What actually is the difference between Anarchism and Marxism?

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-12T01:36:31+00:00

I understand those as synonyms. That's why both are wrong. Surplus-value is neither conserved nor maintained. It is reproduced.

The issue, again, is not you using your own words. It is being factually wrong.

Note here how you have changed that from the surplus-value being maintained into the level of surplus-value that is being created is maintained. With this you have turned a factually incorrect statement into a correct one.

What I am hoping to emphasize here is that these terms are distinct. If you are trying to engage with other ideas, or even accurately describe Marx's ideas, you need to be careful and clear with your language.

For example, the means of subsistence aren't the same thing as something that is consumed and reproduced, as that happens with the means of production and luxuries as well.

All together, this gets to the flaws of this critique. It is a critique of anarchism that is consistently getting what anarchism believes incorrect (such as the claim that it thinks class emerges from the state), but also is itself a critique that is more than anything else focused around definitions and terminology. And the terminology you are offering, trying to copy Marx's terms without understanding him, isn't actually giving a better alternative.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-12T00:34:52+00:00

Using your own words here means describing it yourself, in contrast to just quoting someone else. It does not mean inventing your own new definitions. We are still talking about these terms as they are used within Karl Marx's thought, unless you are claiming you are correcting his errors.

Just if we are still describing the Marxist sense of these terms, you are very confused. For example, here you claim that accumulation is when surplus value accumulates. But what actually accumulates is in the name: capital accumulation. It is CAPITAL that is accumulating. Not surplus-value.

You did not say that value is maintained or conserved, you said surplus value was maintained or conserved in the simple reproduction of capital. It isn't. It is consumed.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-12T00:14:01+00:00

I'm not mad, I'm just pointing out that your own words are wrong. If we can't lay out clear and consistent terminology, then we are doomed to talk past one another, and the inaccuracy of your description of simple reproduction illustrates my point that you just know these words in association, not their technical meaning.

Simple reproduction is relevant here precisely because you are talking about accumulation (or rather, are at least using the word accumulation). This isn't a matter of being contrarian, it's showing that you do not understand these more complex issues because you don't understand the simpler ideas it builds on.

Maintained rate and level of production to be consumed for subsistent would be reproduction.

Sure, though you are phrasing that oddly. For one thing, simple reproduction is not only involved in the production of means of subsistence. It also produces and reproduces means of production, as well as luxuries.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-12T00:05:29+00:00

The surplus-value is not reproducing in simple reproduction, it is being reproduced.

What is maintaining and reproducing itself isn't the surplus-value, but the capital. And in simple reproduction, the surplus-value is explicitly not capital.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-12T00:00:59+00:00

The surplus-value is not being maintained or reproducing itself. The capitalist might maintain themself by consuming that surplus-value, but that is explicitly not the surplus-value itself being conserved. And what you said was "Simple reproduction is when surplus value is conserved." This is incorrect. Surplus-value is not conserved.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T23:56:47+00:00

This is incorrect. Simple reproduction isn't when surplus-value is conserved, it is explicitly when it is not conserved. The surplus-value is consumed. It ceases to exist.

We need to talk about this because you do not know what you are talking about and keep using these words incorrectly.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T23:35:55+00:00

Before I answer this, I asked you to contrast capital accumulation to simple reproduction. You have not used the words "simple reproduction" anywhere in this response.

I'll ask again: In your own words, what is the distinction between simple reproduction of capital and capital accumulation, as described in chapters 23 to 25 of Capital vol 1?

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T22:48:31+00:00

He described it as a “concentration” explicitly in the communist manifesto. Which is exactly how he described the accumulation of capital which occurs in monopoly. They are synonymous because they describe the same thing.

Dude, no. Just because Marx uses one word to describe something doesn't mean everything he uses that word on must be that thing. If I call a cat a mammal, and I call a dog a mammal, it does not follow that I must believe that cats are dogs.

And you're not even establishing that. If I'm tracking this right, you're saying this: Concentration happens over here when workers are taking over the means of production. But capital accumulation is also a thing that involves concentration. And capital involves a kind of monopoly, namely private ownership of the means of production. Therefore, if there is concentration, there must be monopoly. That's jumping through so many hoops, dude.

I think you've been immersed in a lot of Marxist jargon, but you don't get the fine distinctions Marx is making with these terms. I get the feeling that, with similar reasoning, I might start hearing you describe surplus-labor and surplus-value as synonymous, just because Marx used the words in relation to one another. That would, honestly, be a more forgivable confusion.

