Keywords: Marxism, Engels, Bakunin, 1st International, Democracy


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.

BACK TO BASICS

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.

WHO CAN GET RID OF CAPITALISM

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).

LETS BE FRIENDS?

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".

WORKERS POWER OR DICTATORSHIP OVER WORKERS?

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.

AMBIGUITIES

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".

SOCIALISM BY ELECTING 166 TDS?

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.

VOLUNTARY OR NOT AT ALL

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.

**********************
Article taken from Workers Solidarity no 39.

Workers Solidarity is the paper of the Irish
anarchist group Workers Solidarity Movement.
For more details mail

WSM
PO Box 1528
Dublin 8


