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Title: Anarchism and Marxism
Author: Daniel Guérin
Date: 1981
Language: en
Topics: libertarian communism, libertarian marxism, Marxism
Notes: From a paper given in New York on 6 Nov. 1973 with an introduction by the author for the first English language edition, 1981. First published 1981 by Cienfuegos Press.

Daniel Guérin

Anarchism and Marxism

Introduction

The main part of my contribution to this Cienfuegos Press pamphlet is a

paper which I had occasion to give in New York in 1973, on “Anarchism

and Marxism”. But I would like to preface it with a few hitherto

unpublished reflections on Marx and Engels militant. For it is this

aspect of their activities which attracts me most. I must confess that

philosophical marxism, the marxism which criticises bourgeois political

economy, indeed even its historical writings (which are, for me, the

most exemplary) nowadays leave me rather cold. On the other hand, I like

to follow Marx and Engels in action, fitting into the movement of the

labouring masses. I will not discuss here all the militant performances

of the two revolutionaries, but only two episodes, chosen from among the

most revealing; the editorship of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne

in 1848–1849, and the impetus given to the First International of

1864–1872.

If I’ve opted for these two major episodes, it’s partly because some

recent publications have placed them in a new light. The first is the

publication of the articles by Marx and Engels from their journal, the

Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in a French translation in 3 volumes

(1963–1971). The second, also in French, is the Minutes of the General

Council of the First International published in 6 volumes by Progress

Publications in Moscow, from 1972 to 1975. The study of these episodes

fits into the context of a confrontation between anarchism and marxism,

for they demonstrate at the same time the incontestable value of the two

founders of marxism, and their weak points: authoritarianism,

sectarianism, lack of understanding of the libertarian perspective.

It was two young men of 30 and 28 who set up the Rhineland journal in

1848. Their talent as journalists equalled their courage. They ran the

risk of all kinds of harrassments and legal actions, both by police and

judiciary. They were resolutely internationalist and supported all the

revolutionary movements of the many countries seized by the fever of

’48. They struggled alongside the workers of their country and Engels

was justified in maintaining, much later, in 1884, that “no journal was

so successful in rousing the proletarian masses”.[1]

Both devoted admirable pages to what they called the Paris workers’

revolution of 23–25 June 1848, which was to terminate in a heavy defeat,

followed by horrifying repression. Marx was not boasting when he

asserted the following November: “We alone understood the June

revolution.” The two friends understood the dramatic divorce effected

between the Parisian workers, forced into the most violent of riots, and

the mass of small peasantry, malinformed and frightened by this outburst

of the “distributionists”. They condemned the petit-bourgeois idealists

(in power since February ’48) for abandoning the insurgents, a desertion

they were to pay dearly for, because one year later these pale

republicans were to be defeated in their turn by more reactionary than

they, and abandoned by the proletariat.

Marx and Engels in addition saw clearly the European repercussions of

the workers’ defeat in June ’48. From that point the revolution was

forced to beat a retreat throughout the continent. Among other things it

was the bloody days of Paris which drove the armies of the tsar “to

Bucharest or to Jessy”. The courageous attitude of the two young

journalists was to be no less prejudicial to them; their stand in favour

of the Paris insurgents put to flight their last shareholders and they

had to fill this vacuum by exhausting the family inheritance. The lesson

that they draw from both 1793 and from June ’48 is radical: “There is

only one way to abrogate the deadly agony of the old society:

revolutionary terrorism.”

But beneath this extremism appear the already authoritarian traits of

early marxism. Engels, recalling the Rhineland journal in 1884,

acknowledged that Marx exercised his “dictatorship” on the editorial

staff. All his collaborators, recognising his intellectual superiority,

submitted to the authority of their chief editor. He abused that power,

just as, we will see later, he was to abuse it in the General Council of

the First International. Authoritarianism and also excess of pride.

Thus, brought before a tribunal in Cologne, he cried, with complete

disdain, “As far as I’m concerned, I assure you that I prefer following

great world events, analysing the march of history, to wrestling with

local idols.”

The two friends lost no opportunity to pick on Proudhon and Bakunin. The

brave speech given by the former at the 31^(st) July 1848 session of the

National Assembly, to the boos of his furious colleagues, aroused the

ridicule of the Rhineland journalists. Yet in this speech the anarchist

delegate dared to show solidarity with the June insurgents and fling a

socialist challenge at the bourgeois order. But for Marx and Engels it

was nothing but a clever ruse: to carry off his petit-bourgeois Utopias

successfully, the father of anarchism “is forced to hold a democratic

attitude in the face of this whole bourgeois Chamber.”

