The Critical Lenses of Marxism and Anarchism
Marxist critical framework posits some of the most important and fundamental questions for revolutionaries. These questions are concerned with economic exploitation (i.e., extraction of surplus value from labour value) in industries, and the resulting forms of alienation among workers, and power in the form of political capital (money) being accumulated by the bourgeois and the concomitant commodity fetishism.At first glance, these terms and this thorough study of industry seem quite convincing. However, upon dancing a bit deeper is only when one realises that all this framework can do is study workers' problems within industries. Theoretically speaking, Marxist critical lens suffers from two major problems;
- Reduction of Power: It reduces all power to monetary accumulation, that is, as a reductionist ideology, believes that power exists only in the form of money
- Reduction of Domination: As an anti-capitalist framework, Marxism believes that domination can exist only in the form of economic exploitation inside industries. That is, Marxism reduces all conflicts to economic class conflict, and therefore "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". In this context, Economic Exploitation is the economic base problem and everything else is just smoke, suprastructure, derivative, and secondary.
It's easier to see the problems with this extremely narrow and focused lens, since power can surely exist in forms other than monetary and domination too can exist in modes other than economic exploitation.
On the other hand, Anarchism comes from Greek origin "anarkhos" which literally means "no ruler", that is, masterlessness. The word ruler is definable by relation of ruling the ruled, the ruler is the subject and the ruled the object, first is active, the other is passive, the first is primary, the other derivative, the first is privileged, the other unsignificant, and this epistemological imbalance builds basic system of hierarchy. Anarchist Critical Framework studies Hierarchical Systems rather than only Capitalism. A Hierarchical System comprises of the Elite, who accumulates and exercises power, and the subordinate, upon whom the power is exercised; both of these roles are relational within particular hierarchical system, that is, a worker is subordinated in workplace but the same worker may be an elite at home dominating his wife and kids. An elite in the workplace may be subordinated to the financial department.
The power that is accumulated can also be of different forms; social power, patriarchical power, religious authority, capitalist power, cultural power, ethnic power, racial power, symbolic power, and so on.
As Bookchin puts it, the young are dominated by the old, the women by men, one ethnic group by another, one race by another, colonized by colonizer, masses by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their "higher social interests,", countryside by town, and in more subtle psychological sense, body by mind, spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and nature by society and technology.
An elite within a particular hierarchical system can dominate the subordinate without necessarily exploiting them monetarily, that is, men can dominate women, a feudal lord can dominate locals, a religious authority can dominate communities from other religions, one race can dominate another race, and in each case without always necessarily exploiting them monetarily. Therefore, domination can be studied in anarchism under many modes: where elites act as subjects rendering subordinates as objects, elites are active while subordinates remain passive, elites may act as the universal voice while subordinates remain the individual silence, elites may extract surplus from the labour value of subordinates, elites act while subordinates have the illusion of acting through the elites' actions, elites may represent and speak while subordinates are represented and spoken for, elites define rules and subordinates are defined by those rules, elite judges and subordinate is judged, elite retains individuality while subordinate is rendered as category, elite claims epistemic authority, while the subordinate’s cognition is constrained by that authority and so on.
In short, unlike Marxism, the Anarchist Critical Lens is not reductionist, which makes it more accomodating and encompassing, and therefore it can be applied to study different forms of powers and their functions, relational roles of elites and the subordinates, hierarchical systems and their interplay, and various modes of dominations in operation within particular hierarchical system, to comprehend in intricate details, understand how to dismantle each hierarchy and where to begin.
