Lenin was wrong, Marx was right (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 125 years or so since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Socialist Standard has published numerous articles about that event and its acknowledged leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The view those articles have taken is that what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and after, despite their claim to be following Marxist ideas, ran entirely counter to Marx’s advocacy of a democratically run, marketless, socialist society based on production for use not profit and on the idea of from each according to ability to each according to need. Instead, Lenin set up a tyrannical one-party regime run by and in the interests of a small group of bureaucrats with the market mechanism still operating even if commanded by the state, amounting to a form of capitalism – state capitalism. Furthermore Lenin’s – and then Stalin’s – Russia failed Marx’s ‘test’ for socialism (or communism – he used the two words synonymously), which was that such a society had to – could only – arise from advanced capitalism, not from what existed in Russia in the early 20th century, ie, an economically underdeveloped, largely agricultural society in which capitalism had barely begun to take hold. It could not possibly ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and somehow go straight to socialism – something in fact that Lenin, from his speeches and writings, showed he knew, even if this did not stop him from claiming to follow Marx and to have the aim of establishing socialism.

Marxism-Leninism?

One of the inevitable outcomes of such claims by Lenin has been that, over the period since these events, the cry has gone up – and continues to from many ill-informed quarters – that Marxism (or socialism) has been tried and failed. Not only, so the story goes, did it preside over unbridled violence and brutality, starvation and other unimaginable horror in the years of ‘war communism’ (1918 to 1922) and show itself to be an entirely undemocratic authoritarian form of society for decades after that. It also, though Lenin himself died in 1924, sowed the seeds for a dictator – Stalin – to take absolute power and establish an authoritarian tyranny in which people were arrested, deported and slaughtered in their thousands at the arbitrary whim of an all-powerful leader.

There have of course also been others – not just writers in the Socialist Standard – who have studied the ideas and events in question closely, seen through these arguments and concluded that the Bolshevik takeover under Lenin and what happened later in the Soviet Union can in no reasonable sense be seen as Marxism or socialism in action. A recent example worth citing is the 2021 book by Steve Paxton, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, which, by careful analysis of the social and economic situation of Russia in the period leading up to 1917, illustrates ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’ (June 2022 Standard review). The writer’s conclusion is that, since ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’, such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. Another interesting example arises from the 2005 discussion on Marx on the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, urged the three participants, all well known as practitioners of political ideas and philosophy though not necessarily as socialists or adherents to Marxist ideas (A.C. Grayling, Gareth Stedman Jones and Francis Wheen), to confirm the ‘received’ wisdom that Lenin’s imposition of revolution from the top down (as well as that of later dictators such as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) was a reflection of Marx’s ideas. But all three disagreed vehemently. One stated that Marx had become a ‘magical name’ that people liked to quote but whose ideas had been distorted by figures such as Lenin, who in fact had ‘turned Marx on his head’. Another said that others ‘took, adapted and twisted him’. The third participant was even more robust in stating that what happened in Russia (and later elsewhere) ‘vindicated Marx’s point’, ie, that revolution imposed from above by ‘heroes on horseback’ inevitably ‘leads to a police state’ and so was ‘a negation of everything he [Marx] stood for and argued for’. In this light the association implicit in the claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninist’ often made by those on the left can be seen as a stark contradiction in terms. This also receives confirmation from parts of Lenin’s own speeches and writings of 1921-22, in which, with Russia in a piteous state after the mass violence, destruction and brutality of its civil war, he admitted defeat by stating ‘our attempt to implement socialism here and now has failed’ and talked about the need ‘to fall back on state capitalism in many economic spheres’.

Lenin in context

Of course, there are those who find value and relevance in Marx’s ideas but are not necessarily averse to their ‘adaptation’ by later political figures such as Lenin who claim Marxist inspiration. An example of this is to be found in the recent book by the American left-wing academic, Paul Le Blanc (Lenin, Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. Pluto Press, 2023). The key to the association Le Blanc is prepared to make between Lenin and Marx is to be found in the title: ‘Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’. Implicit in this is the idea, often repeated in the pages of an invigoratingly written book that sweeps us informatively through the whole of Lenin’s personal and political life, that the Bolshevik leader, while following in Marx’s footsteps, had to adapt and respond to the circumstances he and Russia found themselves in at the time, to be ‘flexible’ (a frequently used word). Hence Lenin’s work becomes a kind of Marxism in action, ‘open, critical-minded’, adapted to ‘a particular historical situation’ and conditioned by ‘interactions with others’. In support of this, the author quotes a reference by Lenin to the words of Marx and Engels that ‘our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action’. So, according to Le Blanc, Lenin, while sharing and aiming for Marx’s fundamental goal of a free, classless, stateless society, found himself having to deal with ‘living realities and actual struggles, not abstract revolutionary “correctness”’. In this light, therefore, according to the author, far from the ‘architect of totalitarianism’ Lenin is often presented as by conservative commentators, he was rather a leader ready to face the twists and turns of a reality that was ‘complex, ever-changing and contradictory’ and to take action accordingly – the justification for which Lenin himself framed as the application of ‘revolutionary dialectics’.

Yet Le Blanc is not always or unequivocally ready to accept such justification, and it would be unfair to characterise his study as some kind of uncritical rehabilitation of Lenin. It is, however, difficult not to sense a ‘benefit of the doubt’ tendency and this throws up a number of seeming contradictions in the way Lenin’s thought and actions are presented – the author seeming on occasion to want it both (or all) ways. So, while keen to present Lenin as a Marxist in action striving for socialism, he also states (realistically as pointed to by the evidence) that Lenin saw ‘the upcoming revolution’ as ‘not a transition to socialism, but a transition to a capitalist social and political order’. Again he refers to Lenin’s understanding of nationalism as a ‘secular faith’ and ‘the great rival of socialism’, while at the same time pointing to a view he expressed that ‘there were different forms of nationalism – some worthy of support, others worthy of denunciation’. He refers with brutal frankness to the ‘emergency measures’ taken by Lenin’s ‘new Communist regime’ in the period of Russia’s civil war (‘one-party dictatorship’, ‘Red Terror’, ‘persecution of party dissidents’) and the ‘repressive bureaucratic dictatorship’ that came after, yet this does not prevent him from describing the early years of the ‘Communist International’ which Lenin was closely associated with as demonstrating ‘heroic and impressive qualities, crackling with insights’.

Even-handed?

All this could of course simply be regarded as a form of ‘even-handedness’ on the part of the author, and so entirely positive. But it could also perhaps be understood by reference to the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which Le Blanc himself spends a paragraph explaining. Under this dynamic, confronted with evidence that conflicts with our well-established worldview, we experience an uncomfortable mental conflict which tends to make us dismiss that evidence and simply carry on as before. Examples he gives of this are people currently denying ‘the documented reality of climate change’ and others ‘not wanting to acknowledge the horrific realities associated with the Stalin regime’. So, in the case of this author’s take on Lenin, while himself presenting evidence of the ‘horrific realities’ he presided over and what most people would regard as outright distortions (not just ‘adaptations’) of Marx, we have an ongoing attachment to the man, the Bolshevik takeover and the overall claim that Lenin’s ideas seem more relevant than ever now.

Of course, even if the Socialist Party will see this as a serious blind spot in the author’s analysis of the historical struggle for a socialist society from Marx onwards, there is much in his book that socialists would accept and agree with. We would not, for example, want to challenge the author’s brilliantly incisive description of modern capitalism (‘a voracious market economy designed to enrich already immensely wealthy elites … intimately connected with environmental destruction engulfing our world’) or his clear characterisation of class society in capitalism ‘(the working class is those who make a living (get enough money to buy basic necessities and perhaps some luxuries) by selling their ability to work (their labor-power) to an employer. Out of the labor-power, the employer squeezes actual labor in order to create the wealth that is partly given to the workers (usually as little as possible), with the rest of this labor-created wealth going to the employer)’. On the other hand, we would see as misguided various of the ‘remedies’ for this often heard on the Leninist or Trotskyist Left which the author seems to quote with approval, for example the need for workers to have the correct ‘leadership’ for a new society to be established and ‘experiences of struggle that will convince working people of the inevitability of revolution and the significance of communism’. We would also challenge that other commonly held left-wing perspective found in this book of ‘Lenin good, Stalin bad’ (ie, that there was no continuity between the two), though we would heartily agree with one commentator’s view noted here that ‘Stalinism was as different from socialism as the hippopotamus from the giraffe’.

