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Title: Anarchism and Marxism Author: Conor McLoughlin Date: 1993 Language: en Topics: Marxism, Anarchism, Workers Solidarity Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2021 from http://struggle.ws/ws93/marx39.html Notes: Published in Workers Solidarity No. 38 — Summer 1993.
Marxism and Anarchism have been the two major theories of revolutionary
socialism since the middle of the last century. Yet since then they have
constantly been at loggerheads. In this article Conor McLoughlin
examines and compares the two to see do they, in fact, have anything in
common.
Firstly it is essential to define both sets of ideas. What is anarchism?
What is Marxism? For the moment I have decided to ignore all the
latter-day disciples of both sets of ideas. So I will not talk about the
various Stalinist, Leninist and social democratic developments of Marx’s
ideas. These have already been well dealt with in previous issues of
this paper. Instead I wish to concentrate on the basic ideas of Marx and
Engels.
For the anarchist point of view I will use the writings of Bakunin. He
was Marx’s consistent opponent and his basic arguments are accepted by
most anarchists. Neither Marx or Bakunin were ever entirely consistent
and the latter’s writings are very fragmentary, however this seems to me
to be the fairest method of comparison.
A lot of people who call themselves anarchists will probably be
extremely annoyed when I say that the most striking thing is how much we
have in common with Marxism. Both anarchists and Marxists are
materialists. Both believe that the ideas in peoples’ heads are shaped
by the social and economic conditions in which we live. We see that
ideas evolve and change through action. Thought leads to action and
action provokes thought.
Both sides accept Marx’s theory that labour creates value and that in
production much of this is creamed off by the capitalist as profit,
leaving a fraction as wages. Also shared is the view that only the
working class by, virtue of their role in production, have the power to
destroy capitalism.
Further, it is in their interest to do so. Workers have the power to
create a classless society and would benefit from it’s creation. Both
Anarchists and revolutionary Marxists accept that only revolution can
achieve this and that it must be international to succeed.
Marx’s ‘Capital’ is a wide ranging, well researched and referenced
assault on the capitalist system. In his own words a synthesis;
incorporating a range of ideas from right-wing economists like Weber,
Ricardo and Adam Smith to revolutionaries like Proudhon and the Irishman
William Thompson. Anarchists accepted and welcomed this critique. In
fact Bakunin had begun a translation of the book into Russian (no mean
feat if you’ve ever seen the size of this particular work).
So why don’t we all just shake hands and let bygones be bygones?
Firstly there has always been a major disagreement on the nature of the
state. By State we do not mean the country we live in. It is best
described as the ‘executive committee’ of the ruling class, the
mechanism that allows a minority to rule. Ultimately it defends its
power through its monopoly of force, its powers of repression to protect
the bosses’ rule against challenges from below.
Anarchists have always seen it as non-essential for a classless society.
However it is vital to the bosses in all forms of class society. It
intervenes massively in the running of most average capitalist countries
and in some cases may even embody the whole of the ruling class in a
kind of collective exploitation (as in the former Stalinist bloc).
Marx and Engels, on the other hand have always been ambiguous about the
State. At several stages they stressed that it was a neutral body which
could be used by workers in revolution. In 1848, after the Paris
uprising, they drafted the ‘Communist Manifesto’. In this they
repeatedly speak of “The Worker’s State” which was to nationalise and
centralise all production, finance, transport and communication. There
is no mention of how the workers would be able to control “their state”.
However in ‘The Civil War in France’, written after the 1871 Paris
Commune, Marx toyed with the idea of replacing the State with “Communal
Power” and “the self-government of producers”, though without mentioning
exactly how this was to come about. By the time of the publication of
‘The Critique of the Gotha Programme’ in 1875 he was back to the
ambiguous concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
In contrast Bakunin consistently and vigorously attacked the idea of a
revolutionary role for the State. He predicted the tyranny of Leninism
with uncanny accuracy in ‘State and Anarchism’ written in 1873;
“The new social order (of Marx) should not be organised by the free
association of peoples’ organisations or unions, local and regional,
from the bottom up in accordance with the demands and instincts of the
people, but by the dictatorial power of the learned minority which
presumes to express the will of the people.”
