[p2p-research] Marx, theoretician of anarchism

[Ryan]

Marx as anarchist...

Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Marx, theoretician of anarchism
via Spaces of Hope by arminius on 9/19/09

[Maximilien Rubel's 1973 article highlighting the libertarian elements
within Marx's work and its importance to anarchism, regardless of
Marx's lengthy critiques of famous anarchist theoreticians.]

Marx has been badly served by disciples who have succeeded neither in
assessing the limits of his theory nor in determining its standards and
field of application and has ended up by taking on the role of some
mythical giant, a symbol of the omniscience and omnipotence of homo
faber, maker of his own destiny.

The history of the School remains to be written, but at least we know
how it came into being: Marxism, as the codification of a misunderstood
and misinterpreted body of thought, was born and developed at a time
when Marx’s work was not yet available in its entirely and when
important parts of it remained unpublished. Thus, the triumph of
Marxism as a State doctrine and Party ideology preceded by several
decades the publication of the writings where Marx set out most clearly
and completely the scientific basis and ethical purpose of his social
theory. That great upheavals took place which invoked a body of thought
whose major principles were unknown to the protagonists in the drama of
history should have been enough to show that Marxism was the greatest,
if not the most tragic, misunderstanding of the century. But at the
same time this allows us to appreciate the significance of the theory
held by Marx that it is not revolutionary ideas or moral principles
which bring about changes in society, but rather human and material
forces; that ideas and ideologies very often serve only to disguise the
interest of the class in whose interests the upheavals take place.
Political Marxism cannot appeal to Marx’s science and at the same time
escape the critical analysis which that science uses to unmask the
ideologies of power and exploitation.

Marxism as the ideology of a master class has succeeded in emptying the
concepts of socialism and communism, as Marx and his forerunners
understood them, of their original meaning and has replaced it with the
picture of a reality which is its complete negation. Although closely
linked to the other two, a third concept – anarchism – seems however to
have escaped this fate of becoming a mystification. But while people
know that Marx had very little sympathy for certain anarchists, it is
not so generally known that despite this he still shared the anarchist
ideal and objectives: the disappearance of the State. It is therefore
pertinent to recall that in embracing the cause of working class
emancipation, Marx started off in the anarchist tradition rather than
in that of socialism or communism; and that, when finally he chose to
call himself a “communist,” for him this term did not refer to one of
the communist currents which then existed, but rather to a movement of
thought and mode of action which had yet to be founded by gathering
together all the revolutionary elements which had been inherited from
existing doctrines and from the experience of past struggles.

In the reflections which follow we will try to show that, under the
name communism, Marx developed a theory of anarchism; and further, that
in fact it was he who was the first to provide a rational basis for the
anarchist utopia and to put forward a project for achieving it. In view
of the limited scope of the present essay we will only put this forward
as an item for discussion. Proof by means of quotations will be reduced
to a minimum so as to better bring out the central argument: Marx
theoretician of anarchism.

I
When in Paris in February 1845, on the eve of his departure for exile
in Brussels, Marx signed a contract with a German publisher he
committed himself to supplying in a few months a work in two volumes
entitled “A Critique of Politics and Political Economy” without
suspecting that he had imposed on himself a task which would take up
his while life and of which he would be able to carry out only a
largish fragment.

