QI've studied the works of Marx and Engels in depth for quite some time now, and I strongly consider myself a Communist; I'm very proud to say so. Recently, I have been researching more philosophies, and I have come into contact with Peter Kropotkin's work. I was wondering what the CPUSA's viewpoint on Anarcho-Communism. Thank you for your time comrades, and I hope you all have a pleasant day.
AThanks for your question! Unfortunately, I'm unfamiliar with Kropotkin's work, except on a very superficial level. But I might be able to shed some light on anarcho-communism, and why CPUSA doesn't adopt it as a political goal.
From my understanding, anarcho-communists favor a society without a central government, made up instead of small, self-governing units with cooperative industry. That picture of society is an ideal suited to Russian society in the late nineteenth century, where there was little heavy industry and most people were farmers. It's much harder to imagine a society like ours operating on that basis. Think of the labor that had to be coordinated to put a human being on the moon, or build and maintain an interstate highway system for 330 million people, or organize large-scale efforts against climate change. It's hard to see how we could make progress without a centralized way of organizing production and distribution.
That's why we work to establish socialism, where the working class (creators of all wealth) take collective control of that wealth through an expanded and enriched form of democratic governance. Socialist democracy will, I imagine, promote participatory, local governance wherever possible (as in Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution), but it will also provide the ability to enact large-scale projects. Moreover, the working class will need to use state power to abolish capitalism and strip away the private property that capitalists use to exploit us.
Sometime, in the distant future, after socialism has been in place for many years and people have lost the individualistic and competitive instincts of capitalism, when we've reached a level of technical progress and political democracy unequaled in human history, we may be able to think about a transition to the stateless society of communism--but in the here and now, and for the foreseeable future, a socialist state seems like an essential step. Hope this helps.
From my understanding, anarcho-communists favor a society without a central government, made up instead of small, self-governing units with cooperative industry. That picture of society is an ideal suited to Russian society in the late nineteenth century, where there was little heavy industry and most people were farmers. It's much harder to imagine a society like ours operating on that basis. Think of the labor that had to be coordinated to put a human being on the moon, or build and maintain an interstate highway system for 330 million people, or organize large-scale efforts against climate change. It's hard to see how we could make progress without a centralized way of organizing production and distribution.
That's why we work to establish socialism, where the working class (creators of all wealth) take collective control of that wealth through an expanded and enriched form of democratic governance. Socialist democracy will, I imagine, promote participatory, local governance wherever possible (as in Cuba's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution), but it will also provide the ability to enact large-scale projects. Moreover, the working class will need to use state power to abolish capitalism and strip away the private property that capitalists use to exploit us.
Sometime, in the distant future, after socialism has been in place for many years and people have lost the individualistic and competitive instincts of capitalism, when we've reached a level of technical progress and political democracy unequaled in human history, we may be able to think about a transition to the stateless society of communism--but in the here and now, and for the foreseeable future, a socialist state seems like an essential step. Hope this helps.
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