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Title: Marx, Theoretician of Anarchism
Author: Maximilien Rubel
Date: 1973
Language: en
Topics: council communism, Libertarian Marxism, Karl Marx
Source: *L’Europe en formation*, no 163–164, octobre-novembre 1973; Retrieved on 2020-10-25 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm
Notes: Transcribed for marxists.org by Adam Buick; Translated by Adam Buick; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.

Maximilien Rubel

Marx, Theoretician of Anarchism

Marx has been badly served by disciples who have succeeded neither in

assessing the limits of his theory nor in determining its standards and

field of application and has ended up by taking on the role of some

mythical giant, a symbol of the omniscience and omnipotence of homo

faber, maker of his own destiny.

The history of the School remains to be written, but at least we know

how it came into being: Marxism, as the codification of a misunderstood

and misinterpreted body of thought, was born and developed at a time

when Marx’s work was not yet available in its entirely and when

important parts of it remained unpublished. Thus, the triumph of Marxism

as a State doctrine and Party ideology preceded by several decades the

publication of the writings where Marx set out most clearly and

completely the scientific basis and ethical purpose of his social

theory. That great upheavals took place which invoked a body of thought

whose major principles were unknown to the protagonists in the drama of

history should have been enough to show that Marxism was the greatest,

if not the most tragic, misunderstanding of the century. But at the same

time this allows us to appreciate the significance of the theory held by

Marx that it is not revolutionary ideas or moral principles which bring

about changes in society, but rather human and material forces; that

ideas and ideologies very often serve only to disguise the interest of

the class in whose interests the upheavals take place. Political Marxism

cannot appeal to Marx’s science and at the same time escape the critical

analysis which that science uses to unmask the ideologies of power and

exploitation.

Marxism as the ideology of a master class has succeeded in emptying the

concepts of socialism and communism, as Marx and his forerunners

understood them, of their original meaning and has replaced it with the

picture of a reality which is its complete negation. Although closely

linked to the other two, a third concept — anarchism — seems however to

have escaped this fate of becoming a mystification. But while people

know that Marx had very little sympathy for certain anarchists, it is

not so generally known that despite this he still shared the anarchist

ideal and objectives: the disappearance of the State. It is therefore

pertinent to recall that in embracing the cause of working class

emancipation, Marx started off in the anarchist tradition rather than in

that of socialism or communism; and that, when finally he chose to call

himself a “communist,” for him this term did not refer to one of the

communist currents which then existed, but rather to a movement of

thought and mode of action which had yet to be founded by gathering

together all the revolutionary elements which had been inherited from

existing doctrines and from the experience of past struggles.

In the reflections which follow we will try to show that, under the name

communism, Marx developed a theory of anarchism; and further, that in

fact it was he who was the first to provide a rational basis for the

anarchist utopia and to put forward a project for achieving it. In view

of the limited scope of the present essay we will only put this forward

as an item for discussion. Proof by means of quotations will be reduced

to a minimum so as to better bring out the central argument: Marx

theoretician of anarchism.

I

When in Paris in February 1845, on the eve of his departure for exile in

Brussels, Marx signed a contract with a German publisher he committed

himself to supplying in a few months a work in two volumes entitled “A

Critique of Politics and Political Economy” without suspecting that he

had imposed on himself a task which would take up his while life and of

which he would be able to carry out only a largish fragment.

The choice of subject was no accident. Having given up all hope of a

university career, Marx had carried over into his political journalism

the results of his philosophical studies. His articles in the Rheinische

Zeitung of Cologne led the fight for freedom of the press in Prussia in

the name of a liberty which he conceived of as the essence of Man and as

the attire of human nature; but also in the name of a State understood

as the realisation of rational freedom, as “the great organism, in which

legal, moral, and political freedom must be realised, and in which the

individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the

natural laws of his own reason, of human reason.”[1] But the Prussian

censorship soon silenced the philosopher-journalist. Marx, in the

solicitude of a study retreat, did not take long to ask himself about

the real nature of the State and about the rational and ethical validity

of Hegel’s political philosophy. We know what was the fruit of this

meditation enriched by the study of the history of the bourgeois

revolutions in France, Great Britain and the United States: apart from

an incomplete and unpublished work, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy

of the State (1843), two polemical essays, Introduction to the Critique

of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question (Paris, 1844).

These two writings in fact form a single manifesto in which Marx

identifies once and for all and condemns unreservedly the social

institutions — the State and Money — which he saw as at the origin of

the evils and defects from which modern society suffered and would go on

suffering until a new social revolution came to abolish them. At the

same time Marx praised the force — the modern proletariat — which, after

having been the main victim of these two institutions, was going to put

an end to their reign as well as to every other form of class

domination, political and economic. The self-emancipation of the

proletariat would be the complete emancipation of humanity; after the

total loss of humanity the total victory of the human.

