Matt Bruenig Comes Out Against Communism

Matt Bruenig has a post where he takes on the anti-monopolists, characterising them as a group whose views are arguably best suited to a 18th Century US context:

[Thomas] Jefferson is the last guy whose ideas on this made some sense because Jefferson was talking about a yeoman farming freehold that was entirely or almost entirely insulated from capital markets, labor markets, and consumer markets. A subsistence farmer operating like that really does mostly live on an island not affected by the whims and desires of other economic actors.

But that is the only arrangement that works like that. After industrialization, everyone is producing for others, even self-employed small business owners who have no formal bosses but are ultimately jerked around by their clients and customers.

I’m not here to defend the anti-monopolists specifically nor to advocate everyone being self-employed. But I want to put forward a point of view which I think is neglected by Bruenig and more broadly by social democrats/democratic socialists: that is, the communist point of view.

By this, I mean localised communal forms of organisation rather than 20th Century Russia or China. One of the few promising developments in the UK over the past decade or so has been the success of Preston’s Community Wealth Building model, which itself took inspiration from many examples in the USA. Preston has favoured local companies over multinationals; encouraged the development of worker coops; increased participation in matters of local government; and increasingly used community organisations to allocate land, housing, and finance. Despite national austerity, the city has prospered and ensured employment for its population by keeping economic activity within the region.

This is common sense stuff which is like to make an economist cringe and then mutter something about comparative advantage, but it has numerous benefits. The most obvious is environmental. If economies are ‘contained’ at the local level then transport costs will be lower and it will be more feasible to create the so-called circular economy, where waste is re-used rather than dumped somewhere. This reduces material throughput and the need for landfill. Low-scale production may avoid some of the environmental problems involved in mass production: think of allotments versus industrial agriculture, with the latter’s well-known issues of top soil erosion, reducing biodiversity, and emissions.

More generally, large organisations which have a specific purpose will tend to abstract reality to subsume everything to that purpose. The opening example of James Scott’s masterpiece Seeing Like A State, a critique of centralised governance, was actually of a capitalist firm engaged in scientific forestry to produce timber:

Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth.

While worker democracy, participation, and representation is one of my most favoured policies and would address the huge political and economic inequalities associated with capitalist firms, I am not convinced a worker managed corporation with the purpose of producing timber would ‘abstract’ any less than a capitalist corporation. It still has the purpose of producing timber, and there is no reason democracy within the organisation would make it notably more responsive to issues outside the corporation’s boundaries. It will repurpose the environment to its own ends. It will employ a limited number of people so will not necessarily be a boon for everyone in the community. Corporate entities engaged in mass production will neglect people, resources, and dimensions of the world that are not useful to them.

Bruenig raises the issue of whether modern economies can function without this type of mass production, a concern I share:

It is hard to imagine any economic arrangements based on our current level of technology that does not involve the vast majority of people working inside some kind of larger organization rather than being the owner-operator of a single-member firm. Even if anti-bigness advocates were extremely successful to the point where they managed to quadruple the number of firms in the country and spread production out across those firms, the vast majority of working people would be employees not owners.

While it is indeed hard to imagine, we shouldn’t be liberals and assume that just because something is hard to imagine it is not possible. Again, I’m not trying to defend single-member firms, but there is a case for small and community managed production to made here. Bruenig makes his statement without any actual examples such as those by the anarchist Murray Bookchin, who looked in-depth at how modern technology could be integrated at the community level. One of the best things about Bookchin is how he discusses specific technologies — as he puts it in Post-Scarcity Anarchism:

Equipped with five optical microscopetype illuminated control gauges, the mill drills holes smaller than a needle’s eye or larger than a man’s fist. The
holes are accurate to a ten-thousandth of an inch.

The importance of machines with this kind of operational range can hardly be overestimated. They make it possible to produce a large variety of products in a single plant. A small or moderate-sized community using multipurpose machines could satisfy many of its limited industrial needs without being burdened with underused industrial facilities. There would be less loss in scrapping tools and less need for single-purpose plants. The community’s economy would be more compact and versatile, more rounded and self-contained, than anything we find in the communities of industrially advanced countries.

By reconfiguring technology and organisations, it would be possible to have heavy machinery in communities which could produce a wide range of things, as decided by the community themselves. Bookchin states that he does not think all production can proceed like this, though he is not clear exactly where the limits lie. I would like to see more discussion among leftists of specific technologies and whether or not they are amenable to Bookchin’s vision. My suspicion is that physically big industrial goods (buses, cars) and specialised health equipment (x-ray machines) would be among those technologies not amenable.

Governance doesn’t equal states

One of the key commitments of communism and especially anarchism is a vision where the state becomes increasingly weak or non-existent. This doesn’t eliminate the need for governance, of course, which is a core part of the human condition. But at a local level governance can be less formal and does not need the heavy hand of the state to enforce it, something Bruenig also does not see:

Finally, when you think about the governing mechanics that would be used to achieve anti-bigness, you see that it inevitably relies upon collective democratic institutions — namely, the state — to dig in and basically micromanage the economy in order to make sure everything stays small. The charm of decentralization and rule of none/self-rule is thus an artifice being built on top of an iron-fisted centralized state that must constantly quash things on behalf of the small proprietors.

This isn’t necessarily true, since collective non-state entities can enforce norms and rules that prevent the emergence of busineses or other organisations which get too big. Most simply, local governments have powers such as fund allocation, financial penalties, and even jail that we associate with states. Preston has encouraged smaller units of organisation (many of them cooperative) through precisely these avenues.

In addition, we can imagine modern production facilities as ‘commons’ to which Elinor Ostrom’s findings can be applied. She has documented how communities throughout history have self-managed the distribution of resources with escalating punishments for those who abuse or exploit the system. Any person or group who sought to grow to large or else gain a privileged position over the production process could be met with verbal admonishments; this could graduate to dumping fish (or timber) on their doorstep; and might end with actual violence. Ostrom also discusses how ‘polycentric’ notions of governance can combine independent organisations to coordinate and achieve economies of scale without the need for a centralised authority.

Of course, these community approaches are no panacea. If the population of a community are xenophobic and don’t give a crap about the environment, then the organisational forms they choose will reflect that. Arguably, community level organisation is inherently less cosmopolitan and inherently more xenophobic, since communities have boundaries. But many of these seem like general issues of governance and organisation rather than specific issues raised by the communist approach (nations also have boundaries, lest we forget). All in all, there is a better case to be made for smaller units of production based on humanitarian, environmental, and even efficiency grounds than Bruenig admits.