The Cultural Void of Marxism and European Anarchism
If you want your revolution to succeed - look to your ancestors
Marxism and European anarchism are often treated as original political theories, but in reality, they borrow heavily from Indigenous and non-Western social structures. Concepts like communal land, mutual aid, anti hierarchy or dialectical and historical materialism weren’t invented by Marx, Engels, or Bakunin. These systems already existed and endured in Indigenous societies across the world.
The key difference is that those Indigenous societies weren’t just built on political structure. They were held together by culture by relational systems, intergenerational obligations, protocols, stories, spiritual beliefs, and deeply embedded values. That’s what made them resilient over long periods of time, even under immense pressure.
Marxism and European anarchism, in contrast, attempt to reconstruct these ideas in theory, but without the cultural foundations that sustained them. These European ideologies emerged in societies already disconnected from land, kinship, and traditional knowledge. They try to rebuild community through politics alone, without the deeper relational systems that keep people connected and accountable beyond ideology.
This is one reason why leftist movements frequently fracture and fail. Without shared cultural ground, without protocols, shared story, or spiritual connection, conflict becomes personal, power struggles emerge, and internal cohesion breaks down. Theory alone can’t hold a group together.
Movements like the CNT-FAI, the Makhnovists, the USSR, or Maoist China did exist within broader cultural contexts, and often drew strength from those surrounding traditions. But that’s not the same as Marxism or European anarchism being culturally rooted. The political theory sat on top of those cultures, it wasn’t born from them. And when conditions changed, or pressure mounted, the political system often couldn’t hold.
Some will argue that communism and European anarchism failed because of constant attack from capitalist powers. That’s partly true. But Indigenous societies have also been under violent, prolonged assault by colonial capitalism, with even worse treatment and many of us still survive, still around. Not because we're politically superior, but because our social systems are rooted in something deeper than theory. Culture carries us.
Culture is infrastructure. It teaches accountability, obligation, humility, and care. It ties people to each other and to the land. When political systems lack that, they are unstable. They rely on constant effort, enforcement, and ideological unity to function which rarely lasts.
What Marxism and European Anarchism Needs, It Left Behind
If you follow this logic to its conclusion, for Marxism to truly work, it would need to be rooted in something like early, pre-modern Germany. The kind of communal, kin-based life Marx sometimes referenced, village-level organization, shared land, interdependent survival. Ironically, that kind of life looked much closer to Indigenous social structures than to anything in industrial Europe.
But even that Germany was already disappearing in Marx’s time. Christianity, empire, private property, and centralized authority had already reshaped it. And rather than seriously engaging with living Indigenous societies who still embodied the communal values Marx idealized, Marx dismissed them as “primitive” and placed them at the start of a universal historical ladder.
So Marxism ends up reaching for a kind of society it doesn’t know how to create, because it cuts itself off from the people who still had it. It wants the structure of Indigenous life without the culture that made it work.
That’s the paradox. Marxism needs what it ignores. It claims to be scientific and universal, but it actually depends on a kind of cultural cohesion that is neither included in its theory nor reproducible by politics alone.
European anarchism followed a similar path. Thinkers like Proudhon and Bakunin developed powerful critiques of state power and capitalism, but they were also working in a cultural vacuum. The societies they came from had already lost many of the communal, land-based, kinship systems that once supported mutual aid and collective responsibility.
Their anarchism tried to reconstruct those values through theory, but without the deep cultural practices that made them functional in the first place. Like Marxism, it became a framework without a foundation, strong on ideas, but weak on the relational infrastructure that holds people together across generations.
This is well said. I'd just nudge in a clarification, not in opposition, but to draw out what I think you're circling: we aren't dealing with separate epistemologies sealed off from each other, but with a shared field of material history. The recurrence of mutual aid, communal land, horizontal governance, these aren't cultural flukes or evidence of borrowing. They're what people come up with under certain conditions, especially when they’re not being crushed by extractive states or private property regimes.
Marx, Kropotkin, Bakunin, they didn’t conjure theory from the void. They were observing, formalising, sometimes misreading, often abstracting patterns that showed up in Indigenous and pre-capitalist life all over the world. When Kropotkin talked about mutual aid, he was looking at Siberian clans. When Engels riffed on kinship, it was via Iroquois social structures. They were theorists, but they weren’t blind.
So rather than seeing theory as something that takes from Indigenous life, it might be more accurate to say it tries to name what Indigenous life already knew, and sometimes still remembers. And far from being a betrayal, engaging with theory can make that knowledge portable. It lets it move, lets it confront other systems on equal footing.
We shouldn't trap Indigenous insight in particularism. There's nothing in communal governance or non-ownership that says it must stay local or pre-contact or culturally fenced. Those are universal political truths forged in specific places. The point is to see them for what they are: not just traditions to protect, but models to expand.
Thanks
I've been trying to explain this to marxist friend. And yes, the primitive part of the linear evolution of "production". Oh my god. Most modern anarchists I see (on Substack) seemed to have just quietly moved on from all that - regen ag, Villaging, spreading changing permaculture, and listening to indigenous. The arguments seem to impass - massively - around worldviews. Indigenous vs the machine. It's a divide that seems unable to be crossed. I understand their world and, like you said, it's just rationality, enlightenment, dissection, disconnection. But they don't seem to be able to step out of it to consider anything else. Even saying the indigenous perspective is "just an ideality, a fantasy in someone's head" and that "you're talking about primitive communism, where they only had enough production because they needed to survive. They didn't have any surplus to suppress other classes." And therefore evolve, they mean. And then I hear that "perfect communism" is when people share everything and workloads are shared and no one is over anyone else." Gobsmacking. That's the theory? You need this capital history evolution to get to what was already there so you can call it something else? But now there's factories. Perfect. The response, " So you want to go back to primitism and work yourself to death and live in squalor?'
Oh. Dear. I keep trying to find a bridge, but, so far, I get scorn and a repetition of the Marxist jargon real. Burgoiis. Means of production. You know. Sorry for the rant, it's both frustrating and shocking. But I'm open to learning from it. I respect both babies and bathwater.