Translation note:
The following is a translation by Carl Eugene Stroud of a chapter from the biography by Jose Luis Carretero titled Abraham Guillén Guerrilla y autogestión.
In his last major works (“Economía libertaria”, “Socialismo libertario”, and “Economía Autogestionaria”), Abraham Guillén makes a final summary of his basic economic perspective, leading up to his main theoretical contribution: the outline for a self-managed economic paradigm, which is presented as the only viable alternative to the savagery of western capitalism and the ruthless deviations of Soviet-style bureaucratic capitalism.
These three texts are both dense and extensive, detailing the most fundamental economic problems of the end of the 80’s, and laying out the basic concepts that Guillén uses to understand the economy and society, in order to get to the point where a practical and theoretical break can be made based on the proposal for a form of socialism that’s self-managed, federative, and libertarian.
Most of Guillén’s basic concepts are more or less the same ones used by Marx in “Capital”: the differentiation between use-value and exchange-value, the conception of value based on socially necessary labor time (with a really strong and explicit critique of marginalist theories of value), the basic understanding of surplus value as essential for exploitation through wage labor, market fetishism, and the fundamental alienation of workers, as subjects, from the objects they produce through capitalist social relations.
These ideas, coming from a distinctly materialist perspective in philosophical terms, and based on a historical-economic analysis of the capitalist system of the time, when combined with an evolving understanding of the process of social development, lead to something really similar (though not identical) to Marx’s own writings:
“Dialectically, when a contradictory mode of production (based in private or state-owned property and in the antagonistic classes) is approaching decline, antagonistic forces come into play that paralyze the on-going process of economic growth with structural crises, social struggles, wars. By divorcing social production from individual or state production, the primary factor of revolution is articulated in opposition to the “peaceful coexistence between classes” as well as imperialist and neo-colonial countries. This factor takes shape through a revolutionary dialectic.
When the social and economic crisis reaches its culmination, the existing contradictions between production and distribution, between the wealth that’s produced and its unequal redistribution between the bourgeois and the proletarians, is precisely what shapes the class struggle, what determines the form of revolutionary war, like the revolutionary motor of history.”
Using what are basically Marxist categories, (though sometimes not originally coming from Marx himself, as is the case with the concept of the labor theory of value which had previously been used by David Ricardo and Adam Smith), Guillén makes a detailed explanation of the fundamental contradictions of the global economy of his time and of the potential paths for development in the foreseeable future.
In laying all this out, it becomes clear the importance that Abraham places on a concept that has, since his first book, come to be one of the most essential elements of his written work: imperialism. But in these texts, added to this basic category is a profound critique directed squarely at the Soviet model of “State Capitalism”, bureaucratized and inefficient economically, authoritarian and hegemonic politically.
It’s important to keep in mind that for Guillén, as a starting point:
“You have to know the objective laws of the science of economics, without guessing, without allowing them to alienate you into understanding them as a pure conceptual grasp of humanity, which is done in the name of anachronistic economic regimes based in the exploitation of man or in order to prefigure utopian social systems that isolate themselves with semantic idealism (changing the name of contradictory things without removing them, making a change of form but not of content).
Instead of looking for solutions to combat social injustices, with fake moralizing or with State capitalism (since no matter how much one might wish otherwise, suppressing the direct control of the masses over the management of the economy is not a form of socialism). To construct a society freed from the exploitation of someone else’s labor, there have to be advances made in understanding the laws of socialist economics.”
But Guillén doesn’t just make a show of categories and concepts taken from previous books, like an introductory summary of his published works, instead he focuses, in large part, on studying the most disruptive areas of the economy of his time: the drive for new technologies (represented by cybernetics and automation), the construction of mega cities (generating on-going ecological and social contradictions), and the spread of multinational corporations in an increasingly more globalized economy.
Abraham’s fundamentally techno-optimistic understanding of scientific development envisions the possibility for exponential advances in productivity driven by automation as well as a potential paradigm shift toward work based increasingly on developing the intellectual and cognitive capacities of the workers. The genesis of an emerging “society of abundance” that would combat the law of value and the division of labor, marking a new era characterized by the full participation of producers in their own productive processes, finally getting rid of the alienation associated with capitalist social relations. In a chapter of “Economía Autogestionaria”, aptly subtitled “Automation of work + Self-management = Libertarian Socialism”, Guillén says:
“Libertarian socialist society – self-managed, based in associative democracy, without the exploiters and exploited – has to develop faster than the scientific revolution – taking both science and technology into workplaces in a way that leads to everyone having the same opportunities, the same possibilities for gaining a scientific and technical understanding, obviously not factoring in the possibility for a rare, genius intellect.
