PREFACE

Our attempt to sketch the outlines of a transformed society, for the purpose of establishing libertarian socialism, runs up against some realities and difficulties that we cannot ignore. The improvement of the military techniques of the states and the new conservative forces, no longer allows us to expect that the people themselves will be capable of victory, by force of arms, against tanks, jet bombers, modern artillery, H-bombs and guided missiles. In other times, despite an almost total parity in armament, no social revolution was ever able to win by force of arms; such an outcome is even less likely now.

Furthermore, the modern economy implies the interdependence of all nations. If a trade embargo were to be enforced against France, depriving that country of petroleum and its derivative products, as well as the fifteen million tons of coal annually purchased by France, and then of its Saharan gas supplies and the numerous raw materials imported from the four corners of the earth, this would lead to an unendurable economic situation, and all the more so as, for many proletarians, the revolution must entail an immediate improvement in their living conditions.

From numerous perspectives the problems we face therefore appear to be insoluble, since they are largely new problems or have acquired such dimensions that they can discourage us from addressing them. However, two historical reference points permit those of us who are trying to adapt to the new circumstances to entertain renewed hopes.

As we shall see, these reference points are only valid within the framework of our time and within that of the social and moral development that has been achieved by human societies.

The first reference point is the liberation of India. This liberation movement proved that it is possible to achieve in our time, and under favorable international political conditions, something that would have seemed absurd to even consider prior to the First World War: a population colonized by a powerful nation disposing of the means to impose its rule for a very long time, defeated the imperialism to which it was subject, without the use of armed force, violent struggle, or traditional combat. Gandhi’s tactics, which were the same as those of Tolstoy, who for his part appears to have been inspired by Proudhon, have demonstrated their practical value. If the moral power of the combatants, their tenacity, their identification with the public will, their civil courage, and even their heroism, are unhesitatingly mobilized, other no less significant victories are possible.

This is a great lesson that we must learn to profit from, by adapting this method to the specific conditions of the time and place in which the social struggles of the future will unfold.

We have therefore arrived at a stage of development of civilized humanity that, in the non-totalitarian countries, allows us to attempt to do things that have long been unthinkable.

One could imagine and elaborate, on the basis of active but nonviolent struggle, an entire battle strategy in which the truly syndicalist trade unions, the truly cooperative cooperatives, and the communities that boldly attempt to carry out integral projects can and must engage in the construction, both in the sphere of public spirit as well as that of the economy, the new world that has to be developed within the society of the present.

The second reference point is the occupation of the factories throughout a large part of France in June 1936. It is a fact of enormous importance that the workers were not evicted from the workplaces, by force, nor was any attempt made to evict them, as was also the case in Italy, during a similar experience that took place in 1920.

In both instances, there could have been many victims. In the most civilized countries the governments thought twice before repeating the massacres of 1848 or 1871, massacres that were publicized all over the world and are still linked with the names of the men and parties that ordered them. We shall not forget, however, that it was a Labour government that proclaimed India’s freedom—Churchill would not have done so—and that it was Blum who, at the request of the pro-capitalist parties, negotiated with the strikers of 1936. This is the essential function of politics.

We must point out that in the two cases of occupations of the factories, the workers did not rise to the occasion of their historical role. They neither knew how to operate the factories nor how to assure production, at least to the extent that the existing stocks of raw materials, energy and available means of transport would have allowed. Unlike the workers of Barcelona, Catalonia and the Levant in Spain, the French and Italian workers were incapable of replacing the boss and management, proof that the general strike is no panacea, and that it leads nowhere if it is not just expropriatory, but also organizational.

In the latter case, of course, it would no longer be a strike and would instead become a revolution transforming the social structures. But in order for it to accomplish this, preparations must be made. The Spanish libertarians did not improvise. Their achievements were the culmination of a long psychological and practical process, one that was always focused on the final goal.

When a favorable opportunity arose, they took advantage of it.

REPLACING THE STATE

For many people the biggest problem of all is how to build Socialism with an organic national structure that would replace the state and the government. For them, these two different institutions—one is the crown of the other—only play a harmful and anti-social role. But they also perform a useful function, and not to acknowledge this is to display an unfortunate ignorance and an irrational or blind prejudice.

Those who think in this way are, to a certain extent, correct. The state and the government have committed incomparable evils in various human societies, by way of war, taxation, political oppression, support for the exploiters of the masses, a hypertrophied bureaucracy, tyranny of every kind and the apparatus of repression funded and maintained by the latter.

Often, however, they also performed or were the origin of useful activities: such was the case of Louis XIV and Napoleon, under whom the state nonetheless committed so many atrocities, with regard to the construction of highways, roads, and bridges, connecting regions and cities; the construction of canals and irrigation projects; the organization of public sanitation services, primary, secondary and higher education, which had arisen without their help, but which they reinforced; reforestation; aid to the poorest regions—all thanks to tax revenues. All of these things represent a positive role of the state, one that is relatively reduced under the impact of the its negative role, since one year of war destroys more than was built in twenty years of peace, and the state’s role in the economy is becoming so expensive that if all domestic activities were nationalized, bankruptcy would soon ensue.

And this is not taking into account, besides, the ruinous devaluations, or the fraudulent bankruptcies that have taken place throughout history. The example of the franc reduced to less than two centimes in value after 1914, is proof enough. If France, after 1914—and the same thing happened in the other nations—was capable of overcoming its difficulties and amassing wealth once again, it was because of the labor of its peasants and agriculture as a whole, of the workers and industry as a whole, of the technicians and engineers, because of the labor of those who built factories, workshops and laboratories, toiling, often in obscurity, but effectively, and endlessly creating; and also because of those who organized the exchange and the circulation of commodities and monetary values.

In this country, after 1945, fifteen million producers—we shall exclude the five million parasites—have spearheaded economic progress, assuring the population’s existence. Nor was the state idle in the meantime. It intervened, especially in order to extract, by means of an often crippling tax policy, thirty, forty or even fifty percent of the national income, and in exchange has given the nation no more than ten percent of the useful things it possesses.

The period of prodigious development of Europe and North America was that of the liberal economy. The “laissez faire, laissez passer” of the first school of economics formed in France—that of the Physiocrats—was directed at the state, which was encouraged to abolish customs barriers, restrictions, regulations and a large part of the tax burden that so inhibited the development of agriculture, industry and commerce. The state collaborated by abstaining from intervention. Today, the reconstruction of the German economy, which is undoubtedly the most spectacular phenomenon of the post-war era, has been made possible thanks to the liberal economy, in which the state does not intervene.

And throughout the history of the European nations, and that of Republican Rome, ancient China, the Middle East, the Persian, Roman or Byzantine Empires, the periods of prosperity have corresponded with periods when the state refrained from intervening in the economy as much as possible, and those which collapsed fell as a consequence of the stagnation or the paralysis caused by the ruinous triumph of statism.

We shall not overlook all the other aspects of the liberal economy: the division of society into hostile social classes, the shameless exploitation of the disinherited by the privileged, terrible economic crises, wars. These same evils, however, have always been caused by the state as well, and at least the liberal economy has succeeded, as we pointed out, in developing the wealth of nations. The most important problem is that of an improved distribution of the goods produced; the social justice that statism can by no means assure. We shall merely recall at this point that, apart from the public services that have been, on a local scale, the work of the municipalities, the state has not been necessary in ninety percent of the creative activities of society.

Why, then, should everything go off the rails if it disappears? Why cannot the ten percent about which we spoke above be organized without the state?

We must therefore destroy this deeply rooted illusion that maintains that economic relations are, in their totality, organized, regulated, and coordinated by the government and the state and that the disappearance of the latter will lead to general paralysis or chaos in the production and distribution of consumption and production goods; in short, in everything that is necessary for the preservation and enjoyment of life.

Whoever examines the functioning of the economy in capitalist society will observe that the major industrial sectors regulate their mutual relations in accordance with voluntarily established practice, and have often done so for centuries. A mine or a mining corporation provides, thanks to the capital that it has been able to generate, and thanks to the engineers and the miners, the iron ore to the steel companies that were formed a long time ago, without the state’s interference, now or the in the past. These huge forges, these furnaces, these cable or rolled steel factories, ship sheet metal, tubes, ingots or bars of iron, all the prepared raw materials, to hundreds of enterprises, warehouses, and workshops that comprise their regular customer base. These factories and workshops manufacture or assemble machinery, utensils, equipment and other finished products that are distributed to multiple retailers in a certain territory. An enormous sector of activity has thus been constituted, together with many others, and like them it is a living, active whole in full expansion.

In all of this the state—as always—has only intervened in order to collect taxes.

The same picture can be replicated for all industrial activities. From the acquisition of the raw material to its preparation and transformation into articles of use, it is by means of the coordinated activity of men and groups of men that the production and distribution of the most important goods and services have been carried out unremittingly.

The same situation, even more characteristically, prevails in agriculture, which was born long before industry, and which has developed in accordance with its own efforts. It is true that now, in a country like France, the farmers request state assistance in the face of the need for the rapid progress that is required to keep pace with the rhythm of the modern economy. In countries like those of Northern Europe, however, and especially as a result of the activities of the cooperatives, the peasants, thanks to their concerted efforts, have achieved admirable progress. And experience proves that the state intervention that generally leads to protectionism is, in the final accounting, by no means a real factor that contributed to this progress. Is state intervention such a factor, for example, in the United States, where the stocks of accumulated wheat, thanks to government subsidies, are estimated to amount to hundreds of millions of bushels and represent a value of three billion dollars, from which no one benefits?

It is true that with regard to economic activities, the state has sometimes intervened to ensure the quality of commodities (this is what the corporations of the Middle Ages did, in another era). In a socialized society, however, fraud will no longer have any reason to exist, and specialized organizations will be responsible for assuring the quality of the products of labor.

Contrary, then, to what is generally believed, and for the purpose of preparing henceforth for the relations of the future, far from provoking economic collapse and chaos, libertarian socialization will lead to the establishment of a hitherto-unprecedented order. Even though liberal capitalism and the bourgeois economy have created the world as it is by themselves, with the results we have summarized, we are still far distant from the rational organization that common sense would assume is necessary to avoid waste and misuse of resources, to satisfy the needs of all.

We therefore foresee a Society in which all activities will be coordinated, a structure that has, at the same time, sufficient flexibility to permit the greatest possible autonomy for social life, or for the life of each enterprise, and enough cohesiveness to prevent all disorder. However, and we must insist on this point, this new creation will not be a substitute for the state, except insofar as it assumes responsibility for certain public services. For it was not the state that made possible the mining of sand, of rock, of limestone, that manufactured of plaster and cement, bricks, tiles, or that cut down trees and transported lumber, or the metal framing, glass, lead pipes, locks, or that framed, installed doors and windows to build houses.

In a well-organized society, all of these things must be systematically accomplished by means of parallel federations, vertically united at the highest levels, constituting one vast organism in which all economic functions will be performed in solidarity with all others and that will permanently preserve the necessary cohesion.

INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURE

The Trade Unions

What means are necessary to achieve this transformation, assuming that the requisite maturity has been attained by a sufficient number of workers?

The trade unions and enterprise committees spontaneously arise in industry and transport. We cannot foresee the relative importance of these two institutions. Ideally, it is the trade unions that should direct activities, since only they can embrace and coordinate all the enterprises—small, medium and large—that exist in every industry, in every locality—to the extent that we have not gone beyond the local framework.

This coordination is absolutely necessary. It has often been the case that, without being conscious of the fact that they are doing so, the enterprise committees tend to exclusively, or almost exclusively, restrict their attention to the activity and interest of each factory or each workshop.

Thus, let us assume that in the Paris region there are two thousand factories, small and large, that produce chemicals. Some have reserves of raw materials, others do not, and if equality is not established among them within a short period of time, the egoism of each enterprise will emerge and inter-enterprise rivalries will follow as the result of the interruption of transport or shortages of supplies. The trade unions situated above this enterprise patriotism, meanwhile, can equitably distribute the elements of production and direct the latter in accordance with a general plan that is imposed in accordance with the economic needs of the whole. For we must not forget that the social transformation must revolutionize the economic organization not only by eliminating capitalism, the boss, and the exploiter, but also by organizing production in accordance with the interests of the entire society. And in this respect not only are we situated, not only must we be situated, above the particular interests of the enterprise, but also above those of the corporation, or the interests of each trade, or of each industry. Otherwise, new forms of injustice and exploitation would arise.

In order to perform this role the trade unions must from now on attempt to do what has never been done before in the history of the world: each trade union must proceed to carry out a census of the workshops, the factories, and the industrial complexes corresponding to their particular activities. Each trade union must have precise knowledge of the number of workers in all the enterprises, their specialties and, if this is possible, the volume of production, the number of machines, the technical development attained, the energy consumed, and the percentage of the management personnel and technicians amenable to cooperation with the manual workers.

If, instead of contenting themselves with strike movements that are only imitations of real action, the workers organizations had assumed this task, after a certain period of time, they would have trained their militants at every level for the task of achieving everything that they claim to stand for, and the reformist and communist deviations would not have attained their current catastrophic degree of development.

Management Committees

Naturally, all of these things can only be possible if the trade unions are revolutionary, since, taken as a whole, they have ceased to be and we must even fear that their bureaucrats, their leaders—generally bourgeoisified and turned into officials—their secretaries, and their orators, would be incapable of playing the role, should the factories ever be occupied again, that was played by Jouhaux, Dumoulin and others, in 1936, or by Arragona, in Italy, in 1920. Perhaps it will be possible to take over the local trade union centers, and seize the documentation, which would be at least in part useful, from the strictly trade union point of view, and that might yield fragmentary information about the situation of each trade and each industry. Given the current state of the trade union movement, however, it is much more likely that revolutionary action will have to be carried out in the workshops, factories and enterprises of every type.

In this domain everything remains to be imagined, intellectually elaborated and practically implemented. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the factory committees in Italy in 1920, where the movement was even larger than the corresponding movement that took place in France sixteen years later, is aware of the fact that these committees displayed an almost total inability to carry out practical actions. Once the factory was occupied, no one knew what to do next.

The Hungarian revolution took an “almost” identical turn. Because there are no real trade unions (the institutions that were and still are called “trade unions” are nothing but pseudo-working class organizations that serve as seedbeds for the proliferation of a bureaucracy that is the compliant tool of the Communist Party and the State), enterprise committees were formed everywhere. But they lacked a precise conception of their goals and their methods, and of the complete uprooting of the old system that was required. It would have been necessary to hold, within ten days, in Budapest, a national Congress of enterprise committees, that would have assumed the role of a coordinating institution for the national industrial economy, and to create the technical bodies necessary for the management of the economy as a whole. This would have filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of the state which, for good or for ill, organized the economy; this would have also helped prevent the appearance of a multitude of parties that sowed disorder, and would have rallied a good number of doubters to the side of the revolution.

What we have just written is, to a large extent, an outline of the road that lies ahead of us. We do not know if it would be necessary to act with the same haste in establishing a new institution that would replace the government and the state, or if both would survive thanks to the support of overwhelming armed force, in the absence of which their abolition would be possible.

The conditions of the struggle cannot be foreseen, and to provide solutions in advance, even assuming the best-case scenario, would be equivalent to writing a futuristic novel. There can be no doubt, however, that it is not idle to recall what Proudhon advocated on May 4, 1848, during the revolutionary period during which—once again—the unprepared population did not know what to do.

“A provisional Committee should be established for the organization of exchange, credit and the circulation of goods among the workers.”

“This Committee should establish relations with similar Committees formed in the main cities.”

“By decision of these Committees, a representative body of the workers should be formed, imperium in imperio, to oppose the representative body of the bourgeoisie.”

“The seed of the new society must germinate in the soil of the traditional society.”

“The Charter of Labor should be immediately drafted, and the principle articles of this Charter should be defined within the shortest possible time.”

“The foundations of the republican government should be established and special powers granted, to this effect, to the representatives of the workers.”

By “republican government”, Proudhon meant something very different from the way we would understand that term today. During his time the republic represented for the revolutionaries an ideal that was more social than political. Furthermore, there were two opposed forces: on the one side, the official provisional government, and on the other, the assembly of Luxemburg where the various socialist tendencies were represented, with Louis Blanc, Pecqueur, Pierre Leroux, Vidal, etc.

The republican government could have left this assembly. That is why Proudhon engaged in a fervent polemical exchange with those who held seats in the government, because, as opposed to the statist conception of socialism that they advocated, he advocated an anti-statist federalist conception. So whenever he speaks of the “republican government”, we must understand this to mean a formation that assumes the official representation of France and organizes its affairs according to the directives issued by the assembly of committees constituted “in the principle cities”, and implements these directives or helps implement them by way of that autonomous imperium in imperio organized by the workers that will never depart from the exercise of its social power, its organizational initiatives and its original dynamism.

The existence of a working class power, organically constituted as an independent world, that would impose its existence as a new reality of history upon a government that emerges from a revolutionary situation, taking the reins of the economy or as much of the economy as possible, and would as a consequence of its power compel the state to acknowledge its existence and respect it, is a perfectly plausible hypothesis.

It is possible that this process could lead to another stage during which there will be advances and retreats. Everything depends on the respective forces of the two adversaries. And, as we pointed out above, there will have to be a favorable political situation, since such an enterprise would be doomed to failure if reactionary parties, supported by well-organized forces of repression, were to be in power. It is also necessary for the international political and economic situation not to present an obstacle. A serious revolutionary movement must have specialists devoted to the study of these problems.

Let us therefore assume that, as a result of a wave of expropriations, the workers of industry and the public services in France seize a multitude of existing enterprises, and that they are unable, for the foreseeable future, to rely on the trade unions, which will only attempt to restrain the movement.

What would be their first task?

First of all, to elect enterprise management committees in every city that will, with the necessary authority, assume responsibility for the preservation of the equipment and machinery and the continuity of the labor process. These committees will assume an infinite variety of forms, depending on the size and structural characteristics of each enterprise. The enterprise committee in a workshop that employs fifteen workers will not be comparable to that of an enterprise like Renault, which in 1959 employed sixty-two thousand workers. In an enterprise like Renault, each Section will have to elect a delegate who is chosen on the basis of his competence and his sense of responsibility. These Section delegates, or delegates from specialized workshops, will in turn constitute a General Management Committee that will also be joined by the high level technicians who are reliable.

In smaller enterprises the principle of the enterprise committees will be the same. We mentioned the Sections or workshops of Renault because they concentrate different specialized labor processes. There are also such specialized labor processes—forge workers, rolling mill workers, boiler workers, lathe operators, pipefitters, etc.—in a medium-sized metal factory.

All these special labor processes together participate in the manufacture of machines, instruments, and products. All of them must be represented so that no aspect of the production process is overlooked, and in order to assure that the institution of which they are parts coordinates the labor process and ensures the necessary quality and quantity of production.

As for enterprise committees as they currently exist, they can be quite justifiably criticized to some extent because they often, although unconsciously, enmesh the workers delegates in the game of the employers interests, at the same time that they perform a major service by accustoming the workers to the management of the enterprise and the responsibilities of labor. Under such circumstances, it is possible—experience shows us that this happens in only a minority of cases—for some delegates to forget about the interests of their comrades. The majority do not forget them, and in a revolution something will happen that often takes place with numerous state employees and officials, and sometimes military officers or men who belong to non-revolutionary categories: the momentum of the events drags them along, and turns them into valuable auxiliaries.

Industrial Federations

It is indispensable, however, for the seizure of the capitalist enterprises, the means of transportation and the public services, to immediately acquire the requisite organic and institutional character for ensuring the collective life of society.

In order to achieve this goal it will be necessary, as soon as possible, to coordinate these committees.

How to proceed? We can imagine two ways: one, technical; the other, political-technical. Allow me to explain.

Technical: i.e., by industry. Each industry must, from the very first moment, organically constitute itself as a coordinated whole. The means to obtain this result will consist in electing delegates representing the various enterprises, who will be convened, first of all, in the local assemblies of industry. Let us assume that the following procedure is established for such representation: one delegate for each enterprise employing between five and twenty workers; two delegates for each enterprise employing between twenty and one hundred workers; three delegates for each enterprise with between 100 and 200 employees; and one delegate for every one hundred additional employees. Different percentages could be established for major factories like Renault, Citroën, Peugeot, Berliet, etc.

An arrangement could also be made to group together all the small enterprises to prevent them, because such enterprises are so numerous, from dominating, with the mass of their delegates, the directive organs of industry, when they only represent a minor part of production. These questions will have to be resolved in the future. We are interested above all in suggesting some broad outlines for possible courses of action.

The delegates will convene by industry, in local general assemblies, at which the directives of the labor process will be determined and a Management Commission will be elected, in which the committed militants must be represented in at least equal proportions to the technicians, in order to guarantee the social character of the revolutionary management, unless the technicians are also revolutionaries.

From this point on, the coordinating body will be formed on the living basis of the enterprise committees and, by way of their mediation, of the enterprises themselves. As soon as possible, the factories and workshops must be assigned with the necessary instructions concerning the volume and type of production that each one must guarantee or continue to guarantee. The directives will have to come from the general coordinating body.

This body will create as many commissions as are rendered necessary by the number of major projects that it plans to implement. It will be necessary to obtain, as soon as possible, that which the trade union did not acquire, which we enumerated above: statistics concerning the average volume of production of each enterprise, the size of the labor force, the total number and characteristics of the technical personnel, reserves of raw materials, the usual markets for the enterprises’ manufactured products (consuming regions, exports, local consumption).

All of this information, collected and duly organized, as an instrument of labor, will allow for the accurate management of production, taking into account new needs and the collective interest. For example, in the printing industry, it will no longer be necessary to publish all the newspapers that currently circulate and which respond to the interests of political parties and capitalist enterprises. It would be better to provide for the needs of the workers displaced from these jobs at these newspapers rather than to waste energy and raw materials that are often so hard to obtain.

The organization of production must acquire a national scope as soon as possible. Each industry must organize on the basis of the entire national territory, because, over the passage of time, the distribution of labor has often adjusted, although slowly, to the needs of consumption as well as geological, geographical, demographic and other imperatives, which cannot be ignored. The role played by the transport network in facilitating long-distance distribution has favored this process of adaptation.

It would therefore seem to be logical for each Local Committee of the Federation of Enterprises to elect, in proportion to the number of workers it represents, a small delegation (let us assume, one delegate for every one thousand workers, three for every ten thousand, etc.). All the delegates thus chosen will meet at a National Congress of Metal Workers that will be held in the geographic center of the industry (Paris, Lille, Nancy, etc.).

At this Congress, where more serious business will be conducted than the mere chatter of parliamentarians, the technicians will outline a general plan of labor in accordance with the usual needs that must be satisfied, on the one hand, and, on the other, the technical means, the labor force, the locations of extraction, the raw materials and the energy sources available.

Let us suppose that, broadly speaking—the statistics that will have been compiled will help, at first, to make more precise forecasts—that, in the Paris region, forty thousand farm tractors are produced each year, thirty thousand in the North, twenty-five thousand in the East, the same number in the cities of the Center and five thousand more in the cities of the Southwest.

Let us furthermore assume that this data includes the production figures from three hundred cities and metal working factories. We can foresee meetings in which the delegates of all these production units convene to establish the means to coordinate and synchronize their efforts. These meetings will be able to address, in addition, all the agricultural aspects involving their final product.

We may also consider the problem from another angle: First, regional congresses where all the problems concerning the manufacture of these machines will be examined. The regional congresses will then elect qualified and reliable technicians to serve as delegates to the National Congress, which will thus be streamlined as a result of hosting fewer participants.

These delegates will decide upon the modifications that should be incorporated into the allocation and process of labor, economizing in the use of labor and rationalizing the employment of raw materials and energy.

Today in France approximately thirty different brands of tractors are manufactured, because, in the capitalist regime, it is enough for a man to possess the financial means to build, and hire the technical and manual workers to operate, an enterprise that launches any kind of article onto the market whose sale will bring profits, if, as is generally the case, the initiative is commercially viable. Each enterprise offers its products that possess—or do not possess—their own special characteristics, depending on the degree of inventiveness of their designers or technicians. But we can eliminate three-quarters of the existing brands of tractors and only produce a limited number of models, responding to the terrain for which they are intended, cultural standards, etc.

Instead, then, of manufacturing machines that are too fragile or hard to maintain, the manufacturers will eliminate everything pertaining to the product that was merely commercial advertising, all that serves only to deceive and exploit the peasants, and improve the selected models as much as possible, and all the workshops will specialize in the manufacture, geographically distributed, of the types of tractors that are appropriate for the requirements of each region’s agriculture.

The same approach is valid for all industries. Some, such as the chemical industry, will require extremely precise coordination. From sulfuric acid and coal to petrochemicals, and from petroleum to plastics, its products are of such variety, and play such an important role in the entire industrial and agricultural economy, that a meticulous and comprehensive organization must be created as soon as possible.

The production of textiles, the manufacture of cement, of electrical equipment, furniture, etc., must all be organized or reorganized from the bottom up, from the management or enterprise committees to the national industrial federations. The construction industry alone will require a national plan for urban renewal, addressing the needs of the population, and intensifying work where it is most necessary by way of the rapid distribution of labor power and raw materials.

Organization of Industry on a National Scale

This leads us to extend the range of our constructive and organizational considerations. Anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with the economic activities of a modern society, knows that none of them are independent, just as no particular locality can survive on its own resources, and one would only display the crassest ignorance by conceiving a new society organized on the basis of the self-sufficient “free commune”, as has been suggested by certain people who view the problem in a simplistic way, in accordance with the degree of their intelligence or how well-informed they are.

All industries rely on other industries. There would be no pipefitters without the miners who extract the iron ore, without the foundry workers to manufacture the different kinds of iron and steel, or without the indispensable casting, without the rolling mill workers, without the forge workers, etc. But these activities that are carried out as steps in a process would be impossible without other activities that make them possible. The miner works with machines (drills, jackhammers, pneumatic jacks, conveyor belts) which are supplied by metal working enterprises; these enterprises, in turn, function thanks to the energy provided by the electric power plants. These electric power plants produce electric current because other miners extracted from the bowels of the earth the coal that is transformed into electricity, or because dams are built, sometimes far away, on rivers and in the mountains, by construction workers, with cement, iron, wood, and diverse construction materials, which all come from different parts of the country, or even from other nations.

