Marxism vs anarchism

Hello comrades and welcome back to Marxist Voice, the Podcast of Socialist Appeal. For this week's episode we have a talk from last year's Revolution Festival where Andrea Patine discusses the differences between anarchism and Marxism. Marxists and anarchists have a lot in common. We have a common enemy, capitalism and the bourgeois state. And we have a common goal as well, communism, a classless, stateless society. So it might seem futile to argue, why don't we just put our differences aside and work together. But while there is a basis for common struggle on practical issues, there is a gulf that separates our ideas, our methods and our tactics. If you'd like to learn more about Marxism and anarchism, you can head to the Education Hub on our website, which features articles, excerpts and other talks on anarchism. And if you'd like to delve even deeper, why not get yourself a copy of our book Marxism and Anarchism, an anthology of essays and excerpts discussing various aspects of anarchism and Marxism. This book is available from well-read books, The Publishing House of Socialist Appeal and the IMT, and you can find the link to that in the show notes. So let's get started with this week's episode of Marxist Voice, the Podcast of Socialist Appeal. So I think today we're here all for the same reason. And the reason is that the one that we've discussed many times over during this weekend. Today we're living through one of the deepest crises of capitalism ever. The only thing that capitalism has to offer to millions of young people, like me and you, is a future of increased austerity of environmental catastrophe in one world is a future of misery and horror. I think given these conditions, it's quite unsurprisingly that many young people and many workers alike are increasingly looking back toward revolutionary theories. This is part of the struggle of our struggle to fight for a better world, to fight against capitalism and for a better society. Now I think that the two main theories, the majority of those consider themselves sympathetic to revolutionary theories. They get close to our Marxism and anarchism, or in any way some sort of shades and combination between the two of them. And the question I think arises quite naturally at that point, comrades, because at the end of the day we're all comrades fighting against capitalism, right? So why do we even have two different revolution, two different revolutionary theories? What's the point of that? What's the difference between them? And especially, I think the most important question that we need to ask ourselves is which one of the two, or combination of the two perhaps, is the best tool at our disposal to fight against capitalism and for the overthrow of the society, of capitalist society, and for the revolution, the socialist revolution. Because in fact on the surface, Marxism and anarchism do look a lot similar at first glance. You know, we're both anarchists and Marxists, we're all fighting against the state, we're all fighting for a stateless society, a society without class division, a society without sexism, without racism, without homophobia, without transphobia. As society dates, finally free from all oppression, exploitation, and all of that crap that we have to weaken us every day. But while the similarities between Marxism and anarchism, might appear very striking at first glance, in reality, these two theories are actually incoherent irreconcilable theories, that's the world I'm looking for. In fact, and I think, and this is exactly the thing that I want to discuss today. No, there are many, many, many different ways in which you can discuss the difference between Marxism and anarchism, right? You could talk about Bakunin and Marx and the debates inside the first international, you can talk about the CNT, you can talk about the machnobists, you can talk about way to organize and not to organize and what's the best way at our disposal. But the thing that I want to talk about, really, is the essence of Marxism and the essence of anarchism and what's the core difference between the two of them. In my opinion, in my understanding, the core difference between Marxism and anarchism is the following one. And that is that Marxist theory tries to understand oppression and inequality on a material basis. We ask ourselves, where does oppression, where does inequality comes from, historically and materially. And starting from this understanding, from this scientific understanding, then Marxist argue, what's the best way to fight against this and what kind of society we're actually fighting for. On the other hand, I think, the anarchist theory, paradoxically in a way, it's a theory that rejects historical analysis and scientific analysis in theory in general, as some sort of intellectual kind of things, and more usually calls for direct action and all of these kinds of things. But in fact, rather than starting from an historical or a materially understanding of society and the problem with society, the starting point of anarchism, it's usually comes from the individual itself. And so, I think to the essence to the core, is that rejection from the individual side, from the individual point of view, of all forms of authority. Now, over the weekend, I'm sure we have discussed many, many times over what Marxism is, what Marxism is not, and all of this. So I won't dwell on that too much. But what's anarchism instead? Well, first off, I put a disclaimer, and that is that because of the nature of anarchism, there are so many different shades of anarchism as probably there are anarchists in this world. And all of them has some sort of small or big similarities between each other, right? But clearly, there is something common about all of the anarchist theories. Otherwise, they wouldn't be called anarchist theories, right? There is something that brings them together. And I don't want to tell you, like, I don't want to improvise what that is, but we can read it from anarchist texts. There is this widely available pamphlet that you can easily find online. It's a very nice feed actually, if you're interested on the theories and what the anarchists argue for. And it's called, what is anarchism? There is like an introduction on the pamphlet, and then there are some sort of extract from all of the different main anarchists, theorists in the world. Like, there is work of a malattesta, work of Kropotkin, and all of this. Anyway, the point is that in this pamphlet, in what is anarchism, anarchism is defined as this. The idea of anarchism, and I'm quoting here, the idea of anarchism, is a society in which all of the individuals can do whatever they choose, except interfere with the ability of other individuals to do whatever they choose. And I'm quoting here. So it is on this ground that anarchism rejects the state because the state limits the freedom of the individual. It is on these grounds that anarchism rejects religion, rejects class divisions, reject sexism, and some anarchists would even go as far as rejecting the decision of the majority. Because all of these things, they argue, put limitations on the individual and on the freedom of the individual. Fundamentally, anarchism again is the absolute rejection of all forms of authority from the individual, as those, as these authority, is believed to be the source evils, the source of all of the evils that we have in society today. Now, if you stop one second and you look the world around you today, you see the police and the police uses their authority to keep the population into place. You see the buses, you see the buses, and the buses who use their authority to force you to work when you are in the workplace. You see the bourgeoisie state, and the bourgeoisie state uses its authority to restrict the personal freedom of people. You see all of this kind of example in which authority is used actually to restrict the freedom of people, and you might start to think that actually, you know, the anarchist kind of point of view have some sense, maybe they do make some sense. But in reality, I think the dissimple observation that we're starting from is only scratching the surface, so what is actually going on. If I can use an analogy, for example, if you are sick and you go to a doctor, because you're feeling sick, the doctor won't just look at you, having a good look at you and being like, "Oh, I can see that you're feeling sick," and that's not good. You should try to feel better. That's not how it works. If the doctor is not a charlatan, it's probably going to have a serious look at you, perform some analysis or whatever, come up with a diagnosis, and then based on that diagnosis, it will prescribe you a treatment to hopefully cure the disease that you have. And I think the matter of authority, we should have the same kind of approach when talking about authority, or when talking about any other form of problems that have to do with society. We should approach the question on where do these things come from? Why do they exist? And what is that we can do about it? We shouldn't stop on the surface, we should try to go deeper than that, like a doctor does go deeper than just your surface look when it does analysis of you. Sorry. In fact, you might try to reject the authority of your boss, but you still have a stomach. You still have to feed yourself, and that means you still have to go to work and get a wage and all of that. You might try to reject the authority of the police, but the police is a very material thing, and as we unfortunately know very well today, the police doesn't care if you as an individual rejected. Now most anarchists, so the key question that we have to ask ourselves is why do these people even have authority over us? Where does that authority actually comes from? And fundamentally, thank you. What is that we can do about it? How it is that we can fight their authority? Now, most anarchist theory, I think, would subscribe to some sort of variation of what I would refer to as the theory of force. Now, the theory of force is the assumption that authority basically comes from the direct use of force. So that, for example, the authority of the bosses of the capitalist class over society comes from the fact that they have monopoly over the use of coercion over society today. For example, Charlotte Wilson, which was an English anarchist and anarcho-communist, I think, and was a close-crab later with Kropovkin at the time, stated that all society and states were constructed and held together by force. So the force was the basis of state power, of authority, and of the power of the capitalist class, according to them. But if you think about it, you're not feeling answering the question in a way like this. You're just changing the word authority with the word force. It was then at that point, the thing we might ask ourselves. Well, OK, authority comes from force. But where does force comes from? Well, how is this possible that some people have forced and some other people have not? If you watch Star Wars, force is this mighty thing that descends upon some people, right? And if you're lucky enough to have force within you or whatever it's the way of saying it in Star Wars way, then you're lucky enough, and you're going to be a protector of the states, or you're going to be one of the evil guys. But in the real world, force is not this ghost that descends upon people. So the question stands, where does force comes from? What's the basis of force? This is the key question, I think, we have to answer ourselves. And the most of the anarchist theory do not actually answer to this. And I think angles, just to give some quotes at some point, provided an answer to these questions in this polemic against during at the time. Now, during wasn't in self-anunarchist. But a lot of the theories and a lot of the arguments that during was making were very similar to the ones that anarchists would make today. And we can talk later about why that is the case, actually. But anyway, here I'm quoting from angles on force. And where does force comes from? So force, this is angles, is not merely an act of the will, but requires the existence of very real preliminary conditions before it can come into operation. And these conditions are these instruments. The more perfect of which gets the better of the less perfect of these instruments. But the instrument means weapons here. Moreover, these instruments, the weapons, the arms, have to be produced, which implies the producer of more perfect weapons or more perfect instruments gets the better of the producer of the less perfect instruments, of the less perfect weapons. And that in a ward, and this is the key passage, I think, the triumph of force is based on the productions of weapon. And this in turns on production in general. Therefore, on economic power, on the economic situation, on the material means which force, as this is disposal. Unquote. So force comes from economic power. And come let's say, I think this is the point of the question. If you want to rely, for example, on the authority of the police, first you need to feed the police officers. Then you need to arm them to give them weapons and all of that. Then you need to train them. All of things which require material means that require money, that require wealth, that require very material stuff, which are not simply an act of the will. And by the way, this is one of the problems with Star Wars, because you look at the movie. And on one side, you have capitalist production and all of these things. On the other side, it's kind of a feudalistic kind of society in which there is this thing that descend upon them. And they leave on these nights kind of thing. Another movie, which is instead, is great, is Alien. And in Alien, actually, authority comes from actually capitalism and the company has authority over their workers, because they need to get a wage and all of that. It also discusses how capitalism put profits between the, how to say, in front of people, in front of the interest of before people. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, that's not the topic of the discussion. But it is a great movie and a good critics of capitalism, I think. So force comes from the role that the capitalist class has in society. It is through their economical power, the day a choir force. And not the opposite, which is what many anarchists would end up arguing for. The capitalist class today, through their capitalist state, the day control, through their control of the economy, have a monopoly over violence, precisely because they control the economy, and not the other way around. The state that is the arm body of men and women, which protects the power of the ruling class, is an inevitable product of the fact that society is divided into classes, or the fact that there are oppressed people on one side and oppressors on the other side. This is a necessary product of the fact that-- yeah, the society is divided into classes. Sorry, I'm repeating myself. You see, so rather than coming from force itself, authority, these things that the anarchists argue against, the anarchist theory, sorry, not the anarchist, has a basis on the material conditions of class society. And it is in this that we have to tackle if we want to do with state authority and with authority, in general, and not a simple rejection of abstract authority in the abstract sense. And in fact, if you go on and look at the question historically, where does the state come from? Where does the authority of the state come from? And you look at the historical evidence and archeological evidence and all of that. And there was a talk, I think, before this talk on this question. You see that actually the state didn't exist for all of our existence in this planet. Actually, it's a very recent thing. It dates just a few, a few thousand years ago. The state, as we know it, it's very recent. And the reason for this, ultimately, the reason for this, is that prehistoric society, where characterized by such a low productivity, that they could not afford the possibility of maintaining a privileged stratum that would stand above society, which is what a state is. Now, this wasn't because of some great ideas and all of that. It was a necessity. It was the necessity of the time, because each small community was organized in a much more egalitarian way. And the reason for that is that everybody needed to take part in production and the kind of little food that was gathered would kind of be spread equally among the rest of society at the end of the day. And the situation, this situation of primitive communism, of primitive egalitarian kind of society, changed drastically with technological innovation, because of technological innovation, that led to increased production, and that happened a few thousand years ago. It's a very recent in the great scheme of the history of humanity, if you think about it. And most notably, the great revolution was the agricultural revolution and the introduction of cattle farming. Now, when you hunting gather as a way of subsistence, you get when nature keeps you, right? But with agriculture and cattle farming, humanity started to have a degree of control over nature. And this meant that we started to having a some sort of degree of control of the production. And productivity, the amount of food that we produced, and the amount of things that we produced, changed very drastically at the time. This was an incredible revolution that over the course of the century changed forever drastically the way in which humanity inhabited the planet. For the first time ever, humanity was producing a surplus, was producing more than what it actually barely needed for subsistence, right? The key question of the future development of the whole history of society centered around this surplus, what to do with this extra wealth? Who was to get for themselves this extra wealth? And this was the beginning of economic inequalities. The long story short, this is a very interesting topic that I'm not going to cover, but I see here the regions of the family, private property in the state. This is the thing to read about this, in my opinion, at least. The long story short is that people that found themselves in a favorable economic positions started to acquire incredible economic power with respect to the rest of the population. Now, because it's a simple thing, right? If you have control over the economy, that is, if you control the means of production's comrades, then you have a firm grip over society. This is where your authority comes from. Because if you control the economy, you can decide who has a plot of land and who does not have a plot of land. You can decide who eats and who doesn't eat. You can decide who has a job and who does not have a job. And most importantly, if you have more wealth than what you actually need, you can also pay some guards to defend your interests, defend your property. And not just that, you can also write books or have people writing books for you, newspapers, and all of this kind of propaganda that is used to justify your role. And in fact, but anyway, since that time, the state hasn't been much but a tool in the hands of the ruling class to control the oppressed classes of society and to keep them into place. In fact, if you think about it today, the situation today, it is true that the state oppresses and the state uses authority to oppress people. But it doesn't oppress everybody. in the same way. In fact, capitalists, and even some petibush was it today, some people from the petibush was it today, they feel very much, thank you very much, they feel very much represented by the current state. Because this is their state, this is the capital state that is there to defend the interest of the market, the interest of private property, and that's the interest of their class. And the point is this, that as long as classes with conflicting interests will exist in society, for example, the patrisians and the pelbeian in the Roman times, or the feudal lords and the serfs in the Middle Ages, or today, the capitalists class and the working class, as long as classes with conflicting interests will exist in society, there is no way that these classes that everybody can happily come together and resolves all of their differences and have some sort of rational plan to overcome all of the difference between all of us. Because what is of benefit for one class, for example, a pay rise, it's detrimental to the interests of the other class. For example, if we get a pay rise, it means that we're cutting through the profits of the capitalist class. So, and state power, because and this, this conflict of interest, which is the class conflict, is the initiator, is the original reasons of state power, state power is the navigable results of this. Because we can't solve in any rationalistic way this class conflict, this conflict of interests. Society can't simply come together and find the best path out of this question. And this, this is where laws come from, this is where the police come from, this is where violence, where coercions come from, and all of the sorts of state institutions that we have today comes from these contradictions built in within class society. A stateless society, a society without a state, cannot simply be conjured upon like some sort of wizard, like exactly like the doctor thing, it's not a wizard that can simply heal you. You have to go to the material roots of what is happening beneath them. So, if you like the medicine kind of, the healthcare kind of metaphor here, it's like the state is the symptoms here, but it's class divisions that is the diseases of society. This is where things come from. But so, you know, if you want to get rid of the state, you first have to get rid of class society, first has to get rid of the inequalities that is coming from all of that. But contrary to pre-historical conditions that we were arguing that during the prehistory, people were not leading in this kind of state society like we're doing now. But back in the days, this egalitarian thing came from, ultimately came from scarcity and from the lack of food and from the lack of surplus and all of that. That this is very different from today. Today, we actually live in a society of abundance. We live in a society in which we have plenty of houses for everybody to live in. We produce plenty of food for everybody. I believe we produce something or we have the capability of producing food for 10 million people or something like that. We have plenty of medicines, we have plenty of books. We're really like, if we really can produce whatever we want to produce, really kind of, if we put our mind to it. But the problem is that this wealth, this incredible wealth, is in the hands of the capitalist class of the bourgeoisie. And only when the working class will unite