Chapter 2 : Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the Problem of Human Nature

Introduction

In this paper I argue that anarchist[50] criticisms of Marx’s ‘statism’ inherit themes from liberalism that serve as a brake on the democratic aspirations of anarchist practice. While superficially attractive, especially when deployed to explain the character of both Stalinism and social democracy, this liberal element of anarchist theory prevents anarchist practice developing from a mode of resistance to capitalism to become an adequate strategic alternative to it. Further, I argue that classical Marxism offers tools by which to overcome this problem and suggest that Marx is best understood not as the statist other to libertarian socialism, but as the most coherent exponent of human emancipation. I conclude that anarchists would do well to reengage with his critique of liberalism to help move beyond the politics of perpetual opposition.

The overlap between anarchism and liberalism is evident, for instance, in the parallels between Bakunin’s suggestion that ‘power corrupts the best’[51] and Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that ‘all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’[52] Underlying Acton’s claim is a highly contentious concept of human nature which undermines not only the assertion of papal infallibility — Acton’s specific target — but also the democratic aspirations of the socialist movement. Acton was a liberal Roman Catholic whose comments on power are perhaps best understood as a particularly pithy expression of the political implications of the Christian conception of original sin as secularized through the liberal idea of egoistic individualism. To accept that power corrupts implies something like this model of human essence. One implication of this idea is liberalism’s contradictory view of social organization and thus the state as simultaneously alien and essential: ‘a necessary evil’ in Tom Paine’s felicitous phrase.[53] For the socialist movement the implications of this idea were drawn out most forcefully by Robert Michels. He insisted that an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ followed from humanity’s ‘natural love of power,’[54] and argued that the utopian nature of the socialist project was tacitly registered by Marx through his concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat — ‘the direct antithesis of the concept of democracy’[55] — and practically negated by the German Social Democratic Party’s reproduction of the kind of guiding aristocratic ‘political class’ that ran traditional elitist parties.

Michels wrote that ‘[a]narchists were the first to insist upon the hierarchical and oligarchical consequences of party organization. Their view of the defects of organization is much clearer than that of the socialists.’[56] Interestingly, not only did Michels register anarchism’s insights about the tendency to oligarchy, but anarchists have often returned the compliment. Most recently, for instance, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt have borrowed the concept of ‘iron law of oligarchy’ in their analysis of trade union organization — though they mediate it through reference to a counter ‘tendency towards democracy.’[57] Schmidt and van der Walt’s positive reference to Michels is not unusual in anarchist literature. Indeed, it has been suggested that Bakunin ‘foreshadowed’ Michels’ analysis.[58] And it is clear that there is at least a family resemblance between Michels’ iron law of oligarchy and Bakunin’s claim that ‘all political organization is destined to end in the negation of freedom.’[59]

In this essay I explore some broader implications of these theoretical parallels with a view to challenging what Chomsky called Bakunin’s ‘all too perceptive’ warnings about the inevitable logic of Marxist authoritarianism towards the creation of a ‘red bureaucracy.’[60] I argue that the parallels between social anarchism and Michels’ elite theory actually illuminate aspects of a shared model of human essence that weakens anarchism’s revolutionary intent. Moreover, I argue that the theoretical roots of this weakness are to be found in what is often portrayed as one of anarchism’s strengths: the liberal moment of its dual inheritance from socialism and liberalism. So, whereas Rudolf Rocker, in his oft-repeated claim that anarchism represents the ‘confluence of … socialism and liberalism,’[61] implied that anarchism had forged a synthesis from the best of modern political and economic theory, I argue that far from working a synthesis of these two traditions, anarchism’s inheritance from liberalism acts as a barrier to the full realization of the revolutionary implications of its socialist side. I therefore suggest that if anarchism is to move beyond the politics of resistance to point to an adequate revolutionary alternative to capitalism it needs to reassess the liberal side of its heritage.

