Friday, March 23, 2007

Blast from the past - old Warhol review

Art

TOP OF THE POPS?

John Molyneux reviews the new Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Modern

From Marilyn to the Big Electric Chair--the many works of Andy Warhol on display at the Tate Modern

In 1963 the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein painted 'Whaam!' It was a huge blow-up of a comic book image depicting a US fighter jet destroying an enemy plane at the press of a button. Nearly 30 years later, in the run-up to the Gulf War, Socialist Review put this picture on the front cover with the caption 'Stop Bush's Mad War'. Similarly, in 1962 Andy Warhol produced his 'Marilyn Diptych', with its rows of yellow-haired Marilyns, and 36 years later the International Socialism journal referenced Warhol on its cover with rows of yellow-haired Karl Marxes. This significant art, so often greeted as outlandish or absurd in its day, seeps gradually into the culture until it becomes part of the taken for granted collective visual consciousness, like Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' or a Constable landscape.

It is therefore worth beginning a consideration of Warhol, whose exhibition has been the subject of such massive media attention, by noting just what a radical move (in historical, not political, terms) Pop Art represented at its inception. The art world in the 1950s, especially the New York art world, was dominated by the painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the criticism of their champion, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg's key theoretical statement, 'Avant Garde and Kitsch', defined 'high art' previously in opposition to the products of popular mass culture, of kitsch and 'tin pan alley' as he called it. To try to make art out of the despised imagery of Hollywood and the supermarket was a daring and risky provocation, in the same way that a century earlier it was risky for Monet to present a nude working class prostitute rather than a classical Venus or an Eastern odalisque.

It is true that it was Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and others who were the first to take this road, but it was Warhol who took it furthest and mostly uncompromisingly with his stark, almost unembellished images of serial soup cans, Brillo boxes, Elvises and Marilyns. The word 'almost' is important here, and so is this impressive retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern.

The casual viewer of Warhol reproductions in books, magazines and newspapers could easily get the impression that these are 'simple' mechanical reproductions of already iconic images. But standing in front of the very large originals immediately makes it clear that these pictures are carefully and artfully constructed. For example, '210 Coca-Cola Bottles' (seven rows, 30 bottles each) actually presents us with 210 different bottles, each distinguished by variations in the quantity of the liquid, the highlights on the glass, the lettering on the bottle, etc, so that the pictures constitute not only an invocation of Coke and mass production but also a complex 'abstract' composition in its own right. The same applies to 'S&H Green Stamps' and to '192 One Dollar Bills', in which the bills all vary in tone and some are upside-down. It's even more important where the Marilyn pictures are concerned. All the Marilyns derive from a single source, a clipped black and white still from the 1953 film Niagara, but each are different, and not only in colour. 'Blue Shot Marilyn', for example, has a white circle right between Monroe's eyes, clearly suggestive of a bullet hole. The 'Marilyn Diptych' divides into 25 coloured Monroes on the left and 25 black and whites on the right, with the image passing through near total blackening and disfiguration in the seventh column to extreme faintness on the far right. The more you look at the coloured panels, the more the hair, eyeshadow and lips look like paper cutouts that have been stuck on the faces, emphasising the artificially constructed nature of the Monroe 'image'. Also the misregistration of the colour (the failure of the colour to fit exactly with the underlying black and white photograph) changes the expression on some of the faces from a smile almost to a snarl, especially where the red lipstick overlaps onto the teeth like blood.

Dark side of US life

Thus while it is obvious that these works from the 1960s are 'about' mass production and celebrity, the actual paintings clearly undermine the oft-repeated view that Warhol's art is a simple celebration of either of these phenomena--'fascinated critique' would be a more accurate designation. The images of Elvis also make this point. In the black and white 'Double Elvis' the left hand figure is so darkened as to be virtually a black Elvis, while the red-shirted Elvis against blue background has red lipstick--a camp gay Elvis!

In fact, none of the early 'celebrity' works gives us a romanticised, glamorous publicity-type picture. They are certainly 'beautiful' in the sense that Warhol has created highly charged, highly memorable images, but they all share the same flat, impersonal, distanced quality reflecting the fragile, alienated nature of the fame they represent.

This exhibition also gives prominence to the social-political works--the suicides, car crashes, race riots, electric chairs, etc--in which Warhol documented the dark side of US life in the 1960s. Some of these Warhol has called 'Disasters' in reference to Goya's 'Disasters of War', and indeed his subjects and themes are to some extent similar to Goya's. All of these large silkscreen prints make a strong visual and emotional impact--Warhol has a brilliant eye for the telling image.

Three of them I found especially powerful: the huge black and red 'Atomic Bomb', in which the awesome blackening mushroom cloud is given the horns of the devil; the chilling 'Big Electric Chair', made more so by its use of dilapidated ordinariness; and the whited out 'White Disaster I', depicting a lynching with a black man hanging from a telegraph pole and a burning car. It is, I think, neither possible nor desirable to try to infer a coherent or developed political position from these pictures, but their basic sympathies seem unambiguous. If one wants to pin down Warhol's politics his vicious portrait of Nixon above the slogan 'Vote McGovern' is a fairly straightforward clue (McGovern was an anti Vietnam War left Democrat presidential candidate).

The exhibition also brings out other aspects of Warhol's art--his humour in his 'Mona Lisa' series cheekily entitled 'Thirty are Better Than One', produced to coincide with the original's much-trumpeted trip to New York. His chaotic avant-gardist capacity to annoy the authorities is seen in his 'Thirteen Most Wanted Men' series offered as a mural to represent the US on the facade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World Fair. Particularly surprising to me was the extract from 'Empire', his eight-hour film of the Empire State building. Previously I had assumed this to be of only symbolic or conceptual significance, but the actual film showed that in the absence of any other motion one became sensitised to every slight atmospheric variation in the air. Warhol's 'Empire State' became Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral in a different light.

However, this exhibition unintentionally tells another story as well. It is a deep seated tendency in both bourgeois art appreciation and the mass media's coverage of art to focus more on the artist's personality than the artist's work--to treat the work as simply an effect of the artist's innate 'genius'. This produces a situation where once an artist is established as a 'master' everything from his/her hand is automatically valued highly, both aesthetically and financially. In reality there are both great and poor Picassos, wonderful and mediocre Rembrants. And this exhibition shows that there are good and bad Warhols.

