Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-HONOR LENIN, LUXEMBURG AND LIEBKNECHT-THE THREE L’S-Honor Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose of The Revolution!-"The Political Mass Strike (1913)"

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-HONOR LENIN. LUXEMBURG AND LIEBKNECHT- THE THREE L’SHonor Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose of The Revolution!
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EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR, LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. HERE’S WHY WE HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG
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Rosa Luxemburg The Political Mass Strike/1913)

First Spoken: July 22, 1913 to the Fourth Berlin constituency.
First Published: Vorwärts, July 24, 1913.
Source: Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings, edited and introduced by Robert Looker.
Translated: (from the German) W.D. Graf.
Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins with special thanks to Robert Looker for help with permissions.
Copyright: Random House, 1972, ISBN/ISSN: 0224005960. Printed with the permission of Random House. Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004.

In Germany, the problem of the political mass strike was earlier discussed under the mighty pressure of the great Russian Revolution of 1905, a revolution in which the application of the mass strike brought both defeat and victory to the Russian proletariat. The resolution of the Jena Party Congress [September 1905] was the outcome of this discussion. This resolution declared the political mass strike to be a weapon of the proletariat also applicable in Germany. There followed a period when debate on this problem subsided. Then in 1910 there was a further spirited discussion of the political mass strike in connection with our action to secure the right to vote in Prussia. The mass actions were deliberately suspended and our attention was directed towards the Reichstag elections of 1912. The mass strike again vanished from discussion. Now we see that the issue is again being discussed in meetings and at regional and district conferences. Even the party congress will not be able to avoid adopting a serious position on the question. When it is seen that the mass strike arouses the active interest of party comrades, no one will be able to assume that the entire discussion has been raised by only a few supporters of the mass strike. It is rooted in the economic situation. Such discussions always originate when the party feels the need to impel the movement to take a significant step forward, and when the party comrades become aware that we cannot make any headway with the critics who would write off the whole discussion as a sham perpetrated by a few cranks.

How and when did this discussion start? In the Wilmersdorf meeting? That is an error, but one which can be forgiven those who read only Vorwärts. For it has admittedly made out that Comrade Frank instigated the discussion on the political mass strike in the Wilmersdorf meeting. Long before the mass strike was discussed in Berlin, party comrades in many other places were concerned with it. If it is certain that the elemental power of the masses has now, for the third time, placed the question of the political mass strike on the agenda, then we must welcome it and see in this a symptom of the fact that we cannot avoid any longer applying this most valuable method to the class struggle. This is why it is necessary to examine the mass-strike issue in all its aspects. The question is far from being settled. It must still be discussed at length so that the masses are familiarized with the way in which this new form of struggle is to be applied.

If we consider the present discussion, we see on the one hand ardent advocates of the mass strike who are in favour of the party conference, in consultation with the General Commission of the trade unions, empowering the Party Executive to prepare the way for the mass strike. Indeed, they also demand that we should begin to educate the workers for the mass strike. They further advise the preparation of the mass strike according to the Belgian model. These are the demands made by one group. Another group immediately expressed the strongest reservations against any ‘flirting with the idea of the mass strike’. They said that this is extremely dangerous to our party life, for we in Germany are far from ready to participate in a mass strike. The party would suffer a defeat, their argument continued, from which it would not recover for decades.

The advocates of an application of the mass strike as soon as possible belong to various political currents. Comrade Frank, who has come out for the mass strike, represents the school of political opportunism. In Baden, he advocates the formation of a grand coalition with the National Liberals. His policy is very simple. One pursues grandiose politics in parliament with all the methods of statesmanlike tactics, one comes to terms with the bourgeois parties, one fashions a great block of the entire Left. However, when this policy fails, as it is bound to do, to advance the cause of the proletariat one step further, ah! then workers come into the streets and start a mass strike. Frank’s proclamation is a perfect example of how not to arrange a mass strike.

The mass strike is not something that one can make whenever the parliamentary tricksters’ policy breaks down. A mass strike brought about under such circumstances is a lost cause from the outset. The political tricksters who believe that they can conjure up a mass strike and then terminate it with a wave of the hand are in error. This cannot be done. Mass strikes can only take place when the historical preconditions for them are at hand. They cannot be made on command. Mass strikes are not an artificial method that can be applied whenever the party has bungled its politics, in order to extricate us overnight from the morass. When the class conflicts have become so pronounced and the political situation so tense that parliamentary means are no longer sufficient to advance the cause of the proletariat, then the mass strike is urgently necessary, and then, although it may not bring unconditional victory, it is immensely useful to the cause of the proletariat. Only when the situation has become so extreme that there is no more hope for co-operation with the bourgeois parties, especially with the liberals, does the proletariat obtain the impetus necessary for the success of the mass strike. Accordingly, the mass strike is not reconcilable with a policy centred around parliamentarism.

The Belgian movement is a storehouse of information on the problem of the mass strike. After they had abolished the plural vote by means of the mass strike, our Belgian comrades centred their efforts on parliament. This meant that the mass strike was put on ice. All proletarian actions were suspended as part of an overall plan to combine with the bourgeois Left in order to achieve universal suffrage. But the election of 1912 brought about the complete collapse of liberalism, and what remained of it went over to the camp of reaction. Then a storm of indignation broke out. Immediately following the elections the question of the mass strike reappeared. But the leaders of Belgian Social Democracy, who had based their policy on co-operation with the liberals, endeavoured to placate the masses by promising to arrange for the mass strike later. Then began the systematic postponement of the mass strike. Instead of an elemental eruption, a new tactic was begun; preparations were made for a new mass strike to be held in one month. After preparations lasting nine months, the masses could no longer be restrained. The strike finally broke out and for ten days was carried on with admirable discipline. The result was this: the strike was discontinued upon the first illusory concession made, a concession which represented a gain of virtually nothing. The Belgian comrades did not feel that they had achieved a victory. We see then, that the mass strike, employed in conjunction with the policy of a grand coalition resulted in nothing but set-backs. In view of this, we will reject any possible recommendation that we form a grand coalition in the south while at the same time starting a mass strike in Prussia.

On the other hand, it is said that we would be acting prematurely were we to propagate the mass strike in Germany, for we are less ripe for it than the proletariat of other countries. We in Germany have the strongest organizations, the fullest coffers, the largest parliamentary party, and yet we, alone among the whole international proletariat, are not supposed to be ripe? It is said that, despite its strength, our organization is only a minority of the proletariat. According to this notion, we would be ripe only when the last man and the last woman had paid their dues to their constituency associations. This is one wondrous moment for which we need not wait. Whenever we instigate an important action, not only do we count upon those who are organized, but we also assume that they will sweep the unorganized masses along with them. What would be the state of the proletarian straggle if we counted only on the organized!

During the ten-day general strike in Belgium, at least two-thirds of the strikers were not organized. Of course one must not conclude from this that the organization was of no significance. The organization’s power lies in its understanding of how to draw the unorganized into the action at the right time. The exploitation of such situations is a method of bringing about a huge growth in the organizations of the party and trade unions. Recruitment to the strong organizations must be based on a large-scale and forward-looking policy; otherwise the organizations will quietly decay. The history of the party and the trade unions demonstrates that our organizations thrive only on the attack. For then the unorganized flock to our banner. The type of organization that calculates in advance and to the nearest penny the costs necessary for action is worthless; it cannot weather the storm. All this must be made clear, and the dividing line must not be drawn so nicely between the organized and the unorganized.

If it is demanded that the party executive, in conjunction with the General Commission, should prepare for the mass strike, then it must be said that mass strikes cannot be made. But it is necessary to recognize that in Germany we are approaching a situation in which mass strikes are inevitable. We have just witnessed another victory of imperialism in the passing of the enormous military bill. After many in our ranks had so hoped to co-operate with the liberals, we see that these same liberals are hand-maidens of imperialism. If regrettably our parliamentary party supported property taxes in the fiscal covering bill, then this was nothing more than an intent to combine with the progressives and National Liberals to eliminate the Blue-Black Block. But the liberals, in league with the Blue-Black Block, eliminated us and, behind the backs of the Social Democrats, bungled miserably the property tax. Our parliamentary party’s final covering bill evoked powerful reactions in the Social-Democratic press abroad and in our own meetings. We shall have lively debates on this subject at the party congress.

The triumph of imperialism in the military bill brought home once more the painful lesson that we can no longer rely on the liberals. For this reason it is necessary to open the masses’ eyes. It is a fact that our parliamentarians lived in the illusion that they could form a coalition with the liberals against the Blue-Black Block, and that this illusion resulted in a miserable fiasco. This victory for imperialism was a new step towards the heightening of the class conflicts. We live at a time in which no more advantages can be gained in parliament for the proletariat. This is why the masses themselves must enter the theatre of action. Developments have taken such a turn that the mass strike will not disappear from the agenda in Germany. It is not a matter of preparing the mass strike; instead, we must ensure that our policy expresses the utmost strength necessary in the present situation.

The latest phase of our party’s policy dates from our electoral victory of 1912. We had set our greatest hopes upon it. An article by Kautsky, printed in Vorwärts, mentioned that a new liberalism was emerging. That was a disastrous illusion, but explicable on the basis of the slogan of moderation issued for the run-off ballots.

Moderation is an unacceptable policy. As a result of moderation we had vague hopes of a new liberalism and then the exuberant anticipation attached to the possibility of a Social Democrat being chosen President of the Reichstag. All these hopes have been dashed, and they show that our policy and tactics are outmoded. We have now witnessed the tumult of the Jubilee celebrations and the visit of the Bloody Tsar to the Berlin Court. This opportunity should have been used to instigate some kind of republican action. Do we have four million Social Democrats only so that we can crawl into a mousehole when the Bloody Tsar comes for a visit? How many supporters we could have won if we had organized a demonstration!

If we want to prove ourselves worthy of the great coming events then we must not begin at the wrong end by attempting to make technical preparations for the mass strike. When the situation is ripe, the tactic of the mass strike will present itself. Let us not rack our brains about supporting it at the right time. What is necessary is that you watch the party press to ensure that it is your instrument and expresses your opinion and your mood. You must also see to it that our parliamentarians feel a mass pressing them from behind, so that they do not chart such a disastrous course as in the case of the military bill. Shape the organization so that you need not wait until the command is given from above, but so that you have the reins of command in your own hands. You must not lose yourselves in technical details such as the reorganization of the dues-paying social evenings and of the delegate system. This is all very important, but your attention must be directed above all to the general guiding principles of our policy in parliament and throughout the country. Policy must not be formulated in such a way that the masses are always confronted with faits accomplis. Above all you must see to it that the press is a sharply honed weapon that cuts away the darkness from the people’s minds. The masses must make themselves heard in order to propel the party ship forward. Then we will be able to face the future confidently. History will do its work. See that you too do your work.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’

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Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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Karl Korsch 1930

The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy’
– An Anti-Critique (1930)

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Written: by Karl Korsch in 1930, as a response to criticisms of Marxism and Philosophy;
Source: Marxism and Philosophy. Karl Korsch, translated and with an Introduction by Fred Halliday, Monthly Review Press, 1970;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden for marxists.org, 2004, in its entirety.


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I
Habent sua fata libelli [To each text its own fate]. In 1923 there appeared a work on a ‘problem of the greatest theoretical and practical importance: the relationship between Marxism and Philosophy’. It had a rigorously scientific character, but did not deny that the problem was practically related to the struggles of our age, which were then raging at their fiercest. It was prepared to receive a biased and negative theoretical reception from the tendency which it had attacked in practice. It might, on the other hand, have expected to get a fair and even friendly reception from the tendency whose practical orientation it had represented in theory, and with the tools of theory. The opposite occurred. The evaluation of Marxism and Philosophy by bourgeois philosophy and science evaded its practical premises and consequences, and interpreted its theoretical theses in a unilateral manner. Its representatives were therefore able to adopt a positive attitude towards the theoretical content of a work they had travestied. They did not provide a concrete presentation and criticism of the real theoretical and practical conclusion which all the analyses of the book served to establish and develop. Instead they unilaterally selected what, from the bourgeois point of view, was supposed to be the ‘good’ side of the work — its acknowledgment of intellectual realities. They ignored what was indeed the ‘bad’ side for the bourgeoisie — its call for the total destruction and abolition of these intellectual realities and their material basis: these goals were to be accomplished by a revolutionary class engaged in material and intellectual, practical and theoretical action. Bourgeois critics were thus able to hail a dissociated conclusion of the book as a scientific advance.[1] On the other hand, the authoritative members of the two dominant tendencies of contemporary official ‘Marxism’ sensed at once, with an unerring instinct, that this unassuming little book contained a heretical rejection of certain dogmas. Despite all their apparent disagreements, the two confessions of the old Marxist orthodox church still held these in common. They were therefore quick to denounce the book before their assembled Councils for containing views that were a deviation from accepted doctrine.[2]

At both Party Congresses in 1924 the relevant ideological authorities reacted by condemning Marxism and Philosophy as heretical. What is at once most striking about the critical arguments on which they based this condemnation is the complete identity of their content — a somewhat unexpected one for tendencies whose theory and practice diverge in all other respects. The Social Democrat Wels condemned the views of ‘Professor Korsch’ as a ‘Communist’ heresy, and the Communist Zinoviev condemned them as a ‘Revisionist’ heresy. The difference, however, was merely terminological. In point of fact there is nothing new in the arguments directly or indirectly advanced against my views by Bammel and Luppol, Bukharin and Deborin, Béla Kun and Rudas, Thalheimer and Duncker, or other critics belonging to the communist movement. (Their attacks are connected with the recent inquisition against George Lukács which I will discuss later.) They have merely repeated and developed ancient arguments of that leading representative of the other camp of official Marxism Karl Kautsky, theoretician of the Social Democratic Party. Kautsky wrote a detailed review of my book in the theoretical journal of German Social Democracy.[3] He was under the illusion that in attacking my work he was attacking ‘all the theoreticians of Communism’. The real dividing line in this debate, however, is quite different. A fundamental debate on the general state of modern Marxism has now begun, and there are many indications that despite secondary, transient or trivial conflicts, the real division on all major and decisive questions is between the old Marxist orthodoxy of Kautsky allied to the new Russian or ‘Leninist’ orthodoxy on the one side, and all critical and progressive theoretical tendencies in the proletarian movement today on the other side.

This general situation of contemporary Marxist theory explains why the great majority of my critics were far less concerned with the more limited set of questions defined by the title ‘Marxism and Philosophy’, than with two other problems which the book did not treat thoroughly but only touched upon. The first is the conception of Marxism itself which lies behind all the propositions in my text. The second is the more general problem of the Marxist concept of ideology, or of the relationship between consciousness and being, onto which the specific problem of the relationship between Marxism and Philosophy eventually debouched. On this latter point the theses I put forward in ‘Marxism and Philosophy’ agree in many ways with the propositions, founded on a broader philosophical basis, to be found in the dialectical studies of George Lukács, which appeared about the same time under the title History and Class Consciousness. In a ‘Postscript’ to my work I stated I was fundamentally in agreement with Lukács and postponed any discussion of the specific differences of method and content that remained between us. This was then quite incorrectly taken — especially by Communist critics — as an avowal of complete accord between us. In fact, I myself was not sufficiently aware at the time of the extent to which Lukács and I, despite our many theoretical similarities, did in fact diverge in more than just a few ‘detailed’ points. This is one reason — there are others which this is not the place to discuss — why I did not then respond to the insistent demand of my Communist assailants to ‘differentiate’ my views from those of Lukács. I preferred to allow these critics to go on indiscriminately assimilating the ‘deviations’ of Lukács and myself from the one ‘Marxist-Leninist’ doctrine which alone brings salvation. Today, in this second unaltered edition, I cannot again state that I am in basic agreement with Lukács’s views, as I once did. The other reasons which previously restrained me from any full exposition of our differences have also long since ceased to apply. Nevertheless, I still believe to this day that Lukács and I are objectively on the same side in our critical attitude towards the old Social Democratic Marxist orthodoxy and the new Communist orthodoxy. This is, after all, the central issue.

II
Marxism and Philosophy advanced a conception of Marxism that was quite undogmatic and anti-dogmatic, historical and critical, and which was therefore materialist in the strictest sense of the word. This conception involved the application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of history itself. The orthodox critics of both old and new schools opposed this. Yet their first dogmatic counter-attack came in the guise of an extremely ‘historical’ and apparently quite ‘undogmatic’ accusation. They charged that my work showed a quite unjustified preference for the ‘primitive’ form in which Marx and Engels had originally founded their new dialectical materialist method, as a revolutionary theory that was directly related to revolutionary practice. I was alleged to have ignored the positive development of their theory by the Marxists of the Second International; and to have also completely overlooked the fact that Marx and Engels themselves had modified their original theory in important ways, so that it was only in a later form that it achieved its full historical elaboration.

It is clear that this raises an issue of really major importance for the historical materialist view of Marxist theory. It concerns the successive phases of development through which Marxism has passed from its original conception up to the situation today, where it is split into different historical versions. It also involves the relationship of these different phases to each other and their significance for the general historical development of theory in the modern working-class movement.

It is perfectly obvious that these different historical phases are bound to be evaluated in quite different ways by each of the dogmatic ‘Marxist’ tendencies which compete with each other in the socialist movement of today and which, even on the theoretical level, clash with greatest bitterness The collapse of the First International in the 1870s prefigured the collapse of the pre-1914 version of the Second International on the outbreak of the World War, in that both produced not one but several different tendencies, all of them invoking Marx and fighting each other for the ‘genuine ring’ — the right to claim the succession of true ‘Marxism’. It is best simply to cut through the Gordian knot of these dogmatic disputes and place oneself on the terrain of a dialectical analysis. This can be expressed symbolically by saying that the real ring has been lost. In other words, dogmatic calculations of how far the different versions of Marxist theory correspond to some abstract canon of ‘pure and unfalsified’ theory should be abandoned. All these earlier and later Marxist ideologies must on the contrary be seen in a historical, materialist and dialectical perspective as products of a historical evolution. The way one defines the different phases of this evolution, and their relations to each other, will depend on the angle from which one starts such an analysis. In my work, there is a discussion of the connection between Marxism and philosophy, and for this purpose I have distinguished three major periods of development through which Marxism has passed since its birth and in each of which its relation to philosophy has changed in a specific way.[4] This particular approach is valid only for the history of Marxism and Philosophy. This is particularly true for the second period I distinguished, which is too undifferentiated for other purposes. I dated this second period from the battle of June 1848 and the subsequent years of the 1850s, which saw an unprecedented new upswing in capitalism and the crushing of all the proletarian organizations and dreams that had arisen in the previous epoch. In my schema, this period lasted up to about the turn of the century.

It would be quite possible to argue that this was too abstract a way of analysing the ties between Marxism and philosophy. For it involved treating an extremely long period as a single unity, and ignoring historical changes within it that were of great importance for the whole history of the workers’ movement. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century there was no such decisive change in the relationship between Marxism and philosophy as that which occurred at the mid-century. For it was then that philosophy expired, affecting the whole of the German bourgeoisie, and in a different way the proletariat as well. However, a full history of the relationship between Marxist theory and philosophy after 1850 would naturally have to make certain other major distinctions in this period, if it were not to be content with tracing only the very general outlines of the process. In this respect my work did leave open a great number of questions. Yet as far as I know they have not been broached by anyone else. For example, in a famous passage at the end of his work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels refers in 1888 to the German workers’ movement as the ‘heir of classical German philosophy’. This might have been taken as more than just the first sign of the approaching third phase, when Marxism and philosophy began to interact positively once again. For Engels himself refers in his introduction to ‘a kind of rebirth of classical German philosophy abroad, in England and Scandinavia, and even in Germany itself’ — although this at first only involved the revisionist Kantian Marxists who were applying the bourgeois slogan ‘Back to Kant’ to Marxist theory. I described the dialectical materialist, critical revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels in the 1840s as an ‘anti-philosophy’ which yet in itself remained philosophical. It would be necessary to make a retrospective analysis of the four decades from 1850 to 1890 to show how this ‘anti-philosophy’ later developed in two separate directions. On the one hand, socialist ‘science’ became ‘positive’ and gradually turned away from philosophy altogether. On the other hand, a philosophical development occurred, apparently in conflict with the former but in fact complementary to it. This is first to be found in the late 1850s, in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, and then later in those of their best disciples — Labriola in Italy and Plekhanov in Russia. Its theoretical character may be defined as a kind of return to Hegel’s philosophy and not just a return to the essentially critical and revolutionary ‘anti-philosophy’ of the Left Hegelians in the Sturm und Drang period of the 1840s.[5]

This philosophical tendency of the later theory of Marx and Engels is not just to be found in the altered attitude to philosophy in Engels’s Feuerbach. It also had definite implications for the further development of Marxist economics: clear signs of this are already present in Marx’s 1859 Critique of Political Economy and in Capital. It had even more evident consequences for Engels’s special topic of the natural sciences: they may be seen in his Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring. Given all this, one can only regard the ‘German workers’ movement’ as the ‘heir of classical German philosophy’ in so far as it ‘absorbed’ Marxist theory as a whole, including its philosophical aspects, with the birth of the Second International.

But these are not the issues raised by those who have criticized the three periods I outlined in the history of Marxism. They have not tried to show that this periodization was useless even for the specific purposes of my investigation. They prefer to accuse me of tending to present the whole history of Marxism after 1850 in a negative light, as a single, linear and univocal process of decay suffered by the original revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels — not only in the domain of the relation of Marxism to philosophy, but in every domain.[6] They love to attack this position, though I have never adopted it. They compete with each other in pointing out the absurdity of a view they themselves have invented and attributed to me; that Marx and Engels were responsible for the degeneration of their own theory. They never tire of proving the undoubtedly positive nature of the process that led from the original revolutionary Communism of the Manifesto to the ‘Marxism of the First International’ and then to the Marxism of Capital and the later writings of Marx and Engels. Having first argued that the later Marx and Engels made a significant contribution to the development of Marxist theory, which no one denies, they end by slipping into a claim that the ‘Marxists of the Second International’ made a ‘positive’ contribution to it too. This is where it becomes obvious that there was a dogmatic preconception behind these attacks from the outset, though they all pretend to be concerned with the historical accuracy of my account of the development of Marxism after 1850. What this really involves is a straightforward dogmatic defence of the traditional and orthodox thesis that the theory of the Second International was basically Marxist all along (according to Kautsky) or at any rate until the ‘original sin’ of 4 August 1914 (according to the Communists).

Kautsky is the clearest example of orthodox Marxist prejudices about the real historical development of Marxism. For him, it is not only the theoretical metamorphoses of the different Marxist tendencies of the Second International, but the ‘extension of Marxism undertaken by Marx and Engels with the Inaugural Address of 1864 and concluded with Engels’s introduction to the new edition of Marx’s Class Struggles in France in 1895’ which ‘broadened’ Marxism from a theory of proletarian revolution into a ‘theory valid not only for revolutionary phases but also for non-revolutionary periods’. At this stage, Kautsky had only robbed Marxist theory of its essentially revolutionary character: he still, however, professed to regard it as a ‘theory of class struggle’. Later he went much further. His most recent major work, The Materialist Conception of History, eliminates any essential connection between Marxist theory and proletarian struggle whatever. His whole protest against my alleged ‘charge’ that Marx and Engels impoverished and banalized Marxism is merely a cover for a scholastic and dogmatic attempt to base his own betrayal of Marxism on the ‘authority’ of Marx and Engels. He and others once made a pretence of accepting Marxist theory, but have long since denatured it out of recognition, and have now abandoned the last remnants of it.

Yet it is exactly here that the theoretical solidarity of the new Communists with the old Marxist orthodoxy of Social Democracy emerges. Communist critics like Bammel argue that in my work ‘concepts like “the Marxism of the Second International” are obscured by an excessively abstract and schematized problematic’. This accusation conceals a dogmatic attempt to defend the ‘Marxism of the Second International’ whose spiritual legacy Lenin and his companions never abandoned, in spite of some things they said in the heat of battle. As Communist ‘theoreticians’ tend to do in such cases, Bammel avoids taking any responsibility himself for trying to rescue the honour of Second International Marxism. Instead he hides in Lenin’s ample shadow. He tries to explain to the reader what he means by attacking the allegedly ‘abstract and schematic’ way in which Marxism and Philosophy obscures the ‘Marxism of the Second International’, and he does this in standard scholastic fashion by quoting a sentence of Lenin in which he once acknowledged the ‘historical contribution of the Second International’ to advancing the modern workers’ movement.[7] Lenin was a great tactician and he made this remark in a highly complex tactical situation, when he was referring to the International’s practical contribution and not to its theoretical one. But Bammel stops short of his intention of extending Lenin’s praise of the good aspects of Social Democratic practice to Social Democratic theory. Instead of drawing this clear conclusion, he mumbles in ‘an excessively abstract and obscure way’ something to the effect that ‘it would not be difficult to show that it would be quite possible to say somewhat the same thing about the theoretical foundation of Marxism’.

