This is mostly because of different theories about reality. Anarchists are ideologically committed to the position of prefiguration - the idea that the way you get somewhere must be shaped like the place you’re trying to go. They categorically deny the possibility of getting somewhere by going somewhere else first.
Marxists apply systems theory to human society and have arrived at the analysis that the way we got here was a complex series of developments that produced the conditions for the next complex series of developments. For example, it was impossible to have a stock market for securities exchange before the systems existed from money, common stock, and corporations.
The Marxist path towards a stateless society is a series of transitions that deal with the current shape of the system and the system controls that rebalance the system towards its current state. The anarchist path towards a stateless society is to just declare a stateless society and either destroy or ignore anything that disagrees so that whatever they are building can replace it.
We can use all sorts of metaphors for this. Marxists look at a self balancing system and look at dismantle the pistons or the sensors that balance it where as the anarchists just thinks we should just all crowd to one side of the platform and make it unbalanced through being unbalanced.
Or the Marxist and the anarchist are both trying to head West but they come to a deep river full of alligators and hippos. The Marxist decides to follow the river North to look for a crossing, but the Anarchist argued that they can’t go West by going North and they jump and try to swim West.
Prefiguration is a ridiculous ideological position that assumes reality is fundamentally driven by values as opposed to the other way around. A Marxist might identify that the cause of a subset of precarity is dependence on the hierarchy to produce medically necessary drugs. The Marxist might then size the hierarchy and over produce these drugs, freeing this subset of people from precarity and adding them to the revolutionary movement. The anarchist would argue that using the hierarchy is a nonstarter, and that the best way to produce an abundance of these drugs is to distribute drug production kits to every family that needs them with the end result being that those people remain in precarity until someone figures out how to scale that prefigured idea without using hierarchy. One moves the system towards a new state through stages, the other refuses to move the system until the ideas are worked out.
Marxism explicitly acknowledges that the nature of globe spanning complex systems is ultimately unknowable a priori and therefore must proceed in stages guided by an awareness of how systems work to avoid progress towards a new stage being undermined by movement back towards the prior stable point. That means analyzing what is and experimenting at the systems levels to understand the mechanisms that reassert system stability for states that are inherently unstable (like class society). It also means analyzing what emerges as progress is made to understand what other aspects of instability and stability emerge that we don’t know yet.
Anarchism throws all of that out the window and asserts that nothing is worth doing unless it is ideologically purified of specific errors (unjust hierarchy being the primary one). It’s a moral/idealist position that operates on the assumption that things are the way they are because of a moral failing (hierarchy) and that any attempt to change anything on anyway while maintaining acceptance of a hierarchy is not merely doomed to fail but worthy of being actively destroyed.
This is mostly because of different theories about reality. Anarchists are ideologically committed to the position of prefiguration - the idea that the way you get somewhere must be shaped like the place you’re trying to go. They categorically deny the possibility of getting somewhere by going somewhere else first.
Marxists apply systems theory to human society and have arrived at the analysis that the way we got here was a complex series of developments that produced the conditions for the next complex series of developments. For example, it was impossible to have a stock market for securities exchange before the systems existed from money, common stock, and corporations.
The Marxist path towards a stateless society is a series of transitions that deal with the current shape of the system and the system controls that rebalance the system towards its current state. The anarchist path towards a stateless society is to just declare a stateless society and either destroy or ignore anything that disagrees so that whatever they are building can replace it.
We can use all sorts of metaphors for this. Marxists look at a self balancing system and look at dismantle the pistons or the sensors that balance it where as the anarchists just thinks we should just all crowd to one side of the platform and make it unbalanced through being unbalanced.
Or the Marxist and the anarchist are both trying to head West but they come to a deep river full of alligators and hippos. The Marxist decides to follow the river North to look for a crossing, but the Anarchist argued that they can’t go West by going North and they jump and try to swim West.
Prefiguration is a ridiculous ideological position that assumes reality is fundamentally driven by values as opposed to the other way around. A Marxist might identify that the cause of a subset of precarity is dependence on the hierarchy to produce medically necessary drugs. The Marxist might then size the hierarchy and over produce these drugs, freeing this subset of people from precarity and adding them to the revolutionary movement. The anarchist would argue that using the hierarchy is a nonstarter, and that the best way to produce an abundance of these drugs is to distribute drug production kits to every family that needs them with the end result being that those people remain in precarity until someone figures out how to scale that prefigured idea without using hierarchy. One moves the system towards a new state through stages, the other refuses to move the system until the ideas are worked out.
Marxism explicitly acknowledges that the nature of globe spanning complex systems is ultimately unknowable a priori and therefore must proceed in stages guided by an awareness of how systems work to avoid progress towards a new stage being undermined by movement back towards the prior stable point. That means analyzing what is and experimenting at the systems levels to understand the mechanisms that reassert system stability for states that are inherently unstable (like class society). It also means analyzing what emerges as progress is made to understand what other aspects of instability and stability emerge that we don’t know yet.
Anarchism throws all of that out the window and asserts that nothing is worth doing unless it is ideologically purified of specific errors (unjust hierarchy being the primary one). It’s a moral/idealist position that operates on the assumption that things are the way they are because of a moral failing (hierarchy) and that any attempt to change anything on anyway while maintaining acceptance of a hierarchy is not merely doomed to fail but worthy of being actively destroyed.