Marxism and Anarchism

Callinicos, A. (2003). Marxism and anarchism. In T. Baldwin (Ed.
), The Cambridge History of

Philosophy 1870–1945 (pp. 297-308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:
10.1017/CHOL9780521591041.024
22
MARXISM AND ANARCHISM
ale x cal l i n i co s
The years between 1870 and 1914 saw the emergence of international socialism
as a force in European and, to a lesser extent, North American politics. Most
notably in Germany, socialist parties began to attract significant blocs of votes.
Their broader aspiration to become the agency of a global social transformation
was reflected in the formation of the Second International in 1889. Plainly
such aspirations required theoretical articulation, and thanks to the influence in
particular of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Marxism became the
most important socialist ideology (though its position never went unchallenged).
Indeed, Marxism’s transformation from the doctrine of a handful of German
exiles in London into the ideology of a mass movement was largely the work of
the SPD. Engels’s key work of popularisation, Anti-Dühring (Marx and Engels
1975–98: XXV), was originally serialised in the SPD paper Vorwärts in 1877–8.
The task of simplifying the complexities of Marx’s concepts was later taken on
by Kautsky as editor of the Social Democratic weekly Neue Zeit. His voluminous
writings provided the way into Marxism for a generation of socialist militants,
not merely in Germany but elsewhere in Europe.
M A R X V S. BA K U N I N
The Marxism that was thus popularised itself gained sharper definition thanks
to the emerging contrast between it and a rival radical ideology, anarchism. The
contest between the followers of Marx and Bakunin helped to destroy the First
International in the early 1870s. The respective movements which arose from
this dispute – social democracy (as, following the example of the SPD, Marxists
tended to call their parties) and anarchism – competed for influence in many
countries, with Bakunin’s followers often gaining the upper hand in Southern
Europe.
The thought of both the founding figures had been formed in the same
intellectual context – the disintegration of Hegelian idealism in the 1840s.
Bakunin had, along with the critic Vissarion Belinsky, originally embraced
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298 Alex Callinicos
an extravagantly quietist version of the Hegelian dialectic, according to which

