Talk:Anarchism and Marxism

message: I first created the Anarchist Objections to Capitalism page, then moved it per suggestion to Anarchism and Capitalism (someone has since decapitalized "capitalism", heh) -- there was a redirect from here to Anarchist Objections to Marxism but to be consistent I've redirected the redirects so that this is where the Anarchism vs. marxism (though mostly from the anarchist viewpoint) debate should unfold, as it did originally. Expand it! --albamuth 05:29, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revival? 

message: This article, from where I stand, lacks rigor and useful information.
--GTubio 07:33, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improve it, please... 

message: Shouldn't a (very) large part of this article be concerned with the historical relationship between Anarchists and Marxists? It's discussed on other pages, but not in detail, which is strange considering it's importance. I'm suprised the Spanish Revolution, the Ukrainian guerillas, Goldman and Berkman, Cuba, China and so on hasn't come up.
Or is that all worthy of it's own page, or does such a page already exist? --Ragnor Ironpants 16:40, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a lot of information about the split of the First International, which was primarily a fight between Marx and Bakunin, I believe. However I do not have the background to elaborate on it. --albamuth 20:58, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: I made a number of revisions:
There was a half-paragraph discussing the consequences of the supposed fact that no Marxist revolution has been led by workers, which I removed in its entirety.  Not only is the premise false - the Russian revolution for one was led by the Bolsheviks a clear majority of whom, by that point, were workers - but there were several major inaccuracies in the following discussion, e.g. identifying the "labor aristocracy" thesis as a basic tenet of Leninism when it is highly contested.
I added a very brief discussion of the Marxist position on the relation between class and other oppressions, and the criticisms of it.  I also added a very brief discussion of Marxist positions on inevitability, and the famous Luxemburg phrase.
I removed "agricultural workers" from a list of non-working-class groups, because agricultural wage-laborers, in contrast to peasants, are working-class by the Marxist definition.  A related problem in the sentence below I could not solve, and would appreciate help with:
:Key differences thus include the fact that Anarchists do not differentiate between peasants, lumpen, and proletarians and instead define all people who work for wage labor as members of the working class, regardless of occupation;
This is self-contradictory.  Peasants, by definition in the standard use of the term, do not work for wage labor.  They own land or rent it and live by eating or selling the crop they grow.  I am not an anarchist, and I do not know whether anarchists usually believe that peasants are not workers  or whether they believe that some people who don't work for wage labor are still workers, but one or the other must be the case.
An aside - there's a general pro-anarchist and anti-Marxist bias in this article.  I'm not going to try to correct all of it, just noting the fact.
Kalkin 00:35, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See the article New Class for Soviety-style society inspired concepts of a managerial class, as developed by communists. Fifelfoo (talk) 03:18, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes to "understanding of class" section 

message: The section describing views of the state is seriously biased towards anarchism/against Marxism.  There are a number of language-strength issues, and space allocation issues, and there is a tendency to conflate all Marxist views with Leninism, or even with Stalinism - Marxists of course agree that the state is an instrument of class rule (contra this article, so do some anarchists), but have widely varying views on its relationship to the revolutionary process.  I don't have time to fix it at the moment but I'm putting the POV tag until I do. Kalkin 05:46, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: state section = POV

message: I've come to this article from the backlog of articles with NPOV disputes. I have some comments:
*Articles to be expanded? Hmm. The article reads like an essay that someone has padded out to reach a set word count, or as if the author was going to get credit for each aspect of the A./M. relationship s/he could think of. 
*There's no point in tagging every single section as NPOV. Why not tag the whole article and remove the section tags. Are you really arguing about the Further reading?
*If the article were referenced properly, i.e. sentence by sentence, then the NPOV issues could be resolved. 
*Why not agree on a To-do list, and then start working through it? 
This is meant in a friendly way. Your efforts with the article are appreciated. Itsmejudith 20:17, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV dispute 

message: As written, this article covers very little of the common history of anarchism and Marxism; it doesn't cover the linked origins of the two movements or the split between Proudhon and Marx. What can we do about this? Jacob Haller 18:10, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History

message: Someone changed my phrase "small-scale terrorism" (followed later by a reference to "propaganda of the deed") to "propaganda of the deed". For the record, "terrorism" is the most technical and accurate term, here. It's "propaganda of the deed" that's more subjective. But I understand that "terrorism" has become such a distorted term in the modern world (particularly here in the US) that some (the one who changed it or the readers) might not even know what it means anymore, so I'll relent. --MQDuck 17:06, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, the term's usually used to refer to "the other side's actions," but where applied consistently, it is often used to refer to military attacks on uninvolved civilians. Politicians, the main targets of PotD, have more responsibility for their government's actions than soldiers or mercenaries do, so I'm not sure how people could consider them uninvolved civilians. Jacob Haller 18:47, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Terrorism"

