Letters: More on Marx (2023)

Letters to the Editors from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

More on Marx

Dear Editors

As a professional philosopher and a socialist I was interested to read the exchange between Brian Morris and SJW in the June Socialist Standard.

We cannot simply call Marx a philosopher, or indeed an economist or an historian. He made huge contributions to all three disciplines but more importantly he challenged their orthodoxies. He also had other things on his mind, such as fomenting a global revolution.

What shines through in all his work is a commitment to argumentation and evidence rather than just wishful thinking or arm waving. That commitment is echoed in the practice of current Marx commentators known as analytical Marxism (sometimes called by its practitioners non-bullshit Marxism). Whatever their failings politically, they too insist on logic and rigour in contrast to the flashy and obscurantist work of some other currently fashionable commentators.

An excellent example of analytical Marxism is G A Cohen’s book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (which I reviewed in the Socialist Standard in August 1979). In it Cohen provided a philosophical underpinning for Marx’s theory and considered what implications this had for when and how revolutionary change might occur.

I am not a card-carrying member of the non-bullshit Marxism group but I used the same analytical methodology in my book Karl Marx our Contemporary: Social Theory for a post-Leninist World (reviewed by Adam Buick in the Socialist Standard for October 1992). In it I argued that the welcome collapse of the East European regimes gave us a chance to assess Marx’s theories in their own right rather than through the distorting lens of Leninism. What emerges from that analysis is that Marx’s theories are remarkably close to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Keith Graham 

Even more on Marx

Dear Editors

I thank SJW for his response my letter. Three reflections.

I was surprised to learn that Marx was a postmodern skeptic who repudiated all ‘isms’. I always thought that he (and his friend Engels) expressed and defended philosophical materialism as a metaphysic.

Contrary to SJW’s assertion, I am unable to read other people’s minds. I simply interpreted Marx as a philosophical (dialectical) materialist through a serious study of his life and works extending over fifty years.

I too am a ‘worker’ and have been so since the age of fifteen when I began work in an iron foundry. But this has no relevance at all to an understanding of Marx’s philosophical outlook. Equating philosophical materialism with ‘capitalist interests’ (whatever they may be) is hardly enlightening.

Brian Morris, 

Lewes

Letters: Karl Marx and Russia (2003)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx and Russia

Dear Editors,

I would like to discuss the issue of “the necessity for capitalism to have been achieved for socialism to occur” (“Desai on Marx”, Socialist Standard, November 2002).

Desai suggests that Russian Communism was wrong to use the principles of Marx being as Russia was a backward country. Then he goes on to suggest that Russian Communism developed a capitalist economic model as it developed the Russian economy and industries. What could be wrong about the development of a backward country under socialist principles? What would socialism look like if it only ever occurred in capitalist countries?

Desai appears to suggest that only an economically wealthy country, developed through capitalism can support a socialist system. Does he mean to say that socialism, should it succeed, should stagnate and decay as it devours the capitalist system of economics of its predecessors. A progressive, organised socialist party should enable economic growth to sustain socialism within one country but also to develop new industry and technology under its guiding principles. How is it possible to totally eradicate capitalist consciousness when socialism is developed that relies heavily on its economic principles for stability?

Socialist policies should inform the new methods of economics and seek to build a set of new socialist methods of production, in short a socialist economy based on Marx. This is not merely a question of graduated taxes, but a fairer system with a socialist aim, and cultural and aesthetic values that reflect the working class and encapsulates socialism.

Marx states that socialism should occur out of a capitalist economy because he thought that the working class were the intrinsic factor in a communist revolution; and the working class were common to developed countries under capitalism.

If socialism is to succeed, the party must win the support of the working class who desire to see an end to the current ideology of world capitalism.

In order to eradicate capitalism completely the Socialist Party must have a firm vision fixed in its mind, that by adhering to its principles, must revolutionise the consciousness of the people in areas of politics such as: economics, the environment, foreign policy and culture; in order to achieve power, not for a bureaucratic system (the fault of Russian Communism) but to achieve equality and fraternity among the working class.

G. Cubbage, 

Bolton, Lancs

Reply:

We define socialism as a society without private property, money, wages, nation states, where production is for use, not profit. In order for socialism to be successfully established, capitalism would need to develop industry to the point where a society of common ownership would be possible. Along with this, a modern working class would need to emerge that understands and desires socialism. It is clear that neither was the case in Russia in 1917. It was a predominantly agrarian country where the industrial working class were in a minority of the population.

It is true that Marx and Engels in the introduction of the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto raised the possibility that Russia could, through an old system of common ownership of land maintained by the peasantry known as the Obshchina that existed in Russia at that time, could pass directly to socialism, without the necessity of developing the capitalist mode of production. However this could only be possible if the Russian revolution ignited a revolution in the West. This did not happen in 1917. Although working class uprisings did occur in the West, such as in Germany, they were more expressions of discontent arising from the First World War than a conscious desire to bring about socialism.

The Bolsheviks did not rise to power on a programme of genuine socialism, but to provide relief to a war-weary population and distribute land away from the large landowners to the peasantry. In fact, Lenin admitted that only state capitalism could be established in Russia at that time. As he wrote in The Chief Tasks of Our Times: “Reality says that State Capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State Capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us”. We also believe that the Leninist theories of the Bolshevik Party are prescriptions for state capitalism: the belief that socialism can only be brought about by a party of professional revolutionaries leading the working class and the establishment of a centralised state under the theory of so-called democratic centralism. We insist that the establishment of Socialism require the political actions of a socialist conscious working class without leaders.

Therefore, we agree with Lord Desai that only state capitalism could have emerged from the Russian Revolution. However, we part company with him when he insists that we need many more years of private capitalism to raise the level of society’s productive forces. We maintain that globally the size of society’s productive forces today would allow for the establishment of socialism.

Our definition of socialism above implies that it can only be established on a world-wide basis. Clearly a society where there is common ownership, money has been abolished and production is for human use cannot co-exist with countries where there is still private property, buying and selling and production for profit. Many of the measures that Marx and Engels outlined in the Communist Manifesto, including the call for graduated taxes, were based on the assumption that the working class would take power in Marx and Engels lifetimes. They would be necessary to develop the means of production to levels required for the establishment of socialism. However, since then, capitalism has done the job for us and there is no longer any need for these measures.

We can only agree with the last two paragraphs of your letter. If you study our object and declaration of principles, we hope that you agree that the Socialist Party fits the bill–Editors.

 

The urgent need for Socialism

Dear Editors,

Here we are, having finished the twentieth century which saw many advances in science and technology. Yet despite the potential to satisfy world-wide human need, there are still millions of people suffering from hunger and human misery. Unhappily our social organization has not changed in a way that would enable the human race to reap the full benefits of the useful advances—and abandon the harmful ones. Instead science and technology are commodities produced for sale and profit—they serve the needs of the market system. Presently the only access to the means of life is through money and for the majority this means employment of some kind. However, jobs only come when there is the prospect of profit. Also the standard by which men and women are judged is their material possessions. In every country a minority win out at the expense of the majority. Oh how apparent is the most urgent need for the Earth to belong to its entire people! Then, freed from the shackles which sale and profit places on human endeavour, there will be sufficient resources for everyone to have a satisfying way of life.

Justus Weijagye, 

Kabale, Uganda

 

Castle Breweries Kenya Limited

Dear Editors,

It was June last year when Castle Breweries Kenya Limited ceased its operations in the country. The company had been in operation in Kenya for only five years. A total of 1015 employees were affected by the closure. They, their children, families and relatives were left without any means of earning their daily what is famously called “bread”.

What led to the closure of the company is perhaps illustrative of how capitalism works. Castle Breweries had only one competitor—Kenya Breweries Limited. The South African company thus found it easy going at first but not so during the subsequent years.

Barley, an important ingredient in the manufacture of bee, is grown by a clique of farmers who are contracted by Kenya Breweries for their beer. Most of these farmers are either relatives or associates of senior officials of Kenya Breweries Limited. And thus any other person, or brewer for that matter, had to buy the barley at a higher cost. The only alternative is to import the barley. And this is what Castle Breweries used to do.

