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HandWiki. Libertarian Marxism. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/34141 (accessed on 22 September 2026).
HandWiki. Libertarian Marxism. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/34141. Accessed September 22, 2026.
HandWiki. "Libertarian Marxism" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/34141 (accessed September 22, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, November 11). Libertarian Marxism. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/34141
HandWiki. "Libertarian Marxism." Encyclopedia. Web. 11 November, 2022.
Libertarian Marxism
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Libertarian Marxism is a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism such as left communism emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism. Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France; emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism. Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Socialisme ou Barbarie and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, Raoul Vaneigem and Yanis Varoufakis, who claims that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.

marxism–leninism anarchism socialism

References

  1. "The 'Advance Without Authority': Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism and Intellectuals" by Chamsy Ojeili, Democracy & Nature vol.7, no.3, 2001. http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/ojeili_intellectuals.htm
  2. Beer, A History of British Socialism, vol. 2, pg. 256.
  3. Marx-Engels Collected Works: Volume 48. New York: International Publishers, 2001; pg. 538, fn. 95.
  4. Carr, E.H. – The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923. W. W. Norton & Company 1985.
  5. Avrich, Paul. "Russian Anarchists and the Civil War", Russian Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 296–306. Blackwell Publishing
  6. Noam Chomsky Notes on Anarchism http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1970----.htm
  7. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview". Telos (23). , p. 133
  8. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview". Telos (23). , p. 134
  9. Brinton, Maurice (Goodway, David ed). For Workers' Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton. AK Press. 2004. ISBN:1-904859-07-0
  10. "Peasant (农民)" was the official term for workers on people's communes. According to the ultra-left, both peasants and urban workers together composed a proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution.
  11. See, for instance, "Whither China?" by Yang Xiguang. http://www.marxists.de/china/sheng/whither.htm
  12. The 70s Collective, ed. 1996. China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
  13. Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation Part II ISBN:0-415-93344-7
  14. The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. Inclusivedemocracy.org. Retrieved on 2011-12-28. http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/
  15. "Libertarian Marxism? by Daniel Guérin". revoltlib.com. 2011-04-23. http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1352. Retrieved 2013-10-11. 
  16. Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993; pg. 107.
  17. "How the Socialist Labor Party Differs From the Industrial Workers of the World". http://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/slp_vs_iww.html. 
  18. "Council communism - an introduction" (in en). http://libcom.org/thought/council-communism-an-introduction. 
  19. "Left-Wing Communism Subject Archive". https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/. 
  20. "Wilhelm Reich is again the main pioneer in this field (an excellent, short introduction to his ideas can be found in Maurice Brinton's The Irrational in Politics). In Children of the Future, Reich made numerous suggestions, based on his research and clinical experience, for parents, psychologists, and educators striving to develop libertarian methods of child rearing. (He did not use the term "libertarian," but that is what his methods are.) Hence, in this and the following sections we will summarise Reich's main ideas as well as those of other libertarian psychologists and educators who have been influenced by him, such as A.S. Neill and Alexander Lowen." "J.6 What methods of child rearing do anarchists advocate?" in An Anarchist FAQ by Various Authors.
  21. "In an earlier article (“Some Thoughts on Libertarianism,” Broadsheet No. 35), I argued that to define a position as “anti-authoritarian” is not, in fact, to define the position at all “but merely to indicate a relationship of opposition to another position, the authoritarian one...On the psychoanalytic side, Wilhelm Reich (The Sexual Revolution, Peter Neville-Vision Press, London, 1951| Character Analysis, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1945; and The Function of the Orgasm, Orgone Institute Press, N.Y., 1942) was preferred to Freud because, despite his own weaknesses – his Utopian tendencies and his eventual drift into “orgones” and “bions” – Reich laid more emphasis on the social conditions of mental events than did Freud (see, e.g., A.J. Baker, “Reich's Criticism of Freud,” Libertarian No. 3, January 1960)." "A Reading List for Libertarians" by David Iverson. Broadsheet No. 39
  22. "I will also discuss other left-libertarians who wrote about Reich, as they bear on the general discussion of Reich's ideas...In 1944, Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd, The Empire City, and co-author of Gestalt Therapy, began to discover the work of Wilhelm Reich for his American audience in the tiny libertarian socialist and anarchist milieu." Orgone Addicts: Wilhelm Reich Versus The Situationists. "Orgone Addicts Wilhelm Reich versus the Situationists" by Jim Martin http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/ReichVersusTheSituationists/ReichVersusTheSituationists.htm
  23. "In the summer of 1950-51, numerous member of the A.C.C. and other interested people held a series of meetings in the Ironworkers' Hall with a view to forming a downtown political society. Here a division developed between a more radical wing (including e.g. Waters and Grahame Harrison) and a more conservative wing (including e.g. Stove and Eric Dowling). The general orientation of these meetings may be judged from the fact that when Harry Hooton proposed "Anarchist" and some of the conservative proposed "Democratic" as the name for the new Society, both were rejected and "Libertarian Society" was adopted as an acceptable title. Likewise then accepted as the motto for this Society - and continued by the later Libertarian society - was the early Marx quotation used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, vis: "Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be." "SYDNEY LIBERTARIANISM & THE PUSH" by A.J. Baker, in Broadsheet, No 81, March, 1975. (abridged)
  24. That he was one of the most radical figures in psychiatry, see Sheppard 1973. Danto 2007, p. 43: "Wilhelm Reich, the second generation psychoanalyst perhaps most often associated with political radicalism ..." Turner 2011, p. 114: "[Reich's mobile clinic was] perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date." For the publication and significance of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, see Sharaf 1994, pp. 163–164, 168. For Character Analysis being an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory, see: Young-Bruehl 2008, p. 157: "Reich, a year and a half younger than Anna Freud, was the youngest instructor at the Training Institute, where his classes on psychoanalytic technique, later presented in a book called Character Analysis, were crucial to his whole group of contemporaries." Sterba 1982, p. 35: "This book [Character Analysis] serves even today as an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic technique. In my opinion, Reich's understanding of and technical approach to resistance prepared the way for Anna Freud's Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)." Guntrip 1961, p. 105: "... the two important books of the middle 1930s, Character Analysis (1935) by Wilhelm Reich and The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) by Anna Freud." For more on the influence of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, see Kirkpatrick 1947, Burgess 1947; Bendix 1947; and Turner 2011, p. 152. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907256-1,00.html
  25. For Anna Freud, see Bugental, Schneider and Pierson 2001, p. 14: "Anna Freud's work on the ego and the mechanisms of defense developed from Reich's early research (A. Freud, 1936/1948)." For Perls, Lowen and Janov, see Sharaf 1994, p. 4. For the students, see Elkind, 18 April 1971; and Turner 2011, pp. 13–14. https://books.google.com/books?id=jtO7czidPeYC&pg=PA14
  26. Sharaf 1994, pp. 419, pp. 460–461.
  27. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Danto writes that Reich offered a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives," and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help. Danto, Elizabeth Ann (2007). Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938, Columbia University Press, first published 2005., pp. 118–120, 137, 198, 208.
  28. The Sexual Revolution, 1945 (Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
  29. Douglas Kellner Herbert arcuse http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm
  30. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 1987.
  31. Young, Robert M. (1969).THE NAKED MARX: Review of Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, New Statesman, vol. 78, 7 November 1969, pp. 666-67 http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper89h.html
  32. Douglas Kellner "Marcuse, Herbert" http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html
  33. Howard, Dick (1975). "Introduction to Castoriadis". Telos (23): 118. 
  34. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview". Telos (23): 133. 
  35. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975). "An Interview". Telos (23): 134. 
  36. The Beginning of an Era (part1, part 2) Situationist International #12, 1969 http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/12.era1.htm
  37. Karen Elliot (2001-06-01). "Situationism in a nutshell". Barbelith Webzine. http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 
  38. Now collected in a book, Maurice Brinton, For Workers' Power.
  39. Barberis, Peter; McHugh, John; Tyldesley, Mike (2000-01-01) (in en). Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations: Parties, Groups and Movements of the 20th Century. A&C Black. ISBN 9780826458148. https://books.google.com/?id=qps14mSlghcC&pg=PA167#v=onepage. 
  40. Cuninghame, Patrick (2010). "AUTONOMISM AS A GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT" (in en). WorkingUSA 13 (4): 451–464. doi:10.1111/j.1743-4580.2010.00305.x. ISSN 1089-7011. https://www.academia.edu/1342334. 
  41. Benjamin Noys (ed). Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Minor Compositions, Autonomedia. 2011. 1st ed. http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=299
  42. "As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process." Anonymous, Call http://www.bloom0101.org/call.pdf
  43. For a critique of Tiqqun from an ultra-left perspective, as well as a description of the opposition between the two sense of "communization" See also Dauvé and Nesic, "Un Appel et une Invite". http://troploin0.free.fr/ii/index.php/textes/19-communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite
  44. See e.g. "After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California" http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/
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