The quotes below have been taken from some of the celebrated texts of the socialist movement and arranged in the form of a short multiple-choice quiz. Pit your wits against the forces of reaction and reformism, and discover in the process that not everything which labels itself (or is labelled) “Marxism”, actually is! Answers (with explanations) are found on a later page.
The first five questions all have to do with criticisms of the following passage:
The (...) workers' party, in order to pave the way to the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of producers’ co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people. The producers' cooperative societies are to be called into being for industry and agriculture on such a scale that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them.
1. To the ideas of which political figure does the following refer?
"In place of the existing class struggle appears a newspaper scribbler's phrase: ‘the social question , to the 'solution' of which one ‘paves the way’. Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the ‘socialist organisation of the total labour’ ‘arises’ from the ‘state aid’ that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies and which the state, not the worker, 'calls into being'."
a) Mao Zedong
b) Joseph Stalin
c) Edouard Bernstein
d) Ferdinand Lassalle
2. To which country does this quotation make reference?
“From the remnants of a sense of shame, ‘state aid’ has been put - under the democratic control of the ‘toiling people’ [However,] the majority of the ‘toiling people* in consists of peasants, and not of proletarians."
a) Germany in 1875
b) France in 1848
c) Russia in 1917
d) China in 1950
3. The working class in which country is being indicated in the following passage?
“. . . ‘democratic’. . . means ‘by the rule of the people', but what does ‘under the control of the toiling people organised so as to rule themselves' mean? And particularly in the case of toiling people which, in making such demands on the slate, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!”
a) Russian workers before 1917
b) Russian workers after 1917
c) German workers in the third quarter of the 19th century
d) Spanish workers during the 1854 Revolution
4. What type of organisation is being indirectly criticised by the author?
“The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed this specific nostrum in the programme. but in taking, in general, a retrograde step from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.”
a) Owenite communities (c. 1840)
b) National workshops (c. 1848)
c) An organisation of revolutionaries (c. 1902)
d) Workers’ soviets (c. 1917)
5. Who was the head of state in the regime referred to below?
“. . . a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie and bureaucratically carpentered . . . ”
a) Tsar Nicholas II
b) Kaiser Wilhelm I
d) Nikita Krushchev
6. “The indirect dependence of man on man, which is now the basic feature of conditions which are most fully developed economically, cannot be understood and explained from their own nature, but only as a somewhat transformed heritage of an earlier direct subjugation and expropriation."
Who made the above statement?
c) V. I. Lenin
7. “Recently, however, since adopted state ownership, a certain spurious socialism has made its appearance - here and there even degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism - which declares that all taking over by the State, even the Bismarckian kind, is in itself socialistic."
To which political regime was the writer of these lines addressing himself?
a) Bismarck’s Prussia
b) Mussolini's Italy
c) The Bolshevik state
d) The Popular Front in France
8. “The publicistic (ie, public] right of an economic commune in its instruments of labour is an exclusive right of property at least as against every other economic commune and also as against society and the State. But this right is not to entitle the commune ‘to cut itself off from the outside world, for among the various communes there is freedom of movement and compulsory acceptance of new members on the basis of fixed laws and administrative regulations . . .”’
Which sort of economic organisation do you think most closely fits this description?
a) A commonly owned and democratically controlled world-wide system of wealth production and distribution
b) A system based on New Lanark-style factory communities (as in 19th- century Britain)
c) A collective farm in a proletarian state (for example Russia)
d) An advanced co-operative or people's commune during a protracted period of socialist transition (China)
9. The “equality in principle of economic rights does not exclude the voluntary addition to what justice requires, of an expression of special recognition and honor . . . Society honors itself, in distinguishing the higher types of work by a moderate additional allocation for consumption."
To whose ideas does this statement allude?
a) Deng Xiaoping
b) V. I. Lenin
c) Eugen Dühring
10. “On the world market gold and silver remain world money, a general means of purchase and payment, the absolute social embodiment of wealth. And this property of the precious metals gives the individual members of the economic communes a new motive to the accumulation of a hoard, to getting rich, to usury; the motive to act freely and independently of the commune outside its borders, and to realise on the world market the private wealth which they have accumulated."
What kind of society, in your opinion, is being discussed here?
a) A society of free access to the means of life
b) A system under the thumb of bankers and financiers
c) One variety or another or state capitalism
d) A traditional capitalist economic system
11. “Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour."
How would you describe the type of social organism implied in the above passage?
a) One in which the state regulates production, pays wages to workers and turns a profit on investment
b) A society reorganised as a proletarian state, in which capital is accumulated for the benefit of the workers
c) One in which the bourgeoisie has been forcibly subdued by the proletariat and which is evolving into a communist society
d) A communist society, not as it has developed on its own basis, but as it is just issuing out of capitalist society
Answers and explanation on page 16
Answer key and explanatory notes. Since a score doesn't really prove that you understand a subject, the purpose of this quiz is not to have you tally up points but only to induce you to think a little. And since the quotations were all taken from either Marx's
critique of the Gotha Programme or f
rom the second and third sections of Engels' Anti-Dühring, it would be automatically impossible for any of the choices referring to persons living or events taking place after 1878 to be correct. Apart from this little technical (and historical) detail, however, many of the ideas which were articulated by Lenin and his followers and which have long been considered as forming part of the heritage of Marxism turn out to be the same ideas for which Marx and Engels reserved their harshest criticisms!
