Marxism in our time

Marxism In Our Time • 4 Marxism in our time Over the past 15 years Marxism has come under considerable attack by theoreticians and academics in the West. Anti-Marxism has always been a favourite preoccupation of the right-wing intelligentsia. But in recent years many commentators who describe themselves as socialists have joined the fray. The trend has been most striking in France, where formerly left-wing intellectuals have issued fierce diatribes against the Marxist tradition. Marxism has become distinctly unfashionable on the Left Bank of Paris - and elsewhere too. The concept of 'post-Marxism', now much favoured by left-wing thinkers, reflects the widely held view that the irrelevance of Marxism is now beyond controversy. There is a growing consensus on the left that little, if any, of Marx's theory is useful for understanding contemporary society. Post-Marxist theoreticians point to changes in the appearance of capitalist social relations as proof of the defects of Marx's Capital. Some argue that changes in the structure of the working class mean that the whole concept of class struggle has lost its validity; others, that Marxism is "classist" because of its emphasis on the working class as the primary agent of social change. Meanwhile key elements of Marxist politics, especially the theory of the state and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, are increasingly regarded as absurd.

5 • Marxism In Our Time Only one of 19 contributors to a recently published collection of articles on the crisis of social democracy tries to present a Marxist critique of reformist politics.? The rest regard that crisis as final proof that Marxism is out of date. In a concluding article, Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman argue for revolutionary reformism' as the only viable path to political change, and go on to dismiss revolution as a mindless fantasy.

To substantiate their argument, Miliband and Liebman reduce all the subtlety of the Marxist project to a familiar level - that of caricature. For the two writers, Marxism consists of nothing more than this: "The building and nurturing of a "vanguard" party, highly organised on "democratic centralist" lines, involved in daily class struggle at the point of production and at all other points of tension in capitalist society, with the expectation that capitalist crisis must ultimately reach a point at which it will become unmanageable, as a result of which it will no longer be possible to contain popular anger....At that point, a revolutionary situation will have come to exist, which will make it possible for the "vanguard" party to seize the moment and lead the working class towards a seizure of power.

The bourgeois state will be smashed, and replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat..' Such cynical 'summaries' of the entire Marxist canon are now so commonplace among left-wing theoreticians as to serve as an excellent substitute for reasoned argument.

It is interesting that the anti-Marxist industry rarely considers theoretical issues. Its energies are directed against Marxist politics, while statements on fundamental matters of theory appear only as an afterthought. This approach sums up contemporary anti- Marxism. It represents a political reaction against the consequences of Marx's ideas, not a scientific critique of the theory itself.

There are many causes for this political reaction against Marxism. The most important ones are the demise of the radical petit bourgeoisie since the early seventies, and the fragmentation of Western Stalinism. The implications of these developments will be discussed further in a forthcoming issue of Confrontation. Here our aim is to discuss their effect on theoretical questions and in

Marxism In Our Time • 6 particular, to examine what has become known as the crisis of Marxism'. Our concerns are unashamedly partisan: we wish to show the immediacy and relevance of Marx through a critique of his critics.

The crisis of Marxism Exhortations about the need to update theory in line with current circumstances hold a central place in the anti-Marxist pantheon. Yet the most striking feature of anti-Marxist criticism is its lack of originality. Today's anti-Marxist scholars only repeat points first raised by revisionist thinkers at the turn of the century. The words have changed — we are in the age of the 'new middle class", of the end of 'corporate class consciousness" and of the 'second industrial revolution'. But otherwise little is written which cannot be found in the works of the German revisionist Eduard Bernstein and the Austro-Marxist school. Marxism has its roots in the nineteenth century, but so do the criticisms laid against it today. What, then, really lies behind them? Theoretical disputes cannot be fully grasped on their own terms.

For example, the recent growth of hostility towards the Soviet Union and Stalinism is not the result of new conceptual breakthroughs. Not long ago, the people who now denounce the Kremlin as a menace to civilisation strongly supported it.^ So what has happened to change their views? It cannot be that the Soviet Union has become more repressive and authoritarian. Compared to the terror of the thirties the Soviet Union today looks positively liberal. We have the paradox that, while it kept a dutiful silence under Stalin's reign, the European left now objects to comparatively trivial forms of repression. What explains the shift in left-wing attitudes is not new facts about the Soviet Union, but changes in the left-wing intelligentsia itself.

The capitalist crisis and the decline of traditional working class organisations have thrown radical thought into disarray. The collapse of trade unionism and the profound crisis of identity of the social democratic and Stalinist parties together express the growing irrelevance of traditional collective solutions to the problems

7 • Marxism In Our Time created by world recession. The more such solutions lose credibility, the more convincing individualistic responses appear. Europe has witnessed a growing individualisation of its left-wing intelligentsia.

In the political sphere this has brought about a marked shift to the right. Even intellectuals who proclaim themselves socialist boast about being 'independent' and 'non-aligned". From such a perspective Marxism, with its emphasis on collective struggle, appears as an archaic and even alien ideology.

The course taken by Marxism over the past century has always been conditioned by changing class relations and social development. As a general rule, periods of sharp class antagonism have stimulated interest and support for Marx, while periods of stability have encouraged criticism and attacks. This pattern was already evident in the decades preceding the rise of imperialism, decades in which Marxism achieved considerable influence in the working class. Bitter class conflict and the overtly anti-working class character of the nineteenth-century state appeared to vindicate Marx. However, the subsequent period of prosperity and reform instilled a critical attitude to his theory. In this period Marxism attracted the scorn of a new breed of reformist politicians and was substantially revised by many of its supporters. It was only when an era of revolution opened up with the October Revolution in Russia that Marxism once again began to influence significant sections of the European proletariat.

