From: miballar@leland.Stanford.EDU (Michael Ballard)
Subject: Re: Bakunin on Marxism (was Re: Engels on Bakunin)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 20:12:23 GMT

In article <anand.717709061@cds705> anand@Cadence.COM (Anand Bemra) writes:
>miballar@leland.Stanford.EDU (Michael Ballard) writes:
>
>>... Bakunin maintains that the state has created 
>>capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the 
>>state.  And since the state is the chief evil, the state above all must
>>be abolished; then capital will go to hell of itself.  We, on the contrary,
>>say:  Abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production 
>>by the few, and the state will fall of itself.  The difference is an 
>>essential one:  the abolition of the state is nonsense without a social
>>revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.  
>
>Well, we have seen the actions of communists in Soviet, the Spanish
>Revolution (read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia) and China.
>I know, those communists are probably wincing, saying that that was
>not _true_ communism.
Yes, it's true--Stalinism is not communism.  And while Stalin considered
himself to be a Marxist, Marx himself answered the question as to whether 
he was one by answering that he wasn't.  While both Engels and Marx 
considered themselves to be socialists, so many of their contemporaries
considered themselves to be socialists e.g. people like Blanqui.  But
Marx would not have considered himself to be a Blanquist then anymore than
he would have considered himself a Stalinist today.
>The simple matter is that Power corrupts and that is what has 
>happened in Soviet and that is what is happening in China. Anarchists
>believe in bottom up theory. i.e. power should flow from bottom up and
>not as the communists think that it should flow from top down.
First, it should be noted that the above quote by Engels does not address
the question of whether power should go up or down.  As matter of record 
though, both Engels and Marx thought power should flow from the bottom up.
What happened under Bolshevism and its various Stalinist offshoots was not
what Engels or Marx admired.  See for instance what they wrote on and about
the Paris Commune of 1871.  
>Anyways here is Bakunin on communism/Marx:
>
>Bakunin:
> 
> "I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty and I cannot
> concieve anything human without liberty. I am not a communist because
> communism concentrates all the powers of society and absorbs them into the
> State, because it leads inevitably to the centralization of property in
> the hands of the State, while I want to see the State abolished. I want
> the complete elimination of the authoritarian principle of state tutelage
> which has always subjected, oppressed, exploited, and depraved men while
> claiming to moralize and civilize them. I want society, and collective or
> social property, to be organized from the bottom up through free association
> and not from the top down by authority of any kind . . . In that sense I
> am a collectivist and not at all a communist."
Note that what Bakunin is saying here is that he wants to abolish the state.
Engels says above that he too wants to abolish the state.  The difference,
as Engels points out, is that Bakunin mentions nothing about the necessity
of ridding society of capital--the social relations based on wage labor
which result in the basic class divisions in modern society--before one can
abolish the state.  This, in Engels' opinion, is a mistake for both Marx
and Engels thought that the modern state rested on the social relations
built on wage labor.  So, they thought that as long as you had wage labor
and capital and class divisions, it was nonsense to talk of abolishing the
state.  Both Marx and Engels thought that if classes existed after the 
ascent of the workers to a governing position in society, that form of 
governance would be a state.  If the workers ascended to power and had the
ability to socially own the productive apparatus of society, then the social
relation of capital/wage labor would no longer exist and classes would
be a thing of the past, along with the engine of class rule, the state.

>"One asks oneself how a man as intelligent as Marx could conceive of such
>a heresy against common sense and historical experience as the notion that
>a group of individuals, however intelligent and well-intentioned, could
>become the soul and the unifying and directing will of a revolutionary
>movement and of the economic organization of the proletariat of all
>countries ..."
If one could quote Marx somewhere as saying that he thought that, "a 
group of individuals, however intelligent and well-intenioned, could
become the soul etc.", I would be most interested in reading it.
>Red Bureacracy:
>
>Bakunin summed it up as follows: "Take the most radical of revolutionaries
>and place him on the throne of all the Russians or give him dictatorial
>powers ... and before the year is out he will be worse than the Czar himself."
What Bakunin has summer up here could be agreed to by almost anyone i.e.
anyone given singular power in a state, even if they were really nice or
really, really revolutionary like Marx or Bakunin, would be (maybe could
be) worse than the Czar himself.  After all, look at Stalin.
>

>--
>Screw PBS & NPR news. Tired of news "sanitized for your protection?". Try:
>misc.activism.progressive, "Lies Of Our [NY]Times", "Z" magazine (Boston).
>KPFA 94.1 FM (Bay Area), 90.7 (L.A.), 90.1 (Houston, TX), 89.3 (Washington, DC)
>These are my opinions, not my employer's. 


-- 
Mike Ballard 
Time is money. Steal some today!
Don't just complain, organize! e-mail iww@igc.org  Ph: (415)863-WOBS.

Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy