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Anarchism and Socialism The Abolition of the State Wayne Price Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2007, 196 pp., $14.49
Wayne Price's The Abolition of the STATE is a well considered, well researched, and well written book. I shall try to summarize his major points in the first several chapters. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with the failure of revolutions in Russia and Spain and the success of the counter-revolution in Germany, and I shall discuss them as well.
* Both anarchists and Marxists believe in a revolution from below by the working class.
* Both see the state as a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" Communist Manifesto).
* Marxists would replace the existing state with a new state that would wither away when the class struggle ceases. (Price questions this, given his view of Lenin and Trotsky as incorrigible centralizers.)
* Anarchists, on the contrary, "plan to go immediately into a stateless society" (p.5).
* Homo Sapiens began about 50 thousand years ago, but states did not start until about 5 thousand years ago. Hence, state is not "required by human nature."
* Reformism - whether Fabian or Scandinavian - cannot work because even if social democrats get elected and control the government, "they do not control the economy . . . [and] have to manage a capitalist economy" (p. 25).
* Cooperatives and other alternate institutions are fine, but they are no strategy for overthrowing capitalism.
* Decentralism: Small closely knit communities should be the goal. (According to Ralph Borsodi, 2/3 of the national product could be made more cheaply on homesteads; only 1/3 is more effectively made by mass production.)
* Price acknowledges Marx and Engels' insistence on democratic worker democracy, but faults them for not rooting it locally in worker institutions and communities.
* Price believes in a federation of cooperative communities and of worker-controlled industries - a federalized pluralistic system (pp. 81,97).
* Anarchists and socialists, generally speaking, agree on the beginning and ending of the struggle for a classless society. Both begin with a sine qua non - a bottom-up workers' revolution (although some anarchists believe this must be a spontaneous movement, and some socialists believe in the leadership of a workers' party). The ending...