In addition to the barbs that were naturally thrown against it by the ruling class, Marxism has always faced a challenge from within its own camp. The tendency to revise Marx is proportional to the strength of bourgeois ideology in the working class at any given period. Marxism is open to revision because it is not a closed and defined philosophy. New developments require fresh analysis and Marxist theory has to evolve alongside the changing forms of social relations. Marx himself ridiculed those who expected theory to provide ready-made answers for all time. He lampooned Proudhon and other utopian socialists for 'hunting for a so-called "science" by means of which they want to devise a priori a formula for the "solution of the social question", instead of deriving their science from a critical knowledge of the historical movement'S

Marxism In Our Time • 8 Marxism is not a philosophy or a ready-made system of thought.

Neither does it provide an abstract method of investigation which can simply be applied to new phenomena. Marx's famous criticism of Lassalle was directed precisely against just such an attempt to apply dialectics as a ready-made schema. Writing of Lassalle's efforts in the realm of theory, Marx observed: 'He does it like a schoolboy who has to prove in his exercise that he's got his "essence", "appearance" and "dialectical process" down pat. When the schoolboy has mastered the dialectical method, one can be sure that nevertheless he will be able to conduct this process of thought properly only according to the prescribed recipe and in the sacred forms....He will learn to his cost that to develop a science by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically presented is an altogether different thing from applying an abstract ready-made system of logic to vague notions of a system of this kind.* The open and changing character of Marxism follows from the close relationship it assigns to understanding and experience. For Marxists practice has a central place in theory because understanding comes from man's interaction with nature.

Marxism cannot be developed in isolation from the class struggle.

To become an adequate instrument for that struggle, it must interact continuously with social relations. Revolution exists first as a theoretical possibility. Its fulfilment is found in the class struggle, through a process of continuous interaction between theory and changing social conditions. The result of this process is conscious activity. The problem of theory in and of itself is foreign to Marx. It is through social experience that understanding develops. Writing of the labourer, Marx notes that "by thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature??

Likewise man's consciousness 'not only reflects the objective world' but, as Lenin pointed out, 'creates it' as well." We can now understand the meaning of Marx's oft-quoted remark: *The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it." Marx does not counterpose practice to theory, as is often believed. Rather, he is asserting the fundamental premise of his theory of knowledge: that to interpret the world requires changing it. Academicism is antithetical to Marxism — which is why

9 • Marxism In Our Time there can be no such thing as 'academic Marxism'.

What gives Marxism its revolutionary significance is its evolving character and its dynamic relationship to social change.

Unfortunately even those who describe themselves as Marxists have tended to lose sight of this. Too often, they have ignored the vital task of developing Marx's theory in line with changing social conditions. Instead they take the results of his inquiry as fixed and then attempt to reconcile them with reality. Such orthodox' efforts turn Marxism into dogma and make it vulnerable to revisionist attack. For the revisionists themselves present the results of Marx's analysis as his theory and counterpose it to new social conditions to demonstrate its irrelevance. Thus orthodoxy and revisionism in different ways express the same problem: the failure to develop Marxist theory. Bernstein pioneered the method of contrasting fresh realities to Marx's 'predictions. He observed that from 1880 to 1900 the bourgeois state had begun to be more responsive to democratic pressure, that capitalism experienced a period of stable growth, working class living standards improved and a new middle class was in formation. Bernstein counterposed this "new reality' to Marx's theory of capitalist crisis to show that the latter had become irrelevant and dated. In anticipation of contemporary criticisms of Marx he argued that social conditions have not developed to such an acute opposition of things and classes as depicted in the Manifesto. "o For today's academic Marxists the further passage of time confirms the redundancy of Marx and of the historic mission he assigned the working class. Writing in Marxism Today Stuart Hall recently observed that the Marxist conception of socialism was grounded in an earlier grasp of the historic tendencies of capitalist development.' According to Hall time has undermined the theory and the historic mission it assigns to the working class: *What we are here referring to is therefore more than the collapse of the traditional historic agencies of change. It is the erosion of the cultures of work, economic organisation, social and sexual identities in which the left, in an earlier era unreflectively was rooted. It is therefore necessary to ask, on what new actual forms of social life is socialism's conception of the

Marxism In Our Time • 10 future rooted or grounded today? The answer is by no means obvious."!

Like Bernstein, Hall turns historical change into an argument against Marxism. But Marxism would not be Marxism if it did not presuppose change and the emergence of new forms of social organisation. The revolutionary significance of Marxism Marxism is a total theory and any attempt to isolate certain of its components is bound to give rise to distortions. It is the dialectical materialist method as developed by Marx which provides the key to an appreciation of his theory. Marx's conception of history was materialist — but not in the sense in which this is conventionally understood. Marxist materialism recognises that material reality evolves on the basis of a dialectical relationship between society and nature. This relationship (which Marx called the social relations of production) is governed by social laws which are independent of man's will. Marxism is an attempt to come to terms with these laws with the precision of science.

The distinctive, revolutionary content of Marxism flows from its understanding of the relationship between material reality and subjective consciousness. Marx recognised that relations of production throw up 'definite forms of social consciousness. He remarked: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their * In other words, the relations of production give consciousness. rise to specific ideas, ideologies and so on. This view has been much subsequent debates about the relationship misunderstood in between 'base' and 'superstructure'. Academic Marxists have tried to argue that ideas are autonomous or 'relatively' autonomous from the social relations of production andspeculation abounds about the degree to which the base determines the superstructure. This approach - which reflects the narrow preoccupation of contemporary Marxism with ideology and culture, as opposed to real social and historical trends - presents a break with the Marxist understanding of the relationship between reality and consciousness.

11 • Marxism In Our Time For Marx the base-superstructure problem did not exist. There is no duality here which has to be reconciled. Marx discusses 'definite forms of social consciousness* existing in unity with their content the social relations of production." But Marx shows that forms of consciousness cannot be directly derived from their social content.

They can only be grasped by an analysis which uncovers the mediating links between social relations and consciousness. Marx's theory does not provide a formula for solving this problem, but an approach which must be developed through specific analysis. In his treatment of legal ideology in Grundrisse Marx observes: "The really difficult point to discuss here is how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations. '4 The problem is not to divine the general relationship between base and superstructure. This merely invites abstract philosophical speculation. The problem is to look at each particular social relation in all its specificity, and in all its forms. This becomes clear in Marx's remarks on art: *To examine the connection between spiritual production and material production it is above all necessary to grasp the latter itself not as a general category but in definite historical form....If material production itself is not conceived in its specific historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other."!5 Marx's achievement was to make clear the historically specific nature of social phenomena. For Marx, the task of scientific inquiry was to show how different social determinations interacted in different ways at different times. Only in this way can theory comprehend society in movement.

Since every form of social organisation is historically specific, it follows that it is also transient. Every social order is in flux and at a certain stage gives way to a new one. Marx appreciated that the materialist dialectic was an 'abomination' to the bourgeoisie for precisely this reason. Materialism highlights the change which lies at the core of social development. As Marx put it, materialism regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature no less than its

Marxism In Our Time • 12 momentary existence because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary. For Marx change comes about through the evolution of social relations of production. At a certain stage the growth of the productive forces comes into conflict with the existing social organisation, leading to its displacement.

The displacement of the old society occurs once this conflict becomes acute enough for society to become conscious of its impasse. In Henryk Grossman's succinct phrase, change requires the "slow maturation' of both 'subjective and objective factors.

Hence Marxism combines evolutionary and revolutionary elements in an original manner to form a meaningful unit".!" Beyond a certain point gradual evolution leads to a sudden, major social evolutionary process and the class struggle becomes the engine of social transformation. No system collapses by itself. Revolution requires the intervention of a revolutionary class. But revolutionary struggle is not a chance incident: it is the outcome of the pressure created by material conditions. Once it begins the revolutionary class itself becomes an objective factor in history. This relationship is the basis for the unity between theory and practice. In changing history, the revolutionary class changes itself.

Marx's uniqueness consisted in putting communism on a scientific basis. He demonstrated 1) that capitalism, like every other form of social organisation, is transient 2) that, at a certain stage, capitalist relations of production would act as a brake on the development of the productive forces and 3) that only destroying this brake could guarantee human development. For Marx communism was not a utopia but a stage in historical development whose foundations were already laid within capitalist society. As Marx argued, unless the possibility of communism is already contained within the existing society its realisation depends on faith alone: *If we do not find in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then attempts to explode it would be quixotic."!.

13 • Marxism In Our Time The reforming of Marxism Today virtually every Marxist text is prefaced by a self-conscious disowning of vulgar materialism", 'fundamentalism' or 'reductionism'.

At first sight it is not at all clear why such denunciations of orthodoxy have become so popular. For while left-wing academics are no strangers to vulgarity, materialism is distinctly out of fashion.

Even a superficial survey of new Marxist texts reveals a strong inclination towards idealism and a positive distaste for materialism.

What, then, do the polemics against vulgar materialism really represent? And why are they always associated with injunctions that we rethink the fundamentals of Marxist politics? To give an accurate answer we need to see how the twentieth century has moulded Marxism — how, above all, Marxism was affected by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration and by the failure of the European revolution. The highpoint of Marxism The period 1917-24 can be considered to be the highpoint of Marxism. The social upheaval of these years gave a profound stimulus to the development of Marxist theory. The most outstanding innovations were made by the Bolsheviks, but this was also a vital phase for the development of important theoreticians like Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch and Grossmann.' The Russian Revolution and the problems thrown up by the creation of a new society generated debates which were rich in theoretical content.

Nonetheless there were serious problems. Especially outside Russia, the world's first successful overthrow of capitalism caught the international revolutionary movement unawares. As a result, Marxist theory often lagged behind events — a problem which played a major part in the defeat of the European working class in the twenties. In the Soviet Union the pressure of events forced the Bolsheviks to concentrate on keeping a grip on practical problems.

There was little time left for theoretical elaboration.

Marxism's prestige among the international working class was unprecedented. But there were early signs that the defeat of the European revolution would create tensions in the Marxist camp.

Marxism In Our Time • 14 Predictably the most serious blows came from the reformists. Social democrats loathed revolutionary violence and greeted its defeat in Europe as a vindication of their point of view. The success of the Russian Revolution could not be denied. But it could be dismissed as an aberration, arising out of the peculiarities of Eastern society, which showed that a similar denouement was simply not on in the civilised West. Thus Karl Kautsky's major work of the period portrayed October as a negation of Marxist principles. For him Russia was too backward economically even to dream of building communism: *The Bolsheviks are Marxists and have inspired the proletarian sections coming under their influence with great enthusiasm for Marxism. Their dictatorship, however, is in contradiction to the Marxist teaching that no people can overcome the obstacle offered by the successive phases for their development by a jump, or legal enactment.*20 Kautsky ignored the international dimension of the Russian Revolution and wrote it off as a product of exceptional national circumstances. In counterposing Western to Eastern experience, Kautsky did something else too — he anticipated one of the central themes of what today is called •Western Marxism'. At the time, Kautsky's arguments were demolished by Lenin and Trotsky?' But as the European working class went from one setback to another, Kautsky's views gained wider assent. Even committed Marxists were disoriented by the defeat of the European revolution and the subsequent revival of reformism: 'The West stands still.... The German proletarian movement, languishing in the same swampy morass the entire land is in, leaves its endless crises without the struggle to transform them. Every putsch in Germany goes under, while every idea shoots beyond reality, without influence, almost without meaning.*2 Written in 1924, Ernst Bloch's epitaph summed up the intellectual climate which prevailed as Marxism began to disintegrate.

15 • Marxism In Our Time The Stalinisation of Marxism As October withered and fascism grew, sporadic despair over the impasse faced by the revolutionary movement gave way to more systematic attempts to reinterpret Marxist theory. Stalinism, which transformed Marxism into an apologia for the bureaucracy, played a critical role in this process. But the initial impulse for questioning Marxism came from Western Europe. European Marxists became increasingly preoccupied with the causes of working class defeat.

