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Libertarian Marxism is a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism such as left communism emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism.

Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France; emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a state or vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.

Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Socialisme ou Barbarie and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Walter Benjamin, Andre Breton, Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Michael Löwy, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, and Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.

Overview

Theory

According to Chamsy Ojelli, for

"many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists made a return 'behind Marx' to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism. Libertarian socialism has frequently linked its anti-authoritarian political aspirations with this theoretical differentiation from orthodoxy. [...] Karl Korsch [...] remained a libertarian socialist for a large part of his life and because of the persistent urge towards theoretical openness in his work. Korsch rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by the essential role of practice in a theory's truth. For Korsch, no theory could escape history, not even Marxism. In this vein, Korsch even credited the stimulus for Marx's Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes".

In rejecting both capitalism and the state, some libertarian socialists align themselves with anarchists in opposition to both capitalist representative democracy and to authoritarian forms of Marxism. Although anarchists and Marxists share an ultimate goal of a stateless society, anarchists criticise most Marxists for advocating a transitional phase under which the state is used to achieve this aim. Nonetheless, libertarian Marxist tendencies such as autonomism and council communism have historically been intertwined with the anarchist movement. Anarchist movements have come into conflict with both capitalist and Marxist forces, sometimes at the same time as in the Spanish Civil War, although as in that war Marxists themselves are often divided in support or opposition to anarchism. Other political persecutions under bureaucratic parties have resulted in a strong historical antagonism between anarchists and libertarian Marxists on the one hand and Leninists, Marxist–Leninists and their derivatives such as Maoists on the other. However, in recent history libertarian socialists have repeatedly formed temporary alliances with Marxist–Leninist groups in order to protest institutions they both reject.

Part of this antagonism can be traced to the International Workingmen's Association, the First International, a congress of radical workers, where Mikhail Bakunin (who was fairly representative of anarchist views) and Karl Marx (whom anarchists accused of being an "authoritarian") came into conflict on various issues. Bakunin's viewpoint on the illegitimacy of the state as an institution and the role of electoral politics was starkly counterposed to Marx's views in the First International. Marx and Bakunin's disputes eventually led to Marx taking control of the First International and expelling Bakunin and his followers from the organization. This was the beginning of a long-running feud and schism between libertarian socialists and what they call "authoritarian communists", or alternatively just "authoritarians". Some Marxists have formulated views that closely resemble syndicalism and thus express more affinity with anarchist ideas. Several libertarian socialists, notably Noam Chomsky, believe that anarchism shares much in common with certain variants of Marxism such as the council communism of Marxist Anton Pannekoek. In Chomsky's Notes on Anarchism, he suggests the possibility "that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the belief that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a 'vanguard' party, or a State bureaucracy".

History

19th century

Marx

Bleakley suggests that "As in the case of more conventional forms of Marxism, the basic tenets of libertarian Marxism can be traced to the theories espoused by Marx and Engels in the mid-to-late 19th century." He identifies Marx's text, the Grundrisse as "considered one of the formative texts in the libertarian strand of Marxism – its assertion that the working classes did not require the intervention of a revolutionary party or government to achieve liberty and sovereignty".

After Marx

According to Chamsy Ojelli, "[o]ne does find early expressions of such perspectives in Morris and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (the SPGB), then again around the events of 1905, with the growing concern at the bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation of international socialism".

In December 1884, William Morris established the Socialist League which was encouraged by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx. As the leading figure in the organization, Morris embarked on a relentless series of speeches and talks on street corners as well as in working men's clubs and lecture theatres across England and Scotland. From 1887, anarchists began to outnumber Marxists in the Socialist League. The 3rd Annual Conference of the League held in London on 29 May 1887 marked the change, with a majority of the 24 branch delegates voting in favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring: "This conference endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued by the League, and sees no sufficient reason for altering it". Morris played peacemaker, but he ultimately sided with the anti-parliamentarians, who won control of the Socialist League which consequently lost the support of Engels and saw the departure of Eleanor Marx and her partner Edward Aveling to form the separate Bloomsbury Socialist Society.

20th century

According to Chamsy el-Ojeili, libertarian Marxism broke with the Marxist mainstream in the wake of the First World War: "Disillusioned with the capitulation of the social democrats, excited by the emergence of workers' councils, and slowly distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reject the claims of socialist parties and to put their faith instead in the masses". For these socialists, "[t]he intuition of the masses in action can have more genius in it than the work of the greatest individual genius". Rosa Luxemburg's workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of positions later taken up by the far-left of the period. Anton Pannekoek, Roland Holst and Herman Gorter in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and György Lukács in Hungary. In these formulations, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to be the dictatorship of a class, "not of a party or of a clique". Similarly, Bleakley argues that "A range of prominent theorists would go on to build upon Marx and Engels’ work in the development of libertarian Marxism such as György Lukács, Karl Korsch and Daniel Guerin."

However, according to el-Ojeili, within this line of thought the "tension between anti-vanguardism and vanguardism has frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed ways: the first involved a drift towards the party; the second saw a move towards the idea of complete proletarian spontaneity. [...] The first course is exemplified most clearly in Gramsci and Lukacs. [...] The second course is illustrated in the tendency, developing from the Dutch and German far-lefts, which inclined towards the complete eradication of the party form".

At the same time, in the emerging Soviet state, there appeared left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks which were a series of rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists. Some were in support of the White Movement while some tried to be an independent force. The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the Russian Civil War and after until 1922. In response, the Bolsheviks increasingly abandoned attempts to get these groups to join the government and suppressed them with force.

In the interwar years, according to Benjamin Noys, George Bataille attempted to "develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism... that would break with the Marxist tendency to set up a new dictatorship of labour in place of the capitalist dictatorship of value, Bataille intended to rescue Marxism from Stalinism and revitalise it as a liberatory practice."

Later, the POUM is viewed as being libertarian Marxist due to its anti-Soviet stance in the Civil War in Spain.

Post-World War II

Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie

In the mid-20th century, some libertarian socialist groups emerged from disagreements with Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-Stalinism. For example, the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie emerged from the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism", leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of the 1920s". In the United Kingdom, the group Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Almost from the start, it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis (who wrote under the name Maurice Brinton).

In the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, the terms ultra-left and left communist refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further left than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a pejorative, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further left than the party line. According to the latter usage, in 1978 the CCP Central Committee denounced as ultra-left the line of Mao Zedong from 1956 until his death in 1976. Ultra-left refers to those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CCP-PRC party-state itself and the masses of workers and peasants conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled the means of production through the party's mediation, the ultra-left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the masses, regardless of however "red" a given bureaucrat's thought might be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticize reactionary "ideas" and "habits" among the alleged 5% of bad cadres, giving them a chance to "turn over a new leaf" after they had undergone "thought reform", the ultra-left argued that cultural revolution had to give way to political revolution "in which one class overthrows another class".

The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism. The New Left's critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism and the Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like Radical America and Black Mask in the United States, Solidarity, Big Flame and Democracy & Nature, succeeded by The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy in the United Kingdom, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation. Within the British New Left, EP Thompson retrieved the legacy of William Morris. He believed that "Marxism is permanently fractured between Stalinism and a libertarian Marxism devoted to humanism and democracy." Russell Jacoby suggested that "Thompson has established a small beachhead for a libertarian Marxism."

In 1969, French platformist anarcho-communist Daniel Guérin published an essay called "Libertarian Marxism?" in which he dealt with the debate between Marx and Bakunin at the First International and afterwards suggested that "[l]ibertarian marxism [sic] rejects determinism and fatalism, giving the greater place to individual will, intuition, imagination, reflex speeds, and to the deep instincts of the masses, which are more far-seeing in hours of crisis than the reasonings of the 'elites'; libertarian marxism [sic] thinks of the effects of surprise, provocation and boldness, refuses to be cluttered and paralysed by a heavy 'scientific' apparatus, doesn't equivocate or bluff, and guards itself from adventurism as much as from fear of the unknown".

Autonomist Marxism and situationist theory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian variants of Marxism that are firmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. As the scholar Paul Bleakley notes, "Amidst the sociopolitical upheaval of the mid-20th century, the philosophy of anti-authoritarian Marxism assumed a divisive position that rejected the traditional notions of structural change that typified the mainstream activist movement. From its inception in 1957 until the early 1970s, this branch of libertarian Marxism was primarily led by acolytes of the Situationist International." Bleakley says that the Situationists influenced other groups, such as "a collective of libertarian Marxist activists operating as the Angry Brigade". Related to this current were intellectuals who were influenced by Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga, but who disagreed with his Leninist positions, including Jacques Camatte, editor of the French publication Invariance; and Gilles Dauvé, who published Troploin with Karl Nesic.

