Recently, I have encountered many so-called “anarcho-Marxists” on the internet. Or at least, that is the term I apply to them, as they identify as anarchists and Marxists, or sometimes simply as anarchists but then try to utilize Marxian rhetoric.
However, anarchism and Marxism are fundamentally opposed on every level. No, Marxists and anarchists are not “trying to achieve the same thing but with different tactics”. Marxists and anarchists are almost polar opposites of one another, and what they are trying to achieve is in no way compatible.
The claim that they are compatible usually comes down to the fact that both Marxists and anarchists are in favor of a “classless, moneyless, and stateless society”, and therefore, they desire the same things. This is the logical fallacy of conflation. Marxists and anarchists may use similar language, but with fundamentally and directly opposing meanings.
There are three main components to Marxism: (1) political economy, (2) historical materialism, and (3) dialectical materialism. The first two are the ones that are important here.
I wrote another post here on historical materialism. In very simple terms, historical materialism holds that humans have passed through many economic systems because of the development of the productive forces. Each economy, as it develops, develops in a certain way, this way it develops lays the foundations for a new society, and destroys its own foundations. Eventually, it develops so much that it collapses, and a new economic system emerges.
primitive hunter-gather communal societies → ancient slave-based economies → medieval feudal economies (or AMP) → modern industrial capitalist economies
The transition from one to the next is known as “historical progress”.
Therefore, for Marx, socialism is not a matter of opinion or ideals. In order to know what economic system is coming next, you can’t just assert whatever one sounds good to you. You have to study the one you’re currently living under, see how it’s developing, and then objectively and scientifically, figure out what it is developing into.
This is when we get into Marxian political economy, the very reason why he became an economist and studied capitalism in such grand detail. His conception of socialism did not come out of what society he subjectively desires the most. His conception of socialism is objective, it is scientific. It follows from a very rigorous analysis of the development of capitalism, and in order to contradict it, you must show contradictory evidence, not simply assert it doesn’t match your ideals.
What is it that Marx found? Very simple, he spells it out in the Manifesto quite clearly.
“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
— Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
The important bit here is that capitalism, as it develops, replaces “isolation” and “competition” with “the revolutionary combination” and “association”.
What does this mean? In very simple terms: CENTRALIZATION
I put it in big caps so people don’t miss it. This is very important and crucial to Marx’s entire argument. Capitalism relies inherently on decentralization. In order for there to be commodity production, there must be trade. In order for there to be trade, there must be distinct firms, for Firm A to sell to Firm B, they must be separate firms.
However, as capitalism develops, it destroys these distinctions by constantly reducing the amount of distinct firms. It takes laborers out of competition with one another, and places them in association, it destroys the foundations of capitalism, it destroys competition and markets and replaces it with highly centralized monopolies.
Marx gives various arguments for this throughout Capital which he collectively calls the “laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital”. The simplest one to understand is the one provided in the first volume of Capital:
“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.”
— Karl Marx, “Capital”
Businesses compete by reducing production costs, reducing production costs inherently entails innovating, developing more complex machinery and technology. The size of capitals therefore is always increasing, as well as the barrier of entry for new businesses to enter and compete.
If capitalism centralizes production (political economy) and the development of one economic system lays the foundations for the next (historical materialism), then the only inevitable conclusion is that socialism must be centralized.
“What will this new social order have to be like? Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole — that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.”
— Friedrich Engels, “The Principles of Communism”
This is fundamentally why you cannot be both an anarchist and a Marxist. In order to deny that socialism is a centrally planned economy, one must either reject Marx’s economic analysis (political economy), or they must reject that the basis for an economic system is created by the development of the prior system (historical materialism).
If you accept both, there is no other conclusion you can draw than socialism is centralized. This is why Marx explicitly says if the proletariat take power, they should gradually centralize all means of production in the hands of the state alongside the development of the economy.
“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.”
— Marx & Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
This is clearly a point of view they never changed, as in 1880, Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific which reiterates all these ideas. This was published far after the Manifesto, far after Marx’s The Civil War in France. It was one of the later works.
Everything I have said here, from capitalism laying the foundations of socialism through centralization, and the proletariat seizing the reigns of the state to centralizing all property into its hands, are also to be found here.
“Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals
….This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation…The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.
…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.”
— Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”
From a Marxian perspective, socialism is defined in terms of centralization and production according to a common plan. The decentralization anarchists call for is the very conditions that give rise to capitalism.
Anarchism makes absolutely no sense form a Marxian perspective. How do anarchists deal with this? Moral philosophy. Anarchists never present economic arguments of their own, they simply moralize, attack those who disagree saying that those methods go against their ideals.
There is fundamentally no way to separate Marxism from centralization.
The decentralization anarchists call for is inherently anti-communist. It is pretty much the polar opposite of what Marxists call for. I wrote a post here explaining how a cooperative society would inevitably lead back to capitalism, but this applies to anarchism as well, to any decentralized economy.
decentralization → markets → private property → class struggle → the state
Each one leads directly to the next. Hence why for Marxists, the only way to dismantle the state and capitalism, is centralization, which occurs naturally as any market economy develops. Any decentralized society will inevitably revert back to statism and capitalism. Hence why Marxists do not believe you can simply abolish the state either, it must “wither away” as Engels said, as you can only abolish private property gradually as the productive forces develop and centralize themselves.
“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, you can’t abolish the state in one stroke either. Engels straight-up calls out the anarchists on this point.
“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”
People who claim otherwise simply demonstrate they have not read a word of either. They also are unaware of basic history, as the First International broke apart due to disagreements over the anarchist and statist faction, and Marx personally led the statist faction.
