Varn Vlog: Ridhiman Balaji on The Impasse Between Marxism and Anarchism
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- Ridhiman Balaji is an economist and activist who has worked with the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. He also is a serious student of Marxist economics. He comes on to discuss the misunderstanding between Marxists and anarchists.
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Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Cohost of Excavations: Jordin Dubin
Cohost of Vulgar Complexity: Abi Hassen
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro Music: Spaceship Revolution by Etienne Roussel (Grim Intro), Bitterlake (Political Intro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro)
Outro Music: Bitterlake
Intro and Outro Video Design: Djene Bajalan (Grim Intro, Political Intro, Outro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro)
Art Design: Corn ( / cornflow ) and C. Derick Varn
Good convo. I do think both host and guest would benefit from brushing up on some of Proudhon’s more proletariat-oriented ideas, on the controversy around the Hague Congress of the IWMA, and on some other things from that period. A lot of anarchist criticism of Marx are a criticism of what Marx did, not just what Marx thought. The Hague Congress and the falling out it caused was the spark that ignited anarchism to really distinguish itself through the so-called “anti-authoritarian international” that was seen as a rejection of the Hague Congress resolutions and a continuation of the First International. Also the stuff about Bakunin’s secret cell groups needs to be put in the context of being a strategy for states that were not democratic and where socialist parties or even voting at all were impossible. It wasn’t a strategy favored by Bakunin over potential democratic strategies.
I salute your learned and knowledgeable reply
@@Sam.Kangarloo is this a d*cks out for Harambe kind of salute?
Hi, thank you for this. Yes. I will admit my knowledge of this history is poor so I cannot comment. But, you are correct regarding criticism of Marx's conduct. The book by Wolfgang Eckhardt explains how Marx and Engels falsely accused Bakunin of being a Russian spy during the First International.
@@Ridhimaniac yes Marx did was much more serious than that…
The first thing to understand is the composition of the IWMA and how Marx aligned with others in it. But the main thing to understand is the General Council’s role in the organization and what Marx wanted to transform its role into. The General Council was created to be a strictly administrative body to coordinate communications and perform other administrative tasks. It had no decision-making power over the regional sections of the IWMA. Marx wanted to change this. He wanted the General Council to become an authoritative body and he wanted to use that power to ensure that the regional sections organized themselves into parliamentary political parties, which they were not all interested in doing. Bakunin wanted to maintain the administrative status of the General Council, the autonomy of the regional sections, and allow the regional sections to choose the best mode of struggle for themselves.
That is the context…
The actions Marx and Engels took to organize the Hague Congress and push these changes they wanted through are what anarchists since then have been the most bitter about. Marx and Engels asked delegates they were allied with to give them a blank mandate… meaning that Marx and Engels could fill in the blank with whatever they wanted. In addition, they invented organizations that didn’t really exist so that they could claim those organizations sent delegates. I’m effect, they ensured that their resolutions would be passed and that the General Council would become a governing body of the organization. Only in addition to this major change did they also expel Bakunin and other collectivists.
The result was that when all of the sections of the IWMA found out about this, they left the organization and the organization fell apart. Most of them went on to organize internationally though what has come to be called “the anti-authoritarian international,” but for its first few congresses it wasn’t anarchist and only wanted to ensure the autonomy of the regional sections to decide how they would engage parliamentary politics.
There are several other things, like Engles miscommunicating or refusing to forward messages meant for collectivists as a translator in the IWMA, or the lack of German participation in the IWMA which indicates how few people Marx and his views represented within the organization.
René Berthier documents all of this very well in a few different works if you are interested.
Anyway, that is what is so frustrating about watching people debate the disagreements anarchists have with Marx’s ideas. Those disagreements pale in comparison with the disgust anarchists have for what Marx did.
@@CyberDandy that the vast majority of contemporary anarchists don’t know this means that they aren’t what motivates the disagreement now ;)
Thank you varn for letting Mr balaji on
Commenting to help with the algorithm
I always viewed anarchists as the hipsters of Marxism.
Russia has already lost this war, now it is a question of how long they are willing and able to fight
This video never really covered the impasse between Marxists and anarchists, a more accurate title would be "various criticisms of anarchism".
It doesn't even mention the big disagreement over a transitionary State.
At one point they say that "Bakunin didn't understand historical materialism" as if it was objectively true. In fact, Bakunin understood it well enough to correctly predict that:
#1 Non-Western peasants had the most revolutionary potential, not proletariat.
#2 The state is counter-revolutionary.
No matter what you think of Bakunin, every Marxist now agrees with the first point. The second is controversial even though every ML State slid back into capitalism.
Also I've never heard of Keynesian anarchists and google hasn't brought up any results.
Graeber is a Modern Monetary Theorist, which has both chartalist (state theory of money) and Keynesian origins (Keynes is the one who picked it up and maintained theory.) It is the theory that undergrids his book debt.
1) Point 1, no not every Marxist concedes that because of point 2), all those revolutions became national liberation revolutions and established elements of capitalism quickly, and whose was the subject of the revolution, the peasantry.
So in hindsight, point 2 actually contradicts point 1. By that logic both the Marxists and Bukaninists are wrong
As gotchas go, this one is self-contradictory and thus weak. It is quite possible for both sides to be wrong.
@@VarnVlog Hey, I've found a few of your other episodes really informative, I just think this one doesn't fit the title.
RE: MMT, as far as I know Keynes was using MMT to advocate for state action while Graeber was using it to criticize the state. Like, at one point Graeber calls it "the military-coinage-slavery complex". But I read "Debt" ages ago and may be wrong.
RE: The Peasantry, the point was that Historical Materialism predicted that peasants couldn't lead revolutions AT ALL, because of their alleged inability to form relations. And Marx himself changed his mind on that after learning about the Mir/Russian communes.
-And that's fine! Any science is adjusted over time. But it doesn't make sense to criticize Bakunin for pointing out a then-legitimate problem in HistMat.
I feel like this episode focused on minor criticisms of Anarchism (even ones like the above that apply just as much to Marxism) without really touching the main disagreement. And I think there's still space for a constructive discussion on that main issue.
It's mostly asinine to call it anti-anti-imperialism. Certainly some positions can be flattened to that resolution but the broad strokes of this conversation are not anarchists opposing your opposition to the US or western imperialism. What we are opposing is your Motte and Bailey where you hide behind that obviously correct position when pressed but then immediately re-deploy into supporting other regimes. Sometimes maybe it's relatively worth it to support them. I mean it's not like we are talking REAL support, we are talking about rhetoric. But even if we were I get the idea of supporting Peter to kill Paul and protect Mark. What I don't get is how yall can say "critical support" but then bristle at every criticism. If you recognize there are two bad actors and your only marginally supporting one over the other because of an imperial power inbalance then it seems like a waste of your breath to commit time and effort to rhetorically defending that regime from literally any sling and arrow. Much less the modest critiques like those I often see such as "well x,y,z policy or decision hurt the domestic workers".
Ofc this might not apply to you and Ofc my defense doesn't apply to every anarchist but then that is my entire point. You've ironed out all the texture in this conversation with a term like "anti-anti-imperialism". No, we too are anti imperialists. There is just more going on in the world than "x bugaboo imperial core bad".
Cores and peripheries are inter-nested, interlocking, overlapping, and asymmetrical.
Black people are a periphery within the imperial core of the US. Black people themselves have a core "misleadership" class (-Pascal (Tm)) as well as a periphery poor. Aspects of the class have accumulated some marginalizing power against poor whites despite whiteness itself being a larger power core which blackness is a nested periphery inside.
The same is true in any nation state or block of nations such as BRICS or whatever line you want to draw. Sorry the world is more complicated than your black and white.
Unironically loved the guest btw. Great episode. I've got more disagreements but this post is already too long.
I don't bristle at every criticism, and I make A LOT of criticism of the parties involved and get attacked for it. But I feel you.
@@VarnVlog oh no I was directing at towards the guests terminology not you. Afaik they are the one who introduced that term. And to be fair to them I am reading a lot into that term that maybe they didn't intend. Idk.
Glad you liked our discussion. Anti-anti-imperialism is a term I came up with. In the video I am essentially referring to non-defencist Trotskyists and self-proclaimed Anarchists who endorse western capitalist governments' aggression towards Russia, Syria, Libya, and so on. I mean I know people who have no problem with sending Ukraine cluster bombs, tanks, or fighter jets, despite the risk of escalation.
@Ridhimaniac I'm glad to see someone Anarchist leaning call out the pro-interventionist Anarchists, especially a popular Portland based Podcaster and Midlands based Podcaster come to mind.
I think same rings true exactly your own statement against you with the virulent anti western imperialism rhetorics i often see of ironically self proclaimed reader of Marx, Anarchists, or other left groups in western world or anywhere else that pretty much rings true to ironicallu supports or disheartingly ignore an actual regime that persecutes anarchist, marxist and so on in their illiberal society. Its a fair assesment but some of these are borderline Stalinist rhetorics