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Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism,[1] emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism[2] and its derivatives, such as Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism.[3] Libertarian Marxism is also critical of reformist positions, such as those held by social democrats.[4] Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Marx and Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France;[5] emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a revolutionary party or state to mediate or aid its liberation.[6] Along with anarchism, Libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism.[7]
Libertarian Marxism includes such currents as Luxemburgism, council communism, left communism, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Johnson-Forest tendency, world socialism, Lettrism/Situationism and operaismo/autonomism, and New Left.[8] Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Anton Pannekoek, Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James, Antonio Negri, Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Brinton, Guy Debord, Daniel Guérin, Ernesto Screpanti and Raoul Vaneigem.
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Council communism was a radical left-wing movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. Its primary organization was the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Council communism continues today as a theoretical and activist position within Marxism, and also within libertarian socialism. The central argument of council communism, in contrast to those of Social democracy and Leninist communism, is that workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural and legitimate form of working class organisation and government power. This view is opposed to the reformist and Bolshevik stress on vanguard parties, parliaments, or the state.
The core principle of council communism is that the state and the economy should be managed by workers' councils, composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose state-run "bureaucratic socialism". They also oppose the idea of a "revolutionary party", since council communists believe that a revolution led by a party will necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers' democracy, which they want to produce through a federation of workers' councils.
The Russian word for council is "soviet", and during the early years of the revolution worker's councils were politically significant in Russia. It was to take advantage of the aura of workplace power that the word became used by Lenin for various political organs. Indeed, the name "Supreme Soviet", by which the parliament was called; and that of the Soviet Union itself make use of this terminology, but they do not imply any decentralization.
Furthermore, council communists held a critique of the Soviet Union as a capitalist state, believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia became a "bourgeois revolution" when a party bureaucracy replaced the old feudal aristocracy. Although most felt the Russian Revolution was working class in character, they believed that, since capitalist relations still existed (because the workers had no say in running the economy), the Soviet Union ended up as a state capitalist country, with the state replacing the individual capitalist. Thus, council communists support workers' revolutions, but oppose one-party dictatorships.
Council communists also believed in diminishing the role of the party to one of agitation and propaganda, rejected all participation in elections or parliament, and argued that workers should leave the reactionary trade unions and form one big revolutionary union.
Left communism' is the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the Communist International after its first and during its second congress.
Left Communists see themselves to the left of Leninists (whom they tend to see as 'left of capital', not socialists), Anarchists (some of whom they consider internationalist socialists) as well as some other revolutionary socialist tendencies (for example De Leonists, who they tend to see as being internationalist socialists only in limited instances).
Although she lived before left communism became a distinct tendency, Rosa Luxemburg has heavily influenced most left communists, both politically and theoretically. Proponents of left communism have included Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Sylvia Pankhurst and Paul Mattick.
Prominent left communist groups existing today include the International Communist Current and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Also, different factions from the old Bordigist International Communist Party are considered left communist organizations.
The Johnson-Forest tendency, sometimes called the Johnsonites, refers to a radical left tendency in the United States associated with Marxist theorists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, who used the pseudonyms J.R. Johnson and Freddie Forest respectively. They were joined by Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American woman who was considered the third founder.
Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period (the name comes from a phrase Rosa Luxemburg used in a 1916 essay, 'The Junius Pamphlet'). It existed from 1948 until 1965. The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan.[9]
The Situationist International was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.
They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy, through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.
After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions,[10] the SI was dissolved in 1972.[11]
Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical anti-Leninism. Solidarity was founded in 1960 by a small group of expelled members of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. It was initially known as Socialism Reaffirmed. The group published a journal, Agitator, which after six issues was renamed Solidarity, from which the organisation took its new name. Almost from the start it was strongly influenced by the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group, in particular by its intellectual leader Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essays were among the many pamphlets Solidarity produced. Solidarity existed as a nationwide organisation with groups in London and many other cities until 1981, when it imploded after a series of political disputes. Solidarity the magazine continued to be published by the London group until 1992; other former Solidarity members were behind Wildcat in Manchester and Here and Now magazine in Glasgow. The intellectual leader of the group was Chris Pallis, whose pamphlets (written under the name Maurice Brinton) included Paris May 1968, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-21 and 'The Irrational in Politics'.[12] Other key Solidarity writers were Andy Anderson (author of Hungary 1956), Ken Weller (who wrote several pamphlets on industrial struggles and oversaw the group's Motor Bulletins on the car industry), Joe Jacobs (Out of the Ghetto), John Quail (The Slow-Burning Fuse), Phil Mailer (Portugal:The Impossible Revolution) John King (The Political Economy of Marx, A History of Marxian Economics), George Williamson (writing as James Finlayson, Urban Devastation - The Planning of Incarceration), [David Lamb] (Mutinies) and Liz Willis (Women in the Spanish Revolution).
Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, etc.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson-Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie.
It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide Social Centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists. The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian operaismo movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford.
In communist political theory, communization ("communisation" in British English) is the process of abolishing ownership of the means of production, which, in societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production, are owned by individual capitalists, states, or other collective bodies. The association of the term communization with a self-identified "ultra-left" was cemented in France in the 1970s, where it came to describe not a transition to a higher phase of communism but a vision of communist revolution itself. The term is still used in this sense in France today and has spread into English usage as a result of the translation of texts by Gilles Dauvé and Théorie Comuniste, two key figures in this tendency. But in the late 1990s a close but not identical sense of "communization" was developed by the French post-situationist group Tiqqun. In keeping with their ultra-left predecessors, Tiqqun's predilection for the term seems to be its emphasis on communism as an immediate process rather than a far-off goal, but for Tiqqun it is no longer synonymous with "the revolution" considered as an historical event, but rather becomes identifiable with all sorts of activities – from squatting and setting up communes to simply "sharing" – that would typically be understood as "pre-revolutionary".[13] From an ultra-left perspective such a politics of "dropping-out" or, as Tiqqun put it, "desertion" — setting up spaces and practices that are held to partially autonomous from capitalism — is typically dismissed as either naive or reactionary.[14] Due to the popularity of the Tiqqun-related works Call and The Coming Insurrection in US anarchist circles it tended to be this latter sense of "communization" that was employed in US anarchist and "insurrectionist" communiques, notably within the Californian student movement of 2009-2010.[15]