An Anarchist-Communist is a person who is a man first and a Communist afterward. He generally gets into a great many irreconcilable situations at once, believes that property and competition must die yet admits he has no authority to kill them, contends for equality and in the same breath denies its possibility, hates charity and yet wishes to make society one vast Sheltering Arms, and, in short, very generally rides two horses going in opposite directions at the same time. He is not usually amenable to logic; but he has a heart forty or fifty times too large for nineteenth century environments, and in my opinion is worth just that many cold logicians who examine society as a naturalist does a beetle, and impale it on their syllogisms in the same manner as the Emperor Domitian impaled flies on a bodkin for his own amusement.

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Na versão com que somos aquinhoados, os Puritanos, impelidos por idealismo equivocado, inicialmente tratam de restaurar o primitivo comunismo cristão do Livro dos Atos, “tendo todas as coisas em comum.” Stossel caracteriza o arranjo como soando “como algo proveniente de Karl Marx.” Quando os óbvios problemas de incentivo implícitos naquela prática levaram a inanição, os colonos tiveram de aceitar a realidade e dividiram a terra, passando a trabalhá-la individualmente. A produção disparou, a inanição foi revertida, e todo mundo ficou feliz.

Não foi assim, porém, que as coisas realmente se passaram.

A história, escrita por Richard Curl, acerca das cooperativas nos Estados Unidos, Para Todas as Pessoas, preenche alguns detalhes faltantes que modificam inteiramente o significado da narrativa. Curl suplementa a história de Bradford com material deColônias Inglesas, de J. A. Doyle. De acordo com Doyle, o acordo entre os Peregrinos Separatistas e a corporação dos Comerciantes Mercadores estipulava que

“[t]odos os colonos … receberiam suprimento para suas necessidades oriundo de estoque comum. Durante sete anos não haveria propriedade ou comércio individual, mas o trabalho da colônia seria organizado de acordo com as diferentes capacidades dos colonos. Ao final dos sete anos, a companhia seria dissolvida e o estoque todo dividido.

Foram incluídas duas ressalvas, uma dando direito aos colonos de separar glebas ao redor de suas casas, e a outra permitindo-lhes dois dias na semana para cultivo delas. Os parceiros de Londres, contudo, recusaram-se a fazer essas concessões, e os agentes dos emigrantes retiraram-nas, para não abrirem mão do esquema.”

Na história convencional o zelo apostólico dos Peregrinos, que desejam recriar o comunismo da Igreja primitiva, é confrontado pela dura realidade. De acordo com Curl, porém, as relações entre os colonos Puritanos e os Comerciantes Mercadores fazem mais sentido à luz de significado implícito inteiramente diferente — as relações do campesinato inglês com as classes proprietárias de terras do País Velho: “Os colonos, a maioria dos quais formada de arrendatários rurais nos campos abertos de um velho parque de caça senhorial em Nottinghamshire, consideravam que a exigência dos investidores essencialmente reduzia-os à condição de servos. Os colonos não estavam pedindo mais do que o normal no sistema senhorial da Inglaterra em vigor desde a Idade Média. Os camponeses trabalhavam nos campos do senhor mas também tinham tempo para trabalhar glebas individuais para suas necessidades familiares.”

A história de Plymouth é por vezes comparada à da agricultura nos últimos dias da União Soviética, onde a maior parte do alimento consumido vinha de glebas familiares privadas — essencialmente hortas domésticas com algum gado de pequeno porte ali inserido. Se a população soviética inteira tivesse sido forçada a subsistir só com a produção das fazendas estatais e coletivas, o resultado teria sido inanição em massa — exatamente como em Plymouth. Esse paralelismo é inteiramente correto. O que a versão com que somos aquinhoados da história de Plymouth deixa de fora, entretanto, é que o papel da “fazenda coletiva” no pequeno drama é obra não de ingênuos Puritanos extremados procurando “ter todas as coisas em comum,” e sim de corporação privada credenciada pela coroa inglesa.

E, do modo que descreve Curl, o sistema de glebas privadas adotado depois da rebelião contra os Comerciantes Mercadores tampouco assemelhava-se às ideias modernas de domínio pleno da “propriedade privada.” Soa mais como o sistema de campo aberto de que os colonos tinham tido experiência em Nottinghamshire: As glebas familiares eram ad hoc, a serem periodicamente redivididas, e não passíveis de herança.

