Old posts - Articles for Korean Socialist Newspaper Counterfire

I am publishing/republishing a number of old articles so they are readily available online and can be referenced with links. First comes a series of columns for Counterfire in Korea under the general title: Introduction to Marxism. Introduction to Marxism The Point is to Change it ‘Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways, the point however is to change it’. These words, written by the young Karl Marx, are inscribed on his grave in Highgate Cemetery in London. And rightly so, for they inspired everything he did and wrote throughout his political life. Today, more than 150 years on, it is easy to see that the world needs changing. The horrendous and ever growing inequality within and between nations; the almost unimaginable sums spent on arms while billions lack the basic necessities of life; the proliferation of destructive wars and the hatred and racism they generate; the crude domination of the world by the big corporations and by their representatives in the US government; the powerlessness and alienation experienced by the large majority of people in their daily lives and especially in their soul destroying jobs; the continuing subordination of women ie half the human race; the hypocrisy, lies and cruelty of our politicians and rulers the world over; the criminal inaction of governments in the face of environmental and human catastrophe through global warming. All these things, and many others, make it obvious that we, humanity, need a better society. The only people who really can’t and won’t see it are those who benefit massively from the present system, the rich and powerful. But HOW to change the world? That is the real question. Perhaps the problem is just that the wrong people are in charge. Get rid of Bush and Blair, replace them with … Hilary Clinton and Gordon Brown ? Or maybe not. Maybe what we need is for mankind to have a collective change of heart, but how do we bring that about? Prayer? Or is the solution to try to improve things gradually,bit by bit , reform by reform, country by country? If that won’t work and we need a revolution , what does that mean? Planting bombs or plotting a coup d’etat? Indeed can the world be changed ? After all people have been trying a long time – at least since Spartacus – and don’t seem to have done very well so far. A moment’s reflection on these questions shows that to change society we need an understanding of how it works. We need to know what causes the inequality, war, racism and other evils listed above. We need to know the system’s weak points, the fault lines along which it might fracture if the right pressure is applied. We need to know who will be our friends and potential allies in the struggle and who will be our enemies. If we are going to change this society we need to understand the principles governing the changing of society in general. This is where Marxism, or Marxist theory, comes in. The simple fact is that of all the various critiques of the system, all the theories of reform or revolution, all the strategies for change, by far the most serious , the most worked out , the most coherent and the most effective as a guide to action is Marxism. This is why, generation after generation, the majority of the most determined fighters for a better world, whether they were intellectuals like Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci , or militant workers like the fighters of the Paris Commune or proletariat of Petrograd in 1917 or the student rebels of the sixties, have been drawn towards Marxism. Sometimes the version of Marxism to which people have been drawn – that of Stalin’s Russia is the prime example – has proved to be a vicious caricature of the real thing and has betrayed them terribly. This is a real problem , a bitter legacy we have to deal with. But always the genuine Marxism of human liberation has survived . Time and again the establishment, the media and the professors have declared Marxism dead, out of date, and superceded. Again and again Marxism has reemerged as the principal intellectual and practical challenge to the status quo.This column is the first in a fortnightly series that will introduce and explain the basic ideas of Marxism. There are, of course, many readily available ‘introductions to Marxism’. Every serious library and bookshop will stock at least a few. Some are very good, some are very dry and academic and some are seriously misleading. What will distinguish this series from most of the rest is that it will be written , in the first place, for the activist – for that generation of young, and sometimes not so young , people who have come into politics through the struggle against authoritarian rule, neo-liberal globalisation and war and who are looking to deepen their critical understanding of the system and clarify their strategy for challenging it. The next column, in a fortnight’s time, will discuss what is the central idea in the whole of Marxism, namely the revolutionary role of the working class. John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 2 The Revolutionary Role of the Working Class Today there are millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, who broadly identify with the international anti-capitalist movement and want to see a change in the system. For the most part these people do not have a clear idea as to how this change can be made or who can make it. Many look to NGOs and single issue campaigns; others put their hopes in progressive governments like Chavez in Venezuela or Morales in Bolivia. Still others, though very much a minority at present, back some form of armed struggle. In Marx’s day there was also range of opinion among radicals. In the 1840s ,prior to Marx, two trends, both deriving from the French Revolution, dominated the left . The first, inspired by the Jacobins, believed that a small group of enlightened individuals should seize power by means of a secret conspiracy and then enact laws to establish a just society on behalf of the masses.This would be an egalitarian republic, without inherited privilege, but still with private property. The second, known as the Utopian Socialists, included figures such as Charles Fourier in France and Robert Owen in Britain. They were convinced that socialism ( collective ownership) was a better way to order society than capitalism and sought to bring it about by rational argument and force of example i.e. forming model communities. In other words the revolutionaries were not socialists, while the socialists were not revolutionaries. Marx rejected, or rather transcended, both these approaches to found revolutionary socialism. The key to revolutionary socialism was the identification of the working class or proletariat as the agent of social change. By the working class Marx meant those who live by the sale of their labour power, employed and exploited by the capitalists. – the new class was emerging from the Industrial Revolution in cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London and, to a lesser extent, in Europe especially its north western corner. Whereas for the conspirators and the Utopians change was to brought about from above, for Marx change was to come from below, made by the workers themselves. ‘ The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself’, he wrote. What made Marx base his politics on the working class was not its suffering but its power. The suffering and exploitation of the working class was, of course, appalling and it gave workers the motive and the interest in challenging the system, but slaves and peasants had suffered and been exploited for millennia. What distinguished the working class was a) its power actually to defeat capitalism, and b) its ability to create a new society. The working class is the unique child of capitalism. As capitalism expands so does the working class. Capitalism can defeat the worker class in battle after battle, break its strikes, smash its unions, curtail its liberty, but it cannot do without it to produce its profits, so always the workers return to fight again. Capitalism draws workers together in large workplaces, links them in national and global industries, and concentrates them in vast cities. This gives them massive potential political power. Without their work no train, bus, or lorry moves; no coal, iron or oil leaves the earth; no papers are printed, no TV station broadcasts, no bank or school opens. Even the armed forces of the state depend on workers in their ranks. In creating the working class, capitalism creates the most powerful oppressed class in history. The struggle of the working class is, by its nature, a collective struggle. To take on the mill owners of the !9th century or Ford or Hyundai today, workers have to combine their efforts and act together. To take possession of Ford or Hyundai the workers cannot divide the company up between them (as peasants divided the land) but have to turn it into social property. This what makes the working class a socialist class. Moreover, when the working class takes power it remains the producing class in society, with no class below it, which it can exploit or live off. And being concentrated in big industry and big cities at the center of economic and political power, it has the capacity to prevent any new class emerging above it; it will be able to produce and rule at the same time, thus laying the foundation for a genuinely classless society. In liberating itself the working class liberates humanity. This, the revolutionary role of the working class, is the core of Marxism. All Marx’s philosophy, history, economics and politics starts from here. No proposition in Marx has been so roundly dismissed by academics and pundits, including those otherwise ‘sympathetic’ to Marxism. ‘ The working class has changed’, is their familiar cry. Yes, the working class has changed, in its jobs, its clothes, its pay, its nationalities and its culture. But in its fundamental conditions of existence it remains: it is still the child of capitalism, still living by the sale of its labour power, still exploited and still struggling collectively; while in its size and potential power it has grown enormously. In Marx’s day the proletariat was more or less confined to western Europe, today it stretches and fights on all five continents, from Sau Paulo to Seoul. Therein lies the basis of socialism and the hope for humanity. John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 3 What is Capitalism ? Know your enemy is an old and useful maxim. The enemy of the working class movement and of millions of others round the world – peasants, students, intellectuals etc – is capitalism. Yet amongst the general public and also within the movement there is often only the vaguest of notions what capitalism is. This is because our rulers want it that way and thus ensure that from the lowest journalism to the top universities confusion reigns on the subject. Above all they want it to appear that capitalism is practically eternal – a matter of human nature – so as to dispel any idea of getting rid of it. Consequently they identify capitalism with a human character trait, namely ‘greed’ which, at least to some extent, has been around as long as humans, or with ‘money’ which has been around about 5000 years or with ‘private property’ which has existed for about 10,000 years. Inevitably ‘ordinary’ people are influenced by this. It doesn’t stop them disliking capitalism, especially the effects of capitalism which they experience daily. Nor does it stop them resisting capitalism, sometimes very fiercely. But it does seriously hamper any attempt to overthrow it. It was one of the most important of Karl Marx’s many intellectual achievements that he produced a clear and precise analysis of what defines capitalism, of how it emerged historically, and of the fundamental dynamic that drives it. The first thing to grasp is that capitalism is neither an attitude nor an idea, but a definite economic system, a way of organising production, which arose initially spontaneously and relatively recently in human history. It began to develop seriously in Europe in the late Middle Ages within the previous mode of production, feudalism. It was, and still is, a system of commodity production (commodities are goods produced for sale on the market) in which labour power becomes a commodity and wage labour becomes the main form of labour. The system is dominated by capital ( hence its name ), which is accumulated wealth used to employ wage labour with the aim of increasing its value in competition with other capitals. The wage labour /capital relation is the fundamental social relation that defines capitalism. In order to fully assert itself capitalism had not only to develop economically, the owners of capital, the capitalists or bourgeoisie, had also to conquer political power. This they did first in the Dutch Revolution of the 16th century and the English Revolution of the 17th century. Following the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (in Britain) capitalism came to dominate the world. Today it rules virtually everywhere. These basic features explain why capitalism was a more progressive system than feudalism. First, wage labour was an advance – in terms of human freedom, productivity and revolutionary potential – on the labour of slaves, serfs and peasants that preceded it. Second, the competition between capitalists compelled them to develop production on a scale unthinkable under the sway of the feudal lords or any previous set of rulers. However these same basic features also contain the seeds of all the inhumanity, inequality, crises, wars and destructiveness that have characterised the history of capitalism and make its overthrow so vital today. The development of generalised commodity production leads to a world in which everything is for sale – they would sell air if they could. The transformation of labour power into a commodity alienates workers from their labour and the products of their labour. It turns work into mindless drudgery and workers into appendages of the machine ( and the office). The employment of wage labour by capital is a process of exploitation, which grinds workers down and results in ever increasing inequality. The relentless uncontrolled competition between capitals produces periodic crises in which businesses go bankrupt, production falls, and mass unemployment and poverty ensues. The same competition means that smaller weaker businesses are taken over by larger stronger businesses and capital and production become ever more concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations. Competition between these corporations – for resources (oil!), markets, labour, investment outlets – leads to wars of increasing ferocity and growing destruction of the environment to the point where the survival of society is threatened. Historically the two most important errors in the understanding of capitalism have been its identification with a) private ownership and b) the free market. In both cases the mistake has been to equate one important and sometimes dominant feature of the system with the essence of the system. The social democrats (like the German SPD and the British Labour Party) used to believe that by expanding state ownership and state planning, by the capitalist state, it would be possible gradually to abolish capitalism or at least tame it. They were wrong. It produced not a mixture of capitalism and socialism but only a mixture of capitalism and state capitalism. The Stalinists believed that those countries where state ownership and state planning were close to total (the USSR, China etc) were therefore socialist even though the workers controlled neither production nor the state and wage labour remained and the state was in competition with the rest of world capitalism. They were wrong. Control of society by a privileged state bureaucracy was not socialism but bureaucratic state capitalist tyranny. In today’s anti-globalisation movement there are some who identify the enemy as only neo-liberalism, not capitalism as such. Neo-liberalism is indeed an enemy , but it is only one head of the capitalist hydra. Cutting it off , which is both good and necessary, will not, however, render the other heads less deadly. Ultimately there is only one way to abolish capitalism and achieve socialism. That is for workers themselves to take ownership and control of the process of production and to do that , like the bourgeoisie before them, they must take political power. Rosa Luxemburg summed it all up when she wrote, ‘ Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must they be broken ! ‘ John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 4 Why Revolution ? ‘ Marx was above all else a revolutionist’, said Engels in his speech at Marx’s graveside. But why, and why do Marxists go on about ‘ the revolution’? Revolutions are dangerous affairs . People get killed in revolutions, especially working people. And they have a habit of going wrong : look what happened in the French Revolution and in Russia and China – all that sacrifice and they ended up with tyrants as bad or worse than before. Besides revolution doesn’t look very likely. Most of the working class people you actually meet don’t seem in the least revolutionary. They are more interested in TV and football than revolution. So, surely, it is better and more realistic to try to change the system step by step – to work through trade unions and parliament to raise living standards and win reforms that benefit working people. Maybe that way we will eventually arrive at socialism but even if we don’t at least things will get better for us and our children. On the face of it these are powerful arguments and my guess is that many millions of working people have reasoned like this and as a result supported ‘moderate’ politicians and trade union leaders who have promised them reforms without the risks of revolutionary struggle. The history of what really happened in the French, Russian and other revolutions is obviously very important in this debate but space does not allow me to deal with it here. Instead I want to focus on Marx’s own answer to this question which was summed up in a single sentence written in 1845. ‘This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but because only in a revolution can the class overthrowing it rid itself of all the muck of ages and fit itself to found society anew.’ Like so many of Marx’s sentences this one combines a number of profound ideas and repays detailed examination and explanation. Let us start by noting that Marx is a revolutionary not out impatience or bitterness or love of violence or excitement, but out of necessity, because there is no other way of fundamentally changing society. The reasons for this are both economic and political. Let us start by noting that Marx is a revolutionary not out impatience or bitterness or love of violence or excitement, but out of necessity, because there is no other way of fundamentally changing society. The growing and profits are high, increased living growing and profits are high, increased living standards and reforms ( under pressure from below) are possible but only on condition that they do not threaten the central mechanism of accumulation. Thus, even in this most favourable scenario, reforms result only in more crumbs for the workers from the rich man’s table, while the gap between the workers and the rich grows wider and the power of the capitalists in society increases. When accumulation is going badly and profits are falling the ruling class attacks workers’ living standards and fights to claw back reforms granted in the past. The struggle for reforms, though it has to be waged, is like the labour of Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology condemned to push a ball up a hill only for it to roll back down again. But if step by step reform cannot change society what about electing a socialist government committed to the overall transformation of society ? Surely that at least would be peaceful ? Unfortunately not. Faced with such a threat the capitalist class, as it has shown many times in the past, would use all its economic and political power to undermine, frustrate and destroy the government. It would attack the currency through speculation, go on investment strike, close down factories, lock out workers and thus provoke an intense economic crisis. It would use the state apparatus, which is not neutral but tied by a thousand threads to the interests of the ruling class, to block legislation and government action, and in the final analysis it would use force, in the shape of a military or fascist coup. The working class would only be able to resist this offensive by using its power, by occupying the factories and workplaces, by breaking up the existing state machine and taking control of society itself. In other words, far from avoiding the need for revolution, the election of a socialist government would either be a prelude to revolution or it would fail. And unless there existed within the movement an organized body of workers with a revolutionary perspective – a revolutionary party – the chances of success in this confrontation would be slim. But this is all fantasy, our skeptic might object. The working class is never going to opt for revolution, it’s too brainwashed by the system. This is where the second part of the quote from Marx comes in, for it is true that the system , through the media, education etc. stuffs workers’ heads with reactionary ideas – nationalism, racism, sexism, deference, belief in capitalism and so on – the ‘muck of ages’ as Marx calls it. It is often assumed that for there to be a revolution the majority of people have first to be convinced of revolutionary ideas. This is not how it happens says Marx. Revolutions begin spontaneously when large masses of workers engage in struggle, usually over a particular issue or against a particular regime. It is in the process of revolutionary struggle, above all because of the sense they get of their collective power, that the mass of workers rid themselves of their prejudices and illusions and develop revolutionary consciousness. This is why revolution is both necessary and possible. John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 5 The Principle of Internationalism ‘ Workers of the world, unite !’ Ever since these words brought to a close the Communist Manifesto of 1848, this has been the basic slogan of our movement. It brings together, in the most succinct form, two fundamental ideas:1) that our movement is the movement of a definite class, the working class or proletariat; 2) that it is an international movement – the working people of all countries are our brothers and sisters. The first of these ideas I discussed earlier in this series; in this column I shall discuss the principle of internationalism. ‘ The proletariat has no fatherland’. With these words, also from the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels signaled their complete break with the ruling ideas, the ideas of the ruling class, on the question of patriotism and nationhood. Across the globe, from the cradle to the grave, we are all indoctrinated to believe that our first loyalty is to, and our basic identification is with, our nation. Education, culture, sport and politicians all contribute to this process to the point where it is made to seem almost unnatural not to support ‘our’ ( Korean, British, American, Chinese, whatever) industry, team, army, etc. In reality there is nothing ‘natural’ at all about nationalism. For the vast bulk of human history people had no sense of nationhood whatsoever for the simple reason that there were no nations. Nationalism emerged in Europe over the last 4-500 years and in most of the world only in the last century. This is because nationalism is a product of capitalism. Like capitalism itself, nationalism was originally progressive. It served as a rallying cry against the dynastic empires, monarchies and petty principalities of feudalism – witness its role in the French Revolution. Like capitalism it has long since become reactionary, acting as the principal ideological mechanism for obscuring the conflict of interest between the working class and the capitalist class and creating a false sense of identity between exploiters and the exploited. At the same time it works, like racism, to divide and weaken the working class by making them see foreign workers as their rivals and enemies. Breaking with nationalism is, therefore, central to breaking with capitalist ideas and is one the key dividing lines between Marxists and reformists, who, by and large, go along with nationalism ( as they tend to go along with much of bourgeois ideology, importing it into the workers’ movement). The question of internationalism versus nationalism comes to head in time of war. For the socialist movement the test case was the beginning of World War 1 in 1914. This led to split between the reformist leaders of most European socialist parties who supported their ‘own’ ruling classes in the imperialist slaughter and the revolutionary Marxists, such as Lenin and Trotsky in Russia and Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Germany, who opposed the war and followed Liebknecht’s maxim that ‘The main enemy is at home’. In general terms the internationalist attitude to war is to condemn wars between big capitalist, ie imperialist, powers and to work for the overthrow of our own ruling class and the unity of the workers of the contending nations. In wars of imperialist conquest, such as the Vietnam War or the Iraq War, internationalists both condemn the war and positively support the right to self-determination of the oppressed nation , including its right to wage a war of national liberation.(Though it must be remembered that each war is different and a concrete analysis must always be made.) Does this support for ‘national’ liberation violate the principle of internationalism? No. The support is given to the struggle against national oppression, not to nationalism. Its aim is to weaken imperialism, our common enemy, and to facilitate the voluntary unity of the working class and oppressed of all countries. There is a further, equally important, reason why Marxists are internationalists. Capitalism is a global system and the workers’ struggle against it can only be waged successfully on an international basis. The revolution may begin in one country but to be completed it must be spread. A socialist society cannot be built in one country, because of the counter revolutionary pressure, both economic and military, that will inevitably be applied to by the rest of world capitalism. Marx and Engels realized this from the beginning. Already in 1847 in The Principles of Communism Engels directly posed the question, ‘Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone ?’ and answered ‘No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the earth… into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.’ The experience of Russia proved the point in practice. The adoption of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ by Stalin in 1924 marked Stalin’s break with Marxism and produced not socialism but state capitalism. Having abandoned international revolution the Soviet bureaucracy was forced to compete with western capitalism on its own terms ie in terms of the exploitation of its working class. Today, in the age of globalisation and global warming, internationalism is more relevant and vital than ever. It must be applied at home in defense of refugees and migrant workers, in the trade union struggle against the multinationals, in the struggle against Bush and Blair’s ‘War on Terror’, and in the international anti-capitalist and socialist movements. Now more than ever we have a world to save and to win! John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 6 Their History and Ours In the first five of these columns I have set out some of Marx’s key political ideas on the working class, capitalism, revolution and internationalism. Although these ideas are important in themselves, they also form part of a wider system of thought, Marx’s theory of history which is usually called ‘historical materialism’. Historical materialism is the backbone of Marxism as a whole. It provides an overview of the whole of human history from the Old Stone Age to the modern era and it is the method used by Marxists to analyse not only past events like the French Revolution and the Second World War, but also current developments such as the rise of China and the Lebanon War. And its not just a theory but also a guide to action. Some people will say why bother with a theory of history at all, why not just stick to the facts. But this is an illusion. In history, indeed on any day in history, there are an infinite number of ‘facts’, of things that happen. ANY account of history, whether it admits or not, depends on a general theory in order to decide which facts are important for human development and which are not and what are the likely relations between these facts. Mainstream history, the kind that dominates in the media and in school, is mainly based on the ‘theory’ that what shapes history is, first and foremost, the actions of powerful individuals – emperors, kings, politicians, generals and the like – particularly the battles they fought, the policies they pursued and the laws they passed. This theory, fairly obviously, expresses the standpoint of the ruling classes who naturally assume that it is they who make history. An alternative theory, popular with intellectuals, is that history is shaped primarily by ideas – either the ideas of great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle , Confucius etc. or disembodied ideas like ‘order’, ‘nationalism’, ‘democracy’, ‘economic growth’ which mysteriously capture society at various times and express the ‘spirit of the age’. The great weakness of this approach is that it fails to explain where these ideas come from or why they arise when they do. Then there is an approach which appeals especially to academics. It denies that history is driven by any single factor. Rather it says that history is shaped by various different ‘factors’ – a bit of economics, a bit of politics, an element of class, an element of religion and so on. In recent years ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are often added to the list. This method, sometimes called ‘pluralism’, sometimes ‘postmodernism’, suits those who do not want to make up their minds or take sides, but want to present their ideas as unbiased, sophisticated and profound. Its defect is that it explains neither how the different ‘factors’ arise nor how they interact – it simultaneously explains everything and nothing. What unites all these approaches is that they tend to view society and history from the top down. Marx’s theory of history is quite different: it is history from below, from the standpoint of the working class, and openly acknowledges itself to be so. It does not deny that the deeds and ideas of powerful individuals play a role in history but it does not begin with them. It begins with the everyday actions, the work, of the many millions of ordinary working people struggling to make a life for themselves. Historical materialism is not only more radical than the various mainstream, i.e. bourgeois, theories, it is also more coherent and more scientific. This is because it starts where history has to start, with real human individuals and their needs and what they do to meet those needs. ‘ The first premise of all history’, writes Marx, ‘ is that men must be in a position to live in order to “make history”. But life involves before anything else eating, drinking, clothing, a habitation and many other things.’ Of course animals also have material needs but the difference is that humans produce their means of subsistence through social labour. Historical materialism, therefore, focuses first on production: on the technical means through which it is achieved, which Marx calls the forces of production, and the social relations between which it involves, which Marx calls the relations of production. Together the forces and relations of production form definite modes of production or economic systems, such as ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism. The mode of production, Marx argues, constitutes the ‘real foundation’ or economic base of society ‘on which arises a legal and political superstructure’ and which ‘conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’. Marx’s insight here turns upside down the way these things are usually put. To give some examples: we do not live in a capitalist society because people believe in capitalist ideas, people believe in capitalism because we live in a capitalist society (which began to develop spontaneously out of the soil of feudalism long before it was conceptualized by anyone); the Atlantic slave trade and western imperialism were not caused by racism, rather racism was caused by the slave trade and imperialism, which were part of the expansion of capitalism. Or, to be absolutely contemporary, Islamophobia is not the cause but the consequence of US imperialism’s desire to control Middle Eastern and Central Asian energy supplies. It is important to point out that Marx was able to have these insights – so invaluable for understanding both past history and current politics – because he had already grasped the revolutionary potential of the working class. How he developed them into a full blown theory of social change and revolution will be discussed in the next column. John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 7 How Society Changes As I explained in the last column Marx’s theory of history centred on production. The way a society organizes the production of the necessities of life constitutes its mode of production, the economic base which shapes its superstructure- its law, politics, religion, philosophy, morality, art etc. But how does one mode of production change into another? For Marx, himself, and for us today, for everyone who is anti-capitalist, i.e. wants to get rid of the capitalist mode of production, this is the crucial question. To answer it we must go back to the fact that Marx distinguished two aspects of production: the forces and relations of production. It is the interaction and conflict between these which lays the basis for fundamental social change. The forces of production are the capacity of a society to produce goods: its resources, labour, knowledge and technology. Examples include: the spears and bows and arrows of stone age hunters; the ox or horse drawn ploughs of the medieval farmer; the textile mills, spinning jennies and steam trains of the industrial revolution; the production lines, power stations and computers of modern industry. The relations of production are the social relation people enter into in the process of producing. They range from the primitive communist clan of hunters and gatherers, to slave owners and slaves of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, to landlords and serfs or peasants, to capitalist employers and wage workers today. Marx argues that it is the level of development of the forces of production that shapes the relations of production. ‘ The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist’. The forces of production, however, tend to grow, by no means evenly or at a uniform rate, but over time they tend to advance as human beings discover ways to produce more effectively. At a certain stage in their development the forces of production come into conflict with the existing relations of production (which are also society’s property relations). While at first these relations had assisted the growth of the productive forces, they now become an obstacle, a ‘ fetter’ on their further development. Then , says Marx, ‘ there begins an epoch of social revolution’. When this contradiction sets in the whole of society is thrown into prolonged crisis. The old ways of doing things no longer work. The old ideas and established institutions start to lose their authority. New critical and revolutionary ideas start to emerge. The crisis is only resolved when a new mode of production with new relations of production is established and society is able to move forward. This, in essence, was what happened in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and is what lies behind the general crisis of capitalism today, now operating on a world scale. It is why, despite the existence of productive forces easily capable of supplying everyone on the planet with a decent living, thousands of millions suffer poverty, malnutrition and homelessness. It is why we are beset with endless conflict and wars and why we are threatened with environmental catastrophe. It is a crisis that will be ended only with the establishment of a new mode of production – socialism. Put just like this ( and, for various reasons, Marx did sometimes put it this way) the whole process can sound mechanical and automatic – economically determined and independent of human action. But nothing could be further from the truth and nothing further from Marx’s real meaning. This is because the conflict between the forces and relations of production is also a conflict between social classes. Ever since the end of primitive communist hunter-gatherer society, the relations of production have been, at the same time, class relations, relations of exploitation and oppression in which one class ( the class which owns and controls the main means of production) is the dominant or ruling class – in Ancient Society the slave owners, in feudalism the landed aristocracy, in capitalism the bourgeoisie. This class has a vested interest in the existing order which is the basis of its power and privileges. Faced with a challenge from developing productive forces it does not at all say ‘ Our time is up. Let us vacate the stage gracefully’. On the contrary it fights bitterly to defend the status quo - ‘ our way of life’ or ‘ civilisation as we know it’, as they say. The developing forces of production are also linked to and produce a definite class – under feudalism the growth of manufacture and trade gave rise to the bourgeoisie, under capitalism modern industry gives birth to the working class or proletariat. The resolution of the crisis, and the fate of humanity, depends on the outcome of the struggle between the old ruling class and the new rising class. This is anything but pre-determined.. In Europe the failure of the bourgeois revolution in Italy and Germany in the 16th century set those countries back three hundred years – they did not even achieve national unification until the 19th century. In China ( and by extension Korea) the old imperial order was able to suppress the development of capitalism with the consequence that they entered the 20th century as deeply impoverished, perennial victims of imperialism. The defeat of the workers’ revolution in Germany in 1918-23 led to the rise of Stalin and Hitler and was paid for in blood by more than 70 million people. The ruling class has much on its side, wealth, tradition, ideology and in particular state power, which has been fashioned specifically for the purpose of holding down the oppressed classes. The struggle of the revolutionary class has to be both an economic and a political struggle, a struggle for state power. Victory in the struggle depends on political consciousness, mobilization and organization. A significant part of that is what we, as activists, do now. John Molyneux 19 August 2006 KOREA COLUMN 8 The Meaning of Class As we saw in the last of these columns the concept of class struggle played a crucial role in Marx’s theory of history. For Marx class struggle was the main driving force in history and the means by which one mode of production is transformed into another, for example feudalism into capitalism or capitalism into socialism. But what is meant by class? In modern capitalist society this question has become very confused, and not accidentally so. On the one hand the term is very widely used – in the media, in literature and in daily life – because the existence of layers of people with very unequal amounts of wealth, and widely differing life styles and opportunities is so obvious that it cannot be denied. On the other hand our rulers have a massive interest in ensuring that people, especially working people, do not develop a clear understanding of it, do not, in other words, develop class consciousness. Consequently, for more than a century, the ruling class has been happy to fund academics (particularly sociologists) and pundits to come up with a variety of theories and concepts of class. They have not minded very much about the content of these theories on one condition – that they disputed and ‘refuted’ the Marxist theory of class, the only one they really feared. The principal strategy in this ideological mystification has been to treat class as essentially a subjective matter, a question of how people see their own and others’ position in the social structure and how they define their own class identity. Max Weber, the early 20th century sociologist who is the key intellectual figure in much of this debate, focused primarily on ‘status’ and ‘status groups’, rather than economic class, as being the main factors in social action, with status defined as prestige in the eyes of others. Even when class is defined by occupation, as is the case in many governmental and sociological statistics, which appears to be an objective criterion, the ranking of the occupations – for example teachers as middle class, mechanics as working class – is done on the subjective basis of presumed status. Treating class as subjective makes the concept highly unstable, varying from year to year, decade to decade, country to country, and also opens the door to regular claims that class divisions have disappeared or are no longer important, and that viewing politics in class terms is out of date. By contrast Marxism, though obviously concerned with class consciousness, insists that class divisions are objective – they exist in the structure of society independently of people’s awareness or conception of them. For Marx, class divisions derive from and are based on the relations of production in society. Often this is expressed in the phrase ‘class is defined by relationship to the means of production’, usually with the rider that ‘it is a question of ownership or non- ownership’. But, although it points in the right direction, this formulation is inadequate and can be misleading. Slave owners, feudal lords and capitalists are all owners of the means of production but they are three different classes. Similarly, in modern society, neither a middle manager in Samsung nor a shop floor worker are owners of the means of production but they are not both members of the same class. A fuller understanding of the Marxist theory of class requires a grasp of three points. First, that the relations of production of society form a totality, a definite system of production, and classes are defined by the roles they play in the system as a whole. It is necessary to start from the system as a whole, not from individual cases. Second, that classes are a matter not only of relations between people and things (means of production – land, machines, factories etc.) but also of social relations between people; classes are formed in conflict with one another. Third, that what drives the conflict is not envy or different life styles or even just inequality, but exploitative relations of production, that is the systematic extraction of a surplus (profit) by one group of people from the labour of another group. Class struggle derives from exploitation in the process of production and from there extends to every aspect of social life. It is the concept of exploitation ( to be explained further in my next column) which differentiates the Marxist theory of class and which is absent from all the bourgeois, liberal and sociological accounts. Exploitation creates an objective conflict of interests – first over pay, hours of work, conditions etc. and then over housing, health, education, law and order, foreign policy (warfare versus welfare) and so on. Apply this analysis to modern capitalist society and, with some important local variations, we find essentially the same class structure in all developed countries. At the top, stands the ruling or capitalist class, which owns or controls the major means of production, and lives on the profits it makes from the employment of wage labour. Not every member of the ruling class, e.g .some top politicians and state officials, is personally involved in the employment and profit making, but they are all tied into it and depend on it. In opposition to them stands the majority, the working class, who live by the sale of their labour power and are exploited by the capitalist class. The working class includes both manual and white collar workers – nurses and teachers as well as dockers and car workers. If people live primarily by the sale of their labour power they are part of the working class whether they work in mines and factories or call centers and colleges. Between these two main classes stand various intermediate strata, commonly called the middle class, who shade into the ruling class at their upper levels and the working class at their lower levels. There are two strands in the middle class, both hierarchically organized. On the one hand, small business owners, the petty bourgeoisie, who are either self employed or employ a few workers. On the other, managers. Managers may appear to be working class in that they do not own the means of production and are paid wages or salaries, but in fact they are not paid to work as such and are not exploited, they are paid to manage and enforce the exploitation of the workers under their control. Such managers exist not only in private companies, but also in schools, hospitals, and the state bureaucracy. It is the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class that shapes the basic political terrain in modern society. The middle classes play an important role – the ruling class cannot run society without them – but politically they tend to vacillate between the two main classes according to which is exerting the stronger ‘gravitational pull’. In many less developed countries there is another large class, the peasantry, which plays a significant role in production and politics, but even where the peasantry are still a majority, it is usually the battle between capitalists and workers which is decisive. And on a world scale it is absolutely clear that it is the struggle between the international bourgeoisie and the international proletariat that will determine the fate of humanity, John Molyneux September 13, 2006 KOREA COLUMN 9 How Workers are Exploited In my last column I showed how for Marx classes and class struggle are created and shaped by exploitation. This reverses the way the matter is usually seen – that first classes exist and then, every now and again, one class exploits the other. It is also the case that Marx’s concept of exploitation differs fundamentally from what it is the dominant conception in our society. According to the dominant conception exploitation is either mainly a thing of the past – eg child labour was exploited in the Industrial Revolution – or exists today only by way of exception , practiced by rogue employers who pay especially low wages. For Marx, however, exploitation is the norm not the exception. Even relatively well paid workers employed by so-called ‘good’, even ‘generous’ employers are, nevertheless , exploited. Exploitation is inherent in the capitalist wage labour relation. ‘How can this be?’ cry the employers and their supporters with one voice. ‘When we employ workers it is a fair exchange, wages for work, and a voluntary contract freely entered into by both parties. Indeed they should be grateful to us for providing them with work and if they don’t like it, let them go and work somewhere else.’ In reality this argument is false from beginning to end. Capitalists do not ‘provide work’ or ‘create jobs’. There was work before capitalism and there will be work after capitalism. Jobs, i.e. tasks that require performing, arise from human needs, and with 6 billion people on the planet, who all need feeding, clothing, housing, educating etc. etc. there is absolutely no shortage of work for those 6 billion to do. What the capitalists actually do, through their ownership and control of the means of production, is make it impossible for most people to work except by working for them. Nor, of course, do they employ people out of charity or civic duty, but in order to make a profit i.e. expand the value of their capital. But how is this profit made? Where does it come from? Obviously by not paying the workers enough. But how are the capitalists able to get away with this daylight robbery, day after day, year after year, decade after decade and why does it all look so fair on the surface? It was one of Marx’s greatest intellectual achievements to answer all these questions and to demonstrate that beneath the façade of a ‘fair exchange’ lay the systematic extraction of unpaid labour from the workers. The starting point of Marx’s answer is that under capitalism workers’ ability to work, their labour power, is sold as a commodity like every other commodity. The value of a commodity ( value is not the same as price but is the underlying point around which actual prices oscillate) is determined, Marx says, by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. The reason a loaf of bread sells for $1, while a shirt sells for $20 and a car for $10,000 is, in the final analysis, that it takes 10,000 times as many hours of labour (with current levels of technology) to make a car, and 20 times as many to make a shirt, as it does to make a loaf of bread. Not surprisingly, bourgeois economists deny this ‘labour theory of value’, but in practice all capitalists know it, if only by instinct. Consider a capitalist who consistently sold his products below their value – he would run at a loss and soon go out of business. Now consider one who tried to sell his products above their value – sooner or later a rival capitalist would be able to undersell him and he would again go out of business. Competition, therefore, forces capitalists to sell their products at prices which fluctuate around their value measured in labour time. Now apply this to the commodity of labour power and it follows that the value of labour power – its wages- is determined by the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce it, i.e. to rear, feed, clothe, train etc. the worker so that s/he is able to work. But if labour power is bought and sold like any other commodity, there is one vital respect in which it differs from all other commodities: it is creative – in action it produces more value than was required to produce it. The difference, this surplus value as Marx called it, is pocketed by the capitalist and is the ultimate source of all profit. What it means is that the worker who works 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, and is paid $40 dollars a day, $200 dollars a week, produces goods or services equal to their wages in say, 5 hours a day, 25 hours a week and in reality works 3 hours a day, 15 hours a week, unpaid. Unpaid labour – exploitation in its strictest sense – is, therefore, alive and well under capitalism today, just as much as it was under slavery or feudalism or in the early Industrial Revolution. Marx’s theory of surplus value is of immense significance. It exposes the ideological, self – serving nature of the capitalist view of wage labour and opens the door to the scientific analysis of the laws of motion of the capitalist economy. But it does something else as well: it shows that at the heart of capitalist production lies a direct and irreconcilable conflict of interest. The longer the working day the greater the proportion of unpaid labour and of surplus value for the capitalist. The shorter the working day the lower the proportion of unpaid labour. The lower the level of wages, the higher the level of profit. The higher the wages, the lower the profits. Wages and profits, therefore : …stand in inverse ratio to each other. Capital’s exchange value, profit, rises in the same proportion as labour’s share, wages, falls, and vice versa. Profit rises to the extent that wages fall; it falls to the extent that wages rise… the interests of capital and the interests of wage labour are diametrically opposed . (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital) This is how Marx’s theory of exploitation underpins his theory of class and class struggle. John Molyneux KOREA COLUMN 10 How They Rule Us Capitalism, as we have seen, is a class divided society based on exploitation. Under capitalism a tiny highly privileged minority rules over the large majority and lives off their labour. How do they get away with it ? The answer, as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci pointed out, is by a combination of force and consent. In reality force and consent are very closely intertwined and mutually reinforce each other, but for the moment I shall discuss them separately. The element of force is primarily exercised by the state, that network of interlocking institutions – armed forces, police, judiciary, prisons, government bureaucracies etc – which stands over society and claims general authority, including a monopoly of legitimate force. This state apparatus claims, at every level of its operation, to represent society as a whole – the so-called national or public interest. Hence the perennial assertion by police, judges, generals and so on that they are politically neutral. But the idea of a common national or public interest is a myth. The nation consists of classes, exploiters and exploited with opposed interests, and the society which the state represents is not society as such but specifically capitalist society, based on capitalist property relations and capitalist relations of production. The first duty of the state is to secure the preservation of this capitalist order. and since this order embodies the supremacy of the capitalist class, the state is, in the words of Marx ‘ but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. The class character of the state is reflected in its composition. The upper ranks of the military, the police, the judiciary and the civil service are drawn overwhelmingly from the bourgeoisie and retain economic, family and social ties with that class. But the intrusion into this milieu of the occasional individual from the lower orders changes nothing. On the one hand the actual class position of such an individual is changed by the fact of their promotion and their outlook will tend to change accordingly. On the other hand acceptance of the capitalist mode of operation of the state is the condition of such promotion. The consequence of the capitalist nature of the state is that force, or the threat of force, underpins almost every aspect of daily life. Consider some examples: a worker goes to work and makes some products. At the end of the day he or she tries to take all or some of them home. The worker will, of course, be forcibly arrested and forcibly detained in a police cell. Or the workers at a factory decide to go on strike, but only ninety per cent of them come out while ten per cent try to continue working. The law, in the shape of a substantial number of police, will immediately arrive at the factory to ensure the scabs’ ‘right to work’. But if the factory bosses decide to close down and make all the workforce redundant, the police will also arrive, this time to ensure that everyone goes home and no amount of appeals to the ‘right to work’ will move them in the slightest. In all these cases the police will say they are ‘only doing their job’, but that is the point – their job is the enforcement of capitalist exploitation. The examples I have given may seem slightly strange precisely because they are so obvious, so taken for granted, but that is also the point. Capitalist exploitation would not last five minutes without state law, backed by state force, to sustain it. Most of the time state force remains as far as possible low key and in the background but it comes to the fore the moment there is a real challenge to the interests of the capitalist class. If the challenge comes from abroad this takes the form of war; if the challenge is internal it is met with repression. If the challenge comes from an elected government it can take the form of organizing a military or fascist coup, as happened, for example, with General Pinochet in Chile in 1973 or as has been attempted recently against the Chavez government in Venezuela. This last point – the potential use of state power on behalf of the bourgeoisie and against the government of the day – is very important. First it completely undermines the official constitutional view (and the view promulgated by political science and taught in the education system) that the state apparatus is subordinate to the elected government. Secondly it raises a key issue in Marxist theory which was ignored or distorted by most supposedly socialist or Marxist parties in the twentieth century. The strategy of these organizations, beginning with German Social Democracy before the First World War, was to win ‘power’ by means of parliamentary elections, thus acquiring control of the state apparatus which would then be used to construct socialism. But Marx, on the basis of the experience of the Paris commune, had argued that it was not possible for the working class to take over the existing state machine and use it for its own purposes. The existing state was organically tied to the bourgeoisie and could not be used for socialism; rather it had to be broken up – smashed – and replaced by a new state apparatus created by the working class. Marx’s genuine theory of the state was rediscovered and vigorously reasserted by Lenin in his great book, The State and Revolution. More than that it was put into practice in the Russian Revolution by means of soviet power, i.e. the power of workers’ councils. Later, however, the international communist movement, under the direction of Stalinism reverted to the idea of a parliamentary road to socialism and taking over the existing state apparatus. But, the objection is often raised, the modern state, with its armies, tanks, bombs, planes etc is too powerful to be smashed, even by the largest mass movement of the working class. This, however, leaves out of the equation the crucial weakness of the state and of all the power of the ruling class which is the fact that for all its operations it depends on the collaboration of a section of the working class. Every gun needs a soldier to carry it, every tank a driver, every plane a team of mechanics. Almost the entire apparatus of the state is staffed, at its lower levels by workers and what happens in a mass revolution is that the pressure of the working leads to many or most of these workers breaking from their officers and joining the people. This is how the state is broken. What this makes clear however is that the final analysis the rule of the bourgeoisie depends not just on force but also on consent. How that consent is maintained and how it is lost will be the subject of the next column. John Molyneux 13 October 2006 KOREA COLUMN 13 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 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 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 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 19th 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 19th and early 20th 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 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 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 17th 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 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). 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. 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. 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. 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 KOREA COLUMN 19 The theory of the Revolutionary Party The most important of the many contributions to Marxist theory after Marx is, in my opinion, the theory of the revolutionary party developed by Lenin. What makes this theory so important is, first, that history has shown that without such a party the socialist revolution cannot be victorious and, second, that this theory affects and transforms every aspect of socialist activity in the here and now. Before setting out the positive features of the Leninist theory of the party, it is perhaps necessary to say what the theory is not. It is not simply the idea that to struggle effectively the working class needs to be organized into a political party. This was well understood by Marx and by most Marxists and socialists long before Lenin and has continued to be an article of faith of most reformists and non – Leninist socialists subsequent to Lenin. Nor is it some special organizational formula, such as ‘democratic centralism’. The principle that a socialist party should be internally democratic in discussing and forming policy but united in action in implementing that policy was indeed adopted by the Bolshevik Party and other Leninist organizations but it was not invented by Lenin, not a fixed organizational structure or regime, and certainly not the key distinguishing or defining characteristic of the Leninist party. What was distinctively Leninist was a new conception of the relationship between the party and the class. This conception was not arrived at by Lenin in a single moment of theoretical inspiration, nor is it systematically set out in any single Lenin text. Rather it was developed in practice, by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, before it was expounded theoretically. With hindsight we can say that this conception rested on the combination of two key principles: 1. The independent organization of a party consisting wholly of revolutionary socialists 2. The establishment and maintenance of the closest possible links between the independent revolutionary and the mass of the working class. Prior to Karl Marx there existed two models of socialist activity. The first, drawn from the French Revolution and based on the Jacobins, was of a secret club or conspiracy which would seize power in a coup d’etat on behalf of the masses. The second, as with the ‘Utopian Socialists’, was of passive propaganda which would preach the virtues of socialism to the general public and, especially, to the ruling class. Marx transcended both these models with the understanding that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself, and the idea of a workers’ party combining active engagement in workers’ day to day struggles with socialist political propaganda. Following Marx the predominant form of socialist organization was the large national workers party, including in its ranks all or most of the strands of socialism in a given country. A typical example was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which had an openly reformist right wing led by Eduard Bernstein, a revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and a majority ‘centre’ led by Bebel and Kautsky, which talked revolution while practicing reformism. Similar parties, with similar trends existed in most European countries before the First World War, and together they made up the Second, or Socialist International. What Leninism brought to this was the idea that the revolutionary left should separate from the reformist right and the vacillating center, and organize independently. What was really at stake here was the role of the reformist leaders. Marx and Engels and the young Luxemburg and young Trotsky were all revolutionaries, not reformists, but they tended to assume that once revolution broke out the reformist and centrist leaders would either be swept along with the movement or swept aside by it. KOREA COLUMN 20 Capitalism and Imperialism As Marx explained in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism is a system which is subject to constant change and development. ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions… distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all others.’ In the run up to the First World War, i.e. twenty five to thirty years after Marx’s death, it became clear to most of the leading Marxist theorists that capitalism had entered a new stage of development, distinct and different in various ways from the capitalism analysed by Marx in Capital. Since one of the most obvious characteristics of the period was the struggle between the so-called ‘Great Powers’ (Britain, France, Germany, Russia etc.) to take over and colonise virtually the whole world, the term ‘imperialism’ was widely adopted as the name for this new phase of capitalism. Analysis of imperialism became an important task for Marxism, and that task became even more pressing when rivalry between the imperialist powers erupted into the mass slaughter of world war – the most destructive conflict in human history up to that point. Many leading Marxists of the time – Hilferding, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin – applied themselves to this project. Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910), Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1915), and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy(1916), were particularly important contributions to an ongoing debate, but what was to prove by far the most influential analysis was provided by Lenin in his brochure Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin’s work had significant limitations. By his own account it was only a ‘popular outline’ of the subject and, because it was designed to get past the Tsarist censorship, it dealt only with the economic features of imperialism and refrained from drawing political conclusions. Nevertheless it provided an extraordinarily clear and concise summary of imperialism’s essential characteristics and structure and of the theoretical underpinning of Lenin’s political opposition to the war and to imperialism, which became known by other means. For Lenin ‘ Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general’ but it was also distinguished by five main features: 1. The replacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly and the domination of economic life by giant monopolies, cartels, trusts etc. 2. The merger of bank capital and industrial capital to produce ‘finance capital’ and the emergence of a financial oligarchy 3. A shift from the export of goods (typical of the previous phase of capitalism) to the export of capital, particularly to economically backward countries where profits are high, due to a scarcity of capital, and cheap labour, land and raw materials 4. The formation of international capitalist monopolies, which operate across the globe and divide the world among themselves. 5. Alongside this economic division, the complete territorial division of the world among the Great Powers, so that further expansion, further acquisition of colonies, was possible only through the forcible repartitioning of the world. Clearly Lenin’s analysis both offered a Marxist explanation of the First World War, and supported his revolutionary opposition to it. Since war was the necessary consequence of imperialism and imperialism was capitalism in its latest stage, any ‘peace’ on a capitalist basis would only be a ‘truce’ before the next war. Real peace could be won only by the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Throughout this analysis Lenin was keen to stress his differences with Kautsky, widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on Marxism, but whom Lenin viewed as a traitor since his failure to oppose the War in August 1914. Kautsky argued that imperialism was not a ‘stage’ of capitalism as such, or even an economic necessity for capitalism as a whole, but merely a ‘policy’ adopted under the influence of particular pro-imperialist capitalists. He also suggested that it was possible, even likely, that capitalism would soon enter a new ‘ultra-imperialist’ phase in which competition and conflict between rival monopolies and states would give way to agreement and peaceful co-operation. Lenin insisted that such views were both theoretically false, completely separating the politics of imperialism from its economics, and politically disastrous, blunting the struggle against war, imperialism and capitalism and leading directly to opportunism, reformism and class collaboration by sowing illusions in the possibility of a peaceful non- imperialist capitalism, freed of its contradictions. Lenin’s economic analysis of imperialism must also be seen in the context of his political position on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. He had first developed this position in relation to the many oppressed nationalities within the Tsarist Empire – Latvians, Georgians, Ukrainians etc. Lenin insisted that revolutionaries in the oppressor country, i.e. Russia, had an absolute duty to defend the right of oppressed nations to secede if they chose to do so, and that this was the only basis on which the international unity of the working class could be achieved. Lenin extended this position to apply to colonial countries in general, arguing that imperialism would inevitably generate anti- imperialist struggles from Ireland to China, and that these would play a vital role in weakening the imperialist powers and assisting their overthrow by the working class. It was therefore necessary to establish an international alliance between the working class and the oppressed nations and people’s of the world against imperialism (without, of course, abandoning independent revolutionary socialist organisation). The ninety one years since the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism have obviously witnessed enormous further changes in world capitalism, economically and politically – the depression of the thirties, the rise (and then fall) of fascism and Stalinism, the Second World War, the Cold war, the permanent arms economy and the post war boom, the retreat from colonialism, the return of crises in the seventies, globalisation and others too numerous to mention here. At times elements in Lenin’s analysis, e.g. the export of capital to underdeveloped countries, have become less relevant, and elements emphasised by other Marxists, such as the drawing together of the state and capital pointed to by Bukharin, have become more relevant. Nevertheless it is astonishing how well the core of Lenin’s analysis has stood the test of time and how much of it still applies to the world today. We still live in a world dominated by giant capitalist corporations (far larger, of course, than in Lenin’s day) and imperialist states. Despite the illusions, peddled by the system’s ideologists, in a peaceful ‘new world order’ or a conflict free ‘end of history’ following the fall of the Soviet Union, or in the abolition of poverty and war by capitalist globalisation, imperialism remains warlike and anti-imperialist revolt grows. Despite the existence, in the shape of the US, of a single imperialist superpower, that power is already obliged to strategise against potential future threats such as China, or a resurgent Russia, and has already over reached itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, from our side, uncompromising opposition to imperialism and imperialist war remains absolutely central to socialist politics. John Molyneux 13 April 2007 KOREA COLUMN 21 Marxism and the Russian Revolution The Russian Revolution had more influence on the development of Marxism after Marx than any other event. First it confirmed the argument put in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution (discussed in column 18 of this series) that the working class could still take power even where it was, as yet, a minority and society had not yet passed through the stage of capitalist democracy. Secondly it demonstrated the crucial role of a centralised revolutionary party in transforming a revolutionary situation into a revolutionary victory (dealt with in column 19). Thirdly, it showed in practice the form of political organisation through which the working class could actually run society – and this will be the focus of this column. The first historical example of workers’ power, the Paris Commune of 1871, had proved to Marx that the working class would not be able to take over the existing capitalist state machine and use it to construct socialism. Rather it would be necessary to destroy the existing state and create a new workers’ state. The Commune had also established certain key principles on which such a state should operate, e.g. the recallability of elected representatives and their payment at workers’ wages. These points were recognised and noted by Marx in his great study, The Civil War in France, but in the years following his death, the years of the Second International, they tended to be lost sight of, or to be positively suppressed. This was particularly the case regarding the need to smash the state, which was passed over and avoided as international social democracy became more and more committed to a strategy of parliamentary reform in the run up to the First World War. KOREA COLUMN 22 Russia: What Went Wrong? The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the world’s first successful socialist revolution. It proved that the working class was capable taking power even when it was a still a minority in society. It also showed the world the form of political organisation, the workers’ council or soviet, through which the working class could actually run society. But if we look at Russia twenty years later, in 1937, we see a society which, with the exception of being dominated by state rather than private property, is completely at odds both with the conception of socialism held by Marx and with the aims of the 1917 Revolution. It is a society ruled by an absolute dictator, Stalin, with the aid of a vast apparatus of secret police. It is a society in which freedom, debate, and democracy are non- existent and where the slightest dissent is punishable by imprisonment or death. The working class live in grim poverty forced to work long hours for low wages, without even real trades unions to defend them. Many of the peasants have recently endured famine and starvation. Inequality, having been massively reduced by the Revolution, is now increasing rapidly as the new rulers, managers, bureaucrats etc. enrich themselves and the preaching of equality is an offence against the state. So what went wrong? Obviously a great deal hangs on the answer to this question, not least the possibility of making a convincing case for socialist revolution now, in the twenty first century. Before setting out our own views on this issue let us begin by considering some of the other answers that have been put forward. There are two major groups who, basically, deny that anything went wrong - the western ruling classes (and their ideologists) and the Stalinists themselves. The western bourgeois view is that since working people are inherently incapable of running society, all talk of workers’ power, freedom and equality is a pipedream, and dictatorship and tyranny is either the conscious aim, or at least the inevitable outcome, of any attempt to create a socialist society. The Stalinist view is (or mainly was) that the Soviet Union in the thirties was a true embodiment of socialism and of the ideas of Marx and Lenin and that all talk of tyranny and a police state is bourgeois propaganda. The bourgeois view is based on a) prejudice against the working class, and b) ignorance of socialist and Marxist ideas. I shall not answer it further here, as every word of this series of columns, from first to last, is an answer. The Stalinist view is based on either ignorance or denial of the facts. It has been refuted by a mountain of evidence and eyewitness testimony, including from genuine revolutionaries (see for example the memoirs of Victor Serge) and, above all, by history. If Russia, or the other so-called socialist countries of Eastern Europe, had really been the promised land for working people, it is inconceivable that these regimes could have been overthrown as they were in 1989-91, without the working class lifting a finger in their defence. From those who recognise that a problem exists the main focus has been on the character and ideology of Russia’s political leaders – Stalin, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. In 1956, Khrushchev, in his ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denounced the crimes of the Stalin era. He blamed the ‘cult of personality’ that developed around Stalin and the latter’s sadistic character. Both the cult and the sadism were facts but the weakness of this as an explanation is obvious: why was the cult developed and why did the Communist Party install and sustain a sadistic monster as its leader? The main explanation favoured by western academics has stressed the role of Leninism and Bolshevism. It was, the argument goes, the totalitarian character of Lenin as an individual and of Leninism as an ideology, both embodied in the totalitarian Bolshevik Party, that led, more or less inevitably, to the excesses of Stalinism. This view has to ignore or discount important historical facts such as the extremely democratic character of the Bolshevik Party, before, during and immediately after the Revolution, and Stalin’s need, in order to establish his regime, to physically eliminate virtually the entire Bolshevik old guard. * However, all these explanations suffer from a deeper flaw. They are all versions of what might be called the bourgeois ‘great man’ theory of history, which sees the course of history as shaped, first and foremost, by the ideas and deeds of the tiny minority at the top (usually kings, generals etc. but in this case Marxist theorists and activists). In reality history is shaped primarily by the struggle between classes, which in turn is conditioned by the development of the forces and relations of production, and this historical materialist approach should be applied to the fate of the Russian Revolution just as much as to the rest of world history. The real question, therefore, is how did the working class who took power in October 1917 then come to lose it again? Once this is established as the core question the main answers are not hard to find. First the backwardness of Russian economic development, compared to Europe and North America, and consequently the relatively small size of its urban proletariat. This was not in itself decisive (or October 1917 would have been impossible) but it weakened the position of the working class from the start. Second the utter devastation of the Russian economy in the Civil War of 1918-21 which followed the Revolution and which was imposed on Russia by Western imperialist intervention. The scale of this devastation is hard to grasp: large scale industrial production fell to 21% of its 1913 level, factories closed, transport ceased to function, epidemics of cholera and TB raged and there was widespread famine. Above all this destroyed the economic foundations of the working class. Added to this was the slaughter of a large proportion of the most advanced workers in the Civil War. By 1921 the class, which took power in 1917, had virtually ceased to exist and was no longer able to assert its collective will over society. In the absence of the working class another social force had to take control. Normally it would have been the aristocracy or bourgeoisie, but they had been expropriated and driven out, consequently it was the bureaucracy, of the state and the party which came to the fore, more and more freeing itself from popular control. Finally, the isolation of Russian Revolution, its failure to spread internationally. This was a very close run thing, especially in Germany, but the effect was to deprive the Revolution of the aid needed to restore the economy and renew and refresh the working class, and to put Russia under immense economic and military pressure from western capitalism. It was the interaction of these real material factors, not human nature or the alleged defects of Marxist or Leninist ideology, that sealed the fate of the Russian Revolution and produced the phenomenon of Stalinism. The precise nature of that phenomenon will be discussed in the next in this series. * The claimed ‘textual basis’ of this argument in Lenin’s What is To Be Done? has recently been meticulously refuted by the US scholar Lars T. Lih in his book Lenin Rediscovered – sadly it is very large and very expensive. John Molyneux 11 May 2007 KOREA COLUMN 23 The Nature of Stalinism Stalinism is an appropriate name for the political regime operating in the Soviet Union in the nineteen thirties and forties because a) Joseph Stalin was its absolute ruler in those years, and b) the name rightly differentiates this regime from socialism or communism in general, and from the Leninist period of Soviet power that preceded it. However, the term does not tell us anything about the economic, social or class character of the society over which Stalin and Stalinism presided. What was the economic dynamic of Stalinist Russia – was it fundamentally the same or different from that of western capitalism? Was it fundamentally a class divided society or a classless society, or was it a transitional society on the way to becoming classless? If there were classes in Russia, what classes were they and which was the ruling class? These questions which were all bound up with one another and in reality all boiled down to one – the class nature of Soviet Union – were the subject of intense debate among socialists and Marxists for more than sixty years. The issue was hugely significant not only in Russia itself and in other similar ‘communist’ countries, but everywhere in the world because the Soviet Union claimed, and to a considerable extent exercised, leadership of the whole international communist movement. The issue remains important today, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of East European communism, partly because some Stalinist and semi-Stalinist regimes survive – most notably North Korea – partly for historical reasons, and partly because, theoretically, it goes to the heart of what we mean by capitalism and socialism. In the course of the debate four main positions emerged:1) that the Soviet Union was socialist; 2) that it was a degenerated workers’ state; 3) that it was neither capitalist nor socialist but bureaucratic collectivist; 4) that it was state capitalist. The first position was by far the most common – it was shared by mainstream ‘communists’, many social democrats, and by the right, and therefore became the ‘common sense’ view - but it was also the most damaging. On the left it often involved the denial of well established historical fact, but at bottom it rested on the idea that the essence of socialism is simply state ownership of property, not working class self emancipation or workers’ power. The right agreed with this because they regarded workers’ power as impossible anyway and knew that identifying Stalinism with socialism discredited socialism in the eyes of the masses. The degenerated workers’ state position was associated with Trotsky and Trotskyism. It argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy had betrayed the aims of the Russian Revolution and was a counter revolutionary force hostile to the development of socialism in the Soviet Union and to workers’ revolution internationally. It called for a political revolution to overthrow Stalinism. However, it also insisted that, by virtue of its nationalised property relations, the Soviet economy remained post capitalist and this made Russia a workers’ state which was more progressive than world capitalism and had to be defended by socialists. The strength of Trotsky’s position was that it combined revolutionary socialist opposition to both Stalinism and western capitalism. Its weakness was that it opened the door to separating socialism from the self emancipation of the working class. The bureaucratic collectivist position was first developed within the Trotskyist movement (particularly by the American, Max Schachtman) in opposition to the workers’ state view, but has subsequently been adopted by various academics. It rejects the idea that state ownership equals socialism or a workers’ state, but accepts the idea that state ownership means the abolition of capitalism. It maintains that Russia represented a new form of class society, with a new ruling class. Unfortunately the advocates of this theory have not been able to identify clearly the economic dynamic of this new mode of production or its position in historical development. This has produced confusion as to whether ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ societies were more or less progressive than capitalism and has led many its supporters to move to the right, including support for US imperialism, on the grounds that Stalinism was worse than capitalism. The designation of Stalinist Russia as state capitalist seems to have been there from the beginning among some Trotskyists and other oppositionists, but the most coherent theory of state capitalism was developed in the late 1940s by Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialist Tendency. Cliff’s point of departure was that if Stalinism had brought socialism or workers’ states to Eastern Europe (and North Korea) – by means of the Red Army and without workers’ revolutions – then Marx’s fundamental ideas on the revolutionary role of the working class would have to be abandoned. Faced with the choice between the state property criterion and the self emancipation of the working class, between socialism from above and socialism from below, Cliff opted decisively for the latter. This led him to look beyond property relations as such to the actual relations of production underlying forms of property. Where state property was concerned Cliff argued that it had existed in many different societies and that the real question for Marxists was which class owned or controlled the state. He then showed, through detailed analysis, that the real relations of production in the Soviet economy, were capitalist relations: the control of the means of production by a small minority, with the large majority forced to live by the sale of their labour power and be exploited in the process. Cliff also showed that once Stalinist Russia was seen in the context of the world economy rather than in isolation the idea that it was basically a planned economy was false. When the Stalinist bureaucracy opted for ‘socialism in one country’ it committed itself, in fact, to competition with western capitalism on capitalism’s terms, i.e. the accumulation of capital, and thus to the ruthless subordination of living labour (the workers) to dead labour (capital) – precisely the fundamental characteristic of capitalism as analysed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Capital. The theory of state capitalism was not only the theory that accorded best with the Marxism of Marx, but it was also the position that best stood the test of time and events. The fall of communism in 1989-91 proved that far from constituting a superior, more progressive mode of production the so-called socialist countries had lost their economic competition with the west. It showed that the working class not only did not control these states, but also felt no allegiance to them. Finally the way the old Stalinist bureaucrats simply ‘moved sideways’ from state to private ownership, without, in most cases, losing power proved there was no fundamental, i.e. class, difference between the two systems. The theory of state capitalism is thus a hugely important development of Marxism, essential for understanding the world in the 20th and 21st centuries and for continuing the struggle to change it. John Molyneux 25 May 2007 KOREA COLUMN 24 The International Communist Movement: Part 1 The last two of these columns have dealt with Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This one deals with the history and fate of the international communist movement. Internationalism has always been a fundamental principle of Marxism and genuine socialism, and Marxists have always sought to organise their forces internationally. Faced with the betrayal of internationalism by the majority of the parties of the Socialist or Second International in 1914, when they supported their own ruling classes in the First World War, Lenin speedily grasped the need for a new (third) international. However, circumstances – primarily the combination of the War and lack of forces – prevented the realisation of this project until fifteen months after the Russian Revolution. In March 1919 the First Congress of the (Third) Communist International was convened in Moscow in conditions of civil war in Russia and a rising tide of revolution sweeping Europe. Its aim was to create more than just a federation of national parties. The Comintern, as it became known, was to be a single international revolutionary organisation – the Russian Bolshevik Party on a world scale – capable of leading the international proletariat to victory worldwide. At the time of its First Congress the Comintern was still relatively weak. Apart from the Russian Communist Party the bulk of the foreign Communist Parties participating were from Eastern Europe – the Hungarian, Polish, Latvian, Estonian CPs and so on. From Western Europe and elsewhere came mainly the representatives of small groups or trends, not yet fully formed parties and in many cases not yet fully formed Communists. But by the Second Congress in July 1920 not only had the number of parties represented increased dramatically, so had the size of their support in the working class, especially in Germany. By now the Communist International had emerged as the highest point yet reached in the history of the organisation of the international working class and the most powerful threat to the rule of the bourgeoisie that has existed up to and including the present day. For the first and only time in history, three things seemed to coincide: a deep and general crisis of the world system, a massive upsurge in militancy and consciousness in the working class internationally, and the existence of strong interlinked revolutionary organisations in a number of countries. Tragically the Comintern did not succeed in its aim and the opportunity was missed. Why was this? Essentially it was due to a failure of revolutionary leadership. The two crucial defeats were in Italy and Germany and in both cases the passivity of the workers leaders was the decisive.factor. In 1919-20 Italy experienced its biennio rossi, its ‘two red years’, in which there were mass strikes and large scale factory occupations, especially in Turin and Milan. But the leadership of the main working class party, the Italian Socialist Party, which had flirted with the Comintern, sat on its hands and did nothing. The result was not only the missing of a revolutionary opportunity but a terrible reactionary backlash. The two red years were followed by two black years, which culminated in the conquest of power by Mussolini’s fascists. In terms of building a real revolutionary party it could be said that Italian Marxists were strategically late and tactically premature. On the one hand the revolutionary left remained for too long attached to the wavering and reformist leadership of the Socialist Party. On the other the actual break to form a Communist Party, when it came in 1921, was rushed through in such a way as to minimise the forces won from reformism. In Germany the process was more drawn out but no less catastrophic in the end. The German Revolution began in October 1918 with a mutiny of sailors in Kiel which spread like wildfire through the German armed forces. Within weeks the Kaiser abdicated and power was assumed by the leaders of German Social Democracy. In January 1919 the revolutionary Spartacus League (shortly to become the German Communist Party) attempted to transform this democratic revolution into a workers’ revolution through an uprising in Berlin. The rising was premature and was put down by an alliance of the Social Democratic Government and right wing militia, called the Freikorps. Its leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxumberg, - Luxemberg was Germany’s foremost Marxist and revolutionary at this time – were murdered. The so-called Weimar Republic with its Social Democratic government continued but so did the revolutionary crisis. In March 1920 came the Kapp Putsch, a rightwing military attempt to crush the republic, but it was defeated by a nationwide general strike. Then in 1921 the Communist Party, which had grown massively, launched another revolutionary offensive called the March Action. Again it was premature, and again it was defeated. Still the chronic instability of German society persisted and it all came to a head once again in the summer and autumn of 1923.when Germany was gripped by extreme hyperinflation. In January 1923 1 US $ = 18,000 marks, in June 1$ = 100,000 marks, in December 1$ = 4000 billion marks! With workers carrying their wages in wheelbarrows, support for the Communist Party mushroomed. But having twice acted prematurely the German Communist leaders, acting on advice from Moscow, now did nothing - the moment was lost and German capitalism restabilised itself, at least for five years. The consequences of this can hardly be overstated. If the German Revolution had succeeded the likelihood is that capitalism would quickly have fallen in all the countries between Russia and Germany, and the possibility is that this would have created such revolutionary momentum that we would be living in a socialist world today. As it was the German defeat brought the post war revolutionary crisis to an end and ensured the isolation of the Russian Revolution, thus massively reinforcing the tendencies to bureaucratic degeneration and Stalinism that were already beginning to manifest themselves. Behind the failures in Italy and Germany and elsewhere in Europe (e.g. Hungary and Bulgaria) lay the fact that in the short period of time available, less than four years, it proved impossible to transfer to the fledgling European CPs the experience and lessons of revolutionary strategy and tactics acquired by Lenin and the Bolsheviks over decades. Unfortunately the years that followed showed that it was much easier to transfer to the international movement the methods and policies of Stalinism. The consequences of this for the Comintern and for the international working class will be discussed in part 2 of this article. John Molyneux 8 June 2007 KOREA COLUMN 25 The International Communist Movement Part 2 As said in the last column the early years of the Communist International (1919-23) marked the highest point reached in the history of working class political organisation. But the defeat of the European Revolution, and the isolation and consequent degeneration in Stalinism of the Russian Revolution was to have a devastating affect on the fundamental role and policies of the Comintern . The key development was the adoption by Stalin and the Russian leadership of the policy of ‘Socialism in one Country’. Lenin, Trotsky and the entire Bolshevik leadership, like Marx and Engels before them, regarded socialist revolution as an inherently international process and saw the Russian Revolution as the first step in an international revolution without which it could neither build socialism nor survive. In 1924, Stalin, in the wake of the failure of the German Revolution, abandoned this internationalist tradition and opted for the view that it would be possible to complete the building of socialism in Russia alone, provided only that military overthrow by Western Capitalism could be avoided. This had a profound impact on the policies of the Comintern and its member parties. Initially, the first task of these parties had been to pursue the revolution in their own country, thus simultaneously serving the interests of their own working class and of the Russian Revolution. Now the main task became to prevent a military attack on the USSR and this in turn meant the Communist Parties making alliances with various nationalist and reformist forces who, while totally untrustworthy from the point of view of workers’ revolution, could at least be induced to oppose war on Russia. The first fruits of this shift to the right were seen in the British General Strike of 1926. In 1925 the Russian Trade Unions, on orders from Stalin, had formed an alliance with ‘left’ British trade union leaders, in what was called the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, to oppose British intervention in the Soviet Union and this alliance started to have a big effect on the whole attitude of the British CP to the reformist union leaders, silencing criticism of them and reducing the ability of Communist trade unionists to act independently. At just this time the British working class and its trade unions, led by the miners, moved into a massive confrontation with the government and the ruling class, which culminated in the all out General Strike of May 1926. After only nine days, however, this General Strike was called off and abjectly betrayed by the same left union leaders with who the CP had been in alliance. Moreover, the British CP had been prevented by the Comintern brokered alliance from warning the working class of the unreliability of these leaders or preparing its militants to act independently in the event of a sell-out. Thus the British working class suffered a defeat that set it back for a generation and the Comintern was complicit in it. A fundamentally similar but even worse catastrophe followed in China in 1927. In the years 1925-7 the Chinese working class, especially in Shanghai and Canton, rose in a huge wave of revolt against the imperialist and feudal warlord hold on China and young Chinese Communist Party grew massively. But the line of Stalin’s Comintern was that the CP should not only ally with, but also subordinate itself to, the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek, because Chiang was seen as a potential defender of the Soviet Union. In 1927, however, Chiang turned on his communist allies and literally put them to the sword. It was a disaster that led directly to Mao’s turn to the countryside and the peasantry and from which Chinese working class socialism has still not really recovered. In the process of pursuing these disastrous policies other changes were occurring in the nature of the Comintern. To justify the tactics in China, Stalin reverted to the old Menshevik and social democratic line that the colonial countries were not ready for socialism and that in such circumstances Marxists had to support the ‘progressive’ national bourgeoisies. At the same time all opposition and democratic debate was eliminated from the international communist parties whose leaderships became ever more compliant servants of Moscow. When, in 1928-29, Stalin embarked on forced industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture – a state capitalist course which crushed the Russian workers and peasants - he needed to cover his tracks with left sounding phrases and slogans. Transferred to the international sphere, as they automatically were, these pseudo left slogans produced a sectarian policy of denouncing the Social Democratic Parties as ‘social fascists’ and rejecting any alliances, even with other working class parties and even against Nazism. This phoney leftism had even more terrible consequences than the previous rightist strategy in that, by dividing and confusing the German working class in the crucial years of 1929-33, it greatly assisted the rise to power of Hitler. [ I shall deal more fully with the question of fascism in the next column]. Faced with the direct military threat posed by Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Comintern did a further about turn. From opposing even a workers’ united front it moved to establishing alliances with ‘democratic’ bourgeoisies in what became known as the Popular Front. Put to the test in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) this meant Communists repressing the spontaneously developing Spanish Revolution in the name of unity with sections of the Spanish bourgeoisie against Franco. In practice this not only stopped the revolution but also demobilised the Spanish working class and so aided Franco’s victory. Meanwhile another force was at work in international communism. If socialism in one country was possible for Russia it was possible for lots of other ‘single’ countries. On this basis the idea of separate national roads to socialism gradually took hold in the various CPs. For a long time this remained subordinate to loyalty to Russia, but as the power of Moscow waned in the fifties and sixties so the nationalist reformist tendencies in the Stalinist parties came to the fore until they became more or less indistinguishable from Social Democracy. The overall historical effect of Stalinism on the struggle for international socialism, therefore, was a) to preside over a series of catastrophic defeats which ensured the survival of capitalism and the victory of fascism, and b) to transform a movement for world proletarian revolution into a movement for international counter revolution and bourgeois reformism. Thankfully, today, the ability of Stalinism to block workers’ struggle and obstruct genuine socialism is enormously reduced. John Molyneux 22 June 2007 KOREA COLUMN 26 What is fascism? The worst defeat suffered by the working class in the 20th century – the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis – led directly to the worst catastrophe for humanity in the century, the Second World War, and the worst single crime against humanity, the Holocaust. This nexus of events, therefore, poses a number of questions of the highest political importance: what was the cause of the Nazi phenomenon? What was the nature of the Nazi movement? What enabled it to take power? Could it have been stopped? Could it happen again? Above all, what lessons can we learn from the past to help ensure that it doesn’t happen again? Obviously it is not possible to deal properly with all these issues in a single column, but what I will try to do is to set out the main lines of the Marxist analysis of Nazism, which can then serve as a basis for fuller answers to the above questions. This analysis was developed principally by Leon Trotsky in 1929-33, i.e. the years of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and it is best understood in relation, and contrast, to the bourgeois and the orthodox communist, i.e. Stalinist, interpretations of Nazism. The bourgeois view of Nazism, embodied in thousands of press articles, books, films, TV programmes etc., oscillates between seeing it as an outgrowth of the German national character (its supposed authoritarianism, militarism, cruelty etc.) and as the product of the evil genius of one man, Hitler, who allegedly hypnotised an entire nation with his demonic oratory. These two interpretations, which formally contradict one another, are complementary in that they avoid any connection with social forces or economics, and especially any connection with capitalism. However, two simple and obvious facts expose the falsity of the bourgeois view in both its versions. The first is that German Nazism was part of an international fascist movement that did not begin or end in Germany, but which existed with varying degrees of strength in almost every country, including supposedly ‘moderate’ Britain, and which first came to power with Mussolini in Italy. The second is that Hitler and his Nazi Party only became a serious political force in Germany in the wake of the international economic crisis that began with the Wall St. Crash in October 1929. Prior to this Hitler’s supposed oratorical powers had little appeal to the German people. For Trotsky, and for all Marxists, fascism as a whole was a product of, and response to, the international crisis of capitalism that gripped the system following the First World War. It was an attempt to resolve that crisis in the interests of capital by dispensing with parliamentary democracy, establishing a reactionary dictatorship, and crushing the working class. To this general analysis Trotsky made a crucial addition. He saw that fascism was not just a policy or political trend promoted by the capitalist class as such, or even by a section or wing of big business. Rather fascism began as a real mass movement based in the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie. This class suffered acutely and in a particular way in the economic crisis: on the one hand crushed from above by the banks and giant monopolies, on the other pressured from below by the trade unions and organised working class. Driven to despair by the economic crisis and feeling ground between the great millstones of the two major classes the petty bourgeoisie ‘went berserk’, and became fertile ground for fascist demagogy. It is this class basis, which provides the key to the understanding of fascist and Nazi ideology, including its anti-Semitic component. In one direction, ‘anti- capitalist’ rhetoric, but directed against international and finance capital rather than capitalism as such. In the other direction, and much more serious, bitter anti- communism , anti-socialism and anti - trade unionism. Then, uniting both elements, at least in the fascist imagination, anti-Semitism – the Jews as the sinister conspiracy behind both finance capital and communism (after all were not Rothschild and Marx both Jews?).Finally, standing above the classes, the mythical exaltation of the state, the nation, the leader and the race. The petty bourgeois basis of fascism also shapes its development as a movement. No matter how many supporters it attracts fascism cannot take power by itself, because the lower middle class cannot overthrow the capitalist class proper. Instead it has to be ‘lifted’ into power by big business, as happened in Germany in the autumn of !932. But the ruling class will only take the risk of partially relinquishing control of their state to dangerous outsiders under extreme pressure and it has to be convinced a) that the severity of the crisis is such that it can no longer continue to rule in the old way, and b) that the gamble of unleashing the fascists on the organisations of the working class will succeed. Equally the fascists have to have proved themselves worthy of ruling class backing, by demonstrating in practice their ability to take on the workers’ organisations on the streets. If the petty bourgeois base of fascism makes it dependant on big business, it nevertheless enables it to offer the ruling class something beyond what is offered by ‘ordinary’ police or military dictatorship. This is a mass cadre at grass roots level which can smash workers’ organisations in the workplaces, on the estates, in the streets, far more thoroughly and effectively than just external operations by the police or army. This analysis, developed in detail by Trotsky in his brilliant writings on The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, not only captured the essence of fascism but also showed how it could be fought. First, because fascism was such a mortal threat to all workers’ organisations, it was necessary to establish maximum working class unity against fascism by means of the workers’ United Front. (It was precisely this unity that Stalinism sabotaged in 1929-33 with its ultra-left notion that social democrats were social fascists). Second, the petty bourgeoisie could be won over to the side of the working class or at least neutralised, provided the socialist left could convincingly present itself as able to resolve the chronic crisis of the system. In the end this meant proving in practice its ability to overthrow capitalism. ( Again it was just this that was prevented by the later Stalinist policy of alliance with the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ in the Popular Front.) The contemporary relevance of these lessons should be clear. The crisis of the system, though less acute than in the 1930s, is still with us and, therefore, so is the threat of fascism, regardless of national character or individual leaders. If the threat is not yet immediate, all the more reason it should be nipped in the bud by strong united working class action. However to eliminate the fascist threat for good, to make the slogan ‘Never Again’ a permanent reality, it is necessary to destroy its breeding ground, the xcapitalist system John Molyneux 4 July 2007 KOREA COLUMN 27 Capitalism Today Capitalism first began to emerge, within feudalism, in Europe and elsewhere, as long ago as the fourteenth century. Through a long series of struggles, revolutions and wars capitalism established itself as the dominant mode of production in Europe by the beginning of the 19th century. It was at this point that Karl Marx became the first person to produce a comprehensive analysis of capitalism’s structure and laws of development. It is useful to compare capitalism today with capitalism in Marx’s time to see what has changed and what remains the same. The most immediately obvious change is in capitalism’s scale of operation. In the 1840s, when Marx began his analysis, capitalism may have been dominant in Europe but in its developed industrial form it was still more or less confined to a small corner of the north-west – Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium, parts of France and Germany. Today it is truly global. Capitalism, by means of trade and, indeed, its armed forces, long ago ‘reached’ and affected virtually everywhere but now there is probably no country on the planet where the majority of goods are not produced on a capitalist basis. In 1848 Britain, the so-called ‘workshop of the world’, was by a long way the leading economic power, with France its nearest rival. By the end of the 19th century Germany had displaced France and the USA was advancing swiftly. By the end of the First World War the United States had clearly overtaken not only Britain but all of Europe. By the end of the Second World War US dominance was even more entrenched, with the state capitalist USSR its only serious challenger. Today the USA remains economically, and, of course, militarily, dominant but, despite its victory in the cold war, its economic lead over the rest of the world is much diminished. In the fifties and sixties ‘economic miracles’ in Germany and Japan put America under pressure and now there is the emerging challenge from China, with India also making huge progress. In addition there are numerous significant and independent centres of capital accumulation, such as South Korea and Brazil, dotted round the world. Capitalism has thus ‘filled up’ the world more completely and is more poly-centred than ever before. Along with this geographical spread has gone a huge increase in the size and range of capitalism’s major corporations – the Exxon Mobiles and Wal-Marts, the Toyotas and Samsungs – in other words in the concentration of capital, and in the intensity of global economic integration. It is not simply that the international transportation and sale of raw materials and manufactured goods has grown immensely but that the actual manufacture of individual commodities has become an international process. The growth of the system has been anything but smooth, passing through severe international crises such as the Great Depression of the thirties and the international recessions of the seventies and eighties, and numerous national or regional upsets, nevertheless overall it has been massive. The economic role of the state has also generally increased substantially, but again the process has been extremely uneven. Since the onset of neo-liberalism in the seventies and the ‘collapse of communism’ in 1989-91 the role of the state has clearly declined compared to the days of Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt and Keynes, but not nearly as much as neo-liberal ideologues expected or wanted. Another major change has been the rise in the average standard of living of the masses, first in the advanced industrial countries of the so-called West, and second in a significant number of newly industrialising countries. Cross-cultural statistics on living standards are tricky and unreliable, but figures on life expectancy give the broad picture. In 1850 in the US life expectancy for the average white male was 38 years, and for white women, 40 years. By 2001 that had risen to 75 years for men and 80 years for women. In countries such as Canada, Sweden, France and Australia it is similar but even higher, while in Mexico, Brazil, Poland and even China it is now over 70. Viewed superficially and one-sidedly these changes could be seen as a success story for capitalism. However, what has remained unchanged is even more basic than what has changed. First, the fundamental social relations of production are the same. The main forces of production are still owned and controlled by tiny minorities who produce in competition with one another, on the basis of the exploitation of those who live by the sale of their labour power The immediate producers remain alienated from their labour and the products of their labour – they produce a world not under their or, ultimately, anyone’s control. Society is divided into antagonistic classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat – whose interests are diametrically opposed. Second, the fundamental dynamic of the system also remains unchanged; it is the same in China today as it was in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, namely the drive to accumulate capital i.e. to pursue profit before human need. Precisely because of this underlying continuity all the changes in capitalism described above have their dark or negative side. The rise in living standards, though real, has been massively uneven – using again the measure of life expectancy we find, for example, Angola on 37, Mozambique on 40 and South Africa on 42.5 – and accompanied by rising inequality, both within nations and between them. In the US in 1980 the pay of company Chief Executives was 42 times that of a production worker; by 2000 it was 525 times greater! In 1998 the United Nations Development Program reported that the world's 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion which is equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people and the wealth of the three richest individuals now exceeds the total GDP of the 48 poorest countries. The economic growth experienced by capitalism has been paralleled by a growth in its destructive tendencies. In terms of wars and mass slaughter the 20th century was, by a huge distance, the most costly in history and today the capacity to eliminate human life is greater than ever. The emergence of the US as sole super power (and the potential threat to its position from China) has made it more not less inclined to use and threaten military force. To this must be added the devastating threat capitalism poses to the environment, and thus the future of humanity, through climate change. But by far the most important consequence of the apparent international ‘triumph’ of capitalism has been, precisely as Marx foresaw, the production, in greater numbers with greater geographical spread.(from South Korea to South America), concentrated in ever growing giant cities (from Kolkata to Cairo), of its own gravedigger – the international working class. John Molyneux July 23 2007 KOREA COLUMN 28 Socialism and the Trade Unions The role of trade unions in the struggle for socialism and the related matter of the role of socialists in the trade unions, have always been questions of enormous strategic and tactical importance and, moreover, ones on which a Marxist approach differs sharply from that of reformists, anarchists, syndicalists and other radical tendencies. History shows that in almost every country trade unions are the most elementary, most widespread and broadest form of organisation adopted by the working class. Their basic function is to defend and improve the jobs, pay and conditions of working people by enabling them to act in unison against their employers. Whether union leaders and members are aware of this or not, trade unionism’s point of departure is the class struggle: the fact that there is a permanent and fundamental conflict of interest between workers who live by the sale of their labour power and bosses (capitalists) who strive to maximise profits by increasing the exploitation of their workers. As such Marxists give strong and active support to trade union organisation and the trade union struggle (where it is waged, as it generally is, in the interests of workers – very occasionally trade unions wage reactionary, e.g. racist or sexist, campaigns). The basic principles of trade unionism - unity is strength, an injury to one is an injury to all and so on – are principles shared by socialists and Marxists, though obviously Marxist principles go beyond trade union principles. This enthusiastic support for trade unionism already distinguishes Marxism from various other tendencies. There have been some socialist sects (for example some of the 19th century utopian socialists) who dismissed trade unionism as unable to achieve any improvements for working people, on the grounds that any increase in wages would be met by an equal increase in prices. Marx refuted this argument in detail in his pamphlet Wages, Prices and Profit and history has clearly vindicated him, so I will not repeat the argument here. Some would-be revolutionaries or radicals have rejected the trade union struggle on the grounds that it was merely self-interested or that by its very success in improving workers’ conditions it corrupted them and reconciled them to capitalism. For Marxists, however, the interests of the working class (taken as a whole) are the interests of humanity and they should be pursued more vigorously not less, and the revolution is not an abstract goal for which the workers should sacrifice themselves, but necessary precisely because capitalism cannot meet the needs of workers or mankind. Of course, the dominant approach to trade unionism is that of the reformists who acknowledge a positive role for unions but within quite narrow limits. For reformists trade unions defend the sectional economic interests of workers but should leave the wider political struggle to a political party operating through parliament. Also the workers’ economic interests are seen as legitimate, but subordinate to a wider national interest which transcends class. For Marxists, by contrast, the working class struggle is always both economic and political and the centre of gravity of the political struggle is not parliament but the workplace. Moreover the notion of a common national interest is myth behind which hides the interest of the capitalist class. Marxism, therefore, argues that socialists should work consistently within trade unions both raising the level of their economic militancy and encouraging them to take up political questions. At the same time Marxists recognise that trade unions, despite their essential role in the struggle for socialism, do have certain limitations which mean they are not the only form of organisation needed by the working class. First, trade unions basic activity is to negotiate the terms of sale of workers’ labour power within capitalism, whereas the aim of socialism is to abolish that sale altogether. This means that trade unions by themselves are not well suited to organising the actual overthrow of capitalism. For that task workers’ councils, which represent workers not as sellers of labour power but as producers and potential rulers of society, are also needed. Second, to negotiate effectively with the bosses, unions have to strive as far as possible to include in their ranks every worker in the relevant industry, trade and workplace, regardless of that worker’s level of political consciousness or militancy. [To every rule there is an exception, and the exception here is workers who are organised fascists, who should be driven out of the unions]. This necessary inclusiveness means that although the unions have certain educative and ideological functions they are not well suited to leading the ideological struggle for socialist consciousness within the working class or to providing political leadership for the class at times of intense conflict. For these tasks a revolutionary party, bringing together the most conscious and committed elements in the working class, across all industrial or occupational boundaries, is what is required. The Marxist understanding of trade unions has one further crucial and distinctive feature – the analysis of the trade union bureaucracy. Much bitter experience in many different countries has shown that trade union leaders display a tendency to betray not just the socialist revolution but even the most basic economic struggles of their own members. Nor is it only the top leaders who are prone to this but also full time trade union officials in general. The tendency is far too persistent to be a matter of personal failings. Rather it is that trade union officials come to form a definite social layer, with interests distinct from those of rank and file trade unionists, who specialise in mediating between the working class and the employers. Most union officials enjoy higher wages and better working conditions than their members, and even if they negotiate a bad deal in which jobs are lost or hours increased, they do not lose their jobs or have to work longer. It is not, in most cases, that they are total traitors or servants of the bosses, for they still need to retain the loyalty of their members (with no members they have no salary and are no u8se to the bosses either) but they continually vacillate, now showing resistance and talking left, now backing down and undermining workers’ struggles Socialist strategy in the unions has to take this well-established tendency into account. Socialist militants have to learn how to work with union leaders and officials when they move in the right direction and how to combat them when they vacillate or sell out. This involves not only supporting the trade union struggle and working in the unions as a whole, but also building within the unions networks of rank and file activists, able to put pressure on the leaders and act independently of them when necessary. John Molyneux 6 August 2007 KOREA COLUMN 29 What about human nature? In my experience the two most common objections to Marxism are 1) that it fails to take account of human nature, 2) that it reduces everything to economics. Actually the two objections contradict each other – the ‘human nature’ argument suggests that socialism won’t work because people are basically greedy and self interested; the overestimating the economic factor argument claims that Marxism fails to take enough account of the role of ideas and ideals in history. The contradiction is not usually noticed because the two arguments are deployed in different spheres. The first is mostly encountered in the sphere of everyday political debate and discussion. The second is most common at the level of theoretical critique in the academic world. For this reason I shall devote a separate column to each. We should begin by recognising the plausibility of the human nature argument. It is plausible partly because it has such a long pedigree. It embodies an idea that has been central to bourgeois ideology for centuries and to ruling class ideology for millennia. The Christian religion, for example, taught that people were all born ‘wicked’ and this justified both the power of the church to bring them salvation in the afterlife and the power of the state to keep them in order in this life. It is also plausible because it seems to fit with historical experience, with the simple fact that all past attempts to achieve a society of freedom and equality have failed. Finally it is plausible because it seems to explain a lot of our personal experience – all those occasions when we have been treated badly by workmates or let down by friends or people around us just seem to be apathetic. All this plausibility, however, does not make the argument sound and it is precisely in the last area, the area of our personal experience, that we find the most obvious evidence of its falsity. Yes, it is true that everyday life presents plenty of examples of selfishness, callousness, lack of sympathy and so on, but it is also the case that it offers many examples of the opposite, of kindness, self sacrifice and solidarity – of people who help strangers in difficulties, who risk their lives to save those in danger, who devote their lives to what they see as good causes. IF it really were human nature to be selfish, if we were actually programmed to be that way, such altruistic behaviour would either be non-existent or at best extremely rare, but it is not. What experience actually shows is that human nature permits both selfish and unselfish behaviour, both apathy and commitment, cowardice and bravery and that which predominates depends on both circumstances and conditioning. Here we have to remember that the human behaviour we experience is behaviour under capitalism and that capitalism massively conditions people towards selfishness. Of course the system preaches morality and altruism to children but look at how schools are actually organised: the children required to compete to come top of the class (or be punished for not trying), to pass exams, to gain entry to ‘good’ schools and top universities, to get the best jobs, and with any deviation from this self interested agenda subject to severe condemnation. Nor is it just a question of early socialisation and childhood conditioning. As adults the system virtually forces selfishness on people if they are to survive or be treated with any social respect. Capitalists obviously have to be greedy, in the sense of pursuing maximum profits, unless they are prepared to renounce being capitalists. The managers who work for them have to adhere to the profit/ greed agenda or be sacked. Only the workers are pushed towards, and have an interest in, solidarity (which is what makes workers the socialist class) and such solidarity is not only seriously stigmatised (‘militants’, ‘troublemakers’ etc) but also frequently illegal. The wonder, under capitalism, is not how little but how much self-sacrifice and social responsibility we encounter. Much the same applies, in a different way, to broader social and historical experience. If we explain the failures of the French, Russian, Chinese and other revolutions – the return of tyranny in Napoleonic or Stalinist form – by human nature, either the greed or ambition of bad leaders or the apathy and inertia of the masses, how do we explain the revolutions in the first place? Of course, in a sense, everything that has happened in human history must be compatible with human nature or it wouldn’t have happened, but in explaining everything in this way we explain nothing. This raises the question, very seldom asked by most of those who invoke the human nature argument, of just what is meant by ‘human nature’ or what it consists of. I shall take it that by ‘human nature’ is meant a combination of the characteristics which all, or almost all, humans have in common and the characteristics which distinguish humans as a species from other species. A complete list of such universal characteristics (especially in the biological sense) is obviously immensely long but those that are relevant to the issue of socialism are fairly few and pretty simple. Above all they consist of a number of basic needs which all humans share and which have to be met for humans to survive: the need for air, water, food, clothing, shelter, for social interaction with other humans, for sex. Equally the key distinguishing characteristics of humans relate to the means by which these needs are met, namely collective social labour, followed by language and expanded social consciousness. Do any of these common or distinguishing characteristics that make up human nature constitute an obstacle to an equal society or to socialism? Both history (real history not bourgeois myth) and reason give a resounding no to this question. History, because for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the development of agriculture, i.e. the vast bulk of human existence, when ‘human nature’ was being forged and consolidated, people lived as hunters and gatherers in deeply egalitarian communities, with no division into rich and poor or leaders and led and with distribution of goods based on the principle of sharing. Reason, because a glance at the state of the world today shows that capitalism, despite an abundance of resources, is extremely poor at meeting these basic human needs for most of humanity at the best of times and its worst (through war, climate change etc) threatens even the limited provision that exists. Socialism, by contrast, would make its whole point of departure and raison d’etre the planning of production to meet the basic physical and social needs of human nature Far from human nature being incompatible with socialism, socialism is just what human nature needs. John Molyneux 27 August 2007 KOREA COLUMN 30 Is Marxism Economic Determinist ? The criticism of Marxism that it 'puts too much emphasis on the economic factor' or 'falsely reduces everything to economics' is the main theoretical objection to Marxism in academic circles. The reason it is so popular with professional sociologists, historians, political philosophers and the like is because it fits so neatly the needs of their social situation. Academics are people who earn their living, or like to believe they earn their living, on the basis of their ideas. Instinctively they are repelled by a theory which seems to downplay the role of ideas in history, and therefore to downplay the role of people like themselves. The professional ideologist is naturally drawn to theories which suggest that in the end it is the power of ideas that is decisive in shaping the world. Within this there is a narrower career interest in theories that are 'sophisticated' and 'complex', and in questions 'in need of more research and development' - so many research grants and publication opportunities - and a strong bias against definite answers of any kind. 'Communism', the young Marx wrote,' is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be so', but such a claim would appall the typical academic who would much prefer the riddle to remain unsolved. But if this explains the popularity of the objection we still have to assess its truth and on this I would start by saying that all talk of the primacy of ‘economics’ in Marxism or of Marxism reducing everything to ‘economics’ is inaccurate and, at best, ‘loose’. Marx’s theory of history, as The German Ideology makes clear, does not begin with ‘economics’ or with ‘economic motives’, but with human needs – both biologically determined and historically developed – and with the organization of production to meet those needs. Nor does Marx claim that the organization of production determines everything in history, merely that it constitutes a foundation or base on which everything else in history rests. Moreover this fundamental Marxist proposition must be true, for the simple reason that any individual who is unable meet their needs for food, drink, shelter etc will die, and that any society unable to organize social production to meet those needs, at least to some degree, for most of its members, will cease to exist. To depart from this premise is, as Marx put it, ‘possible only in imagination’. Ruling classes and their ideologists can avoid it because the material work to meet their material needs is always done by others, and because those others (slaves, peasants, workers) are socially subordinate to them, and can be ignored or dismissed. But isn’t this a round about way of saying everything reduces to economics? No. The human needs we are talking about range from the very basic and absolute need for air, to the only slightly less pressing needs for drink, food, clothing, and shelter, to the need for social interaction (care, language, socialization etc) for babies to grow up human, the needs for love and sex (both a necessity for the survival of the species and a felt need by individuals) and ‘spiritual’ needs for art, music etc. Which of these needs can be called ‘economic’? In a sense none of them – is the need for air an ‘economic’ need? At the same time without economics i.e. the social organization of production, none of these needs, except air, and even that may become problematic, can be met on a consistent basis. For example, without material production there can be no art, which requires such things as walls, paper, canvas, pencils, paint or whatever and above all people with the time and energy to be artists. What then is the relationship between this economic base of organized production and what Marx calls the ‘superstructure’ of politics, law, philosophy, religion, art etc.? Clearly, as we have seen, economics is a necessary condition for the rest, but does it determine them in some mechanical or absolute sense? Not according to Marx who mainly speaks of shaping or conditioning rather than strict determination. The conditioning of the superstructure by the base is best understood, in my opinion, in terms of a combination of constraints and impulses. First, the economic level of society constrains or set limits to what is possible at the ideological or superstructural level. For example, modern art and modern culture generally, is obviously impossible on a feudal or medieval economic base. Equally it was not possible to achieve modern political democracy- parliamentary government, universal suffrage etc. - without the development of capitalism with its cities and its working class. Second, developments in the economic base create powerful impulses for change. For example the early development of the bourgeoisie within feudalism gave an impulse to the rise of a new form of Christianity – Protestantism- which would challenge the alliance of Catholicism and the feudal aristocracy. Similarly the later development of industrial capitalism into monopoly capitalism created a very powerful impulse towards imperialism, the division of the whole world between the ‘great’ powers, and that in turn generated a huge pressure towards war. Thus neither the Reformation nor the First World War were accidents of history or mainly caused by ideology; on the contrary they had profound ‘economic’ causes or, more accurately, causes located in the development of the forces and relations of production. At the same time it was by no means economically determined that Martin Luther would nail his 95 Theses to door of the church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, or that world war would break out in August 1914 following an assassination in Sarajevo. Let us apply this historical method to a contemporary problem: the likelihood of a US attack on Iran. On the hand there is a very strong economic impulse to attack Iran. To defend its global economic empire the US needs to assert its military dominance, especially over the crucial regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq create an incentive to try to recoup the situation with another throw of the dice in Iran, before Iran gets a nuclear weapon. But there are also certain basic constraints ( what the US can afford)and a number of complicating factors such as the real possibility of military defeat in Iran, the danger of provoking huge turmoil in the region with disastrous consequences, the probability of massive opposition domestically and internationally. In such a situation an attack on Iran is fundamentally economically caused and motivated, not ideological or religious, but it is also not absolutely economically determined. It hangs in the balance and may depend on factors such as the judgment and character of US political and military leaders, and the strength of resistance in the Middle East, the US and elsewhere. John Molyneux 14 September 2007 KOREA COLUMN 31 Marxism and Climate Change Climate change is real and it is a serious threat. More or less all rational people, including even the US government who are at the very edge of that category, now know this to be the case. If climate change is not tackled immediately global temperatures will, before very long, rise to the point where millions die through the failure of their food supplies, floods, storms and other catastrophes and many millions more are displaced. If it is allowed to run unchecked even beyond that point incalculable horrors could be inflicted on both the human race and innumerable other species. Faced with such clear and present danger the most widespread response, both in the media and amongst environmental campaigners is to say that this issue is so big, so urgent, that it stands above politics or ideology. Since, in the long run, climate change threatens all humanity, all humanity should unite to prevent it. Conservatives, liberals. anarchists, Marxists, especially Marxists, should submerge their differences and put to one side their doctrinal squabbles, special interests and philosophical goals and concentrate on the business at hand – saving the planet. This all sounds like common sense. In fact it is completely false. To see why this is so just think what would be done about climate change if we really did live in a half way rational world, or if even a significant portion of the key players i.e. the politically and economically powerful, really did sink their differences, put aside their special interests and tackle the problem. First, all the major governments – the US, Russian, Chinese, British, Japanese, German, French etc - would immediately initiate a massive shift from carbon emitting sources of power such as oil and coal to non - carbon emitting sources such as wind, wave and solar power. Second, they would complement this with government led programmes to insulate all buildings effectively so as to reduce drastically the amount of power used to heat them. Then there would be strict regulations introduced to prevent offices and other public buildings wasting power by being lit up at night. Finally there would be huge public investment in environmentally friendly forms of public transport, crucially buses, coaches and trains, so as to greatly reduce dependence on carbon emitting cars,lorries and planes and once the efficient and comprehensive public transport was in place this could be backed up, if need be, by legal limitations on, for example, cars in city centres or on long distance runs between cities. One could think of many other measures that could and should be taken but the important point is that all these developments would be government led and legally enforced. There would also be education and propaganda directed at the public but this would be to win support for government action, not instead of it. There is nothing unusual about this. It is what governments and ruling classes ALWAYS do whenever they are serious about tackling an issue or meeting a threat. Thus it is inconceivable that ANY government would say that the way to deal with bank robberies and burglaries is to appeal to people’s consciences and to rely on the interventions of publicspirited citizens. Inconceivable that George Bush would say that the combating terrorism should be left to market forces or that the way to invade Iraq was to encourage as many Americans as possible to make their way to Baghdad under their own steam. Indeed it is precisely to secure centralised and effective action that ruling classes everywhere have created state machines to do their bidding. Yet when we turn away from this utopian fantasy of rational action in a rational world to what is actually happening, we find that almost NONE of the things that most obviously need doing are being done and that just the leave it all up to the individual approach, which would be dismissed out of hand on other issues, is the one being adopted. The reason for this abject failure is clear: the priorities and logic of capitalism. The principal holders of economic power in the world capitalist system are the giant corporations. According to the Fortune 500 list the world’s ten largest companies are as follows: 1.Wal-Mart, 2. Exxon Mobile,3. Royal Dutch Shell, 4.BP, 5. General Motors,6. Toyota, 7.Chevron, 8.DaimlerChrysler, 9.ConocoPhillips, 10.Total. It should be immediately obvious that of these ten, nine have an absolute vested interest in the oil/car economy. The other main centres of power in capitalism are the state machines of the major nations but these are tied directly and indirectly by a thousand strings to these same corporations. Moreover they are locked into competition with each other on behalf of their respective national capitalisms. Thus not only do these state apparatuses not want to make the changes necessary to halt climate change they feel they cannot afford to lest their rivals steal a march on them by opting out of the process of change. To put it very concretely the US ruling class says to itself we can’t really cut our carbon emissions (which would hit profits and damage our economy) for fear the Chinese don’t follow suit and thereby gain a competitive advantage.Likewise the Chinese ruling class will not want to cut back in case the Americans use the opportunity to race ahead. So compelling is the logic of capitalist competition that both corporations and governments are willing to put at risk the whole future of humanity and the planet rather than lose their position in the world market. And this is why it would be folly for socialists to drop their distinctive politics or put to one side their distinctive Marxist ideology in the cause of stopping climate change. The reality is that only the Marxist analysis of capitalism reveals the true cause of climate change and, even more importantly, identifies the vested interests standing in the way of preventing it reaching catastrophic proportions. And only socialist politics linked to the mass movement of the working class can mobilise the social and political power able to overcome the resistance of those vested interests and force through the changes necessary to save humanity from disaster. John Molyneux 15 October 2007 KOREA COLUMN 32 The Politics of Migration The issue of migrant labour and/or refugees is at, or near, the top of the political agenda in many countries round the world today. There are two main reasons for this. First, the combination of globalisation and war over the last decade or so has generated flows of migration greater, possibly, than at any previous point in human history – in excess, possibly, even of the huge displacement of people caused by the Second World War. Second, the ruling classes in most of the affected countries put it there. Despite the fact that these ruling classes are directly or indirectly responsible for the bulk of this movement of people (either by driving people out of one part of the world through poverty, unemployment or war, or attracting them to another part to meet labour shortages) they try to ensure that the prevailing attitude to the phenomenon of migration and to the migrants themselves, is one of hostility. Obviously the details vary from time to time and country to country, but the general thrust of the ruling class argument, presented through the statements of politicians and complemented through innumerable press and media stories, remains essentially the same everywhere. It is that migrants are to be seen primarily as constituting a ‘problem’ for the ‘host’ country into which they come. For a start there are always too many of ‘them’; ‘they’ are always arriving or about to arrive in vast numbers, like an invading army, into a country which is always already bursting at the seams. Then ‘they’ are pretty much always taking ‘our’ jobs, causing unemployment among ‘native’ workers, and at the same time jumping the queue to get houses and flats thus creating a housing shortage for deserving citizens. Their presence will also be putting all sorts of pressure on public services. Their children will be causing problems in schools because they don’t yet speak the local language or because they speak too many languages. Form time to time they will get sick and this will cause problems in the hospitals as they take up needed beds and use up scarce resources. They are also quite likely to be bringing and spreading foreign diseases. Remarkably these migrants and refugees also often seem to have tendency to crime – stealing, drugs, prostitution, knives etc – and other forms of bad behaviour but despite this the authorities still seem bent on giving them preferential treatment over local people. But, even if they are not guilty of all this bad behaviour, ‘they’ are still a ‘problem’ because of their different and ‘alien’ culture – language (which makes them hard to understand) clothes, food (which makes them smell funny), religion (which makes their morals doubtful) and so on. It being well known that people of different cultures have difficulty mixing or living together. Every socialist has to be able to refute these arguments and expose them for the reactionary rubbish they are. She or he needs at their finger tips concrete facts and statistics to dispose of the mass of exaggerations, myths and downright lies that invariably surround this subject and clearly such concrete facts will differ from country to country and case to case. However there are also certain basic theoretical points which underpin the whole debate. The first is simply that a rise in population is not a bad thing. All over the world the system tries to convince us that the existence of people is a problem, and of more people a calamity. Obviously this is the perfect alibi for governments and ruling classes everywhere – if there is unemployment, homelessness, poverty etc it is because there are too many people – but it is complete nonsense, an absolute inversion of the truth. If an increase in population really caused unemployment or homelessness then unemployment and homelessness would have been rising relentlessly since the year dot. In reality there is not some fixed number of jobs or houses, and every increase in population means an increase in the workers able to make these things. On the contrary a rise in population is, fundamentally, a result of an increase in the standard of living. The world’s population is not rising because people are having more children but because more children are surviving and living longer, which in turn is caused by caused by improved diet, health care and living standards. Equally an expanding capitalist economy generates a demand for more labour, which can be met either by natural increase in population or immigration. By the same token the real cause of rising unemployment is economic contraction or crisis. KOREA COLUMN 33 What is Real Democracy? ‘Democracy’ is about the most abused word in the political dictionary. Almost every reactionary politician you can think of - Bush, Cheney, Blair, Thatcher, Berlusconi – swears by it. Blatantly undemocratic regimes call themselves democracies: the ruling party of the Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, is called the National Democratic Party; the Stalinist one-party states of Eastern Europe called themselves People’s Democracies.. At the same time, however, democracy is invoked by people who cannot be dismissed as crooks and opportunists. Nelson Mandela proclaimed his willingness die for democracy at his trial before being jailed for twenty seven years. Similarly when Martin Luther King campaigned through the streets and jails of the Deep South until his life was actually taken, it was, for the democratic right to vote. Karl Marx was also a committed democrat. Even more importantly, millions of ordinary people, over the centuries, have fought and died for democracy. The tradition stretches from the Levellers in the English Civil War, through the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the resistance fighters in the Second World War, the South Korean workers in the 1990s to the Burmese monks and the Pakistani lawyers of today. Yet it is also true that millions of people who live under what is generally thought to be democracy, in the USA or Britain for example, are disillusioned with it. Swap the word ‘politics’ for ‘democracy’ and they will rush to express their lack of interest or their contempt and their conviction that it doesn’t matter who gets in, ‘they’ are all the same. To understand this it is necessary to view ‘democracy’ historically: it was not an abstract concept that fell from the sky or one day popped into the mind of some philosopher, but t was a political ideal and system that developed in specific circumstances The word ‘democracy’ itself, meaning ‘people’s rule’, originated in Ancient Greece but modern democracy comes from the struggle against feudalism in Europe. Before the emergence of capitalism, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the prevailing order in Europe was the feudal system. This rested on a division in society between lords or aristocrats (large hereditary landowners) and peasants. These societies, which ranged from tiny principalities to huge empires, were ruled by a variety of princes, monarchs, and emperors, who each represented the dominant family in that territory and who frequently claimed that they ruled by divine right. At this time there was no democracy of any kind, and the mass of ordinary people had no political rights at all. Similar undemocratic systems existed in most of the rest of the world e.g. China and India. Gradually, however, a new class of people began to develop within the feudal order. These were mainly artisans in the towns who became merchants, and small manufacturers – often they were called ‘burghers’ (townsmen), hence the later term ‘bourgeoisie, used by Marx. . Under feudalism the bourgeoisie were treated as second class citizens and denied political power by the aristocracy, even though many of them became rich and cultured. Increasingly the bourgeoisie came to resent the arbitrary power of the aristocracy and its monarchs, which they saw as holding back both their own advancement and society as a whole Eventually the bourgeoisie was able to cast aside the aristocracy and assume its rightful place at the head of society. This involved a series of revolutions and wars such as the English Revolution of 1642, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution of 1789, as well as lesser battles. But merchants and manufacturers cannot fight wars and revolutions by themselves. To win power they had to mobilise ‘the people’, the lower orders of urban poor of and peasants. In other cases the lower orders mobilized themselves and the bourgeoisie had to manoeuvre to place itself at their head. To do this they needed a political philosophy that offered something to the masses. Out of these struggles was born the ideology and rhetoric of modern democracy – of the rule of law, of equal rights, of freedom of speech, of representative and accountable government based on election not inheritance. At first, however, it was an extremely restricted democracy. The bourgeoisie did not think that people of no property should have the vote in case they used the vote to abolish property. Accountable government, yes, but accountable to them not to the working masses. All men are born equal, yes, but this doesn’t include black slaves, ‘natives’, women or, probably, factory workers. But once the genie of democracy was out of the bottle it was not so easy to control. As the working classes grew in strength, so they seized on the idea of democracy and made it their own. The world’s first mass workers’ organisation, the Chartists, centred on the question of ‘one man, one vote’. Then towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British bourgeoisie made a remarkable discovery – that it was possible for them to grant workers the vote without the workers voting to get rid of the bourgeoisie. Indeed it was even possible to persuade some workers to vote for their capitalist bosses. From this point onwards every political reactionary and shyster began proclaiming themselves true believers in democracy (while discretely crossing their fingers behind their backs in the knowledge that ‘sometimes’ democracy has to be dispensed with). What conclusions should we draw from this? That the whole idea of democracy was or is a mistake? That democracy is irrelevant to real needs of working people? This would be a disastrous mistake. The problem with the democracy that exists in Europe, the US and many other countries today, is not that it’s wrong in itself or even doesn’t matter. It is that it is far, far too limited. The democracy we have been talking about is political democracy. What is needed is political democracy plus economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy because the decisive levers of power lie not in parliaments or governments, but, first, in the boardrooms of industry, business and the banks and second, in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The former it owns directly, the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties and by these means it can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to its will, as we have seen with reformist governments round the world. This is why Marxists call this form of democracy, bourgeois democracy: democracy that is based on the rule of the bourgeoisie. To move beyond bourgeois democracy to workers’ democracy, to democracy that means real power for the mass of people, it is necessary to extend it from the political sphere to the sphere of production and then other areas of social life. It means democracy in every factory, call centre,school, university, and hospital. It means democracy in the armed forces, the courts and the civil service. But none of that can be achieved without overturning capitalist property and the capitalist state, without, in other words, a revolution which creates a new form of state that will enable the working class to run society. Thanks to the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917, backed by other revolutions such as Hungary 1956 and Iran in 1979 we know that the core institution of such a state is the soviet or workers’ council based on the election of recallable delegates from workplace meetings. However recognising the extremely restricted character of bourgeois democracy and understanding how this alienates millions of working people, does not mean it is not worth defending or fighting for On the contrary even a freedom of the press that allows The Sun(PLEASE GIVE KOREAN EXAMPLE) to dominate the market also allows socialist papers to be published. Even a parliament reduced to a talking shop is a platform from which socialist ideas can be propagated. Even an elected New Labour government is preferable to no elected government at all. Even the rule of law which defends the property of the rich, offers some protection against the extremes of repression. But it does mean that the working class should take the lead in the struggle for democratic demands and not be satisfied with just political i.e. bourgeois, democracy . Instead it should transform the ‘democratic’ struggle into a social revolution which alone will make genuine democracy a reality.. John Molyneux 9 Dec 2007 KOREA COLUMN 34 Marxism and Art What Marxism has to say about art (by which I mean all the creative arts i.e. music, literature, painting, sculpture, photography, film, drama, dance and so on) is limited but important. It is limited in that Marxism does not offer, and should not try to offer, any prescriptions or instructions as to how artists should make their art. There is no ‘Marxist’ way to write poetry, or paint, or play the trumpet or compose symphonies, any more than there is a Marxist method of mechanical engineering, playing chess or doing the high jump. (Marx himself wrote some poetry when he was young, but it wasn’t very good and he soon gave it up). Marxism does not require that artists tackle certain themes e.g. class, war or revolution, rather than others such as sex, dreams or religion, or even that art be overtly political or committed. Nor does Marxism provide a set of ready made political or ideological criteria for the evaluation of art. Mao Ze Dong was a poet as well as leader of the Chinese Revolution , but his merits as a poet are not determined by his merits or lack of them as a revolutionary or ruler of China. A Marxist who argues that T.S. Eliot was a bad poet because he was a reactionary (he was very reactionary) or that Diego Rivera was a greater painter than Picasso because he was more left wing, is not being a Marxist in his or her approach to art. Marx (and Engels) preferred the reactionary pro-aristocratic novelist, Balzac, to the progressive Zola, because he thought Balzac was a better writer who provided a fuller and more insightful picture of French society. The standpoint of Marxism, as Trotsky insisted in his debates over literature and art with the Stalinists, requires that art be judged as art. What Marxism does do, however, is provide: a) a unique appreciation and understanding of the overall importance of art in individual and collective human development; b) the best analytical method for grasping the course of art and cultural history as a whole; c) an extremely useful standpoint for the analysis of the meaning and significance of individual works of art. None of the great Marxists ever suggested that either individual works of art or art in general played a key role in determining the outbreak or outcome of revolutions. Nonetheless, they all took a serious interest in art and clearly felt informed and sustained by it. In this respect art seems to operate in a manner closer to medicine or nutritious food than to political action. Also the fact that art has existed in every known society in the history of the world reinforces the case for its social necessity. Marxism enables us to understand this. For Marxism, creative labour is the essence of becoming and being human. Human beings are animals who have made themselves into more than animals through labour, ‘by producing their means of subsistence’ as The German Ideology puts it (see also Engels, The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man). Through labour humans shape their environment, their history and themselves. However, in class divided society, and especially in capitalist society, most people most of the time are deprived of the possibility of creative labour. Their labour is alienated: they do not control it , and are forced to perform it not for themselves but at the behest of others and it becomes something that damages and distorts their lives. Art is the name we give to one of the few forms of creative labour, i.e. labour controlled by the producer (revolutionary practice is another) that is possible in class society. This makes genuine truthful communication of ideas and emotions possible in art in a way that is not possible in completely mercenary entertainment, journalism and advertising. And this is why art is important to us as human beings and Marxists even when that art is ideologically conservative and even though the art world and the cultural industries are dominated by the ruling class. Indeed it is a central proposition of Marxist art history that the class which controls the major means of material production will also fundamentally dominate artistic production. For Marxism approaches art history on the basis of historical materialism which sees art, along with religion, philosophy, politics and law, as part of the superstructure of society which rests on, and is conditioned by, the economic base constituted by the forces and relations of production. Of course the relations between economic development, class and art are not to be understood mechanically – they are complex and highly mediated – but denying or disregarding them as in the numerous bourgeois schools of formalist art and literary criticism makes it impossible to grasp the overall movement of cultural history or major developments within it. For example, why was the art of the European Middle Ages so (relatively) static, formalised and unchanging ? Because it reflected the (relatively) slow development of the forces of production under feudalism and their accompaniment by a rigid social hierarchy resting on frozen relations of production. What generated the spectacular artistic and cultural upsurge of the Renaissance that began in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century (with Dante and Giotto), culminated in Italy with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian and then spread north through Germany, the Netherlands and England, encompassing such giant figures as Durer, Breughal, Rembrandt and Shakespeare? The historical materialist will answer that it was a reflection of the rise, at first within the fetters of feudalism and then breaking through in its own right, of the dynamic but contradictory system of capitalism and of the class associated with it, namely the bourgeoisie. How do we explain why the stately procession of artistic phases ( Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical, Romantic) measured in centuries and half centuries, suddenly gave way to the frenzy of modernism in which art movements ( impressionism, expressionism, fauvism cubism , futurism, suprematism, dadaism etc) came and went almost in the blink of an eye, except as a response to the ‘constant revolutionising of production’ and ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’ imposed by modern capitalism. Can the succession of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop etc, and therefore the whole course of modern popular music from Elvis Presley to Amy Winehouse be understood apart from the freedom struggle of BlackAmerica? Even where individual works and individual artists are concerned Marxism offers unique insights. In his great book Ways of Seeing John Berger used the Marxist critique of capitalist social relations to produce superb accounts of Holbein’s The Ambassadors and Dutch still-life paintings. Neither Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times nor Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot can be understood without a grasp of Marx’s theory of alienation. In Seoul eighteen months ago I saw the Korean artist, Nam June Paik’s great pagoda of TV monitors The More the Better. It cried out for analysis using the concepts of Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development. No amount of Marxism can substitute for specific knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the art concerned. But art is part of society and evolves in constant interaction with society. The richest, most profound and most scientific analysis of society, which is Marxism, cannot fail to enrich our understanding of art. John Molyneux January 15, 2008