Whither Marxism?

Global Crises in International Perspective

Bernd Magnus, Stephen Cullenberg, Bernd Magnus, Stephen Cullenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134979165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

This is the companion volume to Spectres of Marx, and tackles the central theme of the fate of Marxism after the global collapse of communism.

PART ONE

marxism's future?

DOUGLAS KELLNER

the obsolescence of marxism?

Crises of Marxism have erupted regularly throughout the twentieth century. The concept of crisis within Marxian theory has its origins in theories of the “crisis of capitalism,” which were linked to notions of the collapse of capitalism and triumph of socialism. The term “crisis” itself is a medical metaphor that suggests the possibility of breakdown, collapse, or a terminal illness that could bring death to its patient, in this case, Marxism.¹ The term “crisis” was applied to Marxism by Georges Sorel, Karl Korsch, and others earlier in the century (see Gouldner 1980). In recent years, there have been many claims that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the era of Marxism is over and the theory is now obsolete. Consequently, it is claimed that the crisis of Marxism has terminated in collapse, that the patient has died, that Marxism is no longer a viable theory or politics for the present age.²

The discourse of the crisis of Marxism has had a long history. During World War I, the failure of the Second International and Marxist parties and individuals to stop the war put in question the political efficacy of Marxism as an organized movement. The failure to carry through European revolutions after the war produced new crises of Marxism, and the triumph of fascism threatened to eliminate Marxist governments, parties, and militants. After World War II, the integration of the working class and stabilization of capitalism in the so-called democratic capitalist countries seemed to portend the obsolescence of Marxism.³ Thus Marxism, like capitalism, its object and other, has been in crisis throughout the century.

However, just as capitalism has survived many crises, so has Marxism. And just as Marxist critics too quickly proclaimed the demise of capitalism, so too have critics of Marxism too glibly forecast its death. Moreover, just as various crises of capitalism have elicited new survival strategies that in certain ways have strengthened the capitalist system (i.e., imperialism, organized capitalism, state capitalism, the welfare state, the consumer society, transnational capitalism, technocapitalism, and so on), so too crises of Marxism have periodically led to the development and improvement of Marxian theory. Indeed, Marx's historical materialism is intrinsically a historical theory, and its categories demand revision and development as new historical conditions and situations emerge. Revision is the very life of the Marxian dialectic, and the theory demands development, reconstruction, and even abandonment of obsolete or inadequate features as conditions emerge that put tenets of the original theory in question.

Marxism has, of course, been regularly denounced and declared over, especially by its one-time adherents. During the Cold War era, a whole generation of former Marxists denounced the “God that failed,” and Sidney Hook and others declared the movement dead by the 1940s. As Derrida reminds us (1993), during the 1950s intellectuals in France proclaimed the end of history and the obsolescence of Marxism; similar “end of ideology” discourses and “postindustrial society” theories emerged in the United States in that decade to proclaim the end of Marxism. In post-1960s renunciations of earlier Utopian hopes, many previous adherents turned on Marxism. In The Postmodern Condition (1984 [1979]), one-time Marxian radical Jean-François Lyotard argued that the era of totalizing theories of history and grand narratives of emancipation was over. Earlier, former Marxist theorist Jean Baudrillard declared in The Mirror of Production (1974) that Marxism merely mirrored capitalist development and ideology and was inadequate as a radical theory of emancipation. In his next book (still untranslated), L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976), Baudrillard declared the end of political economy and the end of Marxism in the emergence of a postmodern society of media, simulations, and hyperreality⁴ Indeed, the success of post modern theory is largely parasitical because it rests on its proponents' claims concerning the obsolescence of Marxism, which positions postmodernists as the most advanced radical social theorists.

