Anarchism and Marxism - Arguments Surrounding The Issue of Class

Arguments Surrounding The Issue of Class

Both Marxist and socialist anarchist class analyses are based on the idea that society is divided into "classes", which are created based on the control each class has upon the means of production and hence each class having differing interests. The two differ, however, in where they draw the lines between these groups. Anarcho-primitivists and post-left anarchists reject left wing politics in general (and theoretically by extension Marxist class analysis) as they typically see left wing politics as corrupt and in the former case see civilization as unreformable.

For Marxists, the two most relevant classes are the "bourgeoisie", those who own the means of production, and the "proletariat", more explicitly, the wage laborers. Marx believed that the industrial workers -and only them- would organize together, abolish the state, take control over the means of production, collectivize them, and create a classless society administered by and for workers. He believed that only the workers have the motive and power to do that. For this reason, he dismissed peasants,the "petty-bourgeois", and the "lumpen-proletariat"—the unemployed "underclass"—as incapable of creating revolution.

The anarchist class analysis predates Marxism and contradicts it. Anarchists argue that it is not the whole bourgeoisie who has control over the means of production and the state, but only a minority of them, which is part of the ruling class, but has its own concerns. Also, traditionally anarchists have rejected Marx's dismissal of the lumpen proletariat and the peasantry as revolutionary and argued that a revolution, in order to be successful, needs the support of the peasants. Classical Anarchists believed that this is only possible through the redistribution of land. That is, they explicitly reject imposing state property of the land, although voluntary collectivization is seen as more efficient and thus supported (indeed, during the Spanish revolution anarchists impulsed hundreds of collectivizations but only a tiny minority had all the land in the area, small peasants were allowed to cultivate their own land without hired labour).

Some modern anarchists (particularly pareconists) argue that there are three "classes", which have relevance to social change—not two. The first is the labor class (which includes everyone whose labor is involved in producing and distributing goods as well as much of the so-called "service" industry). This includes farmers, peasants, industrial workers, small landowners, small business owners who labor with their employees and blue, pink and white-collar workers. The second is the coordinator class which includes everyone whose labor is primarily concerned with "coordinating" and managing the labor of others primarily on behalf of the bourgeoisie, administrating organizations, setting the intellectual status quo or managing the State apparatus. The anarchist definition of the "coordinator class" includes people such as bureaucrats, technocrats, managers, administrators, middle-class intellectuals (such as economists, political and social scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, etc.), physical scientists, judges, lawyers, military officials, political party organizers and leaders, etc. And finally the elite owning class or "capital class" which derives its income from its control of wealth, land, property and resources. Marxists vigorously debate the exact composition of the middle class under capitalism. Some also describe a "co-ordinating class" which implements capitalism on behalf of the capitalists, composed of the petit bourgeoisie, professionals and managers. Others dispute this, freely using the term "middle class" to refer to affluent white-collar workers as described above (even though, in Marxist terms, they are part of the proletariat—the working class). Still others (for example, Council communists) allege, like anarchists, that there is a class comprising intellectuals, technocrats and managers which seeks power in its own right. This last group of communists allege that such technocratic middle classes seized power and government for themselves in Soviet-style societies.

Anarchists contend that Marxism fails, and will always fail, because it creates a dictatorship of the coordinating technocratic/managerial class and that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a logical impossibility. Mikhail Bakunin foreshadowed this argument when he wrote:

State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls—or, if you will, rises—to the position of a machine.

—On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx, 1872

Some believe that Marxism fails because its theoretical "socialist mode of production" involves centralizing and empowering the State apparatus which empowers people from the coordinator class to seize control of the State and means of production to manage the labor class, effectively acting as a surrogate capital class. However, this is less of a problem for libertarian Marxists who believe that such as State apparatus should operate on working class-led participatory democracy or even as a consociational state.

Key differences thus include the fact that Anarchists do not differentiate between peasants, lumpen, and proletarians and instead define all people who work for the profit of others as members of the working class, regardless of occupation; and that anarchists do differentiate between the economic and political elites who set policy and the business and government functionaries that carry those policies out whereas Marxists lump the two together.

Further, some Anarchists argue that Marxism fails because it springs from the minds of middle class intellectuals, while arguing that anarchism springs spontaneously from the self-activity and self-organization of the labor class. They point to the fact that the major schools of Marxism are often named after the intellectuals who formed the movements through high analytical and philosophical praxis theorization. While schools of Anarchism tend to emerge from organizational principles or forms of practice and are rarely (if ever) named after or centered around an individual intellectual. Anarchists distinguish themselves by what they do, and how they organize themselves whereas Marxists tend to distinguish themselves by their strategic approach and their philosophical or intellectual methodology. Marxists, however, contend that their ideas are not new ideologies which sprang from intellectuals but are ideas which form from the class contradictions of each economic and social mode of history. They argue that Marxian socialism in particular arose from the minds of the working class due to the class contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Some Marxists even argue that anarchism springs from the ideas of proletarians (or even petty bourgeoisie) who have been marginalized by capitalism as an unorganized and unrefined reactionary struggle against the forces of capitalism.