[The following talk was given at a Melbourne Camp on May 19, 1990.]

A Reaffirmation of the relevance of revolutionary Marxism today.

This is a time of major upheavals in the world socialist movement.

The developments unleashed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power are leading to possibly the biggest shake-up in the socialist movement since the victory of Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Communist Party. We are confronted with the possibility of the definitive exposure and defeat of Stalinism, which has shackled the Communist movement since the death of Lenin. This is a welcome prospect for non-Stalinist communists, for partisans of socialist democracy. But we know that this welcome prospect carries with it grave dangers of setbacks and defeats for the workers’ movement, setbacks which were already pre-ordained with the very triumph of Stalinism. We are already seeing some of the sorry consequences of the rule of Stalinism and its demise, in Eastern Europe – the destruction of working-class gains and the destruction of working-class consciousness and beliefs in socialism. These setbacks were probably inevitable, in the sense that it had to get worse before it got better.

And throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fierce discussion on all questions of socialist theory and strategy has sprung up, in sharp reaction to the mind-numbing conformity and censorship of the Stalinist years. It’s hard to get a true picture from afar of the wide-ranging fiery debates that are raging in the Soviet Union, even by reading Moscow News and New Times. Jim [Percy]’s trip a few months ago was able to give us a little more insight. And with Steve and Tracey reporting for DA from Prague we’re getting more information, and we might have a correspondent in Moscow by the end of the year.

And there are serious debates taking place today among Third World revolutionaries as well, both in the wake of Perestroika and Glasnost, and also following the electoral defeat by the Sandinistas at the hands of US imperialism.

There are important debates, and some demoralisation too, occurring here in Australia as well, and in similar advanced capitalist countries.

So it’s very timely that we are organising this Socialist Scholars Conference for the end of September. It will go into many of these questions being discussed by revolutionary socialists around the world, it will be a forum for debating many of the different viewpoints current on the left. It will be a high-level conference, a conference that we’ll all find extremely stimulating. And in the four months leading up to it, we all have a responsibility to be thinking more about theory, about political strategy, and to step up our study, to get the most out of the conference.

We can see this camp and future camps and class series we have in Melbourne as part of our preparation for the conference. This weekend we want to try and give a brief overview of the main debates in 20th Century Marxism.

The ‘main’ debates

But which have been and are the “main” debates? Which are the most relevant, which have had the most impact on the course of the class struggle and world history?

It’s not just a personal judgment, of course, although everybody would have their own estimate of the key issues. And certainly in the milieu of Marxist academics you can frequently see how many writers just happen to decide the dividing, decisive issues are, of course, those related to their particular academic interest. Philosophers will make a division, along a particular philosophical dispute, for example. Those with an eye on a career in the economics faculty will naturally pick on an economic angle.

Obviously we have different criteria. As revolutionaries, active in the class struggle today, it’s the political questions that most concern us, questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics, debates that will most aid us in our political activity. But what are the most relevant of the past debates for us to study today?

Many of the debates were certainly conjunctural, very much related to the specific events and issues of the times. And some of the debates seem that they have been settled by subsequent events, the test of life has settled some of the old disputes.

But in fact all the debates over revolutionary strategy are still relevant because we have not achieved worldwide socialism. Those debates over strategy are still relevant, especially when new turns in the class struggle require us to situate the new developments (particularly a major defeat) in our theoretical and strategical overview.

Such questions as reform vs revolution do get tossed up again at times like these. We do have to continually examine how a revolution will be made in the advanced capitalist countries, what class forces will achieve it, and so on.

Thus a setback in existing socialist states, a realisation of how much damage Stalinism had done, might make it worthwhile for us to review those debates in the early Marxist movement…e.g., what class forces, what place for reforms in your revolutionary strategy, where would revolution first take place, and then, after 1917, how to consolidate, what economic policies for a backward country, how to guard against bureaucracy.

The richest debates in the past in both these areas took place within the Russian revolutionary movement. The experience of the first socialist revolution is still by far the most fruitful source. With the ferment that has developed in the Soviet Union in the last few years we could be seeing the most interesting debates occurring there again.

The debates in the Soviet Union are certainly varied, often all over the place. They’re rerunning all the old ones.

Obviously the Stalin-Trotsky discussion will loom large, although that still hasn’t completely come out into the open. It’s still distorted, the dominant line coming through in many articles is that Trotsky would have been just another Stalin, or even worse. But all questions pertaining to the nature of the bureaucracy, and how to overcome it; socialist democracy, and how to secure it; socialist economic development, and the market under socialism; the NEP in the ‘20s, and the foreign policy of the early Soviet power. All these and more are being discussed and will be discussed very deeply.

But also some of the pre-revolutionary debates will be aired again.

Reform vs Revolution is getting discussed again. Some Soviet and East European Communists are casting their eye a bit towards Social Democratic parties in the West. Some are asking, Is the so-called Swedish model best? (Some are even asking, in all the confusion, what about the American Model!)