At the beginning there are early paintings influenced, I guess, by Johns and Rauschenberg which do not work visually. More importantly there is a marked decline in the second half of the show featuring work from the 1970s and 1980s. Here the silkscreen portraits of Liza Minelli, Mick Jagger, Peter Ludwig and others have lost their edge, becoming 'Pop' versions of the familiar saccharine society portrait, and some of the attempts at new directions, such as 'Oxidation Painting' and 'Camouflage', are not very interesting failures. Of course Warhol has not lost all his talent, so there are exceptions such as the beautiful 'Portrait Joseph Beuys', but the general trend is downwards. Significantly in his collaborations with his protege, Basquiat, it is the younger artist's style and work that predominate. It may be that Warhol's shooting by Valerie Solanas, author of the Scum [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto, in 1968, was the turning point. Or it may be that he was the victim of his own success, his own celebrity.

Never mind. The show as a whole remains very impressive, and the first half offers the opportunity, probably unique for a generation, of a face to face engagement with some of the most surprising and telling art of the last 50 years.
Andy Warhol is at the Tate Modern until 1 April.

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Permanent Revolution: Then and Now

Permanent Revolution : then and now

All theories – like ideas generally - have material roots. They develop as reflections of, and responses to, specific historical and social situations, and to understand them fully they have to be seen in their context. However, it is a big mistake to conclude from this, as people often do, that the moment time passes or society changes, a formerly valid theory now becomes irrelevant. Least of all can socialists afford this error, as we have so much still to learn from the classic texts of our tradition, such as, for example, the writings of Marx and Engels.

There are two main reasons why such texts retain their importance. First, because there is always continuity as well change in history. Capitalism has been around for about five hundred years, and in the course of that time has changed enormously, but its central dynamic – the accumulation of capital - and its basic classes – the bourgeoisie and proletariat – and the relationship of exploitation between them, remain the same. Consequently works which have a firm grasp of these fundamentals, like The Communist Manifesto, retain more validity than any number of ‘up to date’ history or sociology textbooks which fail to grasp them. Second, because a theoretical analysis that contains real insight into the underlying tendencies in society may become more not less true with the passing of time as those tendencies work themselves out. Thus Marx’s statement that, ‘ The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (1), is clearly a far more accurate description of the world today than it was when it was written in 1848.

At the same time, however, we must remember that none of the writings in the Marxist tradition are sacred texts and none of them stand above or outside history. They deal not in eternal truths but in concrete analyses and none of their propositions are valid simply by virtue of the author’s authority. Nothing is true just because Marx, or anyone else, said so. Socialists must value and study the outstanding works from the past, but also critically assess them in relation to history and contemporary reality. That very perceptive Marxist, Tony Cliff, summed this up by quoting Isaac Newton, ‘ Those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see far,’ but then improved on Newton by adding ‘… provided they open their eyes’. An excellent example of this is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, which was developed over a hundred years ago but which, on condition it is not approached dogmatically, remains an extremely useful guide to action in the world today , and particularly in Egypt and the Middle East.

The theory of Permanent Revolution arose in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century. This was then the most economically, socially and politically backward society in Europe. The vast majority of the population were peasants living and working in conditions at the level of Western Europe in the 17^th century. Serfdom had been abolished only in !861, more than 400 years after its disappearance in Britain, and the aristocratic landowners remained the country’s ruling class. Modern industry, with its associated classes of bourgeois and proletarians, was starting to develop in the towns, especially St. Petersburg and Moscow, but agriculture remained predominant. There was no democracy or freedom of speech. Political power was concentrated in the hands of the Tsar or Emperor whose rule was absolute. In other words the situation in Russia was comparable to that in France before the French Revolution of 1789.

The problem facing the young Marxist movement in Russia was what they should do in such circumstances. On one thing they all agreed – that Russia was heading for a revolution that would overthrow the Tsarist autocracy and that they should help bring this about. Where there were differences was on the precise nature and dynamics of this coming revolution, and hence on the strategic role of Marxists within it. These differences came to a head as a result of the 1905 Revolution and three definite positions emerged.

The first, that of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks, was that the Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois revolution led by the bourgeoisie, resulting in a capitalist democracy in which the bourgeoisie was the ruling class . The job of Marxists was to support this process while defending the interests of the working class within it. The struggle for socialism would come later.

The second, taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, accepted that the fundamental character of the revolution would be bourgeois – its outcome would be capitalist democracy not socialism – but argued that the Russian bourgeoisie was too conservative and timid to lead its own revolution. The working class , in alliance with the peasantry, would have to lead the democratic revolution. The revolution, Lenin envisaged, would culminate in ‘the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’(2).This would mean, for a short period, a Worker-Peasant government which would establish a democratic republic and carry through radical land reform. Then the peasant majority, having secured their main aim, the land, would cease to be revolutionary and the revolutionary democratic dictatorship would revert to a normal bourgeois democracy in which socialists would be a revolutionary opposition.(3)

The third, developed by Leon Trotsky, became known as Permanent Revolution.(4) It agreed with Lenin that the working class, not the bourgeoisie, would lead the revolution but argued that in the process the working class would be obliged to take power and begin the transition to socialism. In other words the Russian Revolution would not stop at its bourgeois democratic stage but would grow over into workers’ power and a socialist revolution.(The name came from the use of the slogan ‘ The Permanent Revolution’ in an 1850 article by Marx which put a similar position for Germany).(5)

To the important objection that Russia’s peasant majority and economic underdevelopment made it too backward to sustain socialist relations of production, Trotsky replied that this was true if Russia was considered in isolation, but that the Russian Revolution should be seen as the first step in an international revolution and that internationally the conditions for socialism were in place. However, without the spread of the revolution to other countries it would not be possible for workers’ power to survive in Russia.(6)

Trotsky’s theory, it must be stressed, was rooted in a concrete analysis of Russian history and society. This analysis brought out the peculiarities of Russia’s development, but always by understanding its relationship to the rest of the world , not by viewing Russia in isolation. The national was seen in the context of the international.

The main characteristic of Russian history, Trotsky argued, was its backwardness in relation to the rest of Europe. Pressure on Russia from its more advanced European neighbours resulted in disproportionate growth in the role and size of the Russian state apparatus . This in turn meant that when capitalism, very belatedly, did start to develop in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, it did so very much under the tutelage of the state and on the basis of foreign investment (especially from France and Britain). These factors produced a bourgeoisie which was exceedingly weak in terms of its organic roots in Russian society, peculiarly subordinate to the Tsarist autocracy, and peculiarly tied to foreign capital , which had long since ceased to be revolutionary and had become a thoroughly counter-revolutionary force internationally.

These same factors, however, had produced in Russia a proletariat whose economic a social and political weight far exceeded its numerical size. Precisely because of its late development and dependence on foreign capital Russian industry arose on the basis of the most modern technique and the largest possible scale.

At the same time that peasant land- cultivation as a whole remained…at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries and in certain respects even outstripped them. Small enterprises, involving less than 100 workers, employed in the United States, in 1914, 35% of the total of industrial workers, but in Russia only 17.8%… But the giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the US 17.8% of the workers and in Russia 41.4%. (7)

Thus despite being only about 5% of the population the working class held in its hands the decisive productive forces in Russian society and through its massive concentration in a few key cities, exercised potentially decisive political power. The whole phenomenon was epitomised by the Putilov Works, in the Vyborg District of St. Petersburg, which with 40.000 workers in 1914, was probably the largest factory in the world and renowned for its political militancy.

This tendency of capitalism to bring side by side in one social formation the most backward and the most advanced social structures and phenomena, was called by Trotsky ‘the law of combined and uneven development’. In Russia combined and uneven development produced the combination of a weak, conservative bourgeoisie and a strong revolutionary proletariat – this was the core material foundation of the strategy of permanent revolution.

To this must be added Trotsky’s analysis of the role of the peasantry. Whereas the Mensheviks had a generally suspicious attitude to the peasant movement, Lenin supported it enthusiastically, but where they agreed was that the peasant majority excluded the possibility of workers’ power. In opposition to this Trotsky maintained that the peasant revolt, although it was a vital factor in the revolution, would not be able to push the proletariat aside or lead the revolutionary government. Basing himself on Marx’s analysis of the French peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and the record of peasant revolts in Russia and elsewhere, Trotsky concluded, ‘Historical experience shows that the peasantry are absolutely incapable of taking up an independent political role’ (8) The countryside would follow the town. The peasants would follow whichever of the urban classes provided the stronger lead, and since the cowardly bourgeoisie would betray the peasant struggle for land, it would follow the working class who would be obliged, by the logic of events, to take power into its own hands.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 vindicated the theory of Permanent Revolution. Reality was, of course, richer and more complicated than any theory, but there is no doubt that actual events corresponded more closely to Trotsky’s perspective than to any other.. The Revolution began with the February uprising which overthrew the Tsar and was the spontaneous action of the workers themselves. The bourgeois Provisional Government proved completely incapable of carrying through any of demands or tasks of the revolution, neither ending the war, nor giving land to the peasants, nor even convening a constituent assembly to establish a democratic republic. The Menshevik insistence on the bourgeois character of the revolution turned them, first, into a conservative force trying to hold back the working class, and then into outright counter revolutionaries opposed to the October Revolution. The intermediate position of the Bolsheviks was overtaken by events, especially the emergence of Soviets (workers’ councils) as embryos of workers’ power, and Lenin, returning to Russia from exile, rapidly won the Bolshevik Party to a perspective of workers’ revolution based on the call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, i.e. effectively adopted Trotsky’s position. Trotsky, in turn, joined the Bolsheviks and together they led the working class seizure of power in October.

The theory of permanent revolution was also confirmed, negatively, by the fact that although the Russian Revolution did inspire a wave of revolution internationally, the defeat of the international revolution made it impossible to construct socialism in Russia and led to the Stalinist reaction.

But if Permanent Revolution was valid for Russia, what was its applicability to other countries where the tasks of the bourgeois revolution had not yet been achieved? This question was posed sharply by developments in China. China in the years1925-27 saw the rapid rise of a mass revolutionary movement, directed against foreign imperialism and Chinese warlords and feudal landowners. The leading role in this movement was played by the militant mass strikes of the young Chinese proletariat in the coastal towns of Shanghai, Canton etc.(9)

The Communist International, by now under complete Stalinist control, responded to this situation by reverting to the pre-1917 Menshevik position of arguing that the Chinese Revolution would be a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie, and that the task of Chinese communists was to do no more than support this process from the left. In pursuance of this policy the Chinese CP was instructed to join, subordinate itself, and even hand over its membership lists, to the main Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai- Shek. This policy was persisted with, despite Trotsky’s protests and warnings, right up to the point in 1927 when Chiang Kai-Shek put the Chinese revolutionary workers and Communists to the sword in a series of massacres in Shanghai and Canton. Trotsky responded by insisting that, ‘The Chinese Revolution… will win as a dictatorship of the proletariat or not at all.’ (10) Then in 1928 in his polemical work, The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky formulated his theory as applicable to all underdeveloped and colonial countries.

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation. (11)

This generalization of permanent revolution was both an immense breakthrough and a source of various problems. It was an immense breakthrough because by disposing of mechanical stages theory, typical of both reformism and Stalinism, and getting rid of the idea of individual countries not yet ready for socialism, it made workers’ power and socialism a fully international programme for the first time. It was a source of problems because, by insisting that almost no progress was possible without the dictatorship of the proletariat, it tended to substitute one mechanical dogma for another. These difficulties came to the fore after World War II when a number of the imperialist powers, especially Britain, retreated from policies of direct colonial rule, and many colonial countries achieved national independence without workers’ revolutions. This left some Trotskyists who adhered fanatically to the letter of Trotsky’s formulations either denying the possibility of changes that were manifestly in the process of happening – for example, Gandhi and Nehru leading India to independence in 1947, or Mandela and the ANC defeating Apartheid and establishing democracy in South Africa. – or inventing revolutions that had manifestly not occurred, such as workers’ socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba. (For a Marxist analysis of what really happened in class terms in China and Cuba, and similar revolutions, and how it relates to the theory of permanent revolution see Tony Cliff’s article ‘Permanent Revolution’) (12).

So where does Permanent Revolution stand in relation to the struggle today ? Here a distinction must be made between permanent revolution as an absolute and general prediction, and permanent revolution as a strategic goal. As an absolute prediction ( as in its 1928 formulation) it is clearly not sustainable, but as the theory of a general strategic orientation it is, in many situations, extremely useful – indeed essential.

Wherever there is a fight to be waged against imperialism, national or racial oppression, or dictatorship, revolutionary socialists are put under intense pressure ( by liberals, nationalists, reformists, Stalinists and so on) to sacrifice or shelve ( for the time being !) socialist ideas and demands, and even basic working class interests, in the name of unity in the struggle for the immediate aim. The strategy of permanent revolution rejects those pressures, not from the sectarian position of dismissing the anti- imperialist or democratic struggle as irrelevant , but from the standpoint of arguing for working class and socialist leadership in the fight for national independence and democracy.

In all such struggles the strategy of permanent revolution will treat the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’, even its most ‘patriotic’ sections, as at very best an unreliable ally and potential enemy and therefore resist all calls for socialists and the working class to give up their political and organisational independence. Permanent revolution means that socialists while participating vigorously in the movements for national liberation and democracy, will seek to develop those movements into struggles for workers’ power and international socialism, not because no kind of national independence or democracy is possible without socialist revolution , but because the very nature of world capitalism and imperialism will weaken, corrupt and undermine any independence or democracy won on a capitalist basis.

