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

How will capitalism end? (2023)

From the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We discuss this with Steve Paxton, author of How Capitalism Ends. History, Ideology and Progress (Zero Books, 2023).

Steve Paxton’s book on Russia, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, published in 2021, stated that the development of technology under capitalism now allows the production of ‘the material abundance required by a free society’ but that the capitalist system by its very nature does not allow this to take place. His book, reviewed in the Socialist Standard in 2022, did not go so far as to propose any kind of detailed remedy for this but rather referred the reader to his upcoming book about ‘the end of capitalism and what comes next’. That book has now been published and the author has agreed to discuss it with the Socialist Standard.

Socialist Standard: Your book contains great analysis of class in terms of capitalist society being divided into two distinct classes, those who possess sufficient capital not to have to sell their energies to an employer and those – the vast majority – who aren’t in that position and have to seek paid employment to survive. It also presents a very detailed and effective demolition of arguments that insist on the inevitability of the market and deny that effective economic calculation would be possible in a non-monetary society. But to what extent do you see the end of capitalism, which is part of the title of your book, as leading to a non-monetary society, to a society without a market?

Steve Paxton: I don’t see a post-capitalist society as necessarily having no room for markets at all. Just as markets existed before capitalism, they may well exist after capitalism. The important thing is that there will be significant differences from the way markets operate under capitalism. In pre-capitalist societies, you couldn’t consider the markets in labour or commodities as free markets in the way that people do under capitalism. So in a post-capitalist future, we might still see markets, but they’re likely to be very different from those we experience under capitalism. The first thing we need to remember is that socialism makes an important distinction between ownership of the means of production and ownership of personal property. Impersonal property is incompatible with socialism, but nobody’s coming for your toothbrush or your bicycle. So I think there’s always room for some kind of market mechanism, the difference being the ownership pattern underlying that market mechanism. The problem with capitalism isn’t that people buy and sell things. It’s the position we start from, in which the only thing one group of people have to sell is their labour power, and they have to do that to survive. So, I guess it’s important to really define what we mean by capitalism. There are in fact competing ideas of what capitalism means. And that’s the case even within Marx. Sometimes he talks about it as a mode of production, and sometimes he talks about it as an economic structure. But I like to take Marx’s idea of capitalism as an economic structure, the sum of class relations, of production relations. It’s basically who owns what and what ownership means is what defines capitalism. So, under capitalism, the dominant production relation is that most people are proletarians, which means they own only their labour power. They’re free to sell that labour power to any capitalist, but because they own no productive forces, they’re actually unfree, in that they must sell that labour power just to survive. So, if that’s how we view capitalism, then markets in themselves are not intrinsically or inherently capitalist. Capitalism is defined by the concentration of ownership of productive resources in very few hands and the consequences that flow from that. It’s true that, once you have a market, you have the potential that some people are just better at buying and selling. But it also has to be said that most of the inequality of ownership under capitalism doesn’t come from the particular skills of entrepreneurs. It comes from people starting with a massive fortune in the first place and starting with lots of resources. So if you remove those things, then the ability to get rich from a market becomes much more limited. At the same time, there’s no hard and fast rule that everyone’s income must be equal.

SS: So how would you see a more equal society with money and a market working?

SP: Under socialism, you might have a situation where, for example, there’s basic income, and on top of that, maybe people that do particularly unpleasant work, particularly hard work, work that no one else wants to do, or maybe work that requires a particular set of skills, will be rewarded more. But these differences would, again, be differences in income, not wealth. And they would be very, very limited compared to today’s great inequalities. Providing income inequality, is structurally limited, it needn’t in itself be a bad thing. Then the person who chooses to work 20 hours a week rather than 40 shouldn’t mind not getting some of the benefits. That’s the choice that people can make under socialism. It’s not a choice they can make under capitalism. So I think that, while it’s possible that we might be able to work out a way to get by without markets at all, just the existence of markets doesn’t necessarily derail the socialist project.

SS: What would be your objections to a moneyless, wageless society as opposed to the kind of thing that you’ve described? After all, Marx did talk about socialism as the abolition of the wages system.

