Comparison
Anarchism vs Marxism
If the existing order is unjust, what should be done about the state on the way to a free society?
Marxism
Capture the state and use it as a transitional instrument to abolish class, then let it wither.
Read the full entry ›Anarchism
Abolish the state directly; a liberatory end cannot be reached through the machinery of domination.
Read the full entry ›What both accept
Both judge the current order deeply unjust, both trace much of that injustice to concentrated economic power, and both aim at a classless society in which people are not dominated.
Where they decisively part
Marxism holds that the working class must first capture state power and wield it, through a transitional workers' state, to dismantle the old class structure, after which the state withers away. Anarchism holds that the state is itself a machine of domination that cannot be used for liberation: seize it and you reproduce the hierarchy, so it must be abolished directly.
The strongest case for each
Marxism
A dispossessed class needs organized power to overcome an organized ruling class, and only a coordinating authority can hold ground against counter-revolution and restructure an entire economy.
Anarchism
Means shape ends: a centralized apparatus built to seize power tends to keep it, so freedom has to be built through the decentralized, voluntary institutions meant to endure.
The strongest objection to each
Marxism
Transitional states have shown a strong tendency not to wither but to entrench a new ruling stratum, exactly the outcome the theory promised to avoid.
Anarchism
Refusing centralized power can leave a revolution unable to defend itself or coordinate at scale, ceding the field to better-organized adversaries.
When they predict differently
They diverge sharply on strategy in a revolutionary moment: whether to build a centralized party and take the state, or to build decentralized, federated self-organization and refuse it. They converge in their critique of capitalism and of unaccountable power.
Primary sources and further reading
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
- Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873)
- Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)