More on modern marxism

Marxists redux II

All aspects of politics, not to say social theory, need to be revamped in light of the changes wrought by the extraordinary 20th century; the first century in which the battle for the conscious management and control of the world by the majority of the world’s population began: the real beginning of un-alienated human history.

In popular culture, understood in its broadest sense, the emphasis presented for us today prioritises both the continuity of the human experience as a consistent background chorus bridging the old century with the new, coupled with a mosaic of individual and personal acts of brilliance, mainly technological invention, – picked for us by the cultural establishment - and which in turn appear to alter nothing in the historical flow of the ‘common sense’ of daily life. A TV series on the Romans tells us that people have not changed in their characters and personalities at all, only really in what they wear and possibly the speed by which they ‘communicate’. Everything is changing and yet, apparently, nothing has changed. It has all just got faster and faster.

This specious absurdity is another attempt to commodify the human imagination by alienating it from its own conquests. In fact humanity has changed utterly in the last 2000 years. Mainly through its struggles (and not mainly through its science and technology) human beings have defeated the aristocracy, state slavery, political weightlessness, ignorance, want, and waves of reaction in vast wars and revolutions. They have opened the door to the vacuum cleaner, Health Services, penicillin and television.  All of this has been achieved (albeit temporarily) in large parts of the world. And that has changed us all. It has changed how we see ourselves and how we see others. The great sparks of human thought were the fission generated out of all these great battles for a meaningful life.

The key characteristic of human existence is change and change in the context of a totality of change. What is change? Change, which can be better captured in the term motion, is the result of the contradiction that presses everything that is not us against everything that is (ourselves, our class, our gender, our ethnic background, our desire for a different society etc). And that process simultaneously alters us, and everything that is not us, because the friction, that struggle, to overcome the contradiction increases our adaptation to everything else, and also increases its adaptation to us. This is as obvious in our mental world and our social world as it is in our physical existence. The point about the Romans is that their social and economic organization, and therefore their mental landscape, were devastatingly different to us. Their clothes (because the human form alters at a snail’s pace) are what remain most similar.

When we examine the thoughts of a genius from 150 years ago, particularly in the sphere of social and political theory, it is simply inconceivable that social and political life has not given rise to the need for new insights and considerations. Some will argue that Darwin established a benchmark that stands firm after a similar period. But while Marx did the same – at a basic level of the comprehension of the great forces of change in human history – his policy for going forward in a completely new stage would inevitably be more fragile.  Millions have gone into battle demonstrating the evidence of the accuracy of his vision but that in turn has changed things, both itself and everything in its world. Marx’s initial theses on capitalism and its overthrow, even as adapted and modernised by Lenin and many others, needs to be reconsidered in light of those great battles and their results.

Looking at four original Marxist concepts, a critique of them enables us pose important new questions and see the cause of liberation in a new light – even to begin, at the highest level of abstract thought, to make new concrete analyses of the concrete situation.

The four (linked) ideas are: The problem of Imperialism and the ‘progress’ of capitalism; the problem of agency and the character of the working class; the problem of the state; and the problem of the ‘scientific’ character of socialism.

Some initial thoughts follow on each of these points.

Capitalism and its premature death agony

‘The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Communist Manifesto.

These words of Marx and Engels are the only definite prediction of the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system; the creation of social production contradicting private accumulation. Their prediction rests on the emergence of the proletariat who will become the nemesis of capitalism and its ruling class. At other points in their writings they point to the inevitability of ongoing capitalist crises – essentially produced by ‘over production’ but not that these crises are defined as mortal as such. Lenin writes of imperialism as the highest (and last) stage of capitalism. Again, it is the revolutionary character of the working class and not the internal contradictions of the capitalist system itself that will bring it to its end in his view, although World War One and its results seemed enough like Armageddon to give merit to the idea of inevitable capitalist collapse. The vivid slogan of ‘socialism or barbarism’ was born, although this was not a prediction as such, but more a moral claim on oppressed classes to prevent the collapse of all civilization. In this version capitalism could end up as the gravedigger of us all if we did not, if we do not act.

Another element enters into the argument in later parts of ‘Capital’ and in later references by Marxists in the first years of the 20th century. The imperialist stage means that capitalism has begun to form itself into an economic and social system that can no longer produce the expansion of the productive forces of the planet. The capitalist system, by locking up its productive capacities in the west, by its growing dependence on monopoly and finance capital and among dominated countries, by super-exploitation and the political castration of local capitalist classes, can no longer expand and create (albeit in a deformed, indeed a nightmare, fashion) technological and social progress for the planet as a whole. Its race, as a social system, has run.

And what has happened? Capitalism is still with us. Indeed it has overthrown the revolution against it in a significant part of the globe. The factories in China (and the huge social unrest in China as UN figures show year after year) look exactly like the workplace hell described as the fate of proletarians in the Communist Manifesto. Yet in 2005, for the first time in human history, a majority of the planet’s population had moved to cities. Imperialist dominated countries like Brazil, India, China and South Africa had broken some of the west’s traditional imperialist chains and have begun enormous industrial development. Indeed the huge progress in China has single handedly reduced the most extreme world poverty in the world by half. These and many other aspects of the modern capitalist development are hugely contended. Development that occurs in 2014 is often temporary, lopsided, completely unequal, at the cost of the environment and brutal – even counter productive - in its impact. But development happens. And the health and welfare services of a large part of Western Europe are real enough – and although constantly eroded, suborned by private capital and under attack, they still exist, after 60 years, as the largest single item of Western Europe’s states’ expenditure. Facts like these need a new explanation.

In Picketty’s magnificent book on the formation of capital over centuries he demonstrates that the 20th century showed a narrowing of the gap in the west between the wealthiest and the rest compared with the 19th century and the 21st century. As Picketty leans towards social democratic politics, he associates that position with the value of the social democratic cause in those years. Picketty misses the great facts of the 20th century, and the totality of the world which forged direct links between developments in economics and politics in the west with the condition of the rest of the world. The two overriding determinants of the 20th century turn out to be imperialism – the main project of capitalism on the one hand, and on the other - revolution.

The great revolutions and imperialist wars (often co-mingled) of the 20th Century have created a new landscape in which, despite appearances, immense gains have been won by the world’s working class – most especially in the anti-imperialist struggle. Western Imperialism is weaker than it has ever been, without which the development (albeit industrial capitalism) that has taken place in countries like China, affecting billions, would never have happened. If you like, the huge efforts and sacrifices of the working class and its all allies, across the globe, have broken through the social and economic contradictions of the system to restart some productive capacities of capitalism in some parts of the world, originally destined only to be basket cases, and wrenched vast structural reforms from it in the west after revolution and two world wars.

Is this a social democratic vision? Does this herald a new reformism? Far from it. It is ‘reform’ but as a bi-product of a century of revolution and war. Social democratic parties may have done some bargaining with their ruling classes in the west on behalf of their working class vote – but blocked with their various imperialisms when it came to sorting out where the resources came from.

Capitalism as a system of society today is rotten ripe. Imperialism in its traditional sense is failing. The mechanisms sustaining it (which are enormously fragile as we saw in 2008) are more and more bizarre. Essentially the US, the world’s leading power today, relies on Chinese ‘investment’ read profits, to sustain a country that has no economic engine of its own. Its society is rapidly falling into decay and its politics are in deep crisis – with a haunting suspicion among its leading class that even their own billionaires’ democracy must give way to a more authoritarian (and successful) system. It is sustained in its leading position only by the manipulation of international capital flows and a vast war machine, which itself has just suffered two major defeats. Capitalism today seems to have reached its apogee. Its reach is over-extended. The imperialist chickens are coming home to roost from all over the globe.

The legacy of the defeat of the Soviet Union remains today a huge material and ideological stumbling block for the development of the next wave of humanity’s endeavor to found societies representing the majority. One sign that capitalism is tipping, even in some parts of the globe already producing the conditions of barbarism, is the reactionary banners under which opposition often emerges. Seeing the world rolling backwards the object of the revolutionaries becomes to create their own version of a fantastical past. And this is a major problem

A summary at the end of the discussion about modern revolutionary Marxism will examine (in practice) the implications of this and the other questions that have been raised.