For the Appeal to the Slavs started by Bakunin, the same sarcasms: For

this Russian patriot, the word “liberty” replaces everything. Not a word

of reality. All you find in this Appeal are more or less moral

categories, “which prove absolutely nothing”. Only “Bakunin’s

imagination” was unaware of geographical and commercial necessities

which “are vital questions for Germany”. The northern parts of Germany,

are they not “completely germanised”? Are these good Germans to be

forced to speak dead Slavonic languages? The political centralisation

imposed by the German conqueror and which only “the most resolute

terrorism” can safeguard is the expression of a “pressing need” of an

economic character. Too bad if it involves “brutally crushing a few

tender little national flowers”, exclaims Engels the Jacobin.

Let us move on now to the First International. At the time when he was

both holding it poised on the baptismal font and serving as its

penholder, (with, I may add, considerable panache”) Marx is truly

touching in his selflessness and modesty. When the chairmanship of the

General Council was offered him, he declined humbly, regarding himself

as “unqualified, as he is an intellectual worker, not a manual worker”.

On the eve of the Lausanne Congress in 1867, he stated that he was in no

fit state to go, and stood down as a delegate. Moreover he was to absent

himself from all the annual conferences until the fateful one of 1872.

He professed a spontaneist faith. Writing the 4^(th) annual report of

the General Council for the Brussels congress of 1868, he proclaimed:

“The International Working Men’s Association is the daughter neither of

a sect nor a theory. It is the spontaneous (in German, naturwüchsig,

begotten by nature) product of the proletarian movement, which itself

springs from the normal and irrepressible tendencies of modern society.”

This definition of what nowadays we call (incorrectly, anyway) workers’

autonomy could have come from the pen of a libertarian.

But soon enough Marx took an authoritarian turn, for several reasons: to

start with, he had published, in September 1867, the first volume of his

Capital, which brought him a speedy notoriety and the congratulations of

the internationalists, the Germans first: next, under the banner of

Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, German social democracy had an

animated blossoming and succeeded, in spite of government restrictions,

in getting about a hundred unions to affiliate to the International. In

the Reichstag in 1869, Bebel boasted of this affiliation. Marx, who was

Secretary of the Regional council for Germany,[2] swelled with pride. He

was no longer alone. At last he had a great political party to protect

him from the rear. Finally, in September 1868, Bakunin founded an

International Social-democratic Alliance and aimed to enter it en bloc

into the AIT. Panic-stricken, Marx got the Regional Council to refuse

this admission. But in March 1869, a shaky compromise intervened: only

the national sections of Bakunin’s libertarian organisation were

accepted into the International. With a bad grace, Marx had picked over

the programme and statutes of the Alliance, in the margin of which he

had scrawled a reference to Bakunin as asinus asinorum” (the ass of

asses). The quarrel was to be revived in 1871–1872. Weary of this

internal struggle, so wounding to his pride, Marx called on Engels for

help, had him admitted as a member of the General Council and entrusted

him with the job of undermining Bakunin and his partisans in all the

countries concerned. Landed thus in the saddle, Engels proved himself

more aggressive and more sectarian even than Marx himself. He showed a

distinct liking for dirty work. In this way the two revolutionaries put

their partisan interests before those of the workers who joined the

International in ever-increasing numbers and endowed it with a

heightened brilliance. Even the bloody crushing of the Paris Commune,

far from damaging the AIT, gave it an extra lustre: survivors of the

massacre, escaped to London, made dramatic entrances into the General

Council.

Marx and Engels made use of this growth of prestige and power of an

organisation which they then led, to plot the expulsion of the

anarchists, those spoilsports, those declared enemies of the State,

those opponents of electoral compromises of the kind practised by the

German social-democrats. The eviction was contrived in two stages,

firstly, at a meeting (nonstatutory) in London in September 1871, then

at the Congress (rigged) held at La Haye in 1872. Three spokesmen for

libertarian socialism, Michael Bakunin, James Guillaume, Adhemar

Schwitzguebel were excluded by an artificial majority. Marx and Engels

managed to get the General Council relegated to New York, to the tender

mercies of their friend Sorge. The International, at least in its first

form, was dead.

Daniel Guérin

1

When one wishes to discuss this sort of subject, one is confronted by

several difficulties. Let us begin with the first one. What do we really

mean by the word “marxism”? And which marxism are we talking about?

I feel it’s important to explain immediately: what we mean here by

“marxism” is all of the material written by Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels themselves. And not that of their more or less faithless

successors, who have usurped the label of “marxists”.

Such, in the first instance, is the case of the distorted (one could

even say betrayed) marxism of the German social-democrats.

Here are a few examples:

During the first years of the social-democratic party in Germany, in

Marx’s lifetime, the social-democrats launched the slogan of a so-called

Volkstaat (People’s State). Marx and Engels were probably so happy and

proud to have at last, in Germany, a party of the masses drawing

inspiration from them, that they displayed a strange indulgence towards

it. It took Bakunin’s furious and persistent denunciation of the

Volkstaat and at the same time of the social-democrats’ collusion with

the bourgeois radical parties for Marx and Engels to feel obliged to

repudiate such a slogan and such a practice.

