Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Conclusion

Marx, in the course of disputing Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy says of
its author that

he understands nothing about the social revolution, but only
political phrases about it. Its economic conditions do not
exist for him. As all hitherto-existing forms, developed or
undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether
in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a
radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. . . The
will, and not economic conditions, is the foundation of his
social revolution.¹

This is an assessment with which Bakunin might have agreed; it can
certainly serve as a point d’appui by which Marx’s differences from the
anarchists can begin to be appraised. Bakunin’s extreme voluntarism
takes the form of what is surely an overestimation of the potency of
revolutionary will among society’s lower depths and outcasts. It was
more an act of faith than an appeal to evidence. In the International
Bakunin opposed organization de haut en bas, as well as theorizing and
generalization about the supposed preconditions for revolution, and
did so with considerable success. He considered that the International
was being used by Marx and his cohorts to impose a set of dogmas on
those who stood least in need of any such arrogant regimentation;
that such imposition reeked of Germanic Obrigkeit and encouraged
servility; and that the imminent revolution would proceed from the
downtrodden, the oppressed, the exemplary, the despairing and poten-
tially violent, and not from those who were deemed to be more ‘ad-
vanced’ on Marx’s scale.

Bakunin’s conflict with Marx was a bitter and pointed one, not just
because of what he said, which does raise many of the problems attend-
ant upon a Marxist politics, but also because of how and where he said
it. The conflict took place within the forum of the International,
where each protagonist could observe the effect of his own, and his




opponent’s words and actions. The setting of the conflict magnified the
issues involved; each protagonist, after a certain point, could scarcely
avoid acting in such a way as to bear out the worst fears of his rival.

There was in this disputation a certain immediacy that was lacking
in Marx’s earlier attacks on Stirner and Proudhon, partly because the
direction of a revolutionary movement - and eventually its very existence
- was at stake, and partly because the linkage between the immediate
and the ultimate, the short term and the long term, was lost neither on
Marx nor on Bakunin. Everything having to do with the organization,
allies and ideology of the International retained in the eyes of Marx
and Bakunin alike a significance that transcended immediate tactical
considerations. Both were sensitive to, and aware of, what might be
the eventual outcome of even the smallest tactical decision; each
protagonist considered in his own way that post-revolutionary society
was presaged in and by the organization, allies and choices of the
International itself. Marx disparaged the Bakuninists’ claim in the
Sonvilliers Circular that the International was a presentiment or the
prefiguration in embryo of future society; yet in truth his own beliefs
about the futurity embodied in and by the International were, mutatis
mutandis, not so very different.

This point is of considerable importance, since it has been suggested,
understandably but quite wrongly, that because of the opposition to
the state Marx is said to have ‘shared’ with his anarchist rivals, his
differences from them, even in the International, can safely and un-
problematically be resolved into a difference about tactics, and that
disagreements were merely about the means to be used to bring about
the common end of the abolition of the state. The trouble with this
oversimplified and overdrawn view is that the abolition of the state,
in Marx’s view and in Bakunin’s, was not an end but a beginning, and
that neither was inclined to treat revolutionary means and revolutionary
ends separately. Neither Marx nor Bakunin, in other words, treated
tactical means as though the end could be taken as invariant or simply
assumed as a ‘given’. The participants in the dispute believed in the
necessity or desirability of revolution; but unless we bear in mind that
they were also afraid that the wrong kind of revolution - the kind
propounded by the other side - might ensue, the dispute itself makes
no sense. The protagonists in the Marx-Bakunin dispute were agreed
basically on one thing and one thing only: that the dispute itself
mattered, since its outcome would affect the direction of future society.
What explains the intensity of their debate is the hothouse atmosphere
in which it was conducted; Marx and Bakunin alike believed that future
society would be stamped by its origins, that it had nowhere from
which to emerge but the organization of the revolutionary movement
itself, and that each and every move made within the International
embodied a real futurity.




Bakunin’s emphasis on the primacy of revolutionary will recalls
Stirner; Stirner’s trade mark, der eigener Wille meiner ist der Verder-
berer des Stoats, could easily have been written by Bakunin, though
not in the first person singular. To Stirner and Bakunin alike the
source of revolutionary liberation was the will of the revolutionary,
uncontaminated either by politics or theory; this will, once extended,
is capable of destroying the state and its ‘hierarchy’. Marx’s words in
The German Ideology against Stirner might apply equally well to
Bakunin.

So long as the productive forces are still sufficiently developed
to make competition superfluous, and therefore would give rise
to competition all over again, for so long the classes that are
ruled would be wanting the impossible if they had the ‘will’
to abolish competition and with it the state and law ... it is
only in the mind of the ideologist that this ‘will’ arises before
conditions have developed far enough to make its production
possible.²

To argue from the primacy of will over ‘real conditions’ is, according
to Marx, to fall into the same trap into which Stirner had so haplessly
stumbled.

Bakuninism signified much more than the primacy of will, however;
it also signified what Proudhon had called Tindifference en matiere
politique’ as a guiding conception for the revolutionary movement.
Abstention from any revolutionary activity that could be called political
was bitterly opposed by Marx, who remained untroubled by what
seemed to his anarchist rivals to be an unbearable paradox: that of
using political means in order to transcend what now passes for politics.
Marx saw no reason why the proletariat should not ‘use means for its
liberation which become superfluous after its liberation’;³ the important
point was not to abjure political action across the board, lest it con-
taminate the actor, but to be able to distinguish among different kinds
of political action, the better to be able to use those that were appro-
priate to furthering the revolutionary cause. Politics, after all, does not
stop just because some people think it unimportant or distasteful.
Marx’s 1872 speech on The Hague Congress⁴ is adamant on this point:
the International, Marx insisted, had finally proclaimed the necessity
for political struggle and had repudiated once and for all the ‘pseudo-
revolutionary’ principle of abstentionism from political struggles. The
workers, Marx went on,

must overthrow the old political system sustaining the old
institutions. If they fail to do this, they will suffer the fate of
the early Christians, who neglected to overthrow the old




system and who, for that reason, never had a kingdom of this
world. I must not be supposed to imply that the means to this
end will everywhere be the same. We know what special regard
must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of
various lands; and we do not deny that there are certain
countries such as the United States and England (and, if I knew
your institutions better, I would add Holland) where the
workers may hope to secure their ends by peaceful means. If
this is so, we have to recognize that in most of the countries
of the continent force must be the lever to which it will be
necessary to resort in due time if the domination of labour
is at last to be established.⁵

The distinction Marx is concerned to draw here is crucial. It is a
distinction that meant little enough to the anarchists, to whom ‘the
state’, any state, was the main enemy, and politics was an unconditional
evil;but to Marx, who regarded the category ‘the state’ as an abstraction
- as The Critique of the Gotha Programme shows - it meant a great deal.
Marx, far from denigrating the positive accomplishments that the
emergence of the modern, liberal-bourgeois state had brought about,
insisted that political reforms tending to make the state more liberal
and more democratic were laudable and worthy of support. What
Marx’s early essay, ‘On the Jewish Question’, had termed ‘political
emancipation’ - the freedom signified by the French and other bourgeois
revolutions, which consisted in liberal democracy, formal freedoms and
parliamentarism - may mark a radically unsubstantiated stage of free-
dom in its true notion, of real, ‘human emancipation’, the need for
which it cannot satisfy, and the outlines of which it can but dimly
discern. Yet it is a stage, and the gains denoted by ‘political emanci-
pation’ are no less real by virtue of their incomplete character; they are
not to be despised or ignored but recognized and, where appropriate,
put to good use by those having an interest in revolutionary emanci-
pation in its more substantiated form.

The distinction between an autocratic state, be it Bonapartist or
Bismarckian, and the liberal bourgeois state may have meant nothing to
the anarchists, to whom all these adjectives paled into insignificance
alongside the monstrosity to which they all referred, from whose
abolition all blessings would flow; the anarchists were not inclined to
regard liberal democracy as a measure, hint or premonition of progress,
as Marx did. From Marx’s perspective, on the other hand, the anarchist
argument that differences among state-forms were not differences at all
but insignificant variations on a brute theme was simply statism inverted.
The choice of allies, the selection wherever possible of liberal rather
than autocratic allies may have mattered comparatively little to those
who would turn, with impunity, to a Louis Bonaparte, a Bismarck, a




Tsar of all the Russians; but it mattered a great deal to Marx, who took
it with a great deal of seriousness and invariably supported it against
the right on the straightforward grounds that any future society brought
into being with the help of autocratic allies, or by means of a con-
spiratorial or terrorist mode of organization, would be a reactionary
utopia.

The corollary of Marx’s position is that there is no reason why the
workers’ movement should not work within, enjoy recognition by, and
extract reforms and concessions from the state - provided only that the
state in question be liberal-bourgeois, like England, and not autocratic,
like Bonapartist France or Bismarckian Germany. Marx’s insistence that
the workers’ movement should under these circumstances on its own
initiative engage in political activity, enjoying the legal protection and
even using the electoral machinery of the democratic state, like his
cognate insistence that the workers’ movement be organized openly
rather than conspiratorially, was greatly disliked by the anarchists -
many of whom, like Bakunin himself, had an incurable taste for con-
spiracy, a kind of closet authoritarianism. Marx held to an increasingly
unpopular position tenaciously, even though in so doing he had to tread
a delicate balance, and treat political activity as a means towards
emancipation, not an end worthy of pursuit for its own sake. Other-
wise, the illusion would be fostered that social ties were determined by
political relations - the very illusion Marx had always wished to counter.

Marx’s position was sufficiently complicated not always to lend
itself to straightforward defences, and is still often misunderstood. He
considered, for example, in 1852, that

the carrying of universal suffrage in England would. . .be a far

more socialistic measure than anything that has been honoured

with that name on the continent. Its inevitable result. . . [would

be] the political supremacy of the working class.⁶

Yet Marx’s argument is not the purely parliamentarist-reformist one it
might seem to be; it is rather that suffrage would facilitate the articu-
lation of common grievances and concerns, thus contributing to class
consciousness and the class struggle. Parliamentary representation was
valued not because it would subsume, replace or sublimate class conflict
but because it would lend it one more forum. Parliamentarism cannot
satisfy the requirements of working-class political activity ; taken in and
of itself, it might be a snare and a delusion, as Marx’s reference in 1879
to the ‘parliamentary idiocy’⁷ of the German workers’ movement
should remind us. The point was not to pursue the franchise as though
it were a Workers’ Holy Grail but to transform it ‘from the institute of
fraud it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation’.⁸
Marx’s insistence in the Resolutions of the London Conference of




1871 that were so infuriating to the anarchists, that the working class
should transform itself ‘into a political party distinct from, and opposed
to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes... in order to ensure
the triumph of the social revolution’,⁹ implies parliamentarism, but as
a means, not an end. If we need reminding that the aims of the working-
class movement pointed beyond the confines of the bourgeois state and
its institutions, we need only remember that the resolutions of the
London Conference appeared but a few months after that other official
document of the General Council, The Civil War in France, with its
emphasis on the overcoming of parliamentary limitations and the
revolutionary de-institutionalization of political power.

Marx’s ‘Instructions’ to the Geneva Congress of the International
are consonant with this point of view, stressing as they do the import-
ance of the struggle to win reforms from the existing bourgeois state,
particularly those concerning conditions of labour. The ‘Instructions’
argue against the Proudhonists - and by extension later Bakuninist
abstentionists also - that the working class can win valuable reforms
prior to the attainment of socialism, and that the only method of doing
so is through ‘general laws, enforced by the power of the state’. Marx
further believed that ‘in enforcing such laws, the working class do not
fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that
power, now used against them, into their own agency’.¹⁰ This is a
statement that is all too easily ripped from its context, as it was to be
by the German SPD who used it to justify their belief that the working
class could gradually take over the existing state and wield it for its own
purposes; and while Marx countered such readings effectively enough
in The Civil War in France as well as The Critique of the Gotha Pro-
gramme, it remains true that, in David Fernbach’s words, Marx ‘did not
make clear ... to what extent the working class could transform the
existing governmental power into their own agency, and what the limits
of this transformation were’.¹¹

The important point here is not simply that Marx during the years
of the International propounded certain beliefs about political action
which can be shown to be cognate with some of his earliest political
speculations; it is the extreme lengths to which he was prepared to go
in their defence, knowing full well that the merest suggestion of political
action was anathema to important and growing sections of the Inter-
national. Yet not only did Marx steadfastly refuse the compromise, or
the playing down of the issue, which prudence might have dictated; he
raised the stakes, quite deliberately stepping up his campaign on
its behalf by having the principle of political action formally en-
shrined in the Rules of the International. The 1871 London Conference
specified that social emancipation and political action were linked
‘indissolubly’; and against those who ventured to disagree Marx de-
scended to the kind of strategem and the kind of abuse that could have




been calculated to make all subsequent accusations of ‘authoritarian-
ism’ appear to many otherwise uncommitted, or parteilos International-
ists - De Paepe, Hales and Becker are cases in point - to have the ring of
truth. Indeed, Marx was not content with converting the International
into a dogmatic forum, thus bearing out Bakunin’s worst suspicions; he
jeopardized the future of the International itself by making the 1871
London Resolutions formally binding on all sections of the Inter-
national. (That such a ruling was unenforceable, therefore futile, makes
it even worse.) Finally, of course, once he was faced with a choice - a
choice his own actions had done much to set up - between an Inter-
national that in practice would abjure political activity and no Inter-
national at all, Marx opted decisively for the latter.

Why was Marx prepared to go to such lengths in defence of the
principle of political action? In 1871 he said of Bakunin, unflatteringly
as usual, that ‘this ass cannot even understand that any class movement,
as such, is necessarily and always has been, a political movement’.¹²
What Marx meant here is something to be elaborated more fully in his
letter to Bolte in 1871.

The ultimate object of the political movement of the working
class is... the conquest of political power for this class, and
this naturally requires that the organization of the working
class, an organization which arises from its economic struggles,
should previously reach a certain level of development. On the
other hand, however, every movement in which the working
class as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain
them by pressure from without is a political movement. For
instance, the attempt by strikes etc. in a particular factory or
even in a particular trade to compel individual capitalists to
reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement. On
the other hand the movement to force through an eight-hour,
etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the
separate economic movements of the workers there grows up
everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a class movement,
with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a
form possessing general, socially coercive force [die allgemeine,
gesellschaftlich zwingende Kraft]. While these movements
presuppose a certain degree of previous organization, they are in
turn equally a means of developing this organization.¹³

This distinction should give us pause, since Marx’s understanding of
the term ‘political’ is very different from, and indeed ultimately incom-
patible with what the anarchists understood by the word. Politics is
understood in this statement, and in statements like it, as being ex-
pansive, not restrictive; politics does not amount to the threat the




anarchists always saw in it, but actually embodies promise and potential.
Anarchists - we must here think of Stirner and Proudhon as well as
Bakunin - always see power, authority, organization and politics itself
in purely institutional terms, as though measure were always external
measure, organization always imposed from without as what Stirner
had called a ‘task’ or ‘vocation’, and as though regulation were always
restrictive and intrusive. It is here that anarchists’ links with the liberal
tradition and its negative conception of liberty - as freedom from some-
thing external and exterior - are at their clearest.

Proudhon and Bakunin, unlike Stirner, each believed in organization
of the kind that would go against the grain of the prevailing form of
society. Proudhon, who was a theorist of order, believed in organization
on the basis of the workshop and workplace, since such organization,
he believed, contained within itself a socially regenerative principle.
Bakunin, who was an advocate of disorder, believed in organization of
clandestine, conspiratorial and decentralized cells, and that violence
alone was redemptive and regenerating. In either case organization of
the required type was valued because it was held not to be political;
the organization in question was predicated upon rejection, across the
board, of the political realm. Politics in its established form, no matter
what this form is or how it was established, is conceived as an external
threat or impediment, which is always, in principle, to be avoided as
ominous and reprehensible. Freedom and authority are regarded as
unalterably opposed, as polar opposites, as zero-sum categories.