Marx pointed to the kind of root and branch critique of liberalism necessary for such a maneuver. In arguments first articulated in response to Max Stirner’s anarchism, he responded to the naturalization of egoism not by positing an opposite socialistic essence, but rather by extending Hegelian insights to suggest a fully historicized conception of our nature.[62] Marx’s critique of Stirner is of general significance because it acts as the theoretical core of his critique of the liberalism underpinning Acton’s aphorism about the corrupting influence of power. Against liberalism’s embrace of a transhistorical conception of human nature,[63] Marx grasped the socio-historic co-ordinates of modern egoism in the rise of capitalism, and conversely pointed to the seeds of its potential transcendence in the solidaristic movements of the ‘newfangled’ working class. His was a historical model of human essence that underpinned a historical model of human freedom.[64] It was through these arguments that he was able to conceptualize socialism as, in the words of Ernst Bloch, a ‘concrete utopia’: a tendency towards political power rooted in the workers’ movement against capitalism.[65]

This argument illuminates an important difference between Marxism and anarchism. Both of these tendencies on the revolutionary Left emerged in the nineteenth century as aspects of a democratic revolt against capitalism. However, whereas Marx was able to conceive of new forms of democracy that overcame the capitalist separation of economic and politics, as we shall see anarchism’s tendency to embed a transhistorical conception of human egoism acts as a barrier to its conceptualization of any such project. I suggest that if the potential of the democratic impulse behind class-struggle anarchism is to be realized, anarchism needs to address underlying ontological assumptions about human nature.

Marx’s critique of anarchism: Human nature and democracy

The first significant engagement between Marxism and anarchism was Marx’s critique of Stirner in the 1840s. It is important to note that Marx did not reject Stirner from a pre-established position, but rather developed his vision of socialism in no small part in answer to Stirner’s critique of ‘true socialist’ moralism in the context of the emergence of the collective workers’ struggles against capital in the 1840s.[66]

Stirner argued that all political systems lead in practice to the authoritarian suppression of the individual ego. Even revolutions, by claiming to be in the common interest, lead to the suppression of individual egoism. Consequently, he conceived ‘self-liberation’ to be possible through an act of rebellion rather than through revolution.[67] In a comment on the French Revolution which he believed to have general salience, he suggested that this upheaval was not directed against ‘the establishment, but against the establishment in question, against a particular establishment. It did away with this ruler, not with the ruler.’ That the French Revolution ended in reaction should therefore come as no surprise: for it is in the nature of revolutions that one authority is merely exchanged for another.[68] ‘Political liberalism’s’ embrace of the post-revolutionary state revealed its authoritarian implications, implications that were also inherent in socialism and communism (ideologies he subsumed under the revealing heading ‘social liberalism’), for these too would merely repeat the transference of power from one authority to another.[69]

Stirner embraced an absolute model of freedom, according to which ‘freedom can only be the whole of freedom, a piece of freedom is not freedom.’[70] From this perspective, he concluded that all moral approaches, because they preached self-sacrifice in the name of some metaphysical notion — god, man, the state, class, nation and so on — were the enemies of freedom. If ‘the road to ruin is paved with good intentions,’ the correct egoistic response was not revolution in the name of some ‘good’ but a more simple rebellion of the ego against authority.[71] For Stirner, therefore, there exists a fundamental opposition between individual ego and society, which could not be overcome by any form of social organization.[72] Indeed, he believed that communism (‘social liberalism’) was not so much a radical alternative to the status quo as it was its latest moralistic variant.[73]

In his reply to Stirner, Marx argued that, far from being an abstract moral doctrine, solidarity was becoming a real need within the working-class movement whose emergent goal was, as he was later to write in The Communist Manifesto, an ‘association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’[74] From this perspective there would be no need to impose the idea of community on the working class from without because solidarity/community would emerge from below. This historical model of freedom was rooted in a historical model of human nature. Marx argued that communism is, for Stirner:

quite incomprehensible … because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism … communists do not preach morality at all … on the contrary they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of self-assertion of individuals.[75]

