by Judy Jones
There’s one more very big issue: As with all dialectics, change is part of the very nature of things; a force necessarily calls its opposite into being. For Marx, the social system—the superstructure, as it were—contains within itself the seeds of “contradiction,” leading to a disequilibrium with the economic base and, eventually, to the overthrow of the whole business—in other words, revolution; also progress. Watch how it works: Material conditions (agrarian, industrial, whatever) spawn economic classes. Thus, at some point, there’d been a feudal, or landholding, class, which, according to the theory, got top-heavy and overwhelmed by a bourgeois, or commercial, class. Now, in plain sight of Marx and anybody else whose eyes were open, that bourgeoisie was calling into being its dialectical antithesis, the proletariat. In fact, the more bourgeois a country was, the more it was going to become proletarian: The busier the factories, the bigger the laboring class. Eventually, with all these bourgeois types devouring each other in their race to get ahead, the proletariat will see its chance and take over, “expropriating the expropriators,” “seizing the levers of production,” and abolishing private property. Marx thinks he sees this coming in 1848, but he’s wrong; society isn’t quite ready to become classless, the state to “wither away,” or religion— “the opiate of the people,” the only thing that keeps them from protesting the grimness of their lives by promising all of them another one later—to pack its bags and leave town.
Of course, the theory is much more complicated than that. (Simplified descriptions like the foregoing are the basis for what is commonly called “vulgar Marxism.”) In fact, Marx devoted his life to elaborations on all of the above, producing a vast body of work, vastly documented and vastly ramified. But Marx knew that he couldn’t change the destiny of the world just by hanging out in the library. He was also a revolutionary who held that theory must be joined with practice. “Philosophers have studied the world,” as he put it, “but the problem is to change it.” So Marx organized. He lectured and made speeches. He went to meetings and debates. Eventually, he went west, to London and Paris, more evolved than any German city was and hence that much closer to the inevitable revolt. He wrote newspaper articles (Marx was for a time the European correspondent for the New York Tribune). He, with his family, starved and got deported. And he, with his friend Engels, wrote The Communist Manifesto— perhaps the most stirring and incendiary document ever. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” it concludes. “They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite.”
Marx had a lot of faith in these proletarians, the class of wage earners capitalism was, in effect, fleecing. Not only were they destined to rise up and overthrow the system, they were the harbingers of everything Marx was working toward— initially a new socialist order in which the oppressed would be freed and wealth would be distributed on the principle of “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability.” Ultimately, even this workers’ state would “wither away,” leaving no oppressive institutions to mediate among people; in the meantime, it was to be governed, in Marx’s phrase, by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
But while Marx was probably just trying to describe the class content of the regime, many subsequent self-avowed Marxists have seen it otherwise, warming especially to the possibilities of that first word, “dictatorship.” Such, as with so many other great thinkers, has been the fate of Marx: He has been interpreted. As his work attained the stature of holy writ, his disciples—and his exegetes— multiplied. Marx became a dogmatist’s dream. His work (enormous, changing, and incomplete: Das Kapital, his magnum opus, was never finished) has been battled over by countless factions, each of which claims to know the “real” Marx. As a result, the first thing most Marxists want to know about other Marxists is which side they’re on. The following may provide some clues. FRIEDRICH ENGELS (GERMAN, 1820-1895)
Friedrich Engels was the perfect collaborator: patient, intelligent, articulate, enthusiastic, and rich. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, he was, for many years, in charge of the Manchester branch of his family’s factory. This not only enabled him to send regular checks to Marx (often the one thing standing between the Marx family and destitution), it also gave him a fine vantage point from which to survey the course of mid-nineteenth century capitalism, providing grist for such works as The Condition of the Working Class in England. In truth, Engels’ work is inseparable from that of Marx (they wrote successive drafts of The Communist Manifesto, and Engels ghosted many of Marx’s Tribune articles), and he proved Marx’s staunchest defender in the years after his death. Largely self-educated, Engels was not as deep a thinker as Marx but he was a brilliant polemicist, and his ongoing fascination with science, particularly Darwinism, made him even more adamant than his colleague about the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall. Perhaps his most enduring contribution, however, is the elaboration of the idea of the “relative autonomy” of the superstructure, the notion that it could interact with the base, sometimes actually pushing it along a bit, if only for a limited period. Through such subtle divergences as these Engels started a trend toward revisionism—the customary pejorative for any and all tampering with Marx—that would soon become standard operating procedure. VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN (RUSSIAN, 1870-1924)
With Lenin, as with college freshmen, the key word is party—in this case, the Communist Party. Lenin (né Ulyanov) was the revolutionary’s revolutionary. He wed Marxism—up to that point, don’t forget, a Western doctrine—to a strong, and absolutely Russian, tradition of false names, forged passports, and invisible ink. Then, incredibly single-minded, he proceeded to put everything through the sieve of revolutionary practice in the belief that any issue could be resolved in response to the query: “Is it good for the revolution?” Tireless as a propagandist, prolific as a writer, incomparable as an agitator, and merciless as an adversary, Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik (or “majority”) faction of the Russian Communists, and became, after the October 1917 revolution, the first head of state of the new Russia. His version of the dictatorship of the proletariat tended to emphasize the dictatorship. As he saw it, authority was to be exercised not by the unwieldy mass of proletarians but by a surrogate: the Communist Party proper, composed of dedicated and knowledgeable people who could both understand the proletarian worldview and act as its instrument. In fact, according to Lenin, there couldn’t be any revolution at all without such a powerful vanguard party to get things organized. There was, needless to say, disagreement on this, which Lenin, who died on the job, never saw resolved. Even so, his heirs had him embalmed and placed on display in Red Square, where he remains an object of necrophiliac admiration for what’s left of the masses and a source of continuing embarrassment to the post-Communist Russian government, which can’t quite make up its mind how to dispose of him. ROSA LUXEMBURG (POLISH, 1871-1919)
Rosa Luxemburg (“Red Rosa,” as she came to be known) was the great champion of revolutionary orthodoxy. Considerably more leftist than Lenin and the Bolsheviks, she vigorously assailed their revisionism, most notably over the issue of party organization. Luxemburg pushed for what she called “spontaneity,” the kind of worker-originated impulse that resulted in things like general strikes and that upbraided Lenin for his opportunistic advocacy of “ultra-centralism,” arguing that “revolutionary tactics cannot be invented by leaders, they must develop spontaneously—history comes first, leaders’ consciousness second.” And “We must frankly admit to ourselves that errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible central committees.”