Much later, in 1895, the ageing Engels while writing his famous preface

to Marx’s Class Struggle in France, was to make a complete revision of

marxism in a reformist direction, which is to say putting the accent on

the use of the ballot paper as the ideal way, if not the only way, to

take power. Engels, therefore, was no longer marxist in the sense that I

understand it. Next, Karl Kautsky became the equivocal successor to Marx

and Engels. On one hand, in theory, he made a show of keeping within the

bounds of revolutionary class struggle, while in fact covering up the

successively more opportunist and reformist practices of his party. At

the same time, Edward Bernstein, who also saw himself as a “marxist”,

called for more frankness from Kautsky and openly renounced class

struggle, which according to him was out of date, in favour of

electoralism, parliamentarianism and social reforms.

Kautsky, on the other hand, considered it “entirely wrong” to say that

the socialist conscience was the necessary and direct result of

proletarian class struggle. If he was to be believed, socialism and

class struggle did not generate one another. They arose from different

premisses. The socialist conscience came from science. The carriers of

science would not be the proletariat, but the bourgeois intellectuals.

By them would scientific socialism be “communicated” to the

proletarians. To conclude: “The socialist conscience is an element

imported from outside the proletarian class struggle, and not something

which springs from it spontaneously.”

The able theoretician in German social-democracy who remained faithful

to the original marxism was Rosa Luxemburg. Nevertheless, she had to

make plenty of tactical compromises with the leadership of her party;

she did not openly criticise Bebel and Kautsky; she did not enter into

open conflict with Kautsky until 1910, when her ex-tutor dropped the

idea of the mass political strike, and above all she tried hard to

dissimulate the strong links with anarchism of her conception of the

revolutionary spontaneity of the masses; she resorted to pretence of

vituperations against the anarchists.[3] Thus she hoped not to alarm a

party which she was attached to both by conviction and, it must be said,

for it is now known, by material interests.[4]

But, in spite of variants in presentation, there is no real difference

between the anarcho-syndicalist general strike and what the prudent Rosa

Luxemburg preferred to name “mass strike”. In the same way, her violent

disagreements, the first with Lenin in 1904, the last in the spring of

1918, with the bolshevik power, were not very far from anarchism. The

same for her ultimate ideas, in the Spartacist movement, at the end of

1918, of a socialism powered from the bottom up by workers’ councils.

Rosa Luxemburg is one of the links between anarchism and authentic

marxism.

But authentic marxism was not distrusted only by German

social-democracy. It was altered in a great measure by Lenin. He

considerably increased certain of the jacobin and authoritarian traits

which already appear from time to time, although not always, in the

writings of Marx and Engels.[5] He introduced an ultracentralism, a

narrow sectarian concept of the Party (with a capital P) and above all

the idea of professional revolutionaries as leaders of the masses.[6]

Not many of these notions can be found in Marx’s writings, where they

are no more than embryonic and underlying.

Nevertheless, Lenin violently accused the social-democrats of having

reviled the anarchists, and, in his little book The State and the

Revolution, he devoted a whole section to paying them tribute for their

fidelity to the Revolution.

2

The approach to our subject presents a second difficulty. Marx and

Engels’ way of thinking is difficult enough to comprehend, for it

evolved quite a bit in the course of a half-century of labour to reflect

the living reality of their times. Despite all the attempts of certain

of their modern commentators, (which included a Catholic priest) there

is no marxist dogmatism.

Let us take a few examples.

The young Marx, a disciple of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and a

humanist, is very different from the Marx of riper years who, having

broken with Feuerbach, retreats into a pretty rigid scientific

determinism.

The Marx of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, whose sole desire is to be

regarded as a democrat, and who sought an alliance with the progressive

German bourgeoisie, bears little resemblance to the Marx of 1850,

communist and even blanquiste, the eulogist of permanent revolution, of

independent communist political action and the dictatorship of the

proletariat.

The Marx of the following years, postponing till much later the

international revolution and shutting himself away in the British Museum

library, there to give himself up to extensive and peaceful scientific

research, is again completely different to the insurrectionalist Marx of

1850, who believed in an imminent general uprising.

The Marx of 1864–1869, playing the role at first of disinterested and

discreet counsellor (behind the scenes) of the assembled workers in the

First International, suddenly becomes, from 1870 onwards, an

ultra-authoritarian Marx who rules from London over the General Council

of the International.