The choice of subject was no accident. Having given up all hope of a
university career, Marx had carried over into his political journalism
the results of his philosophical studies. His articles in the
Rheinische Zeitung of Cologne led the fight for freedom of the press in
Prussia in the name of a liberty which he conceived of as the essence
of Man and as the attire of human nature; but also in the name of a
State understood as the realisation of rational freedom, as “the great
organism, in which legal, moral, and political freedom must be
realised, and in which the individual citizen in obeying the laws of
the state only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, of human
reason.”[1] But the Prussian censorship soon silenced the
philosopher-journalist. Marx, in the solicitude of a study retreat, did
not take long to ask himself about the real nature of the State and
about the rational and ethical validity of Hegel’s political
philosophy. We know what was the fruit of this meditation enriched by
the study of the history of the bourgeois revolutions in France, Great
Britain and the United States: apart from an incomplete and unpublished
work, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State (1843), two
polemical essays, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right and On the Jewish Question (Paris, 1844). These two writings in
fact form a single manifesto in which Marx identifies once and for all
and condemns unreservedly the social institutions – the State and Money
– which he saw as at the origin of the evils and defects from which
modern society suffered and would go on suffering until a new social
revolution came to abolish them. At the same time Marx praised the
force – the modern proletariat – which, after having been the main
victim of these two institutions, was going to put an end to their
reign as well as to every other form of class domination, political and
economic. The self-emancipation of the proletariat would be the
complete emancipation of humanity; after the total loss of humanity the
total victory of the human.

In the intellectual development of Marx the rejection of the State and
Money and the affirmation that the proletariat was a liberating class
came before his studies of political economy; they preceded also his
discovery of the materialist conception of history, the “guiding line”
which directed his later historical researches. His break with Hegel’s
philosophy of law and politics on the one hand and his critical study
of bourgeois revolutions on the other allowed him to establish clearly
the ethical postulates of his future social theory for which the
scientific basis was to be provided by the critique of political
economy. Having understood the revolutionary role of democracy and
legislative power in the genesis of the bourgeois State and
governmental power, Marx made use of the illuminating analysis of two
shrewd observers of the revolutionary possibilities of American
democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Hamilton, to lay down a
rational basis for an anarchist utopia as the conscious aim of the
revolutionary movement of the class which his master Saint Simon had
called “the most numerous and most poor.” Since the critique of the
State led him to envisage the possibility of a society free from all
political authority, he had to go on to make a critique of the economic
system which ensured the material basis of the State. The ethical
rejection of money also implied an analysis of political economy, the
science of the enrichment of some and of the impoverishment of others.
Later he was to describe the research he was about to begin on the
“anatomy of bourgeois society” and it was by engaging in this work of
social anatomy that he was to work out his methodology. Later the
rediscovery of the Hegelian dialectic would help him to establish the
plan of the “Economy” under six “headings” or “books”: Capital, Landed
Property, Wage Labour; The State, Foreign Trade, World Market (see
Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). In fact, this
double “triad” of items for research corresponds to the two problems
which he had proposed to deal with fourteen years previously in the
work which was to contain a critique of both political economy and
politics. Marx began his work with the critical analysis of the
capitalist mode of production, but he hoped to live and work long
enough not only to complete this but also, once he had completed the
first triad of headings, to begin on the second triad which would thus
have found the Book on the State.[2] The theory of anarchism would thus
have found in Marx its first recognised exponent without there being
any need to prove this indirectly. The misunderstanding of the century
of Marxism as an ideology of the State was the result of the fact that
Marx never wrote this book. It was this which has allowed the masters
of a State apparatus labelled socialist to include Marx among the
proponents of State socialism or communism, indeed even of
“authoritarian” socialism.

Certainly, like every revolutionary teaching, that of Marx is not free
from ambiguities. It is by cleverly exploiting these ambiguities and by
referring to certain personal attitudes of the master that some of his
unscrupulous disciples have succeeded in putting his work at the
service of doctrines and actions which represent, in relation to both
its basic truth and its declared objective, its complete negation. At a
time when many decades of regression in human relations have called
into question all theories, values, systems and projects, it is
important to gather together the intellectual heritage of an author
who, aware of the limits of his research, made the call for critical
self-education and revolutionary self-emancipation the permanent
principle of the workers’ movement. It is not up to posterity burdened
with overwhelming responsibilities to judge a man who can no longer
plead his cause; but on the other hand it is our duty to take up a
teaching which was completely oriented towards the future, a future
which certainly became our catastrophic present but which mostly still
remains to be created.

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