What is the real Marxist tradition?

[jpjones]

I found this online book by John Molyneaux at the site Introductions to Marxism .  It is the page that has the various translations and clips of the Internationale.  This article is an attempt at filtering out the various sectarian and revisionist tendencies in Marxist thought.  The author arrives at the conclusion that those who are Marxists in name cease to be real Marxists when they detach Marx from the revolutionary proletariat or they view Marx's theories as individual pieces not directly related.  It is certainly worth reading (of course, for me, nearly anything is worth at least a read-through).

Here is the link:
http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/molyneux/realmarx/index.htm

[OUTOFTHENIGHT]

Back in the day J Molyneaux used to be a fulltimer for the Cliffite sect, the SWP.In1983 I saw him taken apart by Peter Taaffe at a public meeting in Portsmouth UK, about the issue of working within the Labour Party. In my view most comments by the SWP on marxism seems to be clouded by their somtimes warped view of society.I will be interested to see what this comrade has to say.......Ian

[redjordi]

I have read through Molineaux´s text, and though some of the ideas are not bad (particularly its criticism of Kautskyism), most of it is written from the standpoint of the ideas of the Cliff tendency. Molineaux himself says at the end:

Nonetheless, our major theoretical contributions and distinctive political positions – the state capitalist analysis of Stalinist states, the theory of deflected permanent revolution in the Third World, the analysis of the arms economy boom and the new economic crisis, the critique of the trade union bureaucracy – have two things in common: they have been developed as responses to real problems faced by the workers' movement in the struggle to change the world, and they have taken as their starting point and emphasise as their conclusion the fundamental principle of Marxism – the self-emancipation of the working class

If you look at these claims you will find that "state capitalism" stands in contradiction to Trotsky´s ideas on the bureaucracy in the USSR, the "deflected permanent revolution" has nothing in common with Trotsky´s permanent revolution, the "permanent arms economy" is a flawed explanation of the capitalism boom after World War Two, and their position on the trade union bureaucracy has changed over the years and most of time is a semi-anarchist departure from Marxism (as anyone who has experienced the British SWP´s trade union "work" knows).

So, despite claiming to represent a continuation of the genuine Marxist tradition, in fact, the Cliff tendency represents nothing like that. We can argue whether their ideas are right or wrong, but they should not claim to be followers of the ideas of Leon Trotsky when they have completely different positions on a number of fundamental points.

redjordi

[John Stalker]

Yes, the theory of State-capitalism is actually a hogwash. They believe stalinists were/are a class and thus would follow that they own means of production and have private property.

[turnoviseous]

Yes, I agree. The main thing why they think that bureaucracy was actually a capitalist class is because workers did not control the means of production directly, but through bureaucracy which abused teh situation because was not under control of the working class.

What these people fail to see is that we are talking of the first stages of the workers´ state, also in a very backward material and cultural position. In this case workers´could not directly control the means of production, but through its vanguard which was later totally liquidated by the complex process of Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration.

They look upon the workers´ state in the idyllic form, such as was described by Marx and later Lenin in the State and revolution, totally ignoring material position from which bureaucracy sprung.

comradely,