Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas
part of what he meant by it was dictatorship in its Roman sense: an
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- Notes Introduction
- 1 Hegelian roots
| part of what he meant by it was dictatorship in its Roman sense: an
assumption of power for a limited period for the sake of carrying through tasks specified in advance. A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the use of the term ‘dictatorship’ to signify absolute power without even a time limit was only just gaining cur- rency during Marx’s lifetime, although this is the sense in which Baku- nin used it. Yet the dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever its connotations, should not be regarded as an institutional panacea for what was not a purely institutional problem. To the anarchist he who says ‘politics’ says ‘the state’; but this is palpably untrue of Marx. The goal of a Marxist politics is the Hegelian goal that man recognize himself in and through his own creations, this being (as Hegel had recognized) the only possible basis for intersubjectivity and thereby for community; the goal in other words is a political goal, the means to its attainment political means. Marx’s starting-point is the Hegelian perception that ‘ethical order’ and community are impossible in modern civil society, to which alien politics alone is appropriate. When individuals live apart from one another, negotiating mutual use in a condition of what Hegel had called ‘mere isolated subjectivity’, moral rules and political regu- lations can appear only as alien, abstract and distant. Yet the solution to alien politics cannot be no politics, but only politics of a different kind; it cannot be further depoliticization, but only repoliticization of the required type. Anarchism is not the solution to alienation but the maximization of a certain kind of alienation - alienation from the future prospect of genuine community. Marx’s starting-point was that of an Hegelian distinction between the state and civil society, and it is significant that no anarchist perceived this distinction in anything like the same way. Stirner conflated the two and thought that the state and society alike would fade away once men began imperturbably to ignore their existence. Proudhon urged his readers to undermine and undercut the state but from the standpoint of the very civil society whose rules, those of political economy, he accepted as having a timeless validity.’" Bakunin, who like Proudhon awarded a certain primacy to the state in wildly overestimating the * Albert Hirschmann has wryly pointed out that ‘the modern political argument for capitalism that is today associated with such authors as [von] Mises, [von] Hayek and Milton Friedman was originally put forward by none other than Proudhon. . . [who] fearful of the enormous power of the state. . . in his later writings conceived of the idea of opposing to this power a similar “absolutist”, power-that of private property'.21 social effects of its abolition (Marx’s words about Proudhon, that ‘he thinks he is doing something great by arguing from the state to society’, certainly apply to Bakunin too), also confused the state with civil society, at least to the extent of urging the simultaneous violent destruc- tion, la liquidation sociale, of both. Marx, however, was party to none of these confusions. He awarded no primacy to the state, his break with Hegel having dictated quite different priorities; he rejected the rules of political economy as having an inhuman application and a purely provisional validity; and he regarded the state as illusory only in its capacity as community, not in its capacity as an agency of the means of violence. This means that the continuity among Marx’s successive attacks on the anarchists, which this book has been concerned to trace, can readily enough be demon- strated. Marx did not simply trot out the same arguments again and again as the occasion demanded, as though he were merely applying an invariant formula; different, successive issues demanded different, successive responses, all of which, taken together, reveal a continuity of outlook and approach that can tell us much about the continuity of Marx’s thought as a whole. Marx used the same kind of argument, which is not easily separated from invective, against Bakunin in the International, as he had already used earlier in his career in his attacks on Proudhon and Stirner; throughout them he emerges at his least appealing and at his most hectoring and heavy-handed. Anarchism does indeed have the ‘broad back’ that Octave Mirbeau attributed to it.22 Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin each raised different issues that demanded different successive responses from Marx, re- sponses which played an important part in the elaboration and evolution of his thought. Yet anarchism, largely under the aegis of Bakuninism, became not just a doctrine but also, much more importantly, a move- ment, and this shift has important implications. The Marx-Bakunin dispute was unlike Marx’s earlier disagreements with anarchists because its protagonists were actually agreed upon two basic fundamentals: revolution as opposed to reform, and collectivism as opposed to indi- vidualism, be this the truculent egoism of Stirner or the no less truculent ‘social individualism’ of Proudhon. Moreover, the battle for collectivism - much more than the battle for revolutionism - had largely been won within the ranks of the International itself, to the evident disarray of the Proudhonists. Yet all these areas of convergence did nothing to push Marx and Bakunin any closer together, but instead exacerbated their remaining differences, which quickly came to seem more irrec- oncilable than ever. Marx’s earlier disdain for anarchism was exacerbated, not repressed, by his encounter with Bakuninism. This leads us to a point of some importance. Merely to counterpose those issues on which Marx and Bakunin could (for different reasons) come to some residual agreement - that is, revolutionism and collectivism - to those that still awaited settlement - the role of the proletariat, of