The Legacy of Marxism

Contemporary Challenges, Conflicts, and Developments

Matthew Johnson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441103499
• eBook ISBN: 9781441113511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Marx's influence is evident in a range of often incompatible and contradictory political movements and intellectual approaches. With a number of those movements now discredited by the experience of 'really existing socialism', and the academic left gravitating towards approaches which eschew 'authoritarian', 'essentialist' and 'ethnocentric' elements of orthodox Marxism, the relevance of Marx has been called into question. Featuring chapters by Norman Geras, Joseph Femia, Alan Johnson, Paul Bowman, Ronaldo Munck, Lawrence Wilde, Mark Cowling, Chengyi Peng, Terrell Carver, Oliver Harrison and Stuart Sim, this book is an attempt to examine means by which the left can make real, substantive and positive contributions to contemporary debate. The collection examines such topics as: the meaning of Marxism and pluralism within the left; Marxism's scientific credentials; Žižek, revolution, democracy and cultural studies; the politics of development; the relationship between Marxism and global capitalism; the global justice debate and Marx's rejection of moral discourse; the analysis of crime and criminal justice; Chinese society and constitutional diversity, and the relationship between Marxism and post-Marxism.

CHAPTER ONE

What does it mean to be a Marxist?*

Norman Geras

I should like to begin by thanking the organizers of this conference for inviting me to take part. I am particularly glad of the opportunity to speak on this topic since it is one I have thought much about in recent times, feeling as I do that there are ways in which I continue to be a Marxist, but also that there is one way in which I don’t. I’ll get to that later. Let me also say at the outset, having brought up the subject of my own relationship to Marxism, that I shall be making further reference to it here. The issues I want to discuss are of quite general import; but I haven’t found it possible to discuss them in a general way without at the same time touching on this individual, biographical dimension.

I shall distinguish three meanings of ‘being a Marxist’. I don’t say that these exhaust the field of possible meanings. They are merely three meanings of interest to me and around which I find it convenient to organize my thoughts. To signal the general shape of what I will go on to say, these three meanings may be labelled, for short, personal, intellectual and socio-political ways of being a Marxist. I deal with them in turn.

Personal

This first meaning is conceptually quite straightforward, but it is not uninteresting for all that. For someone to be a Marxist, in the first – personal – sense I want to distinguish, he or she must (a) subscribe to a significant selection of recognized Marxist beliefs and (b) describe him or herself as a Marxist. Let me elaborate on each of those two points.

(a) I put it the way I do – speaking of a significant selection of recognized Marxist beliefs – because I don’t think there is any single essential, or obligatory, tenet of Marxist doctrine or theory without which a person must fail in their self-identification as a Marxist. In my experience this is not always agreed among Marxists themselves. I have come across people who regarded acceptance of the labour theory of value – or, more bizarrely, of the falling rate of profit – as a sine qua non of authentic Marxist identity. More famously perhaps, Lenin wrote in Chapter 2 of The State and Revolution that ‘Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Lenin 1949: 33). But given the breadth as well as the historical age of Marxism, and the consequent intellectual diversification of it, such attempts to pin down a single compulsory requirement of Marxist belief strike me as absurd. As Stefan Collini (2011) wrote in The Guardian a week ago, ‘A quite extraordinarily rich and sophisticated body of ideas developed, and continues to develop, under this label’ – he is referring to Marxism – and as Marxism has not been a church (despite certain religion-like features displayed in some of its branches; despite the view of certain of its critics that it is a secular variant of religion), it is not up to anyone to decree that adherence to any single thesis is indispensable to being a Marxist.

Naturally, it would not be sensible to call someone a Marxist on the basis of his or her signing up to some isolated and inconsequential proposition(s) lifted from, say, Capital or the Communist Manifesto, and that is why I refer, in the first condition above, to adherence to some significant plurality of Marxist beliefs. I shall give an illustration of the point. When asked a few years ago whether I still thought of myself as a Marxist, I answered that I did, and gave three reasons why I did. They were: (i) that historical materialism is broadly true – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say here, where I’m not spelling out the whole answer with its qualifications, true enough; (ii) that Marxism involves an ‘enduring commitment to the goal of an egalitarian, non-exploitative society’; and (iii) that I valued ‘Marxism’s focus upon what is sometimes called the problem of agency: the problem of finding a route, the active social forces, between existing historical tendencies and the achievement of a substantially egalitarian society’. I would still, today, give these reasons for my being a Marxist; and I offer them also as an example of how being a Marxist depends, in the first of the two conditions I have proposed, on affirming some significant conjunction of Marxist beliefs.

What about the second condition? This is (ii) that the person who affirms the relevant beliefs describes him or herself as a Marxist. I add it as a second requirement not only because, Marxism not being a church, nobody is in a position to insist for anyone else on their membership of it: Marxism is a broad intellectual tradition, and one is free to adhere to it or not, as one chooses. But there is an additional reason for this possibility of choice, one that has long been clear to me as a matter of simple experience and that I shall now try to exemplify in quasi-formal terms.

