Marxist Anti-Bolshevik (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Bolshevism. By Iulii Martov. Translated by Paul Kellogg and Mariya Melentyeva. AU Press, Edmonton, Canada, 2022.

When in 1938 International Review published, under the title The State and the Socialist Revolution, a number of essays written by Martov in the years 1918-1921 (he died in 1923) the translator omitted the first section. The whole collection had been published in Russian, in Berlin in 1923, under the title “Mirovoi bol’shevizm” (World Bolshevism). This explains why Martov has come to be called Julius, the German equivalent of Iulii (or Yuliy), his first name in Russian.

The whole collection has now been published in a new translation with an introduction by Kellogg. In the missing chapters Martov advanced the view that Bolshevism was popular amongst large sections of the working class outside Russia because they had been brutalised by serving as soldiers during the war, hence their belief in violent direct action and contempt for traditional working class institutions and activities (reformist parliamentary action and trade unionism). The newly-translated chapters don’t add much, in terms of Marxist analysis, to the points made in the parts that have been available in English since 1938. In any event, by 1921 the Bolsheviks had abandoned advocating an immediate armed insurrection in favour of electing left-wing governments, which brought them a different following.

As a further dissemination of Martov’s Marxist criticism of Lenin and Bolshevik ideology the new translation can only be welcome.

Adam Buick

Anti-Bolsheviks (2021)

Book Review from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Council Communist Reader. Radical Reprint, 2021

The articles in this collection – by Paul Mattick Snr, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle and Anton Pannekoek – have long been available elsewhere.

They called themselves Communists as they agreed with Lenin’s break with pre-WW1 Social Democracy when he changed the name of his party in 1918 from RSDLP to Communist Party; some initially joined the Communist Party in their country. They had regarded what happened in Russia in November 1917 as what it purported to be – a workers’ revolution in which workers, organised in soviets (the Russian word for ‘council’), had assumed control of society. Within a few years they realised that this had not been the case but continued to call themselves Council Communists as opposed to Bolshevik-sponsored ‘Party’ or ‘State’ Communists.

Their basic position was that workers should abandon the parliamentary Social Democratic parties and trade unions and organise themselves in work-based councils both to wage the day-to-day class struggle and to overthrow capitalism. They became very anti-party and anti-parliament, which made them similar to Syndicalists except that they situated themselves in the Marxist tradition.

They were what Mattick Snr called ‘Anti-Bolshevik Marxists’ (among which we can be included), regarding Russia under the Bolsheviks (Trotsky as well as Stalin) as state capitalism and opposing Lenin’s vanguard party concept. They weren’t always clear on the implications of a post-capitalist, communist society, some of them drawing up elaborate schemes for labour-time accounting and labour-money (not included here).

Annoyingly, Paul Mattick Jnr repeatedly refers in his introduction to the German Social Democrats who took political control in Germany immediately after the end of WW1 as ‘socialists’. He must surely know they weren’t.

Adam Buick

The State and the Socialist Revolution (1940)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

The State and the Socialist Revolution by J. Martov. (International Review, New York.)

This pamphlet consists of a number of essays written during the years 1919-23 by the Russian Marxist, Martov

Who was Martov?

“Integer”, the translator, gives a detailed account of Martov in his Foreword. He was a Russian Marxist who accepted neither the point of view of the Bolsheviks, nor that of the Mensheviks, but was very well known in Russia for his writings both before and during the revolutionary days. He was “one if the founders and collaborators on the Iskra, the publication around which the Russian Social Democracy developed”. After 1917 he opposed the infliction of capital punishment on workers who thought differently from the Bolsheviks, and he demanded trial by jury for political prisoners. Because he persisted in examining critically the policy of the Bolsheviks, he was driven into exile, where he died, poverty-stricken and a victim of tuberculosis.

Martov’s writings are of particular interest to the working class, for therein he carefully examines the content and lays bear the meaning of the Russian Revolution. In addition, he covers such important questions as “Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “The Commune of 1871”.

It is worthy of note that Martov, possibly ignorant of the S. P. G. B., arrived at conclusions on a large number of subjects which coincide with the views of the Socialist Party of Great Britain expressed in the Socialist Standard in the early years of Bolshevik rule.