Many are asking the question, Was Stalinism inevitable? Should a revolution have been made in such a backward country. Should the Russian socialists just have waited for the socialist revolution to occur in the most advanced capitalist countries?

Well, it’s a wild debate that has opened up, and one thing we can all be sure of, if we want to be relevant to these developments, is that we’ll all have to be much more serious about our own discussion and debate in the coming years. They will be important years of thinking, reading, study and debate for our party as well.

Trends in 20th Century Marxism

What do we hope to cover in this series of talks?

In describing the world labour movement when we were part of the Fourth International and described ourselves as Trotskyists, we would characterise it as made up of three main trends:

• Reformism, as embodied in the 2nd International, and the social-democratic or labour parties;
• Stalinism, as embodied in the 3rd International and the communist parties;
• Trotskyism, as embodied in the 4th International.

Now we’ve gone beyond that simplistic picture – we broke with dogmatic, sectarian Trotskyism. (We got rid of our delusions about the size and relevance of the organised Trotskyist movement.) But that sort of characterisation does relate to the major political differences and debates in 20th Century Marxism, and we’re covering these areas in the talks this weekend.

The different debates, the main, serious ones, did reflect different trends in the workers’ movement. And these trends weren’t just accidental, they weren’t merely academic debates. They did reflect real developments in the class struggle, in the development of the working class and its parties.

A. Reform vs Revolution

This first talk will try to cover the debates in the Second International, and especially the debates in German Social Democracy, and the Bolshevik alternative posed by Lenin’s party. It will look at the positions of classical Marxism, the revisions of Bernstein and the positions taken by Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and the Bolsheviks. It will look at the test of 1914, and the test of 1917, and raise such questions as the role of the working class in advanced capitalist countries, the role of the labour aristocracy, has capitalism solved its contradictions, and what is the role and nature of the revolutionary party?

Some of these questions had seemed to be settled by 1917, for Russia and backward countries at least. They are still very much on the agenda in the imperialist countries where no revolution has as yet succeeded, and they frequently recur during ebbs in the workers’ movement. But they have also been getting raised again by socialists in the Soviet Union in recent years, under the shock of the collapse of Stalinism.

B. Stalinism vs Socialist Democracy

The second talk looks at the development of Stalinism from 1922-1990, this second “trend” or departure in the workers’ movement. It will address questions such as What is Stalinism? How did it arise? How can you prevent or guard against it, and look at the relation between Leninism and Stalinism.

C. Western Marxism

The third talk will look at Western Marxism, not so much a trend in the workers’ movement but an academic current that arose as a result of the defeat or failure of revolutions in the West, and the ascendancy of Stalinism or social democracy in the Western labour movement. It was a current isolated from the practical struggle, from the working class, and often adapting to the latest idealist fashions in bourgeois thought. It has been an academic current with a philosophical orientation, in the Hegelian tradition, but often addressing concerns that revolutionaries in the industrialised countries should take note of.

D. Eurocommunism

As a result of a fusion, in a sense, between the dynamics that gave rise to the reformist, revisionist current in the early years of the century, and the dynamics arising from the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, another current could be delineated, the Eurocommunists, the topic of our next session. Although Stalinism was not revolutionary, it did pay lip service at times to a dogmatic Marxism-Leninism, whereas Eurocommunism is unashamedly reformist. Developing after the death of Stalin, the anti-Stalinist aspects of Eurocommunism aren’t its key features – we have to see it as an adaptation to the demands of the ruling class. It’s a current in decline, but a current we’ve had to deal with through the CPA.

E. The Transition to Socialism

The fifth session will discuss some of the theoretical debates associated with the transition to socialism, and draw together some of the pre-revolutionary questions of strategy and key questions thrown up during the period of transition.

Cornerstones of classical Marxism

Prior to Marx and Engels, the utopian socialists had constructed schemes for the betterment of society, “fantastic pictures and plans of a new society”. People such as Owen, Fourier, and St Simon had propagandised for such schemes, and sometimes tried to set up models of their visions. They tried to convince the rulers and the rest of society of the logic of their plans. Their starting point was a moral one, they began with an idealistic view of injustice, what was right, what was wrong, what was evil.

They had little understanding of the nature of class society, of the role of the state, of how to change society. Many of them were “good on the issues”. We’ve all heard that in recent years, especially in the mass movements. Many in the green milieu, for example, have gone back to the position of the utopian socialists. “Love will find a way…” Even hug the cops!

Lenin explained very clearly the significance of the revolution in theory introduced by Marx and Engels:

“The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.”

What was this science?

As Engels put it in his pamphlet Socialism Utopian and Scientific:

“The new facts of the reality of capitalism and the class struggle that Marx and Engels observed “made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that those warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and exchange – in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period….

“From that time forward socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”

This was the materialist conception of history…

As for the basic mechanism in capitalist society? Marx’s lifetime work, Capital, laid bare its workings through his key discovery of surplus value. Engels again:

“It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes….

