Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas



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Karl Marx
and the Anarchists


Paul Thomas

Department of Political Science
University of California at Berkeley


Routledge & Kegan Paul

London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley


This book is for my Father and my Mother

First published in 1980
First published as a paperback in 1985
by Routledge & Kegan Paul pic
14 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7PH,


9 Park Street, Boston, Mass., 02108, USA,

464 St Kilda Road, Melbourne,

Victoria 3004, Australia and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG91EN
Set in IBM Press Roman by
Hope Services, Abingdon
and printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
© Paul Thomas 1980
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism


British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Thomas, Paul


Karl Marx and the anarchists.

  1. Anarchism and anarchists

  2. Marx, Karl
    I. Title


335',83'0924 HX828 79 41564

ISBN 0 7100 0427 3 (c)

ISBN 0 7102 0685 2 (p)


Contents

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Preface vii

Acknowledgments viii

A note on sources ix

Introduction 1

Anarchism, Marx and theory 7

Marx against the anarchists: the problem posed 13

Part 1 Foundations 19

  1. Hegelian roots 21

Individualism and individuality 25

Past and present 27

State and civil society 31

Failure: war 40

Failure: poverty and pauperism 44

  1. Alien politics 56

Marx against Bauer: ‘political emancipation’ 64

Marx’s theory of the state reconsidered 77

Marx against Bonapartism: The Eighteenth Brumaire

and beyond 85

Marx’s theory of the state: a recapitulation 100

Part 2 Disputations 123

  1. Marx and Stimer 125

Egoism and anarchism 128

Stirner, Feuerbach and Marx 134

Revolution and rebellion 140


Pauperism, criminality and labour 144

The division of labour 147

Individualism and individuality 154

Self-activity and communism 164

Marx and Proudhon 175

Proudhon: the excommunicant of the epoch 175

First encounters 191

Entr’acte: the break 204

The Poverty of Philosophy and beyond 210

  1. Dialectics 214

  2. Political economy 223

The politics of anti-politics 233

Postscript: on the use of the term ‘petty bourgeois’ 245

Marx, Bakunin and the International 249

The International before Bakunin 255

The adventures of the working class: Marx and

the Proudhonists 267

Bakuniniana 280

Brotherhood, League and Alliance 300

From Basel to The Hague 309

The International: a post-mortem 329

Marx and Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy
336

Conclusion 341

Notes 354

Works cited 389

Index 399


Preface

This book deals with Marx’s disputes with and arguments against the
anarchists, in the belief that knowledge of the issues involved in them
can help us understand Marx’s stature and importance as a theorist
and as a revolutionist. Inevitably, and quite rightly, questions arise in
books of this kind about the standing of Engels, who is not dealt with
here. There are several reasons for his omission. It is important to
distinguish between the two members of so celebrated an intellectual
partnership, not in order to dismiss or diminish the contribution of
Engels to the theory and practice of Marxism - he was an important
theorist in his own right - but in order to acknowledge the specificity
of the thought of Marx and Engels alike. The two were not interchange-
able theorists, agreed about everything under the sun; the words of
either one should not be used uncritically or incautiously to ‘support’
the opinions of the other. We should also admit at the outset - as Engels
himself quite freely and indeed graciously admitted - Marx’s pre-
eminence in what was not, and what was not regarded as being, a
partnership between equals. What Engels had to say about the anarchists
(much of which may readily be encountered in the text I have used in
what follows,
Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, Selected Writings
by Marx, Engels, and Lenin
) does not add anything substantive to - nor
does it significantly detract from - Marx’s much more protracted and
extensive attacks on anarchist doctrine and anarchism as a movement.
Since it is these attacks that have not received the attention of scholars
they deserve, and because Engels’s comparatively brief forays into this
particular field can be regarded at best as supplements rather than
substantive additions, I feel justified in avoiding, in what follows, the
needless repetition that would have resulted from the superimposition
of Engels’s views on to those of Marx.