As long as science and technology are introduced into massive enterprises, into public and social services, into inquisitive, engineering societies, major scientific discoveries will be more connective and less individualistic.
So, the economic basis for labor in society has to be placed in the hands of the workers themselves, conducting scientific investigations, combining productive capital with the capital used to understand production, treating them as a single whole, without a totalitarian bureaucracy (like in the East) or an oppressive and exploitative bourgeoisie (like in the West). In this way, work, technology, capital, science, and digital information are not separated from the sites of production but are, instead, joined together with them. This is how they can form Self-government, through the self-administration of production, without which the promises of socialism will never be realized.”
In short:
“Self-managed socialism essentially has to be a synthesis of ideals coming from the classical utopian socialists, of automation, of production and of calculation. It has to be better than State or private forms of capitalism at incorporating revolutionary technology.”
Despite the techno-optimism, Guillén doesn’t ignore that “scientists, in the same way as technocrats, are subordinated to either the western bourgeoisie or the eastern bureaucratic communists, pointing to the fact that science and technology tend to turn into ideologies of the privileged classes.”
This is exactly why:
“Left to fend for itself from its inferior position, politically, culturally, scientifically, and technologically, the working class is making history but does not know why or to what ends. This is why it is necessary to raise workers up to the level of technological proletarians with a cultural revolution that does not slow down to a stop like in Russia with the managing bureaucracy, but instead with self-managed organisms of direct democracy which are the only way to overcome the alienation of man.”
Different from the constant growth brought on by focusing only on productivity, Guillén supports a parallel process of growth and development, brought about by automation, that will generate a society of abundance (and shouldn’t be confused with western “consumer society”, since it instead refers to the possibility of having enough productive and distributive resources to cover all the basic material needs of everyone on the planet), replacing the capitalist law of value, based on exchange, with a new social hegemony based on use value. In a self-managed society where exploitation has disappeared, scientific and technological knowledge will be disseminated to the workers, developing a popularly shared understanding of economic production capable of eradicating the old division of labor between manual and intellectual work, removing alienation from the equation.
But unlike some of the orthodox Marxist academics, Guillén isn’t simply theorizing about “developing the forces of production”. Capital’s grip on development, and the way this drives it in the interests of elites, can only be broken by conscious human action. There’s no such thing as a teleological history that developed independently of the effective, revolutionary action of people. So:
“In order for the cultural revolution to be successful, it will have to be preceded by a great social revolution that changes society from the bottom up by socializing the State; a social revolution that, from within a complete structure of self-managed socialism, puts land, capital, and the means of production and of exchange directly into the hands of the producers themselves (without bourgeois or bureaucratic mediation).”
It’s true that this proposal is plainly in defense of development and production, which can make it seem disconnected from today’s ongoing ecological crisis. Guillén himself doesn’t deny this, explaining in detail that:
“Whether we like it or not, we have to become developers in the good sense of the word; but not by increasing production for its own sake; not by producing unnecessary luxury, consumer goods that have the effect of suppressing the social capital required to make the necessary economic, cultural, and technological progress; not by being seduced by market fetishes or money; not by developing unequally in the agricultural and industrial sectors, amassing millions of people into mega cities; not by recreating a system like capitalism that has some regions that are rich and others that are poor, but instead by developing proportionately and in parallel with broad investments coming from a nationalized or socialized fund that guarantees the equity of progress and well-being.”
When it comes down to it, the real, material evolution of precapitalistic modes of production, as much as they’re idealized and dreamt about, would end up being a step back in time since it’s only with a self-managed and technologically advanced form of socialism that the social bonds that have been lost under capitalism will be able to be rebuilt. That’s the only context in which the full participation of human beings can be integrated into a process for producing wealth and life, on their own terms, for themselves:
“The social relations of production in factories have to be democratized, making work into another form of study, so the workers will go on to better understand the general process of production, consumption, exchange, and distribution in an economy based on social property, and in their self-managed factories in particular. The old, polarized division of labor has to be overcome. It put labor into two groups: the ones doing the work related to material production and the ones directing them like autocrats, without the possibility that the two could ever switch places and the ones doing the manual tasks could become managers or technicians.
If self-managed socialism was not capable of overcoming the old division of labor (…) workers’ emancipation would not be possible (…) If it does end up preventing economic equality between men, we will continue living in a residual form of capitalism, even with self-managed socialism.”
