The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx first appeared in 1983, 100 years after Marx’s death. The political climate was very different then. Ronald Reagan had recently become president of the United States. Margaret Thatcher was still in her first term as British prime minister. The offensive of the free market right over which they presided was only beginning to make itself felt in the working class movement.
In Britain the Labour Party was being torn apart by the divisions created by its disastrous period in office between 1974 and 1979. The breakaway of the Social Democratic Party was pulling the party to the right, and the left wing movement headed by Tony Benn was disintegrating. The Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 was still in the future. Its defeat would make the triumph of the right inside the Labour Party inevitable.
Internationally the world was still in the grip of what was sometimes called the Second Cold War, the period of renewed tension between the superpower blocs that started in the late 1970s. Nato plans to install a new generation of cruise nuclear missiles in Western Europe —finally implemented in the autumn of 1983— provoked the revival of the peace movement on an enormous scale. After the crushing in December 1981 of the great Polish workers’ movement Solidarnosc, the Stalinist regimes in the East seemed as ossified and entrenched in power as ever. In Russia itself Mikhail Gorbachev was still only a rising star in the Politburo.
The world is a very different place today. Fundamentally this is a consequence of what has been called the ‘double revolution’ of 1989/91—the 1989 revolutions which swept aside the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the fall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which saw the disintegration of the USSR itself in 1991. This enormous transformation ended the partition of Europe between the superpower blocs and, with it, the Cold War between those blocs.
But as important as these geopolitical changes have been the ideological consequences of 1989/91. The collapse of the Communist regimes was widely taken definitively to refute Marx’s ideas. The free market right seized on the fall of Stalinism and proclaimed it the triumph of capitalism. Indeed Francis Fukuyama, at the time an official in the State Department under President George Bush, announced ‘the end of history’. Liberal capitalism had, Fukuyama claimed, decisively defeated Marxism and with it any serious challenge to its dominance. All that humankind had to look forward to was century upon century of
capitalism.
It was natural enough for the right to exploit 1989/91 in this way. More surprisingly, many on the left went at least part of the way with Fukuyama. This reflected the fact that they had (like the right) equated the USSR and the other Stalinist regimes with socialism. The fall of what had been up to then ‘existing socialism’ was therefore interpreted as a defeat for the left worldwide.
The resulting mood of pessimism in which this left many socialists was summed up by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. In his recent book Age of Extremes (1994) Hobsbawm grimly views a world dominated by a dynamic, increasingly international capitalism, and various forms of political reaction—religious fundamentalism and the like. As for Marxism, ‘clearly, if Marx would live on as a major thinker, which could hardly be doubted, none of the versions of Marxism formulated since the 1890s as doctrines of political action and aspiration for socialist movements were likely to do so in their original forms’.
Marxism as a political and intellectual tradition was thus thrown onto the defensive. Academic Marxism, already weakened by its isolation in the universities through the 1980s, entered a further stage in its decline. The 1980s had seen the rise of postmodernism, which proclaimed the death of all large truths and in particular of the ‘grand narratives’, above all Marxism, that sought to weave together all human history into a single process of development.
With the academic left in disarray, postmodernists proclaimed themselves the real radicals, even though they denounced any attempt to change the world through political action.
Politically, the events of 1989/91 strengthened the hand of those on the left who argue that there is no real alternative to market capitalism. The British Labour Party moved strongly in this direction. For them, socialism amounts to what the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik called ‘the market with a human face’. Such has been Labour’s message since Tony Blair became its leader in July 1994. Blair’s successful attack on Clause Four of the party’s constitution, with its commitment to achieving common ownership of the means of production, served to underline that ‘New Labour’ intends no significant change in the structure of capitalism in Britain.
The odd thing about this embrace of the market is that it comes at a time when capitalism is doing pretty badly. After a wave of speculative euphoria during the Reagan-Thatcher era in the 1980s, the world economy entered a major recession at the beginning of the 1990s. This was the third great global slump since the early 1970s. By the mid-1990s those economies to go first into recession—the United States and Britain in particular—were experiencing uneven and unstable recoveries, but Japan, the most successful major economy in the post-war era, was stuck in the depths of a slump which, if anything, was getting worse.