Understood in this way the strategy of permanent revolution, far from being out of date, fits the current situation in the Middle East like a glove. In the first place there is the struggle against imperialist occupation in Iraq. It is the duty of socialists to support that struggle unconditionally, no matter whether it is led by Islamists, nationalists , Communists or whoever, but it also the duty of socialists to press within that struggle for socialist and working class leadership, precisely because such politics and such leadership are the best bulwark against the sectarian divisions that are so fostered by the imperialists and so weaken the struggle against the occupation.

In the second place there is the Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Again it is the duty of socialists to support that struggle unconditionally. However, is it not also clear that no matter how heroically the Palestinians resist, the economic and military strength of Zionism, funded and armed by US imperialism, is overwhelming that it cannot be overthrown by the Palestinians on their own. The defeat of Zionist Israel and the real liberation of Palestine ( the two are inseparable) is possible only on the basis of a united mobilization of the masses throughout the Middle East. But the major obstacle to such a mobilization is, of course, the corrupt, pro- imperialist and thoroughly bourgeois regimes which exist throughout the region, and which, regardless of their nationalist rhetoric, have repeatedly failed and betrayed the Palestinians. Thus the liberation of Palestine urgently demands the worker-led process of permanent revolution across the Middle East.

In the third place, there is the struggle for democracy now in Egypt ( and, of course, elsewhere). Democratic rights – free elections, free speech, freedom of the press and of association, an end to torture and arbitrary detention – are valid and important in themselves, but the struggle for democracy is not separate from other struggles. The Mubarak regime is able to continue its undemocratic practices and survive in power, in large part because it is backed by the US. US imperialism supports Mubarak because he opens up Egypt to the world market, and to US firms in particular, and because of his role in preventing Arab mobilization against Israel and/or the US. Within Egypt it is the massive Egyptian working class, concentrated in Cairo much as the Russian proletariat was concentrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow, that has, a) the strongest interest in achieving full democracy; b) the greatest power to defeat the regime; c) the capacity and consciousness to lead the anti- imperialist struggle in the region as a whole. In other words, from a different starting point we are back again to the perspective of permanent revolution, developed by Trotsky more than a century ago.

Nor is it just a question of the Middle East . If space permitted it would be possible to make a similar demonstration of the relevance of permanent revolution to South America or South Africa or Indonesia.(13) What is more, the methodological principles of starting from an international standpoint in the analysis of national peculiarities and the law of combined and uneven development, which were key to the theory of permanent revolution are also central to the analysis of global capitalism today. Indeed the argument for the contemporary validity of permanent revolution is but one instance of the wider case for the continuing relevance of Marxism and the Marxist tradition as a whole.

NOTES

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. 9, p.56.
Lenin’s position at that time was outlined by him in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, to be found in the Collected Works, op. cit., Vol. 9.
Trotsky produced a number of statements of the theory of permanent revolution. The first was in Results and Prospects, written and published in 1906, and now available in English in Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York 1969. One of the clearest is in Chapter 1 of The History of the Russian Revolution, London,1977. Permanent Revolution, written in 1928, and published with Results and Prospects, op.cit. is a polemical defence of the theory against Stalinist attacks and distortions
See Marx and Engels, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)’, in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, London 1981.
See Results and Prospects, op.cit., p.105.
Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, op.cit., p31-2.
Trotsky, Results and Prospects, op.cit., p.72.
The best account of these events is probably still Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, Stamford, 1961.
Leon Trotsky on China, New York, 1976, p.269.
Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, op.cit., p.276.
In Tony Cliff, Marxist Theory After Trotsky, London, 2003, pp.187-202.
See for example Tony Cliff, ‘Revolution and counter-revolution: lessons for Indonesia’, in International Socialism 80 and John Rees, ‘The socialist revolution and the democratic revolution’, in International Socialism 83.

This article was written for publication in Egypt, by Egyptian socialists.

John Molyneux

12 March 2007

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The Theory of Permanent Revolution

KOREA COLUMN 18

The Theory of Permanent Revolution

So far this column has focused on explaining the basic ideas of Marxism as developed by its founders, Marx and Engels. But Marxism is a living, growing theory which has to be kept up in response to changes in capitalism and developments in the class struggle, so now I want to have a look at some of the most important contributions made to Marxism after Marx, beginning with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

The theory of permanent revolution was without doubt one the most original and significant additions to Marxism, with the most far reaching implications, made in the whole of the twentieth century. Unfortunately the first obstacle to understanding it is its name. Naturally, when people first hear the term ‘permanent revolution’ they assume it must signify the idea of revolution going on for ever, without end, which might sound exciting to some people who don’t know what revolutions really involve, but would actually be both impossible and contrary to Marxism, which has the ultimate aim of abolishing violence and conflict in human affairs. In reality ‘permanent’ revolution, like other terms in the history of Marxism such as Bolshevism and Menshevism, is just a nickname that happened to stick, and even the nickname can’t be understood until the basic ideas of the theory have been explained and put in their historical context.

That context was- in the first place- Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century. This was then the most economically, socially and politically backward society in Europe. The vast majority of the population were peasants living and working in conditions at the level of Western Europe in the 17^th century. Serfdom had been abolished only in !861, more than 400 years after its disappearance in Britain, and the aristocratic landowners remained the country’s ruling class. Modern industry, with its associated classes of bourgeois and proletarians, was starting to develop in the towns, especially St. Petersburg and Moscow, but agriculture remained predominant. There was no democracy or freedom of speech. Political power was concentrated in the hands of the Tsar or Emperor whose rule was absolute. In other words the situation in Russia was comparable to that in France before the French Revolution of 1789.

The third, developed by Leon Trotsky, became known as Permanent Revolution. It agreed with Lenin that the working class, not the bourgeoisie, would lead the revolution but argued that in the process the working class would be obliged to take power and begin the transition to socialism. In other words the Russian Revolution would not stop at its bourgeois democratic stage but would grow over into a socialist revolution.(The name came from the use of the slogan ‘ permanent revolution’ in an 1850 article by Marx which put a similar position for Germany).

The actual Russian Revolution of 1917 vindicated Trotsky’s perspective. The Revolution began with the February uprising which overthrew the Tsar and was the spontaneous action of the workers themselves. The Menshevik insistence on the bourgeois character of the revolution turned them, first, into a conservative force trying to hold back the working class, and then into outright counter revolutionaries opposed to the October Revolution. The intermediate position of the Bolsheviks was overtaken by events, especially the emergence of Soviets (workers’ councils) as embryos of workers’ power, and Lenin, returning to Russia from exile, rapidly won the Bolshevik Party to a perspective of workers’ revolution based on the call for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, i.e. effectively adopted Trotsky’s position. Trotsky, in turn, joined the Bolsheviks and together they led the working class seizure of power in October.