In the intellectual development of Marx the rejection of the State and

Money and the affirmation that the proletariat was a liberating class

came before his studies of political economy; they preceded also his

discovery of the materialist conception of history, the “guiding line”

which directed his later historical researches. His break with Hegel’s

philosophy of law and politics on the one hand and his critical study of

bourgeois revolutions on the other allowed him to establish clearly the

ethical postulates of his future social theory for which the scientific

basis was to be provided by the critique of political economy. Having

understood the revolutionary role of democracy and legislative power in

the genesis of the bourgeois State and governmental power, Marx made use

of the illuminating analysis of two shrewd observers of the

revolutionary possibilities of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville

and Thomas Hamilton, to lay down a rational basis for an anarchist

utopia as the conscious aim of the revolutionary movement of the class

which his master Saint Simon had called “the most numerous and most

poor.” Since the critique of the State led him to envisage the

possibility of a society free from all political authority, he had to go

on to make a critique of the economic system which ensured the material

basis of the State. The ethical rejection of money also implied an

analysis of political economy, the science of the enrichment of some and

of the impoverishment of others. Later he was to describe the research

he was about to begin on the “anatomy of bourgeois society” and it was

by engaging in this work of social anatomy that he was to work out his

methodology. Later the rediscovery of the Hegelian dialectic would help

him to establish the plan of the “Economy” under six “headings” or

“books”: Capital, Landed Property, Wage Labour; The State, Foreign

Trade, World Market (see Preface to the Critique of Political Economy,

1859). In fact, this double “triad” of items for research corresponds to

the two problems which he had proposed to deal with fourteen years

previously in the work which was to contain a critique of both political

economy and politics. Marx began his work with the critical analysis of

the capitalist mode of production, but he hoped to live and work long

enough not only to complete this but also, once he had completed the

first triad of headings, to begin on the second triad which would thus

have found the Book on the State.[2] The theory of anarchism would thus

have found in Marx its first recognised exponent without there being any

need to prove this indirectly. The misunderstanding of the century of

Marxism as an ideology of the State was the result of the fact that Marx

never wrote this book. It was this which has allowed the masters of a

State apparatus labelled socialist to include Marx among the proponents

of State socialism or communism, indeed even of “authoritarian”

socialism.

Certainly, like every revolutionary teaching, that of Marx is not free

from ambiguities. It is by cleverly exploiting these ambiguities and by

referring to certain personal attitudes of the master that some of his

unscrupulous disciples have succeeded in putting his work at the service

of doctrines and actions which represent, in relation to both its basic

truth and its declared objective, its complete negation. At a time when

many decades of regression in human relations have called into question

all theories, values, systems and projects, it is important to gather

together the intellectual heritage of an author who, aware of the limits

of his research, made the call for critical self-education and

revolutionary self-emancipation the permanent principle of the workers’

movement. It is not up to posterity burdened with overwhelming

responsibilities to judge a man who can no longer plead his cause; but

on the other hand it is our duty to take up a teaching which was

completely oriented towards the future, a future which certainly became

our catastrophic present but which mostly still remains to be created.

II

We repeat: the “Book” on the State, foreshadowed in the plan of the

Economy but which remained unwritten, could only have contained the

theory of society freed from the State, anarchist society. Although not

directly intended for this work, the materials and works prepared or

published by Marx in the course of his literary activity allow us both

to put forward this hypothesis about the content of the planned work and

to work out what its general structure would have been. While the first

triad of headings was part of the critique of political economy, the

second would have put forward essentially a critique of politics.

Following on from the critique of capital, the critique of the State

would have established what determined the political evolution of modern

society, just as the purpose of Capital (followed by the Books on

“Landed Property” and “Wage Labour”) was to “lay bare the economic law

of motion of modern society” (cf. Preface to Capital, 1867). In the same

way that the principles and postulates which motivated Marx when making

his critique of capital are to be found in his published and unpublished

writings prior to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), so we can

extract from these writings those which would have guided him in

developing his criticism of the State. It would however be a mistake to

suppose that at this time Marx’s thought on the nature of politics was

established in its final form, with no possibility of modifying details

and closed to all theoretical enrichment. Quite the contrary. The

problem of the State never ceased to concern Marx not only because he

failed to keep the moral engagement to finish his master work, but above

all because it was constantly kept in his mind by his participation and

polemical confrontations after September 1864 within the International

Workingmen’s Association and by political events, particularly the

rivalry for leadership between France and Prussia on the one hand and

Russia and Austria on the other. The Europe of the Treaty of Vienna had

then become no more than a fiction, while two important social phenomena

had made their appearance on the scene of history: movements for

national liberation and the workers’ movement. The struggle between

nations and the class struggle, which were difficult to reconcile from a

purely conceptual point of view, were to raise problems of theory

requiring decisions by Marx and Engels which could not but bring them

into contradiction with their own revolutionary principles. Engels made

a speciality of differentiating between peoples and nations according to

how, in his eyes, they could or could not claim the historical right to

national existence. Their sense of historical realities prevented the

two friends from following Proudhon in the way of a federalism which, in

the situation of the time, must have seemed both a pure abstraction and

an impure utopia; but they risked falling into a nationalism which was

incompatible with the universalism of the modern proletariat they had

posited.