the rational understanding of reality required reconciliation with it. Perhaps
because reconciliation with the specific social reality which confronted
them – Romanov absolutism – was so unpalatable, this proved an impossible
position to sustain. By the early 1840s Bakunin had moved from Right to Left
Hegelianism.
In a celebrated article, ‘The Reaction in Germany’ (1842), he taxed Hegelian
orthodoxy for its ‘positive’ treatment of existing social reality. This critique de-
veloped in some respects in parallel with Marx’s later attempt to extract the
‘rational kernel’ of the Hegelian dialectic from its ‘mystical shell’. Both seized
on Hegel’s concept of determinate negation, the flaw intrinsic to every concept,
form of consciousness, and social institution necessitating its replacement by a
more inclusive version. Marx gave the concept a straightforwardly social and
historical reference – to the contradictions internal to every social formation
which would doom it, after a phase in which it permitted the further develop-
ment of the productive forces, to revolution, stagnation, or collapse. Bakunin,
by contrast, treated negation as a abstract force, subverting and destroying every
determinate social form. His essay ends with the famous announcement: ‘Let
us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because
it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for
destruction is a creative passion, too’ (1842 [1965: 406]).
The conflict between these rival appropriations of Hegel reached its climax
after the defeat of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Both Marx and Bakunin
championed the Commune and claimed it as an instance of their version of
social revolution. In the aftermath of the Commune Bakunin wrote Statism and
Anarchy. Here he does not repudiate Marx’s materialist conception of history.
Conflicts between classes rooted in production are indeed the driving force of
history. But the domination of the exploiters over the exploited reaches its most
developed, concentrated, and malevolent form in the shape of what Bakunin
calls ‘statism’ – the bureaucratic rule of the modern centralised state. He does
not, as Max Weber would a little later, see this state as representing a source of
social power distinct from and independent of class, but rather understands class
exploitation and political domination as a single complex which it is the task of
social revolution to destroy.
This revolution Bakunin saw at work within the Europe of his day. It would
be carried out by a proletariat which he conceived much more broadly than
did Marx. Whereas the latter identified the working class with wage-labourers,
especially those employed in modern large-scale industry, Bakunin regarded
the generality of the lower classes – peasants and unemployed, artisans and fac-
tory workers – as the agent of revolutionary transformation. Self-organised in
small-scale communes, they would dismantle the centralised structures of
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Marxism and anarchism 299
economic and political power and replace them, not with a new form of state,
but with a federation of self-governing collectives. The goal of the revolution was
thus anarchy, the abolition of the state. Preparations for this transformation were
already well advanced in Southern Europe and in Russia, where the innate col-
lectivism of the peasantry predisposed them to anarchy. Counterposed to them as
the embodiment of the rival principle of statism was Germany. The bureaucratic
structures of the new Bismarckian Reich corresponded to the inborn servility
of the German people – a servility displayed even by democrats and socialists.
Thus Marx and his followers represented little more than the attempt to impose
a new form of statist domination in the guise of social liberation.
As a theoretical critique of Marxism, Bakunin’s arguments are fairly inept.
The experience of the Commune encouraged Marx to clarify and extend his
intuition, already expressed after the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848, that
socialist revolution, at least on the continent, would have to direct itself against
the modern bureaucratic state. In The Civil War in France (Marx and Engels 1871),
Marx praised the Commune particularly for the steps it had taken to dismantle
the centralised apparatuses of state power and replace them with structures much
more directly accountable to the working people of Paris (themselves, in the
shape of popular militias, forming the armed basis of political power). In his
drafts, he went even further, calling the Commune ‘a Revolution against the
State itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people
for the people, of its own social life’ (Marx and Engels 1975–98: XXII, 486).
That this was no temporary enthusiasm is suggested by the later ‘Critique of
the Gotha Programme’ (1875), where Marx criticised the concessions which
his German followers had made to Ferdinand Lassalle’s state socialism when
forming the SPD, affirming: ‘Freedom consists in converting the state from an
organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it’ (Marx
and Engels 1975–98: XXIV, 94).
The critical disagreement between Marx and Bakunin was therefore not over
the objective of abolishing the state. Both regarded it as an inherently oppressive
institution. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Marx
and Engels 1975–98, XXVI), sought to show how the state – conceived as a
specialised coercive apparatus separate from the rest of society – emerged as part
of the same process in which class antagonisms first crystallised. The point at
issue was rather whether the state could be abolished instantaneously, in the
act of revolutionary overthrow, or rather would gradually be dismantled in the
course of a much larger process of transformation. Marx argued that this period
of transition required a distinctive form of political rule, the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Like any state, this would be a form of class domination, but in this
instance the ruling class would be the majority, the proletariat, using radically
democratic forms in order to eradicate their exploitation.
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300 Alex Callinicos
In the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, Marx suggested that the transition
period would require a different principle of distribution from that prevailing in
what he called the ‘higher phase of communist society’. Under the dictatorship
of the proletariat, income would be distributed according the productive con-
tribution made by individuals. What seemed to him the manifest defects of this
principle – namely that it took no account of differences in individual needs
and abilities – would be overcome only once further productive development
and a transformation of motivations made possible the full flowering of a com-
munist society in which neither classes nor the state any longer existed. Here
the communist principle first formulated by Louis Blanc would apply: ‘From
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’(Marx and Engels
1975–98: XXIV, 87).
Marx’s differences with Bakunin therefore arose from his attempt to specify
realistically the historical circumstances in which egalitarian principles could
become operative. ‘Willpower, not economic conditions, is the basis of his
revolution’, he wrote of Bakunin (Marx and Engels 1975–98: XXIV, 519). Yet,
if the latter’s critique did not begin to engage with the complexity of Marx’s
views, one might still argue that it possesses a prophetic quality. Bakunin’s claim
to have detected a will to dominate concealed beneath German socialists’ talk
of emancipation could be taken as an anticipation of the way in which Russian
revolutionaries after 1917 erected new structures of bureaucratic domination
(though, given Bakunin’s tendency to reduce social and political differences to
ethno-racial categories, he would have been baffled by the fact that this was the
outcome of a Russian revolution).
Thus Bakunin homes in on the supposedly temporary nature of the dicta-
torship of the proletariat: ‘There is a flagrant contradiction here. If their [i.e.
the Marxists’] state is to be truly a people’s state, then why abolish it? But if its
abolition is essential to the real liberation of the people, then how do they dare
to call it a people’s state’ (1873 [1990: 179]). In his notes on Statism and Anarchy,
Marx comments: ‘as the proletariat in the period of struggle leading to the over-
throw of the old society still acts on the basis of the old society and hence still
moves within political forms which more or less correspond to it, it has at that
stage not yet arrived at its final organization, and hence to achieve its liberation
has recourse to methods which will be discarded once that liberation has been
obtained’ (Marx and Engels 1975–98: XXIV, 521). But, what if these methods
turn out to be rather difficult to discard, perhaps because those adept in them
have an interest in their preservation? Or, as Bakunin put it, ‘no dictatorship
can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself ’ (1873 [1990: 179]).
In any case, the radicalism of Marx’s own critique of the state was initially
concealed. The SPD leadership prevented the publication of the ‘Critique of
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the Gotha Programme’ till 1891. By then an association of socialism with the
expansion of state power had become well entrenched in the parties of the
Second International. Since various historical factors were promoting the state’s
greater involvement in social and economic life, it was natural for socialist parties’
practical demands to require different kinds of state action. It was only during
the First World War, which revealed a very different face of the state, that Lenin
rediscovered the anti-statist thrust of Marx’s political thought and made it the
central theme of The State and Revolution.
N AT U R A L I S M A N D M A R X I S M
The Marxism that was popularised under the Second International presup-
posed a particular interpretation (or, rather, a range of interpretations) of Marx’s
main concepts and theses. It was largely agreed that Marx’s theory of history
was one specification of a much broader conception of nature. In this sense,
late nineteenth-century Marxism participated in the more general tendency of
post-Darwinian intellectual culture to treat the social world naturalistically, as
continuous with, and subject to the same laws as the physical world. Engels, who
represented the link between the founders of historical materialism and the new
mass socialist parties, played a critical role in articulating this understanding of
Marxism. Thus, in his speech at Marx’s graveside in March 1883, he compared
Marx to Darwin.
Such a naturalistic interpretation of Marxism raised the question of what
place within it could be found for Marx’s Hegelian philosophical heritage.
Engels’s solution, most fully developed in the posthumously published Dialectics of
Nature, was to extract from Hegel’s logic certain general ‘laws of the dialectic’.
These – he usually listed three: the unity and interpenetration of opposites, the
transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation – were
universal laws of nature, operative everywhere. Nature as a whole was therefore
subject to the same processes of historical transformation generated by internal
conflicts which Hegel and Marx had detected in human society.
Though Engels’s dialectics of nature is sometimes counterposed to Marx’s
philosophical views, various obiter dicta indicate that it had the latter’s approval.
As a philosophical strategy, it had two particular advantages. In the first place, the
thought that the fundamental laws of nature were dialectical served to differen-
tiate this version of naturalism from the fairly reductive physicalistic materialism
which the writings of Büchner, Moleschott, and Vogt had made popular among
liberals and radicals in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Marx had contrasted
his approach with earlier versions of this kind of materialism in the 1840s by
arguing that humans interact and shape their environment through social labour
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302 Alex Callinicos
rather than passively depend on it. This theme is continued by Engels, notably
in the celebrated fragment, ‘The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to
Man’.
Secondly, conceiving nature as a complex of processes of historical transfor-
mation allowed Engels to connect Marx’s theory of history with contemporary
developments in the physical sciences, notably Darwin’s theory of evolution by
natural selection and the laws of thermodynamics. Insofar as these theories, like
historical materialism, deal with time-oriented, irreversible processes, Marxism
could be presented as going with the flow of scientific discovery. But, since
the developments in the physical sciences on which Engels concentrated had
taken place without the help of the Hegelian dialectic, in what sense could his
dialectical ‘laws’ be said to direct or guide scientific research? The insistence by
Stalinist ideologists in the Soviet Union that they should do so in a very strong
sense has helped to discredit the very idea of dialectical materialism. Engels’s
own approach, however, seems to have been a much more relaxed one. His
discussions of specific cases imply some sort of concept of emergence, in which
particular domains of being have their own distinctive laws. Thus he argues that
the mechanisms of natural selection discovered by Darwin do not govern the
social world, and that Social Darwinist claims that they do are little more than
capitalist apologetics. Where this relatively pluralistic naturalism leaves the three
great ‘laws’ of the dialectic is an open question.
Of more immediate interest to the Marxists of the Second International were
the implications of dialectical materialism for their understanding of history and
politics. They had a very different intellectual formation from the founders of
Marxism. As the most important among them, Kautsky, put it: ‘They [Marx and
Engels] started out with Hegel, I started out with Darwin. The latter occupied my
thoughts earlier than Marx, the development of organisms earlier than the econ-
omy, the struggle for existence of species and races earlier than the class struggle’
(1927 [1988: 7]). Kautsky indeed came to Marxism with an already formed evo-
lutionary theory which reflected the very common contemporary tendency
to accept Lamarck’s view of evolution as the inheritance of adaptive features
acquired by organisms through the impress of their environment on them.
His ‘materialist Lamarckianism’, as Kautsky called it, led him to conceive
evolution, both biological and social, as a matter of the interaction between
organism and environment. In this relationship, the requirements of the envi-
ronment would invariably prevail over whatever initiatives the organism might
make. The chief peculiarity of social evolution arose from the capacity of
humans to construct ‘artificial organs’ – material means of production – to
supplement their natural ones in meeting their needs. The unequal distribution
of the means of production gave rise to exploitation and to class struggle, which
Kautsky treated as occupying a relatively brief episode in the history of the
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human species, bracketed between the ‘primitive communism’ of early societies

