Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Anarchism, Marx and theory

Anarchism, as David Apter has pointed out,⁸ combines a socialist
critique of capitalism with a liberal critique of socialism. Such a com-
bination is bound to be tense and unsteady, and it is not surprising that
anarchism, which grew up and emerged as a movement during the
nineteenth century alongside socialism and Marxism, was not always - as
we are about to see - in tandem with socialism and Marxism. Many of
its doctrinal features point further back, through the Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century into the liberal tradition. To say that anarchism
is an outgrowth of certain features of the liberal tradition is not to
suggest that the liberal tradition necessarily issues in anarchist con-
clusions, which would be to exaggerate wantonly. To scratch a Lockean




liberal is not necessarily to touch, or galvanize, the anarchist lurking
beneath his skin; Lockean minimal government implies anarchism as
little (or as much) as the labour theory of value so presciently expressed
in the fifth chapter of Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government
implies Marxist economics. Yet in either case the continuities are there.
To see them, in the case of anarchism, we need remind ourselves only
of some very basic features of liberal thinking about politics - of Locke’s
notion of government as a convenience, whose removal (for a while) by
the governed may be no great inconvenience for them; of the ‘night-
watchman’ state; of the ‘self-regulating’ economic sphere; of Adam
Smith’s disdain for politicians; and of the Actonian view of political
power as being inherently corrupting. All these lead into the idea that
power exists in order to be channelled, minimized, checked and bal-
anced by countervailing power in what can take the form of a facile
and mechanistic constitution-mongering.

Small wonder, then, that believers in minimal government, as Robert
Nozick has recently and quite candidly admitted,⁹ have to take and
treat seriously the anarchist claim that the state is intrinsically immoral.
It is for this reason, indeed, that the paradoxical phenomenon of
resolutely right-wing neo-anarchist or libertarian thinking may be
encountered readily enough, particularly in the USA. One basic point
stands out. Anarchist convictions and doctrines are with rare exceptions
based upon a negative view of liberty¹⁰ - a view according to which
freedom is to be understood in the first instance as freedom from some
obstacle or impediment to its exercise, in this case the state and its
various auxiliaries. All anarchist convictions can be summed up under
the rubric not of the hindering of hindrances to but of the removal of
obstacles from some vision of the good life. It is this imperative that links
anarchism to the liberal tradition, and most particularly to the Enlight-
enment - the more so since the obstacles in question are seen, first and
foremost, as political obstructions that need to be overthrown.

Anarchists believe that human affairs constitute in potentia an
harmonious, naturalistic order, whose features are variously defined,
or undefined, and which needs to emerge, uncontrived, by means of
the removal (forcible if need be) of artificial impediments, chief among
which is the state. Anarchists insist that once men are unfettered by
an inappropriate political system that does violence to their individuality
and commonality, they will at last fulfil their potentialities, become
what they really are; artifice will have given way to nature, bad stan-
dards to good, and men will be reborn. The lineage here is clear. It was
the philosophes of the French Enlightenment who had most markedly
put forward the idea that ‘all existing political and religious institutions
were irrational, obsolete and [therefore]“unnatural” ’, that they were
‘designed to prevent an inherently self-regulating society from achieving
universal felicity’. It was the French Aufklarer who believed that




‘coercive institutions, especially the traditional state, were not only
unnecessary; they actually prevented an orderly social life’.¹¹ It was
the philosophers of the Enlightenment who insisted that bad, immoral
legislation creates and sustains inharmoniousness in individuals and
society alike, and that once these obstacles were removed, at their
source, men would live together freely and harmoniously and prosper,
individually, severally and socially.

Two points stand out here. The first is that these three for many phi-
losophes exist on a single continuum; once the sources of oppression and
injustice are removed, each one will simply and straightforwardly imply
the others. The same assumption - that the social and the individual can,
should and will dovetail neatly and tightly - informs anarchism, too, and
does so at a very basic level indeed. Society to most philosophes and most
anarchists is, like nature, inherently good once its operation is untram-
melled; governments - along with their props and struts, particularly re-
ligious ones - prevent society from flourishing. The Aufkldrer, like the
anarchists, saw a conflict between state and society, and between con-
science and power; but neither school envisaged a similar tension between
the individual (once his various layers of prejudice and superstition had
been stripped away) and society (once it, too, had sloughed off illegiti-
mate political authority). In Shklar’s well judged words, ‘there was no
suspicion of a necessary conflict between private and public interests,
between individual freedom and social need’¹² among either group.