The idea of being “developers in the good sense of the word” shouldn’t be incompatible with ecological consciousness. This was Guillén’s position long before discussions about ecology were as prevalent as they are today:
“The wastefulness of bourgeois “consumer society” alienates the body from the mind, creating a global catastrophe that destabilizes the economy as a natural system, an ecosystem; but since it affects the entire planet by polluting the water, land, and air, in order to overcome this stage of economic, cultural, scientific, and technological progress, there has to be a libertarian spirit capable of generating an ethical form of economics related to frugal and rational consumption.”
It’s on this material foundation that Guillén develops his libertarian socialist alternative, with self-managed businesses as the primary factor (where workers manage companies themselves), and with two essential pillars: [1] an expanding, federative process of integration and of democratic planning among the different strategically relevant parts of economic life and [2] recourse to the market as a secondary factor for determining investments and making price adjustments. This would require extensive public investment (maybe more accurately called communal or communitarian investment) to finance strategic sectors and guarantee basic social services (education, public banking, etc.), but all from a participatory, not a bureaucratic, perspective.
To start with: in Guillen’s conception, self-management is tied to planning, to development, and to the increasing integration of different sectors into the economy. This kind of planning is participatory and has federalism at its core, characteristics that will help guide us through the integration process. In this way:
“From the absolute bottom up to the very top, federations of production and of services, since they share a natural commonality, create democratic conditions for emancipatory planning. It does not have to be entrusted in the dictatorship of technocrats (…)
A socio-economic agenda will have to be made through industrial, agricultural, and service-industry federations, with on-going popular participation that is not a simple accessory like it is in municipal, regional, or national elections. It will have to be integrated into a single Federated Council of the Economy where all the federations of productive materials and of public and social services would be represented (…)
A self-managed economy will have to rationally organize the different branches of industry and, within each one, figure out how to combine small and medium-sized factories with large-scale factory production into a single unified whole.”
So, how exactly is this done? New technologies should be seen as important tools for the organizational process of federating a participatory economy, making it more feasible:
“By applying computer technology and information, of all different types, coming from different branches as well as from central hubs, the Federated Council of the Economy would have updated information about every single production and service branch. In this way, integrating the economy based on the multiple branches of production and service sectors will be the result of a positive science that would know exactly what to do to avoid crises related to unequal growth in the different branches. Without this knowledge, personal and market excesses are produced that lead to unsold merchandise and raw materials, which would be avoided by knowing exactly what needs to be produced at any given time, and by distributing and investing so that the social economy would have a harmonious and proportionate law of development.”
This is why it’s necessary to have public-community investment to finance things through “a predetermined quota coming from the economic surplus produced by the self-managed workplaces” which will be “transferred to the self-governments” to “return these funds back to the self-managed society in the form of public, social services”, such as health, education, communication infrastructure, the maintenance of ports, etc. To put it simply:
“Unlike the traditional Roman, bureaucratic model which is a social and public project of citizens, strengthening the economy of a free, self-managed municipality means making the industrial, agricultural, scientific, and service enterprises of society into something managed by the workers related to these different means of productions; it means self-management in the form of Workers Councils and Unified Work Associations, where economic accounting would be automated with computing technology, enabling a holistic calculation of the value of an hour of work (HW) that would have an equivalent monetary value”.
But while laying out a federative structure capable of producing a plan for participatory economic planning, Guillén also details the disastrous effects of Soviet-style planning, which was centralized and authoritarian. Abraham defends the long-term maintenance of a certain price-setting mechanism capable of making decisions about investments, something that, although part of the capitalist system today, existed before capitalism and (Guillén says) will continue to exist after it: the market.
In needing to respect the inner workings of the economy and maintain it until the point when complete and total abundance allows us to move on to a higher state of libertarian communism, and given “the true labor value (…), the law of equivalent exchange, under equal conditions between all the integrated branches of the social division of labor, and the law of cooperation between these different branches or federations of production and services”, the market can be seen as a necessary institution for the self-regulation of the economy:
“It is only possible from within a form of planning that is informed about the system as a whole, while still leaving the market to act freely so businesses have to keep producing the best and most economical products, which is decided by the consumers.”
Keep in mind, when Guillén talks about the market, he’s referring to something different than today’s ultraliberal, market “gurus”:
“The most important thing in the self-managed market of a libertarian economy is that the one form of merchandise, which was the essential condition of capitalism, has disappeared: wage labor, just as common under western, capitalist regimes as under the capitalism of the Soviet State. When wages are removed from the equation, the market will be able to maintain an equilibrium of the division of social labor among the different integrated sectors, fostering a just and equal exchange between them that keeps prices fairly close to the actual cost of production, since there will not be any parasitic rents to pay to bourgeois capitalists, bureaucrats, and technocrats. Additionally, when man is free and no longer forced to sell himself in the market for less than what he produces, the market will become a transparent, self-regulating method of exchange, without taking from some to turn around and give to others the way capitalism is always giving more to those in charge who do not work than to the wage earners who have to work and obey.