Since in its inception in Kenya, their idea or main motive was for profit making, Castle Breweries found it uneconomical to brew and sell its beer at the same price as the competitor, so the company vigorously campaigned for a tax waiver from the authorities.

Kenya Breweries, who had enjoyed monopoly for more than 70 years, found their existence being threatened and thus had to bribe the then President, Daniel Arap Moi. There was to be no tax waiver and in fact in his budget speech, the then Finance Minister Chris Obure increased the taxes on beer from 25 percent to 30 percent.

And thus Kenya Castle Breweries closed its brewing factory at Thika in June 2002 and went ahead at the same time to open others in the USA. The whole thing is Castle Breweries Limited had no intention of remaining in Kenya as long as there were no profits to be made. The welfare of the company’s 1015 employees was far from the concern of Castle’s ‘Bosses’.

The world will continue to witness cases of such nature as long as the so-called investors have only one goal when they are establishing their investments—profits. They go to any lengths to maximise profits and leave the conditions of those making the profits to be the same—Judas wages and salaries and slavery conditions of work.

We, the workers of the world, need to understand that no matter how much money you are paid, you’ll not be able to make ends meet because the wages or salaries are never commensurate to the profits made by the company, organisation or group you are working for. We need to know that the amount of time spent working for profits could be utilised elsewhere working for the welfare of the whole society. Our unity is vital and the capitalist way of doing things will end once we organise and work for the good of all. This will entail us going for political power and make it easy for capitalism to be replaced. Let’s unite to establish the system that caters for the needs of all the members of the society—Socialism.

Patrick W. Ndege,

Nairobi, Kenya

What is Marxism? (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx himself did not call his theories of history, society and the capitalist economy ‘Marxism’. That would have been arrogant and, besides, to attribute the views he developed to the mind of some uniquely great individual would be contrary to his own theory that social conditions gave rise to ideas that were relevant to the social circumstances and problems of the time. If Marx had never lived, ‘Marxist’ ideas would still have arisen.

Nevertheless, after his death those who agreed with his theories began to call themselves ‘Marxists,’ despite this originally being a term of abuse coined by his opponents, and to call the body of his work ‘Marxism’: the materialist conception of history, with technology and class struggles as the driving forces; his analysis of the economic workings of capitalism as a mechanism of uncontrollable capital accumulation that proceeded in fits and starts; and his insistence on the need for the wage working class to win control of political power in order to establish a communist (or, the same thing, a socialist) society based on the common ownership of productive resources and production to directly meet people’s needs rather than for sale with a view to profit.

Marx himself would no doubt have favoured an impersonal description such as ‘communist theory’ or ‘the theory of revolutionary socialism’. But ‘Marxism’ is the term that, historically, revolutionary socialists have inherited even though it is also a term that others have appropriated or been wrongly identified with, in particular the ‘Leninism’ that evolved in primitively capitalist Russia as the theory of state-led capitalist development in countries with a weak private capitalist class .

Marx foremost a socialist

An important aspect of Marx’s view that academics, even those who claim to be Marxists, tend to overlook, in fact often deliberately play down so that they can treat his views as merely academic, is that he identified himself with an already existing movement to see a communist (or, in later usage, a socialist) society established. As he wrote in the conclusion of his main published work Capital, this society was to be based on ‘cooperation and the possession in the common of the land and of the means of production’ (chapter 32 on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’). He further described it, in some 1875 notes on the programme then adopted by German Social Democrats, as a ‘cooperative society based on the common ownership of the means of production’ where ‘the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves’.

At the present stage in the evolution of human society and technology, a world society in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources are the common heritage of all humanity is the only framework within which the problems currently facing humanity in general and the wage working class in particular can be rationally tackled and permanently overcome.

This is the next stage in human social evolution, the material basis for which has developed under capitalism, as indicated by such current terms as ‘world market’, ‘world trade’, ‘world wars’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘global warming’. A single worldwide network of productive units already exists, but the ownership and control of these is in the hands of only a small part of humanity, either directly as rich individuals or indirectly via corporations and states. Instead of this network being co-ordinated to produce what the world’s population needs, it is used to produce items of wealth for sale by private and state enterprises, competing to make profits.

Marx in his day

Today, and for the past hundred or so years, this has been an immediate possibility whereas this was not the case in Marx’s day, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, capitalism was still in its ascendancy and had yet to fully build up the material basis for a world socialist society. Marx himself recognised this and it led him to take the long view and support what he judged would speed up the development of capitalism, its political forms as well as its spread as an economic system. For instance, he supported the Franco-British-Turkish side in the Crimean War, the North in the American Civil War, independence for Poland as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and the rest of Europe, and independence for Ireland to strengthen the hand of Britain’s industrial capitalists against the ruling landed aristocracy.

This is one source of the distortion of Marx’s view into one that supports the development of capitalism even after this was no longer necessary. Not all went as far as the so-called ‘legal Marxists’ in Tsarist Russia who openly favoured capitalist development by private capitalists, but it was an aspect of Social Democracy and Bolshevism which, both in their ways, favoured – and in practice advanced – the development of capitalism, generally in the form of a state capitalism (state organised production for sale with a view to making a monetary surplus), which they imagined, and even defined, as ‘socialism’. However, state or government ownership is not the same as the common or cooperative ownership envisaged by the movement Marx was engaged in.

Marx supported the further development of capitalism in his day in order to hasten the creation of the material basis for world socialism. Once this had been achieved, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the logic of this position no longer applied. There was no longer a case for those who wanted socialism to support the further development of capitalism; they could now work directly for the immediate establishment of world socialism. The tragedy of the twentieth century was that so few took this position.

This underlines that Marxism is not what Marx did, but his general approach to economic and social development.

Materialist conception of society

Marx’s analysis of society, as set out in the well-known Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, has, following Engels, traditionally been called ‘the materialist conception of history’ but it also applies to existing capitalist society and its transformation into world socialist society. It was called ‘materialist’ to distinguish it from the openly ‘idealist’ theories of history that were prevalent at the time, in particular that of Hegel who saw human history as the unfolding of some abstract Idea, though this was also the view of other Christians.

Marx was essentially making the point that the basis of any human society was the way in which its members were organised to satisfy their material needs, to produce the food, clothes and shelter that they needed to stay alive, together with the technology and infrastructure used to do this. As a particular system of production changed, so did all the other ways of social living.

Marx’s materialism was not a denial of the role of ideas. On the contrary, ‘Man makes his own history,’ with humans motivated to act by the ideas they held, even if these arose from the social circumstances in which they found themselves, including, in class-divided societies, the different social circumstances of different classes with regard to production. The driving force of history was struggle between classes, in which a newly arising class championing a new way of organising production challenged an entrenched ruling class that wanted to preserve an established way from which it benefitted.

This view is still valid as a general approach to the study of the past but, more importantly, is of practical relevance for the change from a world capitalist to a world socialist society since it implies that this change of society too will be the result of a class struggle. This will be the last class struggle in history in fact, between the minority class that monopolises the world’s productive resources and the excluded majority. World socialism is going to have to be the outcome of the excluded, majority class pursuing its material interest to establish a society in which the satisfaction of its material needs, indeed those of all humans, will be the direct aim.

Marxian economics

As to Marx’s analysis of the way the capitalist economy works – his ‘critique of political economy’ as he subtitled Capital—this has been confirmed time and again. Marxian economics has proved a better tool for explaining how capitalism works than any other economy theory.

Marx analysed capitalism as a system based on what his first English translator called ‘the self-expansion of value’, value being the basis of the economic exchange value that products of labour acquired through being produced for sale on a market, a concept Marx inherited and refined from the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

When the producers’ ability to work – translated as ‘labour power’ – also became an item for sale due to their being separated from the ownership of land or instruments of production, they produced a value greater than the value of their labour-power, a ‘surplus value’ or, in its monetary form, profits. It was through their work that pre-existing value ‘expanded’, with the production and accumulation of surplus value becoming the driving force of the economic system that Marx called ‘the capitalist mode of production.’

For Marx, this was not a choice by the owners of means and instruments of production but an imperative imposed on them by the competitive struggle for profits that they were engaged in with each other; they were not free agents but cogs in the mechanism of capital accumulation. This competitive struggle for surplus value gave rise to economic laws which acted on economic agents as if they were laws of nature that humans could not change. This has proved to be the case even for governments, which have also had to submit to these economic forces, despite the much-increased role in economic affairs that they have assumed since Marx’s day.

So, capitalism is an uncontrollable, impersonal system of capital accumulation out of surplus value. This, Marx analysed, is not a smooth process. The trend is upward but in fits and starts, with periods of expansion ending in a crisis and a period of reduced production during which the conditions are created for a resumption of the upward trend, which will eventually be stalled by another crisis and slump, and so on in an ever-repeating cycle of booms and slumps. No government, no type of political regime, has ever found a permanent solution to this. The capitalist economic system is simply not amenable to human control. For so long as capitalism lasts Marxian economics will have a future in demonstrating this.

The lesson here is that capitalism cannot be reformed to work for the benefit of all, and certainly not for that of the excluded majority, the exploitation of whose labour to produce surplus value is the basis of the whole system. However, capitalism will not collapse economically of its own accord. It will move uncontrollably from boom to slump and back until the excluded majority organise consciously to put an end to it and move on to the next stage of human social evolution of a united world society based on the common ownership of the planet’s productive resources.

Adam Buick

Henry Ford or Karl Marx? (1926)

From the August 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the Sunday Observer (11.7.26) Mr. J. L. Garvin wrote an article headed “Ford or Marx.” The inspiration for the article was Norman. Angell’s book, “Must Britain Travel the Moscow Road,” which professes to be a reply to Trotsky’s book, “Where Britain is going.”

Times out of number we have balanced accounts with the Russians, and incurred much odium by pointing out that Bolshevism was not Socialism, and that Bolshevik policy was entirely opposed to the principle set forth by Marx. But it pleases the opponents of the workers to confuse the two positions in order the better to resist the spread of Socialism.

For this purpose any stick is good enough. Mr. Garvin brings forward the once execrable, but now quite respectable, Bernard Shaw, and even the ghost of the honest and delightful old dreamer William Morris.

A single article is not sufficient to deal fully with the collection of false suggestions put forward by Mr. Garvin, so I will confine myself to a brief examination of one or two of his leading points.

The first point to clear up is the confusion between Bolshevik policy and the principles laid down by Marx.

Briefly the Bolshevik policy was as follows :—

The conversion of Russian industry from a culture that was overwhelmingly a backward peasant culture into a communistic culture at one bound, without the intervention of capitalist methods of organisation. The capture of power was to be accomplished by a small minority who were to lead the backward masses. Parliament was taboo and armed street risings the method of procedure. The providing of suitable “slogans” with which to play upon the emotions of the ignorant majority was an important part of the policy. The final futility of the Bolshevik programme has been amply proved by subsequent Russian history. The peasants were too backward to grasp the meaning of communism, and to get out of their own insular way of looking at things. A small group of quarrelling partners rule Russia at present, but are compelled to rule in accordance with the needs and wishes of the vast mass of the population—the backward peasants. It is the peasant that, in the main, determines Bolshevik policy to-day, and will do so for a long time to come.

What was Marx’s views on the above methods? In the preface to Capital he states in unequivocal language :

“One nation can and should learn from others. 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. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.” (“Capital,” Vol. 4, p. xix.)

Marx’s collaborator, and “other self,” Engels, stated, in the last thing he wrote, the introduction to “The Class Struggles in France,” that:—

“The time is past for resolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses. When it gets to be a matter of the complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must participate, must understand what is at stake, and why they are to act. That much the history of the last fifty years has taught us. But so that the masses may understand what is to be done, long and persistent work is required, and it is this work that we are now performing with results that drive our enemies to despair.”

The Bolsheviks took the leap, and have landed in a quagmire.

The above quotations on Marx’s point of view are sufficient to dissociate it from Bolshevism.

The next point we come to is Mr. Garvin’s statement that:—

“Mr. Shaw could do more than any man in Europe to destroy the antiquated Marxist superstition which hinders or paralyses the progress of labour on this side of the Atlantic.”

Mr. Garvin gives us no information about this “superstition,” nor does he point out how it hinders. This is a convenient method of arguing, as it knocks the object down without the trouble of hitting it.

Farther on he says :—

”Marx egregiously over-estimated the importance of manual labour by itself. The single person with the original idea is more important economically than the thousands of workers whose employment never would have existed if he had not created it. When Henry Ford in 1914 had the idea of a minimum wage of a pound a day for his workers with profit-sharing on a large scale—terms improved since then—he knocked the bottom out of abstract Marxism deduced front studies in the British Museum.”

The opening sentence is false; the second is a joke. Marx examined the way in which the wealth of capitalism (commodities) was produced and analysed the part played by capitalist and worker. Up to the present no one has been able to show any essential fault in this analysis, although hundreds of professors of political economy have attempted the task. In the course of his analysis Marx showed the respective places of the so-called “manual” and “mental” workers and demonstrated that each was a member of the working class, and had identical interests as opposed to the interests of capital. It has been a common charge against Marx that he ignored the so-called “intellectual” worker. The charge has been levelled by the professional intellectuals, who feel their importance acutely, and would like to think that they are in a class apart, and distinct, from the “common working man” and the wealthy idler. Many years ago Paul Lafargue, in his brilliant essay entitled “The Intellectuals,” reduced their dignity to the level of carrots and potatoes.

Mr. Garvin, however, makes a variation, and puts Henry Ford among the band of economic giants. The argument is a joke.

Taking it at its face value Henry Ford introduced more economical methods of production. The result of improvement in methods is the production of a given quantity of goods with the employment of less workers, and the more rapid satisfaction of the demand for goods. Carried out on a sufficiently extensive scale this means that relatively fewer and fewer workers are required to meet the international demand for goods, an increase in the number of workers seeking jobs ‘that have ceased to exist. The final El Dorado is a small number of workers enjoying high wages and producing all the world requires to meet its needs, and a vast number of workers without employment or the means to purchase goods so lavishly produced ! Not long ago Mr. Ford himself experienced the effect of his methods. So rapidly had motor cars been produced by his system that the market was glutted and he had to close down his works ! A curious way of providing employment !

Another aspect of the question is given by the following quotation from the American Appeal, June 5th, 1926 :—

“Labour’s share of the automobile dollar is shrinking under large-scale mass production, as revealed in the United States census of manufactures for 1925. These figures show that last year only 32.4 per cent. of the value created in the industry went to wages, compared with 40 per cent. in 1923 and 38.6 per cent. in 1919. In 1899, the first year in which automobile production appears in the census, the workers received 44.8 per cent. of the value they created.

“In 1925, according to the figures, automobile manufacturers received $3,371,855,805 for their output, an increase of $208,257,931 over 1923. Deducting the cost of materials leaves the actual value created by manufacture at $1,168,868,466, an increase of $153,003,944 over 1923. In 1925, however, those who actually produced the motor vehicles received only $379,284,935, a decrease of $27,445,343 from 1923. While employer receipts increased 15 per cent. in 2 years, labour’s receipts for operating the industry decreased nearly 7 per cent.” (“American Appeal,” 5/6/1926.)

The above figures show clearly the object and result of the Ford method—more profit for the employers and less return to the workers for the energy they use up.

Mr. Garvin concludes his article with the statement that:—

“Karl Marx, the mid-Victorian Calvin of economics, is as dead as a dodo. That practical, original, Henry Ford—as the epoch-making symbol of high wages and profit-sharing—is the real spirit of the morning.”

In the land in which Henry Ford is a financial king the Federal Trade Commission reports that:—

“One per cent. of the population of the United States owns 59 per cent. of the wealth.

