Marxism

V

Marx and Politics

Marx also regularly applied himself to analysing all the major questions and events of his day, from British colonial expansion in Asia to the American Civil War, from the seizure of power in France by Louis Bonaparte in December 1851 and his subsequent self-proclamation as Emperor Napoleon III, to the Paris Commune of 1871. He wrote pamphlets, contributed to newspapers, and was in correspondence with the radical intelligentsia throughout Europe. As Marx never produced a classic political treatise, much of this work was used by his followers to delineate a theory of politics. Thus The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon provided elements for a Marxist analysis of a 20th-century phenomenon, namely fascism and military dictatorship, by suggesting that when the oppressed classes are not strong enough to overcome the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule by the “normal” exercise of democratic power, a dictatorship will emerge to deprive the working classes of their basic rights.

In The Civil War in France, written shortly after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, he hailed the revolutionary government of Paris as the first case of the exercise of working class power and suggested that society should be organized in a largely decentralized way with communes to be established to manage their common affairs and send delegates to a national assembly for “the few but important functions which still would remain for a central government.”

Finally in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the programme agreed in 1875 by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), Marx returned to the question of how a communist society should be organized. The operating principle was to be “to each according to his needs”, a principle superior to that required in the first stage of constructing communism, that of socialism, “to each according to the work performed.”

VI

Reception and Interpretations

Marx’s complex and at times obscure writings allowed for disparate interpretations, hence the success of a simplified account of “scientific socialism”, such as Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892), which was far more widely read in the socialist movement than the far more complex theories embodied in Das Kapital. Before 1914 the dominant orthodoxy was that propounded by the best-organized socialist party of the time, the German SPD, and by its leading thinker, Karl Kautsky, who stressed the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse. The task of socialists, according to this reading, was that of consolidating the strength of the revolutionary movement and obtaining reforms and social improvements for the working class. With the passage of time, the growth of capitalism would eliminate all classes except for a small class of capitalists and a huge proletariat. Strictly speaking the “revolutionary party” did not make a revolution—it waited for one to occur.

Eduard Bernstein, the leading revisionist of Marxism, argued against Kautsky’s fatalistic view of historical development by pointing out that some of the predictions imputed to Marx had not occurred, in particular that the middle classes, far from disappearing, were expanding, and that capitalism had succeeded in weathering major crises. In his view, Marxists should become less obsessed with the “final goal” of socialism and more with reforms that would more or less imperceptibly alter capitalism by giving more power to democratic institutions. His opponents pointed out that the middle classes which were expanding were not the craft producers, the artisans, and the shopkeepers described by Marx, but the white collar workers who were dependent on large-scale capital as much as the industrial working class. They also pointed out that Bernstein had failed to distinguish between “the final capitalist crisis”, which had obviously not yet occurred, and the business or trade cycles (also explained by Marx) that were an inevitable part of the constant reorganization of capitalism.

In Russia, Marxism was initially developed by Georgy Plekhanov, in opposition to the narodniki, the Russian populist movement (including its terrorist wing) who believed that Russia could skip the stage of capitalism. Some of the early Russian Marxists, dubbed “legal Marxists”, held on to a particularly deterministic version of the doctrine, going as far as to claim that, since there could be no transition to socialism before Russia had become a fully capitalist state, it was the duty of Marxists to fight to establish capitalism, a view which, as we have seen, has some basis in Marx’s writings. When the first Russian Revolution broke out in March 1917, Vladimir Lenin, once a follower of Plekhanov, declared that Russia’s bourgeois revolution had now taken place and that it was possible to move rapidly towards the socialist phase. This was the theoretical justification for the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917.

By then, Lenin had added to the Marxist doctrine three significant texts, all of which became part of the Marxist canon only after his death. In What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin dealt with the principles of revolutionary organization, claiming that the working class could not spontaneously reach a socialist consciousness but that this had to be instilled by a centralized party or professional revolutionaries. The second theory was that of imperialism, developed during World War I. His Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) attributed the causes of the war to the capitalist competition between states for new global markets and the emergence of world monopolies. One of the consequences of this was that communists should support “backward” (i.e. non-capitalist) nations—like Russia, the weakest link in the imperialist chain—resisting imperial exploitation. Finally, his State and Revolution (1917) envisaged simplified bureaucratic and libertarian structures for the future socialist state in stark contrast to the actual Soviet state that later emerged during the Russian Civil War.

After Lenin’s death in 1924 his intellectual heritage was appropriated and disputed by his numerous followers, particularly Stalin and Trotsky. His scattered writings, essentially a response to tactical and strategic needs rather than theoretical ones, were partly systematized and incorporated in a new doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. Under Stalin and his successors, the authoritarian traits of the Soviet Union, already developing during the Russian Civil War against the supporters of the former Tsarist regime, grew to such an extent that Marxism became a kind of secular state religion. Under the label of “dialectical materialism”, a philosophical formula popularized by Engels and others, Marxism came to be regarded as a science on a par with the natural sciences, rather than a tool of analysis requiring constant updating.

As a result many of the subsequent developments of Marxism occurred outside the Soviet Union. Between the two world wars the leaders of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, in particular Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, developed a theory of “slow revolution” that would become the central strategic concept of so-called Austro-Marxism. Each successive measures of a socialist government must not only achieve a more equitable distribution, but also improve production; no aspect of the capitalist system of production should be destroyed without establishing at the same time a socialist organization which can produce goods at least as effectively.