“These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science.”

It’s important to grasp this key concept – that change is to be sought in developing reality, in real life, not in our heads. The motive force is the conflict between the developing productive forces – the factories, the mines, the techniques, the science – and the capitalist mode of using them.

Ernest Mandel describes the keystone of Marx’s materialist theory of social revolution as “the concept of the contradiction between production and property relations on the one hand and the productive forces on the other hand. In today’s world this conflict expresses itself in three ways. First, by the inability of world capitalism to solve any basic economic problems of the masses within the framework of the imperialist system. This is most graphically demonstrated by its inability to eliminate centuries-old backwardness in the so-called third-world countries. Second, by the growing inability of the system to contain the growth of productive forces – especially of the science-oriented third industrial revolution – within the framework of private property and the nation-state. Third, by a periodic large-scale revolt of masses of industrial and intellectual workers, as well as of youth in general, against the persistence of these capitalist relations of production, which mutilate their needs, their lives and their capacity for self-realisation, and totally thwart the tremendous potential of human freedom and human self-realisation opened up by contemporary industry, technology, and science.”

(And we should probably add a fourth: the total inability of capitalism to resolve the threat to the environment…)

This basic conflict inherent in capitalism, expressed in these different facets of its fundamental contradiction, is a very real conflict. And as Engels put it, “Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.”

Isaac Deutscher addressed himself to this question in answering those who challenged the continuing relevance of Marxism, in an essay Marxism in Our Time, and expresses this basic contradiction of capitalism very eloquently:

“When people say that Marxism was a doctrine, highly elaborate and realistic for the nineteenth century but now obsolete, may we ask: obsolete in what? In its essentials? There is one, only one essential element in the Marxist critique of capitalism. It is very simple and very plain, but in it are focused all the many-faceted analyses of the capitalist order. It is this: there is a striking contradiction between the increasingly social character of the process of production and the anti-social character of capitalist property. Our mode of existence, the whole manner of production, is becoming more and more social in the sense that the old freelance producers can no longer go on producing in independence from each other, from generation to generation, as they did in the pre-capitalist system. Every element, every fraction, every little tiny organ of our society is dependent on all the rest. The whole process of production becomes one social process of production – and not only one national process of production but one international process of production. At the same time you have an anti-social kind of property, private property. This contradiction between the anti-social character of property and the social character of our production is the source of all anarchy and irrationality in capitalism.”

Communism as a movement

There’s another foundation that we have to lay down. Before examining the actual debates between the revolutionaries and the reformists, we have to be clear about what the revisionists were intent on revising. What is Communism?

Engels, again, stressed a very important point.

“Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts. The Communists do not base themselves on this or that philosophy as their point of departure but on the whole course of previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries at the present time. Communism has followed from large-scale industry and its consequences, from the establishment of the world market, of the concomitant uninhibited competition, from the ever more violent and more universal trade crises, which have already become full-fledged crises of the world market, from the creation of the proletariat and the concentration of capital, from the ensuing class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.”

So it follows, it’s not a dogma. As the class struggle evolves, develops, so must the theory.

It takes the knowledge of reality, of the conflict between the working class and the capitalist class, for the basis of the theory; it adds the urge to change of the utopians (“links with the struggle of a definite class” – Lenin). When the fusion is really successful, that is, when the class takes it up, its expression is a party. (Lenin)

So socialists have the task of organising the class struggle of the working class.

Communism is a movement, not a doctrine, not a dogma. In changed circumstances and conditions, different tactics and strategies will be needed for the movement. But that’s not a challenge, a refutation of Marxism, but integral to it.

And today, some of those who are making their peace with capitalism, some in the “new left”, some who have been Communists in the past, but are now moving away from Marxism, are saying that conditions have changed so that revolutions are no longer on the agenda, that the class struggle is no longer central, that the working class is dead, diminished, declining, bought off, or some other variant.

But this isn’t a new debate, these aren’t the first to raise these criticisms. They were first raised shortly after Marx and Engels won the socialist movement around to their conceptions, and were again debated fiercely 90-100 years ago in the 2nd International and the German Social Democratic Party. They were analysed most clearly by Lenin.

The First International was set up by Marx and Engels to try to provide that international organisation and solidarity between workers they knew was needed. It was never very effective, and disappeared in the aftermath of the demoralisation following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. There were varied currents within the organisation in addition to Marx’s views – perhaps the main opponent tendency with which Marx and Engels had to contend were the anarchists.

The Second International was established in 1889, sometime after the demise of the first. It was based on the large workers’ parties and unions that had developed by then, especially in Germany. The German SPD had adopted the views of Marx and Engels, after contending with the ideas and followers of Lassalle, a leader of the German working class.

A hostile current within Marxism

But there was a potential split there right at the beginning, on the question of reform vs revolution. After Marxism had ousted the hostile doctrines – anarchism, the Lassallian position etc – a hostile trend arose within Marxism itself. This developed in the largest, strongest party of the 2nd International, the German party. Eduard Bernstein was the name associated with the first and major revisionist assault on Marxism, and the major dispute in the movement for the next few decades revolved around the relation between reform and revolution.

