Karl Marx is among the most cited of intellectuals. He is, in fact, the most cited intellectual
in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
Most people would at least recognize the name. It is therefore quite odd, given such
widespread recognition, that there could be such incredible misunderstanding
and confusion regarding Karl Marx and his work.
In the general sense of the Left it is more than predictable
that there should be not only misunderstanding but also an intentional
misinformation campaign waged against an individual so greatly associated with
revolutionary movements. Within a
hierarchically class structured society where there exists a ruling class with
special privileges and power (among them, near absolute domination of the means
of communication) it follows almost axiomatically that there should be waged a
disinformation campaign against all that which threatens the current relations
of power.
The most common myth regarding Karl Marx involves
associating him with Soviet Russia’s Bolshevism and state totalitarianism in
general. Exacerbating this confusion are
the various self-described Marxists who are nothing more than the descendents
of the Bolsheviks. A great many
so-called Marxists are Leninists, Trotskyites and Maoists of one form or another
who, in concert with bourgeois propaganda, hold up Karl Marx and his work as
the foundation for their positions and actions regarding the seizing of the
state by a party dictatorship.
With the self-described Marxists who follow in the footsteps
of Lenin and company there is a great sense of anachronism. It may have been quite forgivable for
socialists living after Marx and before the dissemination of his unpublished
works to assume that Lenin’s work and actions paralleled the work of Marx due
to much of it remaining unpublished and unknown as well as suppressed by the
Soviets. Modern Bolshevik sympathizers
have no such excuse. Long has Marx’s
unpublished works been rediscovered and distributed by people of a wide variety
of political persuasions, largely beginning with the Marxist Humanists such as
Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm and Maximilien Rubel, among many others, who
popularized Marx’s Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Dunayevskaya was the first to translate
the manuscripts), among other lost
and obscure texts.
People can no longer pretend as though the Communist Manifesto contains the final
word by Marx on the matters of state and revolution. It is no doubt true that in the Manifesto
Marx lays out the revolutionary transition in stages with the first stage
seeing to, “little by little,” the means of production, the means of
transportation and credit all being centralized into the state. However, even were the Manifesto to be the
last word on the matter it must be observed that Marx does not end socialist
transition with centralized state power, as many bourgeois reactionaries often
incorrectly shriek, but rather with the eventual dissolution of classes and the
state into the association of individuals.
No matter familiarity or lack thereof with the entirety of Marx’s oeuvre,
the end goal remains a stateless free association. It remains libertarian socialism.
With this established it is quite obvious that the bourgeois
misinformation confuses the end whereas the so-called “Marxists” who follow the
likes of Lenin, Mao and others confuse the means as well. For the Manifesto does not contain the final
word and was, in fact, itself revised with a forward (dated June, 24 1872), as
described in Daniel Geurin’s No Gods No
Masters. Marx and Engels explain in
the forward that “in many respects” they would now “rephrase” the Manifesto’s
content regarding the state. Geurin
points out that “they cited in support of such redrafting ‘the practical
experiences, first of the February [1848] revolution, then, to a much greater
extent, of the Paris Commune, when, for the first time, the proletariat held
political power in its hands over a two month period.’” Marx and Engels conclude the forward by
stating that all of this “means that, in places, this program is no longer up
to the minute. The Commune in particular
has supplied proof that the working class cannot rest content with taking
possession of the existing machinery of the State in order to place it in the
service of its own aims.”
The Paris Commune discussed in the forward is discussed at
much greater length in perhaps Marx’s most underappreciated and ignored work:
the three addresses drafted by Marx for the General Council of the Workers’
International on the situation in Paris,
better known under the pamphlet name The
Civil War in France. The Paris
Commune saw to the implementation in Paris
of the federation of communes, the basis of libertarian socialism, and at once
the negation of state power.
Arthur Lehning writes that Marx’s addresses involve not a
“’withering away’, but rather” the “utter extirpation of the state.” This could not possibly be any clearer when in
the third part of the third address given by Karl Marx he writes that “the
working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and
wield it for its own purposes.”
Following the unequivocal comment about state power, Marx
then further analyzes the role of the state within developing industrial
society. He writes that “[a]t the same
pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified
the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more
and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public
force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” He continues the analysis several paragraphs
later when he writes that “[i]mperialism is, at the same time, the most
prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class
society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from
feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into
a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.”
Marx’s analysis of the state is in this sense virtually indistinguishable
from the analyses of many anarchists. Rudolf
Rocker is in a sense paraphrasing Marx’s analysis when he writes that “[a]s
long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings
face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing
minority for the protection of its privileges.”
Marx’s analysis, in fact, anticipated the role of the state
within Soviet Russia and the form of state capitalism ruled by a single-party
dictatorship centralized within the state as manifested in Soviet Russia and in
China. It must not be overlooked that socialism
never existed within Russia
and has never existed in China
(the two nations most readily misidentified as socialist or communist). Many anarchists, libertarian socialists and,
in this sense, true Marxists (such as Gorter, Ruhle, Pannekoek, Luxemburg and
so on) predicted that the policy of the Bolsheviks was going to lead to the
state despotism that sunk the Russian people into the Soviet dungeon. They argued that rather than replacing
capitalist relations with socialist relations the Bolsheviks were merely
condensing many capitalists into the single capitalist of the state. The political economy of Soviet Russia
remained capitalist. It was the ultimate
form of state capitalism, where the state is sole capitalist.
Nothing could be more counterrevolutionary and nothing could
be more contrary to the totality of Marx’s work than turning the state into the
single capitalist and centralizing all power therein. Doing justice to Marx’s work and doing
justice in the real world period means dismantling the state altogether. Not piece by piece or with the hope, after
seizing it, that it will simply disappear on its own accord with the
dissolution of the antagonism of classes.
Instead, the state must be rendered superfluous and powerless through
the instituting of the power of the federation of communes (the workers’
councils, community cooperatives and so on), in the face of which the state can
only dissolve into irrelevance and out of existence and history altogether.
