DAVID f. WIECK of entire social classes. Thus, anarch ists see in Marxism an illusion of liberation and the creation of new structures of power that forever defer it and that nullify spontaneous liberations briefly tolerated. Correlatively, in the anarchist view the choices and actions of individuals are important for those persons, for their milieu, and for all of us; in the view of Marxists, collectivities and their act ions alone have significance, are alone objectively real (this has turned out to be the operational meaning of Marx's famous Feuerbach-thesis on the individual). Congruently with theory, the strategi es of Marxist movements have been strategies for conq uest and use of power, strategies of affir,ination of politics. In every country ruled by Marxists the basic politics, i.e. the basic structures of state, have been perpetuated, or if in collap se reinstituted and revivified, a fact that lends support to t he claim that anarchism is the only social philosophy that asse rts an alternative to the politics of power. (Of the various liberalisms, the anarchist critique need not be spelled out.) In the light of the preceding, certa in familiar Marxist polemics against anarchism can be su bjected to inversion: the result is polemical also but perhaps not unfair. Rather than anarchism, it may be Marxism, with it s vision of post-historical transcendence, that is apocalyptic a nd utopian. Anarchism rather than Marxism may be capable of sustaining a conception of genuine social dialectic, for Ma rx's theory of superstructure and the primacy of impersonal economic forces inhibits, if it does not entirely rule out, an ap prehension of continuous interplay among the many arenas o f politics and liberation. It may be anarchism that implies the more complete view of anthropos because it does not by abstraction obsc ure and ignore the psychology and the now so impo rtant sociology of power. And it may be not anarchism but Marxism, with its econocentrism, its controlling dialectic of technology and property, that ls simplistic and naive. In the section that follows, part of the meaning of the above theses will be developed. The New Relevance of Anarchism RECENT REVIVAL of interest in anarchism, and the ten dency of some North American and Western European Marxists to revise Marxism in libertarian dire ctions, allow explanation in terms of the present discussion. 34
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==