Revolutionaries (21 page)

Indeed, in a curious way history has time and again compensated, at least in part, for the errors of British marxists, both by proving Marx right and by demonstrating the inadequacy of the alternatives – whether reformist or revolutionary – which were suggested. It did so by demonstrating, time and again, the fragility of that capitalist system whose stability and strength provided the main argument for both reformists and ultra-revolutionaries. For the reformist argued, with Bernstein and the Fabians, that there was no point in talking about revolution when capitalism looked like lasting for as long as anyone could predict; the only sensible course was to get used to its stability and concentrate on improvements within it. On the other hand the ultra-revolutionaries argued, like so many pre-1914 syndicalists, that there was no point in hoping that history would raise the consciousness of the workers to a new level, because historical development seemed to produce capitalist permanence. It made more sense to raise it by the propaganda of action, by inspiring ‘myths', by the sheer effort of the revolutionary will.

Both were wrong in their prescriptions, though not entirely wrong in their critique of the ‘sit-back-and-wait-for-history-to-do-the-job-for-us' determinism of orthodox social democracy. Both were wrong because in one way or another the instability and the growing contradictions of capitalism have reasserted themselves periodically: e.g. in war, in some form or other of economic disruption, in the growing contradiction between the advanced and the under-developed countries. The very fact that the ultra-left existed and became a significant force was a symptom of the acuteness of these contradictions before 1914, and it is so today. And whenever history once again proved that Marx's analysis of capitalism was a better guide to reality than
Rostow's or Galbraith's, or whoever was in fashion at the time, men tended to turn again to the marxists in so far as they were neither too sectarian nor too opportunist; that is to say in so far as they avoided the double temptation of revolutionaries who operate for long periods under conditions of stable capitalism.

So we may conclude that Marx's influence on British labour could not be expected to be as great as his enthusiastic followers would like it to be. Nevertheless it was, is, and is likely to be, rather greater than both they and the anti-marxists have often supposed. At the same time it was and is smaller (within the limits of historical realism) than it might have been but for the errors of British marxists at crucial stages of the development of the modern labour and socialist movement; errors both of the ‘right' and of the ‘left': errors which are not confined to any marxist organization, great or small. However, we cannot make Marx himself responsible for them. What both he and Engels had expected of the British labour movement after the Chartist era was modest enough. They had simply expected that it would once again establish itself as an independent political as well as trade unionist class movement, that it should found its own political party, and rediscover both the confidence in British workers as a class and the decisive weight of the working class in the politics of Britain. They were too realistic to expect more in their lifetime, and indeed the labour movement did not quite achieve even these modest objectives before Engels's death.

The British marxists would have done well to listen to Engels's advice, while he was alive, for it was very sound. Nevertheless, even if they had, within a few years of his death the British labour movement had come to a point where Engels's opinions about it, and even less those of Marx who had said so little on the subject after the early 1870s, were no longer of much specific relevance to the situation. If Marx's theory was to be a guide to action for British marxists, they would henceforth have to do the work themselves. They would have to learn the
method of Marx, and not only his text, or that of any of his successors. They would have to make their own analysis of what was happening in British capitalism and of the concrete political situations in which the movement found itself. They would have to work out the best ways to organize, their perspectives and programmes, and their role in the wider labour movement. These are still the tasks of those who wish to follow Marx in Britain, or in any other country.

¹
Marx to Engels, 16 April 1863.

²
Engels to Marx, 7 October 1858.

³
Marx to Meyer and Vogt, 9 October 1870.

⁴
Marx,
Confidential Circular
, 1870 (
Werke
, vol. 16, p. 415).

⁵
Marx,
Speech after The Hague Congress 1872
(
Werke
, vol. 18, p. 160); Marx,
Konspekt der Debatten über das Sozialistengesetz
(K. Marx-F. Engels,
Brief an A. Bebel., W. Liebknecht, K. Kautsky und Andre
1, p. 516); F. Engels, Preface to English translation of
Capital I
.

⁶
Marx to Bolte, 23 November 1871.

⁷
Marx to Engels, 10 December 1869.

⁸
Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue, 5 March 1870.

The purpose of my talk is to start discussion on the basis of two questions: why is marxism flourishing today? and how is it flourishing today? You may say that both these beg another question, namely: is it flourishing today? Well, is it? The answer must be yes and no. Marxist socialist movements are on the whole not particularly successful at the moment, and the international communist movement is split, and thus greatly weakened.

It may be that this is to some extent offset by the tendency of other movements, such as those of national and social liberation in many of the emerging countries, to draw closer to marxism, to learn from it, perhaps even to accept it as the basis of their theoretical analysis. It may be that the present phase is temporary. Nevertheless, the general picture of the international labour movement today by no means encourages a state of euphoria.

On the other hand, there can be no doubt whatever that the intellectual appeal of marxism, and I should add the intellectual vitality of marxism, has increased quite remarkably in the past ten years or so. This applies inside and outside communist parties, inside and outside countries of strong marxist labour movements. It applies, for instance, to some extent among students and other intellectuals in countries like West Germany
and the United States, in which marxist political organizations are either illegal, or negligible, or both. If you want a rough measure of it, you can find it in the number and circulation of various openly marxist books, which is much greater today, I fancy, than it was say in the 1930s, even at the height of the
Left Book Club
.

You can also find it in the general respect for Marx and marxism which exists in certain fields of academic work, such as history and sociology, though this does not mean that Marx, while respected, is also accepted. I think there can be no doubt that we are at present living through a period when marxism is flourishing, though marxist labour movements may not always be.

What is strange about this situation is that in the developed capitalist countries it occurs during a period of unexampled prosperity, and what is more, after the major marxist organizations – the communist parties – were fairly heavily discredited intellectually by the revelations of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The situation during the last major advance of marxism in the 1930s and 1940s was quite different; marxism advanced because capitalism was obviously in crisis, quite possibly, as many thought, its final crisis, because it was in a political crisis, as shown by the advance of fascism and war, because communists were the best anti-fascists, and lastly, because of the direct appeal of the Soviet Union. And marxism consequently advanced overwhelmingly in the form of a strengthening of communist parties.

The most popular marxist case against capitalism was that it would not work; against liberal bourgeois democracy, that it was ceasing to exist, being replaced by fascism. I do not say that this was all of the marxist analysis, but it was certainly the part which struck home most immediately. None of these three powerful arguments operate very strongly today in the developed capitalist countries.

Why then did marxism not merely survive, but in many ways revive in the past ten years? Clearly the first conclusion is, that its strength does not depend on such elementary failures of capitalism as mass unemployment and economic collapse. Of course in countries where the case against capitalism (in the form of imperialism or neo-imperialism) remains obvious, where starvation and misery are widespread, the arguments for marxism are much simpler. But just because they are not so simple in Britain and France as in Peru and India, I am in this talk concentrating on the situation in the advanced capitalist countries.

Yet having established that marxism flourishes today, we must nevertheless look at the peculiar situation in which its revival is taking place. Not to beat about the bush, just because it is so entirely different from that of the 1930s and 1940s, a general trend towards marxism is combined with a disintegration of the traditional marxist analysis. In the years immediately after the war attempts were still being made to maintain the old arguments. Capitalist stability, it was said, was not going to last. Well, perhaps in the long view this is true, but it has certainly lasted for the best part of twenty years, which few marxists expected. The liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples, some argued, was a sham. Well, this is certainly true in the same sense that mere political independence is not enough, and can lead to an informal type of economic domination which we now call ‘neo-colonialism'. Nevertheless, it has made a fundamental difference to the political configuration of most parts of the world, which few marxists predicted or were immediately prepared for.

The advance of socialism, most of us thought, would not necessarily be the unaided work of the communists, but it would certainly depend on the efforts of a single united worldwide communist movement organized round the Soviet Union. But for various reasons this single world communist movement has
tended to develop tensions within it, and even to split, and our regrets do not alter the facts. Other ways of national and social liberation, perhaps even of achieving socialism, emerged in some colonial and semi-colonial countries independently of the communists, or where the communists were so weak as not to play a major role. Lastly, within marxism itself the end of stalinism brought a major crisis, and much rethinking. This is the setting for the ‘dialogue on marxism' which is my subject.

This dialogue therefore takes two major forms: a discussion between marxist and non-marxists, and a discussion between different kinds of marxists, or rather between marxists holding different views on various theoretical and practical topics, both within communist parties, between supporters of rival communist parties (in some rather unfortunate countries) and between communist and non-communist marxists. None of these forms is new. For instance, until the first great split within the marxist movements during and after the first world war and the October revolution, it was accepted that a constant process of debate was normal within the social democratic parties.

Even the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party did not actually split organizationally until just before the first world war, though we have mistakenly learned to think of bolsheviks and mensheviks as separate much earlier. And, as we are now remembering, even after the revolution discussion between widely different viewpoints on ideological and practical matters was accepted as normal in the Soviet Communist Party and the international communist movement until, certainly, around 1930. Still, for a generation – say from 1930 to 1956 – the dialogue of marxism atrophied.

This applies both to the dialogue between marxists and non-marxists and between different views within marxism. As for the non-marxists, we were very keen to confront them, to tell them what marxism was, to expound and propagate it, to polemize against its adversaries. But we did not believe that there was
anything we could learn from them ourselves. A conversation in which one partner is expected to listen and the other not, is not a dialogue. The terms in which we spoke of such confrontations reflected this. We spoke of the ‘battle of ideas', of ‘partisanship' in intellectual discussion, even – at the peak of sectarianism in the early 1950s – of ‘bourgeois' versus ‘proletarian' science.
¹

Increasingly we eliminated all elements other than those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin or what had been accepted as orthodox in the Soviet Union: any theories of art other than ‘socialist realism', any psychology other than Pavlov's, even at times any biology other than Lysenko's. Hegel was pushed out of marxism, as in the
Short History of the C P S U
, even Einstein roused suspicions, not to mention ‘bourgeois' social science as a whole. The more unconvincing our own official beliefs were, the less we could afford a dialogue, and it is interesting that we spoke more often of the ‘defence' of marxism than of its power to penetrate. And of course this was natural. How could we discuss, say, the history of the Soviet Union, if we left Trotsky out of it, or thought of him as a foreign agent? At most we could write books and reviews proving to ourselves that we need not listen to those who took a different view.

After Stalin it became increasingly clear that this would not do, and for two reasons: first, because it deprived socialism itself of important tools of research and planning, as notably in economics and the social sciences. (One of the ironies of the situation was, that some of the economic ideas which we deprived ourselves of had actually been developed by marxists in Russia during the 1920s, for instance, much of the modern
theory of economic development and the techniques of planning and national accounting.) Second, because we largely deprived ourselves of marxism as a means of propaganda. People might well, as during the war in resistance movements, join communist parties for class reasons or because there were the best fighters against Hitler. They might then become marxists, and our very effective methods of education helped them to do so. But very few people after the 1930s became communists because of the scientific power of Marx's ideas.