Since Marxism and Philosophy I have written a study elsewhere of the real historical nature of the ‘Marxism of the Second International’. What happened was that the socialist movement reawoke and grew stronger as historical conditions changed over the last third of the nineteenth century; yet contrary to what is supposed, it never adopted Marxism as a total system.’ According to the ideology of the orthodox Marxists and of their opponents, who share much the same dogmatic ground, it is to be believed that the whole of Marxism was adopted in both theory and practice. In fact all that was even theoretically adopted were some isolated economic, political and social ‘theories’, extracted from the general context of revolutionary Marxism. Their general meaning had thereby been altered; and their specific content usually truncated and falsified. The endless asseverations of the rigorously ‘Marxist’ character of the programme and theory of the movement do not date from the period in which the practice of the new Social Democratic workers’ movement approximated most to the revolutionary and class-combative character of Marxist theory. In this early period the ‘two old men in London’, and after Marx’s death in 1883, Friedrich Engels alone, were directly involved in the movement. Paradoxically, these asseverations date from a later period when certain other tendencies were gaining ground in both trade union and political practice, which were ultimately to find their ideological expression in ‘revisionism’. In fact, at the time when the practice of the movement was most revolutionary, its theory was essentially ‘populist’ and democratic (under the influence of Lassalle and Dühring) and only sporadically ‘Marxist’.’ This was the result of the impact of the periods of economic crisis and depression in the 1870s the political and social reaction following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Anti-socialist laws in Germany, the defeat of the growing socialist movement in Austria in 1884 and the violent suppression of the movement for an eight-hour day in America in 1886. However, the 1890s saw a new industrial boom in Europe, especially in Germany, and therewith the first signs appeared of a ‘more democratic’ use of state power on the continent of Europe. This process included the French amnesty for the Communards in 188o, and the lapsing of the anti-socialist laws in Germany in 1890. In this new practical context, formal avowals of the Marxist system as a whole emerged as a kind of theoretical defence and metaphysical consolation. In this sense, one can actually invert the generally accepted relationship between Kautskyian ‘Marxism’ and Bernsteinian ‘revisionism’, and define Kautsky’s orthodox Marxism as the theoretical obverse and symmetrical complement of Bernstein’s revisionism.[10]

In the light of this real historical situation, the complaints of orthodox Marxist critics against my work are not only unjustified but null and void. I am alleged to have a predilection for the ‘primitive’ form of the first historical version of the theory of Marx and Engels, and to have disregarded its positive development by Marx and Engels themselves , and by other Marxists in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is claimed that the ‘Marxism of the Second International’ represents an advance on original Marxist theory. Yet in fact it was a new historical form of proletarian class theory, which emerged from the altered practical context of the class struggle in a new historical epoch. Its relationship to the earlier or later versions of the theory of Marx and Engels is very different from, and essentially more complex than, the way it is presented by those who talk of a positive development, or conversely of a formal stagnation or regression and decay of Marx’s theory in the ‘Marxism of the Second International’. Marxism is therefore in no way a socialist theory that has been ‘superseded’ by the present outlook of the workers’ movement, as Kautsky maintains (formally he refers only to its earlier version, the ‘primitive Marxism of the Communist Manifesto’, but actually he includes all the later components of Marx and Engels’s theory as well). Nor is Marxism what it was claimed to be by the representatives of the revolutionary tendency within orthodox Social Democratic Marxism at the start of the third period towards 1900 or what some Marxists still consider it to be. It is not a theory that has miraculously anticipated the future development of the workers’ movement for a long time to come. Consequently it cannot be said that the subsequent practical progress of the proletariat has, as it were, lagged behind its own theory or that it will only gradually come to occupy the framework allotted to it by this theory.” When the SPD became a ‘Marxist’ party (a process completed with the Erfurt Programme written by Kautsky and Bernstein in 1891) a gap developed between its highly articulated revolutionary ‘Marxist’ theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory; in some respects it directly contradicted it. This gap was in fact obvious, and it later came to be felt more and more acutely by all the vital forces in the Party (whether on the Left or Right) and its existence was denied only by the orthodox Marxists of the Centre. This gap can easily be explained by the fact that in this historical phase ‘Marxism’, while formally accepted by the workers’ movement, was from the start not a true theory, in the sense of being ‘nothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement’ (Marx). On the contrary it was always an ideology that had been adopted ‘from outside’ in a pre-established form.

In this situation such ‘orthodox Marxists’ as Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of a temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers ‘from outside’, by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers’ movement.[12] This was also true of Left radicals like Rosa Luxemburg who talked of the ‘stagnation of Marxism’ and explained it by contrasting Marx to the proletariat: the one had creative power because he was armed with all the resources of a bourgeois education, while the other remains tied to ‘the social conditions of existence in our society’, which will continue unaltered throughout the capitalist epoch.[13] The truth is that a historical fact provides a materialist explanation of this apparent contradiction between theory and practice in the ‘Marxist’ Second International, and a rational solution for all the mysteries which the orthodox Marxists of that time devised to explain it. The fact is this. The workers’ movement at that time formally adopted ‘Marxism’ as its ideology; yet although its effective practice was now on a broader basis than before, it had in no way reached the heights of general and theoretical achievement earlier attained by the revolutionary movement and proletarian class struggle on a narrower basis. This height was attained during the final phase of the firs major capitalist cycle that came to an end towards 1850. At that time, the workers’ movement had achieved a peak of development. But it then came to a temporary yet complete halt, and only revived slowly, as conditions changed. Marx and Engels had initially conceived their revolutionary theory in direct relation to the practical revolutionary movement, but when this died down they could only continue their work as theory. It is true that this later development of Marxist theory was never just the production of ‘purely theoretical’ study; it was always a theoretical reflection of the latest practical experiences of the class struggle which was reawakening in various ways. Nevertheless it is clear that the theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement. Thus two processes unfolded side by side in relative independence of each other. One was the development under novel conditions of the old theory which had arisen in a previous historical epoch. The other was the new practice of the workers’ movement. It is this which explains the literally ‘anachronistic’ height which Marxist theory reached and surpassed in this period, generally and philosophically, in the work of Marx, Engels and some of their disciples. This is also why it was wholly impossible for this highly elaborate Marxist theory to be effectively and not just formally assimilated by the proletarian movement, whose practice reawakened during the last third of the nineteenth century.[14]

III
Orthodox Marxists, whether Social Democrats or Communists, have a second major criticism. This concerns my thesis in Marxism and Philosophy that there needs to be a new appraisal of the relation between philosophy and Marxism in the third phase of the development of Marxism which began at the turn of the century. In the period before this, various trends within Marxism had neglected and minimized the revolutionary philosophical content of the teaching of Marx and Engels — a neglect which took various forms but had a common outcome. By contrast, Marxism and Philosophy aimed to re-emphasize this philosophical side of Marxism. In doing so it stood opposed to all those groups within German and international Marxism which had earlier appeared as consciously Kantian, Machian or other philosophical ‘revisions’ of Marxism. The most prominent of these trends, which developed among the dominant centrist group within Orthodox Marxist Social Democracy, came more and more to adopt an anti-philosophical, scientifico-positivist conception of Marxism. Even such orthodox revolutionaries as Franz Mehring paid tribute to this view by endorsing its disdain for all philosophical ‘fantasies’. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that my conception of the revolutionary tasks of philosophy today was if possible even more antagonistic to a third trend. This was a tendency which had mainly emerged from the two factions of Russian Marxism and was now chiefly represented by the theoreticians of the new Bolshevik ‘Marxism-Leninism’.

