Political Indifferentism

An important work by Marx criticizing Bakuninism. Completed in January 1873, appeared in the December 1873 volume of the Almanacco Republicano (Republican Almanac). The Chinese version was first published under the title Absent Political Nature in La Jeunesse (The Youth), No. 13, published in Paris in December 1923, signed by the translator 抱兮 (Bao Xi).

After the failure of the Paris Commune Revolution, the workers’ movement was repressed and restricted by the bourgeois governments, thus fell into a low ebb. Under such circumstances, Bakunin and his disciples vigorously advocated anarchism, which had a great negative impact on the workers’ movement, which led the First International to the threat of disintegration and split, political indifference was one of the mistaken trends of anarchism. In order to criticize it, Marx wrote this article at the request of Enrico Bignami, the editor of the journal called La Plebe (People). In his work, Marx has first listed the claims of political indifferentism with regard to politics, economics, and culture. These claims include that the working class should not form trade unions and political parties, engage in political action, take part in demonstrations and marches, struggle for shorter working-day, fight for the rights of woman and child workers, assume revolutionary forms of political struggle to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, “must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep; it must leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the law.” In his view, anarchists were those who desired that the working class maintain political indifference and stay away from politics. Then, Marx exposed the essence of political indifferentism. In his view, these claims of political indifference were actually sophisms against the workers’ movement, and sought “to deny to the working class any real means of struggle”. In order to prove the essence of political indifference, Marx has profoundly anatomized the three basic principles in Proudhon’s The Political Capacities of the Working Classes, and clearly pointed out that the political indifference preached by the anarchists essentially served to protect bourgeois freedom and maintain the capitalist system.

The publication of Political Indifferentism has lifted the veil of political indifference, exposed its essence to the people, thus became a powerful ideological weapon in the critique of anarchism, and provided theoretical guidance for the proletariat.