Reconciling Anarchism and Marxism
To reconcile is to restore friendly relations and harmony. I’m not sure Anarchism and Marxism need to be reconciled, and I’m not sure what there really is to restore. There never really was much of a friendship or harmony.
But that’s not what people seem to ask for anyway. Reconciliation has become an odd synonym for unity, the idea being that anarchism and Marxism can be mixed together for a stronger movement, a bigger one. What moves people to such absurdities, I believe, is a desperate clinging to a logic of strength in numbers, a political instinct.
Before we can even begin to talk reconciliation and harmony, we would need to be very clear about how these two might relate to each other. What connections can we make, what contexts do they share? In which ways do they differ? In which ways do they conflict?
But more importantly, other than calming our instinct for mass, what exactly do we gain from bringing those two together? Perhaps the strengths of both Anarchism and Marxism remain in how they differ and conflict.
I’m not opposed to attempts of reconciling the two, but I’m much more interested in seeing them fight. I respect Marxism enough to wanna see anarchists fight our best against it.
Capitalism is a hierarchy.
Both capitalism and hierarchy certainly play important roles in conversation about any vaguely coherent anarchism, but equating the two is hardly more than an inelegant way of taking position. Taking position against one thing, by a presumably understood position against the other. This amounts to little more than a vote, an empty signal for or against something. A desperate cry.
Capitalism really isn’t a hierarchy.
It is in all likelihood, or in most contexts, more accurate to say that capitalism is a system of economic exploitation that we can identify in existing political economies. Hierarchy is a ranking of positions of authority, a relationship that elevates one above another. Capitalism’s exploitative mechanisms depend on norms and institutions that authorize some to govern others, creating social hierarchies.
These are sort of a minimum definitions that can be contested and debated; depending on context you may want to use rather different definitions. My point here is really to draw distinctions, and to push for more clarity in our positions against capitalism and hierarchy. Because playing this game of “identify the bad thing” has a narrowing, flattening effect on anarchist discourse.
Capitalism isn’t just hierarchical, and we don't seem to gain anything from reducing anarchism to a mere opposition to hierarchy. No ‘bad’ thing worth worrying about is simple or one-dimensional. Nor is any ‘good’ thing worth living.
How would a communist society function? How would an anarcho-primitivist society work?
Today we see hardly enough anarchists to be recognized as anything like a force within society. The few anarchists that do exist stubbornly cling to rather narrow ideas of what anarchy might look like. This points to a contradiction of sorts: We narrow our options despite already not having any.
In a sense, currently existing anarchists are — equally brave and ridiculous — “early adopters” of anarchy, embracing it without any guarantee that we will ever see more anarchists or more anarchy in this world. The Bilge-Rat's Gambit.
Whenever someone starts laying down a plan of how it would work, I can’t help but see it as an attempt of explaining anything other than anarchy. Anarchy could very well be a massive disaster. We are ill-prepared to even recognize and talk about the challenges we might face. The challenges we do talk about are those we can hope to have the luxury of facing them.
The question of how it would work perhaps needs to start there. With this big unknown, and with our embrace of anarchy despite it being so alien and rare in this world. Subordinating anarchy to specific visions, economic arrangements, or responses to various aspects of the status quo, is to reject anarchy in one way or another. I want to see anarchy, in the full force of the term. Anarchy in all its senses.
Our fights will continue, and should continue — but more than that, anarchists need to overcome the ways our ideas of "what it would look like" actively stand in the way of 'getting there.'
I think I wanna write part 2 some time soon, perhaps covering property, semantics, flags and anti-statism. For fun. Hoping to antagonize my fave antagonists. In the meantime, gimme yer unfiltered thoughts.
ziq wrote
Not sure I agree about capitalism not being a hierarchy on its own. At its most basic level, it's simply the ownership of capital. If certain privileged people own capital, and a few select people own most of the capital, a hierarchy is immediately evident, created by the system of capitalism. Making capitalism an arrangement of haves, have-lesses and have-nots, where the power each group has is completely unbalanced - a rigid hierarchy.
This I agree with. Just stating you oppose something for being a hierarchy and not analyzing its further consequences is very limiting and self-sabotaging. Every fiber needs to be pulled on until the ball of string is fully untangled.