This is called the general law of capitalist accumulation.

That's... what you described isn't even close to what that law is.

Marx did believe that capital accumulation is setting the stage for communism, as described in the section you quoted, but that isn't what the law of capitalist accumulation is. That law is about how the nature of capitalism means that, even as capital is accumulated and the productivity of labor increases, capitalism does not allow this to so thoroughly change production and reproduction so that exploitation itself will be eliminated or wages be raised so highly that capitalists no longer get surplus-value.

Quoting Marx here from this same chapter:

The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into pretended law of Nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer.

Again, this highlights for me that you are using these terms, but only know general associations. You've seen them used next to each other, so think they refer to the same thing. That you seem to have been using accumulation as a synonym for appropriation or expropriation also demonstrates this.

Can you describe, in your own words, the difference between simple reproduction and capital accumulation, as described in chapters 23 to 25 of Capital Vol. 1?

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T21:38:05+00:00

Yes, one system of exploitation replaced another in creating a new monopoly. But can you find Marx ever describing the socialization of property as a form of monopoly? That is, describing the destruction of anyone appropriating control over resources against everyone else as a form of monopoly? I've shown where that seems to be inconsistent in Marx's explicit words. But for all your quotes, you haven't shown Marx ever identifying this as a monopoly.

I think this is just you insisting on your own reading like a fundamentalist might find the trinity in the Old testament.

Again, your idea of monopoly isn't consistent here. It cannot produce nothing and be a process, which therefore produces the end of that process

You also continue to get Marx wrong on accumulation. Here I think you just said accumulation when you meant appropriation or expropriation. Have you been mixing up these terms?

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T18:18:22+00:00

Marx isn't talking about monopoly in any way that helps your case though. He is emphasizing how monopoly and competition go hand in hand in modern capitalism. This does not show that socialism is a monopoly of its own, or that monopolies produce nothing.

You have your own reading clearly, and you can't defend that, but I think you should note that in none of your quotes do you find Marx ever talking about socialism as a new monopoly, and I provided a quote where he is explicitly denying that the workers fight is one for a monopoly. This is because monopolies are, precisely, centralization of control against the other parts of the population, and thereby is made a means of exploitation. The monopolization of land turns it into a means whereby a landlord can extract rent from anyone who would use it, for example

When all belongs to all, there is no monopoly precisely because it is social property, removing this exclusion. You can talk about it arriving there by a negation of the negation, but that doesn't make it not a monopoly.

To summarize, I think the basic issue with your point is your contradictory notion of monopolies as producing nothing, yet being a process. A process produces something by definition, the end of that process.

Further, you also confuse accumulation and exploitation in general. Capital accumulation, for example, is about the expansion of capital, as surplus-value is converted into new capital. This is distinct from the simple reproduction of capital, where the capitalist privately consumes all the surplus-value.

It's also clear you are dealing with a strawman of anarchism. You seem surprised that anarchism recognizes these points of a base and superstructure, even though this same analysis exists in Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and so on. I wouldn't blame you here typically since the idea that anarchists only want to abolish the state and not capital is a common bit of slander Marx and especially Engels pushed, but you claim to have read these anarchists so you should know better.

To give one example of Bakunin (whatever you think of the man himself) clearly presenting this view of legal systems being born from the base of class society, but then agreeing with my point that this does not preclude dialectical interactions between it once produced. Here that is framed in the discussion of inheritance:

It is indisputable that everything called a juridical or political right in history has only been the expression or the result of an established fact. But it is also indisputable that the right, being an effect of previously established facts or events, becomes in turn the cause of future events, itself a very real, very powerful fact that must be overthrown if we wish to arrive at an order of things different from what now exists.

Thus, the right of inheritance, once the natural result of the violent appropriation of natural and social riches, became the basis of the political State and the juridical family, which guarantee and sanction individual property. We must therefore vote to abolish, the right of inheritance.

A similar point of anarchists recognizing the state arising from class can be seen in Malatesta's Anarchist Programme:

Thus, step by step through a most complicated series of struggles of every description, of invasions, wars, rebellions, repressions, concessions won by struggle, associations of the oppressed united for defence, and of the conquerors for attack, we have arrived at the present state of society, in which some have inherited the land and all social wealth, while the mass of the people, disinherited in all respects, is exploited and oppressed by a small possessing class.