The same is true of the timber industry, whose products are often indispensable for supporting the galleries of the coal seams in the mines, and forest management is one link in the chain of complementary labors that will culminate in the manufacture of a bicycle, a frying pan, a bottle of perfume or a wristwatch. Inversely, the timber industry requires the help of the metal industry that supplies the axes, the chainsaws, the skidders, the trucks and the tractors to transport the logs to the sawmills that will cut them. Everything is interconnected, everything is linked, we cannot repeat this often enough, and unless we want to return to the economy of the primitive tribal group, which would be impossible anyway due to the density of the population, we have to consider the creation of a vast confederation of industrial production.

There are relatively independent activities which, besides the supply of raw materials that some people or enterprises may obtain locally, need not be directed in accordance with a general plan. However, the energy industry which, in addition to coal, supplies electricity, petroleum and natural or manufactured gas, together with the chemical industry, are auxiliary to all the other industries. Without energy—and this is a platitude—all industries would be paralyzed and the only kind of production that would be possible would be basic artisanal production that would be insufficient for ensuring a modern standard of living.

We must also mention the role played by transport. In 1957, the French railroads alone carried two hundred seventeen million tons of commodities, including fifty-four million six hundred thousand tons of coal, thirty-six million eight hundred thousand tons of minerals and more than twenty-six million tons of metallurgical products. More than sixty-six million tons of diverse products were shipped on the inland waterway network of rivers and canals, including petroleum products and construction materials. In 1958, truck transport, constantly expanding, was responsible for the shipment of two hundred fifteen million tons, most of it on “short-haul”, that is, short distances, while the rail network is used for “long-haul”, or long distance shipping. And of course, all the products destined for the cities, the grains, the meat, the milk, the oils, the fabrics, the clothing, the hundreds of thousands of articles required by the populations of every locality do not arrive at their destination except by way of these means of transport that constitute the vascular system of the great body of society.

Just like the energy producing industries upon which they rely, unless we want to return to the times of the horse and wagon, they are indispensable for the economic life of the population.

We may conclude from this circumstance that all industries and all means of transport must be coordinated within the framework of this totality of general productive activities and that all of them, from the very first moment, must examine the practical means for unifying, ordering, and harmonizing their efforts. The Power Generation Federation must receive from all the other industries their respective demands with regard to the necessary total number (necessarily an approximation, and reserves will also have to be calculated to provide a margin for error) of Kilowatts, of tons of coal and oil and gasoline, and of millions of cubic meters of gas. These four essential aspects of energy and lighting must constitute a totality, whereas in capitalist society they are often opposed to one another, in an absurd rivalry. All of these factors will oblige the coal miners, the gas workers and the electric power plant workers to unite in one vast organization, with its corresponding regional and local sections. Once again we see that certain traditional structures will be disrupted. The miners who extract the iron ore and those who extract the coal do not have to be members of the same industrial organization just because they work underground. The former will have to be members of the Federation of the Metal Industry, while the latter will be members of the Power and Light Federation.

All these Federations, furthermore, whose directive committees will function side by side, will coordinate their complementary activities with regard to means and ends, thanks to a higher coordinating body that will to a certain extent constitute the functional directive center of the national economy. The Industrial Confederation will at its highest levels unite the technicians-delegates elected by the congresses of the various Industrial Federations in order to constitute the Confederal Inter-Industrial Committee.

The very close links thus established will allow for the resolution, as they arise, of the problems posed by the maintenance of relations between these diverse activities.

Thus, we shall have:

At the base, the specialized enterprises and their councils.

Above them, the local industrial committees.

Above the local industrial committees, the regional industrial federations, with the coordination committees elected by the regional assembly of delegates.

Above these bodies, the National Federation of each industry, which will have its own periodic congresses, attended by the regional delegates, led by the Committee of Technicians elected at these congresses, which will be responsible, in accordance with the directives issued, for coordinating general activity on the national plane.

And finally, the national inter-industrial committee.

(Chart 1—Depiction of the Federal Industrial Organization.)(Chart omitted)

DECENTRALIZATION AND THE ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY

Before we address the issue of the structures of the federalist organization, we believe it would be useful to provide some figures that will show that, from the practical point of view—and not just from the point of view of theory or principles—industrial decentralization is an absolute necessity.

In 1954, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), the Paris region had six million three hundred thousand inhabitants, that is, 14.3 percent of the population of France. Yet it is home to twenty-three percent of the industrial wage workers. Sixty percent of France’s aeronautics workers, 56.2 percent of the workers in its electrical equipment industry, and sixty-four percent of its aluminum foundry workers are located in the Paris region; fifty percent of France’s copper and copper alloy workers, and fifty percent of its zinc, lead and tin workers, eighty percent of the country’s high-pressure alloy manufacturing workers, sixty-five percent of its machinery production workers, seventy-one percent of its paint and varnish manufacturing workers, sixty-five percent of its plaster manufacturing workers (which nonetheless would appear to be easy to produce throughout the country), ninety-five percent of its gas meter manufacturing workers, eighty percent of those who manufacture water meters, and ninety-two percent of its auto workers.

We must also mention that one third of the personnel employed in France in the “liberal professions”, dominated by parasitism, are in Paris; that twenty-nine percent of the public service employees live in the Paris region, which shows just how under-represented the other parts of France are in this regard; and that twenty-six percent of the employees of the transport sector are also concentrated in the same region.

Having called attention to these facts, we shall try to set forth the outlines of a decentralized organization of industry.

We have seen that between the organization of local production and that of national production, an intermediate regional organization is interposed. This latter organization may assume multiple forms.

Let us assume that in the city of Lyon, furniture is manufactured for the entire Department of the Rhône, and that its furniture industry also assembles furniture whose parts are manufactured in the Rhône Department as well as the Departments of Aix, Savoy, Isere, the Loire and Saone-et-Loire. This manufacturing and assembly cluster will result in the construction of an inter-departmental Federation of Furniture Workers. However, should the woodworkers of Provence lack raw materials, they would be obliged to appeal to the Federation whose headquarters is in Lyon.

Thus, diverse departmental federations will join the National Federation, not as a result of the capricious ruling of a central committee, even one elected by a congress, but as a result of the vital requirements of consumption and the possibilities of the labor process. Thanks to this national institution that will proceed to undertake a census of the raw materials available nationally, and which will be informed concerning the potential of production of each zone, the regions experiencing shortages will systematically direct their requests to the regions possessing surpluses, which will prevent one department from being overwhelmed with requests when these requests should be evenly distributed among the other departments with a surplus.

Here we have the elements of a federalism that will combine autonomy and cohesion, true self-determination and an overall plan. This is only one aspect of what we shall call decentralization, which we must attempt to implement as completely as possible, in order to prevent the formation of rigid and authoritarian apparatuses contrary to life and liberty. There are other possibilities for this terrain. We shall enumerate a few of them.

The federalist and, to a certain extent, centralized management that proceeds from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom, one that will allow for rational planning, will be neither necessary nor indispensable for all industries, especially for those which have a local character. In a small city where shoes, household objects, fabrics and the furniture required for local consumption is produced, either by assembly line or by hand, it would seem to be unnecessary for these activities to enter into the organic circuit of production directed by the National Federation. And this would be an excellent measure for helping to prevent, to the greatest extent possible, the general mechanization and standardization of human activities. Even so, for the usefulness of the knowledge itself, cities of every size, and even the small villages that would like to participate, could, simply for information purposes, provide statistics concerning their production and consumption.

Let us consider the construction industry. Building houses and public buildings, and urban planning, are local activities, which should be directly organized by the localities involved. More precisely, they should be organized by the specialists elected by these localities, or by their professional institutions: architects, public health experts, delegates of the residents, and representatives of the construction workers. Contrary to the precepts of syndicalism, these tasks are not entrusted solely to the trade union. In this case, as in all others, the consumer must lead the producer, demand must orient production.

A National Confederation of the Construction Industry will not have to perform the same kind of role performed by the National Confederation of the Textile Industry or the Chemical Industry. Decisions will have to be made instead on the basis of local conditions, including matters relating to regional architectural styles, which cannot be directed by a centralized national directive committee, since it is not only necessary to “conceive” the styles, as would take place in the best cases, but also “feel” them, in the context of the ambience of each region, the spirit of the countryside, and that of the inhabitants, the love of the land, and even local history. In this way we could in the future avoid a repetition of the monstrosities inflicted on so many cities in France after the last war, where bureaucrat-architects built barracks- and prison-like buildings, which totally spoiled the cities due to the incompatibility of their lines with the characteristics of the countryside.

Thus, the organization of the workers of the construction industry can only be national for a certain kind of planning pertaining to population growth, statistical projects, imbalances or reforms. Its main purpose would be to ensure the distribution of raw materials, of materials whose extraction, manufacture, and preparation are often localized (around the Loire, the manufacture of cement, etc.).

But a Federation of local workers, which it would appear to us to be preferable to call an “industry trade union”, should be formed immediately, and it should unite all the trades that participate in construction: excavators, bricklayers, laborers, plasterers, plumbers, painters, glaziers, architects, engineers, draftsmen, master craftsmen, etc. The various technical sections will be united by the community of labor.

From this perspective, the professional corporative trade unions have long lacked any reason to exist, not even in the contemporary social struggles, and it is surprising to see that this kind of division still exists in many sectors of the working class.

If, from the very first moments of the movement, we do not eliminate these vestiges of the past, it is likely that, due to a lack of solidarity and fraternal spirit, the revolution will not lead to the construction of a new world. If we do not make an effort to unify our forces, on the level of life and in our hearts, our revolution will not have a truly socialist, or syndicalist or libertarian, character, and it will be stillborn.

The trade union of the construction industry, however, will only be one of many trade unions of industry. The national federations represent the vertical aspect of the organization. The trade unions of industry, and the local federations of the various trade unions of the different industries, represent the horizontal, eminently decentralizing, aspect of the organization.

Let us suppose that, in an average-sized city, after the necessary classifications have been made, that all economic activities together comprise thirty basic industries, including urban transport.

The thirty corresponding trade unions would, on the one hand, be constituted by two hundred or three hundred technically-classified trade sections, each of which is conjoined with the category that corresponds with its general activity, in order to prevent the rivalries that caused such harm for the corporations of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the trade unions of industry will constitute a bond uniting all of them organically. Quite often, the activities of certain industries are directly complementary. Thus, the supply of materials for construction to the workers of the construction sector, of wood to the carpenters, to the furniture workers, of certain kinds of machines to the various workshops, etc. This would facilitate the fullest integration at a local level, true self-determination of a humanist type, and, for each person, an awareness of the activities of the whole.

But if economic decentralization is absolutely necessary in view of the fact that the Paris region is a monstrous conglomeration of factories, workshops, and offices, which since the time of Louis XIV has absorbed a large part of the country’s life and substance, paid for by all of France, industrial reorganization also appears to be a necessity, in a rational and “humanly” organized economy.

In agriculture, more or less quickly depending on regional conditions, the absolute imperative of concentrating the land will be imposed as an unavoidable necessity, instead of dividing the land into separate parcels, which is the offspring of private property, practiced over the course of the centuries. We will have to wait many more years, in the capitalist countries, to attain a more sensible system of organization and distribution for farming.

We must say, however, that some progress has already been made in this regard, thanks to the efforts of the various Ministries of Agriculture whose technicians, following the recommendations that agronomists, economists and specialized engineers have been making for many years, have slowly begun to plan and then implement this trend towards concentration which, in turn, can only acquire the necessary momentum for success by way of the support of the peasants themselves. In this connection, the professional and cooperative mutual aid societies of the peasants have also played an important part.

Yet in France there is also an equally unfortunate trend towards industrial fragmentation, which a social transformation will have to strive to remedy as soon as possible. And this is true of even the most centralized countries, which demonstrates the inherent disorder of a non-socialized economy.

Thus, although at least twenty-three percent of French industry is concentrated in the Paris region, ninety-seven percent of the industrial enterprises of this region (one hundred sixty thousand enterprises!) each employ fewer than fifty persons, and we all know that in modern industry, fifty people is an insufficient number for most industries.

If we take France as a whole, the statistics for the year 1959 show that in the chemical industry, which must be one of the most concentrated industries, 62.5 percent of the enterprises employ between one and six wage workers; 32.6 percent employ between seven and fifty; 4.1 percent, between fifty and two hundred; and 0.8 percent employ more than two hundred wage workers.

The furniture industry has thirty-four thousand “enterprises” which employ one hundred ten thousand people, or approximately three persons per enterprise. Sixty-two percent of the French sawmills employ fewer than five workers each; twenty-three thousand two hundred fifty workshops only employ thirty-seven thousand eight hundred people (as you can see, small business predominates in this industry); twenty-seven percent each employ between six and twenty people, and only eleven percent each employ more than twenty.

It is possible to choose a happy median between the small, all-too-small enterprise, dirty and barely profitable, and the gigantic enterprise. During the Spanish Revolution, our comrades everywhere implemented the changes dictated by economics and good sense, uniting the workers, the artisans and the technical equipment of the small workshops in much larger workplaces, as much for the benefit of the producers who could thus work in more hygienic and comfortable working conditions, as for profitability, thanks to the reduction of overhead costs, energy expenses, etc.

Returning to France, the industry involved in the production of metals is one of those which, for the good of the workers as well as that of the consumers, must be organized in a modern way, and therefore must be sufficiently concentrated, when this is necessary. The statistics for 1959 show that 82.2 percent of the enterprises in this industry employ 17.7 percent of its wage workers; 10.5 percent employ 26.3 percent; 0.9 percent employ 20.8 percent of the workers of the industry; and 0.2 percent employ 35.2 percent. Here we encounter one the characteristic features of capitalism, for, besides the automated enterprises, it is not always true that the large enterprise is more profitable than the average sized one. Beyond a certain level, the general operational expenses, and the costs of bureaucratic personnel, management, etc., are proportionally higher.

Let us consider the food industry. 90.7 percent of the enterprises in this industry employ between one and six people each; 8.6 percent employ between seven and one hundred. These numbers demonstrate that in this category, extremely tiny enterprises predominate. The rest, comprising 1.6 percent of the enterprises, are large enterprises. But one need only enter a sugar refinery, a chocolate or pasta factory, or a vegetable or fish cannery, or even a flour mill, to understand that, from every perspective, the artisanal enterprise, so often defended in the name of freedom, but where man is even more enslaved than in a large enterprise, is obsolete.

We see the same situation in the pulp, printing and paper industry. Eighty-four percent of the enterprises in this industry each employ between one and six persons; 15.1 percent employ between seven and one hundred persons; only 0.8 percent of the enterprises exceed this number of employees. Always extremes, and disequilibrium.

Finally, for the textile industry, concerning which one might assume that it is exclusively composed of large factories, we provide the following figures: 88.4 percent of the enterprises in this industry each employ between one and six persons; 10.5 percent employ between seven and one hundred persons; forty-five percent of all the employees of the industry are concentrated in 1.1 percent of the factories.

The average number of employees per enterprise is four for the food industry, thirty-seven for the chemical industry, six for the leather industry, six for the construction industry, ten for basic metals. Only the mining industry (more than nine hundred persons per enterprise) and the steel industry (approximately five hundred eighty) have the numbers that are appropriate for large enterprises; numbers that are entirely justified, given the kind of activities they pursue. As for the rest, we shall see just how far they are subjected to reorganization, which, we repeat, is only possible in a socialized society.

DISTRIBUTION

Consumption orders production

As we pointed out above, we do not conceive the regional industrial organization as being based on the departmental borders or old provinces of France. The expression, “economic region”, is explicit, and supersedes any political-administrative carving up of the nation into pieces of arbitrarily defined territories. As for the role that will be played by the National Committee of an industry, it will not be that of an absolute authority; we nonetheless believe it is acceptable to depict its most general features.

The need for products obtained from or manufactured in certain territorial zones, for the entire territory of France, cannot be calculated and grasped exclusively from the local standpoint. With respect to fuels, energy, industrial food products, fabrics, paper, certain kinds of wood, plastic materials, chemical products, etc., only precise statistics on a national scale give us a valid idea of the necessary quantities and qualities of each product. How, for example, can a metal factory in Amiens, Orleáns or Grenoble be certain that it continues to manufacture what is needed, depending on the demand and the needs?

This leads us to posit, for a certain number of industries, for which we cannot provide a complete enumeration in advance, a system of production-distribution that, in our opinion, should simplify some of the problems that we need to resolve.

Let us consider the case of agricultural machinery. The peasants of Loiret, or their cooperative organizations and labor groups, could request them from one or another workshop. But what if the workshop, or factory, which we shall situate, for instance, in Orleans, cannot satisfy the demand of the peasants of Loiret? We will be told that the customers need only go to Montargis, or Vierzon. The factories in these two cities, however, may still be unable to deliver the tractors. This example could be extended to all the products of France as a whole: the result would be general disorder, shortages here, surpluses there, which would reproduce the worst aspects of capitalist chaos.

In order to prevent this, the socialized economy must, as soon as possible, organize warehouses for distribution or shipment, and it is to these warehouses that the peasants or the peasants’ organizations will go for their tractors. It is not the producers and the consumers, but the distributors and the consumers, who will be in contact with each other. It is via the channel of these distributors, to whom the tractors will be sent, that the Metal Workers Federation, and the corresponding manufacturing sections of this Federation, will be apprised of the needs that must be satisfied for different types of machinery (tractors, cultivators, mowers, spreaders, plows, rakes, sowers, etc.), because it is to them that the requests will be sent. With all the requests centralized by this multifaceted channel, the National Committee will be able to distribute the production orders to all the manufacturing centers in accordance with their respective capacities. One manufacturing center will receive an order for three thousand machines of various types; another, farther away, will be directed to produce a thousand of them, and yet another, one thousand one hundred and fifty, and all by the established deadlines. All requests, including those for duly foreseen reserve requirements, can only be satisfied in an orderly way thanks to this absolutely indispensable production-distribution organization.