The Marx who, at the start of 1871, gave severe warnings against a

Parisian insurrection, is not the same as the one who, only shortly

after, in the famous Address, published under the title of Civil War in

France, praises the Paris Commune to the skies (certain aspects of

which, be it said in passing, he idealises).[7]

Finally the Marx whom in the same work, asserts that the Commune had the

merit to destroy the machinery of the State and replace it with communal

power is not the same one who, in the Letter on the Gotha Programme,

endeavoured to convince the reader that the State must survive, for

quite a long period after the proletarian revolution.[8]

Thus, then, there is no question of considering the original Marxism,

that of Marx and Engels, as a homogeneous bloc. We must submit it to a

close critical examination and only retain the elements which have a

family tie with anarchism.

3

We are now confronted with a third difficulty. For even less than

marxism does anarchism form a homogeneous body of doctrine. As I have

shown in the preceding book, the refusal of authority, the emphasis

placed on the priority of individual judgement, particularly incites

libertarians, as Proudhon said in a letter to Marx, to “profess

anti-dogmatism”. Thus the views of libertarians are more diverse, more

fluid, more difficult to apprehend than those of the socialists who are

regarded as authoritarians. Different currents exist at the heart of

anarchism: apart from the libertarian communists that I have links with

you can count individualist anarchists, collective anarchists,

anarchosyndicalists and numerous other varieties of anarchism:

nonviolent anarchists, pacifist anarchists, vegetarian anarchists etc.

The problem, then, presents itself of knowing which variety of anarchism

we are going to set up against the original marxism, so as to discover

which are the points where the two principal schools of revolutionary

thought might agree—or not agree.

It is apparent to me that the variety of anarchism least distanced from

marxism is the constructive, gregarious anarchism, the collective or

communist anarchism. And it is not at all by chance that it is that very

one, and it alone, which I have attempted to delineate in the preceding

little book.

4

If one looks a little closer, it is not hard to discover that in the

past anarchism and marxism mutually influenced each other.

Errico Malatesta, the great Italian anarchist, wrote somewhere: “Almost

all the anarchist literature of the 19^(th) century was impregnated with

marxism.”

We know that Bakunin bowed respectfully before Marx’s scientific

abilities, to the extent of having started to translate into Russian the

first volume of Capital. For his part, the Italian anarchist, his friend

Carlo Cafiero, published a summary of the same work.

Going the other way, Proudhon’s first book, What is Property? (1840) and

particularly his great book: System of Economic Contradictions or

Philosophy of Poverty (1846), deeply influenced the young Marx, even

though shortly afterwards the ungrateful economist was to mock his

teacher and write against him the venomous Poverty of Philosophy.

In spite of their quarrels, Marx owed a lot to the views expressed by

Bakunin. So as not to repeat ourselves, two of them will suffice to

remind us:

The Address Marx composed on the Paris Commune is, for the reasons given

later on, largely of Bakunian inspiration, as Arthur Lehnig, the editor

of the Bakunin Archives, has pointed out: It was thanks to Bakunin that

Marx, as has already been said, saw himself obliged to condemn the

slogan of his social-democrat associates’ Volkstaat.

5

Marxism and anarchism are not merely influenced by one another. They

have a common origin. They belong to the same family. As materialists we

do not believe that ideas are born purely and simply in the brains of

human beings. They merely reflect the experience gained by the mass

movements through class struggle. The first socialist writers, as much

anarchists as marxists, together drew their inspiration first of all

from the great French Revolution of the end of the 18^(th) century, then

from the efforts undertaken by the French workers, starting in 1840, to

organise themselves and struggle against capitalist exploitation.

Very few people know that there was a general strike in Paris in 1840.

And during the following years there was a flourishing of workers’

newspapers, such as L ‘Atelier. Now it was the same year—1840—the

coincidence is remarkable—that Proudhon published his Memoire against

Property and, four years later, in 1844, the young Marx recorded in his

celebrated and for a long time unedited Manuscripts, the tale of his

visit to the Paris workers and the vivid impression that these manual

labourers had made on him. The year before, in 1843, an exceptional

woman, Flora Tristan, had preached the Workers’ Union to the labourers

and undertaken a Tour de France to make contact with the workers in the

cities.

Thus anarchism and marxism, at the start, drank at the same proletarian

spring. And under the pressure of the new working class they assigned to

themselves the same final aim, i.e. to overthrow the capitalist state,

and to entrust society’s wealth, the means of production to the workers

themselves. Such was subsequently the basis of the collectivist

agreement concluded between marxists and bakuninists at the 1869

congress of the First International, before the Franco-Prussian war of

1870. Moreover it is worth noting that this agreement was directed

against the last disciples, turned reactionaries, of Proudhon (who died

in 1865). One of these was Tolain, who clung to the concept of private

ownership of the means of production.

6

I mentioned a moment ago that the first spokespeople of the French

workers’ movement were inspired to an extent by the great French

Revolution. Let us come back to this point in a little more detail.

At the heart of the French Revolution there were in fact two very

different sorts of revolution, or if you prefer, two contradictory

varieties of powers, one formed by the left wing of the bourgeoisie, the

other by a preproletariat (small artisans and waged workers).