In recent years, many books and articles have argued that the collapse of Soviet communism definitively signifies the end of Marxism. Francis Fukuyama's celebrated book The End of History (1992), in fact, argues for the end of Marxism. And, of course, there have been a wealth of articles in the mainstream press and opinion journals, too numerous to mention, that have declared the obsolescence of Marxism. Against these positions, my argument will be that the collapse of Soviet communism does not constitute a refutation of Marxism or signify its demise. I will argue, first, that there are important discontinuities between Marx/Lenin/Stalin and the later Soviet leaders, so one cannot blame the collapse of communism on Marx himself or the doctrine associated with his name. Secondly, I will argue that Rousseau, Hegel, and the Right Hegelians and not Marx are more appropriately read as the spiritual ancestors of Soviet totalitarianism and the modern totalitarian state tout court. Further, I will argue that Marx's concept of socialism and democracy is dramatically at odds with Soviet communism, Leninism, Stalinism, or whatever one wants to call the system of bureaucratic collectivism that collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellites. I will also suggest that the overthrow of Stalinism was consistent with, or justified by, Marx's principles and that Marxian theory provides an illuminating analysis and critique of Soviet communism and its empire, providing important theoretical resources to explain the collapse of Soviet communism and to make sense of contemporary historical reality. Finally, I argue that Marxism continues to possess resources to theorize and criticize the present age and that Marxian politics remains at least a part of a progressive or radical politics in the current era.

DISCONTINUITIES WITHIN THE MARXIAN TRADITION

For decades, Marxism has been blamed for the historical catastrophes of the era. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1963 [1945]), philosopher of science Karl Popper argued that the totalitarian state has its origins in the political philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. This refrain was repeated in the 1970s by former Maoist André Glucksmann, one of the darlings of the French “new philosophers,” who claimed that “master thinkers,” such as Marx, were responsible for the evils of communism and other totalitarian societies. And, of course, throughout the Cold War, anticommunists have tried to pin all of the problems of the era on the philosophy of Karl Marx and his followers.

Such polemics are, of course, hopelessly idealist and greatly exaggerate the roles of ideas in history. Blaming the evils of the modern world, and especially the trajectory of Soviet communism, on Marx covers the significant differences between Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and the later Soviet leadership as well as the material and social conditions that inhibited the development of the sort of socialism envisaged by Marx—and even Lenin—in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, I shall first provide some reasons why it is a mistake to blame the catastrophe of Soviet communism on Marx and then will provide a sketch of a Marxian analysis of why Soviet Communism failed.

To begin, there has never been a unitary Marxian theory that has been the basis for socialist development. Marxism has always had a divided legacy between those following socialist as opposed to communist parties, institutionalized in the divisions between the Second International and the Third International. Both the democratic-reformist and insurrectionist-revolutionary strategies for constructing socialism could appeal to Marx's texts and practice for legitimation of their own theory and politics, but as it turned out the Social Democrats of the Second International, beginning already with Fduard Bernstein in the 1890s, distanced themselves from Marxism, while the Leninists of the Third International proclaimed themselves loyal Marxists and the authentic heirs of classical Marxism.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks actually carried through a revolution in 1917 in the name of Marxism and made Marxism the official state ideology. However, this historically accidental bonding between Marxism and Leninism should not obscure the profound differences between Marx and Lenin. Lenin advocated the formation of a conspiratorial party of professional revolutionaries and privileged violent insurrection and a vanguard party as the instruments of revolution. Marx, by contrast, was committed to people's democracy and the tenet that the liberation of the working class could only be achieved by the activity of the working class itself. Marx and Friedrich Engels published the “Communist Manifesto” to openly proclaim the ideas and goals of the communist movement, and both pointed to the Paris Commune, marked by popular sovereignty of the people, as the model of what they meant by socialism. In contrast, once Lenin and the Bolshevik party achieved power, the Central Committee of the Communist party became the self-proclaimed vanguard of the revolution, and power and sovereignty were in effect concentrated in the party's hands.

Indeed, on many occasions, Marx proclaimed a democratic road to socialism and always equated socialism and democracy. His early 1843 commentary on Hegel's Philosophy of Right championed democracy as the highest form of government and contained a powerful critique of the absolutist state and bureaucratic government. During the 1848 revolution, Marx allied himself with the bourgeois-democratic movement and with progressive elements of the bourgeoisie in a two-stage road to socialism. In his address to the First International Workingmen's Association, Marx proclaimed the winning of legislation to shorten the working day and the worker's co-op movement as the two great victories for the political economy of the working class. In his 1871 address on the Paris Commune, Marx championed the popular sovereignty exercised by the citizens of the Paris Commune as “the finally discovered form for the liberation of the working class.” And in his 1872 Hague address to the International, Marx also proclaimed that a democratic road to socialism was viable in many developed countries.

Of course, Marx always had a contextual political theory and thus in certain contexts supported revolutionary class war and insurrection, while in other contexts he defended a more democratic and reformist route to socialism. Hence, one can find support for various theories of the construction of socialism in Marx's own writings. Yet, in his key texts, Marx was a consistent democrat, supporting workers' self-activity as the locus of popular sovereignty. Marx never advocated a party state, never defended a communist bureaucracy, and would no doubt have been appalled by the deformation of his ideas in the Soviet Union, so to pin the failures of Soviet communism on Marx is absurd.

Indeed, there are important differences between Lenin and Joseph Stalin as well, with Stalin eliminating the democratic centralism of the party for one-man rule and literally exterminating all political enemies and opposition.⁵ While Lenin championed a vanguard party to make the revolution and then to run the state, he allowed factions, practiced democracy within the party, was sometimes outvoted, and practiced what he and the Bolsheviks called “democratic centralism.” An early Leninist text, State and Revolution, was even quite populist, following Marx's text on the Paris Commune as the model of socialism and celebrating the Soviets, or workers' councils, of 1905 and 1917 as the authentic organs of socialist construction. To be sure, Lenin established a revolutionary bureaucracy that could be manipulated by a Stalin, but Stalinism had nothing to do with any sort of democratic socialism, centralist or not. Such a regime was a throwback to a feudalistic Czarism and had little to do with Marx's vision of socialism. The later collective bureaucratic Soviet leadership was also at odds with Marxism, which was always strongly antibureaucratic.

Although this point is somewhat tangential to my argument, I believe that the later Soviet leadership primarily continued Stalinism, despite the critiques of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. Perhaps one of the few moments for genuine reform appeared during the Khrushchev era, when another sort of socialism, one closer to Marx's vision, was possible. Such a socialism was grounded in the workers' revolts in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary and Poland in 1956, in the denunciations of Stalin in the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1958, in the reform movement throughout the communist world, and in the movement for “socialism with a human face” during the “Prague Spring” of 1967–1968. The post-Khrushchev leadership, however, until the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, crushed dreams for reform and the creation of a genuinely democratic socialism and reinforced the repressive Stalinist bureaucratic form of state socialism, which caused deep alienation from the system, corruption, economic inefficiency and stagnation, and the eventual collapse of Soviet communism. By the time Gorbachev arrived it was too late to reform this system, and his removal pointed to the demise of the previous form of Soviet communism.⁶

In any case, it is hard to see why the Marxian theory should be blamed for the debacle of bureaucratic communism in the Soviet Union. The polemic that blames the evils of Soviet communism on Marx also fails to notice that there are many distinct traditions and political tendencies within Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, associated socialism intimately with democracy, arguing that one could not exist without the other. She was an early critic of what she saw as the deformations of socialism in the Soviet Union. Likewise, the council communists of the post-World War I revolutionary movement consistently supported a view of socialism as a workers' democracy and advocated a libertarian concept of socialism, as did Herbert Marcuse and his comrades in the Frankfurt School, Korsch (for much of his life), and many other so-called Western Marxists. These theorists were often critical of the deformation of socialism in the Soviet Union and usually supported a democratic version of socialism. Thus, to equate Marxism with the bureaucratic collectivism of the Soviet Union is simply historically false and intellectually dishonest.

SPIRITUAL ANCESTORS OF THE MODERN TOTALITARIAN STATE

In this section, I wish to suggest that it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Right Hegelia...