Engels against anarchism

Anarchism vs. the revolutionary fight for state power

Printed below are excerpts from the writings of Frederick Engels on anarchism, a petty-bourgeois current against which Engels and Karl Marx, founders of the modern communist movement, waged a political struggle within the working--class movement in the 1860s and 1870s.

The main anarchist grouping at the time was headed by Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin. They preached that the state, not capitalism, was the problem facing working people. Workers should abstain from political activity and instead declare a general strike to wait for the old regime to collapse. The Bakuninists postured as "anti-authoritarian" while in reality "constitut[ing] themselves as a secret society with a hierarchical organization, and under . . . [an] absolutely dictatorial leadership" directed by Bakunin himself, Engels explained.

The first and the third items reprinted below can be found in Marx and Engels’s Selected Works, volume 2, and the second piece in their Selected Correspondence, both published by Progress Publishers.

BY FREDERICK ENGELS
("Apropos of Working-Class Political Action," a reporter’s record of a speech delivered on Sept. 21, 1871, at the London conference of the International Workingmen’s Association.)

Complete abstention from political action is impossible. The abstentionist press participates in politics every day. It is only a question of how one does it and of what politics one engages in. For the rest, to us abstention is impossible. The working-class party functions as a political party in most countries, by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention. Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals. To preach abstention to them is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics. The morning after the Paris Commune, which has made proletarian political action an order of the day, abstention is entirely out of the question.

We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics! The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.

The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press--those are our weapons. Are we to sit back and abstain while somebody tries to rob us of them? It is said that a political act on our part implies that we accept the existing state of affairs. On the contrary, so long as this state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognize the prevailing order.

(From a letter to T. Cuno in Milan, Italy, Jan. 24, 1872.)

Bakunin has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of Proudhonism and communism. The chief point concerning the former is that it does not regard capital i.e., the class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers which has arisen through social development, but the state as the main evil to be abolished.

While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers are of the same opinion as we i.e., that state power is nothing more than the organisation which the ruling classes--landowners and capitalists--have provided for themselves in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital, the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is precisely the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.

But since for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can keep the state--that is, any state, whether it be a republic, a monarchy, or anything else--alive. Hence complete abstention from all politics. To commit a political act, especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle. The thing to do is to carry on propaganda, heap abuse upon the state, organize and when all the workers, hence the majority, are won over, all the authorities are to be deposed, the state abolished and replaced with the organization of the International. This great act with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.

All this sounds extremely radical and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes; that is why the Bakuninist theory has speedily found favor also in Italy and Spain among young lawyers, doctors, and other doctrinaires. But the mass of the workers will never allow itself to be persuaded that the public affairs of their countries are not also their own affairs; they are naturally politically-minded and whoever tries to make them believe that they should leave politics alone will in the end be dropped by them. To preach to the workers that they should in all circumstances abstain from politics is to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans.

(From "On Authority," an article published in December 1873.)

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? 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 the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon--authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.