The answers are as follows:
1-d. (Although if you answered a, b or c, we can’t blame you.)
2-a. Russia and China were manifestly not ready for socialism at the time of their respective revolutions. However, you will note that neither the goal of merely establishing a bourgeois republic nor of overthrowing it and setting up a proletarian state in its place (both of which were successively advocated by Lenin) differs essentially from the formula put forward in the Gotha Programme, since “producers’ co-operative societies" is just a fancy term for factories, farms and other forms of socialised labour.
3-c. In German, “democratic” is volks-herrschaftlich. Marx was critical of the suggestion (here) that trade-unions are capable of ruling a capitalist state. “Rule" in economic terms means “administration of wealth"; it is the owners of the means of production who rule. Faced with such a large rival constituency as the (reformed) peasantry of Russia, the workers of Russia were in a poor position in 1917 to claim ownership of the means of production on behalf of society as a whole. Given that not even Lenin supported common ownership of the means of production for the Russian working class during his lifetime, and given also that he dismissed workers in general as being incapable of class-consciousness “by their own unaided efforts", both a and b are logically as well as historically impossible. (Spain, on the other hand, is a somewhat problematical case, with which we need not concern ourselves here.)
4-b. This refers, of course, to the 1848 Revolution in France and to Philippe Buchc in particular, a religiously oriented democrat who advocated the slogan (which Leninists have borrowed and called “socialist”) to the effect that “he who will not work shall not eat”. Marx, in other words, was raking the architects of the Gotha Programme over the coals for confusing economic with political objectives. “Sectarian" in this context means “parochial”; Marx was claiming that the Socialist Workers' Party —product of the uniting of Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Union and the Marxist Social-Democratic Workers' Party — ran a serious risk of losing its way in a labyrinth of economic projects — of becoming no more than a trade-union lobby. Robert Owen's efforts may have been amateurish, but —especially in his later years — he was certainly no glib-talking lobbyist. On the contrary, in Lenin's proletarian state, workers' soviets must necessarily serve only as a lobby for the “armed proletariat", while the “organisation of revolutionaries” (a euphemism for the Bolshevik Party) could only be promoted to a management position.
5-b. Like the Second French Republic, which could not break free of its Napoleonic, Orleanist and Legitimist inheritance, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic of Nikita Krushchev was (and remains) moulded along fundamentally Tsarist lines, so that in many respects this dictatorship of the secretariat promotes a kind of industrial neo-feudalism — as do its enthusiasts in Czechoslovakia. naturally.
6-d. If “political power springs from the barrel of a gun” (Mao Zedong), as a result of having “smashed” the “bourgeois state” (Lenin), then what have you got but a “somewhat transformed heritage” of state-administered capitalism, whether by force (Dühring) or by compromise (Berlinguer)? A revolution whose immediate effect is other than to abolish the wages system is not a socialist revolution.
7-a. All four regimes demonstrate some tendency toward state capitalism, to one degree or another. Lenin himself identified state ownership and management of the means of production with socialism, proving only that if you run a capitalist system, then you must be a capitalist — either that, or you're some kind of flunkey.
8-d. Herr Dühring’s federation of economic communes bears an uncanny resemblance (on paper) to Chairman Mao’s people's communes. Since, on the other hand, common ownership (communism, or socialism) gives you the moneyless, worldwide community of producers, it would be economically impossible for any one locality to live in isolation. By the same token, remaking capitalism in the image of Owen’s New Lanark experiment would spell ruin for production based on profit. (As for the proletarian state, see below. No. 11.)
9-c. Quoted by Engels, the statement might easily have come right out of one of the platitude-filled speeches of either Deng Xiaoping or Edward Gierek; whereas Lenin’s concession to “reality” (the New Economic Policy, state capitalism) conceals the emergence of a new class of bureaucrat-capitalists, who decidedly believe society should honour itself by honouring them.
10-b. “Free access" means exactly that: no money. You cannot get rich in a socialist society; you are already born that way. If, conversely, “economic commune” is just a glorious nickname for “city" or “town", or even for agrarian state capitalism, then we already have them (choices c and d).
11-d. The first three choices respectively describe aspects or consequences of a proletarian revolution according to Lenin. First of all, wages, prices and profits signify commodity exchange; secondly, a “proletarian state" is a chimera — capital can only be accumulated for the benefit of capitalists; and thirdly, the working class cannot “subdue” the capitalist class without by the very fact abolishing its own status and becoming itself transformed into “society as a whole". Marx and Lenin very obviously disagree on whether a communist society can simply “issue out of capitalist society" or must first “develop on its own basis”. What Lenin describes as a "higher” phase, that is, developed communist society, Marx specifically mentions as pertaining rather to its merely having come into existence. He saw it as a political decision which cannot be put off until some remote future date or made by anyone else except the working class — in contrast to Lenin, who gave this “task” to the Party as part of its "leading role" and spoke of it as requiring decades to carry out.
Ron Elbert
(World Socialist Party of the United States)
* Questions 1, 2, 4 and 5 are quoted from Selected Works. International Publishers, 1969 ed.; question 3. because of the inadequacy and awkwardness of the translation, has been here reworded so as to bring out the sense of the passage, which otherwise degenerates into a meaningless conundrum. Question 11 is taken from the same source.
** Questions 6 to 10 are taken from the 1972 ed. of the International Publisher's version.