As we shall see, Marx was interested in the definite historical context through which human essence evolved and the definite circumstances of the contemporary movement for freedom against capitalism. Concretely, he argued that it was through the movement from below that workers begin to challenge the narrow confines of egoism in a way that allows them to conceive society (and thus authority) positively as real democracy. This was no mere political movement, for, as he wrote in On the Jewish Question, ‘political emancipation’ does not overcome the ‘egoistic, independent individual’ of civil society. In fact, it is only when humanity ‘re-absorbs in [itself] the abstract citizen’ that it recognizes its own forces ‘as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from [itself] in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.’[76]

This idea of dialectical development and the model of emancipation it supported is foreign not only to Stirner but also to the most important voices within social anarchism — Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. By contrast with Marx’s fundamental critique of the liberal conception of individual egoism, social anarchists tend rather to mediate this concept by mixing it with more social conceptions of human nature. According to David Morland, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin all embraced models of human nature that included transhistorical conceptions of both egoism and sociality, and which consequently tended to conceptualize history as an ‘everlasting battle in human nature between good and evil.’[77] Proudhon, he argues, wrote that ‘man is essentially and previous to all education an egoistic creature, ferocious beast, and venomous reptile … only transformed by education,’ while Bakunin insisted that man is ‘not only the most individual being on earth — he is also the most social being.’[78] Even Kropotkin, who is by far social anarchism’s most sophisticated spokesperson, was only able to make sense of the evils of modern society by embedding a transhistorical conception of egoism as the necessary counterweight to the idea of mutual aid within his model of human nature. Kropotkin suggested that throughout human history two opposed traditions have vied with each other. As he wrote, this timeless struggle is concretely realized in history as struggles between ‘the Roman and the Popular; the imperial and the federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian.’[79] Moreland concludes that social anarchism ‘rests on the twin pillars of egoism and sociability.’[80] Consequently, and despite social anarchism’s attempts to articulate a social vision in which society is ‘perceived as an organic whole within which individual freedom is mediated through some notion of communal individuality,’[81] in practice the attempt to forge a creative synthesis of socialism and liberalism results in an ‘irresolvable stalemate over the question of human nature.’[82] From this we might conclude that although social anarchists reject Stirner’s extreme individualism they tend not to make a root and branch critique of egoism but rather reify it as an important facet of human essence.

The political implications of this general perspective were forcefully expressed by Bakunin in his Revolutionary Catechism where he insisted that anarchism involves the ‘absolute rejection of every authority.’ While the negative implications of this statement is clear — it informs anarchism’s resistance to all forms of domination — it is less clear how Bakunin, despite his claim that forms of authority are acceptable if they are ‘imposed on me by my own reason,’[83] is able to move from this standpoint to a more positive project of building a democratic alternative to capitalism. Indeed, the worry that Marxists have about Bakunin’s position is that his own criticisms of democracy show no evidence that he even considered the possibility that it could have a deeper social content than bourgeois democracy.[84] This ambiguous relationship to the idea of a real democratic alternative to capitalism seems evident elsewhere in anarchism and is perhaps best expressed by Malatesta, who, despite writing that the worst democracy is preferable to the best dictatorship, remained of the opinion that ‘democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy.’[85] Arguments such as this open the door to George Woodcock’s claim that ‘no conception of anarchism is farther from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme form of democracy.’[86] Similarly, Uri Gordon has recently asserted that anarchism’s defense of the absolute rights of the individual against the state means that, despite its congruence with certain aspects of democratic social movements, it is best understood as ‘not “democratic” at all.’[87]

These arguments have been challenged from within the anarchist movement by, among others, Schmidt and van der Walt, Todd May and Wayne Price. According to Schmidt and van der Walt, ‘anarchism would be nothing less than the most complete realization of democracy,’[88] while May and Price insist, respectively, that anarchism represents the democratic unfolding of social practices or the ‘most extreme, consistent and thoroughgoing democracy.’[89] Given the forthright nature of these claims it is interesting that these authors do not address the kind of anarchist criticisms of democracy noted above — though Price admits that ‘the historical relation between anarchism and democracy is highly ambiguous.’[90] Ruth Kinna’s discussion of the relationship between anarchism and democracy goes further in registering this problem. She points out that while anarchists are drawn towards democratic politics, they have had little of substance to say about democracy beyond a desire for consensus decision-making. And as she acknowledges, this approach is open to the famous criticism leveled by Jo Freeman at the North American anarcha-feminist movement in the 1960s. What she called The Tyranny of Structurelessness,[91] or the ability of the most articulate (usually middle class) members of structureless groups to hold de facto power within them.