In Russia in 1917 the Bolsheviks attempted to implement Marx’s basic
programme. As part and parcel of state controlled nationalisation from
above, they closed down factory committees and soviets. All other
left-wing parties were smashed. The result was the squalid form of State
Capitalism which survived until the late 1980s. Bakunin was,
unfortunately, all too correct in his predictions.
At a deeper level there are ambiguities at the very heart of Marxism. In
his early works like “Thesis on Feurbach” or “The Holy Family” people
are seen as being active in changing history. However in his later works
history and economics take over and are seen to sweep us along with
them.
There are shades of this thinking in ‘Capital’. In this he puts forward
the idea that capitalism would become a fetter on the further
development of production and would be shuffled off in an unspecified
way. He puts up the vague idea that capitalism would become so big and
so planned that socialism, purely in terms of efficiency, would be the
next logical step. Capitalism would “rationalise itself out of
existence” as he put it in his ‘Grundrisse’ notebooks for ‘Capital’.
This is very deterministic thinking. It removes workers from the stage
as consciously moulding and changing the world. Socialism becomes a
matter of waiting for capitalism to “mature”. This was the reason for
some Marxists like the German Social Democrats believing there was no
need for a revolution.
Marx, and then Engels after his death, did follow this through to it’s
logical conclusion. They flirted with the idea of bringing about
socialism through social democracy and the ballot. In 1869 they
supported the German Social Democratic Party’s line of forming alliances
with right-wing parties.
Bakunin poured scorn on these ideas. He described the democratic state
as: “State Centralisation and the actual submission of the sovereign
people to the intellectual governing minority”.
Soon after the Paris Commune Marx and Engels broke with the Social
Democratic Party. But in 1895 the ageing Engels was back to his old
tricks again and put the accent on using the ballot box to get into
power to change society, (in his introduction to a new edition of ‘The
Communist Manifesto’). Marx also claimed, at one stage that it was
possible to introduce socialism through the ballot box in advanced
capitalist countries like Britain and America.
It appears that, except for a brief period around 1871, Marx and Engels
never gave any serious consideration to the idea of workers managing
society. Even then they didn’t look into to the matter in any detail. In
contrast Proudhon (with whom we would have our differences), Bakunin and
Kropotkin did. Marx saw this as very much being a long-term aim.
Bakunin’s rejection of Marx’s determinism also gave him an insight into
the role that small peasants could play in a revolutionary situation.
Marx saw the peasants as a reactionary class who would generally not
support workers. Bakunin believed that peasants could be revolutionary
where they were influenced by revolutionary ideas. He put forward an
excellent programme for the peasants in his work ‘Letters to a Frenchman
in the present Crisis’ (1871).
His basic idea was to hand the land over unconditionally to small
peasants. and to do away with conscription, taxes, rents and mortgages.
With the abolition of the State and by this the loss of inheritance
rights the individual would be the only guarantor of his/her property.
With a large amount of land suddenly becoming available and with
anarchist propaganda pouring in from the city and from landless workers,
a programme of voluntary collectivisation would soon suggest itself.
This is exactly what happened in Spain in 1936 and the Ukraine in 1921.
These ideas might still have relevance in many developing countries.
He also warned about the dangers of forced collectivisation — it would
have to be voluntary: “collectivism could only be imposed on slaves and
that kind of collectivisation would be the negation of humanity”.
So there are important and major differences between anarchists and
Marxists. Marx was no libertarian and took a very deterministic view of
history and class struggle. His disciples from Lenin to Stalin and Mao
picked up and expanded on Marx’s bad ideas to come up with their
theories of ‘the party before all else’, the rationale for their
dictatorships.
On the other hand Marx and Engels have unfairly been demonised by a lot
of anarchists. Most anarchists accept the much of the economic analysis
put forward in ‘Capital’. These ideas are a synthesis putting together
the results of hundreds of years of research and struggle. As such they
are not, properly speaking, the property of Marxists. One can accept a
materialist method of analysis and Marx’s critique of capitalism without
accepting the politics of Marx and Engels. These ideas are not the
property of theorists, either Marxist or Anarchist. They really belong
to all the workers of the world and it is our job to spread them.