Attention began to focus on the resilience of the capitalist system and of capitalist ideology. Hit by a succession of reversals, Marxists began to lose sight of the revolutionary potential contained in the contradictory social relations of capitalism.

With pessimism mounting, theoretical work was more and more pursued outside the context of political struggle. Increasingly, Marxist intellectuals acquired the role of passive commentators.

Testing ideas in practice, an activity essential to the development of a transformative theory like Marxism, tended to give way to literary meanderings. Marxist theoreticians became aloof from the class struggle - although Gramsci and Lukács were two honourable exceptions to this trend. Separating theory from the class struggle inevitably led to a loss of direction. Marxists began to react to events and to substitute impressionism for methodical scientific inquiry. It was understandable that they should want to explore the failure of revolution. But instead of situating it in historical perspective, Marxists began to take the problem of working class consciousness as alpha and omega. The greater their obsessions with this problem, the more loosely did they root it in the surrounding material conditions. As years passed, ideology and the bourgeois state came to be regarded as agencies whose power knew no constraints.

Gramsci was a transitional figure who made a considerable contribution to Marxism. Early on, his writings gave a mature, persuasive account of why the revolutionary movement had been able to move to the seizure of power in Russia — and why, in Europe, it remained at a much more primitive level. Gramsci noted: "The determination which in Russia was direct and drove the masses into the streets for a revolutionary uprising, in central and western Europe is

Marxism In Our Time • 16 complicated by all these political superstructures, created by the greater development of capitalism. This makes the action of the masses slower and more prudent, and therefore requires of the revolutionary party a strategy and tactics altogether more complex and long-term than those which were necessary for the Bolsheviks in the period between March and November 1917.23 Gramsci pinpointed the problem that reformism presented in the advanced capitalist countries. His elaboration of this problem was very much in line with the issues discussed in Lenin's writings on the tactic of the united front. Lenin argued that the initial overthrow of capitalism was easy in Russia, but that it would be more difficult for Russia than for the European countries to continue the revolution and bring it to its consummation"." Like Lenin, Gramsci recognised that the spread of state-sponsored organs of class collaboration in Europe resulted in relations between workers and capitalists there being more mediated than in Russia. Reformism therefore acquired particular strength in the European labour movement. This recognition led Lenin to give top priority to the struggle against reformism — an approach endorsed by Gramsci.

However, when this struggle failed to turn out favourably, Gramsci began to exaggerate the power of reformism. The survival of reformism in fact had little to do with its intrinsic strengths. It was rather a tribute to the ineffectiveness and inconsistency of the challenge mounted against it by the European communist movement.2 Gramsci's one-sided interpretation of the problem showed that his theory too began to be coloured by isolation and pessimism. That is why, as Mussolini consolidated his rule, Gramsci's writing acquired a pessimistic tone. In his Prison Notebooks a fixation with culture and ideology leads Gramsci to separate politics from material relations. Gramsci's famous comparison of East and West shows how much he was overawed by the power of the Western bourgeois state: In Russia the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. 26

17 • Marxism In Our Time For Gramsci the 'sturdy structure' of Western society narrowed the scope for revolution. He began to advocate a more long-term approach. That, sooner or later, such an analysis was bound to give rise to reformist conclusions was shown by Gramsci's discovery of the virtues of "passive revolution. Still, Gramsci himself warned of the danger of 'historical defeatism'.? It was left to others to draw out the reformist implications of his theory, particularly after the Second World War, when the search began in earnest for an "alternative model' to the Russian Revolution.

Gramsci lived and died a Marxist, but his theory eventually lost sight of revolution. Although symptomatic of a wider malaise, his influence on Marxism in the late twenties and in the thirties was limited.

In that period, Marxism was much more severely emasculated by the Kremlin, which derived immense authority in the international working class movement from its inheritance of 1917.

In the hands of the Stalinists Marxism became a turgid series of definitions, each of which could always be recast to meet the changing political requirements of the Soviet bureaucracy. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinisation of the Communist International led to the destruction of Marxism as a living force. It still existed, but only in a thoroughly perverted form.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the crisis of Marxism. But in fact Marxism never recovered from the blow it was dealt by Stalinism. Generations of workers and intellectuals learnt their Marxism from Stalin — and understandably ended up rejecting the theory as irrelevant. A handful of Marxist theoreticians survived, but only as marginal figures. Stalinist intellectuals on the other hand tended to absent themselves from the perils of political involvement and retreat instead into the search for personal fulfilment, theorising about history, psychology and aesthetics. Marxism existed only as bureaucratic dogma or as professorial pastime. Its emancipatory role had become a thing of the past.

Marxism In Our Time • 18 Post-war Marxism When people discuss the crisis of Marxism today what they are really talking about is the crisis of Stalinist Marxism. Stalinism turned Marx into a doctrinaire who could provide fixed answers and 'truths' for all time. The results of Marx's scientific inquiry were set in stone while those insights which betrayed the revolutionary thrust of his theory were revised. But Stalinist Marxism met the fate that awaits all dogmas. It began to disintegrate as soon as changing material conditions exposed its incoherence and artificiality.

The chief cause behind the crisis of Stalinist theory was the postwar boom. This contradicted Stalinist thought in all essentials.

Instead of its predicted inevitable collapse, capitalism experienced an unprecedented era of prosperity. Before Stalin died, only minor theoretical modifications were permitted to accommodate this unexpected turn of events. But after he was gone —and particularly after Khrushchev denounced him at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 — the dam burst.2 On the left, the ensuing ideological chaos was generally interpreted as a crisis of Marxism. People who knew Marxism only in its Stalinist form regarded the collapse of the intellectual and political authority of the Stalinist bureaucracy as an indictment of Marxism itself.

A new dimension opened up in the crisis of Marxism. The East- West problem which had already created so many difficulties for Marxists in the inter-war period, now assumed a new form. No longer was it simply a question of accounting for the failure of the Western revolution. It also became necessary to account for Stalinism. And, since Marxism had long been synonymous with Stalinism, the pressure to abandon Marx himself became immense.