“Thirteen per cent. of the population own 90 per cent. of the wealth.

“Eighty-seven per cent. of the population own 10 per cent. of the wealth.” (“Labour,” June 5th, 1926.)

So much for the land of high wages and profit sharing !

Finally the following quotation may help to dispel any delusion as to who benefits by the prosperity of Ford industries :—

“Last year’s profits of the Ford Motor Company, which started business in 1903 with a capital of $28,000, amounted to $145,000,000, approximately $23,000,000, according to reports filed by the company yesterday.

“Only three persons, Mr. Ford, his wife, and his son, own the stock of the company. On the basis of the published figures it is estimated that every vehicle manufactured by the Ford works brings in a profit of 44.90 dollars (£9), to the shareholders.” (“Daily News,” 9th May, 1926.)

If Marx is “antiquated,” and “is dead as the dodo,” why all the excitement? We have been reading for years that he was “dead,” but he seems to be a pretty lively corpse, and a pretty awkward one.

The facts are he ruthlessly exposed the groundwork of capitalism, and correctly foreshadowed the general methods of its future development. The main propositions he laid down are as true, but more obvious, to-day, as when he wrote. The worker is poor because he is robbed of the product of his mental and manual labours. He is kept in a subject condition by a class that lives like a leech on his back. The means of subjection are the public coercive powers that are centred in Parliament. By preaching “brotherly love” between capitalist and workman the emissaries of the masters seek to disarm the worker’s growing suspicions and induce him to send to Parliament representatives whose object is either to conserve the power of capital or to mislead and make futile any real attempts of the workers to remove wage-slavery.

When Mr. Garvin and Mr. Ford are as dead as a dodo the people of future generations will be celebrating the memory of one of the greatest thinkers of all times— Karl Marx.

Gilmac.

The Founders of Modern Socialism. (1928)

Book Review from the February 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,” by Dr. Ryazanoff. (Martin Lawrence, Ltd. 7/6 net.)

This book of two hundred and twenty-one pages covers the lives and the collaboration of Marx and Engels, with an account of the historical background from which they emerged. The book is well done, without any appearance of bias, and the author criticises the work of others in the same field; for example, Franz Mehring, on certain details, though he sometimes makes assertions in opposition to accepted views without backing them with supporting quotations. This is particularly noticeable where he refers to the correspondence of Marx and Engels. Only fragments of this correspondence have so far been translated into English, so that the mere reference to the correspondence leaves English readers in the dark.

On page 138 there is a curious mistake. Paul Lafargue is stated to have been born in 1811 (seven years before Marx) and to have died in 1877. In fact Lafargue was born in 1842 and died in 1911.

The book is open to the objection one would expect in one of so few pages covering lives so rich in activity. On some points the information is meagre; on others it is substantial.

EARLY INFLUENCES

The opening pages give a fair account of the historical position in the early nineteenth century, and particularly the local conditions, different in detail, but similar in their general effect, that influenced first Engels and then Marx to take up a democratic standpoint. Both were born and spent their early days in the industrial provinces of the Rhine—Marx in Treves and Engels in Barmen. Marx came of a family of Jewish Rabbis, Engels of a family of German cloth manufacturers. Both had a University education. The Rhine province in the ‘thirties of last century was the centre of much agitation on the part of the rising industrialists in their efforts to free themselves from the hampering influences of feudalism. This agitation first attracted both Marx and Engels, and eventually drew them into the progressive movement. Ryazanoff’s summary of the period covers what is essential.

Here is an example of his method :—

  After 1831, as a result of the two events mentioned above [the July Revolution in France in 1830 and the Polish Rebellion of 1831], and despite the frustration of the July Revolution, we witness a series of revolutionary movements which we shall now cursorily review. We shall emphasise the events which in one way or another might have influenced the young Engels and Marx. In 1832 this movement was concentrated in Southern Germany—not in the Rhine province, but in the Palatinate. Just like the Rhine province, the Palatinate was for a long time in the hands of France, for it was returned to Germany only after 1815. The Rhine province was handed over to Prussia, the Pala­tinate to Bavaria, where reaction reigned not less than in Prussia. It can readily be understood why the inhabitants of the Rhine province and the Palatinate, who had been accustomed to the greater freedom of France, strongly resented German repression. Every revolutionary upheaval in France was bound to enhance opposition to the government. In 1831 this opposition assumed threatening proportions among the liberal intelligentsia, the lawyers Wirth and Liebenpfeifer arranged a grand festival in Hambach. Many orators appeared on the rostrum. Borne too was present. They proclaimed the necessity of a free, united Germany. (Page 30.)

MARX AND RUSSIA.

Ryazanoff then gives a summary of the events and of the gradual development inside this movement of a movement of the German workers, the formation of the “League of the Just” and the “Workers’ Educational Association.”

On page 92 he says :—

  To Marx, who had carefully studied the evolu­tion of the Jacobin party, it seemed that in the next revolution, too, it would be possible to direct the forces which would develop spontaneously in the heat of prolonged political action.

  This premise explains his error. For long he held to this opinion, and a whole series of events were needed to make him renounce this premise ….

   The Neue Rhenische Zeitung, relying upon the experience of the French Revolution, advocated the following tactics: War with Russia, it seemed, was the only means of saving the Revolution in Western Europe. The defeat of the Paris proletariat was the first blow at the Revolution. The history of the Great French Revolution showed that it had been the attack of the Coalition upon France that supplied the impulse for the strengthening of the revolutionary movement. The moderate parties had been thrown aside. The leadership had been taken over by those parties which were able to repel most energetically the external attack. As a result of the attack by the Coalition, France had been declared a republic on August 10, 1792. Marx and Engels expected that a war of the reactionaries against the new Revolution would lead to similar results. That is why they kept on criti­cising Russia in the columns of their paper. 

Unfortunately for his readers, Ryazanoff nowhere gives quotations showing that Marx and Engels held the views alleged above nor that they later renounced those views. The “Communist Manifesto,” the “Address to the Communist League” in 1848, the article on the defeat of the Paris proletariat, written in 1848, the article on the German Revolution and oppressed nationalities of the same year, and the article in the “Neue Rhenish Gazette” of 1850 on Taxation Reform and the Social Revolution, certainly do not support the assertions. However, assuming that Marx and Engels were banking on a war with Russia to bring about a similar situation as obtained in France in 1792, the idea was not tested, since the Crimean War broke out long afterwards when circumstances, from a revolutionary point of view, had fundamentally changed. The alleged position was—war with Russia to save the revolution. As the war did not come the revolution was defeated, and the revolutionists imprisoned or scattered, a few finally gathering together in London to begin all over again. So that, assuming Marx and Engels held the view alleged, it looks as if they had correctly forecast the result and there would therefore have been no need for any renouncing.

“REVOLUTION AND COUNTER REVOLUTION.”

On page 105, writing of “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany”, the author states :—

  Marx was credited with this book, but from their correspondence we now know that Engels was the author. However, ideologically it was the common work of Marx and Engels. The latter wrote it on the basis of facts that were supplied by Marx, and chiefly on the basis of the article’s which they had both been writing for the “Neue Rhenische Zeitung.”

Here, again, it is unfortunate that no quotation is supplied from the Marx and Engels correspondence to support the statement. Failing this information, I am bound to state that Ryazanoff appears to me to have overstated the position, and for three principal reasons. Firstly, Eleanor Marx, in her introduction to the collected edition of these articles, definitely gives the impression that they were the works of Marx, as the following quotations will show :—

   The following articles are now, after forty-five years, for the first time collected and printed in book form. They are an invaluable pendant to Marx’s work on the coup d’etat of Napoleon III …. Both works belong to the same period, and both are what Engels calls excellent specimens of that marvelous gift … of Marx …. of apprehending clearly the character, the significance, and the necessary consequences of great historical events at a time when these events are actually in course of taking place, or are only just completed.

  These articles were written in 1851-1852, when Marx had been about eighteen months in England. 

