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Marxism and Anarchism 1122 Chap 12 6/5/03 3:14 pm Page 237 Marxism and anarchism 1122 Although Marxism and even anarchism are sometimes treated as if they are simply varieties of socialism, we consider that they have sufficiently distinctive characteristics to warrant separate treatment. Starting with Marxism, we examine Marx’s theories of history, economics and politics before discussing the controversies within Marx-inspired political organisations in the nineteenth century, particularly the challenge mounted to orthodox Marxism by the ‘revisionist’ school. We then analyse twentieth-century attempts to establish concrete political systems claiming ‘Marxist’ legitimacy, with particular attention to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Finally we examine attempts to reinterpret Marxism to make it relevant to twenty-first-century social and economic conditions. Turning to the wide-ranging form of political thought known as anarchism, we discuss anarchist views of human nature, the state, liberty and equality, and economic life. The chapter ends with a critique of anarchism and some thoughts as to its relevance to modern politics. POINTS TO CONSIDER ➤ Is Marxism correct in identifying class as the most important form of social identity and ‘class struggle’ as the driving force of history? ➤ Does the importance of theory in Marxism undermine its potential for political action against capitalism by stimulating intra-Marxist strife and the proliferation of Marxist movements? ➤ Has Marxism’s association with oppressive communist regimes in, say, the Soviet Union been damaging to its professed role as a liberating movement for the working classes? Or is Marxism inherently oppressive? ➤ Are we too precipitate in dismissing anarchism’s analysis of the oppressive nature of the state? ➤ Has anarchism’s importance as a political movement been undermined by its over- concentration on theory and its neglect of practical measures for reforming society? Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 12:18:30PM via free access Chap 12 6/5/03 3:14 pm Page 238 238 Understanding political ideas and movements The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848) No conception of anarchism is further from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme form of democracy. Democracy advocates the sovereignty of the people. anarchism advocates the sovereignty of the person. (George Woodcock, Anarchism, 1962) Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder. (George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903) Marxism and anarchism are very important parts of the socialist tradition but they differ so significantly from democratic socialism and social democracy as to be worth studying as distinct ideological movements. The collapse of the USSR and its empire in Eastern Europe during 1989–91 is often hailed by Western conservatives as vindicating their belief that Marxism is a failed ideological system, unrealistic and of no value as a political movement or an ideological tool. However, for many Western Marxists the demise of the USSR removed an oppressive and corrupt form of Marxism that held back its potential as an anti-capitalist movement. They claim that Marxism remains a perceptive critique of capitalism and its class system – a critique that has, they believe, increasing value in the modern ‘globalised’ economy of multi-national businesses and international financial markets. Anarchism in Northern Europe and the USA has always been a minor strain of socialism, though in Spain, Italy and France it has been very influential within both trade unions and socialist politics. Anarchism’s anti-state analysis has much value. Particularly interesting and important is anarchism’s critique of capitalism, social democracy and Marxism as state-oriented ideologies doomed to create and maintain political and economic systems that are funda- mentally oppressive of the human spirit and its potential. Marxism It is usual to regard ‘Marxism’ as a branch of socialism, but we have chosen to deal with it separately for a number of reasons: • Marxism constitutes by far the most internally consistent of socialist theories and forms an all-embracing ideology. Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 12:18:30PM via free access Chap 12 6/5/03 3:14 pm Page 239 Marxism and anarchism 239 • Although Marxists have sometimes suggested that their brand of socialism is uniquely valuable and authentic, there is, in fact, much more to the socialist tradition, especially in England. • The major divide in socialist thought is between evolutionary and revolu- tionary socialism: Marxism is the obvious example of the latter. • Marxism has had, for good or ill, a greater impact on human history than other strands of socialism, notably in the emergence in the twentieth century of the self-styled ‘socialist’ states of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe. • Karl Marx, who after all gave his name to the ideology, rather disliked the term ‘socialism’, which he associated with daydreaming and impracti- cality. From The Communist Manifesto (1848) to his final writings, Marx preferred the word ‘communist’ with its unambiguously revolutionary connotations. As the term suggests, it is customary to regard Karl Marx as the only begetter of Marxism. It is worth mentioning, though, that most Marxists attribute a major influence on the development of his theory to his friend, patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Some have even detected nuances of difference between the views of Marx and Engels, especially concerning the alleged ‘scien- tific’ basis of Marxism. Some argue that much of what we now describe as ‘Marxism’ was largely created by Engels’s writings after the death of his friend. Although German, Marx spent most of his life in exile in England, after having been identified by the authorities in his homeland, denounced as a threat to public order and forced to flee. He devoted himself full-time to writing, revolu- tionary agitation and political organisation. Marx’s ideas made a substantial impact on nineteenth-century European political thought and in the twentieth century they profoundly influenced the course of world history. By then, however, the processes of systematisation and reinterpretation by professed followers, such as Karl Kautsky and Georg Plekhanov, had arguably led to much distortion of the original message. Further distortions of Marxism were made by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Marxist revolutionaries during the twentieth century. The emergence of powerful totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union and Communist China, which claimed Marxist legitimacy on the grounds that they were more authentic, exacerbated the process of reinterpretation. Marx himself revised his ideas considerably over time. His earlier writings, for example, reveal a more humane, even liberal, Marx than the narrow deter- minist of his later years. Moreover, the prestige accorded to Marx by some of his followers led to his words being accorded the status of sacred scripture, rather than debatable propositions. Thus Marxism’s claim to be a ‘scientific’ analysis of society was somewhat weakened, to Marx’s irritation. He once Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/02/2021 12:18:30PM via free access Chap 12 6/5/03 3:14 pm Page 240 240 Understanding political ideas and movements famously asserted that if some of the latest ideas being described as ‘Marxist’ were indeed such, ‘I am not a Marxist’. Marx’s ideas on historical development It has been observed that Marxism is essentially a mixture of German Hegelian philosophy, English liberal political economy and French revolutionary politics. Marx emphasised the practical functions of his theories when, in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), he said: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’1 Marx believed he had uncovered the laws governing human society by empirical, scientific investigation. The modern capitalist industrial society was emerging in Britain (especially in Manchester) during his lifetime. Britain was by far the most advanced capitalist society on earth. Industrialisation and the class system it spawned were the most developed in Europe. These economic and social trends would, Marx argued, be repeated in other industrialising countries in Europe and in the USA. Marx’s starting point was the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. According to Hegel, history was a process of self-realisation and unfolding by the ‘World Spirit’. It proceeded through conflict (‘dialectic’) between a given state of affairs (‘thesis’), which produced its opposite (‘anti-thesis’), a conflict resolved in a higher state (‘synthesis’), which in turn becomes another ‘thesis’, and so on. This mode of thinking is particularly alien to the Anglo- Saxon mind, to which Marx’s drastic remoulding of Hegel’s theory is somewhat more congenial, if still rather too theoretical and revolutionary for most Britons and Americans. History was Marx’s preoccupation as well as Hegel’s but Marx held to a materi- alist theory in which the material conditions of human existence were funda- mental, and which determined all other facets of life, such as philosophy, religion, art, culture and politics. In Marx’s scheme of things each successive stage of history rested on economic foundations, called the ‘substructure’. Marx asserted that all humans must first earn a living and that all societies must therefore rest upon some system of wealth production. Thus the ‘mode of production’ played a key role.
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