If Proudhon, by his federalist aspirations, seems to be nearer than Marx

to the anarchist position, the picture changes when we consider

Proudhon’s overall conception of the reforms which should lead to the

abolition of capital and the State. The almost excessive praise of which

Proudhon is the object in the Holy Family (1845) should not mislead us.

From this time on there were deep theoretical differences between the

two men; the praise had only been conceded to the French socialist with

a very important reservation: Proudhon’s critique of property was

implicit in the bourgeois economic system, but however valid it might be

it did not call into question the social relations of the system which

it criticised. Quite the contrary. In Proudhon’s doctrine, the economic

categories, which were theoretical expressions of the institutions of

capital, were all systematically preserved. Proudhon’s merit was to have

revealed the inherent contradictions of economic science and to have

shown the immorality of bourgeois morality and law; his weakness was to

have accepted the categories and institutions of the capitalist economy

and to have respected, in his programme of reforms and solutions, all

the instruments of the bourgeois class and its political power: wages,

credit, banks, exchange, price, value, profit, interest, taxes,

competition, monopoly. After applying the dialectic of the negation in

his analysis of the evolution of law and legal systems, he stopped

half-way by not extending his critical method of the negation to the

capitalist economy. Proudhon opened the way for such a criticism, but it

was Marx who was to create this new method of criticism and to try to

use it as a weapon in the struggle of labour against capital and the

State.

Proudhon had made his critique of bourgeois economics and law in the

name of bourgeois morality; Marx was to make his criticism in the name

of proletarian ethics, whose standards of judgement were taken from

quite a different vision of human society. To do this he only had to

follow to its logical conclusion Proudhon’s — or rather Hegel’s —

principle of negation: the Justice of which Proudhon dreamed could only

be established by the negation of justice just as philosophy could only

be put into practice by the negation of philosophy, i.e., by a social

revolution which would at last allow humanity to become social and

society to be become human. This would be the end of the pre-history of

humanity and the beginning of individual life, the appearance of

fully-developed Man, with all-round faculties, the coming of complete

Man. Marx opposed the realist morality of Proudhon, which sought to save

the “good side” of bourgeois institutions, with the ethic of a utopia

whose demands would be measured by the possibilities offered by a

science and technology sufficiently developed to provide for the needs

of the race. Marx opposed an anarchism which respected the plurality of

classes and social categories, which favoured the division of labour and

which was hostile to the associationists proposed by the utopians, with

an anarchism which rejected social classes and the division of labour, a

communism which took over all in utopian socialism that could be

achieved by a proletariat which was conscious of its emancipating role

and which had become master of the forces of production. However, in

spite of these divergent means — in particular, as we shall see, a

different attitude towards political action — the two types of anarchism

aimed at a common end which the Communist Manifesto defined in these

terms:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class

antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development

of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

III

Marx refused to invent recipes for the cooking pots of the future, but

he did better — or worse — than this: he wanted to show that historical

necessity — like some blind fate — was leading humanity to a situation

of crisis where it would face a decisive dilemma: to be destroyed by its

own technical inventions or to survive thanks to a leap in consciousness

which would allow it to break with all the forms of alienation and

servitude which had marked the stages of its history. Only this dilemma

was fated, the actual choice would be left to the social class which had

every reason to reject the existing order and to establish a

fundamentally different mode of existence. The modern proletariat was

potentially the material and moral force that was capable of taking up

this universally significant task of salvation. However this potential

force could not become real until the bourgeois period had been

completed. For the bourgeoisie too had a historical role to play. If it

had not always been conscious of this, then its apologists had had the

task of reminding it of its civilising role. In creating the world in

its image, the bourgeoisie of the industrially developed countries

embourgeoisified and proletarianised the societies which progressively

fell under its political and economic control. Seen from the viewpoint

of proletarian interests, these instruments of conquest, capital and the

State, were just means of servitude and suppression, but when the

relations of capitalist production and therefore of capitalist States

had been firmly established on a world scale, then the internal

contradictions of the world market would reveal the limits of capital

accumulation and provoke a state of permanent crisis which would

endanger the foundations of the enslaved societies and threaten the very

survival of the human race. The hour of the proletarian revolution would

sound the world over.

By extrapolating reasonably we have been able to see the logical

conclusions of the dialectical method employed by Marx in laying bare

the economic law of movement of modern society. We could back up this

view with textual references beginning with the remarks on methodology

which can be gleaned from many of Marx’s writings dating from different

periods. It is no less true that the hypothesis which Marx most

frequently offers us in his political works is that of the proletarian

revolution in the countries which have known a long period of bourgeois

civilization and capitalist economy; such a revolution would mark the

beginning of a process of development which would gradually involve the

rest of the world, historical progress being hastened through the

revolution being contagious. But whatever the hypothesis Marx had in

mind, one thing is clear: his social theory had no place for a third

revolutionary way where countries which lacked the historical experience

of developed capitalism and bourgeois democracy would show the way to

proletarian revolution to countries which had had a long capitalist and

bourgeois past.

