Prophet and loss: Marxism today

WHEN THE global recession hit the spectre of Marxism rose again, at least in elite circles. Articles in grand bourgeois newspapers such as the International Herald Tribune and Financial Times noted the rising popularity of Marx’s famous – and famously little-read – Capital, including, bizarrely, in graphic novel form and as a musical. Francis Wheen has a lot to answer for.

Of course, there are two things that have been entirely absent from this Marxist revival: working class militancy and Marxism as a living political tradition centred on collective self-interest.

It would be nice to blame Francis Fukuyama, Thatcher, Reagan or some other bastard from (the end of) history for the perverted zombie Marx we are faced with today but the truth is that the fault lies elsewhere.

It lies with us, the left. We ruined Marx as surely as the Russians made a ghoulish Catholic-style freakshow of Lenin’s mortal remains.
 
The two dominant trends in Marxism for much of the twentieth century were both deformed caricatures of Marx: ‘official’ communism or Stalinism and social democracy. Both had their occasional triumphs such as rapid industrialisation in Russia and the NHS in Britain and were not entirely ‘evil’ – just about 90 per cent bullshit.

The two finally merged in the explicitly anti-Marxist New Labour project of the 1990s. New Labour arrived, remember, via Marxism Today magazine which, while technically published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, did everything it could to repudiate Marx, preferring post-Marxist discourse derived from French philosophy. It is hardly surprising that the Young Turks of the Communist Party should want to rebel against the stifling greyness (and apologias for militarism) that the party represented but in (mis-) locating the fault in Marx they did, as most Marxists eventually do, little more than throw the baby out with the stinking sewer water.

Irish Marxism was, more or less, the sole preserve of the Workers’ Party, itself a Stalinist mutation of the IRA which eventually folded into the Labour party, having long abandoned both Marx and Connolly. The dozens of other Marxist and Marxoid groups, from the Communist Party of Ireland to the People’s Democracy, had much more limited influence, certainly in terms of electoral politics and public attention though both had their roles in the trade unions and civil rights movement.

There is nothing wrong with updating Marx or saying he got things wrong. Marx was an economist, philosopher and, as Engels called him in his eulogy, above all a ‘revolutionist’. What he was not was a prophet. Unfortunately the Stalinists and social democrats ossified the old, dead, German bastard and made monuments of his head at the expense of its contents.

There have been myriad other trends on the Marxist left: libertarians (who, sadly, have had too scant an influence to go over here), Trotskyists and New Leftists of the 1960s.

Of the rampant moronism that is Maoism I shall not even speak. The only thing Maoism has ever had going for it is cheap editions of Marxist books.

The Trotskyists appeared in opposition to Stalin’s degeneration of the nascent Soviet Union. While they argued over the specific character of the state – was it a deformed workers’ state, a bureaucratic collectivist state or simply a capitalist state in drag – they were right that something had gone badly wrong since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Still, the Trotskyists were – and are – one-eyed, seeing everything through the prism of Stalin and his cronies. Trotskyist groups today, such as the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party front organisation People Before Profit, rarely talk about the Russian question in public these days but unfortunately for all their orientation toward contemporary struggles, they remain mired in the events of the past.

The New Leftists, meanwhile, delivered a real abortion of a political movement on the doorstep of Marxism. From the pointless and bloody individual terrorism of Baader-Meinhof to the stuntist Situationists and the elitist theorising of their pet philosophers, there is little worth rescuing from the rubble of this 1960s Marxoidism.

The students of the elite Sorbonne who tore-up paving stones and hurled them at the ‘fascist’ police were at least as motivated by the desire for opposite-sex cohabitation at the institution as by anything we would recognise as politics. The many joys of fucking aside – and who knows where mass complaint will next originate – students were never going to be the source of the liberation of all humanity.

This fundamental mistake on the part of the so-called New Left of the 1960s is still playing out today. In ditching the working class in favour of various victimised groups – students, minorities, women, gays, prisoners, peasants – the New Leftists mistook the reason why Marx took the side of the working class in the first place. Marx was neither a mendicant Catholic nor an aficionado of Victorian music hall comedy – his interest in the working class was not borne of pity or love, it was in their potential to transform the world.

By lionising what amount to sectional complaints these neo-Marxists made an elementary error. It’s not that women, minorities, gays and so on haven’t suffered – they manifestly have, often appallingly. The attempted extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany, for instance, is a unique horror in human history despite other atrocities, such as the Spanish conquest of the Americas, having higher body counts.

The point isn’t to have suffered, the point is the ability to do something to transform the situation. The point is to change it, as someone surely once wrote.

All liberation movements prior to proletarian socialism – and a good many since – were based on the liberation of minorities, whether in their self-interest or ‘for their own good’. What Marxism (and proletarian anarchism) did was to locate in the working class a universal class in whose interest was the transformation of all social and economic relations. (1)

‘The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air’, wrote Marx and Engels themselves in the Communist Manifesto. (2)

In this single quotation we can understand the Marxist stance of critical support for oppressed minorities such as Third World liberationists, feminists, Irish republicans, gay liberationists – all have a right to freedom but none can deliver anything more than partial, and sectional, liberation on their own. The proletariat, or working class, transcends all of these groups not because it has some moral or spiritual character that others lack but because its liberation requires the liberation of all humanity – ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’ (3) doesn’t mean that history was one long Miners’ Strike, it means various groups have always struggled for economic and political power. Overturning the economic oppression of the those who produce the wealth in society, the great majority of humanity, would transform society in the interests of all. The communist society would liberate the toff from his alienation as much as the cloth-capped worker of the 1920s.

And today? The majority of us are still alienated, we still work to produce value which becomes someone else’s private profit and yet there is less sign than ever of working class militancy.

Today when we talk of the working class things are confused beyond imagination. For a start, the middle class barely exists as an economic category – and yet we all see ourselves as middle class. Your humble self-employed author is ‘petit bourgeois’ but has, no doubt, less money than many of this article’s readers. This is because classes exist in relation to capitalist production, not as signs of aesthetic or other tastes or even a matter of income.

By the same token, despite the fact that working class people exist, both relatively well off and totally immiserated, there is no political meaning to the working class.

I don’t know who worked as gravediggers in Highgate Cemetery in 1879 but whoever it was that dug the hole that Marx’s corpse was slung into, it was his own followers who truly buried him.

Whither Marxism today? Who knows… The old bastard’s name still has the power to frighten the horses – I remember someone once complaining that the Revolutionary Communist Party would never win an election with a name like that, rather missing the point it has to be said. In this at least Marxism still has value.

Still, when the next general election rolls around voters would be wise to beware of socialists bearing newspapers.

(1) Marxism and proletarian anarchism share a common history and did not diverge until well after the Paris Commune of 1871.
(2) The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Penguin, 2004
(3) Ibid