Acknowledgments

This book has been some time in the making, and the number of
friends, mentors, colleagues and students to whom my thanks are due
is legion. To list all their names would be impossible; I am grateful to
many whose names do not rise to the surface here. Some of those 1 do
mention may be surprised at their inclusion, since not all of them have
agreed with opinions I have expressed in the past; I nevertheless owe
them a great deal.


Some of the thoughts that go into what follows first emerged in a
doctoral dissertation for Harvard University in 1973, which benefited
enormously from the advice, admonitions, cautions and criticisms of
Judith N. Shklar and Michael Walzer. I am most grateful also to Miles
Morgan for his extensive and sensitive comments on an earlier draft of
this book, which helped me considerably in its revision. I should like to
thank Terrell Carver, Hanna Pitkin and Norman Jacobson for their kind
encouragement; Sir Isaiah Berlin, Reinhard Bendix, Michael Rogin,
Martin Jay and Alan Ritter for their helpful comments on individual
sections of the manuscript; and Bertell Oilman, Steven Lukes, David
McLellan and Shlomo Avineri for planting ideas in my mind in the
course of conversations - conversations which may have seemed inconse-
quential to them but which were to prove invaluable to me. My hope is
that all those I mention, and those many more I fail to mention, will en-
counter traces of past conversation in what follows; responsibility for mis-
takes, omissions and drawbacks I insist upon claiming for myself alone.


This book was completed with the timely aid of a University of
California Regents’ Summer Faculty Fellowship; my thanks go also to
the Department of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley, and to its chairmen since I joined it (Norman Jacobson,
Victor Jones and Chalmers Johnson) for their encouragement and aid.
Connie Squires was a great help to me in revising Part 2, and Nancy
Ruttenburg typed the bulk of the manuscript good-naturedly and
cheerfully. My most heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Carolyn Porter,
who I am sure thought it would never end and who deserves more
thanks than she can know or I can possibly express.



A note on sources

There is still no reliable, comprehensive edition of the writings of
Marx - or for that matter of Proudhon, Stirner or Bakunin. In Marx’s
case two editions of the required type are promised, in the new
Gesamt-
ausgabe: Editionsgrundsatze und Probestiicke
, Berlin, Dietz, 1972
et seq., a monumental publishing project which by virtue of its scope
is but barely under way; and in the English language Marx-Engels
Collected Works (MECW), New York and London, International
Publishers, 1975 et seq. Since ten volumes of this latter edition have
appeared to date, I have used it alongside other easily available English
language sources throughout, except for Chapter 4; the International
Publishers’ edition of
The Poverty of Philosophy, New York, 1963,
has the considerable merit of including within its covers Marx’s im-
portant letters to Annenkov and von Schweitzer about Proudhon, so
I have used it in preference to MECW, vol. vi, in which
The Poverty of
Philosophy
is included (without the letters). Translations from the
German and French are either my own or have been checked against
the original. It would have been redundant for me to have repeated the
Marx bibliographies that are readily enough available in English; the
reader is referred, in particular, to David McLellan’s ‘Select Critical
Bibliography’ in his
Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, London, Mac-
millan, 1973, and to Terrell Carver’s more recent ‘Guide to Further
Reading’ published as an appendix to the fourth edition of Sir Isaiah
Berlin’s
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, Oxford University Press,
1978, pp. 209-22. In my own List of works cited below, pp. 389-99,
material included under Part 1 is not repeated under Part 2; I have
included bibliographical notes on Stimer, Proudhon and Bakunin in
the notes to Chapters 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Extracts from Marx-
Engels
Collected Works, vols 3, 4, and 5 are reprinted by permission
of International Publishers, New York, 1975.


Introduction



We have not heard the last of the issues this book discusses. They are
fundamentals of political thinking and organization alike. Ever since the
French Revolution, the rise of the revolutionary Left, and the spread of
its doctrines, has helped shape the contours of political life. The politics
of our own times are simply incomprehensible if we fail to take this
uneven rise into account, and there is no reason to suppose that its
progress will be any smoother in the future than it was in the past.
Marxism has by now assumed a variety of institutional as well as
theoretical forms, but such predominance as it enjoys has never passed
unchallenged. Marxism itself has never lacked critics, inside as well as
outside the revolutionary Left, and it is not likely to lack them in any
foreseeable future. Its critics within the revolutionary tradition may
have interpreted the human brotherhood for which the Left is supposed
to stand in the spirit of Cain and Abel (as Alexander Herzen once
tersely put it), and the Marxists, for their part, have certainly responded
in kind. This, however, should not blind us to the salutary reminder
that Marxism’s critics on the Left have provided: that it is a serious
mistake to confuse Marxism with ‘revolutionary doctrine’, or ‘socialism’,
or ‘the Left’. To do so would be to confuse Marxism with its context,
to take an overlap for a correspondence - or even an effect for a cause.
These critical voices have never been stilled by the variety of Marxism’s
institutional accomplishments. On the contrary, attempts at institution-
alizing Marxism - however successful they may seem to the uncritical -
have stimulated and provoked, rather than dampened, criticisms from
anarchists and others of Marxism’s bearing and directionality.
1

We are speaking, then, of an unfinished story. No matter how
relevant Marxism may be to the world we live in and to the politics
that animate it, this one particular sub-species of revolutionary socialism
has never enjoyed an intellectual or institutional monopoly on the Left,
and it is not likely to assume one. This point, indeed, can be made even
more strongly, for it is precisely Marxism’s successive pretensions to
completeness that have drawn much of the fire from its revolutionary
rivals; and their challenges have helped ensure that Marxism’s purported





monopoly of revolutionary thinking, action and ‘truth’ has remained
an empty, fugitive ideal and not at all the
fait accompli that some of its
adherents - with no small degree of desperation - insist has been attained.


This book deals with some of the confrontations that belie Marxism’s
claims to completeness and finality, in the belief that such finality is
(fortunately) unattainable. The particular challenges and responses that
form the subject of this book raise issues which, like most political
issues, defy final resolution. Marx may have got the better of his
anarchist rivals, but he paid a heavy price for his success; even so, the
bill was not presented in its entirety to Marx himself, and the final
reckoning may still await settlement. It is certainly safe to predict that
we have not heard everything from the anarchists; they, too, and the
radical questioning they represent, have outlived the historical context
in which their doctrine first came to light. This context overlaps signifi-
cantly with that of the growth of Marxist doctrine; but such an overlap
does not suggest the possibility of any future convergence, unless we
assume, against all the evidence, a homogeneity of outlook within the
Left, or an equally unlikely willingness to compromise of the type that
neither Marxists nor anarchists have yet been eager to reveal.


Anarchists insist that the basic source of social injustice is the state.
While they are not alone in wishing to overthrow the state - a fact that
has led to some confusion of anarchism and Marxism - they distinguish
themselves from Marxists by further insisting that all revolutions (in
particular Marxist ones) which seek to replace one form of state by
another will merely perpetuate or even extend tyranny. Freedom, they
insist, is found by following the instincts of the masses, which lead
them to organize themselves in communal institutions unsullied by
power relations but galvanized by common interests. When the state,
the main obstacle to communal life, is destroyed, the people, able to
organize themselves without the need for any debilitating hierarchy,
will form such communal associations and transform social existence.
The removal of the state will suffice to restore man to his true nature,
which has been whittled away and eroded by successive state-forms
over the span of history.


Anarchism often shares with Marxism an indignation about the
enervating effects of the division of labour in capitalist society. To
both movements, the perfecting of industrialized economics and the
reach of their economic tentacles into marginal, outlying areas has
resulted in an increasing mechanization and quantification not only of
productive activity
per se, but also of human life itself so that mental
and spiritual horizons are narrowed, injustice spreads like a cancerous
growth, and the leisure produced by material progress becomes (for
those fortunate enough to receive any of it) a vacuum, to be filled by
mindless distraction and violence. Anarchism parts company with
Marxism, however, in its insistence that Marxism itself has not provided,





and by virtue of its theoretical limitations cannot provide, a solution
to these very problems, for it worships the same gods as its enemies,
without even recognizing that it does so. In this view, Marxism, just as
much as capitalism, is a product of a soulless, rationalist faith in the
supreme importance of material progress; it shares with capitalism
a disconcerting overestimation of the significance of productivity,
rationalization, quantification and mechanization.


The anarchists, in advancing this argument within Marx’s lifetime,
were undoubtedly prescient in their predictions (which sometimes even
have a kind of ‘Weberian’ tinge) that pursuit of instrumental values
would push capitalism and communism closer together, in certain
respects, than either of these two supposedly bitter enemies would be
comfortable believing. The distance between the ‘alienation in the
labour process’ outlined so trenchantly and bitterly in Marx’s 1844
Manuscripts, and Soviet Stakhanovism, they still remind us, may not
be vast. And both capitalism and communism, the anarchists propheti-
cally indicated even in the nineteenth century, would come to depend
upon the progressive (if ‘progressive’ is the right word) incursion of
bureaucracy into hitherto uncharted areas of human experience. Marx
himself, of course, was no lover of bureaucracy - as we shall see -
particularly when it proceeded from the autocratic state; but nineteenth-
century anarchists, and their successors, have indicated that even deep
insights into the nature of social evils like bureaucracy do not of them-
selves produce effective solutions to them. Faced with what they took
to be the ambitious social blueprints of Marx, nineteenth-century
anarchists were quite capable of being almost Burkean in their belief
that such theorizing has an intrinsic tendency to mislead practice; and
they could be almost Manichaean in their insistence that Marxists in
power would repeat - or magnify - the mistakes of their capitalist and
autocratic progenitors.


Anarchists - as their Marxist and non-Marxist antagonists have been
made aware - have a way of asking awkward questions at inopportune
moments, as part of an almost temperamental reluctance to accept
doctrinal ‘finality’ on faith or on the authority of anybody (Marxists
included). The unaccommodating and truculent manner in which these
questions are advanced has engendered much criticism, proceeding from
Marxist and non-Marxist alike, of anarchist doctrine in general. It may
be true - and it happens to be my belief - that in the last analysis
Marxism expresses more intellectual and human content, and has
greater political sense, than its anarchist rivals have generally displayed.
But the ‘last analysis’ has yet to be reached. It is not the intention of
this study to say the last word about the issues separating Marx from
the anarchists. These issues were manifestly not settled during the life-
times of the protagonists I deal with; and, in any case, it is in the nature
of the issues themselves that they could not be put to rest in a study





like this one, even with the best will in the world. The issues are political
ones, and political issues - fortunately enough - are not readily deadened
either by academic discussion (with its inevitable aura of comfort and
distance) or by polemical in-fighting (with its tendency to conceal
issues even from the protagonists themselves). To wish to ‘settle’
finally the issues that separated Karl Marx and his anarchist inter-
locutors would be to wish to stifle politics itself.


The dangers of adopting too foreshortened a perspective on the
disputes that are the subject of this book can be indicated, in a pre-
liminary and somewhat oblique sense, in two ways. In the first place,
we can now see with the benefit of hindsight that books treating
anarchism as an intellectual oddity having some curiosity value for the
historian of ideas have themselves turned into intellectual curiosities; to
some extent James Joll’s valuable introductory study,
The Anarchists,2
was overtaken by events the likelihood of whose onset it did not
suspect. Joll (all of whose books are concerned in one way or another
with political failure) could hardly have predicted that the recrudes-
cence of anarchist doctrine and the revival of even scholarly interest in
it (which he played no small part in stimulating) would come as pre-
cipitately as it did. (George Woodcock, the author of another valuable
introductory study,
Anarchism,3 confessed in a 1950 biography of
Kropotkin
4 that his subject, who died in 1921, was ‘half-forgotten’;
today many of Kropotkin’s books have been reprinted by the MIT
Press.)