We recall with particular insistence these elementary truths of the

conception of history called materialist because the Marxist mythology

born with the 1917 Russian revolution has succeeded in imposing on the

uniformed — and they were legion — another view of the process of this

revolution: humanity divided into two economic and political systems,

the capitalist world dominated by the industrially developed countries

and the socialist world the model for which, the USSR, had reached the

rank of second world power following a “proletarian” revolution. In

fact, the industrialisation of Russia has been due to the creation and

exploitation of an immense proletariat and not to its triumph and

abolition. The fiction of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” forms

part of the arsenal of ideas which the new masters have imposed in the

interests of their own power: six decades of nationalist and military

barbarism on a world scale explain the mental confusion of an

intelligentsia which has been completely misled by the myth of

“socialist October.”[3]

Since we cannot deepen the discussion here we will restrict ourselves to

expressing our point of view in the form of an alternative: either the

materialist theory of social development has some scientific validity —

Marx himself was naturally persuaded of this — and in this case the

“socialist” world is a myth or the socialist world really exists and the

materialist theory of social development is completely and totally

invalidated. On the first hypothesis the myth of the socialist world is

perfectly explained: it would be the fruit of a well-organised

ideological campaign by the “first workers’ State” aimed at disguising

its real nature. On the second hypothesis the materialist theory of how

the world would become socialist would certainly be disproved, but the

ethical and utopian demands of Marx’s teaching would have been achieved;

in other words, refuted by history as a man of science, Marx would have

triumphed as a revolutionary.

The myth of “really existing socialism” has been constructed in order to

morally justify one of the most powerful forms of dominating and

exploitative society that history had known. The problem of the nature

of this society has completely confused those most informed about the

theories, doctrines and ideas which together form the intellectual

heritage of socialism, communism and anarchism. Of these three schools —

or currents — of the movement of ideas which seeks a fundamental change

in human society, anarchism has suffered the least from this perversion.

Not having created a real theory of revolutionary practice, it has been

able to preserve itself from the political and ideological corruption

which has struck the two other schools of thought. Originating from

dreams and longings for the past as well as from rejection and revolt,

anarchism was formed as a radical criticism of the principle of

authority in all its forms, and it is above all as such that it was

incorporated into the materialist conception of history. This latter is

essentially the view that the historical evolution of humanity passes by

progressive stages from a permanent state of social antagonism to a mode

of existence based on social harmony and individual development. The

common aim of pre-Marxian radical and revolutionary doctrines became an

integral part of Marx’s anarchist communism just as the social criticism

transmitted by the anarchist utopia had. With Marx, utopian anarchism

was enriched by a new dimension, that of the dialectical understanding

of the workers’ movement as an ethical self-liberation embracing the

whole of humanity. The dialectical element in a theory claiming to be

scientific, indeed naturalistic, caused an intellectual strain which was

inevitably the source of the fundamental ambiguity with which Marx’s

teaching and activity is indelibly marked. Marx, who was a militant as

well as a theorist, did not always seek to harmonise in his political

activity the ends and means of anarchist communism. But the fact that he

failed as a militant does not mean that he therefore ceased to be the

theoretician of anarchism . It is thus right to apply to his own theory

the ethical thesis which he formulated with regard to Feuerbach’s

materialism (1845):

“The question whether human thinking can pretend to objective truth is

not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth,

i.e. the reality and power, the ‘this-sideness’ of his thinking in

practice.”[4]

IV

The negation of the State and capitalism by the most numerous and most

poor class appears in Marx as an ethical imperative before he

demonstrated dialectically that it was a historical necessity. In its

first form, in Marx’s critical assessment of the French Revolution, it

represented a decisive choice to be made: the objective which according

to Marx humanity should strive to achieve. This objective was precisely

human emancipation by going beyond political emancipation. The freest

political State — of which the Unites States of America provided the

only example — made Man a slave because it intervened as mediator

between Man and his freedom, just like the Christ in whom the religious

person vests his own divinity. Man when politically emancipated still

only had an imaginary sovereignty. As a sovereign being enjoying the

Rights of Man he led a double existence: that of a citizen of the

political community and that of an individual member of society; that of

a heavenly and that of an earthly being. As a citizen he was free and

sovereign in the skies of politics, that universal kingdom of equality.

As an individual he was degraded in his real life, bourgeois life, and

reduced to the level of a means for his neighbour; he was the plaything

of alien forces, material and moral, such as the institutions of private

property, culture, religion, etc. Bourgeois society separated from the

political State was the realm of egoism, of the war of each against all,

of the separation of man from man. Political democracy had not freed Man

from religion by ensuring his religious liberty, any more than it freed

him from property in guaranteeing him the right to property. Similarly

when it granted everyone the freedom to choose his occupation political

democracy maintained occupational slavery and egoism. Bourgeois society

was the world of trafficking and profiting, the reign of money, the

universal power which had subjected politics and hence the State.

Such, in summary, was Marx’s initial thesis. It was a critique of the

State and capital and it belonged to anarchist thought rather than to

any socialism or communism. There was not yet anything scientific about

it, but it implicitly appealed to and based itself on an ethical

conception of the destiny of humanity in that it insisted on the need of

doing something within the framework of historical time. This is why he

did not just make a critique of political emancipation — that it reduced

man to being an egoistic monad and an abstract citizen — but put forward

both the end to be achieved and the means of achieving it:

“Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract

citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in

his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular

situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers”

as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power

from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human

emancipation have been accomplished.”[5]

Marx developed his own theory by starting from the Social Contract of

Rousseau, the theoretician of the abstract citizen and precursor of

Hegel. Rejecting only partially the political alienation which these two

thinkers proposed, he arrived at the vision of a human and social

emancipation that would re-establish the individual as a complete being

with fully developed faculties. This rejection was only partial because

this state of political alienation, as a fact of history, could not be

abolished by an act of will. Political emancipation was “a great

progress,” it was even the last form of human emancipation within the

established order, and it is as such that it could serve as a means to

overthrow this order and inaugurate the stage of real human

emancipation. The means and the end were dialectical opposites but were

reconciled ethically in the consciousness of the modern proletariat

which thus became the bearer and historical subject of the revolution.

The proletariat, as a class in which were concentrated all the evils and

which embodied the well-known crimes of all society, possessed a

universal character as a result of its universal poverty. It could not

emancipate itself without emancipating all spheres of society, and it

was by putting into practice the demands of this ethic of emancipation

that it would abolish itself as a proletariat.

Where Marx speaks of philosophy as the “head” and intellectual arm of

the human emancipation of which the proletariat would be the “heart,” we

prefer to speak of an ethic in order to show that it is not a question

of metaphysical speculation but a problem of existence: people should

not interpret a caricature of the world but should change it by giving

it a human face. No speculative philosophy had any solution to offer Man

for his problems of existence. This was why Marx, when he made the

revolution a categorical imperative, reasoned from a normative ethic and

not from a philosophy of history or a sociological theory. Because he

could not and did not want to limit himself to a purely ethical demand

for the regeneration of humanity and society Marx’s interest was then

aroused by one particular science: the science of the production of the

means of existence according to the law of capital.

Marx thus undertook the study of political economy as a means of

struggling for the cause to which from that time on he was to devote his

whole declassé “bourgeois” existence. What till then had only been a

visionary institution and an ethical choice was to become a theory of

economic development and a study of what determined societies. But it

was also to be active participation in the social movement whose task

was to put into practice the ethical demands which derived from the

conditions of existence of the modern proletariat. Both the vision of a

society without State, without classes, without monetary exchange,

without religious and intellectual fears and the analysis which revealed

the process of evolution that would lead by successive steps to forms of

anarchist and communist society implied a theoretical critique of the

capitalist mode of production. Marx was to write later:

“Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of

the natural laws of its movement ... it can neither clear by bold leaps,

nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive

phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the

birth-pangs.” ( Preface to Capital, Volume I)

In short, Marx set out to demonstrate scientifically what he was already

persuaded of intuitively and what appeared to him to be ethically

necessary. It was in his first attempt at a critique of political

economy that he came to analyse capital from a sociological point of

view as the power to command labour and its products, a power which the

capitalist possessed not by virtue of his personal or human qualities

but as the owner of property. The wages system was a form of slavery;

any authoritarian raising of wages would only mean better rations for

the slaves:

“Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely

transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the

relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an

abstract capitalist.”[6]

Economic slavery and political servitude went together. Political

emancipation, i.e., the recognition of the Rights of Man by the modern

State, had the same significance as the recognition of slavery by the

State of antiquity (The Holy Family, 1845). The worker was a slave to

his paid occupation and also to his own egoistic needs experienced as

alien needs. People were just as much subject to political servitude in

the democratic representative State as in a constitutional monarchy. “In

the modern world, everybody is at the same time a slave and a member of

the community,” although the servitude of bourgeois society takes the

form of the maximum of freedom (ibid.). Property, industry and religion,

which are generally regarded as guarantees of individual liberty, were

in fact institutions which sanctified this state of servitude.

Robespierre, Saint-Just and their partisans failed because they did not

distinguish antiquity based on real slavery from the modern

representative State based on emancipated slavery, i.e., bourgeois

society with its universal competition, its unbridled private interests

and its alienated individualism. Napoleon, who understood perfectly the

nature of the modern State and modern society, considered the State as

an end in itself and bourgeois society as the instrument of his

political ambitions. To satisfy the egoism of the French nation, he

instituted permanent war in place of permanent revolution. His defeat

confirmed the victory of the liberal bourgeoisie which in 1830 was

finally able to make its dreams of 1789 become true: to make the

constitutional representative State the social expression of its

monopoly of power and sectional interests.