Marxist theory reconciled the two with perfect success: “The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the social democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal – the conquest of power and the suppression of wage labor,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in 1899 in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution.

But a growing tendency in these parties wanted to elevate reforms to the primary position, or even the only position. The viewpoint of the reformists was most strongly articulated by Bernstein, and his famous sentence – “To me that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything.”

Bernstein was the most outspoken in his repudiation of a revolutionary perspective, and developed theoretical justifications for his position. In his book Evolutionary Socialism (1899) he called for a revision of Marxism in the light of “living reality”. He rejected the method of historical materialism, and denied the importance in general of theory for the socialist movement. He especially assailed the labour theory of value, upon which the entire structure of Marxist political economy rests; the historical necessity of socialism; the inevitable collapse of capitalism; the law of the concentration of capital; and the tendency toward the intensified exploitation of the working class.

Revisionism rejected the philosophy of Marxism. it was uncomfortable with materialism. As Lenin wrote, “In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial ‘science’.”

In the economic sphere, Lenin pointed out the amendments of the revisionists were even more comprehensive:

“It was said that concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale production do not occur in agriculture at all, while they proceed very slowly in commerce and industry. It was said that crises had now become rarer and weaker, and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital to eliminate them altogether. It was said that the ‘theory of collapse’ to which capitalism is heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class antagonisms to become milder and less acute. It was said, finally, that it would not be amiss to correct Marx’s theory of value, too, in accordance with Bohm-Bawerk.”

The continual conflict between the Marxists and the opportunists erupted most violently in the countries of Europe with the most advanced socialist movements, France and Germany. In France the struggle came to a head over the practical political issues involved in the action of Alexandre Millerand, a member of the Independent Socialist Party, who in 1899 accepted a cabinet position in a capitalist government.

The revisionist positions within the Second International were combatted by leaders of the Russian party like Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg, but also by the central leaders of the German party such as Bebel and Karl Kautsky. At the Amsterdam Congress in 1904 orthodox positions prevailed, revisionism was rejected. But in fact the majority of the leadership of the German party, including the defenders of orthodoxy such as Karl Kautsky, proved later that in practice their position was not very different, they just continued to pay lip service to Marxist positions for a little longer.

Four issues marked the growth of the outright opportunist elements in the Second International from 1906 to 1914. First and foremost was the colonial question. The opportunist wing, including Bernstein and the leaders of the German trade unions, did not want to oppose the colonial policies of the imperialist powers. A second issue was immigration – the white Australia policy/white America policy! The third important point of contention involved the relation between the socialist parties and the trade unions. The trade union leaders, leaning on privileged and backward workers, wanted to escape the political control and surveillance of the party where socialist ideas and class struggle methods were current. (Nothing very new…) Finally, the question of war, and what should socialists do in face of the impending imperialist war, was a major debate. The antiwar, anti-militarist position championed by Lenin, Luxembourg and Clara Zetkin won out. But although Marxist revolutionary positions prevailed in the debates, there was actually a growing gap between these positions and the real political character of the German Social Democratic leadership.

The counterposition throughout all these debates was of course Lenin. Certainly from the standpoint of our times we can see this role, for he succeeded in actually making a revolution, refuting in practice the revisionist trend. But he also indefatigably argued for his views throughout the first two decades of the century, defending a revolutionary line, although contemporaries probably did not rate prominently the positions of this Russian revolutionary. And most importantly, he built an instrument to carry out a revolutionary line, his party.

Social basis of revisionism

Opportunism, revisionism, and reformism had their material roots in the social, economic, and political life of capitalist society. This tendency was based on three trends:

Firstly, the extension of reforms and benefits to the working class – both political, social, and economic. As capitalism expanded, got richer, on the basis of monopoly profits, some of the crumbs were able to be passed onto the working class for the sake of class peace. And with the increased emigration to the colonies, and the growth of European exports, capitalism’s reserve army of labour declined, and the working class was in a stronger position.

Secondly, the existence of petty bourgeois remnants and the development of a new intelligentsia as capitalism expands. The development of this trend was observed 100 years ago – it’s had different names applied over the years – new middle class, yuppies, etc.

Thirdly, the development of imperialism changed the world and the course of the socialist movement.

Already Engels, according to Lenin, had begun to discern this tendency. In 1889, Engels wrote to Sorge: “The most repulsive thing here [in England] is the bourgeois ‘respectability’, which has grown deep into the bones of the workers…. Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor.”

Engels also expressed these ideas publicly. In his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England he speaks of an “aristocracy among the working class”, of a “privileged minority of the workers”, in contradistinction to the “great mass of working people”. “A small, privileged, protected minority” of the working class alone was “permanently benefited” by the privileged position of England in 1848-68; whereas “the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement”….”With the breakdown of that (England’s industrial) monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position….”