Both Georg Lukács’s studies on dialectical materialism and the first edition of my own work appeared in 1923. As soon as they became known, they were attacked with extraordinary hostility by the Party press in Russia and everywhere else. This was mainly due to the fact that the leadership of the Russian Party, under the slogan of ‘propagating Leninism’, had by then begun their campaign to ‘Bolshevize’ the ideology of all the non-Russian Parties that belonged to the Communist International.[15] This coincided with a sharpening of the struggle among Lenin’s successors for the legacy of Leninism (which had begun during his lifetime), and with the events of October and November 1923 in Germany which constituted a major defeat for the political practice of international Communism in the West. The central element of this ‘Bolshevized’ ideology was a strictly philosophical ideology that claimed to restore the true unfalsified philosophy of Marx. On this basis, it aimed to combat all other philosophical tendencies within the workers’ movement.

As it moved westwards, this Marxist-Leninist philosophy encountered the works of Lukács, myself and other ‘Western’ Communists which formed an antagonistic philosophical tendency within the Communist International itself. This then led to the first real and direct philosophical discussion between the two revolutionary trends that had developed within the pre-war Social Democratic International. These were united only superficially in the Communist International, although their disagreements had hitherto been confined to political and tactical questions.[16] For certain historical reasons to be mentioned below, this philosophical discussion was only a weak echo of the political and tactical disputes that the two sides had conducted so fiercely some years before. It was soon obscured by the factional disputes that from 1925 onwards emerged in the Russian Party and which were then fought out mote and more fiercely in all the other Communist Parties. In spite of this, the discussion did have a certain importance for a time within the overall development. For it was a first attempt to break through what a Russian critic, who was extremely well informed on the theoretical situation on both sides, called the ,mutual impenetrability’ that had hitherto prevailed between the ideological positions of Russian and of Western Communism.[17]

Let us sum up this philosophical dispute of 1924 in the ideological form that it took in the minds of those who participated in it. It was a dispute between, on the one hand, the Leninist interpretation of Marx and Engels’s materialism[18] which had already been formally canonized in Russia and, on the other hand, what were alleged to be views that ‘deviated’ from this canon in the direction of idealism, of Kant’s critical epistemology and of Hegel’s idealist dialectic. These were the views of George Lukács; and a number of other theoreticians in the German and Hungarian Communist Parties who were regarded with varying degrees of justice as his supporters.[19]

In the case of Marxism and Philosophy, this accusation of an ‘idealist deviation’ was partially based on attributions to the author of views which he had never expressed in his work: in some cases he had explicitly rejected them, as in the case of his alleged denial of the ‘dialectics of nature’.[20] However, attacks were also directed at views that really did occur in Marxism and Philosophy, and especially against its repeated dialectical rejection of ‘naive realism’. The latter included both ‘so-called sound common sense, the worst metaphysician’, and the normal ‘positivist science’ of bourgeois society; it also included the sad heir of positivism today, namely, a vulgar-marxism that is devoid of any philosophical perspective. For all these ‘draw a sharp line of division between consciousness and its object’ and ‘treat consciousness as something given, something fundamentally contrasted to Being and Nature’ (as Engels pointed out against Dühring as early as 1878).

Because I then believed that this view was self-evident to any materialist dialectician or revolutionary Marxist, I assumed rather than spelt out this critique of a primitive, pre-dialectical and even pre-transcendental conception of the relation between consciousness and being. But without realizing it I had hit on the very key to the ‘philosophical’ outlook which was then due to be dispensed from Moscow to the whole of the Western Communist world. Indeed it formed the basis of the new orthodox theory, so-called ‘Marxism-Leninism’. The professional exponents of the new Russian ‘Marxism-Leninism’ then replied to this supposedly ‘idealist’ attack by repeating the ABC of the ‘materialist’ alphabet they had learnt by heart.[21] This they did with a naivete that can only appear as a ,state of philosophical innocence’ to corrupt ‘Westerners’.

I think that the specifically theoretical debate with Lenin’s materialist philosophy, which Lenin’s epigones have followed to the letter despite grotesque inconsistencies and crying contradictions in it, is itself of secondary importance. This is because when he was alive Lenin himself did not base this philosophy on any essentially theoretical formulation. Instead, he defended it on practical and political grounds as the only philosophy that was ‘beneficial’ to the revolutionary proletariat. He contrasted it with ‘harmful’ systems derived from Kantian, Machian and other idealist philosophies. This attitude is clearly expressed in his intimate correspondence on ‘philosophical’ questions with Maxim Gorki in the years following the first Russian Revolution of 1905. Though they were personal friends, they disagreed philosophically and Lenin tried again and again to persuade Gorky that ‘a member of the party has the duty to oppose a particular theory if he is convinced that it is completely incorrect and harmful’, and that the most important thing to do in the case of such an ‘absolutely unavoidable struggle’ is ‘to ensure that the essential practical work of the party is not impaired’.[22] Similarly the real importance of Lenin’s major philosophical work does not lie in the philosophical arguments he uses to combat and ‘refute’ the various idealist tendencies in modern bourgeois philosophy; of these Kantianism had influenced the revisionist tendency within the socialist movement of the period, while Machian ‘empirio-criticism’ had influenced the centrist tendency. The real importance of Lenin’s work rests in the extreme rigour with which he tried in practice to combat and destroy these contemporary philosophical trends. He regarded them as ideologies that were incorrect from the standpoint of party work.

One vital point must be made here.[23] The author of this supposed restoration of the true materialist philosophy of Marx was quite clear about the kind of theoretical work Marx and Engels had carried out after finishing once and for all with the idealism of Hegel and the Hegelians in the 1840s:[24] ‘They limited themselves in the field of epistemology to correcting the mistakes of Feuerbach, to mocking at the banalities of Dühring, to criticizing the mistakes of Buchner, and to emphasizing dialectics — which is what these authors, who were very popular in working-class circles, lacked most of all.’ ‘Marx, Engels and Dietzgen did not bother about the basic truths of materialism. These were being hawked around the world by dozens of pedlars. They concentrated on preventing these basic truths from being vulgarized and simplified too far, from leading to intellectual stagnation (“materialism below, idealism above”), and on preventing the valuable fruit of the idealist system, Hegel’s dialectic, from being forgotten. These were the gems which idiots like Buchner, Dühring and co. (as well as Leclair, Mach, Avenarius, etc.) were unable to extract from the dungheap of absolute idealism.’ To put it briefly: a result of the way existing historical conditions affected the philosophical work of Marx and Engels was that ,they tended rather to distance themselves from vulgarizations of basic materialist truths than to defend these truths themselves’. Similarly, in their political work ‘they tended more to distance themselves from vulgar versions of the basic demands of political democracy than actually to defend these basic demands’. Lenin, however, argues that present historical conditions are, in this respect, completely different. He and all other revolutionary Marxists and materialists must now make it a leading priority to defend, not basic democratic political demands, but the ‘basic truths of philosophical materialism’ against their modern opponents in the bourgeois camp and their agents in the proletarian camp itself. These truths must be deliberately linked to the revolutionary bourgeois materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and spread among the millions and millions of peasants and other backward masses throughout Russia, Asia and the whole world.[25]

It is clear that Lenin is not primarily concerned with the theoretical problem of whether the materialist philosophy he propounds is true or untrue. He is concerned with the practical question of its use for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, or — in countries where capitalism is not fully developed — of the proletariat and other oppressed classes. Lenin’s ‘philosophical’ standpoint basically appears, therefore, to be a specific, if disguised version of the position which in a different form had already been discussed in the first edition of Marxism and Philosophy. This position was strongly criticized by Marx as a young man when he wrote of the ‘practically-oriented political party which imagines that it can supersede philosophy (in practice) without realizing it (in theory)’. Lenin decides philosophical questions only on the basis of non-philosophical considerations and results. He does not judge them on the basis of their theoretical and philosophical content as well. In so doing he commits the same mistakes as according to Marx the ‘practically-oriented political party in Germany’ committed. The latter believed it was accomplishing its justified aim of the ‘negation of all philosophy’ (in Lenin, of all idealist philosophy) because ‘it turns its back on philosophy, looks in the other direction and mutters irritable and banal remarks about it’.[26]

Any discussion of Lenin’s position on philosophy and ideology must pose one initial question on which a judgement of Lenin’s specific ‘materialist philosophy’ has to depend. According to a principle established by Lenin himself, this question is a historical one. Lenin argued that there had been a change in the whole intellectual climate which made it necessary when dealing with dialectical materialism to stress materialism against certain fashionable tendencies in bourgeois philosophy, rather than to stress dialectics against the vulgar, pre-dialectical and in some cases explicitly undialectical and anti-dialectical materialism of bourgeois science. The question is whether there had been such a change. What I have written elsewhere shows that I do not think this is really the case. There are some superficial aspects of contemporary bourgeois philosophy and science which appear to contradict this, and there certainly are some trends which genuinely do so. Nevertheless the dominant basic trend in contemporary bourgeois philosophy, natural science and humanities is the same as it was sixty or seventy years ago. It is inspired not by an idealist outlook but by a materialist outlook that is coloured by the natural sciences.[27] Lenin’s position, which disputes this, is in close ideological relation to his politico-economic theory of ‘imperialism’. Both have their material roots in the specific economic and social situation of Russia and the specific practical and theoretical political tasks that seemed, and for a short period really were, necessary to accomplish the Russian Revolution. This means that the ‘Leninist’ theory is not theoretically capable of answering the practical needs of the international class struggle in the present period. Consequently, Lenin’s materialist philosophy, which forms the ideological basis of this theory, cannot constitute the revolutionary proletarian philosophy that will answer the needs of today.

The theoretical character of Lenin’s materialist philosophy also corresponds to this historical and practical situation. Like Plekhanov, his philosophical master, and L. Axelrod-Orthodox, the latter’s other philosophical pupil, Lenin wanted very seriously to be a Marxist while remaining a Hegelian. He thereby flouted the dialectical materialist outlook that Marx and Engels founded at the start of their revolutionary development. This outlook was by its very nature unavoidably 9 philosophical’, but it pointed towards the complete supersession of philosophy; and it left one single revolutionary task in the philosophical field, which was to develop this outlook by taking it to a higher level of elaboration. Lenin regards the transition from Hegel’s idealist dialectic to Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism as nothing more than an exchange: the idealist outlook that lies at the basis of Hegel’s dialectical method is replaced by a new philosophical outlook that is no longer ‘idealist’ but ‘materialist’. He seems to be unaware that such a ‘materialist inversion’ of Hegel’s idealist philosophy involves at the most a merely terminological change whereby the Absolute instead of being called ‘Spirit’ is called ‘Matter’. There is, however, an even more serious vice in Lenin’s materialism. For he is not only annuls Marx and Engels’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic; he drags the whole debate between materialism and idealism back to a historical stage which German idealism from Kant to Hegel had already surpassed. The dissolution of the metaphysical systems of Leibniz and Wolff began with Kant’s transcendental philosophy and ended with Hegel’s dialectic. Thereafter the ‘Absolute’ was definitively excluded from the being of both ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, and was transferred into the dialectical movement of the ‘idea’. The materialist inversion by Marx and Engels of Hegel’s idealist dialectic merely consisted in freeing this dialectic from its final mystifying shell. The real movement of history was discovered beneath the dialectical ‘self-movement of the idea’, and this revolutionary movement of history was proclaimed to be the only ‘Absolute’ remaining.[28] Lenin, however, goes back to the absolute polarities of ‘thought’ and ‘being’, ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, which had formed the basis of the philosophical, and even some of the religious, disputes that had divided the two currents of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[29] Hegel, of course, had already surpassed these dialectically.

This kind of materialism is derived from a metaphysical idea of Being that is absolute and given; and despite all its formal claims to the contrary it is no longer fully dialectical let alone dialectically materialist. Lenin and his followers unilaterally transfer the dialectic into Object, Nature and History and they present knowledge merely as the passive mirror and reflection of this objective Being in the subjective Consciousness. In so doing they destroy both the dialectical interrelation of being and consciousness and, as a necessary consequence, the dialectical interrelation of theory and practice. They thereby manage to pay an involuntary tribute to the ‘Kantianism’ that they attack so much. Not content with this, they have abandoned the question of the relationship between the totality of historical being and all historically prevalent forms of consciousness. This was first posed by Hegel’s dialectic and was then given a more comprehensive elaboration by the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. Lenin and those like him have revised it in a retrograde way by replacing it with the much narrower epistemological or ‘gnoseological’ question of the relationship between the subject and object of knowledge. Nor is this all. They present knowledge as a fundamentally harmonious evolutionary progress and an infinite progression towards absolute truth. Their presentation of the relationship between theory and practice in general, and in particular within the revolutionary movement itself, is a complete abandonment of Marx’s dialectical materialism and a retreat to a totally abstract opposition of pure theory, which discovers truths, to pure practice, which applies these laboriously discovered truths to reality. ‘The real unity of theory and practice is achieved by changing reality in practice, through the revolutionary movement based on the laws of objective development discovered by theory’ — these are the words of one of Lenin’s philosophical interpreters, and he has not departed one iota from the teachings of the master. With them, the grandiose dialectical materialist unity of Marx’s revolutionary practice collapses into a dualism comparable to that of the most typical bourgeois idealists.[30]

There is another inevitable consequence of this displacement of the accent from the dialectic to materialism. It prevents materialist philosophy from contributing to the further development of the empirical sciences of nature and society. In the dialectic method and content are inseparably linked. in a famous passage Marx says that ‘form has no value when it is not the form of its content’.[31] It is therefore completely against the spirit of the dialectic, and especially of the materialist dialectic, to counterpose the dialectical materialist ‘method’ to the substantive results achieved by applying it to philosophy and the sciences. This procedure has become very fashionable in Western Marxism. Nevertheless, behind this exaggeration there lies a correct insight — namely, that dialectical materialism influenced the progress of the empirical study of nature and society in the second half of the nineteenth century above all because of its method.[32]

When the revolutionary movement and its practice came to a halt in the 1850s, there inevitably developed an increasing gap between the evolution of philosophy and that of the positive sciences, between the evolution of theory and that of practice: this has already been explained in Marxism and Philosophy. The result was that for a long period the new revolutionary conceptions of Marx and Engels survived and developed mainly through their application as a dialectical materialist method to the empirical sciences of society and nature. It is in this period that one finds statements, especially by the later Engels, formally proclaiming individual sciences to be independent of ‘all philosophy’, and asserting that philosophy has been ‘driven from nature and from history’ into the only field of activity left to it: ‘the theory of thought and its laws — formal logic and dialectics’. In reality, this meant that Engels reduced so-called ‘philosophy’ from an individual science above others, to an empirical science among others.[33] Lenin’s later positions might appear at first glance to be like that of Engels, but they are in actual fact as distinct as night and day. Engels considered that it was the crucial task of the materialist dialectic to ‘rescue the conscious dialectic from German idealism and to incorporate it in the materialist conception of nature and of history’.[34] Lenin’s procedure is the inverse. For him the major task is to uphold and defend the materialist position which no one has ever seriously thought of questioning. Engels goes on to make a statement that is in keeping with the progress and development of the sciences; he says that modern materialism whether applied to nature or history ‘is in both cases essentially dialectical and does not in addition need a philosophy which stands above the other branches of knowledge’. Lenin, however, insistently carps at ‘philosophical deviations’ that he has discerned not only among political friends or enemies, or philosophical ideologues, but even among the most creative natural scientists.[35] His ‘materialist philosophy’ becomes a kind of supreme judicial authority for evaluating the findings of individual sciences, past, present or future.[36] This materialist ‘philosophical’ domination covers all the sciences, whether of nature or society, as well as all other cultural developments in literature, drama, plastic arts and so on; and Lenin’s epigones have taken it to the most absurd lengths. This has resulted in a specific kind of ideological dictatorship which oscillates between revolutionary progress and the blackest reaction. Under the slogan of what is called ‘Marxism-Leninism’, this dictatorship is applied in Russia today to the whole intellectual life not only of the ruling Party, but of the working-class in general. There are now attempts to extend it from Russia to all the Communist Parties in the West, and in the rest of the world. These attempts, however, have precisely shown the inevitable limits to any such artificial extension of this ideological dictatorship into the international arena outside Russia, where it no longer receives the direct coercive support of the State. The Draft Programme of the Communist International, of the Fifth Comintern Congress of 1924, called for a ‘rigorous struggle against idealist philosophy and against all philosophies other than dialectical materialism’, whereas at the Sixth Congress, held four years later, the version of the Programme that was finally adopted spoke in a much more general way of the struggle against ‘all manifestations of a bourgeois outlook’. It no longer described ‘the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels’ as a materialist philosophy, but only as a ‘revolutionary method (!) for understanding reality with the aim of its revolutionary overthrow’.[37]

IV
It is only recently that ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ideology has made such claims outside Russia, and the change in Comintern policy I have mentioned may indicate that these claims are now going to be abandoned. Nevertheless, the deeper problem of Lenin’s ‘materialist philosophy’ and of Marxism-Leninism has not been resolved. The problem of Marxism and Philosophy must be reopened, together with the broader issue of the relation between the ideology and the practice of the revolutionary workers’ movement. This poses a concrete task in relation to Communist ‘Marxism-Leninism’. A materialist, that is a historical, critical and undogmatic analysis has already been made of the character of the ‘Kautskyian’ orthodox Marxism of the Second International. This must now be unflinchingly extended to the ‘Leninist’ orthodox Marxism of the Third International; and it must be applied to the whole history of Russian Marxism and its relation to international Marxism. For the ‘Marxism-Leninism’ of today is only the latest offshoot of this history. It is not possible to provide a more concrete elaboration here. One can only indicate a very general outline of such a materialist account of the real history of Marxism in Russia and elsewhere. Even so it yields a sobering conclusion. Russian Marxism, which was if possible even more ‘orthodox’ than German Marxism, had throughout its history an even more ideological character and if possible was in even greater conflict with the concrete historical movement of which it was the ideology.

Trotsky’s perceptive critical analysis of 1908 showed that this was true of the first phase of its history. The Russian intelligentsia had previously been brought up in the Bakuninist ‘spirit of a simple rejection of capitalist culture’, and Marxism served as an ideological instrument to reconcile them to the development of capitalism.[38] It is also valid for the second phase, which reached its climax in the first Russian Revolution of 1905. At that time all revolutionary Marxists in Russia, not least Lenin and Trotsky, declared themselves to be part of ‘the flesh and blood’ of international socialism and for them this meant orthodox Marxism. On the other side Karl Kautsky and his Neue Zeit were in complete agreement with orthodox Russian Marxism on all theoretical questions. Indeed, as far as the philosophical foundations of its theory were concerned, German orthodox Marxism was more influenced by Russian Marxism than itself influential on it, since the Germans were to a considerable extent under the sway of the Russian theoretician Plekhanov. Thus a great international united front of Marxist orthodoxy was able to sustain itself without major difficulty, because historically it was only necessary for it to exist in the realm of ideology and as ideology. This was true both in the West and in Russia, and in Russia even more than in Central and Western Europe. Russian Marxism is now in its third phase and it still exhibits the same ideological character and the same inevitable concomitant contradiction between a professed ‘orthodox’ theory and the real historical character of the movement. It found its most vivid expression in Lenin’s orthodox Marxist theory and his totally unorthodox practice;[39] and it is now caricatured by the glaring contradictions between theory and practice in contemporary ‘Soviet Marxism’.

This general character of Russian Marxism has persisted without fundamental change into the ‘Soviet Marxism’ of today. Involuntary confirmation of this is provided by the position of the above-mentioned Schifrin, a political opponent of the ruling Bolshevik Party, on the general philosophical principles of Soviet Marxism. In an article in Die Gesellschaft (IV, 7), he made what looked like a fierce attack on ‘Soviet Marxism’, but from a philosophical point of view this really concealed a defence of it. He claims that Soviet Marxism ‘wants to make a sincere attempt to reinforce Marxism in its most consistent and orthodox form’ against degenerate ‘subjectivist’ and ‘revisionist’ tendencies (e.g. ‘neglect of the master’s most important statements'), that have emerged as a result of the insuperable difficulties that it is facing. The same bias is even clearer in another article of Schifrin in Die Gesellschaft of August 1929. In this, Schifrin discusses the latest work by Karl Kautsky, the leading representative of German orthodox Marxism, and although he is very critical of most of Kautsky’s individual positions, he greets Kautsky’s book warmly as the beginning of a ‘restoration of genuine Marxism’. He assigns Kautsky the ‘ideological mission’ of overcoming the various kinds of ‘subjectivist disintegration of Marxism’ that have recently appeared in the West as well as in ‘Sovietized Russian Marxism’, and of overcoming the ‘ideological crisis’ that this has caused throughout Marxism.[40] The article is particularly clear evidence of the philosophical solidarity of the whole orthodox Marxist movement down to this day. In his critique of contemporary Soviet Marxist ‘Leninism’ and in his attitudes to contemporary ‘Kautskyism’, Schifrin completely fails to see that both of these ideological versions of orthodox Marxism have emerged from the traditions of earlier Russian and international Marxism. Today they only represent evanescent historical forms that date from a previous phase of the workers’ movement. Here, in this assessment of the character of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and of ‘Soviet Marxism’, one can see the full and fundamental unity of outlook between the old and the new schools of contemporary orthodox Marxism: Social Democracy and Communism. It has been seen how Communist theoreticians reacted to Marxism and Philosophy by defending the positive and progressive character of the Marxism of the Second International. Now, in the periodical of German Social Democracy, one can see a Menshevik theoretician entering the lists to defend the ‘generally valid’ and ‘compelling’ philosophical features of the Marxism of the Third International.

This ends my account of the present state of the problem of Marxism and Philosophy — a problem that since 1923 has been changed in many ways by new theoretical and practical developments. The general outlines of my evolution since then are clear enough, and I have therefore refrained from correcting all the details of what I then said in the light of my present position. In only one respect does it appear to be necessary to make an exception. Marxism and Philosophy argued that during the social revolution a ‘dictatorship’ was necessary not only in the field of politics, but also that of ideology. This led to many misunderstandings, especially in the case of Kautsky. In his review of my book he showed both that lie had misinterpreted my positions and that he had certain illusions about the conditions prevailing in Russia. Thus as late as 1924 he stated that ‘dictatorship in the realm of ideas’ had ‘never occurred to anyone, not even to Zinoviev and Dzherzhinsky’. I now think that the abstract formulation of this demand in my book is genuinely misleading, and I must emphasize that the pursuit of revolutionary struggle by what Marxism and Philosophy called an ‘ideological dictatorship’ is in three respects different from the system of intellectual oppression established in Russia today in the name of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. First of all, it is a dictatorship of the proletariat and not over the proletariat. Secondly, it is a dictatorship of a class and not of a party or party leadership. Thirdly, and most importantly, as a revolutionary dictatorship it is one element only of that radical process of social overthrow which by suppressing classes and class contradictions creates the preconditions for a ‘withering away of the State’, and thereby the end of all ideological constraint. The essential purpose of an ‘ideological dictatorship’ in this sense is to abolish its own material and ideological causes and thereby to make its own existence unnecessary and impossible. From the very first day, this genuine proletarian dictatorship will be distinguished from every false imitation of it by its creation of the conditions of intellectual freedom not only for ‘all’ workers but for ‘each individual’ worker. Despite the alleged ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of thought’ in bourgeois society, this freedom has never been enjoyed anywhere by the wage slaves who suffer its physical and spiritual oppression. This is what concretely defines the Marxist concept of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. With it disappears the otherwise apparent contradiction between a call for ‘ideological dictatorship’, and the essentially critical and revolutionary nature of the method and the outlook of Communism. Socialism, both in its ends and in its means, is a struggle to realize freedom.

Monday, January 28, 2019

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Honor Lenin. Liebknecht, Luxemburg-The 3Ls

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Honor Lenin. Liebknecht, Luxemburg-The 3Ls 


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  

Instead we have a still sad 100th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me. 


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FROM THE ARCHIVES- EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR, LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. HERE’S WHY WE HONOR LIEBKNECHT.

In honor of the 3 Ls . The authority of Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, and Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution, need no special commendation. I would however like to comment on Karl Liebknecht who has received less historical recognition and has had less written about him. Nevertheless, Karl Liebknecht apparently had the capacity to lead the German Revolution. A man whose actions inspired 50,000 Berlin workers, under penalty of being drafted to the front, to strike against his imprisonment in the middle of a World War is self- evidently a man with the authority to lead a revolution. His tragic personal fate in the aftermath of the Spartacus uprising of 1919, being killed by counterrevolutionaries aided by his former comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, helped condition the later dismal fate of the German revolution in1923.

History has posed certain questions concerning the establishment of socialism that remains unresolved primarily to due the crisis of leadership of the international labor movement. Although Liebknecht admittedly was not a theoretician I do not believe that someone of Lenin's or Trotsky's theoretical level was necessary after the Russian experience. To these eyes Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution and Lenin’s Bolshevik organizational concepts hold up pretty well after all this time, even with all the negative experiences.  What was necessary was a leadership that assimilated those lessons. Liebknecht, given enough time to study those lessons, seems to have been capable of that. A corollary to that view is that one must protect leading cadre when the state starts bearing down. Especially small propaganda groups like the Spartacists with fewer resources for protection of leadership. This was not done. If you do not protect your leadership you wind up with a Levi, Brandler or Thalheimer (successively leaders of the German Communist Party in the early 1920’s) who seemed organically incapable of learning those lessons.

One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget.   That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- ‘THE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated) FOR THE WAR’. Wilhelm would have been proud.



Before “The Last Picture Show” Was The “Last Picture Show” With The Larry McMurtry  Book In Mind




Book Review

By Jack Callahan

The Last Picture Show, by Larry Mc Murtry,  

It is time to rally around the troops. Time for me to put my two cents worth in defending my old-time friends who write for this blog (and the on-line editions of American Folk Gazette, American Film Gazette and Progressive Nation among others). Time to honor one old pal, Phil Larkin, known in the old days as Foul-mouth Phil who others have written about in this space and mainly have gotten right about the origin of the name. About the weird twist too of how the girls, including my wife of over forty years Chrissie McNamara, even good go to church, Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, every Sunday and who had rosary beads always present in their hands and a Bible between their knees like her, secretly liked his constant swearing so that he among us all never lacked for dates, at least one date anyway with them. But that is not why I am honoring Phil today since I have much more important business to attend to before I get to a short review of this excellent book by Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, which I saw as a movie (with Chrissie) long before I first read his book (and a number of other related one about the fictional town of Thalia back in the 1950s) which Seth Garth, a longtime writer for this blog mentioned to me has come out recently in a trilogy according to what he had read in the New York Review of Books).

That other fish to fry deals with Phil’s portentous statements which were taken by most of the older staff here, including me, as the usual rantings of Phil when he doesn’t get exactly what he wants, what he considers his due. This time it is centered on a number of statements which he has made as part of his film reviews about the older writers who had been close to the previous site manager being purged, a word at least one of the younger writers has used freely in his reviews so he, they, those now victorious younger writers, must be feeling the wind in their sails. I will not mention his name since the current site manager Greg Green well known for red-penciling, not blue like most editors, copy has “warned” people off doing so under the pretext that “we have to move on” from that pernicious influence) backed up by the newly installed Editorial Board ( a board handpicked by Green and loaded, overloaded, with younger writers who supported him in the internal struggle against that previous site manager and who are really nothing but toadies and rubber-stampers for him).  

Readers familiar with this site, and perhaps with the internal dispute which wound up with the departure and “exile” of that previous manager, know that I have been neither a leading contributor to the writings posted here although I have been the subject of many reminiscences by the older writers including the old gang famous, maybe infamous, one since more than one old fogy has gotten parts wrong, of how Chrissie and I met, nor very vocal in the fight between the younger and older writers which led to that previous manager’s “purge.” (Like I said previously I best put any possible controversial words in quotes to avoid that sweeping Green red pencil despite all the claptrap about the new regime being more democratic, more open to broadening the scope of what is being written about and by whom than previously.) The reason I grabbed this book assignment was that the older writers believed that I would be the only one who had “not burned his bridges” to the new regime which is the way one wag put the matter and could expect to get my piece posted.

Moreover they believed that it would “grease the rails” (I forgot who said that) if I as a big financial backer of the enterprise did the talking about what appears to be coming down the road for the older writers, and who knows maybe some younger recalcitrant writers too (remember the fraught with danger “p” word). That financial backing based on my very successful business as a Toyota car dealer, Mr. Toyota in Eastern Massachusetts with Chrissie as Ms. Toyota so I do not depend on paychecks and fears of lack of paychecks like the others who moreover are closing in on retirement. They don’t want to wind up following the example of the previous manager who with one exception, one important exception, Sam Lowell, who is the only one from the old gang who was placed on that suddenly emergent “democratic” Ed Board, supported him. Don’t want to wind up as the rumors have it hustling newspapers out in Utah for the Mormons with no retirement pension income (I don’t know about his Social Security status), no health plan (if he didn’t have adequate S.S. quarters), and no source for getting steady postings against the dark and wild savage nights going forward (not my expression but one of the older guy’s). I have committed to rallying around the troops and this is the first shot. But enough of this for now.        
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As I mentioned in my defense declaration above my first connection with Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show was viewing the film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich starring Jeff Bridges as Duane  the roughneck’s roughneck, Timothy Bottoms as the gentile roughneck, as Sonny, and Cybil Shepard as the alluring and sexually predatory poor little oil money boomtown rich girl Jacy who has Duane and all the boys in heat, especially Duane and in his dreams Sonny. I should also mentioned that I saw this one the first time at the Hingham, Massachusetts, Plaza Theater when it first opened (a nice counter-position to the “last” in the film title) with Chrissie. That was when we were first living together before we got did get married a couple of years later and well after she had abandoned those rosary bead hands and squeezed Bible knees. Needless to say coming up as an urban, maybe better, suburban roughneck from a hard-struck declining North Adamsville a town like Thalia, with a ton of roughneck friends some of who turned out okay and have written for a long time in places like this blog (although for how much longer is anybody’s guess) and some who didn’t fare so well the film struck a deep chord, “spoke” to me. Spoke to me as well since sports, football in particular, was a subtext for the friendship between Duane and Sonny just like it had been for me and guys like Phil Larkin. (I had been a star football player who led the Blue Warriors to two division state high school Super Bowls which had a lot to do with how Chrissie and I met initially although not how we have stayed together pretty happily for so long.)          

One thing that Seth Garth, a serious writer and a man who has written many well-received articles in this space, who was perhaps my closest friend in high school after we had a fight over Chrissie’s affections and reconciled, has always mentioned to me when writing about films based on novels is how closely they adhere to the storyline of the book. I remember once when we were having a couple of drinks at the old watering hole The Sagamore Grille in Hingham in the days when he could drink unlike now when he has sworn off the stuff we got to talking about fidelity to the book of certain films. This was when I was first interested in writing some reviews for posting here when the previous site manager was more than happy to have an old friend (and serious financial contributor I know helped as well) write up a little something. Seth mentioned that he was appalled when a film screenplay, script, was nothing like the plotline of the book and seemingly the only reason for keeping the title and author’s name was to draw the crowds in based on that cache.        

Seth always would bring up two classic cases both by Ernest Hemingway. One, To Have And Have Not, where in the book the Captain Harry Morgan is a rogue, has-been sea captain running crap to Cuba for the highest bidder with a wife who had seen better days and a parcel of kids. Against the film version where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sizzle up the screen with what Seth called some of the sexiest hottest scenes of two people with their clothes on he had ever seen while doing yeoman’s service to the French Resistance in the Caribbean during World War II. The other The Killers, a short story which starts and ends with two professional killers acting as hitmen for somebody who wanted an ex-pug out of the way and leaving the narrator wondering why he did not put up any resistance. Against the film starring Burt Lancaster as the ex-pug and fall guy and Ava Gardner as a femme fatale who has him going through the hoops for her as the reason that he went gentle into that good night. A dame in short like has happened to a million other guys except this time old Burt paid with his life for shacking up with her.

In Last Picture Show the film there is no such problem since the film adheres in the basic plotline and better in the spirit of two young roughneck Texas boys coming of age in the early 1950s. I first read the book in the 1990s I think when I was on a Larry McMurtry tear after viewing Texasville which is about this same grouping and town about twenty years later once they have gotten over their teenage angst and alienation. I was struck then as now by how closely the key episodes match up. The only added statement I would make at this time is that the book draws many more explicit sexual scenes, more graphically written than the shyer film does including references to homosexually, male and female orgasms, the sexual frustration aspect of the teen angst and alienation component, and the problems as well as good points of growing up in a small if declining town out in what was then considered the Texas countryside.  Finally, I have changed my opinion as I told Seth one of those nights when we were having those few permitted whiskeys at the Sagamore Grille I think everybody should read the classic book first and then the classic film. Now I wish I had done so.