Marxist Ideas Stolen from Anarchism, Utopian Socialism

Jamal Hannah jah at iww.org
Fri Dec 10 22:06:44 PST 1999


---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 12:15:05 +0800 From: benav <benav at one.net.au> To: Jamal Hannah <jah at iww.org>,

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



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