So Marx and Engels began to see all this, but they could not, were not able to, did not integrate it theoretically, because of their age, their isolation, and their lack of a party. In fact, it was hard to see it properly, not until the full consequences of this trend were displayed in August 1914, when the leaders of the mass workers’ parties marched to war behind their own bourgeoisies. Then it was finally grasped fully, and a theoretical understanding of this trend was developed, by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. That’s why we are a separate trend today. Reformism is not the expression of the class interests of the working class. Communism, Leninism is.

So there are two ways of taking account of changed circumstances, of new facts.

Firstly, there’s the method of Marxism. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, reformism, the labour aristocracy, is a classic example. The new reality and the new understanding are integrated into Marxism, and become part of the arsenal of the working-class movement.

Secondly, there’s the method of opportunism. This tendency refers to the changed circumstances to justify reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, to make their peace with capitalism.

So two clear trends were established in the workers’ movement at the start of this century, reform and revolution, revisionism and communism, and it’s been a constant battle between these trends. Not only have we had to contend with the capitalists themselves and their outright defenders and ideologues, we’ve had to fight the agents of capitalism within the workers’ movement itself.

The Leninist party

So how do we make a revolution in these circumstances? How do we prevent reformism triumphing, and delivering the workers’ movement to the bourgeoisie?

This was the dilemma of Marx. He recognised the hegemony of the ruling class ideas in any age. Under capitalism, bourgeois consciousness dominates. Yet the revolution has to be a conscious act. This problem was underestimated by Marx and Engels.

Lenin’s real genius was that he understood this contradiction and resolved it, he built the sort of party necessary to resolve this problem. (We should note that the essence of the Leninist party was not its conspiratorial nature, as you often get taught in 1st year uni political science, it was not that it was a party for the underground, Tsarist conditions, but it was a party to resolve this problem of consciousness in Marxist theory.)

Lenin in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done pointed out that the working class by itself can arrive only at a trade unionist consciousness. Lenin’s solution was threefold:

1. Organisation
2. Education
3. Action

Firstly, the organisational form that was required was his concept of a vanguard party. Those who really agree and understand get together, i.e., not those who wish to maintain capitalism. The role of such a party is to lead, to point out the ultimate aim, and to help organise and educate the working class and its allies. As for all parties, its goal must be to seek power. Obviously the starting point for any revolutionary party is that bourgeois hegemony is not total, you begin with the most conscious elements who have made the break. And you understand that the party is not a mirror of the future society, but a tool for changing the present one. And most importantly, Lenin realised that such a party was necessary even in a downturn in the class struggle, perhaps even more necessary in such times.

Secondly, education was so important because the working class had to go beyond that initial trade union consciousness. And it had to be a broad, comprehensive understanding of many issues. Lenin pointed out that the workers’ party had to respond to all instances of tyranny and oppression. “Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less ‘widely applicable’ as a means of ‘drawing in’ the masses.” Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of oppression. “Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifest itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity – vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc., – is it not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of developing the political consciousness of the workers if we do not undertake the organisation of the political exposure of the autocracy in all its aspects? So Leninism and a Leninist party are in no way narrow. The goal is to build a political movement able to respond on all issues.

Thirdly, action is essential to Lenin’s view of the party and working- class consciousness, because the masses learn in action. Workers and others are mobilised around specific demands, and develop through a series of struggles around transitional demands to a consciousness where they will understand the necessity for a seizure of power and have the will to do it. And Lenin stressed the need for the working class to return to the attack again and again. He summed up this process: “In fact, it is only after the vanguard of the proletariat, supported by the whole or the majority of this, the only revolutionary class, overthrows the exploiters, suppresses them, emancipates the exploited from their state of slavery and immediately improves their conditions of life at the expense of the expropriated capitalist – it is only after this, and only in the actual process of an acute class struggle, that the masses of the toilers and exploited can be educated, trained and organised around the proletariat under whose influence and guidance, they can get rid of the selfishness, disunity, vices and weaknesses engendered by private property; only then will they be converted into a free union of free workers.”

Imperialism and the split in socialism

It took the developments of August 1914 for Lenin to complete his theory. Leading up to World War I, that massive inter-imperialist slaughter, the workers’ parties of the Second International had resolved at conferences time and again to oppose war and not to lend support to the impending war drive of the capitalists. But when actual war was declared, most of the workers’ parties, including the largest, the German Social Democratic Party, fell in behind their own bourgeoisies, even voting war credits in parliament, so as to send their own working class off to fight workers of other countries. When Lenin first heard this news, he didn’t believe it. He thought it was a disinformation conspiracy by the imperialists. But when he realised this monumental betrayal was a fact, he was able to incorporate this understanding of the further degeneration of the reformist tendency into his theoretical framework. In 1916 he wrote his work on imperialism.

A very incisive article written that same year analysed the process: (Imperialism and the Split in Socialism). He pointed out how when England had thorough economic world domination its bourgeoisie was able to bribe its working class, but now in the imperialist epoch, the bourgeoisie of every imperialist “Great” Power can economically bribe the upper strata of its workers. “Now a ‘bourgeois labour party’ is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries.” Lenin was very prophetic:

“On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into ‘eternal’ parasites on the body of the rest of mankind, to ‘rest on the laurels’ of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop.”

Lenin’s words foreshadow the actual development of the colonial revolution which has been such a feature of world politics for the last 70 years.

And they also explain why the struggle for socialism in the West has been so difficult. We don’t say impossible (and neither did Lenin). There have been revolutionary situations in the early 1920s, after 1944-45 in quite a few countries in Europe, in Spain and Portugal with the overthrow of the fascist dictatorships, and in May-June 1968 in France. And there have been many revolutionary struggles. But the course of the world revolution shifted, with the colonial countries at the forefront – China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua and so on.

So these developments, and the analysis by Lenin of capitalism in its imperialist stage, explains the shift, the delay, and difficulty in the advanced capitalist countries. It helps us understand the problem, and how to overcome it.

It’s a continuous, decisive struggle, (not just a debate), in the working class, between reform and revolution, reflecting different material interests. It had its roots in the growth of the workers’ movement in the imperialist countries. It had its clearest formulations first by Bernstein, and its flowering in 1914. This certainly showed how well they had done their job for the bourgeoisie.

But just three years later, the Russian Revolution showed what’s possible, and dealt a blow for the working class, giving a living proof of its theories, and a vindication of the movement, of communism. But the struggle and debate are not settled in advanced capitalist countries, and revive again and again.

Revival of revisionist challenges

Capitalism doesn’t hold back when its rule is threatened in any way. In times of crisis, it will launch bloody interventions against victorious revolutions, it will resort to brutal repression against its own working class, it will resort to fascist solutions to preserve its rule. It also lays down a propaganda barrage, and enlists its agents within the working class again, so time and again this century we’ve seen the apologists for capitalism “refute” revolutionary Marxism.

Leon Trotsky analysed the continuing relevance of Marxism in the face of its reformist and revisionist or straight out capitalist critics in an article written in 1939. It was an introduction to a collection of Marx’s writings, and took up some of the bourgeois attempts to “refute” Marxism.

One of these was by the famous German economist, Werner Sombart, who, Trotsky writes, “was virtually a Marxist at the beginning of his career but later revised all the more revolutionary aspects of Marx’s teaching, especially those most unpalatable for the bourgeoisie, in 1928, toward the end of his career, countered Marx’s Capital with his own Capitalism, which has been translated into many languages and which is probably the best known exposition of bourgeois economic apologetics in recent times.

Sombart writes: “Karl Marx prophesied: firstly, the increasing misery of wage labourers (the usual simplification and distortion of Marx – Australian workers have TV sets etc, therefore Marx was wrong…), secondly, general ‘concentration’, with the disappearance of artisans and peasants (that tendency was taking place, and continues today.) Thirdly the catastrophic collapse of capitalism. Nothing of the kind has come to pass.”

“Against this erroneous prognosis Sombart counterposes his own ‘strictly scientific’ prognosis. ‘Capitalism will continue’, according to him, ‘to transform itself, at the time of its apogee; as it grows older, it will become more and more calm, sedate, reasonable.’“

Trotsky had fun pulling that prediction apart, after the 1929 Crash, the 1930s Depression, and fascism in Europe! And he also foresaw the coming world war – not a picture of calmness, sedateness, reasonableness!

The catastrophic defeats of the 1930s leading to the World War II were succeeded by the revolutionary upsurge after 1943, which culminated in the victory of the Soviet Union, the transformations in Eastern Europe, and victorious revolutions in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. And this was in spite of Stalinism. (Victories didn’t occur in France and Italy for quite specific reasons, very much because of Stalinism.)

Well, in response the bourgeoisie clamps down. The Cold War is ushered in, with Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton Missouri. Anti-communist hysteria and witch-hunting were stepped up, and leftists and militant workers were subjected to physical and legal persecution. A period of stabilisation, capitalist boom was assured in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And the “Cold Warriors” were accompanied by their ideological servants. Daniel Bell and other professors proclaimed “the end of ideology”. They thought they’d got the class struggle licked.

Post-WWII – Again on the revolutionary potential of the working class

The two decades of working-class quiescence from 1948 to 1968 wasn’t just gleefully seized on by open agents of capitalism. It led some on the left to pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of revolution. The old doubts about the revolutionary potential of the working class were raised again. With the continuing developments of technology, and various changes in capitalism, questions were posed:

• Hasn’t the role of the working class been fundamentally changed in this changed environment?
• Hasn’t the long-term high level of employment and the rising real wage undercut any revolutionary potential of the working class?
• Isn’t it changing in composition, and more and more divorced from the productive process as a result of growing automation?
• Doesn’t its relations with other social layers, such as white-collar workers, technicians, intellectuals, students undergo basic modifications?