SP: I don’t really have an objection to it, but I think it’s also something that isn’t a necessary component of moving beyond capitalism. It might be something that we need to go through a few more stages before we arrive at. It might be that, once we’ve got rid of all the stuff that is actually the real problem with capitalism, then we realize that money wasn’t really the problem in the first place. When people talk about getting rid of money and using labour vouchers or tokens, that’s just money, isn’t it? That’s just calling money something else. Maybe we should have different currencies. So you get a basic income in one money that you can spend on basic necessities. And then, if you want to contribute more, particularly if you’re prepared to do an unpleasant job or work longer hours, then you get a different currency that you can spend on luxuries. Anyway, we need to focus on getting rid of the real problems of capitalism, which are the fact that a small number of people own all the productive resources and most people own no productive resources.

SS: Just to clarify that we definitely wouldn’t suggest labour vouchers or tokens as a replacement for money. What we suggest is a society of free access to all goods and services, where you wouldn’t need labour vouchers or tokens. When Marx talked about labour vouchers, he was talking about the possibility of using them at an earlier stage of productive development. We would argue that we are now well past that stage and that enough can be produced now to satisfy everyone’s needs the world over, if goods and services are produced and distributed rationally. But to move to something a little bit different, at one point in your book you refer to a socialist government, and you seem to be favourable to the kind of political position of the Labour Party under Corbyn. But can there be such a thing as a socialist government given that in, in Marxian terms, governments are the executive committee of the capitalist class, and therefore a socialist society should involve the abolition of government over people as we know it and its replacement by the cooperative administration of things?

Steve Paxton

SP: I do write from a Marxist point of view, but I tend not to describe myself as a Marxist because, when you do that, people expect you to defend everything Marx said or wrote. On the other hand, I think you can see Marx’s ideas as a coherent whole while not necessarily defending everything he had to say. But I’m not an anarchist and I guess I’m looking a bit more short-term. I’m looking at what our next horizons should be. There’s very short term, for example not having a Tory government, saving the NHS and things like that. And there’s very long term and the ideal society that might be moneyless and have no government. But there’s a big chunk there in between, which is what we should be aiming for. On governments, I do agree that they’re the committee of the ruling class. But that’s under capitalism. Governments under socialism don’t have to be of that kind; they can represent a different interest. They can represent the people rather than the ruling class. In terms of leadership style and some of his policy positions, Corbyn was closer to my position than any other Labour leader since I was in short trousers. Labour as it stands, after a hundred or something years, isn’t really representing the working people. We need a socialist party. I know you would say there is one, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But we need a socialist party with mainstream political clout. We need socialist MPs, but those MPs who would describe themselves as socialist are unfortunately trapped inside the Labour Party. First of all, we need to get rid of the first past the post electoral system. But there’s also plenty to do outside Parliament in terms of trade unions and industrial relations and worker organization.

SS: What you seem to be saying is that, if we look too far into the future, that takes the focus away from what’s happening right now and the possibility of immediate improvements in workers’ conditions. The Socialist Party would tend to argue more or less the opposite. That is, if you focus on short-term reforms, slight changes to the system, any of which could be easily withdrawn anyway, then you take the focus away from the longer term from the possibility of a really equal society, which we could have if enough people wanted it and were prepared to work towards it. In other words, if you put off the demand for socialism, aren’t you putting off socialism and, in that light can’t reforms actually be the enemy of revolution?

