Reflections on an Anarchist Critique of Leninism

This blog is about my reflections on an influential Anarchist critique of Leninism, written in 1970. Whilst having much adoration for Anarchism, and find its critique of Leninism valid, I nevertheless argue that Anarchism does not fully grasp what needs to change, especially in an epoch of climate crisis and an economy that seems irredeemably screwed.

Read the Anarchist text here. https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/ Written by Maurice Brinton for Solidarity.

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This is a great read and I agree with most of its arguments and historical evidence. I agree wholeheartedly with Brinton where he says, for example, “in relation to industrial policy there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of Stalinism.”

I think where it is going wrong is in seeing relations of production only as social relations. But there is also a thingness to them, isn’t there. They have a material element as well as a social element, hence the view ‘there is no alternative’. Social relations of production are embodied in things – capital, commodities, money, etc. Unless the relationship between mankind and his products of labour changes, social relations of production cannot be altered in the long-term, merely, at best, contested in brief moments of political upheaval.

That’s why the Russian Revolution was doomed from the outset – the Bolsheviks did not have a theory of what replaces capitalism’s Law of Value. And boy, you do need a new mechanism for an economy to function, else there is no social economy and, as we know, self-sufficiency like Richard Briers in The Good Life, does not work and is not attractive.

“For various anarchists the fact that the State or “political power” was not immediately “abolished” is the ultimate proof and yardstick that nothing of fundamental significance [in relation to revolutionary achievement – BC] really occurred. The SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain) draw much the same conclusion, although they attribute it to the fact that the wages system was not abolished, the majority of the Russian population not having had the benefit of hearing the SPGB viewpoint (as put by spokesmen duly sanctioned by their Executive Committee) and not having then sought to win a Parliamentary majority in the existing Russian institutions.”

The SPGB is basically correct, in my opinion, to the extent it is on the path to grasping what the new economic rule is. It is, in the lower phase of communism, the equating of labours, not wage labour which is a form of pay related to a magnitude of value produced (albeit, significantly curtailed). In the lower phase of communism, 4 hours = 4 hours, brain surgery is rewarded with the same amount of physical stuff as cleaning. The magnitude of what a worker receives is shaped only by the amount of time he or she has worked.

Of course, it will be immediately objected that brain surgeons are worth more than cleaners. But the new economic measure is not a moral measure. We are not saying both forms of labour are worth the same in a moral sense, only in an economic sense. Society can find other ways to praise the brain surgeon. Indeed, economic value deviates more from moral value in capitalism. Why can a banker get £100,000 bonus whilst the nurse is going to a food bank? Indeed, let us say a junior nurse earns £500,000 over a lifetime, and that Elon Musk’s net worth is £600bn. In that case, 1.2m junior nurses = 1 Elon Musk. That’s meant to be justice? The only way of suppressing the Law of Value is to equate labour hours instead. No labour commands more wealth than another of equal duration. In a higher phase of communism, it will become “from each according to their abilities to each according to their need”, but that could only evolve non-coercively on the back of a society which has already abolished money. So, we are struggling for the lower phase of communism right now.

By effecting this change, there are tremendous ramifications: 1) the commodity is stripped of its value form and becomes a naked physical thing 2) this allows the exchange of products of labour via a measure of equal labour time, so, assuming it takes 2 minutes to make a pint of beer in an economy of scale, then I get 30 pints a week for 1 hours work (not 15 hours work as it is under capitalism on a pay rate of £10 hour (where 1 pint = £5); the beach hut that requires 8 hours to build and under capitalism retails at a whole year’s salary, instead I can obtain by exchanging 8 hours of my labour; it takes 5.25 hours of my labour to obtain my year’s supply of energy (because that is what it takes them to produce and distribute it), whereas under capitalism I have to work a whole month to heat my home. 3) so, you are able to both increase the physical magnitude of wealth and simultaneously reduce the length of the working day at the same time, by having corrected capitalism’s inversion of the subject and the object. 4) Money is abolished, so the termination of commodity fetishism permits a new fruition in human relationships – at last our existence becomes truly humanized. 5) A substantial chunk of the reasons for war and various oppressions have been annulled.

6) Abolition of the Law of Value furnishes Man with the resources needed to tackle climate change. A 100% switch to renewable energy would require capitalism to invest $73tn, and, once up and running, these renewable sources of energy like wind and solar would be reaping less profit. There is just no material incentive for capitalism to go green which is why, despite vociferous campaigning by literally millions of people, little or nothing has been done in relation to investment in renewable energy. What is more, any attempt by Liberals to coerce capitalism into change (like a Green New Deal), triggers a political rise of the Far Right, eager to protect the ruling class’s privilege. They portray acceptance of climate science as a ‘choice’ between ‘progress’ (which they identify with capitalism), or ‘regress’ from naïve hippy tree-huggers. So, truth, and perhaps existence itself, demands an opposition to these people with dollar signs for eyeballs, and, with regard to gaining the upper hand in economic arguments, an opposition to the Law of Value.

7) Abolition of the Law of Value permits infrastructural improvement, for it becomes far easier to rally resources. Currently Britain’s water and sewage piping dates back to the Victorian period. The result of that is that every river in Britain now breaches safe levels of pollution (by EU criteria). Whatever public service one considers, there are none that wouldn’t fare better without price tags on everything.

8) With increased free time, obviously it is up to individuals how they spend it. But we would hazard a guess that many would want to invoke measures to rejuvenate wildlife which has suffered a 68% decline since 1970.

All these changes are what political struggle is about, and it is non-reducible to a simple idea of ‘worker’s management’.

But Brinton does not go down this route. He says: “Workers’ management of production – implying as it does the total domination of the producer over the productive process – is not for us a marginal matter. It is the core of our politics. It is the only means whereby authoritarian (order-giving, order-taking) relations in production can be transcended and a free, communist or anarchist, society introduced.” But worker’s management is not enough if the context in which said management takes place remains unchanged. If you are still operating in a capitalist economy but have “worker’s management”, all you have is a brief spell of happier workplaces. It is brief. It will be undone, quickly. Besides which, without a concept of radical social change, these workers as managers will not want to take on these roles as they will regard it as an extra burden. Most people say ‘I just want to do my job and go home/I don’t want the burden of managing/I want a job where I don’t have to think’ etc. So, the economic context has to change at the same time the social relations of production change. There is no other way. Given we want to avoid the Red Terror of the USSR, thinking along the lines of how we can expand democracy is a priority, and this involves an active relationship with what little shreds of democracy exist today like Parliament. (My reading of Marx’s notion of ‘smashing the state’ and having a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is non-superficial; I think it can equally mean opening up the state to the widest possible democracy). 

Leninism does not abolish the wages system, and for that, it is tragically flawed. Meanwhile Anarchism does not have any idea of what comes next after the state is smashed. What we do instead is create a new mode of production in which vast quantities of Value can no longer be siphoned off into the netherworld. Something accomplished by no longer producing metaphysical metamorphic substances, but relating human activities to each other directly.