Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

PART ONE

Foundations

CHAPTER 1

Hegelian roots

Hegel, even today, may be best known as an apologist for the nineteenth-
century Prussian state. Because his complex arguments seem tailored to
fit such a reactionary and unappealing political form, they have been
discredited - and Hegel’s political philosophy has appeared to bear
little relevance to the modern world. While his influence on Marx
(whose relevance is less in doubt) is sometimes admitted, it has often
seemed wholly negative in character - the more so, since Marx himself
is often too easily portrayed as the proponent of the kind of neo-
anarchist stateless utopia that by its very nature owes nothing to a
state-worshipper like Hegel.

The crucial point about these two interpretations - of Hegel the
uncritical statist, and Marx the neo-anarchist - is not simply that they
are mistaken, although the idea of Hegel’s supposed servility to the
Prussian state does not withstand close examination, and Marx was a
bitter enemy of anarchist Utopians. The crucial point is that these
views are mistaken for much the same reasons. To see this, we should
not be misled by the institution of the state - or, more nearly, by
Hegel’s ‘statism’ (which is statism of a most unusual kind) and by
Marx’s opposition to the Hegelian, or to the bourgeois, state (which,
unlike that of the anarchists, does not imply a lack of belief in auth-
ority, as we shall see). What this suggests is a continuity between
Hegel and Marx - a continuity that will seem unlikely only on the basis
of an overdrawn polarization between the two. What then - from the
point of view of Marx’s disputes with the anarchists - are the elements
of this continuity? To see them, we must probe beneath the purely
institutional, to the deeper, conceptual level - much as Hegel and
Marx themselves conducted their investigations. What emerges if we
do this is a set of arguments about the nature of community - about
what the notion of community means, about how it relates to the
concept of individuality, about where on the historical spectrum it
should, or can, be located, and about what threatens it. Hegel’s depic-
tion of the state and civil society is an attempt to answer these questions;
and what is striking about Marx’s disputes with the anarchists (which




themselves did not proceed purely on an institutional level) is not only
that these same questions were raised again as sub-themes in the course
of the various polemics, but also that the positions Marx upheld against
his anarchist interlocutors constantly indicate the extent and depth of
his indebtedness to Hegel. What this means is that there is considerable
substance to the claim that without understanding the Hegelian roots of
Marxism, we fail to understand Marx; and that while hostility to
anarchism is one of these roots, a specifically non-anarchist and anti-
anarchist approach to the problem of community is another. A specifi-
cally Hegelian view of what is involved in this problem - of what sustains,
and what threatens, community in the modern world - passes into
Marx’s writings and decisively separates Marx from anarchism.

To see this we must take our bearings. No one, I suspect, could be
more remote from anarchism than Hegel, whose state-centredness is
notorious; but it is striking that Marx, who was not at all state-centred
in the same way, ran Hegel a close second. Marx’s forthright and
sustained opposition to anarchism is incomprehensible unless we take
into account his Hegelian lineage. Marx disagreed with Hegel not
because of Hegel’s presentation of certain deep-seated (and apparently
insoluble) social problems, but because he took exception to the
political solution to these problems Hegel had put forward in The
Philosophy of Right.

Marx’s earlier writings, up to and including The German Ideology,
sought to show that the modern state, as Hegel had portrayed it,
instead of fulfilling, actually vitiated the professed aims of Hegelian
philosophy. Marx operated with Hegel’s basic duality of civil society
and political state - of bourgeois and citoyen - but denied that they
related in the manner Hegel had postulated; his denial, however, is not
based on any substantive disagreement with Hegel’s prescient (and
surprisingly prophetic) presentation of the social tensions attendant
upon the emergence of modern civil society. Marx considered that
under modern conditions Hegel’s state would be incapable of resolving
these tensions, but this is not to say that they stood in no need of
resolution; and while attempting to demolish Hegel’s claims on behalf
of the modern state - claims that it could be a mediating, ethical agency
validated by historical understanding - Marx took the need for such an
agency with all seriousness.

Hegel considered civil society (biirgerliche Gesellschaft) to embody a
‘system of needs’ and of ‘universal self-interest’, which the modern
state would transcend by establishing and sustaining a system of law,
and by integrating consciousness in such a way that the universal egoism
animating civil society would be denied political relevance - without,
however, being displaced within its own proper sphere. In Hegel’s
presentation, the modern state does not possess the wherewithal to
abolish the individualistic self-assertion that characterizes civil society


and poses political problems; instead, the estates (Stdnde) in The
Philosophy of Right were intended to cleanse and purify particular
interests of self-seeking, to deflect these particularistic interests (which
of themselves will not intersect to produce any general good) towards
more public ends. Subjective goals whose origin is in civil society are
to be refracted through a complex series of intermediary institutions
which, taken together, would according to Hegel provide an axis that
would be altogether distinct from the subjective and ‘arbitrary’, but
would not displace the subjective from its own, proper realm.

Marx agreed with Hegel that civil society poses - and is predicated
upon - problems it is incapable of solving. But he was severely critical
of Hegel’s institutional solutions to these problems. Hegel’s state was
supposedly ‘universal’, while Marx came to recognize in the course of
his tortured self-emancipation from Hegel that modern political institu-
tions were so organized as to make the state the mere instrument of
the interests dominating civil society and masquerading as general
‘universal’ interests. The state to Hegel was a different axis; to Marx
it merely provided one more set of conduits. Legislation, Marx came
to insist, was in practice dominated by particular interests originating
in civil society, and not by any guiding principles of ‘universal’ appli-
cability. Hegel’s institutional mediations - the monarchy, the assembly
of estates, the bureaucracy - were to Marx no more than mystifications,
concealing behind their institutional fa?ades powerful realities that
needed to be brought out into the open by social, as well as political,
investigations.

It is for this reason that while Marx’s argument in his early critiques
of Hegel proceeds largely at an institutional level, this should not
distract us from why he was making it. What underlaid, and gave sub-
stance to, Hegel’s institutional arguments was his fundamental belief
that the state as a living ethical structure and the individual as a whole
person presuppose and complement each other. Marx, on the other
hand, considered that Hegel’s exalted and exaggerated claims on behalf
of the state are no real solution to a set of divisive social problems that
not only remain in existence, crying out for a solution, but may also be
given a new lease of life by virtue of any false, or incomplete, resolution
at the level of political institutions. Only by abolishing the state as a
particular institution could the aim of Hegel’s political philosophy -
cohesiveness and universality -become a reality. Yet Marx never disputed
Hegel s arguments about the need for, and the features and prerequisites
of, the kind of community that would resolve the atomistic tendencies
of the modern economy. Indeed, Marx actually extended these argu-
ments throughout his own writings, and it is at this level that the
continuity between Marx s thought and that of Hegel emerges with
greatest clarity. Both Marx and Hegel - to put the same point another
way - are substantive theorists of community, and the reasons why this




is so - which emerge, forcefully and dramatically, throughout Marx’s
disputes with the anarchists - indicate a marked continuity between
the two thinkers.

If we suppose that political consciousness as Hegel portrays it
cannot accomplish what Hegel thinks it can - or, if it is to do its job,
must - accomplish, then we must look elsewhere for an analogue or a
substitute for political consciousness. The unity of thought and action,
as a regenerative principle, must be sought elsewhere - and, at base, it
is this idea that underlies Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, which indeed eventuates in Marx’s identification of the poor and
dispossessed (those cast out by Hegel) as the only possible source of
political consciousness and genuine community alike. To some extent,
Marx’s identification of the revolutionary proletariat as the agency of
social transformation - an identification that has never passed un-
challenged, especially (as we shall see) by anarchists - follows from
what Hegel had to say about the dialectics of labour, particularly when
this discussion is laid alongside another, that of the insoluble problem
of pauperism in The Philosophy of Right. But the lineaments of Marx’s
thinking owe more to Hegel than this. Hegel had fastened the idea of
community on to the state, and Marx himself in his ‘critique’ of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right focused his discussion on Hegel’s ‘institutional’
paragraphs. He was endeavouring to meet Hegel on Hegel’s own terms,
in order to cast into sharp relief a central question Hegel had posed. If
the distinction between state and civil society - a distinction which
meant little enough to any anarchist theorist - is as Hegel portrayed it,
and if it is not to be overcome by the various institutional mediations
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right outlines, then surely the need to overcome
it still remains. Indeed, this can be put still more emphatically. The
atmosphere of moral emergency - the belief that society has been
deprived of ethical possibilities - that is present in Hegel’s political
writings extends much further in those of Marx. Many of the reasons
why civil society points towards the antithesis of community had been
indicated by Hegel himself; and Hegel’s portrayal of civil society was
of a system having its own dynamism. Its various characteristics -
disruption, fragmentation, disunity - on Hegel’s presentation have a
momentum all of their own. What this means is that the longer civil
society’s problems - problems Hegel himself considers insoluble -
remain in existence, the greater will be the need to solve them; and by
the same token, there will be less and less chance of overcoming them
by institutional or governmental means. The elements of this dilemma,
it can be shown, are all present in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right', what
they point to is all too clearly a substantive notion about what it means
to live in a community, about the nature of community, about the
requirements that would satisfy it and the threats that would tear it
apart. Marx was aware of these arguments, and was influenced by them




throughout his career as a revolutionist. But they were not available
in the same way to his anarchist interlocutors. Max Stirner regarded
any community, any generality, any movement, as a threat to the
sovereign individual; Marx’s reading of Hegel enabled him to ridicule
Stirner’s argument. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in a sense had his community
- the pre-industrial workshop - ready-made; Marx, who operated with a
Hegelian conception of the dynamism of human needs and productive
techniques, regarded such a model for post-state society as austere and
reactionary. Mikhail Bakunin threw historical continuity as well as
caution to the winds in insisting that any worthwhile community would
have to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the destruction of society,
and that it would in no way refer to even its proximate predecessor;
Marx, by contrast, believed in studying capitalism in order to see what
communism would look like. If we see that all of Marx’s successive
anti-anarchist arguments are of Hegelian lineage, we can also see that
there is a good deal of substance to the claim that the roots of Marxism
are Hegelian, while those of anarchism - despite the Hegelian pretensions
of some of its spokesmen - are not.