Once wage labor has been removed from the market, in an emancipated society, where the factories are directly self-managed by the producers without bourgeois or bureaucratic mediation, exchanges in the market will be self-regulating, with no need for bureaucratic superstructures to do central planning or for the backbreakers of the bourgeoisie to keep increasing economic productivity.”
In this schema, the negative effects of the market (due to the fact that in a competitive market there are always “winners” and “losers”) would themselves be regulated by the same redistributive mechanism shaping the larger process of integrating into the federated economy. In Guillén’s words:
“A healthy competition between self-managed groupings, cooperatives, and collectives would free the economy from the laws of the capitalist jungle, where the strong survive and the weak disappear. Then, with the shared and self-regulated funds, the self-managed workplaces that are already integrated into their branch of industry would be able to give assistance to the businesses that are lagging behind by using some of the revenue coming from more advanced enterprises. And without producing a stoppage, but by updating and reforming the reciprocity between workers and factories, it would be possible to maintain a general economic equilibrium that neither conventional capitalism nor State Capitalism have ever been able to achieve.”
Finally, after a stage of libertarian socialism based on this kind of coordinated economy:
“A fully developed self-managed economy, based on enterprises of social property, with work to be automated, would overcome price and value, producing an economy of abundance where everyone would provide according to their capacity and would receive according to their need.”
In practice, participatory socialism like this would only need a few guidelines, based on the following principle, to continue generating new ideas that would support the self-managed entities: 1) self-management, 2) cooperation between different initiatives, 3) a federation of self-managed workplaces, 4) direct action, 5) coordinated self-defense, 6) cooperation in the country and self-management in the city, 7) syndicalism of production, 8) all the power to the assemblies, 9) not delegating politics or policy making, 10) socialization, not nationalization, of wealth.
But as we’ve already pointed out over and over again, this isn’t just pie-in-the-sky utopian thinking or academic ramblings about how the world itself needs to evolve in order to guarantee the maximum development of productive forces. As a revolutionary militant, Guillén knows from experience that only action, in the political and social spheres, can cut through the muck and overcome the obstacles preventing human evolution from progressing beyond this stage of ever-increasing exploitation and oppression.
This is why Abraham’s revolutionary philosophy is a philosophy of action. In contrast to the kind of semantic idealism that thinks you solve problems by changing the names of things, Guillén proposes a dialectical realism that takes into account the fact that the contradictions of the material world can only be resolved through action. In the class struggle, when the proletariat reaches the point where they can no longer make progress toward libertarian socialism by just changing the narrative, revolutionary action will be like the fire with which the metal of their weapons will be forged. Unlike the utopian dreams of do-nothing gurus preaching about alternatives or leftist academics always justifying passivity, Guillén isn’t looking for the one, true, perfect way to say things that will magically break the chains of exploitation in the material world. What he’s after is a revolutionary practice that, driven by a philosophy of action capable of grasping real contradictions as they occur, can defeat adversarial forces in a war (the class struggle), which is more than just a metaphor.
Guillén suggests that:
“The main mission of revolutionary philosophy is to politicize, to demystify the outdated ideologies of the world for being distinct in their forms but identical in their content, whether coming from the left or the right (…)
The philosophy of liberation should reach catharsis, purification of the spirit of the masses and the insurrectionist groups. This is how transformative actions in the world will keep from being lost in the void, by not confusing tactics with strategy like some “foquistas” in guerilla war that are isolated from the popular masses because they did not correctly apply their actions to the objective of gaining more political capacity. This is the only way that the minority will mobilize the majority and convert the insurrection into a triumphant revolution (gradually, rationally, and politically).”
And because of all this:
“Theory about action, as practical philosophy, has to have a political program that is sensitive to and represents general interests and not subjective and sectarian ones (…)
The philosophy of liberation, as a form of praxeology, should provide revolutionary vanguards with the creative prudence necessary for conspiring, for the initial triumph of insurrection, whether gradually or suddenly, given the conditions (…) A revolution that does not get out from under the national banner is petit-bourgeois, and in the best of cases, is destined to perish, to be isolated, to get sidetracked in the politics of class movements.
