”
A “free federation of groups of producers” might not seem contradictory to “co-operative production.” But it was.
Anarchism presupposed small-scale private ownership and production. Small producers would barter, sell, or exchange goods with other small producers. This would be a market system.
Communist “cooperative production” meant “the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership.” Large-scale production would rely on planning, not markets.
In 1871, Paris was France’s biggest industrial center. The average production unit had seven workers. Organizing “from simple to complex” might have been easier to imagine than “social ownership.”
Petrograd in 1917, in contrast, had 38 plants employing over 2000 workers each. They comprised over two-thirds of the total workforce. Over 60% of Petrograd’s industrial workers were metalworkers. Capitalist private ownership seemed ripe for transformation into “social ownership.” That is, transforming the social relations of production.
Urbanites relied on the rural hinterlands for their food. Both the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution emerged from great-power (imperialist) wars. Both faced immediate food crises. In Paris, even zoo animals were slaughtered for food.
Property ownership in the French countryside evolved inconsistently, even chaotically. Czarist land-reform in Russia had tried to destroy feudal landlords’ power while isolating peasants from the Bolsheviks. Traditional village communes were destroyed for the benefit of a handful of rich peasants. Many peasants ended up worse off.
Neither communists nor anarchists had a strong rural base in 1871 France or in 1917 Russia. Or a good grasp of rural class relations.
No wonder the Bolsheviks struggled to fulfill their promises of “Peace, Land, Bread.” Amidst an almost continuous civil war. They adopted their agrarian program from the Left-Socialist Revolutionaries. It abolished private property in land. But it organized production mainly around small plots.
Kropotkin saw it would be impossible to organize cooperative production without winning over the masses. But neither anarchists nor communists did this. So Bolshevik efforts to establish collective farms were not immediately successful.
Party organization (built through an “All-Russian” newspaper) enabled the Bolsheviks to take power. In contrast, Anarchists relied on the masses’ spontaneity. They tailed, rather than led. When waves of mass protests subsided, they were left stranded.
That happened in 1917 in the revolutionary struggles against the Tsar. And then against the capitalist Kerensky government. And later, when they unsuccessfully promoted a “third revolution” against the Bolsheviks, resorting to unprincipled alliances with pro-capitalist forces. Anarchism was a dead end.
Communism was not. The Paris Commune lasted only a few months. But it was a rich source of lessons for the working class. The October Revolution left the Bolsheviks in power for years. Their successes and their errors became an even richer source. They created the basis for far more advanced practice and theory. For the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, and now for us in the 21st century.
Chinese communists saw that the future depended on large-scale social production both in industry and agriculture. And on a Bolshevik-type party leading a socialist state.
We think that the Chinese experience shows the need and the possibility of organizing on communist, not socialist, lines.
Without socialism, there will be no socialist state. The final article in this series will discuss this.
Read previous articles in this series:
Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, Part V here, Part VI here, Part VII here.