Various conclusions were drawn by some on the left…

• Capitalism in the West can’t be overthrown, it’s too stable and strong.
• Or, if it is to be overthrown, it will only be after revolutions in all of the Third World.
• Or, although capitalism is unstable, the working class is too drugged and bought off to do any toppling.
• Or, the working class is not the agency of change, there are other candidates, such as racial or national minorities, students, youth. (For example, Herbert Marcuse concluded, first, that the working class had no revolutionary potential, then that the revolution itself had no potential.)

These views were answered on one level by events. In May-June 1968 in France, 10 million workers followed the students into the streets, went on a general strike, and threatened capitalism in France. It was a truly exciting revolutionary situation.

But these views have also been well answered by people such as Ernest Mandel. In a talk given in the US in 1968 he answered these objections by analysing the actual situation of the working class in the economic life of contemporary monopoly capitalism. (And his thorough study, Late Capitalism (1972) analysed it thoroughly.)

“First”, he says, “contemporary production and distribution of material wealth is more than ever based upon modern industry and the factory.” Automation decreases industrial labour in the factory but increases it in agriculture, distribution, services and administration. “What stands out is the fact that industrial labor in the broadest sense of the word – men and women forced to sell their labor power to the manufacturing, cotton-growing, data-processing or dream-producing factory! – more than ever occupies the central place in the economy’s structure.”

“Second, whatever the increase in consumption of the working class may have been, neo-capitalism hasn’t modified in any sense whatsoever the basic nature of work in a capitalist society as alienated labor.” Automation universalises alienation (to an extent Marx and Engels could only have dimly imagined), labor is more than ever alienated labor, forced labor.

“Third, living labor remains more than ever the sole source of surplus value, the only source of profit, which is what makes the system tick.” The fundamental contradiction remains – there is the unlimited potential for the production of use-values, but the system can’t develop or function steadily because of the need to make a profit. Mandel sums up:

“Now precisely these three characteristics of modern labor – its key role in the productive process, its basic alienation, its economic exploitation – are the objective roots of its potential role as the main force to overthrow capitalism, the objective roots of its indicated revolutionary mission.

“Any attempt to transfer that role to other social layers who are unable to paralyse production at a stroke, who do not play a key role in the production process, who are not the main source of profit and capital accumulation, takes us a decisive step backwards from scientific to utopian socialism, from socialism which grows out of the inner contradictions of capitalism to that immature view of socialism which was to be born from the moral indignation of men regardless of their place in social production.”

A new revisionism in the 1980s

The youth radicalisation of the 1960s, the international movement against the Vietnam War, and May-June ‘68 in France, gave rise to both:

1. A renewal of Marxism, in parties like our own.
2. Trends denying the revolutionary potential of the working class, anti-Marxist ideas.

After an ebb in this radicalisation, especially in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, there has been further development of anti-Marxist ideas.

In France, for example, structuralism, then post-structuralism, and new fads in philosophy have made gains against Marxism. Andre Gorz, a former Marxist, bade Farewell to the Working Class in his book, and others have used the questions of environmental concerns and the dangers of nuclear war to decree the class struggle irrelevant. A layer of the new left, and sections of the CPs have taken further steps along the road charted by Bernstein. Some have not merely belittled the role of the working class, but ruled it out altogether, or even ruled it as reactionary. Part of this current finds expression in the CPGB journal Marxism Today (a misnomer), and it has been a growing current. It was tagged the New Revisionists by Ralph Milliband writing in New Left Review.

They have been attempting to impose their views – often by verbal bullying and sneers – as the only acceptable “realistic” common sense. If successful this push by the Marxism Today crowd would be a significant defeat for the resurgence of Marxism in Britain that’s occurred in recent decades, and also for the socialist movement in Australia and other English speaking countries. It’s a dangerous shift to the right, intellectually and politically, providing cover for the right in the British Labor Party. Their counterparts here, in the CPA for example, have been providing the same service for the ALP in the 1980s.

Of course there’s nothing wrong in new thinking or trying to take account of new circumstances – that’s fundamental to Marxism. But you have to check that it is something new, and not merely rehashed old theories, and also that it helps the working class and its allies think through strategies. If it’s old prejudices and old fallacies served up as new then it’s decidedly unhelpful.

The new revisionism in some circles has reached the stage where class, class struggle, class analysis is ruled out altogether.

Boris Frankel wrote an article in Arena in 1984, In Defense of Class Analysis responding to these developing views:

“It is a reflection of the ideological conservative nature of the current period that in the midst of the deepest socio-economic crisis since the 1930s, it is once again necessary to defend the concepts of class and class conflict. Before the 1970s, Marxists had to defend class theory against the endless attacks and simplistic interpretations made by the overwhelming majority of academics, journalists and politicians. Fifteen years later, the dominant conservative and liberal critics have been joined by a chorus of critics from various social movements as well as disillusioned ex-Marxists. In recent years defenders of class analysis have run the risk of being labelled dogmatic, economistic, old-fashioned, sexist or something equally derogatory. While it would be absurd to claim that most feminists or supporters of other social movements are anti-class analysis, nevertheless, there is a significant body of theorists and activists who regard class analysis as part of the enemy!”