Martov on “Soviets for All Countries”

After 1917, the Bolsheviks and their followers in other countries announced to the world that a new weapon, a new political form, had at long last been discovered which would enable the working class everywhere to win its emancipation. This “perfect” political form was, of course, the Soviet. Time and place were of no importance. All that was necessary was for the different peoples to make use of Soviets and each and every one of them would achieve Socialism. Soviets, the Bolsheviks claimed, would be equally efficacious in backward countries like Russia, Bulgaria and Hungary, and in highly industrialised countries like England and the United States. “Soviets are the perfect form of State. They are the magic wand by which all inequalities, all misery, may be suppressed”  (p. 14).

Martov ridiculed the Bolsheviks for their belief that revolutions were ready to break out everywhere, for their belief that workers and peasants, by embracing Soviets (a world merely meaning Council), could establish Socialism. He held the Marxian view that no political form can enable Socialism to be won, unless the material conditions are ripe for such a change, unless capitalism has reached a high degree of development. Says Martov: “No less than mystic is the concept of a political form that, by virtue of its particular character, can surmount all economic social and national contradictions” (p. 15).

Marx’s view on the impossibility of peasant communities passing directly to Socialism without passing through the intermediary stage of capitalism, can be found in his preface to the first edition of Capital. There Marx says: “And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement . . . it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.”

It can easily be seen, therefore, how little the Bolsheviks understood the teachings of Marx (whose apostles they claim to be), and how badly they followed the advice he had to give.

Reality has shattered all these illusions

To-day, we hear little of Soviets. The reality of experience has taught that they are not “a magic wand”.

Reality, too, shattered many of the Bolsheviks’ early illusions. In his essay on “Dictatorship of the Minority”, Martov shows how the Bolsheviks were forced by conditions of the time to change their tactics and ideas.

In 1917, Lenin urged that the Russian workers would shatter the old bureaucratic and oppressive features of the State, once they had gained political power. He wrote of “the substitution of a universal popular militia for the police”, of the “electiveness and recall at any moment of all functionaries and commanding ranks”, of “workers’ control in its primitive sense, direct participation of the people at the courts” (p. 17). Indeed, Lenin claimed that the triumph of the Bolsheviks would bring to the Russian workers a more real democracy than that found in capitalist countries with the parliamentary system.

This soon proved to be an idle dream. (And yet, perhaps, it was not so “idle”, since such talk helped Lenin and his clique to gain support and power.) In any case, the programme above outlined was soon abandoned. It was found impossible to put it into effect in face of the backward condition of industry and agriculture, and of the peasant outlook. Alread, by1919, Martov could observe that the machinery of State in Russia was being strengthened, and that the apparatus for repression was being improved and extended. Martov sums up the matter in these words:

  Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions. The ‘Soviet State’ has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials and the commanding staff. It has not suppressed the professional police . . . It has not done away with social hierarchy in production . . . On the contrary, in proportion to its evolution, the Soviet State shows a tendency in the opposite direction. It shows a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion. It shows a tendency toward the development of a more specialised apparatus of repression than before . . . It shows a tendency toward the total freedom of the executive organisms from the tutelage of the electors” (p. 18. Our emphasis).

Again, on page 55, Martov tells us how things developed after 1917.

  “In Russia the evolution of the ‘Soviet State’ has already created a new and complicated State machine, based on the ‘administration of persons’ as against the ‘administration of things’ based on the opposition of  . . . The functionary (official) to the citizen. THESE ANTAGONISMS ARE IN NO WAY DIFFERENT FROM THE ANTAGONISMS THAT CHARACTERISE THE CAPITALIST STATE” (Our emphasis).

Naturally, Martov, like the S.P.G.B., held the view that the form of State in Russia was not as advanced as the “democratic parliamentarism” found in Western Europe. Whilst ridiculing the democracy of the more highly developed  capitalist countries, the Bolsheviks did not fail to make use of the features of repression existing in those countries (p. 19).

To put the whole matter briefly, after the Russian upheaval of 1917, as before it, the State Power continued to be in the hands of a minority, though it was a different minority (p. 19).

What was the historic role of the Bolsheviks?

In his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Engels showed that after the proletariat has gained political power for the purpose of introducing Socialism, the State would become unnecessary, and die out. “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production” (Our emphasis).

If the conclusions of Engels given above contain the truth, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was not followed by the introduction of Socialism. Or why the continued development and strengthening of the Russian State Power?