Luxemburg’s major theoretical work is The Accumulation of Capital, which attempts to supplement Marx by establishing a precise economic argument for the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism. To make a long story short, she contends that the contradiction between capitalism’s reliance on noncapitalist markets and its tendency to destroy its noncapitalist enviro
nment can only lead to its ruin. The Leninist camp attacked her for this theory, which they twisted into the “automatic collapse of capitalism” and branded as “fatalistic.” Luxemburg would not live to see her reputation totally besmirched—by Stalin—since she and her friend Karl Liebknecht (with whom she founded the Spartacus League, predecessor of the German Communist Party) were murdered while under arrest by the German authorities. JOSEF STALIN (RUSSIAN, 1879-1953)
What can you say about Stalin except that he was one of the worst pieces of bad news since the Flood? Born Josef Dzhugashvili, he soon changed his name to Stalin (“Man of Steel”), which you’d think would have given someone a clue to his mettle. On assuming power, Stalin’s interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be even simpler than Lenin’s: dictatorship by Stalin. His legacy includes the gulag, the cult of personality, the show trials, the purges, mass starvation, a police state, and the industrialization of the Soviet Union. It is to this last that Stalinists tend to point when citing his achievements. Except among the three of them, however, “Stalinist” is considered a term of abuse. When Stalin died, he was put on display next to Lenin until people had second thoughts some years later and removed his corpse to less high-toned surroundings. LEON TROTSKY (RUSSIAN, 1879-1940)
Like Lenin and Stalin, Leon Trotsky (né Bronstein) changed his name. On other points they had less in common. One of the revolutionary “old boys” (though a relatively late joiner of the party, for which he was given much grief), Trotsky organized the Red Army after the revolution and led it to success in the ensuing civil war. Energetic and smart, he was one of the key men around Lenin, despite differences over the role of the Party. Under Stalin, he was not only not key, he was not even around very long, sent into exile by the jealous despot. The issue over which they nominally came to blows was Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” which was in conflict with Stalin’s espousal of “socialism in one country.” Trotsky had what might be called a “process” view of revolution. He felt that the success of the revolution that Russia was having depended on its continuous expansion, both within Russia and in other European nations. “Socialism in one country,” as you may have guessed, held that nurturing the revolution at home was the top priority. The question was finally resolved by one of Stalin’s agents, who tracked Trotsky to Mexico and put an ice ax (almost certainly not an ice pick) through his skull. Like so many other things, though, “Trotskyism” was mainly a fiction invented by Stalin (though fervently believed by Trotsky and a few others) out of sheer paranoia. Not that Trotsky was such a prize, either, being rigid, doctrinaire, and even brutal, although he was a fine writer and the author of the definitive account of the 1917 revolution. Should someone call you a “Trot,” however, it’s to the former attributes that he or she is probably alluding. Remember also that a “Trotskyite” is a “Trotskyist” to a Stalinist. MAO ZEDONG (CHINESE, 1893-1976)
Mao Zedong’s was the last truly great cult of personality. Beside him, such upstarts as Tito, Khaddafi, and Barbra Streisand pale into insignificance. Indeed, among Marxists, Mao’s was the last of the great isms. Mao surely helped all of this along by being as brilliant an aphorist as he was a revolutionary, stirring untold billions of Chinese with lines like “The world is progressing, the future is bright, and no one can change the general trend of history,” “We know the pear only by eating it and we know society only by participating in the class struggle,” and “Some play the piano well and some badly, and there is a great difference in the melodies they produce.”
