An Address to Anarchists
An Address to Anarchists
Italian anarchists are very irritable because they are very conceited. Their longstanding conviction that they’re oracles of revealed revolutionary truth has become “monstrous” ever since the Socialist Party, through the influence of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik…
I love this line:
The bourgeois will become an anarchist again after the proletarian revolution: he will once again become aware of the existence of a State; of the existence of laws foreign to his will, hostile to his interests, to his habits, to his freedom. He will realize that “State” is synonymous with “compulsion” because the workers’ State will take away the bourgeoisie’s freedom to exploit the proletariat, because the workers’ State will be the bulwark of a new mode of production which, as it develops, will destroy every trace of capitalist ownership and any possibility of its revival.
This is exactly the crux of the failure of ideological "Freedom Now" maximalism. That maximalist freedom they want includes the freedom to exploit and take away the freedom of others. The paradox that needs to be accepted and synthesised is that Freedom necessarily must be imposed at this stage.
Precisely, without the dictatorship of the proletariat there is no path towards stopping exploitation.
I agree that anarchists are often conceited, but do we really have to take the exact opposite position to them, and decree that because an oppressive proletarian State is in the interest of the proletariat, that we should not try and dissolve the state at all? Is limiting ourselves to the short-term desires of the proletarian class, not even considering what kind of class structures that could form in the future, really the best way forward?
This reads a strange form of vulgar Marxism to me, a kind of reaction to the idea of anarchism that arises when you criticize it from gut opposition at their “arrogance” rather than the actual issues with it. I’m not saying the article is actually saying this, but what it is saying is dangerously compatible with such a viewpoint.
I am a Marxist because I believe that the struggle of the proletariat has the greatest chance to end the constant class struggle of human society, not because I think that the state is a necessary or even remotely “ok” methods of human organization. It is only justifiable as a form of self-defense for the proletariat (which the dictatorship of the proletariat should fundamentally be viewed as). Anything more than that isn’t just bad from some abstract moral opinion, but because it’s completely pointless to the revolutionary struggle.
Marx was very clear regarding the fact that a proletarian state under the dictatorship of the proletariat would be necessary to replace the existing capitalist state. Marxist idea is not that the state can be dissolved spontaneously, but rather that the state withers away as society internalizes new socialist relations. It's also quite obviously not possible to do away with the state while capitalism is the dominant ideology in the world and capitalist states actively work to destroy socialist ones.
But that is what I am saying.
The article seems to miss the fact that the ultimate point of instating a dictatorship of the proletariat is to protect the creation of a mode of production that doesn’t need a State at all.
If the Anarchist says they are against the existence of the State, then that makes their desire ultimately the same as ours - a communist mode of production. The flaw of anarchist ideology seems to be this idea that the State is not justifiable even if it’s purpose is to destroy itself, which seems like a simple example of not reading about the tolerance paradox to me.
The arguments in the article just seem inefficient.