Marxism and Direct Action¶
Core Argument¶
Phil Mitchinson’s “Marxism and Direct Action” mounts a polemical defence of revolutionary Marxism against the anarchist-influenced “direct action” milieu that coalesced around the anti-capitalist demonstrations of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The chapter’s core argument is that the juxtaposition of spontaneous, leaderless direct action against organised political struggle is a false dichotomy. Marxism, Mitchinson insists, is itself a guide to action; the real question is not action versus inaction, but whether action is coherently theorised, democratically organised, and strategically aimed at the conquest of state power.
The chapter opens by acknowledging the energy and moral legitimacy of the protest movement, citing the May Day 2000 demonstration in London. Mitchinson uses two telling anecdotes: a former Royal Marine who defaced Churchill’s statue and denounced imperialism in court, and an Eton schoolboy who smashed a McDonald’s window. These are presented not as curiosities but as symptoms of a systemic crisis that has radicalised even privileged layers. The target of the polemic is the “carnival” politics of groups like Reclaim the Streets, whose May Day publication Maybe is quoted at length. Mitchinson seizes on their claim to be “non-hierarchical, spontaneous and self-organised,” arguing that such a boast is both empirically false—someone must decide, edit, fund—and strategically suicidal. To face a highly organised enemy like international capital with no theory, no programme, and no direction is, he writes, “the height of irresponsibility.”
The theoretical core of the chapter contrasts Marxist and anarchist conceptions of the state. Anarchism, traced to Bakunin and the First International, sees the state as the root of all evil and demands its immediate abolition. Marxism, by contrast, sees the state as a product of class society; the root problem is not the state per se but the division of society into a minority that owns the means of production and a majority that works for them. The state cannot be abolished by fiat or by “placing oneself outside capitalism”; it must be smashed by the victorious working class, which will then need a transitional state—a “semi-state” in Lenin’s formulation—to suppress the defeated exploiters and begin the construction of socialism. Mitchinson draws on Lenin’s State and Revolution and Trotsky’s Stalinism and Bolshevism to argue that Marxists agree with anarchists on the final goal of a stateless society but disagree fundamentally on the means. The Paris Commune of 1871 is invoked as the historical precedent for the kind of workers’ state Marx and Engels envisaged: elected, recallable, paid no more than skilled workers, and without a standing army separate from the people.
The chapter also addresses the degeneration of the Soviet Union. Anarchists point to Stalinist tyranny as proof that Bakunin was right to warn that a workers’ state would become a new exploiting class. Mitchinson counters that only Trotsky’s Marxism has adequately explained that degeneration, locating its causes not in Bolshevik theory but in the objective conditions of civil war, foreign intervention, and the isolation of the Russian Revolution. Anarchism’s position, he argues, inadvertently endorses bourgeois slanders against Bolshevism.
The final sections attack the practical proposals of the direct action movement: “guerrilla gardening,” “self-reliance,” and the idea of dissolving power rather than seizing it. Mitchinson dismisses these as updated versions of utopian socialism and philosophical idealism—the belief that changing minds will make capitalism simply redundant. He argues that such tactics cannot organise a modern economy, cannot feed the hungry, and leave the capitalist class free to defend its power. The alternative is not individualism but socialism: the democratic, planned use of all society’s resources. The chapter concludes with a call to combine the organised working class with radicalised youth on the basis of a clear Marxist programme, uniting theory and action in the struggle for the socialist transformation of the planet.