What's Wrong With Marxism (The anarchist critique) or "It's power, stupid!" .

Marx is awesome. Seriously. A large part of 20th century intellectual history mostly consisted of working out his original thoughts, especially if you include attempts to oppose and disprove his ideas. His analysis and critique of capitalist society and industrialism is brilliant, insightful, and remarkably prescient (given how the Industrial Revolution was still in a... well, not embryonic but at least 'toddler-ish' state). But like a lot of other thinkers that graced us with brilliant, stirring diagnoses of the problems of modern society (Rousseau and Nietzsche spring to my mind) , he's wasn't so hot when it came to offering a solution. Which proves once again that it's easy to criticize, but much harder to offer a positive, superior alternative. (Please recognize the irony in me writing that last sentence considering what this entry is called).

Most put-downs of Marx are based on gross oversimplifications, if not misrepresentations, of his thought so why not add one more? It's also extremely dangerous to generalize about a movement as diffuse and resolutely unclassifiable as anarchism, but I'm going to presume to speak for anarchism here, and articulate 'the' anarchist critique of Marxism, (an act of almost unparalleled folly and pride). Here goes.

The problem with modern society isn't capital, it's power. People desire and wield power to dominate and exploit others, thinking this will make them better off. They'll use whatever means they can get their hands on: violence, hierarchy, institutions, structures, ideology, tradition, etc. Economics is a particularly powerful one — maybe the means par excellence, and capitalism grants oppressors one of the best economic tools of exploitation yet invented. It's all-embracing, insatiable, innately and constantly expansionary, and in a way quite subtle — much more so then slavery or serfdom, for example. (Though it's potentially less sustainable — will the capitalists manage to rule as long as the Pharoahs?).

But it's not the only way, and exploitation will not just automatically disappear if you eliminate economic exploitation. It certainly won't if you don't systematically dismantle all the other systems of power and domination in society. By creating such a powerful ideology (powerful because there's so much truth in it), Marx handed a excellent tool to those who oppress and exploit. The blood of a hundred million people killed in the name of Marxism bear witness to this fact.