Reihana will be going into some of the arguments of the defenders of Marxism against the Eurocommunist version of reformism, people such as Ellen Meiksins Wood.

But I want to finish up on this question by pointing to the positions of one of the vanguard of the new revisionist academics, Paul Hirst. He heads a chapter of a book “Taking Reformism Seriously”. He’s very open about it. This former Marxist (Maoist) denounces “oppositionism” and “insurrectionism.” He talks of the alien and oppressive traditions of the East. He thinks that only a program of practical reforms is realistic. For him there’s only one credible agent for such changes, the British Labour Party. And he attacks the old-fashioned shibboleths of “nationalisation”, opposition to cuts, and hostility to incomes policy. Now none of these views has a word in them that is new. It was all said already by Bernstein nearly 100 years ago. And none of it is new to us, we run across these views in the bourgeois press, the ALP, in our daily political life. But what is of passing interest is how this view can emerge from the Marxist (albeit academic) milieu one more time. And still be served up as though it’s somehow original!

Stuart Hall… phrases, sarcasm.

Used to hide lack of analysis, old, worn, right-wing positions, and support for the status quo, rejection of the working class as the agency of social change, and the elevation of ideas or democratic struggles as the agency.

As Marxists for the last 100 years have argued, in refuting this trend time and again: if it’s not the working class, then the job won’t be done; if you don’t overthrow capitalist power, then the anarchy, the evils of capitalism will continue.

Frankel, for example, states clearly in his article:

“Anyone who believes that he or she can achieve major improvements in the social welfare system without challenging the whole class nature of revenue collection and expenditure, is dreaming….

“Anyone who believes that just one objective championed by feminists and blacks – the attainment of equal wages with white males – can be achieved without challenging capitalist classes, is dreaming.

“Anyone who believes that hunger and poverty can be eliminated from the Third World without challenging the exploitation perpetrated by capitalist classes, is dreaming.

“Anyone who believes that disarmament can be achieved without challenging profits made by capitalist classes, is dreaming.”

And we could add others… Anyone hoping to save the planet and our environment without removing the power of the capitalist class is dreaming.

We can recall what Lenin said. Marx and Engels substituted science for dreams. These new utopian socialists, new true socialists, new revisionists, have substituted dreams for science. They’ve gone full circle. They’ve gone back beyond Bernstein, beyond Marx and Engels… they’re not very new at all, unfortunately.

Why has there been this retreat by some Marxists at this time? Perry Anderson, writing in 1983 in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, speculated:

“The popular consolidation of political regimes of imperialist reaction in Britain, or the United States, in the mid-eighties may well break the nerve of some socialists, drawing them rightwards in an anxious quest for the middle ground.”

Thatcher, Reagan, Hawke, Mitterand et al have weakened the working-class movement. And there’s a certain social base for this drift too, as a privileged layer in privileged countries can find niches for themselves in the government or other bureaucracy. But in many ways it was an untimely shift to the right, like Sombart’s untimely predictions in 1929. Stalinism is in its death throes (that’s a positive entry in the balance sheet); the world capitalist economy is shaky, tottering on a mountain of debt; workers’ struggles are on the rise in countries like Brazil and South Korea. It is a false, unnecessary surge to the right, to become part of the problem, not a contribution to a solution.

Perhaps it’s also a question of optimism vs pessimism involved here too, the way you look at the world, look at history, how you feel confident about the future.

But we have to reaffirm that Marxism, revolutionary Marxism, is still relevant, the only way to understand reality, the only guide to working-class action.

The reality of capitalist crisis, the horrors, the misery, is evident. The reality of that fundamental contradiction, between the social character of the process of production, versus the anti-social character of capitalist private property, is increasingly apparent.

The reality of class struggle, the revolutionary potential of the working class is still doubted, disputed by many, and people despair. They are feeling the effects of the poison of bourgeois ideology, greatly aided by the modern mass media, and this has certainly thoroughly penetrated the mass of the working class. But Mandel, in that 1968 speech, cautioned:

“One should guard against losing a sense of proportion in respect to this problem. After all, the working-class movement arose in the 19th Century under conditions where the mass of workers were far more dominated by the ideas of the ruling class than they are today. One has only to compare the hold of religion on workers in large parts of Europe, or the grip of nationalism on the French working class after the experience of the great French Revolution, to understand that what looks like a new problem today is in reality as old as the working class itself.

“In the last analysis the question boils down to this: Which force will turn out to be stronger in determining the workers’ attitude to the society he lives in, the mystifying ideas he receives yesterday in the church and today through TV, or the social reality he confronts and assimilates day after day through practical experience? For historical materialists, to pose the question this way is to answer it, although the struggle itself will say the last word.”