June 13, 2000

Anarchocommunism

“[N]ot all anarchists are revolutionaries, but it is no longer possible to be a revolutionary without being an anarchist, in fact if not in name.”
Bob Black, Anarchy After Leftism

I am sure this is true, but not in the manner Black seems to mean. I think it is rather a matter of real-world and theoretical refinement over the years. Marx’s work was quickly drawn into the ideology of the Second International, where it took on all the statist elements of which Bakunin had prematurely, unjustly, accused the antistatist—those elements of Goldner’s “progressive civil service,” which informed not only that International but all the variants of state capitalism this past century, left and right. I understand anarchism to be antistate communism, which is what Marx and Engels always used to write about. The critique of political economy necessarily leads to an understanding of the state which is emphatically anarchist. The critique of the economy also necessarily leads to an understanding of authority in general which is emphatically anarchist.

I remain in the belief that, in spite of everything, the name of the tradition is important. The cowardice sometimes evident in the refusal of “labels” is often more irritating than the actual misunderstanding of labels. Labels are dangerous only in the midst of ignorance, only in the midst of that democratic ideology which refuses challenge and contradiction. Labels, in the midst of reasoned discussion, become, rather, names.

communism anarchism Bob.Black Marx Engels