I have seen even more recently the absurd claim that Marx was apparently “basically an anarchist”. I feel the need to write another post refuting this idea. My last post only addressed the idea of centralization. Here, I will touch on centralization again, but also moneylessness, the state, and historical materialism.
Marx was not an anarchist in the slightest.
The goals of Marxists and anarchists are nearly polar opposites of one another. Anarchists who claim they are the same point to the fact that both Marxists and anarchists want a stateless, classless, and moneyless society, and therefore we are the same.
However, this is a logical fallacy. This is conflation. When Marxists use the terms stateless, classless, and moneyless, they mean something completely different from what anarchists mean. The fact we use the same language does not mean our goals are the same.
The State
Marxists define the state as a tool of class oppression. Anarchists define the state in terms of hierarchies. Anarchists throughout history have always consistently formed what Marxists would call a state. They have established parliaments, military, police, etc. But anarchists say it is not a state because it is very horizontally organized.
The state…is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.
— Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
The Marxist definition of a state has nothing to do with vertical or horizontal organization or “hierarchies”. So when anarchists claim to have established a “stateless” society, for Marxists, it is not a stateless society. I am sure the same would be true if Marxists ever established a stateless society, that it would probably not be viewed as stateless to anarchists.
Tom Wetzel in his answer even suggests Engels was an anarchist because of some quote from Engels. Let me give you a quote from Engels.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State.
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
There is one dishonest thing some of these anarchists will do whenever you provide them a source where they clearly advocate for the workers to seize state power and transform the means of production into state property. What many anarchists will do is claim that “oh sure they said that, but they changed their mind later on in life.”
This pamphlet I’m quoting was written in 1880. Karl Marx died in 1883. This was not some early world from Engels, it was published shortly before Marx died and well over a decade after the third volume of Capital was published.
Another dishonest thing they will do is point to the fact that Engels says the proletariat “abolishes the state as state” and therefore it’s basically the same as anarchism. But this is incredibly misrepresentative and simply reading the full quote in context makes it obvious what Engels is talking about.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abolished”. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: “a free State”, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Even the quote where he supposedly “agrees” with anarchists, he outright calls out anarchists and makes it clear he does not agree with their views on the state.
When Engels says the state “dies out”, he is using a Marxian definition of the state, not an anarchist definition. The definition I provided prior. The state dying out has nothing to do with vague notions of “hierarchies” or decentralization.
The only reason the state dies out is because Engels defines the state in terms of class oppression. When the proletariat seizes the state and converts all private property into state property, and as a result, all other classes slowly die out, then the state would no longer be a “state”. It would not have any classes to oppress, so it ceases to fit the definition of a “state”.
Many anarchists who want to “claim’ Marx try to dishonestly take Engels’s statements about the state as proof Engels supports anarchist views on the state. When he does not, he is talking about the state dying out in reference to his own definition of what the state is and how it arose. His usage of the state is completely different from the anarchist usage.
When Engels talks about the state “dying out”, he does not mean the proletariat seizes political power then abolishes the state out of hand, which is what anarchists want. He directly makes it clear this is not what he is saying. The state will continue to exist, and only slowing wither away, or “die out”, over a long period of time.
You might ask, “Why doesn’t it disappear immediately? If the proletariat seize state power and the state then represents the interests of society as a whole, why doesn’t the state immediately go away overnight? Wouldn’t that still be possible?”
No.
Engels makes it clear repeatedly that it would be impossible for a socialist revolution to immediately abolish all private property. The extent at which you can abolish private property depends on the level of development of the productive forces. This is something I explain in more detail in this article.
This inherently means that no socialist society will fully be able to abolish all private property immediately. It must be a gradual process because you can only abolish it slowly alongside economic development.
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.
— Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism
If you can’t abolish private property in one stroke, then you can’t abolish the bourgeoisie in one stroke, then you can’t abolish classes in one stroke, then you can’t abolish the state in one stroke.
The proletarian state still must necessarily exist for a long time. A state is a tool of class oppression. The proletarian state would still have a class to oppress for a long time — the bourgeoisie.
It means that so long as the other classes, especially the capitalist class, still exists, so long as the proletariat struggles with it (for when it attains government power its enemies and the old organization of society have not yet vanished), it must employ forcible means, hence governmental means. It is itself still a class and the economic conditions from which the class struggle and the existence of classes derive have still not disappeared and must forcibly be either removed out of the way or transformed, this transformation process being forcibly hastened.
