Key Arguments against Anarchism

At the moment there are no known anarchist groups in Uganda. That might be the case because anarchism is an individualistic idea of bourgeois urban intellectuals. The rate of urbanization in Uganda is not very high (yet) and the rural peasants’ society is very collectivistic. Therefore anarchism in Uganda does not have much soil to grow on. Despite that, it doesn’t mean that the issue of anarchism would leave Uganda out. Anarchist views could occur in the future.

For the reason of a lacking urgency I won’t waste more words than necessary about this ideology, but I will focus on addressing its key points instead.

Anarchism is anti-Marxist

Some comrades might believe that Marxism and anarchism would have shared goals, just different paths. Even many comrades in the West commit this grave error. In fact anarchists are foes.

Stalin correctly assessed:

“Some people believe that Marxism and anarchism are based on the same principles and that the disagreements between them concern only tactics, so that, in the opinion of these people, it is quite impossible to draw a contrast between these two trends. This is a great mistake.

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.”¹

The Russian anarchist Bakunin was known for hating Marx. Bakunin used racist slurs against Marx instead of solid arguments. He wrote in 1872 in an anti-German and anti-Jewish tirade: “As a German and a Jew, he is an authoritarian from head to toe.”² Bakunin was openly hating Jews from a racial perspective³ that differed not much from that of European fascists like the Nazis.

The actual reason for Bakunin’s hatred against Marx was the break of the First Internationale into Marxists and anarchists after the Paris Commune: The anarchists claimed that the Paris Commune was “too authoritarian” while Marx and Engels saw it as too inconsequential in their struggle against the French bourgeois state. Engels wrote in his “On Authority” in 1872:

“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 reactionists. 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?”⁴

This shows why anarchists did not achieve anything in history, unlike we Marxists. The anarchists can criticize us as much as they want, nothing comes out of it. We achieved practical examples to critically learn from; the anarchists are armchairs that criticize others with the most vile words while not having any achievements to present.

Anarchism is elitist

Anarchism is an elitist idea of urban (self-declared) “intellectuals”.

Emma Goldman, a famous Russian-born American anarchist theoretician wrote:

“In other words, the living, vital truth of social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass.”⁵

Elitism is against the working people, seeing them as “ignorant” while some urban “intellectuals” in their ivory tower, separated from the actual socio-economic practice, are seen as “saviors”. Of course, among the masses reactionary thoughts might exist, but not because they originate among them; instead they get spread by the ruling bourgeoisie into their minds via the school system of the capitalist state, (especially in Uganda) reactionary priests among the churches as well the media.

Emma Goldman delivers no perspective in her reactionary bourgeois elitist anti-people stance:

“My lack of faith in the majority is dictated by my faith in the potentialities of the individual.”⁶

There is much to be done to teach the masses. Emma Goldman didn’t want to take up that task and instead sided with the bourgeoisie in fact, though never wanting to admit so. Without the masses, the majority, nothing can be achieved. An individual is doomed if not connected to the collective. This is also why anarchist organizations are an oxymoron in itself. Let’s take a look.

Anarchist Organizations – A contradiction within itself

Anarchism, as already seen, is based on individualism. Forming an anarchist organization or even an anarchist party would be an oxymoron.

How should anarchists organize if they reject authority? Every organization is rooted in some central authority – no matter if its a party or a state.

Bakunin rejected to participate in politics at all⁷. Is that something to wonder about? Anarchists in the world have ignored that notion several times when it comes to organizations and de facto ignoring their principles: The CNT in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 was such an example. They even founded a state without wanting to call it one. Anarchism, as the name suggests, rejects the state, or at least it should according to its own principles…

Anarchism and the State

Anarchists might accept the existence of class struggle, but they are not seeing the necessity for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat by overthrowing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Anarchists reject the state per se. They don’t differ between which class is ruling.

The Russian anarchist Kropotkin wrote:

“Either the State forever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it all its wars and domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is … death!

Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principles of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.”⁸

This is an idealist approach, as if abolishing the state would solve all problems. The truth is that the state can only wither away when classes have been abolished, and this can only be achieved by utilizing the socialist state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to expropriate the exploiting classes and organize the working people both politically and economically.

Lenin criticized the anarchists the following way:

“Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the state will also be abolished. The well-known passage on the withering away of the state in Anti-Dühring accuses the anarchists not simply of favoring the abolition of the state, but of preaching that the state can be abolished ‘overnight’.”⁹

Socialism can be accomplished in one country, but communism can only be achieved on the global scale.

Stalin wrote:

“Can the victory of Socialism in one country be regarded as final if this country is encircled by capitalism, and if it is not fully guaranteed against the danger of intervention and restoration?

Clearly, it cannot. This is the position in regard to the question of the victory of Socialism in one country.”¹⁰

Anarchists don’t understand this, just like they have no idea about economics.

Anarchist economics

It is even more than an oxymoron like “anarchist organization” when talking of anarchist economics: The economy needs organization, otherwise it falls apart and ends up as an individualist subsistence economy. This would be a massive backstep which is also an anachronism under the current stand of the means of production.

Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist who established a de facto regime during the Russian Civil War, hated the early Soviet Union already for its centralization and monopolization on the economic field¹¹. He called for seizing “the land, forests, workshops, factories, railways and seaborne transportation, etc.”. That is where he is not in a principle difference to us Marxists. The difference starts in his rejection of the planned economy and instead proposing vague “associations” to control the economy. Effectively this meant to work on the basis of small production.

Lenin criticized already in 1905, years before Makhno came to power in parts of Ukraine:

“The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism. Their views express, not the future of bourgeois society, which is striding with irresistible force towards the socialisation of labour, but the present and even the past of that society, the domination of blind chance over the scattered and isolated small producer.”¹²

Running an economy in the way of the anarchists just means to set capitalism back to an earlier stage instead of abolishing it. Therefore anarchism is not overcoming capitalism but being stuck in a form of the bourgeois society without wanting to admit so.

Conclusion

We can conclude:

Anarchism is not the path to liberate the working people from exploitation and oppression. Its infertility to manifest in any serious political or economical organization and its failure to deliver a solid answer to overcome capitalism disqualifies anarchism. Only Marxism-Leninism can lead us towards socialism and communism and break our chains – in Uganda, Africa and the rest of the world.