Marxism, Anarchism, and Workers’ Movements
Marxism: Origins and Philosophy
Marxism is the set of political and philosophical doctrines derived from the work of Karl Marx, a German philosopher and revolutionary journalist who contributed in fields such as sociology, economics, and history, and his friend Friedrich Engels, who helped him in many of their theoretical developments. To distinguish it from later derived currents, the Marxism proposed by Marx and Engels has been called scientific socialism.
Key Philosophical Influences
Historically, Marx had two major philosophical influences: that of Feuerbach, which shaped his materialist view of history, and Hegel, who undoubtedly inspired Marx regarding the application of dialectical materialism. While working on his doctoral dissertation, where he chose to compare two great materialist philosophers of ancient Greece, Democritus and Epicurus, Marx had already endorsed the Hegelian method, its dialectics. Already in 1842, he had developed his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from a materialist standpoint. But in the early 1840s, another major philosophical influence on Marx emerged: Feuerbach. Especially with his work The Essence of Christianity. Both Marx and Engels embraced Feuerbach‘s materialist critique of Hegel‘s system, though with some reservations. According to Marx, Feuerbachian materialism was inconsistent and idealistic in some respects. It was in the Theses on Feuerbach (Marx, 1845) and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels, 1846) where Marx and Engels settled their accounts with their philosophical influences and established the conditions for the materialist conception of history.
Anarchism: Philosophy and Diversity
Anarchism is a political and social philosophy that calls for abolishing the state, understood as a government, and by extension, all authority, hierarchy, and social control imposed on the individual, which are considered undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful. Sébastien Faure, a French anarchist philosopher, said: “Anyone who denies authority and fights against it is an anarchist.” Despite a seemingly simple definition, few doctrines or movements encompass such a great variety of approaches and actions, which have not always been well understood by the public. Historically, anarchism generally focuses on the individual and a critique of their relationship with society. Its goal is social change towards a future society, in the words of Proudhon, “without a master or ruler”.
There is no academic agreement on a common taxonomy of anarchists. Some make a distinction between two basic lines of thought: individualist and communist. It is also common to note four major streams:
- Individualist anarchism
- Mutualism
- Anarchist communism
- Anarcho-syndicalism
and according to some sources, also collectivism.
The Rise of the Workers’ Movement
At the dawn of liberal capitalism, the working class, deprived of the means of production and forced to sell their labor, was defenseless against abuse by employers. The need to defend their interests originated the workers’ movement. This movement enjoyed greater or lesser force depending on the degree of industrialization of the countries, but in any case, in all of them, the workers were grouped in class organizations with the aim of improving their working conditions, wages, and social standing.