Individualism and individuality

Hegel’s extended and comprehensive critique of the French Revolution
and of ‘the maximum of frightfulness and terror’¹ it involved points
up his central belief that the price paid for a strictly subjective individu-
alism is incoherence and, in the case of the Terror, an unprecedented,
morally chilling destructiveness. The ‘absolute freedom’ that underlay
the Terror was seen by Hegel as a radical acting-out of the idea of the
liberal self - that of having a supposed autonomy in the sense of being
free of others, and engaging others abstractly and interchangeably - that
itself can be traced back to the moral incompetence of the philosophes.
What is often forgotten is that this radical individualism can also be
traced forward; its ultimate avatar in many ways was Max Stirner, and
its ultimate expression (or playing-out) Stirner’s The Individual and
His Own, a book Marx endeavoured to demolish in The German Ideology.
In reading Marx’s attack it is impossible not to be reminded of Hegel’s
point - which was directed at the German Romantics as well as what he
called the French ‘utilitarians’ (i.e. the philosophes) - that to stress what
was to be Stirner’s Eigenheit, individual uniqueness and its irreducible
originality, is to overlook the distinction between individualism and
individuality; and that the Romantic emphasis on subjectivity for this
very reason is best regarded as a reflex of, rather than a solution to,
cultural alienation and social fragmentation. The integrity of the
personality will become emphasized, in Hegel’s view, only when, and
precisely because, it had become a fugitive ideal.




This does not mean that Hegel dismissed German romanticism out
of hand; there was much in its doctrines that he could adapt for his
own purposes, without in any way accepting its precepts uncritically.
He agreed with - and added to - the Romantics’ critique of Enlighten-
ment rationalism and instrumentalism, for example; and the Romantic
critique of market society (which involved attacks on Geldsklaverei,
disconnectedness, impersonality, fragmentation, and the loss of moral
authenticity) was to have some part to play in Hegel’s own, more
searching examination of civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft). Yet
Hegel’s negative characterization of modernity had more content-and
more futurity - than that of his Romantic precursors or than the
rather backward looking solution to the problems of modernity Marx
was to perceive, and attack, in the writings of Proudhon.

The philosophes, according to the Romantics, had rent asunder
what was integral to the human personality; the Romantics wished to
restore to man the unity that recent philosophy - including that of
Kant - had dissolved: the unity of reason and experience, duty and
inclination, imagination and ratiocination. Hegel himself was severely
critical of the Kantian idea of duty as a purely rational imperative,
divorced from and opposed to impulses, habits and instincts. The
abstract Kantian ‘ought’ (Sollen), standing as it does outside the self,
disregards what cannot be disregarded: the context of beliefs, habits,
expectations and inclinations as Montesquieu had emphasized them.
Only these enable the self to identify with what is outside its boundaries.
The need for this identification was what the romantics (and Stirner)
denied, and Hegel insisted upon. He, too, wishes to integrate and
restore those integral features of human experience that had been
shattered by modernity; but, unlike the Romantics, Hegel did not
wish to do so within so incoherent a framework as that of subjectivity
itself - a principle that could be stressed, and offered, only if the
individual had ceased to be comprehensible to himself in the first
place.

Hegel’s real target whenever he took side-swipes at his Romantic
contemporaries (as he did by name in The Philosophy of Right) was
their distrust of reason as an integrative principle. Subjectivity and
uniqueness were stressed by the Romantics in the name of some prin-
ciple or sentiment that mere reason (which they confused with abstract
rationalism) was said to be unable to grasp. This denial was to Hegel
both anti-intellectual and whimsical. Moreover, the Romantics, aiming
as they did to overcome dislocation, succeeded only in dislocating still
further; self-assertion, taken as an end in itself, merely generalizes that
same incoherence of the isolated, disconnected individual - the dislocated
particular - that had created the need for self-assertion in the first place.
The Romantics thus remain on the level of disruption, of fragmented
immediacy; personal, self-defined moral autonomy in the Kantian




sense - itself a deficient principle - was from Hegel’s point of view
bolstered, not subverted, by the Romantics’ stress on subjectivity. The
Romantics, too, have their place within the Phenomenology's history of
the displacement and evasions of egos, confronting (without recognizing)
one another across the terrain of their own social creations.

Romantic subjectivism strikes at true selfhood because it is altogether
lacking in social reflexivity; Hegel’s very different notion of self-
determination embodied both autonomy and interdependence, both
being-for-oneself and being-for-another. The two qualities in question,
according to Hegel, have to go together, have to interpenetrate, simply
in order to be understood. Social reflexivity and selfhood, once they
are properly defined, are different aspects of the same thing. To find,
or to know, oneself is to discover the character of association with
others. Solipsism, by contrast, is not the way to personal identity - as
Marx was emphatically to reiterate, in his fashion, in his attack on
Stirner. Personal identity requires access to others, as the ancient
Greeks - whose polis and culture were so loved by the younger Hegel
-knew full well.