Notable libertarian Marxist tendencies

First English edition of Vladimir Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (published by the Executive Committee of the Communist International for delegates to its 2nd World Congress) in which Lenin attacks left communists and council communists

Within Freudo-Marxism

Main article: Freudo-Marxism

Wilhelm Reich, Freudo-Marxist theorist who wrote the book The Sexual Revolution in 1936

Two Marxist and Freudian psychoanalytic theorists have received the libertarian label or have been associated with it due to their emphasis on anti-authoritarianism and freedom issues.

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936). His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals—during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.

On 23 August, six tons of his books, journals and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York, the Gansevoort incinerator, in response to a violation of a ban on distributing orgone accumulators as medical devices. The burned material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Though these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction. As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the destruction. It has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in the United States. Reich became a consistent propagandist for sexual freedom going as far as opening free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna for working-class patients as well as coining the phrase "sexual revolution" in one of his books from the 1940s.

Herbert Marcuse, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, was an influential libertarian socialist philosopher of the New Left

On the other hand, Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher, sociologist and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work Eros and Civilization (1955) discusses the social meaning of biology—history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against repression of our instincts. It argues that "advanced industrial society" (modern capitalism) is preventing us from reaching a non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations". It contends that Freud's argument that repression is needed by civilization to persist is mistaken as Eros is liberating and constructive. Marcuse argues that "the irreconcilable conflict is not between work (reality principle) and Eros (pleasure principle), but between alienated labour (performance principle) and Eros". Sex is allowed for "the betters" (capitalists) and for workers only when not disturbing performance. Marcuse believes that a socialist society could be a society without needing the performance of the poor and without as strong a suppression of our sexual drives—it could replace alienated labor with "non-alienated libidinal work" resulting in "a non-repressive civilization based on 'non-repressive sublimation'". During the 1960s, Marcuse achieved world renown as "the guru of the New Left", publishing many articles and giving lectures and advice to student radicals all over the world. He travelled widely and his work was often discussed in the mass media, becoming one of the few American intellectuals to gain such attention. Never surrendering his revolutionary vision and commitments, Marcuse continued to his death to defend the Marxian theory and libertarian socialism.

Socialisme ou Barbarie

Main article: Socialisme ou Barbarie

The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie

Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism") was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period, whose name comes from a phrase Rosa Luxemburg used in her 1916 essay The Junius Pamphlet. It existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan. The group originated in the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism", leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of the 1920s". The group was composed of both intellectuals and workers and agreed with the idea that the main enemies of society were the bureaucracies which governed modern capitalism. They documented and analysed the struggle against that bureaucracy in the group's journal. As an example, the thirteenth issue (January–March 1954) was devoted to the East German revolt of June 1953 and the strikes which erupted amongst several sectors of French workers that summer. Following from the belief that what the working class was addressing in their daily struggles was the real content of socialism, the intellectuals encouraged the workers in the group to report on every aspect of their working lives.

See also

• Democracy in Marxism
• Outline of libertarianism

Bibliography

• Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism by Guy Aldred. Glasgow: Bakunin Press.
• Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (a collection of writings by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst, and Ruhle). Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0979181368.
• The International Communist Current, itself a Left Communist grouping, has produced a series of studies of what it views as its own antecedents. The book on the German-Dutch current, which is by Philippe Bourrinet (who later left the ICC), in particular contains an exhaustive bibliography.
  • The Italian Communist Left 1926–1945 (ISBN 1897980132).
  • The Dutch-German Communist Left (ISBN 1899438378).
  • The Russian Communist Left, 1918–1930 (ISBN 1897980108).
  • The British Communist Left, 1914–1945 (ISBN 1897980116).
• (in French) L'Autonomie. Le mouvement autonome en France et en Italie, éditions Spartacus 1978.
• Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed.
• Beyond post-socialism. Dialogues with the far-left by Chamsy el- Ojeili. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015.

Further reading

• Michael Löwy &Olivier Besancenot (2018). "Expanding the horizon: for a Libertarian Marxism". Global Discourse. 8 (2). Bristol University Press: 364–378. doi:10.1080/23269995.2018.1459332. ISSN 2043-7897.
• "Libertarian Marxism?" by Daniel Guérin.
• "Libertarian Marxism's Relation to Anarchism" by Wayne Price.
• "Franz Kafka and Libertarian Socialism" by Michael Löwy.
• For Communism – John Gray WebSite: large online library of libertarian communist texts.
• Left Communism collection on the Marxists Internet Archive.
• "The Libertarian Marxism of Andre Breton" by Michael Löwy.

External links=

• "Libertarian Marxism". The Anarchist Library. 18 August 2020. Retrieved 12 January 2023.
• Situationist International online.