In Italy during the 1930s the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, reflected on the defeat of the left in his Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1948-1951). His starting point was that social and political organization in Western societies was far more complex and sophisticated than it had been in Tsarist Russia. The solid civil society and advanced state that was characteristic of the West could not be taken over with a “war of movement”, as he called a Bolshevik-style revolution, but required a much longer and complex strategy (“a war of position”) aimed at achieving hegemony. Hegemony is defined as a new kind of consensus constructed largely by political and intellectual forces. Gramsci used his main categories to analyse the development of American capitalism (“Fordism”) in terms of the absence of a feudal past and of the classes associated with it. Gramsci’s works achieved considerable influence in the inter-war period, not only in his native Italy where Palmiro Togliatti, his successor at the head of the Italian Communist Party, pioneered a distinctive non-Soviet “national road to socialism”, but in places as different as Japan, Latin America, and the United States.

In the years following the Russian Revolution the majority of socialist parties refused to accept Lenin’s guidance and embrace communism, but they remained committed to Marxism. By the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, even this ideological commitment became less important and was eventually discarded, notably by the German SPD at their Congress of Bad Godesberg in 1959. Marxism, however, remained a state doctrine in the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s death in 1953, and inspired various national liberation movements in the former colonies, in Latin America, and above all in China where, suitably modified by Mao Zedong, it became the guiding ideology of the country after the communists took over in 1949.

In the West, and particularly in continental Europe, Marxism kept its appeal particularly in academic circles. It gave powerful intellectual backing to the moral outrage arising from the purported iniquities of capitalism and to the hope that a system that ought to disintegrate would eventually do so. The theory was sophisticated enough to appeal to the scholarly minded while being amenable to modification and developments. Most of the post-war European and North American Marxists have been highly critical of the Soviet Union.

The spread of Marxism among the intelligentsia was facilitated by the enforced exile of many Marxists after the rise of Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe between the wars, including the scholars based at the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung (“Institute for Social Research”). The leading lights of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, first sought refuge in Britain, then in the US, before returning to Germany after World War II. They opened up Marxism to other fields, notably psychoanalysis, sociology, literature, and music, pioneering the use of “critical theory”. Another member of the school, Herbert Marcuse stayed in the US where he examined how consensus was achieved in an advanced capitalist society in his Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), a text that was highly influential in the student movement of the 1960s. Walter Benjamin, also close to the Frankfurt School, developed analyses on culture and the arts, notably the famous The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). The Hungarian Marxist György Lukács used Marx’s ideas on alienation in his History and Class Consciousness (1923) and pioneered a Marxist analysis of literature in defence of the realist tradition in the novel in his The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1960s and 1970s Horkheimer’s successor as director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Jürgen Habermas, reformulated critical theory to deal with issues such as the public sphere, technology and capitalism, legitimation crises, and communication.

In France, Jean-Paul Sartre, the most influential French public intellectual of the post-war era, had initially examined the question of personal freedom, choice, and personal responsibility in his Being and Nothingness (1943); later, in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he reformulated the problem from a Marxist perspective.

In the 1960s and 1970s Marxism continued to be one of the most important currents of thought in European academic circles, reaching its peak in France when Louis Althusser and his school developed a close “structuralist” reading of Marx’s Das Kapital.

Little was done to develop a Marxist economic analysis since the German socialist Rudolf Hilferding had written Finance Capital (1910) until the 1950s and 1960s when the American economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy introduced elements of Keynesianism into Marxism in their book Monopoly Capitalism (1966). They defined the new stage of capitalism as one in which novel techniques of economic management are developed to absorb the surplus produced and thereby maintain growth. These techniques include military expenditures, as well as “wasteful” consumption. To the extent that the revolutionary potential of the working class is eliminated or reduced by such increased prosperity and employment, the potential for anti-capitalist activity will move to the developing world. Work such as this contributed to the formulation of Marxist views on dependency, peripheral capitalism, and neo-colonialism particularly in Latin America, India, and the Middle East.

Much of the greatest impact of Marxism since the early 1960s has been in the universities, above all in the English-speaking world where, paradoxically, communist parties have been of less importance than elsewhere. The majority of the contributors and readers of the most important and long-lasting Marxist journals in the world, the London-based New Left Review and the New York-based Monthly Review, are academics based in the US, Britain, Australia, and Canada. This contrasts with the period prior to World War II when political activists and leaders, such as Lenin and Gramsci, and continental theorists were in the forefront of the development of Marxism.

Marxism has also significantly contributed to historical studies. Marxist historians have tended to investigate broad historical processes, particularly revolutionary or near-revolutionary events such as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the role of the bourgeoisie, the development of the working class, class formation and the power structure, the function of dissenting ideas, and the development of the welfare state. It has also directly or indirectly influenced the social history, feminism, and colonial and cultural studies.

In France, Marxist historians produced what are now classic, if disputed, accounts of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre, with his The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), established a landmark in the development of today’s “history from below”. Ernest Labrousse (1895-1988) produced a massive study of the economic crisis that led to the French Revolution, while Albert Soboul (1914-1982) published in 1962 what was for long the standard text, The French Revolution 1787-1799 (English translation 1975). Marxism has also influenced the most important French school of history, the Annales School, which, like Marxism, tries to cut across discipline and offer a “total” view of history.

In Britain, the Communist Party Historians’ Group, which flourished from 1946 until the early 1950s, produced some of the leading British historians of our time, notably Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1946), E. P. Thompson (the enormously influential The Making of the English Working Class, 1963), Christopher Hill (author of major studies on the intellectual origins of the English Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, and Puritanism), and Eric Hobsbawm (his trilogy on “the long 19th century” of 1789-1914, and The Age of Extremes, 1994, devoted to the “short 20th century” of 1914-1989). In the US, Marxist historians such as Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974) have produced important studies on slave society, while the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain has been given a new interpretation by Robert Brenner in a set of wide-ranging studies.

Marxism, increasingly detached from immediate practical politics—since there are now hardly any explicitly Marxist political parties anywhere in the world—is likely to continue to be used, alongside other approaches, in the study of society.