SP: I’m not really advocating that we should focus on short-term gains. I’m saying that we shouldn’t reject and we shouldn’t criticize those who do focus on short-term gains. If they’re fighting for a better minimum wage, I’m not their enemy and they’re not mine. We’ve got plenty of enemies, without picking on people who want basically the same as us but are maybe less ambitious. So, while I think our focus should be on a transformation of society away from capitalism into socialism, I also think that we’re not going to get there in one fell swoop, and so the way has to be incremental, via small gains, but gains that make a transformative difference rather than those that just make capitalism a bit less unpalatable. There’s nothing that says that we must have some kind of sudden or dramatic change to get from capitalism to socialism. It’s most likely to happen by gradual and peaceful means. It’s where we end up that’s the most important thing, not how many steps it takes to get there. People are suffering under capitalism, so obviously the sooner the better, but also it needs to be something that’s sustainable. But we shouldn’t underestimate the positive role that the state could play. It’s happened before – with the NHS for example. No one took any violent action to seize any hospitals. The NHS was the obvious answer to people’s healthcare needs. So the state can offer a better alternative than the private sector. And that can apply to education and housing too.

SS: We’d absolutely agree with you that violent conflict couldn’t be on the agenda to achieve socialism, but in response to your incremental focus, how do you see democratic political action by a majority at the ballot box to bring in the kind of system of free access to goods and services that we advocate, even if you think that is a long way off? Given that we already live in a post-scarcity world, where we can produce everything we need, isn’t it just a question of planning so that it can be made available in a freely accessible way once a majority at the ballot box votes for representatives who are in favour of that?

SP: One problem is that we can’t have socialism when there is the number of socialists that we have now. We need to have more socialists. But the problem with that is that many of the people that see themselves as socialists spend all their time insulting the kind of people that are closest to us on the ideological spectrum and berating them for not yet being socialists. What we need to do is to actually convince them to be socialists. And then, as I’ve said before, an obstacle is the lack of proportional representation. If we had a democratic electoral system where everybody’s vote counted for the same amount, we could end up with a socialist party with, you know, maybe 20 or 30 MPs. And that would be enough to say we’re not coming into coalition with anyone unless we get these red lines. We want this minimum wage, for example. That doesn’t drive us past capitalism, but it moves us in the right direction. It’s a process of bringing people on a journey. Look at the huge amount the first post-war Labour government did, and then even in the sixties when Wilson got in, they pushed again. So many things were nationalized. But they made the mistake of not introducing a democratic electoral system. If they had, Thatcher would never have become Prime Minister and all these things that we gained in the post-war period wouldn’t have been wiped out over the last 30 or 40 years.

SS: We wouldn’t see proportional representation within capitalism as constituting any kind of step towards socialism. Some countries do of course already have proportional representation, but would you say that this has moved them any closer to socialism?

SP: Well, you could also look at somewhere like New Zealand, which has got proportional representation and is much better off for it. The Scandinavian countries too. The usual experience of proportional representation is that those countries that have it end up being more progressive and less in thrall to the interests of global capital. Of course, there are still capitalist governments in all of those countries, but they are generally less right-wing than the governments in places like Britain and America. Having said that, I agree that proportional representation doesn’t deliver anything on its own, but without it we’re not really going anywhere.

SS: You may have noticed that, in recent years, there’ve been lots of what you might broadly call anti-capitalist books published and some of these at least are arguing the same kind of things as the Socialist Party. They’re arguing that the only way to get rid of capitalism is to get rid of the market, money and the wages system. You yourself touch on this in your book, when you refer to Marx’s description of socialism as a society based on from each according to ability to each according to need. So do you think there’s a possibility that in the future you might move to this kind of position yourself, that, rather than arguing that things need to get a bit better gradually, you might join us in asking for the whole pie now?

SP: That is what I think we should be asking for, but, realistically, are we going to get it? There are two things we have to have: a vision of where we want to get to, and a vision of how we get there. I think you look a bit further into the future than I do. And I think that, if we can get rid of capitalism as I’ve defined it – the means of production owned by a tiny number of private individuals – then we’re moving towards some kind of system of common ownership. That’s my focus, and ultimately I think the marketless, moneyless society is one of the ways in which we protect that. But while it’s good that people should try to work out recipes for the future society, you have to acknowledge that, by the time we get there, some of those assumptions that those people are making aren’t going to be true anymore. I think it’s still a worthwhile project to try and envisage the kind of details of exactly how the future society would operate, as people like Michael Albert and Ben Burgis are doing. But I also think that we have to accept that, if you tried to do that in 1820, you’d have a horse pulling a cart instead of an engine. In other words we always have to adapt our ideas as we go along. But once we have the big change – that is in the ownership of the means of production – once that’s held in common, then we can look at all the other ideas – maybe to labour tokens or to a moneyless society with the market completely eradicated and free access. But those arguments weren’t really in the scope of my book.

