Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bonapartism. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bonapartism. Sort by date Show all posts

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Harpers Bonapartism

I did a tongue-in cheek post on the Progressive Conservative Leadership Race in Alberta last year comparing the candidates to the Bolshevik leadership. And in perusing that post I came across this definition of Bonapartism which does really describe the Harper Government well.

What Are The Characteristics Of Bonapartism?
The dictator may pay a hypocritical homage to the tradition of popular consent by means of occasional plebiscites in which the people are asked to endorse some proposal desired by the government. But this purely formal consultation is usually carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation wherein the propagandists of the ruling clique predict the direst consequences unless the proposition is confirmed.

Trotsky used the term affectionately when he referred to Stalin.

The contradictions within the bureaucracy itself have led to a system of handpicking the main commanding staff; the need for discipline within the select order has led to the rule of a single person and to the cult of the infallible leader. One and the same system prevails in factory, kolkhoz, university and the government: a leader stands at the head of his faithful troop; the rest follow the leader. Stalin never was and, by his nature, never could be a leader of masses; he is the leader of bureaucratic “leaders,” their consummation, their personification.

It seems appropriate given Harpers Law and Order government has embraced the military and the war in Afghanistan and has branded the Canadian state in the Conservative party image.


Bushism-Cheneyism has aspects of Bonapartism,
whereby the state rules in an authoritarian way and disregards the people, representing itself as the true representative of the business classes. In fact, it serves only a small spectrum of corporate cronies of the ruling elite, disadvantaging almost everyone else. It expands government, but not into provision of useful infrastructure (bridges, airports), but toward the provision of "security" (often just a label for make-work unnecessary jobs, such as extra al-Qaeda-fighting police in Wyoming) or of artificial "investment opportunities" such as an Iraq under US military occupation..


And we know Harper the student of history admires autocratic power and has studied Stalin, thus his re branding of the party in his own image, as the Party of Stephen Harper.

And it became even more relevant this week when the party purged candidates that they deemed out of touch with the party line.



Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes.



Tory brass won't let them run in the next election

What do elected Conservative candidates Brent Barr, Bill Casey and Mark Warner have in common?

From Friday's Globe and Mail

The Conservative Party has named the members of the management committee that has taken over the duties of the riding association that renominated banished Tory MP Bill Casey in his Nova Scotia constituency.

But neither Mr. Casey, nor the president of the riding association in Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley, know who those committee members are.

"It's a secret committee. They took over our riding association and all of our money and they won't even tell us who's on it," Mr. Casey said yesterday.

Mr. Casey had hoped to run again for the Conservatives despite being kicked out of the caucus after voting against the federal budget over changes to the Atlantic Accord. But when the members of Mr. Casey's riding association elected him as their candidate despite the expulsion, the national council vetoed the decision and said it was bringing in a new committee to nominate someone else.

It was "anti-democratic," Mr. Casey said.

But he isn't the only elected Conservative candidate to be internally disqualified.

Two others - one in Toronto and one in Guelph, Ont. - announced this week that they had been stripped by the party brass of the opportunity to run in the next election.

Mark Warner, an international-trade lawyer who was elected by the riding association in Toronto Centre, says the party took issue with his participation in a local forum on income and equality. He was eventually given the green light to participate, he said, but on the condition that he remain silent throughout.

Mr. Warner said he believes he should be able to discuss issues that are pertinent to an urban downtown riding. And he doesn't believe he should have been disqualified as a candidate for saying so.

"The riding association made a choice to elect me as a candidate; the riding association was happy for me to continue as a candidate," Mr. Warner said. "If the national party wants to officiate the judgments of a local riding association, I think there are some questions there that democrats will want to discuss."

As for Brent Barr in Guelph, the Conservative national council accused him of not generating enough support for the Conservatives through canvassing and of running a poor campaign in the last election - charges he vehemently denies.

"I wish that I would say that we did something wrong because then I would actually be able to stand up and say here's my resignation. I would be comfortable with my resignation. But that's not the case," Mr. Barr said.

But Conservative Party president Don Plett said there were problems with the candidacy of both Mr. Warner and Mr. Barr that had to be addressed. He disagrees that there is anything undemocratic in the process.

"Our Prime Minister [Stephen Harper], our leader, has made it absolutely clear that he does not appoint candidates, that we have a democratic process. Both Mr. Barr and Mr. Warner were elected by the democratic process," Mr. Plett said. "The fact of the matter is that there were certain issues. And, as there are in all parties when there are certain problems with candidates, candidates at times get removed."

As for the anonymity of the committee that has taken over the riding association in Mr. Casey's constituency, Mr. Plett said the names are not a secret.

But "the management committee, for the best part, has asked that their names not be put into media because, the fact of the matter is, I think everybody in the riding wants to try to find a peaceable resolution there," he said.

"They are all working toward finding a candidate to run in the next federal election and they don't want anything interfering with that."


TORONTO STAR
EDITORIAL
TheStar.com | comment | PM's way or highway
PM's way or highway
Nov 02, 2007 04:30 AM

Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised in the Conservative party's 2006 election platform that local party riding elections would be conducted in a "fair, transparent and democratic manner."

But that certainly isn't the case in Toronto Centre where Conservative candidate Mark Warner has been dismissed by the party's national leadership after he wanted to play up urban and social issues, such as poverty, affordable housing and reaching out to minorities.

None of these issues are high on Harper's list of priorities, as Warner learned when Don Plett, national party president, signed the formal letter informing him that he was no longer the party's official candidate in the riding. Warner, who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago as a child and has a successful international trade law practice, was slated to run against Liberal candidate Bob Rae.

Warner said he had wanted to stress subjects that matter to residents in the downtown riding, which is home to a large immigrant population and big tracts of public housing.

The move is yet another sign that Harper, despite his claims to the contrary, has little interest in fair and transparent local riding elections. It also is a clear indication that Harper is out of touch with big cities and wants little to do with helping to address their major social and economic problems.

PM distancing himself from 2 rejected candidates

Updated Fri. Nov. 2 2007 4:20 PM ET

The Canadian Press

HALIFAX -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he had nothing to do with decisions by the Conservative party's national council to reject the nominations of two Tory candidates.

Harper says Mark Warner and Brent Barr, both from Ontario, were disqualified by the party's National Council -- and he had nothing to do with it.

The prime minister, in Halifax to address an aboriginal conference, says the democratically elected body is charged with the responsibility of making sure the nomination of candidates runs smoothly.

Warner, an international-trade lawyer, had hoped to run in Toronto-Centre, but he was forced to withdraw his candidacy because of what he called "friction'' with the council.

Guelph businessman Brent Barr says he was told his nomination was rejected because he had not done enough to promote party.

"Frankly, I'm not involved in those kind of decisions,'' Harper said. "The National Council is democratically elected and makes those decisions under the constitution of the party.''




See:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Liberals The New PC's



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Sunday, March 26, 2006

The Stalin Circle in Alberta


It was the New Left that created the term PC or Politically Correct to diferentiate itself from movements of Stalinism and Maoism which took the line that it was the Great Leaders way or the highway, to Siberia. Or in Alberta's case Fort McMurray.

In Alberta to be politically correct is to be PC, full caps.

Our PC's are the Party of Calgary, the Progressive Conservatives, under the Great Leader Ralph Klein.

The Party dominance is everywhere outside of Redmonton, which is the equivalent of revolutionary St. Petersburg (Leningrad).


The current power struggle in the party metaphorically is Stalinism rather than that of the earlier "Great Man" politicks; Bonapartism.

The dictator may pay a hypocritical homage to the tradition of popular consent by means of occasional plebiscites in which the people are asked to endorse some proposal desired by the government. But this purely formal consultation is usually carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation wherein the propagandists of the ruling clique predict the direst consequences unless the proposition is confirmed. What Are The Characteristics Of Bonapartism?

Why Stalin? Because the conflict in the Bolsheviks was a PARTY conflict. The same cannot be said of Fascist states of the time, which were Bonapartist, based solely on the Great Man; Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. Such Bonapartist regimes would become the model for post war Latin American nationalist movements such as Peronism.

Between 1928 and 1933, Stalin inaugurated the First and Second Five-Year Plans to achieve his goal of rapid industrialization. In many respects he was successful - by 1939 the USSR was behind only the United States and Germany in industrial output. The human costs, however, were enormous. Modern History Sourcebook: Josef Stalin (1879-1953 )

And Stalin oversaw the industrialization of Russia, while Ralph did the same in Alberta fulfilling Lougheeds original vision. Which makes Lougheed our Lenin.

But Bloshevism was all about the PARTY and internal faction fights. No different from the PARTY in Alberta. In Russia they sent you to work camps in Siberia, and in Alberta we too are now building work camps in our Siberia; Fort McMurray.

So in keeping with our metaphor, which is endorsed by no less an expert than Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason, here are the players in the game of the Bolshevik Power Struggle in Alberta as the Great Leader flounders and weakens.

Let's play pin the cult of personality on the Leadership contenders and the Great Leader, ala the politicks of the One Party State. Which are unique to the old Soviet Union and to Alberta politicks.

Think of it as a card game, for a pack of cards. Just in time for the Convention next weekend.

Seeking Klein's crown are: former provincial treasurer Jim Dinning, former economic development minister Mark Norris, backbench Tory MLA Ted Morton, Infrastructure Minister Lyle Oberg, Intergovernmental Relations Minister Ed Stelmach and Advanced Education Minister Dave Hancock
.



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Ralph Klein Stalin

"He is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone"

Lenin became increasing concerned about Stalin's character and wrote a testament in which he suggested that he be removed. "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands: and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing Stalin from this post and appointing someone else who differs from Stalin in one weighty respect: being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate of his comrades."

While Vladimir Lenin was immobilized, Joseph Stalin made full use of his powers as General Secretary. At the Party Congress he had been granted permission to expel "unsatisfactory" party members. This enabled Stalin to remove thousands of supporters of Trotsky, his main rival for the leadership of the party. As General Secretary, Stalin also had the power to appoint and sack people from important positions in the government. The new holders of these posts were fully aware that they owed their promotion to Stalin. They also knew that if their behaviour did not please Stalin they would be replaced.