In his attempt to develop the anarchist position, Price argues that anarchism and democracy can be married once it is recognized that it is possible to distinguish between the kind of power that ‘it will be necessary for the oppressed to take’ in the struggle for socialism, and ‘state power.’[92] Against the broad current of anarchist and autonomist thinking which associates Marxism with the idea of state ‘seizure,’ Price argues that this position was, in essence, shared by Marx and Lenin. Interestingly, van der Walt suggests something similar when he argues that the revolution should be defended through workers’ own democratic organizations. In a reply to my own and Leo Zeilig’s rehearsals of the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of extreme democracy, he writes that:

If (and I stress, only if) we concede such definitions, then we must argue that Bakunin, Kropotkin … [and] the majority of the broad anarchist tradition were for the state – at least, that is, for the ‘workers’ state’ and for the ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat.[93]

Clearly, it is safe to say that this statement would be very contentious in anarchist circles — even Price insists that Lenin’s ‘libertarian interpretation of Marxism is contradictory to the totalitarian state’ he developed.[94] Nevertheless, Price and van der Walts’s position seems to open a potential space for dialogue, and assuming anarchists, like Marxists, are able to embrace the Paris Commune as a model of socialism any such dialogue must at some point engage with the problem of adequately conceptualizing it.

In a critique of reformism, Engels famously wrote ‘of late, the Social Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’[95] The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat sits at the very core of the divide between Marxists and anarchists, and forms the basis for anarchist criticisms of Marx’s ‘state socialism.’ The tension between the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marx’s vision of socialism from below was labeled by Alexander Berkman as ‘the great contradiction of Marxian socialism.’[96] Obviously ‘authoritarian,’ Daniel Guérin argues that the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat represents the medium through which the Jacobin tradition found its way into modern socialism. In Marx, he suggests, elements of this tradition sit alongside more libertarian tendencies. Anarchism developed the libertarian side of socialist theory, Guérin argues, and Marxists generally and Lenin in particular embraced the more authoritarian aspect of socialism.[97] More recently John Holloway has argued that although classical Marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Luxemburg believed that modern states could be used for progressive ends, in practice Lenin and Trotsky were conquered by the states they believed they were mastering.[98]

According to this interpretation, Lenin’s claim that ‘we do not at all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as aim’ is undermined by his insistence that socialism can only be won through revolution in which workers would need temporarily to organize ‘the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the exploiters.’[99] Arguments of this type are, of course, a long-standing anarchist criticism of Marx and Marxism going back at least as far as the debates in the First International.

By contrast, a minority of anarchist critics of Lenin accept that it was through the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx sought ‘a method of achieving the liberty that neither falls into chaos nor into state authority.’[100] I think that this argument is, in essence, correct. However, to fully grasp Marx’s arguments we need to engage with his historical conception of human essence. This is because his perspective is so alien to the liberal tradition from which anarchism borrows that without making these ontological assumptions explicit anarchists and Marxists are inclined to talk past each other.

Marx’s concept of human essence

In sharp contrast to even social anarchism’s naturalization of one or other aspect of modern egoism, we have noted that one of Marx’s great contributions to social theory was to outline the first historical account of human essence, on which he built his political theory. In the Grundrisse he developed arguments he had first suggested in the 1840s in his critique of Stirner. He pointed out that the further one looks back into history ‘the more does the individual … appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.’ Through prehistory and on through pre-capitalist modes of production, the individual’s sense of self was mediated through familial and clan units. Conversely, it is only with the rise of capitalism that social relations between people ‘confront the individual as mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity.’[101] The ‘private interests’ assumed to be natural by liberals are in fact a product of history. They are ‘already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society.’[102] Alasdair MacIntyre comments that whereas in pre-capitalist societies individuals conceive themselves through mutual relations involving obligations, liberalism reflects the way that in modern capitalist society individuals appear ‘unconstrained by any social bonds.’[103]