Misunderstandings of Marxists about Anarchism
Anarchism is two things. First, it is an attitude of questioning the legitimacy of hierarchical systems and their modes of domination, which can be many, as discussed earlier. Secondly, Anarchism is an umbrella term for not one but many proposed alternative theories for building alternative societies, and many of these theories are larger than Marxism. Therefore, just criticising Anarchism as if it were a single school of thought is a mere oversimplification and an utterly irrational and dishonest act. Some of the most famous of these proposed theories are Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Anarcho-Collectivism, Mutualism, Egoism, Libertarian Municipalism, and so on. All anarchists agree on the first part, that is, questioning illegitimate hierarchies, while many have proposed different alternatives as per their understandings.Supreme Leader Dictatorship vs Direct Action and Prefigurative Politics
From Lenin killing 18 thousand revolutionaries in Kronstadt just because they demanded the freedom to have a say in their soviet, to waging war on workers, farmers, and starving masses, forcing them to death through famine; from forced labour camps, the abolition of worker unions and worker co-operatives, and crushing down other socialists who dared to disagree with Marxists, to begging for help from Ukraine's anarchists, then selling them to Germany, and, after they successfully stopped the German invasion, Lenin attacking them again. All these are historical facts where supreme leaders and dictators have brought counter-revolution.Marxism, as Maximoff puts it, is a counter-revolutionary ideology that is anti-science, anti-progress, and anti-humanity. (For studying more horrors of Marxism, check out Guillotine at Work by Maximoff.)
Marxists desire an absolutist state with a one-party dictatorship, a supreme leader, and the abolition of unions, worker co-operatives, democracy, and so on. This one-party dictatorship basically includes no workers. (Were Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others workers? Nope. But even if a worker becomes a dictator, he would no longer remain a worker. That's just common sense.)
Karl Marx’s address made to the Union of Communists in March 1850:
“The democrats will either strive for a federated republic or, they cannot get along without an indivisible republic, they will at least try to weaken the central government by granting the widest measure of autonomy and initiative to the communes and provinces. As against that, the workers should strive not only for a single and undivided German republic, but the most vigorous centralization of power in the hands of the state. They should not let themselves be hooked upon the bait of this democratic chatter about the freedom of communes, self-government, etc., like France during the year 1793. The carrying out of the most vigorous centralization of present day Germany should become the task- of a truly revolutionary party”.In his pamphlet “State and Revolution”, Lenin quotes the following lengthy excerpt from Engels’ letter to Bebel, which ends in the following fashion:
“Since our state is only a transitional institution which is to be used during the struggle, in the revolution, in order to suppress violently our adversaries, it would be sheer nonsense to speak of a free state of the people; as matters stand, the proletariat still needs the State; he needs it not in the interests of freedom but in order to be able to suppress his enemies; freedom will be on the order of the day only when the state as such will have ceased to exist”.“Our State,” as Engels wrote—that is such a State about which one might say:
“ … the State it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the vanguard of the working class”. “ … The State —that means the workers, the advanced section of the workers, it is the vanguard, it is we.”[28]Therefore, this "our state" also banned protests because this one party supposedly represents the real interests of the workers. That's why, when Putilov factory workers protested, Marxists just opened fire and killed them without even thinking of a dialogue.
“The State it is we”. … We are the Party, and the Party—that is, the party and the party apparatus, —that is I. Consequently, the State—that is I and only I. A Marxist Louis XIV—such is the inescapable conclusion of the logical unfolding of political Marxism in practice, in life … The Workers’ Socialist State, the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is crowned by a Louis XIV, that is, by a benevolent despotism, by absolutism. It is an inescapable logical necessity… “Our State” is an absolutist State built not only in order to destroy our enemies, but also mainly in order to suppress our “adversaries”. And there are always more adversaries than enemies. The enemies are the capitalists, landlords, generals and priests. And as to adversaries, they comprise, in the first place, those that stand outside the pale of the collective “we,” that is, outside the Party. Those millions of people who are “not our people” fall into two categories of adversaries: those who do their own thinking, who have their own Socialist views and their own ideas as to the ways and means of building up Socialism. Various Socialists and Anarchist groups, parties, workers’ unions, cooperatives, various societies—all those belong to the class of direct and permanent adversaries. The other group consists of the vast mass of passive elements who only at times, sporadically and on specific occasions bring forth adversaries from their midst, that is, the group of potential adversaries. It follows hence that all “adversaries” must be disfranchised and deprived of their liberties. But before that could be done they had to be crushed or physically undermined.
Taken from Maximoff's "Guillotine at Work vol 1"
If anyone thinks that a single-party dictatorship with absolute power and control over all means of production, building an absolutist state, is a solution, and that it will one day give up all its power, abolish party, state, and give up its privileges to build socialism by handing over all means of production to workers, they must have some very misinformed perceptions about human nature.
To discredit Anarchism, the common tactic is to generalise the acts of Illegalists (which are only one tendency under the umbrella term and not common to all proposed alternatives), such as quoting "glueing themselves to trains," "throwing soup at paintings," "robbing banks," and so on, and then saying that all anarchists favour these things.
Anarchism has different proposed alternatives, and all have different ways to bring change. Most prefer prefigurative politics, like Jackson Cooperation, Democratic Confederalist communes and their praxis in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran by the Kurds, and so on. In the past, there were the Black Panthers in the USA, the Syndicalist revolt in Catalonia, the Platformists in Ukraine, and so on. To criticise Anarchism in general is dishonest, and to generalise it is deception. Gandhi, Tolstoy, Malatesta, and many others have propagated alternatives with pacifism as the root philosophy. Studying these diverse proposed alternatives, their experiments, and then criticising them separately would be an honest endeavour that no one really dares to make.
Building Communes from below or One Party Dictatorship
How can we reach the masses? Our answer is: by deeds rather than the false promises of a wolf telling the sheep that, once promoted to king of the jungle, wolves would start eating grass. Trusting promises of good times to come when left- or right-wing leaders are brought into absolute power has all been tested and miserably failed.War Primer reads:
The Prefigurative Politics begins with a simple but uncompromising question: can unjust means ever produce just ends? For centuries, power politics has answered in the affirmative. Monarchies, fascist regimes, liberal democracies, and Marxist-Leninist states alike have justified manipulation, coercion, secrecy, and hierarchy as necessary steps toward stability, order, or even liberation. The governing maxim has been that the end justifies the means. Yet historical experience suggests the opposite: when movements for emancipation adopt hierarchical, authoritarian, or manipulative methods, they do not abolish domination; they reproduce it in new forms. Prefiguration emerges as a radical refusal to separate ends from means. It insists that the future society must be lived and practised in the present struggle against the existing one.Those who take the meat
Bertolt Brecht
from the table teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution
is destined demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill
speak to the hungry
of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the nation
into the abyss
call ruling too difficult for ordinary men.
In Nationalism and Culture, Rudolf Rocker described the maxim of ends over means as the first article of faith in the history of power:
This indictment applies not only to emperors and dictators but also to revolutionary parties that imagine domination as a temporary instrument on the path to liberation. The twentieth century demonstrated that rigidly hierarchical movements promising equality often constructed bureaucratic states marked by repression and centralised authority. Hierarchical means entrenched hierarchical ends.“It is in the nature of all ambitions to political power that those animated by them hesitate at no means which promise success, even though such success must be purchased by treason, lies, mean cunning, and hypocritical intrigue. The maxim that the end justifies the means has always been the first article of faith of all power politics… for the baseness of method is as closely related to power as decay is to death.”
Freedom vs Autonomy
Marxists, Capitalists, and Liberal Democracy all promise freedoms, while Anarchism historically has stood with autonomy. Freedom is indefinable within itself; therefore, it always needs a concrete condition or object attached to give it concrete meaning. For instance, Freedom of Action, Freedom of Movement, Freedom of Speech, and so on. Do you think that people didn't use to speak before they were given freedom of speech? Or that people couldn't move before they were given freedom of movement? Noam Chomsky defines this freedom of speech best: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” The same is true of freedom of movement, which carries more restrictions than the piece of free action it packages in delivery; that is, it describes where you aren't allowed to go or cross over. You can't cross borders, you can't go inside certain areas, and so on.Simply put, freedom always comes in a packet and restricts more than the piece of free action it allows. In other words, freedom is a permission and always exists within hierarchical structures, where elites grant freedom and subordinates receive it. A slave allowed Sunday off for church has one packet of freedom, that is, "freedom of movement" for church on Sundays. Each of these systems offers different packets of freedom. Marxism claims to offer freedom from poverty, inequality, and so on, while liberalism offers individual freedoms in the form of civil rights and freedoms of speech, movement, expression, and so on.
