The Notes Marx took on Statism and Anarchy

I don't remember if it was about statism and anarchy, but I remember reading some notes Marx made on some of Bakunin's stuff and Marx's arguments were pretty weak against it... just like that stupid quote that Trots love from Engels about how revolution is authoritarian, which totally misses the point of what "anti-authoritarian" meant.

Interpreting economically yes, but no good at interpreting dynamics of power and "alienation etatique (Statist alienation)" as the Situationnists called it

I'll go and re-read them.
Pity then that he seems to have forgotten what he wrote earlier on, then!!

The notes give one of the few opportunities where Marx directly comes to terms with libertarian criticisms, whereas in some cases (particularly the early stuff, German Ideology etc.) he can talk like any anarchist but dodges the practical issues. Here, he tries to avoid the authoritarianism that Bakunin charges him with, which in itself is interesting because he's attempting to reconcile his vision with his support for, essentially, hierarchies and executive-leadership. In all it's characterised by a confusion which I think became more and more exaggerated in the rhetoric and action of Marxists. Even liberal commentaries basically come out in support of Bakunin when it comes to the glaring inadequacies of his rival. From a historical perspective his justifications are thrown out the window;

No, and that's the problem.

I'm sure ascendance excuses this kind of position, tho - eh, Alf?

I think the passage is being misinterpreted. I don't see any way to support the interpretation given in this thread without simply assuming that Marx was a statist. But that is precisely the question!

When Marx refers to a factory owner who becomes a municipal councillor, he is fairly clearly referring to a capitalist (not in ideology, but in terms of social function) who remains a capitalist even while becoming an elected official. He doesn't suddenly give up his capital when he is elected to office. Rather, the single person fulfills two roles: capitalist, and politician.

So if Marx is referring to a worker who becomes an official in a "worker's state" (a term used by Bakunin and not Marx) as a parallel to the above, we must assume that he is saying that the worker-official is still a worker in the quite literal sense that he does not stop working as a laborer, but rather also functions as an administrator. This also makes quite a bit of sense given Marx's relatively recent (at that point in time) writing on the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Programme, not to mention the constant thread of direct democracy running throughout all of Marx's writings on the state, and his emphasis on the flexibility of the division of labor in communist society (in The German Ideology and also in parts of the first volume of Capital).

In this sense (of the state during the transition to communism as well as during communism) I don't see Marx's theory of the state as being significantly different from anarchist notions of government of administration.

Well put, mikus. The question has nothing to do with ascendance/ decadence, Volin. Marx's position was always based on the principle of the self-emancipation of the workers, and this view became clearerand more concrete in the light of real historical experience, in particular the insurrectionary struggles of 1848 and 1871.

A very good resource, Ret. I confess right now I have never read the whole text, only passages from it. A rather excellent starting point for a debate.

Yes, I would definitely be interested.

So you think he's consistent from his early stuff - the critique on Hegel, through to the Manifesto, his economism in the Preface of the Critique of Political Economy (or was it? I read it was misinterpreted as well) to the Civil War in France? On what grounds then, were the anarchists making their argument? Was Bakunin just misguided and they were basically saying the same thing?

Maybe you could talk about how you think he saw the workers' movement of the 19th century dealing with the state...

Btw, the jibe on ascendance was on his trade union comments. Even at the close of the century in Britain at least, the unions were already being criticised in some cases (not all) for their "uncontrolled officialism". Why didn't Marx see this coming?

Volin,

Without conceding to either side, IMO one of the challenges of a contemporary consideration of Marx's work is exactly whether or not his (and Engels' as well, btw) critique of democracy and the state from the 1840's is sustained by the ideas of Marx later on. By later, btw, I have in mind from 1848 forward, not some odd break in 1857 or some such, because you can find a shift of sorts already around the time of the 1848 revolutions, though his contempt for the democratic parties is obvious, he also clearly has in mind the liberal petty bourgeois and bourgeois parties. That much will remain a constant.

I think that there is a single theme to Marx’s work, regardless of his formal attitude towards democracy and the state, which is about what allows the workers to increase their level of self-organization, confidence, ability to act, etc. In the period when the bourgeoisie seemed reluctant to extend democratic rights to the working class and was violently opposed to unions, the achievement of these things seemed like major advantages that would allow the workers to form themselves into a proletariat able to seize social power. Looking over the history of the last 150 years, I think it is necessary to re-assess this view. The realization of democracy has hardly been a boon to the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat, and I think that there are good reasons for this, which I am not going to develop here.

As such, the problem is not to adhere ideologically to this or that position of Marx or Bakunin, nor do I much care who was more or less correct in 1870. The issue instead is what theoretical work offers us a way to adequately critically conceptualize these problems in the present. On this, IMO, Marx’s work is the more significant of the two for providing a foundation to the critique, but its development and concretization has to be done by us.