If Marx therefore historicizes what liberalism takes as its universal ontological starting point — the egoistic individual — his political opposition to liberalism is similarly rooted in a historical conception of emergent forms of solidarity and association. He claimed that though the division of labor separated and fragmented the ‘new fangled’ working class,[104] this class’s struggle for freedom takes a new form as a growing need and desire for association. Against any romantic notion of a natural human solidarity, he claimed that ‘individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them.’ If ‘in earlier stages of development the single individual seems to have developed more fully,’ this was only because these individuals had not yet fully worked out their mutual ‘relationships.’[105] Because modern capitalism greatly deepens our mutual interconnections, it creates the potential for us to flourish as much richer social individuals. The problem Marx addresses is not whether workers have the capacity to recreate some pristine humanity out of their alienated existence. Rather, he criticizes the existing social order from the point of view of real struggles against it, judging that workers’ struggles point towards a fuller realization of human freedom. This is why, as Hal Draper points out, rather than use the abstract word socialism to describe their goal, Marx and Engels more usually wrote of workers’ power.[106]

Marx and Engels first drew these conclusions in the 1840s on the basis of their engagement with the Silesian weavers’ revolt, Chartism in Manchester, and socialist circles in Paris.[107] As I have argued elsewhere, Marx generalized from these experiences to argue that in struggling against the power of capital, workers begin to create modes of existence which underpin a virtuous alternative to egoism.[108] This is the reason why he places the working class at the center of his political project. Of course Marx argued that a degree of social surplus is a necessary prerequisite for socialism, but this is a necessary not sufficient prerequisite. Beyond the development of the forces of production, Marx’s political project is predicated upon the emergence of new social relations which underpin novel forms of solidarity and community. It is for this reason that, he argues, the existence of the modern proletariat is a necessary prerequisite for socialism, and that its emergent unity through struggle is the process through which this potential is realized in history.

The novelty of Marx’s model of revolution was based upon his recognition that workers’ unity could only be won through the process of class struggle. In The German Ideology he suggested two reasons for revolution. First, in common with revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Blanqui, he argued that the ruling class (and the state) could not be overthrown by any other means. Second, and much more profoundly, he differentiated his conception of revolution from those associated with these earlier revolutionaries by insisting that ‘the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’[109] From this perspective, revolutionary activity is not merely system changing, it is also individually transformative: it is the necessary means through which workers may come to realize in consciousness their emergent needs, first, for solidarity and then for a new socialized mode of production.

Moreover, because the revolutionary activity through which workers transform themselves is from the bottom up it will not be uniform. There will, therefore, be more and less advanced sections of the working class — that is (so to speak) vanguards and rearguards. Once this simple fact is grasped it is easy to see, first, that the idea of socialist leadership is actually presupposed by the concept of socialism from below, and, second, that this idea has little in common with the caricatured critiques of vanguardism that are all too common in anarchist circles.[110] Interestingly, despite widespread rumors to the contrary, Lenin said nothing about the role of a Central Committee, omnipotent or otherwise, in What Is to Be Done? His actual argument was much more prosaic: Russia’s disparate socialist movement could progress from its existing fragmented state to challenge for political power if the various groups were unified through a newspaper into a single organization.[111]

Far from being a rehash of Blanquism, this general model of revolutionary practice is based upon Marx and Engels’ critique of Blanqui’s Jacobinism. Though Marx agreed with Blanqui that capitalism had made workers unfit to rule, he departed from Blanqui’s revolutionary elitism by insisting that workers could become fit to rule through the revolutionary process itself: ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’[112] Indeed it was the collective struggles in the revolutionary process that did away with the need for Blanqui’s elitist model of ‘revolutionary dictatorship.’ Discussing arguments put forward by the Blanquists in the wake of the Paris Commune (1871), Engels suggested that they were ‘socialists only in sentiment,’ because their model of socialism was not underpinned by anything like an adequate account of either the class struggle or of the historical basis for socialism itself. He thus dismissed Blanqui’s proposal that the revolution be a ‘coup de main by a small revolutionary minority,’ and claimed that the Blanquist conception of politics involved an ‘obsolete’ model of revolution as ‘dictatorship.’[113]

