Mutualism versus Marxism

So, a couple of posts ago I wrote about Benjamin Tucker's "State Socialism and Anarchism" essay which I had just published as an audio reading, and a real-life Marxist complained to me that it was a travesty of Marxism to call it "state socialism". Now I've had a number of quite long, late into the night, Twitter conversations with this chap, and very civil they have been too, and it has ended up with me reading "The State and Revolution" by one Mr Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. My Twitter correspondent's contention was that Marxism is a libertarian ideology (is it right to call it an ideology? I don't know!) and I remembered a long time ago reading the Communist Manifesto and largely agreeing with the statement of the social problem Marx and Engels were explaining. So I was genuinely intrigued.

Mostly I was intrigued because all the critiques of Marxism I have ever come across, from his contemporaries such as Proudhon and Spencer, to commentaries later in the 19th century such as by Tucker (who of course drew on and acknowledged the previous work of the likes of Proudhon himself and Josiah Warren), through to those observing the playing out of the Russian revolution as Franz Oppenheimer ("The State" – of which I am also preparing an audiobook) and Clarence Lee Swartz ("What is Mutualism?"), and later from Albert Jay Nock right through to today, portray Marxism as a road to totalitarianism. And of course, on their part, Marxists will tend to say, as we anarchists do on occasion, that there has never been a proper Marxist-socialist society to criticise, whilst so many of us view the Russian revolution and what followed as precisely that.

Now, it is certainly true that Marx, and Lenin, made great play of the notion that their system envisaged the "withering away" of the "state" and to that extent, creating a "stateless society", I can see why they might think that their end-game is, in some respects, "libertarian" – in that we are supposed to be freed from the oppressive state. It is also true that, like my type of libertarianism – Mutualism or Market Anarchism – the aim is to eradicate those parts of the state-capitalist system that enable privileged groups to exploit the least well able to make the most of their lives.

And certainly, for me at least, "The State and Revolution" poses questions that those of us who want to move to a stateless society do need to have some answers to – mainly about how we get there, revolution or evolution and so on. But that seems to me to be the start and the finish of any similarity between Marxism and Mutualism or any kind of commonly understood libertarian-anarchism.

Marxism is unashamedly revolutionary, and violently revolutionary at that. The oppressed proletariat must overthrow the "present day state" of the "capitalist/imperialist" oppressors and establish an alternative form of a state, albeit "temporary", during the reign of which they become the oppressors of the previous oppressive class. During this time they expropriate the private property of the "capitalists" and turn it over to collective ownership. To be fair, my Twitter correspondent does not appear to be a violent person, but nor does he appear to be willing to acknowledge that the post-revolutionary state is still oppressive – so long as the majority are able to decide democratically to do the oppressing of the minority it is justified by the sheer weight of oppression the proletariat has existed under previously.

This temporary proletarian state exists in order to eradicate the temptation of whoever, but mainly the former bourgeoisie, to reconstruct the mechanisms of exploitation, which eradication is carried out by the "armed workers". So this level of oppression, albeit of a minority (in theory at least), could go on for a very long time before such a society gets to the stage where the state can "wither away". But it also appears to rely on the willingness of everyone to get involved in the running of this state, to hold its representatives to account and so on. In the absence of such perfect participation, notwithstanding that the initial conditions of employment of administrators in the workers' state are that their offices should not confer privilege, financial or honorial, it seems inevitable to me, from the entire history of the state, whether feudal, bourgeois or democratic, that administrative positions will attract people who seek some power over others.

If one type of state is bad, all types of state are bad; or at least that's how it seems to me, and one so overtly founded on violent revolution is supremely bad, whatever the evils from which it is attempting to escape, and however small the minority it wishes to eradicate. Furthermore "perfect democracy" is still bound to become a tyranny of the majority, whether its decisions relate to the execution of a former banker, a debate over whether a worker is taking more from the common property than they need (and what to do about such a dangerous bourgeois tendency if so), or a decision about what to teach in the collectively owned school. Lenin talks a great deal about Marx not being a utopian, but it seems to me that assuming this level of participation is highly utopian.

Further, even if we were to get beyond the temporary state, which I frankly doubt since it would be ever paranoid about the re-emergence of bourgeois factions, always on the watch-out for some evidence of accumulation of property and so on, the entire system relies on some form of collective planning that can only be oppressive. Not only oppressive, but which cannot actually work, because there is no price mechanism that signals what products and labour are "socially necessary".

This is the problem of "socialist calculation" which is discussed in this Mises University audio lecture by Joseph Salerno. I cannot fathom how my Twitter correspondent can say that this will be a voluntary society in which people can do what they want in terms of work. It can only be centrally planned, even if the unit of "central planning" is a small, individual community – which again, I suspect it can never be, since not every such community can be an autarky and must therefore "trade" with other communities, again, through planned transactions based on someone's idea of what is "socially necessary".

This happy land, in which workers will voluntarily do whatever it is they are good at, regardless of the reward that can be gained from it, and who will gladly take "orders" – for orders they will necessarily be – to participate in some of the less pleasant but no less necessary jobs a community needs done, is simply not consistent with observable human nature, which is always to satisfy one's needs by the least effort. Self-interest is always important – that is not to say that this necessarily means grasping greed, a desire to exploit, or ostentatious accumulation. It is inherently subjective. Mutual co-operation does not necessitate collective subjugation.

Mutualists believe that we can "wither away" the state without a revolution, without an interim state. We believe we can have co-operation and mutual support by market mechanisms, with material incentives where necessary, without compulsion. That centralised planning, even on a "small scale" cannot trump the free market as a mechanism for signalling what things people individually and subjectively value and want more or less of. And that the principle of equal liberty cannot be created by violent coercion.

And I stand by my characterisation of Marxism, in its likely practice if not in its avowed intent, as totalitarian coercive collectivism, and thus not, in my understanding of the word, libertarian.