Right or wrong?

So was Lenin a Marxist (or a socialist)? Perhaps in the end what Paul Le Blanc’s eminently readable book can be taken as saying is that he would have liked to be and considered himself one but that circumstances prevented it. But wasn’t that what, if you were a Marxist, you should have known was bound to happen, since Marx saw socialism as arising from advanced capitalist development not from the chronically underdeveloped society that was early twentieth century Russia?

Howard Moss

Time well spent (2000)

Theatre Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three Days of Rain. Donmar Warehouse, London.

What lessons can we draw from the past? At a time when some academics, shamefully unaware of their unwitting attachment to the ideological apparatus of capitalism, claim that history is dead, contemporary playwrights are much concerned with the conclusions we draw from events long ago. In the last year or so I have seen plays by Tom Stoppard (Arcadia), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen—see Socialist Standard, September 1998), Peter Barnes (Dreaming—Socialist Standard, August 1999) and Stephen Poliakoff (Remember This—Socialist Standard, December 1999), all of which conclude that the past very much determines what takes place in the present. And now Richard Greenberg, a young American whose work has not previously been seen in Britain, offers us a splendid new play in which the past is ever present.

Three Days of Rain involves only three actors. In the first act we meet brother and sister, Walker and Nan, together with Pip, the son of their father’s business partner in an architects’ consultancy. In the second act the same actors play Walker and Nan’s father and mother, and Theo, their father’s business partner. And as the second act unfolds it becomes apparent why Walker, Nan and Pip are as they are. Not, I hasten to add, in any crude deterministic fashion, Greenberg’s imagination is far too subtle for that. Rather we are aware of the impact that one generation makes on the next: of the way in which behaviour is affected by the complex chemistry of both nature and nurture. Act 1 offers us a view of the past in which Walker, Ned and Pip strive to understand the behaviours of their parents trying to make sense of diaries and remembered anecdotes. And Act 2 shows, us with both drama and poignancy, that if you don’t have enough evidence and you don’t understand the context, you will reach the wrong conclusions.

The play is a warm, intelligent one, by turns touching, sensitive and funny, which is marvellously played in the small, 250-seater, Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden. It is a play which points to the dangers of judging a person’s contribution on the basis of their family life, their relations with their children, and so on. If we are to understand people’s lives we need to have access to all the relevant evidence. The personal behaviour of the architect fathers of Walker, Nan and Pip cannot be inferred from their buildings, even though the latter command universal praise. Francis Wheen’s recent biography of Karl Marx makes much the same point. Marx’s contribution to the history of western though cannot be judged by his rather fey attempts to live a bourgeois life in mid-Victorian London.

Postscript

The following three plays—all of which have been reviewed in this journal—are still playing in London. All can be seen for less than half the cost of a ticket to a Premier League football match. All have something to say to socialists. All are highly recommended at the turn of the century.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Duchess Theatre) “Michael Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see.”

Summerfolk by Maxim Gorki (National Theatre. Reviewed October 1999). “Summerfolk is as relevant today as it has ever been. I hope to find an early opportunity to see the play again and to marvel at the skill of the actors and the wonder of its staging.”

The Weir by Conor McPherson (Royal Court Theatre. Reviewed April 1998). “Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore the emptiness at the heart of their lives and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner . . . This is theatre at its most sublime.”

Michael Gill

Voice From The Back: Lies, Damned Lies And Diplomacy (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lies, Damned Lies And Diplomacy

The misuse of language is an essential part of capitalist politics. Every country in the world has a Ministry of Defence, none has a Ministry of Offence. Lies are described as being “economical with the truth”. The bombing of civilians is known as “collateral damage”. The US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has recently come up with a new one, “extraordinary rendition”. According to the Times (4 December) “. . . it will anger many in Europe.” “Extraordinary rendition” means transfer for torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” means stripped, chained and made to stand up for 40 hours in a dark, cold cell. It is enough to make socialists “involuntarily eject the contents of their stomachs”. If you can accept another euphemism.

So Much For Human Nature

The journalist and author Francis Wheen in his best selling How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World came up with a great quote from George Orwell: “We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty. But when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe. .. So also for other goods. If they were made plentiful, as they might easily be, there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations.” Nice one, George – but of course we want socialism now! To hell with the notion of generations to change.

The Primitive Accumulation Of Capital

In Capital, Karl Marx has a very revealing section devoted to the primitive accumulation of capital. He deals with the expropriation of the agricultural population in England and the Highland clearances in Scotland. A recent news item in the Times (3 January) shows that this process is still going on in India. “Indian police shot and killed nine tribesmen yesterday in the eastern state of Orissa after they were attacked with arrows and stones, killing a constable, an official said. About a thousand tribespeople, some armed with bows and arrows, who oppose a move by the government to acquire land to set up a steel plant in Jaipur, turned on the police assigned to protect officials demarcating the land for Tata Steel Ltd, India’s largest private steel producer.” As Honore de Balzac, the French novelist wrote way back in the 19th century, “Behind every great fortune lies a great theft.”

For Those Who Have Accumulated

A new magazine has been launched entitled Spear’s Wealth Management Survey. It deals with how to buy your own private jet or acquire a vineyard. You are unlikely to have run across a copy though. “Spear Media, publisher of SWMS, hopes to attract a circulation of 25,000 in the UK, with a further 5,000 going to the wealthiest individuals or families across Europe.” ….According to the publisher, “Although we are targeting people who have assets of £5m, the majority will have £10m-plus.” (Observer 8 January) Like we said, you are unlikely to come across a copy.

God’s Will

“At least 345 pilgrims were killed yesterday when one of the holiest rituals of haj in Saudi Arabia turned to tragedy. White-robed believers rushing to stone the devil in a symbolic ceremony were caught up in a stampede and crushed. Many who escaped were seriously hurt, with 289 people reported injured.” (Times, 13 January) God, Allah, Jehovah or whatever he’s called is supposed to be all powerful so we suppose it is all part of the divine plan. In recent years God seems to have been particularly deadly during haj. In 2004 244 killed, 2001 36 killed and in 1998 180 trampled to death. Truly the ways of God are mysterious but that is small consolation to the victims or their families.

A Changing World?

Away back on the seventh of April 1775 an old conservative gentleman, disgusted by the job-seeking antics of politicians  recorded a worthwhile notion. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” said Dr. Johnson. Now in your newspapers you can read “Gordon Brown is today calling for a ‘British Day’ on which the country can unite and celebrate its values, setting out the fullest version of his agenda for government.” (Times, 14 January) Dr Johnson was an old tory lick-spittle but today he looks distinctly principled.

Marx (2012)

Book Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx. By Paul Thomas, Reaktion Books, 2012

This is a concise, though not always easy to read, exploration of Marx’s life and writing. It can be usefully compared and contrasted with Francis Wheen’s best-seller Karl Marx (1999), which is more accessible but less reliable. Biographies of Marx these days have to declare where they stand on Marx’s alleged illegitimate son. The sole source for this allegation is a typewritten letter supposedly written by the estranged wife of Karl Kautsky. It is claimed that it was written in 1898 but was only made public, in mysterious circumstances, in 1962. Wheen is in no doubt that the allegation is true because, he says, the circumstantial evidence supports it. Thomas on the other hand, after weighing up the evidence, concludes that the allegation sits somewhere between ‘strains credibility’ and ‘stinks to high heaven’.

In Thomas’s book there is picture of the philosopher Hegel, whom Marx, the accompanying caption claims, ‘stood on his head’. Marx actually claimed that he found Hegel’s philosophy to be already standing on its head and that he stood him ‘right side up’. In Hegel’s philosophy the real world results from the unfolding of ideas, whereas for Marx ideas arise from and interact within a specific material context. There is no discussion of Marx’s dialectic in the book, from which we must assume it is of no importance. Wheen, by contrast, repeats the common misconception that Marx’s dialectic is a form of logical syllogism: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But this is precisely the kind of idealism which Marx had rejected after he had stood the Hegelian philosophy of his youth ‘right side up’. It is the understanding of material circumstances, particularly the economics of capitalism, which provides the ‘guiding thread’ for comprehending the world around us.

Both Thomas and Wheen argue that Marx’s legacy is still relevant today. It can also be argued that Marx’s ideas have never been put into practice, and an example of this is suggested by Thomas’s book. At the end of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1871, the Paris Commune was formed. The Commune was an improvised organisation of Parisian workers set up to run and defend Paris. The French army brutally suppressed the Commune and slaughtered at least 20,000 of the Communards. Marx had no input into the creation or running of the Commune and the Commune took nothing from Marx. Afterwards he did write The Civil War in France in defence of the Commune, and from this the press claimed (mistakenly) that Marx was the mastermind or strategist behind the Commune, conferring on him the title ‘red terror Doctor’. Marx for the first time became notorious – but for an event which owed absolutely nothing to him. So apart from the evidence of his own writings, there are historical grounds for arguing that Marx’s legacy has been misunderstood and unrealised.

Lew Higgins

Life of Marx (2000)

Book Review from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx by Francis Wheen. Fourth Estate, London.

Journalist Wheen has performed a staggering feat. In just over 400 pages, he has traced the action-packed life of Karl Marx from childhood in Triers in the Moselle valley to university life in Bonn and Berlin and political exile in France, Belgium and finally London.

In the hands of Wheen the story is one of almost cinematic action. The heady student days of feverish philosophical debate fuelled by too much wine and beer are vividly portrayed. His foray into political journalism, his jousts with state censors and his eventual political banishment, leading to the life of a stateless person trekking through the capitals of Europe in poverty and constant harassment by state authorities and police spies are dealt with in a lively and readable fashion.

The real strength of this book, however, does not rest on the colourful biographical detail, but on its depiction of Marx as a human being, rather than (as has been too often the case in the past) as a god or a devil. Interestingly enough Wheen mentions in his introduction a book, written by an American evangelical preacher, entitled "Was Karl Marx a Satanist?" The other side of the coin, of course, are the books that are nothing less than hagiographies. As the jacket cover says, "Karl Marx emerges as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation."

Socialists might have wished for more emphasis on Marx's ideas, but when Wheen does this he does an excellent job. Considering that his intention was to deal with Marx more as an individual rather than as an economist, historian, philosopher or revolutionary, the author's discussion of the works of Marx is generally speaking difficult to quarrel with and easy to admire. He distances the writings and actions of Marx from his so-called supporters like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. He has a pop at Karl Popper's criticism and absolutely devastates the attacks on Marx by the likes of Paul Samuelson. The role of Marx in the International Working Men's Association is particularly well documented and his jousts with Michael Bakunin and the anarchists are vividly drawn.

A lot of people are going to hate this book. Left-wingers who see every industrial dispute or petty social unrest as the harbinger of a transformation of society will be reminded (if they ever knew) that Marx's view was that a long period of education and organisation was necessary before the working class could establish socialism. Anarchists with their 19th-century romanticism about conspiracy and direct action will be less than pleased at the reporting of the antics of their anarchist heroes in the International. The academics who have dismissed Marx's views as outdated are not going to like Wheen's view that Marx's criticisms of capitalism are still valid today.

Even if a lot of people are going to hate this book, this socialist loved it and advises readers to get down to their local library immediately. If you are going to buy only one book this year, then this is it.

Richard Donnelly

Defending Modernism? (2005)

Book Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 2004

Frank Furedi takes the opportunity in this book to rail against the modern 'cultural elite' and their 'dumbing down' of political, educational and artistic standards.He forcefully argues that an all pervading desire for 'inclusivity' leading to the flattery of interest groups - has replaced more hard-headed conceptions of scientific rigour, critical thought and above all, standards, as the driving force for decision makers in the modern world. Today, he argues, participation (or the appearance of it) is seen as the key issue, while the role of the 'intellectual', as arbiter of taste, independent critical analyst and robust generator of original ideas, has been compromised and diminished.

This is interesting and provocative, particularly as Furedi - currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent - is better known as the leading theoretician of the Trotskyist political current which called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party until a few years ago, notable for their annual 'Preparing For Power' conferences and their glossily superficial Living Marxism magazine. That his views now seem to have more in common with those routinely expressed in the opinion columns of the Daily Telegraph clearly isn't something he feels the need to apologise for. Strangely enough, Mick Hume, the erstwhile editor of Living Marxism (or 'LM' as it became, in a needless concession to the postmodernist culture and 'dumbing down' Furedi now ironically rails against), happens to be a broadsheet columnist spouting similar views to Furedi himself. This does nothing to diminish the prevalent view on the British left that their organisation was a rather bizarre cross between a cult and a sect with a tendency to say anything controversial if it could get them some media attention.

For all that, Furedi's book is well worth reading. He is a thought-provoking writer and something of a critic of the present 'postmodern condition', where everything seemingly has a value of some sort and banality is elevated into an art form, where science and reason are merely another perspective on the world, and where all attempts at fundamentally changing society are doomed to failure, are dangerous - or both. Here he is tilling fertile ground, and his writing is stimulating and energetic.

A large part of the book focuses on the way in which public policy in the major capitalist states is currently using 'inclusivity' and 'widening access' as bogus ways of enfranchising the disenfranchised, whether it be in political life, the arts, or Higher Education. This involves the recognition and flattery of 'identities' (ethnic, gender, sexual, national) and the promotion of the idea that everyone creates even if some of Furedi's hobby-horses lead him astray periodically.  instance, For the current agenda for 'widening access and participation' in HE is little to do with abstract social engineering but the response of successive governments to the demands of the labour market, including the demands of employers for more vocationally-focused university courses and for the creation of intermediate awards like Foundation Degrees. Indeed, this seems an odd point to need to make to someone who has spent most of his life calling himself a Marxist.

Furthermore, even if Furedi is a half-decent sociologist he is certainly not much of an educationalist, as his comments on modern methods of teaching and learning, accreditation of prior learning and other issues tend to show, for here he is unreliable and his approach lacks the type of rigour and engagement with serious study he otherwise insists on. But where Furedi's book misses the mark most noticeably is in his defence of the 'intellectual' as embodying everything that was good about Enlightenment ideals and modernist conceptions of progress. This is a partial, one-sided analysis and it is tempting to suspect that what Furedi really wants to defend is modernism, science and rationality itself against postmodernism, relativism and our seemingly irrational age.

But this has already been done by others quite recently, such as by Francis Wheen, so Furedi has cast around for a new angle that only serves to distort the picture, robbing it of clarity.

Society doesn't need a new phalanx of intellectuals at all, it needs a reaction against reaction and a confidence that humankind generally can look beyond the fragments of the postmodern condition and collectively work towards a vision of how the world ought to be.

Dave Perrin

Global March of the Gurus (2005)

Book Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. By Francis Wheen, Fourth Estate, 2004.

A few years ago Wheen had a critically and commercially successful biography of Karl Marx. This survey – A Short History of Modern Delusions, as the book’s subtitle puts it – takes 1979 as the decisive year. In that year two key events occurred that shaped the modern world: Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to dominate Iran.

The link between the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is uncontroversial. The Shah of Iran was a stooge of western governments, there to guarantee oil supplies. The ideology used to remove him therefore took the form of an anti-western Islam. This ideology then spread through the Middle East and beyond. But Wheen’s interpretation of Thatcher’s rise and the global spread of free market fundamentalism is less convincing. In Wheen’s account, the old status quo (which he clearly favours) was overthrown by New Right zealots spouting mumbo-jumbo. Or put another way, the post-war consensus on the mixed economy, guided by government intervention and Keynesian economics, was supplanted by monetarism, privatisation and the worship of market forces. Of course these facts are not in dispute and Thatcherite/Blairite ideology is mumbo-jumbo dressed-up as common sense (“we are all ‘Thatcherite’ now,” said Peter Mandelson, Labour MP, in 2002). However, what Wheen fails to appreciate is why the post-war consensus was so easily swept away. In the 1970s the long post-war boom had come to an end and the Keynesian status quo was perceived to be a failure in dealing with recession and high unemployment. Hence the spread of free market mumbo-jumbo.

Wheen sets great store by the Enlightenment values of reason and progress. This book is far more wide ranging than space here permits us to discuss. Cults, gurus, irrational panics and post-modernists are all subject to a withering criticism very much in the style of George Orwell. Despite the reservations above, this is a superb piece of work and it will be an invaluable resource for socialists.

Lew Higgins

Marx's Capital (2007)

Book Review from the November 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Francis Wheen: Marx’s Das Kapital. Atlantic

Wheen wrote a well-received biography of Marx and here he turns his attention to Marx’s greatest work.

He traces the influences on Capital, the labours Marx went through in writing it, its main ideas, and its subsequent reception and reputation. He gives a decent account of how surplus value comes about: labour power creates more value than it has itself. To the capitalist, the labour market is just another branch of the commodity market. The effects of machinery are invariably malign: the worker is deskilled and forced to work longer hours. Wheen is particularly good in discussing the idea of ‘increasing misery’, and shows that this has to be understood in relative terms. Marx did not claim that there would be an absolute decline in wages, only a relative decline in comparison with profits. And as another example, workers in Britain now work longer hours than was the case in the early 1980s, so we are indeed more degraded as time (and capitalism) goes on.

In the chapter on the ‘Afterlife’ of Capital, Wheen discusses Marx’s fall-out with Hyndman, who had plagiarised from him with no acknowledgement. He also demonstrates that Bolshevism bore little relation to Marx’s ideas. Citing Lenin‘s arguments that workers should place themselves under the leadership of professional revolutionaries, he notes that here ‘one can see in embryonic form what eventually became a monstrous tyranny’.

Marx’s great triumph, says Wheen, lies in revealing the nature of capitalism, and this makes his work still valid and relevant today: he concludes that Marx ‘could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century’.

Paul Bennett

Das Kapital (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx's Das Kapital by Francis Wheen. Atlantic Books, 2006.

In a series of "Books That Shook The World" which includes Paine's Rights of Man and Darwin's Origin of Species, Wheen's biography of Das Kapital (to give Capital its original German title) is fairly short at 130 pages including index. Wheen has already had a critical and commercial success with his biography of the man himself, Karl Marx (1999) and this work seems likely to do the same.

Das Kapital was planned to be the first of six volumes, but Marx only saw the first volume through to publication. The second and third volumes, and the volumes entitled Theories of Surplus Value, were all compiled from Marx's notes after his death. Apart from a brief Introduction, Wheen's book is divided into three chapters: gestation, birth and afterlife. There are no notes, bibliography or guide to further reading and although Wheen is mostly content to let Marx speak for himself he does occasionally paraphrase and in one place he is seriously mistaken. Wheen explains that value (socially necessary labour-time) may differ from price and sometimes price may be higher than value, but Wheen adds, "under a socialist system this surplus would be redistributed for the benefit of the workers" (p.33). Marx never argued this and the whole thrust of Das Kapital is that value, price and profit can never work for the benefit of the workers. Marx also, incidentally, never argued for redistribution, preferring instead to judge the success or failure of a social system by its ability to produce for human need. Wheen is rightly critical of commentators who read into Das Kapital things which are not there (e.g. increasing "immiseration" or impoverishment of the proletariat), but that has not stopped him falling into the same trap here.

Controversially, Wheen claims that Das Kapital should be thought of as a work of art and this was Marx's stated intention. Das Kapital is usually depicted as a work of science, but Marx seems to have considered art and science to have similar objectives - that is, to see through surface appearances ("the veils of illusion") to reveal the underlying reality. And yet it was the late Louis Althusser who maintained that there was an "epistemological break" in Marx's writing, with the early artistic or philosophical work being only of marginal interest, whereas the later works such as Das Kapital contained his mature and scientific thinking. But as Wheen points out, in Althusser's posthumous memoir he admitted to being "a trickster and deceiver" and only ever studying "a few passages of Marx." Althusser and his work on Marx was a fraud. But even if Althusser was not a con-man, the distinction between an early and a mature Marx does not withstand serious scrutiny.

The alleged impact of Das Kapital on twentieth century politics is well summarised, including the fall of the Russian empire and China's contradictory claim to be "Marxist-Leninist" (Wheen insists that "'Market-Leninist' would be rather more apt"). The framework for viewing these and other events, argues Wheen, is to be found in Marx's writing on capital.

For as Wheen puts it:

"Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century."

Lew Higgins