and the advanced communism which would follow socialist revolution.
This broad conception of social evolution led Kautsky to view the historical
process as governed by what he liked to call ‘irresistible’ forces driving towards
the progressive transformation of society. He brushed off the efforts of his friend
Eduard Bernstein to argue that contemporary capitalist society was gradually
ameliorating itself in ways that were making both Marxist social theory and rev-
olutionary politics obsolete. The conflict between the increasingly concentrated
and organised forces of capital and labour remained, according to Kautsky, the
dominant fact about modern society. Yet the electoral growth of the SPD in the
pre-war era encouraged him to believe that an organised working class would be
able to conquer political power by electoral means, and subsequently to socialise
the economy. While this process might suffer temporary reverses and delays, it
would sooner or later lead to the replacement of capitalism by socialism: ‘The
capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question
of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the
shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for
the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable’ (1892
[1971: 117]).
Kautsky, therefore, while refusing formally to endorse historical determinism,
regarded progressive social transformation as effectively inevitable. Other lead-
ing Marxists of the Second International took a similar stance. Plekhanov, for
example, was much better read philosophically than Kautsky; his own version of
historical materialism was, like Marx’s and Engels’s, shaped by his interpretation
of Hegel. But, whereas Marx had taken from Hegel the idea of human subjec-
tivity defining itself by acting on and transforming its environment, Plekhanov’s
was a reading which highlighted Hegel’s teleology: ‘The irresistible striving to the
great historical goal, a striving which nothing can stop – such is the legacy of the great
German idealist philosophy’ (1977: I, 483).
The ‘irresistible’ historical tendency that mattered most for him was not, as it
was for Kautsky, the triumph of socialism in the Western industrial countries, but
the transformation of Tsarist Russia by capitalism. At the roots of Plekhanov’s
Marxism lay his break, in the early 1880s, with the Populism dominant in the
Russian revolutionary movement. The Populists believed that a conspiratorial
putsch against the absolutist regime was necessary if Russia was avoid the kind
of suffering which, according to Marx, the English working class had suffered
during the Industrial Revolution. Russian society – and in particular, the peasant
commune – contained within it all that was required to construct socialism. But
revolution – to be achieved through the assassination of the Tsar and his leading
officials – would have to happen quickly if Western capitalism were not to
entrench itself in Russian society.
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Plekhanov came to view this ideology (on which Bakunin’s influence is man-
ifest) as a form of voluntarism which sought to impose social revolution in the
absence of the economic conditions required to sustain it. Socialism presup-
posed a development of the productive forces that only capitalism could bring.
And capitalist social forms had already penetrated deep into Russia’s soil. The
commune was disintegrating as a result of commodification and social differen-
tiation. The revolutionary movement would have to wait until capitalism had
triumphed in Russia. Only then could there emerge the industrial working
class which alone could carry through a socialist revolution. In the meantime,
Russian Social Democracy should ally itself to the liberal bourgeoisie, the chief
contemporary agent of historical progress and the potential leader of a revolu-
tion which, as in 1789 in France, would sweep away the absolutist order and
create the bourgeois-democratic political framework required if capitalism were
fully to attain its potential.
As Andrzy Walicki points out, Plekhanov’s Hegel bore a remarkable resem-
blance to that of Belinsky and the young Bakunin in their right-Hegelian phase:
‘The Marxism of Plekhanov and his comrades could also be called a specific vari-
ant of reconciliation with reality (the reality of Russian capitalism) in the name
of historical necessity’ (1995: 237). The political setting in which it developed
drew Plekhanov into an unremitting polemic against the voluntarism of the
Populists. He was particularly stringent in his denial of any creative histori-
cal role to individual actors. If, for example, a falling roof-tile had removed
Robespierre from the French political scene in January 1793, someone else
would have stepped forward to take his place. The influence of Hegel’s con-
ception of the world-historical individual, who expresses rather than creates the
forces he appears to master, is evident here.
Plekhanov thus provided a particularly forceful statement of the understanding
of historical materialism common to the Marxists of the Second International.
It does not follow, of course, that this shared understanding ruled out disagree-
ments among them. One such disagreement is worth discussing for what it re-
veals about the difficulties involved in the naturalistic interpretation of Marxism
which prevailed in this period. It arose from Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the
Materialistic Conception of History (1896). This book constituted the first sophisti-
cated account of Marx’s theory of history, which is perhaps chiefly remembered
for its critique of the idea that society can be understood as an aggregate of
discrete independently constituted ‘factors’. Labriola’s insistence that such fac-
tors are in fact abstractions from a single, integrated social ‘complexus’ greatly in-
fluenced Trotsky and anticipated Lukács’s identification of the Marxist method
with the category of totality.
Labriola says that this method ‘makes history objective and in a certain sense
naturalises it’, by tracing the underlying causes of social action in the process
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of production. But he immediately distinguishes naturalising history in this way