#    #    #    # 

  That readers of these articles may have some idea of the conditions under which Marx was working, under which he wrote them and the “18th Brumaire,” and was preparing his first great economical work, “The Critique of Political Economy,” I again quote from my mother’s notes. 

#    #    #    # 

  Finally, I would remind English readers that these articles were written when Marx had only been some eighteen months in England, and that he never had an opportunity of reading the proofs. 

The above is definite enough, and was written by Marx’s daughter within a year of Engels’ death.

In the second place, these articles are in style essentially Marx’s, and thirdly, I have read somewhere, but unfortunately I cannot lay my hand on the quotation at the moment, that the first group of articles Marx wrote for the “New York Tribune” were sent to Engels for him to correct the English, as Marx had not yet acquired sufficient mastery of the written language. In view of the Marxian style of the articles, and not having had an opportunity of consulting the Marx and Engels correspondence, the latter appears to me the more likely explanation of what happened.

LASSALLE.

From page 113 onward there is an excellent explanation of the differences between Lassalle and Marx and Engels. The former took up the attitude of a Prussian democrat, which compelled him to abuse Austria, take up a gentle attitude towards Russia, and shower compliments on Napoleon the Third. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, in the interests of the international working class, attacked with equal relentlessness, all four contending parties. The curious part is that Lassalle, as well as Marx and Engels, claimed to be carrying out the fundamental principles of the “Communist Manifesto.”

THE INTERNATIONAL.

From page 138 onwards there is a discussion of the foundation of the 1st International. Ryazanoff disputes the common view that the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association originated in the world exposition that took place in London in 1862 to which continental workers came and mixed with English workers at a reception held in honour of seventy French delegates. He points out that the whole business was arranged by the employers and that nothing was said at the reception that could in any way offend the employers, and that the English trade unionists refused to have anything to do with the affair. That the American Civil War of 1860-1865 and the Polish insurrectionary movement of 1862-1863 were the real instigators of movements that led to the foundation of the International. Here are some extracts which will better explain his attitude :—

  But now two very important events happened, the first of which was the American Civil War (1860-1865). We have already seen that the abolition of slavery was the most important problem of the day. It became so acute and it had led to such an acrid conflict between the Southern and the Northern States, that the South, in order to preserve slavery, determined to secede and to organise an independent republic, The result was a war which brought in its train unexpected and unpleasant consequences to the whole of the capitalistic world. The Southern States were then the sole growers of the cotton which was used in all the cotton industries of the world. Egyptian cotton was still of very little importance. East India and Turkistan were not producing any cotton at all. Europe thus found itself without any cotton supply. The textile industries of the world were experiencing a crisis. The shortage of cotton caused a rise in the prices of all the other materials in the textile industry. Of course, the big capitalists suffered, least of all, the petty capitalists hastened to shut down their factories. Tens, nay hundreds of thousands of workers were doomed to perish of hunger.

  The Governments confined themselves to handing out pitiful pittances. The English workers who had not long before, during the strike in the building trades, shown an example of solidarity, now, too. took up the cause of organising help. The initiative belonged to the London Trades Council, which appointed a Special Committee. In France also, there was organised a Special Committee for this purpose. The two Committees were in frequent communication with one another. It was this that suggested to the French and English workers how closely allied were the interests of labour of different countries….

  Another event then occurred which was also of equal interest to the workers of the different countries. Serfdom was abolished in Russia (1861). Reforms in other branches of the political and economic life of Russia were imminent. The revolutionary movement became more animated, it advocated more radical changes. Russia’s outlying possessions, and chiefly Poland, were in a state of commotion. The Czar’s government grasped at this as the best pretext of getting rid of external as well as internal sedition. It provoked the Polish revolt, while at the same time, aided by Katov and other venal scribes, it incited Russian Chauvinism at home. The notorious hangman, Nfuraviev, and other brutes like him, were commandeered to stifle the Polish revolt.

  In Western Europe, where hatred for Russian Czarism was prevalent, the rebellious Poles evoked the warmest sympathy. The English and French governments allowed the sympathisers of the Polish insurgents complete freedom of action, regarding this as a convenient outlet for the stored-up feelings of resentment. In France a number of meetings were held, and a committee, headed by Henri Toulain (1828-1897), and Perruchon, was organised. In England the pro-Polish movement was headed by the workers, Odger and Cremer, and by the radical intellectual, Professor Beesly.

  In April, 1863, a monster mass meeting was called in London. Professor E. S. Beesly (1831-1915), presided; Cremer delivered a speech in defence of the Poles. The meeting passed a resolution which urged the English and the French workers to bring simultaneous pressure to bear upon their respective governments and to force their intervention in favour of the Poles. It was decided to provide for an International meeting. This meeting took place in London on July 22nd, 1863, The chairman was again Beesly, Odger and Cremer spoke in the name of the English workers, Toulain in the name of the French. Nothing but the Polish affair was discussed, and they all insisted on the necessity of restoring independence to Poland. On the next day another meeting took place, to which the historians of the International have not paid much attention. It was arranged on the initiative of the London Trades Council, this time without the participation of the bourgeoisie. Odger had been advocating closer ties between English and Continental labour. The problem presented itself on a practical basis English labour had to take note of the serious competition of the French, the Belgian and particularly the German workers. At the beginning of the ‘sixties, the bread-baking industry which was already concentrated into great enterprises was wholly operated by German workers. In the building, furniture and decorative industries there was an influx of Frenchmen. That was why the English trade unionists valued so much any possible chance of influencing foreign labourers who were pouring into England. This could best be accomplished through an organisation which would unite the workers of various nations.

  It was decided that the English workers send an appropriate address to the French workers. Almost three months elapsed, while the draft of this address was being offered to the London trade unionists, for approval. It was written largely by Odger. (Pp. 140-143.)

MARX AND THE INTERNATIONAL

On September 28th, 1864, the meeting was held that founded the International, Ryazanoff points out that Marx took no part in the initial stages and was only an invited guest to this meeting. Ryazanoff’s attitude agrees in the main with statements of Frederick Lessner in “Recollections of an Old Communist” (page 33), and a letter, addressed by Marx to Engels, translated by Max Beer and published in the “Labour Monthly” in the latter half of 1923. Liebknecht, in his “Memoir” of Marx, bears out a portion of it, but the inference from his remarks is that Marx indirectly inspired the movement. At the same time it is curious and suggestive that Marx should have been invited to the meeting of September 28th. I would quote extensively from each of the above, but I have already overloaded this article with quotations. However, I cannot refrain from some quotations on this point as they illustrate how frail is human testimony where reliance is placed on memory alone. In his letter to Engels Marx says :—

  A certain Le Lubez, a Frenchman, who speaks an excellent English, was sent to me to inquire whether I would take part on behalf of the German workmen, and send a German workman to speak in that meeting. I sent Eccarius, who acquitted himself exceedingly well, while I assisted as a dumb figure on the platform.

Now for Lessner :

  The English committee invited also the Communistische Arbeiter-bildungsverein to this meeting, and at the same time expressed a wish that Marx should attend this international fraternisation of the working men. The Communistische Arbeiter-bildungsverein sent me to Marx. I informed him of the wish of the English workmen, and after some inquiries as to the conveners and the object of the meeting, Marx consented to come.

Now hear Liebknecht:

  This idea [an international association] assumed a more definite form, when in the spring of 1864—and again in April—a delegation of workers came from Paris, which resolved in a conference with German, Polish, English and American delegates to call an international delegates’ meeting for the purpose of founding the ”International Workingmen’s Association,” and to entrust Marx with the preliminary work.

  Five months later, on the 28th of September, 1864, in the memorable meeting at St. James’s Hall, London, the ”International Workingmen’s Association” was founded.

Marx’s letter, of course, was written about the time of the events, whilst both Lessner and Liebknecht were writing over thirty years later.