It is because Marx’s perspective is rooted in a historical materialist analysis of the emergence of a new social class with novel needs and capacities (that is, a new nature), that it is woefully inadequate to characterize his political project in terms of Jacobinism or Blanquism. Anarchist suggestions that Marx reproduced one or other (insurrectionary or reformist) form of statist politics betray a failure to recognize how his novel conception of human nature underpinned a model of the social that escaped liberalism’s naturalization of the egoism of civil society. The consequences of this misunderstanding are most clearly apparent from the perspective of debates over what Marx and Engels took to be the concrete realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat: The Paris Commune.

The Paris Commune

For the purposes of this essay the significance of the Paris Commune lies in the light it casts on Marx’s and Bakunin’s conceptions of socialism. For though both wholeheartedly embraced the Commune, they interpreted it in very different ways: while Bakunin argued that it amounted to the abolition of politics, Marx conceived it as the transcendence of politics.[114] This difference reflected their very different conceptions of human nature.

Within the First International the social content of the division between Proudhonists and Marxists can, in part, be illuminated by their divergent conceptions of human nature. Whereas Marx’s critique of capitalism was made from the standpoint of the struggles of the ‘new fangled’ working class, Proudhon criticized nineteenth-century French society for its deviation from the ‘natural order’: France had become a ‘fractitious order’ with ‘parasite interests, abnormal morals, monstrous ambitions, [and] prejudices at variance with common sense.’[115] The dominant voice of socialism in France at the time was Louis Blanc’s reformism. According to Proudhon, Blanc was heir both to Robespierre’s statism, and through him to the dictatorial methods of ‘the scoundrel’ Rousseau.[116] What these figures shared was a common focus on reform through the state. This approach, or so Proudhon believed, confused legitimate with illegitimate forms of authority: the state transferred patriarchal authority from its proper abode in the family to an unnatural situation.[117] This was just as true of revolutionary socialists such as Blanqui as it was of reformists such as Blanc; Proudhon claimed that both were counter-revolutionary because they failed to see that political power and liberty were absolutely ‘incompatible.’[118] It was against these socialists that Proudhon insisted that the key issue of the day was not which kind of government but rather ‘Government or No-Government,’ or absolutism versus anarchy, and the aim of the revolution was ‘to do away with … the state.’[119] In place of the state, Proudhon envisioned a social contract which was the opposite of Rousseau’s statism because it was to be freely entered into by independent producers.[120]

From 1867 to 1868 onwards the torch of anarchism was taken up within the International by Bakunin. He described his version of anarchism as ‘Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its furthest conclusion.’[121] Concretely, this meant that while Bakunin agreed with Proudhon’s general argument that natural social harmony was possible only through the eradication of government and the state, he went further than Proudhon in a collectivist direction.[122] Within the International, the gap between Marx and Bakunin was, initially at least, less than it had been between Marx and Proudhon.[123] However, areas of convergence were soon overshadowed by renewed debates on the question of political power and the state, where Bakunin’s position ‘was of a piece with Proudhon’s.’[124] Indeed, Bakunin was keen to stress that Marx was a statist who reproduced a top-down politics that he inherited from the Jacobins through Blanqui.

Despite this criticism, both Marx and Bakunin embraced the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of real living socialism. According to Bakunin, whereas ‘the communists believe it is necessary to organize the workers’ forces in order to seize the political power of the State,’ ‘the revolutionary socialists organize for the purpose of destroying or — to put it more politely — liquidating the State.’ Concretely, Bakunin proclaimed his support for the Commune not only because it was made by ‘the spontaneous and continued action of the masses’ but also because it was the ‘negation of the state.’[125] By contrast, he insisted that Marx was ‘a direct disciple of Louis Blanc’ and as ‘an Hegelian, a Jew, and German’ he was both a ‘hopeless statist’ and ‘state communist.’[126]

Passing over this casual racism, Bakunin’s criticism of Marx illuminates the social content of the claim that Marx was a state socialist. At one level this is manifestly false: at the time Bakunin wrote, Marx had already written in a document published under the auspices of the International that though ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,’ it must be ‘smashed.’ Nevertheless, the rational core of Bakunin’s argument is evidenced by Marx’s claim that though the Commune was the ‘direct antithesis to the Empire’ it nevertheless was ‘a working-class government.’[127] The problem for Bakunin was that Marx was palpably correct: the Commune was a novel form of government and indeed a novel form of state.