Imagine someone who sees himself as a Marxist, but not in the sense of slavishly adhering to every important element of what he takes to be Marxist thinking; in the sense, rather, of using his critical faculties to distinguish what is right from what is wrong in that tradition and upholding only those elements he sees as viable. Thus, he says that he is a Marxist because of p, q and r, all these being aspects of Marxist thought which he takes to be true and/or valuable, and despite x, y and z, also aspects of Marxist thought but which he thinks are wrong and to be rejected. Now, here is a second person and she, it just so happens, reverses the weighting put on the very same pair of sets of components of Marxist thought. She says that she is not a Marxist, this because of x, y and z, which she, like the other guy, thinks are wrong, and despite p, q and r, which she too finds true and/or valuable, but not true or valuable enough to outweigh the wrongness and disvalue of x, y and z. These are two people, in other words, who agree that Marxism is good in the very same ways and no good in the very same ways; yet the two of them divide over whether to call themselves Marxists.

Thus, it is perfectly easy to imagine someone saying in response to my declaration of intellectual allegiance of eight years ago that, while agreeing with me that there’s a lot of truth in historical materialism, and that the goal of an egalitarian, non-exploitative society is a good one, and that Marxism’s focus on the problem of agency showed a commendable sense of social and political realism – nonetheless they do not subscribe to Marxism, preferring to identify with a radical left liberalism. Why they do not subscribe to Marxism is, let us say, that the insufficient attention of the tradition to ethical issues, and the lack of an adequate theory within it of political democracy, and the common dismissal by Marxists of the merits of liberalism, have all been seriously disabling features of the tradition, time and again leading its adherents astray. It is not by accident that I cite as weaknesses of Marxism features that I really do take to be such. I call myself a Marxist despite them. I can well understand why others might decline to call themselves Marxists because of them.

There is a sort of existential choice one makes. The choice is based on reasons, as I have tried to show, but the reasons are guiding rather than forcing ones, and other factors come into play, though I leave aside what those other factors are.

Intellectual

I turn to my second meaning of being a Marxist, the one that I have called the ‘intellectual’ meaning. What I have in mind here is that, as well as having some relevant combination of Marxist beliefs, a person can work – as writer, political publicist, academic, thinker, researcher – within the intellectual tradition begun by Marx and Engels and developed by later figures. They can work as Marxists, write as Marxists, by engaging with major themes or thinkers of the tradition, by wrestling with problems they perceive it to have left unresolved, by applying Marxist concepts in fresh domains, by doing new research to expand previously undeveloped aspects of Marxist thought and so on. Here, too, I would want to emphasize the breadth and variety we have seen in this way of being a Marxist.

For Marxist intellectual work embraces the work of historians who have seen themselves as applying the methods and insights of the materialist conception of history to the study of particular countries, social formations, historical periods; of political economists writing on the phases of capitalist development, today on globalization; political philosophers studying the ideas of Marxist thinkers, whether to clarify their meaning, take them further or remedy deficiencies they find there; literary and cultural theorists, interpreting literary texts and other cultural products in the light of Marxist concepts; sociologists of development; students of labour movements; those attempting to theorize the nature of fascism; etc. Whatever its weaknesses and its failures, one of the strengths of Marxism has surely been that it could animate the work of so many people across so many disciplines.

In this connection, also, however, I want to propose that one shouldn’t think of Marxist intellectual work in too fixed and narrow a way – so that writing history or doing political economy can be seen as a straightforwardly Marxist type of activity; whereas, say, doing moral philosophy is not, because moral philosophy isn’t something Marx himself engaged in and it has not been a notable feature of Marxist discussion since Marx. For suppose, as is in fact the case, that Marxism has been deficient in certain areas, saying nothing, or nothing useful, or not much, or the wrong things; and one wants to try and make good the deficiency, help to fill the gap. I shall suggest two examples: one from my own work and the other more speculative.

What does each of us owe to other people in the way of aid or rescue when their situation is dire – life-threateningly dire? What is the extent of our duty to others under such circumstances, assuming there is one? Now, one can ask of these questions: are they Marxist questions? They’re obviously not specifically Marxist since anyone could ask them; they are of quite general philosophical and indeed human concern. But they should be questions of interest to Marxists, since the notion of solidarity, including international solidarity, has been important to Marxists. They are, in any event, questions that I asked in my book (1998) The Contract of Mutual Indifference. They illustrate the fact that there are questions that have not been central in the Marxist canon, but that it is proper for Marxists to pursue – proper because they are questions that arise directly from what are more specifically Marxist concerns. That someone could raise and try to answer the very same questions without relating them to any Marxist context is true, but it isn’t relevant to the point I’m making: which is that the development of Marxist thought must sometimes involve working in intellectual regions, such as moral philosophy, where its presence has hitherto been weak to non-existent.

My second example I will merely gesture towards, sweepingly, as being a general requirement if political Marxism is to thrive again in future – a prospect I no longer take for granted. Marxism has been characterized by a huge deficit with respect to democracy. The deficit has been both theoretical and practical. Theoretical because, envisaging the transformation of the world, no less, Marxism never adequately projected the theory of political democracy that would be adequate to cope with so far-reaching a task. And practical because, partly in consequence, Marxist movements have time and again fallen into anti-democratic and murderous ways. I will do no more than allude to the Stalinist experience, because it is definitive for many as a warning of what Marxism could become. Unless, today and tomorrow, Marxists show themselves willing to engage fully with the intellectual resources of liberalism – yes, liberalism, this so often maligned figure on the Marxist left – and to absorb everything that liberalism knows and Marxists have either derided or belittled or ignored; unless a Marxist political theory comes to terms with the truths of liberal political theory, acknowledging the normative force of human rights, the idea of judicial independence and separation of powers, exploring different forms of representation, insisting on free elections and an untrammelled freedom of speech and opinion, understanding the virtues of political pluralism; unless all of those, Marxism as a political movement might as well shut up shop.

Note that I do not say Marxism should be uncritical of liberalism. Liberalism in many variants is too accommodating of unjust inequalities. Yet, if it is not willing to learn from liberalism, Marxism is unlikely to be of any benefit to anyone politically. It will deserve to have had its day. A frankly, unashamedly liberal Marxism – this too might look unfamiliar to many in the way of Marxist intellectual work. But it is not merely a possible, it is a vital, area for future Marxist work if Marxism itself is to have a worthwhile future. That leads, so to say organically, into the last part of this paper.

Socio-political

The third meaning of ‘being a Marxist’ that I want to discuss – the socio-political meaning – concerns not just the would-be Marxist’s beliefs or the content of his or her intellectual work. It’s about being part of something larger. On this meaning, a person is a Marxist if they belong to the Marxist left. Here I could refer to the old theme of the unity of theory and practice, or to the idea that Marxism as well as being a theory was a mass movement. There is a well-known pedigree for these claims, starting with the eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach – ‘the point is to change it’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 3) – and taking in the idea of Marxism as the self-consciousness of the working class, a theory for the workers’ movement. Whatever truth there may once have been in this notion of a theory providing guidance to a movement, however, it doesn’t apply today. Politically, Marxism has become a very marginal presence.

Still, there is a Marxist left – both in an organized and in a looser sense. There are political organizations that profess Marxism; and beyond these there is a wider current of opinion formed by people who would call themselves Marxist or admit to being significantly influenced by Marxism; one might even count as on the periphery of the Marxist left people who would not acknowledge any direct Marxist influence on their thinking but who share with more avowed Marxists or semi-Marxists some important tenets of belief. Given what Marxism has now come to, it would surely be too strong to refer to this Marxist social presence as a movement. Despite that, I think we can continue to talk of a Marxist left of sorts. And one can be a Marxist in the sense of being part of this Marxist left.

At the risk of startling you, or some of you, but not just for that effect – rather in order to register my own conviction that here is a way of being a Marxist that no longer recommends itself – I am sorry to say that to be a member of the Marxist left today is to be part of something, a body of opinion, a political current, that is accursed. Steady on, you may think, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it? Accursed? Why that? And why now? In view of the history of the Soviet Union, or of the international communist movement that supported and excused it, or of China under Mao (to mention only those sorry examples of Marxism gone wrong), how has the Marxist left become accursed only today and not long before that?

I will not shirk the question, which is fair. This is my answer to it. It is partly personal, but also partly general. Like everybody else, I was – I am – of my generation. I was inducted into Marxism already knowing about Stalinism and all its horrors; but knowing also that that experience didn’t exhaust the totality of Marxist thought or, as I thought and hoped, of Marxist possibility. Stalinism had been one grossly distorted realization of Marxism’s anti-capitalist project, embarked upon under maximally unpropitious historical conditions, but other better realizations were still possible, and under the watchword this time of socialist democracy. Furthermore, what I knew in this regard, or at any rate hoped, I knew and hoped in the company of large numbers of others on the Western left, people not at all indulgent towards the crimes of Stalin. We were a part – for those who remember the 1960s and 1970s – of a new left, a left that had learnt the lessons of the historic tragedy that the Stalinist experience had been. So, although there was even then a section of the Marxist left that one co...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 What does it mean to be a Marxist?
• 2 An image in a curved mirror: Pareto’s critique of Marxist science
• 3 Slavoj Žižek’s theory of revolution: a critique
• 4 How to not read Žižek
• 5 Marxism and development: a search for relevance
• 6 Progress, anti-isms and revolutionary subjects: the importance of transcending liberalism
• 7 Marx, morality and the global justice debate
• 8 Can Marxism make sense of crime?
• 9 Sinicized Marxist constitutionalism: its emergence, contents and implications
• 10 Varieties of constitutionalism: a response to ‘Sinicized Marxist Constitutionalism’ by Andrew (Chengyi) Peng
• 11 Revolutionary subjectivity in post-Marxist thought: the case of Laclau and Badiou
• 12 ‘Post’ or ‘Past’?: does post-Marxism have any future?
• Index