It is now clear, moreover, that the free market right, with their call for a return to unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, offer no solution to this crisis. Britain, which took the right’s policies furthest amongst major economies, is stuck in a century-long process of relative decline. The chief effect of the New Right in power has been a massive transfer of wealth and income from poor to rich, and the more general growth of social and economic inequality. The resulting social polarisation sparked off explosions like the 1990 poll tax riots, which brought down Thatcher, and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. It is hard to see the new generation of right wing politicians—epitomised by Newt Gingrich in the US and Michael Portillo and John Redwood in Britain—producing anything except more of the same.
All of this suggests that the central strand in Marx’s thought—his critique of capitalism as a system profoundly rooted in exploitation and chronically prone to crisis—remains valid today. This raises the question of whether Marxist economic theory can survive when the entire tradition of which it is part has been refuted by great historical events. But has it been refuted?
The answer to this last question is to be found, I believe, in the pages of this book. The reader will discover a Marx who is the very opposite of the icon of a despised and now defunct despotism. This is the real Marx, for whom socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class—not something to be imposed on the mass of people, but something that they can only achieve by and for themselves, through their own struggles and organisations.
One must then distinguish the real Marxist tradition—what is sometimes called classical Marxism—from its various distortions. The informing political theme of this tradition is the idea of (as the American socialist Hal Draper put it) ‘socialism from below’, a socialism that is inherently democratic because it is made by the mass of workers themselves. Classical Marxism was inaugurated, as I describe in Chapter 1, by Marx and his great friend and collaborator Frederick Engels, and was continued by later generations of revolutionary socialists, above all by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Counterposed to it are rival, distorting ‘Marxisms’, which made it variously a doctrine of piecemeal reform (Western social democracy), the state religion of the Stalinist societies (official ‘Marxism-Leninism’), or a form of scholarly inquiry disengaged from political practice (academic ‘Western Marxism’).
In particular the distance between the ideas outlined in this book and the reality of ‘existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union and elsewhere should be obvious. This is one of the main issues I address, in conclusion, in Chapter 8. Drawing on Tony Cliff’s analysis of Stalinism, I argue that the USSR and its ilk can be understood, in Marxist terms, not as any kind of socialism but as instances of bureaucratic state capitalism, a variant of the same exploitative social system that exists in the West. I conclude, in words written seven years before the revolutions in Eastern Europe:
‘ Really existing socialism’ in the Eastern bloc is thus the negation of socialism as Marx conceived it. It rests, not on the self-emancipation of the working class, but its exploitation. Anyone who remains true to Marx’s thought must work wholeheartedly for the downfall of these regimes.
From this perspective the fall of Stalinism was an occasion not for mourning but for celebration. It marked, as I argue in The Revenge of History (1991), not the final refutation of Marxism, but a moment to resume unfinished business. Freed from the monstrous encumbrance of Stalinism, the real Marxist tradition could begin to emerge from the political margins to which it had been driven in the 1920s and challenge a capitalism more barbarous and irrational than it was even in Marx’s day.
The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx may thus serve as a useful way in to a body of thought that is still as relevant as when first formulated. I have left the text of this new edition almost wholly unchanged. No doubt (as is always true) I would write the book differently had I to do so today, but as it stands it has a coherence which tinkering about with the text could damage. There are some passages, particularly in Chapter 8, where the reader should take into account the different political situation —sketched out at the beginning of this Introduction— in which it was written. To help in this task I have revised the suggestions for further reading at the end of the book to cover Marxist writing published since the early 1980s.
Understanding Marx, I should emphasise, is not simply an intellectual exercise. His ideas are indispensable to making sense of a world that seems to be getting more irrational and chaotic by the day. But what is the point of gaining a deeper insight into the driving forces of the contemporary world unless it is a means of changing that world? Capitalist crisis is not just an impersonal economic process. It means mass unemployment in the rich countries, and famine and epidemics in many parts of the Third World. The terrible suffering this represents can produce political reactions that tip humankind further down the slope towards outright barbarism. Already the 1990s have seen in Western Europe the large-scale revival of fascism, in the Balkans a senseless civil war and in many African countries the disintegration of the entire society as it is torn apart by warring bands.
‘Socialism or barbarism’ declared the great Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg during the First World War. Barbarism we can see growing everywhere. The future of socialism depends on the ideas outlined in this book becoming, as Marx himself put it, a material force that moves millions of workers against a capitalist system overdue for replacement.
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The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx