Not Applicable said:
>The main distinction between marxism and anarchism is that while >marxists
>are economic determinists, and seek political revolution >before social and
>economic revolution, anarchists see the primary task >of revolutionaries as
>being Social Revolution
I won't join in the storm of abuse, N/A, and I'll add that I'm not exactly a Marxist either, although I'm _certainly_ not an anarchist. However, I do know something about Marxism; I used to teach it when I was a professor, and have writen on the subject. And the characterizatioin of Marxism as economic determinism in any form is entirely too glib. There is a strain in Marxism, the Orthodix Marxsim of the 2d International (Kautsky, Plekhanov, and such) that might be characterized in that way, and the 2d I theory was given a sophisticated modern ghloss by GA Cohen in his KM's Theory of History a Defense, but Cohen has abandoned the strong determinsim of his earlier view. In Marx himself there are both economic determinist and nondeterminist strains; you can see them both in careful reading of the Manifesto. The Old Bolshevisk were anti-determinist, or they could never have hoped for a revolution in an underdeveloped country. Someone made this point about Lenin. So were the old
Western Marxists, like Gramsci, Lukacs, and Korsch. The Existentislist Marxists, like Sartre, were of course antideterminist, and the structuralists like Althussera re determinsit about sojmething, but it's not clearly the economy. The Brit Marxists (EP Thompson, EJ Hobsbawm, etc) were and and remain adamantly antideterminist. So the genearl characterization is false.
Moreover, Marxists also want a social revolution that well eliminate classes; the Marxist commitment to political revolution (not a Marxist term, btw, Marxists say: to making the working class the ruling class) is undergirded by a belief that conquest of state power is necessary to make and defend a social revolution. Economic determinism has nothing to do with this, either in the sense that revolutions are supposed to occur when the social relations fetter the forces of production, or that the economic relations of production somehow expalin the ideological and political superstructure. Rather it's supposed to be a sociological fact about what's required to overcome bourgeois resistance and get the new instititions off the ground. Indeed, it's an anti-determinsit point in the sdecond sense: here the political institutions determined the social relations of production.
Hope this clarifies things a bit.
jks
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