Revolutionary Studies

Theory, History, People

Paul Le Blanc

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781608467815
• eBook ISBN: 9781608467822
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With characteristic clarity and insight, historian and activist Paul Le Blanc offers a sweeping survey of the key contributions of Marxist theory, exploring its relevance to twentieth-century revolutionary movements and figures.

Paul Le Blanc Has written on and participated in the US labor, radical and civil rights movements, and is author of numerous books.

1.

Explorations in Plain Marxism

The ideas of Karl Marx are often put forward as an invaluable resource for those wishing to understand the world in order to change it for the better. Yet various people who speak as Marxists often insist upon divergent ways of understanding even the most basic concepts associated with Marxism—such as capitalism and the working class. There are also perplexing divergences regarding such conceptions as ideology, class consciousness, and the seemingly bizarre concept of labor aristocracy. As if this wasn’t enough, relatively new concepts—identity and intersectionality—have been thrown into the mix.

It’s almost enough to make activists throw up their hands, shout an expletive or two, and walk away. Of course, one can simply jump into activity to make the world a better place while saying “to hell with all these stupid theories.” But this could reduce chances of understanding the world well enough to be able to actually change it positively. Practical action can be most effective if it is guided by certain structures of understanding that correspond to the way the world actually works.

In what follows, controversies among Marxists will be touched on in a manner contributing—I hope—to the development of effective revolutionary socialist perspectives.

C. Wright Mills and Structures of Understanding

For many of us developing intellectually in the English-speaking world during the early 1960s, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills was an incredibly important influence. While his works—such as The New Men of Power (1949), The Power Elite (1956), The Sociological Imagination (1960)—seem dated in various ways in our own time, their clarity, independence of spirit, and critical edge reward engagement half a century later. My own education as a Marxist was impacted when, in my mid-teens, I pored over his final work, The Marxists (1962).

Mills himself was not, strictly speaking, a Marxist. He had little patience with dialectics, was not inclined to fuss with the complexities of Capital, and concluded that the working class had—certainly by the 1950s—proved itself incapable of bringing about revolutionary change. Yet his own understanding of the world was structured, in large measure, through his own passionate engagement with the work of Karl Marx. As he put it,

The history of social thought since the mid-nineteenth century cannot be understood without understanding the ideas of Marx…. He contributed to the categories dealt with by virtually all significant social thinkers of our immediate past…. Within the classic tradition of sociology, he provides us with the most basic single framework for political and cultural reflection. Marx was not the sole source of this framework, and he did not complete a system that stands closed and finished. He did not solve all of our problems; some of them he did not even know about. Yet to study his work today and then come back to our own concerns is to increase our chances of confronting them with useful ideas and solutions.¹

The Marxists offered a stimulating discussion of Marxist theory and history, as well as excerpts from a diverse range of thinkers associated in one way or another with Marxism. In his critical presentation, Mills made distinctions between different kinds of Marxists. He was inclined to reject two of these—“vulgar” Marxists, who “seize upon certain ideological features of Marx’s political philosophy and identify these parts as the whole,” and “sophisticated” Marxists, who are “mainly concerned with Marxism as a model of society and with the theories developed with the aid of this model.”²

Mills preferred what he termed plain Marxists, who “in great travail … have confronted the world’s problems” and are inclined to be “‘open’ (as opposed to dogmatic) in their interpretations and uses of Marxism,” and who do not shy away from confronting “the unresolved tension in Marx’s work—and in history itself: the tension of humanism and determinism, of human freedom and historical necessity.”³ This approach strongly influences the thinking in the present essay.

Underlying Mills’s approach is an obvious distinction between (1) the infinitely complex swirl of that vast and amazing Everything commonly referred to as “reality” and (2) the study of that reality, involving theoretical constructs, structures of understanding, that we utilize to make sense of reality. It is possible to use different terminologies and different conceptualizations to define the same complex aspects of reality—and nonetheless to come up with insightful and useful understandings of such reality. This outcome is also possible when two self-identified Marxists interpret and develop aspects of Marxist theory in very different ways.

One’s analysis is not necessarily invalidated by the utilization of a different way of defining one or another Marxist term. While there may be validity to both approaches, however, one is superior to the other (as Marxism) to the extent that it conforms to all of the following criteria: (1) accuracy regarding realities being described, (2) clarity in communicating the understanding of reality, (3) coherence in relation to the totality of Marxist theory, and (4) usefulness in practical efforts to push back against oppression and to advance the cause of socialism.