Ralph Stalin Purges Alberta Cabinet


Kliein: A man whose time has come?

The Social Credit Party, which ruled for 34 years, was seen as tired and out of fresh ideas when a newcomer on the scene, Peter Lougheed, swept them from power in an unthinkable rout in 1971. Klein himself has only been in power for 12 years, but the Tories have held onto Alberta for 35 years, since Lougheed’s first win. We don’t change governments very often, but for such a right-wing province, we do think collectively every three decades or so.)

EDITORIAL: Ralph has to go. Now.
Edmonton Sun, Canada -
It's time to go, Ralph. Next Friday, at your party's convention, you should do the honourable thing and resign as leader of the


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Colleen Klein Nadezhda Krupskaya

Yep the brains in the outfit. Relegated by Stalin to the backstage, much like Ralph does with Colleen. She has attempted to ameliorate the Ralph Revolution with philanthropy.

Klein Outta Control

Ralph Klein Abuser



Krupskaya had opposed Lenin's calls for an early revolution but after its success she hid her political differences with her husband.
Trotsky's main hope of gaining power was for Lenin's last testament to be published. In May, 1924, Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, demanded that the Central Committee announce its contents to the rest of the party. Gregory Zinoviev argued strongly against its publication. He finished his speech with the words: "You have all witnessed our harmonious cooperation in the last few months, and, like myself, you will be happy to say that Lenin's fears have proved baseless. The new members of the Central Committee, who had been sponsored by Stalin, guaranteed that the vote went against Lenin's testament being made public.



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Jim Dinning Bukharin


Alberta's next CEO, Mr. P3, and leader in this pack of cards. Sitting on the outside looking in, and allowing the night of the longknives at the Convention to wreak havoc amongst the social conservatives in cabinet, causcus and the backbenches.

Bukharin's theory was that the small farmers only produced enough food to feed themselves. The large farmers, on the other hand, were able to provide a surplus that could be used to feed the factory workers in the towns. To motivate the kulaks to do this, they had to be given incentives, or what Bukharin called, "the ability to enrich" themselves.


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Lyle Oberg Trotsky


Trotsky accused Stalin of being dictatorial and called for the introduction of more democracy into the party.


Calgary — Alberta Tory Premier Ralph Klein's long goodbye from politics is hurting the province and should be reassessed by party faithful, says a leadership hopeful who was turfed this week from cabinet for making “inappropriate comments” about the Premier.

Lyle Oberg, who was Alberta's infrastructure and transportation minister until he was stripped of the position for six months after a Thursday night caucus meeting, apologized yesterday for suggesting he would reveal government “skeletons.”

But he did not back away from his suggestion that delegates at next week's annual meeting of the Progressive Conservative Party should rethink Mr. Klein's plan to stay in the premier's chair effectively until the spring of 2008.


"Given the urgency of the challenges that face the province, and the amazing opportunities that lie before us, the impact of a two-year leadership race must seriously be considered," Oberg said Friday.


Deposed cabinet minister Lyle Oberg says he will spend the weekend considering his political future and whether he will remain in the race to replace Premier Ralph Klein as leader.

Appearing sombre and subdued, Oberg told reporters today the past couple days have been “a difficult time within caucus” but he gave no indication he plans to quit the race.

But he also appeared to criticize Klein’s decision to stick around for two more years and hinted that fellow Conservatives should send a message at a March 31 leadership review that they want a leadership contest before then.

“The vote is not a referendum on the premier’s leadership,” he said, reading from a prepared statement. “The premier has already said he is not running again. The vote is a vote on when the leadership should occur.”


Riding rallying for Oberg

Wendell Rommens, past president and treasurer of the Strathmore-Brooks riding association, said Oberg's call for delegates to vote their conscience was met with applause and reflects what has become a commonly-held view. "I think it's time for (Klein) to move on and I would say the sooner the better," Rommens said.


Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev united behind Stalin and accused Trotsky of creating divisions in the party. In April, 1937, Trotsky appeared before a commission of inquiry in New York headed by John Dewey. Trotsky was found not guilty of the charges of treason being made by Stalin.





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Stelmach
Zinoviev

After the death of Lenin 1924, Zinoviev joined forces with Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin to keep Leon Trotsky from power. In 1925 Stalin was able to arrange for Trotsky to be dismissed as commissar of war and the following year the Politburo.With the decline of Trotsky, Joseph Stalin felt strong enough to stop sharing power with Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev


Ed Stelmach, Klein's intergovernmental relations minister, resigned a week after the premier ordered ministers who want to run for the Tory leadership to step down by June 1 - even though the premier himself doesn't plan to step down for two years. Premier Ralph Klein said he was somewhat surprised that Stelmach decided to resign from cabinet so quickly. "I set June 1 as a deadline and I didn't expect it to happen this fast," the premier told his daily news conference.

Stelmach's move may bolster a sense of urgency among those looking for change.

It's all very confusing for most Albertans watching Conservative politics from a distance. Stelmach's public comments are very reassuring. He's a team player, he supports Klein and all party policies. "Officially, there is no race," said Stelmach, until Klein steps down.

At the same time, he told reporters his resignation means: "Look, there's no doubt about it. We're here, we mean business and we're in the race."

Yes, and there's a new urgency about that business.


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Ted Morton
Kamanev

On his return to Russia he was elected Chairman of the Moscow Soviet and became a member of the party's five-man ruling Politburo. He reached the peak of his power in 1923 when with Joseph Stalin and Gregory Zinoviev he became one of the Triumvirate that planned to take over from Vladimir Lenin when he died.

When Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev eventually began attacking his policies, Joseph Stalin argued they were creating disunity in the party and managed to have them expelled from the Central Committee. The belief that the party would split into two opposing factions was a strong fear amongst active communists in the Soviet Union.



Alberta cabinet ministers who want to take a run at Ralph Klein’s job in two years will have to resign their portfolios by June 1, the premier said Wednesday. Ted Morton, another leadership contender, called Klein’s action “a good idea for obvious reasons.”

Until now, the many Albertans who want their next premier to be ready to at least threaten separation with Ottawa in order to get the kind of respect and deference Quebec has received over the past 40 years -- and there are many of them -- thought their best choice was political scientist and Calgary MLA Ted Morton.

Morton is one of the fellas who developed the idea of building the Alberta firewall -- an idea that basically advocates the province taking full advantage of its jurisdictional rights -- such as establishing its own pension plan, having its own provincial police force, controlling its immigration etc. -- Morton was the closest they could get to threatening Ottawa to keep its paws off of our valuable oil and gas resources.

Not anymore.

This, in effect, means Morton's leadership hopes are severely dampened, since Norris has already raised about $1.4 million from some heavy hitters with more surely to come as the race heats up.


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Mark Norris Sergy Kirov,

As usual, that summer Kirov and Joseph Stalin went on holiday together. Stalin, who treated Kirov like a son, used this opportunity to try to persuade him to remain loyal to his leadership. Stalin asked him to leave Leningrad to join him in Moscow. Stalin wanted Kirov in a place where he could keep a close eye on him. When Kirov refused, Stalin knew he had lost control over his protégé.
Budget not bold enough, says Norris

Norris suggested this week that sitting ministers would have an unfair advantage if they remained in cabinet.

Mark Norris, a former cabinet minister who lost his seat in the 2004 election, said he's glad to see Stelmach stepping away from cabinet to focus on the leadership.

"I was a little surprised that it happened this early, but I'm very happy about it," Norris said in an interview. "It's going to be good to get this race going."

Norris said he's been paying all of his own leadership expenses and he'll be glad to see more of the candidates doing the same, especially cabinet ministers.

"It'll not only put interest into the race, but interest back into the party."

Norris, the 43-year-old Edmonton businessman and former Alberta economic development minister who is chock-a-block with fresh, concrete ideas delivered with a folksy, Ralphy kind of charm.

Norris wants to better care for Alberta's seniors and disabled, believes in strategic investing at all levels of education, would institute a two-term limit for a premier and set election dates for the province.

But it's Norris' willingness to play hardball with the feds and even lead this province down the road of separation if necessary that will set him apart from the others running in this race.


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Dave Hancock
Genrikh Yagoda

Yagoda was a close friend of Joseph Stalin and in 1934 he was put in charge of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). In 1936 Yagoda arrested Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, and fourteen others and accused them of being involved with Leon Trotsky in a plot to murder Joseph Stalin and other party leaders. All of these men were found guilty and were executed on 25th August, 1936.


Klein's rebate musings anger many in party
Short-term view slammed by leadership hopefuls

Advanced Education Minister and leadership hopeful Dave Hancock also indicated he's not too keen on the idea of more cheques. Rather, the dollars should be invested in endowment funds and savings accounts, he said.

"My priority is that non-renewable resource revenue should be saved for the future in a manner which can expand our economy, expand our society and pay dividends long-term into the future," Hancock said Tuesday.

11. This could change everything for Dave Hancock's leadership bid. Over the past week, I was beginning to be convinced that Advanced Education Minister Dave Hancock would drop out of the race in the face of Klein's June 1st deadline, but I now think he may stick around the racetrack. Though I don't think he stands much of a chance at winning the leadership, I think he could probably top the list of "best Tory Premiers Alberta never had." Daveberta

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Iris Evans Alexandra Kollanti

Evans gives Klein healthy boost

Alberta Health Minister Iris Evans says she's squarely behind Premier Ralph Klein and his leadership.

When Joseph Stalin gained power he sent Kollantai abroad as a diplomat. This included periods in Norway (1923-25), Mexico (1925-27), Norway (1927-30) and Sweden (1930-45). Kollantai retired in 1945 and lived in Moscow until her death on 9th March, 1952. She was the only major critic of the Soviet government that Joseph Stalin did not exterminate.



Sunday, November 26, 2023

The Wood Theft Laws and the beginnings of Marxism

Submitted by Zac Muddle
 14 November, 2023 - 
 Author: John Cunningham

LONG READ



Introduction


In the Ariège Department in Pyrenean France, between 1829 – 1831, men dressed up as women revolted against their landowners in what became known, curiously, as the ‘Girl’s War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ (Guerre Des Demoiselles). 

