Paul Blackledge
I. Introduction
The word ‘revolution’ was first used in an unmistakably modern sense in the eighteenth century to describe the American and French revolutions. And although it had begun to gravitate towards something like this modern meaning in England in the wake of her seventeenth-century revolutions (Williams 1976; Hill 1991; Hobsbawm 1962, 74-5), John Dunn is right that ‘in a few short months, in the year of 1789, the people of France set their stamp ineffaceably on a political idea which has loomed over the history of the world ever since’ (Dunn 2008, 17). In fact, as Krishan Kumar points out, the French Revolution inspired ‘practically every important statement about revolution in the subsequent century and a half’ (Kumar 1971, 2).
Maximilien Robespierre’s name is pivotal to this contested legacy. His linkage of virtue and terror through revolutionary government proved not only to be a fundamental point of reference for all subsequent analyses of the Revolution itself, it also provided the backdrop to all ensuing debates on the nature of revolution more broadly. The most important contribution to these debates was made by Karl Marx, who, alongside Frederick Engels, engaged with this issue from a position that was deeply influenced not only by his reading of Hegel, but also by engagements with other critics of capitalism. To make sense of the meaning of the word revolution in the nineteenth century, therefore, necessarily means engaging with the ideas of Marx, through the lens of his relationships both to Jacobinism and classical German philosophy and to other socialist and anarchist intellectuals.
<A>II. The Jacobin Legacy
In his classic critique of Marxism, The Preconditions of Socialism of 1899, Eduard Bernstein insisted that Marx had failed to transcend the Jacobin perspective, that is, the perspective of the followers of Robespierre who supported his programme of revolutionary Terror. Bernstein claimed that Hegelian philosophy was ‘a reflex of the great French Revolution’ and that insofar as Marxism failed to disentangle itself from this framework it too remained politically tied to the far-left tendencies which carried forth the Jacobin tradition into the nineteenth century (Bernstein [1899] 1993, 36ff). For Bernstein these tendencies were represented classically by two revolutionary communists: François-Noël‘Gracchus’ Babeuf who was guillotined after a failed insurrection in 1796, and Louis-Auguste Blanqui who attempted many similar insurrections throughout the nineteenth century, and consequently spent most of his adult life in prison.
Bernstein did not believe that Marx and Engels were uncritical of Babeuf and Blanqui. Rather, he thought that their attempt to synthesise the ‘destructive’ politics of these early socialists with more modern and more ‘constructive’ tendencies was a failure that bequeathed an unstable compromise to their followers. Concretely, Bernstein argued that whereas Babeuf and Blanqui had followed the Jacobins in demanding the violent overthrow of the old order, modern socialism – Bernstein was writing specifically about the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the turn of the last century – emerged in a radically different context. Once the political rights of voting, association, and a free press had been established, the old methods of ‘political expropriation’ were no longer relevant. Emancipation was now to come through ‘economic organisation’. Bernstein claimed that Marx, in trying ‘to combine the essentials of both [of these] streams’ in his political theory, bequeathed to his followers an incoherent compromise from which Bernstein intended to extricate them (Bernstein 1993, 40-1).
Bernstein’s claim that there is a direct lineage from Robespierre to Marx has often been repeated (Birchall 1997, 126, 155). Indeed, even Mikhail Bakunin, who challenged Marx from a diametrically opposed perspective, agreed with Bernstein that the faults with Marxism could be traced back to its Jacobin heritage. Admittedly, Bakunin claimed that the lineage from Robespierre to Marx passed not through Babeuf and Blanqui but via a more reformist route, arguing that ‘in respect to politics [Marx] is a direct disciple of Louis Blanc’ (Bakunin [1873] 1990, 142). Nonetheless, he would have agreed with Bernstein that the faults with Marxism traced back to his inheritance from Robespierre, for – Bakunin claimed – Marx, like Robespierre and Blanc, believed that radical reforms could come through the state.
A problem with both Bernstein’s and Bakunin’s claims is that while Marx obviously admired Robespierre’s ‘historical greatness and revolutionary energy’, he explicitly rejected Jacobinism ‘as a model or source of inspiration for socialist revolutionary praxis’ (Löwy 1989, 119). From his earliest writings, Marx drew on Hegel’s analysis of Jacobinism to criticise the one-sidedly political character of Robespierre’s practice (Marx [1844] 1975c, 413). Moreover, as Michael Löwy suggests, Babeuf was the only actor from the Great French Revolution whom Marx saw as a ‘really important … precursor’ (Löwy 1989, 119). To untangle Marxism from Jacobinism thus requires first making sense of Babeuf’s relationship with Robespierre.
One aspect of the difference between these two revolutionaries is uncontentious. Whereas Robespierre followed Rousseau in believing that the ‘general will’ could be represented in a modern society, Babeuf began to move towards a class analysis of the Revolution which, by placing conflicts between the rich and the poor at the centre of the struggle for ‘common happiness’, pointed beyond Rousseau’s politics (Birchall 1997, 147). This is not to suggest that Robespierre was an uncritical follower of Rousseau. He was well aware that, although Rousseau had suggested that tyrannies could be overthrown by revolutionary movements, he had had no developed theory of revolution (O’Hagan 1999, 56). Robespierre thus recognised that his own revolutionary politics was ‘as new as the revolution which brought it into being’ (Robespierre [1793] 2007, 98).
Andrew Levine highlights one aspect of this difference between Robespierre and Rousseau. He points out that in the Social Contract of 1762 Rousseau had suggested that a ‘suspension of sovereignty’ was permissible only in exceptional circumstances when the republic was threatened from ‘without’. However, in contrast to this model, divisions within the French community between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were rooted in conflicting class interests, and these divisions meant that ‘what threatened the French Revolution in the autumn of 1793 was, in very large measure, internally generated’ (Levine 1987, 54-5). Levine claims that Robespierre responded to this problem by extending the idea of the suspension of sovereignty in a way that revealed both his own inability to articulate the ‘general will’, but perhaps also a more general problem of articulating any kind of general will in a class divided society. The Jacobins discovered ‘that in revolutionary times the general will cannot be exercised if, indeed, it makes sense to speak of a general will at all’ (Levine 1987, 56).
The Terror was therefore evidence that far from articulating the ‘general will’, the Jacobins represented the interests of a particular social group. In fact, George Rudé argues that they represented the so-called sans-culottes of urban ‘small shopkeepers and craftsmen (both masters and journeymen), servants and day-labourers’ (Rudé 1988, 94-5). Because Robespierre de facto recognised the limited nature of his social base, even if he was unable to provide an adequate theoretical account of this, he came to believe that the common good would have to be imposed on society as a correction against ‘the shortcomings and defects of individual men’ (Israel 2001, 717). So, despite his fervent advocacy of democracy, he held to a more or less implicit belief not only that ‘democracy had to be directed from above’ but also that ‘no reliance could be placed on the spontaneous revolutionary ardour of the people’ (Soboul [1965] 1977, 107).
In contrast to this perspective, Babeuf pointed towards a very different form of revolutionary organisation. Unfortunately, this difference was obscured by Filippo Buonarroti, who had been a member of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals in the 1790s and subsequently authored the first serious analysis of this group’s politics: Conspiration pour l’égalité dite de Babeuf of 1828. In this book, Buonarroti underplayed the divergences between Babouvism and Jacobinism by both glossing over Babeuf’s criticisms of the Jacobins and overstating the conspiratorial and clandestine nature of the Conspiracy of Equals (Birchall 1997, 90). He thus distorted Babeuf’s belief that his ‘organisation was an instrument of the people, not something [like the Jacobins] that substituted itself for it’ (Birchall 1997, 158). Ian Birchall argues that it was this democratic characteristic of Babouvism which allowed Marx to trace a lineage through it from earlier to more modern forms of socialism in a way that bypassed Jacobinism (Birchall 1997, 96; cf. Marx and Engels [1844] 1975a, 119). More generally, Marx’s delineation between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions was formulated in part to explain the historical specificity of modern socialism and thus to differentiate it from Jacobinism (Marx [1852] 1973b).
According to Marx, bourgeois revolutions emerged out of developing contradictions between emergent capitalist relations of production and existing pre-capitalist states, and where they were successful resulted in the removal of fetters to further capitalist development. Although these revolutions were generally marked by a progressive break with pre-capitalist hierarchies, because they were characterised by the transference of power from one ruling class to another they involved at best a contradictory relationship between their leadership and the mass of the population. For instance, bourgeois revolutions ‘from above’ such as Bismarck’s unification of Germany involved no mass action at all, whereas England’s, America’s, and France’s bourgeois revolutions ‘from below’ were won through the involvement of the lower classes but ended similarly with the exclusion of the poor from power. Proletarian revolutions, by contrast, because they are made for and by the working class – ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’ (Marx [1864] 1974a, 82) – were necessarily qualitatively more democratic in both their execution and outcome. Their triumph required the workers to be organised as a political force, and, because the workers exploit no social group below them, once the bourgeois counter-revolution was suppressed the workers’ state would itself ‘wither away’ (Callinicos 1989; Draper 1978, 28-32; Hobsbawm 1986, 26; Lukács [1923] 1971, 282).
Despite this divergence, Marx did recognise a degree of continuity between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions; for it was at the radical extremes of the more democratic examples of the former that the germ of the latter emerged. For instance, socialism was not only hinted at in the French constitution of 1793, especially in excluded clauses that had been suggested for this constitution by Robespierre (Rudé 1975, 108-9), but was more properly prefigured in the writings and actions of Babeuf in the 1790s and also of Gerrard Winstanley a century and a half earlier in England. Following their lead, Marx argued that the aim of German socialists should be to make their ‘bourgeois’ revolution ‘permanent’: that is, to fight within it for the realisation of its most democratic, that is socialist, implications (Marx [1850] 1973a, 330). So while Marx expected proletarian revolutions, at least sometimes, to grow out of bourgeois revolutions, his differentiation between these two types of revolution points to fundamental problems with Bernstein’s claim that there was an unbroken trajectory from Robespierre to Marx via Babeuf and Blanqui: Marx’s revolutionary strategy was based upon a total reorganisation of society based upon the prior emergence of new social forces, not a one-sidedly political change of leadership within the state.
Nevertheless, it is true that Blanqui was deeply influenced by the Jacobins, and his model of revolution as the act of a small elite of revolutionaries did build upon their substitutionalist politics. For instance, in the oath of membership to his organisation he suggested that the malicious consequences of existing inegalitarian social structures included the ideological contamination of the people which left them unable to liberate themselves. From this premise, he surmised that the revolution should be led by a ‘revolutionary power’ (Blanqui [1830] 1983, 34). Hal Draper comments that Blanqui believed that socialism could only be inaugurated through the ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ of a small conspiratorial band, who would take power in the name of the workers before leading them forward to socialism through a benign educational tyranny (Draper 1986, 37-8).
Discussing the arguments put forward by the Blanquists in the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871, Engels argued that they were ‘socialists only in sentiment’, because their model of socialism was not underpinned by anything like an adequate account of either the class struggle or of the historical basis for socialism itself. He thus dismissed Blanqui’s proposal that the revolution be a ‘coup de main by a small revolutionary minority’, and claimed that Blanquist politics was an ‘obsolete’ model of revolution as ‘dictatorship’ (Engels [1874] 1989a, 13).
This argument is interesting for the light it sheds not only on Marx and Engels’s relationship to Blanquism and through it to Jacobinism, but also for its illumination of their criticisms of both anarchist and reformist tendencies within the European socialist movement. At the centre of all of these debates was Marx’s deployment of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This concept is often confused with Blanqui’s concept of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’, and many commentators have assumed the truth of the unfounded myth that Marx borrowed his concept from Blanqui. In fact the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ ‘cannot be found anywhere in Blanqui either as a term or as an idea’ (Draper 1986, 35).