Given this fact, the most consistent way to maintain the anarchist variant of an anti-statist position implied developing a much more critical perspective on the Commune. This was Kropotkin’s perspective. He produced what was in effect an immanent critique of Bakunin’s analysis of the Commune. According to Peter Marshall the Commune exemplified not Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat but rather Bakunin’s ‘bold and outspoken negation of the state.’[128] Nonetheless, it is difficult to reconcile Bakunin’s self-image as the enemy ‘of every government and every state power’ with the reality that the Commune organized itself as a military force or state.[129] For Kropotkin the Commune’s key failing was its embrace of a representative structure, which meant that it reproduced the typical vices of parliamentary governments. The weaknesses of the Commune, he insisted, were due not to the men who led it but to the ‘system’ it embraced.[130]

If Kropotkin’s comments point to anarchist difficulties with the Commune, Marx shows that to embrace the Commune involved embracing a novel form of state. He was able to square this perspective with his own anti-statist insistence that socialism could only come through the smashing of the old state on the basis of a deeper conception of the social. Thus in a draft of The Civil War in France he described the Commune in language reminiscent of that he deployed in the 1840s:

The Commune — the reabsorption of the State power by society, as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression — the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organized against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things.[131]

This argument suggests Bakunin’s charge that Marx was a Jacobin or Blanquist was not simply wrong (though it clearly was) but rather involved a complete misunderstanding of Marx’s project. It is not merely that for Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the rule of the working class rather than a dictatorship of an elite,[132] more importantly Bakunin’s criticism does not begin to rise to the level demanded of the theoretical breakthrough underpinning Marx’s position. If, from the standpoint of the egoistic individual, the demand to smash the state can only be understood negatively as the removal of public power, Marx’s historicized conception of human nature — his ‘new materialism’[133] — allowed him a much more positive interpretation of this concept: it would involve not merely the removal of an alien form of public power that stands over society but also its replacement by a public authority that is ‘re-absorbed’ into society.

Unfortunately, Bakunin’s failure to understand Marx is a recurring characteristic of anarchist criticisms of his work. For instance, Peter Marshall is so caught up in is rhetoric about Marx’s statism that he is quite unable to comprehend how Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg could embrace the Commune as a model of the dictatorship of the proletariat except as an ‘irony of history.’[134]

Interestingly, this inability to grasp the novel social content of Marx’s anti-statism informs the tendency within anarchism to conflate Marxism and social democracy and thus to misunderstand both the break between the two towards the end of the nineteenth century, and conversely the profundity of Lenin’s renewal of Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century.[135] Whereas Marx and Engels insisted that socialism could only be won through a revolutionary ‘smashing’ of the old state, German social democracy evolved on the basis of fudging this question. Thus at both the Gotha conference (1875) and the Erfurt Conference (1892) the party elided over what Engels claimed was the main issue, that ‘our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’[136]

It was one of Lenin’s great contributions to Marxism to recognize that German Social Democracy’s reformism (statism) had roots in this elision over the issue of state power.[137] Consequently, his critique of Kautskyism opens a space for a powerful challenge to Michels’ attempt to deploy German social democracy as a proxy for Marxism. For, despite its rhetoric, the German Social Democratic Party was a reformist organization, and rather than Michels proving the iron law of oligarchy to be of universal significance, he merely showed, as Colin Barker has argued, that it applies to those modern parties which aim to win state power. It is because Marx’s project cannot be reduced to these terms that Michels’ critique misses its target.[138] And to the extent that anarchists share Michels’ conflation of Marxism and social democracy, they too miss their mark. Indeed, it is not so much that anarchists disagree with Marx on the state as they misunderstand his project, and this helps explain the tendency for anarchists and Marxists to talk past each other.