SS: We don’t actually go in for, as Marx put it, ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ either, but we do try to outline a broad structure for the future society we advocate. So we’d agree that, when we get the society we’re aiming for, the particular level of development and technology reached at the time will determine the exact details of production, distribution and social organization. Does that seem reasonable to you?

SP: Yes. For example, we now have this situation where producing more copies of something doesn’t have an additional cost. If you’re going to buy more than one copy of my book on Kindle, it doesn’t cost anything. That server is running already. The electricity is being used, the storage space is there, the bandwidth is there. Whether one person or a thousand people buy it tomorrow, it doesn’t cost the printer, the publisher, the retailer any more. And that kind of thing didn’t really exist until very recently. Many of the things we would need would have zero marginal cost per unit sold. And that makes a massive difference in how an economy could work and why people choose one thing over another, a massive difference that, even 50 years ago, people could probably not have envisaged.

(Interview by Howard Moss.)

Marx was right (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx. By Steve Paxton, Zero Books, 2021. 165pp.

The thesis of this interesting book is that the failure of the Bolsheviks to establish a socialist society in Russia following the 1917 revolution shows the correctness of Marx’s contention that such a society can only arise from advanced capitalism. And since Russia was not an advanced capitalist society in 1917, it could not ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and go straight to socialism. This is not of course a new argument. In fact, it’s one of the arguments against Bolshevism posing as socialism that appeared in the Socialist Standard in the period immediately following the Russian revolution. Those early members of the Socialist Party were clear that, whatever was happening in Russia, it wasn’t and couldn’t be socialism. But this book has the merit of going to extensively researched lengths to prove beyond any conceivable doubt not only that Russia was massively backward in terms of capitalist development in 1917 but probably more so than has previously been thought. To do this it goes into enormous detail on economic developments in Russia throughout the 19th century and right up to the revolution, often comparing these to what was happening in Western Europe and in particular in the motor of capitalist development that was England. Such detail is used to demonstrate conclusively ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and so the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’.

The author follows this by discussion, again highly detailed and documented, of how the Russian economy was built up by the Bolsheviks after the post-revolution period of ‘War Communism’ (1917-22), first under Lenin and then under Stalin, often of course with unbridled violence and brutality inflicted on much of the population. And far from being the development of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ as the regime presented it, he sees this period as representing the transition stage from feudalism to capitalism that Western Europe had undergone earlier and much more gradually over a period of several centuries. He rejects too the idea that what Russia had during this period was ‘state capitalism’, on the grounds that capitalism was not sufficiently developed there for that name to be attached to it (more like ‘state feudalism’ at least at the beginning, he suggests). And indeed he argues that capitalism didn’t in fact come to Russia until the end of the Soviet Union in 1989 when the Soviet system reached peak ‘stagnation’. This is debatable as before then Russia had all the typical features of capitalism – a money economy, wage labour, capital investment, buying and selling, a small privileged class in control (in this case Party bosses and bureaucrats) and in effect ownership of the means of production, and a large mass of workers with no control over the means of living.

His book also presents the opportunity for the author to effectively put to bed common misrepresentations of Marx and his ideas. He does this, in the sections that focus on it, in a highly readable and credible way. So, far from the collapse of the Soviet Union being ‘a fatal blow to important Marxian theses’, he makes it clear that ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’ and that such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. A further merit of this book is the nuanced discussion of class to be found in the section entitled ‘Deeper into Marx’ which recognises that a relatively small number of exceptions to the Marxian model of the class divide between those who own and control the means of production and those who have to work for a wage or salary to survive may blur the overall picture, but at the same time makes short shrift of the idea of a large number of classes in capitalist society and correctly sees the key to class not in whether someone actually works for a wage or salary but the ‘economic pressure’ on that person, i.e. whether that person has to work in order to survive or can choose not to if they want.