Portanto o análogo adequado ao que quase exterminou os Peregrinos não é, ao contrário do que diz Stossel, “Karl Marx” ou “políticos e formadores de opinião [presumivelmente de esquerda].” É o senhor da herdade inglesa — ou corporação das 500 da Fortune. A história, porém, como de fato aconteceu, é ainda assim evidência dos males do estatismo e dos benefícios da cooperação voluntária. Os Comerciantes Mercadores, como as 500 empresas da Fortune de hoje, formavam uma corporação credenciada que dependia inteiramente dos benefícios e dos privilégios legais concedidos pelo estado. As fórmulas de convivência que essa corporação tentou impor aos colonos de Plymouth eram as mesmas das estipulações extrativas prevalecentes na herdade inglesa, feitas cumprir pelos privilégios legais que o estado conferia à nobreza fundiária. E o novo sistema pelo qual os Peregrinos as substituíram foi o vetusto sistema de campo aberto que vilas de camponeses haviam espontaneamente criado para si próprias, com ausência de interferência coercitiva, desde épocas neolíticas.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 27 de novembro de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

In the received version the Puritans, motivated by a misguided idealism, initially set out to restore the primitive Christian communism of the Book of Acts, “holding all things in common.” Stossel characterizes the arrangement as sounding “like something out of Karl Marx.” When the obvious incentive problems entailed in this practice led to starvation, the settlers accommodated themselves to reality and divided up the land and worked it individually. Output skyrocketed, starvation was averted, and everybody was happy.

But that’s not the way things actually happened.

Richard Curl’s history of cooperatives in America, For All the People, fills in some missing details that change the meaning of the story entirely. Curl supplements Bradford’s history with material from J. A. Doyle’s English Colonies. According to Doyle, the agreement between the Pilgrim Separatists and the Merchant Adventurers corporation provided that

“[a]ll settlers … were to receive their necessaries out of the common stock. For seven years there was to be no individual property or trade, but the labor of the colony was to be organized according to the different capacities of the settlers. At the end of the seven years the company was to be dissolved and the whole stock divided.

Two reservations were inserted, one entitling the settlers to separate plots of land about their houses, and the other allowing them two days in the week for cultivation of such holdings. The London partners, however, refused to grant these concessions, and the agents of the emigrants withdrew them rather than give up the scheme.”

In the conventional narrative the apostolic zeal of the Pilgrims, who desire to recreate the communism of the early Church, is confronted by hard reality. But according to Curl, relations between the Puritan settlers and the Merchant Adventurers make more sense in light of an entirely different subtext — the English peasantry’s relations with the landed classes in the Old Country: “The colonists, most of them tenant farmers in the open fields of an old manorial hunting park in Nottinghamshire, considered that the investors’ demand essentially reduced them to serfdom. The settlers were asking for no more than was normal under England’s manorial system in effect since the Middle Ages. Peasants worked in the lord’s fields but also had time to work with individual plots for their household needs.”

The Plymouth story is sometimes compared to that of agriculture in the last days of the Soviet Union, where most of the food consumed came from private family plots — essentially kitchen gardens with some small livestock thrown in. Had the entire Soviet population been forced to subsist on the output of State and collective farms alone, the result would have been mass starvation — exactly like in Plymouth. This parallel is entirely accurate. What the received version of the Plymouth story leaves out, however, is that the role of the “collective farm” in the little drama is played not by the naive Puritan zealots seeking to “hold all things in common” but by a private corporation chartered by the English crown.

And as Curl describes it, the system of private plots adopted after the rebellion against the Merchant Adventurers wasn’t much like modern fee simple ideas of “private property,” either. It sounds more like the open-field system the settlers had experienced in Nottinghamshire: The family plots were ad hoc, to be periodically redivided, and not subject to inheritance.

So the proper analog to what almost killed off the Pilgrims is not, as Stossel says, “Karl Marx” or “today’s [presumably left-wing] politicians and opinion-makers.” It’s the lord of an English manor — or a Fortune 500 corporation. But the story as it actually happened is still a testament to the evils of statism and the benefits of voluntary cooperation. The Merchant Adventurers, like the Fortune 500 companies of today, was a chartered corporation that depended entirely on benefits and legal privileges conferred by the state. The living arrangements it attempted to impose on the Plymouth settlers were the same as the extractive arrangements that prevailed on an English manor, enforced by the legal privileges the state conferred on the landed nobility. And the new system the Pilgrims replaced them with were the age-old open field system that peasant villages had spontaneously created for themselves, in the absence of coercive interference, since neolithic times.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Não, Stossel. Os Peregrinos Foram Levados à Inanição por uma Corporação, Não pelo Comunismo.

I’m aware that anarchist communism, libertarian communism has a history nearly as old as the first communist party. But those old anarcho-communists [2] were careful to make sure you knew they were anarchists. Their communist label never went out on the town unless adorned in its seductive anti-authoritarian finery. Most even seemed to recognize that individual autonomy was the primary aim of anarchism, though they often forgot that it’s also the primary practice.

Many of the anarchists today who yabber on lovingly about communism seem to reject the possibility of individual autonomy… or even of the individual. Whether naive nihilists tantalized by Tiqqun’s metaphysical twaddle or ultra-theorists ultra-excited by the ultra-left squabbles, most of today’s young “insurrectionary” communists believe that you and I don’t really act, but are simply the puppets of invisible, bodiless actors like society, social relationships, movements, various collective forces that apparently come out of nothing but themselves, since if you try to bring them back to an actual source, you have to come back to individuals acting in their worlds and relating with each other. And that won’t do, because then you’d have to recognize not “the commune,” not “human community,” certainly not that mystical absurdity “species being,” but yourself here and now – a unique individual capable of desiring, deciding and acting – as the center and aim of your theory and practice. And a whole lot of the theorizing that communists carry out seems to be aimed precisely at avoiding this.

But here I am making fun of the communist babbling while I babble on myself. I suppose it’s time to get to the point (in my roundabout vagabond way). Why am I not a communist? Couldn’t I come up with a communism that’s my own? Such a daffy dadaist absurdity could be a delightful experiment, but I have better games to play. You see, communism has a history, and it’s not at all a pretty one. If I’m gonna turn it on its head, it will be in my own way, not to “take it back” – I don’t want the damn thing – but to use it as a verbal weapon. It’s time that the label “communist” became as much an insult as “capitalist” among those anarchists who recognize that no rule means no rule over me; no authority means no authority over me; no government means no government over me. And the immediate practice of these negations is individual autonomy, willful and aware self-creation on my own terms.

If I am to create myself and my life on my terms in each moment, the established, the permanent, the absolute, is my enemy, so I can’t favor any sort of permanent collectivity, community, or society. Any permanence that permeates me, petrifies me so that I am no longer able to create my self on my terms. I can only try to adapt myself to the permeating permanence. So in insisting upon creating myself on my own terms, I undermine all collectivity, all community, all organization and all society, even those temporary associations I choose to make for my own purposes, since once they no longer serve my purposes I pull myself out and let things fall where they may. This is why my egoist elegance prefers desultory duos, transitory trios, and ephemeral ensembles to permanent partnerships, solidified sodalities, and calcified collectivities.

Communism requires a permanent community. If this isn’t its aim, the word is meaningless, nothing more than the babbling baloney of blowhards battering for their share of revolutionary cred. [3] A lot of the current commies have lost faith in the Gospel of Marx and its promise of predestined communism (of course, no anarchist-communist ever put faith this pious promise, right?). But even the cornballs who conceived “communization” – the idea of communism as an ongoing movement toward community – don’t get away from this goal, because communization is still supposed to be a movement toward that universal (and so, permanent) human community. And what is permanent and universal is anti-individual, anti-me, my enemy.

Communism requires this all-permeating permanence, because it needs an establishment, a state. In the Gospel of Marx, we read: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” [4] For Marx, that pious prophet of atheistic providence, this communist mode of exchange was to be the inevitable outcome of history; for anarchist-communists who took this sacred scripture to heart, it become a moral ideal to realize. My selfish and arrogant heart has no use for either the despotism of historical determinism or the encumbrances of ethical edicts, so I don’t hesitate to bring up the question such a rule raises: Who is to determine the abilities and the needs of each? Only by reducing individuals to what is most abstract about them – their humble and harmless humanity – can their be a “universal” determination of needs and abilities, because then these needs and abilities are also mere abstractions. Without this universal determination, I could claim that I need a Rolls Royce or a 60-room mansion, and no one could contradict me, because there would be no universal standard for comparison. So to establish the status of each one’s abilities and needs, a state would be necessary, i.e., certain individuals would have to be in the position of deciding what everyone’s abilities and needs were. Left to you and I as individuals, we’d probably tend toward the every day egoist form of exchange that tends to be practiced among friends: “From each according to their willingness, to each according to their desire.” A practice that can outwardly appear much like the communist ideal, but that has this difference: The communist ideal implies that the able owe something to the needy, and so involves a duty; in the egoist practice, there is no duty, because no one is expected to do or give what they are not willing to do or give. Their love for (i.e., their interest in) the other is the reason they would give. Egoistic mutuality is the lubricant of this flow.

In conclusion, I have some good news and some bad news for my communist friends. The good news: Communism is already here. Capitalism is simply market communism: “From each [worker] according to her ability, to each [capitalist] according to her need.” Thus, capitalism imposes service to the common good (i.e., to the ruling elite who represent “all”) on all those willing to remain slaves to a higher power. The community of capitalism surrounds us as a system of imposed relationships, and like all permanent communities, it feeds on the life blood of individuals, so long as those individuals succumb. And this brings me to the bad news for you commies: I am your enemy… for the same reason I am an enemy of capitalism. And don’t be fooled if I appear impotent to you. In my world I am the most important and impishly potent entity, and I am an implacable enemy of capitalism and communism.

[1] Marx, himself, was a pretty nasty character, but fortunately the biggest thing he ever got any power over was the First International.
[2] They still exist in certain exotic parts of the globe like Europe and the eastern part of the United States.
[3] Of course, a lot of commie theory sounds like just that.
[4] Critique of the Gotha Program, Part I.

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