from what he calls ‘Darwinism, social and political’. It is easy to see why he
should, since the prevailing Social Darwinist appropriations of the theory of
evolution by natural selection portrayed laissez-faire capitalism as a case of the
survival of the fittest. His solution is to offer natural selection its own domain
within history, namely the very first stage of human existence, ‘that of simple
nature not modified by work, and from thence are derived the imperious
and inevitable conditions of the struggle for existence, with the consequent
forms of adaptation’. Among these forms are ‘races in the true and authentic
sense’, as opposed to ‘secondary historico-formations, that is to say, peoples
and nations’. Subsequent to this very early phase, humans came to rely on
‘artificial means’ – fire, tools, and the like – for their survival, unleashing a
historical process which could no longer be understood in Darwinian terms
(although the influence of race is one complicating factor when it comes to
establishing the material causes of ideology) (Labriola 1896 [1908: 113, 114,
116, 221]).
Plekhanov takes Labriola to task for giving race even this limited explana-
tory role. He points out the difficulty of imagining a form of human existence
which did not involve the use of artificial – in the sense of more or less con-
sciously invented – devices of some kind in order to act on and thereby to
change their environment, and dismisses the concept of race as an obstacle
to scientific enquiry (1969: 113–15, 118–23). In taking this stance, he was
expressing, in all probability, the position of most of his Marxist contempo-
raries. Kautsky, for example, was scathing about the racial theories of history
fashionable among the German intelligentsia of his day. Yet if Plekhanov sought
to exclude one supposedly ‘natural’ factor from history – namely race – he
championed the cause of another, geography. Indeed, in his own account of
historical materialism, he expounded what amounts to a version of geograph-
ical determinism: ‘the properties of the geographical environment determine
the development of the productive forces, which, in its turn determines the
development of the economic forces, and of all other social relations’ (1977: III,
144).
A N T I - N AT U R A L I S T C H A L L E N G E S
Thus, where the idea of the dialectic of nature had provided Engels with a broad
metaphysical doctrine of the dynamic unity of physical and social processes and
with an affirmation of the identity of the scientific method (rather flexibly
conceived) in all natural domains, the theorists of the Second International
tended rather to formulate a theory of history which isolated some ‘natural’
element relatively untouched by or unamenable to human intervention, whether
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it be the environment in Kautsky, geography in Plekhanov, or race in Labriola.

Race in fact plays a secondary and residual role in Labriola’s relatively dialectical
version of historical materialism, but in Kautsky’s and Plekhanov’s cases the
impulses deriving from this underlying substratum of history seem to be the
source of the ultimate guarantee that events will proceed in the required fashion.
The resulting stress on historical necessity leaves, as we have seen, little scope
for creative political intervention.
Inevitably this version of Marxism generated a series of reactions. Politically
these were usually motivated by the refusal to wait patiently on the long-term
evolution of historical forces counselled by Kautsky and Plekhanov. Inasmuch
as this political critique required theoretical elaboration, it could draw on the
increasingly wide range of philosophical anti-naturalisms which became available
as the nineteenth century drew towards a close. Denying the kind of continuity
posited by Engels and the Marxists of the Second International between the
physical and human worlds could serve as a way of insisting that individual
and collective agents played an ineliminable role in making and remaking social
structures. The most important case of this reaction came after the First World
War and the Russian Revolution, in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness
(1923). There were, however, many earlier instances of this kind of rebellion
against the historical determinism and political attentisme of Second International
Marxism.
It was Bergson’s philosophy which helped to provided Sorel with his way
out of orthodox Marxism. Bergson, of course, was not in any simple sense an
anti-naturalist, expressing as he does as strong a sense of the unity of the physical
and the human as did, say, Spencer. But Bergson’s vitalism and his critique of
rationalism helped to provide Sorel with an image of history governed not by the
gradual development of the productive forces but by heroic assertions of will. His
readings of contemporary philosophy (James and Poincaré as well as Bergson)
convinced Sorel that a primarily scientific understanding could not provide the
required motivation for revolutionary action. Only a myth of some kind could
do so: thus the Enlightenment conception of historical progress, though largely
Utopian, had given the French Revolution its necessary ideological stimulus.
Contemporary capitalist society was sinking into decadence and mediocrity,
Sorel argued. The development of parliamentary democracy, far from being (as
Kautsky and Plekhanov believed) a welcome step in the direction of social-
ism, was serving to sap the working class of its revolutionary energy, and to
integrate it into the state, thereby providing once-progressive intellectuals with
power and office. The anarcho-syndicalist myth of the proletarian general strike,
directed against the state rather than to secure limited reforms, was the necessary
means of revitalising both the labour movement and society more generally. The
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violence that was an unavoidable accompaniment of class confrontation should

