I believe that Murray Bookchin himself late in life broke with anarchism and embraced discipline and democratic centralism. The Spanish revolution failed because of anaarchism. See Felix Morrow's Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1938/revolution-spain/index.htm The problem with Lenin and the Bolsheviks was not democratic centralism and central organization per se, but because they refused to extend democracy to the rest of society--as Marx and Engels and the Communist League desired. See my article, Was the Bolshevik Regime Marxist, or Blanquist? https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its
There is a reason WHY Marxists don't "extend democracy to the rest of society." Marxists don't believe that ordinary working class people OUGHT to have the real say in society because they "lack class consciousness" and because they are "brainwashed by the hegemonic capitalist ideology" not to mention that they are also (according to the current Marxist thinking) "racist" and "homophobic" and "transphobic" etc. This wrongful elitist contempt for ordinary people was standard thinking for intellectuals in the past (with Marx being typical in this regard!) and is still standard thinking. I discuss this in my "The Communist Manifesto is Wrong" at https://www.pdrboston.org/the-communist-manifesto-is-wrong and in an article about Marx's writings at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no and in an article about current Marxists/Leftists at https://www.pdrboston.org/all-leftists-are-the-problem.
The issue is not democratic centralism; the issue is an elitist view of ordinary people and the anti-democratic practice that stems from that view.
Substitute "orthodox Leninists" for "Marxists" in your comment, and you're on the money. As Engelstein's RUSSIA IN FLAMES book will verify. The Bolsheviks considered everyone else in society to be an idiot--because they didn't belong to the Bolshevik Party.
But as I've told you before, the biography of Karl Marx by Sven Eric Leidman, A WORLD TO WIN, shows Marx to be thoroughly democratic, and wanting just like you for the socialist revolution to be made by the workers themselves. And other things Marx and Engels said, according to Richard N. Hunt, POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS, show that for societies like Russia, Marx and Engels wanted a full democracy.
Stop talking ignorant, libelous nonsense about them. Read my article, and read these books by Liedman and Hunt.
From what I read from this article, NONE of the quotes from Marx that you provide evidence of your assertions. What you in fact you are doing--and I invite my readers to check the article out for yourselves--is to present evidence of what everybody already knows--that Marx was an economic determinist. But what you do is to assume what you have to prove. The fact that these quotes show this, is evidence, to you, in your hostile attitude, that Marx was dismissive of the capacity of workerrs become self-actualized and equal citizens within a social republic.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These passages can only be read that way, but a person highly biased by his own petite-bourgeois hatred of Marxism.
I'm not going to speculate why you embrace such magical thinking. Look into your own soul, my friend. What privileges do you wish to salvage from the coming class war, that impels you to libel Marxism so transparently, in this way?
John, show us in DETAIL how any of these quotes shows NOT ONLY that Marx was an economic determinist, but IN ADDITION, argued that his determinism was REDUCTIONIST OF MOTIVE.
You are assuming that the one leads to the other. Marx's determinism, for you, means that one's economic conditions will ALWAYS bring out the WORST. If one is middle class, one MUST adopt a petite bourgeois mentality. If one is a worker, one can ONLY adopt a "trade union consciousness". THAT'S NOT TRUE. That's NOT what Marx argued. For Marx, economic conditions do NOT MANDATE a given ideology. They only determine the probability of a TENDENCY. That tendency can be overcome through ideological struggle.
"Try to find Marxist literature (written today or earlier) that explicitly says (however it is worded) this: That the positive values of ordinary people--the values of equality and mutual aid (solidarity) by which people routinely try to shape the small corners of the world over which they have any real control today--are the values that ought to shape all of society, that the purpose of revolution is to make this happen, and that these positive values of ordinary people conflict with the terrible values--inequality and domination of the many by the few--of the ruling elite. You will not find such a statement made by a person trained in Marxist theory! Marxists don't believe such a statement is true. But it is! [as I prove at https://www.pdrboston.org/most-people-are-egalitarians .]
Go ahead and find me such a statement by a trained Marxist.
Marx and Engels wrote the following, which directly contradicts your attribution to them of an attitude hostile to, proposing to dominate, and diminishing of the intelligence of the working class: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves;"
The following passage from their Manifesto shows that they did not have a reductionist view of their own middle class, or even of the bourgeoisie, as inevitably petite bourgeois in their consciousness: " entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. "
I find the following fact ironic, and perhaps other readers will do so as well: John, you assert in your comment that Marxists are bound inevitably by the skill they develop for class analysis, to a class reductionism, and that this reductionism, in turn, inexorably mandates their adoption of a sectarian, totalitarian attitude toward the rest of society.