The second danger is in some ways the obverse of the first. Interest
- not all of it scholarly - in anarchism as the ‘left-wing alternative’ to
‘obsolete communism’ (to paraphrase the English language title of the
Cohn-Bendits’
piece de circonstance)5 was revived as part of the radical
upsurge of the late 1960s. Much of the thinking behind this particular
study of Marx’s disputes with the anarchists was prompted and stimu-
lated, if not caused, by this very upsurge; and to this extent it bears the
imprint of what is still referred to in some quarters (and in hushed
tones) as
les evenements surrounding May 1968. The events in question
would not, I imagine, provoke anyone seriously to predict the onset of
yet another anarchist revival, but the likelihood of similar upsurges can
no longer simply be discounted or dismissed out of hand. It would be
peremptory to dismiss May 1968 as an isolated example that is unlikely
to repeat itself. Even isolated examples are examples of
something-, to
write off the issues - issues which themselves have a history - as the
preserve of ‘extremists’ would be short-sighted. Myopia in politics is
itself a form of extremism. It remains true that anarchists can be im-
patient people who tend to provoke impatient responses; Marx’s own
responses, to which I was led as a result of May 1968, were often
impatient, and sometimes understandably so. Nevertheless, impatient
responses are in real sense less than appropriate, or deserved. It may be





that anarchists’ perspectives on political questions are themselves un-
duly foreshortened and ‘absolute’. This is the way they were criticized
by Marx, among others. Yet foreshortened perspectives cannot be
blocked by perspectives that are foreshortened in a different way,
without leading into a chain of questions that is, in principle, endless.


As I write, we are at some distance from the late 1960s; and distance,
far from lending enchantment to the view - the view, after all, is one of
missed opportunities - perhaps enables us to begin to understand what
happened, and why. However theoretically unsophisticated they may
have been, anarchist alternatives to ‘rigid’, ‘doctrinaire’ Marxism held an
attraction to many participants - many of them thoughtful participants -
in the radical upsurge of that time. Whatever dust was then raised has
by now settled, but many of the questions raised at the same time
remain unresolved. What lay beneath the partisanship was often a real
desire to probe to the fundamentals of politics. (It is presumably no
accident that during the heyday of the student movement in the USA
there was a marked revival at Berkeley and elsewhere of interest in
orthodox political theory.) The claims of Marxism to represent radical
thinking in general were in the late 1960s given a much deserved jolt.
To many, Marxism seemed to resolve itself into an uneasy and unpro-
ductive amalgam - an admixture of elitism and deference to ‘the masses’
conceived altogether abstractly. It seemed to provide a home - a home
that all too easily turned into a retreat - for esoteric theorists about
mass revolution, isolated in their scholasticism not only from ‘the
masses’ and from political action, but even from each other. It seemed
either divorced from political practice, in a refuge built on the basis of
increasingly esoteric and ethereal theorizing, or subsumed beneath an
ideologically dogmatic institutional communism of the type that is
singularly unlikely to tolerate independent theorizing of any persuasion.
The stultifying paradox - in Paris as well as Prague - was that independent
theorists could not be heard, or even survive, without a mass party; yet
the mass party had no more use for them than had anyone else. The
paradoxical eminence of intellectuals in what was ostensibly a ‘workers”
party was simply one of the many unresolved problems brought out
into the light of day,however fleetingly, by other,younger, intellectuals;
but for these non-party militants, Marxism’s much heralded ‘unity of
theory and practice’ might have continued to serve as a smokescreen,
behind which loomed the institutional monolith of ‘the Party’ at its
most hidebound and inflexible. Outflanked on its own left, institutional
communism responded by retreating into itself and proving its rivals’
every point against it; the self-appointed representatives of the working
class looked more self-appointed and less representative than ever; its
bureaucratic and ideological inflexibility looked more inflexible than
ever; its already stale phraseology looked more warmed over and in-
appropriate to the world outside the Party’s confines than ever; and its





residual Stalinism was more apparent than ever. No amount of invo-
cation of worn, hackneyed incantations about the ‘class position’ of
its intellectual critics of the left, or about law-bound social regularities
- all of them discredited phrases pulled from what looked like an
increasingly remote, Victorian Eurocentrism - could redress the damage.
It seemed, remarkably quickly, that, if spontaneity had anything to do
with revolution, there was nothing even remotely revolutionary about
orthodox Marxism.


