The first step in avoiding “caricatured non-debate” is to engage seriously with what Leo calls the “often obscured” history of the broad anarchist tradition. We have real differences too: these require comradely yet frank discussion. The popular classes would “take upon themselves the task of rebuilding society”, through revolutionary counter-power and counter-culture, outside and against the ruling class, state and capital. The “new social order” would be constructed “from the bottom up” by the “organisation and power of the working masses”. For Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, social revolution required a movement by “ the workers and the peasants”, “the only two classes capable of so mighty an insurrection”. īy any measure, anarchists favour working class self-emancipation. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Leo insists, means merely “the democratic defence of working class power” through “organs of self-organisation councils, trade unions, communes etc”. If Marx, Lenin and Trotsky are invoked here, it is because the “essence” of their works is taken to be “working class self-emancipation”. The IST states it is for socialism from below through revolution. It is important to note where we converge.
Leo Zeilig praises Michael Schmidt’s and my book, Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, as “a fascinating account”.
Ian Birchall stresses that “lines between anarchism and Marxism are often blurred”. Paul Blackledge’s article rejects “caricatured non-debate”. The articles I am engaging with are marked by commendable goodwill I strive for the same. I will discuss topics such as the use of sources, defending revolutions and freedom, the Spanish anarchists, anarchism and democracy, the historical role of Marxism, and the Russian Revolution. Marx never did elaborate a theory of an autonomous state, but he never stopped wrestling with the challenge to his doctrine posed by late eighteenth-century France, whose changing conditions and successive regimes prompted some of his most intriguing and, until now, unexplored thought.This article responds to criticisms of the broad anarchist tradition in International Socialism, an International Socialist Tendency (IST) journal. The hesitation, the remorse, and the contradictions of the resulting analyses offer a glimpse of a great thinker struggling with the constraints of his own system. The problem of reconciling his theory with the reality of the Revolution's various manifestations is one of the major difficulties Marx contended with throughout his work. Furet's interpretation follows the evolution of this idea and examines the dilemmas it created for Marx as he considered all the faces the new state assumed over the course of the Revolution: the Jacobin Terror following the constitutional monarchy, Bonaparte's dictatorship following the parliamentary republic. With his early critique of Hegel, Marx started moving toward his fundamental thesis: that the state is a product of civil society and that the French Revolution was the triumph of bourgeois society. François Furet provides an extended discussion of Marx's thinking on the revolution, and Lucien Calvié situates each of the selections, drawn from existing translations as well as previously untranslated material, in its larger historical context. This book assembles for the first time all that Marx wrote on this subject. Throughout his life Karl Marx commented on the French Revolution, but never was able to realize his project of a systematic work on this immense event.
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