Stalinism denounced permanent revolution as Trotskyist heresy and reverted to the Menshevik stages theory of alliance with the bourgeoisie, first in relation to the Chinese Revolution in the twenties, and then for all countries where there was a struggle for democracy or national independence. Trotsky responded by generalizing the theory of permanent revolution from just Russia to the world as a whole.

This was of immense significance for Marxism. Marx’s identification of the working class as the agent of socialism (the core proposition of Marxism) had led many would-be Marxists to see the socialist revolution as relevant only to those industrialized countries where the working class was a majority, essentially Europe and North America. By arguing that, even where it was a minority, the working class could and should take power, in alliance with the peasantry and as a first step in an international process, Trotsky made the programme of socialist revolution genuinely global.

Even today, when feudalism is dead and the bourgeoisie rules virtually everywhere, the perspective of permanent revolution remains relevant and vital wherever there is a struggle for basic democracy or national liberation. In such situations there is always pressure on Marxists ( from liberals, reformists, nationalists, Stalinists, etc.) to set aside socialism, and even the basic demands of the working class, in the name of ‘unity’ in the immediate struggle.

The theory of permanent revolution shows how Marxists and the workers’ movement, by taking the lead in the fight for democratic and national demands, can both strengthen those immediate struggles and make them component parts of the struggle for workers power and international socialism.

John Molyneux

28 Feb 2007

Message to Riaz Ahmed

On 10/11/06 Riaz Ahmed from Pakistan posted a comment which I have only just become aware of . Riaz , if you read this, please contact me by email on john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk and I will try to help with a copy of Arguments for RS.

Best wishes
John Molyneux

Friday, March 16, 2007

Marxism and Religion

KOREA COLUMN 17

Marxism and Religion

The very first article that Marx wrote as a Marxist, i.e. as an advocate of workers’ revolution, began with a discussion of religion. Moreover that article, (‘The Introduction’ to ‘ A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, 1843) contains what is probably Marx’s best known single line, namely ‘ Religion is the opium of the people’

Despite this Marx’s real attitude towards religion has remained largely unknown or misrepresented. There were times and places, for example Europe in the sixties, when this didn’t seem to matter very much because religion appeared to be a declining force in society. But the rise of Islam as a political issue , first in the eighties with the influence of the Iranian Revolution, and then with 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ changed all that . The world political situation became such that leftists and would be Marxists - and there were many – who failed to understand Marx’s analysis of religion, were likely to be blown completely off course.

The most common mistakes were: 1) the belief that Marx and Marxists were hostile to religion in the sense of wanting to ban or suppress it, as it was imagined had happened in Stalinist Russia; 2) the idea that Marxism regarded all religious ideas as simply stupid, backward and to be treated with contempt; 3) the notion that Marxists saw all religions and religious ideas as invariably allies or tools of reaction and the ruling class.

It is true of course that Marx was an atheist who rejected religious explanations of the world or events. This was part and parcel of his materialist philosophy and theory of history, which I have already discussed in this series. For Marx it was not consciousness that determined social being, but social being that determined social consciousness, not primarily ideas that shaped history but history that shaped ideas, and this applied to religion too. ‘Man makes religion, religion does not make man’, wrote Marx. But it was precisely this materialist approach that led Marx to produce a much more complex, rounded and , in a sense, sympathetic analysis of religion than is so often attributed to him.

If people make religion, they do so because religion meets, or appears to meet, real human needs. When religion was first developed in pre- class hunter-gatherer societies, human beings lived in close interaction with, and complete dependence on animal and natural forces, which, in one sense, they knew well, but of which they lacked any scientific understanding. In this situation religion tended to take the form of ‘pantheistic animism’. Rivers, winds, mountains, the sun and the moon, wolves, bears, monkeys, elephants etc were seen as endowed with gods or spirits. In other words religion provided emotional expression for feelings of dependency and an ‘explanation’ for the ups and downs of life, when no rational account was possible.

With the transition, 5000 or so years ago, to class divided, male dominated, state ruled societies, dependency on nature remained, but to it was added inequality, exploitation, slavery, dependence on, and domination by, social forces which were also outside people’s control and beyond their understanding – in a word, alienation. Religion reflected this. Gods ceased to be nature spirits and started to become powerful male authority figures like Zeus, Jehovah, and Allah while at the same time religion started to offer consolation to the downtrodden in the promise of an afterlife in which virtue not wealth is rewarded.

Marx puts it this way:

Religion is… the self consciousness and self awareness of man who either has not yet attained to himself or has already lost himself again… This state, this society, produces religion’s inverted attitude to the world because they are an inverted world themselves. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point of honour, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis for consolation and justification.

Thus religion comes in many different shapes and sizes and performs many different functions, depending always on the specific social conditions in which it is operating. There are versions of religion which serve to justify the position of the ruling class to itself ( even kings and dictators, bosses and generals need self justification); there are versions which justify the ruling class to the masses by preaching that the social order is God’s order and urging passivity and respect for authority ( ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’). There are also versions which give expression to the misery of the oppressed, to their hopes for a better world and even to their outright rebellion. Religion, says Marx,

…. is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless circumstances

One of the characteristics of the so called ‘great’ religions ( Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc) which have survived thousands of years, is that they are sufficiently adaptable to have played all these different roles in different times and places, while maintaining an appearance of continuity. Thus in seventeenth century Europe there was a feudal counterrevolutionary Christianity (Catholicism) and bourgeois revolutionary Christianity ( Calvinism); in the US in the sixties, there was White racist religion and Black anti-racist religion; in Latin America there is a Catholicism of the dictators and Yankee imperialism and a Catholicism of the poor and in the Middle East there is the pro – imperialist Islam of the Saudi royals and the anti- imperialist Islam of Hamas and Hizbollah.

From this analysis flow a number of political conclusions which contradict the stereotype often attributed to Marx. First, Marxists are completely opposed to any attempt to ban religion ( before or after the revolution). On the contrary they defend the principle of freedom of religious belief and worship for all. The only way religion can be ‘abolished’ is by abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation that give rise to it. Second, because socialist revolution is the act of the mass of workers themselves, it is inevitable and necessary that the revolution will be made by, and the revolutionary movement will include, workers with religious beliefs.

Third, Marxists reject the idea that any particular religion is inherently more reactionary, (or more progressive) than others. Clearly, at present, this applies principally to Islam, but in other circumstances it could be Hinduism, Confucianism etc. Our attitude to political movements with a religious coloration or religious leaders, such as the (Catholic) Hugo Chavez, or ( Buddhist) Tibetan nationalism or Falun Gong in China or Islamic resistance in Iraq and Palestine, is based not on the movement’s religious beliefs but on the material social forces it represents and the justice of its political cause.