This is the approach underlying the following discussion of the terms highlighted at the beginning of this essay. The purpose is to help structure our understanding of reality in order to strengthen practical efforts in the struggle for liberation.

Capitalism

Capitalism has been defined by some recent Marxists in a very particular way. For example, in his outstanding study The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post has offered a definition that can be summarized as follows: an economic system in which private owners of the economy—the capitalists (the bourgeoisie)—control the means of production (land, raw materials, tools/technology, etc.) and buy the labor-power of basically propertyless wage workers (the proletariat) in order to produce commodities (products created for the market, by labor-power being turned into actual labor) that are sold at a profit. A similar definition can be found in a number of other Marxist works—for example, Segmented Work, Divided Workers by David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, which succinctly defines capitalism as “a wage labor system of commodity production for profit.”⁴

This seems a reasonable description of what happens under capitalism. There is, however, a problem that develops when this definition is applied to history. For example, before the American Civil War (1861–65) a majority of the labor force in the United States was not made up of wage workers. The Southern economy was predominantly agricultural, and the bulk of the Southern agricultural labor force was made up of slaves. Combined with the large number of poor white farmers, the great majority of laborers consisted of those who did not sell their labor-power to capitalists—so by this definition, the Southern economy could not be termed capitalist. For that matter, a majority of the Northern labor force from colonial times down to the Civil War was made up of small farmers, artisans and craftsmen, and small shopkeepers—only a minority were wage workers. By definition, it could be argued, capitalism simply did not exist in the United States until the 1820s or 1840s or 1860s (which is the position of the afore-mentioned volumes).

The problem is that Marx and Engels themselves believed capitalism did exist in the United States not only after the Civil War, but before—and not only in the antebellum “free labor” North but also in the slave-labor South. Of course, Marx and Engels were only human and could be wrong—although it seems ironic that those who first developed Marxist theory would be so fundamentally wrong in their understanding of how to apply that theory. The problem deepens when we realize that what was true in the United States was true in most of Europe as well, with the exception of England. This was the case when the two revolutionaries wrote the Communist Manifesto, when they were helping to organize the International Workingmen’s Association, and when Marx was writing Capital. It could be argued their analyses of capitalism represented a forecast of the future rather than a prescription for the present—but this is not how they themselves characterized their work.⁵

An additional complication is posed by the question, if it wasn’t capitalism, what form of economy was it? In the slave-plantation South, the dynamics of the economy were different from those of the ancient slave economies, nor did they conform to the dynamics of feudalism. Was it some form of economy that Marx and Engels did not conceptualize? (Post thinks so, presenting it as a theoretically revised variant of what the late historian Eugene Genovese termed “pre-bourgeois civilization.”) The same question can be posed regarding the form of economy in the pre–Civil War North and in nineteenth-century Europe. (The above two volumes tag it as a noncapitalist economy of “petty-commodity production.”) It is possible to argue that there are better ways of understanding the world than the way Marx and Engels understood it in their day, that they were living—contrary to what they seemed to believe—in a fundamentally precapitalist reality. But this suggests a certain incoherence in how this particular definition of capitalism connects with the overall perspectives of Marx and Engels.

On the other hand, the problem may stem from the fact that a reasonable description of mature capitalism does not constitute a reasonable definition of capitalism as such. Capitalism involves an incredibly dynamic process of development, a process of capital accumulation, transforming the world over and over again. It remains true to its own dynamism by taking on a variety of different forms.

It could be argued that a more useful definition of capitalism (perhaps more consistent, also, with the perspectives of Marx and Engels) would posit four fundamental elements in the capitalist economy, three of which are relatively simple: the economy (means of production combined with labor) is privately owned, it is more or less controlled by the owners (in the sense that they make decisions regarding economic policy), and the guiding principle of economic decision making involves maximizing profits for the owners. The fourth element is far more complex: the economy involves generalized commodity production—a buying-and-selling economy, or market economy. With generalized commodity production, more and more and more aspects of human needs and human life are drawn into commodity production, into the production of goods and services that are created for the purpose of selling them, in order to maximize the profits of the capitalists over and over and over again. Capitalists are driven to develop technology and the production process to create more and more profits. And more and more people in society are forced to turn their ability to work (their life-energy, their strength, their intelligence, their abilities and skills) into a commodity, selling their labor-power in order to “make a living” (to be able to buy commodities they need in order to live and additional commodities that they want in order to make life more tolerable). This more open way of defining capitalism allows for considerably more diversity in the forms that capitalism takes, and it captures the incredibly fluid, dynamic “all that is solid melts into air” quality of capitalism referred to in the Communist Manifesto.