Marx, as a permanent observer of both the political evolution and

economic development of French society, was constantly concerned with

the problem of Bonapartism.[7] He considered that the French Revolution

was the classic period of the political idea and that the Bonapartist

tradition was a constant of the internal and external politics of

France. He also outlined a theory of modern Caesarism which, even if it

seemed to contradict in part the methodological principles of his theory

of the State, did not modify his initial anarchist vision. For at the

very time he was getting ready to set out the basic principles of his

materialist conception of history he had formulated the following

conception of the State which places him amongst the most radical

anarchism:

“The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery

... The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the

less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social

ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the

state — i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state

is the active, self-conscious and official expression.”[8]

The example of the French Revolution seemed to him at that time to be

sufficiently convincing to make him put forward a view which only

corresponded in part to the political sociology which he was soon to set

out in the German Ideology, but which can be found much later in his

reflections on the Second Empire and the 1871 Commune.

“Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social

ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the

source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and

great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to

establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of

politics is the will.”[9]

When twenty-seven years later in connexion with the Paris Commune Marx

was to return to the historical origins of the political absolutism

which the Bonapartist State represented, he was to see in the

centralisation carried out by the French Revolution the continuation of

the traditions of the monarchy:

“The centralized State machinery which, with its ubiquitous and

complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs,

entoils (enmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, was

first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent

modern society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism ... The

first French Revolution with its task to found national unity (to create

a nation) ... was, therefore, forced to develop, what absolute monarchy

had commenced, the centralization and organization of State power, and

to expand the circumference and the attributes of the State power, the

number of its tools, its independence, and its supernaturalist sway of

real society ... Every minor solitary interest engendered by the

relations of social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and

made independent of it and opposed to it in the form of State interest,

administered by State priests with exactly determined hierarchical

functions.”[10]

This passionate denunciation of the power of the State in some way sums

up all the work of study and critical reflection which Marx carried out

in this field: his confrontation with the moral and political philosophy

of Hegel; the period during which he worked out the materialist

conception of history; his fifteen years of political and professional

journalism; and, not to be forgotten, his intense activity within the

International Workingmen’s Association. The Commune seems to have given

Marx the opportunity to put the finishing touches to his thoughts on the

problem for which he had reserved one of the six books of his Economy

and to give a picture, if only in outline, of that free association of

free men whose coming had been announced by the Communist Manifesto.

“This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate,

constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a

revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of

society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social

life.”[11]

V

Comparing how the serfs had been emancipated from the feudal regime with

the emancipation of the modern working class, Marx noted that, unlike

the proletarians, the serfs had to struggle to allow existing social

conditions to develop freely and as a result could only arrive at “free

labour.” The proletarians, on the other hand, had, in order to affirm

themselves as individuals, to abolish their own social condition; since

this was the same as that of the whole of society, they had to abolish

wage labour. And he added this sentence which from then on was to serve

as the theme of both his literary work and his activity as a communist

militant:

“Thus they [the proletarians] find themselves directly opposed to the

form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists,

have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In

order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must

overthrow the State.”[12]

This view, which was nearer to the anarchism of Bakunin than to that of

Proudhon, was not uttered in the heat of the moment nor was it the

rhetoric of a politician haranguing a workers’ meeting. It was the

logical conclusion, expressed as a revolutionary demand, of the whole

development of a theory whose purpose was to demonstrate the “historical

necessity” of the anarchist commune. In other words, in Marx’s theory,

the coming of “human society” was seen as the outcome of a long

historical process. Eventually, a social class would arise which would

comprise the immense majority of the population of industrial society

and which as such would be capable of carrying out a creative

revolutionary task. It was to show the logic of this development that

Marx sought to establish a causal link between scientific progress —

above all that of the natural sciences — and, on the one hand, political

and legal institutions and, on the other, the behaviour of antagonistic

social classes. Unlike Engels, Marx did not consider that the future

revolutionary transformation would take place in the same way as past

revolutions, like a cataclysm of Nature crushing men, things and

consciousness. With the coming of the modern working class, the human

race began the cycle of its real history; it entered on the way of

reason and became capable of making its dreams come true and of giving

itself a destiny in accordance with its creative faculties. The

conquests of science and technology made such an outcome possible, but

the proletariat had to intervene in order to prevent the bourgeoisie and

capital from changing this evolution into a march into the abyss:

“The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same

pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other

men or to his own infamy.”[13]

So the proletarian revolution would not be a political adventure; it

would be a universal act, carried out consciously by the immense

majority of the members of society after they had become conscious of

the necessity and the possibility of the total regeneration of humanity.

As history had become world history the threat of enslavement by capital

and its market extended all over the Earth. As a consequence there had

to arise a mass consciousness and will fully oriented towards a

fundamental and complete change of human relationships and social

institutions. So long as people’s survival is threatened by the danger

of a barbarism of planetary dimensions, the communist and anarchist

dreams and utopias represent the intellectual source of rational

projects and practical reforms which can give the human race the taste

of a life according to the standards of a reason and an imagination both

oriented towards renewing the destiny of humanity.