John Molyneux

4 Feb 2007

Marxism and Oppression

KOREA COLUMN 16

Marxism and Oppression

One of the most common criticisms of Marxism, especially in university circles, is that it is inadequate when it comes to issues of oppression such as racism, sexism and homophobia. The charge is either that Marxism has neglected these questions or has ‘reduced’ them to them to the issue of class, suggesting that blacks, women, gays etc should ‘subordinate’ their struggles to the class struggle, or simply wait for the socialist revolution to solve their problems.

Before responding to these arguments theoretically it is worth pointing out that the historical record shows that, far from neglecting these issues, Marxists and Marxist organizations have played a leading role in the struggles against all forms of racial and sexual oppression.

On the question of slavery, Marx and Engels not only strongly supported the North in the American Civil War, but also plated a significant part in ensuring that this position was adopted by the British workers’ movement despite the dependence of many British workers’ jobs on cotton from the Southern states. ‘ Labour with a white skin cannot be free’, Marx insisted, ‘while labour with a black skin is in chains’. Similarly Marx and Engels took up the question of anti- Irish racism (of crucial importance in 19^th century Britain) and far from telling the Irish to wait for socialism argued that a necessary condition of revolution in England was the prior separation and independence of Ireland.

The theme of women’s emancipation appeared in Marx and Engels’ writings from the very beginning. ‘ Everyone who knows anything of history’, wrote Marx, ‘knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of women’. In 1884 Engels, working from Marx’s notes, wrote The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State which opened the way to understanding the roots of women’s oppression. Eleanor Marx, Marx’s daughter, both organized working class women in the East End of London and wrote the important pamphlet ‘ The Women Question’.

In Germany before the First World War the Marxist Clara Zetkin organized a mass working class women’s organization that fought for equality and socialism, while Alexandra Kollontai pursued similar aims in Russia.. The Russian Revolution established complete legal equality for women and also legalized homosexuality. At this time women in Britain had still not got the vote.

The most important achievement of the US Communist Party, despite its Stalinism, was its role in the fight against racism in Harlem and in the South in the 1930s and Marxists played significant roles in the black and women’s movements of the sixties and seventies. The Jewish Marxist, Abram Leon, a victim of the Nazi Holocaust, wrote The Jewish Question, which remains the crucial book on the causes and history of anti-semitism. The tradition continues to this day with Marxists round the world taking up the fight against the new racism of Islamophobia.

This historical record, of which the above is only the briefest overview, has a political and theoretical underpinning. The political aim of Marxism is the self- emancipation of the working class for which its unity, nationally and internationally, is essential. Marxists therefore have an absolute duty to combat all forms of structural and ideological oppression , such as racism, sexism and homophobia, which weaken or threaten that unity.

Theoretically Marxism does not ‘reduce’ other forms of oppression to class but it does show how their fundamental roots lie in the division of society into classes, which is quite a different matter.

Marxism argues that the second class status of women derives from the structure of the family which makes childcare and housework primarily the responsibility of women and either cuts women off from paid employment and public life or, if they do go out to work, saddles them with a double burden. In the aforementioned Origins of the Family Engels showed that the male dominated family developed with the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and agriculture and the emergence of private property and class divisions, with the family ensuring the inheritance of property and the wife being treated as the property of the husband.

The form of the family has undergone many changes but still today it remains the prime site of child rearing and domestic labour and the principal factor underlying the subordination of women. The capitalist class, for all its lip service to equality, has a massive vested interest in this state of affairs: it provides them with the reproduction of labour power at minimum cost, a source of cheap labour and an entrenched division in the ranks of the working class. Homosexuality is stigmatized because it is seen as a deviation from, and threat to, the family.

Marxism sees racism towards non- white peoples as the ideological reflection and justification of the slave trade which transported millions of Africans to labour on the cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations of the Americas, and the primitive accumulation of capital (looting) in the colonies, which played a crucial part in the development of capitalism back in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Racism was further refined and consolidated by capitalism’s imperialist phase in the late 19^th and early 20^th century when the European powers took over most of the rest of the world.

Today we live with the legacy of this history ‘modified’ to focus on the supposed threat posed by immigrants and refugees, who provide capitalism with ideal scapegoats for the failures of the system and another mechanism of divide and rule. On top of this we have Islamophobia as the accompaniment of Western imperialism’s ‘war on terror’ – in reality its struggle to control the energy supplies of the Middle East and Central Asia and prepare for the challenge of China.

The advantage of this Marxist analysis is that it avoids two pitfalls into which other approaches commonly fall. The first is the superficial and complacent view that racism, sexism etc are merely prejudices based on ignorance which will be overcome, in due time, simply by education. The second is the opposite, but often complimentary, view that bigotry is ‘natural’ and therefore inevitable. Both these positions weaken the fight against oppression, the Marxist materialist approach strengthens it.

Marxism does indeed argue that the complete eradication of racism, sexism and homophobia requires the overthrow of capitalism but it never tells the oppressed to wait for the revolution. On the contrary it sees the struggle against all forms of oppression as essential to the struggle for socialism.

John Molyneux

20 Jan 2007

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Marxism Art Show - Left in Vision

MARXISM ART SHOW

MARXISM 2007 (5-9 July) will feature an exhibition of visual art called ‘LEFT IN VISION’. Work is invited from anyone on the left and art with or without overt political content will be equally welcome. The show will be curated by John Molyneux and Chanie Rosenberg and anyone wishing to exhibit should contact John on john@molyneux8652.freeserve.co.uk or 07801 290411.

The Contradictions of Capitalism

KOREA COLUMN 15

The Contradictions of Capitalism

My last column, on dialectics, showed that for Marx all change takes place through contradictions. To nothing does this apply more strongly than the development of capitalism. Capitalism is a mass of interlocking contradictions.

First there is the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. Capitalism has developed the forces of production to a degree inconceivable under any previous economic system but because they are based on alienated labour the more they develop the more they turn into forces of destruction, either in the form of weapons of unimaginable power or through the destruction of the environment on which our survival depends.

As capitalism drives the productive forces forward, so the need becomes ever more urgent for the social ownership and democratic planning of the economy – one thing capitalism, by its nature, cannot deliver.

Then there is the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class rooted in the exploitation that takes place in every capitalist workplace. This class conflict has accompanied capitalism from its birth. For centuries the bourgeoisie has used all its economic, ideological and political power to incorporate, divert and repress working class resistance. Time and again it has been successful, inflicting on the working class numerous grievous defeats, and time and again its ideologists have proclaimed the end of the class struggle.

But to no avail. The fact is capitalism cannot do without the working class; it needs it to produce its profits. And the more capitalism grows and expands, the more it is compelled to increase the size and potential power of its mortal enemy. The bourgeoisie can win battle after battle but it cannot win, or end, the war. The class struggle can end only with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of capitalism.

A further contradiction is that between the capitalists themselves. Capitalist production is organized on the basis of competition between rival capitals. This competition permeates the whole system from the level of the smallest corner shop to the biggest super market, from the most humble workshop to the mightiest multinational corporation, and, because the state is the instrument of capital, it produces competition between states which in turn leads to imperialism, arms races and wars.

Capitalist competition is competition to accumulate capital through the exploitation of labour. Any capitalist business that falls behind in the race risks bankruptcy or take over by its more profitable rivals. Every capitalist is therefore compelled to attempt to increase the exploitation of their workforce and the sum of their profits, thus intensifying the contradiction between the classes. Free market competition turns into its opposite, monopoly, as unsuccessful businesses are swallowed up by successful ones, but competition is not ended, it breaks out anew between the monopolies.

Competition drives capitalism forward and accounts for its historic dynamism, but it also undermines it, preventing it ever achieving stability or equilibrium, and pitches it into crisis.

Competition pushes the capitalists, especially when the system is booming, to produce more and more, but because workers are always paid less than the value of the goods they produce there can arise a crisis of overproduction.. More goods are produced than the workers can afford to buy with their wages. This leads to some businesses being unable to sell their goods and making their workers redundant. This further diminishes the purchasing power of the workers and leads to more cutbacks in production and more workers being made unemployed. A vicious circle develops in which the economic boom turns into recession or slump.

The tendency to overproduction can be overcome but only by means that exacerbate other contradictions in the system. The government can intervene with a programme of public spending which employs workers on various state projects. This puts money in the pockets of workers and stimulates demand thus reversing the downward spiral into slump. But this method known as Keynesianism ( after the British economist Maynard Keynes) has the effect of generating inflation, caused by too much money chasing too many goods, and this fuels the industrial struggle as workers fight for wage demands to keep up with rising prices.

Overproduction can also be avoided by the capitalist class itself buying up the surplus which the workers can’t afford, either as luxury goods for its own consumption or as means of production ( new machinery for its factories etc.) If the capitalists of one country opt for consumption then that country’s economy will grow more slowly and fall behind countries where they opt for investment in new means of production. But opting for investment feeds into another fundamental contradiction of the system, namely the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

This tendency derives from the fact that the source of all profit is the exploitation of workers, of living labour, but the trend of capitalist production is to combine ever greater amounts of machinery, technology etc i.e. dead labour, with relatively smaller quantities of living labour thus reducing the rate of profit as a proportion of the capitalists’ outlay. If the rate of return on investment declines so too does the willingness of the capitalists to invest, causing the economy as a whole to go into crisis.

But if this is the case, why do the capitalists concentrate their investment in machinery rather than in living labour? The answer is because there is a contradiction between the mass of profits and the rate of profit and the interests of each individual capitalist business and the interests of the system as a whole. Each individual capitalist unit is driven by competition to try to increase its mass of profit and its share of the total profit in the system. It can do this by investing in new technology which enables it produce more efficiently and sell more cheaply thus, at least temporarily, stealing a march on its rivals. But once the use of the new technology is generalized the temporary advantage is wiped out and the overall rate of profit is reduced.

The tendency of the rate of profit to decline is only a tendency. It too can be countered or offset in various ways - by increasing the rate of exploitation, by imperialism, arms spending and war – but each of these methods generates resistance and sharpens the other contradictions in the system.

None of these contradictions by itself, nor even all of them taken together, guarantees the victory of socialism but they do make the system, for all its immense power, vulnerable. The question is can the working class overthrow it before its contradictions destroy us all.

John Molyneux

3 Jan 2007

The Marxist Dialectic

KOREA COLUMN 14

The Marxist Dialectic

As was said at the very beginning of this series the starting point of Marxism was not an abstract philosophy but a determination to change the world and an identification of and with the working class as the agent of that change. Nevertheless from that point of departure Marx developed, very rapidly, a coherent philosophical outlook which both built on all previous philosophy and transcended it. This outlook is usually called dialectical materialism ( though Marx, himself, did not use the term)

It is materialist in that it asserts the objective existence of the material world and the priority of matter over mind, so that, fundamentally, it is the material conditions of life that shape human consciousness and ideas rather than ideas which determine material conditions. But it is not at all a mechanical materialism or fatalistic determinism which treats human history as working like clockwork towards a predetermined outcome. Rather it is dialectical in that it deals always with complex interactions and contradictions.

Dialectics is an old philosophical term dating back to Ancient Greece where it signified the idea that truth can be arrived at through dialogue, the clash of opposing arguments. At the end of the eighteenth century, Hegel, inspired by the French Revolution, used a much advanced dialectical method to attempt an account of the whole history of human consciousness and thought as developing through internal contradictions, but in Hegel the dialectic remained confined to the realm of ideas.

Marx took over and transformed the Hegelian dialectic, giving it a materialist foundation. For Marx the driving force of history, both human and natural, was not conflict between opposed ideas or concepts but conflict between opposed material and social forces.

The philosophical starting point of dialectics is that everything, everything in the universe, is moving and changing. This is now established scientific fact and it has profound political implications – think how often you hear people say ‘You will never change such and such’ or ‘ There will always be…racism, inequality, rulers or whatever’ – but it also has philosophical implications because dialectics is the logic of change.

This matters because the dominant mode of thinking, based on the logic developed by Aristotle, is not founded on the principle of universal change, rather it deals with fixed states or ‘things’. Its basic axioms are that A = A (a thing is equal to itself) and A does not = non-A ( a thing is not equal to something other than itself), from which are derived sequences of sound reasoning known as syllogisms. For example:

All birds have feathers
A swan is a bird
Therefore a swan has feathers

This formal logic was, and is, all well and good and very necessary for practical human affairs but it is limited – it excludes change. Dialectical logic moves beyond formal logic by starting not with ‘things’ but with processes, processes of coming into being and passing out of being. The moment processes of change are fed into the equation it becomes necessary to deal with contradiction. If state A (e.g. day) changes into state B (night) it passes through a phase of A not being A or being both A and B (twilight).

From this insight Marx and Engels developed certain principles of dialectics to reflect (and analyse) processes of change.

First, every existing ‘thing’ or ‘state’ is both a unity and a conflict of opposites, i.e. it is a temporary balance or moment of equilibrium between the forces that brought that state into being and maintain it and the forces that will bring about its dissolution or transformation. Second, every process of change involves an accumulation of gradual or quantitative changes within an existing state, which at a certain point turn into a qualitative change in which the nature of that state is transformed. Third, in every process of change the ‘negative’ or revolutionary force which brings about the change is itself transformed or ‘negated’ so that a new state, a new unity of opposites, emerges ( Engels called this ‘the negation of the negation’).

Obviously all this sounds very abstract but, in fact, it is extremely useful for analyzing and effecting processes of social change and especially revolutionary change. The whole of Marx’s theory of history is an example of applied dialectics. History consists of a series of modes of production (ancient society, feudalism, capitalism etc.) each of which may last for centuries and, on the surface, appear very stable but in reality is a unity of opposites, a balance between the forces and relations of production and antagonistic classes. Gradual quantitative changes in the forces of production bring them into conflict with the relations of production and the balance of the class struggle shifts to the point where it explodes in revolution. The old order is overthrown and a new form of society emerges.

Another important example is Lenin’s response to the First World War. Profoundly shocked at the support for the war by German Social Democracy and other European Socialist parties, Lenin re-read Hegel. His study of the Hegelian dialectic then played a major part in his analysis of imperialism ( Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism) which showed that capitalism had entered a new phase in which the contradictions of the system were intensified and lead inexorably to war. Lenin’s deep grasp of dialectical contradictions is also evident in his support for national liberation movements against imperialism. He was an internationalist but he understood that the road to workers’ international unity lay through the struggle against national oppression.

But dialectics is not something just for the great theoreticians of the movement. It is immensely useful for every trade union and political activist who has to grapple with the dynamics of a strike or campaign, with its rapid twists and turns and decisive moments when victory or defeat hang in the balance and for every socialist worker who has to deal, on a daily basis with the consciousness of his or her fellow workers, for consciousness also develops dialectically, i.e. through contradictions.

One final point needs to be made, for it is often not understood. Dialectics reflects and expresses the logic of natural and social change but it is not a magic key to history. In itself dialectics cannot prove that any particular change has happened or will happen. Only a dialectical analysis of the real world can do that. And, like Marxism as a whole, dialectics is not a dogma but a guide to action.

John Molyneux
21 December, 2006

Monday, March 12, 2007

The Roots of Alienation

An aspect of Marxism which I have not yet covered in this series is Marx’s theory of alienation. This is not because it is not important - on the contrary it is central to the whole of Marxism – but because, like dialectics which I shall tackle next, it can seem ‘philosophical’ and ‘difficult’, although as I will try to show, it relates directly to all our everyday experience.

One part of the difficulty in explaining Marx’s concept of alienation accurately is that the word ‘alienation’ has a well established usage in everyday language, where it means feeling ‘fed up’, ‘outcast’ or ‘estranged’, and that Marx’s concept , while related to the everyday meaning, is also significantly different.

Another problem is that there is a long standing philosophical usage of the term which was prevalent in Marx’s youth (particularly in the work of Hegel) and again Marx’s concept is related to this usage but also profoundly different. To this must be added the fact that many of the academic commentaries on this subject fail to understand these differences and consequently to grasp Marx’s real meaning.

Marx ‘s first and most comprehensive presentation of his theory of alienation was in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 which was one of the early works in which he worked out his ideas in relation to existing philosophical, economic and social theories.

In the existing philosophical usage man’s alienation ( I’m using the masculine language of the time) signified that he was cut off, separated from ‘God’, from ‘the true meaning of life’, or from his own ‘true nature’. For Hegel it was all three, but it was fundamentally a mental problem, a problem of our false consciousness and insufficient understanding (a problem which Hegel’s philosophy would remedy).

Marx was profoundly aware of this but he approached the matter differently. He showed that alienation was not just a ‘feeling’ or a problem of consciousness but a material and economic fact. Using the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, he showed that under capitalism it was a fact that workers were alienated from the products of their own labour, i.e. they neither owned nor controlled the goods which they made with their own hands, but which formed a world of ‘things’ set against them and dominating them. And the harder workers worked, the more they produced, the more they increased the power of this alien, hostile world.

‘It is true’, says Marx, ‘ that labour produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity’.

But then Marx takes the analysis a further crucial step. He argues that if workers are alienated from the products of their labour this can only be because they are alienated in the act of production, in the labour process itself. ‘The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production’. What then makes labour alienated?

First, says Marx, the fact that labour is external to the worker, ‘ it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself’. It is not voluntary but forced labour and as soon as no compulsion exists ‘it is shunned like the plague.’ Above all it is the fact that the labour is not the worker’s own, but someone else’s and ‘that in it he belongs not to himself but to another’. A moment’s reflection makes clear that this is an exact description of capitalist wage labour in which the workers can survive only by selling their labour power to the employers.

Why this is so important is because labour is fundamental to being human. It is through labour that humanity makes itself and creates its history and society. The alienation of labour, therefore, means the alienation, the estrangement, of the producers from the whole material world which they produce; from their humanity , individually and collectively; from themselves and from society and also from nature since it is first and foremost through labour that humans relate to nature. Alienation thus pervades the whole of our society. Even the capitalists do not escape alienation for they too are locked into the same process; they merely constitute the conservative side of the same alienated relationship.

The theory of alienation thus contains in embryonic form the entire Marxist critique of capitalism. It shows why capitalism is a fundamentally inhumane and dehumanizing system; why it subordinates living labour to dead labour, people to profit.; why even when workers living standards rise their lives are still deformed by wage labour; why even the most intimate personal relations are so often damaged and distorted; why people, the oppressors but also the oppressed are capable of such barbaric treatment of each other; why capitalism is ultimately a system out of control even of the capitalists themselves and why, under capitalism, every human advance in production, technology and science threatens to turn against us and destroy us. The threat of nuclear annihilation, the industrial mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust, and the potential disaster of global warming are all extreme examples of a world based on alienated labour.

And although alienation is a profound philosophical concept it is also something every worker feels in his or her bones – it is the reality of their daily lives in the factory, the call center, the supermarket and the kitchen. Every strike, every trade union struggle, whether over wages, hours or conditions is, in part, a rebellion against alienated labour.

But the theory of alienation also has revolutionary implications. Neither improvements in wages and conditions, nor advances in welfare, nor any kind of parliamentary legislation can overcome alienation. Nor can any change in consciousness or attitude.Only a qualitative transformation in the relations of production, only workers’ power in society and workers’ control in the workplace can make workers masters of their own labour and thus end alienation, opening the way for the real development of humanity.
NOTE: It is impossible in the space of a column to do justice to the richness and complexity of Marx’s analysis of alienation. Interested readers are strongly ureged to consult the original source. The key text is Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 especially the section on ‘Estranged Labour’. It can be difficult but is immensely rewarding.

John Molyneux
December 2006