The second point about the confluence of individual and society
that anarchist theories commonly proffer appears at first glance to
derive from the fact that most anarchists, unlike most philosophes,
are revolutionaries driven by despair and conviction to advocating
violence; for what emerges from this advocacy is the dualistic pro-
position - very marked in Bakunin and some of his successors - that
violence will bring about and turn into its opposite. Such dualism,
variously expressed, is a characteristic feature of anarchism, and runs
deep within anarchist doctrine. Hate will turn into love, chaos into
harmony, violence into peace, desperation into hope and optimism.
One example must suffice. Gerald Brenan recalls an experience during
the Spanish Civil War.¹³

I was standing on a hill watching the smoke and flames of some
two hundred houses in Malaga mount into the sky. An old
Anarchist of my acquaintance was standing beside me.

‘What do you think of that?’ he asked.

I said: ‘They are burning down Malaga.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are burning it down. And I tell you not
one stone will be left on another stone - no, not a plant, not even
a cabbage will grow there, so that there will be no more wickedness
in the world.’




The reader of literature by and about anarchists becomes accustomed
to statements of this kind -so much so, that one of the striking features
about them is too easily missed. The dualism involved, the belief that,
to quote Bakunin, ‘there will be a qualitative transformation, a new,
living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a new and
mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into
a harmonious whole’,¹⁴ is occasioned by immediate disruption. It is
provoked by the violence and desperation that were a response to the
unsettling and frequently disastrous irruptions of capitalism during the
nineteenth century and beyond. But the form this response takes is
not just one of desperation and violence; it involves a view of what
comes in their wake, a vision of human perfectibility that can come
about in no other way. Once the ground is cleared, once a tabula
rasa is created, or regained, once the various successive layers or accre-
tions of centuries of tyranny and prejudice have been reduced to rubble
and cleared away from men’s lives and spirits - then, and only then, will
human perfectibility be placed on the agenda of history. The phi-
losophes, whose idiom this is, were not themselves revolutionaries; yet
their unparalleled emphasis on the clearing of the ground, on the
removal of obstacles that alone prevent the emergence of men as they
could and should be is one we encounter among anarchists again and
again, in forms that would have surprised the philosophes themselves.
Even the peaceable Proudhon - described so tellingly by Metternich as
the illegitimate child of the Enlightenment - adopted with some flourish
the motto destruam et aedificabo', and Jeremy Bentham, we may
surmise, knew what he was about when he considered ‘Anarchical
Fallacies’ to be implicit in the natural rights doctrines so beloved of
the philosophes - the better, it is true, to combat each alike.

Anarchists, in Isaac Kramnick’s words,¹⁵ ‘waver between a progressive,
futuristic orientation with assumptions of perfectibility and endless
improvement [on the one hand], and a nostalgic yearning for a simple,
agrarian and pre-industrial existence’ on the other; and while the
latter was evidently provoked by nineteenth-century capitalism, it
is too often overlooked that the former is an outgrowth of the En-
lightenment. And while it may be true that the anarchist ‘is forever
torn between the liberal values of individuality, independence, auton-
omy, privacy, and self-determination, on the one hand, and the non-
liberal values of community, solidarity and the encouragement of
virtue through social pressure on the other’,¹⁶ we should remember
that this tension also, and for many of the same reasons, characterizes
the political theory of the Enlightenment.

Yet Enlightenment speculation about politics is not all of a piece.
The aspect it turns towards anarchism, that of negative liberty and of
a certain disdain for power - a project, that is, to limit its scope and to
dispense with as much of it as is considered desirable - is not the only




face it has to present. There is also the very different approach epito-
mized by Rousseau, whose view of liberty was not negative but positive,
and whose desire was not to minimize power but to admit the need for
power legitimized as authority. Once it is legitimized, power is a promise,
not a threat. It is important to what follows in this book that we
recognize at the outset that it is Rousseau’s perception of the problem
to which Marx, following Hegel, subscribes; and that there is a divide,
a watershed in Enlightenment thinking about power, authority and
politics. Marx is on one side of it, the anarchists on the other. The
difference is not simply genealogical but programmatic; it means that
while the distinction between Marxism and anarchism is in a sense
incomplete - both schools wish to abolish or overcome the state in its
present form the better to synthesize or make cognate the individual
and society - this area of agreement is in the nature of a penumbra, an
overlap, that is to say, and not a convergence. It is for this reason that
what on the face of it might appear to be a broad area of agreement
has done nothing to bring Marxism and anarchism any closer together,
in Marx’s lifetime or since.

