On Marxism: An Anti-Authoritarian Analysis Turned Upside Down

An essay specifically for those who think liberals are Communists

Yes, Karl Marx really did write that in a letter in 1883 to some French socialists. The works in which he and Friedrich Engels laid out their economic theory, The Communist Manifesto(1848) and Capital(1859), had been out for some time, and clearly something had happened since then to make Marx deny what his own ism was becoming.

A lot more has happened to it since, and while there have been some Marxists, like Richard Wolff, who adhere to Marx’s vision of political and economic power, there have been lots of others who ignored it and only used his critique of capitalism to advance their own authoritarian tendencies.

In America, that last bunch has received all the attention and changed the meaning of Marxism in American minds, and that bit is where I am going if you will bear with me.

Marxism has two main parts. One is an analytical, materialist critique of the power relationships between those who have it and those who don’t throughout history, culminating in a detailed dissection of the capitalist system that existed in the 19th Century.

I’ve read it, and it all boils down to realizing capitalism is the economic system where more profit soonest is the Prime Directive and takes priority over literally everything else. Understand that, and you will not only understand everything Marx ever wrote, you will understand why your boss or your government is screwing you over right now. It’s real simple.

The other, which I will focus on here, is Marx’s vision of what needs to be changed now. Europe has had three main social orders since civilization developed: Slavery, feudalism, and capitalism.

In slavery, the workplace was dominated by the master-slave relationship. In feudalism, it was lord and serf. In capitalism, it is employer and employee.

In all three, a very small group of people had total control over how the majority of people lived their lives, how they worked, and what they did. Marx’s really brilliant idea was to get rid of that authoritarian system where a tiny minority has sweeping control over the majority.

Of course he was influenced by the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment, as he should have been, as am I. Why not, thought Marx, give the workers(or the farmers or whoever) control over how they produce what they do and let them determine where and how the surplus, or the profit and wealth produced by their work, be distributed?

IOW, Marx and Engels were for majority rule in the workplace. They thought that once that happened, eventually the state, or government, would “wither away” because there would no longer be a need for it, which is why so many anarchists like Emma Goldman were attracted to Marxism.

According to Marx, there should be no bosses except those appointed by the majority of the workers, appointments which can be easily revoked by a vote. This happened for a brief time in Russian cities during the Russian Revolution, but it did not last.

Lenin and Trotsky, for what they thought were excellent reasons(they wrote enough books on the subject), did not abolish the employer-employee relationship in the workplace and on the farms. After some back-and-forth, they ended up having loyal Party bosses take the place of the capitalist employers, thereby becoming socialist employers, but employees were still employees. Without economic or political power.

In the Soviet system, a tiny group of government bureaucrats told the majority what to do, which made it a very authoritarian system, and it didn’t take all that many smarts for Western capitalists to point that out. And point it out again, again, and again for year after year, generation after generation, until there is a whole new generation of Americans who just know that Marxism equals Authoritarianism.

The objective of Marxism is the reverse, but that was deliberately forgotten by both the authoritarian socialist systems of the Communist countries and by capitalist apologists. Since Marxism is seldom taught in the US, it’s no surprise that most Americans don’t know it, either.

Well, if you read this, now you do. I am not saying that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were not “real” Marxists. That would be silly. I am saying that they were authoritarian Marxists, while Marx and Engels were most definitely not.

Marx did not care about what we call social or cultural issues today. He was all about how power was structured in the economy. He was for majority rule, so he wouldn’t ever have pushed for special rights or privileges that were not granted by the majority.

Hell! If anyone other than the wealthy owned real property when Marx was around, he wouldn’t have even been opposed to property ownership so long as that ownership did not dominate other people. The widespread private property found in the United States after World War II simply had never existed when Marx wrote Capital.

Capitalists like Paul and Sowell love to say that Marxism means authoritarianism or totalitarianism, but Paul’s just ignorant and Sowell is flat-out lying because he’s too smart not to know better. Marxism is about, in short, community co-ops, not the Cheka or the Stasi.

I hope some of you find this information useful, and that if you are an anti-authoritarian of any type, to pay some attention to Marx, and especially to living Marxists like Richard Wolff who haven’t gone off on some power trip imagining they are the vanguard of the Revolution, like the Trotskyists in Ann Arbor who produce the World Socialist Web Site.

And please stop calling liberals Marxists. They’re not. They believe in privately owned capitalism, which no Marxist(not even a Stalinist) does, and they believe in imposing their own social and cultural “values” on the rest of us, which is also something Marx would never have tolerated.

In short, Marxism can be a great ally of anti-authoritarian, freedom-loving people. You can bet your last dime that Emma Goldman would never have had to tell Karl Marx, “If I can’t dance, then to hell with your revolution!”

Marx would never ban dancing or partying. Liberals did just a few short years ago. Think about that.

Thank you for reading, have a great day, and please feel free to shoot me full of questions!

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