The book’s short concluding chapter which looks to the future is also encouraging. Using Marx’s theory of historical development (historical materialism) as a framework, as the writer has done throughout the book, it states tellingly of capitalism that ‘it has provided the means to produce more and better and faster’, that it has developed ‘technology to the point where we can produce the material abundance required by a free society’ and that ‘the level of technological development it has delivered means that we have now entered a post-scarcity world’. Yet, as he points out, ‘Twenty thousand people starve to death every day. Not because we don’t have the food to feed them – but because our current economic and social mechanisms don’t allow us to deliver that food to them.’ At the same time, he sees no virtue in violent revolution: ‘We are not going to progress past capitalism by seizing the means of production in armed conflict.’ Nothing here that socialists can disagree with, but this reader was left a little bemused by the remedy proposed, as a way of organising our ‘post scarcity world’, consisting as it does of ‘new approaches to the relationships between work and leisure, between work and reward, between possession and ownership and between private property and public value’ and not a democratic system of free access to all goods and services.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

This same book was previously reviewed in the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard by another writer.

Marx vindicated (2021)

Book Review from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unlearning Marx: Why the Soviet failure was a triumph for Marx. By Steve Paxton, Zero Books, 2021

In August 1918 the Socialist Standard carried an article which made this argument about the recent revolution in Russia:

  ‘Is this huge mass of people, numbering about 160,000,000 and spread over eight and a half millions of square miles, ready for socialism? Are the hunters of the north, the struggling peasant proprietors of the south, the agricultural wage slaves of the Central Provinces, and the industrial wage slaves of the towns convinced of the necessity and equipped with the knowledge required, for the establishment of the social ownership of the means of life? Unless a mental revolution such as the world has never seen before has taken place, or an economic change has occurred immensely more rapidly than history has ever recorded, the answer is “No!”’

Following Marx, the Socialist Party’s contention that Russia’s revolution could not be socialist was twofold: that the number of people who wanted socialism anywhere was extremely small, and Russia being predominantly feudal was economically underdeveloped. At this time, anyone who regarded themselves as Marxist would have agreed that socialism was not possible in one country.

The Socialist Party went on to argue that the Bolsheviks oversaw the eradication of feudalism and the development of capitalism in what became known as the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. The USSR was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1991. The Socialist Party has always argued that the best analysis of the former USSR is a Marxist one: it reveals its exploitative nature with a ruling class drawn from the ‘Communist’ Party. It was a dictatorship over the proletariat and it was always going to fail. It is a vindication of Marx and the position taken by the Socialist Party.

For some this will involve ‘unlearning’ or learning what Marx had said. Steve Paxton doesn’t mention the Socialist Party’s Marxist analysis of the former USSR. He bases his book mainly on GA Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, first published in 1976. Cohen’s book has been accused of presenting Marx’s theory of history as a form of technological determinism, though Paxton rejects this interpretation. But when Cohen wrote in his book that ‘high technology was not only necessary but also sufficient for socialism’, it certainly looks like technological determinism. And in the final sentence of Paxton’s Conclusion he writes that he is:

  ‘advocating an overthrow of capitalism by changing the economic structure in the only way it ever really changes – slowly, and in response to changing circumstances, by utilising technological developments created within the existing system.’

So, we sit back and wait for the gadgets to overthrow capitalism. Paxton’s error (and Cohen’s) is in supposing that the socialist revolution will be like previous revolutions, such as the change from feudalism to capitalism. The socialist revolution will be crucially different in that ‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ (Communist Manifesto). The objective is uniquely different too: common ownership of the means of life, with the consequent abolition of wage labour and capital.

It’s a pity that Paxton has allowed himself to be misled because there is much here that is worthwhile. He provides a wealth of data on why Russia under Communist Party rule couldn’t be socialist. Some of it closely parallels arguments the Socialist Party has used for over a century.

Lew Higgins

Blogger's Note:

GA Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.