To describe this area as an overlap or penumbra is to recognize that
Marxists and anarchists approach it from different directions and draw
'from it different conclusions. The conclusions in question have proved
to be irreconcilable ones, which should surprise nobody. The synthesis
of individuality and community that Marx proffered was not advocated
in the name of a natural harmony of interests; Marx - again following
Hegel (and not, in this case, Rousseau) - recognized that nature does
not provide standards in the required sense. What does provide standards
is society itself which in its various successive forms has shaped nature
to human purposes. It is in this sense that capitalism, for instance, may
be said to furnish preconditions as well as obstacles to emancipation,
and that the new science of economics - or, more exactly, of ‘political
economy’ - can be turned to good account. The distinction between
nature and artifice, which is so important and basic to anarchist thinking,
is subverted in and by the way in which Marx wishes to synthesize
individuality and community; and here, of course, Marx’s itinerary
from Hegel is of crucial importance. We shall see that the distinction
Marx drew between individualism and individuality (not least in his
attack on Stirner) owes much to Hegel (and indeed to Rousseau).
Hegel’s incisive portrait of modern civil society, as we shall also see,
has a great deal of relevance to Marx’s depictions of capitalist society,
since what Hegel termed the ‘system of needs’ is the antithesis of
community to both of them. Yet because Marx’s synthesis of Hegel-
ianism and political economy takes a particular form, embodying as
it does a view of self-activity, a conception of the unity of theory and
praxis, and a revolutionary project that embodies what Ernst Bloch
termed ‘futurity’, we can see that the Marxist enterprise, unlike the




anarchist, far from being satisfied by the removal of obstacles and
impediments to something that pre-dates them, is in the fullest sense
a political enterprise. It is a creative endeavour; and whether or not
we believe, or can afford to believe, with Marx, that the proletariat
alone embody futurity and the possibility of community, it is im-
portant that we remember and acknowledge that the creation of
community - das Allgemeine, the most important word in Hegel and
in Marx alike - is a political task that goes against the grain of capitalist
society.

Marx’s task or enterprise is predicated to some extent on a theory of
the production of new needs throughout human history, alongside the
means to their satisfaction. This production of new needs involves a
view of labour as anthropogenesis, but this is not all it involves; it also
entails what can only be described as a political project, since one of
the needs in question is the need for community. To look again at
Marx’s conception of class consciousness among the proletariat as the
only possible embodiment of community is to recognize that Marx,
unlike the anarchists, does not wish to dispense with politics. He
wishes to re-cast politics, to extend its scope, to give it more meaning
and greater depth. His view of politics is not restrictive but expansive.
It is for this reason that the revolutionary unity of theory and practice
is no mere empty phrase, is no merely rousing propaganda, and is not
simply the unity of doctrine and method. It involves not a sloughing-off
of politics but a substantive redefinition of what politics involves - a
shift away from the increasingly foreclosed area of state action, towards
the task of building a movement. We may - and I hope we will - differ
about its outcome; but we must recognize that there is something
heroic about the quest. Marx, in Sheldon Wolin’s words, founded
‘a new conception of politics, revolutionary in intent, proletarian in
concern, and international in scope and organization’.¹⁷ All three
aspects had to be defended against anarchist attacks, as we shall see,
and defended - sometimes against all the odds - they were; they were
defended with the same kind of theoretical passion we encounter
elsewhere in Marx, the passion that animated what Marx did as well as
what Marx wrote. One example will have to suffice. ‘I am working
madly through the nights’, we find Marx writing in 1857 to Engels, ‘so
that, before the deluge, I shall at least have the outlines clear.’¹⁸ This
may be one of the most extraordinary statements about theorizing ever
made; it is small wonder that Prometheus to Marx was the most inspiring
saint in the calender. Marx may not have been alone in devoting his
life to a revolutionary cause or even in being galvanized by revolution-
ary urgency, as any look at the wonderland of nineteenth-century
revolutionizing will show; but what is distinctive is his view of theorizing
as an Archimedean lever with which to move the world. And it did
move the world - if not immediately; rarely can the disparity between




the immediate circumstances of theorizing* and the eventual effects
of the theory have been wider than it was in the case of Marx. While
my concern in this book is with the former rather than the latter, and
indeed with some of the reasons for the gap between the two, this gap
itself is no yawning chasm, as Marx himself somehow must have recog-
nized. Marxism was and is a world-historical theory; the phrase is for
once no euphemism. Sheldon Wolin has pointedly reminded us of

the extraordinary fact that [Marx] succeeded in demonstrating
the power of theory far beyond any of his predecessors. If it is
proper to gauge a theorist’s achievement by the extent to which
his ideas survive and become common currency, by the number of
his self-proclaimed followers and disciples, by the stimulus which his
ideas have furnished to creative domains distantly removed from
economics, politics or sociology, by the amount of criticism and
vilification which has been dumped on his writings since his death
and, above all, by the demonstrated impact of his theory on the
lives of ordinary people and actual societies, then no other
theorist - not Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Smith or
Ricardo - can be said to have equalled Marx’s achievement. If
Plato is the symbol of theory’s eternal frustration, Marx is its
triumphant hero.²⁰