be welcomed for the stimulus it offered to social renewal: ‘Proletarian violence,
carried out as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of the class
war, appears thus as a very fine and very heroic thing; it is in the service of
the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate
method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world
from barbarism’ (1908 [1950: 113]).
While Sorel developed a quasi-Nietzschean version of anarcho-syndicalism,
theoretical challenges to orthodoxy also developed within the Second Interna-
tional. Perhaps the most intellectually creative challenge was provided by the
Austro-Marxists, an extremely talented group of theoreticians headed by Otto
Bauer, Max Adler, and Rudolf Hilferding, and associated with the Austrian
Social Democratic Party. Influenced both by the various German schools of
Neo-Kantianism and by Mach’s phenomenalist philosophy of science, they
sought to remedy what Bauer called the ‘bastardisation of Marx’s doctrine’
by Kautsky and other popularisers. More particularly, Adler tried to show that
Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories in the first Critique demon-
strates not simply the necessity of these categories in constituting our experience
of an objective world, but also the inherently social character of conscious-
ness. Thus ‘an Ego-consciousness is only possible where there is an imma-
nent relation to an indeterminate multiplicity of knowing subjects, with which
every individual consciousness sees itself connected’ (Bottomore and Goode
1978: 75).
In thus discovering in individual consciousness ‘a supra-individual, transcen-
dental-social, a priori socialized character’, Kant had provided Marx with his
starting point, ‘socialized man’, or what Adler calls ‘sociation’ (Vergesellschaftung).
Marx in turn, by formulating the concept of sociation, provided a transcenden-
tal justification of the causal explanation of social life, just as Kant had done
for that of the physical world. So, unlike some versions of Neo-Kantianism,
Austro-Marxism did not seek to treat the human and the physical as requiring
fundamentally different forms of enquiry. Nevertheless, Adler agreed that the
dividing line between the two domains was provided by the presence of mental
activity: ‘In general, therefore, the materialist conception of history is concerned
with the activities of the human mind by which it establishes and develops the
conditions of life through social life’ (Bottomore and Goode 1978: 65, 67). This
stress on social consciousness leaves its traces on the more substantive works of
Austro-Marxism. For example, in The National Question and Social Democracy
(1907) Bauer tends to conceive national identity as deriving more or less exclu-
sively from the possession of a shared culture, a surprisingly ‘idealist’ approach
for a Marxist.
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308 Alex Callinicos
More generally, however, in their content these works did not stray far from
the mainstream of the Second International. Indeed, in his book Finance Capital
(1910) Hilferding provide the movement with its most important economic
treatise. In the preface to that work he famously denies that ‘Marxism is simply
identical with socialism.’ A Marxist causal account of the tendencies driving
capitalism towards socialism is logically independent of the value-judgement
that such an outcome would be desirable: ‘it is one thing to acknowledge a
necessity, and quite another thing to work for that necessity’ (1910 [1978: 23]).
Such an affirmation of the autonomy of morality was, of course, a stan-
dard Neo-Kantian position. But it went against the drift of Marx’s and Engels’s
scattered remarks on the subject, which followed Hegel in rejecting any such
separation of ethical and causal judgements, and, in some moods at least, seemed
to require the reduction of the former to the latter. Beyond any considerations
of orthodoxy, or indeed of what might be the right way of viewing the question,
Hilferding’s remarks highlighted the tension running through socialist thought
in the era of the Second International, between the scientific understanding
of the tendencies which would, by historical necessity, bring about the over-
throw of capitalism at some time in the future, and the subjective will to achieve
that outcome quickly through insurrectionary action. Sometimes this tension
was expressed in the confrontation between orthodox Marxism and its oppo-
nents on the left, chiefly the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Sometimes it
took the form of political debates and theoretical aporias within Marxism itself.
Before 1914, while the parliamentary strategy of the SPD and its allies seemed
to offer the prospect of success, the tension was more or less manageable. With
the outbreak of war, and the upheavals it brought in its wake, this ceased to be
the case.
Cambridge

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Callinicos, A. (2003). Marxism and anarchism. In T. Baldwin (Ed.

), The Cambridge History of

MARXISM AND ANARCHISM

an extravagantly quietist version of the Hegelian dialectic, according to which

human species, bracketed between the ‘primitive communism’ of early societies

of production. But he immediately distinguishes naturalising history in this way

it be the environment in Kautsky, geography in Plekhanov, or race in Labriola.

violence that was an unavoidable accompaniment of class confrontation should

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