The boom stifled Marxism. Growth, stability, the extension of state involvement in social and economic life and marked improvements in working class living standards appeared to confirm the irrelevance of a revolutionary perspective. This period saw the most thoroughgoing attempts to revise Marxism and to transform it into a schematic sociology. Stalinist theoreticians 'updated' Marxism until virtually every component of the original theory was defined out of existence.

19 • Marxism In Our Time Had the post-war boom continued, Marxism would have become an object of historical curiosity. But its demise was halted by social upheaval in the West. In the late sixties the boom began to falter and mass industrial militancy erupted, signalling a revival of class conflict. The renewed manifestation of the tendencies towards stagnation inherent in capital also precipitated a crisis of bourgeois ideology and a radicalisation of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia. This period saw a flowering of Marxism. But it was a Marxism that had still not cut its links with the Stalinist heritage. This post-war Marxism displayed a number of features which we shall now look at.

The separation of theory from the class struggle Marxist theory became uniquely academic. Virtually all Marxist theoreticians of the post-war era were professional academics with no experience of or inclination toward political struggle. This isolation is well-known and many academic Marxists themselves have regularly issued calls to unite theory with practice. Ferdinand Claudin's Some reflections on the crisis of Marxism warned that it could eventually be converted into an academic discipline, without much influence on practical struggles for the transformation of the world.2 In fact Claudin only summed up what had already happened Academic Marxism was not merely an unfortunate product of historical circumstance. It also reflected the social position of the radical intelligentsia. Rudolf Hilferding was the first to contend that you can be a Marxist in theory, but not in practice.3° Following him, Western Marxists began to talk about the 'autonomy' of theory. This approach found its most consistent advocate in the French Stalinist academic Louis Althusser, Althusser coined the presumptuous term *theoretical practice' to justify the contemplative existence preferred by contemporary Marxist theoreticians." Henceforth every intellectual with a mouth or a pen could boast an involvement in theoretical practice. The fact that this absurd notion was taken seriously revealed just how much Western Marxism had been dragged through the dust.

Autonomy of theory meant that subjective inclination became the guiding principle in theoretical development. As a consequence

Marxism In Our Time • 20 even genuine theoretical breakthroughs remained arbitrary and inconsequential, as they were not tested through interaction with the class struggle. Thus a number of Marxist intellectuals who made positive steps towards retrieving the revolutionary content of Marxism — for example, Elmar Altvater and Lucio Colletti-ended up renouncing their views."

New Left Review editor Perry Anderson's well-known Considerations on Western Marxism provides a fascinating display of what happens once theory is given autonomous status. After pages and pages of examples detailing the separation of Marxism from working class politics and bemoaning this phenomenon, Anderson's "Afterword' defends..academic Marxism. In an enviable choice of phrase, Anderson proclaims: *There will thus always remain an inherent scissiparity between knowledge and action, theory and practice, for any possible science of history."33 Not surprisingly, he then goes on to reject every important theoretical conquest of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.

Anderson explains the gap between theory and practice by arguing that, in Stalin's heyday, Marxist intellectuals had two choices: they could knuckle under, join the Stalinist parties and 'retain a certain nominal level of contact with the life of the national working class*; or they could be prophets in the wilderness, shorn of any 'anchorage within the social class for whose benefit theoretical work in Marxism alone has ultimate meaning'.3 This may have been roughly what happened, but it was not a choice a revolutionary Marxist could accept. Once Marxism ceases to interact with society it ceases to be Marxism. The introduction of practice as a central criterion of logic was the starting point for the development of Marxism as a distinct theory. Marx observed: Already with Hegel, the absolute spirit of history has its material in the masses, but only finds adequate expression in philosophy. But the philosopher appears merely as the instrument by which absolute spirit, which makes history, arrives at self-consciousness after the historical movement has been completed. The philosopher's role in history is thus limited to the subsequent consciousness, for the real movement is executed

21 • Marxism In Our Time unconsciously by the absolute spirit. Thus the philosopher arrives postfestum."s Theory separated from the making of history can be no more than after-the-event commentary: an opinion that cannot be tested or developed in the light of social experience. Theory of this kind may yield a few insights about the past, but cannot anticipate trends or shape the future. As Lukács argued, to rise above the level of abstract opinion, theory, 'if it really intends to point the way to its own fulfilment in practice, must develop an 'organisational arm'. A Marxist theoretician has no choice but to be a Marxist politician, to ensure that the struggle for theory yields organisational consequences. Yet this is the course that professional Marxists have always avoided.

What is more, their separation of theory from practice has important political consequences. Their theory ceases to be a transforming one — it blends with reformism. Ultimately it reflects the old reformist separation of the final goal from the existing movement. Such theory, like the Sunday sermons on socialism beloved of classical social democracy, has no practical consequences. The theoretician becomes reconciled to the movement as it is.

Note that celebrating the autonomy of theory also allows Marxist theoreticians to declare their 'independence' from everyday political life. Just as Althusser disclaimed responsibility for French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais, so every autonomous intellectual distances his theories from the more objectionable practices of his party-political mentors. This freelance Marxism is evident in all the major British theoretical journals from Marxism Today to the New Left Review.

The rejection of materialism Unanimity prevails among academic Marxists about the need to reject historical materialism. With working class revolution contained since the inter-war period, Marxists now meditate on spiritual matters. In place of research into the accumulation of capital, they dabble in film and linguistics. Materialism — 'vulgar" "crude' or "simplistic' - has become an object of derision. The

Marxism In Our Time • 22 disdain for what is an essential organising principle of Marxist science is not simply the product of a theoretical misunderstanding.

It is a response to the strength of bourgeois ideology in the post-war period, which has led to a basic lack of conviction in the potential for revolutionary change.