Yet, spontaneity was not lacking - elsewhere - and those who lent
exhilaration to the search for
la plage dessous les paves could not but
be disdainful of ‘authoritarian’ Marxism. Radical disdain was bolstered
in France among a variety of
groupuscules by the conservative role that
was played, just as they predicted, by the Parti Communiste Fran?ais
and the trade union bureaucracy in their indifference to, or outright
suppression of, any emergent radical currents within the French working
class, or outside it. The remoteness of institutional communism from
everything but the prevailing system - at a time when it looked as
though it might not prevail - took on the character of a self-fulfilling
prophecy as
les evenements proceeded with its encouragement or
saction. They proceeded, too, in a spirit that was as antithetical to
the joylessness of party orthodoxy as to that of everyday life. ‘La
grande fete de mai’ seemed to one of its leaders, the irrepressible
bon enfant, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, to be ‘an irruption of the future
into the present’; ‘ayant vecu ces heures’, he later said, ‘je ne peux
plus dire: c’est impossible’.


Yet even to Cohn-Bendit the exhilaration lasted a matter of‘hours’,
and his example testifies that the transformation of everyday life by
spontaneous improvization, transitory and necessarily incomplete as
it was, arrayed itself alongside the narcissistic, performing temperament
of the movement’s leaders. Cohn-Bendit’s chutzpah made it easy for
him openly to celebrate his notoriety, on the grounds that it was not
to be taken seriously; he later said that ‘j’ai eu le privilege
de me jouer
moi-meme
a grande echelle: la tele, la radio, les journaux’6 (my em-
phases). Yet, particularly in France, where the long tradition of
epater
le bourgeois
has always found its readiest customer in the hated
bourgeois (witness the career of Sartre), revolutionary euphoria becomes
as marketable a commodity as anything else. Today, all aspects of the
so-called ‘counter-culture’ (including nostalgia for May 1968) can be
bought and sold on the market.


Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man,1 a book whose pessimism
seems intended to justify yet another kind of self-serving retreat,
indicates that society has again and again proved its ability to numb,
absorb and (to use a word that was fashionable in 1968) ‘co-opt’
protest. Protest, for its part, knows this; cultural forms commonly
become more and more extreme in their ultimately futile desire to



shock (epater) the bourgeois. It is on the political front that bourgeois
absorption of extremes remains much less likely. The attraction of
discontented intellectuals to left-wing movements is not simply deter-
mined by the success and failure of the movement in question; it is
also influenced by the peculiar tension between two forces - between
solidarity and identification with more popular forces making for
social change, on the one hand, and the desire for intellectual indepen-
dence, on the other. The tension between wanting to feel
engage and
needing to maintain one’s own painstakingly trained critical distance -
from society at large as well as from ‘the movement’ in particular - is
a tension on which anarchists, whose
Leitmotiv is individual freedom,
have thrived in the past. It may not be fanciful to suppose that they
might thrive on it again.


Anarchists exemplify the radical tendency to question things estab-
lished, to query received truth and dogma. There are many ways of
answering the questions that they in turn pose; and Marx’s responses,
which form the subject of much of this particular study, do not dis-
place or invalidate others. Nevertheless, Marx’s responses have an
importance for the study of politics that, thus far, has been oddly
neglected. To understand what this importance may be, I have set
myself the task of looking, or looking again, at what Marx said to, and
said about, his anarchist rivals, and of examining the ways in which he
countered their various arguments. Even if this examination should
prove insufficient to settle the fundamental questions that underlie
it - and this study entertains no pretensions to finality - it is hoped that
it will bring into the open a controversy that has ill deserved its pre-
mature burial. The issues forming it have not died, and successive
reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. To still discussion
of these issues is, fortunately, beyond my powers; to stimulate further
discussion, which is my hope, may not be.


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