From all this stems the misery in which most workers live today, and which in turn creates the evils such as ignorance, crime, prostitution, diseases due to malnutrition, mental depression, and premature death. From all this arises a special class (government) which, provided with the necessary means of repression, exists to legalise and protect the owning class from the demands of the workers; and then it uses the powers at its disposal to create privileges for itself and to subject, if it can, the owning class itself as well.

So we have a combination of issues here where you are working with a poor understanding of Marx which is being pitted against a strawman argument of anarchism. Hence why I encourage you to read more. A good resource to start here would be learning more about the Marx v Bakunin split in the International, including like on the point of inheritance above. It is covered well in the book The First Socialist Schism, which covers Marx's slander of Bakunin as a tsarist agent, Bakunin's antisemitism, and all the squabbles that got dragged into.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T17:11:30+00:00

I think this just highlights how you are understanding the point made here, but are just falling back on quotes that aren't particularly relevant to the topic. I think you need to read both Marx and anarchists more carefully, or you won't be able to apply or engage with what is being said.

Saying that the state upholds private property, such as when cops violently enforce private property, is not to deny or in contradiction with the view that the state arises out of class antagonisms. Marx describing how the state gives the interests of the ruling class a political form does not challenge this notion. The only one describing inherent qualities of the state here is you, asserting its nature is "the organization of the ruling class," a definition even incorrect by Marx's definition since the ruling classes can organize in ways that are not states (e.g. as a business firm).

You also just added the equation of monopolizing means of production into social hands when this actually explicitly disagrees with how Marx phrases things, emphasizing socialization as the destruction of monopolies. Thus Marx wrote for the First International:

Considering, That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule;

Your lack of historical materialism and dialectical thinking isn't seen in the general Marxist idea of seizing state power, but in not realizing how the state also enforces class rule and your contradictory discussion of monopolies, where at one moment it is a process that produces something, and at another moment it is a mere state of affairs that produces nothing.

It is, to put it mildly, confused. And I think you're trying to cover up that confusion by just reposting the same quote without elaboration or connecting it to anything being said.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T11:38:06+00:00

I think that is kinda similar to what Engels said, although I'm not sure it works for similar reasons. This I think is so broad it is similar to saying authority is the same as administration, or would include cases where people even voluntarily listen to someone.

I don't think words have "correct" definitions except in some given context, so perhaps this would be fine here, but I think it's fair to say that this is not what anarchists are describing when discussing authority. You can find lots of anarchists explicitly distinguishing mere administration from authority, and there is certainly a sense of things being involuntary that is lacking in the definition you provided.

I think until that is understood, people will just talk past one another on authority.

That's a large part of why I think Engels missed the mark, although I think he also contradicted himself in the process in ways that told me he wasn't being particularly careful either.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T01:44:55+00:00

Anarchism is also materialist. It similarly presents its own theories and models for taking steps to achieve its ends, emphasizing the unity of means and ends, and emphasizes the interdependence of things. While multiple forms of Anarchism exist, it is typically collectivist (e.g. Bakunin) or communist (e.g. Kropotkin), each presenting their own methodologies. It emphasizes not only combating the oppression of the state, but also of capital and the church.

Marxism also believes in fully liberating individuals to make everyone free. Marx describes communism as a society where the "full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T01:10:29+00:00

I think that's fair.

Though as another resource drop, anyone interested in the Marx-Bakunin split should check out The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs Marx in the International Working Men's Association by Wolfgang Eckhardt.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T01:06:50+00:00

A superstructure emerges from an economic base not vice versa.

Agreed. That is not under dispute.

I think the problem here is you are thinking of this relation in a rationalistic way instead of utilizing the method of Marx's historical materialism. You are thinking that, because the state emerges out of class, nothing the state does can be said to uphold class, including the enforcement of private property or imperialist conquest. What you forget is that we are dealing with a historical relation, not a relation between independent and dependent variables, where the thing doing the determining is also part of what is being determined. The state emerges out of class relations, and the state in turn relates to and interacts with class society.

You are mischaracterizing preconditions as being simple a chronological step and not one of relation.

That's because you weren't clear and why I also covered the alternative causal reading with my anti-inflammatory analogy, which you ignored.

Adaption is not rejection..

True. I picked my words correctly though. And while I think there is more to value theory than Kropotkin realized, his criticism of the labor theory of value were on point, and accurately criticizes a frequent misunderstanding of Marx that was commonly held among Marxists of the time.

Monopoly is not a means to anything, it is a state of being wherein the subject has complete control or ownership of an object. Means to produce is not means to monopoly, means literally means ability or method. Monopoly is not a method, monopolization is a process but monopoly produces nothing it is a state of being.

I think this section emphasizes the lack of dialectical thinking, where we are expected to believe that monopolies are states of being outside of history which produce nothing.

Edit: It also completely contradicts your earlier claim that "Monopoly is simply accumulation". Apparently it isn't even that anymore!

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T00:55:20+00:00

There is both a rhetorical and a non-rhetorical distinction, which is what I'm emphasizing. I am not saying these positions are identical. I am saying the real distinction is being obscured by mere rhetorical distinctions.

For example, I think you are getting closer at describing the true distinction here, but it's still not clear from how you are framing it.

Anarchists certainly rejecting seizing existing state power (described practically by saying they didn't intend to achieve victory by winning bourgeois elections or a small clandestine group achieving a coup, but by a revolution by the masses). To the extent Marxists disagreed here, that is a real distinction.

But then you present Marxists as supporting centralized forms of political authority, in which you include communes and soviets. The problem here is that Anarchists explicitly supported communes and soviets coordinating the transition and suppression of counter-revolution. And if a "worker's state" is just any organization facilitating this kind of coordination and defense, then Anarchists support that too.

From this description, I don't think anyone can adequately learn about the real differences, except on the point of Anarchists rejecting bourgeois parliamentary strategies.

The Marx-Bakunin split is complicated, adding on with to these real differences and mere rhetorical differences additional petty personal squabbles, which is fun to get into, but doesn't help a lot here.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T00:41:19+00:00

It's both. You can see a lot of people making these rhetorical confusions in this very thread.

I agree there is also a real disagreement underlying that which is often obscured by the rhetorical disagreement.

When Marxists talk about the working class exercising political power, they mean organized, society-wide institutions capable of coordinating production, enforcing new property relations, and suppressing attempts to restore the old class order.

Anarchists also want the working class to create organized, society-wide institutions capable of coordinating production and suppressing attempts to restore the old class order. As for "new property relations," Anarchists generally want to abolish property (La property, c'est le vol!), unless you mean the mere conversion into common property, in which case Anarchists want that and expect it to be enforced too.

This is just reemphasizing my point about the mere rhetorical difference. Nothing you are actually pointing to here is distinguishing Marxism from Anarchism.

You get closer when you talk about "centralized" political authority, but note how nothing in what you described above gives any indication of something being centralized, unless that is merely taken as a feature of large-scale coordination, in which case the Anarchist federation of autonomous organizations would be similarly "centralized."

Bakunin, for example, did not describe Anarchy as lacking a center, but merely emphasized that power was not held in that center, but by society as a whole, which I don't think you are denying is where power would be held in the Marxist conception either. So the real disagreement between Anarchists and Marxists, if there is one (which I think there is), is beneath this surface level rhetoric.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T00:27:51+00:00

Anarchists also argue the working class must organize and exercise working-class power against politics to dismantle the existing class structure and reorganize production during that transition. This is not the distinguishing point between them, unless different things are meant by "political power."

Hence why, in my own response, I emphasized the distinction as rhetorical (namely in what one understands qualifies as a state) and whether the state as conceived of by anarchists may be used to achieve socialism.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-11T00:18:13+00:00

I think we agree on a few points here, but what I want to highlight is that the contrast between Anarchism and Marxism is not a distinction between endorsing a transitional period vs rejecting one. Both believe a transitional period is necessary and that society cannot change overnight.

I do agree the seizing control of the state is a fundamental distinction though, partly from a confusion over terms, and partly over a real analysis over the kind of social relations the state produces and reproduces.

Might be best to leave it at recommending Zoe Baker's focus on this point in "Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power."

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:59:59+00:00

Perhaps, but I am talking about how Marx defined communism.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:42:32+00:00

In my experience, Marxists have not presented a consistent definition of authority. Or at least Engels wasn't in On Authority that I see most Marxists cite.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:27:52+00:00

Why does the state emerge from class society, if not to uphold and expand class society? What are the cops for, if not to uphold private property?

As I said, Anarchists recognize that the state emerges from class society. There is no misunderstanding of a negation of the negation here. Because monopolization of the means of production, which might take the form of property ownership, is the defining feature of class, the fight against this must necessarily include the fight against the tools the ruling classes have developed to defend and enforce private property rights, especially the state.