This assertion of yours, is itself, however, reductive and sectarian! You yourself are just as guilty of diminishing our capacity for humanity, as you accuse us of inexorably diminishing that of others!
Intelligent Marxists can and do strive to avoid such reductionism. They hold to the proposition that a given class basis gives rise only to powerful tendencies—not certainties--toward a given ideological distortion.
For example, Marxists would say that having a class background, with its concomitant privileges enjoyed within the capitalist system, tends the vast majority of the middle class to embrace such petite bourgeois ideologies as libertarianism, populism, corporatism, and Progressivism. All of these ideologies are means by which many—but not all—middle class individuals—small entrepreneurs as well as members of the professional managerial service class—delude themselves into thinking they may have their cake and eat it too. They may have Catholicism,without the Pope, as Marx quipped about Proudhon’s views. They can have capitalism, by which they continue to enjoy their privileged status and comforts, vastly superior to those “enjoyed” by the workers and poor—and yet free themselves from the corruption, irrationality, and their own exploitation, by the capitalists, and by themselves against the workers and poor.
Yet Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht—most every prominent Marxist of the 20th century, somehow escaped this purportedly “inexorable fate”!
Of course, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks, infected by the Blanquism of Lenin’s idol, Petr Nikitch Tkachev, indulged themselves in a “socialist” version of this: their employment of the Russian workers revolution to erect a one party state, was, I believe unconsciously, a means by which they believed they could enjoy such privileges within a socialist society (the fact that they thereby created a Caliban, Joseph Stalin, who had them all murdered, including Lenin himself, according to both Trotsky’s bio of Stalin, and Robert Payne’s biography of Lenin, shows you how deluded this particular self serving petite bourgeois belief also was!)
But Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and even Trotsky, for a time (his 1904 critique of Lenin’s Jacobinism, Our Political Tasks) rejected this totalitarian element within Blanquism. (It is tragically unfortunate that the Leftists within the German Social Democratic Party, all too late splitting off to form the Spartakus League, did not adopt Blanquism’s positive, democratic centralist elements, as did Lenin and Trotsky. This determined their deaths, just as much as the Bolsheviks’ embrace of its totalitarian elements, determined theirs).
Our class analysis does not dictate that we embrace the sectarianism and totalitarian despotism you impute to us. Your very imputation of this, shows you to be just as sectarian and totalitarian as what you attribute to us.
So as the old saying goes, John, “You spot it? You got it!”
If you are going to criticize my words then at least quote them first. I have no idea what words of mine you are referring to and I’m not sure you do either.
My last few comments are in reference to your first comment. I find this comment to be evasive. Please don't resort to such sophistries, John. You know exactly what I mean, and your evasion angers me. This is my substack page. Don't be juvenile on it. Engage my criticisms of your comments, rationally. Or get off.
In other words, "Projection ain't just a river in Egypt." :-) Your accusation that we are inexorably bound to commit "bad faith", as Sartre might say, because, as you purport, we always and everywhere attribute this to others, is itself, a beautiful example of .... bad faith!
Better to just give your opponents the benefit of the doubt. N'est-ce pas?
Thank you for sharing your article about anarchism in Spain; I agree with it in part, but only in part.
I agree with you when you write:
"The biggest problem in spain was that the anarchists did not really believe in the philosophy they wrote and talked about for so many years. They did not have the courage of their convictions. When they had the opportunity, the day after the defeat of the military uprising, to continue on and help develop the stateless society they found themselves in in Catalonia, they instead chose to turn to the state. They never had enough faith in the huge number of anarchists in Catalonia and Aragón to tell the politicians enough was enough and carry on as if they did not exist, which was essentially true since the state had no actual power there at that time. If they had really believed their propaganda that regular working people, in field, factories, restaurants, and shops, had the wisdom and knowledge to fend for themselves and create a new libertarian society on their own initiative, they would never have so easily turned their victory into defeat by encouraging the reinstitution of the state on the morn of the revolution."