The same system will apply to fabrics, canvas, dresses, and everything that concerns clothing.

Each locality will have at least one distribution center. Every retail store will be in contact with the distribution center to which it is linked.

Let us take a look at Paris and its eighty districts, each of which will have its own distribution center.

And each district, according to its size, will have fifteen, twenty, or thirty retail stores, strategically located. Each retail store will send requests once or twice a week to its supply center, specifying its sales figures and its immediate expected requirements. Specialists know, more or less, how long different fabrics will last (wool, cotton, silk, rayon, various other synthetic fabrics), depending on how much they are used. Standard variations are for the most part firmly established. Supplementary variations can be ascertained as they occur. And all the textile distribution centers in every city and town in France (there might be, depending on each case, one for every ten or fifteen towns, and one store in each town. Practice will suggest the best solutions), all the distribution centers—we maintain—will communicate all their requests to the National Federation of Textile Production to which they belong, or to its different local or regional manufacturing sections, which will transmit them to the National Committee.

The National Committee, for its part, will allocate the work assignments, always in accordance with the known production capacities of all the factories and workshops.

The same method can be applied to linens, shoes, clothing, mass-produced furniture, home appliances, etc.

Once again, however, it will be observed to what extent it will be necessary to calculate, starting now, precisely how much means of production, labor power, technical material and energy resources are available or needed.

(Chart 2: the consumption-production mechanism and its linkages)

1. Production Centers

2. Wholesale Distribution Centers

3. Retail Stores

The Production Centers (1) distribute the products that they manufacture to the Wholesale Distribution Centers (2). The latter distribute them to the Retail Stores.

The Retail Stores, in turn, send their requests to the Wholesale Distribution Centers, which transmit the statistics concerning the requested products to the Production Centers.

The Production Centers send all the requests to the National or Regional Coordination Center. The Coordination Center, depending on the industry in question and its method of organization, will allocate work orders to the various Production Centers. Manufacturing and distribution will continue, and production will increase or diminish, in accordance with current needs or existing reserves, information concerning which is also sent to the Coordination Center.

Once this schema has been generalized, it will be possible to engage in further decentralization, by way of the creation of more or less autonomous zones, when and where this is possible.(Chart omitted)

Yet again, we see just how important it is to take action immediately to elect responsible local, regional and national committees. If this is accomplished with the necessary precision and speed, we may be sure that the degree of revolutionary change will be such that a profound transformation of the social structure will take place and it will be impossible to return to the old order.

The financial mechanism

Considering the abundance and the variety of products offered for consumption, on the one hand, and the multiplication of needs, on the other, it is not possible, without ignoring economic and psychological realities, to defend the theory of free consumption, or what has commonly been called, “taking from the pile”. A way must be found to adapt consumption to the possibilities of production, one that is not an attack on individual freedom, as generalized rationing would be, regardless of its form. In our opinion the most valid way would be to use a monetary symbol. The only objection that could be raised against this symbol would be the danger of hoarding. But we have already pointed out that it is only in a society where one can make enough money to build a workshop, or an apartment building, or open up a store, that hoarding constitutes a means by which others may be exploited.

This scale of accumulation surpasses what one can earn on a basic wage. Furthermore, a certain amount of trafficking, commercial or otherwise, is necessary to achieve this result, which is inconceivable in a socialized economy. Private commerce no longer exists in the latter; to the contrary, collective distribution prevails; as for housing, it will be administered by the municipality.

Then there is production—how can you assume, if you devote the slightest thought to the matter, that in an egalitarian society there will be people who are so stupid that they would allow themselves to be exploited, voluntarily, by new bosses? And where will the latter obtain their raw materials, which society will have the right to refuse to give them?

Finally, and we could very well have begun with this point, this egalitarian society will also have the right—even if, hypothetically, some persons allow themselves to be exploited—to intervene and confiscate the means of production of those who would volunteer to serve the new exploiter.

The accumulation of money, therefore, will no longer have to be feared, and it will not even be necessary to introduce the fungible money (with an expiration date) that is advocated by the theorists of “abundance”. There will be a need to preserve the use of money—regardless of its form—for a number of years, for certain purchases. A simple bank account could also be used to solve this problem.

Thus, we are supporters of the use of money.

Only an autarchic and very primitive economy would render money unnecessary.

And even all the primitive tribes and peoples who practice exchange have some kind of money, which assumes a multitude of forms.

The money we advocate will not have the purpose of facilitating these exchanges, but to facilitate and regulate distribution. We conceive it in the following manner: let us assume that the volume of commodities for sale and reimbursed services represents, in France, according to the most precise calculations possible, ten billion francs per year.

This implies the issue of an equivalent sum of purchase coupons, distributed pro rata among individuals and families, a “wage fund” like the one that is determined annually in Russia, but which, naturally, we shall distribute in a more equitable way.

Each individual and each family will have, according to the established scales, that portion of the purchasing power that corresponds to them.

What mechanism will be used to distribute this purchasing power?

It seems to me that the municipality would be the most suitable intermediary. It would be possible, after ascertaining the number of inhabitants of each town, to send from the Issuing Institute the necessary sum of money, which would be distributed to each home and, where applicable, to each individual. We shall refrain from going into details concerning the scale that might be established based on the ages of the children. I believe it is of interest to point out that this kind of distribution, carried out by a system that would occupy a position outside of and above the different trades, professional bodies and industries, would possess the advantage of being able to forestall any attempts on the part of the workers of one professional grouping to make more money than the other workers and would be able to abolish in one stroke all the outrageous inequalities of pay that exist in capitalist society.

This distribution of purchasing power will assume a human character, rather than a professional or trade-based one. It will be truly egalitarian, and this is the real socialism.

By making their purchases in the distribution centers, the consumers will hand over the money that will be returned by these centers to the local sections of the Issuing Institute, and once this money has once again been concentrated in the Institute, the latter will once again introduce it, at the proper moment, into the limited monetary circuit that we have just described.

It will therefore be unnecessary to accumulate and invest enormous amounts of financial capital in order to carry out public works projects. It will be sufficient, thanks to the federations of industry, to bring together the necessary labor power with the technical resources, the machines, the raw materials and the energy supplied by the various industries and specialized professional bodies, whose workers will have received their annual wages, just as in all the other industries.

A general principle of economics is that every commodity or every service costs the time spent by men in its manufacture, or the totality of efforts utilized to obtain it and distribute it.

In capitalist society, we must add the profit of the entrepreneur, and that of the shareholders and the various intermediaries, that is, the “profit” of, or the interest on capital. Once this has disappeared, all that remains is labor time.

Now that labor time is reimbursed, by way of the distribution of the annual purchasing power, it will be understood—and we insist on this—that we shall need to provide the labor power, the machines, the raw materials, and the energy, but not enormous sums of money. The appeal to loans, to savings, to private capital, will no longer have any reason to exist.

It seems to us that one more clarification is in order. This involves the problem of what can be done during the transitional period with regard to the monetary question, since the outline we just sketched is only applicable to a completely socialized society.

Naturally, it will be necessary to retain the money of capitalist society for a while. Its replacement will require a quite prolonged period of adaptation. In the meantime, it will be inevitable that the usual mode of circulation will be used, while immediately limiting injustice and inequality, until the new society makes them disappear.

Those who have made their living, by way of their wages or their labor, unless they are notorious exploiters, will keep their savings. Those who have hoarded gold, as is the case with numerous peasants, some of the more fortunate wage workers, and members of the middle class, will have the opportunity to exchange this gold for the new currency when the latter is introduced. You cannot, often without committing a real injustice, just take it away from them. Nor would this be any good, because in this case the gold will still remain buried.

It could be objected that such measures will preserve, for a certain period, the inequality inherited from capitalist society. We do not deny this. There is not, however, any ideal and perfect solution, one that is applicable within twenty-four hours. It will only be possible to limit the harm inflicted by the prolonged existence of a continually reduced sphere of privileges, by means of a serious control exercised over the progress of the monetary transformations, when they are implemented.

The method of allocation

We have mentioned distribution centers for the sale of consumer goods. Indeed, it is advisable to socialize this sector as soon as possible, in order to free it from the obstacle represented by private commerce. In France, there are at least three times as many stores and shops than are necessary and these traders, wholesalers and retailers, intermediaries of every description, have the entire nation at their mercy, and impose whatever prices they please and fleece the consumers. During periods of social upheaval and revolution, they enjoy a continuous enhancement of their fortunes, they are the masters of the situation, and they become, as in Paris during the French Revolution and the Commune, the most effective agents of the counterrevolution.

The provisioning of a city is an immense task. That is why we shall engage in an extensive discussion, in our chapter on agriculture, concerning the essential importance of the peasants’ producers’ cooperatives, and the urban consumers’ cooperatives or distribution centers of a communal or socialized nature.

If there are one hundred grocery stores in a city district, you may be sure that twenty stores, organized by the commerce employees’ trade union, together with those owners willing to join the collective effort, could advantageously replace them.

Perhaps here as well it will be necessary to posit, while the reorganization of the trade unions is taking place, a general institution that could lead us towards a definitive structure. The employees will get together and calculate the number of stores that are necessary for each district, depending on the size of the district and its population density. Technical advisors, with knowledge of demographic issues and each city’s particularities, will be able to help them complete this project.

What we are saying about the grocery stores also applies to butchers shops, dairy products, haberdashery, hardware, etc.

In small cities, many of these products can be sold in stores with many branch outlets. These various solutions could even be applied in big cities, such as the employment of stores with many outlets. These solutions will be perfected in accordance with circumstances, and the preferences of the buyers. We cannot provide in advance a detailed plan for all sectors, without indulging in fiction.

One could also foresee (others have done so before us) communal stores for distribution, especially in rural areas, for the sale of the numerous articles (groceries, household goods, stationery, etc.) that derive from multiple sources, and whose sales of small quantities are not of such an importance as to require detailed accounting to assure the mechanism of input and output, consumption-production-consumption, even one as simple as the one we outlined above. The “industrial concentration” which is just as necessary in numerous areas as decentralization is in others, will certainly facilitate this process of adjustment. In all such cases, however, distribution will be an autonomous and local function.

The same distribution cooperatives, linked with this social function and acting jointly in all aspects of economic life, will no longer possess their current character. They will become collective stores for distribution in the service of the entire population. In any event, whether you call them cooperatives, communal stores, distribution centers, the name does not matter. What is important is the institution itself, which must be studied in advance and in detail, in order to be capable of organizing it when the time comes.

There will undoubtedly be, for a certain time, individual traders, but these must be compelled, under the penalty of severe sanctions, to sell at prices fixed by the price commission, which will be composed of producers, distributors and consumers. In this way even the provisionally tolerated private merchants will be, for all practical purposes, socialized.

Will rationing be necessary?

There can be no question that the difficulties of the first days of the change will make rationing necessary for some products. Perhaps one or another agricultural region will refuse to send its food products; perhaps certain colonial commodities would be unavailable for a certain period. In such cases, rationing cards will be issued. It is of great importance that the technical personnel who support the revolution should plan in advance with regard to the means to maintain international trade at as high a level as possible. It is also of great importance to plan in advance with regard to the difficulties that could be posed by the various regions that are the sources of provisions for the cities. This is why, we must repeat, the cooperative bond between the cities and the countryside is of such major importance. This is why the urban workers must prepare the intellectual, psychological and material foundations for fraternal contacts with the workers of the rural areas.

AGRICULTURE

Peasants and workers

We shall now address the issue of the peasantry. Because it is indispensable for the urban workers, especially the industrial workers, to understand its importance, if they do not want to once again undergo a hunger blockade, such as the workers of Paris experienced in 1848, or the active hostility that the “rurals” displayed in 1871 towards the insurgents of the Commune. The old mindset that accused the socialists of being “re-distributors” is not entirely dead among the inhabitants of the countryside, and it is upon this hostility, at times still latent, that reactionary governments, conservative parties and the privileged classes will rely in order to once again impose, in a mortal struggle, the hunger blockade or the force of arms on the industrial centers, in a situation of social transformation.

We must point out, however, that the situation today is not exactly identical to the situation that prevailed in 1848 or 1871. First of all, the proportion of inhabitants of the rural areas, which was at that time—especially in 1848—much larger than that of the cities, has been reversed. Today the peasants represent twenty-five percent of the population of France. In addition, a significant number of them have a completely different mentality. Social and socialist ideas have penetrated the rural world.

The trade union organizations, the cooperatives, the mutual aid associations, the sporting clubs and other groups, have generated relations of solidarity and mutual support, and created among the peasants a spirit and a practice of solidarity which have transformed the man of the countryside, giving him a more extensive knowledge of the world. In addition to the availability of an extensive selection of different kinds of newspapers and magazines, frequent contact with the cities, thanks to the multiplication of means of transport—railroads, buses, cars, motorcycles—has narrowed the gap between country and city and has allowed for the establishment of bonds between the inhabitants of the cities and the countryside. Numerous peasant organizations, both corporative and inter-corporative, have their headquarters in various cities in France. These contacts and continuous relations, and access to more comprehensive information, have changed many things.

Finally, in everyday work and in practical life, solidarity—de facto inter-dependence—has also been established. The city cannot live without the countryside, but the countryside is even less capable of living without the city. Every tractor, every agricultural machine—mowers, reapers, etc.—would cease to function without the gasoline, the petroleum and the petroleum derivatives that are supplied by the refineries located in the industrial centers. These machines are provided by the factories and workshops, as are the fabrics, the clothing, the furniture, household appliances, individual means of transport—along with the fuel the latter need to function—and, finally, almost everything that constitutes the elements of modern life, without which the farmer, his wife and their children would be condemned to return to the status of serfs of the glebe, the poor beasts of toil that they were in the past.

The workers of the city and those of the countryside must acquire an increasingly more comprehensive understanding of the fact that they have a shared destiny in society. The former cannot exist without the grains, the meat, the vegetables, the fruits, and all the products of the land that are provided by the latter.

But the workers of the countryside can produce nothing, or almost nothing, not only without the machines and fuel, but also without the chemical fertilizers, the herbicides and pesticides, and the vaccines for the animals. Even more importantly, in many rural areas they do not even produce a significant portion of their own food needs, since, specialized agriculture has made great inroads in the countryside.

The Midi supplies wine to Beauce and receives wheat, potatoes and sugar.

The Southwest supplies milk and butter to part of the East and the Paris basin; it receives machinery, some of its fruit, and certain vegetables. The Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal areas supply the interior with fish and receive meat and butter. All of these movements of goods would be impossible without the railroads and motorized transport, which are of an essentially industrial character and which also depend on the cities.

This is what the peasants must understand. They are in the same position as the industrial workers, and although their situations are formally different, they are victims of a form of exploitation that both groups have an interest in eliminating. Nor are we referring exclusively to their exploitation by the state, since the taxes the peasants pay in France are much lower than those that we, the wage workers of factories and workshops, pay, without any possibility of avoiding paying them.

There are other kinds of theft that we shall not overlook.

When, at the beginning of 1957, the Christian Democratic leader Pierre Pfimlin was Minister of Agriculture, he declared that the producers had been paid a total of two hundred billion francs for all the agricultural products they supplied during the previous year, but these same agricultural products were sold to the consumers for a total of seven hundred billion francs. An honest organization, impossible in our current society, would make it possible to pay the producers another one hundred fifty billion francs, and charge the consumer one hundred fifty billion francs less. In such a case both the city and the countryside gain. But this orgy of pillage called capitalist society has allowed middlemen of all kinds to pocket five hundred billion francs—or four hundred fifty billion if you deduct the costs of transport and storage incurred by various other stages of the distribution process.

Information has come to light concerning countless cases of products (artichokes, cauliflower, tomatoes, beans), for which the producers are paid a few francs per kilo, but which are sold in a neighboring city for one hundred or one hundred fifty francs per kilo, or the cases where the farmer must let fruit rot on the trees because the middleman will not even pay him enough for the fruit to pay the workers to pick it. And everyone knows that the meat problem has not been resolved either, not only because the middlemen took, and still take, the lion’s share, but, worse yet, because the lack of rational organization raised the cost of production, or caused and still causes significant losses, whether due to the fact that the herds are too far from their pastures, or that the place where the animals are raised is too far from the slaughterhouse, but especially because the structure of the exploitation of agriculture does not allow the means of production to develop in a rational and scientific way.

In one case, it is the lack of financial resources. In another case, the tiny size of the enterprises renders the necessary organization impossible. Elsewhere, even the means of transport are lacking for the timely delivery of the products, or if the means of transport exist, they are too expensive.

Even when these difficulties do not exist, however, insoluble problems arise. We have seen the wheat harvest for several years in succession reach one hundred or one hundred twenty million quintals, while, during the same period, the production of wine and milk, butter, fruit, and greenhouse vegetables, has resulted in surpluses.

This was catastrophic for the peasants because this society is of such a nature that an increase in the amount of goods, instead of being a cause for jubilation and satisfaction, is a cause of misfortune and poverty due to the decline in prices.