message: It seems to me that many references of conflict between the Anarchist and Marxist seem to be using the USSR under Stalin as example. Can we really call Stalin a Marxist? He did not follow the teachings of Marx, so I think those examples are unfounded and misleading to an uninformed reader. FrankPalmerWhite 12:24, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Marxism

message: The opening paragraph states: As working class movements Marxism and anarchism have been sometime allied and sometimes opposed groups.
Is that really - both movements were started and largely dominated by middle (and upper) class intellectuals - neither can truely be described as "working class"!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.132.127.177 (talk) 20:32, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: A simplistic stereotype. Both movements, particularly Marxism, have had a history of working class involvement, particularly in industrialised Western nations with an established proletariat, much as the efforts of Marxism in these has often over-shadowed by Marxism originally unindustrialised nations in the eyes of popular history. In the Cold War era, granted, the movements were often lessened in significance, meaning that only middle-class academics remained as significant spokespersons, but that only represents the last third of the history of each movement, nor does it imply that they actually became middle class movements. Furthermore, both movements have always aligned themselves with the working class and sought to further what they see as the cause of the working class cause, and did so in contradiction to middle and upper class privilege, so the personal origins of certain member is not relevant in describing the movement as a whole, nor does it describe any innate property of the movement. Traitorfish 05:01, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Working Class movements?

message: The following quote reduces and simplifies the two, no?
"Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has distinguished the two philosophies as follows:
Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice."
I can't speak say anything about anarchism but marxism is much more than simply concerned with revolutionary practice. In four volumes of Marx's Capital, there is not a single section or chapter that outlines anything of that sort. marxist thought is applied to so many different fields including political theory, empirical economic theory, humanist studies, aesthetic theory, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, etc. I think one of the LAST things marxism is, is a guide to or analysis of revolutionary practice or even about capitalist revolution in general. Most of Marx's writings and many marxists after him were concerned with critiquing capitalism, its organisation, structure, history, etc and not about things the working class have to do in order to overthrow the system. You could  argue that a majority of marx's writings as well as marxist writings, from all sects, are not concerned with revolutionary strategy but rather with examining, analysing, evaluating and assessing the system, conditions and circumstances of different classes within it and so on. Even if you go ahead and cite Graeber, I think the quote should be supplemented with a reference to a body of literature that discusses theoretical/analysitcal marxist concern with revlutionary strategy. The only example I can think of, and it's not a very good one, is the International Workingman's Association and their internationalist rhetoric and support for global trade unionisation. 
There are only 5 references in this entire article! Who is writing this article, I mean seriously. And there's not a single mention of the ideas of Proudhon? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.68.252 (talk) 23:23, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  quote from graeber 

message: "Marxism has a unique definition of the state: that the state is an organ of one class's repression of all other classes. To Marxists, any state is intrinsically a dictatorship by one class over all others. Therefore, within Marxist theory, should the differentiation between classes disappear, so too will the state."
Too many sweeping generalisations in this article and a total neglect for the Miliband-Poulantzas debate. For such an important topic, very little effort seems to have been put into it all. Marxists do not say the state is intrinsically a dictatorship by one class over all others. This is ridiculous. You are confusing and mixing up a whole body of Marxist literature with different views on the state here. It was Miliband's argument which conceived the state as an instrument of the capitalist class. He held a voluntarist theory of class struggle which saw the only limits to the articulation of state power as residing in popular resistance. Nicos Poulantza, another Marxist which our author seems to have overlooked and mixed up with Miliband, argued the state has a degree of autonomy and specificity of the state in relation to both the economy and class actors (Clarke, 1991). Then there is the so called state derivation debate of the 70s which rejected both approaches, instead examining the 'internal relation' between capitalism and the state. Elmar Alvater sought to 'derive' categories of the political from analysis of the economy. Then there's the postmarxist structuralists (e.g. Michael Aglietta and Alain Lipietz) which advanced tte functionalist argument that a regime of accumulation required a corresponding mode of regulation in the interests of stable accumulation.  And then theres the Parisian regulationists state theorists such as Bob Jessop and Joachim Hirch who sought to establish a relation between the relatively autonomous instances of the economic and political through the reformulation of state theory. There's also the poststructuralist Marxist turn of the 80-s -- neo-Gramscian school in International Political Economy (.e.g Robert Cox who sought to overcome economistic and structuralist marxisms through a gramscian inspired historicism and humanism. Then there's the open marxism which sees the state as 'arguably the site where the difference between structuralist and dialectical/criticial (that is 'open) Marxsism emerges mostly clear'y (Bonefeld et al., 1992, pp.xxi, xv). 
I'd suggest reading the Elgar Companion of Marxist Economics (2012) and the chapter on the state for a brief overview.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.68.252 (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  marxists on the state 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: As was written on this talk page a decade ago, the article remains unsourced, and its few references are primary/unreliable sources. The topic would need a complete rewrite, so I'm taking the bold move of redirecting it to an existing summary of the subject. Anyone is welcome to rewrite this article from scratch, though it would need to have reliable, secondary source references to meet the WP principle of verifiability. czar 16:58, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  TNT