There is no leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, as

Engels thought, and there cannot be a direct transition from capitalism

to anarchism. The economic and social barbarism brought about by the

capitalist mode of production cannot be abolished by a political

revolution prepared, organised and led by an elite of professional

revolutionaries claiming to act and think in the name and for the

benefit of the exploited and alienated majority. The proletariat, formed

into a class and a party under the conditions of bourgeois democracy,

liberates itself by struggling to conquer this democracy: it turns

universal suffrage, which up till then had been “an instrument of

deception,” into a means of emancipation. A class which comprises the

immense majority of modern society only takes alienating political

action in order to triumph over politics and only conquers State power

to use it against the formerly dominant minority. The conquest of

political power is by nature a “bourgeois” act; it only becomes a

proletarian action by the revolutionary aim which the authors of this

overthrow give to it. This is the meaning of the historical period which

Marx was not afraid to call the “dictatorship of the proletariat,”

precisely to differentiate it from a dictatorship exercised by an elite,

dictatorship in the Jacobin and Blanquist sense of the term. Certainly,

Marx, in claiming the merit of having discovered the secret of the

historical development of modes of production and domination, could not

have foreseen that his teaching would be usurped by professional

revolutionaries and other politicians claiming the right to personify

the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, he only envisaged this

form of social transition for countries whose proletariat had been able

to make use of the period of bourgeois democracy to create its own

institutions and made itself the dominant class in society. Compared

with the many centuries of violence and corruption that capitalism had

needed to come to dominate the world, the length of the process of

transition to anarchist society would be shorter and less violent to the

extent that the concentration of political power would bring a mass

proletariat face to face with a numerically weak bourgeoisie:

“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from

individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a

process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the

transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically

resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the

former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few

usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by

the mass of the people.”[14]

Marx did not work out all the details of a theory of the transition; in

fact noticeably different views can be found in the various theoretical

and practical outlines which are scattered throughout his works.

Nevertheless, throughout these differences, indeed contradictory

statements, a basic principle remains intact and constant to the extent

of allowing a coherent reconstruction of such a theory. It is perhaps on

this point that the myth of the founding of “Marxism” by Marx and Engels

is seen at its most harmful. While the former made the postulate of a

proletarian self-activity the criterion of all genuine class action and

all genuine conquest of political power, the latter ended up,

particularly after the death of his friend, by separating the two

elements in the creation of the workers’ movement: the class action —

the Selbsttätigkeit — of the proletariat on the one hand and the policy

of the party on the other. Marx thought that communist and anarchist

self-education was, more than any isolated political act, an integral

part of the revolutionary activity of the workers: it was the workers’

task to make themselves fit for the conquest and exercise of political

power as a means of resisting attempts by the bourgeoisie to reconquer

and recover its power. The proletariat had to temporarily and

consciously form itself into a material force in order to defend its

right and project to transform society by progressively establishing the

Human Community. It was in struggling to affirm itself as a force of

abolition and creation that the working class — which “of all the

instruments of production is the most productive” — took up the

dialectical project of creative negation; it took the risk of political

alienation in order to make politics superfluous. Such a project had

nothing in common with the destructive passion of a Bakunin or the

anarchist apocalypse of a Coeurderoy. Revolutionary purism had no place

in this political project whose aim was to make real the potential

supremacy of the oppressed and exploited masses. Marx thought that the

International Workingmen’s Association, which combined the power of

numbers with a revolutionary spirit conceived of in a quite different

way from Proudhonian anarchism, could become such a fighting

organisation. In joining the IWMA, Marx did not abandon the position he

had taken against Proudhon in 1847, when he put forward an

anti-political anarchism to be achieved by a political movement:

“Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a

new class domination culminating in a new political power? No ... The

working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the

old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their

antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly

so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of

antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the

proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a

struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution.

Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition

of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body

against body, as its final denouement? Do not say that social movement

excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which

is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in

which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social

evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.”[15]

Marx’s point here is quite realistic and free from all idealism. This

address to the future must be clearly understood to be the expression of

a normative project committing the workers to behave as revolutionaries

while struggling politically. “The working class is revolutionary or it

is nothing” (letter to J.B. Schweitzer, 1865). This is the language of a

thinker whose rigorous dialectic, in contrast to a Proudhon or a

Stirner, rejects impressing people by the systematic use of gratuitous

paradox and verbal violence. And while everything is not and cannot be

settled by this demonstration of means and ends, its merit is at least

to urge the victims of alienated labour to understand and educate

themselves through undertaking together a great work of collective

creation. In this sense, Marx’s appeal remains relevant, despite the

triumph of Marxism and even because of it.

The limits of this essay do not allow us to go further in proving this.

So we will limit ourselves to citing three texts which demolish in

advance the legend — Bakuninist and Leninist — of a Marx “worshipper of

the State” and “apostle of State communism” or of the dictatorship of

the proletariat as the dictatorship of a party, indeed of a single man:

“Marginal Notes on Bakunin’s book State and Anarchy (Geneva, 1873, in

Russian).” Main themes: dictatorship of the proletariat and the

maintenance of small peasant property; economic conditions and social

revolution; disappearance of the State and the transformation of

political functions into administrative functions of self-managed

co-operative communes.