What DID the capture of political power by the Bolsheviks mean? Briefly stated, it meant this. The Bolsheviks became the instruments for the furthering of a capitalist revolution in Russia.

After a life-time of experience of working-class movements, Engels, in his preface to The Class Struggle in France, wrote:

  The time has passed for revolutions accomplished through the sudden seizure of power by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses . . . As soon as the situation calls for the total transformation of the social order, the masses must participate in it directly, and they must have an understanding of what is at stake and what must be won. This is what the history of the last half-century has taught us” (Quoted by Martov, pp. 57-8).

Both Engels and Marx knew from experience that before there could be a Socialist revolution, capitalism must have reached a high stage of development for “no social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room within it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society” (Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy).

The Bolsheviks, however, thought it possible for an active minority, representing the vague aspirations of the workers, to gain political power before the capitalist revolution itself had been completed. (See Martov, pp. 58-60.) What would happen if such a minority gained a political victory over the capitalist classes?

Marx himself answers this question in clear-cut terms in his article, “Moralising Criticism”. Briefly stated, his answer is the following: In those circumstances, the minority become merely the tools of the capitalist class, which has not been virile enough to gain or hold power. Such a minority finds itself in the position of having to develop and run capitalism for a class unable, at the time, to do it successfully itself. Hence, let it be remembered, in running capitalism, the minority will be compelled to use its power to keep the working class in its slave position. Says Marx:

  Its victory will only be a point in the process of the bourgeois (capitalist) revolution itself, and will serve the cause of the latter by aiding its further development. This happened in 1794, and will happen again as long as the march, the movement, of history will not have elaborated the material factors that will create the necessity of putting an end to the bourgeois methods of production and, as a consequence, to the political domination of the bourgeoisie” (p. 59, Martov’s emphasis).

Hence, we see the real content and meaning of the Russian Revolution. It was “only a point in the process of the capitalist revolution itself”.  The Bolsheviks, finding Russia in a very backward condition, were obliged themselves to do what had not been done previously, i.e., develop capitalism. The Bolsheviks performed the task of setting Russian capitalism on its feet and helping it through a very stormy period. “For the proletariat can score a victory over the capitalists—and not for the capitalists—only when the march of history will have elaborated the NECESSITY (not merely the objective POSSIBILITY) of putting an end to the capitalist methods of production” (p. 59).

We had hoped to include in this article reference to two other essays by Martov; first, “Metaphysical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism”, and secondly, “Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, but, owing to lack of space, we must leave them for a future issue.

Enough, however, has been said to show that we consider The State and the Socialist Revolution worthy of careful study. Like the books by Gide and Yvon, reviewed already in the Socialist Standard, Martov’s appears to add further proof of the correctness of the attitude taken up by the S.P.G.B. [about] the Russian Revolution.

We recommend it to all workers. We are confident that, if widely read, it will dispel many of those illusions which have been hindering the growth of a solid Socialist movement during the past twenty years.

Clifford Allen

(The State and the Socialist Revolution is obtainable from the Literature Secretary, 42 Great Dover Street, London, S. E. 1. Post free, 1s. 1d.)

Mattick Again (1979)

Book Review from the February 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Bolshevik Communism by Paul Mattick. Merlin Press. London, £2.50.

This is a collection of articles written by Mattick over the past thirty or so years. Despite his sometimes convoluted style Mattick is always worth reading as on a number of important points his views are very close to ours (though on others, such as using parliament in the establishment of socialism, there arc fundamental differences). He did in fact write occasionally for the Western Socialist in the 1950s though none of these articles arc reproduced here.

Particularly good is his 1947 article on "Bolshevism and Stalinism" in which he shows how Lenin and Trotsky had laid the foundations for Stalin's dictatorship and that Trotsky’s basic complaint against Stalin was simply that it was Stalin rather than Trotsky who had succeeded Lenin. And we can only but agree with the view expressed in the Introduction that "the revolutions which succeeded, first of all, in Russia and China, were not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense leading to the ‘association of free and equal producers'. but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism. Marxism served here as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist systems, which were no longer determined by market competition but controlled by way of the authoritarian state".

Adam Buick

Bolshevism (2004)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bolshevism. By Rudolf Sprenger, Redline Publications, 2004.

One of the greatest obstacles to socialism in the twentieth century was Bolshevism. A key text in that ideology was Lenin's 1902 book, What Is To Be Done? There was nothing particularly new in that work, being the general outlook of the Second International, but it did lay out clearly the idea that leadership was needed for a working class which was incapable of emancipating itself. Rudolf Sprenger (real name Helmut Wagner) wrote this eloquent demolition of Leninist élitism in the early 1930s, published in New York in 1939 and favourably reviewed in the Socialist Standard that year. Sprenger argues that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois rather than a proletarian revolution.

The pamphlet is priced at £2.00 plus 50 pence postage in the UK. Inclusive airmail price to Europe is 5 euros, and to the rest of the world US$7.00. Overseas orders should be paid for with currency notes. Order from: Redline Publications, PO Box 6700, Sawbridgeworth, CM21 0BS, UK.

Lew Higgins

Stalin — Three Portraits (1940)

Book Reviews from the June 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism by Boris Souvarine (Secker & Warburg, 15s.)
Stalin by Isaac Don Levine (Newnes; Private Lives Library; about 2s. 6d.)
Stalin by Stephen Graham (Hutchinson’s "Pocket Specials,” 7d.)

As an essay in “applied” psychology alone, Souvarine’s work, “Stalin” (Seeker & Warburg, 15s.), would occupy a high place; as a piece of historical interpretation it is in line with Marx’s classic “18th Brumaire.” While its 700 pages demand close attention, it is difficult to suggest how the conciseness which is a marked feature of Marx's work could have been attained here by Souvarine; analysis of historical events to-day is becoming increasingly difficult, complicated as it is (among other things) by powerful political movements claiming to be “Marxist” and “Socialist,” which are Reformist in intent, and therefore essentially capitalist in the outcome.

In Souvarine’s work, Economic Forces, shaping big human ends, are never lost sight of. As far as the working class is concerned, capitalism is a divinity which shapes our ends rough . . . hew them as we will (due apologies to big Shade at Stratford); the potent influence of an historical Past is skilfully but unobtrusively used to shed clear light upon the actors in the November Revolution, and the humble necessary “stage crowd” ranks with sordid “stars” in interest and importance.

It is worth recording that historical analogies suggested on the platform and in the Press of the Socialist Party of Great Britain occur frequently in this work.

From the political point of view, the least valuable result of “Stalin” is the sure emergence of a convincing likeness of this sinister hero of the Communist Party. “We are the Party of Lenin, Stalin and Dimitrov. No other party can produce such Giants, Leaders and Heroes as these” bawls Harry Pollitt (gigantic and heroic features duly glaring out on title-page). After reading Souvarine’s book it would surely be difficult not to reply, “Thank goodness!” To find parallel for dirty intrigue, appalling treachery and sickening cruelty within the Party itself, let alone outside, one has to go back to Elizabethan orgies of foulness and blood as mirrored by the lesser lights of the contemporary drama; it is more than probable that British tradition, outcome of the course of historical development in this country, will save Harry (spite of himself) from developing into “such” a Hero as Stalin in the extremely unlikely event of post-war "leadership” by the footling hangers-on of Moscow in this country. In this expression of opinion, the Brailsfords and the wailing Pinks of the New Statesman, seeking to distinguish the “Communist” from the “Stalinist,” will probably agree.

With unerring skill, Soviet “giants” are reduced to their real stature; undisputed facts backed by apt quotations from official sources do their work—quotations showing deliberate Soviet excisions from previous editions of official works are especially illuminating, not to speak of wholesale suppression of complete works hitherto officially recognised and boomed.

Startling examples of the Communist penchant for eating dirt are given—the peccant Pollitt grovelling in the dust for his “How to Win the War” via the Daily Worker, doesn’t do it with quite the abandon that his Russian comrade manages.

Souvarine trenchantly comments on the outward and visible signs in the Soviet Republic which indicate clearly inward and spiritual dis-grace— read pages 350 onwards. Significantly the author says: “The embalming of Lenin’s remains found its counterpart in the Communist International in the mummification of its founder’s work, the petrification of his thought.”

An example of Souvarine’s penetration is encountered on page 426: “Stalin likes to set going exaggerated demands in order that he may appear in the rôle of mediator, proposing a compromise which can then easily be put over.” In the light of recent events (Finland, for example) this estimate of one side of our hero’s low cunning is startlingly correct.

One thing is emphasised which is too often ill- understood, or simply not known. In Russia, expulsion from Party membership entails “loss of wages and house-room” (page 382). Loss of employment in this country too often entails the horrors of the P.A.C., in the U.S.S.R. it is often practically a sentence of death for the “purged” member; it carries with it the same dire consequences as banishment did in the Middle Ages. . . . It would be interesting to know how this feature of “Communism” reacts within the British Section; more unlikely things in this unlikely- happening war may eventuate which will reveal the extent of dependence.

Incidentally, a statement in a recent article, “The Real Russia,” was challenged; Souvarine may now be cited as credible evidence: “A decree extended the application of the death penalty for delinquents and criminals as from the age of twelve.”

We hope sympathisers and others will do their best to get this magnificent work in their public library—it is a tragedy that 15s. (cheap at the price) renders it practically impossible for private possession by the worker. One name may be missed in reading—the translator, C. L. R. James. What a piece of work! One wee criticism: Why “epigones”? English has a less recondite word for “Big Pots.”

Stalin by Isaac Don Levine.

For those who desire immediate information on the Russian Revolution, two other more modest works may be recommended. The first is by Don Levine (Newnes; Private Lives Library; about 2s. 6d.); the second, by Stephen Graham (Hutchinson’s "Pocket Specials,” 7d.). Both are entitled ”Stalin.”

The first-named is a sober record, with a clearly arranged chronological sequence of events; the author’s sympathies are vaguely "Trotskyist.” Page 168 contains as unflattering a portrait gallery of Communist Heroes as Souvarine’s. Pages 40-41 have a very useful summary of pre-Revolution industrialisation in Russia (considerably greater than is generally known).

Stephen Graham’s “Stalin” is a lively record covering a longer period than Levine; he makes no effort to conceal his loathing for Stalin; his modified admiration for Lenin is rather one outcome of a very pronounced anti-Semitic bias; Trotsky finds some grace, and is damned with faint praise as a Hamlet who never plucked up sufficient energy to apply the bare bodkin to his co-rival for Lenin’s mantle. Liveliness of style is instanced in summaries of character. "Litvinov was of the Potash and Perlmutter type.” “You could not say that Litvinov was a poisonous Jew like Zinovief, or a slimy Jew like Yagoda. He was just a plain, ordinary good-humoured Israelite. There are hundreds like him in New York.” As journalese, good of its kind in spite of crudity and over-emphasis, useful for certain facts.

Reginald

Revisiting Marx (1998)

Book Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reflections on Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Collectivities, Faridabad, India, 1997

This 48-page A4 pamphlet produced by a "council communist" group in India focuses on five elements of Marxian economics although the authors prefer to use the term "Marx's critique of political economy". This is specifically what Marx wrote as the subtitle of Capital and is in large part what he set out to provide. However, in elaborating this critique he went beyond a mere criticism of bourgeois economics and developed his own analysis of how the capitalist system actually works--or, as he put it--of "the laws of motion of the capitalist system of production". The five elements discussed here--each with its own chapter--are Marx's basic characterisation of capital; the extent of the domination of the capitalist mode of production; the significance of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall; the problem of extended reproduction; and monopoly capitalism and imperialism.

The coherence of the analysis offered in each chapter varies. The best is the last one where the position of revolutionaries is taken up unequivocally against the Leninists who have attached themselves to the Marxian framework this century while in reality abandoning the working class viewpoint and supporting "anti-imperialist" states against imperialist powers and proclaiming the so-called "right of nations to self-determination".

Unfortunately some of the specifically economic analysis in the other four chapters is less good. There is an odd chapter denying that there is any tendency at all for the average rate of profit to fall in capitalism, argued principally on the strength of a misreading of a passage in Volume Three of Capital about the effect of the growth of joint-stock companies on the rate of profit. This is a point answered comprehensively enough by another council communist type group called Internationalist Perspectives in the latest edition of their journal.

The main problem though with this pamphlet is its seeming insistence that the cause of capitalist crises is the inability of the working class and capitalist class combined to buy back the entire product of industry. This is a dangerous theory to hold, on two grounds. One is that it explicitly leads to the view that capitalism is somehow going to collapse as a mode of production, thus encouraging crude determinism and a fatalism within the working class movement. The other is that it is simply, and demonstrably, incorrect.

In essence the view Collectivities put forward here appears to be the one elaborated by Rosa Luxemburg in her work The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1914. In this theory, the growth (and survival) of "pure" capitalism is impossible as it is unable to realise on its markets all the value that has been added in the sphere of production; hence capitalist growth is only possible when a non-capitalist periphery exists for the system to use as a source of additional markets. This is an argument based on a complete misreading of Marx's reproduction schemas for both "simple" and "extended" reproduction. Indeed, Marx himself furnished the theoretical disproof of this view that growth in "pure" capitalism would be impossible, in Chapter 49 of Volume Three of Capital.

However, fundamentally the disproof of this theory is practical rather than just theoretical, based on the actuality of capitalist development this century. If growth in "pure" capitalism or at least something near to "pure" capitalism is impossible, the system just wouldn't have been able to expand the forces of production in the way that it has been doing. If capitalism has been in a state of market saturation for decades (and according to Luxemburg as far back as 1914) its long-term growth in the years since would have been impossible. And, although its rate of expansion has slowed in recent years, it has still continued to enjoy considerable long-term growth ever since Luxemburg wrote--and without selling sizeable quantities of commodities to undeveloped non-capitalist areas of the planet (if anything the opposite has been the case--it has attempted to plunder the small remaining non-capitalist periphery, rather than attempt to sell products to people with no money to buy them anyway).

Frankly, the idea that a serious revolutionary organisation locating itself in the Marxian tradition can still hold this view is more than faintly ridiculous. But it does illustrate another key problem with this pamphlet. Though there is much to commend it, from its definition of capitalism as a world system based on the exploitation of wage labour through to its largely excellent analysis of imperialism, it tends to lack a grounding in some of the realities of contemporary capitalist production. There are, for instance, in several thousand words of text, very few statistics or references to back-up what are sometimes rather grandiose and sometimes over-confidently stated claims. Interestingly, Collectivities claim that "obsession with the significance of the rate of profit and its tendency to fall in the present results in very sad and shabby attempts in force-fitting data to outdated concepts". Unfortunately, this equally applies to Collectivities own "market saturation" view of capitalist crises, for which--conveniently--they do not bother to provide any data at all.

DAP

Why we need a theory (2008)

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Towards a better understanding of the world, in order to change it.

The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve, while food stocks remain unused. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from involuntary labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience – not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience. “Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists” (Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution).

Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of commodities, wage labour and the market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored surplus value). The pursuit of ever increasing profits is the driving force behind the whole process – the fulfilment of people’s needs is a secondary and not always occurring result.

Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted, those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour-power. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an alienated or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.

Capitalist society is therefore split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those who own and control the means of production – the land, equipment, machinery, buildings and raw materials necessary to create the things we need and use every day) and the proletariat (those with “nothing to lose but their chains”), broadly speaking the “modern working class” including the un-employed and unemployable. However the proletariat is not to be understood as a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, but as a social relation of capitalism. It is all those who have little or no means of support other than selling their physical and mental labour-power. The proletariat is the only class capable of ending class society, as it produces the material conditions of its own enchainment. However, both classes are subject to the laws of the market economy – our concern is with the social relation capital not the individual capitalist – the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals. While the rag-wearing classical proletariat of Marx’s time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. The modern proletariat is almost everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both alienated work and class.

The “official” history of the working class’s struggle against capitalism is an inversion, what is presented as its greatest triumphs are in reality its most bitter defeats; Leninist “Communism” in the East and reformist “Socialism” in the West were both expressions of a general movement towards state-capitalism. The greatest tragedy of these times is that in the minds of the vast majority of workers the project for the dissolution of the commodity economy became associated with its exact opposite. “So the light darkened that had illuminated the world; the masses that had hailed it were left in blacker night… By usurping the name communism for its system of workers' exploitation and its policy of often cruel persecution of adversaries, it made this name, till then expression of lofty ideals, a byword, an object of aversion and hatred even among workers” (Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils).

Though the call for a new society was never thoroughly extinguished; small and often profoundly isolated groups and individuals arguing the case for a social reorganization to bring free access and control of the means of production into the hands of the whole of humanity. “From each according to ability, to each according too need!”

The creation of such a society has two preconditions; firstly that technological production techniques have been sufficiently developed to be able to fulfil the material needs of the whole of society and secondly, that the majority of the population have an understanding of what needs to be done and want to carry it through. Revolutionaries are painfully aware that the first requirement has long since been reached but that the second is still far from being realized.

If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to “get to the root of all things” and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it, but a matter of finding the “moment of truth” in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.

“Theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses” (Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

Darren Poynton

Maximilien Rubel: Anti-Bolshevik Marxist (1996)

Obituary from the June 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maximilien Rubel who died at the end of February was not just a Marx-specialist, he was also someone who wanted Socialism in the real sense of a society of common ownership and democratic control from which what he along with Marx regarded as the two great expressions of human alienation, money and the state, would have disappeared. As such he recognised, and denounced in his writings, the rulers of state-capitalist Russia and their state ideologists as the great distorters of Marx's ideas. His ambition, on the academic field, was to produce a definitive edition of the writings Marx himself published but free from the distortions and tendentious commentaries in the editions emanating from Moscow and East Berlin.

Unlike many others, Rubel was never taken in by the state-capitalist regime in Russia. In other words, he was never at any time a member or supporter of the Communist Party. He came in fact from the old minority Marxist tradition within European Social Democracy.

He was born in 1905 in Czernowitz, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and later, successively, part of Rumania, the Russian Empire and now the Ukraine), and it was in Austria that he first encountered the ideas of Marx. There he came under the influence of the social philosopher Max Adler who, before the First World War, had been amongst those Social Democrats who sought to supplement Marx's critique of capitalism with an ethical element based on Kant's "categorical imperative": socialism was something the workers ought to establish for moral reasons rather than something they were inevitably going to establish for economic reasons. It was a controversial position but Rubel embraced it and expressed it in his own writings. In 1931 he moved to Paris where he lived for the rest of his life.

Rubel was the author of many books and articles on Marx mainly in French but some in English. They all make interesting, if sometimes difficult reading. Particularly to be recommended are the selections from the writings of Marx and Engels he edited with Tom Bottomore (Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy; published by Penguins, this is still available and is one of the best of its kind) and the life of Marx he wrote with Margaret Manale Marx Without Myth. He also contributed a chapter to Non-Market Socialism in the 19th & 20th Centuries which he co-edited with John Crump.

In French there is the collection of his articles published in 1974 under the title Marx critique du marxisme ("Marx Critic of Marxism"). In it Rubel argued that Marx was not a Marxist. In two senses. Firstly, that Marx's own views conflicted with what was generally called "Marxism" (Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, etc). Rubel argued vehemently against "the myth of the October Socialist Revolution" which he saw, not as the winning of political power through the self-activity of the working class as a prelude to socialism, but as the capture of political power by the Bolshevik Party as a prelude to the development of capitalism in Russia under the auspices of the state.

Rubel's second reason for saying that Marx was not a Marxist was that Marx had not set out to establish a new school of thought to be named after him and that in fact the establishment of such a body of thought named after an individual was contrary to Marx's whole approach and analysis. Ironically, though Rubel always refused to regard himself as a Marxist his writings expressed Marx's views more accurately than most of those who have called themselves Marxists.

Rubel emphasised that since his earliest socialist writings in the mid-1840s Marx had regarded money and the state as two expressions of human alienation, and had envisaged their disappearance as a defining feature of the free society that was the alternative to capitalism. Marx, said Rubel, saw this moneyless, stateless, classless society as being achieved by the independent self-activity of the workers themselves, which would include turning the vote into an instrument of emancipation; in other words, Marx's position was that the state, as an organ of class rule standing above society, should be abolished by democratic political action. Marx was not opposed to socialists contesting elections.

This of course is an interpretation of Marx very close to our own. Rubel was aware of the SPGB, having attended some of our meetings and corresponded with some of our members as well as subscribing to the Socialist Standard. He was apparently fascinated by our existence as a group which had stuck so closely to Marx's own conception of socialism and the socialist revolution. He didn't agree with our position of concentrating exclusively on what William Morris called "making socialists", and, tempted by the specious plausibility of the "lesser evil" argument, voted for in the 1981 presidential elections in France. Needless to say, within a year of election the Mitterrand government was freezing wages and cutting social benefits in accordance with the dictates of the economic laws of capitalism that profits and profit-making must come first. There is no lesser evil under capitalism, only one big evil, capitalism itself, as Rubel should have known.

Rubel was in the tradition of what Paul Mattick called "Anti-Bolshevik Marxism" and, through his writings, will continue to contribute to the socialist understanding required before a genuinely socialist society can be established.

Adam Buick