The first was authoritarian, nay dictatorial, centralised, oppressive to

the unprivileged. The second was democratic, federalist, composed of

what today we would call workers’ councils, that is to say the 48

districts of the city of Paris associated within the framework of the

Paris Commune and the people’s societies in the provincial cities.[9] I

am not afraid to say that this second power was essentially libertarian,

as it were the precursor of the 1871 Paris Commune and the Russian

Soviets of 1917, whereas the first kind was christened, (although only

after the event, in the course of the 19^(th) century) jacobin. What’s

more, the word is incorrect, ambiguous and artificial. It was taken from

the name of a popular Paris club, The Society of Jacobins, which itself

came from the abbey of a monastic order in whose building the club was

set up. In fact, the demarcatory line of the class struggle between

bourgeois revolutionaries on one side and unprivileged on the other

passed inside and right through the Society of Jacobins. Put more

plainly, at its meetings those of its members who extolled one or other

of the two revolutions came into conflict.

However, in the later political literature, the word jacobin was

commonly used to describe a revolutionary bourgeois tradition, directing

the country and the revolution from high by authoritarian means, and the

word was used in this sense as much by the anarchists as by the

marxists. For example, Charles Delescluze, the leader of the majority

right wing of the Paris Commune Council, regarded himself as a jacobin,

a robespierrist.

Proudhon and Bakunin, in their writings, denounced the “jacobin spirit”,

rightly considered by them as a political legacy of the bourgeois

revolutionaries. On the other hand, Marx and Engels had some trouble in

freeing themselves from this jacobin myth, made glorious by the “heroes”

of the bourgeois Revolution, among them Danton (who in actual fact was a

corrupt politician and a double agent) and Robespierre (who ended up an

apprentice dictator). The libertarians, thanks to the keenness of their

anti-authoritarian vision, were not duped by jacobinism. They understood

quite clearly that the French Revolution was not only a civil war

between absolute monarchy and the bourgeois revolutionaries, but also, a

bit later, a civil war between “jacobinism” and what I will call, for

convenience’s sake, communalism. A civil war whose outcome, in March

1794, was the defeat of the Paris Commune and the beheading of its two

municipal magistrates, Chaumette and Hebert, that is to say the

overthrow of the people’s power, just as the October revolution in

Russia ended in the liquidation of the factory councils.

Marx and Engels swung perpetually between jacobinism and communalism.

Right at the beginning they praised the “example of rigorous

centralisation in France in 1793”. But much later, much too late, in

1885, Engels realised that they had been misled and that the said

centralisation had laid the way open to the dictatorship of Napoleon the

First. It happened that Marx wrote once that the Enrages, the supporters

of the left wing ex-priest Jacques Roux, spokesman of the working class

population of the suburbs, had been the “principal representatives of

the revolutionary movement”. But, conversely, Engels claimed elsewhere

that someone “could at the very least have lent a hand from above” to

the proletariat of 1793.

Lenin, later on, showed himself to be much more of a jacobin than his

teachers, Marx and Engels. According to him, jacobinism would have been

“one of the culminating points tht the oppressed class reaches in the

struggle for its emancipation”. And he liked to call himself a jacobin,

adding always: “A jacobin linked with the working class.”

Our conclusion on this point is that the anarchists could not have got

on with the marxists if the seconds-in-command had not purged themselves

for good of any jacobin influences.

7

Now let us recap on the principal points of divergence between anarchism

and marxism:

First of all, although they agree on the ultimate abolition of the

State, the marxists believe it necessary, after a victorious proletarian

revolution, to create a new State, which they call a “workers’ state”,

for an indefinite period: after which they promise that such a State,

sometimes labelled “semi-state”, would finally wither away. On the

contrary, the anarchists object that the new State would be much more

omnipotent and oppressive than the bourgeois State, due to the statist

property of the whole economy, and that its ever growing bureaucracy

would refuse to “wither away”.

Then, the anarchists are a little suspicious as regards the missions

assigned by the marxists to the communist minority of the population. If

they were to consult the Holy Scriptures of Marx and Engels, they would

have only too good a reason to harbour doubts on the subject. Certainly,

in the Communist Manifesto, you can read that “the communists do not

have separate interests from the rest of the proletariat” and that “they

consistently represent the interest of the whole movement”. Their

“theoretical concepts”, swear the authors of the Manifesto, “are not in

the least based on the ideas or principles invented or discovered by

some world reformer or other. They are only the general expression of

the effective conditions of an existing class struggle, of a historic

movement operating before our eyes”. Yes, sure, and here the anarchists

are in agreement. But the sentence I shall now quote is somewhat

ambiguous and alarming: “Theoretically they (the communists) have the

advantage over the rest of the proletarian mass of understanding clearly

the conditions, the progress and the ultimate general results of the

proletarian movement.”

This trenchant affirmation could well mean that, because of such an

“advantage”, the communists reckon to have a historic right to

appropriate the leadership of the. proletariat. If this is so, the

anarchists would no longer approve. They disagree that there can be an

avant-garde outside of the proletariat itself and they believe that they

should limit themselves to playing the role, at the side or in the bosom

of the proletariat, of disinterested advisors, of “catalysts”, so as to

aid the workers in their own efforts with a view to reaching a more

elevated degree of consciousness.

Thus we are brought to the question of the revolutionary spontaneity of

the masses, a specifically libertarian notion. In fact we very often

find the words “spontaneous” and “spontaneity” flowing from the pen of

Proudhon and Bakunin. But never, which is rather strange, in the

writings of Marx and Engels, at least not in their original pieces in

German. In translations, the words in question appear from time to time,

but they are inexact approximations. In reality, Marx and Engels refer

only to the auto-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) of the masses, a more

restrained notion than spontaneity. For a revolutionary party may,

parellel to its more important activities, gingerly admit to a certain

dose of mass “auto-activity”, but spontaneity is another matter and

risks compromising the party’s pretensions to the leading role. Rosa

Luxemburg was the first marxist to use, in German, the word spontan

(spontaneous) in her writings, after having borrowed it from the

anarchists, and to accent the predominant role of spontaneity in the

mass movement. One could imagine that the marxists harbour a secret

distrust of a sociological phenomenon which does not leave sufficient

room for the intervention of their supposed leaders.

Then the anarchists are none too comfortable when they observe, from

time to time, that the marxists are quite willing to use to their

advantage the means and artifices of bourgeois democracy. Not only do

they willingly make use of the vote, which they regard as one of the

best ways of taking power, but it happens that they delight in

concluding sordid electoral pacts with bourgeois liberal or radical

parties, when they think they won’t succeed in winning parliamentary

seats without such alliances. Certainly anarchists do not have, as

people are too ready to imagine, a metaphysical horror of the ballot

box. Proudhon was once elected to the 1848 National Assembly; another

time he supported the candidature of Raspail, a progressive doctor, for

the presidency of the Republic. However, later on, under the Second

Empire, he dissuaded the workers from presenting candidates at the

elections. But for him it was a simple question of opportunity: he

disapproved of any oath of allegiance to the imperial regime. On one

occasion, the Spanish anarchists avoided taking a rigid position against

participation in the Frente Popular elections in February 1936. But

apart from these rare exceptions, the anarchists recommend quite

different ways to vanquish the capitalist adversary: direct action,

union action, workers’ autonomy, general strike.

Now we come to the dilemma: nationalisation of the means of production

or workers’ control? Here again Marx and Engels evade the issue. In the

Communist Manifesto of 1848, which was directly inspired by the French

State socialist Louis Blanc, they announced their intention of

“centralising all the means of production into the hands of the State”.

But by the word State they meant the “proletariat organised into a

leading class”. Then why on earth call that kind of proletarian

organisation a State! And why, too, do they repent much later on and

add, in June 1872, a preface to a re-edition of the Manifesto in which

they revise their summary statism of 1848, referring to the 1871 Address

on the Commune where the phrase is henceforward “self government of the

producers”? Doubtless they felt the need to make this concession to the

anarchist wing of the International.

But it must be pointed out that Marx never examined in detail the ways

in which workers’ control could function, whereas Proudhon devoted pages

and pages to it. The latter, who began life as a worker, knew what he

was talking about; he had observed attentively the “workers’

associations” born during the course of the 1848 revolution. The reasons

for Marx’s attitude is probably that it was inspired by disdain and that

he considered the question to be “utopian”. Today, anarchists have been

the first to put workers” control back on the agenda,[10] whence it has

become so trendy that it has since been confiscated, rehabilitated,

altered, by anyone and everyone.

8

Let us recall now how anarchists and marxists, since their political

birth, have come into conflict with one another.

The first skirmish was started by Marx-Engels against Max Stirner in

their second-rate book: German Ideology.[11] It rests on a reciprocal

misunderstanding. Stirner does not underline clearly enough that beyond

his exaltation of the Ego, of the individual considered as a “Unique”,

he advocates the voluntary association of that “Unique” with others,

that is to say a new type of society founded on federative free choice

and the right of secession—an idea to be taken up later by Bakunin and

finally by Lenin himself when discussing the national question. On their

side, Marx and Engels misinterpreted Stirner’s diatribes against

communism, which they thought to be of reactionary inspiration, whereas

in reality Stirner was inveighing against a very particular variety of

communism, the “crude” State communism of the Utopian communists of his

time, such as Weitling in Germany and Cabet in France, for Stirner

estimated, rightly, that that kind of communism endangered individual

liberty.

Next, as already mentioned, occurred Marx’s furious assault on Proudhon,

in part for the same reasons, which were these: Proudhon extolled

limited personal property in as far as he saw in it a measure of

personal independence. What Marx failed to grasp was that for major

industry, in other words for the capitalist sector, Proudhon came down

fair and square on the side of collective ownership. Did he not remark

in his Notebooks that “small scale industry is as stupid a thing as

small scale culture”? For large modern industry, he is resolutely

collectivism What he calls the workers’ companies would play, in his

eyes, a considerable role, that of managing the big instruments of

labour, such as the railways, the large manufacturing, extracting,

metallurgic, maritime etc., production.

On the other hand Proudhon, at the end of his life, in The Political

Capacity of the Working Classes, opted for the total separation of the

working class from bourgeois society, that is, for class struggle. Which

didn’t stop Marx from having the insincerity to call proudhonism

petit-bourgeois socialism.

Now we come to the violent and despicable quarrel between Marx and

Bakunin in the bosom of the First International. Here again there was to

some extent a misunderstanding. Bakunin attributed horrible

authoritarian designs to Marx, a thirst to dominate the working class

movement, whose traits he probably exaggerated somewhat. But more

astounding is that in doing this Bakunun showed himself all the same to

be a prophet. He had a very clear vision of a distant future. He foresaw

a “red bureaucracy” entering the scene, at the same time feeling a

foreboding of the tyranny which one day the leaders of the Third

International would exercise

over the world labour movement. Marx counterattacked by slandering

Bakunin in the vilest fashion and by getting the La Haye Congress in

Sept 1872 to vote to exclude the Bakuninists.

Henceforth the links were broken between anarchism and marxism: a

disastrous event for the working class as each of the two movements

would have needed the theoretical and practical contribution of the

other.

During the 1880’s an attempt to create a skeletal anarchist

International foundered. There was no lack of good will, but it found

itself more or less completely isolated from the labour movement. At the

same time marxism was developing rapidly in Germany with the growth of

social-democracy and in France with the founding of the Labour party of

Jules Guesde.

Later on, the various social-democratic parties united to create the

Second International. At its successive congresses, there were lively

confrontations with the libertarians who had managed to participate in

these conferences. In Zurich, in 1893, the Dutch libertarian socialist

Domela Nieuwenhuis picked holes in German social-democracy in terms as

much violent as glowing and was greeted with boos. In London in 1896,

Marx’s own daughter Mrs Aveling and the French socialist leader Jean

Jaurès insulted and flung out the few anarchists who had managed to

penetrate the precincts of the congress in the capacity of delegates

from various workers’ councils. True, the anarchist terrorism which

raged in France between 1890 and 1895 had contributed not a little to

the hysterical repudiation of the anarchists, regarded from then on as

“bandits”. These timid and legalistic reformists were incapable of

understanding the revolutionary motives of the terrorists, their

recourse to violence as a form of resounding protest against an

abhorrent society.

From 1860 to 1914 German social-democracy and (even more so) the heavy

machinery of the German workers’ councils spewed anarchism out: even

Kautsky, at a time when he declared himself in favour of mass strikes,

was suspected by the bureaucrats of being an “anarchist”. In France, the

opposite took place. Jaures’s electoralist and parliamentary reformism

disgusted the progressive workers so much that they took part in the

founding of a very militant revolutionary syndicalist organisation, the

memorable CGT of the years prior to 1914. Its pioneers, Fernand

Pelloutier, Emile Pouget and Pierre Monatte, came from the anarchist

movement.

The Russian, and, later on, Spanish revolutions were all that was needed

to really create a gulf between anarchism and marxism, a gulf which was

to be not only ideological but also particularly bloody.

To terminate these considerations on the past history of relations

between anarchism and marxism, let us add this:

• Certain marxologists, such as Maximilian Reubel in France, are to some

extent tendentious when they pass off Marx as a “libertarian”;

• Some sectarian and narrowminded anarchists, such as Gaston Leval in

France, are to an extent blinded by passion when they hate Marx as if he

were the devil.

9

And now what of the present?

Without a doubt a renaissance of libertarian socialism is taking place

today, I hardly need to remind you of how the renaissance occurred in

France in May 1968. It was the most spontaneous, the most unexpected,

the least prepared of uprisings. A strong wind of freedom blew across

our country, so devastating and at the same time so creative that

nothing could remain exactly the same as what had existed before. Life

changed, or if you like, we changed life. But a similar renaissance also

took place in the general context of a renaissance of the whole of the

revolutionary movement, notably among the student population. Due to

this, there are hardly any watertight barriers any longer between the

libertarian movements and those who claim to be “marxist-leninists”.

There even is a certain nonsectarian permeability between these

different movements. Young comrades in France pass from “authoritarian”

marxist groups to libertarian groups and vice versa. Entire groups of

maoists split up under the libertarian influence, or are attracted by

the libertarian contagion. Even the small trotskyist groups are

developing certain of their views and abandoning several of their

prejudices under the influence of libertarian writings and theories.

People like Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends in their monthly review now

expound anarchist views and one of their recent articles was entitled

“Adieu to Lenin”. Of course there are still some authoritarian marxist

groups who are particularly anti-anarchist, just as you can still find

anarchist groups who remain violently anti-marxist.

In France the Libertarian Communist Organisation (O.C.L.)[12] finds

itself positioned on the borders of anarchism and marxism. It has in

common with classical anarchism their affiliation with the

anti-authoritarian current which dates back to the First International.

But it also has in common with the marxists the fact that they both take

their stand resolutely on the field of proletarian class struggle and of

the fight to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist power, On one hand, the

libertarian communists endeavoured to revive all that had been

constructive in the anarchist contribution to the past (I must mention

in passing, that that was my aim in publishing the preceding book,

Anarchism, and the anarchist anthology, in four pocket volumes, under

the title Neither God nor Master.[13] On the other hand, the libertarian

communists did not reject those things in the heritage of Marx and

Engels which seemed to them still valid and fruitful, and, in

particular, relevant to the needs of the present day.

An example is the notion of alienation contained in the young Marx’s

1844 Manuscripts, which fits in well with the anarchists’ concept of

individual liberty. Similarly with the affirmation that the emancipation

of the proletariat ought to be the work of the proletariat itself and

not that of substitutes, an idea which is found as much in the Communist

manifesto as in its later commentaries and in the resolutions of the

congress of the First International. The same applies to the revelatory

theory of capitalism which remains even today one of the keys to

understanding the workings of the capitalist machinery. So, too,

finally, with the famous method of materialist and historical dialectic

which is still one of the threads connecting the understanding of past

and present events. One necessary condition however: do not apply this

method rigidly, mechanically, or as an excuse not to fight under the

false pretext that the material bases for a revolution are absent, as

the Stalinists made out three times in France in 1936, 1945 and 1968.

Besides historical materialism should not be reduced to a simple

determinism; the door must stay wide open to individual freewill and the

revolutionary spontaneity of the masses.

As the libertarian historian A E Kaminski wrote in his excellent book on

Bakunin, a synthesis of anarchism and marxism is not only necessary but

inevitable. “History,” he adds, “makes her compromises herself.”

I should like to add, and this will be my own conclusion, that a

libertarian communism, fruit of such a synthesis, would without a doubt

express the deepest wishes (even if sometimes not yet wholly conscious)

of progressive workers, of what is nowadays called “the labour left”

much better than degenerate authoritarian marxism or the dated and

fossilized old-style anarchism.

[1] Engels, “Marx und die Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, Sozialdemocrat,

Zurich, 13 March 1884, Werke, Dietz, b.XXI, p. 18.

[2] Marx was quite attached to his title and function. At the General

Council session of 11^(th) May 1868 he snapped at the secretary, his

compatriot Eccarius, for having omitted his name at the bottom of an

address that the habitual spokesman of the International had composed.

He was most indignant: “Mr Eccarius must not be allowed to make use of

council members’ names as he pleases.” Personally, he was quite

indifferent, he said, as to whether his name was mentioned. But “the

Secretary for Germany is an entity, not a fiction!”

[3] Cf. my book: Rosa Luxemburg and Revolutionary Spontaneity,

Flammarion, ‘“Questions of History” series, 1971.

[4] Cf. Rosa Luxemburg, Letters to Léon Jogichès, 2, Vol.,

Denoël-Gonthier, 1971.

[5] Cf. in my book For Libertarian Marxism, Robert Laffont, 1969, the

essay “The Dejacobinised Revolution”.

[6] Ibid., the essay “Lenin or socialism from the top”.

[7] Cf. in my book The French Revolution and Us, Maspero, 1976, the

essay “Beware of the new Versailles!”

[8] It is true that the piece on the Commune was really an Address to

the First International: Marx, holding the pen, had to take into account

the various currents of that working class organisation where statist

authoritarians rubbed shoulders with libertarians and were obliged to

make them concessions, disclaimed later on.

[9] Cf. my book Class Struggle under the First Republic, reprint, 2

vol., Gallimard, 1968, and the digest Bourgeois and shirtsleeves,

Gallimard, 1973; finally The French Revolution and Us, cited above.

[10] The essential framework of the preceding book, published in 1965,

is workers’ control, the dynamics of which were accentuated by the May

’68 revolution.

[11] In fact this vituperative attack remained in manuscript form and w

as not published until 1932 (in French 1937–1947), bringing into

conflict with Stirner a number of marxists of this century, such as

Pierre Naville.

[12] 33, rue des Vigno les, 7 5020 Paris.

[13] Petite Collection Maspero, 4 vol., 1970.