The revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx, by Alex Callinicos, Bookmarks, £3.95; Marx 100 years on, edited by Betty Matthews, Lawrence and Wishart, £4.95; Marx the first 100 years, edited by David McLellan, Fontana, £3.95.
It was perhaps inevitable that the centenary of Marx's death should produce a crop of books, articles and television programmes which have been deeply partisan and controversial. Marxism is so deeply interwoven with the social and political conflicts of our time, that these three books inevitably reflect in different ways the political views of their authors; or to put it another way, the politics of the authors penetrates their own view of Marx.
The most straightforward of the three is that of Alex Callinicos who is a member of the Central Committee of the British Socialist Workers Party, so there's no mucking about here. The book has got SWP stamped all over it — literally and metaphorically. And that's by no means all bad. In fact Callinicos largely succeeds in his aim of providing a readable introduction to Marx's ideas for socialist militants, in a comprehensive and concise manner. His account is likely to render slightly more comprehensible all that stuff about Ricardo and Hegel which most of us couldn't quite fathom before, and his chapter on Marx's method is particularly valuable. I particularly liked his defence of the Sixth Thesis of Feuerbach, in which Marx concludes that the 'essence of man' is the 'ensemble of social relations' — and not an unvarying 'human nature'. This is the orthodox Marxist view, Norman Geras notwithstanding.
Compounding error with silliness
Inevitably perhaps, it's in the chapter on 'Marx Today' that the text gets most convoluted and SWP-ish, Callinicos persists in defending Tony Cliff's ludicrous version of the theory of state capitalism in Russia, The market, it appears, is dominated by state planning and not by the law of value. But the Soviet Union competes with Western capitalism through arms spending, and therefore the law of value re-asserts itself and Russia is state capitalist. I ask you.
Callinicos attempts to explain the contemporary crisis of the Western economies by the theory of the permanent arms economy. In this version, the post-war boom is put down to arms production — not as a source of super-profit, but as a mechanism for retarding the growth of the organic composition of capital. This in itself would only be viable if you could demonstrate that the average composition of capital in the arms sector was lower than the average in the rest of industry, and that arms spending was entirely financed from surplus value. Even more eccentric however is the notion that the crisis was essentially a run down in US arms spending at the beginning of the 1970s, thus allowing the organic composition of capital to rise. In reality all the signs of a decline in long-term growth trends, and the tendency towards a synchronised recession in the western countries, existed after the German recession in 1967. But I digress.
The McLellan book suffers from its 'academic' approach. Assembling six authors to write independently on Politics, Economics, Philosophy, Culture, History and Sociology is bound to produce a collection where the effect of Marxism on the different disciplines in the universities is the result. This is particularly true of Tom Bottomore's essay on 'Sociology'. This concludes with the earth-shattering: 'A hundred years after Marx's death Marxism has become firmly established as one of the major paradigms in sociological theory'. God help us, Bottomore's assessment of the value of Marxist theory is precisely to what extent it intersects with the concerns of contemporary sociology itself. Thus it asserts the only worthwhile Marxism to have been 'Western Marxism' — Gramsci, Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Althusser, Poulantzas and so on. It's not only that the trend in Marxism which these schools represent were, as Perry Anderson has cogently pointed out, the most attached to the universities. It's also that they rejected central elements of not only Stalinism but classical Marxism itself.
Discussing the degeneration of theory under Stalin, Bottomore says: 'Marxism ceased to be a science of society, but instead became the ideology of a political regime. Indeed it had begun to acquire this character in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky — both of whom were political pamphleteers and activists rather than thinkers — in the period before the Revolution'. Anyone who could seriously assign Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia, or Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism or Trotsky's Results and Prospects to the realm of the occasional and incidental political pamphlet, has a rather idiosyncratic view of what Marxist theory is all about — one which replaces the unity of theory and practice with academic 'paradigms'.
By far the best piece in the book is that on 'Philosophy' by Roy Edgely. He takes on the whole question of 'Western Marxism' which pervades the book, by way of posing the problem of whether there exists a 'Marxist philosophy'. He convincingly shows that Marx's work is a rejection of philosophy in favour of historical materialism: 'Marx's materialism is of course historical materialism. His conception of thought and theory themselves is a historical materialist conception. That historical perspective is incompatible with dogmatism, but as a point of view which competes with others it is incompatible with comprehensive (philosophical) scepticism... The historical materialist conception of thought implies material social change as a crucial determinant of differential cognitive access'. Thus: 'There is a paradox in Western Marxism. Itself predominantly philosophical, it regards Marx's early work as philosophy. Yet though that early work begins as philosophy, as Marx's own subject and one which he conceives as having intellectual authority over all others, it soon develops a persistently anti-philosophical theme: the end of philosophy'. His conclusion is admirably trenchant: 'Marx's science is materialist and practical, (and) is thereby political and not philosophical...For Marx philosophy is idealist ideology, and his relation to it exemplifies his materialist relation to bourgeois ideology in general; his rejection of it by a process of critical analysis in which he deciphers and appropriates its secret truth about society's practical confusions and contradictions.'
Marx, 100 years on is at one and the same time the best and the worst of the three books. Most of the essays are admirably scholarly and provocative, but the political complexion of the book is frankly Eurocommunist. This gives the book a distinct political and theoretical slant, The scene is set by a piece by Gwyn Williams on 'Marx and Defeat', which re-assesses the class struggles in France from 1848-50. His thesis is that Marx made a radical re-assessment between writing the Class Struggles in France and the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and that it is in the reflection of defeats that Marxism makes most progress, The sting is in the tail of his piece. Just as Marx re-adjusted his perspective, so we have to adjust our perspective in the light of the defeat of the Comintern. Out with Leninism, insurrectionism and the rest, in with Gramsci, 'war of position' as opposed to 'war of movement', and the other leitmotifs of Eurocommunism.
This theme is taken up by Alan Hunt, with a more directly political perspective — the rise of representative democracy. According to Hunt, Marx failed to provide an account of politics in bourgeois democratic societies: 'In a profound sense there is no Marxist theory of political democracy'. Everything in politics is in fact changed by political democracy, which requires parties to organise internal and external alliances which are not always 'consistent'. What Hunt of course means is cross-class alliances, historic compromises with the bourgeois parties, popular fronts and so forth. In other words, political democracy means the abandonment of class politics, the expression by political parties of the interests of a single class. Once again poor old Gramsci, Leninist and insurrectionist to the core of his being, is disinterred to give false evidence for these atrocities.
The abandonment of class politics is expressed at a deeper theoretical level in the book. Stuart Hall backs up Laclau's refutation of the idea that ideologies are ascribable to a particular class, or 'represent' the interests of a particular class. The effect of such a refutation is to imply that popular hegemony is not reducible to the hegemony of the working class, or even to an alliance in which the working class plays the leading role. At this point one is tempted to try to make sense of what lies behind this line of reasoning, which has produced such a lamentable move to the right in those significant organisations which take it seriously (the Italian CP). Such a 'discourse' obviously has deep material roots, In a layer of intellectuals polarised by Eurocommunism there is a deeply defeatist mood, which arises from the failure of the working class to take power in the advanced capitalist countries. What has evolved in response is a theoretical framework which effectively displaces the question of working class power by asserting it to be the wrong 'problematic'. Traditional Marxism then gets assailed as 'reductionist' for seeing everything in terms of class struggle, class conflict and so forth. This view entails huge concessions to non-Marxist theories of society, which Tom Bottomore would instantly recognise from his knowledge of classical sociology, which displace class analysis with notions of society as an ensemble of competing interest groups, layers, 'elites' and so forth.
Gwyn Williams' reflections on the defeat of the Comintern however pose another problem, which a book by Lawrence and Wishart on Marx's centenary, should not be allowed to omit. The defeat of the Comintern, and with it the historic defeat of Marxism in the twentieth century, cannot be separated from the question of Stalinism. You can't conduct a reflection on the failure of the working class to take power, without integrating into that reflection the balance sheet of concrete struggles which posed the question of power. If you say 'failure of the working class to take power', then you have to answer the questions posed by Germany 1933, Spain 1936, France and Italy after the Liberation, France in May 1968, Portugal 1975. Edgely is right. Marxism is political. Callinicos is also right. Marxism is about workers' power. After 100 years, as the Eurocommunists continue their 'discourse', that familiar sound of subterranean spinning continues to emanate from Highgate cemetry.
PHIL HEARSE is a member of the Socialist Action editorial board.