Libertarian Socialist Economics
I write this essay as my own vision of how an anarchistic post-capitalist economics may work. It is idealistic but not prescriptive. Unlike rigid Marxist ideologies I recognise that a libertarian socialism must form organically from the ground up. We cannot say how a future society may look, we can only use our basic belief in fairness to influence the shaping of our politics and economy in the post-revolutionary era. So I offer this piece as inspiration, just as Catalonia and Rojava will always be, to all you anarchists and libertarian socialists out there. ¡Viva la Revolucion!
Here I want to argue that socialism and markets are not mutually exclusive. Markets don’t have to be completely free – there can be limits on their actions placed by the democratic processes of society, and they don’t have to be part of a capitalistic mode of production. We can already envisage a politically devolved system, with local assemblies taking local decisions and passing up other decisions to higher assemblies, through regional, national, international and even global assemblies. These can take place too for macroeconomic decisions, those beyond the immediate concerns of directly-owned worker enterprises.
So, let’s look an anarchistic economy. What about the argument that there is no alternative to capitalism or that a socialised economy has a tendency to authoritarianism and even totalitarianism? Well if the economy is not controlled by a centralised state then the latter argument has no force. Friedrich Hayek's book-length protest against any state involvement in the markets, The Road to Serfdom, is completely bypassed as no centralised bureaucracy exists to gather ever more power to itself. The former argument is also shown to not be true either. Worker-owned concerns can buy and sell in a market without shares being traded in its value or a worker otherwise being stripped of the extra value s/he creates. Nor is this a third way of democratic socialism trying to mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism, such as with Keynesian tinkering.
A way, but only a way, of describing this new mode of production would be ‘market socialism’. The undeniable dynamism of the capitalist system, of which Karl Marx noted, would be captured in this economic evolution, but the benefits would be harnessed for the whole of the population and not simply for an oligarchic class. Anarchism is the public taking direct control of politics and the economy, and not putting a state in between them and their control of the means of production leads to an economy that is still able to keep its energy and creativity while putting people first.
It should be obvious, but to many it just isn’t, that when workers own the concerns where they work, they are more productive as they have a personal stake in its success. Centralised state planning of the economy is not the only way to socialism. It is not even the best. It can be fairer than unfettered free-market capitalism, though usually only in the sense of levelling people down. Also, the ends of equality tend to be just economic, even when the aims are proclaimed to be wider than just the material. Claims of political liberty, if even made, are nothing more than propaganda. In a libertarian socialist economy, only large-scale infrastructure and services could arguably be administered by a state but even this would be by a form of state that is under direct democratic control from the bottom up.
Small-scale planning, microeconomic management, has been shown over and over again to be a dismal failure, both in economic terms and in the huge democratic deficits that have resulted. Libertarian socialism knits together the strength and adaptability of the market structure with the egalitarianism of worker-owned/managed concerns. Unlike the Leninist/Trotskyist model the only form of revolutionary authority would be that which ensures each concern would have to have at least one union member of 'higher consciousness' on its board, but if need be enough members to have a controlling vote. This would be purely in an educational capacity to keep each workplace society not profit-centred, and any compulsion would be discontinued as soon as practicably possible with the rise of a more 'conscious' society. Any attempt to impose a ‘Cheka’ would be instantly recognised as counter-revolutionary and their influence resisted by an educated and revolutionary proletariat.
I believe that only on this anarchistic manifesto can a truly democratic socialism be built, and that this is the only economic model that can provide everybody’s physical and psychological needs, all while also being the only possible way of doing so in an environmentally conscientious way.