As the Civil War writings of Marx and Engels indicate, it is possible for peculiar variants of capitalism to develop that—for example—make the entire laborer (not just his or her ability to work) into a commodity to be bought and sold, as slaves (not just “wage slaves,” as many free laborers dubbed themselves). The different variants of capitalism yield dramatically different social and cultural dynamics, just as they are intertwined with dramatically different economic policy needs (high tariffs versus low tariffs, etc.) as well as consequent dramatic differences in political goals, which combined to culminate in the bloody explosion of 1861–65. Moving back further in economic theory, as Adam Smith’s 1776 classic Wealth of Nations indicates, capitalism develops and continues to exist before a majority of the labor force is transformed into a wage-earning proletariat. And as Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development suggests, different modes of production can combine in a variety of peculiar ways to create an unstable economic, cultural, and political mix, often with explosive consequences, especially given capitalism’s incredible dynamism. To utilize a relatively simple definition of capitalism, then, does not necessarily whisk away the complications and contradictions with which serious theorists must wrestle.⁶

But we must see capitalism as a complex and dynamically evolving reality, a vast and contradictory process, assuming different forms in different moments of history and in different places on our planet. All this is inseparable from the relentless process of capital accumulation. The diversity of “capitalisms” cannot be defined by a single description. This is particularly true in regard to the shaping and reshaping of the working class, which is always in process, being composed and decomposed and recomposed by the dynamics of the capital accumulation process—over and over again being “pulled apart and pushed together,” as Kim Moody once put it. “The shape of the working class in all corners of the world has changed as capitalism itself has altered its geographic, organizational, and technological contours,” he noted near the close of the last century. “As old structures of the working class are altered, however, new ones arise.”⁷

This brings us to additional Marxist debates about yet another central Marxist category—the proletariat, or working class. (Or are these two terms really synonyms?)

The Working Class

Some Marxist theorists have introduced what appear to me to be unnecessary complications in the way the central category working class is to be understood. One of the best expositors of Marxism, Hal Draper, makes a distinction between the proletariat (which he defines as those whose labor creates surplus-value for capitalists, i.e., those in the private sector of the economy) and a broader working class (more simply, those who sell their ability to work). Nicos Poulantzas, in a similar manner but with different labels, makes a distinction between workers (those who produce surplus-value for capitalists) and a more inclusive category of those who are wage-earners (some of whom do not produce surplus-value and whom he designates as a “new petty bourgeoisie”). Erik Olin Wright, highly critical of Poulantzas, developed the category of contradictory class locations, distinguishing between “pure” workers and those who have “mixed locations”—workers who have a significant degree of autonomy over their labor and/or exploited workers who, nonetheless, have control over other workers. Wright sees these as a blend of the proletarian and the “petty bourgeois.”⁸

All of this is in contrast to the simple, more open definition offered by Frederick Engels in an 1888 footnote to the Communist Manifesto: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”⁹

It is not clear why Engels’s identification of the class of wage laborers (working class) with the proletariat is inferior to Hal Draper’s insistence upon a distinction. Among the problems with Poulantzas’s restrictive analysis are (1) the fact that it seems to restrict, in our own time, the working class of advanced capitalist countries to a declining fraction of the labor force (which throws into question a key element of Marxism’s strategic orientation), and (2) the fact that historically it would read out of the ranks of the working class most of the leadership and the social base, for example, of the Paris Commune of 1871 (which throws into question the judgment of Marx and Engels, who hailed the Commune as an example of political rule by the revolutionary working class). Even Wright’s conceptualization of “mixed-class locations” seems to collide with certain historical realities. For example, through Francis Couvares’s incisive study of Pittsburgh’s working class from 1877 to 1919, we can see that skilled workers who had both a significant degree of autonomy over their labor and at the same time had a significant degree of control over less-skilled laborers working under them, provided the leadership for the explosive insurgency of 1877 and the momentous Homestead steel strike of 1892.¹⁰

This is hardly meant to restrict class analysis to the simplicity of Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1. Explorations in Plain Marxism
• 2. Uneven and Combined Development and the Sweep of European History (2005)
• 3. Radical Labor Subculture: A Key to Past and Future Insurgencies
• 4. Class and Identities
• 5. Democracy
• 6. Making Sense of Postrevolutionary Russia
• 7. The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star: Trotsky’s Struggle against Stalinism
• 8. Origins and Trajectory of the Cuban Revolution
• 9. Nicaragua: Revolution Permanent or Impermanent?
• 10. South Africa: Race, Class, Vanguard
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover