Hiding your politics under a bushel (2003)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ideas of Karl Marx: A beginner’s guide. By Aindrias O’Cathasaigh. Irish Socialist Network. €2.

This is the text of a talk given by the author to a meeting of an Irish reformist organisation who has published it as a short pamphlet. Naturally, in 16 pages Marx’s views can only be expressed in very succinct form. The parts concerning history and economics are basically OK,.

But it is the part on Marx’s political position that is confused. Marx argued that, to free themselves from capitalist exploitation, workers needed to win control of political power and that to do this they needed to organise into a political party; and that what socialists should be doing is everything they could to encourage the emergence of such a class political party.

In an understandable reaction against vanguardism—not that Marx had a vanguardist conception of the socialist party (he saw it rather as a mass democratic political movement)—O’Cathasaigh and the Irish Socialist Network recoil from the idea of a “party” and even from advocating socialism directly. This they see as socialists trying to impose their views on the working class; they favour going along with the day-to-day struggles of non-socialist-minded workers in the hope that these will somehow spontaneously evolve into a struggle for socialism.

Marx, who never hid his socialist light under a bushel, would have been appalled. Such timidity and drifting with the current will not advance the cause of socialism. It leads straight into the bog of reformism.

Adam Buick