Has Marxism failed?

[OUTOFTHENIGHT]

As far as Rosa is concerned the ideas of genuine Marxism have failed the working class and therefore there is no hope.
BUT getting away from Rosa's very one sided debate I thought I would introduce the thought of another ex marxist who recently stood for the deputy leadership of the UK Labour Party.
Read on and let me know your thoughts comrades....... From the Norman Geras Blog. Just ask for the link and I will get it for you.

'July 16, 2007
Why I am not a Marxist (by Alan Johnson)
[Alan's opening sentence should make it clear enough that I post his statement though having my differences with it. - NG.]


I have been prompted by Norm's posts which set out why he is still a Marxist [follow the links given here] to write down why I have not been for a while. The points that follow are hardly original, and I make no effort here to anticipate objections to them. So, here we go.

1. I no longer think that the bad bits in human beings can be swished away by replacing scarcity with 'abundance'. I think they are pretty much here to stay. And I think the bad bits amount to enough of the whole, enough of the time, to undermine the idea of a 'leap to the kingdom of freedom'. We are never going to reach a time when we each turn into a Goethe or a Beethoven, as Trotsky thought. I think we are 'ill-constituted beings' as Primo Levi put it, and as such we are never going to 'cleanse the world of all evil' as Trotsky hoped. We are not wholly bad by any means, but ill-constituted for sure, so pretty poor material for Marx's secularized version of the end-time. If we are lucky, and vigilant, we can create decent social democracies, maybe, but that's it.

2. (Actually, I don't believe one should even try to replace scarcity with abundance in Marx's sense. The planet would not cope.)

3. I no longer want to get rid of markets as to do so would produce economic stagnation and political tyranny. I want to regulate, humanize, counter-balance and embed markets, and keep them out of some tracts of human endeavour. I think Dan Bell was right to worry about the 'cultural contradictions of capitalism'. I want a social market. But as for 'a society beyond markets' or 'a socialized economy', no thanks.

4. I don't even want the good life that Marxists seem to seek. When I read analytical Marxist Andrew Levine writing that under socialism we will each 'act in harmony with other free beings... integral components of an harmonious, internally coordinated association of rational beings', I find I have written a protest in the margin of his book - 'urgh! count me out!' I really like the diversity, celerity, unpredictability and innovation of the society I live in. I think the way it combines all that with welfare and sociality is by any measure a bloody good achievement. We can reform it all to improve it all, yes, but I'm not about to exchange it wholesale to become an 'integral component of an harmonious, internally coordinated association of rational beings'.

5. I no longer believe the proletariat is a revolutionary force. Far from having 'nothing to lose but its chains', the working class has enjoyed an unprecedented, world-historic rise in its living standards and life-expectancy under capitalism. Yes, the more workers are organized in unions the more they benefit from the dynamism of capitalism. Yes, Labour parties matter also. But the dynamism of capitalism has pulled the rug from under the feet of revolutionary Marxism. Hence the search for substitutes - Lenin's 'vanguard', Mao's peasants, Guevara's guerrilla foci, Marcuse's students, through to the contemporary alliance between Marxists and radical Islamists (note how the substitutes have become progressively more preposterous). The common man and woman remain the bedrock of progressive social change – but there is not going to be a 'proletarian revolution'.

6. I think the general theory of Marxism - historical materialism - is the crown jewels. But insofar as the theory of history shapes the theory of socialism it is plain wrong. Socialism does not inevitably follow capitalism (bureaucratic collectivism, an historical regression, can replace capitalism - indeed it's the only thing that has so far, with tens of millions of victims). Moreover (and despite the writings of Marxists who seek articles of conciliation with liberalism), the Marxist theory of history marginalizes both ethical deliberation about norms and political deliberation about forms, and those two lacunae fatally disable Marxism as a theory for democrats.

7. I think the special theory of Marxism - the theory of the capitalist mode of production - was wrong from the start, and is now, 150 years on, definitively falsified. So there is no objective basis for the proletarian revolution. Between the writing of the Communist Manifesto and the founding of the Socialist International, real per capita income in the major European countries nearly doubled. The middle class will not disappear, and capitalism will not 'collapse under the weight of its contradictions'. And has any theory been more spectacularly falsified, so quickly, yet with so little an impact on its adherents, than Trotsky's theory of the 'death agony of capitalism'?

8. Marxism opens the door to totalitarianism. That is not to say 'Marx was a totalitarian' or 'Marxists are totalitarians'. But whatever the subjective intentions and desires, in the theory the door-opening is going on. Here are the doors left open or at least unlocked:

a. First, the sunlit philosophical anthropology. That causes us to drop our guard and it encourages and licenses the attempt to make a leap to a perfect world, a heaven on earth, 'the kingdom of freedom'.

b. Second, the organicism. Marx thought there was once a unity of civil and political society, and he desired to get that unity back - after our long travail through the forms of class society – in the form of communism. I think Leszek Kolakowski shows that that desire is the source of a 'continuity (though not identity)' between Marxism and totalitarianism.

c. Third, the theory of the proletarian revolution. Marx thinks that 'It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat... will historically be compelled to do'. The problem with that kind of formulation is that those proletarians who fail to understood what they are, in their being, are likely to be viewed as, 'at present', benighted (i.e., suffering from false consciousness). The door is opened to 'this or that proletarian' being treated rather badly, and with a reasonably clear conscience.

d. Fourth, the lack of interest in discussion of the how of politics, and not just the who of politics (i.e., the refusal to treat politics in its own terms, even to see that it has its own terms). Marx offers brief scattered remarks on complex political questions while liberalism and conservatism offer shelves of books. The Marxists then dismissed those shelves of books as mere 'ideology' - and felt licensed to do so by Marx's own scorn for 'ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists' and his contempt for 'modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity'. When the concept of 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' came into contact with the world it was turned into a theory of minority dictatorship by Lenin and Trotsky to catastrophic effect. And that theory was then absorbed by the Marxists. Listen to Perry Anderson, long-time editor of New Left Review, a man of the New Left, and an 'anti-Stalinist': 'The iron dictatorship exercised by the Stalinist police administrative apparatus over the Soviet proletariat was not incompatible with the preservation of the proletarian nature of the state itself - any more than... the fascist dictatorships exercised over the bourgeois class were with the preservation of the nature of the capitalist state.' That's the sound of a man rushing through an open door to apologize for a totalitarianism. He is following in the footsteps of his hero, Isaac Deutscher, a Marxist who defended Stalinist repression of East German workers on the grounds that the tanks had - although killing people and defending the grip of a police state – prevented the greater evil: the return of 'bourgeois' society.

e. Fifth, the extraordinary romantic hostility to 'bourgeois' society that Marxism projects. Hatred of 'bourgeois' rights, 'bourgeois' democracy, 'bourgeois' morality, 'bourgeois' art, the 'bourgeois' family (and on and on), has fuelled hatred toward decent if prosaic societies and institutions and indulgence or worse toward appalling societies and institutions. And all in the name and the spirit of being 'anti-capitalist' or 'anti-bourgeois'. Take a romantic like Michael Lowy, an outstanding anti-Stalinist theoretician, author of a book extolling the self-emancipatory socialism of the young Marx. When he looked at the 'proletarian socialist revolutions' of Tito, Mao and Ho, he saw, fantastically, parties which 'acted as "representatives" of the proletariat', nothing less than 'the political and programmatic expression of the proletariat by virtue of their adherence to the historical interests of the working class (abolition of capitalism etc.)', and, therefore, whose 'ideologies were proletarian'. The Trotskyist Ernest Mandel, who for twenty years defined Mao's totalitarian China as a 'workers' state' with no qualifications, argued that, "the Chinese Communist Party... was striving to destroy capitalism and therefore represented a fundamentally proletarian social force'. Please read both quotes again, noting Lowy's 'by virtue of' and Mandel's 'therefore' as markers of a door held wide open to totalitarianism.

This animus against things 'bourgeois' I have come to despise. It is reckless about the defence of democratic society, insensible to how truly miserable the actually existing alternatives to 'bourgeois' society have been, and quick to morph into support for any thug who happens to be shooting at anything identified as 'bourgeois'. This animus is the common sense of much of the intellectual class in the West where it is called 'critical theory'. Inchoate negativism toward anything 'bourgeois' has morphed into support for anything that is 'transgressive'. We are all Hezbollah now.

9. I used to think Marx's thought had been distorted not disproved. But I have come to find compelling Irving Kristol's argument - any theory that can't stand being placed in the real world without turning into its opposite must be judged by that fact.

A theory is a system of concepts. Either the system of concepts persuades and guides one's thinking and activity, or it does not. And it does not. I am no longer persuaded by the philosophical anthropology, the absence of a sense of 'limits' (implicit in the concept of 'abundance'), the economic model of socialism, the vision of the good life, the theory of the proletariat, the theory of the proletarian revolution, the general theory of history, or the special theory of capitalism.

10. I now think a modest, chastened progressive politics can draw most from the social-democratic idea (a broad river into which flow many tributaries). True, as Leszek Kolakowski put it, the social-democratic idea 'does not stock or sell any of the exciting ideological commodities which totalitarian movements - communist, fascist or leftist – offer dream hungry youth' and is 'plagued with ambiguities'. But these are precisely its strengths. As Kolakowski wrote in 1982:

[The social-democratic idea] requires the commitment to a number of basic values - freedom, equal opportunities, a human-oriented and publicly supervised economy - and it demands hard knowledge and rational calculation, as we need to be aware of, and to investigate as deeply as possible, the historical and economic conditions in which these values are to be implemented. It has an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy. Yet it is aware of the narrow limits within which this struggle is being waged, limits imposed by the natural framework of human existence, by innumerable historical accidents, and by various forces that have shaped for centuries today's social institutions.
(Alan Johnson)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

OOTN:

As far as Rosa is concerned the ideas of genuine Marxism have failed the working class and therefore there is no hope.

I am very careful to say that it is Dialectical Marxism that has failed, not Marxism; so this post of yours seems rather pointless.

And far from there being no hope, my Essays are aimed at helping to reverse this long history of failure by destroying the theory that has presided over it: Materialist Dialectics.

But not Historical Materialism (a theory I fully accept).

And this long article you have posted too seems rather irrelevant, and in the wrong section.

Here's an outline of my argument:

Is Marxism true? How can we tell? Dialecticians have a direct answer: the validity of revolutionary socialism must be tested in practice.

But, what if it turns out that in practice they themselves reject this criterion?

Indeed, but worse: what if it should turn out that practice has refuted Dialectical Marxism?

Do we abandon the criterion of practice as a test of truth, or bury our heads in the sand and hope no one notices?

[DM = Dialectical Materialism.]

Up until now DM-fans have opted for the latter strategy.

But, is this conclusion as hasty as it is unfair?

As we will see, it is neither of these.

Unfortunately, as hinted at earlier, the results of "practice" have not been too kind to Marxists of every stripe. Indeed, they have been even less kind to Trotskyists (like Woods, Grant and Sewell, comrades not known for their 'mass following').

And they are not alone; practice has not looked at all favourably on our side as a whole for close on a hundred years. All Four Internationals have failed (or have vanished), and the 1917 revolution has been reversed.

Indeed, we are no nearer to (and arguably much further away from) a workers' state now than Lenin was in 1918. Practically all of the former 'socialist' societies have collapsed (and not a single worker raised his or her hand in their defence). Even where avowedly Marxist parties can claim some sort of mass following, this is passive and electoral --, and those parties themselves have openly adopted reformism (despite the contrary-sounding rhetoric).

So, if truth is tested in practice, practice has delivered a rather clear verdict: "materialist dialectics" does not work, so it cannot be true.

But, when confronted with such disconcerting facts, dialecticians tend to respond in one or more of the following ways:

1) They flatly deny that Marxism has been an abject failure.

2) If they admit to failure, they blame it on "objective factors", or other Marxist parties.

3) They simply ignore the problem. Or:

4) They say it is too early to tell.

Now, there doesn't seem to be much point in dialecticians claiming that "materialist dialectics" guides all they do, avowing that truth is tested in practice, if when the latter reveals its long-term verdict, that verdict is denied, disregarded or explained away.

In that event, it might well be wondered what sort of practice could possibly constitute a test of dialectics if, whatever the results, dialectics is always either excused or exonerated? What exactly is being tested if the outcome of every test is ignored or re-configured as a success?

Indeed, what (permanent) successes can we claim in the last 80 years?

Hence, it is not so much the case that dialectics has never been tested in practice as it is that dialecticians are practiced at never actually testing it.

Why not just declare that Marxism is and always has been a success with or without any such test?

This would seem to be a more honest and appropriate conclusion based on the sort of practice that constantly ignores the results of practice!

However, taking each of the above excuses one at a time:

1) Those who think Dialectical Marxism is a ringing success have so far failed to reveal where and how it enjoys this blessed condition.

[Presumably there is a Workers' State on the outer fringes of the Galaxy?]

Systematic denial of reality of this order of magnitude is difficult to counter without professional help.

In fact, there is no debating with hardcore Idealism of this sort -- with an attitude that re-interprets the material world to suit a comforting idea, but which then encourages its adepts to bury their heads in their own idea of sand.

Anyone who can look at the international situation and fail to see that our movement is not only deeply divided, it is in long-term decline -- and that the vast majority of workers have never been, and are not now, "seized" by Dialectical Marxism --, is probably a danger to him/herself.

[This should not be taken to mean that I think that things cannot change! Indeed, this site was set up to help reverse this trend!]

2) It is undeniable that objective factors have hindered the revolutionary movement. These include a relatively well-organised, rich, powerful and focussed ruling-class, imperialism and a growing economy -- compounded by racism, sexism, nationalism and sectionalism among workers --, and so on.

But, dialecticians are quite clear: the veracity of a theory can only be tested in practice. Now, since that requires the subjective input of active revolutionaries, this aspect of practice has plainly not worked. [Or if it has worked, then the meaning of the word "success" has changed.]

So, either, (a) materialist dialectics has never actually been tried out, or (b) revolutionaries have actually been using another theory all along (which fact they kept well hidden), or (c) the theory they say they have always used is indeed a monumental failure.

Whenever revolutionaries have reluctantly brought themselves to acknowledge the subjective side of failure, they often blame it on a lack of "revolutionary leadership" (but mostly this is then located in another party, never their own!), forgetting to note the input of dialectics in all this.

But, to repeat: if this theory is as central to Marxism as dialecticians believe, then it cannot be unrelated to its long-term lack of success. Once more: which party can claim the opposite over the last 80 years?

Now, those who reject any connection at all between 'materialist dialectics' and the long-term failure of Dialectical Marxism cannot claim in one breath that all things are inter-related, but in the very next deny these clear links.

So, whether or not there have been objective factors, practice itself has refuted the subjective side of Marxism: "materialist dialectics".

Moreover, since the Essays at the main site show that DM is not so much false as far too confused even to be assessed for its truth or falsity, the long-term failure of Dialectical Marxism is no big surprise. And because this theory arose from the brains of card-carrying ruling-class theorists (like Hegel), this is doubly no surprise.

Indeed, under such circumstances, had Dialectical Marxism been a success, that would have been the surprise!

3) This is probably the safest alternative for dialecticians to adopt: ignore the problem (or explain it away). It is certainly the option that inadvertently helps further the interests of the ruling-class, since it prevents the serious theoretical problems our movement faces from ever being addressed, guaranteeing another century of failure.

Indeed, the bosses could not have designed a better theory to screw with our heads if they had tried, initiating in our movement a monumental waste of time as our best theorists vainly try to grapple with Hegel's fluent Martian (in order to make some sort of sense of it -- but, mercifully, no success so far!).

All this is quite apart from the fact that practice cannot distinguish between correct and incorrect theories. The latter often work (and they can do so for many centuries). For example, Ptolemaic Astronomy was highly successful for over a thousand years, and it became increasingly accurate with age.

And, correct theories can sometimes fail. For instance, Copernican Astronomy predicted stellar parallax, which was not observed until the 1838, with the work of Friedrich Bessel, three hundred years after Copernicus's book was published.

[More examples of both of these alternatives are given in Essay Ten Part One.]

And even if this were not so, and success were indeed an unfailing criterion of truth, since there is as yet no socialist society on earth, we will only know if Marxism is correct after the event. So, this criterion cannot tell us whether Marxism is correct now. [That disposes of Excuse Number Four.]

In fact, the following declaration could become true:

"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." [Marx and Engels (1848), pp.35-36. Underlining added.]

According to this, the "contending classes" could wipe each other out --, or at least the class war could result in their "common ruin" (which outcome itself is not at all easy to square with the NON -- why this is so will be explored in Essay Three, Part Five).

However, judging from the way that dialecticians themselves disregard the deliverances of practice, all this suggests that even they do not accept this criterion, in practice.

For in practice, they ignore it.

[NON = Negation of the Negation.]

Unfortunately, pragmatic theories (like this) are hostages to fortune; those who adhere to them should feign no surprise if history pays little heed to their dialectically-compromised day-dreams, and delivers decade after decade of refutation.

[HM = Historical Materialism.]

There are other (much better, and more materially-based) ways of confirming the validity of HM -- these will be explored in an Essay to be published later at the main site.

All this means that if we want our practice to be more successful, we will have to ditch the theory that has dropped our movement into this quagmire, and which has helped reduce it to the sorry state we see it in today: "materialist dialectics".

Extracted from here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/Why%20I%20Oppose%20DM.htm

The argument is presented in full here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2009_02.htm

and here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%20010_01.htm

The first Essay is entitled; "The damage dialectics has inflicted on Marxism", the second: "Dialectics -- Refuted By Practice".

[OUTOFTHENIGHT]

I am very careful to say that it is Dialectical Marxism that has failed, not Marxism; so this post of yours seems rather pointless.

Where has Marxism, the non dialectical variety succeeded? A really brief answer will do.

The point of the article, (if you read it carefully, is that it  is not mine but a quote from another blog,) is to divert a bit of the debate back to something everyone can participate in .

But then you are right. It is pointless even to wish that ,as we are all dialecticians and therefore doomed to failure.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

OOTN:

Where has Marxism, the non dialectical variety succeeded?

It has not really been tried out anywhere; in that case questions about its 'success' cannot arise.

The point of the article, (if you read it carefully, is that it  is not mine but a quote from another blog,) is to divert a bit of the debate back to something everyone can participate in .

Yes, I did notice it wasn't by you, just as I said it was in the wrong place.

If you repost it in History, or perhaps in Politics, I am sure others would join in.

But then you are right. It is pointless even to wish that ,as we are all dialecticians and therefore doomed to failure.

Not if you kick the mystical habit.

[T.K.A.-Denmark]

The whole point as I see it is that you (Rosa) has never cared to explain what marxism without dialectical materialism is and how this alters your view on current events. I asked you many a time, especially on revleft, and you always avoid the question. Which is why I long ago stopped reading your essays.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

TKA:

The whole point as I see it is that you (Rosa) has never cared to explain what marxism without dialectical materialism is and how this alters your view on current events. I asked you many a time, especially on revleft, and you always avoid the question. Which is why I long ago stopped reading your essays.

I have no need to do so; Marx did it for me.

It's called 'Historical Materialism'. [HM]

And I have explained how HM (minus the mystical gobbledygook drawn from Hegel) can help alter our view of current events in Essay Nine Parts One and Two. More will be added later.

Recall, my primary aim right now is to kill this theory before it does any more damage to Marxism, not replace HM.

And I think I have done that.

So, I have to eliminate this 'disease' (and neutralise its source) before any healing can begin.

And if you have given up reading my Essays, that is naturally up to you.

I hope you did not think [Teis??] that that serious blow to my project would deflect me from continuing?

[OUTOFTHENIGHT]

Sorry Rosa ,the thread was started in relation to the comments made by Alan Johnson on a blog. He brought into question the validity and correctness of Marxism and I found it appropriate to raise it in the philosophy section. While he does make some historical references I fail to see why you think it should be brought up in the History bit of this forum.

Unless you are arguing that due to my 'mystical' leanings I have got that wrong.

Maybe you could use your non mystical marxism to analise the quote in order to prompt debate.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

No, it contains little I find at all interesting. I still fail to see how it addresses anything relevant to the points I raise.

[Volkov]

Since when were these Alan Johnson comments anything new?  Just a rehash of old bourgeois nonsense.  The revolutionary movement in Latin America is a slap to the face to such people spouting out such nonsense about "the proletariat no longer being a revolutionary force."  If people like him were right, there would be no need for the bourgeoisie to spend billions of dollars on making lie books to scare people away from Marxism.  I personally believe that one of the primary functions of schooling is to indoctrinate students with anti-communism!   

It has not really been tried out anywhere; in that case questions about its 'success' cannot arise.

Actually, Alan Woods has pointed out that anti-dialectical "Marxism" is nothing new, and it has never borne any fruits.

And, well, no one has really tried out the philosophy of the magical red scaled lizard residing in some ex-Stalinist arsenal, whose task it to make sure that the old SKS's lying around are still preserved in a layer of cosmoline either, but I guess it must be a valid possibility by your logic! :p :p

[OUTOFTHENIGHT]

Your right Volkov.
The Johnson article is typical of a bourgieous who through cynicism and dissollusionment has concocted ideas that justify the political reaction we see in particular in the UK amongst some of the leaders of the LP. These ex marxists who in their younger days, flirted with marxism ,have to try and justify their betrayal of the ideas and their move into the comfortzone of careerism. 

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Axel/Volkov:

Actually, Alan Woods has pointed out that anti-dialectical "Marxism" is nothing new, and it has never borne any fruits.

And, well, no one has really tried out the philosophy of the magical red scaled lizard residing in some ex-Stalinist arsenal, whose task it to make sure that the old SKS's lying around are still preserved in a layer of cosmoline either, but I guess it must be a valid possibility by your logic! :p :p

And dialecticla thought is not new either: it dates back to ancient mystics who imposed their ideas on nature, before there was any evidence.

These days you Dialectical Mystics do more or less the same, but with a little more evidence (all taken apart in my Essays) to back your claims up before you too impose them on reality.

And that other 'theory' you invented sounds about as logical as the mystical gobbledygook you have swallowed, the latter of which also does not work.

As history has shown...