What is the response of the rural producers? They call upon the state to assume responsibility for these surpluses, by means of subsidies, in order to ensure their sale on foreign markets. In the other countries, however, the same things are happening, and French products must confront Italian, Dutch, Danish, American, Australian, New Zealand, English, Algerian and Spanish products in international competition. Our sense of justice tells us that these solutions are bad ones, and that others must be sought. The injustice of this situation is also demonstrated by the fact that the other producers, the exploited workers of the cities, pay, thanks to the high taxes deducted from our wages, the subsidies granted by the state to support the sale of the surplus agricultural products on foreign markets. After all, it is from our pockets that the state takes the money with which it concedes subsidies and price supports to the wine producers of the Midi, when they cannot sell their wine; to the grain producers of Beauce, Brie and the North, when they cannot sell their wheat; to the butter and meat producers of Charente or Normandy, when they cannot sell their butter or meat; and to the cattlemen of the Center or Savoy, when they cannot sell their cattle.

Furthermore, due to the capitalist mechanism, in addition to the corporate dividends, the profits of the employers and middlemen and the excessive expenses of the state, the peasants also pay too much for the industrial products they buy.

The producers of the city and the producers of the countryside must therefore seek a rational, just and sincere solution, which can be nothing other than the organization of industrial and agricultural production for the benefit of all.

Not all the producers of the countryside, however, have the same interest in this reorganization of collective life.

According to the general census of Agriculture carried out in 1956–1957, published by the INSEE, concerning the structure of agricultural ownership in France, the latter is distributed as follows:

Area Cultivated (hectares) Total Area (hectares) Percentage of Total

Less than 1 85,700 0.3

1–2 333,000 1.0

2–5 1,377,000 4.3

5–10 3,458,000 10.8

10–20 7,536,000 23.4

20–50 11,167,000 34.7

50–100 4,968,000 15.5

100–200 2,196,000 6.8

More than 200 1,037,000 3.2

Total 32,157,700

Out of more than thirty-two million hectares, half, at least, of the total belongs to small property owners. And quite often, the land owned by small to middle level property owners (who own thirty to fifty hectares) is of inferior quality. It is obvious that profound reforms are necessary in order to improve the social condition of the farmers.

There are approximately two million farms in France, yet, between the smallest and the largest properties, the social problem assumes a different form. Besides a minority of large landowners who exploit a large contingent of wage workers, however, the other, medium size, small and very small landowners, the small farmers, and the sharecroppers—who constitute one quarter of the agricultural population and are often despised in certain regions of France—can understand the necessity of and the interest they, together with the entire collectivity of which they form a part, have in the change we advocate. They must understand that their standard of living will improve, and their labors will be lightened, that their fate can be much happier, their moments of rest more frequent, thanks to the collective organization that we are advocating. And we must immediately make it clear that this collective organization, however desirable it may be, must by no means be imposed by force. We shall nonetheless make an attempt to describe what seems to us to be the ideal. Then we shall address the question of how it many be achieved in stages and intermediate forms that would constitute real progress.

The Spanish experience

The ideal was realized in Spain, during the libertarian revolution of 1936–1939. It consisted in the expropriation of all the big landowners and the membership of all the small landowners in what were called the village collectives.

These collectives functioned as large producers cooperatives. They operated under the authority of the directives agreed upon by the general assemblies of the collectivists, which included the small landowners who contributed their land, their tools, and their cattle, and the wage workers, all of whom associated on equal terms.

A commission was elected to implement these directives. This commission included, in every collective, one delegate from each specialty—field crops, fruit, cattle, rice, olive oil production, oranges, vegetables, etc. Each delegate, who worked either a half-day or a full day, depending on the scale of his responsibilities, coordinated, together with the delegates of the work teams of his specialty, the work that had to be done. For example, in the zones characterized by diversified agricultural production, work was carried out in accordance with the succession of types of cultivation, the needs of each kind of production, and the location of the land. Wheat, grapes, olives, oranges, root crops, beets, various kinds of vegetables; the work teams were given their assignments by the general delegate, and they fulfilled their tasks. The hardest work was reserved for the youngest and strongest men. The lighter work was assigned to men over fifty years old. The elderly were assured of their livelihood, just like the other members of the collective, and devoted themselves to useful, but not compulsory, activities, which constituted for them a pastime.

The products belonged to the collective, generally composed of the entire population of the town, or almost the entire population. They were deposited in the communal storehouses.

The Supply Delegate organized exchange with the industrial regions.

He sent surplus agricultural products in exchange for fabrics, machinery, chemical fertilizers, books, household utensils, etc. The value of each product was calculated in pesetas, and the exchange transaction was carried out by means of a kind of clearing [in English in the original—English translator’s note], as is customary in capitalist society, which often renders the use of money superfluous.

Locally, and for individuals, distribution was carried out by the communal storehouses, which in some towns were also called cooperatives. Distribution was characterized by one of two basic procedures. The first consisted in the distribution of products whose amounts were fixed in accordance with the size of the family by the assembly of the collective. There was no longer a monetary system and everyone was freed from the obsession, “if you do not have money, you do not eat”.

The other procedure was characterized by the use of a kind of currency that was sometimes improvised, but more often official. A family wage was established, depending on the size of each household. The vicissitudes of the war and the inherent difficulties of such a complicated situation, where the political parties were creating countless obstacles, prevented these two systems from being unified into a single system, but the results that were obtained, frequently after only a few months, were decisive.

First they were decisive for the improvement of production, since the use of the land, the pastures, the irrigation systems, the various means of labor, and of the human labor itself, was much more rational.

Previously, one landowner may have possessed enough pastureland to raise twenty cows or one hundred sheep, but he only raised ten cows or thirty sheep. Another landowner may have had only enough land to raise four cows but he had ten of them, with the meager yields that we may assume would result.

Another landowner sowed wheat on land that was only fit for raising goats or sheep: he harvested eight quintals per hectare. The donkeys, the mules, and the horses that were employed to work the land, were distributed in accordance with the characteristic disorder of the prevailing social system. One peasant only had one donkey to plow a hard and rocky soil. Another had good mules, half of which would have been enough to work an easier soil. Rich landowners were the proud owners of a tractor that they operated two months a year, and then went unutilized the rest of the year, while the poorest peasants only had their two hands to till their soil.

The village collectives put an end to all this disorder. The tractors were used year-round, the strong mules were employed wherever they were needed and the donkeys were used for lighter duties.

More work was done with fewer animals, it was done more effectively, and it was done in a way that meant less toil for the workers. Lands that were to be used for cattle raising were allocated in accordance with the productivity of the soil. It is interesting to note that the rotation of pasturelands, which had been established in France for a number of years, although it was not yet generalized, emerged spontaneously in Spain as a result of the initiative of the collectives. The yields of meat and milk rose accordingly.

Communal stables were organized outside the towns, as well as henhouses and pig ranches, which separated the human beings from the animals and the flies, and from the accompanying filth. Women were liberated from the pitchfork, the wheelbarrow and the manure. The methods of cattle raising, applied in accordance with a general plan, made it possible for the number of pigs in the collective’s pig farms, classified by age, to multiply as never before.

The animal husbandry facilities of the collectives, in a short time, doubled the number of rabbits, chickens, other fowl and eggs, to which everyone had equal access.

Agricultural yields also rose. Anyone who had the opportunity to survey the collectivized farms and compared the density of the wheat growing on them with that of the farms of the small landowners who refused to join the collectives, saw that the latter, despite the labor of their wives and children, obtained a much lower density of wheat. This was unavoidable because the collective organization possessed the more advanced technical means that allowed it to till the soil more effectively, and to give the crops, at the requisite stages of their growth, the indispensable attention, to more effectively utilize and organize the irrigation networks, to procure selected seeds or to plant them in the most effective manner, to intelligently utilize, thanks to the advice of agricultural technicians, the fertilizers or the lands whose soil chemistries often varied from one area to another.

These opportunities for improvement made possible a thirty percent increase in both the amount of land sowed with wheat and the yield per hectare, despite the mobilization of a large proportion of the youth, who had to go to the front to fight against Franco’s army.

All of these factors, together with the disappearance of the owners of the large estates and exploiters of every kind, resulted in a doubling of the average standard of living of the peasants, if not more in some cases.

Let us try to imagine the results that would issue from such a form of organization in France, where the soil is generally more fertile and the climate more benign than in Spain.

Not only would the yields increase, but, above all, the lives of men and women will be infinitely more human, more pleasant, and more happy, in the domains affected by the numerous consequences that will accompany the major, large scale achievements. An abundant crop will not be a catastrophe and it will no longer be necessary to compete with the middlemen. We shall remind the reader of the example of the cattle accommodated in collective stables. Today, the small farmer, or his wife, cannot be absent from the farm for even one day: they are the slaves of the beasts in the pigsties, the stables and the paddocks. But when people take turns taking care of the animals, all the farmers will be able to enjoy their holiday. And when comrades who specialize in this kind of work come at the end of the day to take care of the animals, or the tractors, so that the drivers can take a break while their comrades take care of the horses or fix the machinery, this would be a conquest of a kind that only those who have practical experience of these things can fully appreciate.

Intermediate stages

Objections could be raised against our view which, in our opinion, are unfounded, but which we do not want to leave unaddressed.

The vast majority of the peasants f