"Initially, right after the anarchists defeated the fascist forces in Barcelona, their power in that city and its entire province of Catalonia was unchallenged. The anarchists could easily have established a government that would have explicitly defended egalitarianism from the anti-egalitarian forces, and they could have done this in the larger region of Republican Spain. But they did not. The reason they didn't was because the anarchists had a theory that said that all governmental power was bad. This was a huge error in anarchist theory that resulted in the defeat of egalitarianism in Spain.
"In the absence of an egalitarian government defending egalitarianism in the part of Spain where the anarchist-led social revolution was happening, the anti-egalitarian forces there were able to, and did indeed, set up an anti-egalitarian government (it was the "Spanish Republic") that attacked egalitarianism; in particular it tried to define the goal of the people in Republican Spain as merely to defend the old liberal rule of capitalists and big land owners against fascism. The anti-egalitarians were the capitalists and landlords and their politician allies, as well as Communists sent by Stalin to Spain, and some (but not all) Communist followers of Leon Trotsky.
"The anarchists were confused about what to do and in this confusion they ended up collaborating with the anti-egalitarian government (known now as The Republic). The defeat of egalitarianism in Spain was due largely to this huge mistake."
Regarding authority in a militia, I think joining a militia should be voluntary, that militia officers should be elected and not have special privileges, and that during a battle militia members should be required to obey militarily-appropriate orders because everybody in the militia is at a seriously increased risk of being killed by the enemy otherwise.
Regarding authority generally, I think that egalitarians have the right to make laws prohibiting anti-egalitarian oppressive acts. Don't you agree?
Ok. The revolution failed because the anarchists were never anarchic. When the government in Catalonia was defeated the anarchists handed the keys to statists. And during the war they “commandeered” other people’s shit, just like other statists. And the one prominent “individualist” anarchist, Federica Montseny,joined the government. WTF? I am an anarchist. And an individualist. And the Spanish civil war only give bad examples of how to behave. But not nearly as loathsome as those of the Bolsheviks.
I believe that Murray Bookchin himself late in life broke with anarchism and embraced discipline and democratic centralism. The Spanish revolution failed because of anaarchism. See Felix Morrow's Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain. https://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1938/revolution-spain/index.htm The problem with Lenin and the Bolsheviks was not democratic centralism and central organization per se, but because they refused to extend democracy to the rest of society--as Marx and Engels and the Communist League desired. See my article, Was the Bolshevik Regime Marxist, or Blanquist? https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its
There is a reason WHY Marxists don't "extend democracy to the rest of society." Marxists don't believe that ordinary working class people OUGHT to have the real say in society because they "lack class consciousness" and because they are "brainwashed by the hegemonic capitalist ideology" not to mention that they are also (according to the current Marxist thinking) "racist" and "homophobic" and "transphobic" etc. This wrongful elitist contempt for ordinary people was standard thinking for intellectuals in the past (with Marx being typical in this regard!) and is still standard thinking. I discuss this in my "The Communist Manifesto is Wrong" at https://www.pdrboston.org/the-communist-manifesto-is-wrong and in an article about Marx's writings at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no and in an article about current Marxists/Leftists at https://www.pdrboston.org/all-leftists-are-the-problem.
The issue is not democratic centralism; the issue is an elitist view of ordinary people and the anti-democratic practice that stems from that view.
What do you think?
Substitute "orthodox Leninists" for "Marxists" in your comment, and you're on the money. As Engelstein's RUSSIA IN FLAMES book will verify. The Bolsheviks considered everyone else in society to be an idiot--because they didn't belong to the Bolshevik Party.
But as I've told you before, the biography of Karl Marx by Sven Eric Leidman, A WORLD TO WIN, shows Marx to be thoroughly democratic, and wanting just like you for the socialist revolution to be made by the workers themselves. And other things Marx and Engels said, according to Richard N. Hunt, POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS, show that for societies like Russia, Marx and Engels wanted a full democracy.
Stop talking ignorant, libelous nonsense about them. Read my article, and read these books by Liedman and Hunt.
Please note that my criticism of Marxism in my article at
https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no Is based on what Marx and Engels wrote and not on what Lenin wrote or said.
From what I read from this article, NONE of the quotes from Marx that you provide evidence of your assertions. What you in fact you are doing--and I invite my readers to check the article out for yourselves--is to present evidence of what everybody already knows--that Marx was an economic determinist. But what you do is to assume what you have to prove. The fact that these quotes show this, is evidence, to you, in your hostile attitude, that Marx was dismissive of the capacity of workerrs become self-actualized and equal citizens within a social republic.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These passages can only be read that way, but a person highly biased by his own petite-bourgeois hatred of Marxism.
