I am neither an anarchist nor a Marxist-Leninist, but I have learned a decent amount from each, and take both intellectual traditions seriously. These groups are vastly opposed to each other in desired organizing practice and in terms of their view on the state. In contemporary US practice, however, they can often put aside their differences to organize together somewhat effectively. I think they each bring up some useful points for leftists like me, and I think they fill some of the gaps in each other’s politics.
My Experience With Anarchism in the USa
Anarchists emphasize some very important things. Particularly, I value their expansive thought on the many types of unjust power relations; the emphasis on the ideal of direct action; the dangers of trying to seize the state and unwittingly establishing authoritarian rule in the name of revolution; their emphasis on running organizations democratically; their belief in the capacity of each person to be an important decision-maker and actor in the revolution; and their accessible, non-mystifying style of writing.
Where they often seem to lack is in the scalability of their organizing; their overemphasis on direct democracy and consensus at the expense of organizational efficacy; and their occasional focus on immediacy at the expense of long-term power-building. That last one may be a general problem in the contemporary US left, not simply of anarchists. Finally, they seem to lack an overarching historical, scientific, economic view of the world—although this has improved over time, in the 1800s, many anarchists simply referred to the Marxist analysis. Some anarchists are serious about long-term, scalable projects, but most do not seem to be—instead focused on the minutia of voting systems, short-term mutual aid, and moral arguments that lack a way to translate their beliefs into realizable actions.
I think many anarchists tend to be too focused on moral arguments, while lacking a nuanced analysis of the world and how to practically create change. They lean heavily on the insight that directly practicing democracy, mutual aid, and utopian social relations is a necessary practice which develops people in positive ways. However, I think they underestimate how much this ideal is constrained by needs for practical, large-scale material effectiveness—particularly up against the power of the state and capitalists. There are of course, also many serious anarchist organizers with good power analyses.
My Experience With Marxism-Leninism in the USa
Marxist-Leninists emphasize some other very important things. My views have improved from exposure to their emphasis on internationalism and their critique of imperialism; their emphasis that the left must not underestimate the dangers of state repression; and their emphasis on what practically needs to be done to win power.
I am very disappointed by their emphasis on vanguardism, which I take to be a practical distrust in the capacity of ordinary people to become an active, generative, self-organizing part of revolutionary decision-making and action. I also think they have almost a willful misunderstanding of what makes democracy effective, and particularly think they overlook the potential for overwhelming social engineering of votes by left bureaucrats. Additionally, we don’t need to go to Marxism-Leninism to find the benefits that I described in the previous paragraph—although I think we should give MLs credit for being the group in the left which centers these concerns.
Most importantly, I have been very off-put by the Marxist-Leninist mode of organizing. They don’t seem to understand what makes a proper democracy—they often are fine with a lack of open discussions, and fine with establishing overwhelming internal social pressure for conformity, which restricts valuable discussion and inclusive deliberation. Particularly, in disagreements, they are quick to escalate rather than deescalate, which is what causes that stifling social conformity—people conform because they are terrified of facing a massively escalated backlash from even slightly stepping out of ideological line. Usually, this ideological line is largely practically determined by an elected leader or group of elites, and it’s very difficult to challenge this group because of the conformity. Everyone is scared that they will be called out for not conforming enough, so to signal that they should not be a target, they themselves reinforce the escalating and confrontational behaviors.
People tend to try to get their way in the organization by framing their proposal in the language of the group’s core ideological tenets and buzzwords, rather than making the direct case about the effectiveness of their proposals. In practice, they tend not to admit that a disagreement might productively change or develop the group’s theory of the world. The only changes therefore come from the top elite group, because those are the leaders whose signals and statements everyone else looks to for coordinating their ideological beliefs around—again, out of fear of retaliation from the rest of the group, and not because it’s necessarily the best set of guiding ideological beliefs.
If someone steps out of line, the group finds a way to remove them for some reason or another. Perhaps it’s said that they aren’t a true revolutionary because they don’t believe everything the group believes to a high enough degree. Or, it’s said that they’re causing disunity which is seen as harmful to the cause—which is seen as especially damning when strict revolutionary order is seen as necessary for revolution. A person might be socially shunned and disincluded until they leave the organization themselves, which can be difficult when that organizing group has been central to their social life. Marxist-Leninists are very quick to revoke and withdraw their kindness to one another when someone disagrees with the party line. They would do well to learn how to deescalate situations and create an organizing culture where people don’t feel so ridiculously socially precarious. At its historical worst, Marxist-Leninist groups are so incompatible with disagreement about left organizing that they have murdered anarchists en masse to extinguish what they considered misleading left views that hurt the revolutionary movement.
Most of the problems with Marxist-Leninist organizing seems to stem from poor responses to understandable concerns. People are tired of the left continually losing, and this leads them to want to take shortcuts to state power, without building up the necessary active, democratic, and self-organizing capacities of the working class in general. They are tired of highly democratically-run organizations being too ineffective or not streamlined, and they therefore give up some of their democratic control (and thus long-term effectiveness) for short and medium term streamlined decisionmaking. They are properly concerned about state repression, but they take this to justify internal hierarchies and pressured conformity that threatens their members with social punishment in ways I believe are damaging for the organization’s effectiveness and members’ mental health.
I think this can cause people who are deep into ML organizing sometimes therefore care too much about signaling their politics for fear of that social punishment—and care more about that than collectively developing their politics to meet the specifics of the problems they are organizing around. I think they are too quick to give up on strongly democratic norms for the ideals of unity and decision-making efficiency—when these things can be more strongly achieved without sacrificing strong democratic deliberation and the potential for sustained policy disagreements.
Closed groups are sometimes necessary, but I think Marxist-Leninists design their closed structure poorly
My criticisms of Marxist-Leninist organizing are not to say that there is not sometimes a need for closed groups, especially when organizing against state repression. However, I think these closed groups would be suited better by a democratic organizing structure that tries to decentralize power as much as possible while still being able to remain effective and efficient in the short-to-medium term.
Closed groups can also productively consider disagreements when they arise—treating people as potentially filling in blind-spots that the organization had missed before, and realizing that we can likely come to a consensus because we’re all in the group because we care about bringing power into the hands of the people. We can agree on core principles, but a group should be able to develop its core principles through inclusive, continuous, and sustained deliberation. The core principles should not merely stay static based on the founders of the organization. Nor should they only change in practice depending on the decisions and deliberations of an elite few (even if those few people have been voted into power).
Closed groups can also do their best to build up working class consciousness through active democratic engagement, decisionmaking, and actions—rather than treating people as if they are merely a target to disseminate anti-capitalist, anti-state propaganda to. I would prefer a working class who has become practiced in how to organize for themselves, rather than a working class who doesn’t know how else to systematically fight capitalist and state oppression but by following a vanguard organization’s calls to action.
Filling In Each Other’s Gaps
Whereas anarchists tend to organize in ways that practically underestimate the power of the state, Marxist-Leninists tend to base their organizing around the idea that they need to be prepared for capitalist / state repression. But where Marxist-Leninists say that democratic centralism is a sufficient form of democracy, they tend to miss the dangerous potential for undemocratic, top-down influence over voting and social norms that anarchists are concerned about.
Anarchists have clear guiding moral ideals of expansive democracy and mutual aid living. But we need to act on the concerns that Marxist-Leninists highlight of imperialism, practical efficacy, and state repression. I think anarchists are too quick to deny the potential efficacy of influencing and transforming state power, and I think MLs are too quick to deny the long-term effectiveness of expansively democratic organizing and building up each person’s capacities to organize among their community.
I lean toward a politics of something following from Rosa Luxemburg, a clearly principled socialist who doesn’t shy away from political and economic analysis, and who thinks that the revolution must come from democratic, mass organizing by and for the majority of the working class—not from a small vanguard group of committed organizers who claims to be able to lead the working class. I am also particularly inspired by Hélène Landemore’s analysis of what makes effective democracies, and I think her analysis of democracy as ‘inclusive deliberation with a backstop of majority-rule tiebreaks’ cuts through both the anarchist practical over-emphasis of direct democracy and consensus, and the Marxist-Leninists’ quickness to compromise on democratic norms.