A revolution, if that’s what it truly is, should be conceptually developed by the philosophy of the masses in revolt, teaching them the basic principles of the dialectic, of strategy, of politics, of how to organize people to act (…) Without revolutionary philosophers (…) it is hard for the blind action of the masses to turn an insurrection into a triumphant revolution that is politically and ideologically expanding on an international level.”
So, we have to be familiar with revolutionary philosophers, but which ones? In this same paragraph Guillén quotes from the French and American revolutionaries responsible for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and for the Declaration of Independence, as well as 1917 Lenin. But in the same book, he spends even more time on an in-depth analysis of the main authors coming from the political tendency which, with few exceptions, he had been connected to since his youth: anarchism.
After going through a detailed exposition of the basic ideas of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin, as well as of the collectivist experiences of the Spanish Civil War, Guillén reflects on anarchism today as a functional revolutionary ideology, which is relevant at a moment in history when the crisis of the Soviet model has laid bare the inherent contradictions of the Marxist project for building socialism.
This analysis confronts the internal limitations and contradictions of the anarchist movement, something he had witnessed since he was young. In previous texts, he had blamed the working-class defeat in the Civil War on this exact problem: Spanish anarchism had “neither the strategy nor the politics necessary to make the revolution”. This is why he says that:
“Anarchism that is non-scientific, that is dogmatically apolitical, is a form of alienation; it may point to a beautiful utopia but is not able to take the reins of self-Power in order to abolish (both private and State) capitalism: instead it stays a kind of “heavenly promise”, a form of social justice that is not achieved on Earth and that would have to be fought for forever; while in the meantime, Evil continues to triumph over Good, here and now. Sterile politics like this only serve to tease and taunt the proletariat with never-ending cliquishness and sectarianism.”
And in a fragment meant to be especially polemic, Guillén warns us that:
“Concepts like “libertarian municipalism” or “liberated communities” are basically proposing a return to the Middle Ages and do not fit into a world where labor, technical knowledge, and Capital have been integrated into large systems of production capable of revolutionizing computing (…) agriculture and the automation of work (…) social and public services (…)
Medieval-style communes and traditional municipalities will have to be integrated in the formation of the agro-communities of the future which will replace them, since they will offer all the advantages, comforts, productivity, education, and information of big cities, something that is not possible with the municipality form, no matter how liberating it might be. Kropotkin’s idea of the “free commune”, like Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, has lost its relevance. The classical form of the State, oppressive and exploitative, has to be transformed into self-government since, without private or State capitalism, it will not have any motive to oppress or exploit anyone. Self-government, based on social production and co-governing, is the foundation of self-managed socialism, which is fundamentally libertarian.”
After hinting at it and justifying it with quotes from both, saying that “Bakunin was not as anti-Marx as his disciples would have you think, making anti-Marxism the essence of Bakuninism today” and also that “Marx did not disagree with Bakunin about the problem of the State, as much as you might assume”, Abraham makes a concrete proposal for developing a kind of thought that would actually be revolutionary:
“Anarchism (without the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) constitutes a social, economic, and political doctrine capable of replacing private and State capitalism with something better. So, it is better to refer to this kind of scientific anarchism as self-managed socialism: semantically it is useful for attracting and unifying socialists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and petit-bourgeois leftists that see in this doctrine shared ideals and similar aspirations for a free and peaceful world without classes.”
This kind of self-managed socialism, of scientific anarchism, that sees itself as a “shared space” of the revolutionary left, will undoubtedly have to be an intensely modern form of anarchism that has left the 19th century behind and given up on idealistic, sectarian, and utopian dead-ends: “Modern anarchism will have to be self-managing and conscious of, not only the spontaneous and harmonious order produced by a moral society (without capitalism and without private property), but also the laws of the economy, since there are also economic, political, and social factors to consider.
Because in the end, and this is really important, Guillén thinks that:
“We need to put a socialized economy in place that is self-managed directly by the producers, by the consumers, by the people using social and public services, taking politics out of the professional sphere through the self-government of the community by the people themselves, in their own interest. By ensuring the smooth functioning of the economy, of science, technology, information, education, by developing the division of labor in society around automation, by bringing science and technical knowledge into the workplace, there will be no place for technocratic professionals or bureaucrats, marking the triumph of self-managed socialism, the first step toward libertarian communism.”
Even with such clarity of thought and a clear proposal for what to do, the question still stands: does it have any resonance today? Does it offer any possibilities for the 21st century? The readers will have to decide for themselves. But in the next and final chapter, we’re going to get into some preliminary ideas on the topic with the aim of helping to progress this necessary and unavoidable debate.
CES 