I'm not going to speculate why you embrace such magical thinking. Look into your own soul, my friend. What privileges do you wish to salvage from the coming class war, that impels you to libel Marxism so transparently, in this way?
John, show us in DETAIL how any of these quotes shows NOT ONLY that Marx was an economic determinist, but IN ADDITION, argued that his determinism was REDUCTIONIST OF MOTIVE.
You are assuming that the one leads to the other. Marx's determinism, for you, means that one's economic conditions will ALWAYS bring out the WORST. If one is middle class, one MUST adopt a petite bourgeois mentality. If one is a worker, one can ONLY adopt a "trade union consciousness". THAT'S NOT TRUE. That's NOT what Marx argued. For Marx, economic conditions do NOT MANDATE a given ideology. They only determine the probability of a TENDENCY. That tendency can be overcome through ideological struggle.
I challenge you, as I wrote in my article that you are referring to (at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no ):
"Try to find Marxist literature (written today or earlier) that explicitly says (however it is worded) this: That the positive values of ordinary people--the values of equality and mutual aid (solidarity) by which people routinely try to shape the small corners of the world over which they have any real control today--are the values that ought to shape all of society, that the purpose of revolution is to make this happen, and that these positive values of ordinary people conflict with the terrible values--inequality and domination of the many by the few--of the ruling elite. You will not find such a statement made by a person trained in Marxist theory! Marxists don't believe such a statement is true. But it is! [as I prove at https://www.pdrboston.org/most-people-are-egalitarians .]
Go ahead and find me such a statement by a trained Marxist.
This is where you're going wrong, John.
Marx and Engels wrote the following, which directly contradicts your attribution to them of an attitude hostile to, proposing to dominate, and diminishing of the intelligence of the working class: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves;"
The following passage from their Manifesto shows that they did not have a reductionist view of their own middle class, or even of the bourgeoisie, as inevitably petite bourgeois in their consciousness: " entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. "
You Spot It? You Got It!
I find the following fact ironic, and perhaps other readers will do so as well: John, you assert in your comment that Marxists are bound inevitably by the skill they develop for class analysis, to a class reductionism, and that this reductionism, in turn, inexorably mandates their adoption of a sectarian, totalitarian attitude toward the rest of society.
This assertion of yours, is itself, however, reductive and sectarian! You yourself are just as guilty of diminishing our capacity for humanity, as you accuse us of inexorably diminishing that of others!
Intelligent Marxists can and do strive to avoid such reductionism. They hold to the proposition that a given class basis gives rise only to powerful tendencies—not certainties--toward a given ideological distortion.
For example, Marxists would say that having a class background, with its concomitant privileges enjoyed within the capitalist system, tends the vast majority of the middle class to embrace such petite bourgeois ideologies as libertarianism, populism, corporatism, and Progressivism. All of these ideologies are means by which many—but not all—middle class individuals—small entrepreneurs as well as members of the professional managerial service class—delude themselves into thinking they may have their cake and eat it too. They may have Catholicism,without the Pope, as Marx quipped about Proudhon’s views. They can have capitalism, by which they continue to enjoy their privileged status and comforts, vastly superior to those “enjoyed” by the workers and poor—and yet free themselves from the corruption, irrationality, and their own exploitation, by the capitalists, and by themselves against the workers and poor.
Yet Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht—most every prominent Marxist of the 20th century, somehow escaped this purportedly “inexorable fate”!
Of course, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks, infected by the Blanquism of Lenin’s idol, Petr Nikitch Tkachev, indulged themselves in a “socialist” version of this: their employment of the Russian workers revolution to erect a one party state, was, I believe unconsciously, a means by which they believed they could enjoy such privileges within a socialist society (the fact that they thereby created a Caliban, Joseph Stalin, who had them all murdered, including Lenin himself, according to both Trotsky’s bio of Stalin, and Robert Payne’s biography of Lenin, shows you how deluded this particular self serving petite bourgeois belief also was!)
But Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and even Trotsky, for a time (his 1904 critique of Lenin’s Jacobinism, Our Political Tasks) rejected this totalitarian element within Blanquism. (It is tragically unfortunate that the Leftists within the German Social Democratic Party, all too late splitting off to form the Spartakus League, did not adopt Blanquism’s positive, democratic centralist elements, as did Lenin and Trotsky. This determined their deaths, just as much as the Bolsheviks’ embrace of its totalitarian elements, determined theirs).
Our class analysis does not dictate that we embrace the sectarianism and totalitarian despotism you impute to us. Your very imputation of this, shows you to be just as sectarian and totalitarian as what you attribute to us.
So as the old saying goes, John, “You spot it? You got it!”
Tom
If you are going to criticize my words then at least quote them first. I have no idea what words of mine you are referring to and I’m not sure you do either.
My last few comments are in reference to your first comment. I find this comment to be evasive. Please don't resort to such sophistries, John. You know exactly what I mean, and your evasion angers me. This is my substack page. Don't be juvenile on it. Engage my criticisms of your comments, rationally. Or get off.
In other words, "Projection ain't just a river in Egypt." :-) Your accusation that we are inexorably bound to commit "bad faith", as Sartre might say, because, as you purport, we always and everywhere attribute this to others, is itself, a beautiful example of .... bad faith!
Better to just give your opponents the benefit of the doubt. N'est-ce pas?
See: https://www.bad-press.net/reflections-on-the-revolution-in-spain/#more-436
Thank you for sharing your article about anarchism in Spain; I agree with it in part, but only in part.
I agree with you when you write:
"The biggest problem in spain was that the anarchists did not really believe in the philosophy they wrote and talked about for so many years. They did not have the courage of their convictions. When they had the opportunity, the day after the defeat of the military uprising, to continue on and help develop the stateless society they found themselves in in Catalonia, they instead chose to turn to the state. They never had enough faith in the huge number of anarchists in Catalonia and Aragón to tell the politicians enough was enough and carry on as if they did not exist, which was essentially true since the state had no actual power there at that time. If they had really believed their propaganda that regular working people, in field, factories, restaurants, and shops, had the wisdom and knowledge to fend for themselves and create a new libertarian society on their own initiative, they would never have so easily turned their victory into defeat by encouraging the reinstitution of the state on the morn of the revolution."
I make the same point in my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/anarchism but I make it without the "all government is bad" framework:
"Initially, right after the anarchists defeated the fascist forces in Barcelona, their power in that city and its entire province of Catalonia was unchallenged. The anarchists could easily have established a government that would have explicitly defended egalitarianism from the anti-egalitarian forces, and they could have done this in the larger region of Republican Spain. But they did not. The reason they didn't was because the anarchists had a theory that said that all governmental power was bad. This was a huge error in anarchist theory that resulted in the defeat of egalitarianism in Spain.
"In the absence of an egalitarian government defending egalitarianism in the part of Spain where the anarchist-led social revolution was happening, the anti-egalitarian forces there were able to, and did indeed, set up an anti-egalitarian government (it was the "Spanish Republic") that attacked egalitarianism; in particular it tried to define the goal of the people in Republican Spain as merely to defend the old liberal rule of capitalists and big land owners against fascism. The anti-egalitarians were the capitalists and landlords and their politician allies, as well as Communists sent by Stalin to Spain, and some (but not all) Communist followers of Leon Trotsky.
"The anarchists were confused about what to do and in this confusion they ended up collaborating with the anti-egalitarian government (known now as The Republic). The defeat of egalitarianism in Spain was due largely to this huge mistake."
I discuss this "all government is bad" idea in my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/yes-we-need-a-good-government .
Regarding authority in a militia, I think joining a militia should be voluntary, that militia officers should be elected and not have special privileges, and that during a battle militia members should be required to obey militarily-appropriate orders because everybody in the militia is at a seriously increased risk of being killed by the enemy otherwise.
Regarding authority generally, I think that egalitarians have the right to make laws prohibiting anti-egalitarian oppressive acts. Don't you agree?
What do you think?
And, perhaps you should all read Lessons of the Spanish Revolution by Vernon Richards.
Ok. The revolution failed because the anarchists were never anarchic. When the government in Catalonia was defeated the anarchists handed the keys to statists. And during the war they “commandeered” other people’s shit, just like other statists. And the one prominent “individualist” anarchist, Federica Montseny,joined the government. WTF? I am an anarchist. And an individualist. And the Spanish civil war only give bad examples of how to behave. But not nearly as loathsome as those of the Bolsheviks.