secrecy, conspiratorialism and violence, of capitalism, of the state, of politics itself - would be much too schematic an approach. The point is, rather, that the way in which Marx had confronted the earlier issues, and for that matter the way in which he had confronted earlier anarchists, led him to try to bring to bear a similar approach to his dealings with Bakunin. Anarchism’s transformation from the status of a doctrine to the level of a movement took place within and as part of Marx’s career as a revolutionist; yet Marx did not adjust his arguments against anarchism accordingly. To examine the anti-Bakuninist documents written by Marx and issued under the imprimatur of the General Council is to be struck time and time again by their similarity, even in the archness of their tone, to Marx’s earlier anti-anarchist expostulations. Bakunin simply reminded Marx of all the nonsense he had already encountered and (at least to his own satisfaction) put to rest. Marx saw in Bakunin- ism even at its most expansionist little more than something he was already familiar with - ‘Proudhonized Stirnerism’ or Proudhonism warmed over and mis a la Russe. Such designations tell us nothing about what is distinctive about Bakuninism, the existence and spread of which indicates that Bakunin himself was much more than one more thorn in Marx’s flesh. Besides misjudging Bakuninism’s nature and expansive potential, Marx failed to recognize that doctrinal im- patience, heavy-handed irony and withering scorn, which had never been effective in disposing of Proudhonism, would be counter-productive if brought to bear in so similar a way against Bakunin in the context of an organization like the International. Marx’s armoury of abuse served mainly to reinforce accusations that he was dogmatic and ‘authoritarian’; he became in this way the victim of his own earlier arguments. Even though these arguments are vital to our understanding of Marx’s thought and career as a revolutionist, the continuity among them that may readily enough be traced is not one that worked to Marx’s advantage - or for that matter to ours. For we are led once again to Marx’s coup de grace at The Hague in 1872: the climax and upshot of a long series of anti-anarchist argu- ments and manoeuvres which did so much to ensure that ‘proletarian internationalism’ would turn into the dogma it need (and should) never have become, and that future Internationals would be ideologi- cally monolithic in a way the First International was never originally intended to be. The doctrinal rigidity of future Internationals is on no account to be defended. It reinforced tendencies within Marxism we would all be better off without; it is a sorry story of hidebound in- flexibility, bureaucratization and the stifling of questioning and initiative from below. These tendencies have never lacked for defenders - defenders whose bluff was called in May 1968; lovers of the idea of ‘poetic justice’, or perhaps of Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, will be quick to point out that Bakunin was more right, so to speak, than he could possibly have known. Yet the issues Bakunin addressed go beyond dogmatism, just as they go beyond their immediate setting. They have to do with whether a transition to socialism is possible without bourgeois society’s having already attained an advanced stage of development with high levels of production and strongly established democratic practices which would provide a reliable foundation for an extension of human freedom. The point here is not simply that this question has not yet adequately been answered, but that it has to it certain dimensions we would all do well to ponder. On the one hand, if we regard history as an automatic, causal process and the socialist movement, correspondingly, as a ‘necess- ary’, determined phenomenon - this is still the received view of Marxism in some quarters - then the transition to a socialist society will be, likewise, an inevitable development. If all this is true, then moral impulses and aims would be of no account and socialist politics could be represented (as they were by Kautsky, for example) as an ethically neutral technology based on a science of society. Politics would become supernumerary, the government of persons the administration of things. This picture of Marxism is not compelling; my hope is to have shown that it is also radically incomplete. There is another dimension to our problem. As Barrington Moore has (somewhat melodramatically) put it, The chief basis of radicalism (in modernizing countries) has been the peasants and the smaller artisans in the towns. . . .the wellsprings of human freedom lie not where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of a class over whom the wave of progress is about to roll.23 There is much here that is well-founded, particularly after a hundred years or so of chercher le proletariat among committed Marxists. Yet even to agree with Moore that the proletariat is the fata morgana of Marxism should not blind us to deeper questions: whether we can trace the lineaments of a free and decent society from the voice-prints and ‘dying wails’ of those who were faced with ‘progress’ - here the record of the anarchists does not uniformly inspire confidence - and whether freedom (which Moore does not define) and progress are in fact anti- thetical. It is because there is at least a strain in Marxism that tells us they are not antithetical but cognate that I find myself in agreement with the words of Charles Taylor, that ‘the line from Hegel to Marx remains in many ways the most clear and intellectually structured theory of liberation in the modern world’.24 Notes Introduction
pp. 8-10.
p. 128.
1 Hegelian roots
pp. 599-610; and, for discussions, Judith N. Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s 'Phenomenology of Mind’, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 173-9, and Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 185-8,403-27.
Modes of Human Association in the Writings of Montesquieu and Hegel’ (doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1976), passim. My indebtedness to this manuscript is considerable.
ch. Ill (pp. 34-61).