Conclusion

In a brilliant early essay, Gramsci made the interesting suggestion that anarchism was a universal and elemental form of opposition to oppression. He argued that, because ‘class oppression has been embodied in the state, anarchism is the basic subversive conception that lays all the suffering of the oppressed class at the feet of the state.’ However, he noted that because different states have structured different forms of oppression the concrete form of ‘anarchism’s’ victory is distinct in each determinate epoch: each new class substantiates ‘its own freedom.’ From this perspective, the bourgeoisie had been the ‘anarchist’ opponent of the feudal state, and their victory was the victory of liberalism: the freedom of free trade. By contrast, the ‘anarchist’ opponent of the modern bourgeois state is the working class whose victory takes the form of ‘Marxist communism.’[139]

Whereas Gramsci’s argument assumes something like Marx’s historicisation of the concept of human essence/freedom, anarchism’s reduction of Marx’s politics to a new form of statism illuminates its own understanding of human essence. As we have seen, social anarchism embeds one or other variations on the liberal conception of individual egoism/freedom, and this informs the parallels between its critique of Marxism and Acton’s and Michels’ comments on power and oligarchy. The problem for anarchism with this perspective is that liberalism falsely universalizes a definite, historical conception of human essence, and this idea of essence acts as a fundamental barrier to conceptualizing a real democratic alternative to capitalism. Indeed, Bakunin’s a priori comments on Marxism as a prospective ‘red bureaucracy’ reflect not a perceptive grasp on reality but rather the fundamental problems associated with conceiving democracy from an anarchist perspective and thus the limitations of anarchism as an anti-capitalist ideology. As David Morland suggests, ‘the rationale behind the anarchist objection to Marxism is, to put it very simply, that Marxist-Leninists have misunderstood human nature. There is, anarchists caution, a lust for power in humankind that will jeopardize the very outcome of the revolutionary process itself.’[140] This suggests, notwithstanding Marx’s nominal convergence with anarchism over the desire to ‘smash’ the state, that it would be wrong to claim that the differences between them were of a merely tactical kind.[141] On the contrary, because the anarchists do not have, as did Marx, a historical conception of human nature, they do not understand, as he did, the overthrow of the state to mean that ‘socialized man … man freely associated with his fellows, could control the totality of his social existence, and become master of his own environment and activity.’[142]

From this perspective, anarchism is best understood as sitting at a political fork in the road: to the extent that it remains a mix of a socialist critique of capitalism and a liberal critique of communism it is limited to a form of perpetual opposition. Of course it is possible to take the right-hand road from this fork towards a type of radical liberalism — this is effectively the substance of Bookchin’s charge against lifestyle anarchism.[143] On the other hand, the democratic impulse behind class-struggle anarchism tends towards Marxism. To realize the potential of this movement demands both that we unpick Marx’s anti-statism from its caricatured distortion at the hands of the Stalinists and that we reconstruct his positive democratic alternative to alienated capitalist politics.

According to Istvan Meszaros, ‘the central theme of Marx’s moral theory is how to realize human freedom’ against the capitalist system of alienation.[144] The social content of this conception of freedom is, according to George Brenkert, a model of social self-determination through democracy.[145] The realization of this project assumes a historical model of human essence which denaturalizes both the exchange relations characteristic of civil society and the liberal conception of the social as an alien power. So, whereas liberalism can conceive the state only as an alien power, Marx’s model informs his claim that freedom consists ‘in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.’[146] Far from being a ‘statist’ project, this goal assumes the existing state must be ‘smashed’ and replaced by organs of workers’ power. Surely authoritarian in the sense that such an organization must aim at suppressing the counterrevolution, Marx’s goal was, as Herbert Marcuse insisted, the democratization of authority based upon the emergence of a new class rooted in new relations of production and with a new need and desire for solidarity.[147] Class-struggle anarchism is part of this movement, but it is hindered in realizing its potential by its inheritance from liberalism. Marx pointed beyond this inheritance, and class-struggle anarchism would do well to reengage with his political theory to develop its own.