— Karl Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy
Its job is to rapidly encourage economic development which would allow for more and more private property to be centralized in the hands of the state, allowing private property to be very gradually — by degree — abolished.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Hence, the state cannot be abolished in one stroke. It dies down because it takes a lot of time to develop the economy enough so that all private property can be centralized in the hands of the state, and thus a long time for all classes to be abolished. The state can only die down over a long period of time as class distinctions slowly die down.
But who knows how long this can take. No one has ever managed to completely centralize all private property in the hands of the state. Even the USSR failed to do this because it was too underdeveloped and had internal markets.
This is obviously totally different and in no way related to what anarchists mean by abolishing the state. Do anarchists want to take state power for a really really long extended period of time where centralize private property in the hands of the state slowly alongside rapid economic development?
No. Anarchists want largely the opposite. They want decentralization and the state to never hold any power and a transition period that would be incredibly brief.
Moneylessness and Centralization
“Moneyless” is incredibly different as well. When anarchists talk about “moneylessness”, they just mean they want to ban money and replace it with labor vouchers. This is not what Marxists mean by “moneylessness”.
Moneylessness from a Marxist point of view arises from centralization.
Decentralized communes would inevitably try to trade with each other, and this trade lays the foundations for the restoration of money. No one would trade worthless pieces of paper if there is no central bank to verify their worth. They would expect only in trading things with real value, such as trade in gold. When you start trading in things with real value, that is money. The restoration of money would inevitably lead to the restoration of commodity production, and the restoration of commodity production would inevitably lead to the restoration of capitalism.
How do you prevent two communes from trading? It is inevitable that some will find other communes to have things they want, and will trade. Trade only begins as bartering, but a cow producer will quickly find not everyone wants cows, so he will begin bartering his cows for something that he knows is much more commonly desired, such as salt or silver. This makes it easier for them to then barter that more desired thing for something he wants.
In other words, specie money develops to facilitate bartering, a generic commodity comes to be desired by all producers, who then trade that generic commodity for what they want. The people who trade in silver often don’t actually use the silver, it only serves as “the wheel by which commodities are exchanged” as Adam Smith puts it.
If people are trading on a market this implies value. Value holds the germ to the restoration of money. But eventually many producers will begin ramping up production specifically for the purpose of acquiring more money. In other words, the development of commodity production.
The concept of value is the most general and therefore the most comprehensive expression of the economic conditions of commodity production. Consequently, this concept contains the germ, not only of money, but also of all the more developed forms of the production and exchange of commodities. The fact that value is the expression of the social labour contained in the privately produced products itself creates the possibility of a difference arising between this social labour and the private labour contained in these same products. If therefore a private producer continues to produce in the old way, while the social mode of production develops this difference will become palpably evident to him. The same result follows when the aggregate of private producers of a particular class of goods produces a quantity of them which exceeds the requirements of society.
— Friedrich Engels, Anti-Durhing
In other words, capitalism is the natural state of a society of decentralized — but not completely isolated — producers. If producers are decentralized, but they come into contact and want to trade, a market economy is the natural result of this.
What anarchists advocate for from a Marxian analysis would inevitably just lead to the restoration of capitalism.
Engels specifically even criticizes this idea of decentralized communal society in Anti-Durhing. Dühring proposes the same system anarchists want, a decentralized communal society. Engels points out that this society lays the basis for the restoration of exchange.
First, anarchists will say that they will abolish money by decree and replace it with labor vouchers. The obvious problem with this is that labor vouchers have no inherent value, as Engels describes, they are mere “phantoms”, mere “bookkeeping”. A labor voucher is like a movie ticket, only redeemable to the same place that produced it.
This would mean the labor vouchers would be largely worthless to other communes. They could only redeem the labor voucher within the commune itself. If the commune only produces movies, then they could only redeem the vouchers for movies. At that point, why even trade in labor vouchers? Why not just trade directly for movies?
At that point, you basically are just bartering. Trading in labor vouchers would just be an indirect form of barter, and in the same sense, it suffers from all the same inefficiencies as barter. If I produce movies but I want milk, the only way I could get milk from the milk producer is to trade him milk for movies. But what if he doesn’t want movies?