The problem of life is purpose, order, fulness-lebendiges Leben ; the problem of philosophy is justification through comprehension - the Sichwissen des Geistes. Life actualizes; thought eternalizes; they do this to each other. The state is the amniotic protection for the exchange. Where the political community is impotent, fragmented or ‘accidental’ to its role, thought retreats to subjectivity and life is cleaved into private wish and public act, into ‘chimera’ and prejudice. (Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p.348) In accordance with this ambitious demarcation of the political, Eric Weil points out that the purely private world of action and work, civil society, constitutes ‘un monde qui se fait sans vouloir se faire’; men need not understand what their actions are perforce bringing about. The state provides the opportunity and where- withal for such understanding. (Cf. Eric Weil’s valuable Hegel et I'etat, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950, p. 46.)
of the American Hegel Society (Villanova University, Philadelphia, November 1976), Philadelphia, State University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.
The Passions and the Interests, pp. 71, 80.
1976, p. 27. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, §244A, pp. 277-8. Ibid., §244, p. 150; cf. §195, p. 128. O’Malley, p. 142;MECW iii, p. 187. O’Malley, pp. 141-2;MECW iii, p. 186. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, §65, p. 52. Ibid., §66, pp. 52-3. Ibid., §67, p. 54. Ibid. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 228-40. Cf. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, Paris, NRF, 1947, especially pp. 52 ff., for an influential interpretation; and G.A. Kelly, ‘Notes on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”’,Review of Metaphysics (Chicago), June 1966, pp. 780-802, for a criticism of Kojeve. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole’, in T.B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 198-9, 201; MECW iii, pp. 329, 332. Marx, “Critique”, p. 203; MECW iii, p. 333. Marx, “Critique”, p. 202; MECW iii, p. 332. Marx, “Critique”, pp. 213-14; MECW iii, p. 342. O’Malley, p. 32; MECW iii, p. 31. O’Malley, p. 81; MECW iii, p. 80. O’Malley, pp. 77-8; MECW iii, p. 77. Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston, Beacon Press, 1968, p. 208. O’Malley, p. 22; MECW iii, p. 21. 2 Alien politics
Jolin, ed. and with an introduction by Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970 (henceforward cited as O’Malley), pp. 91, 64; to be found also in Marx-Engels Collected Works (hencefor- ward cited as MECW), vol. iii, New York and London, Inter- national Publishers, 1975, pp. 91, 63. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes by T.M. Knox, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, §182A, p. 266. O’Malley, p. 31; MECW iii, p. 30. Marx to Arnold Ruge, May 1843, in MECW iii, p. 137. O’Malley, p. lvijcf. pp. 98-101 (MECW iii, pp. 98-100). O’Malley, p. 111; MECW iii, p. 111. Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in T.B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964 (hence- forward cited as Bottomore), p. 30; MECW iii, p. 167. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt, ed. Salo Ryazanskaya, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1965, pp. 91-2;MECW v, p. 78. 9 O’Malley, p. 72;MECW iii, p. 72.
The German Ideology, p. 93. Bottomore, pp. 13-14; MECW iii, pp. 153-4. Bottomore, p. 26; MECW iii, p. 164. Bottomore, pp. 24-5; MECW iii, pp. 162-3. The Holy Family, in MECW iv, pp. 120-1. Bottomore, p. 31; MECW iii, p. 168. Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx-Engels Selected Works, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962 (henceforward cited as MESW), vol. ii, p. 32. Ibid. MESWii, p. 33. Ibid., pp. 33-4. Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MESW i, p. 38. Ralph Miliband, ‘Marx and the State’, in R. Miliband and John Saville, eds, The Socialist Register, 1965, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1965, p. 280. This pioneering article has now been extended: cf. R. Miliband, Marxism and Politics, Oxford University Press, 1977, passim. The Critique of the Gotha Programme, in MESW ii, p. 32. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Response to ‘The Philosophy of Poverty’ of M. Proudhon, New York, International Publishers, 1963, p. 83. Ibid., p. 174. Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform.” By a Prussian’, in MECW iii, p. 204. The German Ideology, pp. 357-8; MECW v, pp. 329-30. ‘Critical Marginal Notes’, in MECW iii, p. 199. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., pp. 197-8. The German Ideology, p. 78; MECW v, p. 90. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in MESW i, pp. 54, 36.
1/6. Partial translation in H.J. Stenning, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Essays, New York, International Publishers, 1926; this quotation is from Stenning, pp. 136-7. The Holy Family, in MECW iv, p. 113. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York, Vintage, 1966, pp. 9-10. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, in MESW i, pp. 142 189-90. Ibid., p. 189. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MESW i p. 312. Marx, Preface to the second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, p. 244. The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, pp. 331-2. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MESW i, p. 518. The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, p. 332. Ibid., p. 284. The Civil War in France, in MESW i, p. 518. The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, pp. 284-5. Ibid., pp. 285-6. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 333. Ibid., p. 333. Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., pp. 340-1. Ibid., pp. 340-1. The Civil War in France, in MESW i, p. 518. The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, p. 342. Ibid., pp. 343-4. ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Bottomore, p. 16; MECW iii, p. 356. The Eighteenth Brumaire, in MESW i, Yüklə 0,52 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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