They were trying to protect their long held right to forage for firewood and graze their animals in the forests. A new forestry code passed in 1827 denied them this right and the rebellion spread across the region with many pitched battles taking place. So strong was feeling amongst the local populace that it became difficult to recruit anyone for the mayoralty lest they became ‘tainted’ with the detested new laws. The resistance of the ‘Maidens’ continued sporadically until 1872. Around the same time, over in the Rhineland, a part of Prussia, peasants hired a local Advocate (roughly equivalent to a lawyer in the British legal system), one Heinrich Marx of Trier, to fight a court case on their behalf in an attempt to affirm and uphold their long held right to collect firewood from the forests around Koblenz. The legal proceedings ran on for a staggering 27 years (outlasting Heinrich by seven years), prompting his slightly more famous son, Karl, (left) to write a series of articles in a liberal-radical newspaper (Rheinische Zeitung, RZ) about what became known as the Wood Theft Laws. What connects these two historical events, separated by geography and a few years? The answer is simple and complex at the same time: in both cases rural communities were denied a long established right to help themselves to firewood from the forests and surrounding woods. It sounds unimportant, trivial even, yet it became a burning issue – if somewhat localised – of the time, evoked much controversy and was indicative of wider and deeper trends. It was also important for the political development of the young Karl Marx.

All over Europe ideas and practices about ownership and inherited rights were in flux as economic needs, modes of production and demographic patterns changed. The last vestiges of feudalism were being erased and replaced by the new, dynamic yet more brutal mode of capitalism. The court case pursued by Heinrich Marx began when Karl was only nine yet it ran on into his adulthood and, in total he wrote five articles for the Rheinische Zeitung on this issue, all in 1842. It was not the first of his forays into radical journalism but it was one of the most important for the future author of The Communist Manifesto, written at a time when ‘Marxism’ was unheard of and the word ‘communism’ was being used for the first time in Germany. The young journalist from Trier, on the banks of the Moselle, considered himself a radical liberal, certainly not a communist or any of those other new-fangled labels that were just starting to circulate and soon to become common currency in Europe and elsewhere, particularly in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848-9 and beyond. Socialist and communist thought (the two terms were interchangeable at this time) began to take root in Germany in 1842 starting with a key publication: Lorenz von Stein’s ‘The Socialism and Communism of Present Day France’. This book had strange origins particularly in light of the role it would later play. It was originally commissioned by the Prussian government and planned as a report on the influence of leftist ideas among German immigrant workers in Paris. Stein was no socialist but inadvertently his book became widely read and helped spread the ideas of socialism in Germany (no doubt to the embarrassment of the Prussian government).

Throughout Europe, for generations, those who worked on the land (loosely labelled as ‘peasants’, although this was not in any sense a homogenous class), had certain rights. In England these rights went as far back as the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). For our purposes there were two main elements to this entitlement: firstly, the right to access common land to graze pigs and cattle and secondly the right to access the forests to gather firewood for domestic use. In some areas wood-burning to make charcoal was also included in these rights although the charcoal burners and wood gatherers would occasionally clash. The situation varied from place to place: killing a deer generally brought severe retaliations from landowners but catching the odd rabbit for the pot was sometimes allowed, likewise fishing in rivers was permitted in some areas but banned in others. Collecting the ‘fruits of the forest’ (mushrooms, berries, nuts etc.) was also part of this complex and varied but well-established package of rights. There were other activities such as gleaning (scouring fields after the harvest for left-over grain
‘The Gleaners’ (Les Glaneuses) by Jean Francois Millet, completed in 1857. Gleaning, although somewhat outside of the terms of our discussion, was another ancient right which came under attack from farmers and landowners and was fiercely contested by the French peasantry. The practice continues to this day and modern day gleaners can also be found in those groups who search the ‘waste’ bins of supermarkets to procure foodstuffs which are still edible, as depicted in Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000).

And other crops such as grapes left on the vine) which existed as long-established rights and they too came under attack. The extent to which the peasantry relied on these rights to survive (particularly in times of a bad harvest or a harsh winter) is hard to assess but it can be said with some certainty that the right to gather wood for the home fire was essential for heating and cooking, without which life would be grim indeed. The erosion of the right of access to common land and the forests was fiercely contested. Peasants would often engage in stand-up fights with the landowners and their stewards and bailiffs and it was not unusual for the military or police to be called in to crack open a few peasant skulls. In one notorious instance in the village of Newton on 8 June 1607 in Northamptonshire, England, over 40 villagers were killed in fighting. While this was an exceptional case, deaths were not uncommon. The erosion of commons rights was an issue, but not the main one in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and was a central motivating element in the Jack Cade Revolt of 1450 and Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 (all in England). It was also a concern of the Levellers and Diggers during the period of the English Revolution. In Scotland the Highland Clearances (roughly 1750-1850) took on an exceptionally brutal aspect as whole families were forced off their land to make way for sheep rearing, many being forced to emigrate to North America.

In Switzerland, herdsmen take their cattle to the commons for summer grazing. From ‘A Short History of Enclosure’ by Simon Fairlie in The Land No. 7. Summer 2009.

In England, common land was closed off mainly for sheep grazing in order to supply the growing and extremely lucrative wool trade. By the reign of Henry V (1413-1422) around 63% of the Crown’s total income came from a tax on wool exports. Wool was big business – the commons simply got in the way. It was a long process and there had already been many enclosures before the first enclosure facilitated by an Act of Parliament in 1604 (there were others). In practice, this meant that a landowner had simply to apply for an enclosure to Parliament and it was usually granted. Many more applications were to follow, over 5,200 individual cases. To take just one of a myriad of examples: the last enclosure in the Sheffield area occurred in 1837 when 1,200 acres in the district of Totley were enclosed. The last enclosure in Britain, astonishingly, occurred as late as 1914! On mainland Europe the seizure of the commons did not always lead to such confrontational and bloody showdowns as at Newton but nevertheless the peasantry of the Rhineland, France, Sicily (which enclosed its commons in 1789) and elsewhere fought to protect their ancient rights, whether through the courts or through guerilla warfare, acts of sabotage or open conflict. The resort to the courts, as in the Rhineland, was unusual as legal cases were often too expensive a course to pursue and, of course, the judges were frequently drawn from the landowning class. This was not a time for the faint-hearted, many were prepared to stand up and fight for what they saw as their inalienable rights and death threats were not unusual, though it is not possible to know how many were actually ever carried out. The anonymous sentiments expressed below were probably not that usual, though in this particular case, the Lord of the Manor, wasn’t gunned down in the street.

Anonymous letter received by John Edward Dorington (and his son) Lord of the Manor, Gloucestershire, England, in 1864:

‘You are robbing the working class of the Parish and their offspring for ever in fact you are not gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it [the common land] is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on the lookout for you both and so help my God I am on the alert for you and if I have one chance of you I will shoot you as dead as mortal.’

To put it simply: firewood ceased to be something you picked up on the floor of a nearby forest and took home; it became a commodity to be sold on the market, as explained by Karl Kautsky in the first of his two volume work The Agrarian Question, written in 1899,


Once urbanisation had made wood into a desirable commodity – and in the absence of coal or iron a much more important building material and fuel than now – the feudal lords tried to grab forest lands, either by taking them off the Mark [German village with a strong communal ethos] communities to whom they belonged, or, where they themselves owned them, by restricting peasant access for the collection of wood and straw for grazing. (Kautsky 24)

As in Britain this was no recent development. Over 350 years before Kautsky put pen to paper, the rebellious peasants of the 1525 Peasant War, issued a famous statement of their beliefs. The peasants, ill-equipped and with little or no military training, were slaughtered at the Battle of Frankenhauser (15 May 1525) but they left to posterity their famous Twelve Articles, drawing attention to their ancient rights such as wood gathering and couched in the religious idiom of the time. The famous leader of the peasants, Thomas Muntzer did not write this but he penned a supporting document, The Constitutional Draft. Sections four and five of the Twelve Articles read as follows:

The Fourth Article. – In the fourth place it has been the custom heretofore, that no poor man should be allowed to catch venison or wild fowl or fish in flowing water, which seems to us quite unseemly and unbrotherly as well as selfish and not agreeable to the word of God. In some places the authorities preserve the game to our great annoyance and loss, recklessly permitting the unreasoning animals to destroy to no purpose our crops which God suffers to grow for the use of man, and yet we must remain quiet. This is neither godly or neighbourly. For when God created man he gave him dominion over all the animals, over the birds of the air and over the fish in the water. Accordingly it is our desire if a man holds possession of waters that he should prove from satisfactory documents that his right has been unwittingly acquired by purchase. We do not wish to take it from him by force, but his rights should be exercised in a Christian and brotherly fashion. But whosoever cannot produce such evidence should surrender his claim with good grace.

The Fifth Article. – In the fifth place we are aggrieved in the matter of wood-cutting, for the noble folk have appropriated all the woods to themselves alone. If a poor man requires wood he must pay double for it (or, perhaps, two pieces of money). It is our opinion in regard to wood which has fallen into the hands of a lord whether spiritual or temporal, that unless it was duly purchased it should revert again to the community. It should, moreover, be free to every member of the community to help himself to such fire-wood as he needs in his home. Also, if a man requires wood for carpenter’s purposes he should have it free, but with the knowledge of a person appointed by the community for that purpose. Should, however, no such forest be at the disposal of the community let that which has been duly bought be administered in a brotherly and Christian manner. If the forest, although unfairly appropriated in the first instance, was later duly sold let the matter be adjusted in a friendly spirit and according to the Scriptures.

The historian Christopher Clark in his monumental study of 1848-9, Revolutionary Spring, highlights how the enclosures and wood theft laws closed down the open spaces previously accessible to the rural population. The forest skirmishes and land battles in pre-1848 Europe were ‘… often (though not always) rearguard actions against the more homogenous and spatially delimited forms of ownership that would become characteristic of modern society’. (Clark 88) Clark’s academic language should not be allowed to hide the brutal reality of what this meant: hunger, starvation, immiseration and death for thousands of rural people throughout Europe.