humanity together under a rational plan of production, only then we can take all of this wealth and we can put it democratically to use to satisfy the needs of everybody. So that no lasting antagonism between classes, between nations, between peoples will last. Only when the needs of everybody will get satisfied, only then classes will go away, will wither away. And only then we can pave the way for the future communist stateless society. But how do we get there? What is that we first need to do? Well, I think first we need to fight against the capitalist class. Because I don't know about you, but I cannot see Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk just giving us the keys to the office of Amazon or Tesla or whatever Elon Musk is doing nowadays. Because we need to fight against them, right? And for the working class to fight and defeat a capitalist class, it will require a conscious and political effort on our side. It will require us to arm ourselves with our own independent political weapons, our own independent organization to struggle against it, which we'll see. And in the struggle to fight the class war, the working class will be compelled to arm itself and to do all of these things and build a worker state to fight and to defend the workers' revolution. And to be sure, a worker state and a workers' revolution comrades are matters of authority. There is no way out of this. What we are talking about is to defend ourselves, is to take the keys of the Amazon offices or something like that. And this is authority, it's us imposing our authority over the capitalist class. We need to be careful when we talk about authority in general, and now we're all against authority and all of these things. Because there are certain things that if we want to have a revolution, we do, we do, we do need to do. And I think Engels addressed this quite strikingly, again, I'm quoting from Engels again. He said, and I'm quoting here, a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing that there is. It is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part of the population by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon. A authoritarian means, if there are any authoritarian means at all. Now I don't think we will use bayonets in the revolution because those are kind of outdated. But the point stands that we need to impose our will on the other part of society. It is not authority in the abstract sense that Marxists oppose. We definitely oppose the fight against the authority of the bourgeoisie over the working class. Why? Because the bourgeoisie is, how to say, it's doomed us, it's condemning us to a future of misery while destroying the planet in the meantime. But we fight for a worker state. We fight for the authority of the working class over the capitalist class, for the authority of the working class over society. And when anarchist, when anarchist theory denounce every forms of authority in the abstract, there are two options. Either they're not being exactly clear of what they mean, or they're the factor renouncing to the revolution. They're the factor disarming us in the face of our enemy in front of the ruling class, in front of the capitalist class, and they're condemning us to the feet. But the difference, there is a clear difference. There is a key difference between a worker state, which is what we're fighting for in the first place, and the capitalist state, which is this monstrous thing that is destroying our planet and our lives today. And the difference is that in a worker state and in a worker's revolution, for the first time in history, it will be the majority of the population using the state to defend their interests against the minority of the population, but which I mean, they oppressors the capitalist. For the first time in history, it will be the oppressed people deciding what to do, deciding their faith, and all of that, democratically, and together. And the thing is these comrades, this is not some idea. It's in a sense, it's a very scientific and beautiful idea, as if you want, but it's not just a beautiful idea as they came out of the mind of somebody. It's reality imposing this on us. In fact, for all the denunciations that you can find in anarchist theories about authority and about the state and all of that, every time that the anarchists have been at the forefront of a revolutionary struggle, they've been forced to throw away all of their theories about the state and build something that very much resembled some sort of central state authority. For example, during the Russian Civil War, when Magnov's troops, and I don't know if the name Magnov is new to you, Magnov was this anarchist in the Ukraine that was fighting during the Russian Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. And so during the Russian Civil War, when Magnov was an anarchist, and his group was an anarchist group, when every time the Magnov army conquered a new town or a new city, they would just put posts through soil around the town, stating, again, I'm quoting, "Magnov army does not represent any authority, "who will not subject anyone to any obligation whatsoever, "which is a very anarchist, and all of that, right?" But what was the reality of the matter? Magnovists were actually acting like a state. For example, Magnovists passed an enforced law for the redistribution of land. They had a tight control over the press, they banned every political party and organization, which was not the Magnovists. They even set up monetary policies and organized legislative conferences. Not only that, they even instituted something called the regional military revolutionary councils of basins, workers, and insurgents, which basically acted as a government in the regions that were occupied by the Magnovists. When faced with the threat of the White Army, which was the reactionary army, the capitalist army, Magnov enforced conscriptions for the defense of the revolution. Now, you can call these the workers, councils of basins, workers, and insurgents, and all of that. But what is it, right? If you like, what is the way of saying it? If it walks like a duck, and it looks like it. like a dog, then my friend, this is a dog, right? If you set up monetary policies, if you have conscriptions, if you have a government, this is a state. It doesn't matter what you call it. This is what they end up for me. Now, it's not like Macknell was this sort of dishonest anarchist or something. What other choices did he even have? Facing the threat of an enemy army, he had to have an army himself. Having an army yourself, he had to feed the army. If you want to feed the army, you have to have economic policies to feed the army and you have to have a government to implement these policies. There is just no way out of all of this. Those are material forces which are independent of the kind of ideas which are in any single person kind of mind. And in fact, this is not a thing cooler to Macknell. Even the C&T leaders did something very similar to this. Again, the C&T was the major anarcho-syndicalist trade unions that was operating in Spain during the Spanish Civil War against Franco, against fascism. That was a mass workers' organization with the main workers' organization in Catalonia at the time. But after what did the C&T did during the revolution during the Civil War? After first refusing to form a government when they had the chance to do so alone and they refused because they were anarchists, later on they made a year turn and joined the popular front government. Basically, they refused to form a government by themselves and then ended up joining a bourgeois government after that. Now, one of the leaders of the C&T at the time justified the decision with the following statement. The entry of the C&T into the central government is one of the most important events in the history of our country. That's some betrayal of our revolution. It's very important, in fact. The C&T has always been by principle and conviction and the enemy of government. But circumstances have changed the nature of the Spanish government and of the Spanish state. Now, we have to ask ourselves if we are honest. What good is a revolutionary theory if it doesn't hold during a revolution because circumstances change? The whole meaning of the word revolution is actually changed. What other things are going to happen here? Of course, these circumstances are going to change during a revolution. Again, it was the reality of the events that forced the C&T leaders to abandon their previous theory and to join the government. The reason for this, I think, fundamentally lies in their theories or lack of theory in the theories of anarchism. I think Trotsky compared anarchist theory to an umbrella with holes. It's useless exactly when you need it. Theory is worth nothing if it is not a guide to action. And exactly at the moment in which the C&T and the macro and the macro and macro leaders needed a guide to action that is during the revolution, their theory betrayed them. Their theory left them completely anarched. And instead of carefully planning ahead, they just had to improvise. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to justify what the C&T did because the C&T did betray the revolution when they entered the bourgeois government. Exactly like I'm not trying to justify what Machnov did because Machnov did build a personal dictatorship over the Ukraine. The difference between the forms of state, the Machnov and the C&T ended up forming or joining. And the Marxist understanding of a worker state, and in fact very significant, I think. A worker state needs to be something very different from a capitalist state, from the state in which we are living in. Above society, a worker state would be the expression of the majority. It would be used by the majority to defend itself from the pressing minority, which are the capitalist. It would be comprised of democratically elected neighborhood and workplace committee. And this would be linked up locally, regionally, and then nationally, and then even internationally at some point. These things would be based on the election and recall of all public officials at all level, with no official to receive more paid than a skilled worker, and positions would be rotated regularly. Finally, instead of a minority of specialized oppressor, a worker state would have the armed masses themselves, armed, elected, and accountable in defense of the revolution. These kind of organs that we're talking about, again are not the beautiful invention of Marx and Engels one day. And yesterday we had an amazing talk, I think, about the Paris commune and what happened in the Paris commune. We have things that Marxists learn a lot from on the concept of the worker state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This kind of worker state, this kind of workers' organizations, arise every time that there was a revolutionary struggle on the part of the working class against the bourgeoisie. We see this, as I just said, on the Paris commune, we saw these things in the Russian Revolution in 1917. We saw these things in Italy in 1919 and 1920 during the two red years, which was a betrayed revolution. We see these things in Bavaria, in Germany during the failed revolution in there. We see these things in Spain. We see these things everywhere in which the working class is struggling for power, for political power. And this is the point, right? The Marxist understanding of authority, the Marxist understanding of state, the Marxist understanding of worker state, does not come from the genius mind of Marx and Engels or something like that. By any means, they were probably very, very incredible genius thinkers and all of that. But it comes from lived from historical experience, thank you. Instead, the anarchist theory, and this is the paradox here, because anarchists would argue that we need to live in the real anarchist theories. We don't talk about anarchist theory, we need to live in the real world, we need to have two things by itself and all of that. But in reality, anarchist theories are the product of the mind of a single person. May this person be Prudon, Bakunin or Steerner or any or Chomsky or anything like that. Is these people thinking what they think the ideal society is and wanting to implement that? It doesn't come from the lived experience of the working class, it doesn't come from history in any direct sort of way, at least. It comes from the mind, from the theory of a single person, from the ideas of a single person. And really, this is the main problem of anarchist theory. It's abstract. When faced by events, it soon clashes against the reality of the evolutionary situation and forces anarchists, leaders, to act differently from their theories. So all their parents' similarities, this is the bridgeable gap between anarchism and Marxism. Anarchism is abstract. It's an idealist philosophy. It's based on abstract ideas of freedom, of individuality and of authority. Marxism instead is a concrete philosophy based on the material world, from which it takes inspirations and learns lessons. If you think about it for a second, the main slogan of anarchism are not really different from the slogans of the great French revolution, liberty, equality, and fraternity, which was a bourgeois revolution. And the point of this is that anarchism is a bourgeois, is a petty bourgeois ideology nowadays. It builds on the individualism of the petty bourgeoisie. For example, the rejection of leadership and organization that many anarchist theories have kind of reflects the role that the petty bourgeoisie holds in production today under capitalism. There is not a single honest worker that has ever taken part in a strike that can doubt for a second the need for working class unity in the class struggle, the need for fighting together against the bourgeoisie for imposing their authority on the rest of society. Workers in a picket line actually have a word to describe the individuals that reject the decisions of the majority, and they call them scubs, they call them class traitor. And this is what anarchism actually very often ends up arguing for. This is the difference, this is the key difference between a true proletarian revolutionary Marxist standpoint and a petty bourgeois and individualistic the anarchist theory argues for. And what I want to make clear here is that what I've talked about is about anarchist theories. I don't doubt for a single second. And actually, it's very inspirational, I think. The anarchist movement has produced the most inspiring revolutionary fighters ever. We talk about the leaders of the SCNT, but what about the rank and file of the SCNT? I think the rank and file fighters of the SCNT demonstrated the heroic efforts and sacrifices in fighting against fascism. They gave their lives fighting for the cause of the international socialist revolution, and they did this when the whole of the world was against that, including their leaders by the way. And I think if we want to honor them, along with all of the other people, all of the other workers, all of the honest people and fighters, they gave their life to the cause of socialism. In my opinion, I think, as revolutionary, it is our duty today to learn the lessons from the past, and it is also including learning the lessons from the anarchist movements. And unfortunately, I think I have to say, we learn from their struggle, we learn that sacrifice and willingness to fight alone are not enough to win, are not enough to win the revolution. We also need a correct program that goes through the understanding of what authority is and what authority is not. What a state is and what a state it is not. And especially, that goes through the understanding of what is that we have to do to fight against capitalism, to overthrow the capitalist state, it with a worker state and paved the way for the future communist, stateless, classless society of tomorrow. And comrades, Marxism is the crystallized experience of the working-class struggle fighting for the socialist society. We build from the past history and we learn the lessons from it. So that we can avoid making these same mistakes over and over again in the future. And this is what we're trying to build with the Marxist student federation. This is what we are trying to build with socialist appeal. And this is what we are trying to build with our comrades from the international Marxist tendency. So if you if you want to fight against capitalism, if you want to fight for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist society and for socialism, then you should join us in this fight. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Marxist Voice, the podcast of socialist appeal. If you're feeling inspired by Andreas talk and wants to get involved in the fight for socialism, consider getting involved in socialist appeal and the international Marxist tendency. Head to www.socialist.net/join to get in touch with your nearest group of Marxists. And make sure you stay tuned for next week's episode on Biden's presidency and the situation in the USA. Have a great week and see you next time.