Hence, communes would have a tendency of producing things and then exchanging them directly for something that is more commonly desired. They would accumulate something like salt or silver, and hence, money will return, initially in the form of specie money. Specie money has an inherent value in and of itself.
Since anarchism is not an enforced system, no one could then stop a person from hoarding money. No one could stop a person from passing it down to their children. No one could stop even people loaning out money, causing the return of banking and financing, and thus usury.
Herr Dühring gives everyone a right to “quantitatively equal consumption”, but he cannot compel anyone to exercise it. On the contrary, he is proud that in the world he has created everyone can do what he likes with his money. He therefore cannot prevent some from setting aside a small money hoard, while others are unable to make ends meet on the wage paid to them. He even makes this inevitable by explicitly recognising in the right of inheritance that family property should be owned in common; whence comes also the obligation of the parents to maintain their children. But this makes a wide breach in quantitatively equal consumption. The bachelor lives like a lord, happy and content with his eight or twelve marks a day, while the widower with eight minor children finds it very difficult to manage on this sum. On the other hand, by accepting money in payment without any question, the commune leaves open the door to the possibility that this money may have been obtained otherwise than by the individual’s own labour. Non olet. The commune does not know where it comes from. But in this way all conditions are created permitting metallic money, which hitherto played the role of a mere labour certificate, to exercise its real money function. Both the Opportunity and the motive are present, on the one hand to form a hoard, and on the other to run into debt. The needy individual borrows from the individual who builds up a hoard. The borrowed money, accepted by the commune in payment for means of subsistence, once more becomes what it is in present-day society, the social incarnation of human labour, the real measure of labour, the general medium of circulation. All the “laws and administrative regulations” in the world are just as powerless against it as they are against the multiplication table or the chemical composition of water. And as the builder of the hoard is in a position to extort interest from people in need, usury is restored along with metallic money functioning as money.
— Friedrich Engels, Anti-Durhing
The anarchist system of decentralized communes just lays the foundations for the restoration of not only money, but eventually, capitalism itself, as these usurers will later evolve into private owners.
The usurers are transformed into dealers in the medium of circulation, bankers, controllers of the medium of circulation and of world money, and thus into controllers of production, and thus into controllers of the means of production, even though these may still for many years be registered nominally as the property of the economic and trading communes. And so that hoarders and usurers, transformed into bankers, become the masters also of the economic and trading communes themselves.
— Friedrich Engels, Anti-Durhing
When Marxists talk about “moneylessness”, they do not mean simply banning money by decree and replacing it with labor vouchers. Socialism for Marxists is centralized. In a centralized system, it is impossible for any of these problems to appear.
Why? Because all these problems arise from trade. Trade only occurs between decentralized producers. Walmart trades with cereal companies by buying cereal. Walmart then trades with you by selling you cereal. But Walmart never trades with Walmart. Walmart, internally, is fully a centrally planned and coordinate enterprise. There is no internal trade.
Hence, if the entire economy is centralized, if there are no individual producers, then there is no trade. Without trade, money won’t arise. Without money, commodity production won’t arise.
Of course, this society would still have labor vouchers. But the reason the labor vouchers would not circulate between individual producers is not because we specifically designed it this way. That’s what anarchists want to do, they want to either somehow invent a type of labor voucher that is impossible to circulate, or they want want to rely on honesty of the community not to circulate them.
For Marxists, the reason they do not circulate neither requires any sort of special labor voucher that can’t circulate, nor does it require the honesty of the community. They don’t circulate simply because there is no individual producers for them to circulate between. They can’t circulate because there is nowhere for them to circulate to. It has nothing to do with any special property of the labor voucher itself, nor with any laws we decree, nor with relying on the honesty of people. There is simply nowhere for them to be circulated even if people wanted to.
The moneylessness of socialism derives from centralization itself.
Utopianism vs Historical Materialism
I have already written a lot, so I’m not going to keep this final bit short.
Marx was critical of those who purely criticized capitalism on moral grounds. He argued that his views of socialism were scientific and not based in any sort of moral philosophy or moral criticism of capitalism.
Why? Because Marx argued that human societies are not a reflection of human ideas. Rather, human ideas are a reflection of human society, and humans organize their societies based on the material environment. Again, this is a long topic, but I will link my short summary article on this again here.
For Marx, humanity evolved through many economic systems in their history. From primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, to ancient slave-based economies, to feudal monarchies, and today, to capitalism. Marx argued these transitions are caused by economic development itself.
When guns were invented, you needed new battle tactics. You couldn’t use the same old battle tactics with incredibly different weapons. In the same sense, when new machines, technology, etc, is invented, humans organize themselves around production differently, and so the economic system changes.
Hence, Marx viewed the development from one economic system to the next as not something that occurred just because someone had a great idea one day that feudalism was bad and we should implement capitalism. He instead argued that economic development itself causes tiny changes to how people organize themselves in the economy over time, and these tiny imperceptible changes build up, and over thousands of years, the economic system can look totally different.
The ideologies people come up with to justify the system, Marx believed these were all post-hoc ideologies. The liberalism of Johne Locke and Adam Smith were not the reason capitalism came into existence. Rather, capitalism coming into existence is what gave rise to liberalism.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness
— Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Most people view economic systems as reflections of ideas. Most people see capitalism, for example, as a reflection of the ideas of liberalism. Most people back in feudal times saw feudalism as a reflection of the ideas of the divine right of kings.
When Marx says, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”, he is contradicting this belief, stating that it is the other way around.
It is the economic system that gives rise to these ideas. Not the ideas that give rise to the economic system.
This is why Marx thought you could have an objective and scientific conception of what system would follow capitalism. You can figure out what system would come after capitalism by rigorously studying and analyzing how economic development is making small changes to the relations of production, and then make long term predictions of where capitalism is going.
When Marx talked about a socialist society, he was not prescribing some ideal society to go out and implement. He was making predictions about the direction capitalism is going.
For example, Marxists claim that socialism will be centralized. Why? Is it because Marxists think centralization is “good”? Because it fits our moral philosophies? No. Because Marx demonstrated that as capitalism develops, it centralizes.
The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play — the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.
— Karl Marx, Capital
Engels has a very good summary on why capitalism centralizes and lays the foundations for socialism in the third chapter of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. I also give an explanation for this in my article here.
Anarchists have no historical materialist explanation for their system. They instead start with a moral philosophy. They start with the moral philosophy that “hierarchy is bad” and strive to construct a society where there is no hierarchies.
This is the very mode of thinking which Marx’s entire book The Germany Ideology attempts to refute. It is this very mode of thinking which Engels’s book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific attempts to refute.
You cannot construct an economic system based on moral philosophy.
Economic systems are real, physical machines that constantly transform nature into goods and services over and over again. They are real, physical machines that exist in the real, physical world.
Saying you can build an economic system by starting from moral philosophy makes about as much sense as saying you can build a smartphone starting from moral philosophy.
I can imagine a smartphone with infinite battery life. But can I build it? No. Because my thoughts have to leave my brain and enter the real world, and the real world has real limitations that limit and determine what I can build.
Just because something sounds good, doesn’t mean it works in the real world.
Anarchists do not take a historical materialist approach. Anarchists don’t even know what that means. If you ask an anarchist to give a historical materialist argument, universally I have always found that this simply puzzles them. They don’t even know what I’m asking.
Anarchists have no historical materialist approach to their system. They do not derive their system from a rigorous, objective, and scientific analysis of the real world. They instead start with their moral philosophy and pick what sounds good to them, and then try to bend the world to fit that system.
You can’t bend the world to fit any system you want. Material conditions do not care about your ideals. Your system will be the one that bends until it returns to something that actually matches the material conditions.
The claim that Marx in any way is an “anarchist” is just an extremely absurd lie that many anarchists push in order to make their ideas sound more legitimate. They ignore, for example, that Marx wrote lengthy criticisms of every single major anarchist at the time.
He wrote an entire book criticizing Prouhdoun, The Poverty of Philosophy. I quoted at the top, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, which was a critique of Bakunin, in which Marx accuses Bakunin of “schoolboy stupidity”. Marx had Bakunin expelled from the IWA at the Hague Congress in 1872.
There is hardly any similarities between Marxism and anarchism.
The people who make this claim constantly demonstrate they have no idea what Marx even wrote about. You question them on historical materialism, and they demonstrate they do not even know what it is. They misrepresent the Marxian understanding of the state and money, and misrepresent what Marx viewed socialism to be.