What makes it all so special? To start with the obvious, Mao’s Marxism is uniquely Chinese, with dialectics as much indebted to Taoist yin and yang as to Hegel. But Mao’s major contribution is the idea of peasant revolution. In the late 1920s Mao broke with the orthodox view that the proletariat was the only revolutionary class and proposed, to the consternation of the Soviets, that the peasantry play the leading role—a strikingly apt idea in a country that had jillions of oppressed peasants and scarcely a prole. Mao also departed from theoretical orthodoxy by emphasizing the importance of the superstructure. Later, this was to lead to the so called Hundred Flowers Campaign (which encouraged people to criticize the Party and which rapidly got out of hand) and to the so called Cultural Revolution (which encouraged people to criticize the Party and which rapidly got out of hand). In the West, nobody much is a Maoist anymore, probably because you can only say “The revolutionary is like a fish swimming in the sea of the people” so many times before beginning to feel a little silly. GEORG LUKÁCS (HUNGARIAN, 1885-1971)
If you’re determined to go after bourgeois culture with a Marxist cleaver, the work of Georg Lukács is indispensable. Lukács (that’s pronounced “LOO-kahsh”) provided the first serious evaluation of Hegel’s role in Marx’s thought, revising then-current views of dialectics. No intellectual lightweight, he argued that the historical interaction of subject and object is the basic form of dialectics, insisting in History and Class Consciousness, his major work, that a developed class consciousness would impel the proletariat to become both the subject and the object of history. As he put it, proletarian dialectics implies an idea of consciousness which “is not the knowledge of an opposed object but is the self-consciousness of the object the act of consciousness overthrows, the objective form of the object.”
Another riveting concept of Lukács’ is “totality.” Bourgeois society, he insisted, tends to destroy the possibility of images of the whole, forest-for-the-trees-style, preventing proletarians (among others) from acquiring true knowledge of reality. Dialectics is the answer, because “only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of facts hope to become knowledge of reality.” Which brings us to the idea of reification, the one thing to remember about Lukács should you choose to remember anything at all. Reification (a concept Marx had introduced in his discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital) is the process by which bourgeois society transforms social relations into commodity relations, the process by which people become mere objects, and it’s the real culprit behind our inability to grasp the totality of things. ANTONIO GRAMSCI (ITALIAN, 1891-1937)
Antonio Gramsci is everyone’s favorite Marxist, as poignant and congenial a figure as the movement has spawned. A hunchbacked scholar and man of action who was in on the founding of the Italian Communist Party, he spent the last ten years of his brief life in a Fascist prison, where he managed to write the appropriately named Prison Notebooks, his major legacy. A lengthy sentence allowed him to focus his attention on theoretical questions and, over the years, he constructed a Marxist philosophy of culture, in the process becoming the great theoretician of the superstructure.
Perhaps one of the reasons for Gramsci’s current popularity in academic footnotes is the great emphasis he places on the significance of intellectuals, whom he saw as the leading agents of ideology, an indispensable (and heretofore counterrevolutionary) force in preserving the dominance of the ruling class. This ideological ascendancy he called “hegemony,” the central Gramscian cocktail-party concept. The danger of hegemony lies in the way it sneaks in everywhere, so much so that the Weltanschauung of the ruling class comes to seem like simple common sense. To combat this, Gramsci urged proletarians and other progressive elements to struggle to create a counterculture (sound familiar?) that would challenge the hegemonic domination of the prevailing ideology. In opposition to Lenin—obsessed with the seizure of governmental control—Gramsci envisioned a cultural, educational role for the Party. In the Sixties in the United States, however, Gramsci’s countercultural ideas wound up resulting less in Party than in partying. HERBERT MARCUSE (GERMAN-BORN AMERICAN, 1898-1979)
Marcuse is one of ours, local hero to a generation whose Marxism tended to be closer to Groucho’s than Karl’s. Never mind his early work on Hegel—Marcuse’s great contribution was the joining of politics with sex, a conjunction that wou
ld come to be virtually synonymous with the Sixties. Abandoning Freud’s pessimistic view of society (with so much labor-saving technology everywhere you looked, who needed the repression and sublimation that used to get us all to the factory on time?), Marcuse held that we could finally afford to liberate Eros, to eroticize all human relations. This sounded good.
Marcuse was also popular around the campus because of his implacable opposition to positivism, empiricism, and formal logic, the ABCs of your typical college curriculum. He stood for the union of Logos, more or less “reason,” with Eros, again, which, rather than the union of subject and object à la Lukács, he saw as the main job of dialectics and which he felt would make for freedom and happiness. Marcuse was a Meher Baba among Marxists, a utopian apostle of good times. He was also keen on pointing out who was keeping whom from having any fun—the reified, “one-dimensional” society which, with its pluralist “repressive tolerance,” tried to make it look as if we had options but which really only offered the terrors of conformity. You needed violence to overthrow this, violence which Marcuse believed would be wielded not by the industrial proletariat (which had been bought off) but by people who were really outside the system, like racial minorities and students. No wonder the kids loved him. LOUIS ALTHUSSER (FRENCH, 1918-1990)