My provisional sense is that the thrust of Marx’s later comments reflect a practical orientation towards workers’ struggles, as indicated in his On Political Indifferentism (directed against Proudhonians from the IWMA) and his break with Guesde over the Programme of the French Workers’ Party (Guesde believed the demands were largely impossible and served only as propaganda to prove that the state could not meet these basic demands, which Marx not only did not, but it amounted to a dishonest attempt to trick the workers into a certain consciousness; never mind that by today’s standards, some of these demands are in fact truly impossible to realize under capital). Even though these two documents were for different political ends, one against opponents and one against so-called allies, their thrust was similar.

In the first, Marx is taking the position that communists should not oppose workers’ struggles for immediate gains and for using whatever means are available to secure them, which at that point in his opinion included forcing through protective legislation and getting “workers’ representatives” elected in democratic regimes, as well as strikes, wage agreements, etc. Remember, this is still from the man who said (and this not in 1843, but in Value, Price and Profit from 1865) ‘Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!"’ and “Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. The fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”) Side note: Marx himself would later criticize the Lasaaleans for the formulation “abolition of the wages system”, where instead it should have said “abolition of the system of wage labor” in the Critique of the Gotha Program. The main point for Marx is rather that it is not for communists to tell workers to engage in limited struggles for immediate gains. It was only those struggles that raised workers’ confidence. Marx had at one point said that it would be a very bad thing were the workers to cease struggling, that it would both indicate and result in, a deep demoralization, something we can clearly see today in the US.

But it also becomes clear in the Programme of the French Workers’ Party dispute that Marx believed that democratic demands were beneficial to the development of a revolutionary proletariat and that workers could learn to manage themselves and make decisions themselves in this process. IMO, this reflects the limitations of Marx as a man of his time. He could in many ways grasp issues that theoretically would be lost for decades, until the opening of the epoch of revolutions from 1917-37, and others that would only be grasped even latter in the face of the struggles from 1953 to 1973 (starting in East Germany and Hungary through the waves of wildcats in Europe and the US.) However, he was IMO mistaken on this and treated the effects of winning democratic struggles and improving working conditions as something that led in a cumulative fashion to increasing self-organization and self-confidence as a class. He was only just beginning to see the possibilities of the integration of the proletariat, and even Engels only saw in it the expansion of workers’ social power before his death. Looking back from today, I do not think we can believe this.

Did Bakunin have a greater distrust of these things? Was he in fact formally more correct in his distrust? I would agree with Debord that Bakunin was in fact more perspicacious on this point.

But then we come to the problem of revolution and ‘political’ power. In fact, political power is almost a redundant term. Politics is about the wielding of power. I will repeat here the fact that in Marx’s classical usage, the dictatorship of the proletariat means the social domination of society by the proletariat, not a specific state form. There is no contradiction between this and Marx’s assertion that the proletariat would have to organize itself as a political power, nor that the political power of the proletariat constituted a kind of semi-state, that is, that is was already breaking down the separation of the division of social life into distinct spheres of ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’, while needing to exert violence both against the counter-revolution and more importantly, the suppression of the market, exchange relations, the value and wage forms, the capital form, the money form, etc. It is especially against this latter that the centralized suppression of the dictatorship of the proletariat is aimed.

Now, a fact which no doubt many will disagree with, federalism and workers’ control tend to reproduce exchange relations, IMO. Marx is a centralist exactly in the sense that the issue is the suppression of exchange relations and all the rest, not because it is necessary to have some kind of representative democracy. Property does not become, cannot become, the property of the workers who work it, but rather an aliquot part of the total social property at the disposal of humanity as a whole. The factory does not become the property of the workers who work there, it becomes social property and has to be handled as such. This is why Marx does not dispense with government qua the organized governance of things.

However, in Marx’s opinion, even though the proletariat begins the process of the dissolution of class relations, this is not an immediate process. This is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is prior to communism, is itself the process of the global revolution, and itself would likely extend over many years, not simply 2 or 3 or 4 years. Suffice to say, if the revolution began tomorrow, most of us would be old or dead by the time the first phase of communism was reached. This is irrespective of the question of whether or not Marx was correct in his assumption of roughly two distinct periods of communism, a conjecture based on a very different concrete world situation in any case.

So these are some very rough preliminary thoughts on these matters.

Cheers,
Chris

As anarcho says, to rely on Wheen for a correct account of Bakunin's activities and thought would be foolish, as it is just the same old, same old, Leninist account.
You'd be far better off looking at Saltman, Brian Morris and Nettlau for Bakunin

Volin: I don't see the problem is seeing that there was an evolution in Marx's thought. On the contrary, his method would have been meaningless if he didn't try to develop the theory in the light of proletarian practise. I agree with Mikus for example when he points to importance of the 'Address to the central committee of the Communist League'. Marx (or rather the 'marxist' fraction in the League) draws a whole number of lessons from the experience of the 1848 revolutions, all of them in the direction of ensuring the self-organisation and political autonomy of the proletariat, even in the context of a bourgeois revolution. The Paris Commune afforded even more insights into the content of a future proletarian revolution.