It is important to register the distinction between Marx’s concept of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and Blanqui’s idea of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ because it provides a basis from which to explain Engels’s justification both of the criticisms of Blanqui noted above, and his argument against Bakunin’s anarchism, made for instance in his essay On Authority written just a year earlier, that ‘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’ (Engels [1873] 1988, 425). If this claim appears to suggest that Engels favoured a Blanquist model of revolution, this interpretation of his ideas is reinforced by his later critique of the SPD’s Erfurt Programme. In this essay he insisted that ‘our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Engels [1891] 1990c, 227). To make sense of these seemingly contradictory statements – in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yet against the (Blanquist) idea of a revolutionary dictatorship – it is necessary to examine Marx and Engels’s relationship to other forms of anti-capitalism.
<A>III. Marxism, Hegelianism and the Historical Model of Human Nature
In his important study of Marx’s relationship to anarchism, Paul Thomas argues that although Marx and his anarchist counterparts desired the overthrow of the state, it would be a misconception to claim that the differences between them were of a merely tactical kind (Thomas 1980, 13). On the contrary, because the anarchists did not have a historical conception of human nature as Marx did, they did not understand, as he did, the overthrow of the state to mean that ‘socialised man … man freely associated with his fellows, could control the totality of his social existence, and become master of his own environment and activity’ (Thomas 1980, 106). The historical conception of human nature was not merely the basis from which Marx criticised anarchism. It was also first formulated, in no small part, as a response to Max Stirner’s extreme egoistic anarchism.
Stirner developed this perspective against what he saw as the limitations of Feuerbach’s materialism. Both Feuerbach and Stirner were prominent members of Berlin’s radical Young Hegelian circle in the 1830s and 1840s. This milieu was characterised in part by its interrogation of what Engels later described as tensions between Hegel’s (conservative) system and his (revolutionary) dialectical method (Engels [1886] 1990a, 363). Indeed, many of Hegel’s followers believed that he had resisted the revolutionary implications of his analysis of the contradictory character of bourgeois society. This is apparent in Hegel’s analysis of the Jacobins. Like Kant (Kersting 1992, 360; Kant [1798] 1991, 182, 188), Hegel welcomed the ideals of the French Revolution but he rejected the revolutionary means by which they were realised, and he detested Robespierre.
This is not to say that Hegel simply counterposed 1789 to 1793. Rather, he believed that although the Terror was the inevitable excess which accompanied the progressive realisation of the freedoms of civil society, the idea that the Jacobins pointed beyond the limits of the Revolution towards a freer society was unfounded. This was because, for Hegel, Robespierre’s Terror was the culmination of the abstract political will’s attempt to impose its vision on society from the top down without transforming the nation’s ‘dispositions and religion’ (Hegel [1837] 1956, 446, 449, 450). More specifically, because Hegel believed that personal freedoms were realised in civil society, he saw this type of social organisation as the historical limit on human progress. So, although he recognised that the modern contradiction identified by Rousseau between homme and citoyen had its roots in civil society, he believed that this contradiction was a necessary manifestation of personal freedom. Against the chaotic implications of this perspective, he argued that the universal class of state bureaucrats would subordinate the fragmenting interests of civil society to the broader interests of the community as a whole (Hunt 1974, 53-4; Taylor 1975, 437). So while he rejected Jacobinism, he at least believed that Robespierre had been part of an excessive but necessary evil through which progress had been realised. Nevertheless, he dismissed the idea that the proletarian ‘rabble’ (Hegel [1821] 1952, 150), who had taken up the struggle against the bourgeoisie in the wake of the Revolution, could forge an ethical alternative able to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois society.
After Hegel’s death, one issue faced by the Young Hegelians was, as Marx suggested in 1843, that the state bureaucracy, far from operating in the universal interest of the community, seemed to be alienated from the people’s will and in fact to have its own particular interests (Marx [1843] 1975a). The Young Hegelians explored this problem, and the tensions between the conservative and revolutionary aspects of Hegel’s thought generally, through a debate on the issue of religion. Because this debate was effectively about the nature of authority, its political implications were apparent from the outset. This was nowhere truer than in the work of Feuerbach, who challenged Hegel’s claim that human history was a product of the Absolute, arguing instead that the idea of god was a property of human consciousness. Feuerbach also rejected the egoistic freedom of civil society. He argued that ‘man is conscious of himself not only as an individual, but also as a member of the human species’ and that ‘God is really the perfected idea of the species viewed as an individual’ (McLellan 1969, 92). This concept of species-being both challenged the liberal naturalisation of the egoism of civil society and informed a turn towards socialism amongst a layer of the Young Hegelians.
The concept of species-being also influenced the young Marx. But from a very early stage he was aware that the naturalistic morality which Feuerbach extrapolated from it was inadequate to the needs of modern politics (McLellan 1969, 113). Interestingly, it was partly to the same weakness with Feuerbach’s moralism that Stirner addressed The Ego and His Own (1844) (McLellan 1969, 131; Hook [1950] 1962, 174). And it was through answering Stirner’s criticisms of Feuerbach that Marx moved beyond the limitations of the latter’s perspective.
Stirner argued that all political systems – conservative, liberal, socialist or whatever – led in practice to authoritarian suppression of the individual ego. Even revolutions, by claiming to be in the common interest, involved the suppression of individual egoism. Consequently, Stirner conceived ‘self-liberation’ to be possible through an act of rebellion rather than revolution (Martin [1963] 2005, xiii; see also Thomas 1980, 130). Drawing on Hobbes, but in a way that prefigured Nietzsche (Hook 1962, 165), Stirner insisted that
<EXT>because each thing cares for itself and at the same time comes into constant collision with other things, the combat of self-assertion is unavoidable. … The victor becomes the lord, the vanquished one the subject … But both remain enemies. (Stirner [1844] 2005, 9) </EXT>
Nevertheless, in contrast not only to Hobbes but also to his liberal critics, Stirner did not extend this argument into a justification of some form of political state. Quite the reverse, he suggested that ‘political liberty’ amounts to nothing less than the ‘individual’s subjugation in the state’ (Stirner 2005, 106, 196, 255). In a comment on the French Revolution which he believed to have general salience, he suggested that this upheaval was not directed against ‘the establishment, but against the establishment in question, against a particular establishment. It did away with this ruler, not with the ruler’. That the French Revolution ended in reaction should therefore come as no surprise: for it is in the nature of revolutions that one authority is merely exchanged for another (110). The embrace of the post-revolutionary state by ‘political liberalism’ revealed its authoritarian implications, implications that were also inherent in socialism and communism (ideologies that Stirner subsumed under the heading ‘social liberalism’), for these too would merely repeat the transference of power from one authority to another (122, 130). Even the ‘humane liberalism’ of the best of the Young Hegelians was suspect, because it too saw the egoism of others as a weakness while denying it in itself.
In contrast to Hegel’s socio-historical understanding of the conception of freedom, Stirner argued that ‘freedom can only be the whole of freedom, a piece of freedom is not freedom’ (160). From this perspective, he concluded that all moral approaches, including Feuerbach’s, were the enemies of freedom because they preached self-sacrifice in the name of some metaphysical notion – god, man, the state, class, nation, and so on. If ‘the road to ruin is paved with good intentions’, the correct egoistic response was not revolution in the name of some ‘good’ but a more simple rebellion of the ego against authority (54, 75). Moreover, communism was not so much a radical alternative to the status quo as its latest moralistic variant (18, 164, 258).
The vast bulk of the almost universally unread sections of Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology is a critique of Stirner’s book. Against Stirner’s claim that socialists had embraced a static model of human essence which provided them with a moral basis for criticising existing society, Marx outlined a Hegelian historicised transformation of his earlier Feuerbachian materialism. On this basis he insisted that people made and remade themselves through history. As he argued in Capital, by working purposefully together on nature to meet our needs, people not only change the world around them, they also change themselves (Marx [1867] 1976, 283). In the modern world this process underpinned the emergence of both egoistic and more social forms of individualism. Morality, as it was understood by Stirner, was an essential authoritarian characteristic only of communities made up of the former. By assuming the universality of egoism, Stirner was unable to comprehend the concept of workers’ solidarity. By contrast, Marx argued, solidarity had become a real need for workers, such that it was wrong to contrast individual and social emancipation. So, whereas Feuerbach’s abstract humanism tended to dissolve the individual into the species, whilst Stirner saw only the conflict between these two elements, Marx countered both of these models. He did so by claiming that socialism would be a working-class based movement whose goal was an ‘association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels [1848] 1973, 87; see also Thomas 1980, 154). From this perspective there would be no need to impose the idea of community on the working class from without. This is why, Marx claimed, ‘communists do not preach morality’ (Marx and Engels [1845] 1976, 247).
Embedded in this argument is a general historical model of human nature. This model built upon Hegel’s attempt to point towards an ethically (that is, socially and materially) grounded theory of social transformation. But Marx did so while simultaneously rejecting Hegel’s dismissal of the proletariat as a ‘rabble’. Marx claimed that while the division of labour separated and fragmented its members, the ‘new fangled’ working class (Marx [1856] 1980, 656) could be characterised also by a rebellion against this fragmentation, which was manifest as a growing desire for community. He first drew these conclusions in the 1840s on the basis of his engagement both in the Silesian weavers’ revolt and in socialist circles in Paris (Perkins 1993, 33). Generalising from these experiences, Marx commented that in struggling against the power of capital workers begin to create modes of existence which offer a virtuous alternative to egoism. This is an alternative both to the egoism of capitalist society generally and, more specifically, to the enforced egoism of working-class life within that society.
<EXT>When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means had become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures. (Marx [1844] 1975b, 365) </EXT>
This class analysis differentiated Marx’s model of liberation from both Robespierre’s abstract conception of the ‘general will’ and the moralistic approach embraced by Feuerbach’s ‘true socialist’ followers. Because Marx’s politics were based upon a socio-historical analysis of the emergence of a new social class it escaped the abstract character of Robespierre’s practice. From this perspective Marx also criticised the ‘true socialists’ for aiming to liberate not real men and women but rather some disembodied ‘Man’ (Marx and Engels 1976, 468). He insisted that because ‘true socialism’ abstracted the human essence from its real manifestation in history it acted as a barrier to the real diffusion of socialist consciousness, which could only arise through the recognition of the class-divided nature of society (469). The true socialists forget
<EXT>that the ‘inward nature’ of men, as well as their ‘consciousness’ of it, i.e., their ‘reason’, has at all times been an historical product and that even when … the society of men was based ‘upon external compulsion’, their ‘inward nature’ corresponded to this ‘external compulsion’. (Marx and Engels 1976, 468) </EXT>
This historical model of human nature is central not only to Marx’s theory of history, but also to his theory of revolution. In The German Ideology he suggested two reasons why socialism could only come through revolution. Firstly, in common with revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Blanqui, he argued that the ruling class could not be overthrown by any other means. Secondly, and much more profoundly, he differentiated his conception of revolution from those of these earlier revolutionaries by insisting that ‘the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’ (Marx and Engels 1976, 53). Revolutionary activity was therefore not merely system-changing, it was also individually transformative: it was the necessary means through which workers could come to realise in consciousness the power of their situation at the centre of the new socialised mode of production. Moreover, Marx suggested that workers, in tending to rebel against the process of their dehumanisation, begin to act as potential agents for not only their own liberation but also the universal liberation of humanity, because they exploit no groups below them (Marx and Engels 1975, 36-7).
This model of revolutionary practice is of the first importance to an understanding of Marx’s theory of revolution, because it is the basis on which he and Engels criticised Blanqui’s Jacobinism. While Marx agreed with Blanqui, and for that matter Robert Owen, that capitalism had made workers unfit to rule, he departed from their respective solutions to this problem – Blanqui’s revolutionary elitism and Owen’s philanthropic elitism (Owen [1817] 1991, 188). Instead Marx insisted that workers could become fit to rule through the revolutionary process itself: ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice’ (Marx [1845] 1975d, 422). Indeed it was the collective struggles in the revolutionary process that did away with the need for Blanqui’s elitist model of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’.
Marx also rejected Blanqui’s political voluntarism. He believed that while individuals would play pivotal roles within them, revolutionary situations developed, fundamentally, out of objective historical circumstances over which individuals had little control (Marx 1973b, 145). He was adamant that capitalism was subject to systemic contradictions which could not be reformed away, and that these were a specific instance of a pattern of structural crises recurring throughout history. Consequently, whereas Alexis de Tocqueville famously pointed to a political explanation of the genesis of the French Revolution as a specific instance of a more general pattern, Marx attempted to analyse the underlying causes of the political shifts themselves. According to Tocqueville’s classic formulation, revolutions tend to occur when bad regimes move to reform themselves:
<EXT> it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways. (Tocqueville [1856] 1966, 196) </EXT>
While Marx had read Tocqueville’s study of the French Revolution (Marx 1981, 939), I am unaware of any substantive comments he made on it. Nonetheless, we can probably assume that while he would have accepted the limited power of Tocqueville’s suggestion, he was himself interested in uncovering not only the political dynamics of revolutions but also the seismic shifts that underpinned their emergence. As Rudé has argued, for all Tocqueville’s ‘brilliance’, he leaves unanswered the general problem of why Louis XVI’s ministers, and why other reforming governments before and since, ‘have to stop short’ their reforms. More specifically, Tocqueville does not explain the actual circumstances of the outbreak and the process through which a revolt of the elites was transformed into a revolution from below (Rudé 1988, 15). For Marx, by contrast, revolutions emerged at specific historical junctures: when the mode of production entered a structural crisis.
<EXT>At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. (Marx [1859] 1970, 20) </EXT>
Under capitalism, Marx argued, the contradiction between forces and relations of production is expressed through the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Because it is rooted in the capital accumulation process, this tendency cannot ultimately be resolved without a revolutionary transformation of social relations. Moreover, capitalism is also characterised by the growth in size and strength of the working class, such that when workers join together to resist the consequences of crisis they begin to offer a potential political alternative to capitalism (Marx 1976, 929; Marx and Engels 1973, 68; see also Callinicos 1995, 151-65).
This process is obscured so long as it is viewed from the point of view of the atomised individual within capitalist society, and it becomes fully apparent only when examined from the point of view of the totality of the capitalist system (Marx 1976, 732). Moreover, it is from the standpoint of workers’ struggles that the nature of the social totality itself becomes clear (Lukács 1971, 28, 129). This perspective provides the point of contact between Marx’s scientific, explanatory, account of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, and his normative critique of capitalism. Far from being mutually exclusive, these two aspects of his social theory are two sides of the same coin: capitalism as a system for the exploitation of wage labour becomes apparent from the point of view of class struggles over the length of the working day. These struggles simultaneously point beyond what Alasdair MacIntyre suggests is the structure of incommensurable moral preferences which characterises modern, bourgeois, moral theory (MacIntyre 1985, 8). It is therefore from the perspective of workers’ struggles that we can begin to make sense of Marx’s condemnation of morality. He dismisses those moral attitudes that pretend to offer some mechanism through which a universal good can be promoted in a world in which social divisions undermine such a project. But he does this from the point of view of a class-based morality which, through the emergence of a need for solidarity, not only points beyond liberal naturalisations of egoism, but also, he believes, has become universal in the modern context. Marxism therefore presupposes and reaffirms the sort of social practice – collective working-class struggles – which simultaneously reveal and point beyond the facts of exploitation (Blackledge 2008).
It is because Marx’s perspective is rooted in a historical materialist analysis of the emergence of a new social class with novel needs and capacities (that is, a new nature), that he points beyond the one-sidedly political character of both Jacobinism and Blanquism, while nonetheless remaining a revolutionary. It is this dual character of Marx’s revolutionary theory that underpins Engels’s criticisms of Bakunin’s anarchism, Blanquism, and statist reformism noted above. Despite appearing to be opposites, both Blanquism and state socialism are united as examples of what Hal Draper called ‘socialism from above’, to which Engels opposed Marx’s ‘socialism from below’ (Draper 1992). However, whilst anarchism and Marxism are both varieties of socialism from below, Marx differs from Bakunin in recognising, on the one hand, the historical novelty and social specificity of the modern socialist movement, and on the other hand, the need for a revolution which not only ‘smashes’ the old state machine, but which simultaneously builds new forms of workers’ power.
<A>IV. Marxism, Anarchism and Social Democracy
This historicised conception of human nature also underpinned Marx’s criticisms of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchism. Proudhon’s anarchism was of a very different stripe to Stirner’s. Whereas Stirner dismissed Proudhon as a moralist (Stirner 2005, 47), Proudhon could not have accepted Stirner’s claim that ‘labouring does not make you a man, because it is something formal and is … accidental’ (130). For Proudhon, labouring, and the morality attendant upon it, was at the centre of his critique of capitalism; and, according to Thomas, he believed that while ‘power corrupts, labour ennobles’ (Thomas 1980, 148). Indeed, against Lockean attempts to derive the rights of private property from a basic labour theory of value, he insisted not only that the transformation from ‘possession into property’ necessarily involved something ‘besides labour’, but also that even in a situation of wage labour the labourer retains ‘a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced’ (Proudhon [1840] 1993, 85, 88).
Proudhon’s famous claim that ‘property is theft’ (Proudhon 1993, 13) therefore rested on the distinction he drew between possession and property. Whereas he believed that the act of labouring entitled the labourer to the possession of the product of his labour (and for Proudhon it most certainly was his rather than her labour), he believed that such possessions did not underpin entitlements either to the ownership of the means of production (primarily land) or to the appropriation of the product of the labour of others (McNally 1993, 140). It was these latter forms of property which he believed were artificial and immoral. Consequently, as Peter Marshall has argued, Proudhon ‘did not attack private property as such’, since he believed that freedom was threatened both by communist plans to collectivise and by the way that large property owners ate into the property of the petty bourgeoisie (Marshall 2008, 239). And although his critique of property might appear to be a rehash of the attacks on individual rights associated with Robespierre’s rule, nothing could be further from his thoughts (Proudhon 1993, 13). The error of the revolutionaries of the 1790s, from Proudhon’s point of view, was that their attack on the ancien régime had been hamstrung by an inability to think beyond the old monarchical system. Rather than overthrowing the property system, they generalised it downwards: ‘the people finally legalised property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did’ (30). Because Proudhon saw in the bourgeoisie’s defence of property not the ideological reflection of class interest but an intellectual error, he aimed to correct it through a ‘revolution’ that was primarily ‘a movement of the mind’ (27; see also Proudhon [1851] 1989, 8). In fact, when a decade later he published a monograph on the concept of revolution, he dedicated it to the ‘bourgeoisie’, because he believed that its members were, not only in 1789 but also in the 1840s and 1850s, ‘the boldest and most skilful revolutionaries’ (1989, 7).
Proudhon insisted that ‘revolution was necessary’ because the aims of 1789 had yet to be realised (45). Far from being a ‘natural order’, France had become a ‘fractitious order’ with ‘parasite interests, abnormal morals, monstrous ambitions, [and] prejudices at variance with common sense’. Interestingly, despite his claim that he alone represented ‘the revolutionary point of view’ (Proudhon 1989, 125), like Stirner he explained the injustices of the status quo in a way that tended to naturalise particular modern capitalist social relations. As David McNally has argued, Proudhon’s critique of modern capitalism involved an actual accommodation with bourgeois ideology in a number of important ways. First, he defined justice by ‘equal market exchange’; second, he used commodity exchange as ‘the model for the social contract’; third, he depicted exploitation not as a product of commodity production, but as its violation through monopoly; fourth, he aimed to foster equal exchange of commodities by opening a ‘People’s Bank’ which would use paper money to overturn ‘the royalty of gold’; fifth, he equated socialism with the ‘abolition of monopoly and the realisation of free trade’; and, sixth, he argued within the workers’ movement against strikes and political struggles against the state, and in their place for ‘mutualism and equal exchange’ (McNally 1993, 141-3). This ‘absolute pure morality’ emerged, or so Marx argued, out of Proudhon’s critique of the classical political economists ‘from the standpoint of political economy’ (Marx and Engels 1975, 31).
The political consequences of this perspective are apparent in Proudhon’s critique of socialism. The dominant voice of socialism in France at the time was that of the reformist state-socialist Louis Blanc. According to Proudhon, Blanc was heir both to Robespierre’s statism and, through him, to the dictatorial methods of ‘the scoundrel’ Rousseau (Proudhon 1989, 188, 152-3). What these figures shared was a common focus on reform through the state. This approach, Proudhon believed, confused legitimate with illegitimate forms of authority: the state transferred patriarchal authority from the family, which was its proper abode, to an unnatural situation (171). Practically, this meant that whereas anarchists focused upon demands for jobs and a ‘living wage’, socialists followed the Jacobins in their focus on politics (166). This was just as true of revolutionary socialists such as Blanqui (and before him Babeuf) as it was of Blanc’s reformism: Proudhon claimed that both were counter-revolutionary because they failed to see that power and liberty were absolutely ‘incompatible’ (Thomas 1980, 180, 212). Against these socialists, the key issue of the day was not which kind of government but rather ‘Government or No-Government’, or absolutism versus anarchy, and the aim of the revolution was ‘to do away with … the state’ (Proudhon 1989, 153; see also 105, 128, 286).
In place of the state, Proudhon envisioned a social contract which was the opposite of Rousseau’s statism because it was to be freely entered into by independent producers (113ff; see also 130, 206). While Proudhon accepted the need for workers’ trade unions as a buffer against the power of capital, at a deeper level he insisted that these organisations were antithetical to his idea of anarchy. Commenting on Blanc’s advocacy of the needs principle – ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ – Proudhon responded that such a principle could operate only through a ‘binding’ union that would infringe individual liberty. Given this situation, he asked, who is to decide what my needs and capacities are? Noting the tyrannical consequences of this perspective, he suggested that the only beneficiaries of such an agreement would be ‘weak or lazy workers’ (84-5, 96). More generally, while he agreed that unions were important to workers, the role of workers in the coming revolution was not to fight for their ‘petty union interests’, but rather to deny ‘the rule of capitalists, money lenders and governments, which the first revolution left undisturbed’ (99).
The second half of this sentence allows us to make sense of how Proudhonists and Marxists were able to work together within the International Working Men’s Association or First International (1864-72). However, the first half of the sentence, and Proudhon’s anti-political perspectives more generally, point to the tensions embedded in this relationship from the start. From Marx’s standpoint, Proudhon’s mutualism – the idea that capitalism could be transformed ‘by means of producer co-operatives financed by a “people’s bank”’ – was the most extreme muddle, which reflected his inability to look beneath capitalism’s surface appearance as a system of equal exchange to the underlying appropriation of value from workers. ‘We may well’, wrote Marx, ‘feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon who would abolish capitalist property – by enforcing the eternal laws of property which are themselves based on commodity production!’ (Marx 1976, 734)
Within the International, debate became focused on the issue of working-class demands made on the state. On one side, the Proudhonists opposed this approach, while Marx, supported by English trade unionists, stressed the necessity of fighting for reforms. According to Collins and Abramsky, whereas Marx believed that ‘trade union struggle represented a necessary phase through which the workers must pass on the road to full emancipation’, ‘for the French they were a barbaric expedient, necessary perhaps, as a last resort in particular circumstances, but contributing nothing of value to the movement’ (Collins and Abramsky 1964, 101, 117; see also Gilbert 1981, 90). Thus, whilst Proudhon’s mutualism meant that his followers tended to reject both strikes and ‘political’ struggles, Marx insisted that when workers won reforms and then acted to enforce these laws they did not ‘fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency’ (Marx quoted in Fernbach 1974, 17).
Marx was generally successful in his struggles against the Proudhonists. But from 1867-8 onwards the torch of anarchism was taken up within the International by Bakunin. He described his version of anarchism as ‘Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its furthest conclusion’ (Guerin [1965] 1970, 4). Concretely, this meant that Bakunin agreed with Proudhon’s general argument that natural social harmony was possible only through the eradication of government and the state. But he went further than Proudhon in a collectivist direction (12). If anarcho-syndicalism or libertarian-communism was the logical culmination of this intellectual movement, Bakunin himself was keen to stress his ‘detestation’ of communism’s top-down, state-led, approach, which he compared unfavourably to the bottom-up democratic processes that gave rise to collectivism (22). Nevertheless, in the first instance the gap between Marx and Bakunin was less than it had been between Marx and Proudhon, and at the 1869 conference of the International, Bakunin supported Marx’s motion in favour of ‘public ownership of land and industry’ against the Proudhonists (Collins and Abramsky 1964, 228; see also Thomas 1980, 268).
This convergence was soon overshadowed by renewed debates on the question of reformist political demands. On this issue, Bakunin’s position ‘was of a piece with Proudhon’s’ (Thomas 1980, 294). Draper comments on their differing approaches to this issue. He suggests that whereas both Marx and Bakunin aimed at ‘abolishing’ the state, this for Marx – unlike Bakunin – did not mean an end to authority but rather its ‘democratisation’. This, in turn, Marx thought would be possible only after ‘a sufficient period of socialist reconstruction of society’ (Draper 1990, 174).
Rather ironically, given the animosity of the debate between them and their followers, both Marx and Bakunin embraced the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of real living socialism. Nevertheless, Bakunin insisted that whereas ‘the communists [that is, Marxists] believe it necessary to organize the workers’ forces in order to seize the political power of the State’, ‘the revolutionary socialists organize for the purpose of destroying – or, to put it more politely – liquidating the State’. Concretely, Bakunin proclaimed his support for the Commune not only because it was made by ‘the spontaneous and continued action of the masses’ but also because it was the ‘negation of the state’ (Bakunin [1872] 1973, 263, 264, 268). Marx had already written, in a document published under the auspices of the International, that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’. Nevertheless, Marx insisted that although the Commune was the ‘direct antithesis to the Empire’, it was still ‘a working-class government’ (Marx [1871] 1974c, 206, 208, 212). This last point is important, because despite Bakunin’s attempt to paint Marx’s model of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Jacobin, Blanquist or Lassallean colours, Marx did not mean by this term the dictatorship of an elite. Rather, for him it meant more simply the rule of the working class (Draper 1987, 29). Thus, two decades later Engels could write that
<EXT>of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. (Engels [1891] 1990b, 191) </EXT>
The difference between Marx and Bakunin was, however, about more than mere semantics. Bakunin argued that Marx’s approach was mistaken because ‘every state power, every government, by its nature and by its position stands outside the people and above them, and must invariably try to subject them to rules and objectives which are alien to them’ (Bakunin 1990, 136). Therefore, whereas Marx predicated his political practice on a historical model of human nature which underpinned his differentiation between more and less democratic states, between better and worse laws, and indeed between workers’ and capitalist states, Bakunin believed that the desire for freedom was a universal human characteristic and declared himself the enemy ‘of every government and every state power’. This informed his refusal of reformist political demands (Bakunin [1869] 1992, 109). It is not clear, however, how this position cohered with his embrace of the Paris Commune as an example of his model of revolution. For, as Peter Kropotkin argued a few years later from a perspective very close to Bakunin’s, the Commune’s key failing was its embrace of a representative structure which meant that it reproduced the typical vices of parliamentary governments. The weaknesses of the Commune were due not to the men who led it but to the ‘system’ it embraced (Kropotkin [1880] 2002a, 237-42). Kropotkin went on to reject the Blanquist idea of a ‘revolutionary government’ as the dream of ‘budding Robespierres’, and like Bakunin he conflated Marx’s conception of revolutionary leadership with Blanqui’s elitism. Consequently, like Bakunin’s claim that Marx was a Jacobin, Kropotkin’s critique of Marxism tended to miss its mark (Kropotkin 2002a, 242-50; [1887] 2002b, 61; see also Bakunin 1990, 182).
To this conceptual problem was added a more substantive issue. Bakunin’s approach immunised his followers against the malign appeal of reformism. But by rejecting a whole series of ‘political’ struggles for reform he found that he had little to say to those workers in the advanced capitalist states who were engaged not only in struggles to extend the laws that protected them but also to defend existing laws from the encroachment of individual capitalists. More generally, by tarring all states with the same brush, Bakunin was unable to formulate an adequate model of the revolutionary transformation to socialism. So, although he had no trouble conceiving of a violent struggle between classes, he avoided the problem of how workers might win victory without violently replacing the old order with one of their own. As Marx pointed out in his notes on Statism and Anarchy, it was precisely the need for violent revolution which implied that the working class must be organised as an armed force, that is as a form of state (Marx [1874-5] 1974b, 517).
The trouble with Marx’s approach, by contrast, was that in focussing on the necessity for socialist revolutionaries to engage in struggles for reform, he left himself open to misrepresentation as a reformist (Fernbach 1974, 17). To counter this problem, he wrote his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. This programme was agreed to by the German Social Democratic Party under the influence of the followers of the state-socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (see Draper 1990, 41-71, 241-69) at the Gotha unity congress in 1875. The programme was an odd amalgam which brought together some ultra-radical verbiage with a series of practically moderate political demands. Both aspects of this ‘synthesis’ were evident in the programme’s central demand for a ‘free state’.
Marx famously subjected a draft of the programme to a brutal interrogation. Beyond pointing to the authoritarian implications of the aim of fighting for such a goal, he insisted that in the transitional period from capitalism to communism the state could only exist as ‘the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. He suggested that in avoiding this issue the SPD had opened itself up to a possible evolution towards liberalism (Marx [1875] 1974d, 355). Contrary to Bakunin’s attempt to paint him as a statist, Marx was careful to differentiate between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the modern capitalist state. Indeed, he criticised the statism of the draft programme, claiming that beneath its ‘democratic clang’ could be discerned ‘the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state’ (357).
Engels similarly criticised the draft programme, commenting that ‘all the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the commune, which has ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term’ (Engels [1875] 1989b, 71). Nevertheless, Marx and Engels did not carry out their threatened break with the SPD after the programme was ratified. In a context in which both the bourgeois press and the workers read into the Gotha Programme their views (Engels [1875], 1991, 97-8), they wagered that, despite the shortcomings of the party’s programme, the general superiority of the perspectives of the Party’s Marxist tendency would lead to its eventual hegemony within the organisation. In the medium term this was precisely the turn taken by events, a process which culminated with the revision of the party’s programme at the Erfurt congress of 1891 (Schorske [1955] 1983, 3). However, while Engels welcomed the Erfurt Programme as an improvement on that of Gotha, he once again criticised the failure to address the question of state power scientifically: ‘The political demands of the draft have one great fault. It lacks precisely what should have been said’ (Engels 1990c, 225). Noting that reformism was ‘gaining ground in large sections of the Social-Democratic press’, Engels argued that it was incumbent upon the framers of the programme to spell out clearly to the German workers that the transition to socialism could only come ‘by force’, insisting that if the SPD did not make this clear then, in the long run, the party would go ‘astray’ (226-7).
<A>V. Conclusion
Despite Engels’s prescient warnings, reformist tendencies grew in strength across the European socialist movement towards the end of the nineteenth century. Partly as a reaction to this tendency, a syndicalist current emerged within the workers’ movement which combined a rejection of reformism with a focus on independent working-class action. Syndicalism was rooted in a renewal of class struggle from below and drew on Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s rejections of bourgeois politics, alongside Marx’s conception of socialism as working-class self-emancipation (Darlington 2008, 74-5). Expressed in the writings of intellectuals such as Georges Sorel, the syndicalists had ‘nothing but contempt for ‘politics’ in the form of compromise and opportunism which characterised parliamentary affairs’ (Portis 1980, 44-5; Sorel [1908] 1999). A parallel reaction against the growing reformism of the Second International developed within the Marxist movement itself. Associated with the writings of Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin in The State and Revolution of 1917 traced the intellectual basis of reformism in the Marxist movement to a wilful misrepresentation of Marx’s critique of the state within the Second International (1889-1914).
The trajectory taken by Antonio Gramsci highlights both the differences and similarities between this renewed Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism in the early twentieth century. In response to the accusation that he and the L’Ordine Nuovo group around him in Turin in 1919 and 1920 had acted in a syndicalist fashion, he replied that, yes, like the syndicalists and against the mechanical interpretation of Marxism which had been dominant with the Second International, his grouping had attempted to root their socialism in the real spontaneous movement of workers from below instead of offering an ‘abstract’ model of leadership. However, the weakness with this approach, and for Gramsci the weakness with syndicalism more generally, was that L’Ordine Nuovo did not articulate a strategy for replacing the capitalist state with a workers’ state, a lacuna which informed their failure to build an all-Italian revolutionary socialist party (Gramsci 1971, 197-8; Williams 1975, 145-68).
Over the next few years Gramsci sought to overcome these weaknesses while building on the strengths of the L’Ordine Nuovo period. Like the anarcho-syndicalists, he rooted his practice in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary workers, but unlike them he extended this approach into a strategy that included fighting for ‘immediate’ reforms within capitalism as part of the broader struggle against capitalism (Gramsci 1978, 369). In so doing he moved towards a Leninist position which had little in common with caricatures of Lenin as a latter-day Jacobin, but which did cohere with Marx’s broader historical analysis of the emergence of new class relations and thus of new forms of class struggle. It was these historically novel class relations which pointed towards a revolutionary political project that aimed to escape the abstract character of Jacobinism.
This strategy was both ‘political’ and ‘statist’ in the limited senses criticised by Bakunin and Proudhon, because it was based upon the distinctions Marx made between proletarian and bourgeois revolutions and between bourgeois and workers’ states, including the claim that the latter would wither away in a post-revolutionary context. The strategy was, however, anti-statist and thus anti-political in the sense in which Marx and Engels had described the Commune as the antithesis of the capitalist state. Unfortunately, the anti-statist character of Marxism was subsequently and wilfully obscured by Stalin who re-interpreted the success of his counter-revolution as the victorious culmination of the Russian Revolution itself (Blackledge 2006, 126-30). While academic discussions of Marxism in the twentieth century tended to be distorted by the Stalinist lens through which Marx’s ideas were interpreted, the divisions between Marx, Proudhon, and Bakunin were rehearsed on the libertarian left throughout this period. These debates relate, on the one hand, to the coherence of Marx’s claim that his model of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is distinct from Blanqui’s Jacobin-influenced model of ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ and to whether Marx’s vision of the ‘withering away’ of such a state is a utopia, and, on the other hand, to whether anarchist models of revolution can adequately confront not only capitalist society but also the system of capitalist states. These divisions, in turn, relate to the coherence of Marx’s historical model of human nature and, what is the corollary of this, his distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, and thus to the coherence of the distinction between his politics and Jacobinism.
It is perhaps ironic that although the libertarian left welcomed the collapse of Russian state communism, this event, in a context overdetermined by defeats suffered by the workers’ movement over the last three decades, ensured that the voices of the left became even more marginalised within the academy in the 1990s. Nevertheless, since the emergence of a global anti-capitalist movement at Seattle in 1999, revolutionary voices have once again found a hearing. If these voices include, most prominently, thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, perhaps the pre-eminent amongst them are Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, who in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) attempted to synthesise Marxist with postmodernist themes to reach recognisably anarchistic conclusions. Each of these thinkers has been criticised from a more classical Marxist perspective by Alex Callinicos (2006). Whatever one thinks of the relative merits of these arguments, it is undoubtedly true that their power has helped to push the concept of revolution back into the academic mainstream over the last decade, opening the door to a welcome revival of engagements with this issue both as a philosophical problem and as a political necessity.1
<A>Notes
<EN>1. For an instance of this re-engagement, see Foran et al., eds, 2008.
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