In the Rhineland

In Prussia (which included the Rhineland) the issue became so toxic that between 1830-1836, 77% of all prosecutions were concerned, in one way or another, with forestry, hunting and pasture rights. Generally speaking peasants had, under the old system of rights, been allowed to gather wood which was lying on the ground. In some cases there were maximum dimensions to the wood which you could pick and cutting down branches was not allowed and could result in a severe penalty. Now, under the increasing restrictions being introduced even this wasn’t permitted. Given the large number of prosecutions it looks as if this policy was energetically policed by the landowners, through their bailiffs, hired hands and the police and then pursued through the courts.

Urban growth in the Rhineland during the 1800s was the fastest in the whole of what was to become Germany in 1871: The figures below show urbanisation rates (in %) between 1815 – 1850 in the Rhineland.

Although these figures are not as great as some areas in Europe they nevertheless indicate an increasing escalation in the urban population. These people had to be fed and they needed fuel for their fires. Urban growth was to have a profound effect on rural life, not least in the drift of the rural population to toil in the workshops and factories now beginning to develop in the new towns and cities; increasingly the rural economy was geared to feeding the urban population and centuries old patterns of agricultural practice were swept away. Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto, ‘All that was solid melts in the air’ were rarely so appropriate. Wood was now collected by the landowners to be sold on the market in the growing towns and cities. If peasants collected firewood they could not use it for themselves unless they paid for it, or they could sell it to the landowner who in turn would sell it to merchants in the towns, at a profit of course.

Given that his father was the Advocate in the long-running legal battle around the Wood Theft Laws it is hardly surprising that the young Karl Marx became interested in the issue. Marx paid close attention to the debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly about the Wood Theft Laws which took place between 23 May to 25 July. The Rhine Province was created in 1822 from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg; its capital was Koblenz. The Assembly was formed a year later and was hardly democratic. The system of election was based on landownership which gave landowners a comfortable majority when it came to voting. Apparently, he attended all the sessions where the issue was discussed but, for reasons which are not clear, was not supplied with any of the relevant documentation pertaining to the issues raised in the chamber. Fortunately, he was an assiduous note-taker.

He reported, analysed and commented on what he heard in the Rheinische Zeitung (RZ) which had been established in January 1842 with Moses Hess as its editor. In October Marx was appointed to the editorial board. Before looking at what Marx wrote it is worth mentioning that, at this time in his life he was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Hegel who had taught at Berlin University before Marx arrived there. Although Hegel died in November 1831 and Marx arrived in Berlin in October 1836 the Hegelian influence was still very strong. Many of Marx’s early collaborators were Hegelians and he too fell under the spell of this philosopher who did much to shape the intellectual landscape of Germany and other parts of Europe. One result of this philosophical influence is that it renders some of what Marx wrote about the Wood Theft Laws rather abstract. In later years Marx turned away from Hegel (although never totally abandoning him) towards a class analysis based on historical materialism and a concentration on economic analysis as manifested in his monumental study Das Kapital, the first volume being published in German in 1867.

As a contributor and later as an editor on the RZ, Marx addressed a number of issues not least of which was the question of press censorship which was widely practiced at the time and would ultimately signal the death knell for the RZ in 1843. His concern for the Wood Theft Laws could be seen as an element in Marx’s growing awareness of what was often referred to, at the time, as the ‘social question’. There were numerous writings about the social conditions of the newly emergent working class which proliferated in the first half and middle of the 19thC: James Kay, Bettina von Armin, Heinrich Grunholzer, Ange Guépin and Eugene Bonamy were just five of these chroniclers of urban labour, poverty and destitution, to which we must add the classic study, The Condition of the Working Class in England written in 1845 (by which time Marx and his family were living in Belgium) by Marx’s future friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. Hal Draper elaborates,




Concern with the “social question” was not only new, it was the special characteristic of the pioneer socialists and communists whose ranks Marx was still unwilling to join. What was characteristic of these early radicals was that they mostly dissociated the “social question” from the “political question” (gaining freedom in the state) […] It was precisely Marx’s contribution to develop a communism that integrated into one consistent perspective both the battle for political democracy and the struggle on the “social question”. (Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. p. 66)


Marx’s articles in the Rheinische Zeitung

Turning now to what Marx wrote in the RZ about the Wood Theft Laws, it is striking that he expends much energy writing in a mode that, from today’s perspective, could be called satirical (in fact throughout his life Marx displayed an abundant talent for this kind of expression and rarely missed an opportunity to ‘have a go’ at an opponent). He clearly regards the Assembly Deputies as a bunch of idiots and there are many examples of his talent for put-downs and insults, although he mentions no-one by name. Marx’s articles on the Wood Theft Laws are not easy to follow (apart from other considerations he thought the debates were ‘tedious and uninspired’). There are detailed accounts on what constitutes a right, what punishments are appropriate or not and the appointment of Forest Wardens and the role they play; none of which need detain us any further. What follows is an attempt to pick out the main issues and summarise what Marx wrote, not to provide a blow-by-blow account of what transpired in the debating chamber.

His first article (although they are usually referred to as Supplements) appeared in the RZ 298 in 25 Oct. 1842. The other Supplements appeared in No. 300 (27 Oct.), No. 303 (30 Oct.), No. 305 (1 Nov.), No. 307 (3 Nov.). Two main themes soon begin to emerge:

a) the rights of property versus the rights of the people.

b) the relation between the state and the property owner.

One of the key aspects of the wood theft debates is to what extent does an inherited right have over a new law which clearly works to the disadvantage of those who have previously benefitted from the old, well-established practice? Does a new law simply sweep away the old rights? The dynamo of capitalist development was rapidly changing the face of Europe (and the rest of the world would follow), what chance did a relatively small number of peasants in the Rhineland and elsewhere have of maintaining a practice that was perceived by many (particularly landowners) as outmoded and flew in the face of the inexorable march of modernity? What did it matter that a few peasants would have to abandon an age old right and, probably also, at some point, abandon their whole way of life and move to the cities? Why not succumb to the inevitable? Marx did not see it this way, his sympathies were clearly with the wood gatherers.

Marx argued in RZ 300 that ‘Little thought is needed to perceive how one-sidedly enlightened legislation has treated and been compelled to treat the customary rights of the poor…’ (in all quotes from RZ italics are as in the original). The very question of whether wood lying on the floor of the forest was property or not was a matter of debate as was the question, if indeed it was property, to whom did it belong? Marx elaborates,


‘…all customary rights of the poor were based on the fact that certain forms of property were indeterminate in character, for they were definitely not private property, but neither were they definitely not common property being a mixture of public and private right, such as we find in all institutions of the Middle Ages.’

‘Indeterminate’ is a key word here. The wood on the forest floor is not private property (as opposed to the trees themselves). The scattered branches are ‘accidental’ and ‘elemental’ and belong to what Marx called ‘occupation rights’, in other words to ‘those excluded from all other property’ (in this case the peasantry). Marx likened the loose wood to the ‘alms of nature’ and just as the poor could claim alms (money or food distributed to the destitute) which were given out in the street, so they could claim branches and twigs lying on the forest floor. The wood becomes an ‘accidental appendage of property’. The landowners were having none of this – an attitude starkly illustrated by the apparently innocuous practice of picking berries in the forests. Traditionally, this task was left to children and was another long-established customary right. The landowners did away with this practice and the berries too became part of the monopoly of the landowning class. As a Deputy explained in the Assembly and quoted by Marx ‘…in his area these berries have already become articles of commerce and are dispatched to Holland by the barrel.’

What was particularly striking to Marx was the way the Wood Theft Laws represented the power of the landowners over the elements of the state at both regional and local level. The authority of the state has become a servant of the landowners, ‘All the organs of the state become the ears, eyes, arms, legs by means of which the forest owner, observes, appraises, protects, reaches out, and runs.’ (RZ 303) Marx continued on this theme in RZ 305, ‘What then are the harmful results? Harmful is that which is harmful to the interest of the forest owner.’ The Deputies even discussed taking punishment out of the hands of the law and, in effect, giving it to the landowner. The possibility arose of making a convicted wood thief work (unpaid of course) for the landowner meaning that the landowner would actually profit from the activity of the wood thief. In this way crime would ‘pay’ twice over but only for the landowner. Marx, evoking the spirit of Jonathan Swift, commented, ‘We are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with wood thieves.’

In his final article on the Wood Theft Laws (RZ, 307 3 Nov. 1842) Marx attempted to sum up the situation. Private interest (i.e. of the landowners/capitalists) was paramount, all else was subordinate, ‘Our account has shown the Assembly degrades the executive power, the administrative authorities, the life of the accused, the idea of the state, crime itself and punishment as well, to material means of private interest.’ Considering that his father was a legal Advocate it must also have impressed itself upon the young Marx how the law was ‘outvoted’ by the Assembly Deputies. The principles of law, supposedly so sacrosanct to the ruling classes, were sacrificed to the interest of forest protection, for the sole benefit of the landowners,


This abject materialism, this sin against the holy spirit of the people and humanity, is an immediate consequence of the doctrine which the Preussische Staats-Zeitung [Prussian State Gazette – an official publication] preached to the legislator, namely that in connection with the law concerning wood he should think only of wood and forest and should solve each material problem in a non-political way, i.e. without any connection with the whole of the reason and morality of the state.’

The relationship of the state and local authority to the landowner was one which Marx had not yet fully worked out; this would come later beginning in 1843 with some critical notes on Hegel and The German Ideology (written in 1845-6 but not published till much later). At the time Marx has no developed analysis of the state and he expects the state authorities to defend the wood gatherers, which of course, is precisely what did not happen. Another crucial aspect of Marx’s thought, which he is only just beginning to understand, is the notion of class. He does not talk about the working class in his articles on wood theft although he does refer to the poor as the ‘elemental class of human society’. He sees in the poor many virtues and here we can also locate an area where Marx moved away from Hegel. The latter was utterly disdainful of the poor who he referred to as Pöbel (usually translated into English as ‘rabble’). All in all, Marx’s writings on the Wood Theft Laws were important stepping stones in his political development, as mentioned by Hal Draper, ‘His article on the Wood Theft Laws anticipated his critique of Hegel: the Diet debases the state officialdom into “material interests of private interests.” His article on the Moselle peasants emphasised the narrowmindedness of the bureaucratic mentality’. Much later, when Marx was dead, Engels, writing to R. Fischer in 1895, made much the same point, ‘I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood theft laws and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions, and thus came to socialism.’

The Rhineland at this time, although developing quickly was not a place where the industrial bourgeoisie yet held sway and in Germany as a whole, even after 1871, landowners, nobility and the new bourgeoisie all vied for control while keeping an eye over their shoulder at the growing proletariat in the cities. One key aspect of Bismarck’s rule was his attempt, not always successful, to play-off one class or section of a class, against another and later Marx and Engels were to regard his regime as Bonapartist in the same way (though not exactly) as the Bonapartism of the the great Napoleon’s less illustrious, nephew Louis. In time, Germany was to develop as one of the industrial powerhouses of the world, defeating France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, flexing its imperial muscles overseas (in Morocco for example), building a navy, a large army and gearing up for the First World War. None of which would have been possible without a powerful, highly productive industrial base. In this complex and unstoppable process the needs and rights of the Rhineland peasants were swept aside.



Sources and notes:

For general background reading there are a number of biographies of Marx which mention, in varying degrees of depth (and quality), his engagement with the Wood Theft Laws and, although it is not a biography, Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. particularly chap. 2. ‘The Political Apprentice’ is excellent. The reference to the ‘Girls’ War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ can be found in The Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. The full text of the five ‘Wood Theft’ articles by Marx in the RZ can be found in various sources, I used the Marxist Internet Archive website which was also useful for footnotes giving background information (social makeup etc.) to the Assembly. For general background to issues around the question of land, land rights, enclosures etc. the journal The Land proved invaluable; the information about enclosures in Sheffield came from an article by Peter Harvey in the website our Broomhall.org.uk in 1982. The text of the threatening anonymous letter to John Edward Dorington can be found in a review by Dinah Birch of Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters by Emily Cockayne in London Review of Books, 21 Sept. 2023. Karl Kautsky’s classic study The Agrarian Question was published in English (for the first time) in two volumes by Zwan Publications in 1988. The Twelve Articles can be easily found on various websites. Some ideas about Marx and Hegel were derived from Draper (see previous reference) and ‘The Virtue of Poverty: Karl Marx’s Transformation of Hegel’s Concept of the Poor by Erica Sherover, Canadian Journal of Political Social Theory Vol. 3. No. 1 (Winter 1979) pp 53-66. Figures for urban growth in the Rhineland came from: ‘Population Growth and Urbanisation in Germany in the 19th Century’, Jurgen Reulecke in Urbanism Past and Present. No. 4. (Summer, 1977) pp 21-32. Engels’ letter to R. Fischer (15 April, 1895) is quoted in Draper, see previous reference p. 75.

Note on a source not used: For various reasons I was not able to locate a copy of Daniel BensaÑ—d’s The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’ Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor (University of Minnessota Press, Minneapolis, 2021). However, I understand that BensaÑ—d’s text uses Marx’s writings on wood theft primarily to discuss various issues arising in the 21st century and this is outside the remit of my basic introduction to the topic. BensaÑ—d was a highly respected theoretician and activist long associated with the international Trotskyist movement who died in 2010. A beautifully written assessment of his life and work can be found in chapter 11 of Paul Le Blanc’s Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2022).

Cover illustration: Peasants on a path in the forest (oil on panel, painted in 1626) by Jasper van de Lanen of Antwerp (1585-1634).

Thursday, November 19, 2020

 Maximilien Rubel 1973

Marx, theoretician of anarchism


SourceL'Europe en formation, no 163-164, octobre-novembre 1973;
Transcribed: for marxists.org by Adam Buick;
Translated: by Adam Buick;
CopyLeftCreative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.


Marx has been badly served by disciples who have succeeded neither in assessing the limits of his theory nor in determining its standards and field of application and has ended up by taking on the role of some mythical giant, a symbol of the omniscience and omnipotence of homo faber, maker of his own destiny.

The history of the School remains to be written, but at least we know how it came into being: Marxism, as the codification of a misunderstood and misinterpreted body of thought, was born and developed at a time when Marx’s work was not yet available in its entirely and when important parts of it remained unpublished. Thus, the triumph of Marxism as a State doctrine and Party ideology preceded by several decades the publication of the writings where Marx set out most clearly and completely the scientific basis and ethical purpose of his social theory. That great upheavals took place which invoked a body of thought whose major principles were unknown to the protagonists in the drama of history should have been enough to show that Marxism was the greatest, if not the most tragic, misunderstanding of the century. But at the same time this allows us to appreciate the significance of the theory held by Marx that it is not revolutionary ideas or moral principles which bring about changes in society, but rather human and material forces; that ideas and ideologies very often serve only to disguise the interest of the class in whose interests the upheavals take place. Political Marxism cannot appeal to Marx’s science and at the same time escape the critical analysis which that science uses to unmask the ideologies of power and exploitation.

Marxism as the ideology of a master class has succeeded in emptying the concepts of socialism and communism, as Marx and his forerunners understood them, of their original meaning and has replaced it with the picture of a reality which is its complete negation. Although closely linked to the other two, a third concept – anarchism – seems however to have escaped this fate of becoming a mystification. But while people know that Marx had very little sympathy for certain anarchists, it is not so generally known that despite this he still shared the anarchist ideal and objectives: the disappearance of the State. It is therefore pertinent to recall that in embracing the cause of working class emancipation, Marx started off in the anarchist tradition rather than in that of socialism or communism; and that, when finally he chose to call himself a “communist,” for him this term did not refer to one of the communist currents which then existed, but rather to a movement of thought and mode of action which had yet to be founded by gathering together all the revolutionary elements which had been inherited from existing doctrines and from the experience of past struggles.

In the reflections which follow we will try to show that, under the name communism, Marx developed a theory of anarchism; and further, that in fact it was he who was the first to provide a rational basis for the anarchist utopia and to put forward a project for achieving it. In view of the limited scope of the present essay we will only put this forward as an item for discussion. Proof by means of quotations will be reduced to a minimum so as to better bring out the central argument: Marx theoretician of anarchism.

I

When in Paris in February 1845, on the eve of his departure for exile in Brussels, Marx signed a contract with a German publisher he committed himself to supplying in a few months a work in two volumes entitled “A Critique of Politics and Political Economy” without suspecting that he had imposed on himself a task which would take up his while life and of which he would be able to carry out only a largish fragment.

The choice of subject was no accident. Having given up all hope of a university career, Marx had carried over into his political journalism the results of his philosophical studies. His articles in the Rheinische Zeitung of Cologne led the fight for freedom of the press in Prussia in the name of a liberty which he conceived of as the essence of Man and as the attire of human nature; but also in the name of a State understood as the realisation of rational freedom, as “the great organism, in which legal, moral, and political freedom must be realised, and in which the individual citizen in obeying the laws of the state only obeys the natural laws of his own reason, of human reason.”[1] But the Prussian censorship soon silenced the philosopher-journalist. Marx, in the solicitude of a study retreat, did not take long to ask himself about the real nature of the State and about the rational and ethical validity of Hegel’s political philosophy. We know what was the fruit of this meditation enriched by the study of the history of the bourgeois revolutions in France, Great Britain and the United States: apart from an incomplete and unpublished work, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State (1843), two polemical essays, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question (Paris, 1844). These two writings in fact form a single manifesto in which Marx identifies once and for all and condemns unreservedly the social institutions – the State and Money – which he saw as at the origin of the evils and defects from which modern society suffered and would go on suffering until a new social revolution came to abolish them. At the same time Marx praised the force – the modern proletariat – which, after having been the main victim of these two institutions, was going to put an end to their reign as well as to every other form of class domination, political and economic. The self-emancipation of the proletariat would be the complete emancipation of humanity; after the total loss of humanity the total victory of the human.

In the intellectual development of Marx the rejection of the State and Money and the affirmation that the proletariat was a liberating class came before his studies of political economy; they preceded also his discovery of the materialist conception of history, the “guiding line” which directed his later historical researches. His break with Hegel’s philosophy of law and politics on the one hand and his critical study of bourgeois revolutions on the other allowed him to establish clearly the ethical postulates of his future social theory for which the scientific basis was to be provided by the critique of political economy. Having understood the revolutionary role of democracy and legislative power in the genesis of the bourgeois State and governmental power, Marx made use of the illuminating analysis of two shrewd observers of the revolutionary possibilities of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Hamilton, to lay down a rational basis for an anarchist utopia as the conscious aim of the revolutionary movement of the class which his master Saint Simon had called “the most numerous and most poor.” Since the critique of the State led him to envisage the possibility of a society free from all political authority, he had to go on to make a critique of the economic system which ensured the material basis of the State. The ethical rejection of money also implied an analysis of political economy, the science of the enrichment of some and of the impoverishment of others. Later he was to describe the research he was about to begin on the “anatomy of bourgeois society” and it was by engaging in this work of social anatomy that he was to work out his methodology. Later the rediscovery of the Hegelian dialectic would help him to establish the plan of the “Economy” under six “headings” or “books”: Capital, Landed Property, Wage Labour; The State, Foreign Trade, World Market (see Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). In fact, this double “triad” of items for research corresponds to the two problems which he had proposed to deal with fourteen years previously in the work which was to contain a critique of both political economy and politics. Marx began his work with the critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production, but he hoped to live and work long enough not only to complete this but also, once he had completed the first triad of headings, to begin on the second triad which would thus have found the Book on the State.[2] The theory of anarchism would thus have found in Marx its first recognised exponent without there being any need to prove this indirectly. The misunderstanding of the century of Marxism as an ideology of the State was the result of the fact that Marx never wrote this book. It was this which has allowed the masters of a State apparatus labelled socialist to include Marx among the proponents of State socialism or communism, indeed even of “authoritarian” socialism.

