8Įngels reiterates (in the same year): ‘All Socialists are agreed that the political State, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and be transformed into simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society’ (as determined by the sociological genius). will disappear and governmental functions will be transformed into simple administrative functions’. The key passage from Marx on this topic is the following (from 1872): ‘What all socialists understand by anarchism is this: as soon as the goal of the proletarian movement, the abolition of classes, is attained, the power of the State. Marxian thought represents, therefore, (a) a revolutionary compromise, the compromising of the negative moment - in fact the compromising of anarchism in the form of a ‘Marxian “Anarchism”’, by the willful misrepresentation of Marxian socialism as the true anarchism. (on the dubious basis of which Marxism identifies itself as genuinely anarchist) and (b) the eternal preservation of the arbitrarily designated ‘non-political’ State (on the basis of which Adamiak rightly denies Marxism’s anarchism).Ģ. This Marxian sublation of the State represents simultaneously: (a) the abstract (post-transitional) negation of the (as Hegel describes it) ‘strictly political’ State 7 Marx’s revolutionary vision, unlike that of Bakunin, certainly maintains a role for the State in some form – we can say, in sublated form. 5Īdamiak, accordingly, classifies Marxism as ‘a statist ideology’ which is, as such, antithetical to anarchism. 4īakunin, who drew this conclusion originally, says of Marx and Engels, therefore, that ‘They have not learned how to dismantle the religion of the State’. 3Īdamiak’s main conclusion in this article is ‘although Marx and Engels anticipated the demise of “politics” and “political power”, the future communist society they envisioned was by no means anarchistic the State was to be its one indispensable institution’. (Thus, for Marx there are three forms of State: the present ‘political’ State the ‘transitional’ State and the ‘non-political’ State.) These ideas have been explored previously by Richard Adamiak in ‘The “Withering Away” of the State: A Reconsideration’. Perhaps the notions that define Marx’s position here best are those of the ‘non-political’ post-revolutionary State and the ‘transitional’ dictatorship that will usher in this utopia. The ‘Transitional’ and ‘Non-Political’ States In the second place, there is an ontological distinction between Bakunin’s naturalism (his prioritization of nature, of which mankind is merely a part) and Marx’s anthropocentrism (his prioritization of man as, essentially, a productive mediator of nature) Bakunin, accordingly, rejects Marx’s anthropocentric economism as non-naturalistic and metaphysical.ġ. In the first place, there is a logical distinction between Bakunin’s negative dialectic (in which sublation and mediation are excluded, so that each dialectical product is a fulfillment of the antithetical or ‘revolutionary’) and Marx’s affirmative dialectic (in which these aspects are retained, so that each dialectical product preserves something of what was confronted by the negative, that is the ‘thesis’ or, in Bakunin’s terms, the ‘reactionary’) on this basis, Marx is, from the standpoint of ‘revolutionary logic’, what Bakunin terms a ‘compromiser’. We cannot hope to discuss them adequately here, 1īut we must at least mention the two central distinctions. We should note initially that while these issues of State are often taken to constitute the sole difference between Marx and Bakunin (or between Marxism and anarchism), there are in fact more fundamental, philosophical distinctions between Marx and Bakunin that come into play at the level of discussion of the State. In this brief paper, however, we will focus on just one of them: the fate of the State. All of these issues are of interest and importance. The most well known differences between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin concern their attitudes toward the State: its genesis, its ‘nature’, its relation to the economic side of affairs, and its fate under revolutionary conditions.
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