Conversely, Anarchism speaks of autonomy, which is concrete in meaning without needing attachment to a concrete object or condition like freedom. Autonomy means self-determination, self-governance, and self-rule. The scope of autonomy is determinable by the principle of "Affectees Have the Final Say." This means that a decision that affects an individual comprises individual autonomy, and anyone else imposing it would mean the tyranny of the majority or mob rule; a decision affecting a free association of two must be taken by those involved; a decision affecting women must have women having the final say in it; a decision affecting one ethnicity should have that particular ethnicity having the final say in it; a decision affecting one neighbourhood should have that neighbourhood having the final say in it; a decision affecting a city should have that city having the final say in it; and so on.
Therefore, the disagreement between Marxism and Anarchism is not merely a disagreement over economics or the ownership of the means of production; it is a disagreement over the very nature of power itself. Marxism seeks to abolish one form of domination while preserving and centralising many others in the hands of the state, the party, and the supreme leader. Anarchism begins from a much broader premise: wherever power accumulates into a hierarchy of command and obedience, domination inevitably follows. Consequently, it refuses to postpone freedom until after a revolution or entrust liberation to a new ruling class. Instead, it seeks to construct the future within the present through direct action, voluntary association, prefigurative politics, and the gradual building of democratic institutions from below. If the destination is a society without masters, then the path towards it must itself be free from masters.
Bookchin's Critique of Marxism
1. Historical and Technological ObsolescenceBookchin argues that Marxism was born of an era of material scarcity and industrial capitalism, making its strategies (like the "transitional period" and "proletarian dictatorship") obsolete in an age where post-scarcity technology is now possible:
Marx anchored his theory in the "realm of necessity," believing that freedom was only possible after a massive development of productive forces to conquer nature. Bookchin contends that today, the potentiality for abundance already exists, meaning we no longer need the coercive "transitional" stages Marxism prescribes to reach freedom.In the thirties, at least it was understandable. The United States was paralyzed by a chronic economic crisis, the deepest and the longest in its history. The only living forces that seemed to be battering at the walls of capitalism were the great organizing drives of the CIO, with their dramatic sitdown strikes, their radical militancy, and their bloody clashes with the police. The political atmosphere through the entire world was charged by the electricity of the Spanish Civil War, the last of the classical worker’s revolutions, when every radical sect in the American left could identify with its own militia columns in Madrid and Barcelona. That was thirty years ago. It was a time when anyone who cried out “Make love, not war” would have been regarded as a freak; the cry then was “Make jobs, not war” — the cry of an age burdened by scarcity, when the achievement of socialism entailed “sacrifices” and a “transition period” to an economy of material abundance. To an eighteen-year old kid in 1937 the very concept of cybernation would have seemed like the wildest science fiction, a fantasy comparable to visions of space travel. That eighteen-year-old kid has now reach fifty years of age, and his roots are planted in an era so remote as to differ qualitatively from the realities of the present period in the United States. Capitalism itself has changed since then, taking on increasingly statified forms that could be anticipated only dimly thirty years ago. And now we are being asked to go back to the “class line,” the “strategies,” the “cadres” and the organizational forms of that distant period in almost blatant disregard of the new issues and possibilities that have emerged.
Excerpt from Listen, Marxist! (1971) by Murray Bookchin
Marx hypostasized the problem of needs as the “realm of necessity,” a concept that reaches back to Aristotle, and thereby absolutized it in a way that obscured the historical formation of needs. How needs are formed — this, in contrast to the acceptance of needs as they exist — represents a complex problem which I shall not attempt to explore here. It suffices to point out that the formation of the “realm of necessity,” with the harsh split between the “realm of necessity” and the “realm of freedom,” is not a natural fact that has always been with our species or must always exist with it into the future. The “realm of necessity” is a distinctly historical phenomenon. In my view it emergedwhen primitive communities ceased to view nature as a co-existent phenomenon to be accepted or revered and, to use Marx’s simplistic metaphors, had to “wrestle with nature” as an “other” ultimately to be “dominated.” Once early humanity’s mutual reciprocity with the natural world dissolved into antagonism and its oneness into duality, the process of recovering a new level of reciprocity and oneness doubtless includes the scars of millenia- long struggles to master the “forces” of nature. I share the Hegelian view that humanity had to be expelled from the Garden of Eden to attain the fullness of its humanness. But I emphatically deny that this exile necessarily taints utopia with the blood and toil of history; that the “realm of necessity” must always be the “basis” or precondition for the “realm of freedom.” It remains Fourier’s lasting contribution that the “realm of necessity” can be colonized by the “realm of freedom,” the realm of toil by the realm of work, the realm of technics by the realm of play, fantasy, and imagination. In any case, the “realm of necessity” can never be viewed as a passive “basis”; it must always infiltrate and malform the “realm of freedom” until Fourier’s ideal becomes a conscious reality. Marx’s tragic fate can be resolved into the fact that, integral to his entire theoretical edifice, he colonizes the “realm of freedom” by the “realm of necessity as its basis.” The full weight of this theoretical approach, with its consequent reduction of social relations to economic relations, of creative to “unalienated labour,” of society to “associated producers,” of individuality to embodied “needs,” and of freedom to the “shortening of the working day” has yet to be grasped in all its regressive content.
Excerpt from Toward an Ecological Society by Murray Bookchin
2. The Myth of the ProletariatWith the development of hierarchical forms into a threat to the very existence of humanity, the social dialectic, far from being annulled, acquires a new dimension. It poses the “social question” in an entirely new way. If man had to acquire the conditions of survival in order to live (as Marx emphasized), now he must acquire the conditions of life in order to survive. By this inversion of the relationship between survival and life, revolution acquires a new sense of urgency. No longer are we faced with Marx’s famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or annihilation. The problems of necessity and survival have become congruent with the problems of freedom and life. They cease to require any theoretical mediation, “transitional” stages, or centralized organizations to bridge the gap between the existing and the possible. The possible, in fact, is all that can exist. Hence, the problems of “transition,” which occupied the Marxists for nearly a century, are eliminated not only by the advance of technology, but by the social dialectic itself. The problems of social reconstruction have been reduced to practical tasks that can be solved spontaneously by self-liberatory acts of society.
Excerpt from Post Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
Marx’s prediction that the industrial proletariat would be the "agent of history" driven to revolution by immiseration has been discredited by history. Instead, the factory system domesticates and dehumanizes workers, conditioning them to managerially rationalized hierarchy rather than rebellion.
We are asked to focus on the working class as the “agent” of revolutionary change at a time when capitalism visibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among virtually all strata of society, particularly the young. We are asked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a “chronic economic crisis” despite the fact that no such crisis has been in the offing for thirty years,4 We are asked to accept a “proletarian dictatorship” — a long “transitional period” whose function is not merely the suppression of counter-revolutionaries but above all the development of a technology of abundance — at a time when a technology of abundance is at hand. We are asked to orient our “strategies” and “tactics” around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance. We are asked to establish political parties, centralized organizations, “revolutionary” hierarchies and elites, and a new state at a time when political institutions as such are decaying and when centralizing, elitism and the state are being brought into question on a scale that has never occurred before in the history of hierarchical society.
Excerpt from Listen, Marxist! (1971) by Murray Bookchin
3. Anti-Ecological BiasesWe arrive at the troubling fact that this structure, far from functioning as a force for social change, actually functions as a force for social regression. Marxism and syndicalism alike, by virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial management of the self. For Marxism this poses no problem. Selfhood can never exist within the factory walls. The factory serves not only to mobilize and train the proletariat but to dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but rather outside it. For freedom “cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power…” Marx observes in volume three of Capital. “But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.”
Excerpt from Toward an Ecological Society by Murray Bookchin
The Conquest of Nature: Marxism shares the Enlightenment and Victorian view of nature as "stingy" and a mere object of utility to be dominated
Bookchin critiques Marx’s reverential attitude toward technological growth and industrial rationalization, which mirrors the "grow or die" maxim of capitalism and threatens the integrity of the biosphere.These notions reveal the limits of Marx’s own work, his inability to grasp a realm of history that is vital to understanding freedom itself. So blind is Marx to authority as such that it becomes a mere technical feature of production, a “natural fact” in “man’s” metabolism with nature. Woman, too, becomes an exploited being not because she is rendered docile by man (or “weak” to use a term that Marx regarded as her most endearing trait) but because her labour is enslaved to man. Children remain merely “childish,” the expression of untamed and undisciplined “human nature.” Nature, needless to say, remains mere object of utility, its laws to be mastered and commanded in an enterprise of conquest. There can be no Marxian theory of the family, of feminism, or of ecology because Marx negates the issues they raise or worse, transmutes them into economic ones. Hence, attempts to formulate a Marxian feminism tend to degenerate into “wages for housewives,” a Marxian psychology into a Marcusan reading of Freud, and a Marxian ecology into “pollution is profitable.” Far from clarifying the issues that may help define the revolutionary project, these efforts at hybridization conceal them by making it difficult to see that “ruling class” women are ruled by “ruling class” men, that Freud is merely the alter ego of Marx, that ecological balance presupposes a new sensibility and ethics that are not only different from Marxism but in flat opposition to it.
Excerpt from Toward an Ecological Society by Murray Bookchin
4. Authoritarian Statism and the Vanguard PartyFinally, this denaturing of human beings into vacuous class beings led to a denaturing of nature itself. Not only were ecological issues alien to the Marxian revolutionary project, but they were seen as insidiously counterproductive in the literal sense of the word. They inhibited the growth of industry and the mining of the natural world. Nature was treated as “stingy,” “blind,” a cruel “realm of necessity,” and an ensemble of “natural resources” that labour and technology had to subdue, dominate, and rework.The great historical advance produced by capitalism, which Marx welcomed as “necessary,” was its ruthless capacity to destroy all restraints and limits on the ravaging of the natural world. Hence we encounter encomiums by Marx to the new industrial dispensation introduced by capital which, in his eyes, was “permanently revolutionary” because of its reduction of nature to “simply an object” for human utility.
Excerpt from Remaking Society by Murray Bookchin
Bookchin views the Bolshevik "vanguard party" as a bureaucratic, hierarchical machine that replicates the very society it seeks to overthrow
Marxism conflates statecraft (professionalized rule) with authentic politics (citizens' self-management). By capturing state power rather than dissolving it, Marxists inadvertently facilitate the transition to state capitalism rather than communismThe party becomes less efficient from a revolutionary point of view the more it seeks efficiency by means of hierarchy, cadres and centralization. Although everyone marches in step, the orders are usually wrong, especially when events begin to move rapidly and take unexpected turns — as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficient in only one respect — inmolding society in its own hierarchical image if the revolution is successful. It recreates bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the very social conditions which justify this kind of society. Hence, instead of “withering away,” the state controlled by the “glorious party” preserves the very conditions which “necessitate” the existence of a state — and a party to “guard” it. On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vulnerable in periods of repression. The bourgeoisie has only to grab its leadership to destroy virtually the entire movement. With its leaders in prison or in hiding, the party becomes paralyzed; the obedient membership has no one to obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets in rapidly. The party decomposes not only because of the repressive atmosphere but also because of its poverty of inner resources. The foregoing account is not a series of hypothetical inferences, it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century — the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Trotskyist party of Ceylon (the only mass party of its kind). To claim that these parties failed to take their Marxian principles seriously merely conceals another question: why did this failure happen in the first place? The fact is, these parties were co-opted into bourgeois society because they were structured along bourgeois lines. The germ of treachery existed in them from birth.
Excerpt from Listen, Marxist! (1971) by Murray Bookchin
Lenin’s assertion that “socialism is state capitalism for the benefit of the people” reveals the bankruptcy of the socialist project of appropriating the present society while unthinkingly perpetuating its old perverse traits within the “new” one. Nor do economistic libertarian movements offer us a qualitatively new alternative, however anti-authoritarian their goals.
Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin
FAQs
But what about Marx's The Civil War in France and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where his views appear to be libertarian?
Maximoff also examines:The pamphlet was written under the pressure of the 1871 events in Paris and the prevailing spirit of the First International that threatened Marx with the loss of influence. By making concessions to Anarchist tendencies, Marx aimed to remove the growing dissatisfaction with his policies and to check the growing influence of the Federalists and Bakuninists in the First International. Had Marx not done it, had he based his pamphlet The Civil War in France upon the ideas of the Communist Manifesto, he would have been cast aside and would have ended his days in the remote by-ways of the course of socialism and the revolutionary labour movement."
Bookchin, in his book titled Free Cities, also reaches a similar conclusion:"The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels is a reactionary manifesto and is in striking contradiction to science, to progress in general, and humanism in particular. The demands of dictatorship, of absolute centralization, of political and economic life in the hands of the State, of 'forming industrial armies, especially for agriculture,' of a regimented agriculture in accordance with a single plan, of raising the State to the position of an Absolute and the resulting stultification of the individual, its rights and interests—all that is nothing but the program of reaction which is incompatible with human progress, with freedom, equality and humanism. The realization of these demands inevitably carries with it state slavery."
"Finally, the most disturbing feature of statism—even 'minimal statism'—is that it completely undermines a politics based on confederalism. One of the most unfortunate features of traditional socialist history, Marxian and otherwise, is that it emerged in an era of nation-state building. The Jacobin model of a centralized revolutionary state was accepted almost uncritically by nineteenth-century socialists and became an integral part of the revolutionary tradition—a tradition, I may add, that mistakenly associated itself with the nationalistic emphasis of the French Revolution, as seen in the 'Marseillaise' and its adulation of la patrie. Marx's view that the French Revolution was basically to be a model for formulating a revolutionary strategy—he mistakenly claimed that in its Jacobin form it was the most 'classical' of the 'bourgeois' revolutions—had disastrous effects upon the revolutionary tradition. Lenin adopted this vision so completely that the Bolsheviks were rightly considered the 'Jacobins' of the Russian socialist movement, and, of course, Stalin used techniques such as purges, show trials, and brute force with lethal effects for the socialist project as a whole."
But what about Pannekoek and Luxemburg? They were also Marxists.
Marx and Engels differed from Anarchism just because they believed in (i) Transitional State, (ii) Economic Reductionism, (iii) One Party Dictatorship, that being said, Yes, Pannekoek differed from these fundamental Marxist notions; his ideological solution is known as Councilism. Luxemburg's variety of socialism also differs from these notions. Richard Wolff, John Holloway, Erik Olin Wright, and many other scholars of the third wave of Marxism have also abandoned these fundamental beliefs of Marxism. Wolff talks about building worker cooperatives as Marxism; for John Holloway, it is cooperatives, building alternatives, and prefigurative politics, and the same is the case for Wright. These thinkers have all aligned themselves more closely with anarchist tendencies than classical Marxism; in comparison, it is just ironic that they still called, or call, themselves Marxists when already having abandoned all three primary beliefs that separated Marx from anarchists.