Certainly, like every revolutionary teaching, that of Marx is not free from ambiguities. It is by cleverly exploiting these ambiguities and by referring to certain personal attitudes of the master that some of his unscrupulous disciples have succeeded in putting his work at the service of doctrines and actions which represent, in relation to both its basic truth and its declared objective, its complete negation. At a time when many decades of regression in human relations have called into question all theories, values, systems and projects, it is important to gather together the intellectual heritage of an author who, aware of the limits of his research, made the call for critical self-education and revolutionary self-emancipation the permanent principle of the workers’ movement. It is not up to posterity burdened with overwhelming responsibilities to judge a man who can no longer plead his cause; but on the other hand it is our duty to take up a teaching which was completely oriented towards the future, a future which certainly became our catastrophic present but which mostly still remains to be created.

II

We repeat: the “Book” on the State, foreshadowed in the plan of the Economy but which remained unwritten, could only have contained the theory of society freed from the State, anarchist society. Although not directly intended for this work, the materials and works prepared or published by Marx in the course of his literary activity allow us both to put forward this hypothesis about the content of the planned work and to work out what its general structure would have been. While the first triad of headings was part of the critique of political economy, the second would have put forward essentially a critique of politics. Following on from the critique of capital, the critique of the State would have established what determined the political evolution of modern society, just as the purpose of Capital (followed by the Books on “Landed Property” and “Wage Labour”) was to “lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society” (cf. Preface to Capital, 1867). In the same way that the principles and postulates which motivated Marx when making his critique of capital are to be found in his published and unpublished writings prior to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), so we can extract from these writings those which would have guided him in developing his criticism of the State. It would however be a mistake to suppose that at this time Marx’s thought on the nature of politics was established in its final form, with no possibility of modifying details and closed to all theoretical enrichment. Quite the contrary. The problem of the State never ceased to concern Marx not only because he failed to keep the moral engagement to finish his master work, but above all because it was constantly kept in his mind by his participation and polemical confrontations after September 1864 within the International Workingmen’s Association and by political events, particularly the rivalry for leadership between France and Prussia on the one hand and Russia and Austria on the other. The Europe of the Treaty of Vienna had then become no more than a fiction, while two important social phenomena had made their appearance on the scene of history: movements for national liberation and the workers’ movement. The struggle between nations and the class struggle, which were difficult to reconcile from a purely conceptual point of view, were to raise problems of theory requiring decisions by Marx and Engels which could not but bring them into contradiction with their own revolutionary principles. Engels made a speciality of differentiating between peoples and nations according to how, in his eyes, they could or could not claim the historical right to national existence. Their sense of historical realities prevented the two friends from following Proudhon in the way of a federalism which, in the situation of the time, must have seemed both a pure abstraction and an impure utopia; but they risked falling into a nationalism which was incompatible with the universalism of the modern proletariat they had posited.

If Proudhon, by his federalist aspirations, seems to be nearer than Marx to the anarchist position, the picture changes when we consider Proudhon’s overall conception of the reforms which should lead to the abolition of capital and the State. The almost excessive praise of which Proudhon is the object in the Holy Family (1845) should not mislead us. From this time on there were deep theoretical differences between the two men; the praise had only been conceded to the French socialist with a very important reservation: Proudhon’s critique of property was implicit in the bourgeois economic system, but however valid it might be it did not call into question the social relations of the system which it criticised. Quite the contrary. In Proudhon’s doctrine, the economic categories, which were theoretical expressions of the institutions of capital, were all systematically preserved. Proudhon’s merit was to have revealed the inherent contradictions of economic science and to have shown the immorality of bourgeois morality and law; his weakness was to have accepted the categories and institutions of the capitalist economy and to have respected, in his programme of reforms and solutions, all the instruments of the bourgeois class and its political power: wages, credit, banks, exchange, price, value, profit, interest, taxes, competition, monopoly. After applying the dialectic of the negation in his analysis of the evolution of law and legal systems, he stopped half-way by not extending his critical method of the negation to the capitalist economy. Proudhon opened the way for such a criticism, but it was Marx who was to create this new method of criticism and to try to use it as a weapon in the struggle of labour against capital and the State.

Proudhon had made his critique of bourgeois economics and law in the name of bourgeois morality; Marx was to make his criticism in the name of proletarian ethics, whose standards of judgement were taken from quite a different vision of human society. To do this he only had to follow to its logical conclusion Proudhon’s – or rather Hegel’s – principle of negation: the Justice of which Proudhon dreamed could only be established by the negation of justice just as philosophy could only be put into practice by the negation of philosophy, i.e., by a social revolution which would at last allow humanity to become social and society to be become human. This would be the end of the pre-history of humanity and the beginning of individual life, the appearance of fully-developed Man, with all-round faculties, the coming of complete Man. Marx opposed the realist morality of Proudhon, which sought to save the “good side” of bourgeois institutions, with the ethic of a utopia whose demands would be measured by the possibilities offered by a science and technology sufficiently developed to provide for the needs of the race. Marx opposed an anarchism which respected the plurality of classes and social categories, which favoured the division of labour and which was hostile to the associationists proposed by the utopians, with an anarchism which rejected social classes and the division of labour, a communism which took over all in utopian socialism that could be achieved by a proletariat which was conscious of its emancipating role and which had become master of the forces of production. However, in spite of these divergent means – in particular, as we shall see, a different attitude towards political action – the two types of anarchism aimed at a common end which the Communist Manifesto defined in these terms:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

III

Marx refused to invent recipes for the cooking pots of the future, but he did better – or worse – than this: he wanted to show that historical necessity – like some blind fate – was leading humanity to a situation of crisis where it would face a decisive dilemma: to be destroyed by its own technical inventions or to survive thanks to a leap in consciousness which would allow it to break with all the forms of alienation and servitude which had marked the stages of its history. Only this dilemma was fated, the actual choice would be left to the social class which had every reason to reject the existing order and to establish a fundamentally different mode of existence. The modern proletariat was potentially the material and moral force that was capable of taking up this universally significant task of salvation. However this potential force could not become real until the bourgeois period had been completed. For the bourgeoisie too had a historical role to play. If it had not always been conscious of this, then its apologists had had the task of reminding it of its civilising role. In creating the world in its image, the bourgeoisie of the industrially developed countries embourgeoisified and proletarianised the societies which progressively fell under its political and economic control. Seen from the viewpoint of proletarian interests, these instruments of conquest, capital and the State, were just means of servitude and suppression, but when the relations of capitalist production and therefore of capitalist States had been firmly established on a world scale, then the internal contradictions of the world market would reveal the limits of capital accumulation and provoke a state of permanent crisis which would endanger the foundations of the enslaved societies and threaten the very survival of the human race. The hour of the proletarian revolution would sound the world over.

By extrapolating reasonably we have been able to see the logical conclusions of the dialectical method employed by Marx in laying bare the economic law of movement of modern society. We could back up this view with textual references beginning with the remarks on methodology which can be gleaned from many of Marx’s writings dating from different periods. It is no less true that the hypothesis which Marx most frequently offers us in his political works is that of the proletarian revolution in the countries which have known a long period of bourgeois civilization and capitalist economy; such a revolution would mark the beginning of a process of development which would gradually involve the rest of the world, historical progress being hastened through the revolution being contagious. But whatever the hypothesis Marx had in mind, one thing is clear: his social theory had no place for a third revolutionary way where countries which lacked the historical experience of developed capitalism and bourgeois democracy would show the way to proletarian revolution to countries which had had a long capitalist and bourgeois past.

We recall with particular insistence these elementary truths of the conception of history called materialist because the Marxist mythology born with the 1917 Russian revolution has succeeded in imposing on the uniformed – and they were legion – another view of the process of this revolution: humanity divided into two economic and political systems, the capitalist world dominated by the industrially developed countries and the socialist world the model for which, the USSR, had reached the rank of second world power following a “proletarian” revolution. In fact, the industrialisation of Russia has been due to the creation and exploitation of an immense proletariat and not to its triumph and abolition. The fiction of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” forms part of the arsenal of ideas which the new masters have imposed in the interests of their own power: six decades of nationalist and military barbarism on a world scale explain the mental confusion of an intelligentsia which has been completely misled by the myth of “socialist October.” [3]

Since we cannot deepen the discussion here we will restrict ourselves to expressing our point of view in the form of an alternative: either the materialist theory of social development has some scientific validity – Marx himself was naturally persuaded of this – and in this case the “socialist” world is a myth or the socialist world really exists and the materialist theory of social development is completely and totally invalidated. On the first hypothesis the myth of the socialist world is perfectly explained: it would be the fruit of a well-organised ideological campaign by the “first workers’ State” aimed at disguising its real nature. On the second hypothesis the materialist theory of how the world would become socialist would certainly be disproved, but the ethical and utopian demands of Marx’s teaching would have been achieved; in other words, refuted by history as a man of science, Marx would have triumphed as a revolutionary.

The myth of “really existing socialism” has been constructed in order to morally justify one of the most powerful forms of dominating and exploitative society that history had known. The problem of the nature of this society has completely confused those most informed about the theories, doctrines and ideas which together form the intellectual heritage of socialism, communism and anarchism. Of these three schools – or currents – of the movement of ideas which seeks a fundamental change in human society, anarchism has suffered the least from this perversion. Not having created a real theory of revolutionary practice, it has been able to preserve itself from the political and ideological corruption which has struck the two other schools of thought. Originating from dreams and longings for the past as well as from rejection and revolt, anarchism was formed as a radical criticism of the principle of authority in all its forms, and it is above all as such that it was incorporated into the materialist conception of history. This latter is essentially the view that the historical evolution of humanity passes by progressive stages from a permanent state of social antagonism to a mode of existence based on social harmony and individual development. The common aim of pre-Marxian radical and revolutionary doctrines became an integral part of Marx’s anarchist communism just as the social criticism transmitted by the anarchist utopia had. With Marx, utopian anarchism was enriched by a new dimension, that of the dialectical understanding of the workers’ movement as an ethical self-liberation embracing the whole of humanity. The dialectical element in a theory claiming to be scientific, indeed naturalistic, caused an intellectual strain which was inevitably the source of the fundamental ambiguity with which Marx’s teaching and activity is indelibly marked. Marx, who was a militant as well as a theorist, did not always seek to harmonise in his political activity the ends and means of anarchist communism. But the fact that he failed as a militant does not mean that he therefore ceased to be the theoretician of anarchism . It is thus right to apply to his own theory the ethical thesis which he formulated with regard to Feuerbach’s materialism (1845):

“The question whether human thinking can pretend to objective truth is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the ‘this-sideness’ of his thinking in practice” . [4]

IV

The negation of the State and capitalism by the most numerous and most poor class appears in Marx as an ethical imperative before he demonstrated dialectically that it was a historical necessity. In its first form, in Marx’s critical assessment of the French Revolution, it represented a decisive choice to be made: the objective which according to Marx humanity should strive to achieve. This objective was precisely human emancipation by going beyond political emancipation. The freest political State – of which the Unites States of America provided the only example – made Man a slave because it intervened as mediator between Man and his freedom, just like the Christ in whom the religious person vests his own divinity. Man when politically emancipated still only had an imaginary sovereignty. As a sovereign being enjoying the Rights of Man he led a double existence: that of a citizen of the political community and that of an individual member of society; that of a heavenly and that of an earthly being. As a citizen he was free and sovereign in the skies of politics, that universal kingdom of equality. As an individual he was degraded in his real life, bourgeois life, and reduced to the level of a means for his neighbour; he was the plaything of alien forces, material and moral, such as the institutions of private property, culture, religion, etc. Bourgeois society separated from the political State was the realm of egoism, of the war of each against all, of the separation of man from man. Political democracy had not freed Man from religion by ensuring his religious liberty, any more than it freed him from property in guaranteeing him the right to property. Similarly when it granted everyone the freedom to choose his occupation political democracy maintained occupational slavery and egoism. Bourgeois society was the world of trafficking and profiting, the reign of money, the universal power which had subjected politics and hence the State.

Such, in summary, was Marx’s initial thesis. It was a critique of the State and capital and it belonged to anarchist thought rather than to any socialism or communism. There was not yet anything scientific about it, but it implicitly appealed to and based itself on an ethical conception of the destiny of humanity in that it insisted on the need of doing something within the framework of historical time. This is why he did not just make a critique of political emancipation – that it reduced man to being an egoistic monad and an abstract citizen – but put forward both the end to be achieved and the means of achieving it:

“Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.” [5]

Marx developed his own theory by starting from the Social Contract of Rousseau, the theoretician of the abstract citizen and precursor of Hegel. Rejecting only partially the political alienation which these two thinkers proposed, he arrived at the vision of a human and social emancipation that would re-establish the individual as a complete being with fully developed faculties. This rejection was only partial because this state of political alienation, as a fact of history, could not be abolished by an act of will. Political emancipation was “a great progress,” it was even the last form of human emancipation within the established order, and it is as such that it could serve as a means to overthrow this order and inaugurate the stage of real human emancipation. The means and the end were dialectical opposites but were reconciled ethically in the consciousness of the modern proletariat which thus became the bearer and historical subject of the revolution. The proletariat, as a class in which were concentrated all the evils and which embodied the well-known crimes of all society, possessed a universal character as a result of its universal poverty. It could not emancipate itself without emancipating all spheres of society, and it was by putting into practice the demands of this ethic of emancipation that it would abolish itself as a proletariat.

Where Marx speaks of philosophy as the “head” and intellectual arm of the human emancipation of which the proletariat would be the “heart,” we prefer to speak of an ethic in order to show that it is not a question of metaphysical speculation but a problem of existence: people should not interpret a caricature of the world but should change it by giving it a human face. No speculative philosophy had any solution to offer Man for his problems of existence. This was why Marx, when he made the revolution a categorical imperative, reasoned from a normative ethic and not from a philosophy of history or a sociological theory. Because he could not and did not want to limit himself to a purely ethical demand for the regeneration of humanity and society Marx’s interest was then aroused by one particular science: the science of the production of the means of existence according to the law of capital.

Marx thus undertook the study of political economy as a means of struggling for the cause to which from that time on he was to devote his whole declassé “bourgeois” existence. What till then had only been a visionary institution and an ethical choice was to become a theory of economic development and a study of what determined societies. But it was also to be active participation in the social movement whose task was to put into practice the ethical demands which derived from the conditions of existence of the modern proletariat. Both the vision of a society without State, without classes, without monetary exchange, without religious and intellectual fears and the analysis which revealed the process of evolution that would lead by successive steps to forms of anarchist and communist society implied a theoretical critique of the capitalist mode of production. Marx was to write later:

“Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement . . . it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.” ( Preface to Capital, Volume I)

In short, Marx set out to demonstrate scientifically what he was already persuaded of intuitively and what appeared to him to be ethically necessary. It was in his first attempt at a critique of political economy that he came to analyse capital from a sociological point of view as the power to command labour and its products, a power which the capitalist possessed not by virtue of his personal or human qualities but as the owner of property. The wages system was a form of slavery; any authoritarian raising of wages would only mean better rations for the slaves:

“Even the equality of wages, which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.” [6]

Economic slavery and political servitude went together. Political emancipation, i.e., the recognition of the Rights of Man by the modern State, had the same significance as the recognition of slavery by the State of antiquity (The Holy Family, 1845). The worker was a slave to his paid occupation and also to his own egoistic needs experienced as alien needs. People were just as much subject to political servitude in the democratic representative State as in a constitutional monarchy. “In the modern world, everybody is at the same time a slave and a member of the community,” although the servitude of bourgeois society takes the form of the maximum of freedom (ibid.). Property, industry and religion, which are generally regarded as guarantees of individual liberty, were in fact institutions which sanctified this state of servitude. Robespierre, Saint-Just and their partisans failed because they did not distinguish antiquity based on real slavery from the modern representative State based on emancipated slavery, i.e., bourgeois society with its universal competition, its unbridled private interests and its alienated individualism. Napoleon, who understood perfectly the nature of the modern State and modern society, considered the State as an end in itself and bourgeois society as the instrument of his political ambitions. To satisfy the egoism of the French nation, he instituted permanent war in place of permanent revolution. His defeat confirmed the victory of the liberal bourgeoisie which in 1830 was finally able to make its dreams of 1789 become true: to make the constitutional representative State the social expression of its monopoly of power and sectional interests.

Marx, as a permanent observer of both the political evolution and economic development of French society, was constantly concerned with the problem of Bonapartism. [7] He considered that the French Revolution was the classic period of the political idea and that the Bonapartist tradition was a constant of the internal and external politics of France. He also outlined a theory of modern Caesarism which, even if it seemed to contradict in part the methodological principles of his theory of the State, did not modify his initial anarchist vision. For at the very time he was getting ready to set out the basic principles of his materialist conception of history he had formulated the following conception of the State which places him amongst the most radical anarchism:

“The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery ... The more powerful a state and hence the more political a nation, the less inclined it is to explain the general principle governing social ills and to seek out their causes by looking at the principle of the state – i.e., at the actual organization of society of which the state is the active, self-conscious and official expression.” [8]

The example of the French Revolution seemed to him at that time to be sufficiently convincing to make him put forward a view which only corresponded in part to the political sociology which he was soon to set out in the German Ideology, but which can be found much later in his reflections on the Second Empire and the 1871 Commune.

“Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social ills to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality. The principle of politics is the will.” [9]

When twenty-seven years later in connexion with the Paris Commune Marx was to return to the historical origins of the political absolutism which the Bonapartist State represented, he was to see in the centralisation carried out by the French Revolution the continuation of the traditions of the monarchy:

“The centralized State machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (enmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent modern society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism ... The first French Revolution with its task to found national unity (to create a nation) . . . was, therefore, forced to develop, what absolute monarchy had commenced, the centralization and organization of State power, and to expand the circumference and the attributes of the State power, the number of its tools, its independence, and its supernaturalist sway of real society . . . Every minor solitary interest engendered by the relations of social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and made independent of it and opposed to it in the form of State interest, administered by State priests with exactly determined hierarchical functions.” [10]

This passionate denunciation of the power of the State in some way sums up all the work of study and critical reflection which Marx carried out in this field: his confrontation with the moral and political philosophy of Hegel; the period during which he worked out the materialist conception of history; his fifteen years of political and professional journalism; and, not to be forgotten, his intense activity within the International Workingmen’s Association. The Commune seems to have given Marx the opportunity to put the finishing touches to his thoughts on the problem for which he had reserved one of the six books of his Economy and to give a picture, if only in outline, of that free association of free men whose coming had been announced by the Communist Manifesto.

“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.” [11]

V

Comparing how the serfs had been emancipated from the feudal regime with the emancipation of the modern working class, Marx noted that, unlike the proletarians, the serfs had to struggle to allow existing social conditions to develop freely and as a result could only arrive at “free labour.” The proletarians, on the other hand, had, in order to affirm themselves as individuals, to abolish their own social condition; since this was the same as that of the whole of society, they had to abolish wage labour. And he added this sentence which from then on was to serve as the theme of both his literary work and his activity as a communist militant:

“Thus they [the proletarians] find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.” [12]

This view, which was nearer to the anarchism of Bakunin than to that of Proudhon, was not uttered in the heat of the moment nor was it the rhetoric of a politician haranguing a workers’ meeting. It was the logical conclusion, expressed as a revolutionary demand, of the whole development of a theory whose purpose was to demonstrate the “historical necessity” of the anarchist commune. In other words, in Marx’s theory, the coming of “human society” was seen as the outcome of a long historical process. Eventually, a social class would arise which would comprise the immense majority of the population of industrial society and which as such would be capable of carrying out a creative revolutionary task. It was to show the logic of this development that Marx sought to establish a causal link between scientific progress – above all that of the natural sciences – and, on the one hand, political and legal institutions and, on the other, the behaviour of antagonistic social classes. Unlike Engels, Marx did not consider that the future revolutionary transformation would take place in the same way as past revolutions, like a cataclysm of Nature crushing men, things and consciousness. With the coming of the modern working class, the human race began the cycle of its real history; it entered on the way of reason and became capable of making its dreams come true and of giving itself a destiny in accordance with its creative faculties. The conquests of science and technology made such an outcome possible, but the proletariat had to intervene in order to prevent the bourgeoisie and capital from changing this evolution into a march into the abyss:

“The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.” [13]

So the proletarian revolution would not be a political adventure; it would be a universal act, carried out consciously by the immense majority of the members of society after they had become conscious of the necessity and the possibility of the total regeneration of humanity. As history had become world history the threat of enslavement by capital and its market extended all over the Earth. As a consequence there had to arise a mass consciousness and will fully oriented towards a fundamental and complete change of human relationships and social institutions. So long as people’s survival is threatened by the danger of a barbarism of planetary dimensions, the communist and anarchist dreams and utopias represent the intellectual source of rational projects and practical reforms which can give the human race the taste of a life according to the standards of a reason and an imagination both oriented towards renewing the destiny of humanity.