Professional Marxism is so mesmerised by the power of ideas that it can lapse into the irrational. The Frankfurt School, which reduces social analysis to radical Freudianism, expresses this trend most vividly." But the Frankfurt School has only drawn out the logic of anti-materialism in a particularly extreme form. A recent article by two highly respected Marxist academics claims in all seriousness that Western Marxism has defeated historical materialism. ' Such is the force of anti-materialist prejudice in the academy that dissidents feel powerless to resist. Cohen, the author of a confused defence of historical materialism, concludes a subsequent piece in terms which recall the recantations of medieval heretics: *I have come to think more critically about historical materialism. Thave not rejected it, but I have doubts about it. I have also been involved with many others in investigations which seek to preserve what is good in it and eliminate what is bad."9 Picking and choosing is the preferred procedure of Western Marxism. Usually what is chosen are the peripheral aspects of Marxism and what is thrown out is its revolutionary content.

The idealist trajectory of Western Marxism was most clearly marked out by Althusser and — indirectly — by Gramsci. Althusser fragmented Marx's theory, breaking up the dialectical interconnections between concepts. He abstracted concepts like forces and relations of production from their context so as to examine them in all their autonomy. In Althusser's work politics is severed from economics. Virtually every aspect of social life takes on a life of its own. Ideology in particular is elevated into a discrete independent force.40 Althusser's Marxism-as-Thesaurus appeals to the non-dialectical imagination. The confidence with which he defines forces and relations of production stands in sharp contrast to the caution exercised by Marx. Marx noted that the dialectic between these

23 • Marxism In Our Time concepts was one 'whose boundaries are to be determined'.* The definitional approach was alien to Marx precisely because concepts only acquire meaning in relation to each other. Wrenching concepts out of context deprives them of the ability to throw light on the dynamic of social relations. Such procedures represent a break with the Marxist method and a reversion to pre-Hegelian philosophy.

Today many Althusserians have explicitly rejected Marxism. But in the seventies the Althusserian school was the dominant form of Marxism. This was not because its founder produced profound theoretical insights. Indeed Althusser's writings reveal an often embarrassing incomprehension of basic Marxist categories.*2 Rather, Althusser's reinterpretation of Marxism trivialised Marxist concepts, so that they became consistent with bourgeois theory became, in other words, a ready-made model. Althusser inspired a resurgence of radical bourgeois idealism. It was because of this that he attracted a profusion of followers to the method of theoretical practice. The rediscovery of Gramsci in the seventies is more easily explained. Gramsci provided academic Marxism with the authority of an authentic revolutionary. His virtue was that he was dead, so that just about any position could be attributed to him. Althusser himself claimed Gramsci's mantle, modestly intimating that, to his knowledge, Gramsci was the only theoretician 'who went any distance on the road I am taking'.* Another Marxist professor expressed his affinity to Gramsci like this: 'He ascribed to superstructural activities a primary role in Marxist theory. Following in Lenin's footsteps Gramsci defended the primacy of political practice. Lenin however did not analyse the theoretical foundations of such a practice. It was Gramsci who developed the theory of politics and thus founded a Marxist science of politics.*** Thus transformed into a theorist of 'politics, a courageous revolutionary now serves as a model for the separation of theory and practice.

Marxism In Our Time • 24 Theories of impressionism Having dropped historical materialism, Western Marxism dissolves into the pre-Marxist duality of philosophical conjecture and empirical science. Its analysis of social phenomena is empiricist. In the absence of a materialist framework, theory becomes unable to grasp general social trends. Instead the surface appearances generated by capitalist society become the point of departure and the limit of investigation. Thus Western Marxism pursues autonomy to the bitter end. Phenomena are analysed in isolation from each other and the unique and special features of the object of investigation are stressed at the expense of underlying social relationships. Thus, instead of representing real society in movement, theory becomes a series of pigeon-holes. This empiricism is not immediately apparent in the writings of the Western Marxists. Many of their works are heavily philosophical, dealing with 'methodology' rather than empirical investigation. But the problem with abstract methodology is that it remains external to the object of investigation. In place of the historical materialist method, which uncovers the inner links behind surface phenomena, we find only tired universals. Objects of inquiry are forced into abstract definitions. As a result theory becomes unmediated, incapable of embracing the points of transition between it and the object of study. This explains why there is such a separation in the works of Western Marxists between chapters on method and chapters on facts. Ultimately such abstract schemas must yield to the real world, for a changing reality provokes changes in theory. As a result theory becomes unstable and impressionistic. No sooner is one proposal advanced before a 'self-criticism' is published. Impressionism becomes the guiding principle of theoretical development, scientific integrity is jettisoned, and arguments are made, thrown out and forgotten at a dizzying pace. The British academics Hindess and Hirst are the most grotesque example of this trend: they used to publish a new theory every year.

25 • Marxism In Our Time The West is good - the East is bad All Western Marxists follow Kautsky's verdict that October 1917 was an unseemly departure — a product of unparalleled Eastern circumstances from which there is nothing to learn about revolution in the West. The very term 'Western Marxism' is a reaction against Soviet Marxism. However Western Marxists wish to distinguish themselves not only from Stalinism, but from the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. A recent text on the origins of Western Marxism notes: *A non-Western Marxism has dominated the history of Marxism this century: to speak of Western Marxism is to speak of the overwhelming impact exerted upon Marxism itself by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its subsequent development. Not only did a Marxist revolution not take place where it was supposed to (Europe 1917-23) but the Marxist ideology that resulted from this paradoxical set of circumstances— Soviet Marxism — came to prevail in the West as well as Russia.*S Such resistance to 'Eastern' Marxism can take an openly chauvinist form. One British academic recently took it upon himself to remind readers that Marxism is 'after all a Western body of thought, originally formed in the context of Western intellectual tradition in philosophy and social sciences. He added: Western Marxism, from this point of view, is simply the mainstream of Marxist thought; communist orthodoxy a deviation, if not an aberration, engendered in peculiar social and historical conditions.* Keeping the abomination of Leninism at arm's length from European universities has become a key theme in Western Marxism and indicates its reactionary thrust.

