Russia: What Went Wrong?

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 20^th 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

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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 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.

Blast from the past - old Warhol review

Issue 261 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published March 2002 Copyright © Socialist Review

Art

TOP OF THE POPS?

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

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

In 1963 the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein painted 'Whaam!' It was a huge blow-up of a comic book image depicting a US fighter jet destroying an enemy plane at the press of a button. Nearly 30 years later, in the run-up to the Gulf War, Socialist Review put this picture on the front cover with the caption 'Stop Bush's Mad War'. Similarly, in 1962 Andy Warhol produced his 'Marilyn Diptych', with its rows of yellow-haired Marilyns, and 36 years later the International Socialism journal referenced Warhol on its cover with rows of yellow-haired Karl Marxes. This significant art, so often greeted as outlandish or absurd in its day, seeps gradually into the culture until it becomes part of the taken for granted collective visual consciousness, like Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' or a Constable landscape. It is therefore worth beginning a consideration of Warhol, whose exhibition has been the subject of such massive media attention, by noting just what a radical move (in historical, not political, terms) Pop Art represented at its inception. The art world in the 1950s, especially the New York art world, was dominated by the painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the criticism of their champion, Clement Greenberg. Greenberg's key theoretical statement, 'Avant Garde and Kitsch', defined 'high art' previously in opposition to the products of popular mass culture, of kitsch and 'tin pan alley' as he called it. To try to make art out of the despised imagery of Hollywood and the supermarket was a daring and risky provocation, in the same way that a century earlier it was risky for Monet to present a nude working class prostitute rather than a classical Venus or an Eastern odalisque. It is true that it was Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and others who were the first to take this road, but it was Warhol who took it furthest and mostly uncompromisingly with his stark, almost unembellished images of serial soup cans, Brillo boxes, Elvises and Marilyns. The word 'almost' is important here, and so is this impressive retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern. The casual viewer of Warhol reproductions in books, magazines and newspapers could easily get the impression that these are 'simple' mechanical reproductions of already iconic images. But standing in front of the very large originals immediately makes it clear that these pictures are carefully and artfully constructed. For example, '210 Coca-Cola Bottles' (seven rows, 30 bottles each) actually presents us with 210 different bottles, each distinguished by variations in the quantity of the liquid, the highlights on the glass, the lettering on the bottle, etc, so that the pictures constitute not only an invocation of Coke and mass production but also a complex 'abstract' composition in its own right. The same applies to 'S&H Green Stamps' and to '192 One Dollar Bills', in which the bills all vary in tone and some are upside-down. It's even more important where the Marilyn pictures are concerned. All the Marilyns derive from a single source, a clipped black and white still from the 1953 film Niagara, but each are different, and not only in colour. 'Blue Shot Marilyn', for example, has a white circle right between Monroe's eyes, clearly suggestive of a bullet hole. The 'Marilyn Diptych' divides into 25 coloured Monroes on the left and 25 black and whites on the right, with the image passing through near total blackening and disfiguration in the seventh column to extreme faintness on the far right. The more you look at the coloured panels, the more the hair, eyeshadow and lips look like paper cutouts that have been stuck on the faces, emphasising the artificially constructed nature of the Monroe 'image'. Also the misregistration of the colour (the failure of the colour to fit exactly with the underlying black and white photograph) changes the expression on some of the faces from a smile almost to a snarl, especially where the red lipstick overlaps onto the teeth like blood.

Dark side of US life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Permanent Revolution : then and now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

John Molyneux

12 March 2007

KOREA COLUMN 18

The Theory of Permanent Revolution

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

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

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

The 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

Message to Riaz Ahmed

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

Best wishes
John Molyneux

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 16

Marxism and Oppression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Molyneux

20 Jan 2007

Marxism Art Show - Left in Vision

MARXISM ART SHOW

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