Marxism and Anarchism March 30, 2008

What is the difference between Marxism and anarchism? Both are socialist ideologies, with many aims in common, and both are generally on the same side in the class war.

Both anarchists and Marxists believe that ultimately there should be no government by the state, that there should be free socialism. Anarchists believe that should be implemented at once, while Marxists believe it should be done in stages. In the first stage after the revolution, Marxists believe there should continue to be government by the state. Only after a transitional period, possibly a long transitional period, should the second stage be reached, when the state would gradually wither away and free communism be achieved.

(Above is the simple view of an instant insurrectionary revolution, but more realistic and desirable to see revolution as a process happening over a period of years and decades, not in a split second, as the diagram suggests.)

Because the transitional state government would not rule over a capitalist system, it would not be a capitalist state but instead a ‘workers state’ or a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The idea is that would gradually wither away over time, leading to the eventual anarchist style future society.

The withering away mechanism is not clearly explained, and there seems a great risk that it will not happen, and that the transitional workers state will become permanent. That was certainly the case in the historical record, and it was also warned of by anarchists such as Bakunin during Marx’s own lifetime – warnings which unfortunately were not accepted. Millions of lives, along with the reputation and chances of success of the socialist movement, could have been saved had the anarchist fears and warnings been taken seriously.

It seems curiously naive for otherwise serious and knowledgeable revolutionaries to believe that a structure of centralised state power would voluntarily wither itself away over time. The experience of history is that the powerful never relinquish control except when forced to through revolution or the threat of revolution from the people they control. The various state socialist countries proved no exception. Recognising this, would leave no pragmatic option for socialism than libertarian socialism.

Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had a sinister ring to it even in his day, more so now given the terrible history since then. But in fact many Marxists, including Marx himself, did not intend it to mean an actual ‘dictatorship’. They were only using exaggerated language to describe a minimal system of defence of the revolution – which anarchists do not disagree with. In that case, there is only a difference in terminology. But some Marxists really do want full blown dictatorship, replete with secret police and state terror. And unfortunately those have tended to be the types of Marxists who seized power in different places and times.

Also, although I stated above that “Both anarchists and Marxists believe that ultimately there should be no government by the state, that there should be free socialism“, for some Marxists that ultimate end state is downplayed to such an extent as to mean that it is effectively removed from their programme. In that case, state socialism, as opposed to libertarian socialism, is genuinely their ultimate aim.

But it is important to note that there is continuity stretching from anarchism to left Marxism – the two ideologies in fact merge into each other. Autonomous Marxism and Council Communism have negligible differences with class struggle anarchism. And at least some modern Trotskyists are genuinely sympathetic to the need for democracy and freedom within socialism. In cases like those, it would be sectarian to fail to ally with fellow socialists over minor differences.

Organisational structures now are based on the desired structure of society after the revolution. Marxist-Leninists organise in centralised top-down parties, which are meant to be the vanguard of the working class, because after the revolution they want to see a centralised workers state. Some Marxist-Leninist parties (but by no means all) even resemble miniature versions of the worst Marxist-Leninist state dictatorships: with secretive leadership cliques, intrigues, denunciations, and cult-like uniformity of thought. Anarchists organise themselves in decentralised autonomous local groups, federated from the bottom up through conferences with mandated delegates, because they want to see that sort of structure of government after the revolution.

Further reading – Anarchist FAQ, Section H, Why do anarchists oppose state socialism?

Capitalism is the enemy January 29, 2007

What we socialists are about often becomes confused. There talk of issues such as markets, nationalism, patriarchy, religion, racism, and so on, as our enemy, as that which we should be concentrating our efforts upon. For some people that might be a good idea – good luck to them – but it is not for me, nor I hope for you.

Because really our present predicament is not complex. It is summed up well by the below (century old) cartoon, with ourselves, with the great mass of ordinary people, represented on the bottom rung:

Command Economies January 15, 2007

My response to the end of Soviet tyranny was similar to my reaction to the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. In all cases, it is a victory for the human spirit. It should have been particularly welcome to socialists, since a great enemy of socialism had at last collapsed. Like you, I was intrigued to see how people — including people who had considered themselves anti-Stalinist and anti-Leninist — were demoralised by the collapse of the tyranny. What it reveals is that they were more deeply committed to Leninism than they believed.

[Noam Chomsky, Interview, online at http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/interviews/9505-anarchism.html]

Political Economy/macro-economy is (or aspires to be) an observational science, like astronomy. It is not possible, or at least not moral, to conduct repeatable experiments on whole economies to determine which economic policy is optimal. At times though we have the good fortune (a fortune not necessarily shared by the subjects of the experiment) to observe the effects of some economic policies when a government happens to choose to implement them. Such occasions are valuable for study and their lessons should not be ignored.

Starting in 1917 in Russia, and later repeated elsewhere, was a grand experiment in command economies, that is where market transactions are forbidden, and economic activity directed by central planning authorities. The experiment was conducted for long enough and in enough different places to allow for general conclusions to be drawn on the relative merits of command economies compared to market economies.

And the results do not look good for the command economies. As BBC comedian (and Socialist Workers Party member) Mark Steel said:

Anybody looking at the world now can see that Communism doesn’t work. If you had a party one night, and the only way to keep the guests in was with a 50 foot high wall, an army of snipers and even then some of the guests were trying to escape in a hot air balloon, you couldn’t say, “Well, that was a successful evening”.
[Mark Steel, The Mark Steel Lectures, quoted in Socialst Review, October 2003, online at http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=8609]

Workers spontaneously demonstrate their enthusiasm for command economies. With soviet symbol style hammers. Berlin 1989.

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The Future Society

The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed three questions as constitutive of the philosophical enterprise: What can we know? How should we act? In what may we hope
[David Schweickart, http://www.chicagodsa.org/hope.html]

Is a better world possible? What would it look like? What can we do to help advance towards it?

Socialism in a past age believed it held the answer to those questions. But since the collapse of the USSR such belief has been fatally undermined.

Yet peoples lives are sadly limited by the twin evils of:

• lack of freedom in our working hours – which is most of our productive time. We work for others, not for ourselves, and are subject to the direction of the bosses appointed over us.
• inequality, unemployment and poverty.

Which is not the best imaginable state of affairs for us all. What better system is possible? What would it look like?

Imagine a world where we did not work for the profit of others, but for our own benefit.

Imagine we kept whatever profits our work produced, rather than giving it away to absentee owners.

Imagine the management of our firms was elected by us, not appointed by strangers.

Imagine a world where our government was local and accountable, where democracy was direct and real and responded to our needs.

Imagine there was full employment – that large numbers of people were not kept semi-permanently unemployed, and wasted to society. Imagine there was no more poverty.

In such a world, we would live lives as full human beings, not as waged workers under the control of an outside agency, and not as consumers passively consuming from what we are offered by other external actors. Our cities, which would become, as they should, our political entities, would be communities of neighbours, and our lives would be more appopriately balanced between life and work.

All this is possible in the immediate future, easily so, given the great technological advances the human race has made over the last hundred years – provided though that people want it enough: “If you will it – it is no dream” [Thedore Herzl]

How though – especially in light of the decline of socialism since the fall of the USSR – do we advance towards such a happy situation?

I will outline the steps simply in the rest of this post, and develop them further in future postings: