Anarchism and Marxism - Methodological Disagreements

Methodological Disagreements

Marxism uses a form of analysis of human societies called "historical materialism." The central idea of historical materialism is the idea that people live in a determined material world, and act in order to produce changes upon this predetermined world, without being able to fundamentally change it. In economic terms, the relations of production are the driving force of history. Underlying these processes, as a dialectical background notion, is the idea that contradictions and opposed social groups are the ones that form and drive social progress.

Marx formulated the concept of historical materialism from a critique of Hegel's Idealism and dialectics. Marx only applied historical materialism to human history; however, Marxists claim that his methodology can be applied to all phenomena and they usually describe it as dialectical materialism. Anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin developed dialectical naturalism out of a combination of Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, and Kropotkin's biological outlook.

Classical Anarchists saw value in historical materialism as a tool for social analysis. Contemporary anarchists use a wide variety of tools of social analysis, historical materialism included. The Irish Workers Solidarity Movement, for instance, makes agreeing with the historical materialist method's value a central point of unity. Many anarchists, however, dismiss dialectical materialism as a pseudo-science based on untestable and unfalsifiable universal claims. Anarchists were among the first to criticise the dialectical materialist trend as pseudo-science and generally criticised either the Marxist methodologies as such, or the applications of them, on the basis that both historical and dialectical materialism dehumanise people as the agents of history. Within Marxism these criticisms are mirrored by the criticisms of socialist humanists, Western Marxists, Autonomist Marxists and other similar thinkers.

The rule of heaven and the rule of nature—angels, spirits, devils, molecules, atoms, ether, the laws of God-Heaven and the laws of Nature, forces, the influence of one body on another—all this is invented, formed, created by society. Marxism is the new scientific Christianity, designed to conquer the bourgeois world by deceiving the people, the proletariat, just as Christianity deceived the feudal world.