Marx against the anarchists: the problem posed

Marx’s dislike of anarchist doctrine has often been misunderstood
because of his forthright opposition to the bourgeois state. It has
seemed to some commentators that because of the opposition to the
state he ‘shared’ with his anarchist rivals, his doctrinal differences
from them can safely be resolved into a difference in emphasis, about
tactics. It has seemed that Marx and his anarchist competitors were in
agreement about the desirable, or ‘necessary’, goal of revolution and
disagreed merely about the means to be used to bring it about. But
this is not the case. Neither Marx nor his anarchist interlocutors -
particularly in the First International, where differences seemed more
than purely theoretical in scope - were inclined to separate means from
ends in so absolute a fashion; and there are good reasons for their
reluctance.

Marx’s attacks on the anarchists were not purely tactical or strategic;
they did not treat of revolutionary means as though the revolutionary
end could be taken as invariant or assumed as a ‘given’. Neither side

*Marx once described himself to one of his daughters, Eleanor, ‘as a machine
condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on
the dunghill of history*.¹⁹




in the International was concerned to divorce revolutionary means
from revolutionary ends. Future society, both sides recognized, is not,
properly speaking, an end, but a beginning', how it would develop
depended greatly on the character of, and decisions taken by, the
revolutionary movement itself. Both sides acknowledged the very real
stakes involved in any ostensible ‘tactical’ resolution about organization;
they were the shape of future society. Both Marx and Bakunin saw the
International not only as the embodiment of the revolutionary move-
ment as it then existed, but also as a presentiment - quite possibly the
presentiment - of future society which, like all societies, would be
stamped by its origins. This joint perception was not a measure of
their agreement, but the source of an increasingly bitter hostility, as
Marx and Bakunin themselves were at pains to point out.

Marx’s contemptuous dismissal of Bakunin was matched only by
Bakunin’s contemptuous dismissal of Marxism. The dispute between
the two in the First International has its place not only in the history
of socialism but also in the history of invective, a history that would
not be stretched unduly if it also included Marx’s earlier disputations
with Max Stirner, in The German Ideology, and with Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, which culminated in The Poverty of Philosophy. The per-
sonal antagonism and pronounced tactical differences separating Marx
from Bakunin were symptomatic of a far more fundamental division
between Marxism and anarchism (which were rival ideologies, and were
perceived as such by their bearers), a division which later historical
events have done nothing to bridge.

To mention Marx’s attacks on Stirner and Proudhon is not simply to
point up the more famous dispute between Marx and Bakunin; it is
also to emphasize the fact that Marx criticized, and criticized viciously,
every anarchist with whom he came into theoretical or practical con-
tact. All of Marx’s objections reveal a method of social and political
analysis that was fundamentally at variance with the anarchists’ ap-
proach. The point here is not merely that Marx had a method, whereas
the anarchists so often were inimical to method; it is also that the
method in question has attributes and an intellectual lineage that
separate Marx decisively and irreversibly from the anarchist tradition,
whose attributes and lineage are quite separate.

Marx’s lineage was Hegelian, but how Hegelian it was remains
disputed among scholars. Marx’s successive disputes with the anarchists
cast light on the vexed issue of the extent of Hegel’s influence on
Marx’s thought; the continuity that links together attacks on anarchism
made at widely separated points in Marx’s career is itself in significant
respects Hegelian. Moreover, Marx’s three main anarchist antagonists,
Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin, were themselves thinkers who in
their various ways entertained ‘Hegelian’ pretensions, pretensions
which Marx, for his part, was concerned to deflate. Stirner’s historical




schematization was broadly Hegelian; Proudhon claimed that his
principle (or demi-urge) of ‘contradiction’ was based on the Hegelian
dialectic; and Bakunin attempted to appropriate the same, Hegelian,
base for his obsession with negativity, or destruction. Marx’s main
object, to be sure, was not to portray these anarchists as bad Hegelians -
although the fact that he does succeed in doing this, if only en passant,
should give pause, at least, to those who would de-emphasize the con-
tinued hold of Hegelian categories on Marx’s thought. Marx, as we shall
see, was no less successful in accomplishing what was his main goal:
that of sharply distinguishing substantive theoretical difference between
his approach and any anarchist alternative.