Beginning on page 183, there is a good account of the struggle within the Inter­national between the Marxians and Bakunin and his followers. I would particularly re­commend this part to the English ultra-Bolshevists. On the same point I cannot refrain from quoting from a letter written by Engels to Marx in March, 1852, in which Engels says : —

  Bakunin has only become of some importance because no one knows Russian. And the old pan-Slav trickery that the old Slav communal ownership can be transformed into communism, and that the Russian peasants are to be regarded as born Communists, will again be widely canvassed. (The Life and Work of Frederick Engels by Zelda Kaban-Coates, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920.)

THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

On page 155 Ryazanoff quotes certain paragraphs from the Inaugural Address of the International as follows : —

  Considering that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves ; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule ;

  That the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence ;

  That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means ;

   That all efforts aiming at that great end have hitherto failed from want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries ;

    That the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern societies exist and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries ;

    That the present revival of the working classes in the most industrious countries of Europe, while it raises a new hope, gives solemn warning against a relapse in the old errors, and calls for the immediate combination of the still disconnected movements.

THE "RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS” AND MARX.

Immediately following these quotations, Ryazanoff makes the following remark : —

  A careful perusal of these points reveals how closely the Communist Party of Russia had, in some planks of its programme, followed the theses formulated by Marx.

Now I do not know to which particular programme the author refers, but the pro­grammes I have read have not shown any marked likeness to the above theses. For instance, if one compares the first paragraph in the above theses with the following quotation, taken from the “Resolutions and Regulations of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party” (29th March-4th April) 1920) a remarkable unlikeness will be noticed :—

  The Congress makes it obligatory to all the members of the Party mercilessly to fight that particularly obnoxious form of ignorant conceit which deems the working class capable of solving all problems without the assistance in the most responsible cases of specialists of the bourgeois school. The demagogic elements who speculate on this kind of prejudice of the more backward section of our working classes can have no place in the ranks of the Party of Scientific Socialism.

  Registration of individual output or productivity of labour and the granting of individual premiums, must also be carried out in a way suitable to administrative technical staff. Better conditions must be secured for our best administrators and engineers to enable them to make full use of their capacities in the interests of social economy.

  A special system of premiums is to be established for those specialists under whose guidance the workers can attain the necessary qualifications to make them capable to accept further independent posts.

Or again, take the programme drawn up at the beginning of 1919 on the occasion of the first call for the 3rd International, which invited as participants the ”Syndicalist ele­ments of the workers” and the various national groups of the industrial workers of the world. Paragraph 7 states :—

  The most important method is the mass action of the proletariat, including armed struggle against the government power of capitalists.

This paragraph is made clearer by the first President of the Executive Committee of the International, Zinovief, in a document dated September 1st, 1919, which includes the following paragraph :—

  What we would particularly emphasise is the following : The real solution of the question is to be found, under all circumstances, outside Parliament, in the street. That strikes and insurrections are the only methods of resolute war between Capital and Labour is now clear.“ (The Socialist Review, p. 272, July, 1920.)

Now if there was one thing against which the 1st International set its face determinedly from the very beginning it was the policy of street fighting and the barricade. It was out of matters like this that the struggle with the Bakuninites arose, and moved Marx to state, after the Congress at The Hague in September, 1872 (the last Congress of the 1st International) :—

  A group had arisen in our midst which proclaimed working-class abstinence from political work.

  We deemed it our duty to declare how danger­ous and how threatening such opinions may become for our cause.

  The worker must, sometime, get the political power into his own hands in order to lay the foundation of a new organisation of labour. He must overthrow the old political system that upholds the old institutions unless he is ready like the old Christians—to sacrifice the “kingdom of this world.” (Taken from “The Class Struggle,” Vol. 2, May-June, 1918, No. 3.)

In conclusion, however, in spite of the criticism I have offered of the book, it is well worth reading, and contains much valu­able information in a handy form.

Gilmac.

Blogger's Note:

On the matter of the true authorship of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, please see the following article from the May 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letters: Will capitalism collapse? (1989)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will capitalism collapse?

Dear Editors.

The sense of the last paragraph of my letter (March Socialist Standard) was completely lost because of your typographical error. I repeat the question I asked you which I notice you did not answer. How can capitalist production which only operates through the prospect of profit, continue to operate prior to the political capture of power when the socialist aim to abolish the profit system becomes itself a serious prospect once the socialist movement reaches a significant size? I think it is important that your readers should have an explanation so that they may judge for themselves the feasibility of obtaining an entirely new economic system more or less overnight without some change in economic relationships having occurred prior to this apocalyptic event.

Louise Cox

Haslemere

Reply:

Sorry about the error that made the last sentence of your letter incomprehensible. As to the point you wanted to raise, you appear to be saying that the growth of the socialist movement will bring about the economic collapse of capitalism before a socialist majority has come into being.

We have heard this sort of argument before. but we don't see why the socialist movement merely growing to a “significant size" should make profit prospects disappear. An analysis of the way capitalism works discloses, perhaps unfortunately, that the capitalist system will be able to stagger on, even if this involves increasing government intervention, until it is abolished by the conscious political action of the working class.

In any event, the socialist mode of production and distribution, i.e. production geared exclusively to meeting human needs and free access for all to goods and services according to their self-defined needs, cannot gradually evolve within capitalism. Whatever may be the political, economic and social effects within capitalism of the growth of the socialist movement, production for use — and the consequent disappearance of money/commodity relations and wage labour — cannot begin until after the socialist movement has democratically won control of political power and established the common ownership of the means of production by the whole community.

Editors.

Independence and Culture

Dear Comrades,

The brutal history of capitalism has often involved invasions from abroad as part of the process of its local development. Cromwell's occupation of Ireland, with all its savagery, was an early instance. In Marx's day, when capitalism was still young and insufficiently widespread in its establishment, it might have been valid to argue (and he did) that its further extension was a progressive necessity. Indeed at the time of the Crimean War Marx regarded the possibility of a Tsarist victory as such a retarding factor in historical development that he felt able to look favourably upon the opposing Anglo-French and Ottoman Turkish forces. By the twentieth century the world dominance of the capitalist system was no longer in the balance even if to this day large areas of the under-developed world have yet to undergo their own thoroughgoing changeover to commodity production and wage- slavery.

This means that the world-wide establishment of socialism no longer hinges upon the yet further spread of the iron heel of capital. But the state-capitalist bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking have not let this inhibit them where the extension of their control over Afghanistan or Tibet has been concerned. It is true that as the harbingers of industrial society the Russian imposed regime in Kabul and the Chinese colonial administration in Lhassa represent modernising trends as did British and French imperialism in their day. But in recognising this and in our repugnance for the superstitious, women-oppressive and backward-looking old orders we must not ignore, as I feel the article "Independence no benefit" in the April issue did, the harshness of imposed foreign ways and language by the latest conquerers. So whilst the notion of “national independence" is rightly shown as being, from the working-class point of view, merely a change of rulers imagine how any of us would feel if the purchase of a postage-stamp, the reading of a "news" paper or our kids' schooling required the use of Chinese! Our rejection of nationalist delusions ought never to show insensitivity to the valid concerns of oppressed people. Moreover. it strengthens the appeal of Socialism to show that in contrast to the imposed uniformity and centralisation of commodity production we aim for a way of life which, of its nature, fosters cultural freedom and diversity.

Yours for the revolution 

Eddie Grant 

London NW4

Letter: Dight's Dilemma. (1922)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Editors, Socialist Standard.

Dear Sirs,

On page 104 of the Socialist Standard of this month's issue you quote from Marx’s "Critique of Political Economy," as follows :—

  "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed ; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions for their existence have matured in the womb of the old society."

And then, for the purpose of emphasising the above quotation, you quote again, this time from the "oft-quoted passage" (so gleefully and gloatingly quoted so often by yourselves since the November Revolution in Russia) from the preface to Marx's "Capital”

  "One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs." (Italics mine.)

And this is your interpretation as instanced by your comment which follows immediately upon the quotations :—

  "These quotations prove not only that Marx did not expect a country in a backward condition economically to be able to establish Socialism, but also that he expressly denied such a thing possible. So far from following Marx as 'Judex' suggests, Lenin has acted in direct opposition to Marx’s teaching. To suggest that, a country like Russia, still largely feudalistic, with only the beginnings of capitalism, is 'most suitable for Socialism,' shows a most complete ignorance of Marx, coupled with a boundless recklessness of assertion."

Far from wanting to defend "Judex," of the "English Review," I am nevertheless opposed to the possible inference that can be drawn from the above, that Lenin, as well as "Judex," displays "ignorance of Marx, coupled with a boundless recklessness of assertion," as well as your "reckless assertion" that "Lenin has acted in direct opposition to Marx's teaching." Marx, of course, "did not expect a country in a backward condition economically to establish Socialism." But did Lenin? Again and again did Lenin assert the necessity for the economic development of Russia as being requisite for the establishment of Socialism. But if you wish to imply that that means that Russia must first of all pass through all the phases of capitalist development, then how do you account for, say, America (among other countries) not having passed through feudalism as well as others that have not passed through all its phases? Marx, when referring to a society being on “the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement,” clearly refers to a revolutionary period within that society. Hence his reference to the "birth pangs.” And then if we read that this revolutionary period cannot be cleared “by bold leaps,” nor that "the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development ” can be removed “by legal enactments,” we shall then be able to reconcile your quotations with the following:—

  “Let us now look at Russia. At the time of the Revolutions of 1848-1849, the monarchs of Europe, like the European bourgeoisie, saw in Russian intervention their sole means of protection against the proletariat, at that time just awakening to a consciousness of its strength. They placed the Czar at the head of European reaction. To-day, he is a prisoner of revolution at Gatchina, and Russia is in the front rank of the revolutionary movement of Europe. The burden of the Communist manifesto was the declaration of the inevitable disappearance of existing bourgeois property. But in Russia, along with the capitalist system which is developing with feverish haste, and of the large landed property of the bourgeoisie in course of formation, more than half of the land is the common property of the peasantry. The question is, therefore, whether the Russian peasant commune, that already degenerate form of primitive commune property in land, will pass directly into the superior form of communist ownership of the land, or whether it must rather first follow the same process of dissolution that it has undergone in the historical development of the West? The only possible way to reply to that question to-day is as follows : If the Russian Revolution is the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, and if both should be successful, then the existing communal property of Russia may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” (Preface to 2nd Russian edition of Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels, 1882. Italics mine.)

If my reading and interpretation (which opposes yours) of your quotations is incorrect, how do you reconcile your quotations with mine? It seems to me you’ve got some job.

Yours faithfully,

Hy. Dight.

Reply—
Mr. Dight’s method of discussing Marx in relation to Russia is so delightfully simple as to almost cause one to wonder if it is genuine. If we will only suppose that Marx meant something quite contrary to what he wrote, then it will be easy to follow Mr. Dight. But if one decides to keep closely to what Marx wrote and taught, then Mr. Dight is hopelessly out of the argument.

Mr. Dight’s "possible inference” only becomes so by straining language beyond all reason. The very quotation, "most suitable for Socialism,” shows that it was "Judex” who showed a "most complete ignorance of Marx, coupled with a boundless recklessness.” Lenin is not ignorant of Marx. But this only makes matters worse for Lenin.

Mr. Dight says: "Marx, of course, 'did not expect a country in a backward condition economically to establish Socialism.’ But did Lenin? ” The answer is Yes! Lenin proclaimed the upheaval in 1917 as a "Socialist Revolution” even as late as his "Left Wing Communism,” written in 1920. It's true that later Lenin had to modify his own words, as he has had to do on so many other points. But that hits Lenin and Dight —not us.

Almost any elementary school child could answer the question about America. That country was colonised by people who had already reached the early stages of capitalism, and is an example of capitalist development by transplanted material. It is not a case of a nation passing over to capitalism without going through Feudalism, as the natives did not develop at all—perhaps because they were exterminated by the newcomers.

It is in his next sentence that Mr. Dight tries to saddle us with the simple assumption referred to above when, in dealing with the quotation from "Capital,” he says : "Marx . . . clearly refers to a revolutionary period, etc.” Marx, on the contrary, "clearly” does nothing of the sort. He was dealing with the "normal development” of societies and how they cannot evade the "successive phases” of this "normal development.”

But even if one takes Mr. Dight’s absurd assumption, for the purpose of the argument, Mr. Dight’s conclusion is still false. When Marx writes of "revolutionary periods” he takes care to explain that he is dealing with "social revolutions,” where one system is broken up and another takes its place. No such "revolution” has taken place in Russia. Due to the war and the corruption it developed among the ruling class, Czarism collapsed, and in the chaos following, the Bolsheviks—a tiny minority— after a first failure, seized power in 1917. No fundamental change took place in the methods of producing and distributing wealth. In other words, there was no "social revolution.” All that happened was that one minority began to rule instead of another. The attempts of this minority to impose economic methods and conditions upon a people not yet developed to a level of these conditions has been without success. That is to say, that they have failed disastrously to "clear by bold leaps or remove by legal enactments” (though the latter have been turned out by the ton) "the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.” To any normal person the facts of the situation in Russia would be a complete and crushing answer to Dight. Not so to the short-sighted and intellectually limited fanatic. Calmly ignoring the situation, he tries to find comfort in idiotic interpretations of Marx’s writings.

As Mr. Dight’s first point falls, his second —dealing with the 1882 preface to the "Communist Manifesto”—no longer holds. But even apart from this, the quotation itself is a flat contradiction to the position of Mr. Dight. Take the very sentence he has put into italics because he thinks it gives us "some job.” (It does—to avoid choking with laughter at his blindness.) The sentence contains three points, each of which is in direct opposition to the position in Russia:—

“If the Russian Revolution is the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West . . . "(Italics ours.)

As the upheaval in Russia in 1917 scarcely raised a ripple among the "workers of the West,” and certainly not the faintest suggestion of a Revolution, this point by itself smashes Dight’s attempted case. At the Berlin Conference of the three "Internationals” Radek made a statement showing how correct our attitude is. He said in reference to the Soviet Republic "which no one denies is, if not a workers’, at least a revolutionary state (“Communist,” 15/4/1922). As he admits it was not a workers' "revolution,” it would be interesting to know whose "revolution” he considers it to be !

The second point is :—

 "and if both should be successful, etc.,”

As neither came into existence, Mr. Dight cannot draw even the pretence of support from this phrase.

  "then the existing communal property of Russia may serve as the starting point for a Communist development.”

Even in the conclusion, nothing positive. Marx and Engels do not say that it “will” be a starting point, but only that it “may.” Two "ifs” and a "may” in the sentence —with the "ifs” not yet fulfilled! And this is the sort of stuff Dight relies upon when he tries to falsify the teachings of Marx. But the matter may be taken a point further.

The great blunder made by Lenin and Trotsky was that they, in their ignorance of Western conditions, expected a revolution by the workers of England, Germany, and France. Even after their first disappointment, when they had to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they still hoped for this Western Revolution. Only now are they beginning to realise the hopelessness of such an event for some time ahead. Hence their concessions and offers to the European and American capitalists.

A great deal of injury has been done to the propaganda of Socialism by attempting to foist upon Marx the responsibility for the wild-headed schemes of the Bolsheviks and their supporters. The blind praise of anything emanating from Russia has led these fanatics to actions injurious to the Bolsheviks themselves. Instead of recognising the overpowering conditions against the Bolsheviks and giving them praise for certain things they have done, these ranters have devoted their whole attention to boosting the absurd claims of the Bolsheviks. Fantastic decrees that had not the slightest effect outside of the office issuing them, were hailed as marvels produced by geniuses, that changed Russia overnight from a private property basis to one of advanced Communism. Millions of peasants who could not read were converted, we were told, into class-conscious, highly intelligent Marxians by the shoals of pamphlets distributed among them.! Only its tremendous tragedy saves it from being a farce.

And all the time, as we have continually pointed out in the pages of the Socialist Standard, the Bolsheviks were doing things that deserved high praise and which, put in their proper perspective, gave valuable lessons to the Western workers. The first lesson they gave was to show that a minority, who were not capitalists, could run the affairs of a huge country, under the special conditions existing there, in an efficient manner. This lesson tends to break down the superstitution still held by many workers, “that you must have the capitalists in control,” and has aroused shrieking opposition from the Churchills and Poincares of the West.

One of the Departments whose efficiency has been most loudly advertised by the supporters of Bolshevism is the War Department, whose head, Trotsky, has appropriated most of the praise to himself. But, as a matter of fact, Trotsky’s work— assuming it was his—was far less difficult than that of every other Department. After being under Conscription for generations, the Russian peasant falls almost automatically into the position of a soldier if he is supplied with munitions. It was a task of immensely greater magnitude to manufacture a rifle in Russia than to use it once it was made. The difficulties of transport were colossal, and under the conditions prevailing the Transport Department worked in a marvelous manner. The question of obtaining food for the townspeople, and the paralysing problem of how to transport such food as existed in face of the Army’s demand for railways and wagons, was sufficient to appall the strongest. In education, too, the attempt to adopt the best of Western methods, and the care given to the children will stand like a monument to the credit of those responsible for the Department.

It is for things of this kind that the Bolsheviks deserve high praise—not for ignoring the teachings of Marx. And even here the Marxian dictum receives marked illustration. What was the first obstacle the Bolsheviks met? The answer is, "Lack of sufficient men and women capable of carrying on the work.” With all the good-will in the world, they were too few in numbers to "man” all the Departments themselves, and there was a lamentable shortage of others, capable of doing so, in the country. Practically every visitor to Russia, even if a bitter opponent of the Bolsheviks, agrees that the latter have been "bled white” under the terrific strain imposed upon them by the attempt to administer so huge a country.

Jack Fitzgerald

Why Socialists Oppose the Vietcong (1968)

From the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vietnam is the latest of the left-wingers’ adopted fatherlands. Before Vietnam it was Algeria, before that it was Cuba, and so on back to Russia. This support for the Vietcong does not depend on what is actually going on in Vietnam, but is rather an expression of the left-wingers’’ dissatisfaction with certain aspects of modern society. To that extent it is irrational.

Nevertheless those who support the Vietcong imagine that they are Marxists and it is in pseudo-Marxist terms that they rationalise their support for this nationalist movement whose aim is to set up a state capitalist regime in the South similar to that in the North. The Vietcong is not a socialist movement, and by no stretch of the imagination can it be said to have anything to do with Socialism. But since those who shout for “Victory for the Vietcong” have dragged in Marx and Socialism, we must at least refute their arguments and state why Socialists do not support the Vietcong.

Left-wingers’ use two basic arguments. First, that socialists should support any movement, even if it is not socialist, that weakens “American imperialism” which they say is the main threat to social revolution throughout the world, just as Marx supported moves against Tsarist Russia. Second, and this comes from Lenin, the Vietcong and workers in the West are fighting the same enemy – imperialism – and so we should support each other.

It is true that in the middle of the nineteenth century Marx saw Tsarist Russia, the “gendarme of Europe”, as a great threat to the further social progress of mankind. He felt that if Russia overran western Europe it would crush the democratic movement and put the social revolution back for years. Therefore, he was ready to support any moves that might weaken the power of Tsarist Russia. He supported Britain, France and Turkey in the Crimean war. He stood for an independent Polish state, to be a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. He did all he could to expose the pro-Russia policies and intrigues of Lord Palmerston. These may seem odd activities for a socialist – and, indeed, we have criticised Marx for them. Marx argued that before Socialism is possible society must pass through the capitalist stage. But this is no automatic process; it depends on the outcome of human struggles. Russia was “reactionary” in the proper sense of the word in that it was a threat to the development even of capitalism. Marx opposed Tsarist Russia, not because it was the strongest capitalist power, but because it was the strongest anti-capitalist power.

Looking back now we can see that Marx was over-optimistic as to the prospects of a socialist revolution in Europe. In time the capitalist states of western Europe grew stronger and the Tsarist Empire weaker, finally to be destroyed along with Austro-Hungary and Imperial Germany in the first world war. Before that even, Russia in a bid to keep its armed forces up to date had become indebted to the capitalists of France and Belgium. Well before the turn of the century we can say that conditions had changed since Marx’s day. Capitalism was firmly established as the new world order. Russia was no longer a threat. The task of socialists was even clearer: to oppose all wars and nationalist movements and to work to build up a world-wide workers’ movement with Socialism as its aim. This has always been the policy of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Today capitalism quite clearly dominates the world, in Russia and China as well as in the West. To talk of “American imperialism” as the main threat is to play the game of state capitalist Russia and China. Every up-and-coming capitalist power finds the world already carved up by the established powers. If it is to expand its influence it must clash with these powers, as Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia have found and as China is now finding. All of them, in their time, have beaten the “anti-imperialist” drum, that is, have opposed the domination of the world by Britain and France and later America. Mussolini talked of Italy as a “proletarian nation” in a class war against the “bourgeois nations”. Nazi Germany stirred up Arab and Latin American nationalism. Japan advanced the slogan of “Asia for the Asians”. Russia, too, and now China, like Germany before, vociferously denounce Anglo-French-American imperialism.

Naturally socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, do not allow themselves to be used as tools of some capitalist state, as most of those who shout for the Vietcong are (some know full well what they are doing). Socialists are opposed to world capitalism and to governments everywhere.

Lenin could not believe it when he learnt that the German Social Democrats had voted for the war credits in 1914. Later he worked out a theory to try to explain it, his theory of imperialism. Basically, he argued that as profits were greater in the undeveloped parts of the world capitalists were eager to invest there; this brought the capitalist states into continual conflict over the division of the world. Part of the “super-profits” of this imperialist exploitation, were used to pay higher wages and provide social reforms for sections of the workers at home. They were thus led away from revolutionary socialism towards opportunism.

This theory is mistaken on nearly all counts. It has not been proved that the rate of profit was higher in the colonial territories. There is a much simpler explanation for capitalist expansion into the undeveloped world in the forty or so years before the first world war: the need to secure sources of raw material for the expanding industries at home, and then to secure strategic points to protect these sources and the trade routes to and from them. As for Lenin’s explanation of reformism it is the purest nonsense. To suggest that workers share in the proceeds of colonial exploitation is to reject the Marxian theory of wages which says that wages are the price of labour-power.

But this argument was an essential part of Lenin’s theory. For on it he based his strategy of support for anti-imperialist nationalist movements. If they succeeded, he believed, they would deprive the imperialist state concerned of its super-profits and so also of its ability to buy off its workers. Deprived of their share the workers’ standard of living would drop and they would once again become revolutionary, affording a chance for a Bolshevik-type vanguard to seize power.

This is typical of Lenin’s thinking, to rely on some factor outside of the development of the working class itself to create the conditions for social revolution. It fits in well with his contempt for the abilities of workers and his view that they should be manipulated by a self-appointed vanguard. Needless to say this short-cut to Socialism is just as much a dead-end as all the others.

Of course defeat in Vietnam, and the whole of South East Asia, would have serious consequences for American capitalism. That is why they are fighting. It would deprive them of access to many raw materials, but more important it would shift the balance of power around the pacific in favour of Chinese state capitalism.

It is not true that the Vietcong and workers are fighting the same enemy. The Vietcong are fighting American capitalism. The interests of workers are opposed not only to American capitalism but to capitalism everywhere including Russia and China. Victory for the Vietcong, as we have already explained, would shift the world balance of power from America to other capitalist powers. This is not something that is in the interests of workers, or something that they should support. There is no issue at stake in Vietnam worth a single worker’s life.

The Socialist Party, then, is opposed to the Vietnam war, as to all wars. We do not take sides. Nor are we hypocrites like those who cynically use all normal people’s abhorrence of the burning of women and children (as if the Vietcong did not use flame-throwers) to get them to support one side in this war. Such people do not really want an end to the killing; they want it to go on till the side they support has won. Let them at least be honest and stop trying to fool people with their phoney anti-war sentiments.

Adam Buick