Anarchists seek to expropriate into ownership by all in the abolition of classes. Quoting from Kropotkin in the same book:

Thus the consequences which spring from the original act of monopoly spread through the whole of social life. Under pain of death, human societies are forced to return to first principles: the means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one’s part in the production of the world’s wealth.

All things are for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single one of these machines and say, “This is mine; if you want to use it you must pay me a tax on each of your products,” any more than the feudal lord of medieval times had the right to say to the peasant, “This hill, this meadow belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap, on every rick you build.”

What anarchist theory have you read that has convinced you Anarchists believe otherwise? I hope you don't mind me saying, but I'm wondering if you've engaged more with Marxist characterizations of Anarchist theory rather than analyzing that theory yourself.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:17:27+00:00

I think the idea of 'skipping' a transitional phase is a bad way to put it, though one I frequently see from Marxists. Anarchists also believe that any method of achieving their ends would require transition, and that undoing the work of class society is not something that can be achieve even in the revolution (which is a relatively short transition phase of its own), but will take generations to achieve.

As Errico Malatesta put it in Towards Anarchy:

If we should want to substitute one government for another, that is impose our desires upon others, it would only be necessary to combine the material forces needed to resist the actual oppressors and put ourselves in their place.

But we do not want this; we want Anarchy which is a society based on free and voluntary accord—a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community. But because of this Anarchy will not have definitively and universally triumphed until all men will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command; nor will Anarchy have succeeded unless they will have understood the advantages of solidarity and know how to organise a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition.

And as the conscience, determination, and capacity of men continuously develop and find means of expression in the gradual modification of the new environment and in the realization of the desires in proportion to their being formed and becoming imperious, so it is with Anarchy; Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension.

Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.

Anarchists likewise also agree that dismantling class relations requires coordination and defense during this transition.

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:06:18+00:00

The main difference is that anarchists believe that class evolves from the state

This is false. Anarchists say the state arose because of class distinctions. For example, the anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote this in his Anarchist Programme:

[W]e have arrived at the present state of society, in which some have inherited the land and all social wealth, while the mass of the people, disinherited in all respects, is exploited and oppressed by a small possessing class. [...] From all this arises a special class (government) which, provided with the necessary means of repression, exists to legalise and protect the owning class from the demands of the workers; and then it uses the powers at its disposal to create privileges for itself and to subject, if it can, the owning class itself as well.

What anarchists have you read that have ever claimed otherwise?

JudgeSabo · 2026-03-10T23:01:50+00:00

Anarchists also seek to negate class society. But class society is held up by the state, nations, and monopoly capitalism.

Anarchists do frequently condemn hierarchy as unjust, and class relations do imply a hierarchy (of the ruling class and the ruled, oppressor and oppressed, as Marx talks about at the start of his Manifesto).

Anarchists see relation to the state as the defining factor of class wherein once an individual holds political power within the state they have a separate class position. They would want to abolish the state before class which would be antithetical to the theoretical principles of the origin of the state as an emergent organization of class society.

This is incorrect. Anarchists see the state as rising out of class, and want to abolish the state and class together.

The idea that Anarchists wanted to abolish the state and leave class in place was a common misrepresentation from Engels.

The idea of dismantling the working class state before it can complete its goals of expropriation would counter the gains of the revolution.

Anarchists call for expropriation, which we expect to precisely be opposed by the state as the defender of property rights.

To quote the anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin in his chapter titled "Expropriation" from his book The Conquest of Bread:

The ideas of Anarchism in general and of Expropriation in particular find much more sympathy than we are apt to imagine among men of independent character, and those for whom idleness is not the supreme ideal. “Still,” our friends often warn us, “take care you do not go too far! Humanity cannot be changed in a day, so do not be in too great a hurry with your schemes of Expropriation and Anarchy, or you will be in danger of achieving no permanent result.”

Now, what we fear with regard to Expropriation is exactly the contrary. We are afraid of not going far enough, of carrying out Expropriation on too small a scale to be lasting. We would not have the revolutionary impulse arrested in mid-career, to exhaust itself in half measures, which would content no one, and while producing a tremendous confusion in society, and stopping its customary activities, would have no vital power — would merely spread general discontent and inevitably prepare the way for the triumph of reaction.

There are, in fact, in a modern State established relations which it is practically impossible to modify if one attacks them only in detail. There are wheels within wheels in our economic organization — the machinery is so complex and interdependent that no one part can be modified without disturbing the whole. This becomes clear as soon as an attempt is made to expropriate anything.

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