This task did not lack urgency. Marx was concerned to frame his
successive arguments against the anarchists not for the sake of posterity,
or even simply to hasten the advent of revolution; more immediately,
his object was practical. Increasingly, as time went by, the emergent
revolutionary movement needed to be shielded against rival revolution-
ary creeds. Within Marx’s lifetime, after all, the theoretical and practical
dominance of his own doctrine was never something that could be taken
for granted; to confuse ‘Marxism’ with ‘socialism’ or even revolutionary
‘communism’ (the term Marx preferred) at this time would be an
egregious error. Anarchism was not the only rival revolutionary creed
that Marx (whose personal intolerance was notorious) felt the need to
attack; but it was one of the most important, and its importance
increased over time. With the emergence of the International, where
revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice stood some chance of
effectively being merged, the task of attacking anarchism took on an
added importance.

Marx’s conflict with Bakunin in the International brought to a head
the issues raised in his earlier disputations with anarchists; continuity
among these successive disputations can be shown, as we shall see.
This is not to say that the International wrote the last chapter in
Marxist-anarchist relations; the last chapter, presumably, has yet to
be written. It may be that the issues involved in the International’s
duel of the Titans were, ultimately, left unresolved; indeed, it may be
that these issues are unresolvable. We must content ourselves, for the
time being, in delineating as clearly as possible what these issues were
when they were so dramatically raised, bearing in mind throughout our
investigation that neither side at the time regarded them as purely
theoretical, or purely tactical.

What, then, in outline, were those issues? And how, in particular,
do they concern Hegel? The answer need not be indirect. Hegel, the
theorist of the modern, bureaucratic state and its ethical primacy
over ‘civil society’, had priorities that Marx - particularly, and directly,
in his earlier writings - took it upon himself to reverse. Marx awarded




primacy over the bourgeois state to the capitalist economy and mode of
production. The anarchists, for their part, made no such statement of
primacy, and saw no need to do so; what they did see the need to do - at
least in Marx’s eyes - was habitually to exaggerate not only the oppressive
nature but also the determining influence of the state, as a focus for rev-
olutionary energies. They also made these excessive (to Marx) claims in
the name of a similarly exaggerated and unrealistic ‘anti-authoritarianism’,
an opposition to authority as such that Marx, manifestly, does not
share. That Marx, unlike his anarchist enemies, saw fit to investigate
forms of authority for the sake of distinguishing ‘authority’ from
‘authoritarianism’ suggests a point we find attested to in his writings
taken as a whole. This is that Marx did entertain a distinction between
power and authority. This distinction may not solve all our problems
in the study of politics, but it is sufficiently sharp not only to cut
through anarchist arguments but also the arguments of those who
would confuse anarchist arguments with those of one of their most
trenchant critics, Karl Marx himself. What I am suggesting, and pro-
posing to bear out, is that the study of Marx and the study of politics
are not inimical enterprises; and that this is so, not simply in the
straightforward sense that Marx all too obviously provoked a revol-
utionary politics that shook the world, but in the additional sense
that there is in Marx’s writings a theory of the modern state, in its
relationship with civil society, that has more substance than has often
been credited to it.

We shall find that Marx’s theory of what might be termed ‘alien
politics’, adumbrated largely in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’,
raises analytical and political possibilities that cannot be resolved or
satisfied by the anarchist panacea of abolition of the state, tout court.
This means not only that the roots of Marxism are Hegelian whereas
anarchism has no such lineage, but also something programmatic as
well as genealogical. It means that Marx had in mind for future com-
munist society not so much the outright abolition of all authority
relations, but a possibly more drastic, and irreversible, alteration of
the form of authority relations. Alien politics will be succeeded not by
no politics but by authority relations that are re-integrated within society.
This, of course, is exactly what Bakunin (who could be a prescient man)
feared, and fought. It is also something that helps explain a number of
questions that, without it, would seem rather unconnected: why
Marx was so concerned about the practice of revolutionary politics
in a pre-revolutionary context; why he always insisted, unlike the
anarchists, on liberal rather than authoritarian allies; why, again unlike
the anarchists, he insisted that class struggles are ultimately resolved
not on the economic or cultural level, but on the political level.

When Marx described the modern state in terms other than those of the
anarchists’ ‘Genghis Khan with telegraphs’, when he said, unflatteringly,




of Bakunin, that ‘this ass cannot even understand that any class move-
ment, as such, is necessarily. . . a political movement’, we may suppose
that he understood by the word ‘political’ something quite different
from the anarchist definition. Just how different it is my intention,
in this book, to demonstrate.