There is no leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, as Engels thought, and there cannot be a direct transition from capitalism to anarchism. The economic and social barbarism brought about by the capitalist mode of production cannot be abolished by a political revolution prepared, organised and led by an elite of professional revolutionaries claiming to act and think in the name and for the benefit of the exploited and alienated majority. The proletariat, formed into a class and a party under the conditions of bourgeois democracy, liberates itself by struggling to conquer this democracy: it turns universal suffrage, which up till then had been “an instrument of deception,” into a means of emancipation. A class which comprises the immense majority of modern society only takes alienating political action in order to triumph over politics and only conquers State power to use it against the formerly dominant minority. The conquest of political power is by nature a “bourgeois” act; it only becomes a proletarian action by the revolutionary aim which the authors of this overthrow give to it. This is the meaning of the historical period which Marx was not afraid to call the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” precisely to differentiate it from a dictatorship exercised by an elite, dictatorship in the Jacobin and Blanquist sense of the term. Certainly, Marx, in claiming the merit of having discovered the secret of the historical development of modes of production and domination, could not have foreseen that his teaching would be usurped by professional revolutionaries and other politicians claiming the right to personify the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, he only envisaged this form of social transition for countries whose proletariat had been able to make use of the period of bourgeois democracy to create its own institutions and made itself the dominant class in society. Compared with the many centuries of violence and corruption that capitalism had needed to come to dominate the world, the length of the process of transition to anarchist society would be shorter and less violent to the extent that the concentration of political power would bring a mass proletariat face to face with a numerically weak bourgeoisie:

“The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialized production, into socialized property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.” [14]

Marx did not work out all the details of a theory of the transition; in fact noticeably different views can be found in the various theoretical and practical outlines which are scattered throughout his works. Nevertheless, throughout these differences, indeed contradictory statements, a basic principle remains intact and constant to the extent of allowing a coherent reconstruction of such a theory. It is perhaps on this point that the myth of the founding of “Marxism” by Marx and Engels is seen at its most harmful. While the former made the postulate of a proletarian self-activity the criterion of all genuine class action and all genuine conquest of political power, the latter ended up, particularly after the death of his friend, by separating the two elements in the creation of the workers’ movement: the class action – the Selbsttätigkeit – of the proletariat on the one hand and the policy of the party on the other. Marx thought that communist and anarchist self-education was, more than any isolated political act, an integral part of the revolutionary activity of the workers: it was the workers’ task to make themselves fit for the conquest and exercise of political power as a means of resisting attempts by the bourgeoisie to reconquer and recover its power. The proletariat had to temporarily and consciously form itself into a material force in order to defend its right and project to transform society by progressively establishing the Human Community. It was in struggling to affirm itself as a force of abolition and creation that the working class – which “of all the instruments of production is the most productive” – took up the dialectical project of creative negation; it took the risk of political alienation in order to make politics superfluous. Such a project had nothing in common with the destructive passion of a Bakunin or the anarchist apocalypse of a Coeurderoy. Revolutionary purism had no place in this political project whose aim was to make real the potential supremacy of the oppressed and exploited masses. Marx thought that the International Workingmen’s Association, which combined the power of numbers with a revolutionary spirit conceived of in a quite different way from Proudhonian anarchism, could become such a fighting organisation. In joining the IWMA, Marx did not abandon the position he had taken against Proudhon in 1847, when he put forward an anti-political anarchism to be achieved by a political movement:

“Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No ... The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement? Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.” [15]

Marx’s point here is quite realistic and free from all idealism. This address to the future must be clearly understood to be the expression of a normative project committing the workers to behave as revolutionaries while struggling politically. “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing” (letter to J.B. Schweitzer, 1865). This is the language of a thinker whose rigorous dialectic, in contrast to a Proudhon or a Stirner, rejects impressing people by the systematic use of gratuitous paradox and verbal violence. And while everything is not and cannot be settled by this demonstration of means and ends, its merit is at least to urge the victims of alienated labour to understand and educate themselves through undertaking together a great work of collective creation. In this sense, Marx’s appeal remains relevant, despite the triumph of Marxism and even because of it.

The limits of this essay do not allow us to go further in proving this. So we will limit ourselves to citing three texts which demolish in advance the legend – Bakuninist and Leninist – of a Marx “worshipper of the State” and “apostle of State communism” or of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the dictatorship of a party, indeed of a single man:

(a) “Marginal Notes on Bakunin’s book State and Anarchy (Geneva, 1873, in Russian).” Main themes: dictatorship of the proletariat and the maintenance of small peasant property; economic conditions and social revolution; disappearance of the State and the transformation of political functions into administrative functions of self-managed co-operative communes.

(b) Critique of the Programme of the German Workers Party (Gotha Programme) (1875). Main themes: the two phases of communist society based on the co-operative mode of production; the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class; the international action of the working class; criticism of the “iron law of wages”; revolutionary role of workers’ productive co-operatives; primary education freed from the influence of religion and the State; revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as a political transition to the transformation of State functions into social functions.

(c) The Peasant Commune and Revolutionary Perspectives in Russia (Reply to Vera Zasulitch)(1881). Main themes: the rural commune as an element of regeneration of Russian society; ambivalence of the commune and influence of historical background; development of the commune and the crisis of capitalism; peasant emancipation and taxation; negative influences and risks of disappearance of the commune; the Russian commune, threatened by the State and capital, will only be saved by the Russian revolution.

These three documents to some extent make up the essence of the book which Marx considered writing on the State.

It can be seen from these remarks that Marx expressly presented his social theory as an attempt at an objective analysis of a historical movement and not as a moral or political code of revolutionary practice aimed at establishing an ideal society; as the laying bare of a process of development involving things and individuals and not as a collection of rules for use by parties and elites seeking power. This, however, is only the external and declared aspect of a theory which has two conceptual tracks, one rigorously determined, the other freely making its way towards the visionary aim of an anarchist society:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.” [16]

The past is an unchangeable necessity; and the observer, equipped with all the instruments of analysis, is in a position to explain the series of phenomena which have been perceived. But while it is a vain hope that all the dreams which humanity, through its prophets and visionaries, has entertained will come true, the future could at least bring an end to the institutions which have reduced people’s lives to a permanent state of servitude in all social fields. This is, briefly, the link between theory and utopia in the teaching of Marx who expressly proclaimed himself an “anarchist” when he wrote:

“All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement – i.e., abolition of classes – is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.” [17]

Post Script [18]

The essay above does not take into account the ideas of Frederick Engels on the State and anarchism. Without entering into the details of his view, we can say that it does not completely coincide with that of Marx, although it too proposes the final disappearance of the State. The most important passages in this connection are to be found in Anti-Dühring (1877-8) which to some extent had Marx’s imprimatur. Engels here sees the conquest of State power and the transformation of the means of production into State property as the self-abolition of the proletariat and the abolition of class antagonisms, indeed of “the suppression of the State as State.” Further on he describes this “abolition” of the State as “a dying out” of the State: “Der Staat wird nicht ‘abgeschafft’, er stirbt ab.” After Marx’s death, drawing his inspiration from the notes left by his friend on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, Engels again dealt with the subject but in a wider socio-historical context. The highest form of the State, the democratic republic, is considered by Engels as the final phase of politics during which the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat will take place; the exploited class becomes ready for self-emancipation and forms itself into an independent party: “universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class” – and that suffices to do away with capitalism and the State, and hence with class society. “Along with them [i.e., classes] the State will inevitably fall. The society ... will put the whole of the machinery of State where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” [19] See also Engels’s letters to Philip Van Patten of 18 April 1883 and to Edward Bernstein of 28 January 1884. In the latter Engels quotes some passages from the Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and the Communist Manifesto (1848) to prove “that we proclaimed the end ["Aufhören"] of the State before there were really any anarchists.” Engels undoubtedly exaggerated – a mention only of William Godwin would invalidate this view, without referring to the others who were won over to anarchism through reading Political Justice (1793).

Notes


1. “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.” Rheinische Zeitung, 10-14 July 1842.

2. See “plan et méthode de l'Economie” in M. Rubel, Marx, Critique du Marxisme, Payot, Paris, 1974, pp. 369-401.

3. See Marx, Critique du Marxisme, pp. 63-168, for a further development of the themes of the myth of “proletarian October” and of Russian society as a form of capitalism.

4. Second Thesis on Feuerbach, as translated in Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited T.B. Bottomore and M. Rubel, Pelican, 1963, p. 82.

5. “On the Jewish Question,” Deutsch-französische Jarbücher, February 1844.

6. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, section on “Estranged Labour,” 1844.

7. See M. Rubel, Karl Marx devant le bonapartisme, Mouton & Co., Paris-The Hague, 1960.

8. “Critical Remarks on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,” Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844.

9. Ibid.

10. The Civil War in France, First Draft, section on ‘The Character of the Commune’, 1871.

11. Ibid.

12. The German Ideology, 1845, edited by C.J. Arthur, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1970, p. 85.

13. Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper, 14 April 1856.

14. Capital, Vol. I, end of chapter XXXII.

15. Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, chapter II, part 5.

16. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1851.

17. Fictitious Splits in the International, 1872.

18. 1976, for this translation.

19. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, chapter IX.