Post by RedFlag32 on Jan 8, 2008 20:40:40 GMT
Decentralism, Centralism, Marxism, and Anarchism
The Problem of Marxist Centralism
There is a paradox about Marxism. Its goals are similar to anarchism: a classless, cooperative, society, self-managed by the freely associated producers, with the replacement of alienated labor by craft-like creativity, and the replacement of the state by the democratic self-organization of the people. Yet in practice Marxism has resulted in the Social Democratic support of Western imperialism and in the creation of "Communist" totalitarian state capitalisms. Why is this?
One reason is Marxism's commitment to "centralism" from its very beginning in the work of Marx and Engels. In the programmatic part of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (the end of Section II), they wrote that the goal of the working class should be "to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state...." (1974, p. 86) This would include measures such as "5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state.... 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.... 8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies.... When...all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character....." (1974, p. 87)
That is, they assumed there would no longer be a state - a specialized, bureaucratic, coercive body standing above the rest of society. However, there would be a centralized "vast association." Presumably such a centralized national association would be run by a few people at the center - which is what makes it centralized. Everybody else would be in those industrial armies. What if the masses in the industrial armies resented the few central planners and rebelled against them? The central planners would need coercive power to keep the system working. In other words, they would need a state, whatever Marx and Engels wanted.
After the 1871 rebellion of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels changed their attitude toward the state. The old bourgeois state of the capitalists could not be simply taken over by the workers in order to carry out the above program, they wrote. The state of the capitalists would have to be destroyed. A new association would have to be put in its place, something like the Paris Commune, which was nonbureaucratic and radically democratic. Sometimes they called such a Commune-like structure a "state" and sometimes they denied that it was a "state."
But this does not mean that they rejected centralization. Some people read Marx's The Civil War in France (his writings on the Commune) as decentralist. The Revisionist (reformist) Bernstein said that Marx's views on the Commune were federalist, similar to the views of Proudhon (Bernstein was trying to discredit Marx as almost an anarchist). Lenin insisted that Marx was still a centralist. Actually Marx's writing on the Commune did not deal with the issue of centralism or decentralism at all.
Full at: www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=5714
The Problem of Marxist Centralism
There is a paradox about Marxism. Its goals are similar to anarchism: a classless, cooperative, society, self-managed by the freely associated producers, with the replacement of alienated labor by craft-like creativity, and the replacement of the state by the democratic self-organization of the people. Yet in practice Marxism has resulted in the Social Democratic support of Western imperialism and in the creation of "Communist" totalitarian state capitalisms. Why is this?
One reason is Marxism's commitment to "centralism" from its very beginning in the work of Marx and Engels. In the programmatic part of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (the end of Section II), they wrote that the goal of the working class should be "to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state...." (1974, p. 86) This would include measures such as "5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state.... 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.... 8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies.... When...all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character....." (1974, p. 87)
That is, they assumed there would no longer be a state - a specialized, bureaucratic, coercive body standing above the rest of society. However, there would be a centralized "vast association." Presumably such a centralized national association would be run by a few people at the center - which is what makes it centralized. Everybody else would be in those industrial armies. What if the masses in the industrial armies resented the few central planners and rebelled against them? The central planners would need coercive power to keep the system working. In other words, they would need a state, whatever Marx and Engels wanted.
After the 1871 rebellion of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels changed their attitude toward the state. The old bourgeois state of the capitalists could not be simply taken over by the workers in order to carry out the above program, they wrote. The state of the capitalists would have to be destroyed. A new association would have to be put in its place, something like the Paris Commune, which was nonbureaucratic and radically democratic. Sometimes they called such a Commune-like structure a "state" and sometimes they denied that it was a "state."
But this does not mean that they rejected centralization. Some people read Marx's The Civil War in France (his writings on the Commune) as decentralist. The Revisionist (reformist) Bernstein said that Marx's views on the Commune were federalist, similar to the views of Proudhon (Bernstein was trying to discredit Marx as almost an anarchist). Lenin insisted that Marx was still a centralist. Actually Marx's writing on the Commune did not deal with the issue of centralism or decentralism at all.
Full at: www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=5714