Critique of the Programme of the German Workers Party (Gotha

Programme) (1875). Main themes: the two phases of communist society

based on the co-operative mode of production; the bourgeoisie as a

revolutionary class; the international action of the working class;

criticism of the “iron law of wages”; revolutionary role of workers’

productive co-operatives; primary education freed from the influence of

religion and the State; revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as

a political transition to the transformation of State functions into

social functions.

The Peasant Commune and Revolutionary Perspectives in Russia (Reply to

Vera Zasulitch)(1881). Main themes: the rural commune as an element of

regeneration of Russian society; ambivalence of the commune and

influence of historical background; development of the commune and the

crisis of capitalism; peasant emancipation and taxation; negative

influences and risks of disappearance of the commune; the Russian

commune, threatened by the State and capital, will only be saved by the

Russian revolution.

These three documents to some extent make up the essence of the book

which Marx considered writing on the State.

It can be seen from these remarks that Marx expressly presented his

social theory as an attempt at an objective analysis of a historical

movement and not as a moral or political code of revolutionary practice

aimed at establishing an ideal society; as the laying bare of a process

of development involving things and individuals and not as a collection

of rules for use by parties and elites seeking power. This, however, is

only the external and declared aspect of a theory which has two

conceptual tracks, one rigorously determined, the other freely making

its way towards the visionary aim of an anarchist society:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry

from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself

before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.”[16]

The past is an unchangeable necessity; and the observer, equipped with

all the instruments of analysis, is in a position to explain the series

of phenomena which have been perceived. But while it is a vain hope that

all the dreams which humanity, through its prophets and visionaries, has

entertained will come true, the future could at least bring an end to

the institutions which have reduced people’s lives to a permanent state

of servitude in all social fields. This is, briefly, the link between

theory and utopia in the teaching of Marx who expressly proclaimed

himself an “anarchist” when he wrote:

“All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of

the proletarian movement — i.e., abolition of classes — is attained, the

power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers

in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the

functions of government become simple administrative functions.”[17]

Post Script1976, for this translation.

The essay above does not take into account the ideas of Frederick Engels

on the State and anarchism. Without entering into the details of his

view, we can say that it does not completely coincide with that of Marx,

although it too proposes the final disappearance of the State. The most

important passages in this connection are to be found in Anti-Dühring

(1877–8) which to some extent had Marx’s imprimatur. Engels here sees

the conquest of State power and the transformation of the means of

production into State property as the self-abolition of the proletariat

and the abolition of class antagonisms, indeed of “the suppression of

the State as State.” Further on he describes this “abolition” of the

State as “a dying out” of the State: “Der Staat wird nicht

‘abgeschafft’, er stirbt ab.” After Marx’s death, drawing his

inspiration from the notes left by his friend on Lewis Henry Morgan’s

Ancient Society, Engels again dealt with the subject but in a wider

socio-historical context. The highest form of the State, the democratic

republic, is considered by Engels as the final phase of politics during

which the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat will

take place; the exploited class becomes ready for self-emancipation and

forms itself into an independent party: “universal suffrage is the gauge

of the maturity of the working class” — and that suffices to do away

with capitalism and the State, and hence with class society. “Along with

them [i.e., classes] the State will inevitably fall. The society ...

will put the whole of the machinery of State where it will then belong:

into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and

the bronze axe.”[18] See also Engels’s letters to Philip Van Patten of

18 April 1883 and to Edward Bernstein of 28 January 1884. In the latter

Engels quotes some passages from the Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and

the Communist Manifesto (1848) to prove “that we proclaimed the end

[“Aufhören”] of the State before there were really any anarchists.”

Engels undoubtedly exaggerated — a mention only of William Godwin would

invalidate this view, without referring to the others who were won over

to anarchism through reading Political Justice (1793).

[1] “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.”

Rheinische Zeitung, 10–14 July 1842.

[2] See “plan et méthode de l’Economie” in M. Rubel, Marx, Critique du

Marxisme, Payot, Paris, 1974, pp. 369–401.

[3] See Marx, Critique du Marxisme, pp. 63–168, for a further

development of the themes of the myth of “proletarian October” and of

Russian society as a form of capitalism.

[4] Second Thesis on Feuerbach, as translated in Karl Marx, Selected

Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited T.B. Bottomore and

M. Rubel, Pelican, 1963, p. 82.

[5] “On the Jewish Question,” Deutsch-französische Jarbücher, February

1844.

[6] Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, section on “Estranged

Labour,” 1844.

[7] See M. Rubel, Karl Marx devant le bonapartisme, Mouton & Co.,

Paris-The Hague, 1960.

[8] “Critical Remarks on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social

Reform. By a Prussian,” Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844.

[9] Ibid.

[10] The Civil War in France, First Draft, section on ‘The Character of

the Commune’, 1871.

[11] Ibid.

[12] The German Ideology, 1845, edited by C.J. Arthur, Lawrence &

Wishart, London, 1970, p. 85.

[13] Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper, 14 April 1856.

[14] Capital, Vol. I, end of chapter XXXII.

[15] Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, chapter II, part 5.

[16] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1851.

[17] Fictitious Splits in the International, 1872.

[18] The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chapter

IX.