I don't know whether Mikus is thinking of the following passage when he refers to some of Marx's most 'anti-state' writings on the subject of the Commune. In any case it's from the first draft of the Civil war in France:

"The 4th of September was only the revindication of the République against the grotesque adventurer that had assassinated it. The true antithesis to the Empire itself – that is, to the State power, the centralized executive, of which the Second Empire was only the exhausting formula – was the Commune. This State power forms in fact the creation of the middle class, first [as] a means to break down feudalism, then [as] a means to crush the emancipatory aspirations of the producers, of the working class. All reactions and all revolutions had only served to transfer that organized power – that organized force of the slavery of labour – from one hand to the other, from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other. It had served the ruling classes as a means of subjugation and of pelf. It had sucked new forces from every new change. It had served as the instrument of breaking down every popular rise[v] and served it to crush the working classes after they had fought and been ordered to secure its transfer from one part of its oppressors to the others. This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a revolution to break down this horrid machinery of class domination itself. It was not one of those dwarfish struggles between the executive and the parliamentary forms of class domination, but a revolt against both these forms, integrating each other, and of which the parliamentary form was only the deceitful bywork of the Executive. The Second Empire was the final form of this State usurpation. The Commune was its definite negation, and, therefore, the initiation of the Social Revolution of the 19th century".

I'll come back on Bakunin later.

Marx was primarily a dedicated theoretician, unlike Bakunin, and so there is more substance to his writings. But on certain crucial points Bakunin was more insightful. Bakunin had more of an instinct for seeing the dangers of recuperation of workers struggle thru representative structures. Marx rarely, if ever, criticised publicly German social-democracy or the reformism of British trade unions. The English union leaders who sat on the General Council of the IWMA were alway reformist - they were happy that the 1st Int. was able to stop foreign scabs from strike-breaking in England, but they left the IWMA when it became too radical in the public eye thru its support for the Paris Commune. Whereas Bakunin made a very good critique of the opportunism of German social democracy; "I have no hesitation in saying that all the Marxist flirtations with bourgeois radicalism - reformist or revolutionary - can have no other outcome than the demoralization and disorganization of the nascent power of the proletariat, and therefore the further consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie."
http://libcom.org/library/a-critique-of-the-german-social-democratic-program-bakunin

So there is a sense in which one could say Marx remained a statist - and much of the difference in outlook with Bakunin is related to this; in 1871 at a London conference of the IWMA "in which Marx was the most active and dominant participant" and where "the main business was the dispute with the Bakuninists" "... the first documents of the International to speak of a 'workers party'" appeared (McClellan).

He didn't really seem to consider that changed material conditions for 'worker' MPs might change the material interests of even the 'right man'. He said shortly before he died that in England it might be possible to have a peaceful parliamentary transition to communism. With such an outlook Marx is really only restating the earlier 'moral force' Chartist philosophy (and one the SPGB still so 'heroically' holds to). Such views were very different from Bakunin's. Maybe Marx had a clearer idea of what a communist society would be but Bakunin had a better insight into the false routes that might be taken trying to get there.

(Leaving aside assumptions about historical timescales) - that's the thorny issue, ever since Marx & Bakunin; communism is also the existing movement, the process. What does it mean in practice, outside of bolshevism, to establish a class dictatorship as part of the process of abolishing class relations? How much of a danger/fetter is institutionalisation of 'dictatorship' likely to be on immediate expanding communisation of social relations as the real suppressor of class society and establisher of communism? The establishment and maintenance of any dominant force would have to be part of the abolition of class relations in motion, otherwise one falls into bolshevik statism, seeing the state as protector, guarantor and centre of the process. Just as the economy as a separate field of activity is progressively destroyed/transformed by communisation of social relations creating new forms of productive/creative activity and distribution, so is politics as a separate arena of activity destroyed by transforming decision making - destroying the division of labour of specialist legislators, politicians/politicos, thinkers & doers, order givers & takers etc - and integrating it more directly into life. One can see that councilism and syndicalism are just as vulnerable to a fetishisation of forms as guarantors of revolution, as past revolutions have shown when the content of the form becomes counter-revolutionary.

Hi Ret,

I tend to agree with your observations on Marx's limitations and Bakunin's greater insight on this.

I also agree with the thrust of your comment above. I am only focusing on the content of a revolution, not its form, which IMO we have not a lot to say at this point despite the many experiences. Personally, I think that soviets and councils relate to an older form of organization of labor. I am sympathetic to Gilles Dauve on this point.

Cheers,
Chris