Anarchism and Marxism PERSONS familiar with «early Marx» might suggest that I have just described uncorrupted Marxism. The matter is worth pursuit both for its own sake - since I believe Marxism and anarchism to represent truly basic alternatives - and in order to bring out other important dimensions of the anarchist Idea, especially its temporallty. Marx might be called a philosophical anarchist in the sense of the phrase that signifies affirmation of anarchy as an ideal without present relevance. The conflict between Marx and the anarchists in the First International makes it clear that Marx did not in organizational practice or revolutionary program share the anarchists' negativity toward power. He demanded control by the central organization over the sections; he insisted on programmatic unity, in effect the enforcement of agreement to truths of a leadership-elite; he destroyed the International rather than permit it to be an association of solidarity in diversity; he emphatically rejected the anarchist thesis that the abolition of the state was a present concern. Anarchist criticism of Marxism, in addition to unjustly identifying Marx with later dialectical materialism, sometimes overstresses the historical personage Karl Marx but, besides foreshadowing the political and tdeological practice of future socialism, including the Leninist monoliths, his behavior reflects his conception of power and freedom. The ideals sometimes (not so very frequently) affirmed in Marxism may not be significantly opposed to those of anarchism; but for all the time between the present and, in Marxism, the eventual realization of the ideal there is systematic variance. For Marx as for Marxism, no-power, to the extent acknowledged, is beyond History, while for anarchists it ls within History, within the present, immanent as potentiality in the present. Anarchism provides, as I have indicated, a critique of the politics of liberation itself - a critique that only a few Marxists have attempted. Basic to Marxism is the view that. economic power is the key to a liberation of which the power of a party, the power of government, and the power of a specific class are (or are to be) instruments. Basic to anarchism is the opposing view that the abolition of dominion and tyranny depends upon their negation, in thought and when possible action, in every form and at every step, from now on, progressively, by every individual and group, in movements of liberation as well as elsewhere, no matter the state of consciousness 33
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