AnarchyAreWe <anarchy-list at lists.village.virginia.edu> Subject: Re: Anarchism vs. Marxism-Leninism
Dear Jamal,
It just shows you how intellectually bankrupt so called marxist thought and memory really is....especially if we reflect on Rocker's observations which have been confirmed by his contempories and the passage of history......(see below)
Jamal wrote:
To say that anarchist theory is ripped off from Marx suggests that:
1) You have so little faith in humanity that you do not think different people can come to _some_ simmilar conclusions, while diverging greatly on others. 2) You are a dogmatist who believes that the word of Marx is the word of God and anything that reminds you of it is obviously (to you) ripped off from it.
"SOME YEARS AGO, shortly after Frederick Engels died, Mr. Eduard
Bernstein, one of the most prominent members of the Marxist
community, astonished his colleagues with some noteworthy
discoveries. Bernstein made public his misgivings about the accuracy
of the materialist interpretation of history, and of the Marxist
theory of surplus value and the concentration of capital. He went so
far as to attack the dialectical method and concluded that talk of a
critical socialism was impossible. A cautious man, Bernstein kept
his discoveries to himself until after the death of the aged Engels;
only then did he make them public, to the consequent horror of the
Marxist priesthood. But not even this precaution could save him, for
he was assailed from every direction. Kautsky wrote a book against
his heresy, and at the Hanover congress poor Eduard was obliged to
declare that he was a frail, mortal sinner and that he would submit
to the decision of the scientific majority.
For all that, Bernstein had not come up with any new revelations.
The reasoning he put up against the foundations of the marxist
teaching had already been in existence when he was still a faithful
apostle of the marxist church. The arguments in question had been
looted from anarchist literature and the only thing worthy of note
was that one of the best known social democrats was to employ them
for the first time. No sensible person would deny that Bernstein's
criticism failed to make an unforgettable impression in the marxist
camp: Bernstein had struck at the most important foundations of the
metaphysical economics of Karl Marx, and it is not surprising that
the most respectable representatives of orthodox marxism became
agitated.
None of this would have been so serious, but for the fact that it
was to come in the middle of an even more important crisis. For
almost a century the marxists have not ceased to propound the view
that Marx and Engels were the discoverers of so called scientific
socialism; an artificial distinction was invented between so called
utopian socialists and the scientific socialism of the marxists, a
distinction that existed only in the imaginations of the latter. In
the germanic countries socialist literature has been monopolised by
marxist theory, which every social democrat regards as the pure and
utterly original product of the scientific discoveries of Marx and
Engels.
But this illusion, too, vanished: modern historical research has
established beyond all question that scientific socialism only came
from the old English and French socialists and that Marx and Engels
were adept at picking the brains of others. After the revolutions of
1848 a terrible reaction set in in Europe: the Holy Alliance set
about casting its nets in every country with the intention of
suffocating socialist thought, which had produced such a very rich
literature in France, Belgium, England, Germany, Spain and Italy.
This literature was cast into oblivion almost entirely during this
era of obscurantism. Many of the most important works were destroyed
until they were reduced to a few examples that found a refuge in the
tranquillity of certain large public libraries or the collections of
some private individuals.
This literature was only rediscovered towards the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and nowadays the
fertile ideas to be found in the old writings of the schools which
followed Fourier and SaintSimon, or the works of Considerant,
Demasi, Mey and many others, are a source of wonder. It was our old
friend W. Tcherkesoff who was the first to come up with a systematic
pattern for all these facts: he showed that Marx and Engels are not
the inventors of the theories which have so long been deemed a part
of their intellectual bequest; (1) he even went so far as to prove
that some of the most famous marxist works, such as, for instance,
the Communist Manifesto, are in fact only free translations from the
French by Marx and Engels. And Tcherkesoff scored a victory when his
allegations with regard to the Communist Manifesto were conceded by
Avanti, the central organ of the Italian social democrats, (2) after
the author had had an opportunity to draw comparisons between the
Communist manifesto and The Manifesto of Democracy by Victor
Considerant, the appearance of which preceded the publication of
Marx and Engels' pamphlet by five years."...........
Who stole what.......!?.
regards Uri