Western Marxists often flaunt an almost pathological hatred for the Russian Revolution, portraying it as the source of all the left's problems. According to Claudin the October Revolution opened up a theoretical crisis in Marxism.* Others have gone further, blaming Lenin for Stalinism and — in a splendid twist - slotting Marx himself into a rogues' gallery of 'un-Western' thinkers.* Despite its strong anti-Eastern thrust, however, Western Marxism cannot conceal its origins in Stalinist theory. This is particularly apparent in the Eurocommunist current, which explicitly acknowledges its debt

Marxism In Our Time • 26 to Bukharin, Dimitrov and Togliatti. It may be an irony, but the role played by these leading Stalinist thinkers in the destruction of Leninism strikes a sympathetic chord among Western Marxists.

Repelled by the consequences of Stalinism, Western Marxists remain a product of it. Denunciations of the East are complemented by applause for the West. European Marxists depict Western bourgeois democracy as a launching pad for socialism. Santiago Carrillo, the father of Eurocommunism, argues that 'it is logical that the communist and socialist parties of the developed capitalist West should establish, not just their tactics, but their entire strategy on the basis of the democratic process! * The delight with which Western Marxists regard Western society indicates that their theory has become an ideology of bourgeois order. It is not only against revolutions in the past (1917) but also in the present and the future. In the writings of Althusser the class struggle is reduced to conquering combat positions' inside the bourgeois state. All Western Marxists object strongly to class violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The term 'insurrectionist model' has been coined to caricature the struggle for working class power.

Marxism has become a philosophy of bourgeois democracy.

Poulantzas, whose scathing attacks on 'vulgar Marxism' have been celebrated in centres of educational excellence across Europe, is a fervent advocate of the apologetic doctrine of bourgeois liberalism: *It is necessary to take sides. If we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, recognition of the role of universal suffrage, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms, including for opponents; then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal tack."".

Utopianism Western Marxism represents a reversion to utopian socialism. Its antipathy to historical materialism has produced a theory incapable of identifying the contradictions in the capitalist system which provide the material basis for a new society. Western Marxists

27 • Marxism In Our Time explicitly assert capital's potential for unlimited economic expansion and accept that there are no material forces at work which might necessitate its overthrow. Carrillo argues: *Formerly we Marxists thought that, when a certain ceiling was reached, the capitalist system would become an almost insurmountable obstacle to its own development. But practice has shown that, one way or another, the law of human progress breaks the strait-jacket of the social system.*S Western Marxism is characterised by an almost religious belief in the prospects for capitalism. A recent contribution notes that Marx's theory of capitalism 'cannot be saved". It continues: "Many socialists would now concede that nothing can match capitalism as a stimulant to progress in productive power, but nevertheless favour socialism since they think that somewhat slower productive progress is a reasonable price to pay for better use of productive power at every stage."53 The reactionary implications of this approach are apparent.

Socialism is desirable even though it is less productive than capitalism. This back-to-the-land philosophy turns socialism into a purely ethical question. It becomes a moral ideal which has no grounding in the real relations of production. Western Marxists have no inhibitions about aligning themselves with utopian socialism. A recent New Left Review collection of articles on the arms race called for a 'reworking of the principal traditions of socialist thought' and concluded that the resources of...utopianism will need to be drawn upon and developed again, if socialism is to confront with any realism the universal threat of a military thal, han th wandoned matericism, Western Mari surphing discover its roots in the pre-Marxist utopianism of the early nineteenth century. But while the utopian socialists of that era sought to anticipate the future, Western Marxists flatter themselves on their modernity by looking forward to a future rooted in their rediscovery of the past. Marx and Engels were not contemptuous of the utopian socialists. They praised their vision and moral courage, and pointed

Marxism In Our Time • 28 out that the utopians could not transcend idealism because during their lifetime the material force for revolutionary change was still in its infancy. That was the working class. Its entry on the stage of world history turned socialism into a real possibility and provided the stimulus for the development of Marx's scientific theory of human liberation. A hundred years on, Western Marxism has degenerated to the point where self-inflicted blindness prevents rational insight into the material foundations for social change. It is not surprising that the denial of the revolutionary role of the working class forms a central theme in the writings of Western Marxists. Throughout Europe, Marx is accused of a naive faith in the historic mission of the proletariat. In Britain Marxism Today has pioneered the pluralistic non-class approach to social change. The separation of theory and practice which has been a key feature of post-war Marxism has opened up a gulf between theory and class struggle. This must be bridged by a struggle to retrieve Marxism for the working class.

Those who want to re-establish Marxism as a revolutionary science must be prepared to settle accounts with the past. Marxism cannot simply be reasserted — it has to be developed in relation to the contemporary environment. Our first task is to engage the various revisionist forms of Marxism in an ideological struggle. This is necessary to clear the air and reconstruct the revolutionary content of the theory. But debate will not be enough. The experience of the past has shown that theory must have organisational consequences if its role as a revolutionary science is to be fulfilled.

Frank Richards Notes 1 E Laclau and C Mouffe, Hegemony and socialist strategy, London 1985, p181.

2 E Mandel, 'Marx, the present crisis and the future of Labour", in R Miliband, J Saville, M Liebman, L Panitch eds, Socialist Register 1985-86, Social democracy and after, London 1986. Mandel is the only author represented here who argues in defence of Marxism.

3 R Miliband and M Liebman, "Beyond social democracy", ibid, p483.

29 • Marxism In Our Time 4 The pioneer of this approach is J Ellenstein. See his The Stalin phenomenon, London 1976. Since the publication of this work Ellenstein's condemnations of the Soviet system have become increasingly vitriolic.

K Marx to JB Schweitzer, 24 January 1865, in Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (MESC), Moscow 1975, p165.

6 MESC, op cit, pp94-95 7 K Marx, Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p173.

8 VI Lenin, "Philosophical notebooks", Collected Works (CW), Vol 38, Moscow 1960, p217. 9 "Theses on Feuerbach", Marx-Engels Collected Works (MEW), Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p8. 10 E Bernstein, Evolurionary socialism, New York 1972, p xxv.

11 S Hall, 'Realignment for what?, Marxism Today, December 1985.

12 K Marx, A contribution to the critique of political economy, Moscow 1979, pp20-21. 13 Ibid. 14 K Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth 1973, p109. On this point see the excellent discussion in Chapter 4 of II Rubin, Essays on Marx's theory of value, Detroit 1972 15 K Marx, Theories of surplus value Part 1, Moscow 1968, p285.

16 K Marx, Capital Vol 1, op cit, p29.

17 H Grossman, The evolutionist revolt against classical economics", Part 2, The Journal of Political Economy, No 6, New York 1943, p519.

18 K Marx, Grundrisse, op cit, p159, 19 The first significant contribution in this respect was Lenin's Philosophical notebooks", CW Vol 38. Other important contributions were K Korsch, "Marxism and philosophy, in Marxism and philosophy, London 1972, and G Lukács, History and class consciousness, London 1968. In the field of the Marxist critique of political economy, Henryk Grossman made important innovations, although his major work was not published until the end of the twenties. See his Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgesetz des Kapitals, Frankfurt 1967. 20 21 Vol 28, op cit and L Trotsky, Terrorism and communism, London 1975 22 Cited in A Arato & P Breiner, The young Lukáes and the origins of Western Marxism, London 1974, p184.

23 A Gramsci, Selections from political writings 1921-26, London 1978, pp199- 24 VI Lenin, 'Notes on "Left Wing" communism", CW Vol 31, p64 25 On this point see F Richards, *The rise, fall and reconstitution of social democracy', in Revolutionary Communist Papers No 8, London 1981, pp 13-16.

26 A Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks, London 1971, p238.

27 Ibid, pl14. 28 F Füredi, The Soviet Union demystified, London 1986, pp6311.

29 F Claudin, 'Some reflections on the crisis of Marxism", Socialist Review May- June 1979, p138.

Marxism In Our Time • 30 Hilferding noted: "It is therefore false to suppose, as is widely done...that Marxism is simply identical with socialism. In logical terms Marxism considered only as a scientific system, and disregarding its historical effects, is only a theory of the laws of motion of society. It is quite possible for someone who is convinced that socialism will triumph in the end to join in the fight against it." See R Hilferding, Finance capital, London 1981, p23. This view has been endorsed by a typical representative of the British radical intelligentsia, Alan Jones. Writing in the now defunct Trotskyist Red Weekly he observed •Marxist theory is not the same as Marxist politics. It is possible to combine brilliance in the first with renegacy in the second' (21 April 1977). Red Weekly's successor Socialist Action shows that Alan Jones was too modest. In fact it is possible to combine renegacy in both.

See L Althusser, For Marx, New York 1969, p12.

Altvater's articles are published in the German journal Probleme des Klassenkampfs. See the collection of Colletti's essays in L Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: studies in ideology and society, London 1972.

Yes, I too had to consult a dictionary to discover the meaning of scissiparity.

See P Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1979, pl10.

Ibid, p44. 35 K Marx & F Engels, "The Holy Family", in MECW Vol 4.

36 G Lukács, History and class consciousness, op cit, p299.

On the Frankfurt School, see M Jay, The dialectical imagination, Kingswood 1976. A Levine & EO Wright, 'History and forces of production', in New Left Review No 123, p48. 39 GA Cohen, 'Forces and relations of production', in B Matthews ed, Marx 100 years on, London 1983, p125.

40 L Althusser, "Ideology and ideological state apparatus, in Lenin and philosophy and other essays, London 1977.

K Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth 1973, p109.

His "Preface to Capital (in Lenin and philosophy, op cit) shows that Althusser has no inkling of the basic concepts of the text. Marx pointed out that Capital Vol 1 is a study of the general features of capitalism. Althusser states that it is a study of 'the capitalist mode of production' (p76). Since he does not grasp the logical construction of Capital and its derivation of one concept from the other, Althusser suggests his readers 'put the whole of Part One aside for the time being and begin your reading with Part Two'. He argues: 'In my opinion it is impossibic to begin (even to begin) to understand Part One until you have read and reread the whole of Volume One, starting with Part Two' (pp 79-80). Marx, of course, would have argued that it is impossible to understand Capital unless you begin at the beginning.

Althusser's philistinism is revealed by his empiricist grasp of the concepts of Capital. There are many examples of this. For example he argues that the theory of surplus value is one 'which proletarians will understand without any difficulty, because it is quite simply the scientific theory of something they experience every day: class exploitation' (p80). This naive view of Marx's Capital is unfortunately shared by many of Althusser's academic Marxist colleagues. 43 Ibid, p131.

31 • Marxism In Our Time 44 L Salamini, The sociology of political praxis: an introduction to Gramscis theory, London 1981, pl2 45 A Arato & P Breiner, op cit, p xi.

46 T Bottomore, "Sociology", in D McClellan, Marx: the first 100 years, Fontana 1983, pp116-17. 47 F Claudin, op cit, p137.

48 In France a whole school of thought — the 'new philosophers' - has converged around this theme. Many of them sport ex-Marxist credentials.

Regis Debray, the former hero of the new left, informed the British public of his recantation of his former adherence to Marxism, saying: "My reputation in Britain is a bit false, I think. They still take me for a man of the lett....In politics, well, I suppose I am, but in my philosophy it is different. It is not that I feel I have been deceived or betrayed, but I have been surprised. I am surprised that Marxist societies which say they believe in scientific socialism are as much, no, even more religious than the ones they replaced. See the Guardian, 4 June 1983. 49 S Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the state, London 1977, p155.

50 L Althusser, Lenin and philosophy, op cit, p140 51 N Poulantzas, Towards democratic socialism', in New Left Review No 109, May-June 1978, pp83-84. 52 S Carrillo, op cit, p34.

53 GA Cohen, op cit, pp 128-30.

54 New Left Review ed, Exterminism and Cold War, London 1982, pp vii-viii.

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