![]() ![]() Sometimes I refer to myself as a “Marxist-informed anarchist.”) Personally, I went from anarchist-pacifism to unorthodox Trotskyism to revolutionary anarchism. ![]() (Note: I was also a member of the RSL and knew Ron for many years. Unlike most ex-Marxists, he has not turned to the right (to liberalism or neoconservatism) but to the left, becoming an anarchist. He was the leader of the unorthodox-Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League (1973-1989). For most of his adult life he was a Marxist. Ron Tabor is a good theorist to examine this vital question. ![]() But isn’t this to be expected under capitalism? Which aspects of Marxism made it most vulnerable to these pressures? What was there in the original Marxism of Marx and Engels which lent itself to these terrible results? How did Marxism start off so well and end so badly? No doubt there have been “objective forces,” as the capitalist system pressures and distorts even the most liberatory doctrine. Currently these have collapsed into traditional capitalism. Their activities resulted in “Stalinism”: a series of monstrous, state capitalist, tyrannies, which killed millions of workers and peasants (and thousands of Communists). Lenin, Trotsky, and others sought to return to revolutionary Marxism. Currently they have abandoned all pretense of advocating a new social system. They supported the existing state, bourgeois democracy, and Western imperialism and its wars. These ended up supporting capitalism and opposing revolutions. Hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, and others have mobilized under its program, aiming for a better world.īut what was the result? The first Marxist movement resulted in the social-democratic parties of Europe and elsewhere. Its stated goals were the end of capitalism, of classes, of the state, and of all other oppressions. Like anarchism, it originated in the 19 th century movements for democracy, socialism, and working class liberation. There is a paradox to Marxism, a central contradiction. Why did this happen? An attempt to analyze this is made in this new book by Ron Tabor, a former Marxist and now an anarchist. Yet Marxism ended up establishing totalitarian, mass murdering, state capitalist, regimes. Its goals were for a free, cooperative, classless, stateless, and nonoppressive society. Marxism, like anarchism, came out of movements for democracy, socialism, and working class liberation. Tabor, The Tyranny of Theory: A Contribution to the Anarchist Critique of Marxism (2013). ![]()
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