Marx’s point of view was very different. The anarchist notion of
the rejection, across the board, of the reprehensible never endeared
itself to him. It may have made the anarchists quick to spot ‘contra-
dictions’ - Proudhon, in particular, saw contradiction everywhere -
yet the contradictions, and the way they are seen, have nothing properly
dialectical about them. Contradiction with the anarchist is a dualistic,
almost Manichaean* principle, particularly in the case of Bakunin. To
Marx, capitalism in some ways creates the preconditions of its own
transcendence, preconditions that have to be acted upon; the ‘political
emancipation’ that characterizes the emergence of the modern state
both denies and creates the need for its own supersession, as well as
the means by which this supersession might best be brought about.
Yet neither process is uniform; evaluations and choices - that is political
evaluations and political choices - need to be made. From this perspec-
tive, the trouble with any anarchist rejection on principle of all instances

*Lest it be thought that to invoke Manichaeanism is to suggest that anarchism is
basically a pre-modern movement - which is quite false - Manichaean dualism
should here be contrasted not just with the dialectic but also with the principle
of plenitude Lovejoy¹⁴ identified as a mainstay of medieval speculation. The
principle of plenitude entails that different degrees of evil are to be valued for
their ultimate contribution to the good; Manichaeans explain the counterpoint of
good and evil in a directly opposite way, as agencies of two independent, co-equal
principles, so that evil as evil is required if the good is to establish itself.




of ‘the state’, or anything else considered reprehensible, is that clean
hands may mean no hands. What good is revolutionary purity without
a revolution? As Plekhanov once, almost bitterly, put it, ‘the utopian
negation of reality by no means preserves us from its influence’.¹⁵

Let us take an example by way of arriving at how deep-seated the
opposition between Marx and any anarchist perspective ultimately is.
Marx considered that the British Ten Hours Act of 1846 ‘was not only
a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first
time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class
succumbed to the political economy of the working class’,¹⁶ because it
raised the prospect of the social control of economic relations-control,
that is, over the operation of an inhuman and dehumanizing market
mechanism, ‘the rule of dead matter’. The operation of this mechanism
is blind, purposeless, uncontrolled, alien to those who are its victims;
against it, Marx advocated not the abolition or diminution of control
but the extension of a certain kind of control, not the abolition of all
norms and sanctions but their reintegration into areas of human life
that under capitalism evade conscious social control. What is aimed for
it not at all the disappearance of anything that might be termed auth-
ority but, on the contrary, the reassertion of conscious social control
by men, associated one with another, over their own lives, creations
and relationships. Marx wrote in The German Ideology that

with the community of revolutionary proletarians the advanced
state of modern productive forces. . .puts the conditions of
free development of individuals under their own control,
conditions which were previously abandoned to chance and
won an independent existence over against the separate
individuals precisely because of their separation as individuals.¹⁷

Revolutionary politics is for the sake of overcoming such separation,
and is itself a means of overcoming it. The goal of revolutionary politics
as Marx described it in 1874 is that the working class, ‘instead of
struggling in isolation against the economically-privileged classes,
[would acquire] sufficient power and organization. . .to use generalized
means in the struggle against them’.¹⁸ The anarchists’ fears that Marxist
revolutionary politics pointed towards and would lead to proletarian
dictatorship were well-founded; Marx’s advocacy of the dictatorship
of the proletariat was as central to his doctrine and, more to the point,
to his activity in the International, as they thought it was, and more
recent attempts to play down its significance are unconvincing. Shlomo
Avineri claims that ‘Marx does not use the term more than two or
three [sic] times . . . and then always in what is basically a private
communication’.¹⁹ Marx’s anarchist interlocutors would have taken
some convincing of this. In one of these private communications


(Marx’s 1852 letter to Weydermeyer),²⁰ he describes the dictatorship
of the proletariat as one of his three basic discoveries; another ‘com-
munication’ was The Critique of the Gotha Programme, which should
not, properly, be regarded as ‘private’ at all; and in any case, Marx
used phrases like ‘proletarian dictatorship’ frequently. It may be that